JimLewandowski Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If I'm writing a creation story, by nature it's
> going to have anthropomorphism in it (otherwise
> the readers would have a hard time understand it).
> So, I decided to have a character named Jim
> Lewandowski in it. Is Jim Lewandowski remotely
> important to the INTENT of writing a creation
> story? IOW, does the belief of creation take
> primacy in the story or does this character named
> JL?

I agree with Roxana. There's nothing 'logical' about your claim that "virtually all biblical characters are mythical (ie. no INTENDED historical basis). The characters in the NT and OT are present to support a subjective creation story". This is nothing more than your own opinion based on your own subjective (and selective?) reading of the available evidence.

> Again, in a book purported to be the word of God
> or inspired by the word of God, having Moses birth
> story mimic Sargon is a BIG red flag as to the
> historicity of Moses.

Talking about subjective opinions (or should that be selective memory?), I posted the following in reply to a post you made on this same topic back in March 2005. It obviously didn't make much of an impression at the time, so I thought I'd introduce it again here ...

[www.hallofmaat.com]

Hi Jim,

What's your evidence that "Sargon II (or I?)'s bio was 'lifted and borrowed' for Moses"?

Donald Redford drew attention to a number of similarities and (equally significant) differences between Moses birth story and the 'Legend of Sargon' in an article written way back in 1967 ("The Literary Motif of the Exposed Child", Numen, 14: 209-228).

More to the point, the surviving fragments of the 'Legend of Sargon' are Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian in date (seventh to sixth centuries BCE). Admittedly, the legend itself is set in the life of King Sargon of Akkad (2371-2316 BCE), but as James K. Hoffmeier pointed out in 1996 (writing in Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition):

"[...] A further problem for those wishing to find a correlation between the Sargon legend and the Moses birth story is [...] that the earliest surviving copies of the Sargon text date from Neo-Assyrian or later times. This factor, along with others, suggests that the legend may have been recorded by (or for) the late eighth century BC Assyrian king, Sargon II, who took the name of his great Akkadian forebear and identified himself with that monarch. This possibility diminishes the case for the Sargon legend influencing Exodus because, if we allow that J or E (usually dated to the tenth and eighth centuries repsectively) is the source behind Exodus 2:1 through 10, and follow the traditional dating for these sources, both would predate the reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC)" (pp. 137).

Damian

**********

And while we're on the subject, here's a little more detail from Hoffmeier's Israel in Egypt:

"[...] In a very thorough study, Donald Redford collected all the known tales using the 'exposed child' motif from the ancient Near East. In all thirty-two examples were produced, which he divided into three categories based upon the reason for the exposure: 1) the child is exposed owing to shameful circumstances; 2) a king or some powerful figure is trying to kill the child who poses a threat to his rule or dynasty; and 3) a massacre is introuced that threatens the life of the child along with others. According to Redford's scheme, the Sargon legend fits into the first class, whereas the Moses birth story fits into the third. Placing the two tales in very different circumstances illustrates that while there are some intriguing similarities between the two, there are fundamental differences. Hence, he concludes 'they are not true parallels' [...].

"While many distinguished scholars have been convinced of some sort of literary dependence of the Moses story on the Sargon legend, there are a significant number who have questioned this connection [...]. Tremper Longman III, in a recent study of the genre 'fictional Akkadian autobiography' [ie. Fictional Akkadian Autobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study, 1991] comes to a similar conclusion about the proposed relationship between the two birth stories after reviewing details of both: 'Thus while there is a definite similarity between Exodus 2 and the Sargon Birth Legend, the differences in detail between them caution qagainst a too easy identification of the two and against the idea that the Moses story is borrowed directly from Akkadian literature' [...]" (pp. 136-137).

**********

All that aside, there's one final little detail that scuppers your insistence that "having Moses birth story mimic Sargon is a BIG red flag as to the historicity of Moses". I think Kenneth Kitchen says it best in his book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003):

"[...] Many times over, [the birth account of Moses] has been compared to an analogous story about the future Sargon of Akkad, of great renown. He too was left in a caulked basket on a river, found by a stranger, who brought him up; and later he became a mighty king [1]. People have usually dismissed both tales as legendary, and therefore sometimes Moses likewise. But the latter does not follow; legendary infancy or not, Sargon of Akkad was a real king, and inscriptions are known from his reign both in the originals and in Old Babylonian copies. So a 'birth legend' (even of a popular kind) does not automatically confer mythical status. Even today, many an infant is abandoned by its despairing mother (mentions in the media are all too frequent), and in antiquity it was no less so in tragic reality [2]. Hence Moses' historicity cannot be judged on this feature; and the story could in fact be true, but not provable [...]" (p. 296).


[1] "[...] The Moses birth narrative in one short passage has at least six words that are of Egyptian origin (New Kingdom period); thus, it is not directly taken from the Mesopotamian story of Sargon (cf. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 138-40). One may add the totally different literary format: Sargon is cast as a first-person address to the reader, while Exod. 2 is a retrospective narrative [...]".

[2] From A Biblical History of Israel by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III (2003): "[...] In the case of the Sargon legend, the high-priestess was apparently not supposed to have children. In both cultures, the idea behind the basket on the water was the commission of the child into the care of the deity who controls the waters (in the case of Exodus, Yahweh himself) - the ancient cultural equivalent to the modern practice of leaving an unwanted child on the threshold of a house or hospital" (p. 126).