Lev Tikhomirov from the early 20th century makes some interesting claims in
RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL BASES OF HISTORY.
(
Каббала)
(My comments are indented)
He writes that during the Babylonian captivity and even afterwards, many Jews remained in Babylon, and picked up Aramaic and stopped speaking Hebrew regularly. They also changed their writing alphabet from ancient Hebrew to Assyrian script (the one we normally associate with Hebrew today). Prior to that time, the letters looked more like Greek ones.
But was it really the Babylonian Captivity when they changed their everyday language to Aramaic? I thought it might have been under the Assyrian conquests. Yet the Assyrians did not conquer Jerusalem, so maybe the babylonian captivity was really it?
He also cites a 3rd century writer who claims that the idea of angels in Judaism came from the Babylonian captivity. And he writes that the calendar was taken from babylon too.
But is that really true? There are important references to angels way before then, from David's time- are we to think those are later insertions? Likewise, if you go back to the Books of Moses, you see references done in the Hebrew calendar. Are we to also propose that these were written back in by the Scribes? This would suggest that the Books of Moses were seriously edited during Babylonian times (the 6th century BC) at least several generations after Moses.
He says that the Assyrian letters above mentioned were given special secret meanings by their scholars. I remember reading something not dissimilar to this idea of secret meanings on a Messianic website, which proposed that the Hebrew letter Ш (same letter in Russian- this is the "sh" in the middle of Jesus' name.) had a special connection to Jesus. Actually, I believe the scribes who wrote the Bible really did give a special meaning to the letters. As the Messianic website mentioned, in certain places, the letter Ш was not written in a normal way, but had something look a hook on it. The Messianic website also pointed out another instance of a very unusual instance of a word or letter, which if I recall you would not pick up in a normal English translation. I found both examples very persuasive, although what was the true importance of this I am not sure.
The author goes on, and his writing is interesting. However, three points must be made. This done not really prove that Kaballah itself goes back to Babylon. Hiermonk Jov showed that Kabballah's main book the Zohar was composed in the 14th century and attributed by its composer back to earlier times. This debunks Tikhomirov's thesis about Babylon, except one can say that this thinking about secrets as a strain in the Jewish community's thought can be traced back that far.
Second, Tikhomirov was really a Monarchist philosopher, who was attached to Orthodoxy. He did work at Sergiev Posad after the revolution, but I think one need not equate his views with those of the church. I think sometimes you have Russian philosophers or figures from before the Revolution who did their own think or thought their own way, even though they were writing about Orthodoxy. I think that his writings may not show enough respect therefore to the Old Testament, from an orthodox point of view, by saying that such ideas came from Babylon. Yet actually he could turn out to be factually correct. Just as we have writers who claim the New Testament did not happen as written, there are writers who claim similar things about ancient Israel, especially from before David's time.
Also, I believe you can find a very similar factor among Orthodox in the west, influenced by movements in Protestantism. I have in mind the former Protestant, and major theologian, Met. Timothy (Kallistos) Ware's writing I cited elsewhere emphasizing how the Jews are still the Chosen People, and equating them with Israel. This is a serious trend in modern Protestantism. Without debating Ware's thesis, I will just point out that it goes in the opposite direction of Tikhomirov- where Tikhomirov really puts in question the Israelites' Scriptures much more than Orthodoxy does, Met. Ware in fact tends to talk about God's people in the Christian era in a more exclusive and national way. On one hand in Tsarist Russia there were alot of prejudicial attitudes, and in modern Protestant countries interfaith equality plays a very important role to the point where in those two societies some Orthodox writers have been influenced.
