The original manuscripts that make up the Bible were written over a 1,500 year time span by more than 40 authors from every walk of life including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, and scholars.
They were written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; in times of war and times of peace; and written on three different continents: Asia, Africa and Europe.
The fact is that some archaeological discoveries in confirming part of the Bible simultaneously cast doubt on the accuracy of other parts. The Moabite Stone, for example, corroborates the biblical claim that there was a king of Moab named Mesha, but the inscription on the stone gives a different account of the war between Moab and the Israelites recorded in 2 Kings 3. Mesha’s inscription on the stone claimed overwhelming victory, but the biblical account claims that the Israelites routed the Moabite forces and withdrew only after they saw Mesha sacrifice his eldest son as a burnt offering on the wall of the city the Moabites had retreated to (2 Kings 3:26-27). So the Moabite Stone, rather than corroborating the accuracy of the biblical record,
gives reason to suspect that both accounts are biased. Mesha’s inscription gave an account favorable to the Moabites, and the biblical account was slanted to favor the Israelites. The actual truth about the battle will probably never be known.
Other archaeological discoveries haven’t just cast doubt on the accuracy of some biblical information but have shown some accounts to be completely erroneous. A notable example would be the account of Joshua’s conquest and destruction of the Canaanite city of Ai. According to Joshua 8, Israelite forces attacked Ai, burned it, “utterly destroyed all the inhabitants,” and made it a “heap forever” (vs:26-28). Extensive archaeological work at the site of Ai, however, has revealed that the city was destroyed and burned around 2400 B. C., which would have been over a thousand years before the time of Joshua…
…The work of Kathleen Kenyon produced similar results in her excavation of the city of Jericho. Her conclusion was that the walls of Jericho were destroyed around 2300 B. C., about the same time that Ai was destroyed. Apparently, then, legends developed to explain the ruins of ancient cities, and biblical writers recorded them as tales of Joshua’s conquests. Information like this, however, is never mentioned by inerrantists when they talk about archaeological confirmation of biblical records…
Of course, there were numerous websites touting the accuracy of the Bible by citing Archeological discoveries.
You have quoted a page from infidels.org almost verbatim without citing your source...that is plagiarism--
http://www.plagiarism.org/learning_center/what_is_plagiarism.html.
Your credibility is undermined at the outset...The conflicting accounts are just that. Ultimately, one must decide who to believe. If you understand the Bible to be written merely by men, the truth of either account is suspect. If, on the other hand, God was at work in the process overseeing/superintending the human writers as they penned the original manuscripts, then the Biblical account is correct. Given the vanity of man and his tendency to lie both to himself and to others (hint) it's not surprizing in the least that the truth of the battle would be surpressed and the king would have recorded for posterity a different account listing that as the 'official' version. Such a situation does nothing to undermine the Bible.
Here is some more info on Kathleen Kenyon:
"Herr, however, also conveniently summarises the somewhat mixed nature of Kenyon's legacy: for all the positive advances, there were also definite shortcomings. "Kenyon... did not capitilize fully on (the) implication of her stratigraphic techniques by producing final publications promptly. Indeed her method of digging, which most of us have subsequently adopted, causes a proliferation of loci that excavators often have difficulty keeping straight long enough to produce coherent published stratigraphic syntheses. Moreover, her insistence that excavation proceed in narrow trenches denies us, when we use the Jericho reports, the confidence that her loci, and the pottery assemblages that go with them, represent understandable human activity patterns over coherently connected living areas. The individual layers, insufficiently exposed horizontally, simply cannot be interpreted credibly in terms of function. This further makes publication difficult, both to produce and to use" (from
http://www.ancientneareast.net/biography/kenyon.html)
Regarding the other issue surrounding AI, do some research here:
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/search/index.php?q=AI&btn=Search
Here is more food for thought:
"If one attempts to harmonize biblical and secular histories, working back from the time of Christ, little difficulty is encountered until one gets back prior to the United Kingdom (i.e., until before the time when Saul became King of Israel). There is no doubt that the central people and places named in the New Testament existed, for example, and a number of Israel's kings are named in the literature of surrounding countries.
But when one begins to work back much prior to the United Kingdom period the picture changes completely. For example: none of the prominent figures of the Exodus can be positively identified in secular records; the chronology and history of Egypt seem incompatible with the biblical account; the archaeology of Jericho cannot be made to fit the biblical record of Joshua's defeat of that city without sacrificing biblical and scientific integrity; and the situation at Ai is even less workable. The trail of harmony between biblical and secular history is lost as one moves back into the period of the judges.
This problem is widely recognized. In fact, the majority of scholars today have concluded that the Bible is simply not historically reliable before the United Kingdom period. They explain away the earlier portions of the Bible as folktales bearing little if any resemblance to real history. Until recently, conservative, Bible-believing scholarship has been in a difficult position. If the Bible tells an accurate story of history, why do archaeology and the Bible not agree prior to the United Kingdom period?
The Solution
Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D., has proposed that this apparent disharmony results from a problem in traditional biblical chronology. Traditional biblical chronologies are constructed by assembling the various chronological data given in the Bible itself. Interpretive issues have given rise to relatively minor variations in traditional biblical chronologies, depending on the scholar. The traditional chronology displayed in the time chart at left is typical.
The key biblical chronological link used to determine the date of the Exodus is a number in 1 Kings 6:1. This verse reads, "And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel...". Solomon's reign is usually calculated to have begun around 970 B.C., thus placing the Exodus around 1450 B.C. As stated above, the archaeology of Egypt and Canaan at this time is incompatible with the biblical record. In addition, the Bible lists consecutive events between the Exodus and Solomon's reign which total at least 600 years.
In 1990, Dr. Aardsma proposed a major adjustment to traditional biblical chronology. He proposed that the "480" of 1 Kings 6:1 was originally "1,480" but the Hebrew letters corresponding to the "one thousand" were lost at an early stage of copying.
This proposal is applied in the second time chart at left. The new biblical date for the Exodus becomes ca. 2450 B.C., and prior biblical events are similarly shifted to earlier times, by exactly 1000 years relative to traditional biblical chronology.
This change is radical, and at first unimaginable. However, as one begins to examine the archaeology at the new dates, the harmony between biblical and secular accounts is overwhelming. Egypt is struck by national disaster, effectively causing the collapse of the Old Kingdom at the end of the sixth dynasty. The trail of the Israelites in the desert at the time of the Exodus, and remains of their encampment dating to exactly this time period have been found. Both Jericho and Ai were destroyed ca. 2400 B.C., with destruction layers accurately fitting the biblical descriptions. The evidence that Dr. Aardsma's proposal is correct has become overwhelming and continues to mount.
This discovery and the ensuing research have resolved the conflicts between biblical and secular histories prior to the United Kingdom period. Dr. Aardsma's research has also led to many exciting discoveries surrounding early biblical events such as Noah's Flood. Conservative, Bible-believing scholarship today has an answer for those who claim that the Old Testament stories are mere fabrications. This discovery is of extreme significance to anyone who believes the Bible or studies biblical archaeology.
The foregoing article was abstracted from the book
A New Approach to the Chronology of Biblical History from Abraham to Samuel. Full details and references can be found there."
(Source:
http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/index.php)
However, despite all of the above, I'm looking for clarification of a particular comment made by Skinwalker...this has not happened.
On a final note, you can be sure that given time, and diligent perseverence, all biblical assertions will be shown to have been true and accurate. Any indications to the contrary are merely the result of a rush to judgement on the part of those who have a bias against the Bible. This is a
fact of history, having repeatedly been shown to be the case in instances where the Bible was claimed to have been wrong, yet in time vindicated by further efforts.
