by Crazyguy 24 Replies latest watchtower bible
I will accept the veracity of the Bible, studied with other fields such as religious history and ancient civillizations, over any WT article any day. The Bible contains a wealth of information, values, and literature. The WT is a cheap rag. Since the Bible is older and our society gives it so much more legitimacy, the WT loses big time.
The Bible does not quote Nuremberg convicted and executed Nazi theologians to make a very minor point. There are no Andres in the Bible.
What about continuity? Where did the Jews come from? They must have started somewhere? Their history is found in the Bible. How factual is its contents?Somewhere along the line they became a nation, making its mark in history. Perhaps some of the Bible writers did exagerate? Perhaps we read into the Bible account more than necessary. However, we shouldn't compare our situation with days of old. Jerusalem, as a city, was well known, even in days gone by. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
Vidqun : I don't think that every Bible account is a myth. However, I do believe that Jewish scribes exagerated many things and coppied and reconfigured some legends.
Just an update on my research. These temples that were built mentioned in my first post as well as the ones built at Tyre and at Hazor were all pretty much the same all except the one at Hazor faced east and were fertility temples in away. They seemed to represent the female vagina and the Sun would come up in the morning shining its rays into the chambers of these temples. Some if not all these temples had what would seem to be phallic symbol pillars at the entrance. These temples may have been built to a Fertility God like Baal Hadad with the idea that he would not only bless the land but the animals and the people with a continued recreation and a renewing of all things. But again these temples and the one described at Jerusalem built by Solomon are all the same and one must ask again. If the god of the bible was the true god of the universe that we must worship today, why was his temple built to resemble a pagan gods temple and faced east, and had pillars in front, just like these others???
The Pslams are a good start. The constant mention of Yahweh a Judean King and a temple for Yahweh can only fit from a 'first temple'. (While the majority of Pslams are from 50BCE-100AD there are several pre-exilic ones.
Like I said I think there was a first temple however it was one of many temples to differnt gods until Josiah.
I do NOT belive the second temple was built in the same place as the first!<<<<<<<
There is a mentioning of a Bit-Shulman temple, I Believe in the El-Amarna letters written in about the 14th century. There was a god named Sulmanu or Shalim and who knows this could of been the patron god of the city of Jerusalem (Urusalim). The other thing of interest in these letters is the same Of Jerusalem (Urusalim), this name was used before the David but according to the bible was not the name of the city until after David.
The details may be sketchy, but if the wailing wall stones are the foundation, the ancients were up to something there.
Here is an excerpt from an excellent thread reasonomg on this very thing. Link to the thread afterwards. Well worth a read:
Solomon’s temple was a lot smaller than most people picture it. 1 Kings 6:2 tells us that it was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. In a rare example of biblical precision, 2 Chronicles 3:3 gives exactly the same measurements. A cubit is 17.5 inches, so the temple would have been 87.5’ x 29’, and about 4 stories high. It would total 2,552 square feet in area. To put this in perspective, it would be less than twice the size of my house, but four stories high. This number is very important, so keep it in mind.
The total temple area was larger than simply the “house of the LORD”. There was a courtyard, a palace, and other buildings. However, as we will soon see, the contents and value are out by at least a factor of a thousand, so, a few extra buildings are hardly significant.
The Gold and Silver
“With great pains I have provided for the house of the LORD, a hundred thousand talents of gold, a million talents of silver, and bronze and iron without weighing, for there is so much of it; timber and stone, too, I have provided.” - 1 Chronicles 22:14
Since 1 talent = 75.5 pounds, this means that 7.55 million pounds of gold and 75.5 million pounds of silver went into the temple - a total of 83.05 million pounds of precious metal. Now, remember the size of the temple. To get this much gold and silver into the temple, there must have been 32,543 pounds of it per square foot. The priest must have had to crawl over the heaps of gold to get to the alter.
Here’s another interesting tidbit. One cubic foot of silver weighs 628.4 pounds. This means that the silver of the temple occupied 120,146 cubic feet. The total gross size of the temple was only 111,650 cubic feet. Therefore, if the silver of the temple was formed into a solid block, it would be bigger than the temple itself - never mind the gold, iron, bronze, timber, and stone.
In addition to the gold and silver, there was apparently so much bronze and iron that it could not even be weighed. Since the gold and silver weighed in at 83 million pounds, that means that the bronze and iron must have weighed considerably more (I will assume that it was double). We are now looking at somewhere in the range of 100,000 pounds of metal per square foot of the temple. That is the equivalent weight of 40 full size cars per square foot. And we haven’t even gotten to the rock and timber, yet.
The gold and silver equates to a dollar value of $54 Billion today. Even given the inflated population figures of Israel that are recorded in the Bible, it still means that every man, woman, and child in the nation contributed almost $20,000, or 40 pounds of gold and silver. In all likelihood, the population of Israel was only about 1/10 of the Biblical figures, so the contribution per person would have been approximately 10 times higher. And, of course, we have not costed the iron, bronze, rock, timber, and labour. Not bad for a group of poor desert farmers.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/154236/2/The-Atheists-Book-of-Bible-Stories
Thats a text from 'the atheists book of bible stories'
Acurate and Chronicles is a fantasy!
Indeed it is, as the link clearly shows :) definatly worth reading
