On Sept. 24, the president of Iran informed reporters that Israel has "no roots there in history" in the Middle East. Now a lot of good jokes come to mind at the expense of this clueless man, but, seriously folks, he has at least conveyed an important truth: he recognizes that Israel's historical presence in that world since antiquity matters -- matters enough to deny it. Now, the Bible pictures an Israelite-Jewish population and government there starting in the 12th century B.C.E. and continuing until the end of the Bible's history about 800 years later. But how do we know if this is true? As scholars, we can't just say, "The Bible tells us so." We need to see evidence that could be presented to any honest person, whether that person be religious or not, Jewish or Christian or from some other religion or no religion, or from Mars.
In the first place, the land is filled with Hebrew inscriptions, so I begin with that. These are not just an occasional inscription on a piece of pottery or carved in a wall. Nor should we even start with one or two of the most famous archaeological finds. Rather, there are thousands of inscriptions. They come from hundreds of excavated towns and cities. They are in the Hebrew language. They include people's names that bear forms of the name of their God: YHWH. This means names like:
"May YHWH bless you and keep you. May YHWH make his face shine to you and give you peace."
It is the words of the Priestly Blessing in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 6:24-26). That's just one inscription. The distinguished scholar Jeffrey Tigay of the University of Pennsylvania sums up: "The names of more than 1,200 pre-exilic Israelites are known from Hebrew inscriptions and foreign inscriptions referring to Israel." Of these, 557 have names with YHWH as their divine element, 77 have names with El.
As for those foreign inscriptions, texts from the neighboring lands refer to the people, to their kings, to their government, to their armies and to their cities. The basic fact: everybody knew that Israel was there: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arameans, the Moabites, the Persians. Pharaoh Merneptah (1213-1203 B.C.E.) refers to the people of Israel in a stone stele. Pharaoh Shoshenk I (c. 945-924 B.C.E.) describes his campaign in which he refers to cities in Israel (including Ayalon, Beth-Shan, Megiddo, Rehob and Taanach). Assyrian King King Shalmaneser III names King "Ahab the Israelite" among his opponents in his Kurkh monument and names and pictures King Jehu on his Black Obelisk. Seven other Assyrian emperors also refer to Israel and Judah and name kings who are also mentioned in the Bible. The Babylonian sources, too, refer to the Jews and their monarchy in the years after the Babylonians replaced the Assyrian empire. And the record continues when the Persians replace the Babylonians, as documented in the Cylinder of Cyrus, the Persian emperor. Cyrus' decree in 538 B.C.E., let the exiled Jews return to their land; it was followed by an influx of Jewish population. There was population growth from the reign of Darius I to Artaxerxes I. The country that the Babylonians had conquered was reestablished as a state of Judah (yehud medintha) within the Persian umbrella. You want irony? Persia, now called Iran, the country that re-established the Jews' country in biblical times, now has a president who says that Israel has no roots there.
Also from that period come the Elephantine papyri, a collection of documents that include letters from the Jewish community in Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E. to the Jewish community back in Jerusalem.
Closer to home, right across the Jordan River from Israel was Moab, in what is now Jordan. In the ninth century B.C.E., its King Mesha erected a stele referring to Israel and its King Omri. He also refers to the royal House of David. An inscription erected by an Aramean (what is today Syria) also refers to a king of the House of David. In all, these ancient texts refer to 15 kings of Israel and Judah who are known from the Bible, and all are referred to in the right periods.
Material culture (in other words: stuff) fills out this picture. Thousands of people have now walked through the Siloam Tunnel under Jerusalem. It is a major feat of engineering. It is a passage nearly six football fields long underground. A tremendous project like this and others that we shall see reflect a major organized society with a government that could bring such an undertaking off. If it were done today, the governor would be there for photo opportunities, and the architect and builder would be honored. When it was done 2,700 years ago, it took a substantial number of workers and tremendous cost.
Likewise, when my students joined in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of Jerusalem under the archaeologist Yigal Shiloh, they uncovered the now visible "stepped stone structure." Whatever purpose it served -- defense, soil or water retention, a platform for some other major structure -- it was a huge project. It wasn't something that a couple of friends assembled. It required community organization, planning, design, a large number of construction workers and funding. The archaeologist John S. Holladay, Jr. thus speaks of the "archaeologically discernible characteristics of a state" from the 10th century B.C.E. on. These include a pattern of urban settlements in a hierarchy of size: cities, then towns, then villages, then hamlets. They have primary seats of government (i.e., capital cities): Jerusalem and Samaria. Then they have major cities as regional centers: Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer and Lachish. They have centralized bureaucracy. They have frontier defenses. They have standing armies. They have economics based on tribute, taxes and tolls. They have a writing system. Holladay lists all of these and more in showing how we know that there was a populous society with a central government from this early stage of the biblical period. Holladay published this in 1995. We can now add more: central planning of the architecture and layout of towns, a distinctive alphabet, standard weights and measures. And we can add that the Israelite sites lack pork bones. The archaeologist Elizabeth Bloch-Smith seconds the point, that the material culture is clearly Israelite starting from the Iron II period (950-600 B.C.E.) at the latest.
We can also see the changes in the Hebrew scripts on the inscriptions developing through time, and we can actually date texts based on this. (An eighth century letter aleph doesn't look the same as a seventh or sixth century aleph.) The study of these scripts and the inscriptions is called epigraphy. Many biblical scholars go through training in this field. The point is that this doesn't happen overnight. It takes centuries for these scripts to go through all these changes. So (1) we can date texts, and (2) we know that the Hebrew of these inscriptions was the language of the people of Israel and Judah, not just for a year or a decade or a century, but for many centuries.
In parallel, we can trace the development of the Hebrew language as found in the Bible and the other ancient texts. We didn't move from Shakespearean English to Valley Girl English overnight. That takes centuries. Likewise, the Hebrew of the Song of Miriam and the Song of Deborah, which are the two oldest texts in the Bible, is different from the Hebrew of the late book of Nehemiah. Hebrew existed as a language that went through all the natural stages of development that we find in any language that people continuously speak and write over very long periods of time.
And then there is the literature itself. What we now know of who wrote the Bible reflects, conservatively, that there were 75 to 100 authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible, and quite possibly a lot more. The literary study of the Bible that has blossomed in the last 40 years has revealed the artistry in so many of these works. Such a huge quantity of prose, poetry and law did not pop up overnight. Or in a year. Or in a century. It had to take centuries and a thriving culture to compose. Great literature (like a bacillus) can only develop in a culture. It is not chance that Russia produced so many superior novels, or that the British isles produced so much superior poetry. For ancient Israel to have produced so many fine authors required a culture that welcomed and fostered such literature over centuries. And the linguistic evidence confirms this, and so does the epigraphic evidence, and so does the archaeological evidence.
The point of this is how vast the array of the evidence is. This is not a vague hypothesis. It is not formulated by overestimating or overinterpreting a single little find. It is not like an Indiana Jones movie (though we love them), in which the archaeologist goes looking for a single object. This is a civilization: between 400 and 500 cities excavated, hundreds of years, thousands of items in writing, millions of people. This evidence was not discovered by an individual or even by a small group. It was assembled by hundreds of archaeologists, with tens of thousands of workers, coming from many religions and many countries. Some archaeologists hoped to confirm the Bible. Some seemed to take pleasure in throwing the Bible into doubt. There have been frauds, and there have been mistakes, aplenty, as in any other field. But the mass of the evidence remains available to all. We can see and continually refine a picture of ancient Israel.
We can (and do) have a million arguments about almost every aspect of the Bible. But what we cannot deny is the existence of the world that produced it. That fact is not true just because the Bible says so. It is true because practically everything says so.
We don't all agree on matters relating to the present politics of Israel and its neighbors. That's OK. It's even healthy. But let no one repeat this nonsense about Israel not having its historical roots there. One cannot understand the Jews or Israel if one displaces the first 1,000 years of their history.
Sources:
Rabbi Jacob Elisha Fine: Killing Our Living Waters: Sukkot's Water Judgment (VIDEO)
Eitan Press: Dreams of a Future Temple: The 9th of Av and Dispelling Hatred With Love
Rabbi Abraham Cooper: An Open Letter to Dr. Talaat Afifi, Egyptian Minister of Religion
They refused and made a war against newborn Israel.
It is called Jordan, the majority of people that live in Jordan are Palestinians. Do you think the river stop anybody from traveling across?
The term itself was made up by the English, it is not a real type of ethnic group or religous group, many of them are Christians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people
We have to states made up of people that have lived in what is called Palestine, Jordan and Isreal.
The fact that many of the Jews converted to Islam during the time of control does not make they a unigue people.
The kurds are a people that have no country at all, not true of the palestinians.
2. their historical ties are well proven.
3. they have a continuing identity
4. their is no other such group in existence
5. their physical persecution throughout history is unparalleled.
6. the nations of the world gave legal authorisation for millions of individual people to come and set up a dynamic, thriving economy and society, which continues to transform the land, despite widespread opposition in actions as well as thoughts, the ferocity of which is easily proven in the replies to this article.
and you still want to tell them **** off?
3. Do you think that Jewish people are unique because "they have a continuing identity?" There are many groups of people that could say the same, what makes that special?
4. There are no other such groups as Mormons, so?
5. Their physical persecution, is no different than the persecution of hundreds of groups of people, ie; black, white, poor, homosexual, christian, muslim, Armenian, women, atheist, etc. etc.
6. Yes a few nations gave authoriazation for jewish people to move to Palistine, but not to Occupy & torment the rightful inhabitants for decades upon decades. Since then there have been numerous UN resolutions against the actions of the "thriving society" due to their lack of common decency. So, YES I do want to tell them to **** off!
This history of the middle east is full of wars, people that are Arab today where Jewish and maybe even Christians at one point.
The concept in the middle east was to make it you had to change, otherwise you were wiped out.
"Genetic research study suggests that present-day Palestinians have roots that go back to the ancient inhabitants of the area.[92]"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people
Yes, the Jewish people, most of the Palestinians and Jews share a gene, they are the same people.
Back then, conquest and colonization were acceptable activities.
Today, that is not the case.
If society acts wrongly but lives in a world where they do not realize they are acting wrongly that is one thing, it is quite another to refuse to compensate those who suffered in taht period after you realize you acted wrongly.
More so, if we consider slavery, from the start there was opposition to slavery. The only people who supported slavery are those who gained from it, while it was morally repungnant to the lower classes, religious classes, and non-colonial elites. In fact, it was essential to the British response to American actions when in a propoganda booklet they wrote "why is it the slave owners that call for representation?"
So in many cases people KNEW it was morally repungnant but did it anyhow.
The argument from past context is faulty at its core, and if its legitimate than I can argue from a subjective past where states can only be judged based on their subjective development. You cannot morally expect the same of South Sudan as you would America because they lack the institutions that come with age and experience. So rather than saying that in 1608 it was ok for America to act like this, I will say that what was acceptable to America at its inception and the "growing pains" associated with developing a state was acceptable to some degree.
Though it's nuts to claim that Jews don't have a long history in that whole area, regardless of religion. It's important to note, that history goes back much much farther than 1300 BCE,.......
How do we know that Israeli tribes didn't conquer a previous culture and take over that land from people with their own roots there.
Taken from : http://oaks.nvg.org/hebrews.html
Read "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.
Other archaeologists have established that Asherah (God the Mother) the Canaanite wife of God, was still worshiped by some Israelites even after the Babylonian exile.
The indigenous Jews in Israel share the same gene pool as Palestinians.
Some culture always slaughters another culture for the benefit of their own.
this history of humanity has been one of constant flux and movement
If there is concern about entitlement to land through roots, start by giving Manhattan back to the native Americans
It is called ETHICS, maybe just a purely Western idea.
In addition to that, there was the Sassanid Empire that controlled Jerusalem in 614a.d. prior to Muslim's first conquering & colonizing of Jerusalem. The Persians of that time even allowed for Jewish autonomy.
It's amazing that a President of a Nation, can be so completely oblivious of the history of his own Country where he was born, raised & maintained residence.
It is true that as a Jew I have almost uncontrollable lusts. I have always thought it came from my Dad.
I can't blame my parents either. Wait. Yes, I can.
"Mr Ahmadinejad has repeatedly downplayed the extent of the Holocaust, describing it as a myth used to justify the existence of Israel." UK Prime Minister Tony Blair called the Holocaust conference "shocking beyond belief".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6172807.stm
Many Iranians must be wondering why they have the right to deny the Holocaust with impunity, but not to question their own leaders without risking jail, BBC correspondent says.
"There is an assumption by deniers that if they can just find one tiny crack in the Holocaust structure, the entire edifice will come tumbling down."
"After the collapse of the Communist government in 1989, the plaque at Auschwitz State Museum was removed and the official death toll given as 1.1 million. Holocaust deniers have attempted to use this change as propaganda, in the words of the Nizkor Project:
Deniers often use the 'Four Million Variant' as a stepping stone to leap from an apparent contradiction to the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, again perpetrated by a conspiracy. They hope to discredit historians by making them seem inconsistent. If they can't keep their numbers straight, their reasoning goes, how can we say that their evidence for the Holocaust is credible? One must wonder which historians they speak of, as most have been remarkably consistent in their estimates of a million or so dead... Few (if any) historians ever believed the Museum's four million figure, having arrived at their own estimates independently. The museum's inflated figures were never part of the estimated five to six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, so there is no need to revise this figure."
"They (the Western powers) launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show and then they support the Jews."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8022125/Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-his-outlandish-quotes.html