A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.
The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.
Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.
The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.
If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.
So the biblical god was just an amalgamation of stories from the bloody reign of some possibly prehistoric warchiefs, it seems to me
A lot of the repurposed stories in the Torah do not have prehistoric origins, as that would mean they have no written predecessor, they have origins that are historic, documented in writings that have been dated by archaelogists and ancient linguistic specialists.
The story of Noachian Flood, and many other elements of stories in Genesis, have been directly connected to much older Sumerian/Akkadian mythology, which predates the Canaanite/Hebrew/Israeli mythology.
Noah’s flood is a rewritten version of the Gilgamesh flood myth, with Utnapishtim as the sole survivor of a massive flood, who builds a giant wooden ark, puts his family and a bunch of animals on it, sends out birds to check if the flood is over, then goes on to restart civilization after the boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.
Yes but the first written stories are most probably oral myths handed down for generations before finally being writ
I mean… probably yes, but in the case of much of the Torah, the mythical characters and stories first appear textually in Sumerian cuneiform.
The Sumerian culture and written language (cuneiform) was located basically in modern Iraq, near the Tigris and Euphrates. The written language and stories can be dated to about 3000 BC, the actual culture itself, even further.
Then you can trace the evolution of the mythic/legendary characters and stories into the Ugartitic texts, located in Ugarit, modern day Syria, dated to about 1200 BC, with the Ugaritic written language itself being an evolution of Sumerian cuneiform.
The Torah itself, in early Hebrew, wasn’t actually written and compiled as such untill roughly 400 BC, despite the tradtitional insistance it is many hundreds of of years older, and is largely based off of the Ugaritic texts.
If you look at the actual archaelogical and linguistic history of peoples, languages, texts and stories, its quite clear that the ultimate origin of many of the characters and stories in the Torah is Sumeria. Those stories then migrated and mutated as they spread from Sumeria to Canaan, where the Hebrews and Israel/Judah later arose.