Sennacherib, IV Kings vs Prism

And it came to pass that night, that an angel of the Lord came, and slew in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and eighty-five thousand. And when he arose early in the morning, he saw all the bodies of the dead And Sennacherib king of the Assyrians departing went away, and he returned and abode in Ninive And as he was worshipping in the temple of Nesroch his god, Adramelech and Sarasar his sons slew him with the sword, and they fled into the land of the Armenians, and Asarhaddon his son reigned in his stead
[4 Kings (2 Kings) 19:35-37]

FB: "The Sennacherib Prism, also referred to as the Taylor Prism"
https://www.facebook.com/groups/ancientsecrets/permalink/865282729066998/

Wiki cites this portion:

As for the king of Judah, Hezekiah, who had not submitted to my authority, I besieged and captured forty-six of his fortified cities, along with many smaller towns, taken in battle with my battering rams. ... I took as plunder 200,150 people, both small and great, male and female, along with a great number of animals including horses, mules, donkeys, camels, oxen, and sheep. As for Hezekiah, I shut him up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem. I then constructed a series of fortresses around him, and I did not allow anyone to come out of the city gates. His towns which I captured I gave to Mitinti, king of Ashdod; Padi, ruler of Ekron; and Silli-bel, king of Gaza.

DV

JL Sennacherib didn't siege Jerusalem and never lost 185,000. How so? Read his chronicles - next years he marched with his army to new wars.

JL

DV ,Sennacherib never had the opportunity to siege Jerusalem, his army was defeated by one angel before he had a chance! 2 Chronicles 32:21 provides the account. Isaiah 37:33-37 gives more details of the same account, verse 36:” And the angel of Jehovah proceeded to go forth and strike down a hundred and eighty- five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians. When the people rose up early in the morning, why ,there all of them were dead carcasses.” 2 Kings 19:35 provides a parallel account of the same event. Sennacherib was killed by his own son upon returning to Nineveh ,2 King 19: 36,37,Read it for yourself!

GA

JL : You are aware that the Bible is about 90% fiction/fantasy, aren't you?

First problem with the objection against the reliability of the Bible is, are we speaking of the same event, or were there two attacks?

Could Sennacherib have won round one not mentioned in the Bible and lost round two as per the Bible and not mentioned in his annals?

Second problem is presuming that secular rulers are honest and down to earth and just because Sennacherib was neither a Christian nor a Jew, that makes him a secular ruler. Rulers in this time, when writing of far-off exploits (far off from the capital) were capable of horrible bragging and lying to keep their populace (specifically in the capital) happy.

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village[a] is a construction (literal or figurative) whose purpose is to provide an external façade to a situation, to make people believe that the situation is better than it actually is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Pretty blatant example from Ancient Near East history is the Battle of Kadesh. Hittite and Egyptian rulers both claimed a decisive victory.

The battle is considered to have ended in a stalemate.

The wikipedian article Battle of Kadesh at this point cites Weir, William (2009). History's Greatest Lies. Fair Winds Press. In other words, it's modern scholars who conclude for a stalemate. Because they do not believe these ancient official accounts.

Third problem, as C. S. Lewis points out, Herodotus gives as general confirmation that Sennacherib suffered an inexplicable defeat, while giving an explanation that doesn't explain. C. S. Lewis comments* "mice don't behave that way" even if in poetry and fiction he went on to explore a vision of "what if they did?"

Fourth problem, DV seems to hail from the former East Bloc, which was quite as good at Potemkin villages as the previous Czarist régimes. I'm anonymising the names, but JL and GA both have English names, DV a Slavic one. In other words, the attacks on Biblical reliability are part of the Communist propaganda, and they are kind of a Potemkin village, as admitting the Bible was reliable could have entrained admitting Communism (in the political sense) was the Scarlet Beast.

Fifth problem, it is usually assumed that Assyrian chronology is fairly good, but it is not over the top to imagine a king could add years (for instance two after the campaign in Judah) in order to make his reign seem longer. Or in this case to make the situation of Hezechias in a cage seem longer. You see, they had no epoch, in the chronological sense. An epoch is an event you date from. Christians have dated Anno Mundi (before replacing it with BC) and with Anno Domini, creation and Christ serving as epochs. Greeks have dated since the Trojan War and then more systematically since the First Olympiad. Romans have dated since Rome founded the City. Egyptians and Babylonians had no such thing, and neither, I think, Hittites, Mycenaeans or Cretans of the Bronze age. He was free to lie, because no one was able to check against the number of the year.

On top of this, we do not know if he wrote it himself or it was written in his name.

On top of that, the cylinder is just six paragraphs long. And passionate brags at that.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
XXth LD after Pentecost
6.X.2024

* In Miracles, a Preliminary Study, if my memory serves right.

"God is Being Itself, Creationism Portrays Him as a Cause Among Others"

Great Bishop of Geneva! Can a Catholic Say the Bible is Infallible? · Creation vs. Evolution: Would Tuas Libenter Condemn Geocentrism and Young Earth Creationism Because of the Theologians who were Fine with Heliocentrism and Deep Time? · somewhere else: "God is Being Itself, Creationism Portrays Him as a Cause Among Others"

Modern Scholastics have a certain way of preferring Tertia Via over Prima Via. Here are Trent Horn and Pat Flynn explaining how the God of the Tertia Via, by the fact of being Being Itself and by the fact that Being and Goodness are convertible, is Goodness Itself, like a certain Iridium bar* in France was THE meter itself. They have oversimplified more than one parts of the argument, but they kind of have a point, as far as that goes:

Why the "medieval God" beats the "modern God" (with Pat Flynn)
The Counsel of Trent | 31 March 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO05XXXxZok

Here is, for one, how they speak of the Eutyphro dilemma, which is a very correct way of seing it:

So so the way we we split the dilemma using Plato's language 25:09 it's not we don't have only two choices to say [...] 25:14 is something good because God wills it is it good because he says so or does 25:20 God will it because it's good that goodness is outside of Him. The way 25:25 you split the dilemma is : God wills it because He is good or He is goodness 25:32 itself right and so naturally what He wills automatically will be good.

To be fair, in the video, I'm four minutes from the end, they have not mentioned Young Earth Creationists, they have mentioned William Lane Craig who isn't YEC, they have mentioned an Orthodox philosopher called Swinburne, perhaps he isn't either. They have not said anything against Kent Hovind or against Ken Ham or against Jonathan Sarfati. But other men have done so. If not every creation act followed from already existing natural laws, note the plural, and as physicists understand "natural laws", then God would have been "arbitrary" and therefore not the God Who's the Eternal Law, of which a human participation is the Natural Law (singular, as lawyers adhering to some theories of law understand the word).

Now, let's check what the Creation dot com has to say of the Eutyphro dilemma. Jonathan Sarfati** in a feedback:

Thus the dilemma can be shown to be a false one. God indeed commands things which are good, but the reason they are good is because they reflect God’s own nature. So the goodness does not come ultimately from God’s commandments, but from His nature, which then results in good commandments. As Steve Lovell concluded in ‘C.S. Lewis and the Euthyphro Dilemma’ (2002):

‘The commands of an omniscient, loving, generous, merciful, patient and truthful Being would not be issued without reason, and that since these characteristics are essential to God, His commands possess a strong modal status. It was also observed that God’s possession of these attributes is sufficient to give significant content to God’s goodness.’

In substance, Jonathan Sarfati has said exactly the same thing as Pat Flynn. So, believing in an all powerful God Who can do any miracle He wants and Who had a possibility to create or not create the world He created does not lead to believing in an all powerful tyrant who for no reason except his whim decrees something to be good or evil.

But back to the metaphysics of being, created and uncreated.

The idea of some critics of Young Earth Creationism (I'm reminded of my second Father Confessor, a Dominican Tertiary, I think the French former Dominican Jacques Arnould said so in a book, maybe Dieu n'a pas besoin de "preuves") goes a bit like this:

If you say that God created rather than that mutations and natural selection produced for instance mammals or for instance man, is "putting God and mutations and natural selection" in an either or relationship. It's like saying I either have to exist because I consist of atoms or because God gives me being, it cannot be both, which is false. Atoms*** are a created and non-ultimate basis of my existence, which should not be confused with the non-created and ultimate basis of my existence, namely God. Both are "the basis of my existence" but on two very different levels.

I'd perfectly agree that we should not confuse the levels. However, I would definitely NOT agree that any statement of the form "God and not X" is doing so. It would only be the case for all statements where X is the created and non-ultimate reason for something, and is actually the reason for something.

If I said "God, and not spacemen who try to elevate our spirituality and failed to do so with Atlantis, raised Jesus from the grave" I would not be committing this kind of fault. No Christian would agree such spacemen° even exist, or that they raised Jesus from the grave, or for that matter that they tried and failed with Atlantis and then judged it. As the spacemen are not the correct explanation, the denial of them raising Jesus from the grave would not be putting ultimate cause and created cause in alternation, they would be putting the ultimate cause acting miraculously against a fake cause supposedly acting by only better (material and spiritual) technology.

The one question that would really confuse the issues would be "was He raised by God or by the reunion of His human Soul and human Body?" or "was He raised by God or by His Heart starting to beat again and His lungs starting to breathe again?" ... God acted through the reunion of a soul with a body, and this reunion by definition, unless hampered, produces a renewed heartbeat and spiration.

So, likewise, about Adam speaking, denying he evolved is not automatically a question of pitting created against ultimate cause, in both cases actual cause. It may simply be to get rid of a fake explanation of Adam speaking.

And another thing. St. Thomas did not put Tertia Via first among the proofs of God. If you know Latin, it means "the third way" ... what is the "first way"?

The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

In a parallel text, or a parallel edition of this text°°, it doesn't go "It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion." But it goes "It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion, like for instance the Sun" (utputa sol). So, Riccioli understood the First Way to correspond to the proposition "God turns the visible parts of the universe around Earth each day" ...

In other words, God could stop day and night by simply stopping to provide, by divine fiat, this motion. Here I am skipping ahead into the philosophical discussion as much as Pat Flynn was in the parts not quoted, but basically, if God is the ultimate cause why the Sun moves around earth, there is at each point of moving causation a natural previous cause and mover, except the caused cause which immediately comes after the uncaused cause, so, for St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed in crystalline spheres, that would be the sphere of the fix stars, which would be contiguous to inferior spheres, and then move them. To me, that would be the aether, a substance which is not in space,°°° but which rather is the substance of space or spacetime itself. Also identic to the aether that light is waves in. But God Himself would not be caused to provide this movement by some even mightier physical mover, God would rather be "moved" in another sense by the necessity we have for a certain amount of light, warmth, and not ten times more, and hence also for moderation, and therefore also for night but one that has no sufficient time to freeze to zero Kelvin, more like perhaps to -5 or -15°C when it gets really cold. And even in the order of purpose rather than of physical application of force, He would be the ultimate mover, since we exist for His glory.

But either way, He was perfectly free to not create us. It's not God, it's we who are arbitrary, since our existance is arbitrary. But it's arbitered by a decision by God. God's goodness isn't. We are.

When we speak of God's goodness, sometimes Fundies do get heat for in practical morals not believing God is goodness and incapable of ordering the evil. I'll hand the word to Jonathan Sarfati:

Some animals only suffer during their short, innocent, miserable lives, but they will never be compensated for this. If innocents suffer but never get compensated, that’s not righteousness, not by my definition at least. Of course you can say that God is the one who decides what’s right and what’s wrong, and that I shouldn’t be arrogant.

Yes, one could, because your knowledge is fallible and your conscience imperfectly informed. After all, you cannot prove that God hasn’t a good reason for allowing the suffering of animals, e.g. to achieve a greater good. See also the discussion in The problem of evil.

But that makes the word ‘right’ meaningless, because even the cruellest things can then be ‘right’.

Indeed, given our imperfect knowledge, you are in a sense right. Consider how a tribesperson from a low-tech culture might view the removal of an eye in a child after a minor injury that seems to have healed. The specialist knows that the patient has ‘sympathetic ophthalmia’, and if the injured eye is not removed, the patient will go totally blind in both eyes, as happened to Louis Braille. Removal of the eye (without anaesthetic, if none is available) seems ‘cruel’, but is definitely ‘right’ given the greater knowledge. God’s knowledge relative to ours is infinitely greater than the disparity between the knowledge of the eye surgeon and the tribesperson.

In other words, certain people who want to use the phrase "God is goodness itself, and some have a mistaken idea that God arbitrarily decides what is good" are simply after validating their own conception of good against God's revelation. St. Thomas certainly didn't go that route.

But even less, if possible, did He go the route of stating "the prime mover moves by secondary movers" (quotation from him, so he would agree with this part), "however this or that model posits a secondary mover is not moved by another secondary mover but bby the prime mover only, therefore this or that mmodel is wrong'" ... whether it be Biblical Creation account of Adam, or the Scholastic and Geocentric view of why we have night and day.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus
3.X.2024

Sanctae Teresiae a Jesu Infante, ex Ordine Carmelitarum Excalceatorum, Virginis, peculiaris omnium Missionum Patronae; cujus dies natalis pridie Kalendas Octobris recensetur.

* Actually, the alloy is 90 % platinum and only 10 % iridium.

** CMI : Feedback archive → Feedback 2007
What is ‘good’? (Answering the Euthyphro Dilemma)
https://creation.com/is-good-what-god-commands-or-does-he-command-what-is-good

*** The ones observed in electronic microscopy are presumably real.

° Even Jimmy Akin, pretty well known for being rather favourable to spacemen, would not accept that they are our spiritual guides or that they are the main agents in wreaking judgement over iniquity.

°° First Part, Question 2. The existence of God
Article 3. Whether God exists?
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3

°°° It would be in space as Newton and Riccioli understood it, but not as Aristotle, Aquinas and Einstein understood it, where it would be identic to the fabric (Einstein) and be one instance of "the surrounding body" (Aristotle's definition of space).

Next Frontiers for Christian Research

A) Iron and the iron age

I) Here is what wikipedia has to say about the Iron age:

Although meteoritic iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.[2]

In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began during the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC).[3] In the Ancient Near East, this transition occurred simultaneously with the Bronze Age collapse, during the 12th century BC (1200–1100 BC).,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age

II) Here are the first five mentions of iron in the Bible:

Sella also brought forth Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron. And the sister of Tubalcain was Noema.
[Genesis 4:22]

And I will break the pride of your stubbornness, and I will make to you the heaven above as iron, and the earth as brass:
[Leviticus 26:19]

Gold, and silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin,
[Numbers 31:22]

If any man strike with iron, and he die that was struck: he shall be guilty of murder, and he himself shall die.
[Numbers 35:16]

For only Og king of Basan remained of the race of the giants. His bed of iron is shewn, which is in Rabbath of the children of Ammon, being nine cubits long, and four broad after the measure of the cubit of a man's hand.
[Deuteronomy 3:11]

And, not many decades after Og of Basan, we have Judges 1:19, here is the Catholic Douay Rheims translation:

And the Lord was with Juda, and he possessed the hill country: but was not able to destroy the inhabitants of the valley, because they had many chariots armed with scythes.

Here is the King James Version:

And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

Even earlier than Judges, you have Joshua, and here even Douay Rheims has:

But thou shalt pass to the mountain, and shalt cut down the wood, and make thyself room to dwell in: and mayst proceed farther, when thou hast destroyed the Chanaanites, who as thou sayest have iron chariots, and are very strong.
[Josue (Joshua) 17:18]

III) Here is the date of the Exodus, in the Roman martyrology, the liturgical martyrology reading for Christmas day says Christ is born in

a Moyse et egressu populi Israel de Aegypto, anno millesimo quingentesimo decimo

So, if Christ is born 1 BC (most of the year was before His birth and the beginning of it even before His conception) and in 1510 after Exodus, that means the Exodus took place in 1511 BC.

Let's confer the Syncellus chronology, used by Orthodox when saying what year after creation it is, on September 1st every year.

Creation 5510 BC - Flood 2242 after Creation = Flood in 3268 BC
Flood in 3268 BC - Abraham born 1070 after Flood = Abraham born 2198 BC
Abraham born 2198 BC - Exodus 505 after Birth of Abraham* = Exodus in 1693 BC (I think I recall seeing 1683 BC, as well).

So, Exodus in 1511 or 1693 BC => Conquest in 1471 or 1653 BC. That's some time before the Bronze Age collapse, 12th C. BC.

IV) Resuming the problem, and solutions to propose:

Iron chariots, iron bed of Og, iron objects in the law. Mentioned before the archaeologically apparent Iron Age.

Speaking of which, this shows the folly of excluding a Middle Kingdom Exodus, just because archaeologists claim the Egyptians had no chariots prior to the New Kingdom.

Iron in Genesis 4, as being pre-Flood, is not a problem. If we haven't found iron objects from Nod, yet, so, we also haven't found Henoch in Nod yet in the first place.

Here are a few solutions:

a) The iron chariots and the iron objects mentioned in the law could simply be things that are sharp. The chariots could be armed with scythes as the Douay Rheims translation suggests, and the iron objects in the law could be sharp objects. Og's bed could be a very isolated item in meteoric iron.

The reason this would work is, barzel does not just mean "iron" the metal, it means also "sharp object" more specially "axe" ....

On this theory too, "bikli barzel" in Numbers 35 would be better translated as "sharp objects" or "sharp tools" than as objects or tools actually made of iron, and a bronze or stone knife would be a more probable itemization than an iron bar.

b) But it could be that meteoric iron had actually been used on the chariots too. They could have had a fright of meteoric iron as endowed with mysterious properties, or they could have had the sun reflected more glaringly in a surface of meteoric iron than in bronze, so the men of Juda were blinded by sunlight.

c) Or, archaeologists are wrong on when iron became a commonly used metal.

Given that lots of what is preserved to us, what they dig up, comes from graves. It was arranged in certain ways to escape normal processes of entropy. Bronze would have been more likely to put in a grave than iron which one could still use.

B) Horses and horseriding

Except, that seems by now to be a fixed problem:

somewhere else: Inerrancy of OT: Riding in King David's Day!
https://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2024/09/inerrancy-of-ot-riding-in-king-davids.html

C) Haven't thought of it yet ...

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bertin, Abbot
5.IX.2024

* Catholics and Orthodox in these chronologies count on a short soujourn, Exodus 430 years from when Abraham got the promise = when he was 75, 75 + 430 = 505.

Who's Afraid of the Squortlebleep?

Barry Goldberg, author of the "Common Sense Atheism" series of books, on Thursday 18.VII.2024 answered:

How can atheists deny that God exists, when the ability to even wonder about it , to even have a concept of God, proves beyond doubt that He does exist?
https://www.quora.com/How-can-atheists-deny-that-God-exists-when-the-ability-to-even-wonder-about-it-to-even-have-a-concept-of-God-proves-beyond-doubt-that-He-does-exist/answer/Barry-Goldberg-1

From his answer:

If you really want to go down that path, however, then you must then let me define Squortlebleep (the magical and invisible winged ferret) as “that which keeps our planet’s atmosphere from flying off into space” and then I can logically assert that the very fact that our planet’s atmosphere hasn’t flown off into space therefore proves beyond doubt that Squortlebleep exists.

In philosophical circles, btw, this is known as the “fallacy of equivocation,” which is when you use two different meanings of a particular word in the same argument and treat them as if they were the same. With regard to Squortlebleep, the fallacy occurs when I define him both as “a magical and invisible winged ferret” and as “that which keeps our planet’s atmosphere from flying off into space” and insist that if there is proof of the second meaning then there must also be proof of the first meaning.

Have I ever heard the fallacy of equivocation from Atheists?

Me

How could an explosion of compressed matter result in formation of atoms and star systems?

Sci teacher

It must have, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Me

How could chemicals that weren't "alive" (that weren't parts of biology) come together to form life?

Sci teacher

If they couldn't have, we wouldn't be here.

Me

How could one life form develop into a radically different one?

Sci teacher

If it couldn't we wouldn't have the variety we have.

Not sure if all the examples I gave are genuine or if one is my addition.

I would say he was equivocating when defining "Big Bang" as both "rapid expansion from a highly condensed state" and as "actual origin of the universe."

I would say he was also equivocating when defining "Abiogenesis" as both "chemical reactions in the primitive atmosphere leading to amino acids further combining into primitive life" and as "actual origin of biological life."

And, if the last one isn't a parallel, false memory, he was defining "Evolution" as both "the interplay of mutations and natural selection" and as "actual origin of the diversity of life" ... in very different life forms with not just different but even incompatible solutions for diverse needs of biological life.

I have a hunch that Barry Goldberg would share the fallacies of equivocation with my Sci teacher. Most Atheist do ...

Seriously, a fallacy of equivocation doesn't exist just because so and so is identifying two concepts that many others do not identify. It only exists if the one doing so is unwilling to argue why he should do that.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bertin, Abbot
5.IX.2024

Inerrancy of OT: Riding in King David's Day!

When was horseback riding invented?

For the Ancient Middle East, I have heard the date 800 BC, when Assyrians came to master riding.

As Biblical material about King David involved riding, this could potentially have been a stumbling block about the credibility of the Bible.

This screenshot involves an old rider carbon dated to 4300 BC, and a few more ones, the youngest carbon dated to 2623 BC:

How do we know he was a rider? Well, if someone has a tennis arm, he probably plays tennis. Riding also leaves traces in the human body.

2080 av. J.-Chr.

75,723 pcm, donc daté à 4380 av. J.-Chr.

2063 av. J.-Chr.

76,553 pcm, donc daté à 4263 av. J.-Chr.

...

1700 av. J.-Chr.

87,575 pcm, donc daté à 2800 av. J.-Chr.

1678 av. J.-Chr.

89,4653 pcm, donc daté à 2598 av. J.-Chr.

The real dates for these riders would be younger than 2080 BC (65 years before Abraham was born) and older than 1678 (88 years before Moses was born). The passages would still present some problem as to why horseback riding was available in Old Israel 200 years before it was so in Assyria, and why we haven't seen that, but the problem is on the level of a quibble, not (at least not to the Christian), not an actual doubt./HGL

PS, Ebla archives involve Indo-European names. Carbon dated 2300 BC, i e during the Soujourn in Egypt (1725 to 1510 BC, carbon dated as between 2800 and possibly precisely 1609 BC). Mentioned later on, by 29:38, as also the fact that horsewhips had been offered as merchandise to people with such names./HGL

Sources:

The video I screenshotted (at 19:31) is:

David Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown: The Yamnaya Origins and the Expansion of Late PIE Languages
HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont | 20 June 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg77kPvDmqQ

And the article that the video features is:

Science Advances | Research Article 2023 Anthropology
First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship
Martin Trautmann et al
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451

For Jewish Readers

Wesley Huff is kind of clueless so far about where Protestants get the Bible from (unless he changes his mind), but he's definitely not bad about the Jewish expectation of the Messiah:

The Jewish Messiah described by the Dead Sea Scrolls
January 22, 2023 | Wesley Huff
https://www.wesleyhuff.com/blog/2023/1/22/the-jewish-messiah-described-by-the-dead-sea-scrolls

It's 4Q521 compared to Luke 7:22./HGL

Israelites at the Exodus

Ibn Khaldun, a Neglected Source of Antichristianity or Attacks on the Bible · Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I · More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now · Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses · Israelites at the Exodus

First of all, like the traditional Christian chronographers and, as I believe, in agreement with the words of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr in Acts, or St. Paul's words in Galatians, I hold to a short soujourn.

The Exodus happened 430 years after God's promise to Abraham. Meaning 215 years after Jacob arrived in Egypt.

The statement "430 years in Egypt" in the text of Exodus look like this in Douey Rheims:

And the abode of the children of Israel that they made in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
[Exodus 12:40]

Ellopos site has LXX Greek and an English translation side by side:

And the sojourning of the children of Israel, while they sojourned in the land of Egypt and the land of Chanaan, [was] four hundred and thirty years.

This obviously means that "the children of Israel" start out with Abraham, who was not a child of Jacob, but his grandfather. But that's no problem, since it is a continuity, this family that becomes a people is named "children of Israel" from a bit before half of the 430 years, but what precedes is actually identical.

GotQuestions wrongly assumed a long soujourn. But they sum up a nice little problem:

How many Israelites left Egypt in the exodus?
https://www.gotquestions.org/Israelites-exodus.html

What can I answer?

Exodus 12:37, Numbers 1:46, and Numbers 2:32 all describe Israel’s population of men, not including women and children. Numbers 1:21–43 gives an account from each tribe, using Hebrew words, not symbols, to represent quantities. Adding these up, one arrives at the figure given in Numbers 1:46. This phrasing is traditionally interpreted to mean just over 600,000 adult men, implying a total population about four times that size, or 2.4 million.

I agree with tradition.

What is the major problem? Feeding them in the desert is a miracle. There was space for the mannah, but God had to give it. Another problem is, the armies of back then are, apart from the Israelites, considered as numerically smaller than 600 000 men. Why would they react as if facing supreme odds if they were in fact the bigger army?

One possibility is, their impression of facing supreme odds are overblown. It says more about their fears than about the real odds. But there are two more possibilities which complete each other and match God's words in Deuteronomy 7 better:

• armies back then were in fact bigger than archaeologists estimate, as well as populations;
• other peoples had well trained élite armies, Israel just a makeshift militia, consisting of men who had other things to do, and who therefore are not the best well trained soldiers. Case in point, the Temple Guard is what caught Jesus, in Gethsemani, and they were so inefficient that Petrus could cut off a man's ear and survive that. That would never have happened with the Romans doing the arrest. Picture other nations as having well trained professional armies, except Moab, and then the odds are what they would seem to be according to Deuteronomy 7.

Now, there is another problem — how did they grow from a population of 70 to a population of 2.4 million or whatever, in 215 years?

70 * 1.05²¹⁵ = 2 516 502, pretty exactly the 2.4 million described.

A further possibility is, after the 40 years, the Israelites in the Desert had actually become fewer, not more numerous, than just after the Exodus.

Other problem, third one:

When Israel conducted their census of the Levites and the firstborn from the rest of the tribes (Numbers 3:39, 46), the number of firstborn males is recorded as just over twenty thousand. Using the traditional interpretation of 600,000 adult males implies that firstborns made up only 1 out of every 30 men. If that were the case, the average Israelite family would have about 60 children, boys and girls combined. This reckoning seems unreasonable.

Here is a tentative solution:

39 All the Levites, that Moses and Aaron numbered according to the precept of the Lord, by their families, of the male kind from one month and upward, were twenty-two thousand. 40 And the Lord said to Moses: Number the firstborn of the male sex of the children of Israel, from one month and upward, and thou shalt take the sum of them.

41 And thou shalt take the Levites to me for all the firstborn of the children of Israel, I am the Lord: and their cattle for all the firstborn of the cattle of the children of Israel: 42 Moses reckoned up, as the Lord had commanded, the firstborn of the children of Israel: 43 And the males by their names, from one month and upward, were twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-three.

I think the solution is, they were only counting first born who were still children, not adolescents or people serving in the militia. The first-born children of the other tribes correspond roughly speaking to the total of males in the Levite tribe. If someone was an adolescent or fully adult before the Exodus, before the law was given, the sacrifice did not apply. So, no, the text would not suggest families of 60 children per couple, unless the population were trimmed downward.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Dominica in Albis
7.IV.2024

Xtra 3 Have You Seen a Resurrection Lately?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

No. I also have not seen a peace treaty observed lately, either between Russia and Ukraine or between Israel and Gaza.

I still believe there was an armistice on St. Martin's Day in 1918.

I also haven't seen the area from Flanders to mid-France covered in water. Shall I conclude the fossil shell fish found in the Paris basin came there because of the French habit of eating shell fish? When no shell fish eating tool has been found along these fossil shell fish?

No, Uniformitarian Geologists and Flood Geologists agree on a thing. This area actually was covered with water. And that's where the fossil shell fish came from, when they were then covered in mud.

Similarily, I give a rough and ready belief to the stories that the participants and their communities took as historic, and exclude exotic interpretations of what they experienced because they don't work. The disciples claimed to have seen their master risen, that's as sure as an armistice in 1918. It was on the third day from a crucifixion in mid-Nisan, that's as sure as it was on 11.XI. And it was not an illusion, that's as sure as French gastronomy not bringing the fossil shell fish into the Paris basin./HGL

Xtra 2 Was Jesus a Schizophrenic?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

The idea being, "if he thought he was God, he was mad" ...

That's a bit short for "if He thought He was God, He either was God, or he was mad" ... you'd have to dismiss all signs He gave of being divine, including the Resurrection.

And by the way, no, a Schizophrenic madman would not have been very good at either hypnotising people to get triggered to see him as resurrected or participate in an intrigue to replace the "crucified twin" and even less at getting complicities from Roman soldiers or people acting under their supervision, into a purely faked crucifixion.

And would not have been any thing like capable of securing loyal followers which He organised beautifully.

And would not have been able to convince anyone He was doing miracles. He would neither have done any, nor been competent at faking them.

So, no./HGL

Xtra 1 Was the Resurrection Real or an Illusion?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Cliffe Knechtle just got asked that on a video, I stopped it, so I haven't heard his answer.

Illusions usually do not involve the false identification of a person. If a girl is seen as sawn into two, she is correctly identified as the same girl when identified as alive. It's the sawing into two which is an illusion.

So, the "Copperfield" theory would not involve a false identification of the Resurrection appearances, but rather an illusory crucifixion.

To be fair to Romans, it would not have been easy to fake getting crucified while they or Jews acting as their delegates were doing crucifixions.

I'm not sure either Copperfield or Houdini could come up with a solution, and if they could it would probably involve modern technology, but even more probably, complicity of those doing the crucifixion, something definitely not to be counted on. So ... no, the Crucifixion was not an illusion.

Two versions more could make the resurrection or crucifixion of Jesus an illusion.

a) There was a homozygotic twin, and either the unknown twin got crucified, or the unknown twin did the appearances.

Dude! Homozygotic twins feel for each other. If your homozygotic twin had just a few days ago died on a cross after hours of agony, would you be in a mood to pretend to be he (if Jesus was the one crucified) or to pretend to have been crucified (if the twin was the one crucified)? Na, me neither.

b) While group hallucinations are usually impossible, one precise setting would make them possible, namely hypnosis, a group trance.

Sure, but who was the hypnotist?

If you were a hypnotist, could you hypnotise your subjects (and disciples) so that they would all be triggered by the crucifixion to experience your resurrection as if it were real, and why would you do that?

Or if the hypnotist was still alive during these "sessions" ... who could be that without being the new visible leader, i e Peter?

But why would you first hypnotise people into believing what you knew to be a lie, and then yourself die for that lie (at least by staying in office long enough to get targetted more than once and then some more until you were actually executed)?

Me neither. Corrolary, the Resurrection was real./HGL

Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Since it involves a kind of questionnaire, or a challenge with arguments given by others, before she answers each, I feel an itch to answer them independently of her first, before even reading a sample.

Meanwhile, here are the 12 questions:

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?
2 Doesn't Christianity Crush Diversity?
3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?
4 Doesn't Religion Hinder Morality?
5 Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?
6 How Can You Take the Bible Literally?
[follow up: Contra Craig]
7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?
8 Doesn't Christianity Denigrate Women?
9 Isn't Christianity Homophobic?
10 Doesn't the Bible Condone Slavery?
11 How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?
12 How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?

Here is her book:

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion
Rebecca McLaughlin
https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Christianity-Questions-Largest-Religion/dp/1433564238/

Here are some Xtras not found in that list of 12 QQ.

Xtra 1 Was the Resurrection Real or an Illusion?
Xtra 2 Was Jesus a Schizophrenic?
Xtra 3 Have You Seen a Resurrection Lately?

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

In the Middle Ages a certain geographic fairly large area known as Christendom:

• allowed people to marry young
• forced no one to stay in school even if parents wanted to take them out
• drove no one to mass shootings like those of Columbine High School in 1998

In a secularised time, in 1998, the US:

• made pretty sure Klebold and Harris could not marry nor study without being with girls
• made sure they could not cease studying
• which certainly contributed to their deed in 1998
• as did the fact they had been encouraged to think of human life as a byproduct of evolution.