Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas de Aynesworth
Karl makes the best case that these tribal Jews were engaged in the creation of a Greater Israel in a similar manner as the Arabs with their Islam, except in that Jews were failures in warfare to the point that not even the Levant in totality was achievable. Much of the classical material available on Jews indicates them as Syro-Phoenicians, not discernible as anything but an oddity.
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I think the key to understanding jewish history before the archaeological record of them begins is to see them as small, bandit tribes with various different religious strands (hence the fact that jews are still dualistic [Yahweh and the Shekhina] and even quasi-polytheistic at times) who basically; as you say, failed in war and sought to cover this up with myth. If you treat them as a smaller tribe then a lot of Genesis and Exodus in particular makes more sense in that they were in the Egyptian sphere of influence in particular and as such their mythos focuses on the Egyptians for its context as opposed to say the Hittites or the Arab peoples to the south-east.