agaj-nimm

If whoever wrote the stretches of the Exodus that might read as genealogies in current translations, in a jarring discontinuity between fluent narrative just before and after them actually meant them as genealogies, I have my doubts.

Did these authors write genealogies because they were practicing primogeniture? Unclear. Were they? To answer that we'd have to figure out who wrote these excerpts, when, where did they live, what was the legal system then and there and did these exact rules apply to them? Short answer is we don't know.

We know very little of history prior to a few hundred years ago. We know a lot of well documented episodes but to do social history even of the renaissance is a serious undertaking and shouldn't be trivialized in terms of "surely it was like so back then". Even the early medieval period has a lot of blanks. Did you know a homossexual bishop called "Flora" lived in first millennium France?

Early iron age? Attributing authorship and writing sociological analysis when we don't even know in which century exactly they lived is far fetched to say the least.

Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously, and to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions.

> Of course not, put that way, we know basically nothing about anything and could simply abandon the discipline of academic history.

This to me indicates this is something else than a friendly exchange between history nerds so I'll drop the issue.

The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.

Let's start with "time period in which the old testament was composed"

When was that exactly? I believe the oldest extant versions are from around 300 AD. We have a rough idea of when certain books might have been written, but that is open to debate, and strong arguments have been made that put the origin of certain parts of these books centuries apart. Even the composition of a 'canonical' version of these books collections is not really clear before a certain point that is several centuries removed from the time in which we think they might have been originally written.

Different books or even different parts of a book (even what constitutes a 'book' in the old or new testament is not well defined for any given time period before a certain point from when we have some evidence of a certain standardization at a certain place - which doesn't even mean all traditions everywhere using these books follow that same standard from that point onward) might have been written at times centuries apart and might have originated in different cultures.

My point is, sweeping statements about customs and practices of specific societies as they were between one and three millennia ago is very hard to make. Even something like "the people who wrote this book clearly practiced primogeniture" is packed with lots of assumptions. And if we could know that a certain part of some scripture was from a definite time period and originally written in a certain language... who wrote it? Where? What was the legal system there?

Take another example, a period and people we have a lot of data about: in XVII century England, for example, primogeniture and entail were standard... for the elite. Not for the middle class. You see what I'm getting at?

Put simply, what I meant with my previous comment was: we have literally no idea if the people who wrote these supposed genealogies in Exodus were in fact practicing these inheritance legal forms you mentioned.

El and Baal both mean something like 'lord'.

We don't really know much about these entities. There are fragments of inscriptions that could be read as 'lord of the city' for example just as easily as naming some deity.

Israel means roughly 'lords' struggle': Isra El.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, we know very little and what evidence we have is fragmentary. Thinking about possible interpretations of and links among what evidence we have is fascinating and every so often we might see a constellation of data points shedding light on events of 2500 years ago or so, but it's important to realize that the gaps in our knowledge of what happened in the iron age are much, much bigger than what we actually know.

I still see obvious mistakes, so not eliminated.

The number of mistakes are also about the same.

But more mistakes are harder to catch. The output is more polished and convoluted and that make errors harder to catch. I don't want that.

May be getting harder to catch the mistakes but that makes them worse in my view. I'd much rather they make easy to spot mistakes because I don't expect factuality from them anyway just speedy transformation of information I already have available.

In fact it's the lossiest transformation tool I've ever used and it's still useful despite that. If it reaches one nine of reliability that would be huge but given the pace of growth in investment a first nine would cost an absurd amount of money, and the second and third nine would cost about the Earth's GDP

That's a bit of an oversimplification. I understand the historical value of genealogy but don't assume all past societies were uniformly practicing some form of entail and primogeniture.

There is no definitive reading of scripture, there is no definitive version of any of the texts, and I enjoy finding new aspects of their history and interpretation. Realizing that some of the texts that read as genealogy might have been originally a form of poetic aphorism is something I wouldn't affirm to a bible scholar but I enjoy thinking about it.

Someone else said a lot of scripture was written as poetry. Imagine people in the year 4500 trying to figure out some fourth hand translation of clippings taken from books by Neruda, Chaucer and Hobsbawm.

Appreciate it but I'm already deeply into bible authorship. Many of my professors in college were bible scholars. Fascinating field really.

Ancient history is much like astrophysics and cosmology. We know so very little and there are so many blanks.

It sometimes catches me off guard that people think our past is well known.

My read is that cor 13:12 is about seeing life from both sides, flesh and spirit. Some things are clearer on either side, and we learn from alternating.

Four years ago LLMs were sometimes amazing, sometimes wrong, sometimes a huge time sink when it's almost there and you try to herd the tokens but it's like herding cats.

Just today I had the exact same experience. Every single testimonial is the same as I described above, just emphasizing a different bit to defend or attack LLMs or to make a case for nuance.

The two differences have been: (1) the 1.5 trillion dollar data center build out (2) everyone and their cats now has an opinion on "AI" and data centers. Software is not super amazing, nor are new useful features coming out super fast - It's about the same as 4 years ago plus 4 years of average long term progress as we've seen since 1990s,

Have you read Patton's poem by that title? It's not great but it's a fascinating window into the beliefs of a major historical figure.

In my experience there's a lot of support for reincarnation in judeo-christian scripture, when you read it open to that interpretation.