A funny thing happened on the way to Mecca

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

 

 

Historians are beginning to realise that the city of Mecca, Islam’s most holy place,

and thought to have been built by Abraham, was not in fact built until about

the fourth Christian century, some two millennia or so after Abraham!

So, can Islam’s view of history really be trusted?

 

 

 

 

 

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, in his highly prophetic article “Mary and the Moslems” (http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2009/fsheen_maryandislam__jun09.asp), will - quite understandably (though differently from my opinion) - take the conventional view that Islam (or “Moslemism”, as he calls it) is a uniquely “post-Christian religion”:

 

Moslemism is the only great post-Christian religion of the world. Because it had its origin in the seventh century under Mohammed [sic], it was possible to unite within it some elements of Christianity and of Judaism, along with particular customs of Arabia.

Moslemism takes the doctrine of the unity of God, His Majesty and His Creative Power, and uses it, in part, as a basis for the repudiation of Christ, the Son of God. Misunderstanding the notion of the Trinity, Mohammed made Christ a prophet, announcing him, just as, to Christians, Isaias and John the Baptist are prophets announcing Christ.

[End of quote]

 

 

 

Here Archbishop Sheen pointed to certain beliefs common to Islam and Christianity, whilst also telling of the notable opposition between the two – the same sort of contrasts that we read about again in the Second Vatican Council’s document Nostra Aetate (# 3), but couched in the Council’s typically more rounded and conciliatory tone:

 

3. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

 

[End of quote]

 

I fully respect the Council’s words which focus upon the commonalities between Christianity and Islam and which urge for mutual respect. Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort (c. 1700 AD), by contrast, bore a more Crusader-like attitude to the Moslems as so typical of his time. Referring once again to the great end-time Marian saints, he wrote: “These are the great men who are to come; but Mary is the One Who, by order of the Most High, shall fashion them for the purpose of extending His Empire over that of the impious, the idolaters and the Muslims”.

 

What is certain, and what Saint Louis himself wholeheartedly believed, is that the ultimate victory of Christianity, defined by the Second Vatican Council in terms of a spiritual, rather than a military, conquest, will belong to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The saint’s confidence in this regard was shared by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Primate of Poland, quoted by John Paul II in his Testament (# 1): "When victory is won, it will be a victory through Mary".

She, as Our Lady of Fatima, will play a meaningful part according to Fulton Sheen (op. cit):

 

Mary is for the Moslems the true Sayyida, or Lady. The only possible serious rival to her in their creed would be Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed himself [sic].

But after the death of Fatima, Mohammed wrote: "Thou shalt be the most blessed of all the women in Paradise, after Mary." In a variant of the text, Fatima is made to say: "I surpass all the women, except Mary."

[End of quote]

 

I, whilst indeed accepting at least the religious and the evangelical aspects of things in relation to Islam, find, nevertheless, that there are immense problems with the conventional view of Islam as an historical phenomenon. There are many articles currently surfacing that support a view that the historical claims of Islam are quite false and inaccurate, with no underlying archaeology to support them.

‘A funny thing has happened on the way to Mecca’ - for it is most curious that, according to this recent scholarship:

 

• “Archaeology of Mecca – the History of Mecca”. There is no archaeological evidence that suggests that Mecca is an ancient town that existed before the Christian era, or even that it existed before about the 4th century A.D. ….
  (http://www.historyofmecca.com/archaeology_mecca.htm)
   

• “Did Abraham Build the Kaaba?” The body of this paper will deal primarily with places and destinations, not theology or personality. I will examine the Biblical accounts of Abraham in the natural and sequential order in which they are preserved in the Bible, while I examine and compare a small sampling of the similarities and differences in the Quran and other Islamic sources. In doing so, I'll point out the several fatal contradictions in the Islamic perspective and leave the reader to determine whether the Islamic version is truth to be believed or fable created to connect a pagan Arabian shrine to the Biblical patriarch of the Israelites. I will cover the ancient evidence and promptly dismember Islamic dogma as inauthentic and based on inadequate grounds. ….

(http://www.answering-islam.org/authors/toler/abraham_kaaba.html

 

• “Islam: In Light of History”. Studies by Classical Writers show that Mecca could not have been built before the 4^th A.D.” There is no mention of Mecca in the writings of any classical writer or geographer. This fact is an important argument against Islam’s claim that Mecca has existed since the time of Abraham. We have complete records of Greek and Roman writers, as well as many geographers who visited Arabia from the 4^th century B.C. through the 3^rd century A.D. Some of these people drew maps of Arabia telling us about every city, village, tribe, and temple existing there, yet none mentioned Mecca. If Mecca did indeed exist at the time of any of these geographers and writers, surely someone would have told us about this city. …. (http://amaicprophetnehemiah.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/296/)
   

• “Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins”. There is, in fact, considerable reason to question the historicity of Muhammad. Although the story of Muhammad, the Qur’an, and early Islam is widely accepted, on close examination the particulars of the story prove elusive. The more one looks at the origins of Islam, the less one sees.…. (http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/did-muhammad-exist-an-inquiry-into-islam%E2%80%99s-obscure-origins/)
   

Islam’s early ‘Mecca’, where Abraham was, is most likely (in our new context) Jerusalem (Arabic al-Makdis) itself.

Whilst Islam’s ‘Medina’ probably stands for Midian – a name which also got confused as ‘Media’ in copies of the Book of Tobit.

Dr Rafat Amari, writing in “The History and Archaeology of Arabia show that Mecca did not exist before the advent of Christianity”, exposes the falsity of claims regarding Islam’s most venerated site of Mecca (http://amaicprophetnehemiah.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/287/):

 

….

The richness of the archaeological findings and inscriptions of many regions of Arabia.

 

Islam claims that Mecca is an ancient historical city which existed long before Christ, dating as far back as the time of Abraham. A powerful argument against this claim is the absence of any inscriptions found on monuments, or in any archaeological records dating back to those times.

The ancient cities and kingdoms of Arabia do have rich histories which survive to this day through monuments, the inscriptions they bear, and in other archaeological documents. These historical records have given archaeologists a highly-integrated and, in some cases, complete record of the names of kings who ruled these cities and kingdoms. These records have also given archaeologists important information about the history of the wars fought over the kingdoms and cities of Arabia.

In most cases, inscriptions and monuments in various cities – especially in the western and southwestern portions of Arabia – even give the names of coregents who ruled with the kings.

Yet, even with this rich collection of historical and archaeological information, there are no inscriptions or monuments, or other archaeological findings whatsoever, that mention Mecca.

Regarding the richness of the archaeological findings in Arabia, Montgomery says that Assyrian inscriptions did not provide as much detailed information as the Arabian inscriptions did.[1] ….

[End of quote]

 

What is going on here?

 

According to my explanation, admittedly controversial, Islam is essentially an Old Testament religion based upon an original Judaïc matrix - hence it is saturated with, as Fulton Sheen had noted, “elements … of Judaism”. Its difference from Judaïsm, though, lies in the fact that it has been filtered through Arabia - the reason for its now “particular customs of Arabia”.

Obviously, then, we cannot accept that Islam is, as according to convention, a “post-Christian religion [having] its origin in the seventh century” - though it has, in the process of its centuries-long evolution, absorbed, as Sheen rightly noted, “some elements of Christianity”.

According to my previous efforts to determine the biblical origins of the Prophet now claimed by Islam, Mohammed, I had concluded that he was something of a composite scriptural character, including bits of Moses, of Tobit and his son Tobias, of Jeremiah and Nehemiah, and even of Jesus Christ himself. This I do not find surprising considering what I have already described as the long evolution of Islam from its original Judaïc foundations in the Old Testament, and then on through the New.

Most extraordinarily, there was a second Nehemiah, a Jew, supposedly in 614 AD (the era of Mohammed), to whom a Persian general had entrusted the city of Jerusalem - just as “King Artaxerxes”, thought to have been an ancient Persian king, had allowed the biblical Nehemiah to return to Jerusalem and to restore the damaged city. This supposedly later Nehemiah “offers a sacrifice on the site of the Temple”, according to Étienne Couvert (La Vérité sur les Manuscripts de la Mer Morte, p. 98. Translated). “He even seems to have attempted to restore the Jewish cult of sacrifice”. Just like the biblical Nehemiah, another template for Mohammed.

 

Most assuredly, a funny thing has happened on the way to Islam’s Mecca!

Professor A. Yahuda’s linguistic contribution to Book of Genesis

by

Damien F. Mackey

 

Yahuda … was an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern any

appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch.

 

 

Whilst I have previously written on the important linguistic contribution to the Pentateuch as made by professor A. S. Yahuda (“a Palestinian Jew, polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Yahuda  ) - and still continue basically to accept the professor’s findings - I would now be inclined to modify a few of the points that he had made.

 

For a better appreciation of what follows, one might like to read e.g. my article:

 

Structure of the Book of Genesis

 

https://www.academia.edu/28809452/Structure_of_the_Book_of_Genesis

 

 

….

It could be said that the ancient literary methods pointed out by P. J. Wiseman in favour of Mosaïc compilation of Genesis were also around much later than Moses, prevailing even into New Testament times (e.g. Matthew 1:1 gives a toledôt of Jesus Christ in the Gospels), and hence these literary methods could have been inserted into texts composed at the time of, say, the Babylonian Exile (C6th BC, conventional dating), almost a millennium after Moses, to give these texts an air of sacredness or antiquity.

 

After all, what Wiseman was drawing his information from were Babylonian scribal techniques, not, say, Egyptian ones, which were quite different.

 

So, why would Moses - let alone the patriarchs who preceded him - necessarily have had any involvement in the Book of Genesis?

 

Well, this is where the linguistic contribution of professor A. S. Yahuda (Language of the Pentateuch in Its Relation to Egyptian (Oxford UP, 1933) comes in to deal a shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism.

 

Yahuda was, unlike Wiseman, an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern any appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch. Yahuda however realized that the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian - not only for the periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including Israel's sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods associated with, as he thought, Babylonia.

For example, the Flood and the Babel incident.

 

Comment: This now need to be modified somewhat, however - so I think - in light of my more recent:

 

Tightening the Geography and Archaeology for Early Genesis

 

https://www.academia.edu/34936691/Tightening_the_Geography_and_Archaeology_for_Early_Genesis

 

For instance, instead of the Akkadian word for 'Ark' used in the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the Canaanite ones current elsewhere in the Bible, the Noachic account Yahuda noted, uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, `box, coffer, chest').

 

Most important was the linguistic observation by Yahuda:

 

Whereas those books of Sacred Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the Babylonian influence in the language is so minute as to be almost non-existent. 

 

Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr. Jean Carmignac, had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise - in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books.

See my article on this:

 

Fr Jean Carmignac dates Gospels early

 

https://www.academia.edu/30807628/Fr_Jean_Carmignac_dates_Gospels_early

 

While Yahuda's argument is totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to consider the likelihood of 'cultural traffic' from Palestine to Egypt, especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might expect that the toledôt documents borne by Israel into Egypt would have become of great interest to the Egyptians under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph (historically Imhotep of Egypt's 3rd dynasty), who had after all saved the nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine, thereby influencing Egyptian thought and concepts.

 

The combination of Wiseman and Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis.

 

Whilst I. Kikawada and A. Quinn (Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, Abingdon, 1985) have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have also suggested how its analytical tools may be useful at least when applied to the apparent multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau and Jacob narrative), the system appears as inherently artificial in the light of archaeological discoveries.

U. Cassuto may not have been “diplomatic” (according to Kikawada and Quinn), but nevertheless he was basically correct in his estimation of documentism: "This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air".

 

It is no coincidence that documentary theory was developed during the era of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who proposed an a priori approach to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the Aristotelian philosophy of being.

The philosophy of science is saturated with this new approach. See e.g.:

 

Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of the Nature of the Modern Sciences

 

https://www.academia.edu/23250163/Gavin_Ardley_s_Marvellous_Perception_of_the_Natur

 

Kantianism is well and truly evident, too - as it seems to me - in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen attitude to the biblical texts.

And Eduard Meyer carried this over into his study of Egyptian chronology, by devising in his mind a quantifying a priori theory - an entirely artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality - that he imposed upon his subject with disastrous results.

Again an "imposing and beautiful edifice … founded on air".

See my article:

 

Berlin Chronologist Dr. Eduard Meyer Doubted Moses. Part Two: Irony of Meyer's Kantianism

 

https://www.academia.edu/37068598/Berlin_Chronologist_Dr._Eduard_Meyer_Doubted_Moses._Part_Two_Irony_of_Meyers_Kantianism

Professor A. Yahuda’s linguistic contribution to Book of Genesis

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

  

 

 

Yahuda … was an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern any

appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch.

 

 

 

 

 

Whilst I have previously written on the important linguistic contribution to the Pentateuch as made by professor A. S. Yahuda (“a Palestinian Jew, polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Yahuda  ) - and still continue basically to accept the professor’s findings - I would now be inclined to modify a few of the points that he had made.

 

For a better appreciation of what follows, one might like to read e.g. my article:

 

Structure of the Book of Genesis

 

https://www.academia.edu/28809452/Structure_of_the_Book_of_Genesis

 

 

….

It could be said that the ancient literary methods pointed out by P. J. Wiseman in favour of Mosaïc compilation of Genesis were also around much later than Moses, prevailing even into New Testament times (e.g. Matthew 1:1 gives a toledôt of Jesus Christ in the Gospels), and hence these literary methods could have been inserted into texts composed at the time of, say, the Babylonian Exile (C6th BC, conventional dating), almost a millennium after Moses, to give these texts an air of sacredness or antiquity.

 

After all, what Wiseman was drawing his information from were Babylonian scribal techniques, not, say, Egyptian ones, which were quite different.

 

So, why would Moses - let alone the patriarchs who preceded him - necessarily have had any involvement in the Book of Genesis?

 

Well, this is where the linguistic contribution of professor A. S. Yahuda (Language of the Pentateuch in Its Relation to Egyptian (Oxford UP, 1933) comes in to deal a shock blow to both the documentary theory and to the related Pan-Babylonianism.

 

Yahuda was, unlike Wiseman, an expert in his field. His profound knowledge of Egyptian and Hebrew combined (not to mention Akkadian) gave him a distinct advantage over fellow Egyptologists unacquainted with Hebrew, who thus could not discern any appreciable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch. Yahuda however realized that the Pentateuch was absolutely saturated with Egyptian - not only for the periods associated with Egypt, most notably the Joseph narrative including Israel's sojourn in Egypt, but even for the periods associated with, as he thought, Babylonia.

For example, the Flood and the Babel incident.

 

Comment: This now need to be modified somewhat, however - so I think - in light of my more recent:

 

Tightening the Geography and Archaeology for Early Genesis

 

https://www.academia.edu/34936691/Tightening_the_Geography_and_Archaeology_for_Early_Genesis

 

For instance, instead of the Akkadian word for 'Ark' used in the Mesopotamian Flood accounts, or even the Canaanite ones current elsewhere in the Bible, the Noachic account Yahuda noted, uses the Egyptian-based tebah (Egyptian db.t, `box, coffer, chest').

 

Most important was the linguistic observation by Yahuda:

 

Whereas those books of Sacred Scripture which were admittedly written during and after the Babylonian Exile reveal in language and style such an unmistakable Babylonian influence that these newly-entered foreign elements leap to the eye, by contrast in the first part of the Book of Genesis, which describes the earlier Babylonian period, the Babylonian influence in the language is so minute as to be almost non-existent. 

 

Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Fr. Jean Carmignac, had been able to apply the same sort of bilingual expertise - in his case, Greek and Hebrew - to gainsay the received scholarly opinion and show that the New Testament writings in Greek had Hebrew originals: his argument for a much earlier dating than is usual for the New Testament books.

See my article on this:

 

Fr Jean Carmignac dates Gospels early

 

https://www.academia.edu/30807628/Fr_Jean_Carmignac_dates_Gospels_early

 

While Yahuda's argument is totally Egypto-centric, at least for the Book of Genesis, one does also need to consider the likelihood of 'cultural traffic' from Palestine to Egypt, especially given the prominence of Joseph in Egypt from age 80-110. One might expect that the toledôt documents borne by Israel into Egypt would have become of great interest to the Egyptians under the régime of the Vizier, Joseph (historically Imhotep of Egypt's 3rd dynasty), who had after all saved the nation of Egypt from a 7-year famine, thereby influencing Egyptian thought and concepts.

 

The combination of Wiseman and Yahuda, in both cases clear-minded studies based on profound analysis of ancient documents, is an absolute bomb waiting to explode all over any artificially constructed literary theory of Genesis.

 

Whilst I. Kikawada and A. Quinn (Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, Abingdon, 1985) have managed to find some merit in the JEDP theory, and I have also suggested how its analytical tools may be useful at least when applied to the apparent multiple sourcing in the Flood narrative (and perhaps in the Esau and Jacob narrative), the system appears as inherently artificial in the light of archaeological discoveries.

U. Cassuto may not have been “diplomatic” (according to Kikawada and Quinn), but nevertheless he was basically correct in his estimation of documentism: "This imposing and beautiful edifice has, in reality, nothing to support it and is founded on air".

 

It is no coincidence that documentary theory was developed during the era of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who proposed an a priori approach to extramental reality, quite different from the common sense approach of the Aristotelian philosophy of being.

The philosophy of science is saturated with this new approach. See e.g.:

 

Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of the Nature of the Modern Sciences

 

https://www.academia.edu/23250163/Gavin_Ardley_s_Marvellous_Perception_of_the_Natur

 

Kantianism is well and truly evident, too - as it seems to me - in the Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen attitude to the biblical texts.

And Eduard Meyer carried this over into his study of Egyptian chronology, by devising in his mind a quantifying a priori theory - an entirely artificial one that had no substantial bearing on reality - that he imposed upon his subject with disastrous results.

Again an "imposing and beautiful edifice … founded on air".

See my article:

 

Berlin Chronologist Dr. Eduard Meyer Doubted Moses. Part Two: Irony of Meyer's Kantianism

 

https://www.academia.edu/37068598/Berlin_Chronologist_Dr._Eduard_Meyer_Doubted_Moses._Part_Two_Irony_of_Meyers_Kantianism

Joseph and Tamar comparisons. Part Three: Tamar and Tyro

  

 

 

 

“Both the stories of Tamar and Tyro begin with the killing of two brothers.

In each case the pair of  brothers die as a prerequisite to explain two things,

why the respective women had no children, and why they were sent away to the place where each would eventually become pregnant with, each their own, set of twins.

The two brothers who die in the tale of Tyro were her own children … while those in the story of Tamar were her two husbands and represented her chance to have children”.

 

John R. Salverda

 

 

 

 

Good friend John R. Salverda writes (and I may have reservations about some of his name interconnections): http://www.academia.edu/3894949/Sisyphus_the_Joseph_of_Greek_Myth

 

Sisyphus, the “Joseph” of Greek Myth

….

Salmoneus as the Patriarch of Judah

The enmity between the House of Joseph … and the House of Judah … is comparable to that between Sisyphus and Salmoneus. Sisyphus keeps trying to establish his stone upon the archetypical mountain, while Salmoneus had appropriated the worship of god to his altars exclusively.

 

The story of Salmoneus seems to be based, however loosely, upon the history of the House of Judah with [its] holy city at Jerusalem … made the capitol because it’s great Temple was founded there by [its] famous King Solomon.

 

 

At the beginning of Judean history, is the story of Judah and Tamar. Here we have a tale that has perplexed Biblical scholars for centuries not so much for what it contains, but rather for where it is located. Right smack in the middle of the Joseph cycle, just as he is being sold to Potiphar at the end of chapter 37, comes chapter 38 which contains the entire story of Judah and Tamar with no mention of Joseph throughout, and then, at the start of chapter 39, the narrative returns to the story of Joseph once again right where it left off, at the selling of Joseph to Potiphar, the continuity of the Joseph cycle being completely interrupted. This, apparent artificial, location of the Judah story we are told, in what seems more like a stretch than an explanation, is positioned to contrast the steadfast virtue of Joseph against the incestuous unrighteousness of Judah. Regardless of the Judah episode’s placement, studying the Sisyphus cycle of Greek mythology as it relates to the Joseph cycle in the Scriptures, testifies in favor of  believing, at least, that the Judah story was already a part of the Joseph cycle, even before the Joseph cycle was included in the book of Genesis. This is evident because, the myth of Sisyphus, ostensibly a collection of the Joseph stories that was current before [its] inclusion in the Genesis narrative, already contains [its] own version of the birth of Tamar’s twins, as the story of Tyro’s twins.

 

Before we get on with the comparison of these two stories let us first compare the names of the two mothers. The name “Tyro,” we are informed by Robert Graves, author of, “The Greek Myths,” was the name of “… the Goddess-mother of the Tyrians …” this was, no doubt, merely a worn down version of the more well known form of the name for the mother goddess of the Canaanites, “Ashterah,” omitting the prefix, “Ash-” as perfunctory.

 

Now, as is well known, the Greeks referred to the Canaanites as Phoenicians, a name that derives from the Greek name “Phoenix” which means, in their language, “palm tree,” however, in Hebrew the word for “palm tree” is “Tamar.” Thus, both women can be said to have names that associates them with the Phoenicians. Incidentally, the mother-in-law of Tamar, the wife of Judah, known only as, “the daughter of Shua” in the Scriptures, is identified as a Canaanitess, while the wicked step mother of Tyro, whom the Greeks called Sidero is thought to be the eponym of Sidon the original settlement of the Canaanites. Because, unlike the name Tyro, the name “Sidero” has retained [its] prefix, it is even more plausibly derived from the name of the widely known Canaanite goddess Ashterah. (those who doubt the original identification between the two names Sidero and Ashterah should consider the two comparable English terms sidereal and astro-.)

 

Let us now continue with the comparison of the two stories, of course, anyone who studies the two accounts will find many differences between them, no doubt the differences are as important, if not more important, than are the similarities, which are also many and are quite comparable. Both the stories of Tamar and Tyro begin with the killing of two brothers. In each case the pair of  brothers die as a prerequisite to explain two things, why the respective women had no children, and why they were sent away to the place where each would eventually become pregnant with, each their own, set of twins. The two brothers who die in the tale of Tyro were her own children, (by Sisyphus) while those in the story of Tamar were her two husbands and represented her chance to have children. Tamar was sent away to live with her father, while Tyro was banished from Thessaly along with her father. Tamar’s father-in-law Judah became a widower, while Tyro’s father Salmoneus became a widower. Each woman, in the land of their exile, desiring to become pregnant, made a plan that involved waiting at a place where they each expected their intended to pass, Tyro on the riverbank at the confluence of two rivers, the Enipeus and the Alphieus, while Tamar waited on the roadside where the road to Enaim branched off of the road to Timnah. In each case, the sex act itself was intentionally deceptive, because one of the partners wore a disguise so as not to be recognized. Of course, as we have said, twin boys were born, in each case, as a result of the deception. Furthermore, the paternity of each pair of twins came into question, Salmoneus, Tyro’s father, doubted the fatherhood of her twins, while Judah, Tamar’s father-in-law, also had to be convinced in regard to her pregnancy. In each story, before the respective twins were born, the true father was revealed and he gave a little speech to the respective women, the intent of which was to justify, each their own, pregnancies and to legitimize the eventual progeny of it. Another weird coincidence, is the fact that both tales include a report, so saying that the first born was marked at birth, and got a colorful name as a result, the Scriptural “Zerah” was named after the “scarlet” ribbon that was tied around his wrist to mark his preeminence, while the mythical firstborn “Pelias,” was named for the “black and blue” mark that he received when a horse stepped on his face at his birth. As it turned out, with each set of twins, both children grew up to be the founders of illustrious houses among the Aeolians and the Judeans respectively.

Well, so much for the part of the myth of Salmoneus which has to do, however little, with Sisyphus, we shall now continue with the rest of the saga of Salmoneus.

 

Besides having an echo of the earliest history about the nation of Judah, these Greeks seem to have a few more details to add, such as the name “Salmoneus” itself, which is an obvious Greek version of the name of that most illustrious of Judean rulers King Solomon. With this realization, an evolution of the myth of Salmoneus can be surmised to have occurred in three steps; firstly, the story about the birth of the Judean twins, Perez and Zerah, whose story, as we have said, precipitated the birth myth of the Greek twins Neleus and Pelias; secondly, the addition of the city of “Salem” and the founding of the Temple by “Solomon,” is ostensibly what lead to the use of the name “Salmoneus” as well as the notion that he founded a city called “Salmonia,” and appropriated the worship of Zeus to his altar; and thirdly, in the end of the myths about Salmoneus, we are told of the divine destruction of Salmoneus and his city, Salmonia. This third point would appear to have been too late to have been included in Greek mythology however, as the famous mythographer, H. J. Rose has pointed out, “It is noteworthy that Homer knows nothing of any evil reputation of Salmoneus, of whom indeed he speaks respectfully.” (“A Handbook of Greek Mythology,” p.83). The Homeric writings are much earlier than the rest of Greek mythologies and it was probably not until the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC., that an evil reputation became attached to the character of Salmoneus. The destruction of Jerusalem was looked upon by some, including the Greeks apparently, to have been an act of punishment upon the city, brought about by God Himself, this no doubt, gave rise to the parallel Greek myth about the destruction of Salmonia.-

….