The first blogger: Amos of Tekoa

What a guy

Today, I finish the last day of Inkhaven. And on this occasion, I would like to tell the story of the man who got us into this mess. The first man to take ink to paper to write for a general audience. We remember him as the Prophet Amos. He lived around 760 BC. People were so amazed by his blogging that he spawned a whole society of very successful bloggers. This is recorded as the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament.

Before I tell you his story, I should justify why he is the first.

I sit at my laptop and write, knowing it is going to be blasted out into the information cosmos. I think Martin Luther and his pals felt the same as they went wild with the printing press. And if you go back far enough there has to be a first time, you arrive at the first writers who must have stared amazed at the technology in their hands, knowing they could get their buddies to read whatever garbage was previously in their heads.

Blogging requires more than writing

Writing began over 5000 years ago. But there weren’t any Mesopotamian or Egyptian bloggers writing in Cuneiform or Hieroglyphs. Writing in these arcane systems required years of scribal school training that could only be accessed by the upper classes. There was a reason they did as much as they could on stone, it was expensive to get someone to write anyway. This was too much of a barrier for general blogging. Yes Hammurabi may have put his law code in the center of the market square, but he didn’t expect everyone would be able to read the thing. Basically all the writing for the first few thousand years is just recording. Writing down poems that already exist, laws, tax codes, accounts. The closest we get is from some rich person sending letters to another rich person. But that’s not a blog for everyone to read.

No, it would take a bit longer. We would need the first mass-purpose written communication technology. This happens around the year 1839 BC, when the Egyptians set up Turquoise mines in the completely barren Sinai Desert, and bring in uneducated laborers from the neighboring Canaan. These are the proto-Hebrew speaking ancestors of the Israelites, Judeans, and Phoenicians (yes, Hannibal - or Hannah Ba’al - basically spoke Hebrew). They couldn’t make heads or tails of the many, many hundreds of Hieroglyphs, so they develop a new code. They took about 20 of the Hieroglyphs, and gave them the sound of the first letter of the word in their own Canaanite language.

• 𓃾 is an Alep (ox) - A

• 𓉐 is Bayt (house) - B

• 𓌙 is Gaml (throwstick) - G

• 𓉿 is Dalt (door) - D,

• 𓀠 is delightfully H for a guy doing Haw (jubilation)

And so on. ABGD. Aleph Bet Gimel Daled. Alpha Beta Gamma Delta. Alphabet. ABCD. We can thank the Romans for not distinguishing between the sounds of C and G and dirtying the beauty of this blog post. There is only one alphabet. All alphabets are descendents of this revolutionary technology. Arabic, African scripts, the Runes, and the Indian scripts all trace their origin to Jews in the Turquoise mines of the Sinai. The alphabet has taken over the entire world, only stopping at the boundary of China, which was the only place to have the linguistic institutions strong enough to withstand it. Also then Korea invented a completely different alphabet from scratch in 1443. But apart from that, it’s all the one thing.

So why was the alphabet so successful? Because it’s piss-easy to learn. Anyone can learn the alphabet. Estimates of literacy rates in ancient Israel where it got going are as high as 25%. And this is probably concentrated in the cities. And when so many people around you can read, oh you just know someone is going to start blogging.

Now it takes a little while after 1839 BC for this to get going. First we need to wait for the hieroglyphs and cuneiform institutions to disappear, which they politely do around 1200 BC when cataclysmic environmental and economic forces overwhelm every civilization in the Cradle of Civilization, causing a violent refugee crisis that precipitates an entire system collapse of the international order. Now with the Bronze Age Collapse out of the way, we can start blogging.

Now we have the alphabet. The mass-communication technology that we needed. Is this enough to start blogging? No. We know that because the Phoenicians famously had the alphabet and spread it everywhere in the world. But just for trade. No, to blog, you must have one more thing.

You must have Something to Say.

Bethel, 762 BC

The kingdom of Israel is at its highest power. A festival rages in the great royal sanctuary of Bethel. Hundreds of prophets clothed in white are gathered, and shout into the midst. “The Day of Yahweh will come, and our enemies will be destroyed”. A great cheer goes up. Wine is poured for everyone as goats are sacrificed on the altar. A great fire rages and consumes the goat, taking its scent high into the heavens through a hole in the roof for Yahweh to smell and delight in. Over the fire looms the great treasure of the kingdom, a giant golden calf (A for Ox).

Bam! The doors fly open. A man in simple brown clothes walks to the center of the room. There is silence. “Thus says Yahweh” he proclaims. “The people of Damascus tortured the people of Gilead, dragging threshing sledges over their backs. For that I will set a fire on Damascus and it will devour them!” It’s weird and gross. The people cheer a little, confused. “Thus says Yahweh. The Ammonites and the Moabites. They committed war crimes too. I will set a fire on their cities and it will devour them”. The prophets look around awkwardly, a little woo-hoo is heard.

“Thus says Yahweh!” He is screaming now, and points his outstretched finger at the high priest. “You, the people of Israel. You charge your poor extortionate rent, you take bribes, you use shoddy weights for your scales in the market. And with your riches you recline here and drink your wine.”

“Duh” says a member of the audience. He continues. “Oh do not hope for the Day of Yahweh. For on that day you will all be killed. He hates your festivals and your sacrifices. He longs for justice.” The high priest Amaziah had had enough of this. “Get out of here, go prophecy somewhere else.”

“I am no prophet. I am a herdsman and tender of sycamore trees. You will die, all your children will die, and everyone here listening to me here today will go into exile. Also, your wife will become a prostitute.”

Time to Blog

Amos is kicked out of the sanctuary and makes the 20 mile trek back to Tekoa, where he sits and has a think. Two incredible things are about to happen that make him immortal and change the world forever.

Firstly, he makes an incredible innovation. He blogs. He writes that shit down, and sends it to everyone he knows. He already has the knack for doing things very publicly and abrasively, so this comes very naturally to him. In doing so he invents prose, invents the trope of man of the people, and becomes the first historically recorded public intellectual.

The second amazing thing that happens is that he was incredibly correct. Less than 40 years after he publicly pesters Amaziah, the Neo-Assyrians come through and destroy the kingdom of Israel. This causes an enormous refugee crisis where everyone moves south into the kingdom of Judah, and causes the ascendancy of their previously quite irrelevant capital of Jerusalem. The world will never be the same, and people start taking this Amos guy very seriously.

We know Amos is the first blogger, because everyone references him afterwards. He spawns a bunch of copycats like Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and all the rest of the prophets that basically just copy his schtick. We also know he’s the first because he also clearly doesn’t know about the rest of the bible. He doesn’t mention Moses or any of the other characters like the later prophets do. And he doesn’t seem to mind about the big golden calf that we know was in the middle of the sanctuary; hating that comes in a later edition written by spiteful priests.

Amos certainly wasn’t the best writer. The book of Amos is… clunky. I mean he hasn’t blogged before. But it does have some bangers in there.

“I hate, I despise your festivals and I will not smell your solemn assemblies. [...] Take away from me the noise of your songs and the melody of your harps I will not hear. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

But mostly the Book of Amos is strange now because of how much it’s been obviously and badly edited. You can’t blame them enitrely though, it was their first time editing things. But they added a whole sections, like a bit of the end saying how actually everything is going to be ok if you repent. It’s a really dismal read so people wanted to have a nice ending. Editing like that would be considered very naughty by today’s standards, but they hadn’t figured that out at the time.

Here is a version of the unedited Book of Amos I tried to reconstruct with the best available evidence.

After Amos, people really honed the craft of blogging. There are parts of the Hebrew Bible that are really good. But they never really got over the editing thing. They realized the power of the written word to manufacture their shared sense of reality. They created stories where they wrote over the memory that they were the same Canaanites who came up with the whole Alphabet thing in the first place. They kept rewriting, pulling things apart and smushing things together; it’s taken centuries to try to untangle the original documents and realize the importance of figures like Amos. Here’s a diagram of the best working theory for how the Torah was put together by various documents. (Shout-out to all the other J-heads)

But you know what. That’s part of the point of blogging. You trade ideas between each other over and over again, and maybe over the centuries you come up with some cool ideas. These guys actually came up with the most successful idea of all time by doing this, God. That’s pretty good.

The book of Amos is obviously not an accurate recording of what happened. For one, he apparently stands there in the center of power of the state and goes on for many chapters about how everyone is going to die and how bad they are, and how the King himself would be killed. I don’t think they would’ve just been cool with that. I think he might have… embellished a bit. But that’s what makes this blogging. He makes up a story to capture his ideas and spread them around. And you know what, I love these ideas. These are great ideas. You should fucking love this guy.

People take the ideas of Amos for granted. God hates war crimes. God wants you to be moral, and treat the poor well. But, why would that be the case? Why would the writers of the bible want that? They were mostly the priests and royalty who benefited from the whole thing. No, Amos was just a good dude who liked goodness. And he went and yelled at some fancy people. Then he wrote about it and sent it to everyone. And everyone basically thought he was right and passed his ideas around and so the Biblical writers were stuck with it, and it influenced the later writers, making morality a core part of their whole schtick.

Anyway. Bloggers be blogging. Pour one out for our boy Amos. The first blogger. He was a great dude, and I wish I coulda met the guy and commented on his post.