Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? 2
The Bible, like other areas of Christian theology, has actually failed to stand up to the trust that Christians, rightly or wrongly, had put in it.John Bowden, SCM
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 30 May 2002
Abstract
Shishak—Sheshonq?
Billington goes on with his citation of kings, not always honestly, naturally:
In 1799 the discovery of an Egyptian relief depicted Pharaoh Shishak who is mentioned in 1 Kings 14:25-26.
The Egyptian kings, there are five of them, supposed to be Shishak are called Sheshonq or Shoshenq, not Shishak. The “n” is absent from the Hebrew rendering, but the biblicist Egyptologist, professor Kenneth Kitchen, says that the “n” was silent in the Egyptian pronunciation. Others are less convinced and think that Shishak might have referred to Rameses II, whose popular name was Shisha. The “k” was a diliberate addition by the biblical authors to make the name sound like “Hooligan” in Hebrew. If the “k” was deliberately added, it means that the various Sheshonqs are less likely as Shishak because even if Kitchen is right that the “n” was silent, the “q” was not as well! Shishak is assumed to have been Sheshonq I because he lived at the right time for Solomon, but, if the story of Solomon is a romance, any of the Sheshonqs could have been the model for Shishak.
The best candidate is the last, Sheshonq V who reigned 773-735 BC, and was a contemporary of a Jeroboam, but not Jeroboam I, but Jeroboam II (794-754 BC). It so happens that Shalmaneser IV (782-773 BC) was a strong king of Assyria at this same time, and his name is Solomon (Salimanu-eser, Solomon directs). A king of Phœnicia also at this time was a Hiram. It looks more likely to the skeptic, in the absence of any evidence of the biblical stories of the tenth century, that a set of kings from the eighth century have been written backwards in history as the basis of the biblical romance of the greatness of an Israelite Solomon.
The discovery of the Moabite Stone in 1868 revealed that 2 Kings 3:4-5 was describing a real event involving real people.
Billington, like all Christian apologists, finds it impossible to tell the truth. The Moabite Stone tells a different story from the bible, and, indeed, the two cannot be reconciled, according to N P Lemche. The Moabite Stone tells us that certain things were common between Moab and Israel, such as that they both had the same attitude to god, but the Moabite god was not Yehouah!
Billington jumps to Hezekiah of Judah. In about 1850 an Assyrian prism was discovered which described Sennacherib’s invasion of the kingdom of Judah. The Taylor Prism, which refers to King Hezekiah of Jerusalem by name, is the Assyrian version of the story told in 2 Kings chapter 18 (2 Chr 32:1-23; Isa 36-37). The prism shows that Sennacherib seiged Jerusalem into submitting and Hezekiah paid a large tribute to be spared. There is no mention of a murderous angel killing a large body of Assyrians, but the prism and the bible are unanimous that Hezekiah paid a large tribute.
In 1880 a plaque was discovered in a tunnel in Jerusalem and describes the construction of the conduit that brought water into the city:
And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?2 Kgs 20:20
“Hezekiah’s” tunnel can be seen by visitors to Jerusalem still today. Billington does not stop to consider that, since it can be seen today, it could be seen by the authors of the bible, who could have reported with no other knowledge that the tunnel was built by Hezekiah. In no way does the biblical mention show that the reports in the bible of Hezekiah are contemporary. Indeed, the single biblical verse is so terse and out of context, some of those skeptics that Billington does not like to open their mouths think the verse was added because the tunnel was built by the Maccabees.
The same applies to the seige of Lachish by Sennacherib. We are now well into recorded history, with the Assyrians keeping concise but well publicised records and drawing bas reliefs of their campaigns. Records like these would certainly have been known by the Persian or Greek authors of the bible as we know it.
Since the skeptics are not questioning the historical background to the bible after about 850 BC—except perhaps that Judah was never a parallel kingdom with Israel, other than in the last decade or so of Israel’s existence, when Judah probably seceded from Israel with Assyrian support—Billington turns to the real points of contention, the history of Israel and Judah before 850 BC—the period of biblical history before the so-called divided monarchy.
Exodus
Scholars say that there is no proof whatsoever that the exodus took place. William Dever, a University of Arizona archaeologist and scarcely skeptical, calls Moses a mythical figure. Even Father Anthony Axe of the Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem, a Vatican institution, admits:
A massive exodus that led to the drowning of Pharaoh’s army would have reverberated politically and economically through the entire region.
Billington resorts to the old Christian fall-back, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” He says that those who sensibly think without evidence nothing should be presumed to exist are on the “dubious ground of having to argue from silence”. When something is believed despite the silence, it is impossible to argue rationally for it. Billington therefore leaves it at that, although, he cannot resist returning to it in a few paragraphs.
He does however have a go at British archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, a popular pastime for timewasting believers these days. She found no evidence whatsoever of Joshua’s conquest of the city of Jericho. The city was deserted during the time of Joshua. Other biblical critics argue that the Israelites cannot have settled the land of Canaan by conquest because there are no signs of any such conquest that are not better explained by local wars, and most importantly, there is no sign of cultural change in the centuries of deposits excavated around the supposed conquest.
Billington, like most apologists, take comfort in the ramblings of Bryant Wood. A singularly inconsequential man, his only claim to fame is that he contradicts every reputable archaeologist about Jericho, and so regularly gets cited by crooked apologists like Billington. He simply contradicts Kenyon. He did find evidence of Joshua’s assault on Jericho and Kenyon was biased or got it wrong. Archaeolologist, William Dever, is no biblical minimalist but says of Kenyon’s work at Jericho (emphasis added):
Garstang had dated a massive mudbrick city wall to the fifteenth century BC and thus adduced it as evidence of the Israelite destruction claimed in Joshua 6 (relying on the date of c 1446 BC for the exodus as typical of the scholarship of the day). Kenyon, however, showed conclusively that this was the city wall of the last urban Early Bronze phase, c 2300 BC at latest.Lutterworth Dictionary of the bible, sub voce “Jericho”
To believe Wood against these reputable archarologists is like believing Yuri Geller against Einstein. No one who is sane would do it.
Nor is it strictly true that there is absolutely no evidence of the Exodus—an ancient Egyptian account of a series of disasters suspiciously like the famous ten plagues came to light several years ago. This evidence was quickly buried…
Billington often likes to hint at suppressed evidence, implying some sort of conspiracy against the faithful ones. The conspiracy has always been by professional Christians against those who want to get at the truth. Needless to say, it would be remarkable if a civilization as long as Egypt’s did not have plagues and pestilence, and obviously they did, but they did not have the biblical sequence of plagues, and especially the last one!
Billington’s excuse for the absence of archaeological evidence of Moses and the exodus is that no one really knows just where to look. “The real historical location of Sinai is still largely guesswork.” He must mean the mountain, because there is no need to guess where the Israelites had to go to get from the Nile Delta to Jericho. He even tells us among his set of examples that maps have been discovered of their journey. Do not expect biblical apologists to be self-consistent. It is far from being quantum mechanics, but gets pretty hazy from sheer dishonesty.
Billington introduces the same excuse over the conquered city of Ai. “Scholars just aren’t sure if they have the right spot!” The truth is that Ai means ruin. The biblical authors knew it as a ruin at best, and otherwise a place called “Ruin” because it had once been a noted ruin, and the name had stuck. The conquest of it is therefore an attempt to explain aetiologically why it was ruined.
Ur or Urfa?
Ur of the Chaldees—the native city of Abraham (Gen 11:31) has been identified.
Has it indeed, or is this more chicanery? In the bible Chaldaea is synonymous with Babylon, but the scholars consider it was only so in the last millennium BC, not in the previous one when Abraham is supposed to have founded the patiarchal tradition. The city of Ur is in the very south of Mesopotamia, and most Christians intelligent or curious enough to know this think that this Ur is the one meant in the bible. The fact is that the Moslem tradition, supported by many modern scholars, and implied by the bible is that the city of Ur is really Urfa in modern Turkey, near the border with Syria. This is a neighbouring town to the city of Haran with which many of the patriarchs were plainly associated in the bible. Billington is merely stating his beliefs in that the home of Abraham was the southern Ur rather than the northern one. He simply does not know, but if the scholars find out, he will not want to know. He asks:
What reason is there then, to doubt that a man called Abram travelled from Ur, to Haran, and from there to Canaan?
Especially if the Ur is Urfa, there is every reason to think that a lot of men and women undertook the journey, and it is possible that any of the men could have been called Abram. The route was a regular trade route and was plied with caravans. Haran was famous as a transit and trading city. What is impossible is that the detailed adventures of one of these should have been set down contemporaneously for us all to read 4000 years later. Keeping diaries on tablets of stone was not practical.
Wanderers like nomads and travellers kept each other entertained at night with tall stories just as Chaucer told 3000 years later. Possible also, since the bible implies it, is that ancestor worship developed heroic tales of the ancestors and these became local gods. Abram, Isaac and Jacob were possibly local gods still remembered when the bible was first set down in the middle of the first millennium. It is unlikely and unreasonable to believe that the tales told of them are true history miraculously preserved.
Billington fatuously argues:
Is it reasonable to claim that the bible account of this is a fable, merely because we have not found any external evidence to confirm it? To reject the bible on such grounds must, perforce, require pre-conceived anti-bible prejudice.
Is it reasonable to claim that Humpty-Dumpty is a fable, merely because we have not found any external evidence to confirm it? To reject Humpty-Dumpty on such grounds must, perforce, require pre-conceived anti-Humpty prejudice.
Going to desperate extremes, Billington claims now that the fact that the bible contains so many identifiable early and widespread myths is proof of it!
The creation of man, the role of the serpent, the fruit of the tree, the fall into disgrace and the expulsion from paradise, are themes which are found in various forms and in most cultures throughout the world—and those themes are found to be as old as the cultures themselves.
So, those among you Christians who thought the bible was the unique revelation of God will have to think again. But fear not, Billington notices a potential gaffe here and turns it to his advantage—all world cultures are derived from a common beginning—Noah and his sons (Gen 9:19; 10:32). Noah already had the bible complete in those just post-diluvian times because Billington declares the bible “is the original (as this writer believes)”, and other myths must be “corruptions that have evolved from that source”. This sadly simple man says the mythology of India has the Nagas which “usually appear in the form of ordinary snakes”, statues of which “are always placed under a tree”. Buddhism has “the tree of wisdom.”
Such echoes of Genesis are too close to be missed!
Anything so foolish can hardly be argued against. The plain original of the Genesis Creation myth has been found in Mesopotamia in more than one version, it seems, and the general set of myths in Genesis obviously originate as a whole from Mesopotamia as the story of Tower of Babel plainly shows, if nothing else. Yet their author was supposed to have been an Egyptian! If the bible preceded all these other myths and they were derived from it, then why were not equivalent myths from the rest of the bible so derived, and how is it that the bible plainly relates historic events up to the second century BC when it was, according to Billington, the original of myths thousands of years older? Prophecy? Even Christians must have difficulty accepting this, surely?
Belshazzar and Darius
Billington tells us that Dr Farrer, in 1895, stated: “There is no Belshazzar.” No such king was known and indeed, no such king ever existed, so Farrer, the devout Christian scholar and Dean of Canterbury, thought he was an invention—like Maximus in Gladiator. In fact, Belshazzar was the son and regent of king Nabonidus, and the offer to Daniel that he would be “third ruler” meant just that, because Belshazzar was regent (second ruler) to the king and Daniel would be the next in authority. So, Farrer was proved wrong, and the bible right in this instance, and Billington concludes hopefully:
The unexpected sometimes shows up!
What Billington does not want to tell his little luvvies is that Daniel was written 400 years after all these events, some of which had already become legendary. Belshazzar’s feast was well known widely. Xenophon refers to it in Persian times. John C H Laughlin in Lutterworth’s Dictionary, sub voce Belshazzar, says:
The story of Belshazzar has all the hallmark’s of historical fiction and needs to be read in the light of the Jewish persecution by Antiochus IV Epiphanes…
Belshazzar was not the king (Dan 5:1), was not the son of Nebuchadrezzar (Dan 5:2) and probably died fighting the Persians rather than while feasting, though he evidently did have a great feast at some point. The conqueror of Babylon was not Darius the Mede (Dan 5:31), like Belshazzar at the start of this section, an unknown man. The Persian king when Babylon fell was Cyrus, but the confusion is that Babylon rebelled at the start of the reign of Darius the Great and he recaptured it in 521 BC. Whoever wrote the romance of Daniel in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, 400 years after the events, mixed up these two conquests of Babylon. So, Billington retrieves the historicity of Belshazzar but omits to tell his admiring clappies the rest of the story. That is God’s Truth!
The city of Lachish was one of the few remaining cities prior to the complete collapse of the kingdom of Judea (Jer 34:7). Billington now comes to the Lachish letters, discovered in the 1930s. They mention several names that also appear in Jeremiah—Gemariah (Jer 36:10), Jaazaniah (Jer 35:3), Neriah and Baruch (Jer 36:4), Mattaniah (who is King Zedekiah, 2 Kings 24:17). These letters also refer to a prophet who was seen to be demoralizing the people and instigating a policy of non-resistance to the Babylonians (Jer 38:1-4, or Jer 26:20-21). Billington jumps to the conclusion, with most scholars admittedly, that these are the people mentioned in the bible and he writes:
The reality of these people and of the situation as described in the bible is thus confirmed for us.
Well, the people might have been real, but was the situation the right one, or had Jeremiah done what the author of Daniel and other biblical authors did—written pseudepigraphs, works set in the past but really allegories of the then present day? The Persian period is almost absent in Judah for the simple reason that the bent scholars dated all Persian strata as Babylonian or Assyrian strata. The destruction found at Lachish among which the letters were found was assumed from a comparison with Jeremiah to have been the conquest by Babylon in about 587 BC.
The actual situation might have been 100 years later when the Egyptians, assisted by the Jews, revolted against Persia and had to suffer corrective expeditions which were quite savage. The author of Jeremiah had written his account dated at the time of the previous conquest by Babylon to show that the situation was parallel and so would the fate of the Jews be, unless they came to order!
A number of seals were identified in 1986 which dated to this same time (supposedly 586 BC). The dating is circular in all of these instances. One of these seals read “Belonging to Baruch son of Neriah”. Billington says:
Without any doubt this is the man who was Jeremiah’s scribe (Jer 36; 45). A finger print on the seal is probably his.
The seal is dated from Jeremiah, but Jeremiah is dated from its own account. It is like someone dating the Last Days of Pompeii, by Bulwer Lytton, to the first century AD because that is what its contents were about! The seal should have been dated independently and the book called Jeremiah dated from that, if the identities were felt to be secure. One thing is certain, and that is that many more seals and bullae come from the Persian period than from earlier times in Judah!
Another example is a seal-bulla found in excavations in Jerusalem (1982-1983) which reads “belonging to Gemariah son of Shaphan”. This man was among the first audience ever to hear the prophecy (Jer 36:12-13). The seal of Gemariah, together with other seals and bullae, were discovered in a “thick level of soot” according to The Jerusalem Post. The Babylonians burnt the great houses of Jerusalem to the ground (Jer 52:13).
Yet in “the burnt remains of a home” were pig bones and other un-Jewish items! A toilet was also discovered which revealed that the people were infested with tape worms from pork, and other parasites. The biblicists immediately react that it is proof of “idolatry and wickedness”. If the archaeologists have dated this layer correctly, it is proof that before the Persian conquest the religion of the people was not Judaism as it became. If the dating is wrong, and the destruction is from more than 100 years later in the Persian period, it suggests that the Persians had still not introduced Judaism, or that people being settled in the area by the Persians did not have the same taboo against pigs that the Jews had, or were to have.
Biblicists see in it evidence of the Babylonian siege, and note the absence of grain foods and the presence of pollens. It might indeed be interpreted as a seige, but if one happened in about 450 BC, soon after tha city had started to be rebuilt, that would be the most evident destruction layer.
Some false weights were also discovered, hollowed out to give less than true value. Billington says it brings to life the picture described in Jeremiah 9:2-6. Inded, it does, but that does not date the account. The Persians were sticklers for honesty because of the importance of trade to the empire, and introduced coinage, and fixed weights and measures, to improve trade through improving trust. The tirade of Jeremiah against deceit is far more appropriate for the Persian period that any time before.
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Moses and Exodus
