04.29.09
Israel and archaic Greece
I keep saying it, but the point doesn’t quite register: to understand the history in the Old Testament, the core history from the ca. -900 to the Exile, it can help to study the Axial Age model of the eonic effect, and then the case of Archaic Greece. Construct parallel time-lines and you will notice something quite remarkable: everything is happening in a roughly similar timing. And yet the two cases are entirely different as to content.
In general we see that the era of the Prophets is a symptom of some deep cultural shift going on. In Greece we see something analogous, although entirely different. We can see that our ‘eonic sequence’ operates a level deeper than the difference between the emergence of a religous culture and what we see in Greece.
In any case the Axial interval in the Greek world can be seen in itself without the confusions of theology grafted onto it, and the basic dynamic stands out. We can then return to the Israelite case and see the way that the theology which the ‘output’ of the transformations is confusing us.
But the Israelites were right in one way: they understood that something remarkable was the case about the age through which they were passing.