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I thoroughly enjoyed your ‘Unfolding History’ series.

I mean I REALLY identified and appreciated the perspectives you put forth … and I read a lot and am hyper critical of most.

That said I was super fired up to stumble across public access to this ‘Reconnecting with History’ series this morning and have been devouring it in delight all afternoon.

Perhaps the commonalities we share in my imagination (Gen X, Bay Area, Burner, Educated, Annoyed) provide a loose framework allowing me to tap in effortlessly and pick up what you’re putting down with appreciation for the tone, metaphors, prose, and philosophy.

All the above being said, what the fuck kind of world do we live in where the factor for my paying you a couple of bucks for work of tremendous value is determined by my desire to let you know that I hope someday soon you’ll forge a pathway to connect your SIDEKiCK to a 4g LTE /5g wireless network, because I know you’ll share that alchemical experience with the rest of us hoping to bridge the gap and make technology great again.

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Thank you so much! And welcome aboard :-)

Which sidekick did you have in mind? My dog? My ladyfriend? The bear that keeps invading my yard? ;-)

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I'm going to learn so much with this subscription, and that makes me happy. One question. I thought Genesis and Hammurabi were written about 700 years before Iliad and Odyssey? I'm not saying I know this, but I thought it.

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Ah! This is a complicated one.

Hamurabi is 18th c. BC, and it (along with the Epic of Gilgamesh) are basically the two solid bronze age sources we've got.

So, the Illiad and the Odyssey are written down (near as we cal tell) in the 8th century BC, which is well into the iron age, but they're based on older traditions that preserve a bronze-age outlook.

Genesis was generally thought to be contemporaneous with Hamurabi, more or less, based on the ancient attribution of the Torah to the authorship of Moses. However, as far back as the late 18th century there has been an argument made from internal evidence within the text that it could not have been written by Moses.

Then, manuscript discoveries from the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, etc. over the last 200 years, along with other arguments from within the text itself (esp looking at the Biblical account of the reign of Josiah) led to a new emerging consensus that the Torah was assembled during the Babylonian Exile (6th c. BC, contemporaneous with the events depicted in the Book of Daniel).

More recent work still, is making a solid argument that the Torah was finally assembled during the Macabeean revolt as a way to unite the disparate Jewish cultural traditions. This work has some solid linguistic basis, but the killer component is that it explains all the weird archeological evidence that shows the Jews worshiping a bog-standard middle-eastern pantheon up through the Macabbean revolt.

In any case, that's ALL Iron age stuff, but it is based on traditions (including the Epic of Gilgamesh) that descend from the Bronze Age and retains the Bronze Age worldview and flavor, as did the Illiad and the Odyssey. What I describe above as the "Iron Age" view comes into consciousness slowly over many centuries--the sharp transitions between the ages that archaeologists assign are like the border of a species or the age of consent: There is a broad, fuzzy border during the transition, and in order to make sense of the transition we must draw a bright line somewhere that we then treat as if it's a bright line except when we are examining the nature of the transition itself. The world is analogue, but because humans understand the world by making models, we necessarily introduce either/or thinking that can't be entirely dispensed with, even with our best efforts.

Anyway, with all that in mind, you could safely think of Homer's works as representing the end of genuine Bronze Age literature (even though they're written down several centuries into the Iron Age) and the Torah as having the same kind of relationship to the Bronze Age as the Lord of the Rings has to the Viking Age. Tolkien worked hard to show Midgard, the world of the Viking Sagas, reworked as an English mythology, and yet he could not avoid bringing to it (and, indeed, intentionally brought to it) a Catholic sense of how grace, providence, and salvation function, and that flavoring touches everything in the story--spicing it without polluting it, so to speak.

The Torah, then, reproduces the Bronze Age worldview and moral scheme as best as possible, but also mixes in some Iron Age sensibilities. Nonetheless, some particular parts of the Bible (The Torah, the Book of Judges, the Book of Job, the Book of Esther, the Song of Songs) are among our best easily-accessible views into the Bronze Age mind, as near as we can tell.

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I understand this now, especially with reference to how the lines don't really do a great job of depicting transitions. Your explanation makes perfect sense to me. I don't believe you can read any of the great works including the Bible or the Odyssey without also understanding the history taking place at the time. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this. I learn something daily if I'm lucky.

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My pleasure :-)

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