Quote:Compared to the other nations of the world, Israel was just some back-water power and David only ruled a relatively small sliver of land deemed so unimportant at the time that the nation was left to its own accord until changing political ambitions three centuries later....this was the same time as the Egyptian Dark Ages.
If "David" as a person existed at all, that is? A significant point of Athas' work on the stele is that because it is in Aramaic there are word dividers in the form of dots all over it. However, the term which makes xtians wet their pants with joy, bytdwd, does not have such a word divider. Athas' conclusion is that this makes it a toponym like "city of david" in a sense similar to Rome being named for "Romulus" of Athens being named for "Athena."
I won't kid you....the book is flat out fucking boring in many spots but it is an important scholarly work.
Now, both Egyptologist, Don Redford and Israeli Archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein have reached the conclusion...based on different evidence... that the Exodus/Conquest tales were written in the 7th century BC. In Egypt's case this is the Saite period, that saw a brief resurgence of Egyptian power and which attempted to intervene in the Assyrian-Babylonian civil war and which ended in disaster at Carchemish. The dynasty did hold on against the Babylonians before being overwhelmed by the Persians in 525 BC.
