I’ll quote the first two paragraphs:

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Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the old testament, for all it’s embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth. Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned a staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a Nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt and that, following some sort of conflict with authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a high-born priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup. Although much was unknown, archaeologists were confident they had succeeded in nailing down at least a few basic facts.

That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 BC. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore. The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries BC who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium BC but appears to be, at most, a product of the first.

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As the excerpt suggests, the Israelites were indigenous or aboriginal. But unlike today, this wasn't thought to convey any legitimacy. Possession of land by right of conquest was the thing. So this was the account set out in the OT.

Another example of how the past is not simply the present read backwards. The past really is a foreign country.

It's a great article, though I was hoping for something more in the way of references. But the author provides his email address, and will provide a list of references on request.

[ March 06, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]

But I'm sure it still leaves us with the kind of ever-elaborating discussion that you provoke in me when you say:

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The implication here, of course, is that the Bible is no more historically valid than any Greek or Norse mythology.

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*cough*

One of the interesting things about the Norse sagas is that, unlike most true epic literature (which usually marks the beginning of a culture's recorded history, when they begin to write down what has been a long oral culture), the Norse bards were often writing under the eye of the Irish priests, heirs to a long recorded history (and therefore already somewhat ironic -- ie, attached to the idea of separating fact and fancy). Either that, or we have two versions of many events, Norse and Irish.

And what do we know from comparing the two sets of texts? Well, that would depend on who's doing the interpreting. But there are grounds for saying that separating fact and fiction is not so simple an operation as we imagine. I mean, there are lies, and then there are ... elaborations.

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Pluralism became the order of the day: the northern kings could manage such a diverse empire only by allowing these cultures to worship their own gods in return for their continued loyalty. The result was a policy of religious syncretism, a theological pastiche in which the cult of Yahweh coexisted alongside those of other Semitic deities.

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Storming the countryside Josiah and his Yahwist supporters destroyed rival shrines, slaughtered alien priests, defiled their altars, and ensured that henceforth Jewish sacrifice take place exclusively in Jerusalem, where priests could exercise tight control.

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Why would you expect any one mythology to be more true and accurate than another?

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I wouldn't; but part of the point of this Harper's piece is that until well into this century, the scholarly consensus apparently was that there was considerable historical accuracy to the Old Testament.

It's my understanding that the pentarch came into formal being around 500 B.C., during the Babalonian Captivity. If my wobbly memory serves, I read that the Priest of Babylon asked the Hebrews in Babylon to commit their traditions to vellum.

If that's the case, then we can view the pentarch as both sucking up to the Babylonians, (the Creation and the inundation story, and Abraham saying, "see, we're your long lost cousins" and also a warning from Exodus: "Hey look what happend to the last guy who held us in bondage. How do you guys feel about frogs? Boils anyone? Nice first born you got there-- be a shame if something happened to him.")

I was talking to my daughter last night in fact about the bible. She says it's nonesense, and I wanted to disabuse her of that view.

Surely, if someone is pushing the bible as the direct, infallible word of god, then it renders the bible as a work to be ridiculed. As a historical record, surely it's at best very unreliable.

But as a work of literature? A record of people just like ourselves trying to grapple with the issues of living together, of the BIG questions like how we got here, what does it MEAN?

Surely we can put the bible along side other works, deserving of respect if not reverence.

[ March 06, 2002: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

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Surely, if someone is pushing the bible as the direct, infallible word of god, then it renders the bible as a work to be ridiculed.

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And which I quite enthusiastically partake in.

Speaking of which, Check it.

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As a historical record, surely it's at best very unreliable.

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Although, as Herzog notes, some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, they are just now making a dent in the awareness of the Israeli public -- a very painful dent. They challenge many of the Old Testament stories central to Israeli beliefs about their own national character and destiny, stories that have influenced much of Western culture as well. The tales of the patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac and Joseph among others -- were the first to go when biblical scholars found those passages rife with anachronisms and other inconsistencies. The story of Exodus, one of the most powerful epics of enslavement, courage and liberation in human history, also slipped from history to legend when archaeologists could no longer ignore the lack of corroborating contemporary Egyptian accounts and the absence of evidence of large encampments in the Sinai Peninsula ("the wilderness" where Moses brought the Israelites after leading them through the parted Red Sea).

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King David was nebbish

lalala...

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That kind of state didn't exist in Jerusalem during David and Solomon's time, so Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the Old Testament must have been written (though perhaps "compiled" is a more accurate term) later. They peg a king descended from David, Josiah, who ruled over a much more developed Jerusalem more than 300 years after David, as the one who ordered its transcription. Josiah, according to "Unearthing the Bible," needed a national scripture to cement a strictly monotheistic religious orthodoxy and to promote the idea that only a king of Davidic lineage could reunite the lost empire. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Old Testament is still used to forge a national identity for today's Israel, since according to Finkelstein and Silberman, it was created to do just that in the ancient world.

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[ March 07, 2002: Message edited by: clockwork ]

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Finkelstein and Silberman are almost certainly right in their confidence in archeology's potential for rewriting Israel's history. And they are also right in their essentially minimalist reconstruction of the patriarchal era and earlier; in their stress on the indigenous origins of most early Israelites; in their recognition of the late date of the "Yahweh alone" (monotheistic) parties; and in their seventh-century BCE date for the composition of most of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. Yet The Bible Unearthed clearly wishes to preserve the biblical worldview and to undergird the Bible's contribution to the much-beleaguered Western cultural tradition. But its facile review of the debate and of the data will simply be co-opted by the more radical "revisionists" and will lend respect-ability to more Bible bashing.

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If the Hebrew Bible is largely pious propaganda - in effect, a monstrous literary hoax that has fooled almost everyone for 2,000 years (until they set matters straight) - how can it be the basis for any religious belief or moral and ethical system?

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It's very doubtful that Jesus was born in Bethlehem," said Hershel Shanks, editor of the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review. "He's always referred to as the Nazarene, not the Bethlehemite. But there were very clear reasons for putting him in Bethlehem. He was supposed to be the scion of David who came back and gave us salvation, and since David was born in Bethlehem there was a desire to put Jesus there. This doesn't reduce the power of symbolic stories, but it's not historic reality."

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History and religious tradition clash not just at the Church of the Nativity, but at many other sites in the Holy Land. One is the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, from which, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad ascended to Heaven. It is considered the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina.

"The Koran says Muhammad traveled to `the farthest mosque' and ascended from there to Heaven," said Mr. Shanks. "The fact is that when he died, there was no mosque at that site in Jerusalem. It was built 50 years after he died. It's filled with elaborate inscriptions in beautiful Arabic script, but there's no mention of Muhammad's ascension because the tradition had not yet arisen. It emerged later because of a political fight the Muslims had. The Jerusalem cadre wanted to denigrate Mecca, so they said the `farthest mosque' was in their town."

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