Rock Art

[Digit]

What? Kilroy was here!

[stan]

Sounds like a pretty good debunking to me.

[clubs_stink]

Sounds like a pretty good debunking to me.

YOu think so? Read the literature surrounding their discovery

The format of the text/glyphs was not even known to any persons at the time the debunkers are trying to claim they were made.

[kbs2244]

Plus, the Mormon debunking ignores the placement of the stone.
It has slipped down from placement high on the side of a narrow gully leading up to a small masa top "fort"
I have forgotton the terms they use, but the people of Samaria traditionaly engraved the 10 commendents above their door, were as the Jews put them in a vase naile to the door jamb
So, this stone was, in effect, over the entrance to the settlement or fort.

[Minimalist]

The finding of the words, 'Eva and Hobie, 3-13-30,

Perhaps it was th original version of the story of Hobie and Eve?

[Digit]

It'scalled a Mezuzah KB and it's quotes from Deuteronomy.

[kbs2244]

Thanks, as a so called Christian I lose some of the details.
The point is that it is there, and it is easy to see where it was intended to be.
The Mormons may not like that because it shows a Samaria based orgin vs a jewish based one.
But it is still there.

[Digit]

Like the 10 lost tribes of Israel KB. Who and where did he lose them I wonder? As I understand it the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints claim that one of the tribes is the basis of their belief, if that is so I've got news for them, there were no lost tribes in that sense.

[Forum Monk]

This link is more up to date than the observations of the BYU professor. It also contains pictures of the 'rock'.

http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/loslunas.html

It should be noted, however, that Pummer himself (personal communication, Aug. 31, 1998) does not believe that the Los Lunas inscription could be Samaritan. First, in Verse 8, the Los Lunas text follows the Masoretic (standard Jewish) text by saying "remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," whereas the Samaritan text always says "preserve the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Second, the Samaritans added a clause to the tenth commandment calling for a temple to be built on Mt. Gerizim, but this clause is absent in Los Lunas. And third, although an inscription in Greek language written in Samaritan letters is known, he is not aware of Greek-style letters ever appearing in Samaritan inscriptions.

[Forum Monk]

More debunking:

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=78

I am a very experienced student of Hebrew in all it's forms dating from at least 1000 B.C. until today. Since my birth I have been speaking Hebrew with my father who was born in Israel. Since then, I have studied the language from both a religious and secular perspective and have always been building on my knowledge of it. I have been searching the web for interesting ancient translations, and despite the seemingly inexperienced writing style on the Los Lunas tablet, I decided to translate it to see what it would yield.

I am not an expert on aging, so I cannot date this archaeologically, but linguistically, some of the characters used could not possibly have been used by any Hebrew (or other Jew /Christian) people from 2000 years ago.

I'm open minded to the idea of ancient Hebrews somehow making it to North America, but this tablet has several errors no self respecting Hebrew-writer would make.

1. Line 2: the last word "panai" has an extra "h"- which never was used anywhere in the bible or otherwise.
2. Line 3: the author seems to make up a character for "samech" here- uses what seems to be a variation on his version of "mem".
3. Line 4: an "alef" is used in the word "zakhor" to represent the place of the English or European "A"- which tells me the author was most likely a Christian, or at least someone who spoke English or a similar language. I guarantee you this would never have been done by anyone who was educated in Hebrew- it is my guess (simply by having done lots of translation/transliteration myself w/different techniques) that the author was using an alphabet key to help him translate from a transliteration in either English or another European language, since copying the original Hebrew text would have helped him avoid that mistake. Adding an "alef" to a Hebrew word (at any time at least since c. 2000 bc) would change the entire structure of the word root- and besides, it would be redundant- since this author seems to be using it to represent the (kamaz) in the hebrew word "zachor", it would not need an extra "alef"- nor was this technique ever used anywhere in the bible.
4. Line 5: The word for "in order that..." - (last on the line) in Hebrew- "l'ma'an" (L-M-'-N)
is spelled here- "l'ma'al" (L-M-'L)- which actually means "above" in Hebrew.
I'm sure it's just an error, but only one that someone not familiar with chiseling these characters would make, since this letter is slightly similar to a "nun", but this is a very common word in the bible... it would be like you or me accidentally spelling "MAN" as
"MAL"- except this person was carving it out slowly... so you'd really have to think you were doing it right for a while.... and, even when he was done, he could have easily altered it to be a "nun" (more or less - so he probably approved of the final copy.

The rest of the text is more or less accurate, but (as I'm sure you know) Greek letters are used here to replace some of the ancient Hebrew characters that are more intricate to draw, so it seems likely to me that the author did not know them (b/c why would he settle for greek letters which were not the language of the bible- if he was a Jew, "lashon hakodesh" [the holy tongue] would have been a priority) - thus I feel it is likely that he thought his audience would not know the difference.

Again, I truly am open minded to the possibility of authentic ancient Hebrew writing arriving somehow in the new world.... but I would stake my life on the idea that this stone was not chiselled by an ancient Hebrew, or an experienced writer of the ancient Hebrew letter system, and probably not even by a Jew.

My best guess is that at some point in America's history, a Christian was inspired by the stories in the book of Joshua (and others in the books of Prophets) - that told of the Hebrews carving out abbreviated versions of God's law on large stones in various locations in the Canaan area.... which is exactly what this author did with the ten commandments. This is a relatively new object... which is to say- after the year 1500AD at least (when white men came to the new world), and that this author was inexperienced at this extremely intricate art of syntax and chiselling. It's highly possible, in my opinion, the cutoff of its age might be connected to Christian settlers getting that far west on the continent (which did not occur for quite some time).

I would very much like to hear your reply and please understand that this is an activity I enjoy- I have no interest in interfering with anyone's beliefs. I merely enjoy studying the roots of human language.

Thank you,

Isaac Emano

And reputiation:
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf043/sf043p02.htm

How old is the los lunas inscription?
Volume 13 of the Epigraphic Society's Occasional Publications (one of two volumes for 1985) contains several articles of great interest to anomalists with an archeological bent. We have space for only two in this issue of SF.

In the first of these, Barry Fell deals with the criticism that the now-famous Los Lunas (New Mexico) inscription cannot be the work of ancient Hebrew-writing visitors to the New World because it employs modern punctuation marks. Fell counters this by reproducing several ancient texts that use similar punctuation conventions, thus blunting this attack on the antiquity of the Los Lunas inscription.

For readers unacquainted with the Los Lunas inscription, it consists of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) engraved in ancient Hebrew on a large basalt rock near Los Lunas, NM.

In the second paper, geologist G.E. Morehouse comes to grip with a second criticism leveled at the inscription; namely, that the engraving looks fresh and lacks the patination characteristic of great age. Morehouse concludes that the freshness actually derives from the frequent, recent scrubbing of the inscription (with wire brushes on some occasions) to improve its visibility. Taking this into account, Morehouse estimates the age of the Los Lunas inscription by comparing its weathering with a nearby 1930 inscription. Conclusion: the Los Lunas inscription is much older than 1930. Any length of time from 500-2000 years or more older would be "quite reasonable."

We are, therefore, still left with the possibility that Old World travelers with a knowledge of ancient Hebrew visited what is now New Mexico perhaps as early as the time of Christ.

(Fell, Barry; "Ancient Punctuation and the Los Lunas Text," Epigraphic Society, Occasional Publications, 13:35, 1985, and Morehouse, George E.; "The Los Lunas Inscriptions, a Geological Study," Epigraphic Society, Occasional Publica tions, 13:44, 1985.)

My commentary:
Its very difficult to find any published reports on this anomaly from any commonly respected source. Good and detailed study is probably not going to happen because the object is too large and has been tampered with repeatedly over the years by a curious public. You can actually pay a fee to the Sate of New MExico and receive a permit to view the item yourself and of nothing presvents you from defacing it.

All I have to ask, is why New Mexico? Why would a lost tribe or any precolumbian entity with knowledge of ancient hebrew script travel thousands of miles from the coast and leave an inscription in the middle of a desert? Draw your own conclusions.

[Minimalist]

Who and where did he lose them I wonder?

The population of the northern kingdom of Israel was deported by the Assyrians and replaced with people shipped in from elsewhere in the Assyrian empire.

It is one of very few factual statements in the OT that has been confirmed by Assyrian records.

[Digit]

That's correct Min, these are the 10 'lost' tribes, the 2 that remained were Benyamin and Yudah, the origins of the modern semitic Jews, the Sephardim.
Years later the Jews are recorded as being in the Slavic countries, where they came under the sway of the Czars, many local people must have converted as Russia became home to the world's largest group of Jews. Under persecution they moved west into modern day Germany and Poland, where they were bought and sold as chattels of the estates on which they lived. These are the Askenazi jews, the European Jews, they are not Semites, and are now the bulk of world Jewry.

[Minimalist]

There is considerable doubt that the northern Kingdom was ever all that "jewish" too. They seemed to be devotees of Canaanite religion and not to have paid a whole lot of attention to ole yahweh....who seems to have been a southern kingdom of Judah kind of guy.

In fact, William Dever suggests that even Judah was not monotheistic until after the Babylonian Exile.

Interesting concepts....but they drove Arch off the deep end!

[Forum Monk]

I have seen lots of theories and suggestions that the tribe of Dan made settlements all over europe and into ireland and the uk.

Some controversial examples:
http://www.britam.org/dan.html
http://www.reluctant-messenger.com/HWA/ ... r9.html#t4

The tribes in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Lost_Tribes

Since at least the 17th century (the time of Oliver Cromwell and Sabbatai Zevi) both Jews and Christians have proposed theories concerning the lost tribes, based to varying degrees on Biblical accounts. An Ashkenazi Jewish tradition speaks of the Lost Tribes as Die Roite Yiddelech, "The little red Jews", cut off from the rest of Jewry by the legendary river Sambation "whose foaming waters raise high up into the sky a wall of fire and smoke that is impossible to pass through".[1]

On December 23, 1649, after Manasseh ben Israel, a noted rabbi of Amsterdam had been told by Montezinus that some of the Lost Tribes were living among the Native Americans of South America, he wrote:

“ ... I think that the Ten Tribes live not only there ... but also in other lands scattered everywhere; these never did come back to the Second Temple and they keep till this day still the Jewish Religion ... [2] ”

[Minimalist]

http://www.marxist.com/the-origins-jews ... 1203-2.htm

The Israelites who were exiled disappeared as a separate group from history permanently. They are referred to as "the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel". The reason for this is not difficult to grasp. The Assyrians did not relocate the Israelites in one place, but scattered them in small populations all over the Middle East. They were farmers who integrated themselves easily into the other cultures.

This make a hell of a lot more sense.