David Rohl

DR: But the words you have highlighted are the whole point.

(a) You don't just have to convince me but all the archaeologists who refuse to accept C14 dating because it messes big time with their research. You do that by proving the calibration curve is correct for the Middle East to everyone's satisfaction - and at present the calibrated C14 dating system is not provable.

(b) The whole point is that science is normally tested by making the data available for others to test and replicate, yet the dendro boys in Belfast won't/haven't published the data after 20 years. What does that tell you.

(c) I would have thought it was obvious that this business of local climate conditions is a major flaw in the dendro uniformity thesis. How can bog oaks in a damp Irish climate have the same growth pattern as Bristlecone Pines high up on the mountains of the western USA?

David Rohl

DR: Now perhaps you might have a better understanding of the position I find myself in here (I haven't done a day's work since I foolishly joined this discussion board). And perhaps a little sympathy for the bombardment I have had to cope with? I am certainly not going to do your work for you. You must understand that it is not just for my benefit, but, if you are going to question my scholarship, you have to make your case to the other readers here. Otherwise its just putting this old dog down without giving him a chance to respond to the details of the criticism.

judge

Well I don't think there is much point unless you have something new to say. I am no expert (far from it), but presently I think your alternative is lacking.
I admire your imagination in proposing it (although perhaps you saw it somewhere?).
I know that tactically at least, you like to insist you are right and perhaps here you are, but I also know that your style is to forcefully state your case, even when you yourself are not really convinced that it is trully persuasive.(your lingusitic arguments re: Nazareth for example).
Anyway I will perhaps continue to consider your alternative, although as I don't believe in a literal exodus it is of no great import, to me.
All the best.

judge

If you are trying to cast doubt on an assertion that this never happened with Hebrew then it seems you must have done this.

I will probably leave this thread now, but all the best with your work when you return to it, and thanks for dropping by. I will make sure I have a look at one of your book/s when next near a large bookstore (maybe later this month if lucky).

David Rohl

DR: The story you give, Joseph, is very interesting indeed. So, are you suggesting that these scientists have acted fraudulently (one conveniently dying in order not to have to account for his dishonesty)? Shocking! And there was me thinking that Science was objective and not subjective. So there is hope for me yet! I can now argue that science is not infallible and that scientists have agendas, and that they can falsify data, and that they can discard results that don't agree with their expectations, and that they can ignore obvious flaws in their methodology. Wow! Thank you.

To err is human. To err (possibly intentionally) and proclaim the objectivity of science in your work is diabolical (unless you happen to be an atheist, then I suppose we had better use the word naughty).

David Rohl

This is going to be my final word on the Shishak issue as the whole drawn-out thing is getting silly. To summarise my position:

(a) There are historical and chronological reasons to question the identity of Shoshenk I as the biblical Shishak who, according to the biblical narrative, attacked Judah, took its fortified cities and plundered the temple of Jerusalem and the royal palace there in the 5th year or Rehoboam (usually dated to 926 BC).

(b) The Shoshenk campaign itinerary at Karnak lists scores of locations which the Egyptian army reached. These do not include Jerusalem or (with the exception of one on the main highway into the northern hill country) any of the fortified towns protecting Judah claimed to have been attacked by Shishak. In fact Shoshenk’s campaign concentrated on the territory of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and then the Negev. In other words Shoshenk actually avoided the Southern Kingdom of Judah. This is the exact opposite of the biblical narrative concerning Shishak.

(c) The internal Egyptian evidence (coupled with inscriptions from Byblos) dates Shoshenk I to the very end of the 9th century BC which is a whole century later than the biblical date for Shishak.

(d) Yet Kitchen uses the biblical date to establish the date for the Egyptian king based on his identification as Shishak. The whole chronology of the Third Intermediate Period is held up by this methodological error.

(e) The only mentions of Israel in Egyptian inscriptions come from the 19th Dynasty (specifically a statue base from the early reign of Ramesses II and the Merenptah Stela). These references place Israel in Palestine and show that Egypt recognised Israel as a political entity. It is listed alongside Hatti, Libya and Syria as a major player in the region (and not a bunch of tribes wandering around Sinai or eking out a living in the hill country of Palestine).

(f) The poem on the Merenptah Stela mentioning Israel is reflected in the campaigns inscribed on the exterior wall of the hypostyle hall at Karnak where we see Ramesses II (or according to Yurco, Merenptah) fighting against an Israelite army using chariots. The first time that Israel possessed a chariot force (according to the OT) was in the time of Solomon. There is absolutely no indication that Moses or Joshua employed chariots. None of the stories in Judges says anything other than that the Israelite tribes employed infantry tactics. King David actually ordered the destruction of enemy chariots seized in battle and the hamstringing of the horses because he had no use for them. So the conclusion I draw from all this is that Ramesses II and his son Merenptah were contemporaries of Solomon and Rehoboam. There are internal chronological indications (genealogies, etc) from Egyptian archaeology which confirm this general time frame.

(g) Ramesses had a hypocoristicon - Sysw - which was common currency in Syro-Palestine (places in that region being named ‘X of Sysw’). The W vowel marker at the end of the shortened name probably represents an A. In the Year 21 Hittite Treaty, the Hittite version (written in the lingua franca of Akkadian) gives the full names of Usermaatre-setepenre Ramesses-meriamun as Washmuaria-shatapnaria Riamashesha-miamana. This shows how the Hittites heard Ramesses name (remember that the writing of the name we employ is modern Egypto-speak based on Greek). So the hypocoristicon of Riamashesha is represented here by Shesha.

(h) Where Egyptians employed the letter S in names, the Semitic languages (including Akkadian and Hebrew) sometimes (and I believe regularly) used a shin. Thus the Egyptian name of the land south of Egypt in modern Sudan was Kus. The Hebrew version was Kush. The name of Ramesses’ father was Sutu (Egypto-speak Seti) whereas the Hebrew version was Shutu. The Egyptian word for ‘man’ was ‘is’, the Hebrew ‘ish’. Kitchen claims that this transfer of S to Sh never occurs. I disagree.

(i) It has been claimed that the name Ramesses is written in biblical Hebrew with samek and not shin/sin. The problem with this argument is that samek in the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age represented Ts and Td and not S [see (J. E. Hoch: ‘Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period’ (Princeton, 1994), pp. 407-8, 429) and R. S. Hendel in BASOR 301]. It is only later, in the late Iron Age, and probably in the time of Josiah, that the name Ramesses was edited into the biblical narrative when samek could be used to represent S. But in the time of Ramesses II (and in the NC, Solomon and Rehoboam) samek could not be used for Egyptian S because it would have given Tsytsw which is nothing like Sysw. This is why we have so much evidence in the Semitic languages to show that Sh (shin) was used.

(j) Moreover, the early Hebrew script (without the pointing of the Massoretic texts of more than a thousand years later) did not distinguish between sin and shin. There was a single sign (looking like W) to represent them both. So I don’t even have to argue that Egyptian S became Sh in early Hebrew writing (although I believe that it did).

(k) And, in addition, the early (10th century) Hebrew signs for waw and qoph were identical (see the Lachish VI ostracon and the Izbet Sartah abecedary). So the name Sysw would have been written in Hebrew in exactly the same way as the scribe would have written Shyshak - with sin/shin-yod-sin/shin-waw/qoph. I cannot illustrate this for you here (I don’t believe you have the facilities to do that) but, rest assured, you would find it impossible to tell the difference. I would therefore argue that the 10th century Hebrew scribes recorded the name as shin/shin-yod-shin/sin-waw and it was only in the time of Josiah or later - when waw no longer looked like qoph - that the scribes of that time mistook the name as shin-yod-shin-qoph.

(l) So I have internal archaeological evidence from Egypt to date Shoshenk later than Rehoboam, plus evidence that Ramesses II was contemporary with Solomon (with his chariots), plus linguistic evidence to show how Ramesses’ popular name - Sysw - might have ended up as Shishak centuries after the events under discussion.

That is it from me on this subject, unless reasonable clarifications are requested.

matthijs

Hi David,

As I said, I would've preferred to leave this up to someone more competent than myself, but I think I've been able to address your concerns adequately, and state my criticisms intelligibly. You're unlikely to agree with most of it, but discourse--even futile discourse--is usually better than silence.

Okay, here we go...

I don't have to convince archeologists at all. Their opinion of a subject that isn't archeology isn't relevant. I also don't intend to prove anything to "everyone's satisfaction." I'm not fussed about what "everyone" thinks, and neither should you be. You're trying to set the bar too high, and I'm just going to ignore it because it's subterfuge. Let's concentrate on what matters--and that would be you, David. You've shown yourself willing to buck a consensus or two, so you don't really get to fall back on an appeal to the numbers at this point. Archeologists be damned.

We have frost damage to bristlecone pine rings[1] that coincides nicely with exceptionally narrow rings in Irish bogs[2], and we have acidity layers in Greenland icecores[3] that coincide with the previous two data without breaching the estimated error limit for the dating. It's not clear to me where uniformity of "growth pattern" is at issue here. The bristlecones are frost damaged, which closely-couples with high dust-veil indices; and we have Irish bogs with exceptionally narrow rings, a phenomenon that has been connected to volcanic activity via its coinciding with other relevant dates. Add to this the icecores, and what you have is a conciliance between several independent models, which together provide, at the very least, strong circumstantial evidence in support of the calibrated C14 dating methods, which form another point of conciliance. There are also weak synchronisms with Egypt and China FWIW, and a few other tidbits that didn't strike me as strong enough to include.

Conspiracy, maybe? Academic cover-up, perhaps? A scandal waiting to be unveiled by a feisty sleuth? The first point here is that scientists are generally honest, so that's the default position. The second point is that you cannot ask me to conjure these data, for obvious reasons, and you cannot win an argument by hinting at malfeasance. Thirdly, and for whatever reason, dendrochronological data are often considered propriety, and can be fiercely guarded. Finally, IIUC the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-ring Research houses a sample specimen from Belfast, where they also have high-resolution photographs available.

This doesn't sound much like a cover-up to me, I just don't get the impression that a box has been locked and the key thrown away. But then again, I don't buy into crop circles either, and my tin-foil hat is on permanent hiatus. Perhaps my credulity needs recalibration; have you heard good things about dendro curves?

Well, hopefully you're just waxing rhetorical with that first part--my access to data is more limited even than yours. And from what I can tell, the second part is based on your dislike of wiggle-matching, which you arrived at mostly as a result of Yamaguchi I presume. This is from your Appendix C:
This is a simple case of failing to acknowledge the context. Yamaguchi provided[4] a corrective for the autocorrelation problem later in the article:
He described a short-coming of the current technique, which you cited, then he provided a solution, which you failed to cite. This is cherry picking, am I wrong? What part of Yamaguchi's corrective are you unsatisfied with? Why didn't you deem it relevant?

I certainly do sympathise. The internet is rough and tumble and very unforgiving, and you've suffered no end of scrutiny by multiple people, a tireless attack on your theses, and you've every right to feel overwhelmed. I'm not mitigating that. But in so many ways, you just started on the wrong foot here. Without wasting a moment, you challenged what most FRDB denizens consider sacred; the right to speak freely, anonymously, deal only with data and analysis, and ignore credentials. Letting arguments float or fail purely on their merits, and having nicknames--these two are especially sacred. You breached those with your very first post. If you're feeling hostility, it's mainly because you entered a foreign community and failed to respect their customs. If you're feeling overwhelmed, that's because people here aren't afraid of expressing their opinions. That's the way this particular merry-go-round goes round, but the free-flow of information can be intoxicating--I wouldn't dismiss it out-of-hand.

(And to answer your earlier question, I'm one of those people who think spin should take the prickle-chain off his knuckles. Don't know if that makes you feel better.)

All I can say is it's really your work. You wrote a book, one that has provided no end of comfort to creationists and other folks who sustain their lunatic beliefs on the trickle of anti-science dogma that flows ever more steadily than it should. They didn't even have to quote-mine you, since you said exactly what they wanted to hear in perfectly articulate terms. This is unfair to everybody, and you shouldn't be attempting to induce guilt in me for not spit-polishing the shrapnel of your scholarship.

The other readers here are quite capable following a hyperlink to another thread. I was convinced that such wouldn't be too tiresome for them, and that they felt no obligation to take my word for anything. I've done this only for your sake, since you asked so kindly, and perhaps because it's a good refresher for myself.

I wish you many happy returns, David.

Elske.

References
1. LaMarche, V. C. Jr & Hirschboeck, K. K. Nature 307, 121-126 (1984).
2. M. G. L. Baillie & M. A. R. Munro Nature 332, 344 - 346 (24 March 1988).
3. C. U. Hammer, H. B. Clausen, W. L. Friedrich & H. Tauber Nature 328, 517 - 519 (06 August 1987).
4. Yamaguchi, D.K. Tree-Ring Bulletin 46, 47-54 (1986).

spin

You see how difficult it is to get you to be rational. The interest is in the origin of the word "Goshen". You need to consider all the data, not be led astray by a portion.


spin

Ben C Smith

I for one am grateful you stopped by to discuss your position.

You mention that the earliest Hebrew signs for the yod and the qoph are identical, and you cite the Izbet Sartah abecedary as evidence. Here are some images and reproductions:







Is there some way you could describe what you are saying from these images? (It looks to me like the alphabet starts at the bottom lefthand corner, right?)

Many thanks in advance.

Ben.

Ted Hoffman

I found the following in the WIkipedia entry of David Rohl
How does David date the Battle of Qadesh in A Test of Time?