(May 8, 2022 at 6:53 am)Green Diogenes Wrote: What we can learn from other disciplines shows that at least one city with surrounding towns, was wiped out by a comet airburst around 1500bc, at a site now called Tall El-Hamman, just north of the Dead Sea.
No, it wasn't. Bunch et al.'s Tall el-Hammam paper has been widely panned as being religiously-motivated cult archeology. It contains serious flaws in the methodology, gross misinterpretations, and outright photoshopping of several images. We can discuss this further in another thread but this paper likely does a very thorough job of it: No mineralogic or geochemical evidence of impact at Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea
Quote:The flash from the airburst is calculated to have been around 8000c, burning pottery. If you also understand the perspective of the people doing the writing, then it looks much more likely that the 'pillar of salt' is a visceral personal description of seeing another human getting evaporated by a brief moment of very intense light, as the result of a comet strike in the next valley.
While I'm sure this feels right to you, it has no basis in either scripture or science. Scripturally, the Hebrews new the words for "vanished in a flash of blinding light", so your interpretation makes no sense. Scientifically, anybody close enough to witness another human as they're vaporized has the proverbial snowflake's chance in hell of surviving. The notion of climbing into the mountains that you mention a few posts further in is simply a brilliant way to use natural terrain to amplify the shockwave.
Quote:As far as I can tell this is the reading with Empathy, that unlocks the authors, and who they are, and what they can individually understand and can communicate.
The problem with this approach is that you have no cultural basis that would allow you to empathize with these bronze age tribesmen. The way in which they crafted their narratives is utterly foreign to you. The closest that our culture contains would be the likes of Paul Bunyan and his ilk, which are not intended to convey a historically accurate account but rather to narrate an underlying principle or warning.
You have spotted a false dichotomy, just not the one you think you have. "Atheists and creationists are wrong but I'm right" fails to take into account the exceptionally good chance that you're dead wrong too.
