@ marmot, are you aware that the word mammoth is drawn from a Russian dialect word meaning marmot? Mammoths in Siberia always appeared under the ground like giant tusked moles hence the allusion to marmots (from a word meaning earth).
Bible Chronology, Egyptology and the Great Flood
by cappytan 23 Replies latest watchtower bible
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cappytan
JW response would be "obviously the method used to date the great pyramid is flawed"
Here's the thing: Biblical chronology requires the Great Pyramid to be built after the flood as Egypt figures into Biblical events. The only problem JW's and other proponents of a literal interpretation of the Biblical flood account have with radiocarbon dating techniques is when it is on dates BEFORE the flood.
Insight Book: With the Deluge great changes came, for example, the life span of humans dropped very rapidly. Some have suggested that prior to the Flood the waters above the expanse shielded out some of the harmful radiation and that, with the waters gone, cosmic radiation genetically harmful to man increased. However, the Bible is silent on the matter. Incidentally, any change in radiation would have altered the rate of formation of radioactive carbon-14 to such an extent as to invalidate all radiocarbon dates prior to the Flood.
So, if the Pyramids supposedly came after the flood, the radiocarbon dates wouldn't be inaccurate based on the pseudoscience bullsh!t above. However, they date prior to the flood.
If you want to turn your brain to mush, get a load of this crap about problems with Egyptian chronology: (I would appreciate anyone's input on debunking the assertions put forth below.)
Problems of Egyptian chronology. Uncertainties are multiple. The works of Manetho, used to give order to the fragmentary lists and other inscriptions, are preserved only in the writings of later historians, such as Josephus (first century C.E.), Sextus Julius Africanus (third century C.E., hence over 500 years from Manetho’s time), Eusebius (fourth century C.E.), and Syncellus (late eighth or early ninth century C.E.). As stated by W. G. Waddell, their quotations of Manetho’s writings are fragmentary and often distorted and hence “it is extremely difficult to reach certainty in regard to what is authentic Manetho and what is spurious or corrupt.” After showing that Manetho’s source material included some unhistorical traditions and legends that “introduced kings as their heroes, without regard to chronological order,” he says: “There were many errors in Manetho’s work from the very beginning: all are not due to the perversions of scribes and revisers. Many of the lengths of reigns have been found impossible: in some cases the names and the sequence of kings as given by Manetho have proved untenable in the light of monumental evidence.”—Manetho, introduction, pp. vii, xvii, xx, xxi, xxv.
The probability that concurrent reigns rather than successive reigns are responsible for many of Manetho’s excessively long periods is shown in the book Studies in Egyptian Chronology, by T. Nicklin (Blackburn, Eng., 1928, p. 39): “The Manethonian Dynasties . . . are not lists of rulers over all Egypt, but lists partly of more or less independent princes, partly . . . of princely lines from which later sprang rulers over all Egypt.” Professor Waddell (pp. 1-9) observes that “perhaps several Egyptian kings ruled at one and the same time; . . . thus it was not a succession of kings occupying the throne one after the other, but several kings reigning at the same time in different regions. Hence arose the great total number of years.”
Since the Bible points to the year 2370 B.C.E. as the date of the global Flood, Egyptian history must have begun after that date. The problems in Egyptian chronology shown above are doubtless responsible for the figures advanced by modern historians who would run Egyptian history all the way back to the year 3000 B.C.E.
Greater confidence is placed by Egyptologists in the ancient inscriptions themselves. Yet, the carefulness, truthfulness, and moral integrity of the Egyptian scribes are by no means above suspicion. As Professor J. A. Wilson states: “A warning should be issued about the precise historical value of Egyptian inscriptions. That was a world of . . . divine myths and miracles.” Then after suggesting that the scribes were not above juggling the chronology of events to add praise to the particular monarch in power, he says: “The historian will accept his data at face value, unless there is a clear reason for distrust; but he must be ready to modify his acceptance as soon as new materials put the previous interpretation in a new light.”—The World History of the Jewish People, 1964, Vol. 1, pp. 280, 281.
Absence of information concerning Israel. This is not surprising, since the Egyptians not only refused to record matters uncomplimentary to themselves but also were not above effacing records of a previous monarch if the information in such records proved distasteful to the then reigning pharaoh. Thus, after the death of Queen Hatshepsut, Thutmose III had her name and representations chiseled out of the monumental reliefs. This practice doubtless explains why there is no known Egyptian record of the 215 years of Israelite residence in Egypt or of their Exodus.
The pharaoh ruling at the time of the Exodus is not named in the Bible; hence, efforts to identify him are based on conjecture. This partly explains why modern historians’ calculations of the date of the Exodus vary from 1441 to 1225 B.C.E., a difference of over 200 years. -
marmot
Half banana, no I did not know that, very interesting. -
kepler
Cappytan,
The simplest solution to dealing with the above critique is to look around in genuine museum collections or check out the terrain of some geophysically active regions of the Earth. In the United States, the Pacific NW is littered with the actions of volcanoes and floods - but not the Big One. Ditto the Grand Canyon. To my knowledge, there are no Noachian flood epochs discussed in geophysical conferences except in one context: Mars. And that is because the notion is an appropriate metaphor for what is observed in Mars terrains due to melts of ice generally more than a hundred million years ago, if not a billion. Ice age melting would be somewhat akin to "Noachian" flood, but these are localized events based on the accumulation of glaciers and lakes behind natural dams... And there is no evidence of communities with written records of the Ice Age thaws.
Something else seems to be at work here. But attempting to reason away the existence of Egyptian civilization prior to 2400 BC is simply sophistry. The next day if it suits the spokespeople, they will invoke the same to support another Bethel point.
The guidebook of the British Musuem to Ancient Egypt, illustrated by its copious collection of artifacts pre and post such a would be flood gives passing mention Manetho, sure. But for the most part their historical records have been obtained from the stone-engraved accounts of the monarchs, scribes and noblemen themselves. Manetho was used as a guidebook obtained from the classical antiquity in the absence of translations of ancient Egyptians.
The Bible in this case mentions names of Pharoahs less than the number of fingers on a hand and in a rather incriminating way if we are wondering about its historicity. Shoshenq's name is garbled. Pi Rameses is already built before the Exodus was undertaken and Neco II the second is attributed with defeating Josiah - in the late 7th century BC. So where was everybody else? Either they were lost in time or the writers never knew, just like it does not mention any pyramids.
The Rosetta Stone was the key to translating Egyptian - and its closest linguistic analog is Coptic. The hieroglyphics date back to 3000 BC. But according to the Guidebook mentioned above:
"Our ability to place features of Egyptian history in their correct relative place depends in part on exact modern dating techniques such as
Carbon 14 testing on organic material, and
thermoluminescence , for dating pottery and in part
on ancient Egyptian texts relating to dates and measurement of time.
Systematic astronomical charts first attested on coffin lids in the first intermediate period, about 2100 BC, [give] the names of decan stars that rose every ten days at the same time as the sun...."
Suffice to say that there are several independent methods of determining the existence of an Egyptian civilization prior to 2370 BC. The JW retort on this question assumes that the reader will not look into the matter at any length.
Note also that Egyptian sources are written in stone or clay. So are Mesopotamian ones. The written artifacts from the same Bronze age period obtained from the Canaan, United Kingdom, Judea or Israel or few and far between. Taking the Exodus and Joshua books sequence of events according to the chronology appearing in the Appendix of the NWT (1984) would have Israel arriving in Canaan while it was still an Egyptian territory ruled as a protectorate. Its a couple of centuries off - if the events occurred that way at all. Check out the correspondence in the Amarna archives, if you want to see what I mean. There is also the battle of Megiddo of circa 1450 BC ( some reckonings in the 1480s - but not the gross uncertainties JW spokespeople imply) Admittedly Thutmose tried to put a spin on this one, but note the location. He wasn't doing battle with Joshua, but Canaanitesin rebellion, supported by Syrians, the king of Kadesh. The battle is recorded in several sources, from first hand accounts, including the temple walls at Karnak.
But I am digressing. Let's talk more about floods.
The most ancient direct accounts of an ancient flood and response with an Ark comes not from Israel or Egypt, but from Mesopotamia. And one of the most recent detailed discussions of this is "The Ark before Noah" by Irving Finkel. Mr. Finkel is an Assyrianologist who has spent his career at the British Museum translating Mesopotamian clay tablets, the curator in charge of cuneiform inscriptions. You should check out the account that he recently published from a cylinder disk dating from between 1900-1600 BC. Not necessarily the oldest account of the story, but certainly the most technically detailed. Significantly the animals collected for this round reed-constructed ark "two by two the boat did enter". While there are values and insights added in the Biblical account, one would have to conclude that the Noah story itself is derivative of this one.
I've got to go.
Kepler