biblical archaeology

umm, that's not in the bible. i mean, jesus may have prophecied about the destruction of the temple (though most read it as metaphorical of the new covenant), but 70 ad is well after his earthly lifetime. there might have been some biblical authorship going on at the time, but they don't seem to mention the destruction of the temple -- everything's set 40 years prior.i mean, it's very interesting 1st century ad archaeology.

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whoa whoa. don't confuse appeal to generalized audiences with lack of scientific foundation. we have lots of very scientific reasons for just about everything that was covered in that series short of coloration. the idea, basically, was to portray dinosaurs as how they lived -- the conclusions of paleontological research -- not the research itself.the problem, imho, is that the discovery channel got confused, much the same as you just did. the bbc knew what it was doing, but the discovery channel treated it as a way to show off computer graphics and make wild speculation.the thing that did the most damage were the subsequent (animal planet?) cg-spec-fests. there was one about future evolution, and one about space aliens. especially the aliens. people saw that, and it was plain as day that it was nothing but pure and unadultered fantasy. even the scientific plausibility was dubious at best.and so people now look back at "walking with dinosaurs" and think that paleontology is the same -- pure speculation. it's most certainly not. but this is just part of the whole "i don't believe in science" movement.

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"infotainment." i agree, really. the issue that started it was the lack of actual depiction of the science behind the theories. i've seen a ton of documentaries that do this. this one got popular because it was easily digested, i think. well, i don't really pay that mush attention to the actual scientific end of things anymore, but not much of it was new to me. i understood how we arrive at reconstructions, how musculature and posture is determined, and even how some behaviour gets preserved. we can tell for instance that some dinosaurs (like hadrosaurs and ceratopsians) hatched and nurtured their young, and we can tell that others (like ceolophysis) ate them. well, there is always debate, and things are always questioned. this, of course, is a little different than just making shit up. probably not, but hey, it sold well! lol, true, true.

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but kings and maybe samuel certainly are at least partly histories. they read like histories, with dates. the questions are really, how accurate they are (evidence clearly shows strong religious bias) and what they are histories OF (traditions, events, what?).

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well, not exactly. kings seems to be a more academic work. names, dates, places. it cites sources. but it's not totally a history, either. it does contain some obvious dramatization, and it does seem to be trying to convey a message of some kind (political...). maybe, but biblical archaeology (the, uh, legit stuff) is a very interesting field.

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have a look at this closed thread: http://EvC Forum: Were there Dinosaurs in the Bible? תַּנִּין (taniyn) is literally "serpent." it's the animal that moses's staff turns into when he drops it before pharoah. i agree that based upon the description of לִוְיָתָן (livyathan) in job it is probably refering to הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים (ha-taniynm ha-g'dolim) of genesis 1 -- the "big serpents" that live in the water. "dragon" is a just an english way of saying the concept forwarded by "large snakes." but by tradition, livyathan is one of these taniynm, and there are only two. god killed the other one.also important here is what the word means today. "livyathan" is modern hebrew word for whale. even in english we use "leviathan" to describe something big and usually whale-like.here are some images i posted previously in this thread of jonah and the whale (which, btw, is not a whale in hebrew, but a "big fish") there has never been an aquatic dinosaur discovered. dinosaurs and the marine reptiles of the mesozoic are both separate branches of reptiles.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 01-11-2006 04:10 PM

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