Thanks for watching the video…you are probably the only one who did. Certainly the David stories were probably embellished, but this wouldn’t make David non-historical. There were plenty of dubious stories about George Washington.
And some of the David stories were so unflattering they were unlikely to have been made up, since David was revered.
Oh yes. Mosaic 3:23 Oh ye of little faith trust not to your Internet understanding.
Yes we have evidence so the lack of evidence argument doesn’t apply. This in no way contradicts the lack of evidence argument.
Jericho was not burned. And it hasn’t been eroded away.
It has been excavated by various parties going back over 100 years.
Jericho is the one of the world’s oldest cities. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of more than twenty successive settlements in Jericho dating to roughly 9000 BCE, close to the beginning of the Holocene epoch.12 The site experienced many destructions and reconstructions, sometimes due to warfare, but more often resulting from earthquakes.
So maybe the Inuit, the Apaches, and even the Neandertals made pottery.
btw, when is somebody going to show us the pottery styles the Hebrews developed in the wilderness?
Agreed. The video was excellent and I enjoyed it as Cargill is an excellent teacher. Years ago, when I took an elective in history, (which I really love reading!) from my intense studies in Science (in a one of Canada’s best Universities), I had a course from a professor who had done their PhD under the famed Near East Expert Dr. Spicer of U of Penn. Cargill reminds me of her in terms of his knowledge and teaching ability.
We studied Roux and other excellent books on Ancient Iraq, Egypt and other ANE stuff focusing a lot of time on Sumer/Akkad. It is interesting that at the time, one of my papers was on the origin of zero which seems to have arisen in Sumer long before the Mayans and other groups had discovered it. The information had just come to light and was cutting edge stuff.
Contains, yes, not “is primarily”, which is what you’re after for pottery. “Is primarily clay and rocks” describes the soil anywhere near me, except with the creeks and rivers where there is more sand.
Now I have found the right pages for those citations:
Influx of people: (what we have is a four-fold increase in the number of settlements over ~60 years) and 60 years seems enough to start producing pottery.
Finklestein, 1988-9. Tel Aviv 15-16 117-183
Zertal, 1991. Biblical Archeology Review 17(5) 28-49; 75
are two of those cited.
The layers from 1280-900 BC are gone; there is plenty from before 1400 BC.
Bienkowski, 1986. Jericho in the Late Bronze Age (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986)
is cited as covering the relevant material.
So did the conquest take 60 years? And was it 20-30,000 people coming in?
Bill says the Hebrews started creating pottery in the wilderness without a potter’s wheel. So I wanted to see the new style of pottery the Hebrews introduced.
Archaeology doesn’t support a conquest of Jericho, which was at best barely occupied at the time.
I said it was possible. So if they did or if they didn’t I am right. Never quoted odds on it happening.
My favorite part of the Exodus narrative is when God murders all the first born babies and children in Egypt.
You hit the nail on the head. Thank goodness the evidence clearly shows most of this stuff is not historical. This is all pretty much settled in scholarship today.
It is a shame to me that so many Christians defend such atrocities and genocide. The desire for certainty and a single doctrinal view that mistakes the Bible’s literary genres seems to take priority over the value of human life. It’s a cold and disheartening theology.
Some can’t conceive of this material being non-historical or being in error as written. Yet they can conceive of God murdering tens of millions of babies and children. We might as well defend the Holocaust and chattel slavery from a Christian perspective as well.
Vinnie
Only most? The total population of Egypt 1446 BCE would have been in the low millions. As in around 2.
What about 1260 BC, which is a better fit for the Exodus?
From the text, it took more like 200 years. It takes some time to build villages.
Archaeology can’t tell us one way or another. There was something there c.1280-1220 BC, but all we have surviving are a few tombs.
On all of the comments about the deaths being problematic theologically, my response is:
Is a person carrying out a death sentence on someone who has been justly convicted guilty of something?
I was using most as an umbrella term for large swathes of the OT. I am not convinced any of the Biblical exodus is historical. Moses is certainly highly suspect and nothing in the account as written seems to have any historical corroboration and everything is against it.
An unjust law is no law at all. Can babies, toddlers, unborn children, be justly convicted of anything and then be put to death?
What was the crime of these children? How can an embryo be guilty of anything? Is it a case of nits make lice?
The Nazis thought like this. Before murdering Jews, Roma, etc. they turned against their own citizens, murdering people with any mental disability or any other “defect.” They started with murdering any defective child up to about 2-3 years old by lethal injection. They expanded this program to all ages and used gas to kill them–lethal injection was too slow.
The Exodus never happened, so Biblical chronology suffices.
Any estimates for population in Ancient Egypt are likely to come with with large error bars and are as likely to fluctuate with what area Ancient Egypt covered as well, but, restricting to traditional Egypt (delta up to the first cataract [Aswan]) numbers seem to range from 2 to 3 million in the New Kingdom (around 1550 to 1077 BCE). BTW 1260 BCE would be right smack in the middle of Ramasses II’s reign and a time where he controlled the Levant including what was to become Israel and Judah at least as far as Byblos. At most you would get a very small exodus (a handful of families) not seriously pursued then.
I am not arguing to support genocide, far from it, and judging scripture is one thing, but the attitude willing to judge God is another.
We dare not presume what justice for lèse-majesté, “to do wrong to majesty”, might entail (one might expect some serious repercussions if they called a queen a whore to her face). That’s something that Job did not do amidst his many sufferings:
Let’s just say, “We were only following orders”
If that was an unspecific reply to me, then you did not understand what I said and/or taking it out of context.
Without definite evidence there is no support for the Exodus. The problem for Biblical passages like this is exactly that, almost no evidence or none. This of-course does not prove that something didn’t happen or is based on something that may have happened (although in a very different way that described). But the flip side is also true, without evidence over time from multiple sources with a reasonable or more than a reasonable amount of evidence, makes the existence of something very unlikely.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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