Monday, October 18, 2021

Tales from the Old New Land - Table of Contents for First 58 Tales (roughly half of Book I)

(none of these can go past 1000 words except with special exceptions, the Moses and Joseph stories may not exceed 3000)

1. Dream of Jewish History 

2. Abraham acquiring Me'arat HaMachpela (in final form)

(New 3, 4, 5, 6?. Earlier mythology of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson that may not have made it into the Bible?)

3.  German bible scholarship and archeology (written but possibly needs revision)

Cain Fragment no. 1: Cain at Masada

(New 4? New story about Egyptians or Mesopotamians coming into contact with monotheism for the first time?

4. Noah's Flood (almost in final form)

(New 5? Journeys of Shem, who comes into contact with Ziusudra and Gilgamesh?)

Cain Fragment no. 2: Cain at Tower of Babel

5. Biography of Abraham. (Do the biography as many tales or just one?) How Terah and Abraham got to Ur.

6. Letters between Rebecca and Laban (complete in final form)

7. Abraham among marauding nomads known as the Habirus. 

8. Abraham and Sarah in Egypt. 

9. Abraham and Lot business fights.

10. Abraham being a mercenary soldier for Sodom, fighting in a war that causes the collapse of the Sumerian Empire and the destruction of Sodom. 

11. Abraham dispute with Abimelech. 

12. Sarah and Hagar, Ishmael's bad behavior. 

13. The healers whom Abraham thinks are angels who cure Abraham and Sarah of their infertility. 

14. Ruth and Naomi - the domestication of homosexuality and their joining as handmaidens to Sarah.

15. Abraham, growing senile, misinterprets God and joins the moon cult. 

16. Abraham has vision to redeem himself for his misinterpretation by sacrificing Isaac. Actually does it and Eliezer has to replace Isaac with Ishmael. 

17. Philo argues for Caligula to take down the statue of himself in Jerusalem's Beit-HaMikdash.

18. Maimonides ministering to Saladin.

19. Nachmanides and Paolo Christiani: the disputation in front of James I of Aragorn. 

20. Kierkegaard dealings with Jews. Evolution of his antisemitism. 

21. The Wisdom of Sirach - Grandson of Jesus

22. Early Reform Judaism - Post-Civil War Cincinnati, and the evolution of modern political correctness.

23. Elderly Jacob writes to Benjamin a revised, deliberately altered history of his family as they journey to Egypt. 

24. Deborah - in this version the daughter of Naomi, who comes to the House of Abraham and fights alongside Jacob. 

25. Something about how Abraham and Jacob finessed their belief in one god with the need to pay tribute to local gods. 

26. Dinah tells the story of Shechem's destruction and the invasion by Simon and Levi. 

27: Vespacian's  meeting with Rabbi Yochanan. 

28. Josephus's unpublished chapter about the destruction of Jerusalem. 

29. Eusebius and the birth of antisemitism in the Byzantine Empire.

30. Levi the 'Lion Man' makes himself king of Shechem after his curse from Jacob. The Egyptians go to war with him, kill him, and force Jacob to take Shechem for himself. Jacob punishes the descendents of Levi with servitude. 

31. The alliance between Joshua and Shechem.

32. Joseph all in one long chapter, focusing on the Potiphar story with subtext of a homosexual relationship between Joseph and Potiphar. 

33. The birth of the monotheistic cult in Egypt - Akhenaten who came to see the sun god Ra as the only god and himself as the Messiah, because he had Joseph as his prime advisor. 

34. The realization by Akhenaten's court that the Hebrews and their monotheism are such a threat that they will upend the entire structure of Egyptian society, and therefore Akhenaten must be killed and the Hebrews must be enslaved.  

35. The lifestyle of Ramses II, who realizes that with such a massive slave population he can get away with the most awful luxuries and tyrannies, and the formative years of Moses. 

36. Moses vs. Crown Prince Merneptah as adolescents in Ramses II's Court. 

37: Solomon building the Temple. 

38: Jepthah and his sacrifice. 

39. Moses, who has become a priest of Ra as punishment for slaying an Egyptian policeman who beat up Jews he was drinking with, gets to know his Israelite scribe Aaron and his Habiru healer Miriam. Together, the three form the plot to perpetrate ten plagues upon the Egyptians, culminating with some sort of sea battle that Moses wins. Originally it was a plot to make Moses another monotheistic Pharaoh, backed by the newly won might of the former Hebrew and the Israelite slaves, but instead it resulted in Moses being thrown out of Egypt along with the Israelite and Hebrew slaves. Told from Aaron's point of view. 

40. Moses hears cases of the Israelites. Told from Jethro's point of view. 

41. Aaron wins favor in the eyes of the Israelites that Moses does not because of Moses's deeply unpopular Ten Commandments and his tyrannical response to the worshippers of the Golden Calf. Though both exhorted by their followers to respond to each others provocations, both refuse to assassinate each other. 

42. Hillel and Menachem, bookish priests fleeing the slaughter following the Golden Calf, immigrate to Athens, where Hillel becomes Hermes Trismegistus and writes the Hermetica, and Menachem becomes Musaeus of Athens and writes the priestly odes. 

Cain Fragment III: Cain details early Jewish history after the manner of Eupolemus and sets the record straight. 

43: The murder of Crown Prince Darius, son of Xerxes I of Persia. Artapanos, the Jewish vizear of Perisa, maneuvers against Darius with Darius's younger brother Artaxerxes, who assassinates his brother and takes the throne. 

44: Aristobulus, recounting meeting between Alexander the Great and the Jewish High Priest. 

(two more potential Cain fragments with Cain Homer and Hesiod)

45. Heraclitus encounter with a Rabbi (who is Cain).

46. Plato writes a Socratic Dialogue with a Jew 

47. Numenius among the Jews and Pythagorians

48. Lost Fragments of the histories of Hecateaus of Abdera: who writes the first antisemitic history. 

49. Manetho, Greek historian, finds actual evidence that Moses was an Egyptian. 

50. Fictional letter of Karl Marx to Engels recounting his dealings with Orthodox Jews. 

51. Article by Freud detailing Orthodox Jew deposited in a Viennese insane asylum for believing he is Moses. 

52. Ancient sailor from China, during the Shang dynasty, recounting the differences between the decadent Egyptian culture which is dying out and the unspoiled Mesopotamian culture which is clearly ready to dominate the Western World. 

53. The Court of Ur - Abraham and Terah facing each other in a court judged by Hammurabi after Abraham demolishes Terah's idols. 

54. Academic detailing the many accounts of Abraham in court, leading to the conclusion that they all may be Cain fragments. 

55. Ezekiel detailing his heretical communion with Moses.

56. Later Judge (one of the 'Judges') must deal with implications of Mosaic code and leads to other which proscribes death for so many problems that don't deserve death, compares to codes of other nations. Leading to formation of the "Law of the Goring Ox."

57. Moses and Aaron form the final form of the Ten Commandments. 

58. Rabbi Simlai (3rd century) tabulates that there are 613 actual commandments in the Torah. 


No comments:

Post a Comment