To be fair to the old testament it’s not factual history. Those no proof of a Unified Kingdom of Israel and no proof for any of Joshua’s conquests. Even though we have evidence of much older kingdoms in the area such as Yamhad.
If anything the old testament has history reversed. In 722 BC the Assyrians destroy Israel (circa 1000 BC with capital always in Shechem). The refugees move to Judah (circa 900 BC). The Israelites took their religion and rebased it on Jerusalem AFTER Israel got sacked. This means a “Jewish” identity for Israel could not have taken off until the 600 BCs at the earliest. 4000 years of Judaism history my 🍑.
Maccabee came in the 200 BCs and forced people into what we now call Judaism. The reason why a complete Bible cannot be found from the BC era is because the Bible wasn’t finished yet.
The oldest fragment of the old testament says that the mountain around Shechem is the holy place.
The Bible says that a lot of the Judahites were bad but all of the Samaritans are bad.
The book of Joshua is archeologically completely anachronistic and false in the Southern Levant.
The early Israelites have only been found to have been peacefully cohabitating with the Canaanites and Philistines in the early Iron Age after they emerged as a population.
Personally, I think like a number of the pre-Judahite stories, that this was coming from an Aegean/Anatolian sea peoples forced relocation into the Southern Levant that ends up absorbed into the Israelite history.
‘Yeshua’ in Greek can go as either Jesus or Jason.
The Argonauts allegedly had a prophet Mopsus that died in the desert as they traveled by foot from a conflict in North Africa (not long before one of their elite warriors was killed by a shepherd casting a stone from a sling, actually).
There’s no walls at the Biblical Jericho at the time these events were supposedly taking place, but Mycenae around 1200 BCE has its walls fall down (and it seems not to have been an earthquake, which was a recent surprise).
There’s no evidence of the Israelites being a bunch of tribes conquering nearby cities and certainly not several across an ancestral homeland, but the sea peoples were a confederation of different tribes conquering their various home cities (at a time of various natural disasters were conveniently undermining powerful kingdoms, which was likely a factor in why they were so successful and why this period ends up mythologized with divine interventions).
At one of those battles the sea people were described as being without foreskins. This seems to be the same one day battle against Egypt that Odysseus claimed to have fought right at after the Trojan war.
The parallels get really incredible when you dive deeper into some of them. The recent Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the only apiary in the “land of milk and honey” importing bees from Anatolia and worshipping an unknown bee goddess, and the song of Deborah (‘bee’), prophet and leader of the Israelites, talking about “Dan stayed on their ships” is super fucking interesting for example.
I think a lot of what we think we know about the Mediterranean at the fall of the Bronze Age is due to be turned on its head as the historians of antiquity like Herodotus, Hecateus of Adbera, Atrapanus of Alexandria, Tacitus, and Manetho end up validated with a number of things modern historians have been making fun of with an air of superiority (bizarre given the relative access to documentary and oral traditions and the relationship of that to the likely impacts of survivorship bias).
If there’s a particular area you want more details on, feel free to ask. But to actually include all the nuanced details for the summary above would take about 20 pages, and I really don’t think most people here care enough to wade through all that (nor do I care to write all that out on my weekend).
You need hard evidence for events that were essentially before the beginning of written history, but apparently this isn’t necessary for their assertions. Weasel words, indeed.
Huh? Written history begins around 2,000 years before these events. What are you talking about?
A number of the relevant pieces of information are the details in contemporary written accounts from Egyptian or Hittite sources which range from royal records of conflicts to letters written between countries.
That’s how we know for example that there was actually a single day battle between Egypt and the sea peoples with Libya which Egypt wins and takes captives from seven years before an usurper Pharoh conquered Egypt. There’s literally dozens of pages written about that battle by Merneptah. Which then bears a striking resemblance to the mythical story in the Odyssey of Odysseus fighting a one day battle against Egypt where he’s taken captive exactly seven years before “a certain Phrygian” shows up to try to ransom him to Libya.
We even have records from Ramses III which describe the end of the 19th dynasty around the time of this usurper as Egypt having been conquered with outside help, switching to a form of government of city state governors, and “making the gods like men.” Claims that resemble the Phoenician form of city state government emerging at this time and the claims of Phoenician euhemerism “from around the time of the Trojan War” in Philio of Byblos.
Yeah, but it’s pretty shit. It’s far from reliable, the Bible counts as part of the historical record and we are reasonably sure there weren’t really any giants.
The rest is all Biblio of Biblios, I’m now aware what me rattling off a bunch of science information must sound like to people.
I was supporting your position anyway, you massive, swinging autist.
Why is it that followers of holy books always have a section or two that should be ignored when it’s convenient?
‘the word of God’, but you can toss out whole sections without a second thought, meanwhile, if you break what’s said in the other section you’re definitely evil
straight from the book of joahua in the old testament
Here is a list of the killings in Joshua.
The Jericho Massacre
Achan and his family are stoned and burned to death
The Ai Massacre
God stops the sun so that Joshua can get his killing done in the daylight
Five kings are killed and hung on trees
Joshua utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God commanded
The genocide of twenty kingdoms
The Anakim: Some more giant killing
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/dwb/jos.html
thanks God
To be fair to the old testament it’s not factual history. Those no proof of a Unified Kingdom of Israel and no proof for any of Joshua’s conquests. Even though we have evidence of much older kingdoms in the area such as Yamhad.
If anything the old testament has history reversed. In 722 BC the Assyrians destroy Israel (circa 1000 BC with capital always in Shechem). The refugees move to Judah (circa 900 BC). The Israelites took their religion and rebased it on Jerusalem AFTER Israel got sacked. This means a “Jewish” identity for Israel could not have taken off until the 600 BCs at the earliest. 4000 years of Judaism history my 🍑.
Maccabee came in the 200 BCs and forced people into what we now call Judaism. The reason why a complete Bible cannot be found from the BC era is because the Bible wasn’t finished yet.
The oldest fragment of the old testament says that the mountain around Shechem is the holy place.
The Bible says that a lot of the Judahites were bad but all of the Samaritans are bad.
The book of Joshua is archeologically completely anachronistic and false in the Southern Levant.
The early Israelites have only been found to have been peacefully cohabitating with the Canaanites and Philistines in the early Iron Age after they emerged as a population.
Personally, I think like a number of the pre-Judahite stories, that this was coming from an Aegean/Anatolian sea peoples forced relocation into the Southern Levant that ends up absorbed into the Israelite history.
‘Yeshua’ in Greek can go as either Jesus or Jason.
The Argonauts allegedly had a prophet Mopsus that died in the desert as they traveled by foot from a conflict in North Africa (not long before one of their elite warriors was killed by a shepherd casting a stone from a sling, actually).
There’s no walls at the Biblical Jericho at the time these events were supposedly taking place, but Mycenae around 1200 BCE has its walls fall down (and it seems not to have been an earthquake, which was a recent surprise).
There’s no evidence of the Israelites being a bunch of tribes conquering nearby cities and certainly not several across an ancestral homeland, but the sea peoples were a confederation of different tribes conquering their various home cities (at a time of various natural disasters were conveniently undermining powerful kingdoms, which was likely a factor in why they were so successful and why this period ends up mythologized with divine interventions).
At one of those battles the sea people were described as being without foreskins. This seems to be the same one day battle against Egypt that Odysseus claimed to have fought right at after the Trojan war.
The parallels get really incredible when you dive deeper into some of them. The recent Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the only apiary in the “land of milk and honey” importing bees from Anatolia and worshipping an unknown bee goddess, and the song of Deborah (‘bee’), prophet and leader of the Israelites, talking about “Dan stayed on their ships” is super fucking interesting for example.
I think a lot of what we think we know about the Mediterranean at the fall of the Bronze Age is due to be turned on its head as the historians of antiquity like Herodotus, Hecateus of Adbera, Atrapanus of Alexandria, Tacitus, and Manetho end up validated with a number of things modern historians have been making fun of with an air of superiority (bizarre given the relative access to documentary and oral traditions and the relationship of that to the likely impacts of survivorship bias).
Or maybe not. There are a lot of weasel words in your write up, seems, alleged, etc, and not many mentions of hard evidence.
It’s a summary of around five years of sometimes rather nuanced research.
If there’s a particular area you want more details on, feel free to ask. But to actually include all the nuanced details for the summary above would take about 20 pages, and I really don’t think most people here care enough to wade through all that (nor do I care to write all that out on my weekend).
If you want a third party suggesting at least part of what I wrote above with some of the cited literature, you might want to read over this: https://armstronginstitute.org/736-were-the-seafaring-denyen-the-tribe-of-dan
You need hard evidence for events that were essentially before the beginning of written history, but apparently this isn’t necessary for their assertions. Weasel words, indeed.
Huh? Written history begins around 2,000 years before these events. What are you talking about?
A number of the relevant pieces of information are the details in contemporary written accounts from Egyptian or Hittite sources which range from royal records of conflicts to letters written between countries.
That’s how we know for example that there was actually a single day battle between Egypt and the sea peoples with Libya which Egypt wins and takes captives from seven years before an usurper Pharoh conquered Egypt. There’s literally dozens of pages written about that battle by Merneptah. Which then bears a striking resemblance to the mythical story in the Odyssey of Odysseus fighting a one day battle against Egypt where he’s taken captive exactly seven years before “a certain Phrygian” shows up to try to ransom him to Libya.
We even have records from Ramses III which describe the end of the 19th dynasty around the time of this usurper as Egypt having been conquered with outside help, switching to a form of government of city state governors, and “making the gods like men.” Claims that resemble the Phoenician form of city state government emerging at this time and the claims of Phoenician euhemerism “from around the time of the Trojan War” in Philio of Byblos.
Yeah, but it’s pretty shit. It’s far from reliable, the Bible counts as part of the historical record and we are reasonably sure there weren’t really any giants.
The rest is all Biblio of Biblios, I’m now aware what me rattling off a bunch of science information must sound like to people.
I was supporting your position anyway, you massive, swinging autist.
Why is it that followers of holy books always have a section or two that should be ignored when it’s convenient?
‘the word of God’, but you can toss out whole sections without a second thought, meanwhile, if you break what’s said in the other section you’re definitely evil
because religion is fake