archeology and religion

so im watching yet another tv documentary with guys out in the desert trying to line up the archeological record with the bible. im wondering to what extent this sort of research is motivated or funded by religion. cause some of it just seems so credulous.

i feel like read something once abt how there is a religious/secular schism in archeology. like there are people out there trying to find evidence of the exodus while others are all UH that clearly never happened at all. what you know abt this.

i don't want to think about/don't really care who funds this shit, but if it is on tv i am always stoked.

as i understand it there's a lot of archaeological evidence about some biblical things (particularly the second temple era and stuff from earlier settlement eras) and nothing about others - basically anything preceding the Exodus. so like Abraham or Noah or Adam/Eve stuff is non-existent (tho there are particular holy sites associated with some of those people there is, afaik, absolutely no archaeological evidence. + then wrt the Exodus there are occasionally cases made for evidence and cases made against it and i think there are legitimate scholars of either side (esp probably the further you get away from hard archaeology and into the more humanities side of it there's probably historiography scholars who believe there's Exodus evidence). but nothing from before that

missed a close parenthesis

so yeah. no ark, definitely not. anyone who tries to claim otherwise is really doing something similar to cryptozoology

(who am i to say that bigfoot doesn't exist?)

Pretty much ever since Heinirich Schliemann connected Homer's Iliad with the ruins (and cool stuff like gold jewelry) he unearthed at Troy, archaeologists have been trying to mine ancient lit for hints about places to dig and how to interpret what they unearth.

The Bible is the perfect nexus of interest between the scientists and the church, so they reinforce one another. I'm not sure how much cash is directly from the churches, though. More likely it's wealthy Christians with deep pockets, who are soft touches for this sort of research.

Also, Israel likes to fund this stuff, as it reinforces their claims to that area as their ancestral homeland.

I thought archeological research was motivated by trying to keep religious artifacts out of the hands of the Nazis.

^This.

"This belongs in my (creationist) museum!"

Biblical archaeology is alive and well:

http://www.davidandnoelle.net/life_files/adeve.jpg

In India the land is filled with ancient temples and littered with sites where Hindu and tribal gods have supposedly touched the earth. I think Christianity's ban on GRAVEN IMAGES did much to keep some cool stuff from popping up.

like there are people out there trying to find evidence of the exodus while others are all UH that clearly never happened at all. what you know abt this.

I can't but think that even the most secular historian/archaeologist would take the Exodus account as an ancient source and then ponder whether there was any reason to believe that something like it might have happened.

I read something a bit similar but without the religious elements where some guy was taking a somewhat outlandish description of some event in an ancient account of the campaigns of Alexander and arguing that actually it could have happened. So you might get the same kind of thing in archaeology.

I suspect that Holy Land archaeology is riddled with tendentious mentalists trying to either "prove" a continuous history from ancient tymes to the modern state of Israel, or else trying to "prove" that there is absolutely no such continuous history. Bags of fun.

I I I.

There was a big flood in Mesopotamia a long time ago and the ancient Israelis got lucky in a few wars, and then a bit later they lost a few. Apparently they felt God had something to do with all of this.

flood narrative is in a ton of different cultures fyi. not that i think that means it happened, but that a flood in Mesopotamia probably doesn't explain the Noah narrative satisfactorily

(archeologists hate when you get all jungian archetype on them tho...)

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

i'm always disappointed when i hear about one of those epic ancient flood myths being explained away via something like "oh yeah, it looks like that's when there was this rain that lasted a couple of days and the euphrates rose three feet."

floods are common and traumatic!

Massive planet-wide floods in 10,000 BC destroyed Atlantis, obv.

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/

I used to read FARMS Review...I was one crazy teen!

I still kind of like it...it is pretty entertaining to read these impassioned defenses of why the Book of Mormon *could* have been right when they said South America had steel, horses, etc.

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

Much better outsider summary of whatever the fuck I think I'm talking about.

I was so stoked to kill this thread btw.

no way, dude, that wikipedia article is fascinating! still reading it

That shit is a *can of worms* to bring up btw. Like talking about any of that shit in a church discussion is basically mad trolling.

I don't really have anything to say about it that isn't obvious and vaguely condescending but I think it's really really interesting

the horses = tapirs thing is just gold, imo

Canh I just say, those TV shows about Bible history just drive me nuts? Esp. History Channel ones, I think they've just pumped out so many. What drives me nuts is they never take a hard line on anything. I know it would be a fool's game to do so, but the big fake "?" hanging over everything just drives me nuts. The style of every sentence starting with "some say"....blergh.

Millions of people believe...
While no hard evidence exists...
But there are other, less conventional, explanations...
A growing minority of experts...

I find those shows extremely entertaining, for the exact same reason. I guess I just get a kick out of hamfisted bullshit.

Yeah, I love the History Channel always having it both ways on almost every issue, too. Makes sure that I, and the people that watch with me, never get offended, or have our beliefs ridiculed or belittled.

Right on, Nostradamus-may-be-right Man

A growing minority of experts.

Even worse is "a growing NUMBER of experts"...i.e. me and this other guy.
Which I think was basically every Erich von Daniken documentary ever.

"a growing NUMBER of experts"...i.e. me and this other guy.

And when he told you about his theory and you believed it, the number of experts doubled over night!

Not archaeology but... I saw a doco about the Bermuda Triangle which ended with some guy claiming when flying over it he'd entered into this grey hyperspace tunnel and had arrived in Florida faster than the speed of light. This was all presented straight-faced and with theories about how a mass of undersea magnetic ore might be able to bend space and time. Serious Weekly World News shit on a mainstream tv channel (ok it was channel 5 but still).

end derail.

I thought no one went on about the Bermuda Triangle anymore.

The Book of Mormon... I have often thought of reading it, because I love ancient history and it would be exciting to read made up history where the ending is a big surprise.

B of M is like King James Bible fanfic + old west/noble savage cowboys & Indians shit.

Yeah I thought Bermuda Triangle was actually connected via magnetic anomaly to a location on the exact opposite side of the earth where weird bizness also goes down...

The book synthesizing the last century of "biblical archeology" is Finkelstein and Silberman's The Bible Unearthed.

Very little of the biblical narrative is supported by archeological evidence. Indeed, it seems that huge swaths of the Old Testament (the patriarchs, Exodus, the conquest, the periods of the Judges and united monarchy), were all 6th-7th century fabrications by the Yahwist cult of post-Assyrian conquest (720 bce) Jerusalem, as well as propaganda by elites returning from Babylonian captivity (587-539 bce) to assist their reassertion of religious authority.

For most of the period represented by the narrative, Israel and Judah were rather poor, polytheistic, and of a cultural piece with the rest of Canaan. Jerusalem was a small town of around 5000 inhabitants, just one of numerous cultic sites devoted to YHWH, his wife Asherah and related deities.

Relavent! http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/12/david-and-solomon/draper-text