Archaeologica.org

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... 2FShowFull

Containers for ritual offerings, weapons and jewelry are among the finds uncovered this week after builders in Jerusalem's Bayit Vagan neighborhood stumbled upon a 4,000-year-old Canaanite cemetery.

Twenty years ago, Milevski worked on his first-ever archeology excavation in Israel, where the Malha Mall stands today, not far from the present day cemetery excavation. The diggers at that site discovered village ruins dating to around 1700 BCE, the same period as the current excavation.

Jews would never put a village and a cemetary in the same place. This find should be the death knell of any nonsense of about Jerusalem being a Jewish city in the MBA.

Min, I didn't realize that a village and a cemetary would not be put in the same place by the Israelites.

But at that time period, were there any Israelites in the Levant at all?

That is the argument, Beags.

Finkelstein and his group cite archaeological evidence for the emergence of Israelites (or proto-Israelites in Dever's case) after the Canaanite cities were wiped out at the end of the LBA by whatever forces were sweeping the entire region c 1200 BC.

The Bible Club insists that the whole story is true but this find will end the idea that Jerusalem was anything but a Jewish city at the time in question.

OK. I guess I didn't realize that anyone thought the Israelites were significantly present prior to (easy now) their supposed exodus out of Egypt.

Standard thought being that Jacob took his tribe to Egypt, and 300 years later emerged as a culture that we know as the Israelites. The time frame and the actual truth of the story is debated, I know, but I have not kept up with the Archaeology of the argument.

BTW, Finklestein seems like a very angry person. My impression from "The Naked Archaeologist"

If you were talking to that idiot, Jacobovici, you'd be angry too.

Standard thought being that Jacob took his tribe to Egypt, and 300 years later emerged as a culture that we know as the Israelites.

A story which exists nowhere except the Hebrew Bible....as redacted centuries later.

I don't know if I should quote the Bible with Min in the loop, but as far as I can remember Jerusalem was a Caananite city, and stood long before the Israelites got there. Shalom.

OK. Definately a topic that I don't want to get into. Seems like we ought to know a lot more by now though.

And still, we don't have all of the Dead Sea Scrolls being made public. Discovered 59 years ago. So much politics.

You have to tell, Arch.

They have found evidence for the Canaanite city in the MBA but it declined over the centuries to the level of a small village. It did not make its way back to city status until the reign of King Hezekiah after the much more prosperous northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians.

Beagle wrote:OK. Definately a topic that I don't want to get into. Seems like we ought to know a lot more by now though.

And still, we don't have all of the Dead Sea Scrolls being made public. Discovered 59 years ago. So much politics.

Dead Sea scrolls were much older.....written during the first century BC and AD and hidden around the time of the Great Revolt (66AD).

Aha - that I knew. I'll stop on that note.

You have to tell, Arch.

They have found evidence for the Canaanite city in the MBA but it declined over the centuries to the level of a small village. It did not make its way back to city status until the reign of King Hezekiah after the much more prosperous northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians.

Archie is SCREAMING at his computer right now! ... "NO! NO YOU FOOLS! ... AARRGGHH!"

Shit.

I realize I skipped another point I meant to make.

One of the big disputes between Finklestein and Dever was the derivation of the populations who subsequently became Israelites.

Dever holds to the view that they were mainly Canaanites, displaced by war and social upheaval who fled East to the unpopulated highlands for safety. He cites pottery and farming techniques as evidence.


Finklestein believes these people were nomadic herders forced to settle down when their agricultural trading partners (the Canaanites) were overthrown because they now had to grow their own grain. He cites village layout and the pastoral tradition for evidence.

One thing was clear. The main distinction which archaeology has found between the Canaanites and the Israelites was that the Canaanites ate pork (as did the later Philistines) and the Israelites did not. Now, we see that in Canaanite cities the taboo against cemetaries within the cities also did not exist.

Returning to memories of my youth, when I studied the Bible, it seemed a wise law to not eat pork. At that time, pork easily transmitted some pretty terrible parasites to humans. The Egyptians were eaten up by them.

I later looked at a lot of those old Mosaic laws in the context of the public health of the time. Of course, none of it is applicable today.

You can pick up some pretty nasty bugs from chicken, too, and there is no law against that.

The implication is this was a life-style differential not a scientific one. I'm no farmer but I have never seen herds of pigs being moved from place to place.

Pig farming seems to be a concept which arises once people settle down to agriculture. The nomads who settled down to become Israelites moved their flocks of sheep and goats and simply had no tradition of eating pork.
Later on, when seeking ways to distinguish one another from their adversaries they noted the dietary difference.

As for me....I love pork.