Everyone Here is a Genius Until...

[allsmiles]

Something comes along that no one can refute. And then everyone just ignores it. Wonderful strategy, but it's really thin.

We know from clear archaeological evidence that the peoples known as the Phillistines never even entered the region until the 12th century B.C.E., and the "city of Gerar" in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, had his encounter with Abimelech, the "king of the Phillistines" (in Genesis 26:1) was in fact a tiny, insignificant rural village up until the 8th century B.C.E. It couldn't have been the capital of the regional king of a people who didn't yet exist!

 

[On Fire]

Something comes along that no one can refute. And then everyone just ignores it. Wonderful strategy, but it's really thin.

Just because you call it "clear archaeological evidence" doesn't make it so.

 

[allsmiles]

Did I say that it was clear? No, I didn't. I quoted it, and I quoted it in the Simply Curious thread and said that I was making no assertions.

Thank you!

 

[Turbo]

Wait... you mean some people who work as archeologists are unbelievers? This changes everything!

 

[allsmiles]

Maybe I should have entitled this thread "Everyone's a Comedian..."

 

[Granite]

:chuckle:

To quote a gangster: If I don't understand it, get rid of it.

 

[allsmiles]

The amount of responses and views is fairly telling.

 

[The Berean]

We know from clear archaeological evidence that the peoples known as the Phillistines never even entered the region until the 12th century B.C.E., and the "city of Gerar" in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, had his encounter with Abimelech, the "king of the Phillistines" (in Genesis 26:1) was in fact a tiny, insignificant rural village up until the 8th century B.C.E. It couldn't have been the capital of the regional king of a people who didn't yet exist!

What is the source for this statement?

 

[allsmiles]

http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm is the source. I've cut out sections to shorten it for this thread.

The Problem of the Exodus Story and the First Great Revision of Judaism
about 1200 B.C.E.

...there is no evidence from the records of Egypt itself that the events of Exodus ever occured, either archaeologically or documentarily in the manner in which the Bible describes the events. The reality is that if a series of plagues had been visited upon Egypt, thousands of slaves escaped in a mass runaway, and the army of the Pharaoh were swallowed up by the Red Sea, such events would doubtless have made it into the Egyptian documentary record. But the reality is that there isn't a single word describing any such events.

This is getting off to a good start.

Instead, what we do have from Egyptian sources is a remarkably different story of the Exodus. From about the beginning of the second millenium B.C.E., through about 1200 B.C.E., Egypt ruled the region known today as Palestine. How do we know this? We know it not only from Egyptian records themselves, which talk about tribute taken from the various towns and cities in Canaan, but from archaeological evidence within the region itself, which shows a number of settlements which were clearly Egyptian military outposts.

Timeline and evidence. Is everyone paying attention? You need to pay attention when you refute all of this. I'm rooting for you, you guys have answers for everything, don't let me down!

During this time, the region which was to become the land of Israel was sparsely populated and was populated by one of two groups (we're not sure which), either the Apiru or Shoshu peoples. The linguistic association of Apiru (sometimes Habiru) with the word, "Hebrew" had long, in the minds of scholars, been considered good evidence that this was the group that gave rise to the Hebrews, but we now know that the association wasn't quite that simple. The name may have been from that source, but the people probably weren't.

Still paying attention? :wave2:

In any event, the highlands of northern Palestine which was home to the Kingdom of Israel has a highly variable climate. Agricultural productivity, and the ability of people to sustain trade with the lowlands, was subject to varying climatic conditions, meaning that famine was a frequent occurence. When crops failed and trade could not be sustained, it was not uncommon for people to flee the region and head for refuge where crops were dependable. The nearest such place was the Nile delta in Egypt.

So many of the "Hebrews" (culturally indistinct from the Canaanites at this time), who were citizens of Egypt, fled to the Nile delta. Time and again. Every time there was a famine in Judah, Israel or Canaan, refugees headed for Egypt. The event was so common, and the refugees so numerous, that they eventually became a substantial minority group, influential in Egypt, where they were known as the Hyksos, as is now very clear from the archaeological record.

The story of the expulsion of the Hyksos is easily the closest parallel we have from either the Egyptian record or the archaeological record to the story of the Exodus as recorded in the Bible. There are problems, though. Besides the Exodus story line, the biggest problem is the dates: the Bible places the Exodus at about 1200 B.C.E., yet the story of the Hyksos culminates in 1570 B.C.E. It is quite likely that the story of the Hyksos is the story that eventually, through generations of revisionistic retelling, became the myth of the Exodus -- another example of history being rewritten to flatter the storytellers rather than to record the unvarnished truth.

More dates, I hope you all are paying attention.

Anyway, the Hyksos grew in influence until they eventually took control of Egypt, which they ruled, with considerable cruelty and tyrrany during the Fifteenth Dynasty, beginning in 1670 B.C.E. The Egyptians had finally had enough, though, and rebelled against the rule of the Hyksos and drove them out a century later in 1570 B.C.E. They weren't just driven out, either; the Egyptians pushed them back into Canaan with considerable force, driving them all the way to the Syrian frontier, sacking and burning Canaanite cities along the way.

Hopefully this post is harder to ignore.

 

[fool]

That's a great essay
I might have to print that

 

[waywardyouth]

Good, very good Smiles. Pretty rock solid.

 

[justchristian]

Umm ok. Interesting history lesson. Just curious, is this all actually accepted history confirmed by other sources?

 

[Granite]

Yes, unfortunately it is.

Two possible Christian answers:

Secular historians simply don't know what they're talking about and are totally, totally wrong

Or

There's a reasonable explanation for all this

The idea that scholars who know what they're talking about might be right is, of course, never entertained.

 

[allsmiles]

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/hyksos.htm

http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/Hyksos.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos

Hope this helps.

 

[justchristian]

I assure you I am more than entertaining the thought they are right and that they no what they are talking about. Unfortunately I am not a historian so I can offer little to refute at least the historical aspect of this. Honestly I don't know. I am not sure I believe this account of history, but I will read up on it more later tonight when I have the time. Thanks allsmiles for the links. I am quite liberal and more contextual when it comes to the Bible - esspecially the OT - so I don't know if you are interested in my view of all of this. But if you are I'd be happy to prepare a thorough response - this is one of the more interesting biblical contests I have encountered in awhile.

 

[allsmiles]

justchristian, I'm very interested in what you have to say, that's why I'm so adamant about getting people to read this stuff, look into it, and then post their opinions. I got sick of Aimiel spouting his vitrolic diatribes, especially after he admitted to me that his opinion is uninformed and demonstrating his lack of interest in anything other than the sound of his own voice, so to speak.

Yes, please look into this, please respond tomorrow when you have a better grasp, I don't say that condescendingly either, this is something I've learned of only recently myself. I invite you to respond, I welcome you to.

Thank you very much.

 

[The Berean]

allsmiles,

Do you know the auther of the webiste you gave? I checked out your "source". I 'm not impressed. He doesn't cite any sources. He makes statements like this:

Scholars have traced the roots of many of the Old Testament stories to the ancient, pagan myths of the ancient Mesopotamian cultures. In the Fertile Crescent, the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in present-day Iraq, gave birth to some of the worlds first civilizations.

What scholars is he talking about? How can I examine the work of these scholars if I don't know who they are and what they actually wrote.

Then he says this:

Many of the stories in that epic were eventually incorporated into the book of Genesis. Borrowed from the Epic of Gilgamesh are stories of the creation of man in a wondrous garden, the introduction of evil into a naive world, and the story of a great flood brought on by the wickedness of man, that flooded the whole world.

Again he cites no source. He mearly asserts the Genesis "borrowed" from Gilgamesh.

How can we respond to this "information" if we don't know where it comes from?

The websites' author is really saying anything that hasn't been said before. I always wonder why some people spent so much time trying to "disprove" the Bible? Don't they have better things to do? So I decided to skim through the author's website.

I read some of the author's other "writings". BillyBob would say this guy is a :Commie: He advocates abortion because it lower crime:

Why did Rowe vs. Wade have such a huge impact on crime in the U.S.? It is simple: Levitt found that single teenage mothers raising children in poverty were frequently undesirous and resentful of their children and did not care for them adequately, or placed them in orphanages where most grew up unloved and unwanted. The child, growing up unwanted and without hope or a sense of acceptance by the world, turned to crime as an easy way to make a living, while getting back at an uncaring world that had rejected him. When Rowe vs. Wade gave teenage pregnant girls an option for not having to raise such children, they took it. The children did not exist to grow into criminals - and the crimes they would have committed did not happen.

source: http://www.bidstrup.com/

The author also left the USA because he actually believes the US government was spying on him!! I guess he was been watching to many X-Files epsiodes:

After the elections of 2000, in which the minority presidential candidate managed to win the election through some very questionable circumstances in Florida, I decided that I should become a bit more active and assertive politically on my web site, and detail what I knew what would be the shenanigans of the new administration. I began by writing up a series of predictions for the new administration on my web site - and it was an instant hit. I was requested by a gay-lesbian magazine in Canada to write a print edition, and did so - it was published in their next edition. And when I took the editorial down from my web site, I began to receive occasional requests for the file. I realized that there was a hunger out there for more information about what the Bush administration was planning, and what it was up to. This led to my creation of the "Dick and Dubya Scandal Chart," which detailed all of the scandals, illegal operations, improper influence, conflicts of interest and other evidences of corruption in the Bush II administration. Within weeks of its publication, I started noticing a few peculiar things beginning to happen.
First, I received a death threat. It came in on my web page response form, but I have the script set up to record the internet IP address of the computer that sends me a response from that page - and when I checked to find out who the sending internet address was registered to, it proved to be assigned to the government of the State of Minnesota. Since this was an interstate communication involving a government, I forwarded the email on to the Phoenix office of the FBI, along with all the headers. But I never heard back from them, and didn't think anything more about it, since I get a lot of email from out there where the buses don't run. It wasn't until much later that it dawned on me that coming from a government network meant it was likely the first incident in what was to become a pattern.

Not long after, I noticed that whenever I went away for a few days, I would occasionally come home and find a few things had been moved around in my still-locked house - where I knew I had not left them. And there were occasional trucks parked out on the street, never in front of my house, but usually within two or three doors of my place. I didn't think too much about this, until one of these trucks, a pickup with a topper on the back, ostensibly owned by a roofing contractor, proved to be not what it appeared. I noticed that it was parked in front of a fire hydrant (for three days solid) - and yet the police drove by on at least three occasions that I saw, and never stopped to ticket it. So I went out for a closer look and what I discovered really piqued my interest. The truck had Colorado plates - a big no-no in Arizona, especially for a commercial vehicle. And I noticed that the ladder on the roof did not have any asphalt on the rungs - and yet the painted signs on the topper advertised asphalt membrane roofing work. When I looked in through the windshield, I got quite a surprise - this pickup truck, with a simple, cheap shell on the back, had a walk-through built from the cab into the bed. When I tried to look in, immediately, in seconds, a man climbed out from the back through the walk-through, got behind the wheel, started it up and drove it away. I never saw it or any of the other trucks again.

This wasn't the end of the strange goings on, by any means. I went to Las Vegas for three days to visit a friend, and as usual, had shut down all my electronics, including my computer. When I got back, I fired up my almost brand-new computer for an overdue email session, and to my horror, it would not boot. There was an operating system error, indicating that I didn't have permission to load certain files. This was odd, because I had set up the operating system just a few weeks earlier as the administrator, and had permission for everything. After several days of effort, I managed to come up with a workaround, and get the system to boot and be able to work with it, even if it was not working right. Then one night, I was watching Tech TV's "CyberCrime" program, and they had a special on the FBI's new virus-like spyware program, called Magic Lantern. They had a computer that they claimed was infected with it, with a defective installation - and the real shock was that the symptoms were identical to what I was experiencing with my own computer! This is when it all became clear - the truck in front of the house was an "LP truck" (listening post truck) designed to monitor a bug placed in my home in previous illegal breakins. And the computer problems were the result of a bungled Magic Lantern installation.

After hearing that Sophos, an anti-virus software firm in Britain, had announced that it would include a definition of Magic Lantern in their virus definition files, I contacted them and offered to conribute my Magic Lantern-infected hard disk to the cause. At first they were very interested in my offer of the hard disk. But then, all of a sudden and right out of the blue, they began denying that there even was such a thing as Magic Lantern! Interesting how they suddenly had come to that conclusion, in spite of the fact that its existence had been acknowledged by the FBI itself!

Furthermore, for some time, my email had begun to arrive days, occasionally even weeks after it had been sent - something that simply shouldn't be happening, given how the internet's email protocol is structured and how my domain email was set up. This was especially true of mail to and from certain correspondents - all activists, and only email with political content. The delays almost never happened with email of a non-political character, or at most, were only an hour or two. And political email I sent was delayed by many hours or days, and occasionally failed to arrive at all, even though I never got a bounce message. The only possible explanation for these selective delays, given my server's configuration, was interception.

I also noticed something strange about my snail-mail. Some of the flaps on the back of certain envelopes had the appearance of having been opened and resealed. When I started watching for this, I noticed it was a pattern - only envelopes dealing with my financial affairs and first-class mail to my friends was apparently being opened. And it was arriving late, too, often several days later than it ordinarily should have.

i'm sure he believes George Bush personally ordered the FBI to spy on him.



He blames "religon" for his problems:

bout this time, I began to realize that I just couldn't reconcile Mormonism with what I knew to be true about science (particularly evolution) and about the facts of my own homosexuality. I knew that I did not choose homosexuality, and that it was nonsensical to believe that God had made me that way only to persecute me. Such a notion made out God to be a very irrational, capricious Being unconcerned with issues of fairness. I just couldn't accept such a concept. One evening, while watching a documentary on evolution, it finally dawned on me that I needed to make a choice.

These words of Shakespeare had always had deep meaning for me: "Above all else, to thine own self be true; and it must follow as the night the day, thou cans't be untrue to any man."

In weighing the evidence, in leaving out all the emotional appeals, applying only the laws of reason and logic to the problem, I had to face the facts. If I was to be true to myself, I had to accept that Mormonism, which claims infallibility, was clearly wrong on at least this issue; other problems existed with Mormon doctrine too, which I couldn't reconcile with the realities of modern science and history. So after much thought and a great deal of self-examination, I abandoned the faith of my heritage.

I began a long period of agnosticism. I could see no evidence before me that could justify a belief in a god.

So allsmiles do you know the sources that he uses for your quotes?

 

[Granite]

:think:

 

[allsmiles]

Do you know the auther of the webiste you gave? I checked out your "source". I 'm not impressed. He doesn't cite any sources.

I don't know him. I'm looking into the Hyksos personally and so far he's dead on. Google the word Hyksos. It's easy dude.

What scholars is he talking about? How can I examine the work of these scholars if I don't know who they are and what they actually wrote.

So that means you can't use the internet to do research? That's awful! I'm sure there's a medical name for a condition like this...

Again he cites no source. He mearly asserts the Genesis "borrowed" from Gilgamesh.

Seeing as how the tale of Gilgamesh predates the writing of Genesis and the stories are both so similar, he probably thought that it was a safe assumption to make. He's not the first to make this assertion and you should know that. I do. Try refuting his assertion instead of discrediting him.

How can we respond to this "information" if we don't know where it comes from?

Justchristian is doing his research to respond to this, I have, Granite seems to know what he's talking about, Fool was appreciative and seems to be interested in looking into it. Everyone's on this bandwagon but you. You're more interested in discrediting the author than critically examining his work.

I read some of the author's other "writings". BillyBob would say this guy is a :Commie: He advocates abortion because it lower crime

Well, it's a free country, he can think what he likes. That hardly changes the evidence that supports his assertion. I've been studying the story of the Hyksos and their corroboration to the Hebrews and I'm an unbeliever. You've been studying the author of the assertion in the hopes of discrediting him because his political views differ from your own. So far you've displayed no previous knowledge of the Hyksos.

Maybe if you do some research into this you'll learn something new. How scary.

The author also left the USA because he actually believes the US government was spying on him!! I guess he was been watching to many X-Files epsiodes

Once again, free country and it doesn't change the evidence that supports his assertion.

i'm sure he believes George Bush personally ordered the FBI to spy on him.

Sarcasm doesn't change anything.

He blames "religon" for his problems

So? Maybe he's right.

So allsmiles do you know the sources that he uses for your quotes?

I cited extra links that describe the Hyksos. The author was aware of the Hyksos, obviously did his homework and presented a theory which makes a lot of sense. Nothing you have said has refuted the assertion, discredited the author, or made the evidence disappear.

You appear to not know what you're talking about, and while that is welcome here (I want us all to learn something new together ) taking blind pot shots at someone for presenting an evidence-supported theory is not.

Thank you!

 

[Hasan_ibn_Sabah]

Maybe the Bible isn't but the chronology is, Canaan at that time was not sparsely populated, but their were political upheavals going on in Canaan at that time, a large scale rebellion of the pastoral and rural peoples against the agricultrally based city dwellers, The Hyksos could have the Hatti or Hittite people, and other Canaanites allied with them who were being expelled from Canaan. When Israel set about expelling the rest of them, they could have high-tailed it over to Egypt, they could be the Hyksos not the Hebrews.