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."
In other words, you rely on history to tell you that apostolic succession occurred.
Thanks.
Rom 9:13 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.
WHo founded your sect? Some half washed German in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages?
The lessons can be accurate because they were written to reflect how Israel experienced God's presence. The Tower of Babel or Noah's Flood, for example, don't have to be literally true for the moral lesson to have meaning. Both speak to man's nature and man's relationship with God, even if they are not literally true.
Consider the non-Biblical fairy-tales that we tell children. Even if Little Red Riding-Hood or The Little Boy that Cried Wolf are not literally true, the lessons they teach about human nature and such are still valuable. Does one have to believe in the literal truth of a boy crying wolf to understand the lesson the story teaches about lying? Of course not.
Remember that the Israelites didn't make up these stories in order to invent God. They developed them out of a desire to understand God and their relationship with Him. Similarly, parents who created the story about the little boy who cried wolf weren't trying to invent reasons why lying was bad. The story illustrates the problem.
Likewise the NT is also worthless since it assumes the OT is historically accurate.
I think that's only true if, like your view of the Old Testament above, you assume that it's a house of cards. I don't. I assume that these stories were passed through oral traditions and manual copying and, as a result, may contain errors. But I look at the overall theme and the presence of details that simply make no sense unless they were literally true and think that the key lies in the large themes and not the little details. Remember, for example, that the Romans mocked Christians for worshiping a deity that was crucified (I've seen Roman graffiti, for example, of a man praying to a donkey-headed man hanging from a cross with a caption about the person worshipping a "dead god"). Having Jesus be crucified is not the sort of climax to the story of a savior that an ancient person would make up (comparisons with Mithra are legitimate but the context is different). And there are plenty of other examples, in details both small and large, that Jesus was real, important, taught certain things, etc. All of that does not fall down simply if a bit of geography is wrong or someone inserts a phrase during the copying process.
Personally, I think that demanding perfect accuracy in the Bible is setting a standard that no ancient manuscript can meet, thus setting the stage for disappointment and failure. And the insistence in literal truth, claims that certain problems don't exist when they obviously do, and idea that once you reject a small part, you must reject it all do more to drive people away from faith than draw them to it. That's why so many atheist cites focus on these points.
Would you be refering to his palace at Masada? If so, I've been there. It's breathtaking.
Thanks for the ping.
Given that I doubt many historians can fully remove their biases as they interpret the archaeological record, I'm not sure there are many "true historians" by your standard out there, on either side.
PBS had a wonderful show about building the pyramids where two academics got a group of workers together and tried to build a small portion of a pyramid to test their theories. The most telling moment came when their foreman essentially told the academics to back off -- they were stone masons and they could figure out what to do -- because they academics were telling them to do stupid things to support their one-size-fits-all theories.
Naw, dude, Moses dropped those. Didn't you see "History of the World, Part I"?
It is up to the individual to be honest - will you accept evidence of the Bible's historical errors? If a person only praises what seems to support the Bible and ignores what does not then that person are just as guilty of being biased.
You'll have to excuse me if my faith in the power of peer review in the social sciences is lacking. Groupthink runs rampant in the social sciences, including archaeology and history. See Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization for some good examples. Some accepted interpretations are so absurd that one wants to scream, like Tim the Enchanter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "Look at the bones!" And as you go back in time and the written and archaeological record thins, its been my observation that speculation becomes an increasingly large part of interpretation.
In fact, I think that one of the biggest dangers of historical movies and documentaries that provide visual reconstructions and single interpretations of historical events is that it creates the illusion that many things which are simply matters of speculation are historical fact, much as early and inaccurate displays of dinosaur bones creates some substantially false impressions about their nature and how they stood and moved for decades.
It is up to the individual to be honest - will you accept evidence of the Bible's historical errors?
Absolutely. But it's important to not simply assume that the Bible is false and evidence from other sources is true or that an absence of evidence is concrete evidence of an absence.
If a person only praises what seems to support the Bible and ignores what does not then that person are just as guilty of being biased.
Absolutely. But it's almost impossible to approach the problem without a bias of some sort. It only becomes a problem when the bias causes a historian or researcher to ignore or twist facts to support their conclusion. It's one thing for a Biblical researcher to point out that finding statues of Yahweh depicted with a female consort don't necessarily represent the mainstream of religion during that period and not solid evidence of mainstream Jewish polytheism and quite another to ignore their existence and the fact that at least some people in that region had very unorthodox views of God.
Am I remembering correctly that it was a death penalty for any ancient scribe copying the Torah if he made even on letter change?
That is why we really don't know when Christ was born (the exact date) the authors did not deem it important enough to include because they were writing on spiritual matters.
This is why textual criticism is an important field of study. Unfortunately it is usually neglected in our churches.
There are two main 'types' of translations. "Formal equivalence" (FE) which is a word by word translation (such as used in the KJV) and "dynamic equivalence" which is a thought by thought translation (such as is used in the NIV).
FE is always more accurate as it retains the original meaning of the words unfiltered through the cultural context of the translators.
Likewise the ability to check the original texts for hard passages is priceless in determining exact meanings. (Use that Strongs and use your Hebrew and Greek dictionaries)
Most modern translations are garbage, that is, if they aren't translated using FE then they can only be called paraphrases and not the Word of God.
(Of course I may not remember the argument correctly)
The dead giveaway was the carved sign found next to a well which said "Edomites Only".
bookmark
ping
I disagree with you about the nature of the OT. Fables and moral stories and indeed the parables that Jesus taught do not have to be true to have meaning. But Judaism stands on the premise that God revealed Himself not only to the Israelites, but also to the nations through His real historical dealings with Israel. God chooses Abraham to father a nation. God leads his descendants into Egypt where they are enslaved, and then miraculously leads them out of Egypt to the Promised Land. God rewards and punishes Israel based on its obedience and disobedience to the Law God supposedly gave to Moses. If none of this is true, then 90% or more of the OT is meaningless. If it is true then all history and the future of mankind hinges on what God taught the Israelites and mankind in general through his dealings with Israel in history. Likewise the NT is meaningless unless Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah promised to Israel in the OT. If He is not the Messiah as He claimed, then he was either a fraud or a kook. If you want to learn moral lessons from frauds and kooks there are many modern ones that you can choose to follow.
Personally, I think that demanding perfect accuracy in the Bible is setting a standard that no ancient manuscript can meet, thus setting the stage for disappointment and failure. And the insistence in literal truth, claims that certain problems don't exist when they obviously do, and idea that once you reject a small part, you must reject it all do more to drive people away from faith than draw them to it. That's why so many atheist cites focus on these points.
There are approximately 5000 NT manuscripts and fragments, many of which are dated to within 100 years of the time the NT was written. No other ancient manuscript comes even close to this. The existing manuscripts agree with each other to an astonishing degree, with only spelling variations and a few added or deleted words. The Dead Sea Scrolls similarly have demonstrated that the Jews very accurately transmitted the OT from 150 BC to the present. There are indeed many problems and many have caused me to doubt my own faith, but when I've looked into the details of these problems they usually end up having trivial solutions or are based on premises that are equally problematic. Frankly I am unaware of any atheist who became a believer in God who didn't also come to trust the veracity of the Bible. Christian faith that has no or little faith in the Bible is by definition no faith at all. Yes atheists have large hurdles to overcome to become Christians, but many do it everyday. Which is harder to believe; that Jesus rose from the dead and then ascended into heaven or that God inspired and then preserved the Bible through the ages?
The Old and New Testaments were not recitations from the mouth of God like the Muslims claim the Koran is. The Bible was INSPIRED by God not written by him.
I believe the Exodus was in 1628BC. The Thera explosion has been dated to that period and the crumbled walls of Jerico are laying just on top of the ash layer from Thera. There is charred grain just under the collapsed wall that date to 1628BC also.
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