Have you guys seen this? Any veracity? seems fascinating Ancient Hebrew curse tablet found by Katy archaeologist could be proof of older Bible timeline https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ne...blet-found-by-Katy-archaeologist-17026823.php
The archaeologist who discovered it certainly has a list of things he wants the tablet to mean, but we have to be very careful when evaluating evidence like this. The main thing it proves is that Paleo-Hebrew (which isn’t the same as biblical Hebrew), was known in written form several centuries earlier than previous finds indicated, based on radiometric dating. But, its being there in the 13th century is no evidence of itself that whoever wrote it originated elsewhere. One tablet the size of a postage stamp doesn’t prove any particular account of the Exodus or the Conquest. It doesn’t even prove that the Israelites wrote it.
That's a good point. YHWH was associated with the Kenites, who lived to the southwest of biblical Israel. This area is where the "burning bush" passage was said to occur in Exodus 3, and the account of Cain in Gen. 4 occurs in the J Source. ("Cain" and "Kenites" are the same word in Hebrew: Qayin.)
It is pretty amazing to see the "skeptical" school of "biblical scholars" be forced to push back their timeline further and further back about which parts of the Old Testament are true Every year we see some news that pushes the "earliest" fragment found to 6th century BC, then 8th century, then 13th... we find a fragment that seems to say David on it, and now this
This is small, 2cm x 2 cm (less than one square inch). A post of facebook claimed this was scientific proof of God. I am sure we need to be glad of the find, however we should not make more of it, nor less of it, than it is. What it suggests is that there were people in a yahwistic tradition in the are by the time of the return of the Israelites from Egypt. I am pretty happy about that, however it is not a surprise. I was listening to someone a while ago who argued that Jerusalem did not exist before 500 bc, and that Abraham, Moses, and David where all creatures of legend with no basis in fact. Not a view I accept, I might add. I am not sure what he would make of the find, however I am pretty sure he would be unlikely to allow it to change his story. I remember the Gilgamesh Epic being touted by some as proof that the Bible was wrong, but not really, because what it showed was the credibility of the account that Arbraham journey from Ur of the Chaldees, and brought with his many things for the journey, including the stories and traditions that found their origins the the stories and traitions of the people from whence he came. I view Gilgamesh as a remarkable testimony to some of the truth of the Biblical Account.
right! this goes against a hundred years of critical-historical "scholarship" exactly, I see things the same way.... The momentum is all on our side, and the more time we give to archeology to just do its thing, the more the skeptics and the atheists will be put into the corner about the irrationality of their beliefs, and the brokenness of their whole worldview (not that any more evidence was needed)
Blessed Aselm, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, argued that science and faith come to the same desitinaion when followed with integrity.
I wouldn’t go that far. There is no unified theory in modern biblical archaeology of what “really happened” at the time of the Exodus/Conquest. There are a number of different theories and they each have their pros and cons in terms of the available evidence. One such theory is that there was no “conquest” per se; rather nomads from the south gradually settled in the lowlands, bringing worship of YHWH with them. Over time, this alien culture became the dominant one in what later became Palestine, and El and Baal (the main gods of the Canaanite pantheon), were gradually amalgamated with YHWH in popular lore (which shows up in the biblical text itself in some of the Psalms as well as in the book of Daniel, for example). The discovery of this tablet does not, as far as I can tell, falsify that particular theory of the Conquest.