RE: Existence of Israel is fulfillment of Biblical prophesies
June 28, 2010 at 3:32 pm
(This post was last modified: June 28, 2010 at 3:50 pm by Minimalist.)
(June 28, 2010 at 11:04 am)annatar Wrote:
check this out.. looks like jesus is using same bacground with Zarathushtra...
Nice hat!
Quote:Created by Pharaoh Akhenaten(not sure though)
I have a problem with that whole idea, though. Yeah, Akhenaten concocted a religion about sun worship but it only lasted 20 years and was stamped out with a vengeance when he died.
Archaeology has dismissed all of this "Israel in Egypt" crap which is based on nothing but the OT and, as such, is damn near worthless. 200 years of excavations in Egypt have turned up no evidence that there were ever any "Hebrew slaves" there. None.
The first time that "Israel" appears in the record is the Merneptah stele but even this is a shaky reference because it doesn't really say "Israel" (it says Ysirir, or something) and the stele is written in Egyptian. The word appears no where else in the entire corpus of Egyptian literature so calling it "Israel" in the sense that the term is used in the OT is a stretch.
The villages in the Eastern Hill region of Palestine which gave rise to the later Israelites arose c 1200 BC. William Dever calls them 'proto-Israelite' and Finkelstein won't even go that far. That's 250 years after Akhenaten's experiment was smashed.
OTOH, however, we can see a gradual shift from polytheism throughout the ancient near east to a henotheistic culture in which one god gains primacy over the others and becomes a "king of the gods."
Marduk in Babylon being a good example of this. How much of a step is it, intellectually, from a king of the gods to a single god? The zoroastrians provided this step and in the Persian Empire they had a vehicle to spread it. Not dissimilar to what the Romans eventually did for xtians or the Arabs did for islam....to our unending sorrow in both cases.