The mystery of the emergence of Judaism, a monotheistic religion that became the forerunner of Christianity (with the help of Rome), still occupies the minds of researchers. The first thing that has long been questioned is the purely Semitic roots of the religion. In fact, they are difficult to find both in the Sahara and in Arabia, from where the Semites came to Mesopotamia. It has long been suggested that the cultural ancestors of the Jews could not have been the Arameans, the Amorites with the Hutians, or even the Akkadians-everything was wrong with them! And Patriarch Noah was also not a "pure-blooded Jew," but an ancestor: Jews trace their tradition back to Abraham, and "officially" became such only after Moses. It is known that a lot of borrowings in Hebrew come from Sumer, and even from the Ubeid Dravidians. Therefore, many Bible scholars write Abraham as a "Sumerian"))). Without thinking too much about what is Sumer? Until now, no one knows where the Sumerians came from, but their arrival is somehow connected with the so-called. Uruk Expansion.

The article argues that the pre-Priestly Jacob story is mainly a unified and coherent composition that was written in Judah in about the mid-6th century BCE. It was composed as part of a larger literary-historical work that narrated the history of Israel's three ancestors and reflects the reality in the land after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and annexed Judah and all other neighbouring kingdoms. The patriarchal story-cycle was intended for an audience comprised of the elite and broader community of the 'New Israel'—the inhabitants of the former kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Some of the narratives are based on oral traditions whose scope and detail cannot be established, which the author augmented by consulting a few written sources and by adding various literary and ideological elements from his own creative imagination. His composition represented a major step towards generating a sense of unity among all those remaining in the land, namely the devotees of YHWH, and it shaped the image of the earliest history of Israel for all generations to come.

A methodology of genealogical research

The bible is at odds with ancient textual sources and with archaeology. Egyptian papyri detail the least things about Egyptian events of the time. One explains that two(!) escaping slaves were pursued across the border, yet there is no record of two million Israelite slaves all leaving one night. Uneducated slaves, desperately escaping from the armies of their powerful oppressor in the desert do not sit down each night and write out a diary of the day's events. Nomads keep up their spirits by telling tall stories around their campfires. The story was written by Persian administrators sent to secure the loyalty of the Jews for Persia, not Egypt. They used the myth, presented then as it was ever after as true history, to depict those loyal to the traditional gods and goddesses as apostates and backsliders from the true God of Israel, Yehouah, who had made a covenant with Moses. Scriptural books are warnings to the natives in Palestine to back the god the Persians were introducing as the God of the Israelites. They pretended that the people were always backsliding from worship of the true god, so they invented a history to prove it. Moses was not important in it. The Prophets could not have avoided talking about Moses and the Sinai covenant had it really been a long known and central element of Jewish history. Prophets preceding Jeremiah are mainly silent about Moses and rarely use the word covenant, but criticize the people for disobedience. The saga of Moses must have been one of the last additions to the history. Invented pseudepigraphic prophecies showed God would punish the people for their backsliding. Since they were written after the events they could seem accurate. The Persians depicted Jewish prophets during the monarchy as incessantly warning the people not to apostatize. They always did! Books were written in Greek professing to give accounts of Egyptian and Babylonian culture, but in the light of modern discovery they were inaccurate.

Scholars agree that early Israel was an oral society of pastoralism and subsistence farming. So how and why did such a pastoral-agrarian society come to write down and give authority to the written word? How and why did writing spread from the closed circles of royal and priestly scribes to the lay classes? It was this spread of Hebrew writing in ancient Palestine that democratized the written word and allowed it to gain religious authority in the book we now call "the Bible." When the Bible became a book, the written word supplanted the living voice of the teacher. Ancient Israelite society was textualized. This textualization marked one of the great turning points in human history, namely the movement from an oral culture towards a written culture. We tend to read the Bible from our own viewpoint—that is, we tend to think of the Bible as if it came from a world of texts, books, and authors. But the Bible was written before there were books. As the great French scholar Henri-Jean Martin has observed, the role of writing in society has changed dramatically through history, yet modern analyses of biblical literature often depend on the perspective of the text in modern society. Using the most recent advances in the archaeology of Palestine and relying on insights from linguistic anthropology, I came to new conclusions about why and when the Bible began to be written down.