Archaeological dig reignites debate over the Old Testament’s historical accuracy
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
We can try "new evidence of an advanced society in the time of the biblical Solomon" would probably be a better fit.
> What Ben-Yosef has produced isn’t an argument for or against the historical accuracy of the Bible but a critique of his own profession. Archaeology, he argues, has overstated its authority. Entire kingdoms could exist under our noses, and archaeologists would never find a trace. Timna is an anomaly that throws into relief the limits of what we can know. The treasure of the ancient mines, it turns out, is humility.
Every once in awhile there’s a headline to the effect of “Breaking: Scientists discover that Bronze Age/medieval/not European people were total idiots in <year>“
My very limited understanding is that traditional Hindu teaching is that human civilization is orders of magnitude older than 5,000 years. If anyone who knows more about that wants to reply I’d be interested.
It would be very strange indeed if the only things that disappeared were the ones necessarily to demonstrate that society was actually highly developed, no?
I’m no expert, but highly developed artifacts strike me as the ones most likely to be fragile to entropy and erosion.
In any event I’m only curious. Questioning an absence of evidence implying evidence of absence is just basic reasoning.
I keep coming across the claim that humans have been around for 300,000 years. Based on no knowledge or expertise at all, I'm sceptical. It seems fairly clear that there exist remains of cities 12,000 years old (e.g. Troy); the classical Greeks regarded the stories of the Trojan war as something close to mythology, but then Schliemann found the place. But there don't seem to be stories of ancient civilisations that go back much further than that.
I find it difficult to believe that people able to build a civilisation would have existed for tens of thousands of years, without actually building one. But evidence for ancient civilisations is hard to find, so perhaps we just haven't found it yet. So I'm open to the view that humans capable of civilisation-building have been around for (say) 50,000 years. But without evidence, I find it hard to credit the claim that humans from 300,000 years ago were at all like us.
I'm ignorant about these matters, and my sketchy opinions are based on stuff I read decades ago. Is there something written for the layman that I could read to inform myself?
But humans were certainly sophisticated long before then, even if they didn't have complex writing and government. One of the strangest pieces of archeology to me is the Löwenmensch figurine or Lion-Man, an ivory figure dating to 40,000 bc. So humans definitely had some complex culture for a long time. One theory I heard about why civilization developed so recently, is that it's in the past 10,000 years that the planet warmed up enough that farming became practical. I don't know enough about geological history to confirm that, but it seems like an appealing theory
What point is that supposed to make? No one's making that error here. They know these ancient mines were mines; they're not going "dunno what this is, must be a temple."
We get to take a different approach here because the economics are different, which is sort of a miracle if you think about it.
Yeah, but does the miracle reaffirm the old testament?
Jk. Keep up the good work, Dang
One of the main charges against Canaan is that they accused Canaan of sacrificing children. It's the exact same "think of the children" justification used endlessly today.
It seems like the primary goal of the war was simply conquest, not freeing Canaanite children. With the child sacrifice simply being used to justify that expansionary war.
Unfortunately, at the time of the Canaanite cities, there wasn't really much infrastructure for providing welfare services to war orphans, and there was a very real risk that young males of conquered peoples would grow up to seek genocidal revenge on their conquerors. By that standard, offering homes to the female prisoners of war was relatively compassionate.
More like taking forced brides from among the desirable female captives. I'm sure many in that situation would prefer death. Arguably, sparing the male children their life dominated by genocidal vengeance is the more compassionate action.
I'm not sure anyone today can reasonably say what they thought. The desire for human survival, though, is incredibly strong.
more likely sex slaves, given the references to young virgins.
Moral arguments for war are bankrupt and disguise the truth.
> Although a lot of things have changed, the nature of human conflict and the desire for power haven't.
In fact, even as late as the Talmud it was explicitly recorded that the whole damn point of the Binding of Isaac story is to give a mythic impetus to the newly-formed Judaic religion to outlaw human sacrifice. Which, yeah, sorta indicates that it wasn't so unthinkable that nobody had to forbid it.
The Pentateuch is clear that the land was given to Abraham and his descendants. After their 400+ years in bondage in Egypt, they returned and reclaimed their land. They weren’t encouraged to kick the Canaanites out because of child sacrifice; (although, that was certainly a practice that some were engaged in.) In any case, the OT doesn’t paint a picture of the Hebrews being some force of social justice, ridding that particular parcel of geography of some vile practice... indeed, Solomon ended up erecting shrines to Moloch, Manessah (a Jewish king) sacrificed his own son to Moloch, as did King Ahaz, and the Jew’s tendency to fall into periods of child sacrifice and idolatry is recounted time and time again throughout the OT. In other words, the vice of infanticide wasn’t described in the OT as exclusive to the Canaanites.
In short, I think you are somewhat confused... clearly, child sacrifice is bad, but it wasn’t the ‘main’ reason — or even a minor reason - for the conquest. Cite something specific if I’m mistaken.
If we can't build a long and comprehensive enduring legacy of our civilization why should we expect older civilizations to have been better at it while theoretically having worse means to do so and expect that legacy to be wholistic when archaeologists explore it?
Puts into perspective how we think about the cultures that came before us.
It must be an amazing feeling to be an archeologist at the moment of new discovery. You suddenly enjoy a serendipitous connection with a human being who has been dead for ages. But is suddenly memorable again, as if reborn.
I think that human connection is the seed of "psychohistory". What message or wisdom can we wish to convey to our Future Selves?
I know both pieces are important, but the intentional record of some ruler tells you more about their ego than what everyday life was like.
I expect that even if we were all snuffed out tomorrow, there would be loads of our record remaining 1000+ years from now— both the intentional efforts like seed vaults, time capsules, stacks of hard copy documents sealed in safes, but also the enormous presence of all kinds of plastic, which even divorced from context would still give myriad insight into what daily life was like at the start of the 21st century.
A lot of scholars used to insist that the Bible was obviously not historical because it talked about this thing called the Assyrian empire that had conquered the fertile crescent, and everyone knew that empire never existed.
And then in the mid 19th century archeologists unearthed extensive evidence of the Assyrian empire.
Interestingly, records from that empire concur on some of the same events in the Bible. For example, Sennacherib is mentioned as the leader of Assyria who conquered most of Judah (the southern kingdom of Isreal - he had already conquered the northern one). See, for example, Isaiah 37.
From an unearthed clay tablet:
"But as for Hezekiah, the Jew, who did not bow to my yoke, forty-six of his strong walled towns, and innumerable smaller villages in their neighbourhood, I besieged and conquered by stamping down earth ramps and then by bring up battering rams, by the assault of foot soldiers, by breaches, by tunnelling and military engineering operations.
I made to come out from them 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, innumerable horses, mules, donkeys, camels, large and small cattle, and counted them as spoils of war. He himself I shut up like a caged bird within Jerusalem his royal city. As for Hezekiah, the awful splendour of my lordship overwhelmed him."
This coincides with the account in the Bible.
Note that Hezekiah is a descendant of Solomon - less than 200 years separate them.
> And then in the mid 19th century archeologists unearthed extensive evidence of the Assyrian empire.
You're conflating the Assyrians and the Hittites. The Assyrians were well known from sources other than the Hebrew Bible before the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform and modern archeology. Even then, Archibald Sayce's 1876 identification of the Biblical Hittites with the Hittite Empire of Anatolia remains problematic today. You're also drawing up a bit of a strawman of pre-19th century scholars—the problem of the Biblical Hittites never seems to have been more than a minor curiosity for those arguing over the value of the Hebrew Bible as a historical work.
Also, if you're going invoke Sennacherib's Annals to compare with the Biblical accounts, actually compare them. Briefly, the Hebrew Bible has Hezekiah paying heavy tribute (though not as heavy as in the Annals) to Sennacherib so he won't attack, Sennacherib lays siege anyway, and then divine forces destroy Sennacherib's army.
For Assyria, there was only textual evidence in the Bible, and some Greek manuscripts. The Greeks even say they are not sure Assyria existed as there were no ruins to point at. All the other textual evidence was based on the Bible and Greek sources.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rdas/hd_rdas.htm
The excavations of the 19th century are often called a 'rediscovery'.
The Assyrian and Biblical accounts are not contradictory. The Assyrian account merely leaves off the humiliation of not actually capturing and killing Hezekiah as Sennacherib intended. How that failure occured is not mentioned in the Assyrian account, which is fairly normal for defeats and failings.
After Assyria withdrew, Hezekiah had a tunnel built to supply water to Jerusalem. You can see that tunnel today, and the Hebrew inscription.
I don't think you can provide an ancient Greek source that is skeptical about the existence of the Assyrian empire. There's a quote from Lucian's satirical dialog Charon that people try to use to for that, but I don't think it works. In the dialog, Hermes notes there's no trace of Nineveh left, suggesting Babylon would soon share the same fate. Never mind that at the time Lucian wrote that (2nd century AD), Nineveh was still standing and inhabited. Nowhere does Hermes suggest Nineveh never existed.
As for Sennacherib's Annals, the similarities are:
* Jerusalem was under siege but was never taken.
* Hezekiah paid tribute to Sennacherib.
* Sennacherib returned to Nineveh after the siege instead of continuing his campaign.
The differences:
* The Hebrew Bible has the Assyrian army being defeated by an "angel of Yahweh" killing 185,000 soldiers in an unqualified defeat. The Annals have Hezekiah abandoned by his mercenary and allied armies. Then, Hezekiah is overwhelmed by Assyrian power and pays the tribute to end things. He submits as a vassal.
* The Bible has Sennacherib treacherously continue his attack after being given tribute. The Annals have the Tribute ending the siege.
* The tribute the Annals record is much larger than in the Bible, including 200,150 people, uncountable livestock, in addition to the aforementioned gold and more than double the silver mentioned in the Bible.
Both accounts are royal propaganda and need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's hard to say what really happened outside of where they agree. Outside of the conflicting accounts, the siege of Jerusalem comes around the time that Babylon again went into rebellion. That seems to explain the end of Sennacherib's campaign better than an overwhelming defeat by a minor vassal king.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos#Potential_biblical_conn...
A local fisherman was able to readily identify it as a spacer for making fishing nets with consistently sized openings.
So much of what gets left behind only makes sense if you have knowledge of human behavior. It isn't necessarily readily inferable from the physical remains themselves.
Reminded me of the quip that science advances one gravestone at a time.
A better title could have avoided this simple answer.
- "Yes it is true. But it's not in Moscow but in St Petersburg. And it's not BMWs but Ladas. And they don't give it, they steal it"
The Genesis account states that the earth was created, then the oceans, then trees and plants, and after all that the sun the moon and the stars were created.
The correct historical order is stars existed, then the sun was formed, then the earth and moon, then oceans, and finally trees and plants.
A person who lived 175 seasons (each 3 months long) would be 44 years old. A person who lived 900 moons would be 74.
It’s happened to spacecraft, http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
So I'm left with three thoughts that don't necessarily agree with each other.
One, is that it seems fairly obvious that there's some transition from oral histories to written histories; and the closer the event was to the written record, the more realistic it gets (which we also see in the OT).
Two, is that there's a lot of crossover between Sumerian kings and Gods, so it doesn't seem inappropriate for the oral tradition to imbue kings with god-like properties.
(As an aside - I can easily imagine that in tens of thousands of years from now, with fragments of records remaining, someone could argue with a straight face that the early space-agers actually believed Queen Elizabeth was immortal and semi-lizard. This is obviously comical, but does illustrate the risks of an oral tradition.)
And three - the possibility that there's intermingling between these two traditions? Or that there's some cultural factors here where we're seeing the effects without the causes (ie we're not seeing why it was popular to assign these characteristics to ancestors, only that they did so).
But to come back a little more on-topic - Sumer is also where we get the sexagesimal (base-60) numbering that we still see in time & angles. So when comparing units, there could be some mistranslation between different number bases at some point.
Oh my god I'm picturing bojack horsemen as the last surviving digital media; not so different from ancient hieroglyphs of animal heads and human bodies...
Robert Best wrote "Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth" ( https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Ziusudra-Epic-Sumerian/dp/0... ) in which he translates the numbers back into Sumerian using the incorrect numbering system and then retranslates them using the correct numbering system. He ends up with not only ages that make sense, but it also fixes the unevenness of the Biblical ages. It also sorts out the Kings List numbers.
Obviously if you take it very literally, every species on earth in the back of a homemade boat, the entire planet being wiped out, etc - it doesn't stand up very well. But I'd be willing to entertain the possibility that the story is the fossilised remains of an oral tradition that predates the written record - perhaps the loss of lands after the last ice age, etc.
FARGARD II. Yima (gamshêd).
And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima, saying: 'O fair Yima, son of Vîvanghat! Upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall bring the fierce, foul frost; upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall make snow-flakes fall thick, even an aredvî deep on the highest tops of mountains. And all the three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the bosom of the dale, under the shelter of stables. Before that winter, those fields would bear plenty of grass for cattle: now with floods that stream, with snows that melt, it will seem a happy land in the world, the land wherein footprints even of sheep may still be seen. Therefore make thee a Vara, long as a riding-ground on every side of the square , and thither bring the seeds of sheep and oxen, of men, of dogs, of birds, and of red blazing fires.
Therefore make thee a Vara, long as a riding-ground on every side of the square, to be an abode for men; a Vara, long. as a riding-ground on every side of the square, to be a fold for flocks. There thou shalt make waters flow in a bed a hâthra long; there thou shalt settle birds, by the ever-green banks that bear never-failing food. There thou shalt establish dwelling places, consisting of a house with a balcony, a courtyard, and a gallery. Thither thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth.
Thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of tree, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of fruit, the fullest of food and sweetest of odour. All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of ever, kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara. There shall be no humpbacked, none bulged forward there; no impotent, no lunatic; no poverty, no lying; no meanness, no jealousy; no decayed tooth, no leprous to be confined, nor any of the brands wherewith Angra Mainyu stamps the bodies of mortals. In the largest part of the place thou shalt make nine streets, six in the middle part, three in the smallest. To the streets of the largest part thou shalt bring a thousand seeds of men and women; to the streets of the middle part, six hundred; to the streets of the smallest part, three hundred. That Vara thou shalt seal up with the golden ring, and thou shalt make a door, and a window self-shining within.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
The biblical account isn't the oldest version, however. So it seems unlikely that that version is correct, whereas older versions were wrong. Although the older known versions weren't very believable either, so it's possible something might have happened, but it doesn't seem like there's really much to go on beyond "there was a huge flood, and a few people survived." Which definitely did happen, repeatedly.
That's the part that fascinates me - it seems obvious that the OT gets more realistic the closer events get to the written record. But some of the parts we write off as unrealistic could be the remains of stories as old as the human race. If the flood myth describes the end of the ice age, that would mean you and I are sharing an oral tradition 10,000 years old. I find that a lot more exciting than how factually accurate it is.
I agree with you, although there's a large contingent for whom whether or not it's factually accurate is the most significant concern.
Genesis 1: the world initially all water. God has to dry it to create land. Genesis 2: the world initially all land. God has to add water.
Genesis 1 creation order: water, land, plants, animals, humans (male and female at the same time, most reasonable reading is many humans all at once). Genesis 2 creation order: land, water, Adam alone, plants, animals, Eve alone.
Fluid (the proto-Earth which didn't have a distinct atmosphere), solid Earth (with liquid water forming oceans, and a gaseous atmosphere), plants, animals, humans, Adam, the garden of Eden (in an area that had been barren), (animals brought to Adam for naming), Eve.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The article is obviously talking about historical accuracy in the context of archaeology and really in the context of a specific archeological dig. It's not about whether God created the earth in 7 days or put a bunch of animals on a boat.
You trying to weaponize the guidelines is an abuse of the community and against the spirit and purpose of the rules.
> fact is not provocative at all.
There are infinitely many facts. They don't select themselves—humans do that—and often they do it in a highly provocative way. That's why "I'm just stating facts" is one of the classic troll tropes.
For example, if one middle schooler points out the acne on another kid's face, that's both factual and provocative. I've used that analogy before. Recently I ran across an old comment by pg where he made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6539403.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...