Biblical Proof

Re: Biblical Pool Uncovered in Jerusalem



So you're telling me that just because people uncovered a pool that was noted in the bible, the whole book MUST be true? So even though many holy landmarks from other religions have been found also, Christianity must be the true religion. Even though thousands of fossils of dinosaur remains have been discovered contradicting the bible, this one pool proves that the bible is true. The findings of a pool is not evidence of your religion being true.

It's a significant discovery for historians. I fail to see what it has to do with theology or religion.

Amen.

Excuse the pun.

Sanctuary Honey!!!!!!

Where have you been!!!!!!

I've missed you!!!!

Oh Chai, my love. I've missed you as well I've been on a two-week haitus to New Mexico; back now! Thanks for the warm welcome

Little off topic - glad to see you also - funny that Eva was also in NM and back now and she is from OK, now I'm wonder if all people from OK do this ritual in AUG.? :wink:

Why didn't you tell us, Sanctuary

Well I had no idea I had so many fans I appreciate it, ya'll...

Do you know what part Eva was visiting, Husker? What a coincidence that is, eh! New Mexico is truly different than Oklahoma, I love it there. I was in Southern NM, Las Cruces area. So much adobe

Hey Husker how's the boy? You feeling better?

Yeah I'm feeling pretty good - Missing the Mrs and Daughter, they are in Mexico and due home on Tuesday and the Son house sitting some really big dogs, I have a lot of silence here.

Re: Biblical Pool Uncovered in Jerusalem


Wow. One piece of evidence means something is true?

Ever noticed how the Earth wasn't as warm as it is now when there used to be more pirates, but it is now? That's proof Global Warming is the result of a reduction in numbers of pirates!

It's true!

http://www.venganza.org/

I'm always fascinated with geological finds that provide insight into the ways of our ancestors. This seems to be one of those finds. It's cool that the coins were inserted as a way to date the event. Perhaps they knew that at some point the area would be covered and anyone finding it would have a reference.

Doesn't that make you wonder what people will say two thousand years from now when they uncover the Empire State Building? Or Pentagon? Or St. Lous Arch? That last one might foster some interesting discussions.

The current uncovering indicates the pool was there. It doesn't prove anything except that the writer incorporated it into his writing, just as an author today might include one of the above mentioned structures.

Now, if they find Noah's Ark I'll be impressed.

Having said all of that, it's about faith. Not proof.

Great site, Wolf! I've forwarded the URL to several friends.

squinney -- I'm not sure I'd be that impressed with Noah's ark. An ark is an ark is an ark. If they found the remains of something like that on, say, the side of Mount Ararat in Turkey, all it would prove is that arks, such as the one described in Genesis, were, indeed commonly built in those days. How would they even prove it was Noah's?

"in NY, there's a statue of a lady with a torch.
2+2 make 34.
sky is red."



i wonder how those 3 lines would be interpreted when 5000 years from now the SoL is unearthed, and if the existance of the first will prove the last 2.

Jewish World Review August 11, 2005 / 6 Menachem-Av, 5765

?'Now the Stones Will Speak'

By Jonathan Tobin

[imghttp://jewishworldreview.com/0805/city_of_david_ariel.jpg[/img

Discovery offers glimpse of both ancient Israel and the travails of the modern state


http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | For those who hate Israel, one of the most dangerous things a Jew can do in Jerusalem is to start digging. Because the more you dig there, the worse it gets for those who would like to pretend that Israelis are alien colonists imposing their rule on the so-called indigenous people of the region.


That's why an interest in archaeology has always been a key factor in the century-long struggle to recreate and then maintain Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.


You might think arguments claiming that the Jews were alien to the place are limited to the nonsensical propaganda that emanates from the less enlightened portions of the Islamic world. Claims from the Muslim Wakf that administers the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that the place has been a mosque since the days of Adam and Eve are, we hope, laughed off by those who read the mainstream press.

UPENDING DAVID
But though few in this country outside of academia have noticed, the notion of Israel being the historical homeland of the Jewish people has been under attack from far more reputable sources. In recent decades, a new front in the war on Israel was opened in intellectual journals and classrooms. Its goal? To trash the notion that the Bible's accounts of the history of ancient Israel have the slightest value, and to debunk the idea that the United Kingdom of David ever existed.


For a growing number of academics and intellectuals, King David and his kingdom, which has served for 3,000 years as an integral symbol of the Jewish nation, is simply a piece of fiction.


Building on the work of deconstrutionists, who have turned the study of literature into a morass of moral relativism and intellectual cant that seeks to undermine the very idea of historic truth, a new school of historians has arisen since the 1970s. Their purpose is to challenge not only the veracity of the biblical narrative, but the very idea of Jewish nationhood having its roots in the distant past.


As professor Jonathan Rosenbaum, president of Gratz College here in Philadelphia and himself a leading authority on Ancient Near East studies, said: "If you can upend the idea that King David was a historic figure and that ancient Israel was real, then you can delegitimize modern Israel."


And in the spirit of the post-Zionist fashion that has swept over Israel in the last decade, these ideas have been embraced by a number of influential Israeli archaeologists, too. Most prominently, Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University has written that the idea of the Davidic kingdom is not based on fact, and that David's Jerusalem was nothing but a "poor village."


But last week, the debunkers of Jewish history got some bad news. And all it took was for a dedicated archaeologist to start digging.


Dr. Eilat Mazar, senior fellow of the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center's Institute for the Archaeology of the Jewish People, made public the results of the dig she had been conducting since February in an area south of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, where scholars believe the city of David existed. What she produced ought to help quiet those who think Jewish history is bunk.


Amid the soil and rocks of the place that is now the village of Silwan, Mazar uncovered the ruins of the building she's sure was the palace of David itself ?- the very same structure that was built, according to the Bible, by King Hiram of Tyre for Israel's greatest king, around 1,000 BCE.


"It was obvious from the first glance that we are not speaking about a private house," recounts Mazar via phone from Jerusalem. "The walls are huge. The construction involved was massive."


Directly underneath the structure that was uncovered were "masses of pottery" all dating to the 11th and 12th centuries BCE, the era that archaeologists call Iron Age I, which predates the era of David. By its position in the site, this pottery, which was a unique find in of itself, makes it clear that "Iron I was over or almost over by the time the building was started," said Mazar.


"I had to ask myself, 'What do we have in hand?' " she says.


Mazar, 48, is the granddaughter of pioneering Israeli archaeologist Benjamin Mazar. She grew up in the world of digs and worked with her grandfather as a research assistant on his excavations on the Temple Mount.


She had talked with him before his death 10 years ago about the possibility of this project and, building upon the work of past generations of archaeologists and by reading a crucial verse in the book of Samuel II (Chapter 5, Verse 17), decided that if David had gone down from where he was to his fortress, then Silwan was the spot where David's abode might be found.


The dig was sponsored by the Hebrew University and Shalem, financed by American investor Roger Hertog and carried out with the help of the Ir David Foundation, which owns the land. But after years of work and planning, the proof was waiting in the ground.


"Once I started to excavate," says Mazar, "it was as if I had written nothing. Now, the stones will speak, not me."


And speak they do.


For those who contend that what she found was more likely the Jebusite fort David conquered or something else that predates his kingdom, Mazar said that the placement of the Iron I pottery right underneath it makes such a conclusion "problematic."


"How come I didn't find any remains of any construction underneath it? It doesn't make any sense. If this is the fortress, it was erected a day before King David captured the city.


"[This] fantastic building [is a] big, obvious answer to those who say Jerusalem was an unimportant settlement."

?'A NAME IS A NAME'
Just as telling was an artifact only 1 centimeter long, uncovered from a slightly later period. It was an impression of an ancient seal, or "bullah," which bore the name of Jerucal, son of Shelemiah, son of Shevi.


Who was he? Nothing less than a minister of the Kingdom of Judah in its last days before the Babylonian destruction of the city in 586 BCE. We know of him only because he is mentioned in the book of Jeremiah. But the bullah proves his existence isn't a literary flight of fancy.


The find shows again, as many other archeological discoveries have also proven, that the Tanach is a credible historic source. For Mazar, this tiny piece of clay ?- found amid thousands of years of remains ?- "goes straight to the point" to understanding the role of the biblical text in reconstructing history.


"Layer by layer, we must take the Bible much, much more seriously than was ever thought, and treat it as a most important historic document that contains a lot of realistic descriptions," declares Mazar.


Any source that is the work of human hands (as scholars consider the Bible) is fallible, but, she says to those who doubt its role in understanding Jewish history, "a name is still a name."


While Mazar and the Shalem Center have tried to steer the discussion of the find away from politics, she knows firsthand that contemporary struggles are never far away from the study of Israel's past.


As spokeswoman for the nonpartisan Committee Against the Desecration of Antiquities on the Temple Mount, Mazar tried to alert the world in recent years to the vandalism being done to site by the Muslim Wakf. Much to her amazement, her pleas fell on deaf ears and the government of Israel refused to intervene. The result is that, due to politics, a treasure trove of antiquities in this sacred place may well be lost to us forever.


Similarly, Mazar knows there will be those who will assault her work for nonscientific reasons. As Rosenbaum noted, many modern scholars now seem to think that if you have an argument between those who claim the earth is flat and those who see it as round, "both are equally legitimate." Thus, it can be asserted, despite the archeological evidence of the Bible's historicity, "there is no such thing as biblical history and no such thing as ancient Israelites."


Though Mazar says she "welcomes controversy over the meaning of the evidence," she urges her colleagues to deal with facts and not fantasies.
But by uncovering the remains of David's palace, Mazar has struck a blow not only for the cause of archaeology, but helped make clear just how deep the Jewish roots of this place run.

http://jewishworldreview.com/0805/tobin_2005_08_11.php3

Thursday, Aug. 11, 2005
Ancient water system discovered near Jerusalem

By Michele Chabin

Religion News Service

JERUSALEM - Israeli and American archaeologists have discovered what they term a "monumental rock-hewn water system" near Jerusalem dating back to the eighth century B.C.

The discovery, announced Aug. 9, was made during an eight-week dig at a cave close to Jerusalem, in Ein Kerem, which is regarded as the traditional birthplace of John the Baptist.

Last summer, Shimon Gibson, the chief archaeologist at the dig, announced that he had found a cave that may have been used by John the Baptist to anoint his followers.

A statement by Gibson and archaeologist James Tabor from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte said that the latest excavations have revealed the cave to be part of "a much larger Iron Age water system, rock-cut in places to a depth of 65 feet."

The archaeologists said the cave, which dates back to the time of King Hezekiah (according to pottery shards from that period), contains a vertical shaft, an open horizontal corridor, a flight of stone steps above a tunnel and three external plastered pools, all of which was on the slope above an underground reservoir.

Although elaborate water systems "have been found elsewhere," Gibson said, until now they were discovered only within Israelite cities such as Beit Shemesh and Gibeon.

"Never before has such a massive water system been found isolated in the countryside without a town or city attached to it," Gibson said, leading the team to believe that the project had been undertaken "by the Kingdom of Judah."

The cave was discovered in 1999 and has been under excavation ever since.

Another ongoing biblical-era excavation -- what is believed to be the Pool of Siloam -- was highlighted in the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, whose editor reported the find to The Los Angeles Times on Monday (Aug. 8).

For more than a year, archaeologists have been excavating the pool outside the walls of what was once the site of the biblical temples.

The pool was the main water reservoir for Jerusalem dwellers two millennia ago. It is fed by the nearby Gihon Spring, which has been under excavation for decades. In biblical times it was utilized by Jews making annual pilgrimages to ancient Jerusalem. The Gospel of John (Chapter 9) says that Jesus, one such pilgrim, cured a man of his blindness by the pool.

http://www.biblicalrecorder.org/con...05ancient.shtml

August 5, 2005
King David's Palace Is Found, Archaeologist Says

By STEVEN ERLANGER


JERUSALEM, Aug. 4 - An Israeli archaeologist says she has uncovered in East Jerusalem what may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by a conservative Israeli research institute and financed by an American Jewish investment banker who would like to prove that Jerusalem was indeed the capital of the Jewish kingdom described in the Bible.
Other scholars are skeptical that the foundation walls discovered by the archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, are David's palace. But they acknowledge that what she has uncovered is rare and important: a major public building from around the 10th century B.C., with pottery shards that date to the time of David and Solomon and a government seal of an official mentioned in the book of Jeremiah.

The discovery is likely to be a new salvo in a major dispute in biblical archaeology: whether the kingdom of David was of some historical magnitude, or whether the kings were more like small tribal chieftains, reigning over another dusty hilltop.

The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem - whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasir Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.

Hani Nur el-Din, a Palestinian professor of archaeology at Al Quds University, said he and his colleagues considered biblical archaeology an effort by Israelis "to fit historical evidence into a biblical context." He added: "The link between the historical evidence and the biblical narration, written much later, is largely missing. There's a kind of fiction about the 10th century. They try to link whatever they find to the biblical narration. They have a button, and they want to make a suit out of it."

Even Israeli archaeologists are not so sure that Ms. Mazar has found the palace - the house that Hiram, king of Tyre, built for the victorious king, at least as Samuel 2:5 describes it. It may also be the Fortress of Zion that David conquered from the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before him, or some other structure about which the Bible is silent.

Either way, they are impressed by its likely importance. "This is a very significant discovery, given that Jerusalem as the capital of the united kingdom is very much unknown," said Gabriel Barkay, an archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University. "This is one of the first greetings we have from the Jerusalem of David and Solomon, a period which has played a kind of hide-and-seek with archaeologists for the last century."

Based on the Bible and a century of archaeology in this spot, Ms. Mazar, 48, speculated that a famous stepped-stone structure excavated previously was part of the fortress David conquered, and that his palace would have been built just outside the original walls of the cramped city, on the way to what his son, Solomon, built as the Temple Mount.

"When the Philistines came to fight, the Bible said that David went down from his house to the fortress," she said, her eyes bright. "I wondered, down from where? Presumably from where he lived, his palace."

"So I said, maybe there's something here," she added, referring to East Jerusalem.

David's palace was the topic of a last conversation Ms. Mazar had with her grandfather, Benjamin Mazar, a famous archaeologist who helped to train her and who died 10 years ago. Five months ago, with money and permission from the Ir David Foundation, which controls the site (and supports Jews moving into East Jerusalem), she finally began to dig.

Amihai Mazar, a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University, calls the find "something of a miracle." He says he believes that the building may be the Fortress of Zion that David is said to have conquered, which he renamed the City of David. "What she found is fascinating, whatever it is," he said.

Mr. Mazar is Ms. Mazar's second cousin, but he has his own reputation to protect.

Archaeologists debate "to what extent Jerusalem was an important city or even a city in the time of David and Samuel," he said. "Some believe it was tiny and the kingdom unimportant." The site of ancient Jerusalem, stuck between two valleys on a ridge south of the Temple Mount, is very small, less than 10 acres.

Israel Finkelstein, another renowned archaeologist, has suggested that without significant evidence, Jerusalem in this period was "perhaps not more than a typical hill-country village."

In his book, "The Bible Unearthed," Mr. Finkelstein writes with Neil Silberman, "Not only was any sign of monumental architecture missing, but so were even simple pottery shards."

Ms. Mazar believes she has found a riposte: a large public building, with at least some pottery of the time, and a bulla, or governmental seal, of an official - Jehucal (or Jucal), son of Shelemiah, son of Shevi - who is mentioned at least twice in the Book of Jeremiah.

The building can be reasonably dated by the pottery found above and below it. Ms. Mazar found on the bedrock a large floor of crushed limestone, indicating a large public space. The floor and fill above it contain pottery from Iron Age I of the 12th to 11th centuries B.C., just before David conquered Jerusalem.

Above that, Ms. Mazar found the foundations for this monumental building, with large boulders for walls that are about 2 yards thick and extend at least 30 yards. In one corner was pottery of Iron Age II, the 10th to 9th centuries, roughly the time of the united kingdom.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mazar said, she found no floor. It is clear the building was constructed after the pottery underneath it, but less clear exactly how much later.

The archaeological debate is also partly a debate over the roots of Zionism and the effort to find Jewish origins deep in the land. Ms. Mazar's latest dig, which has cost about $500,000, has been sponsored by Roger Hertog, a New York financier who is vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management. Mr. Hertog, who owns a piece of The New York Sun and The New Republic, is also chairman of the board of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, where Ms. Mazar is a senior fellow.

The Shalem Center was founded as Israel's first "neoconservative think-tank," said William Kristol, who is also on the board, in an effort to give the Israeli right a better foundation in history, economics, archaeology and other topics.

Mr. Hertog calls his investment in Ms. Mazar "venture philanthropy - you have the opportunity for intellectual speculation, to fund something that is a work of great consequence." He said he hoped to show "that the Bible reflects Jewish history."

Ms. Mazar continues to dig, but right now, three families are living in houses where she would most like to explore. One family is Muslim, one Christian and one Jewish.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/i...ml?pagewanted=1

Never underestimate the tenacity of a hard head . . .

Look at that excerpt.

Now imagine if it was a scientist trying to prove that tobacco had no harmful health effects and he was funded by a tobacco company.

I'm not saying that she is influenced by the companies, but she might be pressured into making conclusions that aren't real.

Besides, what does that prove, ConstitutionGirl?

A holy text obviously has to base its historical parts on real history for people to take it seriously.

Archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of Troy, but did that really mean the Greek Gods existed?