Archeologist unearths biblical controversy

[davidinalameda]

http://www.chn.ir/english/eshownews.asp?no=4648

Canadian archeologist Russell Adams's interest is in Bronze Age and Iron Age copper production. He never intended to walk into archeology's vicious debate over the historical accuracy of the Old Testament -- a conflict likened by one historian to a pack of feral canines at each other's throats.

Yet by coincidence, Prof. Adams of Hamilton's McMaster University says, he and an international team of colleagues fit into place a significant piece of the puzzle of human history in the Middle East -- unearthing information that points to the existence of the Bible's vilified Kingdom of Edom at precisely the time the Bible says it existed, and contradicting widespread academic belief that it did not come into being until 200 years later.

Their findings mean that those scholars convinced that the Hebrew Old Testament is at best a compendium of revisionist, fragmented history, mixed with folklore and theology, and at worst a piece of outright propaganda, likely will have to apply the brakes to their thinking.



saying that this proves the historical accuracy of the bible is like saying that Bush is right all the time just because he was able to put his underwear on his butt instead of his head

[Connie_Corleone]

1. It only proves that some of the cities mentioned in the bible

were real cities. It's just the stories about them are made up or exaggerated.

[aquart]

7. For instance?

[enki23]

11. blowing horns, and making walls of jericho come falling down

just one instance.

[trotsky]

12. Oh but you see we have evidence of crumbled walls...

and so naturally that MUST mean that the horns made them fall just as described in the bible because no way do walls ever fall for other reasons!

[aquart]

14. Ah. And those reasons would be....?

List here, please.

[trotsky]

19. Hmm, let's see...

Regular (non-horn-inspired) siege
Through neglect
Natural disaster
Accident
Age

Tons of reasons.

[arwalden]

20. Wow.

That anyone would actually need to point out something so obvious just astounds me.

[Beetwasher]

21. LOL! Walls That Are THOUSANDS Of Years Old Are Crumbled????!!!!

GET OUT OF HERE!! NO FUCKING WAY!!!! Ha! How do you crazy skeptics explain THAT away?!! Hmmmm???? :eyes:

[Connie_Corleone]

18. Sodom and Gommorah and the surrounding cities...

They might have existed, but that doesn't mean God destroyed the cities because of sin. They might have been destroyed by some asteroid or something, and people at the time just figured that God must've really hated those cities so he destroyed them.

[Ian David]

2. LOL!!!! Very good point!

And even so, that is *IF* the information is even verified in the first place.

That's like saying that because Archaeologists find evidence of Jews held in captivity in Egypt that it proves a burning bush spoke to Moses.

[eallen]

4. It's really hilarious the way fundies think about the Bible....

If they thought about the Homeric epics the same way, they would believe every appearance of Athena, and every adventure of Ulysses, just because Ithaca, Ilium, and Mycenae were real city states!

:crazy:

[aquart]

8. Exactly.

[On the Road]

3. Interesting Find

I am not a minimalist about the OT. Those guys think nothing much happened before the Assyrians in the 700's BC.

The OT is propaganda, but it's propaganda about kings who really lived.

[aquart]

5. WHY wouldn't the Bible be historically accurate?

It's the history of a people, isn't it? The documents it is compiled from aren't different from Holinshed's sources for instance. And in some cases a lot less fanciful.

The Jews, whose book it is, have no policy of inerrancy, and we don't think the writers were writing with God's inspiration. It's just our story. Our laws. Our instructions. Nobody else is required to believe a word of it. We aren't known as missionaries.

Now, if the Christians want to believe the New Testament is the inspired word of God, go for it. Our book was pieced together from our records, from our important legal decisions, from our narrative origin myths. We wrote it all down and kept it handy.

Now any people will put a positive spin on its own story, but why would we lie about when it took place and where? We don't actually give dates, anyway. We say, in the reign of so and so, this and that happened. Kind of silly for anyone to say it didn't.

[Stunster]

6. Wow, that's a coincidence

What was I reading last night? ON THE RELIABILITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by K. A. Kitchen (Eerdmans, 2003). What bit of it was I reading? The stuff about Edom (pp. 193ff).

I had no idea about this archaeologist's findings.

[aquart]

9. So, did the book think the OT is reliable or not?

How about this:

<http://www.ldolphin.org/icc-am.html>

TOWARDS A BIBLICALLY INERRANT CHRONOLOGY

ALAN MONTGOMERY, B.Sc.(Hon)

ABSTRACT

A new biblical chronology is proposed which dates the exodus at 1591 BC. This chronology is constructed from the biblical text including the prophecies of Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The results are shown to be consistent with known sabbatic and jubilee years. The archaeological consequences of dating the fall of Jericho to the Middle Bronze (1551 BC ) are examined and followed through to the Iron Age. The new interpretation of Palestinian archaeological evidence suggested by the new chronology resolves some longstanding historical problems.

[Stunster]

10. Yes

Kitchen defends the general reliability of the OT as regards it being a source of the ancient history of the Israelite people.

He's not a fundamentalist, of course, and he's not entering the arguments about whether there really is a God whom the ancient Israelites encountered, etc. But as an ancient historical source, as ancient historical sources go, he thinks the OT is pretty good.

It's amusing to see the way some fundies and some religion skeptics are reacting to this story. They are so intent on defending the literal truth of the Bible, or on trashing the Bible, that they fail to notice something about the following question:

Whether or not Judaic religion is true, are the historical books of the OT reasonably accurate?

What they fail to notice is that the answer to this question could be "Yes", even if the Judaic religion is false, and it could be "No" even if the Judaic religion is true.

[Selwynn]

13. What does CNH news stand for? What is the bias of this source?

I don't know that I think this claim logically follows the premises:

"Their findings mean that those scholars convinced that the Hebrew Old Testament is at best a compendium of revisionist, fragmented history, mixed with folklore and theology, and at worst a piece of outright propaganda, likely will have to apply the brakes to their thinking."

How exactly is one example of a historical fact the bible potentially got right proof that now somehow the bible should not be considered revisionist, fragmented history, mixed with folklore and theology? Have we suddenly found talking snakes and donkeys I don't know about? Seen a pillar of salt anywhere lately? Found the ark? Are there not still many things reprorted in the OT as historical fact that are either still believed to be incorrect or inconstented with text elsewhere in the OT?

So.. what is the big deal exactly?

[aquart]

15. Sometimes I get really exhausted

When I see a comment like this. Particularly from someone who clearly knows neither the Bible nor the area.

Pillars of salt are there. The Dead Sea is all evaporated salt. Probably part of what inspired the story. They get pointed out to tourists. A more likely source is ancient Sumerian, a pun on "munu" which means "salt" and "munus" which means "woman." Puns meant a lot to ancient peoples and even early Christian myth and art contain numerous puns.

As for the Ark, if it survived that last sacking by Rome, I'd check out the Vatican vaults.

[Lexingtonian]

16. Not to mention

that the point of the Bible was never to simply to be a record. The point of the compilation, choice of canon, and editing is perfectly clear: to recollect the major events of the Past and teachings of the Past into a comprehensive Teaching.

For example, the Book of Esther is clunky fiction, and the only possible reason for making it canonical was because of some particular pedagogical value to it. (It's generally read as nationalistic propaganda and so used in the Purim festival; my own opinion at this point is that it's intentionally bad literature and functions as an illustration of a popular but unacceptable theological approach.)

Trying to read the Bible as a history textbook only reveals that the writers considered getting the substance (impressions, ideas, meanings) they wanted learned into the text more important than getting the facts around them unambiguous or objectively correct.

What we're left with is a particular account of the spiritual development/history of the People; the material development/history, to the extent that it hindered the task, was treated as rather incidental and uninteresting/unrevealing/tedious except in the amount and kind of human effort invested in particularly impressive stuff, e.g. building the Arc, or the Ark, or the Temple.

[aquart]

17. That brings up a very important point.

They needed the story of Esther because it rewrote the Purim Festival. Purim means fires. Sacred, pure fires. There were fire festivals all over the world and still are. The root is not Hebrew but indoeuropean. ALL the important Jewish holidays have indoeuropean root names. Purim gets a book in the Bible, and Passover gets the Haggadah which is a script rewriting the meaning of the messianic fish meal. Pesach is from peisk meaning fish. They re-invented themselves and they needed something to teach the people the new story. Sukkos is the strangest. It's even mentioned how this holiday suddenly appeared in a reading of the Torah after the Babylonian exile. People noticed they'd never heard of this booths thing before. Sukkos means pig, not booths. But it means pig filtered thru the Celtic word Sukko. And yes, there was a major pig festival in the Mediterranean area. And yes, there were Celts.

[Lexingtonian]

22. that's news to me

As far as I know, the holidays have mostly been thought to be of Canaanite origins- and reflect mostly the kind of festivals of farming peoples and their kind of fertility cultism. Obviously the names and other references to the deities of the Semitic polytheistic religions- Ashtaroth, Dagon, and the rest- had to be stripped out of the holiday names.

I'd suppose that the 'Indoeuropean' linguistical bit has to do with the story of the Philistines. It seems, but this is a very tentative reconstruction, that the best guess of where they came from and when is that their ancestors were the sister people of the present day Greeks and their homeland was the eastern edge of the Aegean Sea. There was some sort of disintegration there around the middle of the second millenium BCE and migration via ships happened- the appearance of the Sea Peoples in Egypt, Philistines in the southern end of the Phoenician continuum of seaports, and (pre)Etruscans is roughly coincidental. In the Iliad the major group of people defending Troy is named 'the Pelasgians' and Homer assumes his audience knows who they are and where they come from- unlike other groups, he doesn't take time to tell of some far away place they came from. They're the locals. Ancient World historians tell that 'the Old Language' of the Aegean (clearly not Indoeuropean) survived into Roman times on the island of Lemnos- and a substantial stone inscription discovered there is in a language that resembles Etruscan. Filis-ti...Pelas-ge...in Semitic languages the p/f boundary was semi-fluid back then and still is. We don't know anything much about the Philistines' language, but if their ancestors' language was 'Pelasgian' they probably brought a good amount of loan words from their Anatolian and Balkan neighbors, Hittite or whatever. Russian linguists think that Etruscan/Lemnian is probably most closely related to a North Caucasus language family; all languages in proximity of the Black Sea have bits that seem Indoeuropean-- or, quite possibly, Indoeuropean itself was just the ultimately dominant one and great survivor of a set of regional and interrelated, but long diverged, languages.

Which is a way of saying that the sourcing of such words is not necessarily Celtic, I guess. And I guess borrowing potential Philistine-derived namings would be an additional way of avoiding Canaanite references. All of which goes back to the most interesting idea in Neil Silverstein's book of Biblical archaeology, which is that Judaism could well represent a religious reform movement in Caananite river towns/cities, maybe instigated by a tiny nomadic group or set of groups that lived in the scrub deserts and hills, a movement that revolted against the Canaanite social order and polytheistic/institutional religion. Sort of a puritanish Protestantism vs a corrupt Catholicism conflict.

The idea to Succoth is actually quite transparent. The period following the Babylonic exile was one of rebuilding the agricultural society and its institutions in a country that was devasted and underpopulated. I suspect the priests decided that the roots of the religion in the mysticism of desert peoples- all desert peoples are mystical at heart- was being forgotten and devalued in a time where everyone was grabbing at unclaimed agricultural land (owning land represents fundamental wealth and unrefutable claim to status in agricultural societies) and resettling it, so they decided that a holiday had to be created to keep the Believers from forgetting and fully rejecting the experiences and choices of their teachers and ancestors who found great value in the life in Wilderness. Getting everyone involved in building a nomad's tent and engaged in a ritual repetition of the Old Practices of that lifeway was a way of creating an occasion to talk about what was valuable about that way of life, and what was undesireable. It also countered a general materialist attitude sedentary agricultural peoples develop- that Gods and preachers come and go, but hanging on to the title deeds is what is important. For desert peoples it's the soil that blows in the wind, the mass of human life that looks frail against the conditions of the world- the sun and dryness and rock-, and spiritual experiences (involving other people and those found in the sublimity of the world) are the permanent goods and valuables.

[aquart]

24. Have you actually ever seen a Philistine word? Or heard one?

Do you know what language the Canaanites spoke? Have you ever heard of the Thesmaphoria?

The Celts were all over the area. Mercenaries, whatever. Probably not called Celts. But "sukko" is their word and we took it. That seems to make you nervous. I have no idea why. I would think knowing we have a holiday named "pig" would be a whole lot more freaky.

Chanukkah is safer. Ghans = goose in ie. but the goose is Egyptian and it laid the golden sun.

[Lexingtonian]

26. Nope, not knowingly

I think there aren't any records of the language of the Philistines whatsoever. They were a distinctive people for a while, the clearest historical records about them are Egyptian but superficial, and they apparently assimilated into the Semitic peoples around them.

The Canaanites spoke Semitic languages and these formed a language continuum extending to Ugarit and the Euphrates. Edomite and Amalekite and Israelite and Phoenician inscriptions have been found, and it's clear that Biblical Hebrew is essentially a dialect among many- linguistically it's, unambiguously, simply the Judean variant of Semitic and closely related to its obvious relatives.

No, I know nothing about 'Thesmaphoria'. And I have to doubt that Celts had any contact with that region of the world until the Sassanide and Ptolemean empires at the earliest.

[Igel]

23. The big deal is a tradition of Bible criticism dating

from the 19th century which claims that the Bible wasn't written down until late--7th or 6th centuries, BC, at the latest. Moreover, the history in the Bible is primarily fictitious, with no credibility whatsoever, made up to provide Jews with a distinguished history that they lacked. Compare Anglo-Israelism. And let's not forget the obscure Middle German chronicle averring that Abraham wandered around in Central Europe (Austria, specifically), begetting children and serving as the forefather of the German tribes there in the 1300s.

This view has been increasingly dismissed: fundamentalists and many evangelicals think it's wrong. And the adherent of the strong version of this view have had to push the date of some reliability further and further back.

This is the same school of criticism that decreed that Troy did not exist and the Iliad not written by Homer, but was a fiction made up by some anonymous itinerant bard, passed down orally for hundreds of years until it was finally written down.

[FM Arouet666]

25. Absolutely in agreement.

More specious reasoning from believers. The bible mentions Edom at a particular time in history, and modern archeology verifies the account. Contradicting academia, in support of theologians. So the conclusion is that the bible is an accurate historical text? The person arriving at that conclusion clearly has his underwear on his head. :evilgrin:

If religion is a matter of faith, why do religious people care about the conclusions made by modern scholars?