Current Biblical Archaeology

[Rokcet Scientist]

Amen

[Minimalist]

[Guest]

Now i heard that they are questioning whether or not Jesus died on the cross and if maybe he survived the crucifixion and the artistic pictures of him being carried was out of the tomb not into the tomb. Very interesting. i will keep you all updated if anyone expresses interest.

[wtrfall]

Hi
I am new to this forum.
I m curious,
Is there any evidence about some
things in the bible or not???

have watched some documentaries that there was
But it seems apparant it is in dispute.

Flood???? yes or no
homo sapiens appear suddenly???? yes or no

Any thing else??

Just curious. I am interested in scientific explanation and not religious.
Thank you in advance

[Minimalist]

Now i heard that they are questioning whether or not Jesus died on the cross and if maybe he survived the crucifixion and the artistic pictures of him being carried was out of the tomb not into the tomb. Very interesting. i will keep you all updated if anyone expresses interest.

Read "The Jesus Puzzle" by Earl Doherty. What you will find is that Jesus was a fictional creation of the second century AD.

It does not really belong in this thread as there is no 'archaeological evidence' either for or against the proposition.

[Minimalist]

Hi
I am new to this forum.
I m curious,
Is there any evidence about some
things in the bible or not???

have watched some documentaries that there was
But it seems apparant it is in dispute.

Flood???? yes or no
homo sapiens appear suddenly???? yes or no

Any thing else??

Just curious. I am interested in scientific explanation and not religious.
Thank you in advance

Read this thread from the beginning. Try to stick to the quotations from the real archaeologists.

[Guest]

uhm well that questio has many answers and I persoanlly think it depends on your individual view. Some say yes some say no, some say the bible is just a story and historical book actually stating what really happened. You are correct a lot of it is in dispute and alot of it has been explained as best can be explained. Hope this helps.

[wtrfall]

OK
thanx
guess I have to sort through
"small talk" though to get to science
I will start reading

[wtrfall]

I am sorry so far
I am on page 8 and have yet to read any thing significant.
seems to be a bunch of bible bashers.

I didnt know there was so much bias

Is there such things discussed about nabonidus I wonder?

[Guest]

No. You won't be happy with that either, arch. Most "christians" I know are far more concerned with the Old Testament 'eye-for-an-eye' shit than they are with Jesus's alleged 'turn-the-other-cheek' routine.

When I call them on their 'uncharitable' nature they reply with some nonsense like 'Jesus was perfect but I'm not.' If you believe in the murderous, petty, vindictive god of the old testament than you are a Jew or a Fundamentalist moslem. These people use god as a cover for their own hatreds and prejudices.

I'll tell you this, if Jesus were to come back to Texas and run for public office on that pacifist, socialist, agenda which the gospel writers put into his mouth he could not be elected dog catcher. They sure as hell wouldn't let him into their churches

paragraph #1-- again i have to agree with you and it is something i am not proud of nor part of. that type of attitude is an excuse for some believers to continue in thier desires and not follow Christ. this attitude also gets in the way of constructive biblical archaeology and makes a mess of arch. sites and discoveries. at the end of my present contract, i hope to return to a field of work that will begin to address these issues.

paragraph #2: i don't know how to explain it briefly to you suffice it to say that even christians have the freeedom to choose to follow Christ's ways or not. sadly, some do not and their lives reflect that choice.some have begun to change and are not at the level they should be and need more patience.

#3: i agree with you there as the churches have detoured from following Christ in many aspects and it is an issue that needs to be addressed. what is even more sad is that the people take their lead from their pastor who himself is not up to living the way Christ would want him to.
the church as a whole is in iffy shape but Christ did warn us that this would happen and there will be many who say they are christians but follow their own paths inside the church.

to wtrfall and (-) it would be wise to read all the posts pertaining to your questions as many of those have already been asked and answered. just try to filter the non-religious opinions somewhat as they tend to get a little of base.

[Minimalist]

I'm glad we found something we agree on, arch.

Now, back to the point of the thread....I finally got around to going back and looking up Dever's points of agreement/disagreement with Finklestein.

I have reserved a critical treatment of Israel Finklestein until last, even though in many ways it was he who initiated the current discussion of Israelite origins with his pioneering surveys and excavations in the 1980's and then with his later syntheses of the data. Finklestein, by any account, has been the major spokesperson and I take his views with utmost seriousness even though I often disagree with him. Our back-and-forth discussion dates from the early 1990's, when I began to write more explicitly on this subject and Finklestein responded. For the most part it has been a good-humored debate, and I think a useful one. It may clarify matters to set forth briefly our agreements and disagreements.

We agree largely on the following (and for that matter, so do most archaeologists.):

1 All older models are now obsolete; in future the archaeological data will prevail, even over textual sources, including the Hebrew Bible.

2. The recent Israeli surveys, plus a few excavations, provide the critical information.

3. All the current evidence points to a demographic surge in Iron I, especially in the hill country.

4. The highland settlers were not foreign invaders, but came mostly from somewhere within Canaanite society.

5. The overall settlement process was gradual, best understood within the framework of long-term, often cyclical patters of Palestinian settlement-history (la longue duree.)

6. There are significant continuities with Late Bronze Age material culture, as in the pottery; and also continuities from Iron I and Iron II (the period of the Israelite Monarchy).

7. The unique culture that emerges in the 12-11th century BC is not homogeneous and reflects and ethnic mix.

8. Environment and technology were factors in cultural changes on this horizon.

[Minimalist]

I broke this into two because my ISP has been a bit twitchy tonight and I didn't want to lose the whole post. Dever continues.

There are, however, several critical points of disagreement between Finklestein and myself:

1. The exact origins within Canaan. Finklestein favors a large scale resedentarization of local pastoral nomads (similar to Alt) while I see a much more varied origin, with fewer nomads and more sedentarized peoples from the lowlands.

2. Chronology. Finklestein dates the settlement mostly to the late 12th and even the 11th century BC (except for Izbet Sartah) while I believe it began in the 13th century BC.

3. Pottery. I find much more continuity thatn Finklestein does with the overall Late Bronze Age Canaanite repertoire, regarding the differences in relative percentages of types as less significant.

4. Technology. I see technologies like terrace-building and cistern-digging as both more systemic (that is, more part of a larger socio-cultural pattern of innovation) and also more fundamental than Finklestein sees them.

5. Ideology. I take a less materialistic, less deterministic approach, allowing a relatively greater role for sociological and ideological factors in cultural change (even though they are admittedly harder to specify archaeologically).

6. Ethnicity. I am much more optimistic than Finklestein on the question of defining ethnicity in the archaeological record. In the end, Finklestein is unable or unwilling to identity the hill country settlers; I believe that we can classify them as "proto-Israelite."

And there you have the scholarly dispute between the two foremost archaeologists working in the Middle East as of now.

They disagree by about 100-150 years ( a figure which holds true for the time when each thinks there is the beginning of some historical merit to the bible) and Finklestein sees the hill country as primarily settled by nomadic herders while Dever believes that refugees from the collapsing Canaanite cities made up much of the population. Aside from that they argue over pottery shards (like all good archaeologists do!) and debate the genius behind devising water cisterns in a semi-arid environment.
Don't get too excited by Dever's reference to "ideological factors", arch. The artifacts show that his proto-Israelites worshipped Ba'al and El and Asherah just like their Canaanite forebears and that Yahweh was not written into the story until much later on.

[Guest]

And there you have the scholarly dispute between the two foremost archaeologists working in the Middle East as of now.

the late Yohanan Aharoni, former chairman of the Dept. of Arch. and Ancient Near Eastern Culture and Founder of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, would most certainly disagree with both Dever and Finklestein.

In his book The land of the Bible he has a chapter on the Israel conquest and settlement. He certainly believes, with archaeological data, that the israelites moved into the area and conquered it and that their origin was not as dever and Finklestein have intimated.

one of the rreasons your experts do not believe in the conquest, is because they do not believe in the exodus. they site the lack of pottery and other normally accepted pieces of arch. logical evidence as proof of such an event. yet the lack of such things is more proof than not for if you were transitory for 40 years then you would be lacking those item that reqire permancy to own.

pottery being heavy would not be in large numbers nor would the people be careless with what few pieces they would own. how would they replace it since they were always on the move? sometimes common sense is needed and not scholarship or intellectualism to solve problems.

[Guest]

p.s. www.harkarkom.com may be a useful site for you to review as it deals with Mt. Sinai and some of the proofs found there

[Minimalist]

Well, I thought you'd never get around to Aharoni.

Dever, in a review of other archaeologist's work on the subject, including such 'giants' as Yigael Yadin and Aharoni, has a special section on each.

With regard to Aharoni he says:

Yohanan Aharoni, another protege of Mazar, made his chief contribution to the subject at hand with his 1957 doctoral dissertation The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee, published only in Hebrew (but abstracted in English in 1957). His later publications on the theme include a provocative semi-popular aticle in 1976, "Nothing Early and Nothing Late: Re-Writing Israel's Conquest"; and a chapter in his widely used handbook The Land of the Bible ( 1966, revised in 1979, after his death). Basically, Aharoni followed Alt in advocating the overall process of infiltration. But he also believed that the sedentarizing Israelites destroyed a number of sites in the hill country on both sides of the Jordan. And, in the north, especailly in Upper Galilee, he envisioned large scale confrontation. Based on his survey in the 1950s he isolated what he called "conquest pottery" (like the collar-rim jars) which he dated to the mid-13th century BC or even earlier. But he held that the conquest continued until at least 1150 BC when he thought that Hazor, for instance, was destroyed ( a date over which he and Yadin quarreled bitterly). Despite Aharoni's pioneering emphasis on regional surveys and projects, both in the Beersheba Valley and in Galilee, his synthesis is obsolete today. It was made so principally by the students in the school he founded, the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

While I congratulate you for (finally) using an archaeologist to refute archaeological arguments, surely you must see from the dates of his publications that Aharoni is not "Current." Would you use a doctor who had the same medical training as someone in the 19th century?

What is ironic about your selection of Aharoni is that, as Dever fully credits him, it was Aharoni who pioneered the idea of regional surveys which Finklestein and his younger colleagues went out and did...but Aharoni was dead by the time the results were published and therefore he cannot be held responsible for advances which came about after his demise.

And, of course, the head of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University is now Israel Finklestein, who also notes Aharoni's endorsement of the Peaceful Infiltration model even as he and later generations of scholars who were trained by Aharoni demolished his theories with evidence collected by the use of his methods. As I said, ironic.

But, if you want a real, Imperialistic, Joshua-Conquest, blood and guts version of the story that has also been superceded by further research, you should be checking out Yigael Yadin. He is right up your alley. Of course, the alley goes nowhere but you'll feel like you are getting your daily dose of biblical blood and gore for a little while.