Jewish
Conquest of Jericho
Those
critics of the veracity of the Biblical account of the fall of
Jericho to the Jews usually are not well read in the Bible. Since the
account is of such importance to those godless atheists determined to
defend sin by throwing mud onto the Bible-especially the old
testament, I will reply here a bit.
First
there are three primary threads useful for getting to a true opinion
of the Jericho incident.
1)
History
2)
Linguistics
3)
Archaeological record.
One
might ask, did the Jews ever really invade and conquer Canaan? Did
they have a reason to falsify the Joshua account? Is the alternative
more true. That is, the Jews did not invade Palestine before 1000
a.d., never built the Temple, and the Dome of the Rock built by the
Arabs doesn’t exist and is instead a holograph perpatrated by
thieves that float the actually Dome on an anti-gravity platform with
a need to fool the public?
http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/09/bernie-sanders-shows-lefts-refusal-coexist-traditional-believers/
I
will use the King James version for Biblical citations and quotes. It
was Shakespeare’s era of English, was translated from the Greek
Septuagint translation by 70 Jewish scholars in the 3nd
century to 132 B.C. from Hebrew.
This
is an article by a Dr. Woods who did his PhD dissertation on bronze
age pottery. He finds Kenyon’s recently released final findings off
the mark. It has rigorous scholastic standards.
I
rather like considering some of the history of what is know about the
way the books of the Bible were put together with tools of linguistic
philosophy and history.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein wrote in the Blue and Brown books of the problem of the
indeterminacy of translation, and that certainly is an issue with
some parts of the Old Testament.
As
I understand it, the Hebrew alphabet wasn’t made to exist as the
first phonetic written language before 1500. In my opinion Moses as a
Prince of Egypt who would have been about as knowledgeable at
hieroglyphic as anyone could be, was the inventor of the Hebrew
alphabet as a written language. A literate fellow with time on his
hands after exile to live with the Jews. Having learned the Hebrew
language too while in Egypt, making his own written language to
write in Hebrew rather than Egyptian is a reasonable probable
development. Even so the language would have had huge gaps and an
inadequate vocabulary for hundreds of years. It would have been slow
to develop enough scribes to learn, teach and expand the project.
The
Old Testament books of the Pentateuch were assembled in the court of
Solomon and Jeroboam circa 1000 B.C. hundreds of years after the
events recorded in Joshua. It has been speculated that four different
authors put together the Pentateuch and /or revised it. Some of the
Old Testament may have been worked on as late a s the 5th century
B.C. I believe that much material existed from ancient times but the
idea of adding it to a formal group of books was a project that
evolved under divine guidance rather than with a master secular plan.
The value of the archaeological records is contingent upon an
interpretation of the book Joshua account. Or at least the
contentiousness is built on finding differences between
archaeological, historical and written accounts.
It
is safe to say that the Jews conquered Canaan some time, including
Joshua, before the time of King David. Jericho was the most important
city in early Canaan, and was probably known far and wide for its
city walls. To conquer Jericho would entail overcoming its walls. The
Greeks overcame the walls of Troy with deceit.
In
contrast, pre-Columbian cities in north America had no city walls
except for one small walled city found in North Dakota I believe,
where a slaughter was discovered to have occurred in battle. That
aside, the lack of walled cities exemplifies that the development of
defense walls requires particular social circumstances including
frequent invaders and location. Wall Mart has locations on frequently
traveled route yet uses its wall for sales of consumer goods.
The
account of Jericho had to enter the written record some time. Moses
is thought to be the progenitor of the first five books (Pentateuch)
that made it down through centuries to David, who may actually have
been the guy that started the project to get the old testament
assembled. Solomon his son was perhaps the sponsor of scholars that
worked on correlating the Moses data.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yahwist-source
Who
wrote the book of Joshua? Joshua himself seems to have composed part
of the work. A Bible scholar looked into the issue somewhat and
publish an article here.
Keep
in mind that the Hebrew alphabet might not yet have been fully
developed, and in Wittgenstein’s paradigm of the indeterminacy of
translation the meaning of the Joshua account may be amiss. For
example;
If
there wasn’t an adequate word symbol for beat, victory or trashed,
the writer (whoever it was) who may or may not have been an
eyewitness summarized the event for ordinary understanding of people
of the day- hence- Joshua broadcast psyop music at Jericho for seven
days and the walls came down-that is, they surrendered. To defeat
Jericho meant to overcome the walls. It could have been a synonym for
victory completely disambiguated for all near and far.
Of
course one might wonder how many stones for city walls to fall would
need to fall. Would it have been adequate for a section of the wall
to collapse? If five stones were all that were left standing would
that falsify the account.
The
entire episode appears to be one of advanced psychological operations
against the Canaanite holding the interior lines inside the walled
city. For seven days an armed party circled the city with a loud horn
making a fearsome or strange sound. Given all that time the insiders
may have become terrified and undermined sections of their own walls
(at least a dissenting element may have). When the great shout rose
on the seventh day fear and terror was at a max and someone pulled
the keystones out letting the breach in the walls occur and the Jews
pour through.
Joshua 6:20 “20 So
the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it
came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the
people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so
that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him,
and they took the city.”
It
seems to be excellent history for the day. The uncertainty of the
exact meaning together with uncertainty about the line of
communication from the historical event to inclusion in the Talmud
via ancient and no longer extent sources (scrolls) make it fairly
high quality in my thought.
Critics
of course prefer a naive realist interpretation of the Bible taking
it all literally as atheist Biblical literalistic. They don’t go
far into consideration of the circumstances of Bible construction at
all.
