Bible chronology

[mikeledo]

as far as i know punt has not been positively identified with somalia. the wall of her mortuary temple at deir-el-bahri details her visit to punt which could refer to 'God's land' or palestine, ultimately jerusalem. stepping back a little to view this one should just compare the details of her trip as known and the bilblical account of the visit of the queen of sheba. they are too similar to be dismissed. i think the real clincher is that her successor in egyptian history is thutmose III and in the bible the queen of sheba is followed by shishak. both of these leaders have glorious military campaigns and both end up sacking a temple. thutmose clearly pictures and enumerates his booty on the wall of the 6th pylon in his temple at karnak. these pictorial representations eerily match both the descriptions and number of temple furnishings as listed in the o.t. i really don't see a need to further wonder at these comparisons. the only impediment is the chronology, and if it is in error what stands in the way............of course almost 200 years of published papers, books, degrees, professorships, etc, etc, may be too much inertia to overcome.

I serious doubt if Egypt would refer to Palestine or Jerusalem as "God's land."

Type "Punt" and "Somalia" into a search engine and see what you get. I got 314 pages that claim they are the same. Velikovsky is out to lunch on the topic. It is possible The Queen of Sheba story is based on her trip to Somalia. Cultures incorporated legends and stories from other lands and made them their own.

[Rowland]

Rowland Your are the one that made the original statements on the bible's inerrant's and Noahic flood happening in 4990 BC. All i have done is to prove to you the bible is not inerrant because men wrote, it not God. What proof out side of the bible that the bible is inerrant? You have none.
After the info I gave you on the Noahic flood genealogiest do you still think that flood happened in 4990BC??
For my first 50 years of life I believed the bible much like you do today. When I started to get involved in archaeology I found out thinks that bothered me about the bible claims and what really happened. The real history of the world and the bible history of the world are two different things. Do I believe in a God that made this world YES but not the way the book of Genesis tells the story. God has another book out there in this world that we need to study, it is the building block of this earth and how things happened in the past. God's second book does not lie to us because it was not written by man. That is God's science he shows us how old this earth really is.
So you love the bible - all the real hundreds of contradiction, all the sicking atrocities that this bible God makes his people do, Isaelites utterly destroys the Canaanites, Nu. 21:3; with the Lord's approval, the Israelites slay Og and all his sons and all the people till there was no survivoprs left Nu. 21:35; 32,000 virgins are taken by Israelites as booty and 32 are set aside to be sacrificed as a tribute for the Lord, Nu. 31:31-40; 12,000 men, women died in Ai by the Lord's approval, Js 8:22-25; same for Gibeonites, Js 10:10-27; same for Makkedah, Js 10:28; same for Libnahites, Js.10:30, and Lachish, and Eglonites, and Hebronites Js 10. Is this the kind of God you love who wipes out very man women and child in country after country. Just one gore after another in the OT. My God is not a vindictive God like the OT. These things didn't not happen as has been shown by archaeology. If your faith live with this kind of OT God that is your problem and I feel for you. You know the bible was written by men and God was not guiding their hands to make so many contradictions. Keep in mind that a perfect and omnipotent God could, should, and likely would see to it that such problems did not exist in a book which s/he had inspired. I sure wouldn't allow it and i'm not even God. Love the real God of this world not the made up God of the bible.
You are not week, you just think so because you have been using the bible as a cruch too long. Find the real truth. a friend arlan b.

Obviously, my crutches would be no use to me if they were not real, just imaginary. If the Bible did not express truth it would be of no use to me. Your science, on the other hand, even if true would be of no use to me. How would knowing that human beings evolved from worms help me to understand who I am and my purpose for being? Yes, thanks to science, I can live a longer and healthier life and I can communicate with freinds and family instantly no matter how far away from me they happen to be. However, thanks to science, people have no reason for living at all. Living longer has become a curse. Because of science, God has been shoved way out of the picture and we humans are here because we're here. Because of science, people have nothing to say to one another now that we have all this communication hardware. Science has told us that we are just animals fighting over scraps of food. Those who can snatch the most food will survive and be proven the most fit. What possibly do we have to say to one another in this zoo called earth?

I would rather have a God who orders the killing of Canaanites than a God who never intrudes into our lives. Furthermore, not every killing described in the Bible had God's approval. The Bible describes a lot of history without making any moral judgment one way or another, and, instead, leaving up to the reader to judge. God has killed every human being that has ever lived so why get excited over the deaths of people in the Bible? God will kill me some day; whether God will kill me with a heart attack or with part of my car's windshield piercing my head, or with flying nails from a terrorist's bomb, I do not know.

The world that you use as a bible is just as violent as the Bible. Man himself is just as much a part of nature as any flower or bird. That he killed over 100,000,000 of his own kind in wars in the 20th century is just as part of your bible as is God's destruction of Sodom and Gemmorah is a part of mine. Sure, by eliminating God you no longer have to ask what kind of a God would do all this evil, but then you are left with all this evil with no avenue of escape except for the grave. I will take my God as described by my Bible any day over your messed up universe with no God. My God is a violent God. But He also allowed Himself to become a victim of His own violence when He went to the cross almost 2000 years ago. In the Book of Job, God told Job that his (Job's) suffering was a part of the mystery of His creation. You do not like it that God brings suffering and death to His creatures so you get rid of this God. And what are you left with?

The God of the OT is the same God that Jesus prayed to. Jesus has destroyed death in his own body, has destroyed sin in his own suffering body. We have been waiting for 2000 years now for this victory that Jesus has already won to become apparent to all of us who live on this earth. Some of us have experienced victory over sin. None of us, except for Jesus himself, has come back from the dead to tell us of the life on the other side of the grave. But the Bible promises that even the people of Sodom and Gemmorah will be restored to life. All the Canaanites killed by the Israelites will be restored to life. That all will be restored to life, restored to a life in which there will be no more tears and no more death. I believe in this with my whole soul. This is why I can love the God of the OT. Human suffering is somehow necessary for God to bring us to the point of eternal joy.

And, I am fully convinced that by the year 314 AD, the Christian Church had become apostate. It is the apostate Church that teaches that unbelievers will experience an eternity of suffering in a place called hell. Such suffering has no purpose whatsoever other than causing pain to people who supposedly did really bad things. Since salvation is a pure gift of God, everyone will receive it based on the work of Jesus Christ. A gift is not a gift if some people deserve it and others don't. The "free will" argument for sin and hell simply puts man in charge of God's salvation work just the same as evolultionists put Nature in charge of God's creative work.

You do worship something, Arlan. Everyone worships something. Do you worship yourself? Humankind?, Nature? Life? Who or what is the ultimate authority in your life? Who or what do you obey?

Rowland

[mikeledo]

This a weak foundation for an argument concerning how literal the Bible is and what is the nature of the contradictions. You are basically taking a fideist position here, which is not easily debated. I feel that most of those involved in the debate will admit to the weaknesses and falliability of human nature, but many will not chose to ignore the evidence based on the emotional crutches of belief in presenting their arguments.

My motivation for for questioning a literal understanding of the Bible is the quest for truth putting any personal bias or weaknesses of human nature aside.

I met with Dr. Gary Rendsburg this summer and we discussed OT Biblical contradictions. While I don't agree with his views, I did find them interesting and a Christian might find some comfort in them. He claims the contradictions are literary devices. For instance Joseph is rescued by both the Ishmaelites and Midianites. Rendsburg sees this as a literary technique to illustrate the confusion that existed in the mind of Joseph. In regards to the two creation accounts, Rendsburg divides it up into 2 versions, a cosmic one and an earthly one. This gives a better overall picture by showing multiple points of view, the "Rashomon Effect" as it is called.

The Hebrews did not possess or invent logic. Their literature was poetic in nature.

Now when it comes to the NT-after Greek logic entered Judea, well, you are on your own.

[Arlan]

You asked some interesting questions and you made some statements that were wrong. First of all, i believe in the God that made this world. When he made it we are not told but by the study of what this world is made of and the evidence God has left us on this earth, we know it is not just 6000 years old. I do not believe in the theory of evilution so please do not imply i do. The bible has a lot of information that is historical accurate but it only applies to Israel because the Israelites wrote about it. Most of Genesis is pure fiction and there is fiction and truth mixed in the other parts of the bible. God never wrote the bible and he didn't have a hand in writing it. Man wrote it and man is the one who is making all the contradictions. You know there are unexplained contradictions, you have said so and i know of over 300 all through the bible. That alone proves God didn't write it.

What is going to happen to you or me later i don't know but i hope that God has a plan for those people that truly understand how to be kind to his fellow man. But what if there is no after life, what difference will it make. If you have lived a good life now shouldn't that be satifying for you.

My God of the bible is not a God that would have keep people alive in a burning Hell after they die. How would you like to see your mother and father burning in Hell while you live in heaven, I'm not saying they will be there but if they were how would you feel?? That is not what my God's heaven would be like.
The bible is written for theology, not reality and it should be understood that way. You have a great day arlan b.

[runtmc2jc]

I serious doubt if Egypt would refer to Palestine or Jerusalem as "God's land."

Type "Punt" and "Somalia" into a search engine and see what you get. I got 314 pages that claim they are the same. Velikovsky is out to lunch on the topic. It is possible The Queen of Sheba story is based on her trip to Somalia. Cultures incorporated legends and stories from other lands and made them their own.

i'm not persuaded by the search engine logic - if one theory dominates, obviously it will generate the majority of hits. if we had the internet in the middle ages, typing in 'flat earth' might generate numerous hits as well. you can't argue with the 'facts' as stated above. hatshepsut/thutmose - queen of sheba/shishak - both have the same storylines. are they the same? or did the exact same thing happen some 600-700 years later? or is the chronology errant? the facts are as stated. the theory is they are the same. the more you delve into ancient history and the related sciences, the more discrepancies arise with the accepted chronology. remove the impediment and things begin to fall nicely into place.

[mikeledo]

i'm not persuaded by the search engine logic - if one theory dominates, obviously it will generate the majority of hits. if we had the internet in the middle ages, typing in 'flat earth' might generate numerous hits as well. you can't argue with the 'facts' as stated above. hatshepsut/thutmose - queen of sheba/shishak - both have the same storylines. are they the same? or did the exact same thing happen some 600-700 years later? or is the chronology errant? the facts are as stated. the theory is they are the same. the more you delve into ancient history and the related sciences, the more discrepancies arise with the accepted chronology. remove the impediment and things begin to fall nicely into place.

I might also suggest reading those web sites also. The case that Punt was Jerusalem is absurd. Velikovsky used false information about the trip and Punt to make his case. I haven't seen anyone find a source outside of his work (a promary document) that makes this same claim without relying on his incorrect assumptions.

[runtmc2jc]

I might also suggest reading those web sites also. The case that Punt was Jerusalem is absurd. Velikovsky used false information about the trip and Punt to make his case. I haven't seen anyone find a source outside of his work (a promary document) that makes this same claim without relying on his incorrect assumptions.

why would you use a term like 'absurd' - this indicates a bias and hostility towards the theory presented. what makes v.'s theory any less tenable than that of others. what makes theirs superior to his, when he has plenty of evidences supporting his theory? you seem to easily dismiss the facts as stated, hatshepsut/thutmose III and queen of sheba/shishak have the same story lines in egyptian history and in the biblical text. there must be synchronization between neighboring cultures, and velikovsky has found the point of synchronization (the exodus) and then played the histories out from there, and the multiple problems of egyptian chronology fit nicely into that scheme as depicted in the biblical text.

[mikeledo]

why would you use a term like 'absurd' - this indicates a bias and hostility towards the theory presented. what makes v.'s theory any less tenable than that of others. what makes theirs superior to his, when he has plenty of evidences supporting his theory? you seem to easily dismiss the facts as stated, hatshepsut/thutmose III and queen of sheba/shishak have the same story lines in egyptian history and in the biblical text. there must be synchronization between neighboring cultures, and velikovsky has found the point of synchronization (the exodus) and then played the histories out from there, and the multiple problems of egyptian chronology fit nicely into that scheme as depicted in the biblical text.

Velikovsky's overall theory is absurd because it violates the very simple laws of physics. He places Mars and Venus in the sky as random dueling comets. This is absurd. In making his theory he must also reject archaelogical findings, carbon-14 dating and the simple Assyrian chronology.

I accept Thutmose III as Shishak only because I do not believe the Biblical chronology. However Velikovsky outright lies on his information about the Hatsheput's trip to Punt in order to make her out to be the Queen of Sheba. I have a problem with that, if you don't. Once his lies or unproven statements are removed, the theory falls.

[runtmc2jc]

Velikovsky's overall theory is absurd because it violates the very simple laws of physics. He places Mars and Venus in the sky as random dueling comets. This is absurd. In making his theory he must also reject archaelogical findings, carbon-14 dating and the simple Assyrian chronology.

I accept Thutmose III as Shishak only because I do not believe the Biblical chronology. However Velikovsky outright lies on his information about the Hatsheput's trip to Punt in order to make her out to be the Queen of Sheba. I have a problem with that, if you don't. Once his lies or unproven statements are removed, the theory falls.

first of all, his theories in "Worlds in Collision" don't really have anything to do with his historical works, other than his idea that certain catastrophes were caused by cosmic interaction. regardless of the causation, the histories rely on extant temple engravings, stelae, papyrus, clay tablets, etc - and his attempt to find the biblical and/or extra-biblical equivalents. So his historical works ("Ages in Chaos"," Ramses and His Times", "Peoples of the Sea", and "Oedipus and Akhnaton") can be considered almost completely independent of his theories presented in "Worlds in Collision."

Can you please specify the 'lies' concerning Hatshepsut's trip to Punt as tendered by Velikovsky?

[Geoconsultant]

Hello Rowland, I took a look at your Biblical chronology and realized it was dated (pun intended). New discoveries support your observation that the traditional chronology, at least that of Judges and earlier, is in error and parts are significantly off. While it is true that the archaeologists have traditionally argued with each other, the theologians marched in lock step. I and many others contend that not only is the Exodus evident, but it fits quite well in history with no need of modifying Egyptian history as some desire. The problem has been that while the Bible has been pretty much infallible in its facts, those that interpreted it were anything but. It's all there: Joseph, the Exodus, the Pharoah of the Exodus, the reason there are so few records of the event, Joshua's conquest and more. Confusing the issues have been anachronisms (correct terms and place names but not for the time), and the tendency of Israelite scribes to record proscribed numbers for periods of time defined by life events. It seems that too much trust was placed in the ability of men to interpret the chronology of the Bible and not enough in the Bible's accurate descriptions of undated events. I've found Josephus a good historical suppliment to study if his dates are carefully cross referenced and checked.

[runtmc2jc]

I serious doubt if Egypt would refer to Palestine or Jerusalem as "God's land."

Type "Punt" and "Somalia" into a search engine and see what you get. I got 314 pages that claim they are the same. Velikovsky is out to lunch on the topic. It is possible The Queen of Sheba story is based on her trip to Somalia. Cultures incorporated legends and stories from other lands and made them their own.

Just because you get numerous matches in a search engine doesn't mean that it is the correct answer.... Numbers don't always tell the story, ... didn't the majority believe in the "flat earth" scenario, and the "geocentric" solar system, and after all, when you follow the crowd, you could end up over the cliff (try typing "lemming" in a search engine)...

there is serious scholarship in Velikovsky's historical chronological version.... many points of congruence over hundreds of years to be simply dismissed as "out to lunch".... I would recommend reading "Ages in Chaos", "Ramses and His Times" and "Peoples of the Seas" to get a understanding of these historical matches.... especially "Ages in Chaos", as it starts with the Exodus and details much correlation and correspondence between Egypt and Palestine during the ages in question ....


P.S. I like your pic of Gimli

[mikeledo]

Thanks. I have read those books. I have also read "Scientists Confront Velikovsky." "Worlds in Collision"goes hand in glove with Velikovsky's other works. It is the reason why there were plagues in Egypt. It supplied the manna from heaven. It gave us the vermin which ate only specific crops and only killed Egyptian cattle. It parted the Red Sea. It is also the reason the Earth's rotation stopped for Joshua as mountains tumbled and oceans boiled away.

I question Josephus's work. All his writing about antiquity is no better than what we have. His writings of his own age has been challenged by scholars, especially the suicides at Masada.

The anachronisms I claim are caused by the authors of a later time period. I contend the Bible was composed as a living document. The walls of Jericho fell in the Early Bronze Age (circa 2400 BCE), likewise that is when Ai was destroyed. The city of Heshbon (conquered by Moses)is an Iron Age city and could not have existed prior to 1100 BCE. These events which are one generation apart in the Bible are over 1,000 years apart according to archaeology and in the wrong order to boot.

There is correspondence between Egypt and Palestine and there are some names that were used in the Bible as well as some cities mentioned. So what? No one has been able to link the two.

There is one thing That I do agree with Velikovsky and that was Thutmose III was Shishak. The problem of Velikovsky is that he is rigid on Biblical chronology and loose with everyone else in the world. I.E. The whole world's chronology is wrong except for the Bible. So Velikovsky wrongly moves Thutmose III forward several centuries so he can leave Solomon in place. If he leaves Thutmose III in place, as all archaeological data would dictate, Solomon simply becomes the Jewish name for Hammurabi. This would push Moses back until the Great Famine when Egypt actually had those plagues. I also believe the Admonitions of Ipuwer were written about the time in Egypt described in the Bible like Velikovsky, but I believe it was about the Great Famine.

[showmeproof]

Everyone here would benefit from reading Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times by D.B. Redford.

[mikeledo]

Everyone here would benefit from reading Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times by D.B. Redford.

Looks interesting. I just ordered a copy. From reading the reviews it appears D.B. Beard does rely on the Bible, in that he has drank the United Monarchy Kool-aid. I will find out first hand.

[Ged]

bump

It seems that since most people seem to have hated History and dates in high school, biblical chronology has been greatly neglected. One problem is that so called friends of the Bible have made a mess of biblical chronology. Egyption archeologists of the 19th century thought that they were doiing Bible believers a favor by changing the biblical date of the Exodus to match what they mistakenly thought was correct Egyptian chronology. The Exodus did not occur in 1250 BC as many commentaries suggest. The Bible is very clear about this date. The Israelites left Egypt in the year 1447 BC and 40 years later entered Canaan in 1407 BC.

Hi Rowland if you are still here.

You are so right that biblical chronology is a greatly neglected subject. This has led to weak defenses, with believers unable to rebut skeptical aspersions on the validity of Old Testament history. Even evangelical scholars acquiesce with comments to the effect that the Old Testament was not meant to be followed as a reliable datal source.

However, the Old Testament is rich in historical information. Its internal chronology can be traced back to Abraham (born 2165bc) and forward to Christ (died 7th April ad30) without gaps, by means of the sabbatic-year count. Identifiable validating dates can be cross-referenced to this.

Of course, there will always be those who dispute one event or another. (The invasion of Canaan is a favorite) However the internal chronology of the Bible is very consistent. It's a pity seminaries don't take biblical chronology more seriously.