soc.culture.pakistan

Fables of Ancient Israel Now Being Dissected

Researchers are weighing the accuracy of the reigns of King Solomon and King
David against archeological and scientific data just recently discovered.
These scholars are coming up with some very interesting conclusions.

Many Christian religious scholars, such as noted author Thomas L. Thompson,
think the history of Palestine and its peoples is very different from Old
Testament narratives, regardless of political claims. A history of the
region during the Iron I and Iron II periods leaves little room for any
historicity in the accounts of the books of Samuel and Kings, critics say.
The major media seldom mention the scholarly Christian critiques of the
ancient legends for fear they they will come under attack from those who
believe the facts undermine Israel's very legitimacy.

By John Tiffany

Be ready for a major upsetting of the apple cart. Unknown to almost all
laymen, a huge number of scholars have quietly come together agreeing on a
historical fact that will overturn the entirety of "court history" when all
the facts they have gathered become widely known.

They agree that the various tales of "ancient Israel" are largely fictional.
Based upon the known facts of geography, history, archeology and even
biblical scholarship, many of them argue there was no such entity as
"ancient Israel"-that it never existed. Is it possible that ancient Israel
is a hoax?

In spite of the sensational nature of these findings about "ancient
Israel," they are, so far, all but totally un known to the general public,
including even history buffs. Colleges have been reluctant to teach the
facts, and many Christian pastors stay away from these truths as if they
would be cursed by God, Himself.

There was a time, not so long ago, when one simply did not question the Old
Testament. If the Old Testament said something had happened at some time in
the past, then it happened, and that was that, regardless of whether there
was any other evidence for the event outside of it's pages. No one even
considered that it might be fictional. Today that is no longer the case.

William G. Dever, in his very interesting and extremely important book, Who
Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?,1 answers questions
like "Did the House of David really exist?" and "Is King Solomon a fantasy?"
Dever was formerly the head of the University of Arizona's Near Eastern
studies department.

Most modern scholars consider the Davidic dynasty and especially the Exodus
story to be entirely fictitious.

There are many new things under the Sun, despite the biblical statement to
the contrary, and in recent decades a great controversy has developed among
the clerisy, although little has (until now) been heard about it by the
masses: To what extent may the Old Testament, or parts of it, be considered
an accurate historical document?

Perhaps the Old Testament can answer that question itself:

Thus saith the Lord: . . . Remember ye not the former things, neither
consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing.2

To be a true and honest scientist, one must be open to paradigm shifts, and,
similarly, to be a true historian, a historiologist, is to be a Revisionist.
To realize that what we once believed-although it seemed to make sense to us
at the time-is not what we should continue to believe is the essential
intellectual process by which wisdom grows. This is notoriously difficult
for older, established scientists and historians who find themselves
challenged to repudiate their whole life's work, so that for a new viewpoint
to become dominant sometimes requires us to wait for the older scientists
and historians to die off, as with the Copernican Revolution.3

Just as Copernicus overthrew the old understanding that the Sun goes around
the Earth, and changed the Sun to the center of the universe (and now it is
not even that, but a minor star in an average galaxy, in a vast universe
that has no center),4 so, with increasing knowledge of geography, was
Jerusalem (appropriately enough, considering the gravamen of this article)
dethroned from being the center of the world, as depicted in the Mappa Mundi
in the Hereford (England) Cathedral, to a town in the backwaters of
civilization.5 Jerusalem is no longer the center of anything, either in
geography or in history, except, of course, in the minds of Jews.

AMERIGO VESPUCCI

For centuries, Western scholars generally assumed that Old Testament
"events" such as the exile from the Palestine/Canaan of the Israelites and
their return there to actually occurred. The ancient history of Palestine,
it was taken for granted, could be written by merely paraphrasing or (where
necessary to avoid conflict with known facts) correcting the stories of the
Bible. However, this began to change as early as the beginning of the 16th
century, with the publication of Amerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus letter.
According to Vespucci, in his explorations of the New World, there were
found diverse pumas, panthers and wildcats, so many wolves, red deer,
monkeys and felines, marmosets of many kinds and many large snakes. There
was, in fact, so much wildlife that he concluded "so many species could not
have entered Noah's ark."

On the other hand, there is the case of James Ussher (1581-1656), Anglican
archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland and vice chancellor of Trinity
College in Dublin, who was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as
a scholar. Of his many works, his treatise on chronology has proved the most
durable but perhaps also the most ill fated. Based on an intricate
correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and holy writ, it
was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701,
and thus came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as
the Bible itself. Having established the first day of creation as Sunday,
October 23, 4004 B.C., Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events,
concluding for example, that Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of
Eden on Monday, November 10, 4004 B.C., and that Noah's ark made landfall on
Mount Ararat on May 5, 1491 B.C., on a Wednesday.

In his work, Dr. John Lightfoot (1602-1675), vice chancellor of Cam bridge
University, a contemporary of Ussher and one of the most eminent scholars of
his time in the field of the Hebrew language, declared, as the result of his
study of the Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, center and circumference,
were created all to gether, in the same instant, and clouds full of water,"
and that "this work took place, and man was created by the Trinity, on
October 23, 4004 B.C., at 9:00 in the morning." That would be Greenwich
time; the time at the Garden of Eden would have been midnight. Lightfoot
published his calculations in 1644, before Ussher's were completed. It is
interesting that the two scholars, acting independently, calculated the same
date for the Creation, although Ussher did not give the time of day for the
event. This may have something to do with the fact that both results
compare, roughly, to the Jewish calendar's date for the very beginning of
time, which, rendered into our terms, would be approximately 3760 B.C.

As the sciences of geology and astrophysics and allied studies began to come
into existence, with their intervals of millions and even billions of years
(numbers that people in Bible times probably could not have conceived of),
such chronologies as those of Ussher and Lightfoot impeded progress. Today,
however, Lightfoot and Ussher have become laughingstocks as it is generally
accepted that the Earth is at least 5 billion years old, and the known
universe perhaps four times as old as the Earth.6 (A few scientists such as
maverick astronomer Tom Van Flandern7 even maintain that the universe may be
infinitely old.) Such phenomena as the Garden of Eden and Noah's Flood
cannot be taken literally from the Old Testament by modern scientists.
Gradually the historicity of events farther removed from "Creation"
increasingly came into question as well. Unfortunately, many people today,
known as biblical inerrantists, refuse to consider the evidence, both
internal to the Old Testament and external to it, showing that ancient tales
of the "Jews" are not history.

Criticism of "the Old Testament as history" has quite a history itself.
Benedict de Spinoza, a Jew who lived in Amsterdam, wrote a revolutionary
book on the Bible, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theological-Political
Thesis, or TTP hereinafter), which appeared in 1670 in Latin, and within
eight years it was translated into French. Although it was banned for its
shocking criticism of the Old Testament, somehow everyone who was anyone had
a copy. TTP forced a serious debate about the trustworthiness of the Bible
as history and about the importance of the so-called "ancient Jews."

***

Actually there is no such thing as ancient Jews. Jews, furthermore, are not
the same thing as Judahites, who are not the same as Israelites, who must be
distinguished from Hebrews-and Israelis are something else altogether. The
confusion of these terms works greatly to the advantage of the movement for
political Zionism and is understood by all open-minded scholars.8

This was a formidable onslaught upon the inspired inerrancy of the
Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, or, more accurately,
the Hexateuch, since Joshua seems to show the same hands that wrote Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). It called attention to scores
of what H.L. Mencken called "transparent imbecilities" in the five books,
and especially in Genesis, including a dozen or more palpable geographical
and historical impossibilities. The answer of the constituted authorities
was to suppress the Tractatus, but enough copies got out to reach the proper
persons, and ever since then the Old Testament has been under searching and
devastating examination. The first conspicuous contributor to that work was
a French priest, Richard Simon, but since then the Germans have had more to
do with it than any other people, and so it is common for American
Christians to think of the so-called Higher Criticism as a German invention,
and to lay a good deal of the blame for it upon [Adolf] Hitler and the
Kaiser.9

Spinoza asserts, as his general conclusion about scriptural reports of
miraculous events in history, that everything that is truly narrated in
scripture to have happened necessarily happened, as all things do, according
to the laws of nature. And if anything can be found which can be
conclusively demonstrated to be contrary to the laws of nature, or not to
have been able to follow from them, it should simply be believed that it has
been added to the sacred texts by sacrilegious men.10

Tractatus the first book to analyze the Bible systematically as if it were
an ancient secular text in Latin or Greek or any ancient tongue. Spinoza de
throned the Hebrews and Israelites as the bearers of a unique, divinely
inspired truth. There could be no doubt, for Spinoza, that any valid
historiology had to deny utterly the centrality of what might be called "the
biblical experience."

The Quakers are said to have dismissed the Old Testament as a "dead letter."

AMERICA'S GODFATHER

Thomas Paine, who has been called the "Godfather of America," further laid
the groundwork for biblical historical criticism. He wrote, in his
influential 1795 book The Age of Reason:

It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth; on the
contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more ancient any
history pretends to be, the more it has the resemblance of a fable. The
origin of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition, and that of the Jews
is as much to be suspected as any other."11 (Essai sur les moeurs et l'
esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l'histoire depuis
Charlemagne jusqu'â Louis XIII (Geneva, 1756, known in English as The Essay
on Morals)

People began to wonder: Is the Old Testament, then, merely an antique fable?

These matters were discussed on all sides, and even the apologists of
orthodoxy, if they hoped to be taken seriously, had to use the tools of
historical and philological learning.

In the second half of the 19th century, a school of biblical criticism
developed in Germany, of which Julian Wellhausen was a leading figure. It
challenged the historicity12 of the Old Testament stories and claimed that
biblical historiography was formulated, and in large measure actually
invented, during the Babylonian exile. These Bible scholars, the Germans in
particular, claimed that the history of the Hebrews, as a series of events
beginning with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and proceeding through the exile to
Egypt, the enslavement there and the exodus, and ending with the conquest of
the land of Canaan and the settlement of the tribes of Israel, was no more
than a later reconstruction of events that had never actually happened, and
was written with a theological purpose.

Additional fuel was added to the fire with the publication in 1897 of The
Myths of Israel: The Ancient Book of Genesis with Analysis and Explanation
of Its Composition, by Amos Kidder Fiske (Macmillan Co., New York). Fiske de
tailed how different and incompatible versions of various events were
cobbled together rather clumsily by whoever compiled the Old Testament, as
for example the Elohist and Yahwist versions of the Deluge, resulting in
contradictions that would be intolerable in any book purporting to set forth
an accurate chronology.13

Perhaps there are contradictions in other ancient documents such as the
Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well, but if so, only a handful of
scholars would know about it, or care, since the Iliad does not purport to
be history, nor, while important, does it enjoy quite the central importance
in our culture that the Bible does.

H.L. Mencken's Treatise on the Gods was first published in 1930. (A second
edition, in 1946, changed little of interest here.) Mencken pointed out that
"[W]e have [the Flood myth] from the Jews, who got it from the Baby lonians,
who got it from the Sumerians." He saw in the Flood business the origin of
religion, with the world's first priest being a sort of caveman who boldly
attacked the rising waters of a flood with his club or spear. When the
waters coincidentally receded, the hypothetical shaman was an instant
celebrity within his tribe or band. Mencken wrote that: "The Old Testament,
as history, is on a much lower level" than Parson Weems's Life of Washington
or Uncle Tom's Cabin.

MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

In 1987, The Bible: Modern Critical Views was published, a re presentative
selection of biblical literary criticism, edited by Har old Bloom (Chelsea
House Pub lishers, New York and Phila del phia). Robert Alter, writing there
in ("Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fic tion"), described the
Old Testament as "sacred history." Alter suggested that the biblical
narratives should best be regarded as historicized prose fiction. He wrote:

The case of the Bible's sacred history, however, is rather different from
that of modern historiography. There is, to begin with, a whole spectrum of
relations to history in the sundry biblical narratives, as I shall try to
indicate later, but none of these involves the sense of being bound to
documentable facts that characterizes history in [its] modern acceptation.14

Today the climate of thought has shifted still further in Thompson's
direction, so that there is a whole cluster of scholars who propose that the
Old Testament does not provide us with adequate evidence to construct a
history of early Israel. The Old Testament, these scholars are convinced,
belongs in the same category as other ancient myths and literature such as
the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad and the Odyssey. Still, there must be
some historical truth in the Old Testament, because some of the things
written about therein have been confirmed by archeologists, just as Heinrich
Schliemann seemingly confirmed the ancient Homeric writings by discovering
what seemed to be the lost city of Troy, once thought by many scholars to be
"nothing more than a myth." (See TBR January/February 2007 for an
alternative setting for Homer's sagas.)

This, and other cases like it, indicate that, sometimes at any rate, myths
can be an effective way of preserving bona fide ancient knowledge and
wisdom.15

On the other hand, ancient tales such as the saga of Odysseus and his
encounter with the Cyclops certainly cannot be taken to imply the historical
or prehistoric existence of a race of one-eyed giant human oids. (It is
possible the tall tale, no joke intended, was inspired by someone having
found the fossil skull of a mastodon; the centrally located nasal opening
could easily have been misinterpreted to be an eye socket.) Similarly, we
cannot, as historians, prove from the Old Testament that some of its
characters, such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, actually existed, any more
than some of the characters in the dramatic and romantic Shakes peare plays
existed.16

Whereas internal contradictions within the Old Testament may suggest that
some of these individuals and events are partly or entirely fictional, for
the proof of their historicity we must look to other sources, both in the
form of extrabiblical ancient docu ments and the evidence of archeology.

Of course, by now we should all understand that many an ancient myth
contains valuable nuggets of fact, if we can somehow separate the wheat from
the chaff. But certainly this is not to say that myth is history. The
question is, how much of what resembles history (or perhaps we should say a
chronicle) in the Old Testament corresponds with actual events that occurred
in the region?

The cardinal rule of historiology is the balanced search for truth, and one
does not find this in a partisan document such as the Old Testament. It does
not take a great scholar to realize that the Torah is essentially a
panegyric "mythic history" of the Israelites, a people now long extinct but
claimed (with little actual justification) as their ancestors by the modern
Jews. It is what is known in German as Heilsgeschichte, or a holy and
theological pious fiction, but not true historiography. Historiology is an
exacting discipline, essentially a science, and immensely different in its
aims and methods from those of fiction or theology. In historiology and
historionomy, as in other sciences, we cannot say, as Tertullian, the
ancient church father, is usually quoted (or actually misquoted), "Credo qui
absurdum," or, more properly, "Credible est, quia ineptum est"-"I believe it
because it is impossible to believe."17

SORDID ASPECTS

While it is true that the Old Testament reflects many sordid aspects of the
lives of its characters, which is surprising in a work allegedly intended to
glorify these "founding fathers of the faith" (such as the incident in which
King David engineers the death of Uriah so that he can gain access to Uriah'
s wife), it is clear that as these tales began to be recorded, the
Israelites began to produce an ethnic myth explaining and glorifying their
origins, their superiority and justifying their special claim to the land of
Canaan/Palestine, of which they had, by one means or another, taken
possession, and to exalt themselves above all other peoples and their gods
above all other deities. For example, while the Israelite scribes
acknowledged the common descent of the "Ishmaelites," as they called the
Arabs, from their great ancestor Abraham, they relegated them to an inferior
relation with the story of the Egyptian handmaid and her son. Similarly with
the Midianites, Edomites and the especially hated Moabites and Ammonites,
who were placed on another line.

There is little reason to believe that the "David" of the Bible is really
one person. He may be derived from two or three different Davids of actual
history or prehistory, who became conflated in the evolution of the legends
that eventually gave rise to the Old Testament. For example, consider the
David who supposedly slew Goliath: Many academicians have noted the
similarities between the famous ancient Egyptian folktale The Autobiography
of Sinuhe and the biblical account of David and Goliath. There is no reason
to suppose that this little Egyptian grew up to be a king of Israel.

THE LAND OF CANAAN

Noah, of course, conveniently, is made to say, "Cursed be Canaan; a servant
of servants he shall be unto his brethren," making it supposedly legitimate
for the Israelites to help themselves to the land of Canaan, robbing and
murdering the inhabitants. Then there is the curse of Ham, the curse of
Cain, and so on, so that in their own stories, only the Israelite people are
blessed.

Just as with the Koran, which is now being questioned in regard to its
historicity by Revisionists such as Ibn Warraq,18 Paul Fregosi19 and others,
a number of scholars are now coming forth to analyze, in a critical light,
the historical aspects of the Old Testament. Most scholars are not claiming
that ancient Israel did not exist at all (just as the Islamic Revisionists
do not dispute that some such person as the Koran's Mohammed existed). But
rather the question is whether it was a great empire, as the Old Testament
indicates, and whether such biblical individuals as Abraham or Moses, for
example, ever existed in real life.

Could the so-called empire of Israel actually be a disguised version of the
Egyptian empire, as Revisionist Ahmed Osman reasons? Could the Emperor David
actually be an Egyptian pharaoh, who became confused with an Israelite
chieftain who also was called David?

Ancient Egyptian documents do not appear to reference Moses-unless he was
actually Ahmose I, founder of the 18th dynasty, as Revisionist Ralph Ellis
believes (you will note the similarity of "Ahmose" to "Moses"). Nor are
there any indications that an Exodus ever took place, unless it is a
distorted interpretation of the expulsion of the Hyksos people.20

Since the event describes the departure of a work force of thousands and
details the devastation of Egypt by a series of plagues, such an omission by
the Egyptians is extraordinary, if such an event actually occurred.

Keith W. Whitelam,21 George Mendenhall, Niels Peter Lemche,22 Philip R.
Davies,23 the "Copenhagen school," and even some distinguished Jews such as
Israel Finkelstein (professor and chairman of the archeology department at
Tel Aviv University),24 and leading Israeli archeologist Ze'ev Herzog have
come to very similar conclusions.

Whitelam's excellent book, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silen cing
of Palestinian History (Rout ledge, London and New York, 1996) has a 14-page
bibliography, indicative of the seriousness of the scholarship that went
into his groundbreaking study, which argues that "ancient Israel" was an
invention of the court historians, in the image of a European state.
"Ancient Israel" as it is generally understood, never existed, and this
fiction has prevented a proper understanding of the history of Palestine, he
argues. Whitelam is a professor of religious studies and head of department
at the University of Stirling in Britain.

Among other things, the Revisionist "Bible minimalists" claim to have
determined that: The acts of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) are
legendary, and the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt nor make an "exodus,"
nor did they conquer the land of Palestine or Canaan (western Palestine).

Moses, as such, probably did not exist historically but is a legendary
individual derived from a blend of various polytheistic sources and real
personages such as Sargon of Akkad and Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt, in much
the same way that the legendary British "Robin Hood" arose as a composite of
various imaginary gods and of various people who really lived at one time or
another in the dim past. It is very interesting folklore, and does have some
basis in truth, but does not qualify as accurate history by any means.

Neither is there any mention, outside of the Bible, of the glorious empire
of David and Solomon, other than, at most, as a small tribal kingdom or
chiefdom. It is reasonable to surmise, from the available evidence, that
King Saul, King David and King Solomon were, if anything, the kings of a
very minor nation and not some great empire. Jerusalem, it seems, was
nothing more than a "cow town," the capital of a small statelet in the
highlands to the north of the village. Mencken refers to these people as "a
little tribe of desert Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that secular
history scarcely knows them." (287)

Spinoza dealt with:

. . . misconceptions regarding the true authorship of the sacred books,
beginning with the Pentateuch. The author is almost universally believed to
be Moses, a view so obstinately defended by the Pharisees that they have
regarded any other view as a heresy.25

The point is important because Mosaic authorship was regarded as the
guarantee of the truth of the text. According to the Westminster Confession
of 1658 (a statement of the leading English Protestants), God guaranteed the
transmission of His message to Moses and preserved the Mosaic text perfectly
in all transmissions from then on.26

Spinoza mentions that Aben Ezra, a medieval Spanish rabbi (ca. 1090-1165),
who wrote an important commentary on the Bible, "a man of enlightened mind
and considerable learning . . . was the first as far as I know, to call
attention to this misconception." "Aben Ezra" appears to be a short form of
the rabbi's name; H.L. Mencken refers to the 17th-century Spanish rabbi as
Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, and states: "He unearthed many absurdities, but
he had to be very careful about discussing them, and it was not until 500
years later that anything properly describable as scientific criticism of
the Old Testament came into being." Ibn Ezra is, among medieval Jewish
scholars and interpreters of the Torah, second only to Rashi in the scope of
his influence and the respect he is accorded. His most celebrated work,
analyzing the Pentateuch, is generally known as his Commentary to the Torah,
was originally titled The Book of the Upright, which also happens to be the
name of a work that is cited in the Bible itself (e.g., Joshua 10:13). The
latter part of the rabbi's life was spent wandering in poverty through
Italy, Provence, France, England, Egypt and Palestine. It appears that he
may have wound up living in Morocco. It was during his wanderings that he
composed most of his many influential literary works.

MOSES WRITES ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH?

Among other problems noted by ibn Ezra was the fact that Moses supposedly
wrote in detail about his own death.27 The recognition of the non-Mosaic
authorship began to have serious and severe repercussions in the 1650s, in
the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Pey rère, Samuel Fisher and then
Spinoza. They all seem to have gotten their view directly or indirectly from
ibn Ezra. During the Puritan Revolution, a variety of critics known to
history by such colorful names as Ranters, Levelers and Seekers, rejected
the Bible for all sorts of reasons, including the obvious problems that
learned Old Testament critics had dwelt upon, including the claim that Moses
could not have written about his own death.

We can safely conclude that the Old Testament narratives of the past are
clearly not history, nor were they written anytime near the eras of which
they speak, but rather they reflect the political purposes of their much
later authors. So therefore, it is now part of the scholarly consensus that
the patriarchal narratives of Genesis do not record events of an alleged
patriarchal period but are retrojections into a past about which the writers
knew little, reflecting the authors' intentions at the later period of
composition. It is naive, then, to slavishly accept the view that God made
the promise of progeny and land to Abraham after the fashion indicated in
Genesis 15.28

In the first place, as with the modern Israeli atrocities against the
Palestinian people, this would be horrifyingly immoral (try reading the
narrative from the viewpoint of the innocent parties about to be
exterminated, that is, with the eyes of the Canaanites). In the second
place, it is contra-historical.

Scholars now agree, virtually unanimously, that ancient Israel did not come
to exist by way of the tribal conquest narrated in Joshua 1-12. Outside of
the Bible, we have no evidence of any Hebrew conquest. The archeological
evidence points in an altogether different direction. It suggests a sequence
of periods marked by a gradual and peaceful coalescence of disparate peoples
into a group of highland dwellers whose achievement of a new sense of unity
culminated only with the entry of the Assyrian administration. The Iron Age
settlements on the central hills of Palestine, from which the later kingdom
of Israel developed, reflect continuity with Canaanite culture and repudiate
any ethnic distinction between Canaanites and Israelites. Israel's immediate
origins, then, were within Canaan, not somewhere outside it.29

Archeological silence is a problem the biblical inerrantists do not like to
talk about. While, according to the Bible, the various Israelite tribes were
united for a time into one powerful nation during the reigns of King David
and his son Solomon, the archeological record is silent about these kings
except for two disputed inscriptions some think may be references to "the
house of David." This is odd, considering that references to other kings of
much less biblical importance, such as Omri, Ahab, Jehu and Zedekiah have
been clearly found in extrabiblical records. While this silence obviously
cannot prove David and Solomon did not exist, it certainly gives rational
historians pause to wonder. Assuming that they did exist, they were
certainly of far less global importance in real life than the Old Testament
makes them out to have been.

CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS HELP

These conclusions have been aired among scholars for years, but political
Zionists (especially the Jerry Fallwell types) are stubborn people, and
until recently, nobody wanted to hear about it. Israelis and other political
Zionists (a respectable segment of the Christian population) like to believe
modern Israelis are the descendants of those wonderful Israelites of ancient
times, and certainly they use the Old Testament myths to justify the Jewish
occupation of Palestine-although ironically most Jews today including the
ruling Ashkenazi class in Israel, are not descended from any Middle Eastern
people but from the peoples of the Khazar empire of what today is southern
Russia.30 Even the Sephardic minority of Jews today are such a mixed race
that it appears they can only claim a quite tenuous connection to the
ancient Israelites.

Thompson has spent his academic career steeped in this biblical controversy,
researching the intertwining archeological histories of Israel and Palestine
He has concluded that the Old Testament is not a historical document but
should be regarded as a work of fiction, more like a historical novel than a
history textbook. Thompson contends, however, that understanding the Old
Testament as fictive literature does not have to undermine its spiritual
truth and integrity for Christians, and this is important.

Thompson believes: "How the [Old Testament] is related to history has been
badly misunderstood. As we have been reading the [Old Testament] within a
context that is certainly wrong, and as we have misunderstood the [Old
Testament] because of this, we need to seek a context more appropriate. As a
result, we will begin to read the [Old Testament] in a new way."

Thompson is currently a professor of the Old Testa ment at the University of
Copenhagen. Thompson's The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of
Israel aims to separate the Old Testament from history in order to
understand it on its own terms, in the context its authors intended. While
parts of Mythic Past value research and analysis over readability, it is
arranged to help aspiring scholars negotiate the vast and complex history of
biblical understanding.

It should be noted that Thompson authored a magisterial tome in 1992, Early
History of the Israelite People (EHIP), of 482 pages, with an extensive
bibliography of approximately 900 books, which delves in depth into the
questions involved with the historicity or non-historicity of the Bible.
Mythic Past is largely a popularization of the compendious and detailed,
highly professional but difficult-to-read Early History of the Israelite
People .

Many scholars already view the Old Testament as literature and not as
factual reporting, but their ideas have not been easily accessible to the
general public, nor is such thinking welcome to the average Christian. Even
religious skeptics generally tend to think it is in bad taste to air these
sensitive matters. And very few ordinary folks will go slogging through a
book or journal on academic biblical scholarship or archeology written in
turgid prose calculated to put most readers to sleep.

Thompson's shift in the way we see the Bible is the culmination of centuries
of biblical criticism but it is still radical. Western Christianity has
always narrated a great epic history of salvation based on the Bible:
creation, the fall, the flood, the patriarchs, Moses, the exodus and the
law, the conquest, the judges, the kings and prophets, and the promised
Messiah. We are now invited to see the whole story as back-projected and
mythical.

To read the Old Testament as history, says Thompson, is to distort it. In
Thompson's words, "the misappropriation of ancient texts for purposes
contrary to the tradition's intentions, which two generations of theological
use of the Old Testament have now encouraged, is one of those common abuses
of intellect" that "contributes to the pollution of the ocean of our
language."

Unlike some others who critically analyze the Old Testament, Thompson does
not become cynical, leaving the reader with a desire to "trash" the whole
Bible-after all, one might be tempted to ask, if the Bible, constantly
referred to by fundamentalists as the "Word of God,"31 isn't literally true,
then what good is it? On the contrary, Thompson finds enormous spiritual and
philosophical value in these stories, reminding us that the biblical
storytellers were passing on to us the wisdom of the ages, just as we do not
demand that the stories told in the works of Shakespeare, even the so-called
historical plays, be literally true.

There is even good historical content in the Old Testament, as long as one
is willing to contemplate the possibility that one is really reading about
Egyptians or Hyksos or Sumerians who have been recast as "Israelites." Of
course, it becomes a tricky and intricate task to sort out the truth from
the fiction and the distortions. We must bear in mind that when the Bible
was written down, the modern concept of history writing did not exist.

Be that as it may, certainly the time is long overdue for recognizing that
the Bible is not a collection of religious texts, but rather a hodgepodge of
ancient documents (much reworked), some of which have no religious content
at all, while a few may even incline to religious skepticism (Ecclesiastes
comes to mind-see "The Style of Koheleth" by Robert Gordis, in Harold Bloom'
s The Bible). Written by numerous different authors, many of them unknown,
the Bible's contents are a mixture of good, bad and mediocre, not
infrequently contradictory. A highly selective reading of it is required if
one is to get a positive moral message from this material-much of which is
downright immoral. (You won't hear about those passages from your local
pastor.)

Yet the Old Testament is certainly one of the most influential books ever in
the Western World. It is to many a vital part of our heritage, and as such
it needs to be properly understood for what it is-and what it is not. Mythic
Past achieves this goal and achieves it in a readily comprehensible fashion
making the "minimalist" view available to the average reader for the first
time.

MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN

There have certainly been enough sad, shocking and sickening events in the
real history of man's inhumanity to man. With the exception of a few
harmless books such as Ruth, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon, the Old
Testament is one of the most blood-soaked tomes one could ever hope to find.
Thus, many Revisionists feel that we should perhaps feel relieved, and even
rejoice, that some of the horrific, grisly slaughters described therein
(such as the armed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites) may never have
happened at all. Unfortunately, it is a safe bet that Zionists, including
Christian Zionists, will not welcome the news that the ancient Israelites
did not slaughter the native Canaanites to anything like the extent the Old
Testament leads one to believe.

Thompson's book may not cover much that has not been covered by other
scholars in the past, but it is a controversial volume nevertheless. Any
attempt to question the reliability of the biblical historical descriptions
is perceived (and rightly so) as tending to undermine the alleged historic
right of the Jews (who point to some ambiguous passages in the Old Testament
to "prove" that they are "God's chosen people") to the lands of Palestine
and as shattering the myth of the bandit nation that is supposedly renewing
the ancient kingdom of Israel. Unfortunately, the truth is never so
monetarily profitable as a clever pack of lies, such as the web the Jewish
Zionists and their dupes the Christian Zionists have spun.

Many a Christian will continue to go as a tourist to Israel and give money
to the Israeli government, convinced that Moses and David existed and that
the Old Testament is literally true-regardless of discrepancies.

Thomas Paine, for one, died friendless and broke because he would not mince
words with regard to the truth as he saw it, but spoke and wrote
forthrightly. In essence he was a martyr for truth. Voltaire was persecuted
and forced to move from one nation to another to avoid "the monster"
("Ecrasez l'infame," or "crush the beast of persecution," he was fond of
saying to his followers). Thomas L. Thompson, as noted above, has also
suffered in very recent times for his honest, scholarly views. But still
Revisionists feel morally impelled to always pursue the truth-no matter at
what cost.

The mythic legends of Moses, Joshua, King David, Solomon etc are largely
fake. The myths of the Old Testament are no more valid than the ancient
Greek and Ro man belief in a pantheon of idiosyncratic and psychologically
unstable gods. But as today's Israel derives her very legitimacy for
statehood (and for the continued genocide in Palestine) from these ancient
fairy tales, it would seem the historical truth in this case undermines the
very foundation of the modern state of Israel.

JOHN TIFFANY is the assistant editor for THE BARNES REVIEW. Mr. Tiffany has
a B.S. in biology from the University of Michigan (1969) and has been
writing professionally for about 30 years.

ENDNOTES:

1 Paperback, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006.

2 Isaiah 43: 16-19.

3 John Donne, writing in 1611: "And new Philosophy calls all in doubt . . ."
was troubled that the old answers no longer were capable of being regarded
as true. But modern science has long since inoculated man against the
permanence of all answers. (Donne, "The First Anniversary," in The Poems of
John Donne, edited by Sir Robert Grierson [London, Oxford U. Press, 1933]
205-18.) Donne was not alone in his worry that all coherence was gone, that
the natural order was giving way to disorder. (David H. Levy, Starry Night:
Astronomers and Poets Read the Sky, Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y., 2001.)

4 Eventually the Roman Catholic Church had to swallow the Copernican
astronomy, by fiat of the Holy Office, on September 11, 1822, nearly three
centuries after De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium was published. H.L.
Mencken (259) predicted that the same thing would happen with the theory of
evolution.

5 The Mappa Mundi,or map of the world, in question here is a late
l3th-century parchment credited to Richard of Holdingham. (Trilobite:
Eyewitness to Evolution, Richard Fortey, Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, New
York, 2000, 191.)

6 As Tennyson, who knew that dinosaurs had once strode the Earth and were
now extinct, poetically expressed it: The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go. There rolls the deep where grew
the tree. O Earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street
roars hath been The stillness of the central sea.

7 Van Flandern, Tom, Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes
Resolved: Origins Illuminated, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California,
1993. Van Flandern finds many flaws in the Big Bang theory and has an entire
cosmology of his own devising that is worthy of attention.

8 The word "Hebrew," anciently written as "Habiru," means "one who is from
across the river," i.e., an alien. In Egyptian writings, the word is paired
with "sagaz," meaning "cutthroat" or "bandit."

9 Mencken, H.L., Treatise on the Gods, 2d ed., copyright Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, 1946, reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, available
from THE BARNES REVIEW BOOK CLUB, 94 pp., #229, $18.

10 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, vi. 51.

11 Here is a typical quote from Age of Reason: There is a striking confusion
between the historical and the chronological arrangement in the book of
Judges. This shows the uncertain and fabulous state of the Old Testament.
According to the chronological arrangement, the taking of Laish, and giving
it the name of Dan, is made to be 20 years after the death of Joshua, who
was the successor of Moses; and by the historical order, as it stands in the
book, it is made to be 306 years after the death of Joshua, and 331 after
that of Moses; but they both exclude Moses from being the writer of Genesis,
because, according to either of the statements, no such a place as Dan
existed in the time of Moses; and therefore the writer of Genesis must have
been some person who lived after the town of Laish had the name of Dan; and
who that person was nobody knows, and consequently the book of Genesis is
anonymous; without authority." And another: "Take away from Genesis the
belief that Moses was the author . . . and there remains nothing of Genesis
but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented
absurdities, or of downright lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of
Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit
of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine
hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the
mythology.

12 We need to distinguish two terms here: the "historicity" of the Old
Testament, and the "authenticity" of the Old Testament. Some authors would
reverse the definitions, but as used here, by the historicity of the Old
Testament is meant the correspondence between events and persons described
in the Old Testament with events that actually transpired and people who
really lived. The authenticity of the Old Testament would mean the degree to
which the Bible as we know it today corresponds with what its original
writers intended for it to say. It is a known fact that various theologians
down through the centuries have rewritten the Bible to suit their particular
agenda-a process that would usually detract from whatever historical truth
may have been in it to start with. Herein we will not deal with the
authenticity debate, although it might be noted in passing that the Bible,
according to most modern, respected biblical scholars, is one of the most
tampered-with scriptures on Earth, with dubious authorship and beginnings.

13 A couple of web sites list numerous historical contradictions in the Old
Testament. Among these, to mention just a few, are these: How old was
Ahaziah when he took the throne? "Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when
he began to reign." (2 Kings 8:26) "Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when
he began to reign." (2 Chronicles 22:2) When the chief of the mighty men of
David lifted up his spear, how many men did he kill at one time? "Eight
hundred." (2 Samuel 23:8) "Three hundred." (1 Chronicles 11:11) from Losing
Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist, by Dan Barker, and
angelfire.com/ak/BaltoMuslims. The Angelfire website lists 101
contradictions, and Barker asserts that there are thousands of discrepancies
in the Old Testament.)

14 The Bible: Modern Critical Views 22.

15 An example is the seminal work Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the
Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth, by Giorgio de
Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend (Nonpareil Books, 1969).

16 Regarding Abraham, what can we say of a supposed historical figure whose
life story conforms virtually in every detail to the mythic hero archetype,
with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over? It doesn't
prove there was no historical King David, for it is not unreasonable that a
genuine historical individual might become so lionized, even so deified,
that his life and career would be completely assimilated to the mythic hero
archetype, i.e. King Arthur. But if that happened, we could no longer be
sure there had ever been a real person at the root of the whole thing. The
stained glass would have become just too thick to peer through. Alexander
the Great, Caesar, Cyrus, Arthur and others have nearly suffered this fate.
What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan,
is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information
about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend
cycle. Or they are so intricately woven into the history of the time that it
is impossible, to make sense of that history without them. This is not the
case with King David.

17 We shall leave to one side such quotations as that of Niels Bohr, who,
when speaking to a younger theoretical physicist, is said to have said:
"Your theory is crazy. But it's not crazy enough to be true." Similarly, the
common saying that, "Truth is stranger than fiction," is no justification
for an uncritical or "anything goes" approach in history. In Tertullian's
treatise De Carne Christi,he is arguing against Marcion, whose contention
was that the humiliation implied in the fact of the Incarnation was unworthy
of God. Tertullian answers this in a passage splendidly paradoxical and
profoundly spiritual: "Spare the whole world's one and only hope, thou who
art destroying the indispensable dishonor of our faith. Whatever is unworthy
of God is of gain to me. . . . The Son of God is born; we are not ashamed,
because we ought to be ashamed. And the Son of God died; it is perfectly
credible, because it is absurd. And being buried He rose again; it is
certain, because it is impossible." ("Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet quia
pudendum est; et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est quia ineptum
est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile") To a scientist,
this is on a par with the statement by the Red Queen to Alice that it was
her regular practice "to believe six impossible things every day before
breakfast." The fact that theoretical physics, and even mathematics, the
queen of sciences, are rife with paradoxes (one thinks, for example, of how
the Polish mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski in 1924 proved
that it is theoretically possible to take a small solid sphere, say the size
of a pea, divide it into a finite number of parts and reassemble them into a
solid sphere the size of the Sun, which violates our intuitive understanding
of the meaning of the word "volume") is a separate issue. Anyway, history,
which is full of unexpected twists and turns, demands evidence, not
plausibility. Just as a butterfly fluttering its wings a certain way by
chance in Peking may cause a tornado to occur in Kansas, as chaos theorists
inform us, so the course of world history might be utterly changed by such a
trivium as the happenstance length of a woman's nose (Cleopatra). It is, in
fact, fiction that demands plausibility; and this is the basis for Thompson'
s argument on behalf of a literary approach to biblical material. Still,
when what is promoted as being history is simply too fantastic to be
believable, it becomes necessary to take a closer look at the verifiable
facts, for, as the scientists might say, an extraordinary scenario requires
extraordinary proof.

18 Author of Why I Am Not a Muslim andThe Quest for the Historical Muhammad.

19 Author of Jihad in the West.

20 Tempest & Exodus, by Ralph Ellis, Edfu Books, pub. in the U.S. by
Adventures Unlimited, Kempton, Ill., 2000, 2001.

21 Author of The Invention of Ancient Israel.

22 Author of The Israelites in History and Tradition, and of Prelude to
Israel's Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History and Identity.

23 Author of Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures.

24 Author with Neil Asher Silberman of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's
New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Text.

25 Tractatus viii., 161.

26 The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Don Garett, ed., Cambridge University
Press, 1996, 386.

27 Similar problems exist with regard to Isaiah, for example. The prophet
Isaiah is traditionally supposed to have written the book of Isaiah; but
while it is very likely that he wrote parts of it, "[t]he idea of his having
written the whole of it is completely impossible. In several chapters he is
actually spoken of in the third person. Three main documents have been
separated from the book, but there are also other lesser ones, and two whole
chapters appear to be lifted bodily from II Kings. Isaiah has strained
biblical scholarship very uncomfortably, and many of the problems that it
presents are still under furious discussion. The literature upon the subject
is almost endless, and makes very hard reading." (Mencken 200)

28 "Confronting the Bible's Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine," by Michael
Prior, C.M., in The Link, published by Americans for Middle Eastern
Understanding Inc., vol. 33, No. 5, Dec. 2000.

29 Ibid.

30 Worth quoting in this connection is a passage from the prominent Jewish
writer Arthur Koestler. He told this curious but little-known story in his
1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe: [T]he large majority of surviving Jews in
the world is of Eastern European-and thus mainly of Khazar-origin. If so,
this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the
Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus . . . and that genetically they
are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the
seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then
the term "anti-Semitism" would become void of meaning . . . The story of the
Khazar empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the
most cruel hoax which history had ever perpetrated. Corroborating Koestler,
a noted French Jew, Prof. Maxime Rodinson, has observed: "it is very
probable that the so-called Arab inhabitants of Palestine . . . have much
more of the ancient Hebrews' 'blood' than most of the Jews of the diaspora,
whose religious exclusiveness in no way prevented them from absorbing
converts of various religions." It will surely be acknowledged, then, that
for such people to denounce Palestinian Arabs as "anti-Semites" for
resisting the Khazar-Zionist seizure of their millennia-old homes and lands
must be close to the height (or depth) of what these folks smirkingly call
chutzpah. (Talk About Hate, by William N. Grimstad, Council on Hate Crimes
Injustice, 1999)

31 As early as the 17th century, controversies arose as to the theory of the
inspiration of the Bible, which led certain theologians to change the
formula from, "The Bible is the Word of God," to, "The Bible contains the
Word of God."

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Ahlstrom, Gosta W., The History of Ancient Palestine,

Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1993.

Bright, John,A History of Israel, 4th ed., Westminster

John Knox Press, 2000.

Dever, William G., What Did the Biblical Writers Know

and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us

About the Reality of Ancient Israel, Wm. B. Eerdmans

Publishing Co., 2002.

Dever, William G., Who Were the Early Israelites and

Where Did They Come From?, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Co., 2006. (Available from TBR BOOK CLUB.)

Miller, James Maxwell, A History of Ancient Israel and

Judah, 2d ed., Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

Perdue, Leo G., Reconstructing Old Testament Theology:

After the Collapse of History (Overtures to Biblical Theology),

Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2005.

Smith, Mark S., The Origins of Biblical Monotheism:

Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, Oxford

University Press, USA, 2003.

Thompson, Thomas L., Early History of the Israelite

People: From the Written & Archaeological Sources, Brill

Academic Publishers, 2000.

Thompson, Thomas L., The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology