Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (Copenhagen International Seminar)

While I ended up a fiction writer, I had a comparative religion major for a time at my first university. Over the many intervening years, I have occasionally dipped my toes back into those waters. When I do, I deeply appreciate clarity, objectivity, and logical coherence. This book did not disappoint. I know I have read something that was worth my time when the experience leaves me considering both my own early life religious experiences and a need to read source material sited in the text. Russ Gmirkin put me in a reflective and exploratory space at the same time.

Although much of the law perspective is dry and occasionally unfruitful to the main thesis, the track of this kind of interpretive research is much needed to shed light on the real origin of the old testament. A claim of antiquity and a statement repeated, doesn't necessarily make it incontrovertible.

Good book. Plenty of info to dig into.

For those of us who suspect that the Torah wasn't formed in the vacuum of Moses' mind, and sense it's "Platonism' through-n-through, I found this to be a novel, yet well reasoned-contextual approach to the origins of the Bible. Not necessarily a riveting read, but informative and generously footnoted nonetheless. For me he could have shed more ink explaining how his argument jibes with the Documentary Hypothesis, or have given a nod to the parallels between Platonic allegories and Israel's foundation 'stories', but shoot....those would be books unto themselves. Now onto demonstrating that the Gospels were written in like manner, eh?

This is a scholarly book, thoroughly researched and properly referenced. Classical literature, like the Bible, is numbered so that one can give proper (i.e. concise) references. I am a scholar myself, of mathematics, not classics nor biblical literature. I take many non-mathematical books out of the library to read, but I own only two books: the Bible (KJV) and the Plato’s Complete Works.Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (2017) by Russell Gmirkin establishes the claim that the Pentateuch (and essentially the entire Old Testament) was written simultaneously in Hebrew and Greek in about 270 BC (in Alexandria at the library) by (about 70) Hellenized Jewish scholars. It shows convincingly that Old Testament, in addition to borrowing from Egyptian and Babylonian sources, borrowed heavily from Greek sources, including Plato's Laws.Copious similarities between Plato’s Laws and the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) were noticed in the time of Christ. Josephus comments on them extensively in Apion. I noticed them when I first read Plato’s Laws. The antiquity of the Old Testament has always been assumed, and thus it was always assumed that Plato copied from the Torah/Pentateuch. This put an unresolvable cognitive dissonance in my mind about the relationship between my two favorite books.The Torah (Pentateuch) shouldn’t have been put into Greek until after Alexander the Great’s conquest, which postdates Plato. There are no written references to the Old Testament before 250 BC. Finally, Plato's Laws recommends the very tactic of writing a moral code as a myth and making the laws come from God.Gmirkin (2017) does a very thorough examination of Greek, Biblical, and Ancient Near Eastern laws and legal institutions. He shows that many of the laws and most of the legal institutions in the Pentateuch were unknown in the Middle East before Alexander the Great, but can be definitively traced back to at least the 8th century BC in Greece, very often Athens in particular.The conclusion is that Moses went up the mountain (like Olympus), talked to a burning bush, and came down with an Athenian legal code and institutions!This book was a real find for me in helping me to understand and trace the sources of ideas.

Rarely does a book come along that can change the landscape in historical thinking and has implications that are myriad and iconoclastic. Russell Gmirkin’s new work, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, is just such a book.Mr. Gmirkin, through meticulous research, has outlined a new puzzle board in which many of the pieces of historical difficulty and inconsistency that have troubled scholars for centuries – finally appear to fall into place. This is a tour-de-force of innovative thinking as Mr. Gmirkin examines the ancient texts much as a detective would, carefully sifting-through the evidence and coming to a startling conclusion. The Bible, as we know it today, was written in Alexandria Egypt around 270 B.C.E using Greek sources from the famous Great Library of Alexandria!Why would the Greeks, who give a great deal of detail on surrounding nations such as Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria, fall almost completely silent on what they call Palestine, except for one obscure reference by Herodotus who only speaks of the region, but who does not mention the words Jew, Israel, or the Torah?I had long wondered why Plato’s Timaeus appeared to read like a philosophical Greek outline and intellectual framework for the Book of Genesis. And then there is the question of the palpably strange silence in the writings of Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle regarding the Jewish Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and even the nation of Israel itself, from the 6th century until the middle of the 4th century B.C.E. This book solves this long unsettled and paradoxical issue in Greek history by firmly establishing the timetable of the composition of the Torah, and the implications are myriad and earth-shattering.Mr. Gmirkin has written a remarkable book that is nothing less than a rewrite of the last 2,400 years of human history. He carefully discusses the legalistic code in the book of Exodus and gives us the startling parallels that demonstrate that they were drawn from Plato’s Laws which were written in the middle of the 4th century B.C.E. This book should not only be read carefully, but it should be digested slowly while doing other background reading in Greek and Roman history. It is a remarkable synthesis that profoundly altered my perspective of this critical period in human history. This is a mark of genius when a scholar is capable of providing a simple idea that is only seen as such in hindsight, an idea that crystallizes many obscure historical puzzle pieces into a clear and concise picture that cannot be seen any other way. Kudos to Mr. Gmirkin, for an historical bombshell which will be discussed and debated by scholars and laymen for many years to come.Daniel J Samson – Author of God and Evolution – The Implications of Darwin’s Theory for Fundamentalism, the Bible, and the Meaning of Life.