RE: Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult
January 10, 2013 at 7:51 pm
(This post was last modified: January 10, 2013 at 7:55 pm by Minimalist.)
If you are going to insist on a standard of historicity on a par with today you are bound to be eternally disappointed, Mouse.
We have independent attestation of Hezekiah's existence from Assyrian records. We also have evidence of rapid population growth at Jerusalem in the later 8th century and fortifications as well as increased urbanization.
The inscription itself:
and while it does not name Hezekiah it is rather pointless to think that such works would have been undertaken earlier when the site was little more than a miserable little shithole. There are some things which archaeology can show and some things which it cannot. But the artifacts are what they are and they are not as easily manipulated as human writings which can be made to say whatever an author ( or more importantly, the author's patron) wants them to say.
Such is the problem with the bible. It reflects a much later reality but the only place where I find fault with Davies, Thompson and the rest is in the insistence that these writings were created in the Persian period in toto. I think that if someone sat down to write a bullshit story it would have been better done than it is. What has come down to us suggests a compilation of various oral tales ( much to the chagrin of fundie lunatics you are quite right when you say there is no extant body of literature from the period in question) that was cobbled together - most likely by the Greeks and later re-copied into something called Hebrew.
BTW, in the citation from Wiki above I find it curious that the inscription uses dots as word separators. That is an Aramaic usage most notable on the Tel Dan stele. Hebrew did not use word separators, nor capitals, nor punctuation...in that it was much like the Greek of the same time. Curious.
Probably not. Compared to Judah and other regions to the south it was quite decent agricultural land capable of supporting a much larger population. As Finkelstein and others note the idea that the southern kingdom could have ever dominated the more populous and wealthy north is simply a later fiction created by the Judahite court which thought about expansion to the north and sought to establish a reason for making the claim.
We have independent attestation of Hezekiah's existence from Assyrian records. We also have evidence of rapid population growth at Jerusalem in the later 8th century and fortifications as well as increased urbanization.
The inscription itself:
Quote:Translation
Unreadable at first due to the deposits, Professor Archibald Sayce was the first to make a tentative reading, and later the text was cleaned with an acid solution making the reading more authoritative. The inscription contains 6 lines, of which the first is damaged. The words are separated by dots. Only the word zada on the third line is of doubtful translation - perhaps a crack or a weak part.
The passage reads:
... the tunnel ... and this is the story of the tunnel while ...
the axes were against each other and while three cubits were left to cut? ... the voice of a man ... called to his counterpart, (for) there was ZADA in the rock, on the right ... and on the day of the tunnel (being finished) the stonecutters struck each man towards his counterpart, ax against ax and flowed water from the source to the pool for 1200 cubits. and 100? cubits was the height over the head of the stonecutters ...
and while it does not name Hezekiah it is rather pointless to think that such works would have been undertaken earlier when the site was little more than a miserable little shithole. There are some things which archaeology can show and some things which it cannot. But the artifacts are what they are and they are not as easily manipulated as human writings which can be made to say whatever an author ( or more importantly, the author's patron) wants them to say.
Such is the problem with the bible. It reflects a much later reality but the only place where I find fault with Davies, Thompson and the rest is in the insistence that these writings were created in the Persian period in toto. I think that if someone sat down to write a bullshit story it would have been better done than it is. What has come down to us suggests a compilation of various oral tales ( much to the chagrin of fundie lunatics you are quite right when you say there is no extant body of literature from the period in question) that was cobbled together - most likely by the Greeks and later re-copied into something called Hebrew.
BTW, in the citation from Wiki above I find it curious that the inscription uses dots as word separators. That is an Aramaic usage most notable on the Tel Dan stele. Hebrew did not use word separators, nor capitals, nor punctuation...in that it was much like the Greek of the same time. Curious.
Quote:Was not the Galilee quite lightly populated from time of the Assyrian conquest to the Hellenistic people.
Probably not. Compared to Judah and other regions to the south it was quite decent agricultural land capable of supporting a much larger population. As Finkelstein and others note the idea that the southern kingdom could have ever dominated the more populous and wealthy north is simply a later fiction created by the Judahite court which thought about expansion to the north and sought to establish a reason for making the claim.
