DCHindley

I once watched The Last Bastion, an Australian WW2 Pacific war theater TV mini-series (Robert Vaughn played Douglas MacArthur). According to this mini-series, the Aussies single handedly won the war against Japan and that MacArthur was nothing more than a cartoonish blowhard! (gee, I wouldn't call him "cartoonish" ... although political cartoonists of his day felt his blow hardy-ness was ripe for satire).

But to your point, I was a bit surprised to learn in college that the majority of the French, German and Eastern European anti-German partisans were - gasp - COMMUNISTS!!!!! Of course, we all know they were progressive thinking capitalists ...

DCH

semiopen

2700 Year Old Inscription in City of David Excavations

Maybe somebody will start a new thread on this but the nature of the bowl is very similar to the older inscription. The letters are about the same amount of the way down from the lip.

Anyway, just wondering if the shard in the OP is misdated. The writing looks a little older in the OP picture.

of course, the sensational claim is

Reminds me of the MASH TV episode where the Korean guy is trying to sell Hitler's pencil case.

Although the link notes

Like someone is going to go to the trouble and expense of having their name engraved on the thing (for an offering) and then have it spelled wrong.

outhouse

It is really not much of a find and proves nothing one way or the other.

It is exactly what one would expect to find.

Much is known from this period, and some of the historical cores are known. Nothing though helps building a case for united monarchy I find mythical.

Minimalist

As much as I enjoyed the vast bulk of The Bible Unearthed it is impossible not to criticize Finkelstein when he goes off the rails with "Josiah." After having studiously stuck to archaeological principles for most of his proposal he treats Josiah as a historical character in spite of the fact that there is no archaeological or extra-biblical attestation for him anywhere. "Josiah" is a fictional character as far as archaeology is concerned. He appears in the pages of one book.....just like Luke Skywalker.

semiopen

I tend to agree, but the point brought up above by Robert Tulip is interesting. Josiah is actually named in 1Kings in something which looks like an absurd lie with the phony prophet, etc. Since we know this happened after Josiah was King, the question is who would have inserted that into the book. That seems like some evidence that Josiah was playing with the texts to advance his political agenda.

Seems like a lot of work to compose such a great book for such a trivial reason. But it does support the Josiah idea a little - I'd seen this before of course but didn't realize the implications.

spin

John Hyrcanus

Minimalist

I'm not sure why you put that in such small print, Spin. It needs to be in BOLD!

DCHindley

It's a Chinese whisper ...

Robert Tulip

Thanks Minimalist - down go the nine pins! Bible characters exposed as myth: first Adam, Eve and Noah, next Jesus, Mary and possibly Paul, then Moses, Sarah and Abraham, and now even King Josiah. But I think your Star Wars comparison exceeds the evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah#Sources says Footnotes [20] are to Finkelstein, so don't verbal him.

This precise dating, involvement in a specific war, and consonance with the shift of coin images from astral to iconoclastic, all stand as evidence that King Josiah actually existed, despite the absence of archaeological evidence. To my reading this makes Josiah a much more likely actual historical person than Jesus Christ, since I can't see a motive to invent Josiah. By contrast, Jesus stands as disproved under Voltaire's God Principle, that if he did not exist he would have had to be invented.

A fascinating thing in all this Jewish propaganda, including the Glorious Reign of His High Beatific Serenitude King David, is the effort of the Bible authors to construct a plausible story of divine legitimacy for Israel, as a mythic basis for national security. They had strong motive for this fictional construction, since Israel could not possibly survive just by the sword, and had to desperately attempt to survive by the word. This casting of the old empires as evil involved creation of a new exclusive transcendental monotheism in which the naturalistic religions of the great kingdoms of Babylon and Egypt could be critiqued as morally corrupt, perhaps because they were seen as insufficiently patriarchal, and in which the defence of Israel rested in its moral probity.

Israel got squished like a bug between Babylon and Egypt, but its alienated imaginative moral fantasy of God lives on and remains the crazy creative core of Western religion.

Minimalist

I once had the opportunity to discuss this point with Niels Peter Lemche. In effect my point was that a) every polity had a king back then, b) Judah must have had one also, c) isn't it better to call him Josiah than "What's-his-name?"

Lemche cut my legs off at the knees. His point was that if you start to do that then you end up assuming all the other biblical baggage that goes along with it. Where and why would you draw the line?

We see today that minor states caught between major powers always have factions within them favoring one side or the other. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Egyptian-Assyrian side favored one contender - and removed the other - just as the Babylonians subsequently dethroned that dynasty when they took over. That's politics and I don't think it has changed all that much in the last 3,000 years. But we don't need King Josiah. All it would take to establish him is a single inscription and we don't have one.