My Midterm

3a). Outline the main argument in “FALSE TESTAMENT.”
3b). Offer several ("five to seven") specific examples of why they call it "false testament."

Answer:

In "False Testament", Daniel Lazare presents arguments based on modern Archaeology that he feels refutes the Bible's claim to portraying history in an accurate sense. In particular he is claiming that within the last quarter century, archaeologists have not been able to prove any of the assumptions the Bible has made about ancient Israelites. He contends that rather than a group who fought their way to the Holy Land, ancient Israelites were only a native culture that developed west of the Jordan around 1200 B.C. He further contends that the key leaders were not real but instead pieced together from various stories of folk lore. Even the most important “Davidic Empire” was nothing more that an invention from Jerusalem-based priests in seventh and eight centuries B.C. who were only interested in shining up their national history by creating a grand past that would have been appropriate to such grand empire. Lazare then tries to explain how the Biblical fiction came about. He claims that the books of the Torah, who the Bible credits as being written by Moses, were instead written by Jewish scribes that had been recently released from captivity. He states that they simply pulled together a collection of ancient writings. He then equates the key figures of Abraham and Isaac on the same realm of heroes within Greek or Norse mythology. He feels that these books were more an artificial construct than genuine chronicle of historical events.

For example Lazare article reveals the following accounts that he feels are not credible, thus false testimony. In the case of Abraham, Biblical stories indicate that his family left the city of Ur in the second millennium B.C. to the land of Canaan. Lazare claims that there is no archeological evidence that Abraham ever lived based on what is written about him.

Regarding the actual Exodus of people from Egypt, Lazare claims that there is a growing volume of evidence regarding actual Egyptian border defenses and desert sites that indicates that the actual flight never occurred. Lazare claims that contemporary Egyptian records are completely silence when it comes to issues regarding the mass escape of thousands of Hebrew slaves. He feels that this also proves that the actual numbers were also exaggerated.

Lazare then goes on to contend as further evidence that when archeologists began to shift their attention from surveying the lowland cities where great battles were said to take place into the highlands near the present West Bank. What they found indicated that Canaan was not actual entered from the outside as Biblical records indicated but evidence was instead found to point out that the Israelite culture actually arose around 1200 B.C. as nomadic shepherds who settled down in the nearby uplands. Thus there was no mass migration/escape; rather the Hebrew people were in fact a native people who had never left in the first place.

Lazare also says the Bible makes frequent reference to that of caravans being conducted on Camels, however, analysis of the ancient bones found that camels were not in use until well after the time period mentioned for the accounts. In citing another example, Lazare comments on the account in Genesis where Isaac was seeking a King of the Philistines. He claims that this was also inaccurate, as archeology has not able to prove that the presence of the Philistine people even occupied this area till a much later time period.

Lazare goes into detail regarding the Biblical accounts of David and his son Solomon who were said to rule the southern kingdom of Judah from 1005 to 931 B.C. The accounts also indicate that they had also ruled the northern kingdom in a rare moment of national unity and power. Accounts of Solomon indicated that he was a master builder and an accumulator / collector. However, there has been no evidence of his accumulation or inscriptions on monuments or diplomatic correspondence found to indicated that his reign in fact existed. In the 1970’s and 1980’s countervailing evidence suggested that instead of David using his power base in Judah to conquer the north, shows instead that the area was too poor and sparsely populated to support such military expeditions. While Solomon had once been credited with construction of major palaces in the northern cities, recent archeological analysis of pottery shards (including carbon dating techniques) support that the construction of the palaces actual postdated Solomon’s reign by a century of more.