Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #649, 6/9/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #649, 6/9/13
 
 
AP: “Oldest Written Evidence of Judaism & Christianity Holy Land Roots” Only 2,000 Years Old [Not Exactly]
 
Our hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) ran a 4-paragraph AP squib on Sunday, May 26, on the Palestinian Arab family that originally sold the first Dead Sea scrolls now offering tiny pieces still in their possession for sale. That AP squib ends with the startling statement:
 
Written about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land. [emphasis added]
 
Where to begin?
 
[A] Is 2,000 years ago (as long ago as that is) “the oldest written evidence” to which Jews and Christians can point of Judaism’s and Christianity’s Holy Land roots? No. Written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, some of it written in stone.
 
[B] Is it a big deal, this last phrase of a last sentence of a page 15 “Scroll Fragments Offered” four-paragraph news-in-brief squib? For at least two reasons, it is.
 
[1] Today, much of the world and its media revel in delegitimizing the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. That connection, as I argue in my book, Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine, is an uninterrupted continuous physical presence all through the centuries, but its anchor is the biblical era of from 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. For the Western media to state that there’s no written evidence of our Holy Land roots until the biblical period’s almost end, when in fact that written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, erroneously weakens the fact of that presence.
 
[2] It wasn’t just a four-paragraph news-in-brief squib. A meticulous monitor and tireless disseminator of archeological news emailed me: “That erroneous AP sentence has been published all over the place, including by The Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.” And not just as a 4-paragraph squib. The full AP article as it appeared in Haaretz was 57 paragraphs long, which Haaretz charmingly headlined as follows:
 
Little bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls put up for sale
 
This angers Israel’s government antiquities authority, which holds most of the scrolls, claims that every last scrap should be recognized as Israeli cultural property, and threatens to seize any more pieces that hit the market.
 
By The Associated Press
 
Apart from legal ownership issues of property “lost, mislaid, abandoned and forgotten” that vex law school freshmen their first week reading cases, if the Dead Sea scrolls written by Jews in Judaea are not “Israeli cultural property” then whose “cultural property” are they? Just ask those wonderful folks, UNESCO of the U.N., which voted 44-to-1 with 12 abstentions in 2010 to declare Rachel’s Tomb a mosque and, along with the Cave of the [Jewish] Patriarchs “an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories” – see “UNESCO declares Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb Palestinian Sites,” Examiner.com, 11/2/10; “Until 1996, nobody called Rachel’s Tomb a mosque,” JPost.com, 8/11/10. That Jewish Issues Examiner article’s author ended her article: “Shame on UNESCO. And Jews should know what UNESCO has done and speak up. Shame on them [i.e., us] for not doing so.”
 
 
Written Evidence of Judaism’s Holy Land Roots Antedating the Dead Sea Scrolls
 
Much of the written archeological evidence sample I cite below is written in metal and stone, not on parchment or on skins like the Dead Sea scrolls, but the test of whether something is “written” is whether its “writing,” whether it’s words.
 
Stele of Merneptah: The earliest written evidence extent today of Israelite presence is an Egyptian pharaoh’s c. 1210 BCE stele boasting of claimed victories in Canaan, including: “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.” Archeologist Dever says this reference tells us that “this Israel was well enough established by that time among the other peoples of Canaan to have been perceived by Egyptian intelligence as a possible challenge to Egyptian hegemony,” and through the grammatical manner in which ‘Israel’ was referenced that it was an ethnic group in the remote hill country frontier.
 
Elah Inscription: Archeologists unearthing an Elah Valley Israelite fortress at Khirbet Qeiyafa on the Philistine border a couple years ago found a pottery shard which may have the earliest Hebrew writing ever discovered. The single-period site dates to the early 10th, maybe even late 11th century BCE, the time of King David, maybe Saul. It’s not alone. The “Gezer Stone,” an agricultural to-do list, and an alphabet stone unearthed at Tel Zayit have Hebrew writing of similar vintage.
 
King David Inscription: Although much has recently changed, for decades “minimalist” archeologists belittled the historicity of King David – “about as real as King Arthur,” one of them quipped – given the absence of 10th century BCE remains in Jerusalem. Then, in 1993 archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan in northern Israel a 9th century BCE Israelite enemy’s stele boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and “the House of David.” Archeologist Finkelstein (no “maximalist”) wrote in The Bible Unearthed: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon. The fact that Judah (or perhaps its capital, Jerusalem) is referred to with only a mention of its ruling house is clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period.”
 
Other Foreign Kings’ Inscriptions: The Mesha Stele of a 9th century BCE Moabite king boasts of victories over the northern kingdom’s kings Omri and Ahab, and may have a reference to “the House of David” as well. The 9th century BCE “Monolith Inscription” of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III records his claimed victory over an alliance arrayed against him, which included “2,000 chariots, 10,000 foot soldiers of Ahab, the Israelite.”
 
King Hezekiah’s Tunnel Inscription and Lachish Relief on Wall of Assyrian Palace: Late 8th century Judah king Hezekiah resisted the Assyrians who had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. Among his war preparations was the water tunnel with the famous “Siloam Inscription” found in 1880 dramatically depicting the moment when the tunnel diggers from the two ends finally met. A huge (60’ long x 9’ high) relief on a wall of the victorious Assyrian king’s Ninevah palace depicts the Assyrian siege of Lachish so photographically that archeologists can “identify the precise vantage point of the artist who made the sketch for the relief” (Finkelstein).
 
Jerusalem Tomb Amulets: Of great significance religiously, archeologist Barkey found in a late 7th century Jerusalem tomb a pair of silver amulets inscribed with the Bible’s priestly blessing, “words with which observant Jews still bless their children before the Sabbath meal on Friday nights.” Barkey wrote in the 200th issue anniversary of Biblical Archeology Review that although the biblical source (“P”) to which the priestly blessing is generally ascribed is considered by many to date from post-Babylonian exile times, the amulets’ texts “seem to support those who contend that the Priestly Code was already in existence, at least in rudimentary form, in the First Temple period.”
 
J, E, D, P: And, finally, what about the Hebrew Bible as pre-Dead Sea scrolls written evidence of Judaism’s and Christianity’s “Holy Land roots”?
 
The AP is of course correct that the Dead Sea scrolls, dating to ancient Israel’s final centuries, are the earliest extant writings of any part of the Hebrew Bible. But no other work compiled from multiple sources has been subjected to anything like the intensity of source scrutiny by experts that the Hebrew Bible’s received. These experts don’t agree on the J, E, D and P-sources’ creation centuries span, but 10th to 5th BCE, long before the Dead Sea scrolls, is the range. Scholar Richard Elliott Friedman in The Bible With Sources Revealed (pp. 8-9) dated J to Judah, and E to Israel, during the divided monarchies, 922 – 722 BCE; their consolidation into JE in Judah after Israel’s fall; P to the Jerusalem priesthood as an alternative to the history told in JE that was composed not long after J and E were combined (rejecting the view of 6th-5th century dating of P); and D to King Josiah’s time, with exilic supplementation.
 
What about the Hebrew Bible’s “sitz im leben,” its credibility as a document of its professed place and time? Dr. John Bright’s History of Israel makes a very strong case for names and events in the Bible fitting closely into their second and first millennium BCE times. The July-October 2009 special 200th issue of Biblical Archeology Review wrote of the significance to the authenticity of the Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple of the unearthing three millennia later of the ‘Ain Dara Temple in Syria: “Nearly every aspect of the ‘Ain Dara temple – its age, its size, its plan, its decoration – parallels the vivid description of Solomon’s Temple in the Bible.” Archeologist Dever (no “maximalist” either) says that although the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple might reasonably have been regarded as “a figment of later writers’ and editors’ imaginations” a generation ago, “the fact is we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every single feature [emphasis Dever’s] of the ‘Solomonic temple’ as described in the Hebrew Bible; and the best parallels come from, and only from, the Canaanite-Phoenician world of the 15th – 9th centuries.”
 
 
So what are we to make of this AP misstatement that “has been published all over the place,” that “the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land” is the Dead Sea scrolls of mainly the 2nd – 1st centuries BCE?
 
Herb Denenberg wrote of my book Israel 3000 Years that “in an ideal world this book would not have to be written.” In such an ideal world, a news article misstatement, even by the international news gathering service that dominates American newspaper reporting as does the AP, could be dismissed as thoughtless and inconsequential. Maybe this AP reporter here was simply thoughtless (an allowance I wouldn’t extend to AP writers who wrote, e.g., about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “Israel’s creation,” and about Israel having “seized” lands from Arabs in 1967). But in our real world in which the historicity of every Jewish homeland century from ancient to modern times is challenged by many, a statement by the AP that written evidence of Jewish homeland history doesn’t begin until the second or first century BCE will be taken by many as lending credibility to claims that that Jewish history – history the written record of which made the Holy Land holy – never happened.
 
Regards,
Jerry
 
= = = = = =
 
Bone up on this stuff:
 
Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, Verlin, www.pavilionpress.com and Amazon

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #649, 6/9/13
 
 
AP: “Oldest Written Evidence of Judaism & Christianity Holy Land Roots” Only 2,000 Years Old [Not Exactly]
 
Our hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) ran a 4-paragraph AP squib on Sunday, May 26, on the Palestinian Arab family that originally sold the first Dead Sea scrolls now offering tiny pieces still in their possession for sale. That AP squib ends with the startling statement:
 
Written about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land. [emphasis added]
 
Where to begin?
 
[A] Is 2,000 years ago (as long ago as that is) “the oldest written evidence” to which Jews and Christians can point of Judaism’s and Christianity’s Holy Land roots? No. Written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, some of it written in stone.
 
[B] Is it a big deal, this last phrase of a last sentence of a page 15 “Scroll Fragments Offered” four-paragraph news-in-brief squib? For at least two reasons, it is.
 
[1] Today, much of the world and its media revel in delegitimizing the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. That connection, as I argue in my book, Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine, is an uninterrupted continuous physical presence all through the centuries, but its anchor is the biblical era of from 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. For the Western media to state that there’s no written evidence of our Holy Land roots until the biblical period’s almost end, when in fact that written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, erroneously weakens the fact of that presence.
 
[2] It wasn’t just a four-paragraph news-in-brief squib. A meticulous monitor and tireless disseminator of archeological news emailed me: “That erroneous AP sentence has been published all over the place, including by The Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.” And not just as a 4-paragraph squib. The full AP article as it appeared in Haaretz was 57 paragraphs long, which Haaretz charmingly headlined as follows:
 
Little bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls put up for sale
 
This angers Israel’s government antiquities authority, which holds most of the scrolls, claims that every last scrap should be recognized as Israeli cultural property, and threatens to seize any more pieces that hit the market.
 
By The Associated Press
 
Apart from legal ownership issues of property “lost, mislaid, abandoned and forgotten” that vex law school freshmen their first week reading cases, if the Dead Sea scrolls written by Jews in Judaea are not “Israeli cultural property” then whose “cultural property” are they? Just ask those wonderful folks, UNESCO of the U.N., which voted 44-to-1 with 12 abstentions in 2010 to declare Rachel’s Tomb a mosque and, along with the Cave of the [Jewish] Patriarchs “an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories” – see “UNESCO declares Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb Palestinian Sites,” Examiner.com, 11/2/10; “Until 1996, nobody called Rachel’s Tomb a mosque,” JPost.com, 8/11/10. That Jewish Issues Examiner article’s author ended her article: “Shame on UNESCO. And Jews should know what UNESCO has done and speak up. Shame on them [i.e., us] for not doing so.”
 
 
Written Evidence of Judaism’s Holy Land Roots Antedating the Dead Sea Scrolls
 
Much of the written archeological evidence sample I cite below is written in metal and stone, not on parchment or on skins like the Dead Sea scrolls, but the test of whether something is “written” is whether its “writing,” whether it’s words.
 
Stele of Merneptah: The earliest written evidence extent today of Israelite presence is an Egyptian pharaoh’s c. 1210 BCE stele boasting of claimed victories in Canaan, including: “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.” Archeologist Dever says this reference tells us that “this Israel was well enough established by that time among the other peoples of Canaan to have been perceived by Egyptian intelligence as a possible challenge to Egyptian hegemony,” and through the grammatical manner in which ‘Israel’ was referenced that it was an ethnic group in the remote hill country frontier.
 
Elah Inscription: Archeologists unearthing an Elah Valley Israelite fortress at Khirbet Qeiyafa on the Philistine border a couple years ago found a pottery shard which may have the earliest Hebrew writing ever discovered. The single-period site dates to the early 10th, maybe even late 11th century BCE, the time of King David, maybe Saul. It’s not alone. The “Gezer Stone,” an agricultural to-do list, and an alphabet stone unearthed at Tel Zayit have Hebrew writing of similar vintage.
 
King David Inscription: Although much has recently changed, for decades “minimalist” archeologists belittled the historicity of King David – “about as real as King Arthur,” one of them quipped – given the absence of 10th century BCE remains in Jerusalem. Then, in 1993 archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan in northern Israel a 9th century BCE Israelite enemy’s stele boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and “the House of David.” Archeologist Finkelstein (no “maximalist”) wrote in The Bible Unearthed: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon. The fact that Judah (or perhaps its capital, Jerusalem) is referred to with only a mention of its ruling house is clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period.”
 
Other Foreign Kings’ Inscriptions: The Mesha Stele of a 9th century BCE Moabite king boasts of victories over the northern kingdom’s kings Omri and Ahab, and may have a reference to “the House of David” as well. The 9th century BCE “Monolith Inscription” of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III records his claimed victory over an alliance arrayed against him, which included “2,000 chariots, 10,000 foot soldiers of Ahab, the Israelite.”
 
King Hezekiah’s Tunnel Inscription and Lachish Relief on Wall of Assyrian Palace: Late 8th century Judah king Hezekiah resisted the Assyrians who had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. Among his war preparations was the water tunnel with the famous “Siloam Inscription” found in 1880 dramatically depicting the moment when the tunnel diggers from the two ends finally met. A huge (60’ long x 9’ high) relief on a wall of the victorious Assyrian king’s Ninevah palace depicts the Assyrian siege of Lachish so photographically that archeologists can “identify the precise vantage point of the artist who made the sketch for the relief” (Finkelstein).
 
Jerusalem Tomb Amulets: Of great significance religiously, archeologist Barkey found in a late 7th century Jerusalem tomb a pair of silver amulets inscribed with the Bible’s priestly blessing, “words with which observant Jews still bless their children before the Sabbath meal on Friday nights.” Barkey wrote in the 200th issue anniversary of Biblical Archeology Review that although the biblical source (“P”) to which the priestly blessing is generally ascribed is considered by many to date from post-Babylonian exile times, the amulets’ texts “seem to support those who contend that the Priestly Code was already in existence, at least in rudimentary form, in the First Temple period.”
 
J, E, D, P: And, finally, what about the Hebrew Bible as pre-Dead Sea scrolls written evidence of Judaism’s and Christianity’s “Holy Land roots”?
 
The AP is of course correct that the Dead Sea scrolls, dating to ancient Israel’s final centuries, are the earliest extant writings of any part of the Hebrew Bible. But no other work compiled from multiple sources has been subjected to anything like the intensity of source scrutiny by experts that the Hebrew Bible’s received. These experts don’t agree on the J, E, D and P-sources’ creation centuries span, but 10th to 5th BCE, long before the Dead Sea scrolls, is the range. Scholar Richard Elliott Friedman in The Bible With Sources Revealed (pp. 8-9) dated J to Judah, and E to Israel, during the divided monarchies, 922 – 722 BCE; their consolidation into JE in Judah after Israel’s fall; P to the Jerusalem priesthood as an alternative to the history told in JE that was composed not long after J and E were combined (rejecting the view of 6th-5th century dating of P); and D to King Josiah’s time, with exilic supplementation.
 
What about the Hebrew Bible’s “sitz im leben,” its credibility as a document of its professed place and time? Dr. John Bright’s History of Israel makes a very strong case for names and events in the Bible fitting closely into their second and first millennium BCE times. The July-October 2009 special 200th issue of Biblical Archeology Review wrote of the significance to the authenticity of the Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple of the unearthing three millennia later of the ‘Ain Dara Temple in Syria: “Nearly every aspect of the ‘Ain Dara temple – its age, its size, its plan, its decoration – parallels the vivid description of Solomon’s Temple in the Bible.” Archeologist Dever (no “maximalist” either) says that although the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple might reasonably have been regarded as “a figment of later writers’ and editors’ imaginations” a generation ago, “the fact is we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every single feature [emphasis Dever’s] of the ‘Solomonic temple’ as described in the Hebrew Bible; and the best parallels come from, and only from, the Canaanite-Phoenician world of the 15th – 9th centuries.”
 
 
So what are we to make of this AP misstatement that “has been published all over the place,” that “the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land” is the Dead Sea scrolls of mainly the 2nd – 1st centuries BCE?
 
Herb Denenberg wrote of my book Israel 3000 Years that “in an ideal world this book would not have to be written.” In such an ideal world, a news article misstatement, even by the international news gathering service that dominates American newspaper reporting as does the AP, could be dismissed as thoughtless and inconsequential. Maybe this AP reporter here was simply thoughtless (an allowance I wouldn’t extend to AP writers who wrote, e.g., about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “Israel’s creation,” and about Israel having “seized” lands from Arabs in 1967). But in our real world in which the historicity of every Jewish homeland century from ancient to modern times is challenged by many, a statement by the AP that written evidence of Jewish homeland history doesn’t begin until the second or first century BCE will be taken by many as lending credibility to claims that that Jewish history – history the written record of which made the Holy Land holy – never happened.
 
Regards,
Jerry
 
= = = = = =
 
Bone up on this stuff:
 
Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, Verlin, www.pavilionpress.com and AmazonTo: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #649, 6/9/13
 
 
AP: “Oldest Written Evidence of Judaism & Christianity Holy Land Roots” Only 2,000 Years Old [Not Exactly]
 
Our hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) ran a 4-paragraph AP squib on Sunday, May 26, on the Palestinian Arab family that originally sold the first Dead Sea scrolls now offering tiny pieces still in their possession for sale. That AP squib ends with the startling statement:
 
Written about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land. [emphasis added]
 
Where to begin?
 
[A] Is 2,000 years ago (as long ago as that is) “the oldest written evidence” to which Jews and Christians can point of Judaism’s and Christianity’s Holy Land roots? No. Written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, some of it written in stone.
 
[B] Is it a big deal, this last phrase of a last sentence of a page 15 “Scroll Fragments Offered” four-paragraph news-in-brief squib? For at least two reasons, it is.
 
[1] Today, much of the world and its media revel in delegitimizing the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. That connection, as I argue in my book, Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine, is an uninterrupted continuous physical presence all through the centuries, but its anchor is the biblical era of from 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. For the Western media to state that there’s no written evidence of our Holy Land roots until the biblical period’s almost end, when in fact that written evidence goes back a millennium earlier, erroneously weakens the fact of that presence.
 
[2] It wasn’t just a four-paragraph news-in-brief squib. A meticulous monitor and tireless disseminator of archeological news emailed me: “That erroneous AP sentence has been published all over the place, including by The Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.” And not just as a 4-paragraph squib. The full AP article as it appeared in Haaretz was 57 paragraphs long, which Haaretz charmingly headlined as follows:
 
Little bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls put up for sale
 
This angers Israel’s government antiquities authority, which holds most of the scrolls, claims that every last scrap should be recognized as Israeli cultural property, and threatens to seize any more pieces that hit the market.
 
By The Associated Press
 
Apart from legal ownership issues of property “lost, mislaid, abandoned and forgotten” that vex law school freshmen their first week reading cases, if the Dead Sea scrolls written by Jews in Judaea are not “Israeli cultural property” then whose “cultural property” are they? Just ask those wonderful folks, UNESCO of the U.N., which voted 44-to-1 with 12 abstentions in 2010 to declare Rachel’s Tomb a mosque and, along with the Cave of the [Jewish] Patriarchs “an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories” – see “UNESCO declares Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb Palestinian Sites,” Examiner.com, 11/2/10; “Until 1996, nobody called Rachel’s Tomb a mosque,” JPost.com, 8/11/10. That Jewish Issues Examiner article’s author ended her article: “Shame on UNESCO. And Jews should know what UNESCO has done and speak up. Shame on them [i.e., us] for not doing so.”
 
 
Written Evidence of Judaism’s Holy Land Roots Antedating the Dead Sea Scrolls
 
Much of the written archeological evidence sample I cite below is written in metal and stone, not on parchment or on skins like the Dead Sea scrolls, but the test of whether something is “written” is whether its “writing,” whether it’s words.
 
Stele of Merneptah: The earliest written evidence extent today of Israelite presence is an Egyptian pharaoh’s c. 1210 BCE stele boasting of claimed victories in Canaan, including: “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.” Archeologist Dever says this reference tells us that “this Israel was well enough established by that time among the other peoples of Canaan to have been perceived by Egyptian intelligence as a possible challenge to Egyptian hegemony,” and through the grammatical manner in which ‘Israel’ was referenced that it was an ethnic group in the remote hill country frontier.
 
Elah Inscription: Archeologists unearthing an Elah Valley Israelite fortress at Khirbet Qeiyafa on the Philistine border a couple years ago found a pottery shard which may have the earliest Hebrew writing ever discovered. The single-period site dates to the early 10th, maybe even late 11th century BCE, the time of King David, maybe Saul. It’s not alone. The “Gezer Stone,” an agricultural to-do list, and an alphabet stone unearthed at Tel Zayit have Hebrew writing of similar vintage.
 
King David Inscription: Although much has recently changed, for decades “minimalist” archeologists belittled the historicity of King David – “about as real as King Arthur,” one of them quipped – given the absence of 10th century BCE remains in Jerusalem. Then, in 1993 archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan in northern Israel a 9th century BCE Israelite enemy’s stele boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and “the House of David.” Archeologist Finkelstein (no “maximalist”) wrote in The Bible Unearthed: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon. The fact that Judah (or perhaps its capital, Jerusalem) is referred to with only a mention of its ruling house is clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period.”
 
Other Foreign Kings’ Inscriptions: The Mesha Stele of a 9th century BCE Moabite king boasts of victories over the northern kingdom’s kings Omri and Ahab, and may have a reference to “the House of David” as well. The 9th century BCE “Monolith Inscription” of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III records his claimed victory over an alliance arrayed against him, which included “2,000 chariots, 10,000 foot soldiers of Ahab, the Israelite.”
 
King Hezekiah’s Tunnel Inscription and Lachish Relief on Wall of Assyrian Palace: Late 8th century Judah king Hezekiah resisted the Assyrians who had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. Among his war preparations was the water tunnel with the famous “Siloam Inscription” found in 1880 dramatically depicting the moment when the tunnel diggers from the two ends finally met. A huge (60’ long x 9’ high) relief on a wall of the victorious Assyrian king’s Ninevah palace depicts the Assyrian siege of Lachish so photographically that archeologists can “identify the precise vantage point of the artist who made the sketch for the relief” (Finkelstein).
 
Jerusalem Tomb Amulets: Of great significance religiously, archeologist Barkey found in a late 7th century Jerusalem tomb a pair of silver amulets inscribed with the Bible’s priestly blessing, “words with which observant Jews still bless their children before the Sabbath meal on Friday nights.” Barkey wrote in the 200th issue anniversary of Biblical Archeology Review that although the biblical source (“P”) to which the priestly blessing is generally ascribed is considered by many to date from post-Babylonian exile times, the amulets’ texts “seem to support those who contend that the Priestly Code was already in existence, at least in rudimentary form, in the First Temple period.”
 
J, E, D, P: And, finally, what about the Hebrew Bible as pre-Dead Sea scrolls written evidence of Judaism’s and Christianity’s “Holy Land roots”?
 
The AP is of course correct that the Dead Sea scrolls, dating to ancient Israel’s final centuries, are the earliest extant writings of any part of the Hebrew Bible. But no other work compiled from multiple sources has been subjected to anything like the intensity of source scrutiny by experts that the Hebrew Bible’s received. These experts don’t agree on the J, E, D and P-sources’ creation centuries span, but 10th to 5th BCE, long before the Dead Sea scrolls, is the range. Scholar Richard Elliott Friedman in The Bible With Sources Revealed (pp. 8-9) dated J to Judah, and E to Israel, during the divided monarchies, 922 – 722 BCE; their consolidation into JE in Judah after Israel’s fall; P to the Jerusalem priesthood as an alternative to the history told in JE that was composed not long after J and E were combined (rejecting the view of 6th-5th century dating of P); and D to King Josiah’s time, with exilic supplementation.
 
What about the Hebrew Bible’s “sitz im leben,” its credibility as a document of its professed place and time? Dr. John Bright’s History of Israel makes a very strong case for names and events in the Bible fitting closely into their second and first millennium BCE times. The July-October 2009 special 200th issue of Biblical Archeology Review wrote of the significance to the authenticity of the Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple of the unearthing three millennia later of the ‘Ain Dara Temple in Syria: “Nearly every aspect of the ‘Ain Dara temple – its age, its size, its plan, its decoration – parallels the vivid description of Solomon’s Temple in the Bible.” Archeologist Dever (no “maximalist” either) says that although the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple might reasonably have been regarded as “a figment of later writers’ and editors’ imaginations” a generation ago, “the fact is we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every single feature [emphasis Dever’s] of the ‘Solomonic temple’ as described in the Hebrew Bible; and the best parallels come from, and only from, the Canaanite-Phoenician world of the 15th – 9th centuries.”
 
 
So what are we to make of this AP misstatement that “has been published all over the place,” that “the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land” is the Dead Sea scrolls of mainly the 2nd – 1st centuries BCE?
 
Herb Denenberg wrote of my book Israel 3000 Years that “in an ideal world this book would not have to be written.” In such an ideal world, a news article misstatement, even by the international news gathering service that dominates American newspaper reporting as does the AP, could be dismissed as thoughtless and inconsequential. Maybe this AP reporter here was simply thoughtless (an allowance I wouldn’t extend to AP writers who wrote, e.g., about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” from “Israel’s creation,” and about Israel having “seized” lands from Arabs in 1967). But in our real world in which the historicity of every Jewish homeland century from ancient to modern times is challenged by many, a statement by the AP that written evidence of Jewish homeland history doesn’t begin until the second or first century BCE will be taken by many as lending credibility to claims that that Jewish history – history the written record of which made the Holy Land holy – never happened.
 
Regards,
Jerry
 
= = = = = =
 
Bone up on this stuff:
 
Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, Verlin, www.pavilionpress.com and Amazon
 
Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, Bender and Verlin, www.pavilionpress.com and Amazon