AW! Epistles
From Zvi
Abstract
Monday, 03 May 2004
AskWhy! Modernism in Biblical Archaeology. Your assumption that the Book of Joshua was written in the 5th Cent BCE is contradicted entirely by my new book, The Lost Temple of Israel. I will be guest lecturing on this at the Hebrew University at a graduate seminar in a few weeks. My contention is that the Biblical description of the events at Ebal and the find in the field are so precise at to obviate the possibility that they were written at any time other than the time that the site was active, circa 1200 BCE. I attended a conference this past weekend in Michigan and spoke to the recently elected president of ASOR, Dr. William Garrety, and he also tends ot think I have some legitimate ideas on this. So you may be in for a surprise or two in time, as this material gets out to the public.
The paragraph you mention says the following, “Trivial findings in Israel, such as, say, an altar are given grandiose significance by fanciful suggestions that it was the altar on which Abraham proposed to despatch Isaac, or whatever. Unsurprisingly, believers soon believe such fancies are the truth. Adam Zertal identified a structure on Mt Ebal as an altar and suggested it might be the altar mentioned in Joshua. It is accepted now that it was. Perhaps it was, but it was probably the altar standing on Mount Ebal when Joshua was written in the fifth century, not one that actually played the historical role offered it in the twelfth century in the bible. Believers are unable to see that stories can be written about existing things. The fact that the thing exists, does not prove the stories about them.”
What specifically refutes this? That you can find anything in the five short verses in Joshua 8 that confirms nothing but a thirteenth century BC authorship astonishes me, but, if you have arguments and evidence for your coy statement, then I shall be glad to read them. Why not tell me what they are? Is the law of Moses inscribed on the altar? Moses is here doing what Ezra did. Reading out the law to the people. Moses is Ezra retroscripted by 800 years. Tell me what proof you have it is not so.
For the proof, you have two choices; read my book, or come to Jerusalem to listen to my lecture on April 21, if you understand Hebrew. On the other hand, I may take professor Zakovitz up on his offer to do a doctorate at the Hebrew U, in which case it will be in acceptable scientific format within five years or so. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!
Perhaps I shall read the book, when it emerges, unless it is in Hebrew, but Jerusalem, no! Five years seems a long time to take for a doctorate when you have apparently already done all the work, but perhaps you have a lot of footnotes to compile. Or maybe I misunderstand, and the doctorate is on Santa Claus.
Let me give you the bottom line, so you don’t have to fork out any money for a book. The site at Ebal was deliberately covered up, and INDISTINGUISHABLE from thousands of other mounds of stone in the area.
When was it covered up? Before or after the fifth century?
It was never mentioned again in the bible after Joshua 8.
Are you assuming the biblical chronology?
The correlation between the Biblical text and the archaeological find is so exact as to obviate the possibility of these passages having been written later than the times of the occurrences, circa 1200 bce.
Is the site dated from finds, or, I again ask, are you assuming the biblical dating? If these histories were written so early, then why did they not emerge into the wide world until the third century BC, and why is Herodotus and not Moses the father of history?
Writers of the 6th or 5th cent BCE could never have known the details mentioned in the text.
What details do you mean, and why could they not know them if the site already existed since 1200 BC? Is it because you know the site was buried in 400 BC? If so how do you know? The only detail I can see that could be relevant in Joshua 8:30-35, where Ebal is central to the narrative, is that the altar was built of unhewn stones. Such rough altars might have been built early but nothing stops us talking about them later, any more than that I can talk to you about stonehenge. That two verses of Joshua mention an altar of unhewn stones on Mount Ebal does not date Joshua to the twelfth century.
Writing was not found, but plaster slabs were, and I would wager that further excavation might turn up some writing.
Whatever you might care to wager as a gambling man is not evidence suitable for a doctoral dissertation.
There is much, much more.
I would hope so.
Last week, I attended a conference at Andrews University in Michigan, attended by many professionals, who accepted much of the evidence I presented, and even prior to my presenting these materials, were of the opinion that there were grave inconsistencies in much of the currently taught dating theories.
I agree wholeheartedly that the biblical dates are all to cock, but you seem to be defending them.
Ebal is not the anomaly; it is the real thing. Theories relying on 200 year old textual analyses, ie, De Wette and Wellhausen, are about to be dealt the final kiss of death they deserve.
You are betraying your prejudices.
This has nothing to do with belief. I believe in nothing except for some common sense…
Except also that you know old scholarship critical of the biblicists deserves the kiss of death.
…not necessarily an essential, apparently, when analyzing bible on the internet or even in many universities.
I again agree with you, but now you are confusing me even more. Perhaps the book will be more coherent when it emerges. A lot of people in universities have enjoyed fat sinecures for telling lies. Nobody honest should tolerate that, but Christians encourage it. I am not persuaded that an almighty God of goodness needs a lot of sycophants to tell lies for Him.
The finds were dated from an entire slew of evidence. The pottery was monolithically Iron I, circa 1250-1150 BCE. There were scarabs and a seal dating also to Ramses II. We carbon dated the bones, and came up with the same. IT doesn’t get any firmer than that. The dating is unquestionable. There is an entire body of evidence relating to the specificity of the description in the Bible as far as the position of the central structure we define as an altar is concerned. As the site was DELIBERATELY covered up in the 12th Cent BCE, it could not have been known to the scribes of Josiah or later. There is more, but I really do suggest you go to my website and buy the book. You will see at least that I do not have a religious ax to grind.I don’t even know what you mean by Biblicist. But I will share with you a piece of wisdom I was granted by the late Professor Benjamin Mazar. He told me “you don’t have to prove the Bible, you have to understand it”. That has been my motto for many years now.
The dating sounds secure indeed, but since it goes counter to any other evidence except the biblical romances, I remain skeptical. How are you sure it was covered up at the time? How are you sure that even though it was covered up some legend did not remain attached to it? Since many of the accessible hills in Palestine were probably used as bamahs at some time or other, it could even be coincidence.
Regarding Mazar’s profoundness, I cannot agree at all. All ancient documents have to be verified for historical truth, and quite frankly, the form of the bible stories cries out that they are late compositions even if some were based on earlier traditions. I repeat the question, Why is Herodotus the father of history when the Jewish scriptures had been in existence for 800 years before he set pen to paper, and why did the famous scriptures only see the light of day in the third century? My pages, are not merely a diatribe against uncritical acceptance of the bible, they are also a plea for skepticism. Gullibility has been the plague of ANE inevestigations, mainly based on the gullibility and politics of the biblicists, but also people who uncritically accept what they have always said. You sound as though you have been pretty soundly skeptical in dating your site accurately, but the interpretation still sounds credulous. I will believe almost any impossible thing before I will believe that a hyper-intelligent and all powerful creator God gets his kicks from interfering in His own laws. So, if your identification of the site on Ebal is beyond question, there must be other answers, before I believe in Holy Ghosts.
One more point you mentioned I just noticed that I had ignored replying to, the Herodotus business. I don’t know if Moses ever existed as a living, breathing person. But at least ostensibly, the Old Testament was certainly written with an agenda, and theoretically, Herodotus was “objective”. I don’t know if you read R E Friedman, Who wrote the Bible? Professor Friedman claims that scientific analysis of the Bible is objective. I think that there is no such thing as complete objectivity when it comes to dealing with materials that are part and parcel of all of us in the Western world, almost from the day we learn to talk.
If Moses was not historical then you have “understood” something about the bible. It is not historically true. What then did Mazar mean? You have shown it to be false.
Let me conclude with the one item I discovered which has dropped the jaw of every single professor in the fields of archaeology and bible I have told it to. If you read Genesis 48, you see Jacob crossing his hands, preferring the younger son of Joseph, Ephraim, over the elder Mannasseh. The period that the activity of the Ebal site (in the tribal area of Mannasseh) ended coincides PRECISELY with the period that Shiloh (in the area of Ephraim) begins to function as a central cultic site of Israel, i.e. the story never happened as told, but represents an ex post facto explanation of the transfer of the central holy site of Israel from the elder to the younger. This idea is further strengthened by the specific mention of Shiloh in Ch.49, a few sentences later, in the context of the blessing to Judah, the most important son.
It sounds impressive but I would have to read more. I cannot see why there would be any squabbling about sanctuaries at such an early date. There were many of them, and no one had monotheistic intolerance. The Persians brought that in, and any such preferring of sanctuaries I would see happening in the fifth century culminating in the decision to centralise on Jerusalem.
The complete Mt Ebal scientific report of Dr Adam Zertal will be coming out in English sometime in the next 12 months, and much of what I mentioned here will become common knowledge.
I look forward to reading it.
I see that I am beginning to get through to you, and that you are willing to deal with concepts that contradict what you know to date, which is commendable. Few people are capable of that.
Not generally when they are scientifically and not religiously trained. Anyone honest has to take into account all the evidence, and any new stuff that comes along. Of course, it might not be that compelling, so everything that is found does not make us change our views instantly. Science progresses by the contention of hypotheses, and in studies like history, when a lot of data are lost, the distinction between alternatives are not necessarily clear. You sound reasonably honest and sensible, but also sound to have political baggage associated with Judaism, even if you are like many Jewish people, essentially secular in outlook.
We are sure it was covered at the time, since there is absolutely no evidence in the vicinity of pottery of later periods, which would have been a prerequisite for the activity of deliberately covering an almost 14 sq. dunam site. The survey of Zertal covered the entire tribal area of Mannasseh, some 2,500 sq. kms, an atea famous for a wide range of Biblical stories. Had there been proliferations of what you describe as “many of the accessible hills were probably used as bamahs”, we would have found at least one more. We didn’t.
I just read a little about Zertal, and he does not sound to me to be the full shilling. I gather he is a brave man and has suffered a grievous wounding, but nevertheless seems to be as interested in the politics of Palestine as archaeology. I read that four surveys of Mount Ebal never found any sanctuary before, despite the bible, so one might imagine they are hard to find, although how such a large site could have been missed amazes me. Perhaps you explain it. Nor am I convinced that the absence of any later material is sufficient proof that the burial of the site was as early as you say. I read that the site was a remote location overlooking Shechem, and I also note that an earlier expedition found a Persian building on the mountain! A remote location that ceased to be used would not be expected to accumulate later artefacts because no one used the site any more, and indeed might have avoided it. I read the site was covered in ashes. It seems a lot of ashes. What were they from, and was the charcoal in this C-14 dated?
I am not an expert in legendry, but let’s take a fairly recent example of history and how it is mutilated.
I agree that history has been mutilated and the Christians have been among the mutilators, but so too have the Jews in more distant times.
According to Mel Gibson and his father, my grandparents and numerous uncles, aunts, and more distant relatives were not burnt to a crisp at Auschwitz.
The same Christians refuse to acknowledge, or do so with no sense of sincerity, that they have slowly burnt myriads of people to a crisp, individually and in small groups, throughout history.
So what “legends” remain “historical” is anybody’s guess. Of course, the fact that Pontius Pilate was recalled to Rome for his overbearing cruelty could not be discerned at all from watching “The Passion”. So maybe my mother was, as you suggest the Ebal site may be, “coincidentally” having nightmares every night for as long as I could remember, not based on her experiences during the Holocaust. But I can assure you that the Ebal site was just as legitimate historically as her nightmares.
It is a poor analogy, and does no service to your mother or your relatives who suffered in that way, though it is beginning to look as if it will be an excuse for Israeli crimes for a long time in the future. I tell you honestly that I do not like fascists whether they are atheists, Islamists, Christians or Jews, and I think no Jew should lend themselves to crimes parallel in nature, if not yet the severity, to those of the Nazis. Anyway, I prefer to believe the realities of your mother’s nightmares to your assurance that Ebal was the thirteenth century contemporary source of the book of Joshua. I still prefer to think that the site was known to the authors of Joshua when it was written much later, and it was written to explain it aetiologically, as many other biblical stories more obviously are. But I am happy to read your evidence, puzzling as it is to me.
The Septuagint translated the Bible into Greek exactly at the time you indicate that the scriptures “saw the light of day”. If the Bible becoming accessible to the Greeks is “ the light of day”, you are right. But I would refer you to the writings of Professor Yehezkel Kaufman, Origins of the Israelite Belief, who demonstrated point by point that there is much historical legitimacy in many of the biblical texts. I think you would find his work enlightening.
It is frustrating to have recommendations of books to read like this one and your own, when they are often not readily accesible to me. But, if this legitimacy is so powerful and worth recording, it puzzles me that Christian sectarians have not used them. I have answered some sectarian pages that claim to prove the historicity of the bible, and mostly these Christian proofs are puerile. Regarding the Greek, there had been immmensely powerful nations before hand including the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, yet I know of no versions of the Jewish scriptures in any of their languages except certain romances like that of the Two Brothers that provide a storyline for some biblical passages. (If you argue that Hebrew is Phoenician is Canaanite, then fine, but the biblical distinctions between Israelites and Canaanites are then bogus, and though the Phoenicians were an obviously literate people with clear links to the Greeks, there is still no sign of the bible anywhere before the Ptolemies.)
Such excellently written and compelling histories ought to have gone beyond the Palestinian hills because they were so brilliant for their time. Far too brilliant! Great literature comes from people with the leisure to spend their time on it. And these poor hills were actually under Egyptian rule, as your own scarabs suggest. So, no, I do not merely mean Greek as “the light of day”. There is just no external evidence that they existed at all before the Ptolemies commissioned them, and there is no evidence that the poor shepherds living in the hills were ever literate enough to write them. The internal evidence is better explained by a Persian intervention than the mystery of a millennium long history most of which is unsupported.
I don’t believe in holy or unholy ghosts. I certainly would not ask or expect you to believe in them either. And I am quite certain you are misunderstanding my quote of Mazar. He did not think that the bible is the work of some “all powerful creator”. But he did, as I do, give it a heck of a lot of credit as a brilliant piece of literature, reflecting some fascinating historical antiquity. Its historicity will be argued for many years after we both are long gone, and then some.
God is the same as a ghost to my way of thinking. Regarding the Jewish scriptures, if we do not have to prove them, then they must be believed to be certainly true. That is a belief in God. Understanding them, is understanding which bits are historical and which bits are romance or myth. I concur with your final sentence, but 300 BC *IS* historical antiquity! It is also much more likely a time for brilliant literature!
Re:“Squabbling about sanctuaries at such as early date”. Two things; see Joshua 22 and the Phineas tale there, which all critics believe has some kind of historical ring to it.
I am extremely skeptical indeed about this “historical ring” argument. Equally too the “historical kernal” argument. Any fiction you care to mention has to have these things to be credible at all. Without them, it is lousy fiction. It is not something a serious historian should use in argument.
Also, and possibly more relevant, your fellow countryman John Hobbes, in Leviathan, came to precisely the same conclusions I have, i.e. Deuteronomy was a very early text, got lost, and was re-discovered during the time of Josiah, and not, as De Wette put it, a pia fraua, i.e. a pious fraud.
You begin to sound like a Catholic. I am also not interested in the argument from authority, unless the authority backs it with sound evidence. Hobbes did not have the evidence we now do, and I still cannot see any of it seriously indicating, let alone proving, that the Jewish scriptures began in 1400 BC. The bible’s own excuse is this Josiah discovery, but such ’discoveries’ historically are most often pious frauds. If De Wette is less famous than Hobbes, it does not make him automatically wrong. Deuteronomy is the law imposed by Ezra, the very basis of the Mosaic law, not the last book added to it.
The “monotheistic intolerance” you attribute to the Persians was apparently a much older concept.
But who had it strongly enough, and had the power too to impose it subtly enough? Individuals preferred a god of their own chosing but they respected other people’s preferences for a different god. Even the Babylonian cities had temples to other gods beside the city god. Assur was the state god of Assyria, but the Assyrians promoted the god Sin in Syria, where Sin was preferred, and all Assyrians had ’the gods of their fathers’ too! The Persians continued the Assyrian culture and they had meanwhile adopted a sole god of the heavens. They also got to rule the known world. That is the time it could have happened. Ahuramazda was promoted under local names.
Again to the point of Herodotus versus the bible, the Israelites of then and now never wanted to rule the world, and never commanded enough political clout to come even near that state. There were 14 million Jews during the time of Christ, and just as many Chinese. If we had been busy proselytizing all these years, perhaps those numbers would be equal today. History is written by the physical winners. Jews have only been the spiritual winners, and that does not count for much in this world, except an inordinate number of Nobel prizes in various fields of academia.
The Jewish messianic concept brought with it the desire of Jews to be rulers of the world, but it was hijacked by the Christians. Early Christian success in the Roman empire is entirely because several million Hellenised Jews wanted a Judaism that was easier than the one they had, and gentile Godfearers wanted something that did not require dangerous operations on their manhood. Later Jewish success is a tribute to the revisions made by the Rabbis after the Jewish wars. They made Judaism into a non-religious religion—a social bond that promoted respect for parents and determination to succeed in adversity, and the religion became an academic study in itself.
Jews have also been traditionally noted for having a financial genius, and I suggest it goes back to the establishment of the Jerusalem temple as the Bank of Abarnahara—corporation tax going to the Persian monarchy! The banks of Babylonia at that time in the fifth and fourth centuries were extremely successful, as everyone knows, and the Persian colonists sent to Jerusalem will have had a good sprinkling of Babylonian bankers to start with. The point is that the Rabbis defined Judaism in the way that religions were seen in classical times—as the culture of an ethnos. The Jews were never an ethnos, but their religion made them one. All of us might have been better off, if the culture of the Rabbis had caught on rather than the culture of the Essenes in the form of Christianity. But who knows? Jews in Israel are not looking very civilised at the moment. They are serving the main function the Persians used them for 2500 years ago. They are a fortress against the locals on behalf of the world power.
I cannot begin to tell you how much I have enjoyed this exchange. I am leaving for Israel on Tuesday, and this has been a great preparatory exercise for my lecture in Jerusalem, as I am very likely to encounter some of the very objections you raised. So thank you.
I have enjoyed it too. Seen historically, Jesus called Christ by Christians was a brave and singular Jewish leader. By the time you read this, you will have given the lecture, and I hope you had a stimulating response. Incidentally, I noticed that even Adam Zertal was not ready to accept the historicity of Joshua, and therefore any necessary connexion with the altar you found.
As promised, I am getting back to you as soon as reasonably possible. I arrived back yesterday, and my trip was certainly successful, in a number of ways. As to the subject of our discussion, I got a standing ovation at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem after my lecture, much of it from people who, up to that moment, agreed with your view entirely. So barring the possibility that I am a mass hypnotist, there really might be some legitimacy in some of my claims.
Glad you got back all right and that your talk was so well received. I shall have to suppose, from my viewpoint, that they were being polite! Now you will have to check out the reception at Tel Aviv University!
The ashes and bone remnants were examined and carbon-dated by Dr Leora Kulka-Horwitz at the Hebrew University Dept of Zoology, and her results corresponded PRECISELY with Adam’s estimate of the pottery dating, i.e. circa 13-12 centuries BCE.
From what you say about the excavation of the site, the dating of it is sound within the present bounds of error. I suspect the pottery sequences, if they are those established by Albright, are wrong by perhaps 200 years, and the C-14 dating of any site, unless it is something like a grain pot plainly burnt in the destruction of the site, might easily be hundreds of years out because the date of the growth of the wood is determined not the date of its incineration. Doubtless Dr Kulka-Horwitz has all of this covered in her report, but I would like to be sure. Allowing 200 years does not take us to the Persian period, but, if the complex is thought to be Israelite, it does take us to the time when Samaria was a gleam in Omri’s eye and not merely in God’s. The problem then, to me, is the interpretation. It seems you are not talking only about Joshua 8:30ff but other things in Joshua too, so, I look forward to reading what you have put in your book.
If the “full shilling” is someone completely in touch, Zertal is more than that. He is one of the five most brilliant people I have ever met.
By ’not the full shilling’, I mean he takes an eccentric position without adequate justification. Eccentric is a bit barmy! Many geniuses are a bit barmy, and we do not just accept what they say because they are geniuses. Even geniuses have to have convincing evidence for their inspiration, and barmy geniuses are not always right. What little information I have suggests that Israel Finkelstein disagrees with Zertal, and Finkelstein seems to me a man with a regard for truth irrespective of the dire political pressures in Israel, and the absurd regard many Jews and Christians have for ancient mythology.
Why four people could not find the Ebal site is that they misread Deuteronomy 27, and thought that the site should be somewhere from which Gerizim is visible… The site does not, as you imply, overlook Shechem at all.
Well, it does sound as if a single ritual was intended with people on both mountains. I do not, of course, know the layout of the land, but that seems to be the suggestion. From my small scale map of the Land of Promise in Peake’s Commentary, the two hills look to be about 5 kilometers apart, peak to peak, with a saddle on the ridge between them, Shechem a little to the east and presumably therefore slightly downhill. For half of the Israelites to stand ’in front of’ one mountain and half in front of the other, the two groups need only stand in two rows between the two on the saddle of the ridge to hear the blessings and cursings. So, I would have thought, like the others, that the sensible thing to do was to build the altar on the side of Ebal overlooking Gerizim and the saddle between. Perhaps it is too much to expect that the bible should be logical, and doubtless the lie of the land is not how I imagine it from a crude map. Maybe Moses, since he never got there, had an even cruder map!
Also, those searches were conducted before a good knowledge of pottery dating was available, so even if they had stumbled on to the site, they may not have been able to identify it. The Persian site found in the vicinity (two kilometers away) is a small farm which shows no indication of any connection to the cultic site.
It is a miracle Persian sites are being identified at all. Albright called them all Assyrian, automatically adding 200 to 300 years to the age of Judah. All of this work by Albright needs re-assessing by someone honest. It will never happen. Too political!
You are perfectly correct in assuming that most Christian sectarian explanations are puerile. I would probably choose a harsher term. But I am surprised by your assumption that “great literature comes from people of leisure”. This sounds as dogmatic as the sectarians. I would refer you to thousands of texts written by Jews over the years in Hebrew, some with incredible literary value, and Jews were hardly ever in a “leisure mode”. And having completed an MA in Literature, I have a fairly decent knowledge of what good literature is all about.
I understand that mankind was condemned to eat the plants of the field in toil and the sweat of his face. I am not dogmatic about it, but people in this situation do not have the leisure time to learn how to read and write and then spend even more time doing the creative part of it. Poor people are illiterate and remain illiterate. In the modern age, the state ensures that we all learn how to read and write, but that has taken a considerable effort of administration and political will to do. Having done it, yes, kitchen porters, single mothers and farm labourers can find time by writing, at night time perhaps, to make literature, but primitive shepherds on arid hillsides never did. If anyone was writing in the hill country then, it was Phoenician priests or princes spending the hot season in their country dachas in the cool of the hills. Realistically, I think, the Jewish scriptures were all a much later composition than you think.
The Egyptians did not, as you assume, “control” the hill country. They mainly ignored it, as it was of no value to them. The scarabs were there probably for the same reason that you can see American flag designs all over the world.
Too glib! They controlled it all right, and they had military enclosures and garrisons, no doubt small, on guard. They had to cope with the incursions of the famous Apiru. Read the Amarna correspondence which is almost contemporary with the dates you have suggested. Rohl, whom you might have read, thinks David and Saul can be identified in this correspondence, so they were in the wild arid hills before your Joshua, if his conjecture has any substance. If it has, it is only to the extent that the Ptolemaic priests could use ancient letters like these to invent history a millennium old.
As to messianics, this was not an original Jewish thing, but imported by those returning from the Babylonian exile, and was probably actually Zoroaster-based.
Hey! You are beginning to sound like God! You know what is originally Jewish and what is not, but the only evidence for any such belief is a belief that the bible is history. Of course, the messianic idea was Persian. No doubt about it, though the cracked pots of Judaism and Christianity will be furious at the thought. These religious fanatics are all insane, not just the Moslems, which is why Bush and Bin Laden are spiritual brothers. The Jewish religion is entirely based on Persian religion all bar a few relics of Egyptian and Canaanite religion which it replaced. If there was an original Judaism, the same situation pertains. It was replaced almost entirely with Persian concepts.
Final thought; Adam was and is unwilling to begin talking about Joshua per se, because he does not want to be perceived as some raving fundamentalist, and does not feel comfortable enough in his knowledge of Biblical dating etc. He is, first and foremost, an archaeologist, one who could excavate anything anywhere. Although I don’t think I am a raving fundamentalist either, I have no problem making some giant leaps of faith in different directions, as you will certainly notice in my book.
You make him seem ’as sound as a pound’—the opposite of ’not the full shilling’ in UK street talk.
NOW I finally understand where you are coming from, when you quote Finkelstein with veneration. Finkelstein, throughout his career, has taken every side of every issue, much like the current Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Kerry. I will not say more at this stage, and let you read the book first. But Finkelstein has done some very unacademic, indeed scandalous things, which now make him almost a pariah among respectable academics in Israel. I actually quote a conversation with Finkelstein in my book, but that was before his more recent shenanigans.
Your own prejudices are emerging again. I suspect what you mean by “shenanigans”, “scandalous things”, and “taking every side of every issue”, are just the things that I admire Finkelstein for, namely a desire for truth irrespective of religious, political and peer pressure. What always does seem to be true is that those with a plainly political agenda accuse those with only the thought of truth in their heads with having …a political agenda! Convenient. It is all too easy in somewhere like Israel to take the easy way out and agree with the fanatics who run the place. I must be perverse in admiring those that the fanatics slag off.
Oddly enough, when I got this reply from you, I was just looking up Zertal and his discovery on the net, and had just come across his own pages. I read through them and discovered that the Zertal approach is the Albright approach—what used to be mocked as the bible in one hand and a shovel in the other. Maybe that is not so shocking even today, but his pages give no indication that the bible might not be the origin of these cultish practices, but, as myths usually are, is the justification of them. You say he is a genius, but his own pages do not suggest it. He sounds naive if not simple. He mentions Dr Kulka-Horwitz but gives none of her results, no dates, no clues as to what was dated, no suggestions of error bounds. He mentions, I think, two scarabs, one of Thutmose, who is dated, I thought, about 1500. I know the perpetual excuse is that these are heirlooms when they appear so much out of the supposed context, but if your date is right, this is evidence that the date of Thutmose is wrong.
Remarkably too for a site that supposedly had such amazing importance, and was so significant in having the very stamp of Moses and Joshua themselves on it, was that it closed down in only a few decades, and seems never ever to have been used again. Is he sure it is not just a waste dump for the residues from the shrine at Shechem? You speak also of the plaster, but despite your desire to identify it with the leagcy of Moses, there is no writing on it. Why? Perhaps your book will say.
When we deal with pottery dating, we are on much firmer ground than Albright ever was. You should see the work of Ruth Amiram, who did an incredible, yeoman’s job in classifying the pottery of Israel.
Ah! Mortal life is so short, and the alternative is to be good and get an intolerable eternal life! When I was a schoolboy, I much preferred history and archaeology to chemistry, but chemistry offered some prospects. Now I have neither time nor resources to read everything I would like to. Still, perhaps Ms Amiram is an excellent taxonomist but has she been able to solve the dating problems that rogues like Glueck and Albright introduced, and now the biblicists will not let go of? Finkelstein is at least trying to make some sense out of the spoil heap that biblical archaologists have made out of the Holy Land!
As to the location of the site, Zertal has an idea that the current Mt Gerizim is not the ancient one, and the Biblical Gerizim is actually a mountain called Tel Kabir, just opposite the Ebal site, so that might explain things your way. Imagine that!!
What is that big Samaritan park then? Or was it the Samaritans who got it wrong? More important is the idea that whatever the bible is describing in Deuteronomy and Joshua is not in the middle of the northern hills, but ought to have been facing Jericho just over the Jordan. The site was to be set up “on the day” that the tribes passed over the Jordan. I understand that in ancient times Ebal and Gerizim were not where they now are but were near Jericho.
In my book, you will see how hard Adam Zertal and I fought to keep politics and religion outside the realm of his work. No easy matter in a country like Israel, where people like Finkelstein get the ear of the media so easily. One day, in the not too distant future, everyone will see that it is Zertal who is “sound as a pound”, not Finkelstein.
Perhaps so, but the point about the two is that Finkelstein seems scientific and Zertal seems to be a biblicist. You are trying to have it all ways. Finkelstein is a pariah but gets media attention! If he does then it must be because his views are risable, surely, and the Israeli media cannot be on his side for these political reasons that keep intruding. They must write a lot about him as a laughing stock. If he is a pariah among his traditionalist colleagues and gets media attention even though his views are not what the average Israeli wants to hear, then perhaps he gets into the media simply because he is right! Or there is the distinct fear that he might be. Where are the secular Jews who do not need to have a phony 3000 year old deed of possession that has, moreover, been defunct for 2000 of the 3000 years. In other words, where are those who do not need all this malarchy about God, and will not put up with pseudo-religious lies as a basis for the state of Israel? The true history of the bible is much more fascinating than the infantile notion that an almighty being could think of only this way of communicating with His people!
If you are anywhere in the vicinity of London, I do get there on occasion. I’d love to join you for a beer or whatever.
Its a nice thought, but I rarely go to London, or anywhere else for that matter. I feel most comfortable at home surrounded by my peronal effects. That ole rockin’ chair got me! But for the moment, it is the world snooker championship.
“A waste dump from the shrine at Shechem”????!? Do you carry your trash up a 2,500 foot hill?!?!? I’ll forgive you that silliness, since you don’t know the geography. Also, it assumes that the trash collectors and disposers went to extraordinary lengths to construct an entire series of walls, a full-blown burnt-offering altar, more than 70 stone installations, a corral, etc.,etc.?!?!?! And, of course, they DELIBERATELY buried a valuable royal scarab in situ!!! You really are grasping at straws here!!
Calm down! It was a joke. I have a question, though. What is valuable about a clay scarab? I thought they were made by the million as amulets or seals.
Your “understanding” that, in ancient times, Gerizim and Ebal were near the Jordan is a quote from the Jerusalem Talmud which presents this idea by a Rabbi Eliezer, who had trouble reconciling the Gilgal of Jericho with the Gilgal of Deut 11:30. Read my book for the explanation. I find it amusing that you speak of malarkey about God in Israel, when people in your country put up with the nonsense of a “royal” family for so many centuries, with no end in sight. Every people have their own plateful of stupidity and ignorance.
True enough, but at least the old Queen is real, and not a figment. Of course, it could be much better to be ruled by a figment, but there are always some rogues who pretend to hear his still small voice telling us what to do, and a load of gullible strawclutchers believe them. They thus become the dangerous ones. Tony Blair is one, and Bush too. What God says cannot be contradicted. I suddenly became a monarchist.
You say the nation of Israel was “invented”. I would again refer you to my book, and see whether, after all you read there, you still interpret Deut 27:9 as some “invention”. I have contempt for the Arab claim that there is a “Palestinian” nation, as well as contempt for a religion that enables the kind of madness we are all witnessing today, but not for Arabs.
I am speaking of the state of Israel today as being invented, though my own preference is for the hypothesis that Judaism itself was invented by the Persians in 417 BC, as you will know if you have read my pages. If you have contempt for the Palestinian claim to nationhood, what is your definition of it? A nation is a collection of peoples who decide they have sufficient in common such as culture, religion and language to want to operate together in their own mutual interest under a common government. Isn’t that applicable to both Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs? I fear you are much more blinded by your prejudices than you show in a short correspondence. Islam is a mad religion but so is yours, and so is the one that I was indocrinated in at school but rejected. All of you religious people think you are right because God is on your side and nobody else’s. That is insanity, and I am certain, that if there is a God, no one who thinks like this will find their way into his bosom, or whatever it is that you think will amuse you for eternity.
Also, I am dying to hear from you a better explanation for Genesis 48 than the one I offer in the book.
I agree it probably symbolises some such transfer of power, but beyond that you KNOW what it means, whereas I do not, even if our agreed interpretation is right. There was a period of over 100 years when the colonisation of Yehud by the Persians was haphazard, and achieved little. It was in this time that there were the rivalries that were eventually allegorized in the Jewish scriptures when the cult was centralized in Jerusalem by Nehemiah and Ezra. The country was ruled by magistrates, called in the bible, Judges. There might have been a rivalry between Shiloh and Shechem, the only traces of which we now have are in the bible.
My dear friend, I really think that an objective reading of my book will open you up to the possibility that you may be mistaken in some of your assumptions. I do not pretend to have all the answers, but the fact that no one else does, especially not Finkelstein, is patently clear.
I have received and read your book, for which I thank you. It was a readable book. I am now going through it again with a notebook and pen, and will write up and copy to you my comments, if you wish. To expect an objective reading of it, though, is impossible. Christians always say to me, "read the bible with an open mind and Jesus will enter in." It means suspend all your critical faculties, like them, and that I am not willing to do. So I have read your book critically because I cannot be objective about anything as irrational as belief. You believe! I note you are a sadder man, but I am not so sure about wiser. You seem to stick to the fantasies you were indoctrinated with as a child. One of the sad things about Islam is that the Moslems are more passionate about their religion than most Christians and Jews. But not all! As I said just now, people who are passionate about religion are dangerous to the rest of us who let God get on with it. He is, after all, almighty and we are not, until we get to believe God is with us and agin them over there.
So far, I have 16 pages of comments (by p 125, and I have skipped the first two chapters). Perhaps you will not want them, especially as I am a chemist not an archaeologist or theologian by profession. I recollect in 1967 when I was a new PhD, an old physicist, older than I now am, told me that you lose your originality as you get older, but it is compensated by a great improvement in your critical abilities. So, the older guys write critical papers while the younger ones write original ones. So, though my criticisms might not all be valid, especially as your book is not a scientific report and is frustratingly short on detail I would like to have, they are fairly thorough. If you are serious about doing a doctorate in archaeology or biblical history or whatever, YOU will have to be able to cope with criticism better. Because you are too emotionally attached to your hypothesis, you blame your critics, instead of looking at what they are saying, and taking it constructively. You need to get more objective, or at least be ready to appreciate that blind belief in the bible will not do today, except in narrow circles of bigots. You now show some skepticism about your orthodox views, but do not seem to have changed them, if your book and this correspondence is the evidence. There is a saying in Yorkshire, “The whole world’s daft, except thee and me, and even tha’s a bit daft.” You and Adam sound a bit like that! (It’s a joke, Zvi.)
Thank you for finding my book “readable”. That is all I wanted it to be. The scarab is faience, a type of soft stone, not clay. This particular one was not one that could be found easily in marketplaces, etc., but rather had unquestionable royal provenance.
I have to take your word for it, but checked in the British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, sub voce, “scarab”, where it is described as a “common type of amulet, seal or ring-bezel found in Egypt, Nubia and Syria-Palestine from the sixth Dynasty until the Ptolemaic period (2345-30 BC)”. It adds, “Scarabs have proved to be an unreliable means of dating archaeological contexts since the royal name is often of a long dead ruler, Menkheperra, the pre-nomen of Thutmose III being a particularly common example”. You seem to have an example of this cited case. Faience too is not a particularly valuable material. Their presence is more likely because the country was held by the Egyptians and not because invisible Israelites migrated all of a sudden from Egypt.
As far as God is concerned, I tend to go along with the explanation of a clever co-religionist of mine, Albert Einstein. When asked the inveitable “Do you believe in God?”, he answered: “According to all the laws of physics that I know, something from nothing, i.e. creation, is inexplicable, so I do believe in a higher force. But to say that any religion is the explanation for that force is a leap I cannot make”. Even you should find this outlook pallitable. If I have more than a trace of sympathy for the biblical materials, it is because I am fiercely proud of the heritage, my heritage, which created them (human, not divine!!)
It does not sound like the ZK you described in your book, who was reading the scriptures at three years old and brought up as an orthodox Jew. Einstein had Jewish parents but was brought up in a Catholic school. He was briefly passionate about his Judaism, like you, but rejected religion as a boy while retaining the idea of some sort of impersonal God, which he mentioned often. He sounds more like a Stoic in this respect.
As to the comments you are amassing on my book, I really would be delighted to receive them. But rememeber that to refute what I say, BY SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS, you must come up with a “better mousetrap” for the entirety of the information. I knowingly took some liberties and said things ehich could not hold water under scientific scrutiny, but did that with the complete understanding that my book is not a scientific work. However, even those interpretations, such as the royal scarab, have no better alternate explanations than the one I offer.
I would not presume to refute what you say. History is rarely clear enought to be categorical about it and especially at this distance, and when it is mixed in with myths. What I have been doing is asking questions and suggesting alternative answers to what you have already concluded. Anyway, since you express interest, I shall start typing!
I am certainly looking forward to receiving your book and reading it as well.
I note from your next short acknowledgement email that you have the books. I hope you get time to read them and enjoy them. I think Jesus should be rehabilitated as a Jewish hero. Perhaps then Jews will not all have to be forced into accepting Christ, when Fundamentalist Christian cracked pots think the “Rapture” is nigh. I gather the Jews all have to convert before the longed-for event can happen. These are the footpads that you are walking with, and it seems from recent revelations they will have no compunction at torturing you all into submission to Christ, should you prove intransigent. Watch out! Do not take your eyes off your chosen companions!
I have entertained the idea of resuscitating Jesus as a Jewish hero for a long time. He probably actually was one, otherwise he would not have been so detested by mainstream religion of his time.
You are still wrong on the scarab. It would be like looking up the definition of finger rings. Most are common, omnipresent, and cheap. But there are a few that aren’t. According to museum experts from the same place that published the dictionary you saw, this scarab is not commonplace, is very valuable, and certainly would not have ended up randomly at this site.
Read the critical review of The Lost Temple of Israel
