DaveDonally

Humanist scholars have built up a series of pottery sequences to date man's culture by in the Ancient Near East. According to this pottery paradigm, there are cities that were founded as early as the 9th millenium BCE (Jericho for example) as well as others, and they have exhibited no flood debris universally dated to the 4th or 3rd millenium BCE when the Hebrew Bible claims the Flood occurred. Why?

Mageth

Because the Story of Noah's Flood is a myth.

Kosh

Noah did take a few brooms on the Ark. Maybe they cleaned it all up....

YHWHtruth

Dave,

Your example is a very good test case, and I will again play the devil's advocate. In the Bible there is a continuous chronology of persons and periods from the flood and down to the fall of Babylon for the Medes and Persians in 539 BCE. This chronology places the flood around 2400 BCE. Few persons take this seriously, but my challenge to you is to PROVE that
cultures existed before this date!

Kosh

Continuous chronology of Egyptian History back to thousands of years before 2400 BCE (IIRC, the last pyramids were built around 2500 BCE).

Doctor X

You forgot that the aliens taught the Egyptians to build the pyramids and make it look like they existed before the Flood . . . or do you disagree with Von Daniken?

--J. "Even THAT Needed the Smiley" D.

Celsus

Hi Dave,

You may care to read my second introductory piece here and pay special attention to the Early Bronze III period.

Joel

DaveDonally

Thanks Joel

It would seem, TRUTH, that, as the devil's advocate accepts the literary efforts of the OT/HB in order to arrive at the date 2400 BCE, he would have to accept the literary efforts of other cultures, if he didn't want to be arbitrary. This would include such works as the Assyrian King Lists, one of which spans the time from Shamshi-Adad I down to Shalmaneser V (and 38 kings before Shamshi-Adad I).

It's worth noting that because there are actually three well preserved lists, one (Nassouhi) written at the time of Tiglath-Pileser II showing that attempts a la Rohl to discount such lists are ill-founded, for one cannot be ignorant of parallel reigns at the time there was supposed to have been parallel reigns.
Naturally, one can add the literature of other realms, such as the Babylonians of the era of Hammurabi, which also goes back dozens of generations, then pass back to Mari, Ur, Akkad, Uruk, Lagash, Umma, Kish and through the various literature well before 2400 BCE.

The impressive thing to remember is that, unlike the biblical record which our devil's advocate is taking on trust, much of the information in these king lists finds support amongst the other realms' records.

At the same time the archaeological evidence (at least in the cases of Assyria and Babylon) relates many of the names to strata.

I once read a paper about the Neo-Babylonian chronology, and discovered that the oldest tablet (astronomical diary) that could help us create an *absolute* chronology (=a chronology where an historical event can be tied up with unambiguous astronomical observations), was VAT4956. It is dated to Nebuhcadnezzar's 37th year and the observations are very accurate. (But there are even questions with the connections between astronomy and history in this tablet). Before that, very much is conjecture. Eclipses and similar phenomena are usually only roughly described, and because such events occur so often, they are of little importance as chronological proofs.

The devil's advocate is putting forward arguments that he would not be able to deal with with the material that he is using to support the 2400 BCE date. There is absolutely no supporting evidence for that date outside a collection of books which cannot be dated in itself earlier than DSS times.

The Assyrian King Lists provide both order of reigns and lengths of reigns. Very much of the order is supported by epigraphy. The lists were updated at various times and therefore not of late invention. If we trust the dates provided in the OT/HB which we can only date exceptionally late, why can't we trust the dates supplied in Assyrian lists and other records? They are after all supported by contemporary data, whereas date information in the biblical literature is not. It is after all against good procedure to be tied to any single source of data, when dealing with matters which are not strictly within that data.

Rather than the paradigm you would like to discount, I have argued with the literary/epigraphic evidence, which is of superior historical weight, due to its mainly contemporary status and its cross-support from other cultures.

Dave

spin

If YHWHtruth needs more than what DaveDonally has provided we might enter the realms of epigraphic details, such as the El Amarna letters which ties the chronologies of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Hatti and Ugarit together. Bogazkoy texts to get back to Hatti's attack on Babylon which brought down Hammurabi's dynasty and led to the Kassite takeover of Babylon. Then a wealth of epigraphy for periods before that time in Mesopotamia. We then look at the fairly continuous chronological of Egypt back before El Amarna, despite the confusion of parallel reigns during the 2nd Intermediate Period, which is well understood. That'll take you right back to where you want to go.


spin

Celsus

Surely you mean Ebla tablets? Amarna is a tad* late isn't it?

Joel-the-annoying-interjector (sorry)

*where "tad" = 1000 years