Preface

Let us make no mistake here. Lets us not permit believers to "discover"I am hostile to religion and those who promote religion. There is no question I am openly hostile to religion in any form, organized, unorganized and even chaotic. This is not a secret. This is my premise.

Let me also be clear. I have no intention of presenting myself as more gentle than Muslims, more charitable than Christians or more peaceful than Buddhists. I am not going to pretend you can be better than your goals in your religion by rejecting religion. I have no intention of out-doing the preachers and giving you a new religion called non-religion.

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It is not what you know that is a problem. It is the things you know that are not true that cause you problems.

reading about the archaeological finds in bibleland and slowly realizing what you are not seeing. You are not seeing the kind of things found in other ancient civilizations. You are not seeing palaces, temples, statues, columns, magnificent ruins. You are seeing here and there a wall. And when you do read of an important find like Jericho you find it shows the bible story can not be true.

You are not reading about ancient inscriptions about the people and events of the bible showing them in a different light.

You slowly realize what you are not finding in all your reading. You are not finding biblical Israel.

READING this article will be a challenge to many. It is not easy to stop accepting things which a person has been told all his life. This must be done for all religious traditions unless there is physical evidence for them.

The only way to find the physical evidence for these stories is by archaeology. When one realizes there is no archaeological evidence in support of any religious tradition about the Old Testament stories it is viewed in an entirely different light. It is not a view which is favored by the religious establishment.

I.     Archaeology
II.    Religious Tradition
III.   Literal v Figurative God stories

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I.    Archaeology

How much has to be found in bibleland to confirm the existance of biblical Israel?

ALL of it. The standard of archaeology is the Troy Standard.

BIBLICAL ISRAEL == The Troy Standard

At this point review what you once thought you were reading about the archaeology of biblical Israel and take a close look at what you were reading instead. You were reading religious traditions masquerading as facts. You noticed you were not seeing palaces, temples, statues, columns, magnificent ruins. If you asked you read they did not make statues because they were prohibited. OK. So where are the palaces, temples, columns, and magnificent ruins without statues? Why was it so easy to read about statues and find the absence of everything else making sense?

Where did these religious traditions come from? No one knows. Who created these religious traditions? No one knows? When were they created? No one knows. Were they taken seriously when created? No one knows. We know absolutely nothing about religious traditions save that they exist.

Believers would like you to assume there is something special about religious traditions simply because they are the traditions of the religion dating back as far as they can be traced. So also are Mormon religious traditions which does not sway most Christians. So are Islamic religious traditions which do not sway most Christians. So are Christian religious traditions which do not sway most Jews.

So if we are to take a fresh look at this subject the credible place to start is with Jewish religious tradition which does not sway either Christians or Muslims nor even Mormons be they Christian or not depending upon your position in the matter.

If Judaism crumbles so also does Christianity and Islam.

What constitutes the religious traditions of Judaism? Without pretending to name them all let me be clear that the Old Testament is a set of religious traditions no matter how it arose. What do we know for sure about the Old Testament? Damned near nothing.

We have many religious traditions as to the origins of the OT but nothing more than religious traditions. We have not one evidenced answer regarding the who, what, when, where, and why of the OT.

Take for example the question of when it was written. As little as two centuries ago the first five books of the OT were written by Moses around 1200 BC. Today the when is a range of dates from about 600BC to 200BC with no agreement at all. What we do know is a collection of these stories appeared in Alexandria around the mid 3rd c. BC in Greek. Later several different collections of these stories appeared which are commonly called the Septuagint. So also this collection is called the Old Testament of which there are several different collections. So also there are the scrolls of the Jews which is another different collection.

The only source of a claim that the Greek collection is a translation of an original in another language is the forged Letter of Aristeas from the early 1st c. AD and in the late 1st c. AD Josephus cites this forgery as his only evidence of an older version in another language.

If you believe there was something older than the stories in Greek that appeared in Alexandria that is your religious tradition. There is no evidence any such thing existed.

"But wait," you shout, "we know the Hebrew is older." No you do not. All you know is there is a tradition it is older. There is no evidence of it. Belief is not knowledge. There is not one single inscription of any passage from the Septuagint to be found any place in bibleland which is older than when the Septuagint appeared in history.

Yes there are many fragments of writings found in bibleland. They are in two different scripts, Phoenician and Aramaic. Surprise for the uninitiated, the present day script we call Hebrew is Aramaic. There is no unique Hebrew script. And before the Aramaic appears there is only Phoenician script.

What inscriptions are found in the Phoenician script are declared by many to be a "hebrew" language distinctly different from Phoenician. Their evidence is tenuous at best. Let us not dwell upon that but turn out attention to the inscriptions in this "hebrew" instead which relate to the religion of the people who wrote in "hebrew." They always mention Yahweh and Ashara as the pair of gods which ruled the land. There is no mention of Yahweh without Ashara. If this is in fact the language of the bible people then in fact they worshiped both the god and goddess not just the god.

Based upon the evidence there is no basis to say the people prior to the Septuagint only worshiped one god.

But is not in question as we know the was a temple to Ashara in the upper city on the so-called Temple mount in the 2nd c. AD. We also know from Josephus that the temple of Yahweh was in the lower city.

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Everyone is the same without evidence of a specific difference relevant to the issue being addressed.

===== LITERAL VS FIGURATIVE

        Literal vs Figurative

How were the stories in the OT viewed when they were created?

Fiction of course. And fiction of the fantasy genre no less.

The ancients created stories about their gods. They were not believed but taken to be fantasy or perhaps a separate category of god fiction just as today we refer to this type of story as mythology.

The Iliad and Odyssey are convenient examples attributed to the same author, Homer. There are gods in both poems. The difference is in the former the gods are figuratively involved. In the latter the gods are literally involved.

As a modern example Patton claimed to pray "every damned day" and specifically to pray for victory. After battle he would offer prayer thanking his god for the victory. No place do we expect to read of his god appearing on the beaches raining down heavenly fire on the enemy. We expect figurative involvement of a god in stories about the war. We do not expect literal involvement.

In the Iliad we find such prayers and sacrifices both for victory and to celebrate victory. We do not find a god breaching the walls of Ilium nor setting the city ablaze. We find the kind of story we tell about our own battles and do not expect to read of any literal involvement of a god. All the references are to figurative involvement of the gods.

In the Odyssey we find a different kind of story. We find the literal involvement of gods, children of gods and supernatural beings as critical parts of each story. He blinds the Cyclops, the son of the god Poseidon. As the god of the seas Poseidon keeps Oddyseus wandering the seas for ten years as punishment. This we see as god fiction, i.e. mythology.

However revered these works of Homer and however seriously the Iliad was taken as an epic tale of a real war no one took the Oddysey as literally true. Similarly no one took the other tales of the gods as literally true. The Greeks viewed the stories of the gods the same way we view them, as mythology.

Similarly the Romans, Egyptians, Persians and others did not view their god stories as literally true. On the simple assumption that the Jews were the same as everyone else there is no reason to think they viewed their god stories any differently, that they viewed the stories as myths. There is no reason to think the Jews were different and believed their god stories were literal rather than figurative.

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