Slaves to the QuickFix(tm)
On matters of archaeology, science, and Torah.
One of the things that strikes me about the people that try every Pesah to shlug1 it or the people who observe it is how short-sighted and ultimately “QuickFix” their thinking is.
While there are certainly problems that make it more than a bit muddy, there is zero finality to the thing.
Archaeology as a process. A quick history is in order.
To start, let’s consider archaeology as a science. The “first” start it is known to have is actually a guy from 550BCE, in Mesopotamia. Nabonidus was a king from the Neo-Babylonians (who were like a second try at an empire based in Babylon). Strangely enough he might’ve been married to Nebuchadnezzar II’s daughter….Yes, that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. He is theorized to even be from the Sargonid dynasty of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Yes, the same one with illustrious names like Sennacherib.
But wait, there is more about Nabonidus. He’s the father of Belshazzar. Yes, that Belshazzar from the Book of Daniel. He also happened to lose his empire to Cyrus. Yes, that Cyrus the Great. He may have even lived, if we believe Berossus who was a Babylonian historian/writer during the lifetime of Alexander the Great, until the age of Darius the Great. Hmm…..The same Darius that invaded Greece and whose son was that Xerxes from the 300 story.
Starting to see it come together?
The actual start as a science
We could point to numerous curious folks but as far as wiki(and other googlable sources) are concerned, the first excavation was at Stonehenge in the 1600s by John Aubrey. He put together maps, stylistic evaluations of handwriting, architecture, costume, shield shapes, and other things that interested him.
The next guy after him is Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who was the Spanish military engineer that accidentally dug up Pompeii and Herculaneum while trying to evaluate the estate of Charles III of Spain in the area. Charlie was, at the time, also King of Naples and Sicily and a Duke in other parts of pre-Unification Italy and had sent his people to look for mineral wealth to exploit. It should be noted that Roque eventually was accused of mishandling artifacts, leading to him walking off from the project and dying in shame.
And so a slew of later European rich guys and engineers on behalf of rich guys, having found time to look at neat stuff around them or dig up neat stuff. Some were more detailed than others but basically they were grave robbers and construction crews who irreversibly destroyed whatever context was present in those days.
Some folks in other, related fields like geology and biology, applied their developments to the field at their own convenience.
What’s this mean in essence?
Well, that’s the big question…and the answer as I see it is: the science is still developing. It has a very terrible history of destroying, stealing or making shit up to fit personal and national agendas. Even today you have the AAA(American Anthropological Association) disavowing Israel in BDS measures on behalf of the poor poor Browns…er….”Palestinians”….while ignoring the obvious demography of Israel being 30% those same Browns with a different ID and some 30+ more percent Jewish Browns and Blacks. While ignoring the obvious historical references to Israelite and Judean presence, and the obvious historic Jewish presence in places like the “Arab cities” of Akko(Acre) and Yafo(Jaffa) and Lod(Lydda) for way beyond the Exile.
Why? Marxism. Post-modernism. The usual sicknesses of the last 100 years.
There is nothing completely objective to be found in archaeology. Want that? Go to mathematics, physics, and those sorts of things currently under assail by the hordes of Marxist thinkers with their “1+1=2 is racist” ideology.
My thoughts on why the dating and “finds” arguments suck
Dating is an imprecise science. Some of it is consistent but flawed like the tree-ring analysis. Other things like Carbon-14 rely on woowoo magic, even though you might be aging two objects (like gravel scraped from a wall plus your actual substance) or aging things like rock which don’t have reliable C14 or metals which have been..well…given carbon from outside in an unknown number of meltdowns before final shape.
Not to mention the danger of finding fill layers and such. Where I work has been worked on since the 1967 capture and demolition of the Mughrabi slums under the Kotel. I’ve found plastic Coca Cola bottles from the 90s in tunnels cut by the Umayyad Dynasty Arabs into Roman era paving stones that make up a street. It’s that easy to mix things up and that hard to separate between things. Yes, some spots are clean….but they’re pretty deep underground or inside of spaces that nobody goes to.
There is a rock with writing (Gali, a name) that was a reused very large stone: guess where I found it? Inside a wall ~2-3 meters up from “floor level” of a sewage tunnel that tourists can walk through. It was used as part of a series of filled cells to support a plaza up top. When is it’s date? How many times has that stone been moved around and reused?
But you don’t need to excavate to understand this. Go look at the Old City. Most of the Jewish Quarter looks ancient but it’s really not. It’s all post-1967. Why? The Jordanians destroyed it . Even the non-renovated areas like that on St. James Street (the winding path downhill to the Kotel that isn’t through the Arab shuk) are only partially the original stones….and if you go to Mt. Zion, you’ll notice gravestones or what look like them in the walls of the monastery there. It’s not uncommon to find repurposed stone. Even the Ottoman wall around the entirety of the Old City has reused ancient stones from previous eras (Keep in mind there was a brief period where Jerusalem wasn’t allowed to have a wall under the Mameluks and during the Crusades).
Finds. Let me hash this out a bit.
Finds are called that because… you find them. Things that you find, you know exist. There is no doubt. There is no theory. They are there. A great many things are found partially and that is why the “finds don’t support it” crowd are stupid.
Entire pots have been reconstructed based on single or a small quantity of chips that fit a certain style….and it’s because examples from elsewhere exist.
See this? The white is an educated assumption from previous finds or logical conclusions about an item’s functionality was. How much of the pot is original substance? I’ve personally worked with less pieces and seen an aftermath assembled from them by the pottery expert.
One of the big flaws of finds is the fragility. They shatter, melt, fall to dust, tear, and every other means of destruction in an ironically sad and funny way. Thousands of years of people standing, sitting, walking on top…with rain, snow, whatever…only to be pulled out of the ground and poof there it goes. Sometimes it goes poof from exposure to light or other things.
Therefore, claiming “ohhh it doesn’t exist because the proof doesn’t exist” is not at all a “big-brain” move outside of rhetorical scenarios evaluating for the present moment. Literally all of science has gradually accumulated knowledge and changed theories over time to fit reality as known in its’ time. Archaeology can and will catch up if it hasn’t already at the moment of writing this or reading this.
Where other sciences will have an easier time though is their limitations are more flexible. A unique pot smashed and ground to dust is statistically more likely than a unique organism or material that will be totally lost forever without any possible way to know it. Dinosaurs and other creatures have been found long after and still partially recoverable compared to things that may never be recovered (like writing on a substance that fades).
As it goes with regard to remains, I think Happy isn’t too off-kilter here in his comments vs Bpsb. We know certain battles happened with massive casualty counts. We know massive cities existed for long periods of time. Yet we don’t have the remains to justify the numbers. How many thousands(millions?) died in Yerushalayim and there is a pitifully small amount of ancient burial sites relative to the numbers accepted to have lived and died here. Yet underneath Paris is a catacomb system for miles. Same for Milan. Same for Rome. Same for many places actually. Here is a picture of a graveyard from New York (the Green-Wood Cemetery…from 1838, a massive 478 acres in size).
How many of these massive bad boys just eat up real estate in a given area? Clearly Jerusalem did exist for a long time and was a major population center. Clearly Carthage did exist and did fall. Clearly people lived there significantly enough to push back Rome over a long period of time. So where are the bones? If we take the edgy anti-Exoduser stance, Carthage never existed.
Clearly Cannae happened and nobody says it didn’t because there aren’t heaps of bones somewhere, but again the anti-Exoduser would be forced to concede that lack of remains found means that Hannibal never did it and the Romans who lamented it were liars despite our knowing it solely because Romans told us so.
Here is Merv. Note “one of the world’s largest”.
Modern cases to consider
We know Nanking was absolutely destroyed. We have estimates about how many the Japanese killed.
Do you see it? In dispute. Where are the corpses?! This was something in our grandparent’s own time. You’d think it was a given….but it’s not. It’s in dispute.
Want another example where this is applied? It’s going to make you sick to your stomach.
That’s right. People deny the Holocaust even as the last remnants of the generation live. It’s all the same arguments too. “Too small”. “Where are the bodies”. So on and so forth. Yet as I said, archaeology eventually catches up.
So it’s good to be prudent and patient, rather than presume lack of evidence renders something absolutely impossible.
The Exodus
The point of the Exodus is national formation of an identity: the Children of Israel/Bnei Israel. When people assault the Exodus, they’re assaulting not a historic event or a theoretical event of history, they’re assaulting the identity that emerged from it.
Some use it to justify the pro-Arab cause of making Israel into Palestine. Some use it to justify not adhering to halacha, as if not wanting to follow it needs more than that and as if disproving will somehow be taken any more seriously than “I just don’t feel like it”.2 Some use it because they see themselves as White(tm) American/British/Canadian/Australian/whatever folks who really are from Poland because that’s where papa and bubbe are from and that’s the sole representation of “where a person is from”. Yes, there are silly folks like that who have the inconvenient inability to realize that they’re from Country X in the same way their Papa/Bubbe were from Poland: temporarily there for a number of generations because someone before them was from somewhere else (i.e. Eretz Yisrael).
The QuickFix
Because history, archaeology, and indeed science in the broadest terms is a thing that takes time, it can conveniently be placed into narratives and used to downplay narratives. Today’s science is not 20 years ago’s science. Today’s science is certainly not 200 years ago’s science. It most certainly won’t be 200 years from now’s science.
When someone invokes it in these scenarios, it’s lazy. Sloppy. You call yourself an intellectual but you conveniently overlook the shifting nature of it as a quick fix. It’s not likely in your lifetime you’ll be proven wrong and that’s all you care about. A true intellectual has the capacity and the ethical desire to leave room for systems of time outside their own; leaving room for the eventual time when a greater understanding is achieved than their present one rather than stating with finality.
foil;ruin;disprove
It won’t. Telling people you think they’re fatally wrong in a way that is hurting them and you isn’t going to “release you”, it’s just going to burden them to resolve the wrongness in a way they don’t want to. They’re happy with their choices and views and beliefs and you rendering them wrong is way more mental energy than anyone’s going to ever want to expend just to re-evaluate and adjust their lives. Just eat it that you don’t feel like abiding by something and leave it at that, man up and grow some balls and take responsibility for your actions.