How modern archaeology shows that the bible is bullshit-a must read...

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http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Reference_Links/False_Testament_(Harpers).htm

Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the Old Testament, for all its embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth. Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned his staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt; and that, following some sort of conflict with the authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a high-born priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup. Although much was unknown, archaeologists were confident that they had succeeded in nailing down at least these few basic facts.
 

That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an 'indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore.

This is not to say that individual elements of the story are not older. But Jewish monotheism, the sole and exclusive worship of an The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first. ancient Semitic god known as Yahweh, did not fully coalesce until the period between the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586.

Some twelve to fourteen centuries of "Abrahamic" religious development, the cultural wellspring that has given us not only Judaism but Islam and Christianity, have thus been erased. Judaism appears to have been the product not of some dark and nebulous period of early history but of a more modern age of big-power politics in which every nation aspired to the imperial greatness of a Babylon or an Egypt. Judah, the sole remaining Jewish outpost by the late eighth century B.C., was a small, out-of-the-way kingdom with little in the way of military or financial clout. Yet at some point its priests and rulers seem to have been seized with the idea that their national deity, now deemed to be nothing less than the king of the universe, was about to transform them into a great power. They set about creating an imperial past commensurate with such an empire, one that had the southern heroes of David and Solomon conquering the northern kingdom and making rival kings tremble throughout the known world. From a "henotheistic" cult in which Yahweh was worshiped as the chief god among many, they refashioned the national religion so that henceforth Yahweh would be worshiped to the exclusion of all other deities. One law, that of Yahweh, would now reign supreme.

This is not, of course, the story that we have all been led to believe is, at least to some degree, history. This is not the story told, for instance, in such tomes as Paul Johnson's 1987 bestseller, A History of the Jews, from which we learn that Abraham departed the ancient city of Ur early in the second millennium B.C. as part of a great westward trek of "Habiru" (i.e., Hebrew) nomads to the land of Canaan. "[T]hough the monotheistic concept was not fully developed in [Abraham's] mind," Johnson writes, "he was a man striving towards it, who left Mesopotamian society precisely because it had reached a spiritual impasse." Now, however, we know that this statement is mainly bosh. Not only is there no evidence that any such figure as Abraham ever lived but archaeologists believe that there is no way such a figure could have lived given what we now know about ancient Israelite origins.

A few pages later, Johnson declares that "we can be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century B.C. and had been completed by about 1225 B.C." Bosh as well. A growing volume of evidence concerning Egyptian border defenses, desert sites where the fleeing Israelites supposedly camped, etc., indicates that the flight from Egypt did not occur in the thirteenth century before Christ; it never occurred at all. Although Johnson writes that the story of Moses had to be true because it "was beyond the power of the human mind to invent," we now know that Moses was no more historically real than Abraham before him. Although Johnson adds that Joshua, Moses's lieutenant, "began and to a great extent completed the conquest of Canaan," the Old Testament account of that conquest turns out to be fictional as well. And although Johnson goes on to inform his readers that after bottling up the Philistines in a narrow coastal strip, King David "then moved east, south and north, establishing his authority over Ammon, Moab, Edom, Aram-Zobar and even Aram-Damascus in the far north-east," archaeologists believe that David was not a mighty potentate whose power was felt from the Nile to the Euphrates but rather a freebooter who carved out what was at most a small duchy in the southern highlands around Jerusalem and Hebron. Indeed, the chief disagreement among scholars nowadays is between those who hold that David was a petty hilltop chieftain whose writ extended no more than a few miles in any direction and a small but vociferous band of "biblical minimalists" who maintain that he never existed at all.

By the late nineteenth century members of this school had arrived at the conclusion that the first five books of the Old Testament--variously known as the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, or the Pentateuch--were not written by Moses himself, as tradition would have it. Rather, they were largely products of a "post-exilic period" in which Jewish scribes, newly released from captivity in Babylon, set about putting a jumbled collection of ancient writings into some sort of coherent order. The Higher Criticism did not topple the Old Testament as a whole, but it did conclude that Abraham, Isaac, and the other tribal founders depicted in the Book of Genesis were no more real than the heroes of Greek or Norse mythology.

The first archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived theoretical framework.

Etc., Etc. Etc....

[Deicide]

See how fundies shrink back when they see this; it terrifies them...

[loco]

Who the heck is Daniel Lazare? A renown archaeologist, historian, scholar?   

You keep copying and pasting garbage, conspiracy theories, myths and legends from the Internet, because everything you find on the Internet is true, especially stuff written by unknown authors, or by authors with no credentials.

[Butterbean]

See how fundies shrink back when they see this; it terrifies them...

lolololoz

[Deicide]

Who the heck is Daniel Lazare? A renown archaeologist, historian, scholar?   

You keep copying and pasting garbage, conspiracy theories, myths and legends from the Internet, because everything you find on the Internet is true, especially stuff written by unknown authors, or by authors with no credentials.

Myths and legends...sure sounds like your holy book of holes...

Daniel Lazare is a journalist, however the entire article depends on the work of this man...

Israel Finkelstein is a renowned Israeli archaeologist and academic. He is currently the Jacob M. Alkow Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze Age and Iron Ages at Tel Aviv University and is also the co-director of the renewed excavations at the important archaeological site of Megiddo in northern Israel. Previously, he served as Director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University from 1996-2002.

Born in Petah Tikva, he completed his studies at Tel Aviv University, writing his Ph.D. thesis on the The Izbet Sartah Excavations, for which he was also the Field Director.

...who wrote this book...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed

 

Epilogue: The Future of Biblical Israel
The authors submit conclude the Hebrew bible was conceived, written, and read as a theological and community text. To dissect the bible in search of accurate, verifiable history is to demand of it something that it is not. The bible is narrative expression of shared community life. It emerged in the late 7th century BCE as the response of a small kingdom to the unique pressures it faced, and was later refined as the response of the even smaller Temple community in Jerusalem to the challenges of the post-Exilic period. It demands to be read, not as history in the modern sense, but as the literary and spiritual creation of its own age