Did the flood really occur?

[popeyespappy]

I am familiar with Israel Finkelstein's argument about monotheism emerging during the reign of King Josiah.

I think Finkelstein is one of the great voices of modern archaeology and his The Bible Unearthed is a well-researched and evidenced book....right up until the end. By his own admission there is no archaeological attestation for anyone named "Josiah." Yet, at the end he deviates from his own procedure and starts using the biblical text as authoritative. Josiah is a King Arthurish figure who appears reeking of virtue, doing exactly what the fucking priests want him to do and embracing Yahweh and the bible and who wants to expand the nation into areas vacated by the retreating Assyrians. How very special.

I belong to an email list actually on biblical studies but it includes some of the biggest names in the minimalism school: Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies and Niels Peter Lemche. I was chatting with Lemche one time about this very point and using the "there must have been a king in Jerusalem at the time because every other state had kinds what's wrong with calling him 'Josiah?' line of thought and Lemche made a very clear point. The problem is that if you use bible terminology then you get stuck into the habit of picking up all the other biblical bullshit that goes along with it. Other than what is written in the bible - and it was written much later - we have no indication that Judah was particularly "Jewish" at this point in time as we now understand the word. William Dever makes a great case for a religious struggle between the people in the countryside who worshiped the old Canaanite gods and priests in Jerusalem who were pushing Yahweh as the chief god but this tendency toward henotheism was going on all over the ANE ( Marduk became the chief god in Babylon ) at the time.

So I think Finkelstein goes off the tracks a bit at the end because he does not stay true to his principles. There WAS a king in Jerusalem. The dynasty was undoubtedly an Assyrian vassal and may well have seen an opportunity to assert themselves as the Assyrians were more and more consumed by their war with Babylon. Egypt under Necho allied itself with Assyria and moved northwards to confront the Babylonians. The bible's initial tale is that Necho summons "Josiah" to a meeting and has him killed. Such an unglorious end for such a glorious character! (So inglorious in fact that the later writer of Chronicles invents a battle for Josiah to be killed in. )

Realistically, we have a small weak state caught in a power struggle between larger forces. The power politics of our own days shows that governments are replaced to suit the needs of the larger powers. We know that in such states there are factions which tend to one side or the other and so the idea that kings would be named and replaced at the whim of the major powers is not unusual. Assuming that Necho was not stupid enough to leave an unfriendly king in his rear we can suppose that a ruler friendly to the Egyptian-Assyrian interests was put on the throne and may have still been there in 605 when Babylon crushed the alliance.
That certainly explains the Babylonian interest in crushing Judah a few years later on.

And, Pap, yes. Another book, In Search of Ancient Israel by Philip Davies he does suggest that the "exiles" returning were nothing more than a handful of rulers sent to establish Persian authority over Judah so that Persia could concentrate on more important issues. These "rulers" were given a doctrine that has them being the priests of Yahweh, freed from captivity - with all the kings and their families conveniently dead - restored by the grace of Cyrus to "return" their country to Yahweh who looks suspiciously like the Persian creator god, Ahura Mazda.

Would the peasants care? As far as they were concerned they were trading one group of overseers ( Babylonian ) for another ( Persians masquerading as Jews!) Would they really care which hand held the whip?


As far as Ugarit goes, try this:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsou...20155.html

Ugarit was a town in Syria which was done in by the Sea People.

I'll drop in at AF and see what's going on but everytime there is a find of ancient writings you can bet your ass that xtian morons will come out of the woodwork insisting that "proof" has been found for their fucking bullshit stories. It rarely works out that way.

They pulled the same crap with the Ebla tablets ( which have nothing to do with "Israel" and everything to do with central Syria and the DSS which xtians were POSITIVE would prove their god boy and there is not a single mention of the fucker.

I don'think he's talking about anything new at Ugarit. Just an ancient archive I'm not familiar with.

[Minimalist]

Ugarit was destroyed c 1200 BC which is the date Finkelstein assigns for the emergence of proto-Israelites in the Judaen Hill Country..some distance away.

When it first came out that texts had been found the bible thumpers went wild and there is probably lots of preposterous shit still floating around about how they "proved" the bible and such.

It is similar to this situation with the Ebla tablets.

See here.

http://cojs.org/cojswiki/Ur_and_Jerusale.../Dec_1983.

According to Genesis 11:28–31, Abraham was born in the city of Ur. Contrary to earlier reports, the name Ur does not appear in the mid-third millennium cuneiform tablets uncovered at the ancient city of Ebla, now in Syria. That is the latest word from Ebla’s Italian team of archaeologists and epigraphers, who toured the United States last spring. This revision is the most recent of a long series concerning the contents of the tablets, especially as they relate to the Bible.1

The name Jerusalem is another withdrawn claim. There is no reference to Jerusalem in the Ebla tablets, the Italians say, nor is there any mention of Megiddo, Lachish, Shechem or the Biblical Cities of the Plain.

and even more importantly:

What has happened with the Ebla tablets is, unfortunately, exactly what happened with several other major textual discoveries of this century, such as the Ugaritic texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Linear B tablets in Mycenaean Greek. In each case there was a period of wild enthusiasm with everyone wanting to get into the act. Claim and counterclaim followed one bizarre reconstruction after another. One classical scholar, convinced that the ancient Greeks could write nothing but great poetry, thought he had discovered the poetic metrical system for the poetry of the Linear B tablets—no mean achievement when one realizes that these tablets are administrative texts connected with the wool industry, the flax industry, coppersmithing and the manufacture of perfumes and unguents.

The point is that there seems to be a period of fantasy, almost a silly season, through which we must pass following every great textual or epigraphical discovery. Scholars share the vanities and insecurities common to all humanity. When asked for their opinion by a reporter from the New York Times, Time magazine or BAR, few can resist. The fact that they know nothing about the subject has never hindered most scholars from contributing to the general confusion.

---

My faith is confirmed in the ways the Lord has shown himself in my life time and again, and my faith endures, not on facts that disprove events took place in the past, but facts that prove that I am doing God's will.

Salty, do you understand that you sound like a blithering idiot when you write stuff like that?

If you want to believe in nonsense, be my guest. It's no skin off my nose. But don't expect to be taken seriously.

[Ace Otana]

I do think it is more plausible for it to be local, but then I think of the ark and the animals, there would be no need for the ark if it was just a restricted thing...then again, what if God wanted to only flood Africa, then that could be considered local and the animals would still need saving....etc

What you have to try to understand is that, these stories came from people who knew virtually nothing about the world. They would say "goddidit" to everything. Even volcanoes because they didn't know anything about them. Like "fire from the sky" which was describing rocks being thrown from a volcano. They didn't know, they assumed it was god chucking down fire balls to punish people.

Reason why such stories cannot be taken seriously now is because we now understand a great deal about the world. This is why I won't take the bible at all true. People back then, knew very little compared to what we know now. We know wooden ships cannot be built too big, we cannot even today with our technology do what the bible claimed happened. Which means, the bible must be wrong.

I have reason to believe that Christ is real because after accepting him I changed in ways that I was incapable of doing on my own. As you can see, that kind of reasoning isn't effected by what history tells me.

I reckon it's just you. You're just giving your imaginary friend the credit instead of yourself.

[salty]

I bought an old book called The Bible As History by Werner Keller (New York, 1981).

I'd say that was a waste of money...

Well, Thor, with the way I used that book, yes, it was a waste of money. I also bought one book on creationism, two books on evolution, one book on the trinity and one book called "Is Christianity True?" Actually I have that in my desk I should take a peek.

[KichigaiNeko]

Do we on this forum have a "recommended" reading list??

[The Grand Nudger]

It would likely be too long to compete with certain other groups recommended reading lists. Attention spans and all that.

[KichigaiNeko]

It would likely be too long to compete with certain other groups recommended reading lists. Attention spans and all that.

Perhaps...

A thread based on "What reading material helped coalesce my atheism" ??

[Nitsuj]

I think some better evidence that the flood occurred would be something else to wipe out today's people. Surely people now are much worse than people at that time.

[Ace Otana]

I think some better evidence that the flood occurred would be something else to wipe out today's people. Surely people now are much worse than people at that time.

I'd chance to say that people today are somewhat dumber than back then. I mean, people thousands of years ago had a reason to believe in utter shit, there was no knowledge, science or facts to go by. Just hear say. Today we have all the knowledge and facts readily available to you, yet despite that people today will gladly and foolishly opt for religious bullshit over science, knowledge, and facts. Wilful ignorance is far dumber than just ignorance on it's own.

[Thor]

Well, Thor, with the way I used that book, yes, it was a waste of money. I also bought one book on creationism, two books on evolution, one book on the trinity and one book called "Is Christianity True?" Actually I have that in my desk I should take a peek.

I'm just curious... when you open the book "Is Christianity True?", is there only one page with the word "No"?