BBS Introduction
Introduction:
The Babylonian Captivity (586-516 BC)
What is for the most part an exact
copy of the script follows. There are a
few places where individual speakers could neither be heard nor understood: for
this we apologize. Every effort was made
to be precise: there were just spots that defeated us. Since this is a quote in its entirety it
seemed unnecessary to mark it with quotation marks. The notation for each speaker is tedious
enough: Narrator, Reader, etc. If you
discover bothersome errors please reply to this Blog and point them out. You may verify the script more easily by
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Script
Narrator: God is dead, or so it must have
seemed to the ancestors of the Jews in 586 BC.
Jerusalem, and the temple to their God are in flames. The nation of Israel, founded by King David
is wiped out.
N: For out of the crucible of destruction
emerges a sacred book, the Bible; and an idea that will change the world, the
belief in One God.
N: Now, a provocative new story from
discoveries deep within the earth and the Bible.
Eilat
Mazar:[4] We
wanted to examine the possibility that the remains of King David’s palace are
here.
Dever: We can actually see vivid evidence here
of a destruction.
N. An archaeological detective story puzzles
together clues to the mystery of who wrote the Bible; when; and why?
N: And from out of the earth emerge thousands
of idols that suggest, God had a wife.
N: Powerful evidence sheds new light on how one
people, alone among ancient cultures, finally turn their back on idol worship
to find their One God.
Carol Meyers:[10] This makes the God of
ancient Israel the universal God of the world that resonates with people at
least in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions to this very day.
N: Now, science and Scripture converge to
create a powerful new story of an ancient people, God and the Bible. Up next on NOVA, The Bible’s Buried
Secrets.
Commentary
The Babylonian Captivity of the Jews
is a strange, although startling place to begin a scientific discussion of Biblical
Archaeology or Bible Introduction. We
might have expected some sort of sequential timeline: either from the biblical
internal provenance (chronology), or from the available external archaeological
evidence. There is a logical ordering to
this material, and it does not begin in Babylon. This introduction would be more appropriate
as a course on the justifications for unbelieving liberal Judaism.
Everything about this introduction
screams its newness: God only seems dead, it only seems like the end;
it is the beginning, it emerges, it is new, something
happened [in 500 or 516], it is discovery, it is possibility,
it is vivid, it converges [for the first time in history].
There is nothing new about The
Bible’s Buried Secrets.
Virtually everything in it was known a century ago: from the artifacts,
to the Bible, to the bizarre theories intended to explain the convergence of
archaeology or science and the Bible.
The Merneptah Stele was discovered in 1896.[11] Is Tel Zayit new?[12] The Gezer calendar was already known in 1908.[13] The first of many Documentary Hypotheses was
first proposed in the nineteenth century.
The idea being presented: that the Jews wrote the Bible and invented
monotheism (ca 500) out of thin air and non-existent source documents is
patently absurd. That the Jews first got
serious about obedience to Yahweh’s requirement of monotheism is patently
obvious. But having finally embraced
monotheism, in loyalty to which deity?
In spite of their final rejection of polytheism, the Jews drift farther
and farther away from Yahweh, the God of the Bible. The God of Judaism, the God of Christianity,
and the God of Islam cannot be subsumed under the Rubric of monotheism: for
they are not at all the same, or even similar.
God is not made in the image of man.
The God of the Bible does not resonate with anything else. He is not dependent on us. He was not invented by us. He is unlike us. He does not need our acceptance. He will not cease to be God and disappear if
we reject Him. He alone will judge the
earth.
The Jews did not find God in 500. He
found them and saved them from a predicament that they had brought upon
themselves. He had repeated such
salvation several times previously in their own history.
Nor did the Jews write the Bible, the most casual study of the prophetic
office shows that prophets wrote the Bible.
The rules for prophets, under the death penalty for error, are so strict
that no mere scribe would dare to tamper with biblical contents, and detailed
rules were in place to guarantee that such tampering never took place. The best place to answer the questions “who
wrote the Bible; when; and why?” is through careful examination of the internal
provenance. If the internal provenance
can be linked with external artifacts, so much the better, but these are not
essential, for the most part, in understanding internal provenance.
The suggestion that God had a wife
is another absurdity. It is very clear
from the Bible that God had a wife; not a sensual consort; rather a redeemed
people whose relationship to Yahweh was to be salvific, spiritual, and
worshipful, with respect for fellow Israelites, all mankind, and the rest of
creation.
How good is the Bible? That would be a fair question to ask. The answer is that the Bible is so good that
biblical archaeologists would not know where to take their first shovel-full of
dirt, without the Bible. It was the
Bible that told them where to dig for “Buried Secrets.” Archaeology is very dependent on the
Bible. The Bible is not at all dependent
on archaeology. The details gleaned from
archaeology are nice to know, even important to know; yet, the world would not
end if they were never discovered. On
the other hand, mankind would still be hopelessly lost without the Bible,
whenever the earth ends.
The word, converge, suggests a
parity of fact between science and Scripture.
No such parity exists. The
Bible’s Buried Secrets treats the Bible as an inferior and unreliable
source of information. The reality is
that science is the inferior and unreliable source of information. Science depends on man for veracity. The Bible depends only on God for Truth.
What The Bible’s Buried
Secrets actually does is dig up an old and wicked pattern of
thinking. Such thinking helped undermine
the faith of Kaiser Wilhelm II. There were other factors, of course. These factors combined to lead to WWI and
WWII, and virtually every war since.
Without the absolute authority of Yahweh, the God of the Bible, clearly
expressed in the Bible, mankind simply has no reason to believe that war is
sin. Nor does mankind see the need to
bow to God as King: so the whole point of the Bible is lost. The Bible’s Buried Secrets is a wicked presentation.
[1]
William G. Dever (1933 …), an American Archaeologist serving at the University
of Arizona (1975 to 2002). “[Idolatry] was representative of the outlook of the majority of the population, and
that the Jerusalem-centered ‘book religion’ of the Deuteronomist circle set out
in the Hebrew Bible was only ever the preserve of an elite, a ‘largely
impractical’ religious ideal.”
“I am not reading the Bible as Scripture… I am in fact not
even a theist. My view all along—and especially in the
recent books—is first that the biblical narratives are indeed ‘stories,’ often
fictional and almost always propagandistic, but that here and there they
contain some valid historical information.
That hardly makes me a ‘maximalist.’
“Archaeology as it is practiced today must be able to
challenge, as well as confirm, the Bible stories. Some things described there really did happen,
but others did not. The Biblical narratives
about Abraham,
Moses,
Joshua
and Solomon
probably reflect some historical memories of people and places, but the ‘larger
than life’ portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and contradicted by the
archaeological evidence.”
[2]
Thomas Cahill (1940 …), an American author with no special qualifications in
archaeology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cahill
[3]
Lee I. Levine, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a rabbi without any special
qualifications in archaeology.
[4] Eilat Mazar (1956 …),
Israeli archaeologist with
Shalem Center, Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University. Works: Jerusalem, palace (2005), fifth
century wall (2007), tenth century city wall (2010), Ophel inscription (2012). Ophel Treasure (2013).
[5]
Amnon Ben-Tor, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Works: Horvat Usa (1963), Tel Yarmuth (1970),
Azor (1971), Athienou, Cyprus (1971-1972; with T. Dothan), Tel Qiri
(1975-1976), Yoqne‘am (1977-1979; 1981; 1987-1988), Tel Qashish (1978-1979;
1981-1985; 1987), The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael
Yadin (1990-present). Ben-Tor’s
observation is well taken. Who did
it? By default Israel defeated both
Jericho and Hazor.
[6]
Gabriel Barkay (1944 …), Israeli archaeologist with Bar-Ilan University. Works: Lachish, Ketef Hinnom (1979), École Biblique (1970), Temple Mount,
Solomon's Stables.
[7]
Ron E. (and Connie) Tappy,
is a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Works:
Tel Zayit, datable Hebrew alphabet (1000-901).
[8] P.
Kyle McCarter, Jr., professor at Johns Hopkins University and consultant epigraphist. Works: Tel Zayit, Tel Beth Shemesh, Tel
Ashkelon, coauthor with Tappy on Tel Zayit inscription. http://neareast.jhu.edu/bios/kyle-mccarter/
[9]
Amihai Mazar (1942 …), Israeli archaeologist
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Works: Tel Qasile, Tel Batash (Timnah, 1977-1989), Bet She’an
(1989-1996), Tel Rehov (1997 …). Eilat’s
Cousin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amihai_Mazar
[10] Carol
L. (and Eric) Meyers, a feminist
biblical scholar a professor at Duke University with no special
qualifications in archaeology.
[13]
The Gezer calendar belongs to the same class and date as the Zayit stone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezer_calendar
[14] If you have been blessed or helped by any of these meditations,
please repost, share, or use any of them as you wish. No rights are reserved. They are designed and intended for your free
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