The recent intriguing if not inexplicable recent success of the bible miniseries lets go over some thoughts on the matter.
Imagine you have built a successful career in TV, movies and theater as a costumer and prop master. Hollywood is going to make the biggest budget biblical epic ever. You have just been offered the creative lead in both of props and costumes. Both the producer and director have only one absolute condition, the props and costumes must be authentic but you will have an unlimited budget to achieve absolute authenticity.
You eagerly accept the project and hire a staff whose sole purpose is research to guarantee authenticity. In a month your staff gives you the bad news. There is nothing to work from.
For ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome there are many surviving drawings carved into stone showing the people and their clothing and their weapons and homes. There are incidental images of things used in their every day lives. But for biblical Israel, nothing, nada, zilch, zipsky.
So much for the dream of fame and riches in Hollywood.
So much for the story of another Hollywood failure. We have all grown up seeing drawings of pictures set in biblical Israel. We have seen movies set there. And everything in those pictures and movies has been the invention of the people who made them.
No one, archaeologist or amateur, has found anything to give any indication of what we might expect to see were we transported back in time to see it ourselves. Think about it. Our entire lives and we know nothing about these religiously important natives.
This is partly the reason it is hard for people to accept the total absence of physical evidence of the existence of biblical Israel. They have been looking at drawings and pictures of movie makers and book illustrators all their lives. There is an entire false layer of reality on the subject.
Some have tried to explain this away by claiming the prohibition against "graven images" was carried to a fanatical extreme. However there are jewish catacombs around Rome dating more than a century after the youngest book of the Old Testament. If one does not accept the Maccabe's books then they are two centuries younger.
There are paintings on the walls of these catacombs. There are menorah as a common theme. There are pictures of people. One picture is a man striking a stone with a rock and water pouring out. It is reasonable to assume this represents Moses.
Whenever such a prohibition was invented, it was no earlier than the 2nd century AD. Perhaps someone very long ago started asking why there were no signs of the past glory of Israel and they invented a cover story.
Why do people find it so hard to accept the absence of physical evidence for the Old Testament? Because they have in their heads hundreds of "forged" images and drawings they were lead to believe had a basis in fact.
Imagine you have built a successful career in TV, movies and theater as a costumer and prop master. Hollywood is going to make the biggest budget biblical epic ever. You have just been offered the creative lead in both of props and costumes. Both the producer and director have only one absolute condition, the props and costumes must be authentic but you will have an unlimited budget to achieve absolute authenticity.
You eagerly accept the project and hire a staff whose sole purpose is research to guarantee authenticity. In a month your staff gives you the bad news. There is nothing to work from.
For ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome there are many surviving drawings carved into stone showing the people and their clothing and their weapons and homes. There are incidental images of things used in their every day lives. But for biblical Israel, nothing, nada, zilch, zipsky.
So much for the dream of fame and riches in Hollywood.
So much for the story of another Hollywood failure. We have all grown up seeing drawings of pictures set in biblical Israel. We have seen movies set there. And everything in those pictures and movies has been the invention of the people who made them.
No one, archaeologist or amateur, has found anything to give any indication of what we might expect to see were we transported back in time to see it ourselves. Think about it. Our entire lives and we know nothing about these religiously important natives.
This is partly the reason it is hard for people to accept the total absence of physical evidence of the existence of biblical Israel. They have been looking at drawings and pictures of movie makers and book illustrators all their lives. There is an entire false layer of reality on the subject.
Some have tried to explain this away by claiming the prohibition against "graven images" was carried to a fanatical extreme. However there are jewish catacombs around Rome dating more than a century after the youngest book of the Old Testament. If one does not accept the Maccabe's books then they are two centuries younger.
There are paintings on the walls of these catacombs. There are menorah as a common theme. There are pictures of people. One picture is a man striking a stone with a rock and water pouring out. It is reasonable to assume this represents Moses.
Whenever such a prohibition was invented, it was no earlier than the 2nd century AD. Perhaps someone very long ago started asking why there were no signs of the past glory of Israel and they invented a cover story.
Why do people find it so hard to accept the absence of physical evidence for the Old Testament? Because they have in their heads hundreds of "forged" images and drawings they were lead to believe had a basis in fact.
