GakuseiDon

I would be very, very interested indeed to see any evidence putting Philo in Jerusalem for any length of time, esp at the time of Jesus. It would have incredible ramifications, and I can't believe it doesn't get brought up elsewhere. What is Remsburg's source?

Here is a link to an article: http://www.torreys.org/bible/philoalexindex.html
I think we can assume that Philo may have gone to Jerusalem on pilgrimages on one or more occasions, but AFAIK, there is zero evidence that he lived there for any appreciable part of his life.

Well... okay then.


I don't think that it is necessarily a bad thing to show, just that it struck me as out of place, given that you'd already said it was impossible to prove or disprove, and then that "evidence is against it". I think you just need to explain why the details are important, and how it ties into the next half of the article. It is more a criticism of form rather than fact - but it is really just a nitpick.

"Fundamentalist to a man"? Yes, incorrect. Egyptology started at the time of Napoleon, while fundamentalism didn't start until about 50 years later. It is a myth that people were fundamentalists, and gradually became liberalists. In fact, the two movements have existed side-by-side for 1700 years at least, since the time of Origen. I very much doubt you can show that the early archeologists were "fundamentalists to a man".



But you DO say that the evidence is turning against them. Again, it is more sloppy than incorrect.

Yes.

As the Bible is just referring to one family, I still can't see how you can say that it refers to a whole people.

OK, i see that it makes sense to do it that way, so that is fair enough.

Adora

I'd just like to say I loved reading them, and found them quite thought-provoking. Of course, I can't critique their facts etc, since I don't have much knowledge of them, but still, an entertaining piece.

Celsus

Hi Ebonmuse,
You seem to have turned that into a slogan ignoring the rest of DrJim's post, since he considers himself a minimalist (and spin falls into that camp too). I think the best thing you can do is go read some maximalists and see how much they rely on the Bible in reconstructing history, and see where the minimalist critique of that position is coming from. By the way, Van Seters is something of a minimalist, and Finkelstein is leaning towards the same camp.
This is the straw man (you got this from Dever?), and is misleading in two ways. "Biblical Israel" never existed to begin with and therefore is an invention, but of whichever time period (minimalists and maximalists differing on that matter). Secondly, the Bible being written in the 2nd century CE (didn't you mean BCE?) is not a position any minimalist holds (even if you meant BCE, it's not a position most minimalists hold to either). As I said in the thread I linked (please read it), each position stands or falls on when the Bible is to be dated (since if the Bible actually does date to the 2nd century BCE, then nothing of the Biblical portrait of pre-exilic Israel can be trusted). Lose the straw man, and then go explore what they have to say for themselves (I recommended Lemche's Prelude to Israel's Past in the thread in question, go have a look at that and see whether it bears any semblance to your idea of "minimalism").

Finally, you should not dismiss the minimalists out of hand unless you can understand the dating of the books, something I think you missed in spin's and DrJim's discussions over the books of Kings and Chronicles (spin's Ishbaal/Ishbosheth example being a very pertinent one that Kings did not reach final form until after Chronicles had started to be written, and we all know that Chronicles is late (perhaps the 3rd century BCE, while it's always assumed that Kings is exilic).

Joel

Ebonmuse

Hmm. I'm going to have to do more research on this one and get back to you.

I think you're using a much more technical definition of that term than I had in mind. I didn't mean that all the early biblical archaeologists, for example, subscribed to the creed laid out in The Fundamentals or anything like that (some of them were Jewish, anyway). Instead, by that term I mean something more like what on this board might be called "maximalists" - people who believe that the Old Testament is a straightforward account that can be read as containing literal history, and more so, people who were led to this conclusion primarily by their religious beliefs. (Roland de Vaux is quoted in The Bible Unearthed as saying "If the faith of Israel is not founded on history, such faith is erroneous, and therefore our faith is also.")

Point taken. I will clarify my wording.

I feel that that situation more adequately describes the verse in question. Consider:

"And they returned, and came to Enmishpat, which is Kadesh, and smote all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites."

This seems to me to be a straightforward listing of various groups of people: they smote the Amalekites, and then they smote the Amorites.

Regrettably, we're working with limited data here. I can't refute the proposal that Laban and his family decided to leave the rest of their nomadic culture and go settle down in a city all by themselves. But my point remains: All the datable details in the patriarchal accounts - such as "Arameans living in cities" - are anachronisms. It's possible to deny each example, but then you lose everything anchoring the text to any point in history at all. If there are no authentically Middle Bronze details in the account, it could just as well have been composed in the Iron I, the divided monarchy, or the post-exilic period. (Maybe I should put this in my article?)

GakuseiDon

Sure, no problem (though to be fair that is what you said to me a year ago!) I would still like to know who Remsburg used as a source, though, as I would like to follow that up myself. What does he say is his source?

OK, sorry, you're right, I was taking it out of context.

I think it was inevitable that anyone of the time would have used the Bible as a guide, whether they believed it as literal history or not, since it would have comprised one of the key informational documents of the time. So all archeologists of that period and place would have "had Bible in hand", whether they believed in it as literal history or not.

The early 19th C was distinguished by the rise of German rationalism being applied to Bible studies, and this actually indirectly resulted in the rise of "Fundamentalism" (Capital "F"!) as we know it today. Quite a few articles were written at that time, trying to find a rational or natural explanation to the events in the Bible. A lot of the founding articles for the "Christ Myth" were written at that time.

Some early archeologists who fell into that group:
http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...ictionary.html

Renan, Joseph Ernest (1823-1892), author of The Life of Jesus.

He was trained for the clergy but quit after receiving minor orders and became one of the finer oriental scholars in Europe. Of his many learned and temperately anti-christian, works his Life of Jesus was the most popular. It sold 300,000 copies and was translated in to all the European languages. It was of great value in destroying the supernatural idea of Jesus but has the weakness of taking the gospels as material, though Renan did not insist that the details were to be accepted as historically true.


Renan spent some years digging in Palestine, and was one of the most famous archeologists of his day.

Also: (from the same link)

Champollion Jean Francios (1790-1832), French Egyptologist.

He read Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit as well as ancient Egyptian and it was he who learned the secret of the hieroglyphic inscriptions (1822). His biographer Harteben reproduces a very skeptical discussion of religion which he had written and mildly concludes that he had quit the Church (which still claims him)

Mariette, Francois Auguste Ferdinand (1821-1881), famous French Egyptologist.

He spent 30 years in Egypt in the archeological service of the French government and acquired more foreign decorations and honors than any other archeologist that ever lived. He has in fact a unique place in the history of Egyptology. His brother, who wrote his biography describes him as a very decided atheist. He says that he never entered a church and "found no charm in the pastorals and fictions of which we have a prodigious heap in Christianity." (p. 226).

I think that you should mention this in your article. It isn't so much that I disagree, but it is such an obvious point that perhaps you should think about adding a "pre-emptive" counter-point as an explanatory note.

Yes, again, I think it would strengthen the article by including it in an explanatory note as per the above.

Ebonmuse

I think we're using different definitions of words. I'm certainly not claiming that the theological vision of history as presented in the Old Testament is literal fact; as I hope my article makes clear, I don't accept the historicity of the patriarchs, the exodus or the conquest, and I also believe that Israelite polytheism existed all along and the Yahweh-alone cult was a late development, rather than the other way around as the Bible claims. However, this does not mean I think that no historical memory exists in the OT. The existence of the united monarchy is open to question, but other than that I think most of the events presented in Kings (and to a lesser extent, Chronicles) probably were preserved fairly accurately.

Yes, I meant BCE - my apologies. I was under the impression that many prominent minimalists argue that the Old Testament was invented essentially from whole cloth during the Hellenistic period. Is this not correct?

This seems to me a very curious position. Even if the Bible really was composed that late, which I find unlikely, there is independent historical correlation for things like the Omride dynasty or Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem. There is much that is not historical in the Bible, but I don't believe it is utterly devoid of historical content.

spin

I personally don't believe that all the Hebrew bible was composed in the second century BCE. Some was composed a lot earlier and some later.

When Ben Sira tells us about only three good kings of Israel/Judea, David, Hezekiah and Josiah, he doesn't seem to have had the scant traditions of other good Judean kings available to him that we have. BS 49:4, "Except for David, Hezekiah and Josiah, all of them were great sinners, for they abandoned the law of the most high; the kings of Judah came to an end." Asa was a good guy, so was Jehoshaphat. Joash was given the thumbs up by the writer of Kings, as was Azariah (Uzziah). So, where does Ben Sira get his judgment from if he, the knowledgeable fellow that he is of Hebrew traditions, had Kings in his hands? None of these last four kings mentioned can be called "great sinners" from the evidence that was available in Kings. But of course, Ben Sira didn't have Kings as we have it today available to him.

I wouldn't say that records of much older times didn't survive from the early post-exilic period. That's when some attempts must have taken place to record some of the past "splendour" of the country to which people apparently came from Babylon to occupy. People like having something of the past to look back upon and to provide some reassuring continuity. Both Kings and Chronicles refer to earlier works which they claim as sources. But then, aren't most of the kings of Judah before Hezekiah quite stereotypical in that they seem to have almost no differences one from the other beside name, length of reign and mother's name. You just get some judgment, X did right/wrong in the eyes of God for he did/didn't do away with the high places/temple prostitutes/(signs of other gods or religious centres, loathsome to the centralist priesthood in Jerusalem which had control of the city in the post-exilic period).

Good kings like Manasseh get bad press not because the country prospered but because they didn't get themselves killed for yhwh or because they had a good working relationship with the overlords.

I would expect the selective memory shown in the "historical books" of the Hebrew bible, because they do not represent the sorts of chronicle records one came to expect from the Assyrians and Babylonians, ie passed on from reign to reign. They represent the traditions of a group of dislocated people, traditions kept alive in order to preserve identity, so you get the basics of the Moses and the David traditions, the memories of Hezekiah who resisted the Assyrians and survived, of Josiah who resisted the Egyptians and didn't.

What I am left with are two separate kingdoms, Israel and Judah, the former known from Assyrian records with references to such things as the house of Omri and Samarina, the latter coming into the light at the time of Hezekiah, just when Israel was being destroyed, letting go its hold on its southern possessions and giving space to the little dominion of Jerusalem to come into being, out from under the influence of (apparently Israelite) Lachish, the largest city of the area.

The separation I outline is what emerges also from the archaeological evidence. There is no sign of a centralised Judahite kingdom in Iron II. Biblical archaeologists have to rely on the ancient city of Jerusalem being mostly under the temple mount to justify its apparently paltry size. Have a look at Finkelstein and Silberman's positive evidence for the existence of Judah.

If we put aside the trappings of the romance of David and the ideal wisdom stories around Solomon, what solidly historical stuff do we get about the Judahites until Hezekiah? Zippo. Nada. Zilch. Just what we shold expect given the archaeological void.

What is the connection between the Israel of history, the one that emerges in the confrontation between the biblical and the Assyrian data, and the other, which lies superimposed upon it in biblical literature? The biblical literature doesn't help us much in the credibility stakes given the Davidic kingdom supposedly reaching the Euphrates, but that outlandishly large Davidic kingdom does set the scene for the division of the kingdom into nasty Israel and good ole Judah, so even if Judahite traditon didn't cover all the period, it must have been so.

But what we see is one kingdom waning and the other rising in the former's death throes. We see an Israel with a trading post at Kuntillet Ajrud, deep in so-called Judahite territory in the ninth century, at a time when the cities of Lachish and Gezer (and even the ex-Philistine city of Ashdod) featured Israelite gate architecture, showing the Shephelah as Israelite. When Israel and all the other states in the area were sending gifts to the Assyrians, there is not a word of the Judahites -- which is par for the course.

Biblical literature by itself doesn't seem to reflect the historical era and this is best explained by it having been written by and large very much later.


spin

Ebonmuse

That I don't know. Remsburg doesn't cite a source for this, though I admit I had no idea this was a controversial matter.

I wasn't aware of Champollion's views on religion, but then again, you said it yourself - he was an Egyptologist. There may have been the rare exception, but I maintain that those who started digging in Palestine were there principally because they expected to find evidence confirming the Old Testament accounts.

Also, I've been thinking over the matter of the Amalekites, and given what you've said, I think my article would be better off without it after all. Everyone who disagrees is going to raise the same objection you did, so I don't think that point is going to make much impression on people, and I've accordingly deleted it. Thanks for your comments - I do appreciate them.

Celsus

Chronicles? When do you propose it was dated? Do you think it is reliant on Kings?
Actually it's not. See spin's post--he's a minimalist.
No it doesn't provide any correlation for the majority of the events in Kings, other than (1) Omri existed, (2) Jehu paid tribute, etc. Nevertheless, the fact is that one cannot preserve history orally for centuries--it must have been written down at some point. What remains or what can be unravelled is a good question--spin can tell you about lack of Judahite remnants prior to Hezekiah, but what can excuse a statement like this:

• "David expanded and systematized his predecessor's rudimentary administrative structures. The most direct evidence for this organization of the new state under David and then Solomon comes from three lists of high officials given in 2 Samuel [8:16-8, 20:23-26] and 1 Kings [4:1-6]. . . . The second of the two listings for David, presumably dating later in his reign than the first, indicates the adjustments he made as he gained experience in the royal office.
  
  . . .
  
  "The advent of Solomonic rule, not surprisingly, brought in its wake a more elaborate set of bureaucratic functions. The passages in 1 Kings 4:7-19 and 27-28 describing the twelve officials "who provided food for the king and his household" (each for one month of the year) indicates new administrative hierarchies."
  
  Carol Meyers, "Kinship and Kingship", pp.193,195, in Michael Coogan, Oxford History of the Biblical World

Letting this sort of thing pass as evidence of an administrative structure in early Israel is nothing short of shocking. If the minimalists assume too little (and I say they do, but not the way Dever portrays them), then the maximalists assume far too much.

Finally, when the Bible's sources are established and when the Bible reaches final form (which most will agree is around the 2nd century and later) are two different questions, which is why I think you're still not grasping the nuances of the minimalist position. When the Deuteronomistic portion is written is yet another question to be separated, and when Chronicles appears is another. No one thinks that the Bible sprang out of nowhere in the 2nd century BCE. Not even the most radical minimalist is going to dispute that there may be exilic or pre-exilic materials left which will certainly have some historicity. However what these materials are is an extremely complex and difficult task and assuming that because the Bible got a few facts right it will tell us accurate stories of David is simply unfounded.

Joel