Ebonmuse

On Joshua's conquest and the Israelite settlement:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch3.html

Comments and criticisms are welcomed.

GakuseiDon

Very good, well referenced, and easy to read. The best one to date!

Ebonmuse

Thanks! I appreciate your comments, though I have to say I'm surprised that more people on this board didn't offer any, considering how many knowledgeable posters we have here of all backgrounds. I suppose Old Testament archaeology just isn't a field of great interest to many atheists, but in that case, it's all the more reason for someone to put out an article about it.

DrJim

I liked the piece quite a lot but I think the ending is a little weak.

You so decisively rule out the "biblical" model, but are too brief on the rest. Maybe a bit more on the Finkestein "symbiosis" could tie up quite a lot of loose ends and reinforce the fact that the available evidence can tell a coherent story (although many details are yet unknown) without all the biblicist excuse-making and book-cooking. i.e., giving a bit more space to what you WANT your reader to believe about the origins of Israel will go a long way in reinforcing taht they should DISBELIEVE another solution. I don't think you need a massive expansion, but any more you have time to write would be great.

In the space you gave it, you did a decent job on the "revolutoin model". I would have hung, drawn and quartered it at length, though. It is as absurd (if not more so) than the conquest model. The real influential guy was Gottwald: his book, Tribes of Yawheh is in very wide circulation. Its socialist take on Mendenhall's original idea led to at least one bitter exchange between the two of them. To my mind, Gottwald was doing nothing else but writing his own mythology to provide a "biblical" liberation theology. He couldn't believe the exodus literally anymore, but found an empowering narrative in the"revolution". His model is taken serious by all sorts of like minded writers on the OT. But notice how "biblical" it remains: He still requires a Moses to come from Egypt with some ex-slaves: jsut not enough of them to be noticed on the archaeological radar screen. He still requires a "covenant" with a perfectly unique deity at about the same time tradition says the Big Exodus community had their covenant. HE requires the ideal of an egalitarian society based on divine laws etc. existing at a very early stage. None of this can actually be proven from the available archaeological evidence. It is not an interpretation of the evidence but rather a moralistic legend shaped to reconcile modern Christian ethics and as much biblical myth as possible to the available archy data. Pure junk as far as I'm concerned. Niels Peter Lemche took Gottwald to task in a long book done in 1985, the name of which just escapes me right now. Blew Tribes of Yahweh right out of the water, methinks.

JRL

Jayhawker Soule

:notworthy Nicely done! :notworthy

Ebonmuse

Thanks for this suggestion - I think this is a good idea too. I'll have to find some more material to add to this section whenever I get the time to do it.

As I understand it, Dever still supports a modified view of the peasants' revolt model - in his ABD article on Israel's history and the conquest, I recall him musing about whether some Egyptian elements (the "House of Joseph") might have joined the early Israelite community and given rise to the legend of the Exodus. But you're right, it does seem too idealistic, and IIRC Finkelstein points out that the technological innovations (rock-cut plastered cisterns, etc.) which are supposed to have been a big part of these highland communities actually existed centuries earlier. Do you know anything about the relative degree of support these two hypotheses have among archaeologists?

gregor

I enjoyed the article, and am not qualified to comment on it substantively. I seem to recall on another thread someone mentioning a book by a "Kitchens" (or something like that) who supported the conquest/out-of-Egypt model.

Are you familiar with his theory?

Ebonmuse

I know there's an Egyptologist named K.A. Kitchen (I cite an ABD article by him at one point) who wrote a book called "On the Reliability of the Old Testament". I don't know what arguments it makes, though.