Numbers in ancient texts are fairly unreliable, unless they're tax documents...
See Herodotus talking about Xerxes army.
is bible archeology real?
- Thread starter ryu238
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Numbers in ancient texts are fairly unreliable, unless they're tax documents...
See Herodotus talking about Xerxes army.
HansMustermann
Penultimate Amazing
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I am aware of that. I think most historians are already taking that into account when doing such population estimates, but of course I haven't actually checked their numbers, so I cannot vouch for them.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Historical population estimates that I've seen have never come from historical documents. They've come from the sizes of the towns and their surrounding farmlands.
tsig
a carbon based life-form
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Mana had one serious problem, it caused memory loss so they started out in a new world every day.
Rincewind
Philosopher
Venom
Philosopher
wow I stopped that video as soon as he mentioned Jericho cause I knew what he was on about.
So what if they found a settlement on the ostensible area that the Israelite conquests took place? It could be from earlier or later and the evidence so far says it took place very early.
Many archaeological finds are already full of asterisks. When you work from a perspective that seeks to legitimate something you hold dearly (or at least holds a maximalist bias) it's not hard to present a newly discovered ancient settlement that is on or around the ostensible area of a Biblical town as being that very town, especially to believers who are eager for that confirmation bias.
They are happy to ignore the thousands of years that the Bible doesn't cover during which other settlements could have sprung up.
So what if they found a settlement on the ostensible area that the Israelite conquests took place? It could be from earlier or later and the evidence so far says it took place very early.
Many archaeological finds are already full of asterisks. When you work from a perspective that seeks to legitimate something you hold dearly (or at least holds a maximalist bias) it's not hard to present a newly discovered ancient settlement that is on or around the ostensible area of a Biblical town as being that very town, especially to believers who are eager for that confirmation bias.
They are happy to ignore the thousands of years that the Bible doesn't cover during which other settlements could have sprung up.
The Book of Numbers tries to make sense of it. Per wiki.
God decrees this in Numbers 14
A nineteenth-century rationalist commentator Winwood Reade suggested that the Israelites were not skilled in fighting, having been slaves in Egypt, and following their failure of their first attempt to enter Canaan, they retreated into the desert and remained there until a new generation had grown up, of men toughened by the hardships of desert life, who were able to invade the Promised Land, with the fire and slaughter related in the Book of Joshua.
But recent research has cast doubt even on this rationalist or naturalist analysis, and is tending to reject the story of the Sojourn in the Wilderness as complete fabrication.
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That's unfair, more like the archaeology of Ben Hur or Sherlock Holmes: real places, some real people and some... not so real.
That's better than fuelair's analogies, but not quite accurate. Ben Hur and Sherlock Holmes were written explicitly as fiction, and were admitted to be such by both authors and readers. The Biblical tales belong in a different category - myth. Myths contain false information, as well as some authentic material from time to time; but they were not composed as fiction, or regarded as fiction by those for whom they were composed. They are much more complex than novels or simple lies.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
No, its more like the archaeology of the T'Kon Empire, the Iconians and the Kurlan Master of Tarquin Hill.
I disagree, Egypt was real, as was Ur. Maybe even the land of Punt might have meant a real location to the original storytellers.
A lot of the settings were in the places the storytellers had at least heard of. (That makes it sound like fanfic...)
Hmm, Noah was fanfic of Gilgamesh - that might almost work.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
OK, so I guess sarcasm & irony don't go over well without tone of voice!!
STARRING
Noah as Utanapishtim
SPECIAL GUEST STAR
God as Enki
Noah as Utanapishtim
SPECIAL GUEST STAR
God as Enki
Fair enough Smartcooky.
As an aside I read a provocative* book by Stephen Oppenheimer who was arguing for a SE Asian/New Guinean origin for agriculture** and a lot of the biblical myths. For example, he claims that there are a lot of stories concerning a "tree of life" motif, and some which make more internal sense than the Genesis version.
He claims that some native stories had the serpent (which is now eternally youthful due to it shedding its skin) being supposed to carry the instructions of immortality to man, but tricking them out of it by telling him to eat from the fruit of the tree of death rather than the tree of life.
He lists various other stories that either look more complete than the more well-known myths or have motifs that explain other aspects of myths - the moon dying for three days each month and being reborn being another example with obvious echoes in Christianity.
*Wouldn't like to say whether it was true or not, but it certainly made me think, and the way he presented the geographical distribution of story motifs in folktales and myths (and with some archaeological elements) at the least look worthy of further study to me - a complete layperson.
**There looks to be enough early archaeological evidence for this to be at least considered. (PDF background here)
As an aside I read a provocative* book by Stephen Oppenheimer who was arguing for a SE Asian/New Guinean origin for agriculture** and a lot of the biblical myths. For example, he claims that there are a lot of stories concerning a "tree of life" motif, and some which make more internal sense than the Genesis version.
He claims that some native stories had the serpent (which is now eternally youthful due to it shedding its skin) being supposed to carry the instructions of immortality to man, but tricking them out of it by telling him to eat from the fruit of the tree of death rather than the tree of life.
He lists various other stories that either look more complete than the more well-known myths or have motifs that explain other aspects of myths - the moon dying for three days each month and being reborn being another example with obvious echoes in Christianity.
*Wouldn't like to say whether it was true or not, but it certainly made me think, and the way he presented the geographical distribution of story motifs in folktales and myths (and with some archaeological elements) at the least look worthy of further study to me - a complete layperson.
**There looks to be enough early archaeological evidence for this to be at least considered. (PDF background here)
It's reasonably clear that agriculture was invented independently in various places, and New Guinea is very probably one of them. IIRC Jared Diamond suggests that sugar cane was first cultivated there. But the cultivation of wheat and barley presumably originated locally, as the wild ancestors of these plants hail from the Near East.
The "snake steals gift of life intended for humans" idea also presumably originated there independently of its Near Eastern counterpart. Snakes are common in SE Asia, and the same observation of their apparent rejuvenation by sloughing their skins received a similar mythic explanation. I once heard on the radio a story of that kind, attributed to the mythology of the indigenous inhabitants of an island near Taiwan.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
FTFY.
I think I'd prefer the word "plagiarism" in this context over "fanfic" though.What, BTW, is the rationalization that we have very little early writing of these first "people of the book"? We have Mesopotamian clay tablets by the metric ton, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs going back 2 millennia before king Omri, a complete archive of Ugarit before it was destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but the earliest Bible manuscripts are from the Dead Sea Scrolls, ca. 200 BC. There's literally only one fragment of Bible text that predates the DSS, the "priestly blessings" found at Ketef Hinnom. Didn't YHWH teach them on Mt. Sinai to write on very durable material?
Agreed about agriculture - South America is a good example for one independent site.
The highlighted part is the same region that Oppenheimer was talking about*. He does list several other myths where the distributions of various motifs are either linked to linguistic groups or to genetic markers in the indigenous populations, so his reasoning is a bit stronger but more complex than I stated.
*His basic contention is that the land lost in sea level rises at the end of the Ice Age would have been the most productive for mesolithic peoples (as it would include coastal margins - any fool with a rock can chase limpets). In SE Asia, apparently the land area lost was about the size of India.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Biblical archaeology is real. People do it.
So what?
Every time it disproves the biblical account. No surprise there, but so what? The holey babble is proven wrong yet again. Were there new evidence presented, then it would be examined.
But there isn't. The hamstrer wheel of buffoonery keeps on rotating.
Now you will notice my typo above. I left it in upon reflection, because that is all you have as an argument.
So what?
Every time it disproves the biblical account. No surprise there, but so what? The holey babble is proven wrong yet again. Were there new evidence presented, then it would be examined.
But there isn't. The hamstrer wheel of buffoonery keeps on rotating.
Now you will notice my typo above. I left it in upon reflection, because that is all you have as an argument.
Nobody in this thread is arguing for it, the only one who was "just asking a question" was the OP and from their subsequent posts in this thread, in this case JAQ looks to be a sincere statement:
FTFY.
What, BTW, is the rationalization that we have very little early writing of these first "people of the book"? We have Mesopotamian clay tablets by the metric ton, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs going back 2 millennia before king Omri, a complete archive of Ugarit before it was destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but the earliest Bible manuscripts are from the Dead Sea Scrolls, ca. 200 BC. There's literally only one fragment of Bible text that predates the DSS, the "priestly blessings" found at Ketef Hinnom. Didn't YHWH teach them on Mt. Sinai to write on very durable material?
Have you read bad fanfic?
But yes, your second point is also a good one. It's almost as if there were more sophisticated and powerful neighbouring civilisations that overawed the tellers of the bible stories and greatly influenced them.