Science offers the tools for this
In his article in the "Haaretz" supplement last week, the archaeologist Prof. Ze'ev Herzog made the sensational statement that the biblical period never happened, since no evidence of it can be found in the excavations. Most of the other archaeologists who were interviewed expressed complete agreement with what was said in the article and even claimed that there was nothing new in the ideas expressed in it. There is indeed a minority opinion that continues to present material evidence to the narrator in the Bible, but it seems that the current scientific consensus is not inclined in that direction. However, those who are not archaeologists, both religious and secular, were unanimous that even if the Bible is true or if it is a legend, it is an immortal work that nothing can harm its importance. But it is disturbing that some of them went so far as to declare that archaeologists and their findings should not be believed at all.
Herzog's article actually raises a fundamental question: Is archeology an exact science? The scientific discipline does not refer to the status of a scientist or the emotional reactions that his writing evokes. In the statement attributed to him, "And yet it moves," Galileo Galilei expressed his disgust at the church's desire to subject the scientific experiment to the feelings evoked by the finding that the earth is not the center of the universe. Therefore, it cannot be imagined that the opinion of politicians and poets will be relevant to the dispute between the archaeologists. If it is assumed that archeology is a science like any other science, and that its main occupation is collecting facts in the field and trying to explain them through historical theories, then the only way out of the tangle is to increase the accuracy of the observations and possible changes in the theory. In recent decades, archeology has been undergoing major changes, which will allow it to move from the field of humanities, in which it is now studied in universities, to the field of natural sciences. The "new archeology" expands the use of technologies such as radioactive dating and ancient DNA tests, and also involves understanding the need for accurate quantification and statistical analyses. A center for scientific archeology was recently established at the Weizmann Institute of Science, headed by Prof. Steve Weiner, which enables students with a master's degree in natural sciences to study for a doctorate in archaeology. Similar changes are taking place in the professional departments at the other universities. Will this revolution be able to resolve the contradiction that emerged between the findings of the excavations and what is written in the book of books?
The Bible has three main components: myths designed to create a new nationalism, texts that are the conceptual basis for the world's first monotheistic religion, and detailed historical descriptions. Even if the first two elements are assumed, it is difficult to ignore the feeling that the historical accounts in the Bible sound reliable and deserve a comprehensive examination. No jury would have dared to regard the totality of the exact evidence about kings and prophets, cities and temples, battles and religious wars as absolute heresy. This is how a discipline was born in the last century whose goal is to confirm what is written in the Bible with historical and archaeological methods. Do we now have enough evidence to unequivocally declare this widespread effort a failure? When science encounters a contradiction between facts and theory, the thresholds tremble. This was the case when Michelson and Morley's experiment in 1887 showed that light always moves at a constant speed, regardless of the speed of the flashlight. This contradicted Newton's equations and led Einstein to formulate the special theory of relativity. The upheaval was not initially met with sympathy and it took years of meticulous experimentation to convince the entire physics establishment. It seems that such a combination of a new theory and a careful collection of findings is also required in the matter of biblical archaeology.
How do scientists decide if a new theory is indeed worth the effort needed to confirm it?
It goes without saying that an alternative theory must explain the newly discovered facts. But there may be a situation where several different theories will be somewhat successful. In such cases, science needed the "Ockham's Razor" criterion, named after William of Ockham, an English theologian from the 14th century. According to this principle, it is appropriate to give precedence to the simplest theory. An example of this is the attempt to reconcile the contradiction they discovered
Astronomers between the distribution of matter in galaxies in the universe and the abundant light from them. Most scientists still support the idea that there is "dark matter" in galaxies, but are forced to assume that its amount and distribution varies from galaxy to galaxy. Prof. Mordechai Milgrom from the Weizmann Institute proposed as an alternative to change (again) Newton's equations. It turns out that one simple change in the formula makes it possible to explain the contradictions in hundreds of different galaxies. It is difficult for the establishment to accept a proposal for such a revolution, but because of Occam's rule it is taken seriously.
Is there an alternative theory in the archeology of the Land of Israel?
Seven years ago, the book "The Lost Bible" by Yehoshua Etzion was published by Shoken. Even then, the book detailed almost word for word, while basing itself on a comprehensive literature survey, all the contradictions now presented in Prof. Herzog's article. And even more important: it is proposed to make a radical change in the dating method of the finds of the excavations in Israel, following on from the writings of Emanuel Velikovski ("Periods of Chaos"). The book was written by a person who is not a professional archaeologist, so most establishment scientists treated it with disdain or disregard. Although it is difficult to accept such a revolutionary change, especially from the mouth of a person with no formal education in archaeology, the scientific method requires answering two questions: Does the new approach reconcile essential contradictions? And does it obey Occam's principle?
The "Lost Bible" proposes to stop basing itself on the timing method developed for the archeology of ancient Egypt and try to build a separate scale for dating the layers here. There is a smell of heresy in this, just as it was in the beginning for the theory of relativity. But it turns out that if you change the dates attributed to the different layers by an identical shift that "youngens" them by about 500 years, you suddenly get a much better match with what is told in the Bible, and this at dozens of excavation sites. This includes signs of wandering in the Sinai desert during the Exodus, the rapid conquest and sudden destruction of large cities such as Jericho during the settlement period, remnants of Sivian construction during the time of David and Solomon, as well as evidence of the gradual destruction that came from the north during the Assyrian and Babylonian occupation which led to the destruction of the First Temple.
The consistent lack of a stratum defined for the Persian period, in which the return of Zion took place in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, is also explained. It therefore seems that the proposal does reconcile contradictions, and that Occam's rule is well fulfilled in it: a single change leads to an extensive adjustment, and it is much simpler than the assumption that all the historical descriptions in the Bible did not exist and were not created. Of course, the scientific method does not require that archaeologists accept the alternative theory immediately and without provocation. Nor are unique experiments required in this case to test the theory. Careful data collection could easily ascertain whether it has a basis, while simultaneously examining many other theories. All that is required is a radical change in the use of modern technologies. With the method of measuring with the help of radioactive carbon 14, an accuracy of about 20 years is now achieved, provided that suitable resources are devoted to each and every measurement. If archaeologists, including those trained in the natural sciences, can date using advanced methods thousands of items in many sites and layers, it will be possible to try to reconcile the painful contradiction between archeology and the Bible. Science offers the tools to rediscover the lost Bible. All that is required is a brave and creative approach by the archaeologists and those responsible for supporting their research.
16 תגובות
In my opinion, most archaeologists work within a pattern without any creativity, because there is no smoke without fire (or the opposite) and there are definitely findings that do not fit the time set
when,
Does Etzion outline his entire Torah in the "Book of Apostasy" or is it necessary to read the "Lost Bible" first?
Adam and my father,
Yehoshua Etzion did not write his book in order to convince about the truths of the religion in the Bible, Yehoshua Etzion shows that the history written in it is reliable. (He himself is not religious, see also his book "The Heresy")
Each person will make the consequences for himself, religious or atheist.
The main insight that emerges from his book is that in the end researchers are "fixed" in their thoughts and as the author of the article writes here: "All that is required is a brave and creative approach by the archaeologists and those responsible for supporting their research."
A final note for tonight: the ideas of the postmoderns are increasingly being pushed aside in the light of scientific research - not only from the perspective of the older research knowledge (see for example Finkelstein's repressed interpretive loopholes for the Mernpetah Astelet) - but also from the perspective of the new research knowledge.
It turns out that these ideas will be thrown into the historical scientific dustbin, but it should be noted that the damage caused here is not only on the scientific level. The ideas of the Israeli postmodernists have been used for about 15 years by antisemites, including covert antisemites (Christians and Muslims) and also by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian politicians and 'educated' - as a 'factual' basis for propaganda against the legitimacy of Judaism, the Jews, Zionism and the State of Israel as a nation state A Jew who has the right to exist. All of these are presented as fraudsters and historical forgers and colossal robbers - roughly in the style of Ahmadinejad, but with more sophistication.
The scientific conceptualization made by the postmodernists can be corrected. But these extra-scientific damages cannot be repaired.
And one more thing - note that the postmodernists come from Tel Aviv University - only. Doesn't this seem trendy?
"Most of the other archaeologists who were interviewed expressed complete agreement with what was said in the article and even claimed that there was nothing new in the ideas expressed in it. There is indeed a minority opinion that continues to present material evidence for what is told in the Bible, but it seems that the current scientific consensus is not inclined in that direction."
With all due respect to Prof. Lantz - his words quoted above are nonsense, or what is worse - a deliberate distortion of the truth.
In order to demonstrate the true opinion of most researchers, and as a starting point - I refer to the book that presents the variety of approaches, which is also readable and understandable to those who are not professional archaeologists - "The polemic on the historical truth in the Bible" / Israel Levin and Amichai Mazar, Yad Ben Zvi Publishing.
I highly recommend looking not only at the articles of the extreme postmodernists Prof. Finkelstein and Herzog, who deny the significant historical weight of the Bible but are a minority in the modern scientific community. The articles of most scholars - Mazar, Zertel, Horvitz and others - are much more balanced and convincing, and the recognition of the historical value of the biblical description as a whole is clear.
The amazing wonder in all these debates, no matter how clever they sound, there is not a single drop of objectivity in them. Any unequivocal statement about scientific proof of the existence of God or its denial is up to the listener whether to accept it or not.
The facts known to us from archeology are many and contradict each other and are subject to interpretation. Hundreds of historians build the Hossitory chain according to their worldview "first of all they build a theory and then they look for evidence, and if there is no evidence then they make minor changes to the theory because no one wants to abandon a theory they have been working on for twenty years" (Stephen Hawking - Black Holes and Puppies universes)
And not one historian agrees with his friend.
We all work with a selective and biased mind, first of all we choose if I want to have some kind of God to manage my life or not - and according to this our mind determines which data seems logical to it and which doesn't. In fact, both faith and heresy are both normal psychological phenomena. On the one hand, faith - a person is looking for support and purpose for his life, on the other hand heresy - a person feels a power that is required of him and he rebels just like a teenage boy who knows that matriculation is important, but nevertheless he develops an anti against studies.
The question that bothers me is that some of us are aware of this and some of us that way???
Wow wow what a nonsense article.
The only archaeologists who agree with Ze'ev Herzog's opinion are from Tel Aviv University.
The biblical period is a historical fact that every time another find is discovered that verifies it.
Enter this too – http://www.inn.co.il/News/News.aspx/190230
Spring,
A plastic cup will not explode, no matter how long you give it. But let's take another example. Evolution does not believe in explosions and rapid events. Evolution speaks of very slow processes, which are carefully ascertained.
Let's say I take a block of plastic, and every year I sand it a little. a little bit. Only a few plastic grains fall off the edges. But each time I sand it so that it looks more and more like a glass.
Such a process would require hundreds of thousands of years, with each year I sand just a little more, until the block of plastic resembles a glass. But eventually it will happen.
Evolution works in a similar way - constantly grinding, constantly polishing. slowly, slowly, slowly
Now ask, who chooses how to sand and where to sand? Who decides what the shape will be in the end? Who is the arbitrator in the process?
The mechanism of evolution is called 'natural selection' and it is based on the idea that every year we grind through millions of plastic blocks, choose the one that best fits the shape we are thinking of at that moment, and throw away the rest. In this way, natural selection selects only the most suitable patterns for the environment. This choice is constantly activated by the environment - the forces of nature and other living creatures.
So this has nothing to do with a case or a one-time event. According to evolution, we should find a lot of 'cups' that have not been polished to the end - more primitive life forms than us - and we do find them every day, as fossils and living creatures still in our time.
I hope I answered your question,
Roy.
Sorry, both Adam and Aviv, but you are talking nonsense.
It's a shame I didn't see Adam's response - why should I talk to rabbis who are no wiser than me (and I mean no wiser, to put it mildly) certainly Amnon Yitzchak and Zamir Cohen. Just because they succeed because of their charisma in convincing fools doesn't mean they have to convince me.
Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak after he threatened Wikipedia to take down a section about a boy who committed suicide because of it, a story that appeared on Ilana Dayan's Ovda show, cannot be used by Urim and Tomim as someone who does not censor comments.
Aviv - what the Chabatites explain to you about evolution so that you will be convinced that it is not true, and what happened in reality - there is a difference of heaven and earth.
I agree with Adam, how can it be that there are hundreds of thousands of types of living beings and very billions of cells in the body that are born, all actions have to be performed at once, how can chance do such a thing? I give the whole world as much time as they want and I want to see that in an explosion they will make me a plastic cup...
Believe me, I'm not excited to read these articles and they don't upset me at all, the opposite is true...
And regarding your proficiency (and the shroud is also incorrect, this is not the place to go into detail) I understand that you are very deficient, therefore I recommend that you ask your difficulties only to an authority who is knowledgeable about our sages!!
Regarding the way of writing that you claim that a human wrote it, there is a lot of evidence that refutes your claim such as for example
A- The biblical code that surely no person can plan such a thing (see the Divorut website, they have a detailed explanation of the phenomenon)
In the many prophecies that are spread throughout the entire length of the Tanach, there is something that looks at the fact that such a creation cannot be created by a human being (this is not the place to take a longer look at Rabbi Zamir Cohen's website of conversations, he proves in an amazing way how the prophecies were fulfilled!!)
"However, I'm glad you read articles like this even though they upset you, I'm sure if I make an atheistic comment on a religious website, it will be deleted immediately and they won't respect me the way I respect you"
I don't accept it because on Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak's website there are many like you who believe they came from monkeys and they are given the opportunity to comment!!
With all due respect, the Tanakh was written during the period between the exile of Israel and the exile of Judah, when masses of refugees from Israel flooded Judah, and there was a strong pressure to blend the two religions which are close but definitely not the same. You can see these stitches in almost every book of the Torah (Noah, in one section a crow and a few paragraphs later it's a dove), and even differences in versions between different books in the prophets and in the scriptures (example Kings versus Chronicles). The way of writing a. indicates that humans wrote it and Reflects the politics of that time.
Certainly some of the stories are true, because the closer the period, the more accurate the memories used by the educated who preserved the knowledge from generation to generation.
If you insist on treating the Tanakh as a guidebook for everyday life, then why end up with tefillin? Do you avoid going among women, or do you bruise the ear of a slave? I am an atheist, it is certainly enough for me to regard it as an important book, nothing more. Certainly not as a life guide. I am not eager for any supernatural factor to guide me, and actually enslave me to it, whether it is a sect, some other religion or the religion I happened to be born into.
But even you as a religious person should have criticism. With all due respect, Christianity appeared approximately 500 years after the Tanakh was written, so it accepted it as something older than it should have been, and like any religion, did not doubt its origins. Islam is another 700 years late. Even the life of Jesus has only a few testimonies, and in any case, there is no reliable testimony of his miracles except those of the people of his faith, which are difficult to relate to and there are also contradictions between them. What's more, my initial assumption is that miracles can't happen forever.
However, I'm glad you read articles like this even though they upset you, I'm sure if I make an atheistic comment on a religious site, it will be deleted immediately and they won't respect me the way I respect you.
To my father
A- Regarding the wearing of tefillin, whether it is given to humanity or not, that can be debated, but one thing is not debatable, and that is the strong Jewish tradition that is fortified by many daily actions designed to remind us of our tradition, and tefillin is one of those actions
B- you say that "no one claims that Napoleon did supernatural things" and I ask then what if he didn't??
And Jesus Christ of the Christians did. There is someone who denies his existence.. I even admit that he had powers (DA this does not mean anything as long as there was no revelation of the Creator to the eyes of millions like on Mount Sinai (about which there is the dedication I mentioned) surely he was
C- You say that the biblical events do not have another source that can be cross-checked and check the truth of the stories..I'm sorry, I also disagree with you because all religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism without exception, acknowledge the biblical events. The reason for this is that it was known in the world that there was indeed such a powerful event from which Knowledge of the entire world and that there is no questioning about it gives the power and the crossover that you want so much
PS... Happy Hanukkah
per person
If skeptical scientists didn't exist, you wouldn't have an internet to write this comment on. The historians have the right to be skeptical too.
With all due respect to putting on the tefillin, it does not contribute anything to the welfare of humanity.
And as for the old ultra-Orthodox argument about Napoleon being overused by converts. There is also a difference between Napoleon and the Exodus, no one claims that Napoleon did supernatural things, at the time there was already an organized communication, that it is possible to cross-reference many sources and not one source that was written a thousand years after the event, and which is based on word-of-mouth transmission of dozens of generations that each changed according to his understanding
What is the doubt at all if it was or wasn't?... It's like I'm asking a holocaust.. Was it or wasn't it?? The initial answer of all of us must have been because there are witnesses to it... and what will happen if they pass away and there are no witnesses?? What then.. pictures? Today everything can be falsified!! Therefore, what I want to say is that the strongest proof that there can be is the Day of Remembrance that the State of Israel established in order to unite with the victims of the Holocaust... Now in Judaism there is not one day of the year that reinforces the events (the Exodus from Egypt.. the giving of the Torah.. the walk in the desert and more..) Every day we have a memory of this and it is the placing of the tefillin where it is written about the exodus from Egypt and the mezuzos to remind us of the blood that was on the mezozus... in addition to this there are also 3 holidays a year and they are Pesach Shavuot and Sukkot. For the giving of the Torah... Sukkot is a male for walking in the desert... Now I ask you another question, was there a Napoleon??? What is the evidence for his existence? Archeology is lacking.