Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: First city and longest continuously inhabited city?
From: cctr114@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Rea)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 03:07:00 GMT
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8]

Lee Thomas (leet@ims.com) wrote:
>
>Bill> As for Ibaa's original question, trying to make a blanket
>Bill> pronouncement on the work of many authors over some hundreds of
>Bill> years can't really be done.
>
>Uh, Bill, old friend, that's what McDowell's quotes appear to be - and
>from some pretty authoritative names in archaeology, too.  Can you
>enlighten me some more here?  Thanks.  (No smiley - I'm sincere.)

If we look at the evidence we must say that for a large proportion of
the Old Testament we really don't have any idea whether it is ``historically
accurate''. I put that in quotes because writing history was we understand
it was not their purpose, but their theological outlook was unique in that
they saw God as acting in non-repeating ways in history. Hence the recording
of history for theological purposes was important to them. Take for example
King David. As far as I am aware there is no evidence for him outside
the Bible, but few would doubt that we was a real man and became king of
Israel at the times the Bible said he did. So while there are few things
that don't quite add up in the accounts of David, for the most part it
seems a reasonably historical account of the man and his life, its just
that we have no way to independantly tell if this was so.

Going back to the acount of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. If you read E. A.
Speiser's commentary you would be convinced that these stories were
firmly based on historical events. They don't come much more authoritative
than Speiser. Now he died in 1965, and since then a lot of his evidence
has been examined much more closely by scholars in the same field (excuse
pun) and few now accept that the various identifications which he made,
for example the adoption of a wife as a sister in Hurrian society which
he said was the basis for Abraham and Isaac saying their wives were their
sisters, are actually valid. So while Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
appear to be unremarkable people and certainly not out of the realms of
reality, we have no good non-Biblical evidence to show that they were real
people.

Fast forwarding to the time of the invasion from the east and the
Babylonian exile, here the Biblical accounts match very well with
what is known of from other non-Bibical sources. While the writers
purpose was not to record history and there is much theological
explantion for the events, the historical record seems accurate.

There are some places where the Biblical record appears to gave gotten
things mixed up. For example, in the book of Daniel there is mention of
a Babylonian King who went nuts and thought he was an animal. There is
such a story in the Babylonian records, but the details just don't
match the Biblical story.

So asking about the historical accuracy of the Bible is sort of like
saying, if you have a minute to spare tell me everything you know.
You have to focus your question more precisely and be prepared to
accept the answer that at the moment we don't have any non-Biblical
evidence to check against.

The problem with people like McDowell is that they have decided before
they examine the evidence that the Bible is literally correct, historically
accuarate and all the rest. This is really being a tyrant as far as the
Bible is concerned. If people beleive the Bible contains spiritual truths
then they ought to be prepared to come to it on its own terms rather
than press the whole thing into some preconcieved mold. Historical
accuracy, as we understand historical accuracy, does not appear to me
to have been one of the intentions of the writers. It is an old
collection of books with many authors. It is a non-trivial task to
understand it in its historical and cultural setting. People like
McDowell, perhaps unintentionally, give the impression that the writers
were just like modern western people and wrote in ways which we naturally
understand. I don't think that this is the case. The Old Testament
writers were much more like  Arabs than they are like us.
 
--
                                                                     ___
Bill Rea                                                            (o o)
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