RE: The Bible Is Mostly Not Factual
April 16, 2013 at 8:47 pm
(This post was last modified: April 16, 2013 at 8:50 pm by Minimalist.)
(April 16, 2013 at 7:03 pm)archangle Wrote: so the Jews didn't have a general/leader that lead them to a land and they conquered that land? really?
what is your proof?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/704190/posts
Quote:• The conquest: One of the formative events of the people of Israel in biblical historiography is the story of how the land was conquered from the Canaanites. Yet extremely serious difficulties have cropped up precisely in the attempts to locate the archaeological evidence for this story. Repeated excavations by various expeditions at Jericho and Ai, the two cities whose conquest is described in the greatest detail in the Book of Joshua, have proved very disappointing. Despite the excavators' efforts, it emerged that in the late part of the 13th century BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, which is the agreed period for the conquest, there were no cities in either tell, and of course no walls that could have been toppled. Naturally, explanations were offered for these anomalies. Some claimed that the walls around Jericho were washed away by rain, while others suggested that earlier walls had been used; and, as for Ai, it was claimed that the original story actually referred to the conquest of nearby Beit El and was transferred to Ai by later redactors.
Biblical scholars suggested a quarter of a century ago that the conquest stories be viewed as etiological legends and no more. But as more and more sites were uncovered and it emerged that the places in question died out or were simply abandoned at different times, the conclusion that there is no factual basis for the biblical story about the conquest by Israelite tribes in a military campaign led by Joshua was bolstered.
This piece was published in Haaretz - in Israel, in 1999, and touched off a firestorm which continues to this day. It was not news to archaeologists who had known all of this since this 70's but it pissed off the fundies and the orthodox jews something fierce. Fuck all of them!
The author, Ze'ev Herzog....
Quote:Ze’ev Herzog (Hebrew: זאב הרצוג, born 1941) is an Israeli archeologist, professor of archaeology at The Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University specializing in social archaeology, ancient architecture and field archaeology.
is an accomplished archaeologist.
You, are not.
