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this may be slightly pedantic, but the kingdoms of israel and judah are not even close to being "the only cogent jewish political entities to have ever existed." for one, the religion they practiced isn't really recognisable as judaism, but something scholars call "yahwism," which was maybe closer to a pagan polytheistic cult with a particular focus on one local canaanite storm-god, yahweh, and his wife, asherah. the emergence of judaism proper was slow and mostly took place in exile; the relig…

ps: i feel like it's probably a very bad idea to try to get any kind of factual information about anything from chatgpt. i just got it to provide a list of the kings of yareach shelanu, a ninth-century jewish polity on the moon, which begins with a medieval jewish astronaut called king miriam ii.

Yes, I would never claim that chatGPT should be relied upon exclusively. I never take anything it tells me at face value and use it only to more efficiently island hop across other sources (my most common question was "what's a good wikipedia page for this"). Sometimes you get very pressing but minor questions, and it's a much more efficient lodestar to finding the answer than cracking open a 326-page PDF.

nytimes.com/2023/11/06/…