This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Dec 2007, by Arne Løining.
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07 Dec 07
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Is this the God of mercy and compassion that Bishop Tutu referred to in his appeal in Boston? Or is this the template of an ideological monster dreamed up by a scribe sitting in the Alexandrian Library, and eagerly adopted by bigoted fanatics applying it verbatim to the land of Palestine today?
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Never was there an ethnically coherent Israel, and according to Thomson, neither Jerusalem nor Judah ever shared an identity with Israel before the rule of the Hasmoneans in the Hellenistic period of the 3rd-1st cc BC, coincidentally, when the legends were first written down. Ironically, the Samaritans, scorned by Ezra's (and today's) Jews, are the most likely Semitic ancestors of the historical Israel.
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What do archaeologists tell us? A century of sifting, scrubbing, sorting and debate has produced no evidence of Jerusalem as a large city, let alone the centre of an empire. It was at most a minor trading and olive growing town.
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While the financial benefits of tying the Bible to archaeology have increased, historical and intellectual benefits have just as rapidly diminished.
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