Posted on 07/22/2008 2:37:05 AM PDT by Man50D
Abraham didn't exist? The Exodus didn't happen?
The Bible's Buried Secrets, a new PBS documentary, is likely to cause a furor.
"It challenges the Bible's stories if you want to read them literally, and that will disturb many people," says archaeologist William Dever, who specializes in Israel's history. "But it explains how and why these stories ever came to be told in the first place, and how and why they were written down."
The Nova program will premiere Nov. 18. PBS presented a clip and a panel discussion at the summer tour of the Television Critics Association.
The program says the Bible was written in the sixth century BC and that hundreds of authors contributed.
"At least the first five books of the Bible come together during the Babylonian exile," says producer Gary Glassman.
The program challenges long-held beliefs. Abraham, Sarah and their offspring probably didn't exist, says Carol Meyers, a religion professor at Duke University.
"These stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there's some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later," Meyers says.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
The Pyramids were built over 1,000 years before Moses.
weren’t there many pyramids and other construction projects throughout that era of ancient history?
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There is another thread on this same PBS program. Some good comments there.
Personally I’ve found the whole myth of the literal existence of PBS hard to swallow, especially the Nova story with the part about learning to be noncommercial under the leadership of a producer Glassman.
It may be shocking but recent scholarship has discovered clear evidence of commercials between programs that was long thought to be only sponsor information.
Further details of “membership drive” rituals to follow.
The Bible attests that the Hebrews were living in Canaan before the Egyptian Captivity and between the Egyptian Captivity and the Babylonian Captivity - if residency is the test, then they were Canaanites because they lived in Canaan.
Yet their ancestors came from Aramaea and they spoke an Aramaean language, and it is clear that they had different customs from and were in constant conflict with the other peoples in Canaan.
It’s like we say around here all the time, “If PBS didn’t do it, who would??”
But I thought no one had ever interpreted the Bible literally until ignorant rednecks appeared on the scene after being influenced by nineteenth century positivism! You mean that's not so? Rednecks aren't the only people who believe the Biblical stories are true? Who'da thunk it???
Considering the number of "religious" people who dismiss the first eleven chapters of Genesis as mythology, I find it hard to believed anyone would be shocked at the logical conclusion of such thinking.
On another thread, we were just discussing the DNA evidence (to back family records) that the Kohen line (the line of Aaron) has a common male ancestor circa the time of the Exodus.
http://www.cohen-levi.org/jewish_genes_and_genealogy/the_dna_chain_of_tradition.htm
Yes, all this definatively proves is that one man was the ancestor of the Kohenim.
At the time of the historical Exodus.
Proving amazing maternal marital fidelity for some 35 centuries (something like 99% of all purported Kohen had the gene sequence).
And corresponding to family and Biblical history.
Coincidence? I think not.
(1) That the Bible says that the Jews were the slave laborers who built the Pyramids. The Bible makes no mention of the Pyramids.
(2) That there was some large Egyptian middle class of skilled workmen.
A more accurate picture of Egyptian life was this: 95% of the population were subsistence farmers. There was an elite of priests, scribes and fine craftsmen and these urban upper classes had slaves and eunuchs to serve them and to oversee their households and lands.
The pyramids were built not by volunteers, but by farmers whose taxes were extracted from them in kind by pressgang labor. The work was supervised by artisans and architects, but there was not some vast army of well-to-do craftsmen who decided to work for a few years for free.
But the Pyramids in Egypt (especially the classics at Giza) were built too early for Moses' era.
Actually, if Moses flourished around 1800 BC, he was contemporaneous with the building of the last known pyramid, the pyramid of Amenemhet III.
Of course, the golden age of pyramid building was 800 years before Moses - the time when the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Gizeh was built. Khufu's was almost six times the size of Amenemhet III's.
But in Moses' time there were vast public works projects that would have dwarfed that particular gravesite in scale and importance.
This seems to be what the documentary is contesting...that they came from somewhere other than Canaan.
The usual dating for Moses is well after 1800.
If the Biblical chronology placing Moses at 1200 BC is correct, it would place Moses 500 years after the last documented pyramid project.
Looking at Genesis/Exodus, it appears to me that the proto-Jews (who were not yet “Jews” until Sinai) were largely herdsmen literally on the edge of society.
Not certain about this, but that is certainly the implication of the last chapter of Genesis -— relegated to various semi-arid field areas fairly far from the Nile.
A few weeks ago, I had the TV on the History Channel. The Naked Archaeologist was on. I was only half paying attention to the program as I was reading a book, and the TV just happened to be on.
This archaeologist (who calls himself the Naked Archaeologist) was in a museum in Egypt examining Egyptian hieroglyphics that dated back right to the same time as the Exodus. These Egyptian hieroglyphics told a story that paralleled the Biblical Exodus. There again, I was only paying half attention to the program so I'm not sure what museum this was.
It's getback fueled by the silly self absorbed guilt of some descendants and the wrath of other descendants who don't consider themselves inheritors of said western civilization.
I have 5 kids and have to fight this nonsense every damned day. It's infuriating and it's ruining what made America and the West great and powerful.
God is revealed in the pages of Torah. Regardless whatever one feels therein to be missing, the Creator of the universe nontheless makes it real for me.
A passing reference to the "legend" of Jewish slave labor would have been totally appropriate. By totally ignoring any Jewish element, the piece had the feel of airbrushing history.
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