Great news, everyone! We've finally found proof of the Biblical flood story . . . again. But I think this is a new theory to explain the flood story, so that's exciting . . . sort of . . . if it wasn't so farfetched and wrong . . . and driven by a bit of dilettantism.
Add this one to the growing list of potential candidates for the biblical flood. A local flood in Israel around Carmel doesn't explain most of the details of the biblical flood story OR the parallels with other flood stories in ANE literature anyway. This is just standard pop biblical archaeology: get people's attention by making a connection to the Bible. The connection will be called into question immediately after the lead-in, but they achieved their goal - getting us to read it.
Read the rest of the article here if you're interested.
Via Jack Sasson.
The Jerusalem Post Online EditionHmm...I tend to be suspicious of people who study the Bible because of a desire to connect it with current controversial issues.
Around Israel
Dec 10, 2008 0:27 - Updated Dec 10, 2008 6:53
Did Noah's Flood start in the Carmel?
by ETGAR LEFKOVITS
A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago,submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday.
The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood.
In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the Carmel Mountains villages - which include houses, temples, graves, water wells, workshops and stone tools - is
by far "the most compelling" archeological evidence exposed to date for Noah's flood.
"What's more convincing scientifically, a flood in the Black Sea, so far away from Israel and the fantasy of a supposed ark marooned on the slopes of Mount Ararat, or six submerged Neolithic villages smack-bang in the middle of the Bible Land?" Kingsley said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post.
He added that the site, which has been excavated by Israeli archeologist Dr. Ehud Galili over the last quarter-century, offers a "pretty convincing cocktail of coincidences," including submerged
layers of villages in a critical location, and one that was known for its nautical revolution.
But Galili rejected Kingsley's theory, saying Tuesday that it could not be true.
"Based on our archeological finds, the village was not abandoned due to a catastrophic event, but due to the slow rise of sea levels which occurred all over the world," he said. "The pace of the increase in the sea level was very slow, so that it would not be significant enough for people to remember it in the course of their lifetime."
...
Kingsley, a self-declared atheist, said he had begun studying the origins of Noah's flood five years ago as a result of his interest into "how mythologies came into existence," as well as a desire to connect the biblical story with global warming.
Add this one to the growing list of potential candidates for the biblical flood. A local flood in Israel around Carmel doesn't explain most of the details of the biblical flood story OR the parallels with other flood stories in ANE literature anyway. This is just standard pop biblical archaeology: get people's attention by making a connection to the Bible. The connection will be called into question immediately after the lead-in, but they achieved their goal - getting us to read it.
Read the rest of the article here if you're interested.
Via Jack Sasson.
Good assessment at the end. Claiming that the Biblical flood story was inspired primarily by an actual, localized flood fails to understand how myths develop in relation to other myths. The details of the story are rooted, not in concrete historical events, but in the morphology of other ancient Near Eastern flood stories.
ReplyDeleteIts interesting that the media pays little attention to the 25 year contribution of Ehud Galili or any other career archeologist in the region. But they are willing to build a headline around a biblical "debunking" story by an atheist during the holidays- no matter how amateurish. Maybe Skeptic Magazine will start applying the same standards to this new pop-atheism that it applies to everyone else.
ReplyDelete