(March 27, 2013 at 3:05 am)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:I did not make myself clear in your terms. Detective work in this case is the search for physical evidence. One then develops a theory to explain the physical evidence.
Fuck. I had 80% of a reply written...covering everything from broken pottery to the Silver Scrolls and lost it while trying to get a link.
Broken pottery with merchant agreements shows the locals had no specialized material for writing, not even clay tablets much easier and cheaper to produce than pottery. The total absence of writing specific materials means it was not a literate culture.
The silver scroll is so amusing. May his light shine upon you. How can it be more clear that is talking about a sun god and from the time frame most likely Ra of Egypt?
I have lost long replies. Damn near lost one tonight. Please feel free to try again you can do them one at a time. I do not consider these exchanges debates with winners and losers. I do not count coup.
I will greatly appreciate anyone's effort in telling me about something that is new to me. But there has not been a thing new to me in about ten years including Finkelstein's book. That was at best a summary of what I already knew.
Before you get to the thing about the conquest of Samaria, it only talks about Samaria and bible fiction connection that to Jerusalem is not source material. Further it says one king was replaced by another. It says nothing about taking anyone to Babylon. The other one from Cyrus says nothing about returning people. If the ruling class was taking to Babylon (a retreat from the bible story and thus unrelated to the bible story) who was running the show back in Samaria?
And arkies have shown SaMaRia was a real rich city on a trade route. It might be the origin of the invention of the king name oMRi.
But before you go through the rest of the short list of claimed "evidence" is it not easier to ask why there is no direct evidence of biblical Israel? There is not a single mention of David or Solomon outside of the Septuagint stories but there are reciprocal mentions of foreign kings and emissaries in all other kingdoms in that time frame.
It is like finding a written history of the great kingdoms of Egypt and not finding a single artifact, no temple, no pyramid, no nothing along the Nile.
This has been known for so long that in Catholic gradeschools in the 1950s there was an explanation. The devil destroyed all the evidence. I have no idea why Finkelstein got such popularity when the facts he presented was more than half a century old. That is why I say his book was nothing new, having been told the devil explanation back in the '50s.
Modern archaeology was invented in the 1890s BECAUSE digging in Egypt had proven beyond a doubt the Egypt of Genesis and Exodus were BS. Today Hollywood is happy to set the bible stories in the archaeological Egypt. But if you do in fact read those stories and can shut out Hollywood. The Egypt presented in those stories did not exist. People realized using the bible as a guide was simply impossible. But still today believers try to do it a century after honest people realized it was wrong.
Quote:Well....I've been around the edges of this discussion before.
From Archaeologica.org 3+ years ago.
http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewto...=45#p56776
The discussion goes on for a while....you can see from the thread title that it began with a discussion of Nazareth....demonstrating that we are no more successful at staying on topic over there than we are over here!
I cannot reciprocate as I started on bulletin boards. But I was on soc.history.ancient back in 1995 and probably sci.archaeology that same year. Google has the archive. I was very annoyed with the regular appearance of believers to save us. But in expressing my annoyance I learned their nonsense and how to answer it. I also lost more than a little of my basic civility. Apologies for that.
With regard to the URL, it should be noted Christianity "appears to first appear" in western Turkey and Northern Syria and while close, unrelated to bibleland. I do not explain it. I simply look at the evidence as it exists and do not try to force it into bibleland.
