What Does Archaeology Say about the Bible?

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Dardedar
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What Does Archaeology Say about the Bible?

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What Does Archaeology Say about the Bible?

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Excerpt:

"...Would these fundamentalist folks be so right-wing if they were aware of the relatively recent conclusions regarding the book they take so literally?
A book offering a comprehensive overview of this subject and a mother lode of footnotes is still The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.

New findings point to completely different histories of Israel and Egypt than those in the Bible and thought to be true, including by Finkelstein himself:

• Archaeological evidence contradicts all four stories that make up the foundations of the Bible; and
• the Bible was written, re-written, edited and redacted for the purposes of propaganda.

Early archaeologists in that part of the world were typically trained as clerics or theologians and so forced artifacts they found to match with Bible stories. That all changed once new excavations, chemical analysis of soil samples and refinements in the carbon-dating technique to determine age, revolutionized the study of these two of the most heavily excavated areas of the planet.

"Because many references to places and events in this period show contemporary details were integrated into stories biblical authors maintained happened hundreds or thousands of years before, the modern assessment that the foundations were laid during the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE appears to be an open-and-shut-case."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/2 ... -the-Bible
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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