Posted on 01/17/2007 10:38:52 AM PST by Hal1950
The date was in plain sight on a bread wrapper found in the ruins of a palace.
"Herzog said it,
I believe it,
That settles it for me."
No wonder they are coming to the wrong conclusions. What these types can't get through their heads is that the Bible IS history.
Wow, get two Jews in a room and you really will get three opinions.
There is a bit more dangerous delusion there near the end.
BTW, were you aware that more than one ancient figure was confirmed by grain receipts found imprinted on clay tablets?... Well of course you did, that's why you made the 'bread wrapper' pique.
''Meanwhile another British archaeologist, John Garstang, set out to excavate Jericho with the idea of establishing evidence for the biblical account of Joshua and the Israelite conquest of the land of Canaan. Over the course of six years, beginning in 1930, he moved thousands of tons of earth and is said to have examined approximately 150,000 artifacts. In the end, he established that Jericho had been occupied before the invention of pottery, but he never found the proof of Joshua and the Israelites that he was looking for.
In 1949 he decided to invite Kathleen Kenyon to review his extensive findings. This would turn out to be a defining moment in her life and the beginning of her most famous work. She determined that Garstang’s work needed modification and that another, more complete excavation was necessary, which she began in 1951.
Significantly, she brought with her a refined version of the excavation method pioneered by Wheeler. The Wheeler-Kenyon Method, as it is now called, was perfected during her Jericho excavation. It might be thought of as a vertical as opposed to a horizontal approach. In the latter method, layers were simply peeled off an excavation site. This had been the common procedure up to that time. But as layer after layer—often several inches thick—was stripped away, an important dimension was lost in the process: time.
By contrast, Kenyon’s method involved digging trenches or squares like a checkerboard, with walls or balks between the squares. The balks revealed the layers of time and events at a particular site. From soil composition, archaeologists were able to record the vertical relationship of one soil layer or time period to another, and the relationship of any buildings or architecture to each time period. This significantly improved the ability to date findings and provided a measure of control over the site prior to full-scale excavation and clearing.
Kenyon left Jericho and in 1961 chose to excavate in Jerusalem until the 1967 Six-Day War put an end to the project. This was to be her final excavation.
In the end, her conclusions from Jericho shocked and surprised many. She reported that Garstang’s dates were wrong and that, as a result, there was no walled city for Joshua to conquer. Archaeology didn’t support the biblical text, she said.
But if archaeology is a science, it is an interpretative science, and any interpretation is subject to reinterpretation. Archaeologist Père de Vaux, who worked with Kenyon in Jerusalem, reflected, “Archaeology does not confirm the text, which is what it is, it can only confirm the interpretation which we give it. If the results of archaeology seem to be opposed to the conclusions of text criticism, the reason may perhaps be that not enough archaeological facts are known or that they have not been firmly established; the reason may also be that the text has been wrongly interpreted.”
In the early 1980s, as the publication of her raw data became public, reinterpretation became the order of the day. Some scholars are still reinterpreting her findings and putting new dates on events at Jericho.
Whether or not her conclusions were correct, Kenyon did help to popularize archaeology. During the course of her excavations she made time to present slide shows and lectures and write for popular British and American magazines. In Jericho: Dreams, Ruins, Phantoms, Robert Ruby writes that Kenyon “did know how to tantalize. She made her name familiar. There were occasional progress reports in the Times by [Kenyon], who could stretch the truth for the sake of improving her story. No, she had not yet found walls from Joshua’s time. She did find a small jug—‘perhaps abandoned when the housewife fled before the approaching Israelites.’ This was not demonstrably false, not demonstrably true. It was a masterful ‘perhaps’; perhaps the Old Testament account would be confirmed.”
Autocratic and perhaps overconfident, Kenyon was a larger-than-life personality. She insisted on maintaining control. While these characteristics served her well in the field, they often frustrated her efforts to report her findings and to achieve an accurate synthesis of her work. She created for herself a task beyond her ability to complete. Ruby writes: “Her insistence on doing things her way played a large role in her subsequent failures. Not even she could live up to the standards she demanded.”
Yet she will be greatly remembered for her substantial contributions to the field of archaeology. Her field methods strengthened the science. At the same time, they pinpointed the need to introduce other methods and related fields of study in order to develop a more complete and accurate picture of history.
In 1973, Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged her work, naming her a Dame of the British Empire for her accomplishments.
Dame Kathleen Kenyon never married; she died in 1978 of a stroke at the age of 72.
M
Apparently the writer doesn't know that the Jewish faith rests on the Torah, not the Bible.
If he doesn't know that, it ain't worth reading the rest.
Of course! These ancients were advanced peoples. They anticipated the numbering system of today.
"They anticipated the numbering system of today." Bwahahaha, I love it!
There are only too options open regarding Daniel: Either Daniel was exercising a gift of predictive prophecy about future events, or the Book of Daniel is a fraud, perpetrated at the time, or near the time, of the Maccabees (160 BC). The issues are too stark to present any other possibilities.
"Minimalists" begin from the assumption that "supernatural prophecy" is impossible (owing to the lack of a "supernatural" anything) while believers begin from the assumption that Scripture may not be exhaustive, but it is not false.
I wrote a paper in college exploring this issue years ago, and came to the conclusion that most of the mininmalist arguments didn't add up to a lot, and were largely based on their a priori assumptions (though proving veracity is not so easy, either).
MHG, I can send you a copy of it if you give me a mailing address through private email.
Yeah, who ae you going to believe, God or some over-educated dude with a funny hat and a shovel?
You've got mail ...
A very big problem for Torah and Biblical literalists is the complete lack of physical evidence supporting the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt.
None exists. And the Egyptians were great record-keepers. Nor is there any evidence that Egypt was brought to its knees by the Ten Plagues and the Exodus. Indeed, the biblical timeline places it in the height of Egypt's Golden Age, hardly a time of devastation.
It really comes down to a question of whether you want to believe that every word of Genesis and Exodus is literally true, or whether you're open to the suggestion that these are writings passed down as oral history over the generations that might contain inaccuracies and even some legends or allegories.
One side has drawn its line in the sand. The other side is still trying to figure out what happened based on real evidence.
You've got to be kidding. The "old testament" is the number one punching bag of atheists and unbelievers, including Jewish ones. The Torah is the most blasphemed and deconstructed book in the whole world precisely because it is the direct Word of G-d.
All non-Orthodox forms of Judaism (and even some self-identifying "Orthodox" Jews) reject the Divine dictation of the Torah, which is the traditional understanding.
I'm sorry if I come across as harsh. It's just that even many chr*stians who accept the "new testament" as literally true still enjoy tearing the "old" one to shreds (I refer of course to non-Fundamentalist chr*stians).
Thanks for the ping.
As much as I despise the "scholars" who enjoy deconstructing everything in the TaNa"KH (doubtless while insisting that Holocaust-denial should be a punishable crime), I don't find them anywhere near as utterly loathsome as the smirking jackasses on the sidelines who insist that arguments over historicity "miss the point" because the Bible is merely a collection of Aesop's fables (the predominant position of your co-religionists in the ancient liturgical churches, as you know).
I think that the name of Mircea Eliade can be added to that of G.W.F. Hegel as "ruling the world from the grave." Just as Hegel's pantheistic vision of a universe creating G-d (rather than vice versa) paved the way for all "progressive" non-Theistic moral/ethical/ideological systems, so Eliade's redefination of religion has entered the collective subconscious and become the dominant religious paradigm. According to Eliade, religion began as groundless ritual (called for by something deep in the human psyche). As time passed and people began to ask questions myths and scriptures were created to explain and rationalize the rituals. But the important thing is the rituals, not the myths or scriptures (according to Eliade). This means that now that we have "matured" (in the Comtean/Hegelian sense) we can admit that our myths are so much nonsense because we realize that it's the ritual that matters.
Sure enough, this "the Bible is mythology" is strongest in the highly liturgical, ritualized religions while the churches most committed to the literal truth of Scripture are the ones lacking ritual of any kind. The clergy of ritual religions smirk at the "nineteenth century positivism" of Protestant Fundamentalists who don't realize how "modern" and "unhistorical" their Biblicism is. It's an open secret that many priests in the liturgical churches are agnostics making a good living by acting out a pantomime. Meanwhile Fundamentalist Protestants are despised and detested for mistaking the text of the "pantomime" as history.
Did you see President Ford's lavish, Episcopalian funeral (at which the eulogist alluded to the upcoming schism over sexual issues)? It's no wonder that these ancient churches, whose pomp and ceremony would seem to indicate ultraconservatism, are the very ones who can't make up their minds what to do with homosexuality. After all, sure, the text condemns it, but the text is secondary to the ritual (and its moral anachronisms are as "charming" and meaningless as its linguistic ones). Who are we to deny participation in the ritual to our brothers and sisters based on a few archaic lines in the ritual's text?
Did you read the recent post in which some writer engaged in a tirade against Mormons because their religion isn't old enough to have turned its "myth into meataphor?" "Freedom of religion" has come to mean freedom of practice, but actual belief is more and more circumscribed. Woe betide those of us unfortunate enough to have been born into a culture whose religion was all text and no ritual. We are apparently entitled to none of the respect given to the agnostics who hang on to the meaningless clutter of their "faith traditions."
I hate liberals!
The "higher anti-Semites" are coming out of their septic tanks.
That's all you got? Accusing me of anti-semitism?
If I wasn't laughing, I'd be outraged.
If I wasn't laughing, I'd be outraged.
There's an old Orthodox Jewish saying: "Higher Biblical Criticism is Higher Anti-Semitism."
Besides, I thought you folks spent most of your time assuring Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Armenians, Jews, etc., that if they'd only join you in poking fun at slack-jawed inbred rednecks who believe the world was created in six days, you'd leave all their precious little myths alone. Why, Patrick Henry even quotes Pope John Paul II on his web site, and JPII believed in all sorts of unscientific things (resurrection of J., transubstantiation). You'd better be careful or you're going to let the cat out of the bag that you're actually laughing at your erstwhile "allies" along with at the rednecks.
bump for future reading
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