this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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It depends on the culture. Ancient Egypt had centuries of records by 1450 BCE which have survived until today. Other cultures writing on parchment that didn't survive we know almost nothing about first hand.
So it's a mixture of secondhand reports from people alive during the period those records may have existed, but who didn't have good methodology for reporting history (so you need to take with a giant grain of salt) or primary records which survived, to extrapolating from archeology records.
For example, a few years ago in Tel Rehov an apiary was found active from the 10th-8th centuries BCE.
Until that find, scholars assumed "land of milk and honey" wasn't referring to actual bee honey.
In that apiary was an altar to an unknown goddess where honey was burnt, and that altar had four 'horns' on the corners.
The style of a four horned altar is instructed to the Israelites in the Bible, but this altar was one of the earliest archeologically evidenced, Leviticus make explicit mention of banning burning honey as a sacrifice, and the apiary was destroyed and not rebuilt but the surrounding structures were not at that time, so it looks like it was explicitly targeted. Also, the bees themselves were shown through DNA analysis to have been imported from Anatolia.
So even without any primary written records, we can see that certain aspects of this imported tradition may have been syncretized into the pre-8th century Israelites, but that then there was a reform that resulted in opposition to it and its destruction.
Given the time period it was destroyed was around when Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the Queen Mother and hired mercenaries to conquer the northern kingdoms reforming against goddess worship, we might even fathom a loose guess as to what events triggered that shift.
It's certainly much easier when there's detailed records like in Egypt though, where you even have papyrus records of legal proceedings, etc.
When I was growing up, that was referred to as the "lost scrolls" which is where Jehovah Witnesses claim to get a lot of their info from. I don't know if they do anymore as they have changed a lot of their teachings but they also use to mention that, because stuff that was written down long ago and translated over and over, they tried their best to get the most accurate translations for their bible - but the also cut a lot of stuff out. They claim other religions added versus to scriptures that were unnecessary.
I tried to do some digging once on the ones they removed and they seemed to be mostly related to angel sightings or angels talking to humans and apparently that didn't happen as often other religions might say it did? But all I did was try to compare King James version of the bible to their JW bible.
It's super interesting that for a long time we all just thought a phrase wasn't meant to be literal like that but it really was about honey. That makes me wonder how much other stuff there is in religion where people thought there was some grand explanation when really, its probably just playing telephone with translations over thousands of years and not understanding things until actually digging into it more.
Are there any records of people talking to God? I feel like Egypt would be the place to look too as most of the bible I remember takes place in Egypt.
There are many records of people claiming to talk to gods.
My favorite at the moment is in the boundary stelae of Amarna.
The young Pharoh explicitly claims that it wasn't his wife or anyone else who told him to put the city there, but the god Aten directly that told him.
For context, elsewhere in that inscription it describes his wife Nefertiti as getting everything she asked for, she was the only woman in all of Egypt's history to be depicted in the "smiting pose" and prior to that inscription she and her daughter were recorded in inscriptions communing with the Aten without the Pharoh.
So while it's claimed that he was talking directly to a god, my money would be on it having been his wife's idea after all and that he was adding a denial to the inscription to put to rest rumors of that being the case.
In general, context can add a lot to claims of divine communication. For example, Moses was said to talk face to face with God in the tabernacle and when he would do so everyone knew because a cloud would appear at the door.
But that process of anointing oneself and then going into a tent sounds a lot like the Scythian ritual in Herodotus where they anointed themselves and went into a tent where they burned cannabis. And indeed, just a few years ago there was a discovery of burning cannabis in the holy of holies of an 8th century BCE Judahite temple in Tel Arad.
So perhaps that 'cloud' appearing when communicating with the divine shortly after first finding the ability to do so through a burning bush has more to it than face value.
And yeah, most traditions claim some sort of secret access to knowledge. But the times where those documents turn up they tend to be disappointingly unbelievable, where they may have ended up 'secret' because to those not deeply invested in the tradition their revelation would have pushed people away (like the Xenu stuff in Scientology).
It's one of the things I like about the "put the lamp in the window and not under the bed" or "shout from the rooftops" in early Christianity. That was during a period when mystery traditions and secret teachings were very popular, and it was refreshing to see someone saying to instead put it all out there. Unfortunately secrecy creeps back into Christian traditions not long after both canonically and extra-canonically.
I had never heard about this before!
But I had heard about the tent where they were burning cannabis and yeah, that makes a lot more of the bible stories make sense. I've also heard the burning bush itself was also cannabis.
This has got to be one of the coolest interactions I've had on here, btw.