Bible is 'Alternate Facts'. .
The Jews are the only people who have been dislodged from their country twice in their history. The Jews were a tribal group surrounded by powerful neighbours like the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians. There never made any contributions to math or science and most of their past were overshadowed by their more advanced neighbours. The Bible began as a book of the larger than life Patriarchs and the invention of the Jewish people in an attempt to reconstruct Jewish history with literary embellishment slanted towards success by inventing prophets and heroes where God rewarded the people when they obeyed his commandments and punished them when they failed. But history is not written in isolation and when the Jews tried to treat the bible as a historical record, Contradictions began to expose their literary overreach. Circumcision can only take a people so far and covenants are no guarantee against reality nor can it compensate for the burden of memory carried by the Jews who wished they were better than their neighbours and invented a narrative that reflected their deepest desires.
Now that we know why the contradictions were necessary in the creation of the Jewish people we can try to piece together how these contradictions served their narrative.
"Archeology demolishes the bible.
Israel Finkelstein, Chairman of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv University, With archaeology historian Neil Asher Silberman, Has just published a book called "The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Text. "
"The Israelites were never in Egypt, Did not wander in the desert, Did not conquer the land [of Canaan] in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united kingdom of David and Solomon, Described in the Bible as a regional power, Was at most a small tribal kingdom. "
Jerusalem was essentially a cow town, Not the glorious capital of an empire. These findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades.
The tales of the patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac and Joseph among others -- were the first to go when biblical scholars found those passages rife with anachronisms and other inconsistencies. The story of Exodus, One of the most powerful epics of enslavement, Courage and liberation in human history, Also slipped from history to legend when archaeologists could no longer ignore the lack of corroborating contemporary Egyptian accounts and the absence of evidence of large encampments in the Sinai Peninsula ("the wilderness" where Moses brought the Israelites after leading them through the parted Red Sea).
Finkelstein is an iconoclast. He established his reputation in part by developing a theory about the settlement patterns of the nomadic shepherd tribes who would eventually become the Israelites, Bolstering the growing consensus that they were originally indistinguishable from the rest of their neighbors, The Canaanites. This overturns a key element in the Bible: The Old Testament depicts the Israelites as superior outsiders -- descended from Abraham, A Mesopotamian immigrant -- entitled by divine order to invade Canaan and exterminate its unworthy, Idolatrous inhabitants.
The famous battle of Jericho, With which the Israelites supposedly launched this campaign of conquest after wandering for decades in the desert, Has been likewise debunked: The city of Jericho didn't exist at that time and had no walls to come tumbling down. These assertions are all pretty much accepted by mainstream archaeologists.
So why has the Bible a book of Alternat Facts fascinated the Western World and kept alive by 2 billion Christians when it was written to preserve the Jewish memory of their history reconstructed on Alternate Facts, Especially when the Bible did not serve the Jews well? The bible concluded in the demise of the Jewish people, Their messiah was crucified by the Romans, Jerusalem destroyed along with their temple followed by 2000 years of persecution and expulsions. It also left a sliver of hope that God would someday restore the Jewish nation to its everlasting glory. But how does that comport with the Christians who see their own salvation and future buried in the same Jewish narrative? . . . . . . . . Harikrish.
