Post by specopsgirls on Mar 17, 2014 21:57:49 GMT -5
Did Abraham ever really exist? The Old Testament puts Abraham having lived at about 2,000 BC. The story wasn't written down until the post-exile period around 500 B.C. So, 1500 years after the alleged events of Abraham, the story is finally solidified. (That is supposedly a reliable eyewitness account, right?) And it turns out that the alleged historical events discussed around the story of Abraham couldn't have happened.
If a religion can't survive the light of truth ... it is unworthy of consideration.
Abraham
Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives
Abraham in History and Tradition
NOVA/PBS - No historical or archeological evidence for either Moses or Abraham ever existing
Christian site - Tries to prove Abraham story is true, but ends up confirming that the story was written 1500 years after Abraham supposedly existed and it got all landmarks wrong
Did Abraham Exist?
Oh... and it's impossible for Abraham to have built the Kaaba That story doesn't add up either. And all this means that Muhammad can't claim Abraham as an ancestor because Abraham wasn't real. And that means the Cave of the Patriarchs is bogus too.
Answering Abraham Very long, but excellent presentations by Ibn Warraq on the errors in the Old Testament Patriarchs Stories.
QUESTION - Isn't Sarah already an old lady when she and Abraham go into Egypt? So why is Abraham supposedly uptight about his wifes' supposed great beauty' bringing the attention of the Pharaoh?? And the middle kingdom of Egypt history doesn't match the Abraham account.
ANOTHER QUESTION - The City of Dan didn't exist in Abrahams time so how could he chase an enemy to it??
Oh ... and William F. Albright has been debunked and overturned. Just FYI to anyone who was going to quote him.
Was Abraham Ethical?
IF Abraham existed, which there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence that he did, then he was one sick puppy Supposedly he tried to murder his child and sacrifice him to his God. Voices told him to ... and voices told him not to do it at the last minute.
THIS is the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam??
Not exactly a stable foundation ... if the foundation exists at all.
If a religion can't survive the light of truth ... it is unworthy of consideration.
Abraham
The Bible's internal chronology places Abraham around 2000 BCE,[6] but the stories in Genesis cannot be definitively related to the known history of that time, and the opinion of the overwhelming majority of modern biblical scholars is that the Pentateuch (the series of books of which includes Genesis) was shaped in the post-Exilic period.
"Not only has archaeology not proven a single event of the patriarchal traditions to be historical, it has not shown any of the traditions to be likely."
The book is divided into two parts, Abraham in History and Abraham in Tradition. In Part I part Van Seters argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the stories in the 2nd millennium BC. "Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories, and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C.".
Specially devastating was his analysis of Genesis 14, where he pointed out that the political situation described in Genesis 14 - a Near East dominated by a coalition led by Elam and including Hatti, Assyria and Babylonia - is not confirmed by any monuments, king lists, or other historical and archaeological sources. Van Seters also pointed out that the ten kings mentioned in Genesis 14 cannot be found in any ancient documents outside the Bible
Specially devastating was his analysis of Genesis 14, where he pointed out that the political situation described in Genesis 14 - a Near East dominated by a coalition led by Elam and including Hatti, Assyria and Babylonia - is not confirmed by any monuments, king lists, or other historical and archaeological sources. Van Seters also pointed out that the ten kings mentioned in Genesis 14 cannot be found in any ancient documents outside the Bible
Christian site - Tries to prove Abraham story is true, but ends up confirming that the story was written 1500 years after Abraham supposedly existed and it got all landmarks wrong
Did Abraham Exist?
Whether or not Abraham existed, the stories written about Abraham in Genesis are not historically true. For example, Abraham could not have walked to the land of the Philistines centuries before these sea people came ashore in the Levant. While this alone does not prove his non-existence, it points in that direction. Of course, archaeology can not be expected to prove or disprove the existence of a man like Abraham.
If the Patriarchs lived, then the Israelites should have sojourned in Egypt, but there is no evidence of this in the Egyptian records. If Moses did not live then it is unlikely that Abraham lived. For Moses to have lived, there would have to have been an Exodus from slavery in Egypt and a military conquest of the land of the Canaanites. Not only do almost all scholars say there was no biblical Exodus from Egypt and that there was no unified conquest of the Canaanites, they say that the Hebrew people were really Canaanites who left the region of the rich coastal cities to settle in the hitherto sparsely populated hinterland. There was no biblical Moses and there was no Hebrew Patriarch called Abraham.
If the Patriarchs lived, then the Israelites should have sojourned in Egypt, but there is no evidence of this in the Egyptian records. If Moses did not live then it is unlikely that Abraham lived. For Moses to have lived, there would have to have been an Exodus from slavery in Egypt and a military conquest of the land of the Canaanites. Not only do almost all scholars say there was no biblical Exodus from Egypt and that there was no unified conquest of the Canaanites, they say that the Hebrew people were really Canaanites who left the region of the rich coastal cities to settle in the hitherto sparsely populated hinterland. There was no biblical Moses and there was no Hebrew Patriarch called Abraham.
Answering Abraham Very long, but excellent presentations by Ibn Warraq on the errors in the Old Testament Patriarchs Stories.
QUESTION - Isn't Sarah already an old lady when she and Abraham go into Egypt? So why is Abraham supposedly uptight about his wifes' supposed great beauty' bringing the attention of the Pharaoh?? And the middle kingdom of Egypt history doesn't match the Abraham account.
ANOTHER QUESTION - The City of Dan didn't exist in Abrahams time so how could he chase an enemy to it??
Oh ... and William F. Albright has been debunked and overturned. Just FYI to anyone who was going to quote him.
In the years since his death, Albright's methods and conclusions have been increasingly questioned. Fellow Biblical archaeologist William Dever notes that "[Albright's] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum ... The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer "secular" archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not "Biblical archaeology."
Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson contends that the methods of "biblical archaeology" have also become outmoded: "[Wright and Albright's] historical interpretation can make no claim to be objective, proceeding as it does from a methodology which distorts its data by selectivity which is hardly representative, which ignores the enormous lack of data for the history of the early second millennium, and which wilfully establishes hypotheses on the basis of unexamined biblical texts, to be proven by such (for this period) meaningless mathematical criteria as the 'balance of probability' ...
Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson contends that the methods of "biblical archaeology" have also become outmoded: "[Wright and Albright's] historical interpretation can make no claim to be objective, proceeding as it does from a methodology which distorts its data by selectivity which is hardly representative, which ignores the enormous lack of data for the history of the early second millennium, and which wilfully establishes hypotheses on the basis of unexamined biblical texts, to be proven by such (for this period) meaningless mathematical criteria as the 'balance of probability' ...
IF Abraham existed, which there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence that he did, then he was one sick puppy Supposedly he tried to murder his child and sacrifice him to his God. Voices told him to ... and voices told him not to do it at the last minute.
THIS is the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam??
Not exactly a stable foundation ... if the foundation exists at all.
