Scholar: Archaeology rebuffs effort to erase biblical Israel

BPNEWS ^ | 03/02/05 | Michael McCormack

[Betis70]

C'mon what garbage. Until about 1906 these type of "scholars" believed the Hittites were a mythical culture from the Bible.

from this source:

Prior to the late 19th century, nothing was known of the Hittites outside the Bible, and many critics alleged that they were an invention of the biblical authors.

In 1876 a dramatic discovery changed this perception. A British scholar named A. H. Sayce found inscriptions carved on rocks in Turkey. He suspected that they might be evidence of the Hittite nation. Ten years later, more clay tablets were found in Turkey at a place called Boghaz-koy. German cuneiform expert Hugo Winckler investigated the tablets and began his own expedition at the site in 1906.

[Betis70]

I did it for 10 years. It was great fun but work is hard to come by, so to actually make a living doing it without being independently wealthy is very hard.

I still miss it and think perhaps I ought to go into teaching so I can still do digs and surveys in the summers. It was a great combination of cerebral and physical exercise.

[shubi]

Hebrew is a semitic language. It has roots in earlier semitic languages.

[bondserv]

Bump!

[Ichneumon]

Indeed - "Nature did it!" is neither open-minded nor curious.

How do you figure that, given that the "nature did it" view was the result of many centuries of work by the "open-minded and curious", who as a result discovered that far more than had been previously suspected, nature does indeed "do it"?

To someone familiar with the history of science and the rise of human knowledge, your statement seems quite inaccurate.

[Ichneumon]

One deludes oneself if one believes atheism to be the view of the rational, open-minded and curious.

If you're just going to post a bigoted slur, feel free to leave me off your ping list.

And to boot, your rant is a non sequitur to the article itself.

[AndrewC]

Revisionist Ping

And there wasn't a Holocaust.

[Verginius Rufus]

Bedrich Hrozny, a Czech scholar, deciphered the Hittite tablets found at Bogazkoy and discovered that Hittite was an Indo-European rather than a Semitic languge.

According to Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford University Press, 2002), "our Biblical Hittites with their Semitic names have little if anything to do with the earlier people so called, who occupied central Anatolia..."

But Bryce allows that there may be a connection between some later Hittites or "Neo-Hittites" in Syria (the earlier Hittite Empire fell around 1200 B.C.) and groups of Hittites mentioned in the Bible at 2 Kings 7:6 and in 2 Chronicles 1:17. The mention in 2 Kings is in the time of Elisha (9th century B.C.) whereas the 2 Chronicles passage is in the time of Solomon.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

To someone familiar with the history of science and the rise of human knowledge, your statement seems quite inaccurate.

Not at all. Here's my reasoning on the issue from another thread:

Many metaphysical naturalists find it easy to criticize the religious by mocking them with the words "God did it!" and accusing them of aborting scientific inquiry. What they usually don’t realize is that they are doing exactly the same thing in saying “Nature did it!” and likewise aborting scientific inquiry.

Science is not a justification for atheism, though many treat it that way (e.g. infidels.org).

IMHO, it is like a pendulum swinging over the millennia. At one time – in the days of Galileo for instance – science was an arm of the church and it had to comply with that particular church doctrine.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, and science seeks to distance itself from all theology – even going to the extremes (in some cases) of denying all universals, beginnings and anything else which does not take a physical form.

But universals and beginnings and the ilk are in the domain of mathematics and physics – and thus the pendulum is now moving in the opposite direction as these disciplines become more involved with biology, chemistry and such.

Hopefully we will see balance in our lifetime – where science is ideologically neutral and quits slamming doors altogether.

[Dataman]

Revisionist scholars in Europe are ignoring a wealth of archaeological evidence in seeking to discount and, ultimately, erase belief in the biblical Israel, noted archaeologist William Dever said at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

This is nothing new. I have a collection of pre-1930 world history books in which Israel and Christ are given more prominence as the books get older. This is a phenomenon similar to that in evolutionary circles: The truth is not the objective; The obliteration of the Creator and His interaction with man in history is. If one strays too far from the plantation in either field, he can't get work.

[Dataman]

To someone familiar with the history of science and the rise of human knowledge, your statement seems quite inaccurate.

To whom would you be referring?

[pointsal]

ping

[Dataman]

An excellent example. They (irrationally) assumed that the Bible was always wrong. That is still assumed today even though biblical history has never been wrong.

[aruanan]

Dever described the revisionists’ propositions as: “There is no history in the Hebrew Bible. It’s all written too late to be reliable. It is all a myth. There was no real ancient or biblical Israel. There was no exodus, no Sinai, no [Hebrew] faith, no conquest of Canaan, no Israelite ethnicity.”

“In fact,” Dever said, “they have recently argued that Hebrew is not a Semitic language.”

Pretty funny that they're adopting the philosophical positions of pre-archeological religious liberalism. At least the pre-archeological religious liberals would be able to claim ignorance of the facts. That these guys now want to ignore the facts simply underscores the reasons for their choice--the old liberal myths about the origins of Judaism and Christianity give them some momentary relief from the concept of having to stand before a transcendant judge who has the final word on their behavior.

[hershey]

For some time now, Arabs have been digging under the Temple Mount, hauling out truck loads of archeological artifacts, columns, etc., clearly evidence of Jewish/historical buildings, stables, whatever. They've taken all this to the town dump. I'm hoping Jewish scholars and archeologists have rescued everything and are trying to put smashed artifacts back together, but so far haven't heard anything. (Maybe the less said, the better, lest the Arabs destroy everything instead of leaving it at the dump.) Meanwhile, the foundation of the Temple Mount is getting shaky. What a bunch of idiots.

[Grendel9]

Of course, the ideal set up is to get a post
with a decent college then move on to a wealthy
museum...and that would take decades unless
you attain an influential sponsor, or Dad had
been making sizeable contributions for years! <>g,>