Archaeologica.org

Minimalist wrote:To a great extent, Madison and Jefferson, who were the brains behind the revolution, saw separation of church and state as benefitting religion more than the state. As Madison wrote:

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?

This is exactly the situation we see today with the born-again crowd trying to advance their particular vision of christianity and using the ballot box to do it.

I agree with that, I think they were walking a real tightrope in order to avoid having to share power with a state church authority.

kbs2244 wrote:Seeker:
The Jewish exodus from Spain to Mexico to escape the Inquisition has been of interest to me for some time.
Why. Of all places, the head waters of the Rio Grande?
And were they openly Jewish, or Catholics with some “extra family traditions?”
This all ties into my fasciations with the Samaritan version of the 10 commandants carved into the rock at Los Lunas, NM that nobody wants to talk about.
There are arguments over it’s age but the range is from 1000 BC to 1000 AD.
That is a long time ago.
What kind of prior knowledge of that area would your family had to pick it in 1750?

There were no 'openly Jewish' people in Spain back then, not with the Inquisition actively pursuing Jews as heretics. Most Jews in that region and that era had adopted Spanish names (one of the reasons you see so many Garcias, Garzas etc.) and an outward pretense of Catholocism that probably ended up actually converting most of them since kids showing up in Sunday School with the wrong doctrine could have been fatal.

Though church presence was somewhat less in the Americas it was still pretty strong. Chances are that the Spanish immigrants did what most immigrants do, settle in regions where they knew other people.

As to the Los Lunas Decalogue there is an unfortunate tendency for people to create hoaxes of this type. Here is an analysis of a similar hoax. The Los Lunas Decalogue is a stone that appears with nothing to support an Old World presence in pre-Columbian times in the New World. The beauty of forging in stone is that the stone itself can be impossible to date.

But as Oded Golan has found out, they can date the patina...to drag this thread back towards Syro-Palestinian archaeology.

Oh boy!
Michigan Plates
Burrows Cave
Los Lunas
The Newport Tower
Ancient multi story mud brick “pueblos” vs. current technology holes in the ground.
The American Stonehenge
There are all kinds, litterly hundreds if not thousands, of “Out of Place Artifacts.”
Hoaxes?
Maybe, but why?
Fame? Profit?
Oded is the only one who may have made some money.
But he is more infamous than famous.
Al the others are in for ridicule and bad finances as they try and swim upstream against “accepted opinion”
Pre Clovis Points, anyone?
But this is a long way from Syria.
Maybe we need an Out of Place Artifacts thread.

Your point about your family coming to where they knew people begs the point of why were those people there?
How would a Spanish Jew even know of the existence of Albuquerque, let alone desire to move there?

Oded is the only one who may have made some money.

What they're afraid of is that Oded is the only one who has gotten caught... so far.

kbs2244 wrote:Oh boy!
Michigan Plates
Burrows Cave
Los Lunas
The Newport Tower
Ancient multi story mud brick “pueblos” vs. current technology holes in the ground.
The American Stonehenge
There are all kinds, litterly hundreds if not thousands, of “Out of Place Artifacts.”
Hoaxes?
Maybe, but why?
Fame? Profit?
Oded is the only one who may have made some money.
But he is more infamous than famous.
Al the others are in for ridicule and bad finances as they try and swim upstream against “accepted opinion”
Pre Clovis Points, anyone?
But this is a long way from Syria.
Maybe we need an Out of Place Artifacts thread.

Christians and Jews aren't the only ones to falsify history, Mormanism needed support for their 'lost tribes' theory.

kbs2244 wrote:Your point about your family coming to where they knew people begs the point of why were those people there?
How would a Spanish Jew even know of the existence of Albuquerque, let alone desire to move there?

Everyone knew about 'the New World'. For people fleeing the Spanish inQuisition it was just a way of getting as far from the center of authority as possible

Didn't work, seeker.

http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/037/6.html

There seems to be no relationship between this conspiracy and the one in Peru, but it is probable that the round-up of Jews in Mexico was triggered by the trials that took place in Lima from 1634 to 1639.

Minimalist wrote:Didn't work, seeker.

http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/037/6.html

There seems to be no relationship between this conspiracy and the one in Peru, but it is probable that the round-up of Jews in Mexico was triggered by the trials that took place in Lima from 1634 to 1639.

Sad but true. My ancestors, and I suspect many other families, survived by completely forgetting their Judaism. Personally I wouldn't have known about it had my father not gotten into tracing his geneology

Pissing contest swirling around Biblical Archaeological Review.

http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?p=1024

The cover of the March/April 2008 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review bore a huge photograph of the seal that some scholars have linked with the biblical queen Jezebel. Most recently, Marjo Korpel has published both scholarly (Journal for Semitics 15/2 [2006]) and popular (BAR) articles arguing in favor of this identification. Ha’aretz also reported a brief form of Korpel’s argument in October 2007—in between the Journal of Semitics and BAR articles. As I noted in a previous post (one of several on the topic of this seal), Maarav editor Chris Rollston criticized Korpel’s argument in the wake of the Ha’aretz article, before the BAR article appeared. In response, BAR editor Hershel Shanks ran a long sidebar to Korpel’s BAR article, in which Shanks sharply criticized Rollston

At least when they piss on each other, they do it politely!

But Min, it's a little difficult for someone coming new to this to wade through all it all about why or why not this should be or not be Jezebel (if she did indeed exist), especially as we don't know whose pee smells the sweetest.

So would it be possible for you to give a quick outline of the pros of the cons of the argument?

Jeez....why don't you ask me to explain the Big Bang or something else easy.

There seem to be two prime complaints. The biggest is that the seal itself in unprovenanced. It showed up on the Antiquities Market and no one knows where it came from. That raises eyebrows because of the recent rash of forgeries that have been popping up and always seem to originate in the antiquities market rather than official excavations of the IAA.

Second is that the article showed up in BAR instead of a peer reviewed journal which also seems to raise red flags.

Part of the seal is broken and Korpel is trying to convince everyone that her "reconstruction" is the only possible reconstruction which seems to be an impossible position to sustain.

Lastly, there is no record of "Jezebel" anywhere in the historical record outside of the OT. This last is no surprise. It was a male-dominated world and while there is an inscription naming Ahab there is none naming his queen. So once again we are back to the historicity of the OT.

The seal was discovered in 1964. Three years later Israel, as a result of the 1967 War, gained control of the West Bank where, it so happens, the citadel of Samaria is located. Since even the bible places Ahab and Jezebel in Samaria we are faced with the fact that there were no official excavations done under Israeli auspices until after the item was discovered. That seems to make a lot of people in Israel nervous in the wake of the Oded Golan forgery scandal. Much like the Jehoash Tablet or the James Ossuary it seems simply too good to be true that some bozo would find the exact item needed to prove the historicity of an important biblical character or event.

It doesn't pass the smell test.

Minimalist wrote:Jeez....why don't you ask me to explain the Big Bang or something else easy.

Thanks! I knew you could do it.

Looks like there's a good chance it's not real.

Picking up on your remark Jezebel herself not being attested outside of the OT - is it just me, or are all the main women of the OT (and the NT for that matter) either virgins or no good, down 'n dirty whores?

I'm not saying they all are, but there seems to be a fair few of them: In the red light district, Rahab, Jezebel, Bathsheba, the Whore of Babylon, the Queen of Sheba, Mary Magdelene. In the nunnery, Mary and ... er ... that's it! Hmmm ....

Michelle has just posted this: (my bolding)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 182219.htm

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2008) — DNA analysis of residents of Druze villages in Israel suggests these ancient religious communities offer a genetic snapshot of the Near East as it was several thousands of years ago.....

Technion researcher Karl Skorecki noted that the findings are consistent with Druze oral tradition suggesting the adherents came from diverse ancestral lineages "stretching back tens of thousands of years." The Druze represent a "genetic sanctuary" or "living relic" that provides a glimpse of the genetic diversity of the Near East in antiquity, the researchers write in the May 7th issue of the journal PLoS ONE.