(February 8, 2013 at 11:13 am)John V Wrote: Yes, it can be a starting point, hence "little more than" rather than "nothing more than." The references themselves are frequently of low caliber, but sometimes there's something worthwhile as well. Wiki is better suited for issues that require little or no interpretation.
How are you defining low calibre? What about sources which are books and papers by well respected academics, scientists and archaeologists?
Wiki articles can also have sections pointing out opposing views and controversies and these are given sources as well. People can then read original material for both sides of an argument and make their own minds up.
The Asherah article has a list of See Also articles, one of which is the Asherah pole. From there I went to an article about Israel Finkelstein who is an Israeli archaeologist and academic and then went to see what the book he co-authored with Neil Asher Silberman is about.
The Bible Unearthed - Origins Of The Israelites
Quote:The book remarks that, despite modern archaeological investigations and the meticulous ancient Egyptian records from the period of Ramesses II, there is an obvious lack of any archaeological evidence for the migration of a band of semitic people across the Sinai Peninsula,[12] except for the Hyksos. Although the Hyksos are in some ways a good match, their main centre being at Avaris (later renamed 'Pi-Ramesses'), in the heart of the region corresponding to the 'land of Goshen', and Manetho later writing that the Hyksos eventually founded the Temple in Jerusalem,[13] it throws up other problems, as the Hyksos became not slaves but rulers, and they were chased away rather than chased to bring them back.[13] Nevertheless, the book posits that the exodus narrative perhaps evolved from vague memories of the Hyksos expulsion, spun to encourage resistance to the 7th century domination of Judah by Egypt.[14]
Finkelstein and Silberman argue that instead of the Israelites conquering Canaan after the Exodus (as suggested by the book of Joshua), most of them had in fact always been there; the Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed into a distinct culture.[15] Recent surveys of long-term settlement patterns in the Israelite heartlands show no sign of violent invasion or even peaceful infiltration, but rather a sudden demographic transformation about 1200 BCE in which villages appear in the previously unpopulated highlands;[16] these settlements have a similar appearance to modern Bedouin camps, suggesting that the inhabitants were once pastoral nomads, driven to take up farming by the Late Bronze Age collapse of the Canaanite city-culture.[17]
The authors take issue with the book of Joshua's depiction of the Israelites conquering Canaan in only a few years—far less than the lifetime of one individual—in which cities such as Hazor, Ai, and Jericho, are destroyed. Finkelstein and Silberman view this account as the result of the telescoping effect of the vagaries of folk memory about destruction caused by other events;[18] modern archaeological examination of these cities shows that their destruction spanned a period of many centuries, with Hazor being destroyed 100 to 300 years after Jericho,[19] while Ai (whose name actually means 'heap of ruins') was completely abandoned for roughly a millennium before Jericho was destroyed, and not being re-occupied until 200 years afterwards.[20]
It doesn't look as if the authors are regarded as crackpots.
Quote:The Bible Unearthed was well received by biblical scholars and archaeologists. Baruch Halpern, professor of Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University and leader of the archaeological digs at Megiddo for many years, praised it as "the boldest and most exhilarating synthesis of Bible and archaeology in fifty years",[66] and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it "a brutally honest assessment of what archeology can and cannot tell us about the historical accuracy of the Bible", which embraces the spirit of modern archaeology by approaching the Bible "as an artifact to be studied and evaluated rather than a work of divine inspiration that must be embraced as a matter of true belief".[67]
It seems that Finkelstein got into a heated argument with William G. Dever, another archaeologist, but this kind of thing is hardly unusual between scientists, academics and archaeologists
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?