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Goodbye Jesus

Overview Of Israelite History?


zuker12

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Could there be a topic made for an outline of known history of the Israelites? As per archaeological record. It is a topic I've lately been interested in. I'm currently pondering the conquest of the promised land and It seems somewhat convoluted, giving me the view that most of that conquest is a kind of mythmaking after the fact. If there is anyone knowledgeable on the topic of Israelite history, some sort of a place to look for an general outline would be appreciated, from some 4,000bc to 0ad.

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For starters there is no Israeli history prior to King Saul.  Saul and David were more like bandit leaders than heads of state.  They controlled a few hilltop villages that no nation really wanted.  Ruling over those villages creates Israel because those people were a motley group that didn't have much in common.  Not tribes that all descended as brothers from a single patriarch but rather they are completely separate tribes.  And don't expect that there were only 12 of them.  The "history" stories we find in the Bible are heavily edited propaganda written centuries later.  That is after several civil wars.  So a group that gets painted as the bad guys in the Bible might have been part of the thugs following Bandit David.  The conquests depicted in the Bible generally happened at much earlier times.  In other words any time a Bible writer saw a ruin they would attribute it to Joshua or David when this was not the truth.

 

The other thing to remember is that when Ezra came back from Babylon he sat down with all of his source material and he rewrote it all to fit his political needs and that is how the Old Testament came to be in it's final form.  We don't get to see what his source material looked like before he changed it much like how we don't get to see what the Catholic church burned as heresy.  But in it's final form the Kings of Judah are painted as good or evil based only on how well they supported the temple at Jerusalem (Ezra was rebuilding the Jerusalem temple) when archeologists have been able to find remains of the late Judah kingdom and found that some of the "evil" kings did a fine job with construction and trade.  The Bible didn't care if the kingdom prospered, flourished or had a relatively nice quality of life.  The religious agenda was all that mattered.

 

To sum up David and Saul are highly inflated legends.  Anything prior to them is myth.

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This is not an overview, but much about the OT as propaganda can be found on Contrdictions in the Bible:

 

http://contradictionsinthebible.com/

 

A few months ago srd44 brought this site to our attention. The author of the site goes into a lot of detail about how the jockeying of different groups for influence in ancient Israel can be seen reflected in many OT passages.

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Off the top of my head, there were the Canaanite tribe which were a poor group living under the grasp of their wealthy and extravagant oppressors, who may have become the Israelites.

 

The wealthy group had identical architectural designs, and Judaism seems to inherit a minimised version of their culture.

 

Now I just say this on one of those discovery channel documentaries and I've yet to find many sources to back it up, but I'm not all too big on the research, I'm just accumulating

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I read the essay "Let the stones speak" on patheos.com's Daylight Atheism portal and it portrayed the israelites as coming from inside Canaan during a time of great turmoil, as an outcome of that turmoil. Most of the conquest story is etiological or written in a way that made the israelites seem hugely victorious when that might not be the case. (E.g. saying a city was a thriving, walled metropolis when there was no occupation there during the time of the conquest, which means they had heard something of the city's past splendor and incorporated that into their writing). Seems plausible.

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