RE msg 34 by CountIbli:
This helps, but I already knew that. I'm not arguing that Judah and Israel didn't have kings.
Yeah, but you are arguing that there was no kingdom, or Jews altogether, and that the Bible was false. In order to be honest, one must take ALL the data and construct a reasonable vision of history. So you would have to construct a detailed history of how those twin kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed, without any basis at all on the Bible, because you refused to accept it as a valid document, and that history would have to consistent with how other kingdoms developed, so you would have to use comparative archaeology to show other examples that match both this development and the exact same amount and type of archaeological finds.

In other words, all any reasonable arachaeologist would end up with by accepting your view, is lots of questions and not many answers.

The question is: If you assume nothing of the Bible, then how can you understand the 2 separate nations of Judah and Israel?

How did they come about? Where did they go?

How on Earth do you have 1 group of people, who are scattered across the globe, who claim that they are descended from both, unless they were really 2 groups of the same people? How do you explain the split between the 2 groups? Why is one called Judah, and the other called Israel?

Why don't they speak Aramaic, or some other language, like everyone else?

Why is their script so different than others of the time?

Why is there such an inconsistency of the discovery of archaeological facts, when they are supposed to be like everyone else?

You have to make a whole new history, that is more accurate and more detailed than the Bible, and with archaeological finds to match every decade of your history, and it has to have a very strong internal consistency and consistency with other cultures right through history and around the world, and with explanations for the differences in the level and type of archaeological finds.

That is not unreasonable. English is a language that generally requires punctuation. Hebrew does not. In ancient Hebrew, you are expected to read the consonants, as the vowels were added to make life easier for people who don't know Hebrew, and you are expected to figure out where the punctuation is, because the punctuation was also a latter addition. so BETD WD is really BTDWD = B TDWD = B T D W D = BT DWD. It's all the same. If you see BETD WD, and you think that you cannot read it, you cannot read any part of the document. You use vocab and grammar to know how to read it. If you cannot read it, then you can be sure that you don't have even the grammer and vocab that even the common man had, who was expected to be able to read the inscription instantly. That doesn't mean you're not smart. It means that you don't have the tools to do the job.

Well, for this, I started googling "archaeology walls of jerusalem" and then "archaeology tower of david":
Archaeologist uncovers Scriptures' famed wall
Emergency dig finds tower built by Bible's Nehemiah
Posted: November 11, 2007
1:00 am Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

Present-day wall of Jerusalem
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may want to see Israel wiped off the map and its Jews sent to Europe or Alaska, but an archaeological discovery announced this week marks an event recorded in the Bible when his country ? Persia, at the time ? literally helped put the Jewish people back on the map in their capital city of Jerusalem.

Dr. Eilat Mazar, one of Israel's top archaeologists, ended her presentation Wednesday to the 13th Annual Conference of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies on "New Studies on Jerusalem," with a surprise announcement. She had discovered remnants of the fifth century B.C. wall built by Nehemiah, the account recorded in the Old Testament book of the same name.

According to the biblical account, Nehemiah served as cupbearer for the Persian King Artaxerxes in the city of Susa. The Persians had conquered the Babylonian empire that had destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and taken most of the inhabitants of Judah into captivity in what is now modern Iraq.

The account reads:

In the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, I took up the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had not been sad in his presence.

And the king said to me, "Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart."

Then I was very much afraid. I said to the king, "Let the king live forever! Why should not my face be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' graves, lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?"

Then the king said to me, "What are you requesting?"

So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, "If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers' graves, that I may rebuild it."

Nehemiah's rebuilding of the city began with its walls, a project that was resisted by hostile neighbors who had occupied the area around Jerusalem in the Jews' absence.

But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.

With tools in one hand and weapons in the other, Nehemiah's workmen toiled dawn to dusk, completing the wall in a record 52 days.

(Story continues below)

Archaeological evidence for Nehemiah's project has been lacking. Jerusalem has been rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt in the almost 2,500 years since.

Mazar, who is perhaps best known for her recent excavation that many believe has revealed the palace of King David, was working on an emergency project to shore up remains of a tower long believed to date from the Hasmonean period, 142-37 B.C., that was in danger of collapsing.

According to an account of the conference in "The Trumpet," Mazar said, "Under the tower, we found the bones of two large dogs ? and under those bones a rich assemblage of pottery and finds from the Persian period. No later finds from that period were found under the tower."

Had the tower been built during the Hasmonean dynasty, the Persian-era artifacts would represent an unexplained chronological gap of several hundred years. The tower, said Mazar, had to have been built much earlier than previously thought and the pottery data placed it at the time the Bible says Nehemiah was building it.

Todd Bolen, of BiblePlaces.com, noted that excavations in the Philistine city of Ashkelon during the same Persian era, found 800 dog burials like those uncovered by Mazar.

Nehemiah described 10 gates in the wall around Jerusalem as well as several towers designed to protect the entrances to the city, among them the Tower of the Hundred, the Tower of Hananel, the Tower of the Ovens, and an unnamed tower "projecting from the upper house of the king at the court of the guard" in the vicinity of Mazar's most recent dig.

WND reported Mazar's confirmation that what appeared to be chopped-up carved stone, unearthed by recent trenching on the Temple Mount by the holy site's Islamic custodians, were indeed antiquities with attributes of the Second Temple-era during the ministry of Jesus.

Mazar has urged Christians to help save the holy site.

"The Christian world and all those who care about safeguarding the Temple Mount must immediately join us in our efforts to protect the holy site and demand that the Israeli government stop the Waqf construction," she said.

"The Temple Mount is important to people of all religions. Now is the time to act before more antiquities are erased."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58623

Archaeology and the City of David
by Rick Sherrod, Ph.D

Perhaps more than any other academic discipline, archaeology has enlarged our understanding of the historical record in the Bible. Archaeologists have found some of their most spectacular artifacts in the City of David, an area of 12 square miles in the southeast part of modern-day Jerusalem.

From the earliest investigation, conducted by American Edward Robinson in 1838, to the extensive excavation under the direction of Yigal Shiloh from 1978 to 1982, archaeology has progressively and dramatically confirmed the biblical account—from both Old and New Testaments.

The City of David itself contains only a limited amount of material from the actual Davidic period of Iron Age I and II. To date, diggers have unearthed no evidence of Solomon's Temple.

The archaeological record of Jerusalem in the late 11th and early 10th centuries B.C. is not nearly as prolific as we might wish it were. Indeed, one of the noteworthy products of excavation in Jerusalem, commonly called the Tower of David, excavated by archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister in the 1920s, bears a title that can easily mislead. Although the tower's name associates the structure with Israel's most famous monarch, in fact only the lower courses of the tower are from the Davidic period. Most of this forti- fied edifice dates to the Maccabean period of the 2nd century B.C.

Other archaeological work convincingly documents the history of the Bible. In particular, the grande dame of British biblical archaeology, Kathleen Kenyon, revealed an important archaeological feature from the time of David. In 1961 her excavation exposed a part of the Jebusite wall that surrounded Jerusalem when David took the city near the end of the 11th century B.C. (see 2 Samuel 5:6, 7).

Stealthy fighter

Relevant to this same episode, another discovery numerous archaeologists have examined has supported fascinating speculation about the account of Joab's stealthy entry into Jebusite Jerusalem. The event, related in 2 Samuel 5, occurred near the beginning of David's reign over all 12 Israelite tribes. David had offered to reward the man who took Jerusalem by appointing him leader over Israel's army. David's own nephew, Joab, achieved this seemingly impossible feat by gaining entrance into the city through the tsinnor, loosely translated "gutter" (verse 8) in the King James Version of the Bible and "water shaft" in the New King James Version.

This reference quite possibly describes a subterranean Jebusite water shaft discovered in 1867 by Englishman Capt. Charles Warren. Joab may well have discovered the underground passageway leading to the shaft, then scaled it to gain entry into the city. To demonstrate the possibility of such a feat, one member of the Capt. Montague Parker Mission (1909-1911) climbed the shaft from top to bottom. Though archaeologists still are not certain they have found the right shaft, the wedding of the biblical account and the particular geological feature of the city raises interesting possibilities.

Another major feature, not to mention popular tourist attraction, beneath the City of David is Hezekiah's Tunnel. This underground channel is associated with the reign of Judah's 8th-century (B.C.) king and religious reformer Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:2-4). Edward Robinson was the first man in modern times to explore it. Many others, scholars and tourists alike, have followed in Robinson's footsteps.

Again, the evidence is subject to interpretation, but the tunnel may well be part of a comprehensive defensive response to a late-8th-century Assyrian invasion, first of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and later the kingdom of Judah. The latter military campaign is described in 2 Kings 18:9-19:37 and Isaiah 36, 37. The discovery of the Nahaman Avigad excavation of 1970 is generally considered evidence of the story in 2 Chronicles 32:5, describing significant work on the 8th-century city wall. Hezekiah's concern about an impending military threat is evidenced by the remnants of a wall that expanded to the south and west, considerably beyond the boundaries of the City of David (Isaiah 22:9-11).

This enlarging of the wall suggests that the population of Jerusalem swelled during the years before the Assyrian invasion of Judah. No doubt the project was in part the result of refugees from the falling Northern Kingdom relocating in Jerusalem. Perhaps some Jews as well left the hinterland of the kingdom to seek safety in the capital.

It is plausible that Hezekiah, anticipating the Assyrian onslaught, took measures to ensure a steady water supply should Jerusalem be put to siege. And well he should have; King Sennacherib's Assyrian forces overran the kingdom. According to the biblical record and the Taylor Cylinder (a small cylinder-shaped clay tablet from Sennacherib's archives inscribed with a version of the story of the siege of Jerusalem), Hezekiah found himself, albeit temporarily, trapped like a bird in a cage.

Inscription found

The serpentine tunnel itself runs from the intermittent Gihon Spring, just outside the northeast wall of the City of David, and winds some 1,750 feet before resurfacing at the Pool of Siloam. Evidently Hezekiah's workmen constructed this engineering marvel by tunneling from opposite ends and meeting near the middle. To commemorate such a landmark achievement, someone left a Hebrew inscription on the rock wall near where the two teams of tunnelers eventually met.

When discovered in 1880 near the Pool of Siloam, it was almost entirely preserved. This "Siloam inscription," now housed at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, reads:

"When the tunnel was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through: while . . . were still . . . axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut through, there was heard the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was an overlap in the rock on the right and on the left. And when the tunnel was driven through the quarrymen hewed the rock, each man toward his fellow, ax against ax; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits, and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits."

The Bible, apparently referring to this engineering marvel, says: "Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah— all his might, and how he made a pool and a tunnel and brought water into the city—are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?" (2 Kings 20:20).
http://www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn05/cityofdavid.htm

From the International Herald Tribune:
King David's fabled palace: Is this it?
By Steven Erlanger
Published: FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 2005

JERUSALEM: An Israeli archeologist says she has uncovered in east Jerusalem what she believes may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by the Shalem Center, a neoconservative think tank in Jerusalem, and funded by a American Jewish investment banker who would like to help provide scientific support for the Bible as a reflection of Jewish history.

Other scholars who have toured the site are skeptical that the foundationwalls Eilat Mazar has discovered are David's palace. But they acknowledge that what she has uncovered is rare and important - a major public building from around the 10th century BC with pottery shards that date from the time of David and Solomon and a government seal of an official mentioned in the book of Jeremiah.

For nearly 10 years, Mazar thought she knew where the fabled palace built for King David, as described in the Bible, might be - just outside the walls of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Now she thinks she's found it, and if she's right, her discovery will be a new salvo in a major dispute in biblical archaeology - whether or not the kingdom of David and Samuel was of historical importance.

For that idea, the Bible is a relatively accurate guide, but some question whether they were more like small tribal chieftains, reigning over another dusty hilltop.

Her discovery is also bound to be used in the other major battle over Jerusalem - whether the Jews have their deepest origins there and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians believe -including the late Yasser Arafat - that the notion of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.

Nur el-Din, a professor of archaeology at Al Quds University, says that Palestinian archaeologists consider biblical archaeology as an effort by Israeli archaeologists "to fit historical evidence into a biblical context," he said. "The link between the historical evidence and the biblical narration, written much later, is largely missing," he said. "There's a kind of fiction about the 10th century. They try to link whatever they find to the biblical narration. They have a button and they want to make a suit out of it."

Other Israeli archaeologists are not so sure that Mazar has found the palace - the house that Hiram, king of Tyre, built for the victorious king, at least as Samuel II, Chapter 5, describes it. It may also be the Fortress of Zion that David conquered from the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before him, or some other structure about which the Bible is silent.

But Mazar's colleagues know that she's found something extraordinary -the partial foundations of a sizable public building, constructed in the Phoenician style, dating from the 10th-9th centuries BC, the time of the united kingdom of David and Solomon.

"This is a very significant discovery, given that Jerusalem as the capital of the united kingdom is very much unknown," said Gabriel Barkay, a renowned archaeologist of Jerusalem from Bar-Ilan University. "Very carefully we can say that this is one of the first greetings we have from the Jerusalem of David and Solomon, a period which has played a kind of hide-and-seek with archaeologists for the last century."

Mazar, 48, is the granddaughter of Benjamin Mazar, a famous archaeologist with whom she trained. She got her doctorate from Hebrew University, is the widow of an archaeologist and has worked on and supervised dozens of digs on her own.

"Archaeology is technical, but you dig with a mind open to historical sources, and anything can help," she said, as she clambered over massive stones at bedrock. "I work with the Bible in one hand and the tools of excavation in the other, and I try to consider everything."

Based on the chapter from Samuel II, but also on the work of a century of archaeology in this spot, Mazar speculated that the famous stepped-stone structure excavated previously was part of the fortress David conquered, and that his palace would have been built just outside the original walls of the cramped city, to the north, on the way to what his son, Solomon, built as the Temple Mount.

"When the Philistines came to fight, the Bible said that David went down from his house to the fortress," she said, her eyes bright. "Maybe it meant something, maybe not. But I wondered, down from where? Presumably from where he lived, his palace. So I said, maybe there's something here," and in 1997 wrote a paper proposing a new excavation in the spot, which is in east Jerusalem.

Mazar is building on the archaeologists who went before her, especially Robert Macalister in the 1920s, Kathleen Kenyon in the 1960s and Yigal Shilo in the 1970s and 1980s. Kenyon had found evidence of well-worked stones and protoaeolic capitals, which decorated the tops of columns, evidence of a large, decorative building.

David's palace was the topic of a last conversation she had with her famous grandfather, who died 10 years ago, she said. "He said, 'Kenyon found the protoaeolic capitals, so go and find where she found them, and start there."' Five months ago, with special funding and permissions from the Ir David Foundation, which controls the site (and also supports Jews moving into east Jerusalem), and academic sponsorhip from Hebrew University, she finally began to dig - finding evidence of this monumental public building dating from the time of David and Solomon.

Amihai Mazar, a renowned professor of archaeology at Hebrew University, and Eilat Mazar's second cousin, calls the find "something of a miracle." He believes the building may be the Fortress of Zion that David is said to have conquered, and where he lived for a time, and which he renamed the City of David. "The interpretation will be debated," he said. "But the achievement is great. What she found is fascinating whatever it is."

There is a debate among archaeologists "to what extent Jerusalem was an important city or even a city in the time of David and Samuel," he said. "Some believe it was tiny and the kingdom unimportant."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/04/news/david.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/04/news/david.php?page=2

So there is a lot more archaeological finds that are not being given their full weight. In order to make a consistent theory of the history of the time, one needs to list ALL of these sources, and ALL of these finds, and then take a completely impartial view and analyse it in depth. I'm afraid that at this point, I don't know of any one source who quotes ALL of the archaeological finds in the area, but perhaps you could find a site where they list everything and find a definite consistency in history. So far, all I can see is that some people are ignoring the bits that don't agree with them.

Also, what would really confirm things for those who don't believe the Bible, would be to find the "book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah", because it has been pointed out before that the Bible is not a book listing a complete history of the area. So an archaeological find like that would confirm it one way or the other.

But it doesn't matter anyway. Too many people are not objective when it comes to the Bible. Too many people are opposed to the veracity of the Bible. So how are you going to prove something to someone who is afraid that if it was proved to be true, that "Christians would overtake America"?

OP, it would be helpful if you stated the topic of this thread succinctly so that we could respond to a question. As it is, I will try to respond briefly to the four questions you stated.

I believe that David did exist. I think all of this doubting that historical figures did not exist is without foundation. Obviously the Talmud corroborates the existence of David, Solomon, the exile to Assyria, and the exile to Babylon.

Interesting CountIbli, something I would be interested in is where the 12 tribes of Israel come into play. To me that sounds like a religious/political schism.

I saw a documentary about the Ark of the Coventant, and how its most likely resting place was in Ethiopia and thats was the final destination of one of the Tribes.

sis---Is
Amen-Ra--Ra
Elohim-el

Is-Ra-el

Came from the Egyptians, the Hebrews where the craftsmen, Amen-Ra was before Moses and taught of G-d as the Sun God Ra. Amen is the end of the prayers in Christianity.

Israel was a creation by people (Hebrews) leaving Egypt.

-It is not recorded in any egyptian record that the israelites were ever enslaved, nor does it mention a mass exodus on the scale of an entire city escaping by the israelites.

from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_there_evidence_of_Israelite_slavery_in_Egypt

Since the Israelites were slaves in Egypt one would hardly expect a great mass of information about them. However, an inscription on the great sphinx does mention them. In addition to this, the period in which they were in Egypt is noted for a great deal of building and the Egyptian empire declined after their departure. In addition, it seems historically unlikely that the firstborn son of the relevant Pharoah actually ascended the throne as was normally the case but his place was taken by another.

Thutmose III was the great builder under which they toiled just prior to the ascension to the throne of his successor Amenhotep II. Thutmose III employed semitic slaves in his building program. His CEO, or building overseer, named Rekhmire left a tomb on which brick-making scenes are depicted, reminiscent of Exodus 5:6-19.

The problem often relates to the words 'relevant period.' People don't find evidence because they are looking in the wrong time period, for whatever reason. There is good evidence to suggest that the Egyptian chronology needs revision since a number of 'Kings' may have ruled concurrently and not consecutively.

I don't play word games, I don't play games at all. Gene-Isis try that one on for size.

I never said they were slaves, I said they were the craftsmen. Whats your point.

This is not something I learned off the net, I learned this after yrs of study, symbols, myth, and religious writings. I can give you references.

Sefer Yetzirah-Book of Creation........Aryeh Kaplan
The Sumers....Samuel Noah Kramer.
Any thing by Joseph Campbell
Ages in Chaos....Velikosky....advent studier of Egyptology and believes there is a 500 yr difference between the bible time line and Egyptian time line.
Psyhcology and Alchemy----Carl Jung.
Symbols in Astrology----Dane Ruyhar.

There are tons more but you got to find them yourself.

Ages in Chaos....Velikosky....advent studier of Egyptology and believes there is a 500 yr difference between the bible time line and Egyptian time line.
Psyhcology and Alchemy----Carl Jung.
Symbols in Astrology----Dane Ruyhar.

What I wrote above was taught to me by a teacher who was deeply involved in mysticism.

So when the time came to name Israel, they used the mystical symbols of the past that they knew best, and the language that they knew best to interpret Sumer legend. And there beliefs.Mathematics became symbols, symbols then became language and names. These names represented Symbols. So when the time came to name Israel, they used the mystical symbols of the past that they knew best, and the language that they knew best to interpret Sumer legend. And there beliefs.

Etymology

Over the past three thousand years, the name "Israel" has meant in common and religious usage both the Land of Israel and the entire Jewish nation. The name originated from a verse in the Bible (Genesis, 32:28) where Jacob is renamed Israel after successfully wrestling with an angel of God.[17] Commentators differ on the meaning of the name. Some say the name comes from the verb śarar ("to rule, be strong, have authority over"), thereby making the name mean "God rules" or "God judges".[18] Other possible meanings include "the prince of God" (from the King James Version) or "El fights/struggles".[19] Regardless of the precise meaning of the name, the biblical nation fathered by Jacob thus became the "Children of Israel" or the "Israelites".

The first historical mention of the word "Israel" is in the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt (dated the late 13th century BCE), although scholars disagree on whether it refers to a people or a homeland.

You have just shown how out of depth you really are. You are now using works on velikovsky

The truth is out there.

Actually, if you study the actual documented history Egypt there is serious doubt that there were the massive flux of Hebrew slaves as depicted in the bible. Assuming that the enslavement and exodus occurred during the Middle Kingdom, as thought by certain biblical references including the building of two cities for Ramses, there is a plethora of information from that period. None of said information refers to massive amounts of Hebrew slaves or to a mass exodus. Certainly, there is no literature from that time that points to the plagues that supposedly rained down on Egypt that were described in the bible.

Ha! Galileis theories were vigorously rejected and ignored by the "academic community" . All hail the academic community as no original thinking is allowed

Posted by A Fortiori

Too bad you haven't found it yet...

Thutmose III was the great builder under which they toiled just prior to the ascension to the throne of his successor Amenhotep II. Thutmose III employed semitic slaves in his building program. His CEO, or building overseer, named Rekhmire left a tomb on which brick-making scenes are depicted, reminiscent of Exodus 5:6-19.

Heh, from your own source:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_Jews_become_slaves_in_Egypt

Actually, if you study the actual documented history Egypt there is serious doubt that there were the massive flux of Hebrew slaves as depicted in the bible. Assuming that the enslavement and exodus occurred during the Middle Kingdom, as thought by certain biblical references including the building of two cities for Ramses, there is a plethora of information from that period. None of said information refers to massive amounts of Hebrew slaves or to a mass exodus. Certainly, there is no literature from that time that points to the plagues that supposedly rained down on Egypt that were described in the bible.

The problem often relates to the words 'relevant period.' People don't find evidence because they are looking in the wrong time period, for whatever reason. There is good evidence to suggest that the Egyptian chronology needs revision since a number of 'Kings' may have ruled concurrently and not consecutively.

The papyrus describes violent upheavals in Egypt, starvation, drought, escape of slaves (with the wealth of the Egyptians), and death throughout the land. The papyrus was written by an Egyptian named Ipuwer and appears to be an eyewitness account of the effects of the Exodus plagues from the perspective of an average Egyptian. Below are excerpts from the papyrus together with their parallels in the Book of Exodus.

Thutmose III was the great builder under which they toiled just prior to the ascension to the throne of his successor Amenhotep II. Thutmose III employed semitic slaves in his building program. His CEO, or building overseer, named Rekhmire left a tomb on which brick-making scenes are depicted, reminiscent of Exodus 5:6-19.

Ipuwer describes Egypt as afflicted by natural disasters and in a state of chaos, a topsy-turvy world where the poor have become rich, and the rich poor, and warfare, famine and death are everywhere. One symptom of this collapse of order is the lament that servants are leaving their servitude and acting rebelliously. Because of this, and such statements as "the River is blood", some have interpreted the document as an Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt and the Exodus in the Old Testament of the Bible, and it is often cited as proof for the Biblical account by various religious organisations[5][6].

David Rohl recently proposed a revised chronology, dating the Exodus to the Second Intermediate Period, in which case Ipuwer might refer to that event. However, Rohl's chronology has been rejected by most Egyptologists.[7]. Moreover, the association of Ipuwer with the Exodus is generally rejected by Egyptologists, who when interpreting the Exodus as a historical event generally place it later, in the reign of Ramesses II. Some have alternatively interpreted the poem's references to disturbances in nature as relating to the Thera eruption, which according to dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating occurred ca. 1650-1600 BC.

Both the Exodus and Thera interpretations (which can be combined with each other, and sometimes are) assume that the poem records a historical event, which is disputed by many Egyptologists.[8] Recently, the poem has instead been interpreted by some as an essentially ahistorical, timeless consideration of the theme of 'order vs. chaos'. On this reading, the references in Ipuwer to rivers of blood, and to slaves revolting, may be schematic 'world turned upside down' laments rather than reports of specific historical events.

Assertions do not equate evidence. Nice try. Can these brick making scenes be qconnected in some tangible way to the enslavement of the hebrews?? NO.

and your link from a completely biased source:
http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/838
Note the comparison chart, mentions nothing... NOTHING of hebrews in egypt, no mention of hebrews at all. So what we have is basically an exercise in confirmation bias that attempts to compare a writing to tie into a belief, without anything concrete. This chart is drummed up by a rabbi... gee Kyros, do you actually think he'd say anything else but to try and support the belief??

Actually, even egyptologists reject the idea that the papyrus refers to the exodus:
from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipuwer_papyrus

Sez you.

Gee A Fortiori, did you not notice that he didn't try to support the belief? Simply presented the evidence and left it to the reader to determine whether the parallel had some validity or not. Strikes me as a lot more intellectually honest then some of the remarks you make in this post.

All i see in this wiki and your own comments is the fallacy of incredulity. The "expert" egyptologists are divided in what the papyrus is actually referring to but they are united in their opinion that it can't be in relation to the Exodus in spite of it comparing quite well to the Exodus event.

Galileo's ideas/theories were rejected by religious institutions. Do some homework before you spout off.

The church argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato.

And what religious institution did Aristotle and Plato belong to???

The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time not only for scriptural reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had in fact abandoned the Ptolemaic model for the Tychonian model in which the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun.

We know now that the solution to the problem of the Exodus is not as simple as lining up dates and kings. The expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt in 1570 BCE ushered in a period when the Egyptians became extremely wary of incursions into their lands by outsiders. And the negative impact of the memories of the Hyksos symbolizes a state of mind that is also to be seen in the archeaological remains. Only in recent years has it become clear that from the time of the New Kingdom onward, beginning after the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Egyptians tightened their control over the flow of immigrants from Canaan into the delta. They established a system of forts along the delta’s eastern border and manned them with garrison troops and administrators. A late thirteenth century papyrus records how closely the commanders of the forts monitored the movements of foreigners: “We have completed the entry of the tribes of the Edomite Shasu [i.e. bedouin] through the fortress of Merneptah-Content-with-Truth, which is in Tjkw to the pools of Pr-Itm which [are] in Tjkw for the sustenance of their flocks.”

This report is interesting in another connection: it names two of the most important sites mentioned in the Bible in connection with the Exodus (Figure 6). Succath (Exodus 12:37; Numbers 33:5) is probably the Hebrew form of the Egyptian Tjkw, a name referring to a place or an area in the eastern delta that appears in the Egyptian texts from the days of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the dynasty of Ramesses II. Pithom (Exodus 1:11) is the Hebrew form of Pr-Itm "House [i.e., Temple] of the God Aturn". This name appears for the first time in the days of the New Kingdom in Egypt. Indeed, two more place-names that appear in the Exodus narrative seem to fit the reality of the eastern delta in the time of the New Kingdom. The first, which we have already mentioned above, is the city called Raamses—Pi-Ramesses, or “The House of Ramesses,” in Egyptian. This city was built in the thirteenth century as the capital of Ramesses II in the eastern delta, very close to the ruins of Avaris. Hard work in brick making, as described in the biblical account, was a common phenomenon in Egypt, and an Egyptian tomb painting from the fifteenth century BC portrays this specialized building trade in detail. Finally the name Migdol, which appears in the Exodus account (Exodus 14:2), is a common name in the New Kingdom for Egyptian forts on the eastern border of the delta and along the international road from Egypt to Canaan in northern Sinai.

The border between Canaan and Egypt was thus closely controlled. If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist. Yet in the abundant Egyptian sources describing the time of the New Kingdom in general and the thirteenth century in particular, there is no reference to the Israelites, not even a single clue. We know of nomadic groups from Edom who entered Egypt from the desert. The Mernepath stele refers to Isreal as a group of people already living in Canaan. But we have no clue, not even a single word about early Isrealites in Egypt.

According to the biblical account, the children of Isreal wandered in the desert and mountains of the Sinai peninsula, moving around and camping in different places,for a full forty years (Figure 8). Even if the number of fleeing Israelites (given in the text as six hundred thousand) is wildly exaggerated or can be interpreted as representing smaller units of people, the text describes the survival of a great number of people under the most challenging conditions. Some archaeological traces of their generation-long wandering in the Sinai should be apparent.However, except for the Egyptian forts along the northern coast, not a single campsite or sign of occupation from the time of Ramesses II and his immediate predecessors and successors has ever been identified in Sinai. And it has not been for lack of trying. Repeated archaeological surveys in all regions of the peninsula, including the mountainous area around the traditional site of Mount Sinai, near Saint Catherines Monastery (see Appendix B), have yielded only negative evidence: not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment. One may argue that a relatively small band of wandering Israelites cannot be expected to leave material remains behind. But modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral activity in such eras as the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century BCE.

The conclusion — that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible — seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (Numbers 33) and where some archaeological indication-if present-would almost certainly be found. According to the biblical narrative, the children of Israel camped at Kadesh-barnea for thirty eight of the forty years of the wanderings. The general location of this place is clear from the description of the southern border of the land of Israel in Numbers 34, It has been identified by archaeologists with the large and well-watered oasis of Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, on the border between modern Israel and Egypt. The name Kadesh was probably preserved over the centuries in the name of a nearby smaller spring called Ein Qadis. A small mound with the remains of a late Iron Age fort stands at the center of this oasis. Yet repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence for activity in the Late Bronze Age, not even a single sherd left by a tiny fleeing band of frightened refugees.

Ezion—geber is another place reported to be a camping place of the children of Israel. Its mention in other places in the Bible as a later port town on the northern tip ofthe Gulf of Aqaba has led to its identification by archaeologists at a mound located on the modern border between Israel and Jordan, halfway between the towns of Eilat and Aqaba. Excavations here in the years 1938-1940 revealed impressive Late Iron Age remains, but no trace whatsoever of Late Bronze occupation. From the long list of encampments in the wilderness, Kadesh·barnea and Ezion-geber are the only ones that can safely be identified, yet they revealed no trace of the wandering Israelites.

I think you don't quite understand my position, so hopefully I can clarify. I didn't say that Jews don't exist (there's no Jewish race, but I don't believe in races because the concept has no basis in genetics that I can find).

I believe the Jewish culture and religion grew out of the Canaanite civilization.

It's true that I don't accept the Bible as a valid document. What that means is that I don't believe everything in it is true or accurate. That does not mean that everything in it is a lie. The Bible is not unique in this. I apply the same skepticism to ancient Akkadian records, Civil War diaries, and modern newspapers. What's needed is to look at the evidence from as many sources as possible.

If a biblical story has corroborating evidence from other historical records, archeology, and is plausible then I'd give it high remarks for believability. On the flip side, if it's contradicted by other historical records, science, and is implausible I'll reject it. Thus while I accept that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed, I reject the existence of the Exodus.

The theory that the Jews branched out from the Canaanites explains many things that don't make sense if the Bible is true.

First, they have independent corroboration from external sources, whereas the united monarchy doesn't.

So even if we reject the Bible outright we at least know that they both existed. The two nations came into existence the same way that most nations come into existence: Groups of people have different political opinions, even if they have similar religious beliefs.

They went to Babylon. At least many of the learned people of Israel did. Those that stayed behind were known as Samaritans.

The split was because of political differences and religious differences. The Judahites were moving towards monotheism while the Israelites were henotheists.

After the Babylonian conquest the Judahites wrote a political treatise which blames Israel's woes on them playing the harlot with false gods. This treatise eventually became the Pentateuch.

Of course when the Israelites returned to the region their religion had been strongly influenced by the Zoroastrian masters and they too had become monotheists.

Religiously speaking, 4 different religious documents were then combined (possibly through Ezra) and edited into a fairly coherent whole. Textual critics have actually been able to separate out the 4 documents.

Languages change for a number of reasons. Hebrew is actually quite close to Phoenician, for example, and have a common origin (it's related to other languages like Akkadian, Arabic, Egyptian, Berber, Hausa, and Chadic).

Sometimes languages die out, especially when a politically dominant faction speaks another language (e.g. the Cornish language died out in the last century, and most Native American languages are nearing extinction or have already gone extinct).

Hebrew is a perfect example. it was the language of the OT. But eventually it died out and the people spoke Aramaic. Then it made a comeback when the nation of Israel was reborn in the last century.

Scripts change, just as languages do. The Hebrew script evolved out of the Aramaic script. Before that Hebrew was written in a script derived from the Phoenician script.

Before that Hebrew was written in a script derived from the Phoenician script. The Greek alphabet is also descended from the Phoenician script. The Phoenician script is derived from the Proto-Canaanite script. That script is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Independent of these is the Sumerian script which was also used by the Hittites and Babylonians (and a number of others).

That script is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Independent of these is the Sumerian script which was also used by the Hittites and Babylonians (and a number of others).

The inconsistencies lie in the fact that for decades archaeologists were Christians who tried to force fit archaeological facts to biblical accounts.

But the data doesn't make any sense when you try to do that. It's only been in the past couple decades that researchers have let the data lead them to conclusions. The biggest conclusion is that the Bible is not a reliable historical record.

And this is being done now.

This is part of the problem, of course. Is BT DWD "House of David" or a city named Bethdod?

This is indeed interesting, but doesn't contradict anything I've said. During the time that King David supposedly ruled, his capital, Jerusalem, was a small unfortified town. Interestingly before the 11th century BC and starting up again in the 8th century BC Jerusalem was an important fortified city.

Nehemiah's time was well after David supposedly ruled. Jerusalem was already a fortified town for a couple hundred years before him.

Archaeology and the City of David
by Rick Sherrod, Ph.D

Perhaps more than any other academic discipline, archaeology has enlarged our understanding of the historical record in the Bible. Archaeologists have found some of their most spectacular artifacts in the City of David, an area of 12 square miles in the southeast part of modern-day Jerusalem.

From the earliest investigation, conducted by American Edward Robinson in 1838, to the extensive excavation under the direction of Yigal Shiloh from 1978 to 1982, archaeology has progressively and dramatically confirmed the biblical account—from both Old and New Testaments.

The City of David itself contains only a limited amount of material from the actual Davidic period of Iron Age I and II. To date, diggers have unearthed no evidence of Solomon's Temple.

The archaeological record of Jerusalem in the late 11th and early 10th centuries B.C. is not nearly as prolific as we might wish it were.

Indeed, one of the noteworthy products of excavation in Jerusalem, commonly called the Tower of David, excavated by archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister in the 1920s, bears a title that can easily mislead. Although the tower's name associates the structure with Israel's most famous monarch, in fact only the lower courses of the tower are from the Davidic period. Most of this forti- fied edifice dates to the Maccabean period of the 2nd century B.C.

Relevant to this same episode, another discovery numerous archaeologists have examined has supported fascinating speculation about the account of Joab's stealthy entry into Jebusite Jerusalem. The event, related in 2 Samuel 5, occurred near the beginning of David's reign over all 12 Israelite tribes. David had offered to reward the man who took Jerusalem by appointing him leader over Israel's army. David's own nephew, Joab, achieved this seemingly impossible feat by gaining entrance into the city through the tsinnor, loosely translated "gutter" (verse 8) in the King James Version of the Bible and "water shaft" in the New King James Version.

This reference quite possibly describes a subterranean Jebusite water shaft discovered in 1867 by Englishman Capt. Charles Warren. Joab may well have discovered the underground passageway leading to the shaft, then scaled it to gain entry into the city. To demonstrate the possibility of such a feat, one member of the Capt. Montague Parker Mission (1909-1911) climbed the shaft from top to bottom. Though archaeologists still are not certain they have found the right shaft, the wedding of the biblical account and the particular geological feature of the city raises interesting possibilities.

The problem here is that Jerusalem was unfortified at the time.

There would be no need to sneak into town in this way.

Another major feature, not to mention popular tourist attraction, beneath the City of David is Hezekiah's Tunnel. This underground channel is associated with the reign of Judah's 8th-century (B.C.) king and religious reformer Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:2-4). Edward Robinson was the first man in modern times to explore it. Many others, scholars and tourists alike, have followed in Robinson's footsteps.

"When the tunnel was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through: while . . . were still . . . axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut through, there was heard the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was an overlap in the rock on the right and on the left. And when the tunnel was driven through the quarrymen hewed the rock, each man toward his fellow, ax against ax; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits, and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits."

JERUSALEM: An Israeli archeologist says she has uncovered in east Jerusalem what she believes may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by the Shalem Center, a neoconservative think tank in Jerusalem, and funded by a American Jewish investment banker who would like to help provide scientific support for the Bible as a reflection of Jewish history.

Alas, politics are interfering with science. It's almost as bad as when religion interferes with science. In either case truth is the first victim.

The first accounts of the legend were traced to the 1830s. In 1828 Washington Irving wrote the work of historical fiction The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The book was confused by many as providing an actual historical account of Columbus' life. As a recourse to make his romance more compelling, Irving "...invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a 'simple mariner,' appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate." There was indeed a meeting in Salamanca, but Irving's account for what happened there was entirely fictional.

A few years later, in 1834, Antoine-Jean Letronne, a French academic of strong antireligious ideas, misrepresented the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers. Then, In 1837, the English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, two minimally significant characters named Lactantius (245-325, also mocked by Copernicus' in De revolutionibus of 1543, as someone who speaks quite childishly about the Earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the Earth has the form of a globe) and Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his "Christian Topography” in 547-549. Whewell pointed to them as evidence of a medieval belief in a Flat Earth, and other historians quickly followed him, even though it was hard to find other examples.

The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163). The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the Earth and the heavens met", an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire, but not to any known medieval source. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the Flammarion woodcut himself. In any case, no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known.

The myth that Christians in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat was given a massive boost by Andrew Dickson White's weighty tome The Warfare of Science with Theology. This book has become something of a running joke among historians of science and it is dutifully mentioned as a prime example of misinformation in the preface of most modern works on science and religion. The flat Earth is discussed in chapter 2 and one can almost sense White's confusion that hardly any of the sources support his hypothesis that Christians widely believed in it. He finds himself grudgingly admitting that Clement, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Isodore, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas all accepted the Earth was a globe - in other words none of the great doctors of the church had considered the matter in doubt. Although an analysis of what White actually says suggests he was aware that the flat Earth was largely a myth, he certainly gives an impression of ignorant Christians suppressing rational knowledge of its real shape.

That would be interesting.

Christians have already overtaken America.

Here's the thing. It doesn't matter to me whether King David existed or not, or to what extent his power was. Whatever the answer, my life won't change a bit. I don't have a stake in him not existing any more than I have a stake in Hezekiah not existing (which is just as well because Hezekiah apparently did exist).

If David existed and was king of a massively powerful united monarchy, I'd still be an Atheist. I've gone from believing he existed, to believing he didn't exist, to believing that he probably existed and was a tribal chieftain. I'll change my mind again if the evidence compels me to.

Further, you made claims that you represented as unquestionable fact, that you now say are BELIEFS. To me, that is misrepresention of the truth. I do take issue with that, because that is how many wars started.

Sorry, but you wrote in that thread that "The fact is that there was no Davidic monarchy", and the kings of Israel and Judah were part of that Davidic monarchy.

If the Jews were descended from those peoples, then that continued mingling for hundreds of years would have meant that the Jews never achieved cohesion as a nation, and would have just be subsumed by those nations. So you would never have heard of a Jew.

The before the Russian Revolution, Russians were monarchists, and after they were Communists. Are they different people?

So arguing about genetics has no realistic concept.

For such a claim to be true, then you would have had to find overwhelming evidence that the Temple was built way after the split happened.

However, from what I understand, historical evidence seems to show the opposite. Perhaps you can cite the source that found the document at Tel-Dan that says that King Ahab built the Temple?

Okay, so let's have a look at Solomon's Temple and see what the rocks tell us...Oh yeah, that's right, no one has found a single brick of this Temple. Could it be that it never existed?

Are you saying that people can't believe facts?

Just because I believe the sun is really really hot, that doesn't mean there's any question about it.

The determination of the sun's temperature has been one of the most difficult problems in solar astronomy.

No they weren't. Israel and Judah were two separate nations, and never a united whole.

That's right, they never did achieve cohesion as a nation. Instead they formed two nations.

Yes they are. Before they were Monarchist people and after they were Communist people. As far as their genetics go,

Okay, so let's have a look at Solomon's Temple and see what the rocks tell us...Oh yeah, that's right, no one has found a single brick of this Temple. Could it be that it never existed?

What evidence, besides the Bible, do you have that indicates that Solomon's Temple existed?