(September 25, 2021 at 10:45 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That's the entire reason the story has buzz...and almost certainly the reason that the authors got it published.
With the specific case in question, it appears to be an issue of biblical archaeology. A materially false claim which would invalidate the hypothesis if true. Which is to say that whatever inspired the story, assuming some actual thing did, and assuming that this were sodom, it's still not what the paper proposed. This, as I was mentioning, according to one of the researchers the paper cites as establishing their hypothesis specifically with regards to shocked quartz and impact events. Others have pointed out that they assume that all of the people were blown to bits and their splintered bones scattered throughout - why we find no human remains from this purported event in the destruction layers..which, bioarcheaeologists have pointed out are, in fact, the bones of small game from dinner. The sites were abandoned. They were certainly destroyed, but literally every piece of every finding from this site and every other in the region powerfully argues against the mere possibility of the conclusion that study arrived at. Something shitty went down, for sure, and the sites were abandoned. Not depopulated in an instant. The timeframe itself, even in the paper, doesn't match the biblical narrative or timeframe, to begin with.
From the textual end, neither the story of the deluge nor the story of sodom were arrived at because people dealt with floods or impacts, they're narrative vehicles for politics and theology.
So it’s not just science, but bad science. I don’t disagree. But if the existence of Sodom were to be confirmed, it wouldn't validate the biblical legend, any more than the discovery of Troy confirms the spat between Hector and Achilles.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson