Sacred Mythologies Aren't Historical Documents
proving the historicity of the Bible is a dead end road we would do well to avoid
Zach Ross recently wrote a piece in which he declared that Muslims and Jews aren’t Abrahamic siblings and that peace will come when the Jewish people are respected as the rightful keepers of their own history.
Blah blah blah.
Yes indeed, I’m deliberately irreverent about the ownership of human culture. I have very few fcuks to give for this kind of identitarian-based posturing. I don’t care. Religion is not an identity, it’s a lifestyle choice. Religious mythology is not history, it’s storytelling.
I don’t go to a physics text for meaningful interpretations about the human psyche. I don’t go to a geography text for meaningful discourse about the process of childbirth. I don’t go to a mathematics text for any elucidations about Tolkien’s canon. That’s common sense we all would agree upon.
Hogwarts is not real and that doesn’t make the lessons of the Harry Potter world any less valuable. Hobbits are not real, neither are wizards and balrogs, and that doesn’t make the lessons we derive from the stories about them any less meaningful. Stories help us to understand ourselves and our connection to other humans and the world around us. Stories help us understand the intangible and unseen. They exist as real in their own realm, one slightly out of reach to empirical analysis.
In this same spirit, we don’t go to mythology texts for historical accuracy — biblical history is a bit of a identitarianist grift. Why do we need to treat these mythology stories like verified historical fact? Why can’t we respect the body of mythological canon for what they provide — guidance for human relationship with ourselves, with or fellow humans, with the Universal Programmer? The stories of sacred mythology clearly never existed as means for factual historical documentation. When we lack faith in the Divine, we tend to resort to our material devices in order to fashion origin stories that serve our political ends. In the process, we end up mangling the stories as we read things into them from our modern day mindset.
I’m gonna piss some people off now, and IDGAF if you are mad about this, facts don’t care about your feelings about them. Feelings cannot change facts. Faith can have no verifiable foundation, because then it would not be faith!
There’s no archeological or historical evidence to support the exodus, a foundational story of the Jewish mythological story told by the Torah. Blasphemy, some might cry. Well, I did say I am irreverent a few sentences ago, did I not? Cope and seethe. Also, welcome to adulthood. Ego is not your amigo. Humility is, though.
How can this be, Bad Hijabi, you say, b1tch, you’re so wrong, because Shemot 1:11 tells us that Jews built cities for the Egyptians!
So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor; and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses. (via Sefaria)
Practising Jews revisit the story of the exodus every year during Pesach, it’s a pinnacle of the Jewish mythological narrative that defines the Jewish people as resilient and triumphant. Does this defining and foundational story provided by the Torah for bnei yisrael need to be historically accurate, though? Faith has no solid fact-based foundation, as I said above — that’s the definition of faith, to believe in the unbelievable or unprovable.
The power of faith lies in the reality that we cannot completely prove these things to which we have given our faith. I don’t think any important mythological story needs the secular legitimacy that historical veracity gives for us to derive guidance and understanding from it. Faith doesn’t need material evidence to serve us. Faith does not serve the material egoistic world. In fact it mustn’t — that’s the nature of faith. We believe despite our lower self doubting and ego-posturing. G-d is not an identity, She is a path for life and living.
Faith is the assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence. (via etymology online)
I think this discussion ultimately leads to the question of whether Jews are a race of people or a religion. That’s controversial and a hotly debated question not likely to ever reach any satisfactory resolution. I’m simply gonna remind the class race isn’t real, it’s the stupidest idea humans ever came up with and it’s only created chaos and hardship for humanity.
Let me introduce you to retired IT Specialist and Sephardi Jew Alec Nacamuli. He’s documented the history of Jewry in Egypt, the land of his birth.
“As far as I’m concerned, Judaism is a religion. We’re not a nation, unless you’re an Israeli citizen. We’re not a race. I think any sense of identity is more linked because we’re a minority.” — Alec Nacamuli
In fact, in a lecture about the history of Jews in Egypt, Alec Nacamuli states that no evidence for the enslavement of Jews in Egypt nor the biblical exodus exists. He describes being a guide in a museum of Egyptian history thusly.
Walking further down the gallery, we come to this gigantic bust of Ramses II, whose reign peaked at about minus 1250, and we believe that he was the Pharaoh of the Exodus. However, what we should know is that there is no mention of Israel or Jews in any hieroglyphic text up until then … You should also know that after the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel controlled the Sinai, every single professional and amateur Israeli archaeology rushed to the Sinai looking for traces of the Jewish tribe after the Exodus and they could not find any archaeological trace; not a shard of pottery, not a bone, which could have proven that there were a tribe who had gone round in circles there for about 40 years.
Nacamuli tells us that the first evidence of Jewish presence in Egypt dates to the 5th century, a Jewish temple on the island of Elephantine next to Aswan, during the period of Persian rule over Egypt.
So, let’s return to Zach Ross and Jewish people being respected as rightful keepers of their history. Does that include Alec Nacamuli, a Sephardi Jew who’s documented at lengthy the history of Jews in his homeland of Egypt, from which his family suffered exile during the expulsion of Egyptian Jewry in 1956, when Nacamuli was an adolescent?
Nacamuli describes his own familial origin, noting that In Israel, the Mizrahim who had emigrated from Arab countries were not very well treated. They were snubbed by the Ashkenazi elite and were kept in camps.
Nacamuli, who married an English Ashkenazi woman, describes the sectarianism in the Jewish world of his upbringing, in Egypt, we used to call the Ashkenazim the ‘Schlechts’. It means bad in German, and the Ashkenazi girls were “Schlechtayas”.
So, to where does this all lead us, reader?
Nowhere fast. Following this though track leads us to nowhere fast.
Who owns history?
Can any particular group own a swath of history? I disagree that they can.
The older a people and their culture, the more dispersed throughout humanity they become — a light to all nations, a nation amongst nations, remember? It’s wise to resist the urge to impose modern day meaning and sensibilities onto biblical writings. What is a nation, עם, in the Biblical context? The modern day nation state didn’t exist at the time of the writing of the Torah, so it’s unlikely that we can derive any evidence to support the race narrative of Judaism. In the Tur HaArokh commentary on Bamidbar, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher states, The Israelites are joined together by a common ancestry that forms their national and cultural heritage known as the Torah.
What is a nation of people? A group united by kinship, race, language, religion? A group of people united by judges and a legal system that had authority over them? Conceptually, these are not the same. The former describes a more nuanced and abstract perception of a peoples, a community of humans with a common language and religious culture. Note the specific choice of words provided in the primary source text — in the Torah every word means something, the author chose the specific Hebrew words intentionally. The meaning gets lost in translation.
The Torah does not use the word גוי, another word used to denote a nation of people. Why? Well, because the word עם adds a familial meaning to the concept of nationhood, ie kinsmen. It means we can have family members across nationhoods, because something more that nation state citizenship binds kin to kin.
Antisemites believed racial characteristics could not be overcome by assimilation or even conversion. Jews were said to be dangerous and threatening because of their “Jewish blood.” Antisemitic racism united pseudoscientific theories with centuries old anti-Jewish stereotypes. These ideas gained wide acceptance. — Why the Jews: History of Antisemitism, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
When did we begin to see Jews as a race, as delineated by modernity and social scientists who devised race theory? Hasn’t humanity suffered enough under the whole elite global empire of race-mongering? Why do we need race to be real? We have much valid and reliable evidence to debunk race as a serious concept to classify human beings and govern human societies. Why do we still cling to it, then? What purpose does it serve? Why do we choose to put our faith in the secular canon of racialism rather that the very ancient Divinely-inspired canon of the Torah and accompanying Rabbinical literature? It seems to me like a form of self worship.
I understand the desire to own one’s people’s own history and cultural body of knowledge. My father was a from a wholly Hindu background and I used to get annoyed with the appropriation of yoga and tikka masala by wider cultures. Now I’m satisfied to switch the lens of my perceptual camera — where before I saw appropriation and theft of a cultural object or practise, now I see cultural influence. Where before I felt aggrieved and accusatory, as though many people took things from my father’s people, now I can release that lower-self-ish thinking and feel content with the fact of the immeasurable and phenomenal reach my father’s people had and the joy the Hindu culture brings to the world. Nothing belongs to us anyway, all comes from The Creator. Culture is not a possession, it’s the human condition. We cannot own culture, we can only understand and embrace it. And along the way we can learn to coexist with other humans and their culture.
Islam has indeed taken the sacred foundational mythology of the Jewish people, exploited, distorted, abused it, and used it against Jewish people and anyone who isn’t Islamic. Dhimmitude is very real and it’s destructive and bad. We must do everything we can to crush that mindset.
Whose blood is redder? Is your blood redder? Is mine redder? How would we know unless you spilled our own blood to find out? Sanhedrin 74b asks this question.
My metaphor to address this human dilemma sounds waaaay more crude than that of the Sages’, and it’s something I learned from my years as a caregiver and nurse, in particular when I worked on a bowel surgery ward — every one of us poops and my poop stinks and yours does too—in the end we are the same, have the same requirements and vulnerabilities. Hashem made us each and all in Her image, and that must be good enough for us each and all.
It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether the mythological stories we turn to for guidance have valid and reliable historical veracity. Do you need to be right? That is scientific enquiry and not faith, then. Faith defies all secular attempts to delineate and confine and rank it. Faith is not an empirical endeavour, that’s what makes it mysterious and challenging and timeless. I’ll leave my readers with a quote from Geneticist Razib Khan, whose Substack I highly recommend to you—it’s a great bang for your buck.
But, it also seems that for Muslims, the majority of their ancestry is the same as that of their Palestinian Christian neighbors; they too are the scions of ancient Levantines. The Arabic-speaking villagers of British Palestine descend from ancestors who spoke Aramaic, and who before that spoke Hebrew.
It’s a bittersweet coda to the Jewish return to Palestine that both they and the native Arabs descend from the same Levantine populations, meaning it is a reunion of kin. — More Than Kin, Less Than Kind, Razib Khan
G-d is not an identity. G-d is not a weapon to wield against others. G-d is the path.
May we be wiser and learn to coexist peacefully and compassionately with each other.