Veracity of Biblical History

Aside from his solid credentials as a biblical scholar, he has worked on archaeological excavations in Israel for more than thirty years, and has been co-director of several such projects with Israeli archaeologist Dr. Shimon Gibson.

 

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And I've nothing paticular bad to say about His book or this particular Israeli archaeologist.
It may have seamed that way and for that I apologize.

I only read reveiws on his book...I'm sure it was very informative.
But I used this as an entrance to discuss a much larger topic...that does relate to archeology.

 

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History *is* secular in that it operates independently of religious mythology. Religion has its own agenda and doctrines that need to be supported and, therefore, omit, redact, propagandize, emphasize, exaggerate, and out-right lie about events in order to further that agenda or dogma. My lengthy post a page back discusses just this sort of thing and is supported by verifiable and falsifiable sources.

Your insistence that religious sources be used, perhaps exclusively, to verify religious assertions are not reasonable. This isn't the forum for such assertions. Please stay on-topic with verifiable or testable sources. Other posts of this nature or those regarding meta-discussion will be deleted or split & moved.

 

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Yes, put that way I do see your point.
I will make an effort to "verify" any statements from here on with multiple sources.
Thank you for your patience on this mater SkinWalker.

 

There is a old clay tablet many years older than the bible that is strikingly similar to the Noah story.
Peace

 

The Enuma Elish.

 

Gilgamesh was probably the one he was thinking of, though the Enuma Elish also contains a flood story. I have some info I can post later or this weekend regarding the Noachian flood myth and the Gilgamesh epic.

 

The Enuma Elish deals with the efforts of the Sumerian/Mesopotamian Gods, the power struggles, creation, etc.

The Epic of Gilgamesh specifically details the Flood in the Eleventh Chapter when the main character, Gilgamesh, meets an old man named Utnapisthim at the top of a mountain where he can supposedly find a means to immortality.

Utnapisthim relates to Gilgamesh that he cannot do it and that he is the only one who has been able to do it so far, and that too, only by divine intervention. He tells him that by the favor of Ea, he survived the Flood by building an arc and boarding his family along with the 'seed of every animal' until the Flood ended sometime later. When it ended, he made a sacrifice to the Gods and Ea granted him a wish. He asked for immortality and Ea gave it, albeit unwillingly.

 

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Hi IceAgeCivilizations,
That's a tall request. Are you suggesting that because the Bible contains accurate information, that it's always accurate?
John

 

Hey TheVisitor, what happened in the last few decades which you keep hinting about which supposedly many missed?

Shakushinnen, so much of the Bible has been borne out to have been true that the odds of something being now found wrong in it are very very slim.

 

Hi IceAgeCivilizations,
Are you talking about the old testament, or the new testament? Because I've been led to believe that the old testament is mostly allegorical.
John

 

A reading of the post I made in this thread regarding the Exodus myth and further reading of the texts I cited will show you that allegorical nature. But, perhaps more importantly, the evidence indicates that the bible is a propagandizing form of literature used by Iron Age Israelites to justify unification. There's much in the bible that is based on fact or may even have coincidental correlates, but there is much that is simply invented based upon the archaeological evidence.

 

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M*W: I would venture to go a little further and say "Iron Age Egyptians" instead of "Israelites." Although, "Israelites" was the title chosen by the Egyptians for the worship of Isis-Ra-El-the Sun god." The ancestors of the "Israelites" were the "Abiru" or "Hebrew" people who worshipped Isis, Ra and El, the sun god. The "chosen people" were those who worshipped the sun.

 

There's no doubt that there were a people in the 7th century BCE that referred to themselves as "Israelite." What's questioned is how long they've actually been a distinct culture; whether their Bronze Age and certain Iron Age exploits as depicted in the Old Testament really occurred as they did; and from where these people came. The archaeological evidence suggests that they arose as a distinct culture during one of the many cyclical transitions from pastoral -> sedentary -> pastoral -> sedentary life ways.

Indeed, the earliest settlements transitioning from the Bronze to the Early Iron Age are permanent structures that mimic pastoralist camps in both form and function.

The Egyptians simply didn't find the "Israelites" at all impressive or significant. Had a population equivalent to that of the modern city of Vancouver left Egypt, there would have been a record either archaeologically or epigraphically. The event would have been noticed and at least an embellishment written to explain it. Moreover, the event would have noticeable and lasting affect on the economy of Egypt that would have been evident in the archaeological record.

The most parsimonious explanation for the Exodus myth in the Old Testament is that there existed a cultural memory, perhaps an oral tradition, that told of the Hyksos expulsion from the perspective of the "victimized" Canaanites, the progenitor culture for the Israelites. The Israelites, incidentally, were but one of the cultures to emerge from that of the Canaanites.

 

Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities very accurately portrays locations. The events in the book did not actually occur, however. Same deal.

 

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Wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus