User:Ioe bidome/Biblical Archaeology

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“”Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians had transmitted God's promise to the Jewish patriarchs, as an unbroken patrimony, to the Christians, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries you could hardly throw away an orange peel in the Holy Land without hitting a fervent excavator. General Gordon, the biblical fanatic later slain by the Mahdi at Khartoum, was very much to the fore. William Albright of Baltimore was continually vindicating Joshua's Jericho and other myths. Some of these diggers, even given the primitive techniques of the period, counted as serious rather than merely opportunistic. Morally serious too: the French Dominican archaeologist Roland de Vaux gave a hostage to fortune by saying that "if the historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is erroneous, and therefore, our faith is also." A most admirable and honest point, on which the good father may now be taken up.

—Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Biblical archaeology is the use of archaeology on things related to the bible.

As pseudoarchaeology

While — in modernity — the archeology of the Near and Middle East has become a serious and respectable academic field in itself, without which our understanding of the spurious and man-made nature of various religious texts would be severely diminished, prominent scholars in the field such as Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology Eric H. Cline, author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (published by Oxford University Press and winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society's "Best Popular Book on Archaeology"), takes the time to warn and warn again of the rampant interest in the field from well-funded pseudoscientific cranks out to prove whichever of the abrahamitic myths they happen to subscribe to personally, stating:

While biblical archaeologists working today are generally more interested in learning about details of daily life in the ancient biblical world than proving or disproving the accounts in the Bible, many lay people have these priorities reversed. They want to know: Did the Flood take place? Did Abraham and the Patriarchs exist? Were Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by fire and brimstone? Did the Exodus occur? These were some of the original questions in biblical archaeology that intrigued the earliest pioneers of the field. They still resonate today but are far from being answered by biblical archaeologists.

In fact, solutions and answers to such questions are more frequently proposed by pseudo-archeologists or archaeological charlatans, who take the public's money to support ventures that offer little chance of furthering the cause of knowledge. Every year, "scientific" expeditions embark to look for the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. These expeditions are often supported by prodigious sums of money donated by gullible believers who eagerly accept tales spun by sincere but misguided amateurs or by rapacious confidence men.

These ventures, which usually originate outside the confines of established scholarly institutions, engender confusion about what is real and what is fake. By practicing pseudo-archeology rather than by using established archeological principles and real science, the archaeological charlatans bring discredit to the field of biblical archaeology.

Eminent biblical scholar Michael Coogan and author of The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (published by Oxford University Press) also chimes in to underscore the inherent fail in pursuing pseudo-archaeology to try and prove the patently false myths recorded in scripture:

Correlating the meager textual references with the extensive archaeological discoveries has been controversial, to say the least, and similar problems exist for almost every excavated site whose ancient identification is known. As a result, it is now clear that archaeology cannot "prove" the Bible's historicity.

A textbook example of this exact crankery is the slow but steady stream of nonsensical Noah's Ark sightings every few years.

Ezekiel

Synopsis

A guy named Ezekiel "among the captives" of some prisoners when God and some weird-looking angels decided to show up to Ezekiel. Ezekiel falls on his face. Ezekiel then receives some visions:

• Two women that represent Jerusalem and Samaria (the capital of the northern kingdom of Judah) "committing whoredoms" in Egypt and Assyria. Fun fact: the names of the women, Aholah and Aholibah, literally mean "my tent" and "my tent is in her".
• Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Tyre and then God would destroy it. Ezekiel later retracted this one
• Nebuchadnezzar would conquer Egypt
• Egypt will become a desolate wasteland.
• The Nile would be dried up by God.
• Israel would live in peace with its neighbors. uhhhhh.....
• The "prophecy of the dry bones" where God resurrects the dead.
• A description of what the messiah will do.
• Gog and Magog are prophesized "against", and that they will be defeated. It will take seven months to bury the dead

Who wrote this and what were they on?

Ezekiel was written in the