PROFESSOR OF ARCHAELOGY AT TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY, HE BELIEVES THAT MANY OT STORIES LIKEEXODUS AND JERICHO DIDN'T HAPPEN ARE FICTION.
ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN INTERVIEW IN NEW SCIENTIST
by badboy 6 Replies latest jw friends
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The Lone Ranger
most 'scienctist" don't beleive the bible accounts, but don't mean they aren't true anymore then creation isn't true....
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heathen
I've read some comments from his fellow scientists and there are some that think him a quack . What's so hard to believe about jericho? , could easily have been an earth quake that brought the walls down , like nobody has ever heard of that before.
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badboy
BTTT
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IP_SEC
Jericho is one of the oldest known cities in the world. Its walls have fallen more than once. It is well understood that there is no archaeological evidence for a destruction of Jericho's walls durning the time of exodus.
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reniaa
Actually the evidence is there but very contested atm.
A destruction of Jericho's walls dates archaeologically to around 1550 BC in the 16th century BC at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, by a siege or an earthquake in the context of a burn layer, called City IV destruction. Opinions differ as to whether they are the walls referred to in the Bible. According to one biblical chronology, the Israelites destroyed Jericho after its walls fell out around 1407 BC: the end of the 15th century. Originally, John Garstang's excavation in the 1930s dated Jericho's destruction to around 1400 BC, in confirmation, but like much early biblical archaeology, his work became criticised for using the Bible to interpret the evidence rather than letting the facts on the ground draw their own conclusions. Kathleen Kenyon's excavation in the 1950s redated it to around 1550 BC, a date that most archaeologists support. [9] [10] In 1990, Bryant Wood critiqued Kenyon's work after her field notes became fully available. Observing ambiguities and relying on the only available carbon dating of the burn layer, which yielded a date of 1410 BC plus or minus 40 years, Wood dated the destruction to this carbon dating, confirming Garstang and the biblical chronology. Unfortunately, this carbon date was itself the result of faulty calibration. In 1995, Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht used high-precision radiocarbon dating for eighteen samples from Jericho, including six samples of charred cereal grains from the burn layer, and overall dated the destruction to an average 1562 BC add or subtract 38 years. [11] [12] [13] Kenyon's date of around 1550 BC is widely accepted based on this methodology of dating. Notably, many other Canaanite cities were destroyed around this time.
The widespread destructions of the 16th century BC are often linked with the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt around this time. The 1st-century historian Josephus, in Against Apion, identified the Exodus of Israelites according to the Bible as the Expulsion of the Hyksos according to the Egyptian texts.
A few scholars follow the controversial new chronology of David Rohl, which postulates that the entire mainstream Egyptian chronology is 300 years misplaced; with the consequence that, among other things, the exodus would be dated to the 16th or 17th century BC, and hence the archaeological record on Jericho would be much more aligned with the biblical account. Despite this, a number of literalist Christians, most prominently the respected Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, have vehemently attacked Rohl's chronology, since it introduces a number of other problems and issues (such as identifying the biblical Shishak as Ramses II, rather than the far more obviously named Shoshenq).
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