Genesis One as a Platonist myth

Over a decade ago I picked up John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One - what the Masoretes have divided as Genesis 1:1-2:3. In parallel with Empedocles of Acrágas, êlohîm without hâ- assign function to the base materials of creation. Implicitly the materials are scattered around the formless void, as chaos.

Walton saw the pericope's audience as those Near Easterners who spoke a Canaanite language and believed in êlohîm. Given that, Walton looked to the pre-Hellenistic cultures of Egypt and Iraq whose parallels were involved in Temple consecration ritual. The Temple on Earth was supposed to mimic the Temple in Heaven. The Creator would do his/their work in Creation and then would "rest" in the Temple - that is, "assume his seat on the Throne". So: Priestly. But is it "P"?

Starting on the 25th day of this September, Vridar is reviewing Russell Gmirkin (whom we've literarily met). Gmirkin has mooted - no, Genesis One does not belong to any West Eurasian "P". Godfrey yesterday notes a parallel Genesis One translated in Greek as "the Septuagint" / "LXX" - which (contrast several Greek Psalms) does not derive from the Jerusalem Temple; although pace Godfrey this looks secondary [p. 20]. Other texts flitted about including in the Judaea most notably a Samaritan Torah, kept in Shechem at the Gerizim Temple. Qumran hosted a third priesthood venerating Aramaic documents like Levi and Enoch; their Genesis-One [exempting 4QGen^d and - more so - ^b, both MT, perhaps brought from Masada in ^b's case] hewed closer - says he - to the Samaritan text and to the LXX. One more priesthood was requested for Elephantine up the Nile; these Jews owned a seven-day week but it's difficult to say what the last day meant for the incoming priests.

Vridar/Gmirkin further points out that post-exilic Jews, no friends to the Samaritans to the point of antiSamaritan scripture, in that scripture referred to a pre-Genesis-Two legendarium. It wouldn't just be pre-Genesis-Two in the sequence of narrative; it hews close to Babylonian stories of some ba'l deity fighting against the reified Chaotic dragon. Even if no Hebrew proposed the myth for the Torah directly, this trope would precede all the Hebrew references in the Tanakh. And the trope lingered: among Gmirkin's examples I think most scholars would count Psalm 135 and Isaiah 66 as Persian-era, even Achaemenid.

Letter of Aristeas, claiming a Torah hot from Jerusalem, is dismissed as "fiction". Overall Genesis One is a document of a Jewry so Hellenised they were citing freakin' Plato specifically Timaeus ~360 BC. Probably Alexandria since unlike, say, Antioch, Alexandria's where we got the best record of Hellenistic-era Jews. Although hey, Babylon had a Greek moment too.

Overall I would quibble that if Elephantine could request priests of Judaea, Aristeas cannot be (wholly) dismissed as it claims Alexandria requested books from those priests. Discrepancies are explicable insofar as the Judaean correspondents might not have been working with what is now the Masoretic Text. Or maybe Aristeas was arguing, as "LXX", one of those later Greek text-types (starting with kaige) made from the MT to supplant that older translation. In my moderation here note that I am following... Gmirkin himself.

We might also ask if Plato (or Empedocles) is the source or if Plato, himself, was working with translations of "Phoenician" scriptures, which Empedocles would have known as "Punic". Greek-literate Jews if Ptolemaic or even late-Achaemenid would have Timaeus as a vocabulary-reference for translation.

To sum up: I agree that Genesis One is a lately-composed preface to a lately-assembled Torah. But I remain unsold that it's fourth-century BC. Fifth-century will do just as well if we allow for Walton's theory.

THE GOYIM KNOW 10/20: Didn't take long for TOO to get on it. My Jewish side is thinking: oy vey iz mir. If only in the hope for better discourse on the Internet, perhaps a vain hope, I ask of (let's be delicate) countersemitic advocates not jump too hard at all this, because they already look silly for other reasons, e.g. that Khazar hypothesis.