Posted on 03/09/2002 6:05:30 AM PST by eddie willers
braham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation.
Such startling propositions — the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years — have gained wide acceptance among non- Orthodox rabbis. But there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss them with the laity — until now.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, has just issued a new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60 years. Called "Etz Hayim" ("Tree of Life" in Hebrew), it offers an interpretation that incorporates the latest findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures. To the editors who worked on the book, it represents one of the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document.
"When I grew up in Brooklyn, congregants were not sophisticated about anything," said Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" and a co-editor of the new book. "Today, they are very sophisticated and well read about psychology, literature and history, but they are locked in a childish version of the Bible."
"Etz Hayim," compiled by David Lieber of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, seeks to change that. It offers the standard Hebrew text, a parallel English translation (edited by Chaim Potok, best known as the author of "The Chosen"), a page-by-page exegesis, periodic commentaries on Jewish practice and, at the end, 41 essays by prominent rabbis and scholars on topics ranging from the Torah scroll and dietary laws to ecology and eschatology.
These essays, perused during uninspired sermons or Torah readings at Sabbath services, will no doubt surprise many congregants. For instance, an essay on Ancient Near Eastern Mythology," by Robert Wexler, president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, states that on the basis of modern scholarship, it seems unlikely that the story of Genesis originated in Palestine. More likely, Mr. Wexler says, it arose in Mesopotamia, the influence of which is most apparent in the story of the Flood, which probably grew out of the periodic overflowing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The story of Noah, Mr. Wexler adds, was probably borrowed from the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh.
Equally striking for many readers will be the essay "Biblical Archaeology," by Lee I. Levine, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "There is no reference in Egyptian sources to Israel's sojourn in that country," he writes, "and the evidence that does exist is negligible and indirect." The few indirect pieces of evidence, like the use of Egyptian names, he adds, "are far from adequate to corroborate the historicity of the biblical account."
Similarly ambiguous, Mr. Levine writes, is the evidence of the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the ancient name for the area including Israel. Excavations showing that Jericho was unwalled and uninhabited, he says, "clearly seem to contradict the violent and complete conquest portrayed in the Book of Joshua." What's more, he says, there is an "almost total absence of archaeological evidence" backing up the Bible's grand descriptions of the Jerusalem of David and Solomon.
The notion that the Bible is not literally true "is more or less settled and understood among most Conservative rabbis," observed David Wolpe, a rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a contributor to "Etz Hayim." But some congregants, he said, "may not like the stark airing of it." Last Passover, in a sermon to 2,200 congregants at his synagogue, Rabbi Wolpe frankly said that "virtually every modern archaeologist" agrees "that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way that it happened, if it happened at all." The rabbi offered what he called a "litany of disillusion" about the narrative, including contradictions, improbabilities, chronological lapses and the absence of corroborating evidence. In fact, he said, archaeologists digging in the Sinai have "found no trace of the tribes of Israel — not one shard of pottery."
The reaction to the rabbi's talk ranged from admiration at his courage to dismay at his timing to anger at his audacity. Reported in Jewish publications around the world, the sermon brought him a flood of letters accusing him of undermining the most fundamental teachings of Judaism. But he also received many messages of support. "I can't tell you how many rabbis called me, e- mailed me and wrote me, saying, `God bless you for saying what we all believe,' " Rabbi Wolpe said. He attributes the "explosion" set off by his sermon to "the reluctance of rabbis to say what they really believe."
Before the introduction of "Etz Hayim," the Conservative movement relied on the Torah commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth. By 1936, when it was issued, the Hebrew Bible had come under intense scrutiny from scholars like Julius Wellhausen of Germany, who raised many questions about the text's authorship and accuracy. Hertz, working in an era of rampant anti-Semitism and of Christian efforts to demonstrate the inferiority of the "Old" Testament to the "New," dismissed all doubts about the integrity of the text.
Maintaining that no people would have invented for themselves so "disgraceful" a past as that of being slaves in a foreign land, he wrote that "of all Oriental chronicles, it is only the Biblical annals that deserve the name of history."
The Hertz approach had little competition until 1981, when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the official arm of Reform Judaism, published its own Torah commentary. Edited by Rabbi Gunther Plaut, it took note of the growing body of archaeological and textual evidence that called the accuracy of the biblical account into question. The "tales" of Genesis, it flatly stated, were a mix of "myth, legend, distant memory and search for origins, bound together by the strands of a central theological concept." But Exodus, it insisted, belonged in "the realm of history." While there are scholars who consider the Exodus story to be "folk tales," the commentary observed, "this is a minority view."
Twenty years later, the weight of scholarly evidence questioning the Exodus narrative had become so great that the minority view had become the majority one.
Not among Orthodox Jews, however. They continue to regard the Torah as the divine and immutable word of God. Their most widely used Torah commentary, known as the Stone Edition (1993), declares in its introduction "that every letter and word of the Torah was given to Moses by God."
Lawrence Schiffman, a professor at New York University and an Orthodox Jew, said that "Etz Hayim" goes so far in accepting modern scholarship that, without realizing it, it ends up being in "nihilistic opposition" to what Conservative Jews stand for. He noted, however, that most of the questions about the Bible's accuracy had been tucked away discreetly in the back. "The average synagogue-goer is never going to look there," he said.
Even some Conservative rabbis feel uncomfortable with the depth of the doubting. "I think the basic historicity of the text is valid and verifiable," said Susan Grossman, the rabbi of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Md., and a co-editor of "Etz Hayim." As for the mounting archaeological evidence suggesting the contrary, Rabbi Grossman said: "There's no evidence that it didn't happen. Most of the `evidence' is evidence from silence."
"The real issue for me is the eternal truths that are in the text," she added. "How do we apply this hallowed text to the 21st century?" One way, she said, is to make it more relevant to women. Rabbi Grossman is one of many women who worked on "Etz Hayim," in an effort to temper the Bible's heavily patriarchal orientation and make the text more palatable to modern readers. For example, the passage in Genesis that describes how the aged Sarah laughed upon hearing God say that she would bear a son is traditionally interpreted as a laugh of incredulity. In its commentary, however, "Etz Hayim" suggests that her laughter "may not be a response to the far- fetched notion of pregnancy at an advanced age, but the laughter of delight at the prospect of two elderly people resuming marital intimacy."
In a project of such complexity, there were inevitably many points of disagreement. But Rabbi Kushner says the only one that eluded resolution concerned Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence." "We couldn't come to a formulation that we could all be comfortable with," the rabbi said. "Some people felt that homosexuality is wrong. We weren't prepared to embrace that as the Conservative position. But at the same time we couldn't say this is a mentality that has been disproved by contemporary biology, for not everyone was prepared to go along with that." Ultimately, the editors settled on an anodyne compromise, noting that the Torah's prohibitions on homosexual relations "have engendered considerable debate" and that Conservative synagogues should "welcome gay and lesbian congregants in all congregational activities."
Since the fall, when "Etz Hayim" was issued, more than 100,000 copies have been sold. Eventually, it is expected to become the standard Bible in the nation's 760 Conservative synagogues.
Mark S. Smith, a professor of Bible and Near Eastern Studies at New York University, noted that the Hertz commentary had lasted 65 years. "That's incredible," he said. "If `Etz Hayim' isn't around for 50 years or more, I'd be surprised."
Its longevity, however, may depend on the pace of archaeological discovery.
More about this at http://www.varchive.org/ce/jericho.htm:
Jericho
by Immanual VelikovskyJericho was the first city west of the Jordan to be conquered by the Israelites under Joshua. It was surrounded by a huge wall that was wide enough to have houses built on it. Joshua sent spies into the city, and Rahab, the harlot “let them down by a cord through the window: for her house was upon the town wall.” “About forty thousand prepared for war passed over before the Lord unto battle, to the plains of Jericho.” “Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.” After a few days of siege, the earth groaned loudly - the Israelites thought in answer to their invocation and their blowing the horns, and “the wall fell down flat.” The conquerors entered the defenseless city and “utterly destroyed all that was in the city” (Joshua 2:3; 4:13; 6:1; 6:20-21).
Joshua proclaimed a curse upon anyone who would rebuild Jericho: “He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it” (6:26). Next the Israelites went against Ai.
Jericho’s fortress wall was famous, for it was huge and impenetrable, and only thanks to a violent earthshock did the besiegers obtain entrance. This wall became even more famous after it fell, because the story of it is one of the best-known episodes of Biblical ancient history.
For about five centuries no attempt was made to rebuild the city accursed by Joshua. In the ninth century, in the days of Ahab, king of Samaria, a certain Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho: “he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his first-born, and setup the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun” (I Kings 16:34).
This short record—contained in a single verse—tells not a little. In order to mollify the Deity and overcbme the curse, this private man sacrificed two of his own sons. The ardor of Hiel, unsupported by the king of Israel, did not result in a true resurrection of the doomed city. For some time in the closing days of Ahab, a little band of prophets had its seat there, as we learn from II Kings 2:15. Near Jericho or its mound, Zedekiah, the last king on the throne of David, was seized by the pursuing Chaldeans, in -586. Eight centuries after Hiel, in the last pre-Christian century, Herod the Great built his winter palace and a Roman theater close to the site.
It was the Jericho that succumbed in the most dramatic circumstances, its great wall tumbling down, that beckoned archaeologists from the very first. A mound, visible from afar, covered the ancient city and its wall; an Arab village grew up nearby because of the clean springs that stream past the mound toward the Jordan and the Dead Sea, both in walking distance of a few hours: a fortified city that fell in a very definite moment of history is a desideratum and a prize that are matchless—and archaeological fervor sensed that here great discoveries awaited the diggers. But it was not until 1907 that E. Sellin and C. Watzinger, German archaeologists, after having obtained the necessary firman from the Turkish Government, lifted earth from a portion of the mound. The great wall was found and no archaeologist could possibly have missed it.
The excavation of this city brought to light three consecutive levels of occupation called by the excavators the “blue”, the “red”, and the “green”.(1) The “blue” was ascribed to the Canaanite period, the “red” to the Israelite period, and the “green” to the Judean period. But in the “red” level many scarabs of the Middle Kingdom were found, as well as pot handles impressed with seals of the same time. It was decided that all of them had been used as unintelligible amulets many hundreds of years after they were made.
However, thirteen years after the publication of the report of the excavations, one of the two excavators published a repudiation of their conclusions.(2) He put the city of the “blue” level in the third millennium, and the city of the “red” level, on the basis of its scarabs, he ascribed to the Middle Kingdom, a change of eight or nine hundred years. This “red” city had a tremendous wall and a palace that came to an end in a violent destruction. The “green” city was assigned to the ninth century, as the work of Hiel the Israelite.
As a result of this new assignment, “in the time of Joshua Jericho was but a heap of ruins on which, perchance, a few single hovels stood”.(3)
This means that the Israelites under Joshua did not find a city on the site of Jericho; the city walls could not have crumbled during the siege by the Israelites if they were already in ruins at the end of the Middle Kingdom.
The Turkish rule in Palestine ceased before the end of World War I and was followed by British occupation and mandate. John Garstang undertook new excavations at Jericho. He saw traces of intense fire. “Houses alongside the wall are found burned to the ground, their roofs have fallen upon the domestic pottery within.” (4) “Palace storerooms were burnt in a general conflagration.” “White ash was overlaid by a thick layer of charcoal and burnt debris.” (5)
The consecutive settlements from the lowest level up were called by the letters of the alphabet. One city was destroyed at the end of the Middle Kingdom or at the beginning of the time of the Hyksos. The invasion of the Israelites was synchronized with the end of City “D”, sometime in the days of Amenhotep III: a few scarabs of this king were found in the cemetery, and the excavator reasoned that the city must have fallen during the king’s reign. This theory was inspired by another theory which identified the Habiru of the el-Amarna letters with the Israelites.
Finally, after World War II, Jericho being now a part of the Jordan kingdom, Miss Kathleen Kenyon undertook the decisive work of clarifying Jericho’s history from the Neolithic age on. In several painstaking campaigns she lifted one veil after another from the city of legend and history. She was not led by any theory about the time of the Exodus, neither by that of Garstang who claimed Exodus in the days of Amenhotep II and Conquest in the days of Amenhotep III of the eighteenth dynasty (Habiru theory), nor by that of Albright that the Exodus took place in the days of Ramses II and the Conquest in the days of Merneptah (Israel Stele), both of the nineteenth dynasty, except that in agreement with all schemes of accepted chronology she expected to find the Old Testament confirmed and the great walls of Jericho dating from some time of the Late Bronze: The New Kingdom in Egypt, to which both the eighteenth and the nineteenth dynasties belonged. Whether the Exodus took place in the days of Amenhotep III and of the el-Amarna letters, or in the days of Ramses II or Merneptah and the Israel stele, the Conquest must have fallen into the Late Bronze or the New Kingdom in Egypt. Miss Kenyon revised Garstang’s estimates.
There was found a Jericho of the days of the Early Bronze—the Old Kingdom in Egypt. Its defenses were destroyed, and immediately and in great haste the people of Jericho built again, but their hastily-erected wall was destroyed by fire before having been completed. As to the causes of these destructions, Miss Kenyon expresses herself this way: “Earthquakes undoubtedly played their part. Owing to the cataclysmic terrestrial upheavals which resulted in the formation of this great cleft, the Jordan Valley is peculiarly liable to earthquakes.” (6)
In the time of the Middle Kingdom, Jericho was at its apogee as a city and fortress. “...the Middle Bronze Age is perhaps the most prosperous in the whole history of Palestine.” (7) “The defenses ... belong to a fairly advanced date in that period.” (8) There was “a massive stone revetment... part of a complex system” of defenses.(9) “The final buildings [of the Middle Bronze Age city] were violently destroyed and left in ruins with all their contents.” (10) Fire was one of the agents of destruction. “Over most of the area ... excavated on the west side of the mound, the thick layer of burning above the Middle Bronze Age buildings is the highest surviving layer.” (11)
After the great fortress, its palace and its walls ruined and burned, there was no Jericho again. The near-absence of Late Bronze remains is explained by an extraordinary amount of weathering on the site. “The houses of Late Bronze Age Jericho have therefore almost entirely disappeared.”(12) Only in one small area were foundations of Late Bronze Age houses discovered. When Garstang excavated the site, he found also “traces of the several houses which sprang up independently of the fortifications upon the ruins of the city at its northern end.” (13) The time of this settlement was near the end of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt, the days of Amenhotep III or Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton).
But of any fortifications that the Late Bronze Age settlement might have had, no trace survives. Garstang thought to have found them in the excavations that he conducted on the site between 1930 and 1936; but the double line of wall, thought by Garstang to be of the Late Bronze age, or New Kingdom in Egypt, was proved to date from the Early Bronze, contemporary with the Old Kingdom in Egypt. Garstang’s conclusion of a sizable fortress in the days of Amenhotep III was shown to be wrong. Very few traces were found above the destruction level of the Middle Bronze Age city, which, in accordance with the statement cited above, “is the highest surviving layer.”
“It is a sad fact”, wrote Miss Kenyon, “that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within which period the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace remains. . . . As concerns the date of the destruction of Jericho by the Israelites, all that can be said is that the latest Bronze Age occupation should, in my view, be dated to the third quarter of the fourteenth century B.C. This is a date which suits neither the school of scholars which would date the entry of the Israelites into Palestine to c. 1400 B.C. nor the school which prefers a date of c. 1260 B.C.” (14)
We carefully followed this trend of thought and we see that, under the great walls of Jericho, the theories of Conquest in the days of Habiru (El-Amarna) and the Conquest in the days of Merneptah (Israel Stele) are equally well-buried.
In Conclusions to her Digging up Jericho, Kathleen Kenyon wrote with a sigh: “At just that stage when archaeology should have linked with the written record, archaeology fails us. This is regrettable. There is no question of the archaeology being needed to prove that the Bible is true but it is needed as a help in interpretation to those older parts of the Old Testament which from the nature of their sources . . . cannot be read as a straight-forward record.”
And what a pity it is. “When Joshua wished to lead the Children of Israel into the Promised Land, he said to his spies ‘go view the land and Jericho’, because Jericho was the entrance into central Palestine.” (15)
A tragic note is heard in Kenyon’s report. She intended to discover the truthfulness of the written record. Some other scholars did not share Kenyon’s regret. Professor Martin Noth pointed to the Jericho discrepancy as the best and most decisive proof of the unreliable character of the historical parts of the Old Testament. It became a major issue for Old Testament studies. When Professor Wright of Harvard expressed himself as trusting the historical truth of Old Testament records, he was accosted by Professor Finkelstein of Los Angeles University with reference to the walls of Jericho that were in ruins long before the Israelites reached them.(16)
The conclusion reached by the excavator of the great-walled Jericho—a Middle Bronze city, destroyed only a short time after the end of the Middle Kingdom—is in perfect agreement with the time table of Ages in Chaos: the Israelites arrived at the walls of Jericho only a single generation after the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, still in the Middle Bronze (the beginning of the Hyksos occupation). There is complete agreement between the archaeological finds and the scriptural record.(17)
In the days of Ahab, Hiel, his subject, built on the ruins of Jericho. No wonder that the few buildings that were erected at that time and the few tombs that were used, date from the time of Amenhotep III and IV (Akhnaton). Hiel’s building activity in Jericho falls in their time because they were contemporaries of Ahab. Over sixty-five of Ahab’s letters addressed to these pharaohs are in the el-Amama collection, found in the short-lived capital of Akhnaton.
The stumbling block is really a foundation stone; the great walls of Jericho fell suddenly when the Israelites under Joshua, after crossing the Jordan, were closing in on the city; and the temporary reoccupation almost six hundred years later is, once more, a case of a complete agreement between archaeology and the written record; it verifies the present reconstruction and is verified by it.
References:(1) E. Sellin and C. Watzinger, Jericho, Die Eigebnisse del Ausgrabungen (Leipzig, 1913).
(2) C. Watzinger, “Zur Chronologie der Schichten von Jericho,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, LXXX (1926), 131-36.
(3) Ibid., p.135.
(4) John Garstang, The Foundations of Bible History (1931), p. 146.
(5) J. Garstang and J.B.E. Garstang, The Story of Jericho (1940), p. 104.
(6) Kathleen Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (London, 1957), pp. 175-176.
(7) Ibid., p.212.
(8) Ibid., p.214.
(9) Ibid., p.215.
(10) Ibid., p.229.
(11) Ibid., p.261.
(12) Ibid., p.261.
(13) John Garstang, The Foundations of Bible History, ‘Joshua, Judges’, (New York, 1931), p. 146.
(14) K. Kenyon, op. cit., pp. 261-262.
(15) Ibid., 266.
(16) G. Ernest Wright, “Is Glueck’s Aim to Prove that the Bible is True?”, The Biblical Archaeologist Reader, (Anchor Books, 1961).
(17) [The archeology agrees with the Biblical account even in minor details. Miss Kenyon reports of the last Middle Bronze Age city (MB II) that “very little metal was found” (Digging Up Jericho, p.232.). This is consistent with Joshua 6:24: “And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord”. On the archeological anomalies of Jericho see also John J. Bimson, “The Conquest of Canaan and the Revised Chronology,” S.I.S. Review I, 3 (Summer 1976), pp. 2ff, and G. Gammon, “The Walls of Jericho,” Ibid., pp. 4-5.]
I said mystical...not mythical.
I believe there was a Moses....I just don't believe he received the 10 Commandments from God.
Why would you call someone intellectually dishonest if they don't believe in magic?
Unfaithful, yes....dishonest, no.
Note: this topic is from 03/09/2002. Thanks eddie willers.
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