As far as I am concerned it shows what happens when one excavates for things in the wrong places and then assigning them the wrong geography.
Very sardonic, but funny
Abstract Before the supposed kingdom of David, in the bible, Jerusalem was a small but well fortified town, the city of the Jebusites that David decided would be his capital. There is no historical or archaeological evidence for this belief. Kenyon found no city walls, no signs of occupation and no buildings that might have been public buildings. The Iron Age date of the excavation is certain from a complete jar found on the site. Other cities, Gezer, Hazor, Lachish and Megiddo, of the same period have grand public buildings. It suggests they were administrative centres for a rural area. The bible says Jerusalem, barely more than a village, was the capital of an empire, yet palatial buildings were in Megiddo not in Jerusalem.
" Louis Rushmore reports that not long ago, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review criticized belief in the infallibility of the bible, actually admitting people had been fooled by scholars and ministers in the past, and declaring it was time to stop fooling them. He wanted ministers and priests to accept inaccuracies that have always been there—the bible is not an infallible word of God. Such an admission, he said, might be impossible because ignorant “folk” insist on their bible being infallible. He must mean believers.
David Clines of Sheffield University has found that, though theology students are taught these things at college, they ignore them in their parishes and pulpits. The happy punters are simply kept in the dark. K Van der Toorn, a Dutch biblical scholar, is also remarkably honest for those of his type. He says in Currents in Research: Biblical Studies—1998 that those involved in the study of religion always have, in one way or another, a personal stake in the matter and therefore cannot be expected to set an example of dispassionate scholarly enquiry.
Doubtless he says this because the study of Israelite religion is at present racked with ill-tempered disagreement between different factions. The central difference between them is whether faith requires the bible to be upheld or not—whether the bible really depicts the forward march of God’s unfolding revelation. Otherwise the different parties are in almost total agreement! In these pages we make no apologies for taking the view that much of the bible is myth—indeed “myth” is perhaps too noble a word and “lies” would be better because, unlike myth which is intended to edify, the founders of these biblical “myths” always intended to fool people.
Most of the relevant material has been available from time immemorial and it might be surprising that these matters are not settled. They are, of course, settled for believers in Christianity and Judaism, but if belief were sufficient, we should all be still expecting Santa Claus to fall down the chimney every Christmas with his sack of goodies. Today, even more so than in the time of Celsus, those who merely believe are fools. Whatever way one imagines the Creator, we have been created with intelligence, so to turn round and say that we are not meant to exercise it in case it tests our belief is absurd—not just absurd, a blatant insult to God, if God is who created us.
As soon as it is accepted that some of the biblical material might be in error, it is necessary to decide what is. Evidence, external to the bible and its proponents, is needed and archaeology is the most objective. Biblical archaeologists at one time had as their whole raison d’etre the aim of confirming the bible by practical research. With such a tendentious aim, they were not likely to interpret their finds objectively—nor did they! No reputable scholars deny that archaeology is the prime method of discovering facts about early Israel provided that it is not interpreted tendentiously and finds can be dated to a particular time.
The Golden Age of biblical archaeology—the period between the two World Wars—was dominated by William Foxwell Albright and his disciples—besotted biblicists to a man. A new generation of scholars in the 1960s and early 1970s dismissed their archaeological work as simplistic. They meant “wrong”. The earlier biblical archaeologists were ridiculed for circular reasoning—assuming the biblical stories, fitting their discoveries into their framework, then claiming the discoveries proved the bible! Modern archaeologists do not think the bible is the inspired “Word of God”, basing their views on the cumulative results of a hundred years of archaeology in the Holy Land.
And that is the trouble for those “scholars” whose knees are permanently bent, and not by excessive trowelling! Even James K Hoffmier, a professor at Wheaton College, declares the bible wrong about almost all the early history of Israel, based on the work of these archaeologists. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua have been rejected as historical figures. The Egyptian sojourn and exodus stories, along with Sinai wanderings and Joshua’s military entry into Canaan never happened. The United Monarchy left no traces. They are simply fictional. They are myths retrojected into Israelite history by anonymous biblical writers. The Old Testament is superstition and folk religion.
There is no archaeological evidence for a previous temple on the site of Herod’s. In other words there is no direct evidence even of a second temple, let alone the first. Nor does 1 Kings 6:2-36 make any note of the prominent rock—on which is now built the Dome of the Rock mosque—when it describes the first or Solomon’s temple. It seems impossible not to mention such a feature, so either the site of Solomon’s temple was different, or the whole story is fictional.
The history of Jerusalem and the inhabitants of the hill country of Palestine seems non-existent before about 700 BC, but whereas one faction sees this as evidence that much of the Old Testament is mythology written much later than most believers think, the other factions takes comfort in scraps of “proof”, however indirect, that the Old Testament accounts contain elements of true history. Jerusalem
Much of the archaeological work that has failed to support the biblical story has been carried out in Jerusalem, notably under Kathleen Kenyon. Latterly skilled Israeli excavators have been busy in Jerusalem but much of their work has been left unpublished or even has been reportedly lost through disagreements. Not a little of this dissension will be due to the archaeologists not producing what Israeli nationalists would like to see.
The oldest part of Jerusalem is the hill south of the temple area where the city of David was considered to have been, and tombs found here have been dated to 3000 BC. A small building with benches along the walls might have been an early shrine but the evidence is that the people concerned were herdsmen. Several small villages dating to about 2000 BC have been found in the valleys around Jerusalem, but no sign of occupation in the city has been found at this period.
However, about 1800 BC signs of activity appear and several parts of a city wall have been found. The trouble is that very little of the town itself remains because of subsequent building work. Nevertheless Kenyon unearthed several large storage jars taken to indicate that the town was a regional centre of trade—a market town. This deduction ties in with the source of the clay of the jars being local. Farms of the period seemed to produce sufficient milk for trade—that the jars were used for—and meat. Jerusalem at this time seemed to be quite prosperous to judge by the polished stone and faience beads that have been found and the inlaid bone for decorating furniture. It was obviously a regional centre of some wealth and importance with a popualtion between 1000 and 2500 people. Egyptian References
Now a place called “Rushalimmu” has been noted on the Execration Texts found in Egypt and dated to this period. The Execration Texts were plainly some magic cursing ritual because the names of peoples, rulers and towns that the Egyptians wanted to defeat had been inscribed on to pots that had then apparently been deliberately broken. The magic is that commonly associated with names—that possession of the name gives possession of the owner of the name. This is a reason why the names of gods like that of the Hebrew god were kept secret. By forbidding anyone from uttering the name no enemies could discover the name of the god to get control of him.
The Egyptians were hoping that by breaking the names on the pots, they would facilitate the breaking of the resistence of the people, rulers or towns. Of course, there is no sure way of associating the excavated Jerusalem with Rushalimmu and, indeed, the excavated Jerusalem is hardly likely to have caused the Egyptians enough trouble to merit such a ceremony, but conceivably the excavated Jerusalem was the centre of a chiefdom and so might have been seen by the Egyptians as a potential nuisance. Unfortunately, this Jerusalem ceased to exist after a life of only about a hundred years. Perhaps Egyptian magic really worked!
About 500 years later the administrators of the Pharaohs were at the new town of Amarna busily archiving the Pharaoh’s correspondence. In the Amarna letters were six received from the scribe of the prince of “Urasalim”. If this is Jerusalem it was apparently a walled city and the assumption was that it continued the city of 1800 BC. Again, though, the excavations of Late Bronze Age Jerusalem do not bear out this deduction. There is no trace of a fortified city of this time. Not only are there no walls or towns, very few sherds of pottery can be definitely assigned to this time. There is a tomb on the Mount of Olives and traces of an Egyptian temple north of the city, but no city itself! If Jerusalem was occupied during the time of the Amarna letters, it was situated somewhere else.
Possibly, of course, the hills around Jerusalem at this period of history were all part of a chiefdom or small city state called Jerusalem. The main city itself perhaps was moved in 1800 for some reason and was still elsewhere when its scribe wrote to the Pharaoh. Since no trace of an alternative site for the town has ever been found either, a more likely solution is that the Urusalim of the Amarna letters was not a city at all but one of the Pharaoh’s country estates. Such an estate, especially in wild country, might well have been fortified. The letters mention a tribute of slaves. If the estate managers were in the habit of taking slaves locally in payment of tribute, the fortifications might have been necessary.
The real point, though, is that there is no way that archaeology supports the old idea of an ancient Jerusalem continuously occupied from the Middle Bronze Age. The possible appearance of Jerusalem in Bronze Age documents must refer to the district rather than a specific city. Scholars of all persuasions now recognize that the culture of the Judaean hills was continuous from the Late Bronze Ages to the Early Iron Age, precluding any foreign invasion or infiltration, and it was a culture based on smallholdings and villages living by husbandry and organized on the basis of kin. All scholars see these people as partial bandits raiding the civilized valleys but otherwise sharing the culture of the region including practices that later would be condemned.
Later Egyptian remains at Philistine sites are common. Excavations at Ashkelon and Ekron of twenty sixth dynasty scarabs show that, in the seventh century, Egyptians controlled Palestine, having taken over when the Assyrians withdrew. A stele of Pharaoh Necho (610-595 BC) was found at Sidon. Seventh century ostraca have numbers written on them in Egyptian hieratic, but sometimes with an additional Semitic word usually called Hebrew. Hieratic numbering was common in Israel and Judah in the seventh century, a discovery described as “puzzling”.
It is a commonly accepted view that the Hebrew kingdoms borrowed much of their administrative system from Egypt. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Biblicists will attribute it to the emergence of Moses and the tribes from Egypt eight hundred years before, but as Moses is mythical, it is likely to have been because these lands were for a long time in the Egyptian sphere of influence as the nearest Asian colonies of Egypt. The incursions of the Assyrians only broke Egyptian hegemony temporarily. Jerusalem in the United Monarchy
In the couple of hundred years preceding the supposed kingdom of David, Jerusalem was, in the bible, the city of the Jebusites, a small but well fortified town that David decided could be his capital. Besides the bible there is no historical evidence for this belief and the archaeological work is equally negative. Kenyon found successive built terraces of some size, but no city walls, no signs of occupation and no buildings that might have been public buildings. The Iron Age date of the excavation is certain from a complete jar found on the floor of the site and other sherds. Margreet Steiner judges the terraces to be part of a fortification, but for what purpose? It is the only fortification in the hill country in that period. Nothing suggests it is an Egyptian fort, and, indeed, everything suggests it is local, but perhaps the Egyptians made the locals build a watch tower, or the locals built one to watch for the Egyptians!
Iron Age II is the designation of the period when the United Monarchy of David and Solomon ruled the Levant in a powerful empire. In fact, several buildings large enough to have been administrative buildings are dated to the period but no pottery considered previously to have been typical of David and Solomon is found there! However, a large rampart has been found thought by some to be the “millo” mentioned in the bible. Others date it to the earlier period. Several unused or discarded parts of buildings have also been found and some have reliably been dated on style to the ninth century. Interestingly a bronze fist was discovered that seems likely to have been part of a statue of a god.
All of these are exciting finds, especially for those who want to see David and Solomon emerge into history, but the city seems to have had no population—there is no evidence of occupation—no houses! The buildings and fortifications are all high on the hill with no space for dwellings above and no sign of them below. In the Middle Bronze Age occupation and the later permanent occupation from the seventh century onwards, the walls were lower down so that dwellings behind were protected. Possibly the domestic part of the city was further north, but nothing has been found of it. What has been found here dates from a century later.
So, the Jerusalem of David was a small apparently administrative centre with no attached domestic quarter. No more than 2000 people could have lived within and presumably were administrators and those who serviced them. It must have been an administrative centre for a statelet but could not have been the capital of a state such as that of Solomon.
Other cities of the same type have been excavated from the tenth and ninth centuries like Gezer, Hazor, Lachish and Megiddo, all with apparently public buildings and few dwellings but grander ones than Jerusalem. They also suggest small city states that functioned mainly as administrative centres for a rural locality. Jerusalem, not a very significant settlement, not a very elaborate one, indeed barely more than a village in the tenth century, was, in the bible, the capital of a United Monarchy extending over the northern part of the country to the Euphrates. Yet the grand buildings, the palaces, were at Megiddo not in Jerusalem.
No trace has been found of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and the United Monarchy has to be rejected as not historical. Jerusalem in the Divided Monarchy
The earliest date for a temple in Jerusalem is the 700s BC when the city finally became established as the centre of a small state. Ritual baths are never found before the Babylonian conquest, unless a single example has been found at Tel Masos. This must be another surprising fact. In late Judaism, ritual baths were an essential part of pious living, yet they were not needed earlier, and baths are substantial structures that cannot be easily hidden, and do not easily crumble. It does not suggest continuity of religious practice.
On the eastern slopes of the “City of David”, naturally outside its fortifications, houses for artisans and small traders at last appeared in the ninth century BC. The buildings were small and simple and were plainly not the homes of nobility. However, tombs found cut in rocks dating roughly 850 to 650 BC show that people were getting rich and one tomb is a fine multi-chambered mausoleum. A simple blessing like that of Numbers 6:24-26 has been found on silver funereal plaques from a tomb at Ketef Hinnom. Pottery and jewellery show the tomb is later than the seventh century.
The destruction of the city by the Babylonians in 586 BC left a mass of debris that has yielded sufficient for life in the city just before its destruction to be reconstructed. It had grown enormaously in about a hundred or so years and could have reached a population of 10,000. Substantial walls had been built in about 700 BC and the water system was sophisticated. In contrast to the earlier city, no public buildings are found but many residential buildings, some obviously of wealthy families able to import luxuries from Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece and Cyprus.
The attack by the Assyrians had the effect of destroying most of the small towns that had earlier rivalled Jerusalem. The Assyrians therefore left Jerusalem as an unrivalled buffer city enabling it to prosper out of the misfortune of the others. There must have been a quid pro quo for this favourable treatment and whatever it was the victorious Babylonians a hundred years later did not appreciate it, but the Persians a half a century further on did. The Jews were eminent for their loyalty to the Persians, remaining steadfast to the “Great King” and regaining their prosperity as a consequence. Though the Assyrians are depicted as wolves in the scriptures, the inhabitants of Jerusalem obviously reached an accord with them and prospered as a result when all their rivals were destroyed.
The Canaanite Koine
Phœnician architecture was adopted and imitated by all the peoples of Palestine—Israelites, Judaeans, Philistines, and all the peoples of eastern Jordan. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Could the reason, or a substantial part of it, have been that mostly these “peoples” were all the same—those called in the bible Canaanites? They were all Phœnicians racially, even the Philistines, if they were different at first, having been quickly assimilated by the local people and their culture.
E Stern recognizes what he calls the Phœnician “koine” that “dominated all of Phœnicia and Palestine”. “Koine” is Greek for common, so he means that the common culture of the whole region was Phœnician. The Phœnicians called themselves Canaanites. However, merely to please biblicists, historians feel obliged to keep Israel in the picture, and Stern sometimes calls the culture the “Phœnician-Israelite koine”, contriving to find a place for the short-lived state of Israel (c 950-720 BC) in the name of the region’s architectural style which extended to Cyprus, a place the Israelites never had anything to do with, whereas Phœnicia lasted centuries before and after Israel!
There is no better illustration of a Canaanite cultural theme than that of the woman in the window particularly popular carved on a small scale in ivory but also worked on a large scale in palaces. They are found in Phœnicia as well as in Israel, and even in Ammon. As usual, biblicists will not call these ivories Canaanite, but persist in the expression Phœnico-Israelite.
There were other small states in the Phœnician koine too, and mentioned in the bible. The Phœnician style remained the preferred one of the region until the Assyrians imposed their own style, and even in the Assyrian period, the coastal cities retained their own Phœnician style as far down the coast as Jaffa. Moab
Moab was a small state established about the same time as Israel in the tenth or ninth century BC. Excavators have shown that the language the Moabites used was a dialect of Western Semitic like the language of the Ammonites and Edomites, as well as the Israelites and Jews—Phœnician or Canaanite, actually, but called Hebrew by biblicists. Archaeology has revealed the names of some of the kings of Moab too, many of whom are not mentioned in the Jewish scriptures. Mesha is mentioned but others are Kemoshyt, Salamanu who was a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser of Assyria, Kammushu-nadabi, a contemporary of Sennacherib, Musuri, a contemporary of Esarhaddon and Kemashkalta, a contemporary of Ashurbanipal. What is interesting in this list is that the archaeology has shown that the Moabites but not the Jews had a king Solomon, Salamanu being Solomon! As a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), and listed among the princes paying him tribute, this Solomon is dated much more equitably than the mythical Solomon of the bible, for he also had contemporaries in Phœnicia called Hiram. Only gross misdating allows this to be true for the Solomon of the bible, supposedly living early in the tenth century.
Moab was evidently as poor as Judah and poorer than Israel, for few relics have been found there, besides the famous stele. No seals or bullae have been found in situ, though many are held in museums and collections apparently bought from antiquities dealers. Since the forgery factory of Oded Golan was found in Jerusalem the originality of all of these is doubtful. They are identified as Moabite from them bearing the name of the Moabite god, Kemosh, on them. If some are genuine, they simply show that Moab had the same culture as its neigbouring countries in Palestine. Proto-Aeolian capitals of an eighth century building were found in Moab (Mudeibia) and were described as being “in a typical Phœnician style”. Despite the references to Moab in the bible and in the Assyrian tribute lists, archaeology has to conclude that the evidence in the ground for Moab as a prosperous nation is “more fantasy than reality”. Ammon
The Ammonite god is always considered to have been Milkom, meaning “the king”, often deliberately corrupted to Molech in the bible, but excavated Ammonite seals only unusually have Milkom as any part of the theophoric names that were ubiquitous in the ANE in those days. The most common name of a god appearing in names on Ammonite seals was “El”. A “yahu” appears and is assumed to have been nationally a Judahite, as yahus usually are by biblicists with only the bible as justification. Baalyasha Seal
An Ammonite seal found near Hisbon (Hesbon), in the form of a winged scarab with disc and crescent motifs, had Ammonite words inscribed in the Aramaean script. F M Cross, a biblicist respected for his expertise in Semitic languages, accepts that the language of Ammon east of the river Jordan was the same as Phœnician (Hebrew) with its own dialectical peculiarities. He thinks, even in the seventh century, it was written in Aramaean script. This seal is dated to the sixth century but the fifth is more likely, being when the Persians made Aramaic the official language of the empire, and a more likely time for the events of Jeremiah. The seal named the Ammonite god as Milcom-ur, the exact equivalent of the Phœnician, Melquart. The owner of the seal was Baalyasha (literally “Lord Jesus”!), translated as “My Lord Saves”, thought by some to be the Baalis of Jeremiah. The Persians seemed keen that their puppets and officials should have names implying that they were saviours, as part of their propaganda.
For biblicists it becomes a law that people have the name of their national god in their own personal name, and that shows where they came from. The Ammonite royal family did not have Milkom in their own names, and so, biblicist, N Freedman, has decided that the royal family of this country muct have been foreign. Of course, by the same token, most of the population were foreign too. Silly? It is, but allows the aforementioned typing of people with names in “yahu” as Jews wherever they might be. “Jews” are actually worshippers of Yehouah, and have been since Persian times. Judahites were not necessarily Jews or Jews Judahites. Edom
Another small nation mentioned in the bible was Edom to the south. Edomite language is again Western Semitic (Phœnician, Canaanite, but usually called Hebrew). By the early seventh century BC, like their Canaanite neighbours, it seems they began to write in Aramaic script instead of the Phœnician script that been used previously. The national god was Qos, and Qos was a common element of the theophoric names of Edom, to judge by the evidence unearthed. Curiously Qos is never mentioned in the bible, though Kemosh and Molech are. Edom came under Assyrian control in 734 BC, and Tiglath-pileser III mentions Qosmalku, a prince of Edom, as paying tribute. A letter found at Nimrud also mentions Edom as participating in a Palestinian coalition led by the Philistinian city of Ashdod in the time of Sargon II (712 BC). Aiarammu was another Edomite prince giving gifts to Sennacherib (701 BC), and a Qosga is mentioned in the reigns of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC). Finally, seals of one Qosgabru, entitled “king of Edom” were unearthed in both Petra and Babylon.
Stern says the traditional territory of the Edomites was in the southern Transjordan, but does not say how he knows it, because the biblical Edomites were the southern neighbours of Judah, to the west of the rift valley. In 2 Kings 16:6, bibles say the king of Edom seized Elath from Judah, and remained there until “this present day”. In fact, the Hebrew says the “king of Aram” not Edom, and it was the Syrians (Aramaeans) who were attacking Judah along with the Israelites, according to this biblical author (evidently recounting the events at a distance in time). It is questionable whether the Judahites ever ruled Elath, and seems just as likely that Judah was carved out of Edom as that the Edomites took parts of Judah. Stern obviously has no concern about biblical inerrancy in changing Aram to Edom, but it seems to be done simply to show that Edom stole parts of Judah, setting the precedent for a long antipathy. The politics of religion—never more true than today—are that God’s Chosen People have to believe that the Edomites always coveted Judah.
In fact, Judah seems to be the rump of Samaria, left when the Assyrians conquered the northern statelet. Since the Assyrians had also conquered Edom, it seems impossible that Judah was not itself an Assyrian vassal, and the Assyrians could hardly have tolerated their vassals fighting each other.
It should be remembered that the Assyrian system of vassaldom prevented fighting between and among the vassal states. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
If they did indeed fight, despite the certainty of retribution, it must have been from a powerful motive. Perhaps it was a deep resentment that the Assyrians had set up a puppet out of the rump of Samaria and a chunk of Edom. Samaria was incorporated into the Assyrian empire and ceased to exist as an independent state, but Judah and Edom continued as tribute paying vassals. Judah
Biblicists like to make a fuss of finds from seventh century Judah since it is the time when Judaism was supposed to have been enjoying its best years. Evidence of it being a successful and especially literate society are supposed to be the many bullae found from the time—bullae being clay seals used to seal papyrus documents. Yet we read:
Some assemblages of such bullae were discovered in scientific excavations, as at Lachish and the City of David in Jerusalem, but most were found in illicit excavations or are in private collections. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Stern adds:
A few hundred seals and seal impressions have been uncovered at Judaean sites, and even more are known from private collections.
The trouble with bullae in private collections is that the Israeli authorities exposed an antiquities forgery factory in the Jerusalem flat of a supposed “antiquities collector”, Oded Golan. Bullae were among the many things being forged there, and were among the easiest to make. The scam had been operating for decades. Investigators had to conclude that all such bullae, and many other Jewish antiquities, added to private collections and museums with no clear provenance since about 1980 are almost certain to be forgeries. Even many of those found in context have been misdated. The use of papyri expanded hugely in the fourth century under the Persians, and so too then did the use of seals. Many fourth century bullae have simply been dated to the time when the biblicists want to see them in the seventh.
An example of the overall Phœnician influence on the region is the prevalence of decorated tridacna shells, the shells of a Red Sea shellfish. They are found all over the southern Levant. Engraving them was a Phoenician speciality, and the decorated shells were evidently extremely popular, especially around 600 BC. The shells were supplied by the Arabs through Edom to Phœnicia to have value added by the decorations, and then re-exported. Unworked shells found in Judah show some at least of the trade in raw shells went through Judah. So, despite the supposed perpetiual enmity between the people of Edom and Judah, they were able to suppress it in the interests of a lucrative trade before the Babylonian invasion. A Pre-Assyrian Judah and Edom?
What, then, is the evidence of a pre-Assyrian Judah or Edom? It is not easy to establish that much of Edom was traditionally Judahite. From the myths of the bible, Judah was supposed to have held land south of the Beersheba valley, but it might always have been Arab except for Canaanite trading posts.
Edom is mentioned by the Ramesside kings Rameses II, Merneptah and Rameses III but no pottery preceding the eighth century attributable to the Edomites has been found. It yells out that the Egyptian dating is too high. These mini-states were coalescing from separate settlements and towns from about 850 BC to about 750 BC, suggesting at least a 300 year error in dating the founding of the Egyptian twentieth dynasty.
In 734 BC, Tiglath-pileser III made Edom into a vassal of Assyria. Twelve years later, Samaria went the same way. The bible makes the Jews hate the Edomites, and no one would deny their mutual antipathy, yet they had as much in common as the Jews had with Israel. Their national god was, admittedly different in name, but the gods of the small countries that surrounded Judah had similar characteristics, and were worshipped in a similar fashion.
Stern says the two statelets disputed the copper resources that were east of the Dead Sea, but these were in what Stern considers traditional Edomite territory, not in Judah, so it was the Judahites who were encroaching! But no remains have been found that preceded the Assyrians in Eastern Edom. A line of fortresses aligned north-south were all seventh century, and so post-Assyrian. None of the architecture or archaeology remaining in Buseirah (Bozrah) dates to before the Assyrians. A single period settlement found at Umm el Biyara, near Petra, yielded an inscription to Qosgabra, apparently the king of Edom who appeared on the Assyrian tribute lists about 670 BC. Five phases of archaeology at Tawilan were all post-Assyrian, and the only dating evidence was a cuneiform tablet bearing the name Darius! No Edomite texts pre-date the seventh century BC. What Edomite remains there are all come from western Edom, the part that was supposedly taken from Judah.
Rabbi N Glueck excavated Tell el Kheleifeh, assigning stratum IV to the Edomites of the seventh century BC. Ostraca, seals, and painted and plain clay vessels were found in a fortress with a four chambered gate. The fort was built on the foundations of an older one said to have been… Judahite! At Hazera, another seventh or sixth century fort was found allegedly built on a Judahite one. Stern says 46 fortresses were captured by the Assyrians many of them Judahite. Many were not rebuilt until Manasseh (685-641 BC) did it. In this view, destruction of them allowed in the Edomites. Edomite remains are found south and west to Kadesh Barnea, but most of them are found in a broad swath of land from the southern Dead Sea, along the valleys of the rivers Gerar and Beersheba to the Mediterranean coast. It seems that the Edomites lived from the coast around Qatif back into the hinterland to the east and south in a wedge through the Negev into Arabia. The biblicist belief is that this whole area was Judahite before the seventh century. All Edomite pottery is seventh century or later. Stern concludes that the Assyrians set up a greater Edom stretching almost to the coast, and it became the basis of the Persian Idumaea.
To judge from the excavations in the Negev desert, the pottery and the figurines of the God, Qos, the Negev was Edomite not Jewish. Qitmit and Tel Malhata, excavated by Tel Aviv University, seem to be an Edomite shrine and its nearby residential and servicing village. The many items found on these sites are Canaanite but come from all the statelets in the region. Another shrine was found at Ain Haseva in the Negev about 20 miles from the Dead Sea. Biblicists are perplexed that Edomite shrines are in places they have God’s word were in Judah. If so, it shows that the Judahites of the time, supposed to have been the seventh century, were not the monotheistic bigots they later became. They worshipped the gamut of Canaanite gods and goddesses, according to their own personal preferences, and Qos was among them. The truth is likely to be that the people of Judah in the seventh century were Edomites, or partly so.
In fact the earlier settlements are Canaanite. Pots from the pre-Edomite age bearing Canaanite motifs—roaring lions, a cow suckling a calf, a seated god or king, a grazing stag—have been found at Bozrah, and these motifs continued into the seventh century when Assyrian influence took over. Decorated shells and stones, and carved ivories and bones, quite typically Canaanite are also found. They were Judahite if these Canaanites called themselves Judahites but no one is sure they did before the fall of Samaria. The change from Canaanite to Arab was certainly effected by the Assyrian conquest. Before the Assyrians, the material culture of Edom was Phœnician (Canaanite). Samaria fell, and some decades later Judah was curtailed by Sennacherib. The question is whether Judah existed much before Samaria was conquered or whether it was sliced off that country and left as a newly named vassal of the Assyrians. There is no evidence of an Edomite state before the seventh century BC, but as the Assyrians withdrew, the Judahites might have tried a land grab from the Edomites sometime in the years 640-604 BC, before the Babylonians destroyed both of them as independent states (586 and 582 BC).
The story of Jacob and Esau is an allegory of Judah and Edom, in which Judah would prosper in financial matters while the Edomites would sweat in the fields to earn their living. That Jacob stole Esau’s birthright, forcing him to sell it for a mess of pottage, signifies that the Edomites were evicted with little compensation, to allow the Persian colonists to enter Yehud. The two peoples were thereafter perennial enemies. Jacob got his blind father to bless him rather than Esau, but had to flee, and only returned later, a metaphor of the Persian colonisation called “the Return”. But Edom did well out of the spice and perfume trade from Arabia, and this is reflected in the reconciliation of the two brothers, when Jacob offers to properly compensate Esau, and he accepts, even though he is quite well off himself. It suggests that the Edomites were able to get adequate compensation when they had become more powerful. Israelite and Canaanite Religion
So what was the religion of the Jews before they were exiled and “returned” with a more sophisticated religion? Formerly, believers, not least among them professional biblical scholars, saw history as the evidence of God’s progressive revelation as declared in the bible. Perhaps the sense that the earlier optimism was misplaced led to a backlash against history and a religious inclination towards biblical theology—religious interpretation of the mythology to find its theological importance vis-a-vis God’s revelation. All former religion was idolatrous and true religion came only as a personal revelation of God. Religious history was therefore irrelevant.
Latterly, the importance of history has returned but with a great deal more skepticism about revelation and a great deal more emphasis on history—what ordinary people, women and families were doing, considering where the Goddess had gone and seeking corroboration from different sources. Standard texts had concentrated on orthodoxy’s definition of acceptable religion that had expunged whole areas of religious evolution that were considered unimportant or even embarrassing.
Christians see the pure worship of God in pre-exilic times when the strange figures of God’s prophets were thought of as warning His people of their false steps. After the exile the Jews were thought to have got caught up in an excessive legalism that took all the spark out of God’s revelation. Jews, of course, saw it quite differently—the prophets warned the Jews against straying from God’s laws, so they applied them with firmness.
The seed of Abraham knew there was only one god from about two millennia BC, according to the clerics, and Christian clerics tell us that the Chosen People were truer to God’s wishes from then until they returned from Babylon. This then is an important period for study, especially for Christians. What though is found? The evidence suggests that Israelites worshipped their ancestors and “local” gods, not any universal god!
Biblical theology required the religion of the Israelites, sponsored, as it was, by God himself, to be vastly different—superior no less—to the religion of the other inhabitants of the Levant. The clerics therefore made a point of emphasising any difference they thought they saw between Israelitish religion and that of their contemporaries and compatriots, the Canaanites. Now a panther might be black all over but it is still in every other respect a leopard! To emphasize its different colour from other leopards is to miss every aspect of its true nature. Latterly, the fashion among biblical scholars has been precisely to examine the similarities between Israelitish religion and that of the Canaanites. Only the balance of similarities and differences can fairly suggest whether “God’s religion” was different in the beginning from Pagan religions.
According to the Holy Book, in Deuteronomy, God wants His Chosen People to enter Canaan and wipe out the native people living there as idolaters. The native people would be eradicated and their idolatry would be expunged. This was, of course, a wish of the Maccabees—a thousand years—later who felt themselves threatened by the Greeks and was never a wish of any native Israelites who amicably shared the land with their Canaanite brothers. That, the Hellenized writers considered, was the trouble. The Israelites did not wipe out all other competing religions, but they should have done. Accordingly they put the warning into the scriptures. The temptations of Baal were made to represent the temptations of Zeus and Apollo and the philosophy of Plato, all the pertinent problems for Judaism at the time the scriptures were set down.
Yet an archaeologist (W F Albright) besotted by biblical theology, despite a lifetime of “scholarship”, can assure the readers of a “learned” book that “Canaanite and Phœnician paganism” contrasted with “the faith and practice of Israel”. The only contrast here is in the author’s tendentious choice of words to describe the religion he favours and the one he does not.
Albright and all the many other biblical bigots can only see the source of their own religion as dynamic and true while the religions of the Canaanite neighbours of the Israelites were static and false. Because these religions are dead, they were seen as already dead even when they were alive, while the religion of a small minority of the people of Canaan, the Israelites, was alive, and so it has remained. God’s religion was an active historical stage for Him to unfold his plan, though quite why God had to unfold his plan in this restricted and obscure way, rather than unfolding it for everyone He had created in the world, is never answered. No one knows because the whole thing is a fantasy of clerics intent on controlling simple people to their own financial advantage.
Albright saw the Israelites as non-Canaanites who had entered the land from outside whether by conquest as the bible says or by infiltration, as the theologians accepted as a fall back position. There was not the least bit of evidence on or under the ground for any such invasion, and Albright was an archaeologist! The received view today is that, if there is no hint of a change of culture in some respect, then there was no change. There is no hint, so there was no change. What changed was the climate.
Desication of the land in the Bronze Age led to some Canaanites having to take to a more marginal method of living, pastoralism probably supplemented by the proceeds of banditry. These hill dwelling pastoral Canaanites and part time bandits were called the Apiru or Hebrews. At a later date, just as the Iron Age was beginning, the climate became less arid and conditions changed back to those suitable for sedentary life. The Hebrew bandits started to go straight, settling down first in the hills, then they were gradually admitted back into civilized society. They had not entered or re-entered Canaan, they were ethnically Canaanites, a mixed group anyway, and they had Canaanite culture throughout. Dead Ancestors and Local Cults Baal
The local god and the local ruler were, for the Semites, each a “melek” (their ruler, a king), and a “baal” (their owner, a Lord). The human ruler and the local god were essentially one, an impression the Persians were to use. Often, the ruling dynasty descended from a god or hero, making the king divine, just as the emperor-cult of Rome dominated army and province, and welded the aristocracy and the masses.
Though a few disagree, most students now see the cult of dead ancestors as an important part of the Israelite religion before the exile. Dead ancestors had divine qualities and were called “elohim”—divine beings. The family estate was passed down by the ancestors and so families were more or less wealthy depending upon their ancestors’ endeavours. For this they had to be honoured whatever level the family began at. Even slaves became members of their master’s family. Families kept little statuettes—terephim—that stood for their elohim or “gods” and who represented the family’s identity and fortunes. Rights of passage involved ceremonies of presentation of family members to the terephim for recognition and approval.
Besides the cult of ancestors, successful families also had a cult of a founding “father” as a god. Plainly this was an extension of ancestor worship into a personal god of the family handed down by the father—the head of the household. By the early part of the final millennium BC, large clans had turned their family god into a localized cult with local shrines or temples. Generally he was called “Baal” meaning “Lord” because the senior member of a family is always addressed as Lord by his descendants, but he also had a toponym, a place name, or a clan name. Baal-Peor, the name of a Moabite god, was one such toponymic name.
The names of Yehouah were similarly distinguished as excavators at Kuntillet Ajrud found in 1976 when they found references to Yehouah-Samaria and Yehouah-Teman. Just as Baal was not a single god, Yehouah was not a single god but a set of regional gods. Yehouah seems to mean “He Lives” or “He Is”, rendered for scriptural purposes as “I Am”. Thus the God of the Christians and the Jews is always called “The Living God”.
It seems he was originally a god of life or existence, a god who brought things into life, and therefore of fertility as scholars have long thought. Transfering the creation of everything to him when he displaced El as the creator was therefore easy. To his worshippers he was the “Lord of Existence”.
In any event the plurality of Baals was matched by the multiplicity of Yehouahs. There is good circumstantial evidence for a Yehouah-Hebron and a Yehouah-Zion. The sponsors of the cult of the temple at Jerusalem wanted to gather all of the local Yehouahs into one, whence their slogan:
Hear, O Israel: Yehouah is one Yehouah Dt 6:4
which plainly shows that there was a multiplicity of Yehouahs, but it is not the message the clerics want to tell their monotheistic flocks, and so is deliberately mistranslated as:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.
The Moabite Stone illuminates our ideas of pre-Persian Israelite beliefs. In the bible, the Moabites and Ammonites were kinsmen of the Israelites, and the Moabite Stone shows they had the same language. Though their gods had different names, the two peoples shared similar beliefs. The national god of Israel and of Moab, who controlled national affairs, were each shown as an angry tyrant to be obeyed and mollified. Chemosh, the god of Moab, ruled directly according to Mesha who did what the god told him to do. Moab was oppressed by Israel because Chemosh was angry at his people, and Moab prospered because Chemosh dwelt with his people. Substitute Yehouah for Chemosh and the bible appears. Chemosh ordered Mesha, “Go, take Nebo from Israel!” just as Yehouah ordered Joshua to take Ai (Josh 8:1).
Both the Israelites and Moab used the “ban”, or vow, in warfare. The king would make a vow to kill the entire population of an enemy city, vowing also treasure for the god. Now the king had to enforce the vow. In Joshua 6:17-21, Joshua put Jericho under the ban and ended massacring them all, “men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys”. Saul failed to fulfil a “ban” by sparing the choice sheep and cattle, leading to his downfall. Jephthah vowed his daughter to Yehouah (Jg 11:30-40) and also could not avoid the outcome.
Mesha built houses such as the “house of Baal-Meon”, a common element in Canaanite place names, apparently as the place of a shrine to a deity. Phœnician Cults
Lists of cult items and temple functionaries found in Phœnician temples as far west as Marseilles resemble the lists in the bible. They include, though, the lists of the prices of animals bought for sacrifice. Of the images most often found are a standing, seated or horse-born god, a woman perhaps pregnant, supporting her breasts, or a mother suckling a child, and sometimes separate statuettes of the mother and the child, and statuettes of a youth. The infant motif might have been from Egypt around the eighth century.
The well-known Baalam insciption refers to Shagar and Ishtar. The goddess Ishtar appears in the form common to all these Palestinian countries as a naked woman (in statuettes, seals, and so on) offering her breasts. Remarkably depictions of a child god are also found. It is modelled like the Egyptian images of the child Horus, but no inscribed name has been found. Besides these, archaeologists have found hundreds of dedications to a pair of gods round the coasts of the Mediterranean. Sometimes the gods have inscribed names, sometimes more than one—identities or compound names, perhaps. The male is Bal Melquart, Baal Eshmun, Baal Gebal. The female is Baalat Gebal, Ashtorath Tanit, Tanit Pane Baal. Baal was a title common in theophoric personal names among Israelites, Judaeans, Philistines, Moabites, Edomites and Ammonites as well as Phœnicians.
The official Ammonite cult, like that of other Palestinian peoples in this period, was generally based on a divine couple. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
S Moscati’s explanation was that the Phœnician cults involved a protective father god, a fertile mother god, and their son, whose annual birth or resurrection stood for the growth of vegetation, and therefore the seasonal cycle. These gods seemed common to all Phœnicia, though the names of the gods differed from city to city. So, it was not a pantheon but a trinity differently named according to the place.
The Phoenician cult… became the prototype of all the pagan cults practised by other peoples during the period [the Iron Age] including the Judaeans. E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
It would naturally be so because the Judaeans were simply a Canaanite people like the Phœnicians.
The Phœnician temple of Astarte at Kition accepted the hair of worshippers. A red burnished bowl was found there with a description of the offering. Another find confirmed it. It seemed to be part of a bill of account, and listed the “sacred barbers”. It suggests that the Jewish order of the Nazarites was not peculiar to Judaism. The Nazarites had their head shaved as a penance then did not have it cut again unless they broke a vow.
Evidence from the Phœnician cemetary at Azlit is interpreted as showing the Phœnicians stopped burning their dead at the beginning of the sixth century BC, instead laying the corpses to rest in rock cut tombs. It seems a curious coincidence that this latter was a Persian practice, that the Persians venerated fire and considered it to have been desecrated by burning corpses, and they objected to the burning of young children to be placed in the tophet, as the Phœnicians had dones until the Persian period. In other words, there were good reasons for the change observed in the Azlit cemetary from towards the end of the sixth century but not before, and the dating looks to be at least half a century out. Elsewhere, at Achzib, Persian period shaft tombs have been found alongside what seem to be eighth century ones.
Ephraim Stern says burial in stone anthropoid coffins began in the Egyptian twenty sixth dynasty and the Phœnicians, Ammonites and Palestinians copied them. What point is he highlighting here as having been copied, the anthropoid feature or that the coffins were of stone. Plainly, it is that the coffins were of stone because anthropoid coffins had been common in Egypt for a long time. Yet burial in stone, whether in coffins or in caves of mausoleums made of stone, was a Persian ritual necessary from their desire not to pollute the elements with a corpse. The Persians constituted the twenty seventh dynasty, beginning in 525 BC when the Egyptian twenty sixth dynasty was overthrown by Cambyses. Yehouah as the Dying God Baal
The Persian colonists seemed to have expunged any inscriptional signs of Yehouah as a nature god, and made any reversion to it an apostasy against the proper god, Yehouah. Even so, there still are poetical references to the storm god, Yehouah, and the sun god, Yehouah, in the poetical sections of the bible. Garbini points to the struggle with a sea monster called Rahab or Leviathan. (Ps 74, 79; Isa 27; 51; Job 40-41). Elsewhere Phœnician elements occur as in Psalms 104, a cosmogony from Tyre relating to the god Elqunirs. Part too of the story of Esau and Jacob (Gen 27) seem identifiable in the work of Philo of Byblos on the origins of Tyre. One could hazard a guess that, if we ever found details of the mythology of the Phœnicians, much more of the Jewish scriptures would be found in it. Fragmentary Phœnician texts written in Greek in the Hellenistic period show what Phœnician history must have been like. Mochus, Philo of Byblos and the Annals of Tyre show literature that could have been used as a model, if not a source, of parts of the Hebrew bible. The histories of Phœnicia written by Philo of Byblos and Mochus began with a cosmogony just as the Hebrew bible does. Already, allusions in the Song of Deborah and Psalms 29 have been found in the Ugaritic tablets.
Ras Shamra is the modern name of the ancient city Ugarit, discovered by accident in 1928 on the coast of Syria in what was once Phœnicia. In May 1929, archaeologists uncovered the clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing, unusually written in a cuneiform alphabet of 30 characters. From the summer of 1930, the Ras Shamra cuneiform was decoded. The language of the script, called Ugaritic, was a Northwest Semitic language, closely related to Phœnician and Hebrew but preceding them. Ugaritic alphabet
In the scriptures initiated by the school of Ezra, Baal is an idolatrous god and sometimes a rival to Yehouah for the attention of the Israelites. In Elijah’s dispute with Baal’s prophets on Mount Carmel (1 Kg 18), Yehouah—not Baal—proved to be the controller of rain and storm, or lightning which “fell as fire”. Yet, the Ras Shamra tablets associate Baal with rain, storm, and fertility, and proclaim him as “Haddu, lord of the Stormcloud”. Through rain, Baal provided fertile ground which produced crops on which both animals and men depended. Baal’s worshippers sought to maintain his supremacy so that their life-sustaining crops could continue.
Scholars noted parallels between the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible, suggesting the Israelite religion was an adaptation of Pagan religious myths and practises to worship of Yehouah. Early agricultural societies were polytheistic. They had a pantheon of gods with different functions, although they often had a high god above them all. The main function of agricultural gods was to keep the land fertile, and many of the rites of these gods were sexual. This manifests itself in the Jewish scriptures where the opponents of the Israelites are shown as fornicating with their gods, and the same type of abuse is applied to the supposedly apostate Israelites who follow the same practices. It shows that the Canaanite religion was what could have been expected in that kind of society. Yet the monotheistic worship of Yehouah was imposed on to the formerly polytheistic people.
So, the bible speaks of “sons of El”, “sons of God”, one of whom is Yehouah. The bible itself has evidence that Yehouah was worshipped by non-Israelites, though biblicists can usually find reasons that they really were. Even the admired scholar Martin Noth defends this:
In no case is the name Yehouah to be encountered outside and independently of Israel. So the tradition of the book of Exodus could be right, namely that the divine name Yehouah arose for the first time in Israel, or better for the first time with the people of Israel, and therefore in some way goes back to the work of Moses.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man should be king, but Christians will not even open a single eye to the evidence:
The ark drawn by the Philistine cows ends up in a field of a Canaanite from Beth Shemesh, but he has a theophoric name in Yehouah—Joshua (1 Sam 6:14,18). Names which incorporate the name of a God implies worship of him. Yeho, Yo, and Yah are Yehouah appearing in names and imply worship of Him, but this man was not an Israelite, he was a Canaanite! The son of the king of Hamath, an Aramaean kingdom north of Israel, is Joram (2 Sam 8:10). Biblicists with their usual reverence for the ineptitude of the Holy Ghost say it is an error for Hadoram—theophoric in Hadad. Jochabed is Moses’s mother (Ex 6:20, Num 26:59), so she anticipated God’s revelation to the prophet. Yaubidi was the Aramaean king of Hamath known from the annals of Sargon II. Though he is plainly an Aramaean king of an Aramaean country, Noth makes his theory perfectly valid by declaring this king to have been an Israelite! Names in the tablets of Mari and other Syrian cities of the eighteenth century BC have theophoric elements “yahwi”, “yawi” and “ya”. These are plainly enough theophoric references to Yehouah, supposed to be exclusive to the Israelites in the theories of biblicists like Noth. Biblicists of the Albright school continued the pretence, but “The name of my son is Yaw”, appeared on a fragment from Ugarit. Needless to say, biblicists began to find ingenious ways of denying what is obvious—Yehouah was a god of the Ugaritic people long before Moses. Even a Catholic scholar, Abbé H Cazelles protests that “yaw” at Ugarit has been “challenged without reason”. More absurd still is that no one doubts that the god “Ieuo” was worshipped at nearby Berytus as Porphyry testifies and Eusebius was happy to accept. “Ya” and its variants are also found in the Ebla tablets, even having a divine determinative. G Pettinato deciphers a sign found commonly on the Ebla tablets as “ia” (“ya”), and, though most experts read it also as “i”, “li” and “ni”, biblicists have begun to treat third millennium Syria as evidence of the bible, ignoring in their typical fashion, the actual bible and all previous opinion. Suddenly the Biblicists were glad to accept this “ya” as justification for the biblical cycle of Abraham myths. Abraham found himself wandering around Syria a thousand years earlier than he had been, and Moses became suddenly an embarrassment! It does not work. A widespread regional god could not at the same time have been the exclusive god of one patriarch and his family.
There is no doubt that “yau” was a god of the local Syrian pantheon towards the beginning of the second millennium, worshipped by both nomads and the sedentary population. That Yehouah was a god of the pantheon of the Levant back into time contradicts the Mosaic legend that it was brought by him from Egypt. This pre-Israelite god became the exclusive God of the Israelites but it is certain that it did not happen as the bible says it did. Yehouah was a god of the people that the Israelites supposedly converted long before they arrived in the Mosaic myth.
Psalms 29 has been extensively analysed in comparative studies of the Hebrew and Ugaritic texts. H L Ginsberg, in 1935, suggested a Canaanite origin of this psalm as a Pagan hymn to the storm-god, Baal, later adapted to the worship of Yehouah. Baal is the storm-god, sending lightning with thunder, his holy voice, causing his “enemies to quake”. Baal’s voice “convulses the earth” and causes the “mountains to quake”. In the Ugaritic tablets, the wood for Baal’s palace was from “Lebanon and its trees, From Sirion its precious cedars”. Psalms 29 also speaks of the cedars of Lebanon and Sirion:
From Sirion its precious cedars. Psalms 29:6
In the psalm, Yehouah is described in the same terms as Baal (29:3-5,7-9)—his voice “breaks the cedars” (29:5), “shakes the wilderness” (29:8) and “strips the forests bare” (29:9). Since Yehouah is depicted as a neurotically jealous god, it is not possible for a psalm to Baal to have been transferred to Yehouah. The Israelites must actually have been worshipping Baal under the name of Yehouah. The scriptures admit (Jg 3:7) that the Israelites worshipped Baal when they had occupied Canaan. This admission is a slip of the “second” temple priesthood who had written the scriptures. The priests had set up a temple in Jerusalem at the behest of the Persian king, so that all Hebrews—the people of Abarnahara—would worship one god. The reward for the priests was to get rich quick, and for the Persians to raise revenue and unite a mixed people into the common culture of Persia. So the scriptures were written as a polemic against older gods—the gods the Israelites had worshipped before the colonists were sent. This oversight shows the reality but a critical examination of the Jewish scriptures does not suggest any ancient Israelite allegiance to an almighty transcendental god.
Christians, who are troubled by this, desperately point out that the Ugaritic texts are not “exactly” the same as Psalms 29. One wonders how they can be exactly the same when they are in different languages written in different scripts. The psalmist might have modified a Canaanite hymn essentially by replacing the name Baal with the personal name of the Jewish God. That other changes occurred in translation and subsequently seems obvious and unavoidable, but to pretend that the two hymns are independent because they are not “fully alike”, is typically Christian.
They add that the bible can say what it likes as the word of God and whatever it says implies no dependence on Baal worship or anything else Pagan. Here is an even funnier joke:
The Old Testament was intended also for the gentile world, it is but natural that the biblical authors availed themselves of figures of speech and imagery with which also Israel’s neighbours were familiar, or which were at least easily understandable to them. Alexander Heidel, cited by Garry G Brantley
“Familiar figures and literary style would facilitate gentiles’ understanding of the truth”. Note how these bizarre Christian kooks think the ancient Jewish priests were writing for gentiles and that they were writing the truth! This is only true in the sense that the Hebrews were not all Israelites. They inluded Phœnicians, Levantine Canaanites, Aramaeans and the residue of Hittites and other older invaders as well as the influxing Arabs. Hebrew was their sacred language and script, not just that of the Israelites.
Anyway, in typical Christian polemical style, having argued that there is no link at all between these ancient texts and the Hebrew bible, they then give it all away, hoping that you will not notice because you are as thick and uncomprehending as the average bird-brained believer, by adding that:
The existence of these similarities argues eloquently for the bible’s integrity.
And these similarities…
…provide one of the chief evidences that the bulk of the Psalms were not written after the Babylonian exile. Their language fits that used by Israel’s neighbours in the very time our Hebrew Bible says the Psalms were written.
So these similarities, rather than militating against the bible’s credibility, buttress its integrity. What was denied as being dependent or even connected suddenly proves to be a virtue.
They can, if they wish, believe that black is white and the earth is flat, but intelligent people do not believe either. Nor do they believe that the bible appeared perfectly formed at God’s bidding. Rational people reject this nonsense. Of course, Christianity has never been rational, which is probably the reason Christians want us all to be like them. Christians blindly claim:
the bible’s ethical and spiritual concepts are unparalleled by Pagan sacred literature; the gods of Pagan myths are guilty of degenerate behaviour of all sorts; Yehouah is infinite in purity; Pagans constantly had to pacify their angry gods.
On wonders whether these people ever actually read the Jewish scriptures. They seem to use them simply to dig out some authoritative quotation to suit whatever they are saying. Try reading your Old Testament and tell us then that this syncretistic god, Yehouah, is free of degenerate behaviour, practises unparalleled ethical concepts, is infinitely pure and does not have to be pacified. If they cannot see that the bits of the scriptures that they like are not precisely the sycophantic writings of fearful and superstitious men, eager to pacify the most monstrous ogre that ever got a billion people worshipping him, then they are not only blind but insane.
Aliyan Baal’s supposed death and resurrection has big holes in it at the crucial points, according to Christian apologists. Yet, the text says “Baal is reported to have died” after descending to the underworld. There he is “as dead”. Anat recovers his corpse and buries it. Later El sees in a dream that Baal yet lives. After another gap, Baal is in a battle. What is missing? Baal is reported to have died and is described as dead yet he reappears fighting a battle. Meantime, he must have been revivified..."
Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
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posted
^ There are some Biblical scholars who identify the Hebrews or at least some of among their tribes with a Bedouin people in southern Jordan / northwestern Arabia called 'Yahu' or 'Yehu'. This name occurs in among the names of later Israelite kings and is also related to the deity popularly called 'Yahweh' today although the exact pronunciation was something else.
As for Levantine mythology, have you heard of the Theogony of Sanchuniathon? It is very similar to the Greek Theogony but with Semitic deities. The myth of Baal is not uncommon for fertility male deities who die and resurrect.
Posts: 26243 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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All I can say is people are always eager to right out TRUTH(Bible) and claim they "know" better then an book that is thousands of years old, But still relevant today. The scholars are so pathetic that I remember reading on the net about how "WE FOUND JESUS TOMB" WHen I first heard this I laughed and felt sorry for people who listen to Man and Not God on how shameful these "leaders" are trying to turn people away from Yah. The Bible is All I need to get me through those rocky days and Thank Yahweh that his mercy and not wanting to see ANYONE burning in hell he gives us chances upon chances to come with him.
Remember the parable Jesus said to the People that "Gods not the God of dead but of the Living" There is More rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner that repents then 99 just men that need No repentence.
Never will I listen to man and there lust of being better then others.
WE Christians are Soldiers, As the Bible states We are unprofitable servants we did what we are supposed to do.
Also as having an personal relationship with Christ, We as soldiers don't get angry when people mock Jesus, because We KNOW Jesus is TRUE and he says "Vengeance is mine I will repay" Look how disgustingly this world mocks Jesus yet Christians never threatened to kill, burn flags or harm others. Muslims, MUST threaten and kill others because the Imamss read the quran and see Muhammad was everything Jesus wasn't. Muslims must intimidate others to keep quiet about how evil if islam.
REad this DANA and tell me you are not disgusted with the evil of muahmmad and his false book:
Surah 18:74:
So they set out, until when they met a boy, al-Khidh r killed him. [Moses] said, "Have you killed a pure soul for other than [having killed] a soul? You have certainly done a deplorable thing."
Surah 18:80
And as for the boy, his parents were believers, and we feared that he would overburden them by transgression and disbelief.
See the Evils of that book??? Kill an child because he may leave the faith when he gets older.
Then you understand why In Turkey girls are killed by there fathers for even looking at an boy. To regain "honour" Acid thrown on an 13 yearold by her mom because she talked to boys her own age.
Shieks and Imams marrying 8yearold girls to 50+ yearold men who see no wrong in traumatizing girls.
In Iran you can Rent an girl to Marry for as quick as 15mins then just Repeat "I divorce You three times" then go about your business, sex with no strings.
Sorry for the rant DANA but Man, When I see corruption, I speak up.
Peace
Posts: 9651 | From: Reace and Love City. | Registered: Oct 2005
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