Post 11

post eleven: discuss the main ideas in False Testament and compare
this research to a more traditional religious perspective. What do
you think about this topic?]

Archaeologists can agree that the Old Testament has a bit of truth, even with all of the embellishments and contradictions. It seemed clear that the Israelities did start out as a nomadic band somewhere in the area of ancient Mesopotamia and first migrated to Palestine and then to Egypt. Archaeologists at first were confident that they had covered a few basic facts however that has proven to be false. Who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from was proven fast, rather than invaders who fought into the Holy Land they are thought to have been an indigenous culture who developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Patriarchs appear to have been put together out of local lore. The Davidic Empire is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests during the seventh and eight centuries B.C. Judaism appears to not have come from a dark period of history but more of a modern age derived by big power politics. At this time they had little in military and financial means, the priests and rulers got the idea that their national deity was the king of the universe who would transform them into a great power. From a “henotheistic cult to a monotheistic religion, Yahweh went from being the head god to being the only god. This is not the story told in Paul Johnson’s 1987 bestseller, A History of the Jews where Abraham departed the ancient city of Ur. There is no evidence that any such figure as Abraham ever lived and archaeologists believe there is no way such a person could have lived given what we know about ancient Israelite origins. Evidence indicates that the flight from Egypt did not occur at all. The Old Testament account of the conquest is fictional as well. Archaeologists believe that David was not a mighty potentate but rather a freebooter. Archaeologists have dismantled two myths one with the origins of ancient Israel and the other with the relationship between the Bible and science. The new archaeology has gone back to a “Higher Criticism” which comes from a large German school of biblical study. By the late 19th century they had concluded that Moses himself did not write the first five books of the Old Testament. They were products of a “post-exilic period”. The Higher Criticism did not disprove the Old Testament as a whole. The tribal founders depicted in the Book of Genesis were not real. The first modern archaeologists that set foot in the Holy Land were New England Congregationalists who made use of rigorous scientific methods. The first archaeologists had tried to fit these so called scientific facts into preconceived theoretical framework. During the 20th century the Zionist pioneers were eager for evidence that the Jewish had a claim to the Holy Land. Members of a settlement known as Beth Alpha uncovered an ancient synagogue mosaic while digging an irrigation ditch in 1928. These members were of a left-wing faction known as Hasomer Hatzair and some would argue that the find should be left to the dustbin of history. The number of digs multiplied and became a national passion, Eliezar Sukenik, an Israeli archaeologist, described these times as “Jewish archaeology” being born. During the 1950s there was a happy union of science, religion, and politics. Politicization of archaeology however reached a climax in the early 1960s. The fortress where nearly 1,000 Jewish warriors had committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in A.D. 73 lacks in evidence of a mass suicide which leads us to believe that the events were deliberately falsified. Around that time James Michener author of The Source used a fictional archaeological dig to put together a series of tales about Palestinian life from prehistoric times to the modern era. This “historicity” resurrected a theory that was first proposed in the 1920s. Yohanan Aharoni, an Israeli, argued for evidence in support of an Israelite war of conquest in the 13th century B.C. had a weak premise. His argument was based on re-dating pottery shards found in the biblical city of Hazor. Rather the first Hebrew settlers had filtered into Palestine in a nonviolent fashion settling with the Canaanites. Archaeologists claimed in the 1930s to have uncovered evidence that the walls of Jericho had fallen like the Book of Joshua said they did. However a British archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, demonstrated based on Mycenaean pottery shards found within the ruins that the destruction occurred no later than 1300 B.C. which was seventy or more years before the conquest was said to have happened. Attempting to figure out exactly when Abraham had departed the ancient city of Ur, American scholar William F. Albright theorized that he had left as part of a great migration of “Amorite” desert nomads sometimes between 2100 and 1800 B.C. Research into nomadic growth patterns and urban development indicated to Albright that no such mass migration had taken place. He even hypothesized that several cities within the Genesis book did not exist during the time frame. The biblical text did not match up with what archaeologists were learning about the land of Canaan in the second millennium. In their recent book The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein an archaeologist and Neil Asher Bilberman a journalist point out that in the patriarchal tales they frequently mention camel caravans. However analysis of ancient animal bones confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region until well after 1000 B.C. There was no evidence of the Israelites having lived in Egypt prior to Exodus for five centuries. So it is believed that they invented an identity as exiles and invaders because people in the ancient world did not establish rights to a particular piece of land by farming or by raising families on it but by taking it by force of arms. The Israelites claimed to have conquered it sometime ago in order to establish a moral right to the land they inhabit.

I think that this article does a good job of stating what other people have found in order to use it as a premise in the argument that religion, the Bible namely, and all of its origins are false. However it fails to present the hard-core facts in more depth. There are a couple of times where it is presented well for instance the patriarchal tales they frequently mention camel caravans however analysis of ancient animal bones confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region until well after 1000 B.C. Towards the beginning of Daniel Lazare’s essay he throws out theories and what archaeologists believe as if they were facts without any premise just like the Bible he is trying to disprove. As the essay moves a long he does present some evidence in regards to falsifying Biblical stories and figures. However I wonder the religious origin of the archaeologist’s he has received his information from. Where any of them prejudice against Jews? Have any archaeologists been able to duplicate the same conclusions that these have been able to? Have these theories ever been presented with enough evidence to disprove without a reasonable doubt that they are true? I don’t know if we will ever have enough concrete evidence to know which stories in the Bible are true and which are false.