this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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[–] kromem@lemmy.world 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The book of Joshua is archeologically completely anachronistic and false in the Southern Levant.

The early Israelites have only been found to have been peacefully cohabitating with the Canaanites and Philistines in the early Iron Age after they emerged as a population.

Personally, I think like a number of the pre-Judahite stories, that this was coming from an Aegean/Anatolian sea peoples forced relocation into the Southern Levant that ends up absorbed into the Israelite history.

'Yeshua' in Greek can go as either Jesus or Jason.

The Argonauts allegedly had a prophet Mopsus that died in the desert as they traveled by foot from a conflict in North Africa (not long before one of their elite warriors was killed by a shepherd casting a stone from a sling, actually).

There's no walls at the Biblical Jericho at the time these events were supposedly taking place, but Mycenae around 1200 BCE has its walls fall down (and it seems not to have been an earthquake, which was a recent surprise).

There's no evidence of the Israelites being a bunch of tribes conquering nearby cities and certainly not several across an ancestral homeland, but the sea peoples were a confederation of different tribes conquering their various home cities (at a time of various natural disasters were conveniently undermining powerful kingdoms, which was likely a factor in why they were so successful and why this period ends up mythologized with divine interventions).

At one of those battles the sea people were described as being without foreskins. This seems to be the same one day battle against Egypt that Odysseus claimed to have fought right at after the Trojan war.

The parallels get really incredible when you dive deeper into some of them. The recent Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the only apiary in the "land of milk and honey" importing bees from Anatolia and worshipping an unknown bee goddess, and the song of Deborah ('bee'), prophet and leader of the Israelites, talking about "Dan stayed on their ships" is super fucking interesting for example.

I think a lot of what we think we know about the Mediterranean at the fall of the Bronze Age is due to be turned on its head as the historians of antiquity like Herodotus, Hecateus of Adbera, Atrapanus of Alexandria, Tacitus, and Manetho end up validated with a number of things modern historians have been making fun of with an air of superiority (bizarre given the relative access to documentary and oral traditions and the relationship of that to the likely impacts of survivorship bias).