Larsguy47

I don't leave those out. But you leave out the graph! As I noted, their range of 918-823BCE for 95.4% probability is mid-ranged at 870.5 BCE. So I can take that range and presume the middle is closer to the "true date". The chart confirms that, showing the highest percentages of 99% between 874-867 BCE.

What is amazing is how truly accurate that is, because 870.5BCE is the same year as 871BCE; there's no such year as 870.5, it's 871BCE. But that's precisely the very year of this event.

What this means is that likely the cereal recovered was harvested that same year.

By the way, besides the built in error margin for the dating process, there is another "error margin" imposed depending upon the type of sample. Short-lived grains found at a destructive level are excellent for dating an event like that. So this is exceptional.

Further, all the archaeology agrees. This is the same level as assigned to the so-called "Solomonic" palaces at Megiddo and Jezreel, that ordinarily would have been assigned to Shishak's invasion. But there's confusion because as you can see, 925BCE is out of range as a "probable" date for this event compared to dates closer to 871BCE.

But the effectiveness of this dating is bourne out by the Biblical dating which dates this event precisely in 871BCE, based upon 455BCE or 1947 AD, or of less significance, the KTU 1.78 application to the 12th of Akhenaten. The accuracy of this method validates the true dating.

LG47

Larsguy47

Talk all you want. But the chart is SELF LABELLED. One side is "relative probability" and the bottom are dates. Simple. It means we compare dates with their "relative probability" based upon the height of the shading above that date.

Interpreted that way, the chart suggests that the 99% "relative probability" for dates 874-867BCE actually includes the "true date." And it does! So it works.


LG47

Febble

Well, if you refuse to answer my other questions, what do you think that "relative probability" means?

3DJay

Total BS.

21 And Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. Rehoboam was forty and one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which the LORD did choose out of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. And his mother's name was Naamah an Ammonitess.

1 Now in the eighteenth year of king Jeroboam the son of Nebat reigned Abijam over Judah.

2 Three years reigned he in Jerusalem. and his mother's name was Maachah, the daughter of Abishalom.

Rehoboam's 17 years + Abijam's 3 years = 20 years
Jeroboam's 18th year = kingdom split in Rehoboam's 2nd year
Shishak's invasion happend during his 5th year = after the split.


Peace

-Jay-

"Relative probability" means to him whatever it needs to mean to allow him to cling to the 871 BCE date, and his definition tends to drift just a little depending on who asks him and when. Apparently, in the Magic Kingdom of LarsneyWorld, probabilities of >>100% are no problem at all.

Good luck getting a useful answer out of him.

regards,

NinJay

spin

Shit, no joke!? That's impressive. You can find mid-points!

This is the same blunder you've been making for over a week. If it had the significance you want it to have, there'd be the midpoint value and no need for anything else. But of course that is not the case, because ranges are given for no particular point within them has more significance than any other.

Read my lips: no particular point within the supplied C14 range has more significance than any other.

Actually the chart shows nothing of the sort.

This is precisely the year that you want. Nothing more.

How many C14 analyses have you actually read?


spin

Febble

Oh, I can't bear this...

No, it doesn't. What it shows is the relative probability that the event occurred in each year, given whatever the priors were.

Now, please listen:

The concept of the (absolute) probability of an event is quite straightforward. Let's say I have a bag containing 25 red balls and 75 blue ones, and I draw one from the bag, then put it back. If I do this a very large number of times, and after each draw I write down which colour ball I drew, I will find that about 25% of the time I draw a red one and about 75% of the time I draw a blue one. This is because 25% of the balls are red and 75% of the balls are blue. There is zero probability that I will draw a yellow ball because there are no yellow balls in the bag. If there was one yellow ball in the bag, and only 24 red ones, over a great many draws, I would find that about 1% of my draws were yellow balls, and 24% were red balls and 50% were blue balls. Note that these percentages have to add up to 100%.

OK, here is what the relative probability is:

We decide, arbitrarily, to relate the probability of drawing each colour ball to the probability of drawing blue balls, simply because blue balls are the most common balls in the bag, and I therefore have the greatest probability of drawing a blue ball. So to find the relative probability of drawing a yellow ball (relative to drawing a blue ball) I divide the probability of getting a yellow ball (2%) by the probability of getting a blue ball (50%)

.02/.5 = .02 = 2%

To find the relative probability of getting a red ball, I divide the probability of getting a red ball (24%) by the probability of getting a blue ball (50%):

.24/.5 = .48 = 48%

And to find the relative probability of getting a blue ball (yes) I divide the probability of getting a blue ball (50%) by the probability of getting a blue ball (50%)

.5/.5 = 1 = 100%

So my absolute probabilities are:

Yellow = 1%
Red = 24%
Blue = 50%

And my relative probabilities (relative to blue) are:

Yellow = 2%
Red = 48%
Blue = 100%.

That does NOT, REPEAT NOT, mean that the probability of getting a blue ball is 100%. A relative probability of 100% just means that that colour has the greatest probability of being drawn. If I had 10 blue balls, and 5 each of 18 other colours, the absolute probability of drawing a blue ball would be 10% (10/100) but the relative probability (because I'm still arbitrarily using the the probability of drawing the most common colour as the yardstick) would still be 100%. The the absolute probability of drawing any of the other colours would be 5% (5/100), but the relative probability (relative to blue) would be 50% (.05/.1).

Get it?

This means that your Y axis tells you nothing about the absolute probability of the any date being correct - it only tells you how probable that date is relative to the probability of the most probable date. Which may be quite small.


Now, error margins:

This is so wrong, it is comical. An "error margin" is given by the "confidence limits" of your estimate. What those confidence limits are depends on how confident you want to be. And how confident you want to be is measured in terms of what percentage of the time you want to be right. So if you want to be right 95% of the time, you set your confidence limits so that 95% of the time the true answer will be within those limits. If you want to be right 99% of the time you set those limits rather wider. If you are happier to right only 68% of the time you can set them rather narrower. So it's a trade off - you can say that you are 68% confident that the true value is within a quite narrow range, or you can say you are 95% confident that the true value is within a broader range.

And in fact, you don't even need to read it off the graph -it's written in the top right hand corner. You can be very confident (95.2% confident) that the true date is within the 95 year period from 918 to 823 BCE, or you can be rather less confident (68.2% confident) that the true date is either within the 11 year period between 903 and 892 or the 40 year period between 885 and 945.

And this makes the following completely wrong:

You don't even know the absolute probability of this date being correct, because you don't know the absolute probability of the most probable date being correct, but it will certainly be less than 5%. The phrase "you have a 95% error margin of being correct" is meaningless in this context.

And this is of course ludicrous. It would mean that there was a 99% probability that the true date was within the 21 year period between 881 and 860, in direct contradiction to the legend on the plot.

Yes, but trivially. The most probable date will have a relative probabiliy of 100% relative to itself. That is equivalent to saying that my height is 100% of my height.

There is no "button". All you can say is that your preferred date is within the 95.2% confidence interval, which spans 95 years.

3DJay

Oops, my bad, I interpreted the 21C King James translation wrong. You don't even get the 2 year buffer zone, with the NIV translation.

The bible must have started counting Jeroboam's and Rehoboam's reigns, almost simultaniously. And, what would have been Jeroboam's 18th year, is counted as Abijah's first year. Add to that, the bible clearly states that Jeroboam didn't return, until after Solomon died...meaning...Rehoboam's reign could only have started, after Solomon died. There isn't even any room for a 1 or 2 year overlap, let alone 5 years.


Peace

Larsguy47

They did. They had a choice to begin a reference to their reign when they were first divinely identified as kings of their perspective kingdoms. So yes, their reigns are absolutely parallel since they were appointed king at the same time when the coat was torn. Certainly Jeroboam didn't begin his official, hands-on rule until he actually returned from Egypt, but God had told him he wouldn't begin his actual rule until Solomon died. But that didn't stop Rehoboam from starting his rule as king and co-ruler. The "option" for them both to begin counting their rule simultaneously though from the time of the tearing of the coats is a cultural/literary option. Jeroboam was a king in exile, that's all.


Not exactly. He would have been considered a king in exile, that's all. When he technically or symbolically "became king" is up to the custom or the Biblical reference. It is "apparent" that both Jeroboam and Rehoboam's reigns are counted from the time of their divine appointment. That's when they officially "became king" when God appointed them.

Think of it this way, 3DJay. You've been chosen as the new king of England by this board. It takes you 4 years to conquer England. From when do you count your kingship? From the time you were appointed or from the time you actually began to rule? Point being, you do have a choice.

Further, some of that may have to do with extending the length of the reign, making it as long as possible and thus starting it at the earliest possible moment. If both thought they were "anointed" as king at the time of the tearing of the coats, then certainly a religious book like the Bible might consider that a more important event in relation to that reign than the actual taking over. Further, if the king is deposed or exile, he would still be considered "the king".

At any rate, this is the Bible's choice and not ours. If you want to exclude the literary license of the historians from doing it this way and presume this is just an error or contradiction, be my guest. Because it was meant to be confusing. It was deliberately hiding exactly when Shishak's invasion occurred. This is not the worst example of this "history baiting" by the Bible to the casual reader.

LG47

Larsguy47

You're confusing interpretation with results. If we were just interested in how many years the testing showed up and the range of those years, then we'd have say 918-823BCE. Those are the results. We presume that event occurred sometime between those dates. But what we find with multiple testing in addition to that range, is a concentration near the center of this range. The concentrations cannot be expressed in a single horizontal line across the dates. It is expressed vertically above each date which becomes a shaded area. For some strange and unknown reason the researchers created this vertical bar measurement from 0.0 to 1.0 to measure this aggregated averaging, presuming it was relative or closer to the "true date." They called this vertical measurement of the weighted average "RELATIVE PROBABILITY."

Thus it suggests that the "relative probability" of this event, or the age of the grain likely harvested within a year of this event is most probable in ratio to the other dates turning up in the same at 95% or greater for a very narrow range of dates say from 874-867BCE, for which they are 99% "relatively probable" that this event took place within this range.

We can check the accuracy of this via Biblical chronology which gives us the specific date of 871BCE, which indeed does fall in the 95%+ range of dates. So the chart is quite accurate! The highest "relative probability" matches the historical date that it is indicating.

Period.

So all this "theory" is about is that given a sample that is tested multiple times, the highest average match is likely closer to the "true date" and that theory is confirmed, even when their matching has only a 7-year error margin!

LG47