quote:
Nimrod
But let me get to Blenkinsopp and his comments on the archaeological situation of c580-540 BCE.He disagrees with a 40 year period of an empty land where there was a dramatic population reduction.He doesnt disagree as much with the conflagrations.
PaulK
He disagrees that they were as extensive as the "empty land" proponents claims. That is absolutely clear.
He seemed to let it hang on a further examination of every last city in detail(site by site).Before that,it was only a few cities in the small land of Benjamin that he could find to have escaped the destructions.But the very book he denounced as a political document(Sterns Anchor Bible volume on the archaeological commentary including the Babylonian period) is the most useful handbook (albeit 600 pages) exploring every site in Palestine and how it fared during the Babylonian attacks.
quote:
Nimrod
I said "He tryed .... He Cryed" earlier. I suppose the intent doesnt always come to pass.Perhaps he really attempted to do so but just couldnt? I suppose that would be the toughest historical element to confirm even the the whole darn thing (ie. Conquest) was proven to be mostly historical.
PaulK
The rural communities would generally be more vulnerable than the cities. So it isn't clear to me that a real attempt at extermination would have the same results as a war of conquest. If the rural communities are hit harder, that reduces the chance of a bounceback.
It wasnt just rural Canaanite communities that survived(if any).Large population centers held off.Sidon,Tyre, (what would later become) Philistine cities, Ammon, (dozens of towns in)Bashan, held off completely and others held off at one point or another such as Jerusalem and others.
Rural folk can conduct ambush tactics plus find places to
hide.A sling is a deadly weapon.Benjamin was the most rural of the Israelite tribes but they were deadly with the sling.
quote:
Nimrod
But both propose defeated populations recovering after loosing battles and perhaps the larger war in the case of Joshua
PaulK
But as the defeats proposed by Kitchen are less even than the ones Blenkinsopp actually does believe in, why is there any need to go beyond Kitchen ? Kitchen's reduction of the scale of Joshua's early victories is all that is required. I keep making this point but where's the answer ?
So I'm still waiting for any evidence that Blenkinsipp adds anything that Kitchen says, I've not even seen any evidence that Blenkinsopp is a minimalist
Blenkinsopp proposes a somewhat radical proposal, for 6th century BCE Jews and their abilities to survive compared to the text of Joshua proposing Canaanites ability to reboun and fight back, though it might be reasonable (reasonability can only go so far when the archaeological record contradicts his main point- "There Was No Babylonian Gap" to which Stern's foll-up articles simply responds "Yes There Was").
Also...
Minimalists tend to see the Israelites as existing from before 1200 BCE but not becoming the "Israelites" of the Bible till around 850 BCE (and only in the north,not in Judah till 100 years later).They see historical (ie. non-Biblical)Israelites as only a slight variant of a typical Canaanite, based on all avaliable evidence, before the 9th century.It is only later that they start to become a distinct people.They say that the archaeologists "material culture" distinctions between Israelites and Canaanites in the early Iron Age amounts to little more than poverty and rural variants of the typical Canaanite material culture.
The modern-day Jerusalem 3000 celebration of Israel around 10 years ago led to lots of political posturing among Israeli Jews and their supporters.The arguments from the Anchor Bible Dictionary editors on archaeology (though not all but important members of the editorial staff) that Jerusalem was essentially Canaanite in the 10th century caused some ugly arguments hard feelings in a politically charged atmosphere.Others made some somments that a belief in the United Monarchy was anti-Palestinian. (CORRECTION:the Anchor Bible Dictionary staff only considered the United Monarchy issue in Jerusalem 3000 anti-Palestinian.It wasnt till later that many of the same type of folks started to look at ethnicity as a more complex issue and that was mainly due to the scholarship of the oiginal minimalists like Thompson and others)
Scholars like Blenkinsopp fueled the fire.
He seems on the minimalist side of things on some of the most charged issues.(that doesnt always make him wrong though).He talks just like them when he discusses the "empty land" as if it is nothing more than Zionist propaganda and flat out said that it was used by those who(those archaeologists who hold to the "empty land" belief) justify the 1948 ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians.He mixes truth in with fantasy when he correctly points out Zionist propaganda that attempts to make Palestine look like a desolate empty waste pre-1900 CE/AD. (there were Jews who spoke out nearly100 years ao against the "desolate waste" propaganda by Zionists).
Anyway, I agree with minimalists on alot of things.They rightly point out that many early Israelite sites(around the early Iron Age) such as Shiloh have more connections with the "pre-Israelite" period (Late Bronze Age) than with the monarchy period.William Dever said in his book "What Did The Israelites Know and When Did They Know It" that the #1 way to tell an early Iron Age Israelite site from a Canaanite one is its absence of pig bones and used the c1200BCE settlement of Shiloh as an example.Thomas Thompson rightly pointed out (though attacking Finkelstein and not Dever) in his book Early History Of The Israelite People:From Written and Archaeological Sources that the Iron Age Shiloh should better be called Canaanite than Israelite since it existed some 200 years earlier(when it was abandoned around 1400 in the early LBII period) as the same type of place Finkelstein describes as an Israelite type site.
They(minimalists) are much better at understanding that Israel was only a very slight part of the larger Palestinian population in 1200 BCE and a good while after.Maximalists tend to want to consider "Israel" as some super-majority in the early Iron Age(even as far back as 1200 BCE and even into the Late Bronze Age with the Merneptah record) when they were a super-minority of perhaps 5% at most.They accuse those who consider Judah to be extremely small during the (supposed?) time of David and Solomon to be "anti-semites" who want to strip Israelites of then only period where they controlled perhaps most(they make it seem like all) of Palestine.
Minimalists rightly point out that there are many leading archaeologists that hate the idea of a Palestinian history that looks at *all* ethnic groups in Palestine during the Iron Age, and not just an intense focus on a Palestine(maximalists like Dever and Rainey hate the term Palestine for the etire land) wide Israelite-monarchy where maximalists like to see Israelites as 98% of the population(not literally but they prefer a 98% focus on Israelites and Israelites alone) while viewing all other ethnic groups at interlopers.
But then minimalists go off the cliff on absurdities like their "empty land" of Ezekiel and archaeologists..."is Zionist propaganda to justify the 1948 attrocities" which they beat like a drumb (see the 2007 Thomas Thompson ed. book, Jerusalem In History and Tradition).
Blenkinsopp is a minimalist.Its easy to tell.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
Edited by Nimrod, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2