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  • From: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Can absence of evidence be evidence of absence?
  • Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:09:41 -0800

To all who answered my post about Philistines and Samaritans:

The attempt to make the Philistines of Genesis&Exodus into a different, completely unknown group is motivated only by awareness of the anachronism. No ancient scholars thought there needed to be two groups, nor, I would guess, does any modern reader unaware of the anachronism. Therefore Occam's Razor would certainly come down on the side of there being only one referent for the word "Philistines", even though the way they are pictured in Genesis has little in common with the historical Philistines. If you had any plausible historical candidates for the Genesis "Philistines", that might rebalance the scales, but no one does. (In particular, the "invaders" Jim postulates do not fit the texts that refer to the "land of the Philistines". How can "invaders" be considered owners of the land?)

When I was young I read Robert E. Howard's "Conan" books, which featured a map in which countries like Kush and Cimmeria were fit together in ways that had nothing to do with anything historical. He simply used names that the reader might vaguely recall from somewhere, without attaching specific data. Similarly in the Fantastic Four, Dr.Doom was king of "Latvia", but "Latvia" was a mountain kingdom that had nothing to do with the Baltic state. It seems that the author of Gen.21&26 operated in much the same way with the name "Philistines".

As regards 2Kings17, it is amazing to me that you can read it to say that 90% of the people remained (that would NOT be just Karl's "poorest of the poor"), as archaeology shows (27K out of about 300K deported) .

2Kings17: 18 "... there was NONE LEFT (lo nisha'ar) but Judah alone"
2Kings17:20 "And Yahweh rejected ALL THE SEED OF ISRAEL (kol zera' yisra'el), and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until He had cast them out of His sight."

Not only does the text seem clear, in stating that NO ONE in conquered Israel knew Yahweh (thus a priest had to be imported to stop the lions), but once again you are going against the unanimous ancient understanding -- especially that of ancient Judaism, which used 2Kings17 as proof that the Samaritans were in no way descended from the Israelites.

In both these cases the fundamentalist reading has to do a lot of reaching and postulation of epicycles in order to save the text. But those who seek to understand the Bible according to the same standards they would apply to the Vedas, Gilgamesh or the Book of Mormon do not have to come up with any far-fetched explanatory mechanisms.

The general point then is that while we are indeed working in an area in which definitive proofs are hard to come by, it is only a matter of logic, not ideology or the "religion of naturalism", that leads us to strongly suspect that the Biblical text sometimes misrepresents the facts.


Gabe Eisenstein





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