Posts by Earnest

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Jeffro : ... the method doesn’t establish the date of Jerusalem’s destruction. But I have also already pointed out that the method disproves Watch Tower Society chronology for earlier events in the Iron Age.
Fisherman : What results does the magnetic dating method yield using 607 instead of 586? How does it falsify 607?

It would be well worth reading the article before asserting that the method disproves Watch Tower Society chronology. It does not. It negates or supports hypotheses of contemporaneity. For example,

The intensity results from Tel Malhata are slightly lower than those recorded in Lachish II [which was destroyed at the same time as Jerusalem]. This supports the hypothesis that in 586 BCE the Babylonian army was focused on Jerusalem and had no interest in going far south to the area of Malhata. It seems that after 586 BCE, when the Kingdom of Judah ceased to exist, the eastern and southern periphery of the kingdom collapsed, probably in a gradual process, and sites were destroyed, perhaps by the Edomites or other nomadic elements.

In the above quotation, reference to 586 BCE is based on the presumption that the destruction of Jerusalem happened on that date. But what if Jerusalem was destroyed in 607 BCE?

The geomagnetic field data have nothing to say about that. All it tells us is whether other cities that were burned down in military campaigns had the same geomagnetic field data (which suggests it occurred during the same military campaign). It could also suggest whether other Babylonian campaigns were earlier or later based on a probability distribution of ages. So, if Jerusalem (and Lachish) was destroyed in 607 BCE then the probability distribution curve for the Babylonian military campaigns would be shifted by 20 years.

What about the other evidence which cause the vast majority of researchers to accept 586 BCE? That has been discussed endlessly elsewhere on this forum and I don't think it has changed the view of the protagonists on either side. But if we are to simply discuss the use of geomagnetic field data and not indulge in the childish sport of always having the last word, it is clear that this method does not in itself falsify 607.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Jeffro : “70-100” suggest an error margin of plus/minus 15 years...

Yes, you're right. I had a mathematical blind spot. Sorry about that.

Jeffro : But it’s not clear why you would say the base date used is irrelevant though.

You earlier wrote that the initial assertion that the geomagnetic dating method 'confirms 586' was a misrepresentation of the source material. I agree. That is what I meant in saying that geomagnetic dating is irrelevant in determining the base date. The base dates are not calculated using geomagnetic dating, but are accepted as reliable by most scholars using other criteria.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Jeffro : Also note that the range of "70-100" years indicates a margin of error that renders inconsequential the selection of 586 instead of 587 for the fall of Jerusalem for their purposes.

That margin of error also renders inconsequential the selection of 586/587 instead of 607! However, the date of Jerusalem's destruction is irrelevant to geomagnetic dating as it is used as an anchor as the majority of scholars accept the date 586 as reliable.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Jeffro : Even the Watch Tower Society acknowledges the reliability of carbon dating for that period .

The article I referred to which indicated that carbon-dating was not reliable at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem was in The Economist of December 18, 2021 which I copied in full in an earlier post.

There it stated :

[The period from about 830 BC to the destruction of Jerusalem is] an extremely useful span, for it coincides with a hiatus in the archaeological record called the Hallstatt plateau. This "plateau" is a flat stretch of the calibration curve used for a technique called radiocarbon dating. It is a period from 400-800 BC, when, for reasons not entirely clear, radiocarbon dating breaks down.
Samples from the time of the plateau have hitherto been undatable within that four-century span.

Wikipedia has this to say about the Hallstatt plateau :

The Hallstatt plateau is a term used in archaeology that refers to a consistently flat area on graphs that plot radiocarbon dating against calendar dates. Radiocarbon dates of around 2450 BP (Before Present) always calibrate to c. 800–400 BC, no matter the measurement precision. The carbon 14 dating method is hampered by this large plateau on the calibration curve in a critical period of human technological development. Just before and after the plateau, calibration is accurate; during the plateau only techniques like wiggle matching can yield useful calendar dates.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Fisherman : If you could link the articles that don’t require membership or login, great.

The Rosette stamped jar handle system and the Kingdom of Judah at the end of the First Temple Period is linked here and The Settlement on the Southwestern Hill of Jerusalem at the End of the Iron Age: A Reconstruction Based on the Archaeological Evidence is linked here.

JSTOR allows "independent researchers" to read articles online for free. On both links there is an "alternate access option" which allows those who cannot access JSTOR through a school or library, to read 100 articles a month free. You do need to register with your email address but there is no payment.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Fisherman : Conclusions. I’m not convinced.

I understand. The date of Jerusalem's destruction has often been discussed on this forum and I have no quarrel with those who use 539 as an anchor and work back 70 years to determine when Jerusalem was destroyed. That is based on faith and exegesis with which not everybody agrees. This particular thread is about a scientific method to reconstruct when biblical military campaigns occurred and uses 586 as an anchor for the destruction of Jerusalem, which the majority of scholars accept.

I referred in an earlier post to the archaeological reasons for this. If you have an interest in knowing why the majority of scholars accept 586 you can read the two articles I referenced, here and here. The book by Oded Lipschitz, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule, should be available in most academic libraries and you can see the contents here.

Fisherman : ... I think that 539 is the standing WT also uses to establish the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy in Daniel 9 of Jesus in the 1st Century.

The crucial year WT uses to establish the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy in Daniel 9 is 455 for the 20th year of Artaxerxes, when Nehemiah was granted permission to rebuild Jerusalem. This is contrary to most secular works which place Artaxerxes' 20th year at 445/444, but, again, 455 is largely based on faith and exegesis. As the book Aid to Bible Understanding states (p.137):

Undoubtedly the strongest proof for the date of 455 B .C.E . as the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes, however, is the fact of the Messiah's appearance in the year 29 C .E., and his death in 33 C .E ., in fulfillment of the time period indicated in Daniel's prophecy.-Dan. 9 :25, 26.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

There was also an article in the The Economist of December 18, 2021 on the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where Yoav Vaknin presented his findings. I include it in full as the whole article cannot be accessed without a subscription.

When Sennacherib, King of Assyria, sent his army to the kingdom of Judah in 701BC, and had it destroy the city of Lachish, 43km south-west of Jerusalem, he was doing his bit for science as well. As Yoav Vaknin of Tel Aviv University told this year’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held in New Orleans and online, residual magnetism in the burnt-down buildings is helping archaeologists to date other finds in the area. It also helps geophysicists to chart the ups and downs of terrestrial magnetism.

Mr Vaknin’s work at Lachish is the most recent of a series of studies he has performed that were enabled by arsonous ancient kings. The first examined a building destroyed when Jerusalem was burned by Babylonian troops in 586BC. According to the biblical Book of Kings, this happened “in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon”.

Mr Vaknin says that date is considered reliable by biblical scholars. So he and his colleagues were able to pinpoint the moment when this building, the remains of which were found under a car park, was destroyed. Those remains included pieces of the polished upper floor and the burnt wooden beams that once supported it.

The fire's heat would have erased any magnetism in the minerals of this floor. Earth's magnetic field then left its mark as those minerals cooled, magnetising them anew. Assuming the fragments have not moved since then, the alignments of their magnetic fields will point in the direction of Earth's field as it was on that fateful day.

Looking for magnetic alignments in this way was well understood when Mr Vaknin began his investigation. But he and his colleagues also did an experiment. They heated samples of the fallen floor in their laboratory and exposed them to a magnetic field as they cooled down, thus repeating what had happened when the edifice was destroyed. By comparing the resultant magnetisation with the original one, and knowing the strength of the field they had themselves applied, they were able to estimate the strength of Earth's magnetic field on the day of the sack.

They have now repeated this approach at other sites, leading to well-dated reconstructions of the magnetic fields connected with the sackings of Gath, Kinneret, Bethsaida and Ekronin, as well as Lachish and Jerusalem, courtesy of military campaigns by Aramean, Assyrian and Babylonian kings. The dates range from about 830 BC to exactly 586 BC.

That is more or less the maximum span for which this approach is feasible. Written accounts of earlier invasions, in the Bible and other texts, are thought insufficiently reliable. And after the Babylonians came the Persians, who were, as Mr Vaknin observes, "kind enough not to destroy cities".

It is, though, an extremely useful span, for it coincides with a hiatus in the archaeological record called the Hallstatt plateau. This "plateau" is a flat stretch of the calibration curve used for a technique called radiocarbon dating. It is a period from 400-800 BC, when, for reasons not entirely clear, radiocarbon dating breaks down.

Samples from the time of the plateau have hitherto been undatable within that four-century span. This might now change. Radiocarbon dating relies on measuring the amount of C14, an unstable isotope of carbon, in organic materials such as wood. Thanks to the ingenuity of Mr Vaknin and his colleagues, and the ruthlessness of ancient kings, the magnetisation of inorganic materials that have been exposed to heat, such as shards of pottery from cooking vessels, offers an alternative.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

Fisherman : That doesn’t sound very scientific if the assumed date has any bearing on the accuracy of the results.

The assumed date is not only based on the historically reliable biblical descriptions. It is also determined by a variety of other means which include records of the Babylonian campaigns, stamped jar handles and other archaeological evidence as discussed by Oded Lipschitz and others.

If you are interested, the two articles in the journal Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins are:

The Rosette stamped jar handle system and the Kingdom of Judah at the end of the First Temple Period. ZDP 2013;129:1–23; and

The Settlement on the Southwestern Hill of Jerusalem at the End of the Iron Age: A Reconstruction Based on the Archaeological Evidence. ZDP. 2006;122(2):140–50.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

The original article (Reconstructing biblical military campaigns using geomagnetic field data) in the October 24, 2022 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences can be read here.

Explaining the method used it says:

The Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts describe Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns to the Southern Levant during the 10th to sixth centuries BCE. Indeed, many destruction layers dated to this period have been unearthed in archaeological excavations. Several of these layers are securely linked to specific campaigns and are widely accepted as chronological anchors. However, the dating of many other destruction layers is often debated, challenging the ability to accurately reconstruct the different military campaigns and raising questions regarding the historicity of the biblical narrative.

The destruction of Jerusalem as one of those chronological anchors is based on an earlier article (The Earth's magnetic field in Jerusalem during the Babylonian destruction: A unique reference for field behavior and an anchor for archaeomagnetic dating) in the August 7, 2020 issue of PLoS One (PLoS = Public Library of Science) journal, which can be accessed here.

In that article it says :

Unlike biblical sources regarding earlier periods, the detailed biblical descriptions regarding the end of the Iron Age and specifically the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE are considered historically reliable by the vast majority of researchers.

In support it cites The fall and rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian rule (2005) by Oded Lipschits and two articles in the journal Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins.

So the date of 586 BCE for the destruction of Jerusalem is not based on archaeomagnetic dating, but it is used as an anchor because it is considered historically reliable. The diagram below of field intensity results does help to give an idea of sequence but the dating is based on the anchors.

Yes, I know that's what slim said yesterday, far more succinctly than I have done, but I thought it would be of interest to read the original articles.

88

New method to absolutely date Fall of Jerusalem.

by waton in

for what it is worth to those interested.

1914.. tel-aviv university.

"biblical military campaigns reconstructed using geomagnetic field data.

Earnest

I remember reading an article about this at the time and was excited about an alternative to carbon dating the destruction of Jerusalem as that's not very reliable during that period. However, I concluded that geomagnetic field data doesn't change that often that a year, or even twenty years, makes a difference. For example, in the article in ScienceDaily referred to above it says :

A destruction level at Tel Beth-Shean, on the other hand, recording a totally different magnetic field, refutes the prevailing hypothesis that it too was destroyed by Hazael. Instead, the magnetic data from Beth-Shean indicate that this city, along with two other sites in northern Israel, was probably destroyed 70-100 years earlier, a date which could correspond with the military campaign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shoshenq.

The article explains how geomagnetic dating works :

The geomagnetic field is generated by earth's outer core, at a depth of 2,900 km, by currents of liquid iron. Due to the chaotic motion of this iron, the magnetic field changes over time. Until recently scientists believed that it remains quite stable for decades, but archaeomagnetic research has contradicted this assumption by revealing some extreme and unpredictable changes in antiquity.

As the motion of the liquid iron is unpredictable, the magnetic field can remain stable for decades but there can also be unpredictable changes. To account for this a variation curve of field intensity over time has been constructed so this may help but I have reservations due to the "extreme and unpredictable" changes of liquid iron in motion.