Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Yehoshua Etzion - “The Lost Bible”


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Damien Mackey writes:

Several years back I did have some brief correspondence with Yehoshua Etzion (now deceased) regarding our common interest in the Bible and the revision of ancient history and archaeology. It was not sufficient correspondence, however, for us perhaps to have appreciated the large amount of common ground that (I have since learned) we shared.

 

Martin Sieff, who has made some outstanding contributions to the revision of ancient history, has strongly suggested that I re-visit Yehoshua’s work. To facilitate this, Martin has kindly listed the following sites, in English (because, unfortunately for me, Yehoshua wrote in Hebrew):

 
 
Not as many links as I would like but here they are.
 
 

Yehoshsua Etzion’s controversial book, “The Lost Bible”

 
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is highly regarded by some, whilst others consider it to be amateurish and verging on dangerous. This dramatic contrasting of opinions amongst scholars is well apparent from the following: http://www.avakesh.com/2007/01/the_lost_bible.html

 

Since its publication in February 1992, the book has touched off a storm of debate among Israeli researchers and has been both hailed and rejected.
 
Professor Avraham Negev - former head of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - wrote, in his foreword to the book, that "unlike the work of the traditional archaeologists ... Etzion provides a complete picture without anomalies ... his method should be adopted by any archaeologist researching a new country".
 
At the same time, Professor Ephraim Stern, editor of Qadmoniot the Quarterly of the Israel Exploration Society wrote that The Lost Bible is an example of the tendency of amateurs to interfere in scientific matters reaching new heights. Professor Yaakov Shavit, in a newspaper article, labeled Etzion as a "secular fundamentalist", and Professor David Ussishkin former head of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology warned the public in a radio interview against reading the book.
 
…. Professor Avraham Ronen - head of Haifa University’s Institute of Archaeology - wrote to the publisher that the book [contains] many amazing and stimulating new ideas, and the former president of Israel Mr. Haim Herzog stated that reading The Lost Bible turns one’s interest in archaeology into an exceptionally fascinating adventure. ….
 
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To whet the reader’s appetite, here is Martin Sieff’s own assessment of Yehoshua Etzion’s work which “goes far beyond the work of Anati and Cohen” (VELIKOVSKIAN, Vol. II, No 1, (extracts): http://www.yehoshuaetzion.com/pages/english/lost_bible/TA-siff.html
 
Was Shishak of the Bible really Thutmose III as Immanuel Velikovsky claimed? Or was he really Ramses II, as claim Peter James, David Rohl and other proponents of the historical model long pushed by publishers of the British-based Catastrophism and Chronology Review? Did the Exodus occur at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, as they and John Bimson argue, and as Velikovsky himself believed? Or did it take place at the end of the Early Bronze Age, as Donovan Courville, Tom Chetwynd, Stan Vaniger, Emmett Sweeney, Brad Aaronson and I have argued?
Over the years, it seems that detailed new models for the radical revision of ancient history have been falling faster than leaves in the New England autumn... However, amid this babel of tongues and theories, much significant work has emerged within the past five years or so; from both the academic mainstream and revisionists camps...
It is my contention that the thrust of this work establishes a coherent model that solves many major problems of the revision of ancient history and opens fruitful roads of research to exploring many more...
Professor Anati, who teaches paleoethnology at Italy’s University of Lecce and directs the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici, is probably the world’s leading expert on prehistoric rock art. He summarized his work in Biblical Archaeological Review article [“Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?”, BAR, July/August 1985, pp. 42-57], than wrote richly-illustrated book, The mountain of God [New York, 1986] which described... Mount Karkom in Israel’s southwest Negev Desert, a sacred site of immense popularity throughout the Early Bronze Age but deserted thereafter. In his book, Anati recorded an astonishing array of finds that appeared to correlate with the book of Exodus’s account of the Israelite experience at Sinai...
Dr. Cohen, former Director of Antiquities of the Negev, published an article in Biblical Archaeological Review [“The Mysterious Middle Bronze I People”, BAR, July/August 1983, pp. 16-29], where he discussed the mysterious inhabitants of the Negev who were there no more than two generations, possibly less, during the Early Bronze/ Middle Bronze transition period... In his article, Cohen did not come out and actually say that “the Mysterious Middle Bronze I people” were the Israelites of the books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but he relentlessly piled up one striking parallel after another...
A new book, The Lost Bible [Tel Aviv, Israel, 1992] by Yehoshua Etzion, goes far beyond the work of Anati and Cohen, providing the most detailed archaeological reinterpretation yet of the Israeli strata.
Etzion’s work follows the general outlines of Courville’s work, which he acknowledges... However, Etzion excelled in the rigor, scholarship and detail of his work. He studied the original excavation reports of all the major digs in Israel during this century and quoted extensively from them. When his work appeared, published in Israel, it could not be ignored. Published by Schocken Books, Israel’s largest publisher, his book sold well, attracting both pro and con articles in the mainstream Hebrew press. Some leading Israeli archaeologists, in an eerie echo of the “Velikovsky Affair”, actually threatened Schocken Books with an academic book boycott if that company published the book. This provoked widespread outrage and, unlike the Macmillan Publishing Company, Velikovsky’s first publisher, Schocken Books stood firm, put out the book and made a handsome profit from it.
A few mainstream archaeologists publicly praised Etzion’s handling of the material in their own areas of specialty, and Professor Abraham Negev, one of the world’s leading authorities on the archaeology of Israel, welcomed the book as an important contribution to the archaeological debate.
Etzion’s work has yet to be published in English translation, but any historical revisionist who can read Hebrew should order a copy as soon as possible. I believe that it is the most outstanding work published by any revisionist since Ages in Chaos, volume I, came out 41 years ago. Etzion very carefully limits the scope of the work to Israeli, or Palestinian archaeology, and does not suggest how the chronologies and stratigraphical interpretations of neighboring lands are affected by his work. This is not to duck the issue; as the reader will see, others have already started to take up that challenge.
What Etzion does achieve is to produce a work that, in its depth, scope, command of sources and documentation, is likely to prove as authoritative as Claude Schauffer’s Stratigraphie Comparee [London, England, 1948], a book that influenced Velikovsky greatly. Etzion produces a coherent model fitting the historical record to the archaeological strata over more than 2,000 years, starting with the Chalcolithic period, which he [identifies] with the time of the patriarch Abraham...
 
Mackey’s comment: This accords perfectly with the archaeological model for Abram as established by Dr. John Osgood, which I have followed. See e.g. my:
 
Better archaeological model for Abraham
 
 
Martin Sieff continues:
 
…. Etzion gives more credibility to the radical revisionists than anyone, including Velikovsky, has ever done before. He has made radical revisionism intellectually respectable in the Israeli archaeological mainstream so that the leading Israeli archaeologists, including Professor Abraham Negev, are for the first time procured to debate the subject in an open and fair manner. This is a development whose importance cannot be overly estimated. Etzion’s work also opens up rich and rewarding lines of research for the radical revisionists. I am personally convinced that any future radical consensus will have to coalesce around his work.
 
 
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