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Originally posted by tclune:
ISTM that this view would be much more devastating to the nationalistic claims of the current state of Israel than anything else. For Christians, the claims with respect to who Christ is and was are the bases for our faith. If it were to turn out that Jacob and/or Moses were mythical or composite characters, it hardly seems that it would roil the surface of Christianity at all. But, if Christ were mythical or not raised from the dead, then (as Paul noted)our faith is in vain.

--Tom Clune

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
the reigns of the biblical baddies could be very prosperous, whereas the reigns of the faithful could be a total horlix.

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
They make what I think is a pretty convincing case, for example, that:

1. The Exodus never happened.

2. The story of Israel's Kings in the book of Kings, and whether they were successful or unsuccessful depending on whether they were faithful or unfaithful to Jahweh, is the creation of theological bias and is not historically accurate...

...In fact, the archaological evidence doesn't bear out this supposed correlation - the reigns of the biblical baddies could be very prosperous, whereas the reigns of the faithful could be a total horlix.

My question is, if this is true, where does it leave us Christians?

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Originally posted by §Andrew:
Traditional Christianity gave a huge fight to preserve the historical accuracy of the divine economy in the Old Testament, stressing the unity of the two testaments.

If God is not like the God we read about in the Old Testament, then we have a problem here, because it would turn out that Christianity gives a false image of God.

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Originally posted by tclune:
I am not aware of the Church fighting to preserve the historical accuracy of the OT at all.

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The image of God has very little to do with the question of whether the revelation of that image is communicated through history or literature.

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Originally posted by Ken: If the whole thing was a bit of post-exilic priestly spin-doctoring then I would expect David (& Solomon) would have been written up in a very different light.

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Herodotus' invention earned him the twin titles "The Father of History", first conferred by Cicero, and "The Father of Lies".[5] As these epithets imply, there has long been a debate—at least from the time of Cicero's On the Laws (Book 1, paragraph 5)—concerning the veracity of his tales and, more importantly, the extent to which he knew himself to be creating fabrications.

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
Thanks Woodworm. You've provided me with something I've been looking for. I have heard lots of scholars say that the Exodus didn't happen in archaeological evidence, but it is hard to find such things through the chaff of people that are defending that it did. I look forward to reading it.

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
That raises a further question, and one I was thinking about recently: is there evidence outside the Bible for the Exile? The wholesale movement of populations strikes me as something that would leave all kinds of interesting traces: archaeological, linguistic, DNA ...

Hart's response is right, plenty of evidence, although according to The Bible Unearthed (sorry) the external evidence is that the numbers exiled were relatively low, with a lot of folk left behind (as I guess you would expect).

Thanks v much to all for the other responses, which I am still processing. I can't agree with the posts to the effect that that it doesn't terribly matter; Andrew is right that traditional teaching claims a factual paradigm, hence my question as to whether it is "enough" if the stories are myths.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
Thanks Woodworm. You've provided me with something I've been looking for. I have heard lots of scholars say that the Exodus didn't happen in archaeological evidence, but it is hard to find such things through the chaff of people that are defending that it did. I look forward to reading it.

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Part of the issue lies in how we understand "history" as well. We have to remember that the "historical" books of the OT are written by ancient authors, not modern authors. Thus they reflect ancient understandings of history, not post-enlightenment literalism.

One difference in such a worldview is the way ancients understood "their" history as "our" history. When an ancient Hebrew is telling the story of Exodus, he's not telling it as something that happened to them, it's something that happened to us. Thus a redactor, writing centuries after the event, is going to write what may have happened to a handful of people as if it happened to the entire group at the time of writing.

Thus Exodus might be seen as the story of a handful of slaves, that was appropriated and owned by the nation of Israel.

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I live in a country of Fundiliteralists in many ways. I honestly "get" that the story is not literal, unfortunately, many people don't.

I personally think it didn't happen....at....all as described. But I am willing to let an expert inform me otherwise, thus the book.

--------------------
Diax's Rake - "Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true"

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I recommend this book if you like to be rattled—if you enjoy a provocative, polemical read. Finkelstein and Silberman tell us there were no patriarchs, no Exodus, no conquest of Canaan, and no united monarchy. Such assertions challenge any complacent acceptance of conventional views. They force biblical scholars to recheck the evidence behind their own visions of the Bible and Israel’s history.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Part of the issue lies in how we understand "history" as well. We have to remember that the "historical" books of the OT are written by ancient authors, not modern authors. Thus they reflect ancient understandings of history, not post-enlightenment literalism.

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Thus Exodus might be seen as the story of a handful of slaves, that was appropriated and owned by the nation of Israel.

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To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates - the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.

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Originally posted by ken:
In some ways the Old Testament has a more modern view of history than the Greek writings do. I am very impressed by the general background of technological advancement in it.

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
I cannot recall the details, but there was some recent discoveries that David did exist FWIW.

As to fictional narratives. I have no issue with the names and places, what I find troubling is the apparent serious lack of evidence of a tribe running around and the lack Egyptian evidence. It just seems really odd, at minimum. That someone would contrive that part to make a story around all these people doesn't seem like a stretch at all.
It's like watching as Moses sits his grandchildren and spins a yarn for them all to keep their attention.

There is also the following question....
Where does one begin to question the entire merits of a book if it is sold as "some level of literal" and is later proven to be some version of not "literal at all"? I have answered the question for myself, I pose it rhetorically.

I guess if the Bible was sold as "Don't get to worked up in the details folks! Its a terrifying tale with raunchy bits, action, and a power packed ending with moral lessons thrown in for fun" I wouldn't have had such an expectation for it. As it is, that's almost never what I hear except for sometimes the most liberal of liberal folks.

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It literally is what it is. The trick is teasing the history out of the literature.

As for the "one guy spinning a yarn to amuse his children" theory, that doesn't jibe at all with modern scholarship that reads the Torah as a collaborative effort that spanned centuries. There are places where you can still see the seams if you read closely. As has been observed, there are (as my prof, Julie Duncan, who FWIW, worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls put it) kernels of history throughout the whole text. It's very heavily mythologized history (as a lot of history from this time was), but it's still history.

It's not pure fiction, and it's not pure non-fiction. It's a sloppy mess of both.

And personally, it's fun getting worked up on the details. That's how you work it out.

Besides, what sick fuck of a parent would read their kids Leviticus as part of a bedtime story? And who would make up all those, well, numbers at the beginning of Numbers? or the Genealogies? Or all those screwy details for how to construct a Tabernacle that we've been paraphrasing in Kerygmania?

Like I said, I'm not arguing for hard literal historicity, but to me the argument for pure fiction makes about as much sense as pure non-fiction. Nobody would write and collate this much material just because it was fun. There's an historical reason this stuff was put together the way it was, and it was done by historical people.

I suppose a more fruitful question might be: Why did they do it?

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Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me, I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train. --Josh Ritter, Harrisburg

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Originally posted by Ynot:
Isn't it more important that the stories in the Bible are good stories, or God's stories, as opposed to true stories?
I think I'd be more worried if science came up with facts confirming the truth of the Bible stories. I'd loose my faith. I know faith doesn't keep me good, but it keeps me better than I would have been without it.

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
...My question is, if this is true, where does it leave us Christians? Is it enough for the Exodus to be a powerful myth? Can it be meaningfully distinguished from powerful secular myths or stories? If the OT authors misrepresented history to suit their own agenda, is there anything in the Bible that we can trust?

This is old ground I expect but I am properly perplexed & would be grateful for views.

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Originally posted by ken:
...If the whole thing was redacted in an attempt to prove that all living Israelites were the descendents of the original sons of Jacob and no-one else then those parts would presumably have been edited out.

And the very fact that they weren't edited out in the post-exilic period, when they attached great importance to blood-lines, purity, and separation is itself a clue that those later redactors had too great an attachment to the texts to feel free to alter them. (or that there were enough diverse copies that they would have been found out if they had)

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Originally posted by Bullfrog.:
Besides, if it's really a fabrication...

Who the hell expends that much energy making up names for cities and peoples and inventories that never existed? If so, that's a volume of imaginary cultures and places that even Robert Jordan (RIP) would find daunting!

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Originally posted by MerlintheMad:
The picture of the world of the Patriarchs does not fit into the era claimed for it: but it does fit very well into the 8th century BCE:

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Originally posted by MerlintheMad:

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Originally posted by Bullfrog.:
Besides, if it's really a fabrication...

Who the hell expends that much energy making up names for cities and peoples and inventories that never existed? If so, that's a volume of imaginary cultures and places that even Robert Jordan (RIP) would find daunting!

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The misconception of posters here is that the authors of this book are asserting that the OT was "invented" history: when actually they are saying Israelite history was up till c. the 8th century BCE an orally transmitted one, and that when finally written out as the Torah, it drew all the physical details from that century. The picture of the world of the Patriarchs does not fit into the era claimed for it: but it does fit very well into the 8th century BCE: there are no made up names of towns and rulers: these are just misplaced by a bunch of centuries!

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
My question is, if this is true, where does it leave us Christians? Is it enough for the Exodus to be a powerful myth?

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Originally posted by MerlintheMad:
There is always the possibility that some future discovery will prove an Exodus and historicity of the essential Biblical stories. But that does not seem reasonable to expect, given the complete lack of any such evidence to even suggest that the OT stories are literally true. Everywhere you look in the Middle East the discovered evidence refutes the OT picture of "history": it is out of place or non existent, i.e. made out of whole cloth for religious agenda purposes, as you've pointed out.

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Let me begin by clarifying which books of the Hebrew Bible I think can be utilized by the would-be historian, whether textual scholar or archaeologist. With most scholars, I would exclude much of the Pentateuch, specifically the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. These materials obviously constitute a sort of "pre-history" that has been attached to the main epic of ancient Israel by late editors. All this may be distilled from long oral tradition, and I suspect that some of the stories -- such as parts of the Patriarchal narratives -- may once have had a historical setting. These traditions, however, are overlaid with legendary and even fantastic materials that the modern reader may enjoy as "story," but which can scarcely be taken seriously as history.

- What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (pg. 97)

After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible historical figures. Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. A Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in southern Transjordan in the middle 13th century B.C., where many scholars think the biblical traditions concerning the god Yahweh arose. But archaeology can do nothing to confirm such a figure as a historical personage, much less prove that he was the founder of later Israelite religion. As for Leviticus and Numbers, these are clearly additions to the "pre-history" by very late Priestly editorial hands, preoccupied with notions of ritual purity, themes of the "promised land," and othe literary motifs that most modern readers will scarcely find edifying, much less historical.

- ibid (pg. 99)

Now let us turn to the biblical data. If we look at the biblical texts describing the origins of Israel, we see at once that the traditional account contained in Genesis through Joshua simple cannot be reconciled with the picture derived above from archaeological investigation. The whole "Exodus-Conquest" cycle of stories must now be set aside as largely mythical, but in the proper sense of the term "myth": perhaps "historical fiction" ...

- ibid (pg. 121)

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Originally posted by Pottage:
I don't agree that wherever you look in the Middle East you will find clear evidence of findings which refute Biblical history.

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... But clear evidence sitting in every museum you care to visit that the Bible is, as you say, all just "concocted"? I don't think so.

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My personal view is that events described in the OT in deep antiquity are probably signifcantly corrupted, and the further back in time the events are the greater the likelihood that this is so.

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But I think you overstate the case for deliberate invention many hundreds of years after the fact.

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For instance, why does it seem unreasonable to expect that ongoing excavatations such as that at Khirbet Qeiyafa may substantiate the basic historicity of the OT? Most of that site remains to be excavated in a project that is likely to take some years, but already it appears to be a significant settlement dating from the 10th century BCE. It stands near to Gath but it contains materially different types of pottery to those found in Gath, and it has yielded what appears to be Hebrew writing. A fortification that required the placing of 200,000 tons of stone doesn't SOUND like Finkelstein's vision of Israel in that era as a scattering of hamlets and hill settlements under no central authority. Evidence from that site of everyday literacy dating back to the 10th century BCE suggests in fact that it is relatively UNlikely that the earlier events recorded in the OT are just legends redacted hundreds of years later than this period.

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And as Ken has explained, the Biblical texts which describe Bronze Age events put them in a Bronze Age context, not that of the the seventh century BCE or later.

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Originally posted by Bullfrog.:

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Originally posted by Ynot:
Isn't it more important that the stories in the Bible are good stories, or God's stories, as opposed to true stories?
I think I'd be more worried if science came up with facts confirming the truth of the Bible stories. I'd loose my faith. I know faith doesn't keep me good, but it keeps me better than I would have been without it.

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Is God absent from real human history? If you think so, then I suppose it's not a problem.

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Originally posted by MerlintheMad:
But no matter how much of the authors' theories is proven or otherwise, one thing seems abundantly clear: the OT is not what traditional Judeo-Christianity has believed it to be: the revealed "word of God" and literal history, but instead a collection of very old (oral) traditional tales woven into a much more modern concept to legitimize the claims of Judah over the lands round about.

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Originally posted by Pottage:

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Originally posted by MerlintheMad:
But no matter how much of the authors' theories is proven or otherwise, one thing seems abundantly clear: the OT is not what traditional Judeo-Christianity has believed it to be: the revealed "word of God" and literal history, but instead a collection of very old (oral) traditional tales woven into a much more modern concept to legitimize the claims of Judah over the lands round about.

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OK. To some extent we're talking about differences in emphasis then, your case having been stated in more absolute terms than you actually see it. But I still think that the older parts of the historical Biblical narrative display an understanding of what the world was like many centuries earlier than the 7th century BCE rather than as it was at that time. It's not accurate to say that what the Bible describes is simply a lot of old legends pulled together and reduced to writing for the first time in 7th century BCE and given what was then a contemporary context either to make sense of them or to pursue what was then a contemporary political agenda.

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Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
Just as stupid question, as I've not read the book, but I have done some archaeological digging: if people are wandering in the desert, what archaeological evidence is there likely to be? The stuff that provides good archaeological evidence tends to be buildings, nice solid stone ones for preference, which don't stack up with nomadic tribes.

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That's worth making as a general point. Why on earth should we expect archaeology to provide us with evidence for the way of life or even existence of any one arbitrarily chosen group of people from three or four thousand years ago? It doesn't even give us that for people we know existed three or four hundred years ago.

Partly its a scope problem, to do with the kind of evidence we are dealing with. Archaeology really doesn't tell us the same kind of thing as narrative history does. They can support and illustrate each other, but its very hard to use them to prove or disprove hypotheses made in the other field.

Partly its a scale problem. We've dug up literally hundreds of millions of relics of dead people. But that is out of countless billions of possible relics. So the chance of hitting any one ancient group of people is tiny. Its like the famous golfball and blade of grass effect. Bloke hits golfball. It lands on blade of grass. How unlikely is that?! There are thousands of blades of grass per square metre! Tens of thousands of square metres on the golf course! Its far less than a one-in-a-million chance! But you always hit at least one blade of grass. What's difficult is choosing which blade of grass (or hole) you are going to hit before you strike the ball. Archaeologists are playing on a golf course the size of the planet with millions of holes.

It is bloody difficult to associate stuff dug up by archaeologists with individuals known to written history. More or less impossible for anyone other than kings with their faces on coins - and that applies as much to the 15th century AD as BC. The chance of finding detailed evidence about any one family of ancient shepherds is tiny. Even a big one with lots of camels. There are hundreds of millions of families of ancient shepherds whose bones might be in those hills. And we're talking about a small group of people who are described as living alongside larger numbers of people with a different culture - or rather many different cultures. In a case like this absence of evidence really isn't evidence of absence. What archaeological evidence is likely to be left in modern England by Gypsies or Travellers or Malaysian students or Spanish tourists or Polish plumbers or Tamil shopkeepers? But we know that there have been tens of thousands of such people here.

And if you had the luck to dig up the actual pots and pans that Abraham or Joshua or Jesse ate off, how would you possibly identify them with those people anyway? We only know about the Patriarchs from a handful of books which we have in one version written maybe a thousand years later in a different language from the one they spoke. (Well, different from what Abraham and Joshua spoke, maybe not Jesse - Hebrew is a Canaanite language pretty close to Phoenician, but the OT says that the original Patriarchs were Arameans from Harran - Abraham, like Jesus, spoke Aramaic at home, not Hebrew) Whether it is accurate or not that is a different kind of information from the kind archaeology gets.

And I don't just mean that we shouldn't expect to find evidence of named individuals or families. We should expect to miss whole cultures and lifestyles. Whole groups of cultures. Never mind ancient nomads. We are still discovering the remains of lost cities in the Middle East. Big cities with stone buildings and walls and canals. That we are still finding new ones means there are almost certainly more still to find - and many more we will never find. Which means that not finding one is not conclusive evidence that it never existed.

Heck, every now and again we discover the remains of a entirely unknown urban civilisation in the Middle East. And often we don't know exactly who they were or what language they spoke or what their religion was, or anything.

Elamites are mentioned in the Bible. We dug up some of their cities. They seem to have been the people who invented writing. We still can't read their earliest writings nor do we know if they represent one language or more than one. There are whole lost cultures in there. Same with the Indus Valley/Harappa cultures. We don't really know whether the Hurrians were the same people as the Mitanni and whether or not they are the same as the people the Bible calls Horites. (Don't even start on the Hivites and the Perizzites) Inscriptions in previously unknown writing systems have been found in Iran and Turkmenistan and Xinjang form the early 4th century BC (lending credence to the idea that the invention of writing spread to China from Iran) There are remains of pyramids in Iran, and we have no idea who built them. That we are still discovering such things is a clue that there are more to discover and many we will never discover.

In the last few years archaeologists have uncovered neolithic megaliths and sculptures Turkey that almost certainly predate any others we know about. There are carved stones three metres high, and lifesize 3d sculptures of animals.
This is evidence of a culture apparently unlike any other we know about, totally unknown till the 1990s. It is just outside the city of Urfa, which is ancient Edessa, and so smack plonk in the middle of exactly the bit of the world that the Biblical Patriarchs were supposed to live in. (Which is also pretty much the same area we now know agriculture was invented in) Abraham's family are described as living in Haran, which is about thirty miles away. Think about that. We have, in the lifetime of this website, discovered an entire previously unknown civilisation in the same county that Abraham was supposed to have lived in.

We lost all record of he entire Hittite Empire for three thousand years. If you read books published in the early 20th century they aren't even on the map, literally. We're not talking about a few dozen semi-nomadic shepherds here. These people built big cities out of stone. They had armies and tax collectors and ambassadors and schools and a unique hieroglypic script and two or three religions all their own. They fought against the Egyptians and Assyrians and the Hurrians/Mittani and Urartu and Ugarit and loads of other people; and sometimes they won. They may have invented iron working. Almost certainly the first people to do it on a large scale. They are really very important to history. And we forgot them entirely.

And we still aren't quite sure how the original Hittites related to the Hittite Empire Hittites ("Nesli" IIRC) or to the Hittite and/or Mitanni/Hurrian/Luwian successor state at Carchemish (which is also near Urfa and Harran, and is the site of the battle at which the Babylonians beat the Egyptians and made the exile described in Jeremiah inevitable). And we don't know at all how they relate to the Hittites mentioned in the Pentateuch (which is set contemporaneously with the early Hittite Empire) or the Hittites that Uriah was one of (which on the face of it might mean the neo-Hittites of Carchemish, or their relatives in nearby cities - who were establishing themselves in Syria at exactly the time of King David )

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.