Re: Writing Tablet Graphology

Tom P wrote:
....
One more reason you lack credibility and your posts are considered nincompoopery until proven otherwise. But I digress, to quote Mark Twain. Back to your alleged stone containing Genesis 2.

Criticized by a dead man whose sole known talents were writing and piloting steamboats. Such a stinging professional criticism.

You do not possess the expertise to date anything, so your date is meaningless. But I am willing to reconsider if you post a verifiable vita demonstrating you have the education, training, and experience to date anything.

I asked the opinions of several rabbis. Would rabbis lie?

I doubt you have ever traveled to the West Bank, although I could be wrong. Again, offer evidence and I may reconsider.

What would that have to do with the stone itself?

I doubt you ever participated in any dig near Hebron or anywhere else. Again, if you can post verifiable documentation that you did any such thing, I may reconsider.

What would that have to do with the stone itself?

I doubt you found or have any such "irregular stone tablet" with Genesis 2 "graven" on it in any language. Not that you would recognize any ancient language if you did stumble onto it.

What does that have to do with the stone itself?

No artifact or manuscript should be considered authentic until it is examined by people with the education, training, and experience to date artifacts and manuscripts. You are not one of those people. Neither am I. By the time you and I know of the existence of such manuscripts or artifacts, their authenticity has generally been established, at least to some preliminary degree.

Why would rabbis lie? Only an antisemite would say all rabbis are liars.

I never wrote that every artifact and/or manuscript must be considered authentic until proven otherwise. I asked this of JTEM: Why is your initial presumption that every writing is forged until conclusively proved otherwise?

Now that you have played the game and shown I have used the same methods as believers use to establish their claims of biblical evidence I will debunk my claim in the most obvious way possible. This is one of the methods I use to demonstrate the gullibility of believers.

My claim cannot possibly be true unless there existed chapter division at the date I gave. Therefore I am claiming something to have something that did not exist.

How hard was that?

Similarly believers can and do convince themselves to believe all kinds of nonsense things about bibleland while overlooking the long established fact that the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah never existed therefore there can be no evidence of their existence. They convince themselves such things could have been created in times when there is no evidence for any more than a rural farming culture.

The lovely and talented JTEM never refuted that notion of an automatic presumption of forgery, and in fact defended that particular bit of jackassery. If you agree with it and defend it, you too are uttering jackassery. Shocking. A Holocaust denier uttering historical jackassery. Shocking, I say!

That is because you are not very bright. Forgeries have been an industry in bibleland since the mother of Constantine went there to exchange gold for artifacts and relics. It is not permitted to interperate things found in bibleland using the bible. That method was shown worthless and misleading and downright stupid in the 19th c.

Obviously, there should be no presumption of authenticity or forgery until the object has been examined.

I also wrote the following: "I think anyone alleging that a certain artifact or manuscript is a forgery has a responsibility to offer evidence to support every such allegation." I stand by that. I also stand by this: I think anyone alleging that a certain artifact or manuscript is authentic has a responsibility to offer evidence to support every such allegation. Prejudices and presumptions have no place in dating anything by any method. Why don't JTEM and you understand that?

The only obligation is to critique the basis for the claim of authenticity. If the finder cannot satisfy the critique then there is nothing no matter how "important" the find. It is the same for all ancient finds. It is much more important for finds supposed related to the bible as there are so many bible believers who are archaeologists and believers being a primary source of financing and of course the ancient cottage industry of manufacturing artifacts.

In this case important means desperate. I chose to claim a tablet inscription as a few years ago there was much excitement over one with a version of a bible story on a contribution to building the (mythical) first temple. The excitement claim from the fact it would have been the first and only evidence of something older than the Septuagint.

....

By the time you or JTEM or myself has any notion that such an artifact or manuscript exists, such artifacts and manuscripts have generally already been examined by more than one person with credentials to offer an informed, and usually expert, opinion concerning the dating and authenticity of the object. Or do you claim for yourself some sort of inside or prepublication information concerning artifacts and manuscripts? Please, do explain that if you claim it.

As a matter of fact I myself have usually been the first to post press releases on claims of such discoveries for the last ten years or so. I include commentary to show why the press release claim is nonsense. What I have noticed is people posting as though the reporters' description are always fact even when the archaeologists said nothing of the kind. For the last few years Mazor has been the source of most of "astounding" discoveries and she has created the fool claims for what she has found. She is also funded by a near criminal organization called Elad whose primary objective is to find evidence under the homes of non-Jews so they can be evicted and be replaced by shopping malls for Jews only.

In replying to the believers I eventually get around to asking them to cite from the journal publication instead of the press release. Unsurprisingly these newspaper claims never seem to get into any professional publication. (BAR is magazine not a professional journal.) So far as I can tell Mazor has not published a single one of her amazing finds since started finding things in Jerusalem three or so years ago.

I also remind you that most all of the "astonishing" finds were made in the 19th c. before there was a science of archaeology. With the development of scientific methods and with thousands of times more digging in bibleland nothing more than modestly curious has been found.

I see a very simple explanation for that. Do you?

My explanation calls for a re-evaluation of all finds from the 19th c. as though it had been discovered yesterday.

--
When Israel talks about the city of Jerusalem it is talking
about occupied Jerusalem.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4163
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtml a2
Sun Jul 19 14:35:35 EDT 2009
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