Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
You might be surprised. There’s a ton of BS, but the things it tried to cover up are actually pretty revealing.
For example, it talks about how one of the earliest leaders and prophets is a woman named ‘bee’ and in her song she talks about how the tribe of Dan “stayed on their ships.”
Well just in the past ten years there’s been a discovery of the only apiary in the region which was requeening their bees from Anatolia for centuries up until the period when Asa is supposedly deposing his grandmother the Queen Mother, when the apiary and only the apiary is burned to the ground.
Inside that apiary there’s even a four horned altar to an unknown goddess - a feature that becomes a part of later Israelite shrines.
Just a few weeks ago there were articles about what’s thought to be a very early Israelite graveyard where they were burning beeswax with a similar chemical profile to this apiary with the imported Anatolian bees and four horned altars.
Up in Anatolia was a tribe of sea peoples known as the Denyen, who an archeologist in the 50s thought might have been the lost tribe of Dan staying on their ships. And just in the past few years the lead excavator of Tel Dan was remarking that he might have been right given they found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the early Iron Age layer.
There’s quite a lot more to all this, but while none of it is straight up acknowledged in the Bible, there’s very valuable evidence of it having been covered up and rewritten in the Bible.
Just because you don’t like the current version of royal propaganda doesn’t mean there aren’t earlier layers beneath what’s presented that have value in being learned about and analyzed, particularly for history buffs.
As the science historian John Helibron said, “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.”
You’re welcome to post links to your sources. Credible sources.
Sounds a bit more like sealioning than genuine interest, but far be it from me to hold back more information from the potentially curious.
Anatolian DNA in the bees at Tel Rehov: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1003265107
Dan and the Denyen: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0309089218778583?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.2
Tel Dan excavation and Aegean pottery: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2016-12-04/ty-article-magazine/tribe-of-dan-sons-of-israel-or-of-greek-mercenaries-hired-by-egypt/0000017f-f2fa-d497-a1ff-f2fac60a0000
Iron Age cemetery with beeswax: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024-04-28/ty-article-magazine/archaeologists-find-cemetery-possibly-linked-to-the-ancient-israelites/0000018f-2344-dacd-a7ef-37c510fb0000
None of this prove that the myths in the Bible are real, lol
All the “possiblys” and “could bes” and “suggests”…
There’s a difference between the supernatural component of mythologized history and the historical components being false.
Do you also think that 100% of the Iliad and Odyssey are false just because the stuff about Zeus is? That the ruins of Troy in Turkey aren’t really Troy? That there was no catalogue of ships of the Mycenaean fleet conquering a foothold in Anatolia? That there was no one day battle with Egypt where Aegean commanders were taken captive?
If not, what about the Bible makes it uniquely 100% false to your discerning eye?
Yes, I very much do believe it is a myth that anyone journey to the Underworld and slayed Titans— however much I wish to believe in Achilles’s and Pericles’s deep, sweaty, manly love. It’s just a legend. It did not happen.
You’re right, that the supernatural parts did not happen like a katabasis story.
But you are 100% wrong that 100% didn’t happen.
There are serious issues with the work, chief among them being Homer combining the 14th century Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia with the 12th century sea peoples retaking of Wilusa from the Hittites. But many, many of the fragmentary details being combined into a mythological history did in fact occur, including Odysseus’s one day battle with Egypt (Merneptah’s Libyan/sea peoples war).
I’m not denying that some religious myth-books do, in fact, contain references to historical events, what I’m saying is that they’re not to be relied upon as they’re often inaccurate to the point of being apocryphal.
Example: Hebrew slaves did not, in fact, build the pyramids.
Then we are in agreement. Because what you were saying is that the works were 100% false, meaning that nothing mentioned in them had any historical basis or correlation. Which is factually incorrect.
I agree that they cannot be relied upon in absence of many, many other sources both primary and archeological to discern what’s bullshit from what was a kernel of truth.
But the idea that mythological histories don’t contain any kernels of truth at all is not a position that’s held up well over time, such as the consensus being Troy didn’t exist until some nerds followed the geography in Homer exactly and found the damn thing.
So while you are correct that Hebrew slaves didn’t build the pyramids, there are records that groups of twelve tribes were brought into captivity into Egypt not long before there was a large battle with Egypt where some of those tribes were recorded as fully circumcised (as opposed to the partial circumcision of the time). Tribes who later ally together to conquer their homelands unlike the anachronistic book of Joshua’s conquering. Their later non-Biblical mythologized history even talks about how their prophet died in the desert as they were wandering back by foot from a battle in North Africa, and while there’s zero evidence of the Israelites mentioning Moses until much later on, there’s two separate 8th century BCE inscriptions of one of these tribes of people claiming someone by the same name as the prophet who died in the desert as the ancestor of their rulers. These last people were the Denyen, part of the sea peoples, which included the tribes brought into Egyptian captivity and who were fighting Egypt while circumcised.
Sometimes history gets appropriated and changed, and it’s important to keep an eye out for things like that. So when the Bible has a story about how the ancestors of one group of people have their birthright stolen by the ancestor named ‘Israel’, even if those mythological eponymous founders didn’t actually exist or trick their father with soup, a story of stealing one people’s history and making it Israel’s shouldn’t just be ignored, particularly in light of emerging evidence of Israel in its infancy having had trade relations and cultural exchange with the area those people were in before major religious reforms and rewriting of history.