Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. By RUSSELL E. GMIRKIN.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the title of this book suggests, the author argues for the thesis that the Pentateuch was produced in Egypt under the influence of the two Hellenistic historians, Berossus (in Genesis) and Manetho (in Exodus). It was composed in Hebrew with a Greek translation by the same group of scholars at virtually the same time, in 273–2 bce. Such a daring claim is based upon the principle that the oldest confirmed date for the existence of the Pentateuch is in the account of the Septuagint translation in the Letter of Aristeas, c.273–2 bce, and that parts of the Pentateuch depended upon the works of Berossus and Manetho and must therefore be dated later than both. Thus, it was written all at one time by a group of bilingual Jewish research scholars, working within the confines of the Museum and Library of Alexandria under the patronage of Ptolemy II. The bulk of Gmirkin's book is taken up with the demonstration that parts of the primeval history of Genesis 1–11 are dependent upon Berossus and not on any earlier version of Babylonian traditions, as many scholars believe, and parts of the story of the exodus from Egypt are likewise taken from Manetho's treatment of the expulsion of the Hyksos. All references to the stories of Genesis or Exodus in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, such as the numerous allusions in Second Isaiah to creation, to the flood story, to the patriarchs, to the exodus and sea crossing, to the wilderness journey, are disqualified as unreliable for dating the Pentateuch and are therefore not even considered. Gmirkin identifies the culprit in the misdating of the Pentateuch as Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis, with its early dating of the J source to the ninth century bce, which creates grave difficulties in accounting for parallels to the late version of the Babylonian flood story and the Erra Epic in the primeval history. Only when these esoteric Babylonian texts were rendered into Greek could bilingual Jews have access to such traditions for the creation their own literary works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".