bibleland artifacts, even professionals want to believe

A_Nony_Mouse
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bibleland artifacts, even professionals want to believe

[matt@dawn text2]$ cat israel-antiquities-forgery

guardian.co.uk                                                                        

Faking it

The discovery that ancient artefacts sacred to Jewish history are forgeries
has sent shockwaves through the museum world. But was the gang behind the 
scam only interested in cash, or did they have other motives? Rachel Shabi
investigates                                                              

Rachel Shabi

guardian.co.uk, Thursday January 20 2005 12.09 GMT

Ivory pomegranate, Israel Museum

It started with the pomegranate and ended with a stash of fake Bible-era
artefacts. Photo: AP                                                   

It all started with the pomegranate. On Christmas Eve, the Israel museum in
West Jerusalem made an announcement about a tiny ivory pomegranate that had
been on display at the museum since 1988, believed to have come from the  
First Temple of Israel. The pomegranate, the museum sheepishly revealed, was
actually a fake. It was still a very old and beautiful carving, but the    
inscription denoting its First Temple origins had been forged.             

Five days later, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared that it
had uncovered a sophisticated forgery ring, based in Israel, which had  
produced a stash of fake Bible-era artefacts. In addition to the        
pomegranate, it revealed that two other objects, both similarly revered, had
also been rumbled as bogus. One was a limestone ossuary box said to have   
held the bones of James, the brother of Jesus, and supposedly the oldest   
physical link to the New Testament. The other was a stone tablet, from the 
ninth century BC, inscribed in ancient Hebrew with instructions by King    
Joash for maintaining Solomon's Temple.                                    

The revelation sent shockwaves around the world of antiquities, as museums
were warned to expect more precious relics to be revealed as fakes. "We only
discovered the tip of the iceberg. This spans the globe. It generated      
millions of dollars," warned Shuka Dorfman, director of the IAA. Museums   
were urged to examine all objects of suspicious origin; the forgery ring,  
the IAA cautioned, spanned 20 years.                                       

So what tipped off the investigators? "We got some information in September
2002 about a stone with an inscription about the third temple of Joash in 
Jerusalem," says Amir Ganor, head of investigations at the IAA. "This stone
would be very important to the Jewish people and to the antiquities       
community." At that point the investigators were looking for a rumoured   
relic, not a forgery. Informers said that it had been offered to several  
institutions, including the Israel museum. "We heard that some guy, ex-Shin
Bet [the Israeli security service], had been showing the stone, but we    
didn't know anything more," says Ganor.                                   

The IAA eventually discovered the identity of the former security service
man (How? "Using our methods," says Ganor), who in turn led them to Oded
Golan, a leading Israeli collector and one of the five men alleged by the
IAA to be part of the forgery ring. Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper describes
Golan as a 51-year-old production engineer, based in Tel Aviv, who has  
worked in engineering, tourism, real estate, and who now describes himself
as the "head of a of a hi-tech company". He told the IAA that he collects
antiquities as a hobby, and has been doing so since the age of 14. A search
of Golan's home took place in February 2003. "We found a lot of documents 
about the stone, and pictures, but not the stone itself," says Ganor. "Oded
said that he was not the owner, but was representing some Arab guy." One  
month later, threatened with another search warrant for another of his    
premises, Golan handed over the stone.                                    

It was not the first time he had come in contact with the IAA. Back in
October 2002, the authority had issued Golan with a licence to take an
ossuary ("just an ossuary, not an important ossuary," says Ganor) to the
Montreal museum in Canada. Soon after giving him approval, the IAA got a
phone call from CNN asking about the remarkable inscription on top of the
stone, apparently reading: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."    

The IAA, realising that it had granted an approval licence for a potentially
very special artefact, requested that Golan hand over the relic upon its   
return from Canada, which he did in March 2003. Now the authority had the  
stone and the ossuary, both of which were checked and found to be fakes.   
What's more, the method of forgery in both cases was the same - the patina 
on each object had been artificially contrived. At this point, the authority
launched its fraud investigation with the police, having for some time heard
rumours of more fakes on the market.                                       

The IAA paid another visit to Golan, who had been given back his ossuary.
This time, says Ganor, the IAA "found all the evidence for the fraud    
process, all the materials, all the patinas, some artefacts in the process
of being forged". The ossuary was found on the flat rooftop of Golan's   
rented apartment, in the toilet. "He said it was the safest place to put 
it," says Ganor. "This is the ossuary that millions of Christians have been
speaking about ... and that was insured for $1m when it was sent to Canada."

The investigation has so far named four men, in addition to Golan, whom it
alleges were involved, among them Robert Deutsch, an inscriptions expert who
teaches at Haifa University, and Rafael Braun, former head of the          
antiquities laboratories at the Israel museum. "We have found a key witness
who told us that [he was asked] to prepare thousands of artefacts," says   
Ganor. He adds that witnesses have mentioned possible fakes at British,    
American and German institutions. Golan, meanwhile, has insisted: "There is
not one grain of truth in the fantastic allegations related to me," while  
Deutsch has pronounced the indictment "ridiculous".                        

The story gets cloudy where the pomegranate enters. The Israel museum bought
this relic in 1988, paying $550,000 (£287,000) into a numbered Swiss bank  
account. For more than 20 years, it has been hailed as the only surviving  
physical evidence of the First Temple. This temple is the holiest of holies
in Jewish tradition; it is said to be where Abraham, the father of the     
Hebrew people, prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac to God. (The Wailing Wall
in Jerusalem is the western wall of the Second Temple, built on the site of
the first in the sixth century BC). Scholars thought that the              
thumbnail-sized fruit, which has a hole in the bottom, was used as the top 
of a temple priest's sceptre.                                              

The pomegranate is a high-profile example of a relic acquired "through the
market", meaning that it was not uncovered during a licensed excavation. 
Such objects carry no official documentation denoting their origin. The  
theory is that they come from looted sites. "The pomegranate surfaced a  
number of years before it was acquired and displayed here," says James   
Snyder, director at the Israel museum. "It was examined by a lot of      
scholars, and it wasn't accepted into our collection until ithad the     
consensus of all available experts that it was authentic." Snyder says that
there is always a question mark over the authenticity of an object acquired
through the market, but none the less, some 10% of the museum's 70,000    
antiquities come from this channel. Why? "Because the objects are very    
special, and so they can be placed in a museum setting and benefit the    
public. You wouldn't want to miss that opportunity."                      

Unless, of course, the object is a fake. The museum insists that the
pomegranate was found to be a forgery through its own investigation,
independent of the IAA. However, one source, speaking on condition of
anonymity, says that this is rubbish. "The authority heard about the
pomegranate from a witness in the investigation," he says, adding that the
museum was asked to take the relic to the IAA but refused, negotiating   
instead to conduct its own analysis. Such analysis revealed that the     
pomegranate dates from the Bronze period - 3,400 years ago and long before
the First Temple period. The temple-specific inscription was added to the
fruit recently but it was the relic's patina - older than the first temple
period - that gave the game away.                                        

Commentators have suggested that the museum might not have been sufficiently
scrupulous with the fruit relic over the years but Snyder insists that     
analysis methods have recently developed in one significant direction:     
"Until a few years ago, we would have had to remove a piece of the         
pomegranate in order to scan it," he says. "We did not want to do that."   

What this episode shows is the extent to which the antiquities community has
laid itself open to abuse. According to Israel Finkelstein, archaeology    
professor at Tel Aviv university, most biblical land has been officially and
rigorously excavated and produced few relics. "Do you want me to believe   
that robbers are then going with a flashlight at night and managing to find
50 inscriptions? Of course I don't believe it."                            

Still, the sale of marketplace antiquities is booming. Aren Maeir,
archaeology professor at Bar Ilan university in Ramat Gan, describes it as
"an astounding market, particularly among private collectors with millions
of dollars at their disposal". Objects can sell for $1m apiece, and      
academics say that top forgers hunt academic journals for the objects that
would be considered significant if unearthed, and then sneak fake finds into
the market - giving the antiquity community exactly what it wants. "There is
an eagerness all over the world, in museums, to display antiquities of great
value," says Finkelstein, "and there is no question that some of them were 
not careful enough in their [evaluation] methods. It was some sort of      
naivety, something about wanting to believe."                              

The discovery of a Temple-era pomegranate, in particular, was always going
to provoke excitement. The pomegranate is a deeply resonant fruit in Judaism
that, according to the Bible, was used as a decorative motif in Solomon's  
temple. There is a Rabbinic reference to its seeds, which in legend always 
number 613 - one for each of the commandments of the Bible. One Israel     
museum press officer explains the effect of seeing such relics: "It is very
exciting, very emotional, very Jewish feelings," she says. "Any time you see
something like this, it feels very special because you can see your roots."

It underlines the intense political significance that antiquities,
particularly Biblical-era artefacts, attain in Israel, where discoveries of
ancient sites or relics can be claimed by particular groups as proof of
their historic claim to a particular piece of land. Early Zionism was
enthusiastic in promoting Bible-era relics - they cemented the Jewish
connection to the land, and were seen to give credence to the new state of
Israel: ancient facts on the ground, if you like. It is telling, suggests Dr
Shimon Gibson, archaeology professor at the Albright Institute, Jerusalem,
that the Joash stone emerged at around the same time - early 2003 - that
Palestinian leaders were becoming more vociferous over the "alleged" Jewish
connection to the Temple Mount. The stone's inscription describes repair
works to the Jewish temple at Jerusalem. "Those who forged, if that is what
they did, would be trying to identify key spots of interest to Israel at
that moment," he says. "One of those is, of course, the Temple Mount,
because in any deal made with the Palestinians, the status of Jerusalem and
who controls the holy places is one of the key things that will be on the
table."

Some have argued that the only way to stop antiquity fraud is to properly
ban the sale of objects with unknown provenance. Others, such as Snyder,
counter that this would serve only to bury precious artefacts in the hands
of private collectors, not evaluated by experts and not appreciated by the
public.

Meanwhile, no one can say how many more relics from the world's great
museums will be rumbled as fakes. Snyder says that the Israel museum is
alert to the investigation, but it clearly wants to move on, celebrate its
40th birthday and show off its other collections - including the Dead Sea
scrolls. The museum plans to turn its misfortune with the pomegranate into
an opportunity to mount a display on antiquity dating methods. On my way out
of his office, Snyder hands me a lemon, from a basket on his desk. He tells
me that they come from his own garden; he also grows pomegranates.

[blockquote][font color="#ff00ff"]We have a museum run by professionals and known to archaeologists around the world displaying a forgery for decades. Is it not appropriate to question all the artifacts supposedly confirming the bible stories? It is very important to do so as they stopped being discovered a century ago when real scientists replaced adventurers who would, like Constantine's mother, buy anything to show off back home.

Clearly the fact that recognized authorities have blessed a find authenticity means nothing.[/font][/blockquote]

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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Another lame attempt

Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists.

However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE.

Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:Every dog and its

spin wrote:
Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere. spin

Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:
Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere. spin

Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance.

 

 

spin

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Trust the evidence, Luke


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:
Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere. spin

Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

Here I agree with you that there were no vowels and my agreement with you is a sign of my ignorance. With that I have to agree. Agreeing with you is a sign of ignorance.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

spin

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe. After decades the pomegranate was determined to be a forgery by use of a magnifying glass. The inscription was across cracks in the original. The inscribing tool had made different marks as it moved across the cracks. ANYONE could have seen that from the day one if they did not want to believe so badly.

Currently there is some ballyhoo about five lines of writing on a piece of broken pottery. If the article is complete it includes the one fact the arkies gave, that the language is <b>only</b> described as proto-canaanite. But the religious writers claim it is in Hebrew. They claim the five words on a broken piece of pottery is a legal document which shows there was a King David. Four nouns does not make a legal document. Any document on a piece of broken pottery shows the person who wrote it was impoverished not able to afford special made flat fired clay. An impoverished king David?

Believers are desperate people.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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Joined: 2008-10-29
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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

Quote:

spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
Here I agree with you that there were no vowels and my agreement with you is a sign of my ignorance. With that I have to agree. Agreeing with you is a sign of ignorance.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

Put your ouija board away.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After decades the pomegranate was determined to be a forgery by use of a magnifying glass. The inscription was across cracks in the original. The inscribing tool had made different marks as it moved across the cracks. ANYONE could have seen that from the day one if they did not want to believe so badly.

Currently there is some ballyhoo about five lines of writing on a piece of broken pottery. If the article is complete it includes the one fact the arkies gave, that the language is <b>only</b> described as proto-canaanite. But the religious writers claim it is in Hebrew. They claim the five words on a broken piece of pottery is a legal document which shows there was a King David. Four nouns does not make a legal document. Any document on a piece of broken pottery shows the person who wrote it was impoverished not able to afford special made flat fired clay. An impoverished king David?

Believers are desperate people.

Does that justify awful scholarship??

 

 

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:Quote:spin: Every

spin wrote:

Quote:

spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

[quotw=spin]

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
Here I agree with you that there were no vowels and my agreement with you is a sign of my ignorance. With that I have to agree. Agreeing with you is a sign of ignorance.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

Put your ouija board away.

The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After decades the pomegranate was determined to be a forgery by use of a magnifying glass. The inscription was across cracks in the original. The inscribing tool had made different marks as it moved across the cracks. ANYONE could have seen that from the day one if they did not want to believe so badly.

Currently there is some ballyhoo about five lines of writing on a piece of broken pottery. If the article is complete it includes the one fact the arkies gave, that the language is <b>only</b> described as proto-canaanite. But the religious writers claim it is in Hebrew. They claim the five words on a broken piece of pottery is a legal document which shows there was a King David. Four nouns does not make a legal document. Any document on a piece of broken pottery shows the person who wrote it was impoverished not able to afford special made flat fired clay. An impoverished king David?

Believers are desperate people.

Does that justify awful scholarship??

spin

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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Posts: 188
Joined: 2008-10-29
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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Quote:

spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
Here I agree with you that there were no vowels and my agreement with you is a sign of my ignorance. With that I have to agree. Agreeing with you is a sign of ignorance.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

Put your ouija board away.

The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After decades the pomegranate was determined to be a forgery by use of a magnifying glass. The inscription was across cracks in the original. The inscribing tool had made different marks as it moved across the cracks. ANYONE could have seen that from the day one if they did not want to believe so badly.

Currently there is some ballyhoo about five lines of writing on a piece of broken pottery. If the article is complete it includes the one fact the arkies gave, that the language is <b>only</b> described as proto-canaanite. But the religious writers claim it is in Hebrew. They claim the five words on a broken piece of pottery is a legal document which shows there was a King David. Four nouns does not make a legal document. Any document on a piece of broken pottery shows the person who wrote it was impoverished not able to afford special made flat fired clay. An impoverished king David?

Believers are desperate people.

Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch.

 

Try to stick to the topic.

 

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

 

 

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Quote:

spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

Vowel drift is faster than consonant drift. There is no way to guess at ancient vowel pronunciations without poetry and then the guess is only as to similar at the time not what it was back then. And now you want the world to believe Masoretic reflects pronunciation some 1500 years before the vowel tics were used. Will you enlighten the world as to how this was accomplished or will you appeal to another authority?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
Here I agree with you that there were no vowels and my agreement with you is a sign of my ignorance. With that I have to agree. Agreeing with you is a sign of ignorance.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

Put your ouija board away.

The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

Agnostic == cowardly atheist.

After dismissing all the god content of the OT you are desperate to preserve something from it. In this case you are trying to preserve a "people" who were only linked by religion in the first place.

There is no such thing as an agnostic Jew any more than there is an agnostic Christian.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After decades the pomegranate was determined to be a forgery by use of a magnifying glass. The inscription was across cracks in the original. The inscribing tool had made different marks as it moved across the cracks. ANYONE could have seen that from the day one if they did not want to believe so badly.

Currently there is some ballyhoo about five lines of writing on a piece of broken pottery. If the article is complete it includes the one fact the arkies gave, that the language is <b>only</b> described as proto-canaanite. But the religious writers claim it is in Hebrew. They claim the five words on a broken piece of pottery is a legal document which shows there was a King David. Four nouns does not make a legal document. Any document on a piece of broken pottery shows the person who wrote it was impoverished not able to afford special made flat fired clay. An impoverished king David?

Believers are desperate people.

Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch. 

Try to stick to the topic.

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

spin

I started this thread with a discussion of how desperately believers are to believe. That is the topic. That all the "important" finds prior to the 20th c. have no provenance is a fact. That they should be shitcanned is a fact. That they have not been skeptically reviewed in modern times is a fact.

That your most desired references are without provenence is a fact.

All of this belief to salvage a "people" a concept that was invented by the Zionists mostly in the 20th c.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

Quote:
spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

spin: No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

ANM: Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

spin: Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

ANM: Vowel drift is faster than consonant drift. There is no way to guess at ancient vowel pronunciations without poetry and then the guess is only as to similar at the time not what it was back then.

Except when you have transliterations of names and places in Assyrian Akkadian, in Babylonian, and in Greek. You see, all these languages had ways of indicating vowels. What we learn from the fact that Hebrew names are often verbs and theophorics is that the phonology of the verb system in Hebrew hasn't changed very much in a l-o-n-g time. But I forget, you're not interested in evidence.

 

When you learn about how Semitic languages work, you know about the regularity of vowel usage. You know that Hebrew phonology is not understood by a knowledge of English phonology, but from other Semitic languages. Once you have some idea of how they work you can know about how other such languages work. What you don't know is what makes your assumptions fail.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
And now you want the world to believe Masoretic reflects pronunciation some 1500 years before the vowel tics were used. Will you enlighten the world as to how this was accomplished or will you appeal to another authority?

No, I want you to learn something about what you are trying to talk about.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
ANM: The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

spin: Put your ouija board away.

ANM: The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

spin: I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

ANM: Agnostic == cowardly atheist.

An atheist is as irrational as a religionist. They each have to believe something.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After dismissing all the god content of the OT you are desperate to preserve something from it. In this case you are trying to preserve a "people" who were only linked by religion in the first place.

As a man drowns he clutches the stupidest things. It's interesting to watch you flounder in your own ignorance.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
There is no such thing as an agnostic Jew any more than there is an agnostic Christian.

Well, whaddaya know! Yet another non sequitur.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch. 

Try to stick to the topic.

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

I started this thread with a discussion of how desperately believers are to believe. That is the topic. That all the "important" finds prior to the 20th c. have no provenance is a fact. That they should be shitcanned is a fact. That they have not been skeptically reviewed in modern times is a fact.

That your most desired references are without provenence is a fact.

I see. Does that mean you looked any of them up? This doesn't fit your modus operandi. YOu usually make things up and talk rubbish. Why don't you tell me where you got the information about the provenance of the archaeological artefacts I have cited? Show your readers that you actually know something for a change, rather than flooding the forum with your bullshit?

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All of this belief to salvage a "people" a concept that was invented by the Zionists mostly in the 20th c.

You'd deny the existence of your own mother if you could justify it to yourself.

 

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


Empirical Infidel
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When this post started was

When this post started was it suggesting that because evidence shows that J... (that place to which the old testement refers) actually existed,  therefore, that the bible is factual?  If so, it proves only that the places existed. Atlanta burned in the American Civil War, that doesn't make "Gone with the Wind" a history book.


A_Nony_Mouse
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Empirical Infidel wrote:When

Empirical Infidel wrote:

When this post started was it suggesting that because evidence shows that J... (that place to which the old testement refers) actually existed,  therefore, that the bible is factual?  If so, it proves only that the places existed. Atlanta burned in the American Civil War, that doesn't make "Gone with the Wind" a history book.

That is exactly the reasoning(?) these believers (partial unbelievers?) are using. One of them has even invoked my observation that the land has been populated since humans left Africa, some 60,000 years, as confirming some (unspecified) thing about the OT.

The analogy to Gone with the Wind is apt in that it could have been written any time after the war. It could even have been written last year. But believers want the OT was written contemporaneous with the fictitious events in them. Historical fiction can be written any time after the setting of the events from decades to centuries.

The Book of Mormon was written 1800 years "after" the events it describes. But as the BoM correctly states the Americas were inhabited in the 1st c. AD they should be making the same argument for the BoM as they do for the OT.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:Quote:spin: Every

spin wrote:

Quote:
spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

spin: No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

ANM: Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

spin: Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

ANM: Vowel drift is faster than consonant drift. There is no way to guess at ancient vowel pronunciations without poetry and then the guess is only as to similar at the time not what it was back then.

Except when you have transliterations of names and places in Assyrian Akkadian, in Babylonian, and in Greek. You see, all these languages had ways of indicating vowels. What we learn from the fact that Hebrew names are often verbs and theophorics is that the phonology of the verb system in Hebrew hasn't changed very much in a l-o-n-g time. But I forget, you're not interested in evidence.

While you claim without any physical evidence whatsoever that and without defining what you mean by long, we know the pronunciation and usage of Arabic has changed so drastically since the 7th c. AD that local variations are mutuallly incomprehensible to their speakers. Presuming by "long time" you mean longer than that, how did hebrew avoid changing like other semitic languages? Please be specific in your response.

spin wrote:
When you learn about how Semitic languages work, you know about the regularity of vowel usage. You know that Hebrew phonology is not understood by a knowledge of English phonology, but from other Semitic languages. Once you have some idea of how they work you can know about how other such languages work. What you don't know is what makes your assumptions fail.

I have only the semitic language of Arabic as an example. You have no evidence whatsoever of your assertion about Hebrew.

As to Hebrew I do have a somewhat modern example. When the zionists decided to use Hebrew they had to create some two thirds of its basic vocabulary words such as steam even before adding modern words such as eletricity. They looked to Arabic to invent those words and to come up with a consistent pronunciation.

The real world never seems to agree with you.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
And now you want the world to believe Masoretic reflects pronunciation some 1500 years before the vowel tics were used. Will you enlighten the world as to how this was accomplished or will you appeal to another authority?

No, I want you to learn something about what you are trying to talk about.

All I need from you is an explanation of just the above facts I have recited before I take your masturbatory fantasies about the uniqueness of Hebrew as a semitic language seriously.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
ANM: The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

spin: Put your ouija board away.

ANM: The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

spin: I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

ANM: Agnostic == cowardly atheist.

An atheist is as irrational as a religionist. They each have to believe something.

The absence of evidence is a fact not a belief. No rational person admits anything without physical evidence. No rational person admits the possibility of anything for which there is not some physical evidence as all imaginative inventions are equally admissable. Agnostic is picking one out of an uncountable number of imaginative ideas to make a false distinction.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After dismissing all the god content of the OT you are desperate to preserve something from it. In this case you are trying to preserve a "people" who were only linked by religion in the first place.

As a man drowns he clutches the stupidest things. It's interesting to watch you flounder in your own ignorance.

Rabbinical law holds Jews are only connected by religion. If they do not know then they share my ignorance. Otherwhere I have named the requirements for being considered a Jew. They are all related to the religion. You did not disagree.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
There is no such thing as an agnostic Jew any more than there is an agnostic Christian.

Well, whaddaya know! Yet another non sequitur.

It follows as both are religions and nothing else. Zionism is an atheist political movement with no standing to redefine the meaning of Jew. Religious zionism started in the 1970s and is still a small movement even in Israel.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch. 

Try to stick to the topic.

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

I started this thread with a discussion of how desperately believers are to believe. That is the topic. That all the "important" finds prior to the 20th c. have no provenance is a fact. That they should be shitcanned is a fact. That they have not been skeptically reviewed in modern times is a fact.

That your most desired references are without provenence is a fact.

I see. Does that mean you looked any of them up? This doesn't fit your modus operandi. YOu usually make things up and talk rubbish. Why don't you tell me where you got the information about the provenance of the archaeological artefacts I have cited? Show your readers that you actually know something for a change, rather than flooding the forum with your bullshit?

Not only had I previously examined most of them I gave you the URLs to my discussion of them on my website and you never posted any fault you found with my rejection of them. What am I supposed to do with your silence?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All of this belief to salvage a "people" a concept that was invented by the Zionists mostly in the 20th c.

You'd deny the existence of your own mother if you could justify it to yourself.

spin

Factually she ceased to exist two weeks ago so there is no longer anything to deny. All I do is deal with the physical exidence and do not admit religious tradition as evidence as you do.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


spin
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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Quote:
spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

spin: No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

ANM: Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

spin: Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

ANM: Vowel drift is faster than consonant drift. There is no way to guess at ancient vowel pronunciations without poetry and then the guess is only as to similar at the time not what it was back then.

Except when you have transliterations of names and places in Assyrian Akkadian, in Babylonian, and in Greek. You see, all these languages had ways of indicating vowels. What we learn from the fact that Hebrew names are often verbs and theophorics is that the phonology of the verb system in Hebrew hasn't changed very much in a l-o-n-g time. But I forget, you're not interested in evidence.

While you claim without any physical evidence whatsoever that and without defining what you mean by long, we know the pronunciation and usage of Arabic has changed so drastically since the 7th c. AD that local variations are mutuallly incomprehensible to their speakers. Presuming by "long time" you mean longer than that, how did hebrew avoid changing like other semitic languages? Please be specific in your response.

How drastically did Arabic change? Please be specific with linguistic examples. I can see no point in try to deal with issues you don't know anything about as you've been less than responsive in the past, so I'd like to see some understanding of possible issues before I waste any more effort in trying to educate you.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
When you learn about how Semitic languages work, you know about the regularity of vowel usage. You know that Hebrew phonology is not understood by a knowledge of English phonology, but from other Semitic languages. Once you have some idea of how they work you can know about how other such languages work. What you don't know is what makes your assumptions fail.

I have only the semitic language of Arabic as an example. You have no evidence whatsoever of your assertion about Hebrew.

As to Hebrew I do have a somewhat modern example. When the zionists decided to use Hebrew they had to create some two thirds of its basic vocabulary words such as steam even before adding modern words such as eletricity. They looked to Arabic to invent those words and to come up with a consistent pronunciation.

The real world never seems to agree with you.

English had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words in the year 1000 CE. It now has more than 250,000 available and probably a lot more. It is only obvious that there are a lot more words than 1000 years ago: there are a lot more things to talk about. It is also only obvious that when the Israelis resuscitated Hebrew they had a lot of catching up to do. This is yet another of your tangents.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
And now you want the world to believe Masoretic reflects pronunciation some 1500 years before the vowel tics were used. Will you enlighten the world as to how this was accomplished or will you appeal to another authority?

No, I want you to learn something about what you are trying to talk about.

All I need from you is an explanation of just the above facts I have recited before I take your masturbatory fantasies about the uniqueness of Hebrew as a semitic language seriously.

Start with YHDH. The Assyrians wrote it as Yauda (Ia-u-da-ai) and the Babylonians Yakudu (Ia-ku-du) and Yakhuda (Ia-a-khu-da-a-a). The Assyrians had problems with the medial /h/, as did the Babylonians, but they basically agree on the vocalization, given some variance as to the last syllable. Yehudah is how it is marked up in the Masoretic text. The only difference to be noted is the /a/ in the Mesopotamian texts where the Masoretic supplies /e/, though /e/ wasn't a vowel used in Akkadian. Perhaps you'd also consider Hezekiah or HZQYHW in Hebrew which is Hazaqiau (Ha-za-qi-ia-u) in Akkadian and Hizeqiyahu for the Masoreh. What else do you need linguistically?

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
ANM: The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

spin: Put your ouija board away.

ANM: The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

spin: I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

ANM: Agnostic == cowardly atheist.

An atheist is as irrational as a religionist. They each have to believe something.

The absence of evidence is a fact not a belief.

The usual con. An agnostic has no belief. Scratch the atheist and you'll have "there is no god", which is the belief I was talking about.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
No rational person admits anything without physical evidence.

Given that the vast majority of great thinkers of the previous five centuries in our evolving culture have been christians, I don't think you can say much about rational people and physical evidence. So I'll just let the rest of your waffle fade into background noise.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
No rational person admits the possibility of anything for which there is not some physical evidence as all imaginative inventions are equally admissable. Agnostic is picking one out of an uncountable number of imaginative ideas to make a false distinction.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After dismissing all the god content of the OT you are desperate to preserve something from it. In this case you are trying to preserve a "people" who were only linked by religion in the first place.

As a man drowns he clutches the stupidest things. It's interesting to watch you flounder in your own ignorance.

Rabbinical law holds Jews are only connected by religion. If they do not know then they share my ignorance. Otherwhere I have named the requirements for being considered a Jew. They are all related to the religion. You did not disagree.

Yup. That's well after the disappearance of the state of Yehud.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
There is no such thing as an agnostic Jew any more than there is an agnostic Christian.

Well, whaddaya know! Yet another non sequitur.

It follows as both are religions and nothing else. Zionism is an atheist political movement with no standing to redefine the meaning of Jew. Religious zionism started in the 1970s and is still a small movement even in Israel.

Further non sequitur doesn't help.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch. 

Try to stick to the topic.

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

I started this thread with a discussion of how desperately believers are to believe. That is the topic. That all the "important" finds prior to the 20th c. have no provenance is a fact. That they should be shitcanned is a fact. That they have not been skeptically reviewed in modern times is a fact.

That your most desired references are without provenence is a fact.

I see. Does that mean you looked any of them up? This doesn't fit your modus operandi. YOu usually make things up and talk rubbish. Why don't you tell me where you got the information about the provenance of the archaeological artefacts I have cited? Show your readers that you actually know something for a change, rather than flooding the forum with your bullshit?

Not only had I previously examined most of them I gave you the URLs to my discussion of them on my website and you never posted any fault you found with my rejection of them. What am I supposed to do with your silence?

Start by acknowledging the material I've already cited.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All of this belief to salvage a "people" a concept that was invented by the Zionists mostly in the 20th c.

You'd deny the existence of your own mother if you could justify it to yourself.

Factually she ceased to exist two weeks ago so there is no longer anything to deny.

I won't call this a bait and switch. My commiserations, I've been through the process of losing a mother.

 

I could have said, you'd deny the existence of your face or anything that obviously exists for you, if you found polemic use for doing so.

 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All I do is deal with the physical exidence and do not admit religious tradition as evidence as you do.

I haven't seen you acknowledge the material evidence available. I tend mainly to use physical evidence and cite literary sources when there is physcial evidence to back it up.

 

 

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Quote:
spin: Every dog and its fleas knows that there is a market for fake artefacts especially out of Israel for christian and Jewish religionists. However, it doesn't change the fact that there is evidence from out of the ground from different sites in Mesopotamia, from Elephantine from Lachish and Arad that demonstrate that there was a Judea, there were Hebrew speakers and believers in Yahweh, ie there was a Jewish society by the 6th century BCE. Like a millhorse you keep running around in circles never getting anywhere.

ANM: Were we not just over "judea" which you insist on calling Judah? Was it spelled D or DH?

spin: I really don't see any point in you flaunting your ignorance. 

ANM: Lets get this straight. I say there were vowels, You say there were not. I show you Aleph and Y used as a vowel with the inscriptions showing their use. You say it is too hard for me to understand.

spin: No, actually you are showing it is too hard for you to understand.

ANM: Yes it is difficult to understand how you do not want vowels in one case but want to use the vowel marks of Masoretic from about 1000 AD to use to make the D of Judah look like another word from 1600 years earlier.

spin: Perhaps, you might take note of other languages involved rather than further showing your ignorance in the matter. How did the Assyrians vocalize the names? How did the LXX vocalize names? Hmm? Understand that the Masoretic vocalizations reflect indications from ancient times and stop talking rubbish.

ANM: Vowel drift is faster than consonant drift. There is no way to guess at ancient vowel pronunciations without poetry and then the guess is only as to similar at the time not what it was back then.

Except when you have transliterations of names and places in Assyrian Akkadian, in Babylonian, and in Greek. You see, all these languages had ways of indicating vowels. What we learn from the fact that Hebrew names are often verbs and theophorics is that the phonology of the verb system in Hebrew hasn't changed very much in a l-o-n-g time. But I forget, you're not interested in evidence.

While you claim without any physical evidence whatsoever that and without defining what you mean by long, we know the pronunciation and usage of Arabic has changed so drastically since the 7th c. AD that local variations are mutuallly incomprehensible to their speakers. Presuming by "long time" you mean longer than that, how did hebrew avoid changing like other semitic languages? Please be specific in your response.

How drastically did Arabic change? Please be specific with linguistic examples. I can see no point in try to deal with issues you don't know anything about as you've been less than responsive in the past, so I'd like to see some understanding of possible issues before I waste any more effort in trying to educate you.

How drasically? Does not mutually incomprehensible give a reasonable qualitative description of how drastically? Quantitatively would require volumes and be of interest only to linquists and certainly beyond both our capabilities to understand much less create. But you may continue to pretend mutually incomprehensible is not sufficient to describe the differences so that you can pretend to a knowledge of linguistics you do not have.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
When you learn about how Semitic languages work, you know about the regularity of vowel usage. You know that Hebrew phonology is not understood by a knowledge of English phonology, but from other Semitic languages. Once you have some idea of how they work you can know about how other such languages work. What you don't know is what makes your assumptions fail.

I have only the semitic language of Arabic as an example. You have no evidence whatsoever of your assertion about Hebrew.

As to Hebrew I do have a somewhat modern example. When the zionists decided to use Hebrew they had to create some two thirds of its basic vocabulary words such as steam even before adding modern words such as eletricity. They looked to Arabic to invent those words and to come up with a consistent pronunciation.

The real world never seems to agree with you.

English had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words in the year 1000 CE. It now has more than 250,000 available and probably a lot more.

As you should know a polyglot language such as English is a poor example. Perhaps you do not know.

spin wrote:
It is only obvious that there are a lot more words than 1000 years ago: there are a lot more things to talk about. It is also only obvious that when the Israelis resuscitated Hebrew they had a lot of catching up to do. This is yet another of your tangents.

Are you suggesting steam was invented recently? There is not enough surviving Hebrew from the so-called ancient times to have all the words needed for a functioning language. In English it is something under 800 words for a working pigin. But you know all this.

That is why I made a distinction between the basic words for a functional language and the specialized words for things like electricity. But you know that too.

Do you have a problem with the origin of modern Israeli? That it may be perfunctorily based upon biblical hebrew should not cloud the origin of 2/3 of its basic words and its pronunciation. This is not a secret.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
And now you want the world to believe Masoretic reflects pronunciation some 1500 years before the vowel tics were used. Will you enlighten the world as to how this was accomplished or will you appeal to another authority?

No, I want you to learn something about what you are trying to talk about.

All I need from you is an explanation of just the above facts I have recited before I take your masturbatory fantasies about the uniqueness of Hebrew as a semitic language seriously.

Start with YHDH. The Assyrians wrote it as Yauda (Ia-u-da-ai) and the Babylonians Yakudu (Ia-ku-du) and Yakhuda (Ia-a-khu-da-a-a). The Assyrians had problems with the medial /h/, as did the Babylonians, but they basically agree on the vocalization, given some variance as to the last syllable. Yehudah is how it is marked up in the Masoretic text. The only difference to be noted is the /a/ in the Mesopotamian texts where the Masoretic supplies /e/, though /e/ wasn't a vowel used in Akkadian. Perhaps you'd also consider Hezekiah or HZQYHW in Hebrew which is Hazaqiau (Ha-za-qi-ia-u) in Akkadian and Hizeqiyahu for the Masoreh. What else do you need linguistically?

You present nothing about its uniqueness as requested.

But let me see. You depend upon all of those languages using phonetic spelling. You assume the pronunciations from thousands of years ago in unrelated cultures were essentially the same. And you do not realize how laughable such an argument is if applied to English in the United Kingdom today.

And on top of that you would have only the ancient words from outside bibleland match the English spellings of today even though English spellings are adopted academic tradition from the spellings used by the person attributed with the original translation regardless of the pronunciation in his native language.

I grant there is no clear indication of the ancient languages west of Persia to Egypt and their progress. But when the western version of different languages is expressed in the phonetics of different western languages and then imposed upon to support a religious tradition I lose interest.

Certainly there are some names which are likely similar as we have little idea as to what the names meant in the passed. You want a dynasty of King David because of BYTDWD and I want a dynasty of King Bread because of BYTLHM. At least there is still a Bethlehem.

While it is possible to give examples as you have it is but one. Even if it were a dozen you would pick the twelve best to support the religious tradition.

But here is the rub. Everything you give can indicate creation of the stories either contemporaeniously or any time in the centuries following the event before they appear in history.

My position has been the OT was created after the arrival of the Greeks and that it first appeared in Greek. There is no evidence contradicting that position. You have been invited to present physical evidence of an earlier creation and you have done none. I think I have asked you but if not I do so now to tell me when you think these stories were created and the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE upon which you base that time estimate.

What do you have but mere negation based upon religious tradition? Anything?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
ANM: The issue of course is artifacts confirming the substance of the OT, not a name for a geograhic region, but of artifacts identifiable as having a direct bible context. When it comes to the religious context there is no problem finding such items in all other ancient cultures in the "western" ancient world, Persia to Egypt to Rome. The only exception is for the god of bibleland. Not one single artifact establishes the religious context of the good guys of the OT.

And that leads us to the ones you like to use. They are all 19th c. and were all found and translated by adventurers. They have not been re-examined for authenticity since then.

Maybe back then any name with a D in it could be taken as referring to Judah or Judea but back then people still believed Exodus actually occurred and that there was a biblical Isarel.

What is there besides the letter D?

Apparently you are unaware of how desperately believers want to believe.

spin: Put your ouija board away.

ANM: The desire to believe does not need any help to recognize. I am surprised you, as an atheist, cannot recognize it in yourself.

spin: I'm an agnostic. I don't have any belief commitments. You act and talk just like any religionist. The only difference is that they believe one thing and you believe the opposite. It is not rational.

ANM: Agnostic == cowardly atheist.

An atheist is as irrational as a religionist. They each have to believe something.

The absence of evidence is a fact not a belief.

The usual con. An agnostic has no belief. Scratch the atheist and you'll have "there is no god", which is the belief I was talking about.

An agnostic also has a position that he does not know if purple unicorns are dancing in his backyard. If one wishes to play word games I could assume an agnostic believes nothing is hidden. However you do know there is no physical evidence of any gods. Therefore the matter is decided. There is no evidence of any gods therefore there are none. It is not in question.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
No rational person admits anything without physical evidence.

Given that the vast majority of great thinkers of the previous five centuries in our evolving culture have been christians, I don't think you can say much about rational people and physical evidence. So I'll just let the rest of your waffle fade into background noise.

I can say all human progress has depended upon physical evidence and rigorously evaluating it. Only that has lead to any progress. We know for a fact the descriptor "thinkers" has nothing to do with methodology. Science and engineering rule and those who bemoan them not being enough would likely not be alive without to moan were it not for them. And they were around moaning before science improved our world. As yet there is no mass movement to the wilderness for those claiming there has been no improvement.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
No rational person admits the possibility of anything for which there is not some physical evidence as all imaginative inventions are equally admissable. Agnostic is picking one out of an uncountable number of imaginative ideas to make a false distinction.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
After dismissing all the god content of the OT you are desperate to preserve something from it. In this case you are trying to preserve a "people" who were only linked by religion in the first place.

As a man drowns he clutches the stupidest things. It's interesting to watch you flounder in your own ignorance.

Rabbinical law holds Jews are only connected by religion. If they do not know then they share my ignorance. Otherwhere I have named the requirements for being considered a Jew. They are all related to the religion. You did not disagree.

Yup. That's well after the disappearance of the state of Yehud.

It is difficult to be after what never existed. Are you suggesting genital mutilation was not a requirement for men to be members?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
There is no such thing as an agnostic Jew any more than there is an agnostic Christian.

Well, whaddaya know! Yet another non sequitur.

It follows as both are religions and nothing else. Zionism is an atheist political movement with no standing to redefine the meaning of Jew. Religious zionism started in the 1970s and is still a small movement even in Israel.

Further non sequitur doesn't help.

Don't know what you are talking about here. You rarely recite what you are talking about not even the evidence upon which you base an estimast as to when the books of lies were written.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
Does that justify awful scholarship??

Nothing justified the non-existent scholarship that declared the pomegranate authentic for some four decades. Nothing justifies the refusal of believers to apply the rule of provenence used today to things found before the rule was developed. Crudely the rule is, if there is no provence it is ain't worth jack shit. For believers the exception is if it confirms their belief in the books of magic they love.

Bait and switch. 

Try to stick to the topic.

You are trying to sell the same quality material as those you are trying to deal with.

I started this thread with a discussion of how desperately believers are to believe. That is the topic. That all the "important" finds prior to the 20th c. have no provenance is a fact. That they should be shitcanned is a fact. That they have not been skeptically reviewed in modern times is a fact.

That your most desired references are without provenence is a fact.

I see. Does that mean you looked any of them up? This doesn't fit your modus operandi. YOu usually make things up and talk rubbish. Why don't you tell me where you got the information about the provenance of the archaeological artefacts I have cited? Show your readers that you actually know something for a change, rather than flooding the forum with your bullshit?

Not only had I previously examined most of them I gave you the URLs to my discussion of them on my website and you never posted any fault you found with my rejection of them. What am I supposed to do with your silence?

Start by acknowledging the material I've already cited.

As noted I gave you URLs to my website responding to several and you did not reply.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All of this belief to salvage a "people" a concept that was invented by the Zionists mostly in the 20th c.

You'd deny the existence of your own mother if you could justify it to yourself.

Factually she ceased to exist two weeks ago so there is no longer anything to deny.

I won't call this a bait and switch. My commiserations, I've been through the process of losing a mother.

I could have said, you'd deny the existence of your face or anything that obviously exists for you, if you found polemic use for doing so.

Deny is in common usage by believers as one can only deny what is patently obvious to believers. What to you appears obvious cannot be reconciled with a polytheist Judea into the 2nd c. AD and the records only ceasing because of the Roman urban renewal project in Jerusalem. But that project lets us date it as continuing at least to that time. As the Temple of Astarte in Jerusalem had eight sides it is not unreasonable to expect the Dome of the Rock was built upon its foundations.

I can as easily accuse others of denying the Judeans were polytheists in Roman times but I realize that is not obvious to recovering believers who first believe their faith in religious tradition has to be ground into the dirt before they have to consider the facts in evidence.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
All I do is deal with the physical exidence and do not admit religious tradition as evidence as you do.

I haven't seen you acknowledge the material evidence available. I tend mainly to use physical evidence and cite literary sources when there is physcial evidence to back it up.

spin

From my point of view I have yet to see any "evidence" from you that rises above thus spake Aristotle.

A dozen times at least I have pointed out anything written can have been written from the time frame in which the events are set up until the time when they first appear in history. You have yet to recite any time of creation with evidence to support it. Pick any bible story and there are centuries between the time in which the story is set and the time the Septuagint appears in history.

You have yet to pick any time in those centuries when you have evidence of creation that is earlier than the Septuagint. I am interested in any evidence you know of which does establish an earlier date of creation than the Septuagint. You do post a lot related to it but not one single thing which dates it much less recite the date.

 

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:How

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

How drasically? Does not mutually incomprehensible give a reasonable qualitative description of how drastically? Quantitatively would require volumes and be of interest only to linquists and certainly beyond both our capabilities to understand much less create. But you may continue to pretend mutually incomprehensible is not sufficient to describe the differences so that you can pretend to a knowledge of linguistics you do not have.


That explains why Muslims in any Arab country can carry around the Koran and read it whenever they want. We are talking about diachronic differences, not synchronic ones.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As you should know a polyglot language such as English is a poor example. Perhaps you do not know.


So far you are the one demonstrably ignorant about languages.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Are you suggesting steam was invented recently?


Not a particularly useful approach, Purple wasn't a recent invention, but there are languages that either don't have it or needed to borrow a word for it recently.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

There is not enough surviving Hebrew from the so-called ancient times to have all the words needed for a functioning language.


You're right that there is only a small vocabulary preserved in the bible, but that doesn't help you.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Do you have a problem with the origin of modern Israeli?


The language is still called Hebrew.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

That it may be perfunctorily based upon biblical hebrew should not cloud the origin of 2/3 of its basic words and its pronunciation. This is not a secret.


So? The vast English vocabulary increase in the two hundred years after the conquest by William was more than that. Languages don't seem to behave the way you might want them.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

You depend upon all of those languages using phonetic spelling. You assume the pronunciations from thousands of years ago in unrelated cultures were essentially the same. And you do not realize how laughable such an argument is if applied to English in the United Kingdom today.


When you learn the slightest amount about linguistics, you might start to understand your folly.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

And on top of that you would have only the ancient words from outside bibleland match the English spellings of today even though English spellings are adopted academic tradition from the spellings used by the person attributed with the original translation regardless of the pronunciation in his native language.


You seem not to have been paying attention.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

I grant there is no clear indication of the ancient languages west of Persia to Egypt and their progress. But when the western version of different languages is expressed in the phonetics of different western languages and then imposed upon to support a religious tradition I lose interest.


I grant that you don't know much of the evidence.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Certainly there are some names which are likely similar as we have little idea as to what the names meant in the passed. You want a dynasty of King David because of BYTDWD and I want a dynasty of King Bread because of BYTLHM. At least there is still a Bethlehem.


Another bait and switch. Hello, if you hadn't noticed I'm not supporting the veracity of the stuff that is clouding your judgment.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

While it is possible to give examples as you have it is but one. Even if it were a dozen you would pick the twelve best to support the religious tradition.


And who in this conversation is sup[porting the religious tradition? Yet another non sequitur.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

But here is the rub.


I hope you're not in public, giving it a rub.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Everything you give can indicate creation of the stories either contemporaeniously or any time in the centuries following the event before they appear in history.


I've already shown that the Hebrew text came first. In case you missed it, it was that you cannot get the Hebrew from the Greek, but it can be explained as a translation from the Hebrew.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

My position has been the OT was created after the arrival of the Greeks and that it first appeared in Greek.


Yes, but most people know that that is brainless.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

There is no evidence contradicting that position.


Except as I pointed out the Hebrew first makes better sense of the data, s pointed out in your first LXX thread.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

You have been invited to present physical evidence of an earlier creation and you have done none. I think I have asked you but if not I do so now to tell me when you think these stories were created and the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE upon which you base that time estimate.

What do you have but mere negation based upon religious tradition? Anything?


When you are simply unable to understand the evidence, you don't look at it. This is not blindness on your part per se. It's pure unadulterated lack of knowledge.

But to give you a bone, the Dead Sea Scrolls feature quite a diverse collection of biblical texts, diverse here in the sense that there are different versions of the same works, ie there are diverse textual traditions featured, there are similarities between the some DSS and the LXX, between some DSS and what would become the Samaritan tradition, and between the DSS and what would become the Masoretic tradition. The latter by far the best represented. This means that while the LXX reflected one flavor of biblical text, there were at least two others found among the DSS. Three diverging traditions of Hebrew, one related to the LXX. Your conjecture cannot explain even this. (See Eugene Ulrich, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible", Brill 1999, pp.165-183.)

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

An agnostic also has a position that he does not know if purple unicorns are dancing in his backyard.


An agnostic can know things if there is sufficient evidence. You can't know things when you refuse to deal with evidence, as you so frequently do.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

If one wishes to play word games I could assume an agnostic believes nothing is hidden. However you do know there is no physical evidence of any gods. Therefore the matter is decided. There is no evidence of any gods therefore there are none. It is not in question.


You see, you are prepared to obfuscate. You basically know that a lack of evidence has no necessary weight, but your a priori commitments allow you to sublimate that knowledge.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Yup. That's well after the disappearance of the state of Yehud.

It is difficult to be after what never existed.


Who minted the YHD coins??

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Are you suggesting genital mutilation was not a requirement for men to be members?


What, not even a switch?

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Don't know what you are talking about here. You rarely recite what you are talking about not even the evidence upon which you base an estimast as to when the books of lies were written.


When you go off in tangents, you lose track of where you were.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

Start by acknowledging the material I've already cited.

As noted I gave you URLs to my website responding to several and you did not reply.


So we are going to play that sort of game. I won't look at the material you cited here because you won't look at the material I put on my website. Hmmm.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:

I won't call this a bait and switch. My commiserations, I've been through the process of losing a mother.

I could have said, you'd deny the existence of your face or anything that obviously exists for you, if you found polemic use for doing so.

Deny is in common usage by believers as one can only deny what is patently obvious to believers. What to you appears obvious cannot be reconciled with a polytheist Judea into the 2nd c. AD and the records only ceasing because of the Roman urban renewal project in Jerusalem.


Yet another, yet another bait and switch! You cannot help yourself.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

B&S material omitted

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

From my point of view I have yet to see any "evidence" from you that rises above thus spake Aristotle.


That's probably because you wouldn't know any if it jumped up and bit your nose off.

It's fairly simply, despite your denial, there was a state called Yehud. It had kings from at least the time of Ahaz and Hezekiah. This is found in the Assyrian materials that you deny.

The Babylonians report capturing the city of the Judahites, and there was only one major city in the area, the city besieged by Sennacherib a century earlier. But you also deny the Babylonian evidence.

Judahites lived in Elephantine in Egypt as a colony of soldiers for the Persians and they wrote home to Jerusalem during the Persian period.

There were coins minted in Palestine during the Persian period featuring the name YHD.

And on to Hasmonean times.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

A dozen times at least I have pointed out anything written can have been written from the time frame in which the events are set up until the time when they first appear in history. You have yet to recite any time of creation with evidence to support it. Pick any bible story and there are centuries between the time in which the story is set and the time the Septuagint appears in history.


I haven't supported any time. You continue to misunderstand that I have merely been showing that your arguments are simply rubbish. Question begging. Ignorance of the languages. Of the archaeology and epigraphy. I don't need to date anything. You simply have failed in your thesis. And failed miserably.

When you make an argument, you need to back it up. You have nothing whatsoever, but a bunch of opinions and a lot of denial.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

You have yet to pick any time in those centuries when you have evidence of creation that is earlier than the Septuagint. I am interested in any evidence you know of which does establish an earlier date of creation than the Septuagint. You do post a lot related to it but not one single thing which dates it much less recite the date.

 


Here is a simple test for you: explain from the Greek how Jacob's sons got their names.

The reason why you wouldn't be able to do it if you could deal with the languages is that the names are based on a Hebrew original which supplies how the names came about. There are many linguistic reasons why the Hebrew came first.



spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

How drasically? Does not mutually incomprehensible give a reasonable qualitative description of how drastically? Quantitatively would require volumes and be of interest only to linquists and certainly beyond both our capabilities to understand much less create. But you may continue to pretend mutually incomprehensible is not sufficient to describe the differences so that you can pretend to a knowledge of linguistics you do not have.

That explains why Muslims in any Arab country can carry around the Koran and read it whenever they want. We are talking about diachronic differences, not synchronic ones.

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As you should know a polyglot language such as English is a poor example. Perhaps you do not know.

spin wrote:
So far you are the one demonstrably ignorant about languages.

I agree I have yet to see anything from you external to your sacred books which supports your assertions.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Are you suggesting steam was invented recently?

Not a particularly useful approach, Purple wasn't a recent invention, but there are languages that either don't have it or needed to borrow a word for it recently. [/quote[

As you appear loathe to admit not only are there not sufficient words in "ancient" Hebrew to have a working language you also appear to try to avoid the source of the pronunciation of modern Hebrew comes from Arabic not from any of the local pronunciations over some 2000 years.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

There is not enough surviving Hebrew from the so-called ancient times to have all the words needed for a functioning language.

You're right that there is only a small vocabulary preserved in the bible, but that doesn't help you.

I do not need help. I need only refer to the Zionists themselves in their reinvention of the language.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Do you have a problem with the origin of modern Israeli?

The language is still called Hebrew.

True that is what it is called. There is the thing, the name of the thing, that which the thing is called and that which we call the name of the thing. See Lewis Carrol for details.

It can be called anything one wishes. Even calling it Hebrew is based upon the mythical Hebrews. It is like calling a language Atlanean or Ozian.

However the thing is the language of Israel, or the language of Zionists perhaps. Most name it Hebrew. But it cannot be the language of a people who exist only in myth.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

That it may be perfunctorily based upon biblical hebrew should not cloud the origin of 2/3 of its basic words and its pronunciation. This is not a secret.

spin wrote:
So? The vast English vocabulary increase in the two hundred years after the conquest by William was more than that. Languages don't seem to behave the way you might want them.

We are talking the language of Israel. Its development is documented by the Zionists. Of course development should be properly called invention as so little has any source prior to them.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:
You depend upon all of those languages using phonetic spelling. You assume the pronunciations from thousands of years ago in unrelated cultures were essentially the same. And you do not realize how laughable such an argument is if applied to English in the United Kingdom today.

When you learn the slightest amount about linguistics, you might start to understand your folly.

Linguistics is only the study of what one believes about languages. ALL of the study of "hebrew" has been based upon the belief that its broad outlines are established by the OT even though there is no evidence of when the OT was written. The only thing claimed to be evidence is the circular reasoning that the OT is the outline and therefore the language must comply with the OT. Very circular that.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

And on top of that you would have only the ancient words from outside bibleland match the English spellings of today even though English spellings are adopted academic tradition from the spellings used by the person attributed with the original translation regardless of the pronunciation in his native language.

You seem not to have been paying attention.

All I have seen is the above circular reasoning. There is no explanation of the language without reference to the OT. There is no explanation of the OT without the language. There exists nothing independent of the OT as there is for every other language.

As I keep pointing out there is no explanation for this language in writing from dirt farmers and goatherds. You can recite EVERY example BUT the OT and never get there from here. No local example recites anything remotely like the OT mythology.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

I grant there is no clear indication of the ancient languages west of Persia to Egypt and their progress. But when the western version of different languages is expressed in the phonetics of different western languages and then imposed upon to support a religious tradition I lose interest.

I grant that you don't know much of the evidence.

More sniping. Do you have anything else?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Certainly there are some names which are likely similar as we have little idea as to what the names meant in the passed. You want a dynasty of King David because of BYTDWD and I want a dynasty of King Bread because of BYTLHM. At least there is still a Bethlehem.

Another bait and switch. Hello, if you hadn't noticed I'm not supporting the veracity of the stuff that is clouding your judgment.

You are supporting the idea that dirt farmers and goatherds could have produced and preserved the OT and that is sufficient to label your position a fantasy.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

While it is possible to give examples as you have it is but one. Even if it were a dozen you would pick the twelve best to support the religious tradition.

And who in this conversation is sup[porting the religious tradition? Yet another non sequitur.

You are supporting the creation and preservation of A religious tradition by dirt farmers which no physical evidence supports ever existed in bibleland. If you are not please state what you are supporting.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

But here is the rub.

I hope you're not in public, giving it a rub.

As long as it is not yours why would you care?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Everything you give can indicate creation of the stories either contemporaeniously or any time in the centuries following the event before they appear in history.

I've already shown that the Hebrew text came first. In case you missed it, it was that you cannot get the Hebrew from the Greek, but it can be explained as a translation from the Hebrew.

And I am about a quarter way through a book which claims Hebrew is Greek. It is quite densely written and its arguments are as obscure as yours. But its one for one word correspondences are far greater than you have suggested. The author's years of effort show even if wrong. Line by line exposition showing Hebrew is barely more than Greek backwards with omitted vowels is overwhelming in evidence. Shall I put this book against your claims? Or shall I simply reject both?

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

My position has been the OT was created after the arrival of the Greeks and that it first appeared in Greek.

Yes, but most people know that that is brainless.

Everyone familiar with the region knows there was no sign of civilization in the region before Alexander. There was nothing in the region Alexander bothered to conquer. He went from Tyre direct to Egypt. There was nothing there that needed conquering. There was nothing there to give him the least problem between Damascus, Tyre and Egypt.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

There is no evidence contradicting that position.

Except as I pointed out the Hebrew first makes better sense of the data, pointed out in your first LXX thread.

What you did was pull one example and say it made better sense. Thousands of people have found magical things in the Hebrew OT. Some even found Microsoft's EULA in it. Pardon if I do not consider what you find in it any different.

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

You have been invited to present physical evidence of an earlier creation and you have done none. I think I have asked you but if not I do so now to tell me when you think these stories were created and the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE upon which you base that time estimate.

What do you have but mere negation based upon religious tradition? Anything?

When you are simply unable to understand the evidence, you don't look at it. This is not blindness on your part per se. It's pure unadulterated lack of knowledge. But to give you a bone, the Dead Sea Scrolls feature quite a diverse collection of biblical texts, diverse here in the sense that there are different versions of the same works, ie there are diverse textual traditions featured, there are similarities between the some DSS and the LXX, between some DSS and what would become the Samaritan tradition, and between the DSS and what would become the Masoretic tradition. The latter by far the best represented. This means that while the LXX reflected one flavor of biblical text, there were at least two others found among the DSS. Three diverging traditions of Hebrew, one related to the LXX. Your conjecture cannot explain even this. (See Eugene Ulrich, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible", Brill 1999, pp.165-183.)

As all the DSS appear after the LXX that is not a good place to start. However the idea that the Samaritan was different does not appear until the 2nd c. AD in the NT and it not clear there. As there is nothing to explain unless one's religion assumes there is a difference there is nothing to explain.

So tell me, What do the DSS explain to you about your belief that some dirt farmers in the 7th c. BC created the OT? Please tell me how you connect the DSS to that century.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:As the

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.


And now that you've gone so far out on the limb of this tangent, you can stay there.



spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.

And now that you've gone so far out on the limb of this tangent, you can stay there.

 

 

spin

You brought up the Koran. I described it as it is. It was your tangent. I described it correctly. What is your point?

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


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A_Nony_Mouse wrote:spin

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.

And now that you've gone so far out on the limb of this tangent, you can stay there.

You brought up the Koran. I described it as it is. It was your tangent. I described it correctly. What is your point?

The Koran is read by people around the muslim world. No translation is needed. You don't want to deal with the fact that a language needn't change the way you expect. You just want to boldly go and explore new tangents. You know, confusing reading with memorizing and stuff like that. I feel that you can do that alone.

 

 

spin

Trust the evidence, Luke


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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.

And now that you've gone so far out on the limb of this tangent, you can stay there.

You brought up the Koran. I described it as it is. It was your tangent. I described it correctly. What is your point?

The Koran is read by people around the muslim world. No translation is needed. You don't want to deal with the fact that a language needn't change the way you expect. You just want to boldly go and explore new tangents. You know, confusing reading with memorizing and stuff like that. I feel that you can do that alone. 

spin

As I pointed out "western" Muslims are putting in different vowels which result in different translations which are a point of friction with the traditional speakings of it. One can memorize the original all one wants but that does not preserve either the pronunciation or the translation into local, modern Arabics or into other languages.

Is there a problem with this being true?

Do you have a problem with pronunciations changing? Do you have a problem with meanings changing?

Do you have a problem with the pronunciation of an ancient language is indicated by the phonetics chosen in the language of the principal authority who first translated it? Do you have a problem with the fact there are no transliterations into other languages to reflect the pronunciation?


Do you have a problem with a widespread language being different in different places at the same time? Do you have a problem with vowels changing in a century even with common words like Jeekyll changing to Jehkyll while the famous story is almost constantly in print and being discussed? In Latin the difference between Sisero and Kikero is barely two centuries.

Do you have a problem with J entering English replacing I and Y rather arbitrarily?

I would have no problem with at least the consistency of pronunciation if there were an extensive body of rhyming poetry for the language at a particular time. Consistent does not mean correct.

But you choose to believe that the pronunciations of non-phonetic languages can be related partially phonetic unrelated languages sufficient to identify bible places. Further you wish to believe the name of the bibleland places were not invented based upon those non-phonetic languages.

I cannot muster that degree of desire to believe.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml


A_Nony_Mouse
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spin wrote:A_Nony_Mouse

spin wrote:

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

spin wrote:
A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

As the Arabic of the Koran has no vowel marks at all you only point to the Muslim tradition of memorization of the Koran parallel to the Christian tradition prior to the 20th c. It also leads to a middle eastern problem with "western" muslims who put in different vowels and get different meanings out of the same passages. The few examples I have seen of the differences don't seem to make a dime's worth of difference but then theologians make careers based upon less than a dime.

And now that you've gone so far out on the limb of this tangent, you can stay there.

You brought up the Koran. I described it as it is. It was your tangent. I described it correctly. What is your point?

The Koran is read by people around the muslim world. No translation is needed. You don't want to deal with the fact that a language needn't change the way you expect. You just want to boldly go and explore new tangents. You know, confusing reading with memorizing and stuff like that. I feel that you can do that alone. 

spin

As I pointed out "western" Muslims are putting in different vowels which result in different translations which are a point of friction with the traditional speakings of it. One can memorize the original all one wants but that does not preserve either the pronunciation or the translation into local, modern Arabics or into other languages.

Is there a problem with this being true?

Do you have a problem with pronunciations changing? Do you have a problem with meanings changing?

Do you have a problem with the pronunciation of an ancient language is indicated by the phonetics chosen in the language of the principal authority who first translated it? Do you have a problem with the fact there are no transliterations into other languages to reflect the pronunciation?


Do you have a problem with a widespread language being different in different places at the same time? Do you have a problem with vowels changing in a century even with common words like Jeekyll changing to Jehkyll while the famous story is almost constantly in print and being discussed? In Latin the difference between Sisero and Kikero is barely two centuries.

Do you have a problem with J entering English replacing I and Y rather arbitrarily?

I would have no problem with at least the consistency of pronunciation if there were an extensive body of rhyming poetry for the language at a particular time. Consistent does not mean correct.

But you choose to believe that the pronunciations of non-phonetic languages can be related partially phonetic unrelated languages sufficient to identify bible places. Further you wish to believe the name of the bibleland places were not invented based upon those non-phonetic languages.

I cannot muster that degree of desire to believe.

Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.

www.ussliberty.org

www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml