Duvduv

And if relics WERE found it would be argued that for a "city" of so many people those few relics are not enough to prove anything anyway. In other words to satisfy the curious one would need a consensus of "how much" evidence is enough to persuade them that all those Israelites were there.

Otherwise the process would go on endlessly to suggest that at Kadesh Barnea there were apparently 2,000 people, or 12,000 but certainly not an entire nation, and you would be back where you started from.

To undertake that vast level of archeology would require a financial expense that only countries who fund vast armies of war could ever afford to undertake.

You could take this all one step further, and simply argue that no sufficient amount of archeological evidence demonstrates that a relatively large city of Jerusalem existed at all. Or any other city that you might select, except for a handful of cases. For that matter, there would never be sufficient archeological data to prove that several million human beings ever lived in ancient Palestine anywhere.

So what does archeology leave anyone with where it really requires a HUGE uncovering of evidence to satisfy the criteria for accepting the claims that go with the purpose of the archeological undertaking itself??

Minimalist

In an anthology edited by Amnon Ben Tor called "The Archaeology of Ancient Israel" Amihai Mazar recounts excavations at Kadesh Barnea in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Many Israeli scholars journeyed to places which had been denied to them by politics to excavate their history.

They were bitterly disappointed with the results. Kadesh Barnea in particular yielded nothing from the Late Bronze Age - not so much as a pottery shard.

Not looking good for the bible.

semiopen

One reason we could never get sufficient archeological data to prove that several million human beings ever lived in ancient Palestine [anywhere] is that the population never exceeded a million.

The million figure is from around 600 CE.

Demographics_of_Palestine

Duvduv

So they are the last word on this matter? End of story? BTW, has satellite technology every been used in the field of archeology, or is it way beyond the budgets available?

Duvduv

Is that the be-all and the end-all of this question? One million, that's it?
That being said, what level of technology would be required to make a satisfactory archeological investigation of an area said to have had several million people in order to definitively prove that the location had evidence of that number of people?

Invisible 1

Yes, but LIDAR seems just as promising if not more so.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/maya.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/sc...anted=all&_r=0

Minimalist

There is never a "last word" in archaeology - the next shovel into the ground can cause all the existing paradigms to collapse - but right now, as we sit here in 2013, the bible story about 2 million people chilling out at Kadesh Barnea for 38 years looks to be a total pile of shit. There is no evidence to support it.

Likewise, the bible story makes a big deal of the Kingdom of Arad which contested the "Israelites" passage but Mazar goes on to discuss the findings of Yohanan Aharoni's work on Arad which shows that, like Kadesh Barnea, the place was unoccupied in the Late Bronze Age.

How many nails do you need in the lid of this particular coffin?

steve_bnk

Using humor in a thread on a subject and turning a thread into a platform for mockery are two different things.

Us non believers here all fundamentally take all religions to be basically a silly stupid superstition. That is a given.

Duvduv

How can you nail a coffin when you have to admit that the limitations of the tools of archeological investigation is insufficient given the objective being investigated? Please reread my posting about this. Or is archeology itself now a religion?

Sheshbazzar

The subject includes discussion of why archaeologist are not finding the evidences of the Israelite occupation of this area, virtually taken for granted for generations by most of literate Western society, would, when properly investigated, be found.
And it helps to remember, it is not only the 'non-believers' that are participating in this thread.

Its not much a discussion of whether the Jewish God was real and could perform miracles, but rather like with Homer's Iliad, and Schliemann's convictions, whether there was an actual archaeological site behind the Biblical tale waiting to be discovered.

Even us non-believers and skeptics who 'take all religions to be basically a silly stupid superstition', are still seeking for any evidences of what really happened, and whether, having read of an ancient settlement or an identifiable major ancient battlefield in an ancient fictional text or religious writing, we will be able to recover archaeological artifacts and evidence from the site.
Kadesh Barnia and Arad have been a disappointment to the institutions and those scholars and who spent years of their careers in pursuit of something that, unlike the mythical Troy of Homer, never was.

That no evidence of any significant occupation is found at Kadesh Barnea however, will not cause staunch Bible believers to abandon the Biblical stories as being in someway somewhat true and factual accounts.
As I attempted to humorously point out, they will just shift gears to accommodate that lack, even as Duvduv here, an Orthodox Jew, is struggling mightily to avoid having to confront the sad truth that one of the most fundamental tales of his Tanaka, religion, and culture is simply a fabricated folk tale. Its either 'I believe in 'miracles' ....or let go.


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