Archaeologists: There are too many camels in the Bible, out of time and out of place

[thucythucy]

79. Back again, at least for a bit.

The best I can do is the chapter on origin stories in "Imagining Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs" by David M. Gunn and Paula McNutt, 2003. But I know there's other sources, and better ones, I just can't put my finger on them (a lot of my books are in storage). Also, I seem to recall a Nova from a while back on recent archaeology of Hebrew Scripture sites, and one of the takeaways from that was that the whole "Hebrew tribes coming out of Egypt to conquer Canaan" narrative is probably, perhaps almost certainly untrue, that rather than the Hebrew tribes coming from elsewhere, they had in fact been settled in the region far sooner, and that rather than conquering the original inhabitants the Hebrew tribes intermarried with and evolved from them. That there was far more assimilation than conquest. Wish I could be more specific about all this.

I recently re-read the Book of Ezra, and found it a fascinating slice of that time--if somewhat depressing (the whole "now that we've been released from exile in Babylon let's exile all the folks we intermarried with who aren't directly descended from our bloodlines" story). It's like the only thing the leadership learned from being conquered and exiled (and then released and restored to their home) was that they had to be even MORE ethnocentric and suspicious of the outside world. But the story itself is compelling, of people returning after decades to a devastated homeland, and together with reading the Psalms of the exile and the Book of Lamentations, it really brought home for me how much of the Bible is about oppression. The Lamentations about Hebrew women and girls being raped by occupying soldiers, about homes being sacked, people forced to become refugees, had such a modern ring to it. In that context, the infamous psalm that ends with the lines about how wonderful it would be to bash the heads of our enemy's babies against a wall--well, it just demonstrates for me the hate and the fury generated by foreign occupation, wars of intervention, "counterinsurgencies" and the like. A lesson we might well heed today.

If you look at the Hebrew Scriptures, not as the "infallible word of God" but rather as the record of one people or grouping of peoples and their struggle to make sense of the universe, it really is quite a moving set of texts. To me, framing it as some divine hand-me-down or even as literal history is an insult to the humanity of the people who originally felt compelled to tell and eventually record those stories. Rather than setting the Bible up on a pedestal, I think it becomes more profound as a record of the authors' humanity.

That's how I see it, anyway.

Thanks again for the posts and the vids. See you around DU sometime soon.