yalla

I reckon Archaeology and the Bible by John H.C. Laughlin Pub. Routledge London 2000 is as good as "The Bible Unearthed", maybe better.

philbar

Cause they came crumbling down...duh!

But seriously, I believe you are wrong. I don't read up on archeology, but I have heard a lot of a military fort near or around where Jerico is supposed to be.

Now if you want a none fairytale version of the story of Jerico, I heard once that the horns were used to simply intimidate the people inside the fort of Jerico. They were probably also used as a signal to tell the spies to raid the gate and open it for the rest of the Army to run in and take over the fort. "It's walls came tumbling down" was just a more exciting way of saying, "the gates were opened".

Dean Anderson

There was a fort - it was even a walled one.

There was one before the alleged wall-tumbling, and one after the alleged wall-tumbling. There just wasn't one at the time the siege was supposed to have happened.

Since there wasn't a fort there at the time of the alleged siege, a better non-fairytale version would be:

"The authors of the Bible saw the old broken down ruin of the fort at Jericho, and invented a 'just so' story claiming that their anscestral hero magically destroyed the fort."

Alf

You have been misinformed. Jericho is an old city and at some point had walls around it - well it was probably more like a fort than an actual city - a wall surrounding a few huts - which crumbled partly because the city grew outside of the walls and so the walls no longer functioned as a border of the city. Then, harder times came and the city dwindled and became near empty of people if any at all and that is about the time the supposed exodus is taking place. At this time the city has dwindled to a small village with just a few huts and no wall and there hasn't been any walls around the city for centuries and yet ruins of the city wall could probably be seen here and there. Then later better times came and the city grew again and about the time that the bible was written (around 700 BC) the city was again a larger city but still no walls around it and yet they saw ruins of city walls or fort walls near it and so they assumed that they must have blown them to crumble during the exodus.

The exodus never took place. One thing is that the supposed miracles which there are no traces of anywhere. However, it is even harder to explain how a nation such as Egypt which just has been visited by several plagues and have its land in ruins managed to enter its era of greatness. Such a nation should be crumbled! Most of their army were supposedly drowned at the bottom of the sea when they were chasing the fleeing jews and yet the land had a big and strong army immediately after these events supposedly took place? It does not make sense - we can safely assert that the exodus never took palce.

Another piece of evidence for the same is when we do archeological excavations in judean lands and we find a continuous development of culture from canaanite to jewish/hebrew culture. These were not people coming from egypt! These were people who were essentially canaanites that simply changed religion. The influence to change religion might have come from egypt but that doesn't mean the exodus took place.

Again, I urge you to read up on these matters philbar, you'd be surprised!

Alf