Posted on 01/26/2005 8:44:58 PM PST by blam
Archeologist unearths biblical controversy
Artifacts from Iron Age fortress confirm Old Testament dates of Edomite kingdom
By MICHAEL VALPY
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Canadian archeologist Russell Adams's interest is in Bronze Age and Iron Age copper production. He never intended to walk into archeology's vicious debate over the historical accuracy of the Old Testament -- a conflict likened by one historian to a pack of feral canines at each other's throats.
Yet by coincidence, Prof. Adams of Hamilton's McMaster University says, he and an international team of colleagues fit into place a significant piece of the puzzle of human history in the Middle East -- unearthing information that points to the existence of the Bible's vilified Kingdom of Edom at precisely the time the Bible says it existed, and contradicting widespread academic belief that it did not come into being until 200 years later.
Their findings mean that those scholars convinced that the Hebrew Old Testament is at best a compendium of revisionist, fragmented history, mixed with folklore and theology, and at worst a piece of outright propaganda, likely will have to apply the brakes to their thinking.
Because, if the little bit of the Old Testament's narrative that Prof. Adams and his colleagues have looked at is true, other bits could be true as well.
References to the Kingdom of Edom -- almost none of them complimentary -- are woven through the Old Testament. It existed in what is today southern Jordan, next door to Israel, and the relationship between the biblical Edomites and Israelites was one of unrelenting hostility and warfare.
The team led by Prof. Adams, Thomas Levy of the University of California at San Diego and Mohammad Najjar of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities was investigating copper mining and smelting at a site called Khirbat en-Nahas, by far the largest copper-production site in the region.
They applied high-precision radiocarbon-dating methods to some of their finds, and as they say in the British journal Antiquities, "The results were spectacular."
They firmly established that occupation of the site began in the 11th century BC and a monumental fortress was built in the 10th century BC, supporting the argument for existence of an Edomite state at least 200 years earlier than had been assumed.
What is particularly exciting about their find is that it implies the existence of an Edomite state at the time the Bible says King David and his son Solomon ruled over a powerful united kingdom of Israel and Judah.
It is the historical accuracy -- the very existence of this united kingdom and the might and splendour of David and Solomon, as well as the existence of surrounding kingdoms -- that lies at the heart of the archeological dispute.
Those scholars known as minimalists argue that what is known as "state formation" -- the emergence of regional governments and kings -- did not take place in the area until the imperialistic expansion of the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BC, so David and Solomon, rather than being mighty monarchs, were mere petty chieftains.
And because everything that takes place in the Middle East inevitably is political, the minimalist argument is seen as weakening modern Israel's claim to Palestine.
In the biblical narrative, the Edomites are the descendents of Esau, whose blessing from his father, Isaac, was stolen by his younger brother, Jacob, ancestor of the Israelites. (Fans of the British satirical-comedy group Beyond the Fringe will recall how Jacob pulled off the theft by presenting himself as the hirsute Esau to their blind father, saying in an aside: "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.")
The Edomites are lambasted in the Bible for refusing to let the Israelites rest on their land as they flee Egypt. God declares obscurely: "Over Edom will I cast out my shoe." The Israelites grumble enviously that there were kings of Edom before there were kings of Israel -- a highly significant passage because it implies that state formation occurred in Edom before it happened in Israel.
Finally, there is the biblical account of David's war against the Edomites, in which David and his general, Joab, kill 18,000 Edomites and establish military control over them by "putting garrisons throughout all Edom."
Irish scholar John Bartlett, one of the world's great experts on the Edomites, dates the battle at 990 to 980 BC, precisely when Prof. Adams and his colleagues date the fortress.
Says Prof. Adams: "This battle between the Israelites and the Edomites, although not possible to document, is typical of the sort of border conflicts between Iron Age states. And the evidence of our new dates at least proves that it may, in fact, be possible to place the Edomites in the 10th century [BC] or earlier, which now supports the chronology of the biblical accounts.
"It is intriguing that at Khirbat en-Nahas, our large Iron Age fort is dated to just this period, suggesting conflict as a central concern even at a remote copper-production site."
He concludes: "We're not out to prove the Bible right or wrong. We're not trying to be controversial. We're just trying to be good anthropologists and scientists, and tell the story of our archeological site."
I did not mean it to sound so negative.
In life, Destro, one has to aim higher than the goal if one is to guarantee the goal.
Enjoy your posts and agree with just about everything you have to say, BTW.
Well, I've always wondered if the Tower of Babel story was an allegorical description of the spread of the Indo-European language and its subsequent offshoots. Be a real interesting study.
I believe it had to do with the 'wise men from the east'. A number of anthropologists believe the early Sumerians (the ones we know about) were in fact refugees from the Ice Age flooding of Sundaland, they would have brought a number of 'foreign' languages and possibly their flood stories with them. Some DNA and disease studies offer some support for these theories.
The true believers (a.k.a. "skeptics") will Edom alive.
[I figured you needed some great writing as a break. ;')]
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders
Is this a recent book?
Yes, 2003. It's a decent book. Dr Robert Schoch is the guy who dated the Sphinx at about 9,000 years old.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend, Eden In The East, by Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, an excellent book.
Eden In The East
Stephen Oppenheimer
A book that completely changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the lost 'Eden' - the cradle of civilisation - to Southeast Asia
At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half-sunken continent is the Sunda shelf of Sundaland. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from Creation stories, myths and sagas, and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder-civilisation was destroyed by the catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last Ice Age.
BTTT!
I've seen a few on the Internet. Of course you can find someone who believes just about anything on the Internet. Sometimes they are the same sort of person who believes that the KJV is the "original language" of the Bible.
Human beings are fallible and in their error--deliberate or unintentional--alter almost everything they touch. This doesn't mean that the text was not inspired ("breathed") by God.
Fair enough. But people do use the idea that the Bible was inspired by God to reject the notion that it might have errors of any significance. This becomes important when the Bible seems to conflict with knowledge gained from toher sources. When the Bible conflicts with science or history, for example, do we simply assume that it's one of the mistakes that made its way into the text or do we reject the science and history on the grounds of God's inspiration?
Professor Mike Baillie makes a compelling case for the 1628BC date in his excellent book, Exodus To Arthur.
If I may be excused for being so bold as to contradict: people of science _rarely_ are motivated out of a wish to disprove the "Bible", but to understand the workings of existence. It's the study of the workings of existence, with the formulation of rules to clarify what is "knowledge", that has indeed disproven many statements in the "Bible". For example, one of great minds of Science, Isaac Newton, who laid the foundations of Calculus (along with Leibnitz and others), and of Basic Physics (force, mass, movement, gravity, light, etc.), was a Christian, who went on later in life to occupy himself with theological questions.
"Science" has agreed on various rules to recognize what is "truth", using common observation, logic, predictive value, testability, etc. Religion and religious tenets are practically disqualified right off the bat, since there are no observations on which there is common agreement among the various observers. For instance, within Christianity, there are wide differences in interpretation of almost anything the "Bible" says, besides how those with Muslum, Hindu, or Buddhist backgrounds will interpret them.
An example of something in the "Bible" that has been disproven by the observations of scientists is the view that the Earth is flat, whether of a disk or with corners, on a foundation, covered over with domes in layers ("firmaments"), one of which was a dome of stars, made for "signs".
Science requires predictive value. The predictive value of the "record" of the reigns of David and Solomon, is that they would leave behind great amounts of artifacts to be found by modern Archaeology. Since this has so abysmally failed, the scientific value of this biblical "record" is null and void, as you generalized "...nothing ... was relevant...".
Some have defended the Bible thus: "The Bible doesn't tell how the heavens go; it tells how to go to heaven", but if the statements it makes about the former are wrong, how can it be trusted about the latter? Or even that heaven exists?
In conclusion, much evidence has been found that leads objective scientists to the conclusion that the contents of the Bible prior to the reign of Josiah were contrived to differentiate the people who became Israel from their surrounding "cousin" clans, so predictive prophecy, such as "...shall be two nations...", was made up to promote this ethnic schism, and the religio-political establishment that benefited from it. (I'm doing this from memory, so it might actually have been some other king in whose reign the "scriptures" were "discovered" in the temple, or even after the Babylonian captivity.) Taking a main rival clan, Edom, as a foil (nation/people-group to be overcome) is predictable under this view. However, as another post pointed out, about 2000 years ago, Israel was being ruled by an Edomite, Herod.
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At this point the only way to believe ALL of Homer’s writings is to believe in a superior race on Earth. Make of that what you will.
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