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is bible archeology real?

There seriously are people who essentially think the equivalent of saying that if you found the location of the hof (pagan temple) of Uppsala, that proves that the Norse gods are real. Well, except it's about Xianity.

As you might expect, there's a lot of forgery, and even more mis-representation, and even more taking running leaps to conclusions. Finding some ship's steering wheel in the Red Sea becomes clearly a wheel from an Egyptian chariot (never mind that it's nothing like one of those), which in turn becomes PROOF that the exodus really happened verbatim. Finding some house with shards that kinda fit the Hellenic period in Galilee, but it's not even clear when in that interval it falls, becomes "the house where Jesus grew up!!!111eleventeen" And that's actually some of the less ludicrious ones.

Essentially it's kinda like what creationists do with fossils. It's not particularly good scholarship.

But, hey, as long as lemmings are willing to lap up as much as that crap as they can get, someone will fill the supply side of that market. Big surprise, eh?
 
The ancient Greeks wrote about the city of Troy. Archaeologist discovered the city of Troy. Ergo, ancient Greek mythology is true. Wheeee! Logic is fun.
 
ryu238 said:
Yes I know there is a lot of inaccuracies in the bible: http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/bibleanalysis.html#archae
But the claim kin the video involving the tower of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah...think that's accurate?
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I won't watch a ridiculous video, but who cares if they discover Sodom and Gomorrah? According to the bible they were located in the Jordan River valley, which is right on top of a major earthquake fault line. Why would anyone be surprised to find ruins of ancient towns on top of a fault line?

Steve S
 
I just realized that the video offers no links to the so called evidence...that's a bad sign.
 
ryu238 said:
I doubt it but this video thinks otherwise: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4e20Cq5yob4
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I've only come as far as 1:48 min in the video, but it's one big lie.

Until 1980 or so, Biblical Archaeology indeed was much about digging in the Holy Land to prove the Bible true, until it simply was not tenuous anymore. In fact, most of the Old Testament has been proven to be utter hogwash.

The whole Exodus story - 500,000 men with their wives, children and servants wandering for 40 years (*) through the Sinai - has of course never been vindicated by archaeological finds. And that brings us to their first claim about Jericho, that the excavations in the 1930s and the 1950s corroborated the Biblical tale. This is what wiki has to say about it:
In 1930–36 John Garstang conducted excavations there and discovered the remains of a network of collapsed walls which he dated to about 1400 BCE, the accepted biblical date of the conquest. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated the site over 1952–1958 and demonstrated that the destruction occurred c.1500 BCE during a well-attested Egyptian campaign of that period, and that Jericho had been deserted throughout the mid-late 13th century.[4] Kenyon's work was corroborated in 1995 by radiocarbon tests which dated the destruction level to the late 17th or 16th centuries.[5] A small unwalled settlement was rebuilt in the 15th century, but the tell was unoccupied from the late 15th century until the 10th/9th centuries.[2] In the face of the archaeological evidence, the biblical story of the fall of Jericho "cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources"
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So, they are simply lying: the destruction they cite as proof of the Bible story was not the work of "Joshua" but of the Egyptians! Let me also quote Dever, a Biblical archaeologist who is sympathetic to the superstitious conservative viewpoint, on it from the link (4) in the above wiki quote:
Moreover, Kenyon showed beyond doubt that in the mid-late 13th century B.C. - the time period now required for any Israelite "conquest" - Jericho lay completely abandoned. There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site. This seems a blow to the biblical account indeed. [...] Simply put, archaeology tells us that the bilbical story of the fall of Jericho, miraculous elements aside, cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth.
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A remark on the dating of Exodus: wiki here is clearly wrong, and Dever right. Canaan was under firm Egyptian control from at least as early as Thutmose III (1479-1425 BC) to at least Rameses II (1279-1213 BC). Any dating of Exodus earlier than Rameses II would not make any sense as the Israelites would then simply be migrating within the Egyptian empire, and not flee from their control. This, apart, of course, from the fact that that tall story is also made out of whole cloth.

The only part of the OT that has a ring of truth to it is the part about the two kingdoms, and their conquest and destruction by the Assyrian resp. the New Babylonian Empire. There is no evidence of a unified kingdom of Saul, David and Solomon, nor of the First Temple. And as long as the God-botherers - in this case, the Islamic Wafq - control Temple Mount, there won't be any such evidence either. If there was any such temple, as the archaeological evidence more points to Jerusalem being only a small town until the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians.

(*) bunch of losers, Moshe Dayan only needed six days, and that in the face of fierce opposition. :)
 
Anyone who starts out wanting the Bible to be true isn't a particularly good archeologist.
 
steve s said:
The ancient Greeks wrote about the city of Troy. Archaeologist discovered the city of Troy. Ergo, ancient Greek mythology is true. Wheeee! Logic is fun.
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I know you're just making fun of the video in the OP. But at least the Iliad has the advantage that its conventional dating - going back to the time of classical Greece - agrees with the dating of Troy VIIa, which may indeed have been destroyed in a war.
 
 
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In addition the video makes mention of Kathleen Kenyon's work in Jericho...Wikipedia says

Although Kenyon had no doubt the sites she excavated were linked to the Old Testament narrative she nevertheless drew attention to inconsistencies, concluding that Solomon's "stables" at Megiddo were totally impractical for holding horses (1978:72), and that Jericho fell long before Joshua's arrival (1978:35).
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Indeed Kenyon's work debunked the biblical narrative:
After many hands with picks and shovels dug through the site, Kathleen Kenyon in 1952-1958 gave the most detailed and currently accepted date for the destruction of Jericho, a date which is at odds with the biblical tale. According to biblical chronology considered above in note 3, Jericho should have been destroyed by Joshua sometime around 1400 BCE. Kenyon’s findings however, place the date for Jericho’s destruction at c. 1550 BCE, far too early for Joshua’s conquest as described in the biblical narrative. Kenyon’s work has stood as mainstream scholarship since her dates were proposed
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http://www.theskepticalreview.com/bpbobbywallsofjericho.html
Let's not get into his use of Sodom and Gomorrah: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah#Historicity

Now that said, what do you think about the tower of Babel in the video? It's more than possible that it was based on the ziggurats of Babylon...but probably wasn't a real place: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLviKiEuj30
 
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ddt said:
I know you're just making fun of the video in the OP. But at least the Iliad has the advantage that its conventional dating - going back to the time of classical Greece - agrees with the dating of Troy VIIa, which may indeed have been destroyed in a war.
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I think later Israelite tale-tellers invented stories to account for the existence of ruins their listeners could see around them. Oh, it was our ancestors who destroyed all these places. That's how powerful our God YHWH is.

In the OT Joshua takes the city of Ai, and of course slaughters all its inhabitants. The name of the city in fact means "ruin". So the story is fictitious. It is intended to explain the existence of a ruin which could be seen by later people. The modern name of the site is Et-Tell, which means the same thing, more or less.
 
ryu238 said:
Yes I know there is a lot of inaccuracies in the bible: http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/bibleanalysis.html#archae
But the claim kin the video involving the tower of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah...think that's accurate?
Click to expand...

Actually, the real archaeologists don't really have a clue where either of those towns were. There are MANY ruins of cities in that area, and God only said he destroyed two. The last time anyone believed that they had it nailed was in the '70s, but in the meantime actually those are NOT even considered candidates for the biblical cities any more. At any rate, wilfully ignoring archaeology ever since is not exactly great scholarship.
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, the real archaeologists don't really have a clue where either of those towns were. There are MANY ruins of cities in that area, and God only said he destroyed two. The last time anyone believed that they had it nailed was in the '70s, but in the meantime actually those are NOT even considered candidates for the biblical cities any more. At any rate, wilfully ignoring archaeology ever since is not exactly great scholarship.
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There's more than one pillar of salt near the Dead Sea too. Which of them is Lot's wife?
 
ryu238 said:
Thanks ddt, and I have some more debunking of their claims
here: http://skeptoid.com/mobile/4191
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I fully agree with Brian Duning there. Some idle speculation on how the myth of the Jews building the pyramids came to be: someone along the line thought (a) from the bible story that the Jews must have been doing horrible work while enslaved in Egypt, and (b) seeing those pyramids that that must have been real hard labour, and added one and one. And it's probably untraceable who first came up with the idea.

Dunning is a bit unfair to Herodotus, but OTOH, the article shows nicely how Dunning was taken in, at first, by an inaccurate rendering of what Herodotus actually wrote.

ryu238 said:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/10/as-forged-document-of-second-temple.html
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Isn't it interesting how the "People of the Book" haven't left us any trace of their holy books from before the Dead Sea Scrolls? That blogpost is very badly structured, so it's hard to tell what the author wants to argue. It's certainly not the case that the Hebrew Bible was invented out of whole cloth around 250BC, there are various markers such as doublets and the different names of YHWH used that at least the Torah is a mash-up of pre-existing tales.

ETA: but to be uber-cynical on the other hand, there's no evidence of that Second Temple from Ezra's times either, same reason as for the First Temple. The only part we have of the Second Temple is the Wailing Wall, and that was built by Herodes.

ryu238 said:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Guide_to_the_Bible#Significance_of_Dead_Sea_Scrolls
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2008/06/the-bibles-broken-promises/
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Search this forum for threads started by member DOC. You'll find plenty of debunking of all these Biblical promises. I have to warn you that reading them might be a mental health hazard.

With regards to Gods promise of all the land between Nile and Euphrates, I guess we're back to Moshe Dayan, or Ariel Sharon? ;)

ETA2: is it any wonder that Jews have sued YHWH in NY court for breach of the covenant? ;)

ryu238 said:
http://www.ex-christian.net/topic/60748-written-evidence-for-the-exodus/page-6#entry924283
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I haven't quite read the whole discussion, but apologists will cling on to every small tenuous resemblance to argue the Bible is true.
ryu238 said:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/11/nova-bibles-buried-secrets.html
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Ah, the Tel Dan stele. If you found an article that mentioned Elizabeth II from the House of Windsor, would you also assume she had a forefather named Windsor? :rolleyes:

ryu238 said:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joseph_was_Imhotep
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Well, of course, let's go for the main prize and identify this made-up figure with the greatest scientist, engineer and physician from the pre-classical world. :rolleyes:
 
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ddt said:
Ah, the Tel Dan stele. If you found an article that mentioned Elizabeth II from the House of Windsor, would you also assume she had a forefather named Windsor?
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Even if there was a "David" who was first king of the dynasty named for him, so what? Several Israelite kings mentioned in the Bible, including Jehu and Omri, appear in inscriptions left by the Assyrians and others. So what? These are perfectly natural circumstances. Proof of the existence of a king is not proof of the existence of the gods he worshipped.
 
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I accept that the Bible does contain references to places and people that really did exist. However, I do not accept that this is proof anything, least of all that that any of the events portrayed in the Bible really took place, any more than I accept that any work of fiction portrays real event merely because it might be set in places and mention people that really exist.

When it comes to debunking the interpretation of what its portrayed in the Bible as "truth", I will leave it to the words of a clergyman....

"The Bible is like a person; if you torture it long enough you can get it to say anything you want it to say"
- Rev Dr. Francis H. Wade - Rector, St Alban's Episcopal Church
 
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