Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
In the absence of refrigeration I doubt land-locked Jewrusalites – wealthy or otherwise – ever ate fresh sea fish!Minimalist wrote:
Fish would have been a delicacy in land-locked Jerusalem and then, as now, the upper classes liked to flaunt their wealth!
Thus there was no migration from Mesopotamia, no sojourn in Egypt, and no exodus. There was no conquest upon the Israelites' return and, for that matter, no peaceful infiltration such as the one advanced by Yohanan Aharoni. Rather than conquerors, the Hebrews were a native people who had never left in the first place.
Then, about 15 years ago, in my archaeological work I began to write about ancient Israel. Originally I wrote to frustrate the Biblical minimalists; then I became one of them, more or less. The call of Abraham, the Promise of the Land, the migration to Canaan, the descent into Egypt, the Exodus, Moses and monotheism, the Law at Sinai, divine kingship—archaeology throws all of these into great doubt. My long experience in Israel and my growing uncertainty about the historicity of the Bible meant that was the end for me.
Shanks: Well, then your scholarship did destroy your faith?
Dever: Absolutely.
..... These texts simply cannot be picked up and read in a straightforward manner as though they constitute objective factual history in the modern sense, based on contemporary eyewitness reports. The former books (at least Genesis through Numbers) are by late, anonymous, composite "authors" and editors, produced at least 500 years after a Moses would have lived. And the Book of Deuteronomy, all about Moses, is almost certainly a late monarchial theological homily put into the mouth of a Moses and then attached to both the Pentateuch (making it five books) and the other "historical" works.
Archaeologists have found evidence of a Jewish Temple near Aswan on the Island of Elephantine which precedes the Babylonian conquest.Although Jewish refugees probably fled to Egypt after the Babylonian conquest of Palestine (Jer 42:14–22) by Nebuchadnezzar when they were dispersed throughout the known world, we really have no good evidence of such from archaeology in Egypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyriThe Elephantine Papyri is a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the fifth century BCE. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine, the island in the Nile at the border of Nubia, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, span a period of 2000 years.
Along with other bodies found at Masada, the three were recognized as Jewish heroes by Israel's government in 1969 and given a state burial, complete with Israeli soldiers carrying flag-draped coffins.
But Israel might have mistakenly bestowed that posthumous honor on three Romans, according to a paper in the June issue of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology by anthropologist Joe Zias and forensics expert Azriel Gorski.
The remains of the three became a key part of the site's story when Masada was excavated in the 1960s. Yigael Yadin, the renowned Israeli archeologist in charge of the dig, thought they illustrated the historical account of Zealot men killing their wives and children and then themselves before the Roman legionnaires breached Masada's defenses.
Tablet aids Old Testament's credibility
The cuneiform inscription in a tablet dating from 595BC has been deciphered for the first time - revealing a reference to an official at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, that proves the historical existence of a figure mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
On hearing of the discovery yesterday (Tuesday), Geza Vermes, the eminent emeritus professor of Jewish studies at the University of Oxford, said that such a discovery revealed that "the Biblical story is not altogether invented".
Powerful x-ray to unravel fragile Dead Sea scrolls
