Itinerantlife

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Hello, Itinerantlife, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, your edit to Asherah does not conform to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy (NPOV). Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media.

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  tgeorgescu (talk) 21:06, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

April 2022

Welcome to Wikipedia. Editors are expected to treat each other with respect and civility. On this encyclopedia project, editors assume good faith while interacting with other editors, which you did not appear to do at Talk:Asherah. Here is Wikipedia's welcome page, and it is hoped that you will assume the good faith of other editors and continue to help us improve Wikipedia! Thank you very much! Doug Weller talk 19:05, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Mr Weller,

On January 19, I added an invisible comment to the article on Asherah pointing out that the article was NOT from a neutral point of view. The article as written presented certain disputed views as if they were proven fact.

tgeorgescu insultingly suggested that my comment was based in the theology of Liberty University and that the idea that the article's wording was not neutral was not in harmony with "overwhelming consensus of mainstream historians, mainstream archaeologists and mainstream Bible scholars." I pointed out that Benjamin and Eilat Mazar and Yosef Garfinkel are not "religious fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals" and that they do not agree with the viewpoint he appears to be promoting. In my most recent comment, I did not as you suggest express disrespect for tgeorgescu, I merely stated that he might add to the list of those whom he censors Manfred Bietak of the University of Vienna.

tgeorgescu makes the fallacy of Argument from authority. His argumentation is also unscientific. Until this year, it was the "overwhelming consensus of" particle physicists that the W Boson molecule had a certain weight. It was recently demonstrated that this was false. There are many other examples, some from the field of Archaeology.

tgeorgescu's account name is associated with a number of arguments on the Wikipedia talk pages. He (if that is the correct pronoun) seems quite persistent in censoring those with whom he disagrees. Please, Mr. Weller, explain to me how my comment that he should add Manfred Bietak to the list of people whom he censors is disrespectful to tgeorgescu. Are you claiming that he does not censor those with whomn he disagrees? Itinerantlife (talk) 17:58, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Stuff to ponder: WP:VERECUNDIAM: the argument from authority is not always a mistake, especially speaking of Wikipedia.

The exodus from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert and Mount Sinai: The many Egyptian documents that we have make no mention of the Israelites' presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the exodus. Many documents do mention the custom of nomadic shepherds to enter Egypt during periods of drought and hunger and to camp at the edges of the Nile Delta. However, this was not a solitary phenomenon: such events occurred frequently across thousands of years and were hardly exceptional.

— Ze'ev Herzog, Deconstructing the walls of Jericho

If you want to discuss sources about the Exodus, you should not do that at Talk:Asherah but at Talk:The Exodus.

The question I'd like to see answered is, have any defenses of a sixth-century date been published in mainstream academic outlets. And if they have been, are they the work of a tiny fringe group of scholars, or do they represent a significant number of scholars. So far, it looks as is the 2d-century date for Daniel assuming its present form is the scholarly consensus, although of course there are hold-outs in the religious world, just as there are hold-outs on creationism. Because of WP:FRINGE, Wikipedia generally doesn't make much use of those who hold out against academic consensus. I don't want to speak for Tgeorgescu here, but I don't think he's saying that Christian scholars are automatically disqualified due to their personal faith. Indeed, almost all biblical scholars that Wikipedia cites are either Christian or Jewish. There's only a handful of non-Christian, non-Jewish biblical scholars out there. We don't sideline the views of Christian scholars on Wikipedia, it's that we sideline the views of WP:FRINGE scholars, those whose views have been overwhelmingly rejected by the academic mainstream. Alephb (talk) 21:14, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

And the problem of the Exodus weren't Israelites in Egypt, but two million of them, which boils down to the unbelievable claim that the absolute majority of the population of Ancient Egypt were Israelites. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:27, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes of course I am. Applying our policies and guidelines on sources is not censoring. Our articles are based on reliable sources, almost always mainstream sources except where there is a significant non-mainstream view.

As your first edit was to do something relatively obscure, ie a hidden comment, I'm guessing you've edited before. Am I correct? Doug Weller talk 15:04, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

The reason for the comment being hidden was because the issue under discussion is NOT a settled issue.

You need to read an article at the Livius website. Livius is not focused primarily on the Levantine but primarily discuss all the ancient civilations from Italy eastward to the Persian Gulf.

They have an article which discusses Minimalism and Maximalism and it points out that this discussion is not limited to the Levantine. https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/maximalists-and-minimalists/

Here are two Quotes. The first quote is based on the subject of these two views as they apply to the "Biblical" lands:

The debate between minimalists and maximalists is not always friendly, but there is in fact only one major issue in the Biblical sphere: the existence of the united kingdom of David and Solomon. Minimalists stress that this state can never have been the centralized organization we read about in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, because the necessary archaeological evidence to prove the existence of a state organization is missing. There are no administrative documents, and something resembling a state architecture does not appear in the archaeological record until the ninth century, when almost identical stables and six-chambered gates were built in several places.

In this case, the conclusion appears to be inevitable that the kingdom of the Omrid dynasty (884-842) was the first centralized state. This is confirmed by the Samaria Ivories, which prove that their capital, Samaria, had access to the interregional trade routes, something that tenth-century Jerusalem did not have. David and Solomon appear to have been rulers in a different, more primitive type of society, probably of a tribal nature.

The Second Quote demonstrates that this discussion is not limited to this specific geographical region:

This is not unique. The kingdom of the Medes, which is mentioned in several sources as the forerunner of the Achaemenid Empire, is missing too. This is not to deny that the Medes existed - sites like Tepe Nush-e Jan can safely be attributed to them - but the evidence that they lived in a well-organized state with a central administration, as described by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, is absent: no archives, nothing that may be labeled "state architecture". The contrast with the Achaemenids is striking: their architecture has been identified in cities like Babylon, Sardes, Van, and Dascylium; archives have been found everywhere from Egypt to Afghanistan; evidence for state control of the trade routes is known from cities as far apart as Taxila and Samaria.

Benjamin Mazer, Eilat Mazer, Amihay Mazer, Yosef Garfinkel, and Manfried Bietak are not considered fringe extremists by most archaelogical scholars.

If someone seeks to use the small amount of evidence which exists for the existence of the Median state to seek to bolster the idea that the Medians had some degree of political integrity does that make that person a fringe extremist. tgeorgescu wants to obfuscate this discussion by expanding it beyond the parameters which I was referencing when I stated that the section of the Asherah article pertaining to Israel presents as factual that which is still considered unsettled.

Contrary to what he (and in your defense of him, you) are suggesting. I am not advocating a William Dever approach to the articles on Wikipedia. I am merely stating that there is not the degree of consensus among those who are neither fringe minimalists nor fring maximalists that tgeorgescu seems to promote. The mainstream archaeological community is still uncertain as to what the structure unearthed by Eilat Mazer represents. It is still uncertain as to what the Tell Dan stele actually says although if I believed in consensus (which I don't) I would have reason to argue that it does refer to a dynasty which alleged that it was descended from David. I personally do not put a lot of weight on the Tell Dan stele because without the Jerusalem evidence it could be easily argued that an assertion of a Davidic Dynasty does not demonstrate that David was more than legend.

Have you, Mr. Weller, read a lot of material written in the last fifteen years concerning recent archaeological discoveries? I do think that like the Tell Dan stele, there is a lot of "leaping to conclusions" surrounding these discoveries BUT likewise they also have punched holes in the minimalist's theories.

The point is that a true neutral voice on Wikipedia would neither argue for minimalism or for maximalism but instead would acknowledge that many question are still unanswered, a position which tgeorgescu seems to denigrate. Itinerantlife (talk) 17:12, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

The point you're missing is that the dispute between biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists from the 1990s did not end in a draw. It ended with an almost complete (i.e. 90%) victory of the minimalists. So, basically the minimalists got to define mainstream Levantine archaeology, and they only failed upon one point: removing the Bible from archaeology.

What you fail to get is that I'm asserting that there is no evidence that David and Solomon had a powerful kingdom. I'm not even saying they didn't, I say that evidence for it is lacking, and this is not due to a lack of diligence from Israeli archaeologists. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But absence of evidence is still absence of evidence, and now the burden of proof is upon those who claim that David and Solomon were powerful kings, ruling over a well-developed stated, ruling from Jerusalem over all of Shfela. The burden of proof is not upon skeptics who demand evidence. tgeorgescu (talk) 17:22, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

So once again you asserting that Yosef Garfinkel is a "fringe extremist" since in 2011 he wrote a paper titled 'The Birth and Death of Minimalism." Garfinkel says that minimalism is DEAD.

He continued to make this assertion in 2019. https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/minimalist-vs-maximalist-biblical-archaeology/

According to Garfinkel in 1993, what he calls the "mythological paradigm" of minimalism was defeated so the minimalists retreated and retrenched in what Garfinkel calls the "chronological paradigm" but the excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa defeated that paradigm so the minimalists again retreated and retrench in what Garfinkel calls "the ethnographic paradigm."

But you tgeorgescu believe that you have the right to sit in judgment of Yosef garfinkel and call him a fring extremist for no other reason than the fact that he and Israel Finkelstein disagree with one another.

My view is that the subject is still unanswered and that neither Finkelstein nor Garfinkel has decisively won the day.

Your source for the statistic that there is a 90% victory for minimalism is one which I am sure fact checkers would appreciate being able to examine.

If Mr. Weller reads this please note that I am citing evidence from the 2010s while tgeorgescu is referencing the 1990s. tgeorgescu wrote "the dispute between biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists from the 1990s". Garfinkel's comments are NOT from the 1990s. Itinerantlife (talk) 02:28, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Yup, indeed, that's a dispute from the 1990s, so it does not really concerns the WP:SCHOLARSHIP from the 2020s, except as setting the parameters of the actual mainstream debate.

In case you missed the following at Talk:Asherah:

WP:RS/AC evidence to that extent: Grabbe, Lester L. (23 February 2017). Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?: Revised Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-567-67044-1. The impression one has now is that the debate has settled down. Although they do not seem to admit it, the minimalists have triumphed in many ways. That is, most scholars reject the historicity of the 'patriarchal period', see the settlement as mostly made up of indigenous inhabitants of Canaan and are cautious about the early monarchy. The exodus is rejected or assumed to be based on an event much different from the biblical account. On the other hand, there is not the widespread rejection of the biblical text as a historical source that one finds among the main minimalists. There are few, if any, maximalists (defined as those who accept the biblical text unless it can be absolutely disproved) in mainstream scholarship, only on the more fundamentalist fringes.

Note that Grabbe was applauded for remaining neutral in the quarrel between minimalists and maximalists, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/23970868 .

I don't know much about what Garfinkel does, but I seek to remain neutral between William G. Dever, who stands for the conservative wing of mainstream Levantine archaeology, and Israel Finkelstein.

And please state what's the real, objective evidence that David and Solomon were powerful kings, ruling over a well-developed stated, ruling from Jerusalem over all of Shfela. For the real existence of David there is a fragment of broken stone written a hundred years after him; for Solomon we don't even have that much.

Even if we grant the point that Khirbet Qeiyafa was Judahite instead of Canaanite or Philistine (some mainstream Israeli archeologists do not grant this point), there is still nothing which directly links it to either David or Solomon: their names are mentioned nowhere at this site.

Coogan is a highly reputed OT scholar. He wrote a scathing review of Finkelstein's bestseller. He also stated in Coogan, Michael (2010). "4. Thou Shalt Not: Forbidden Sexual Relationships in the Bible". God and Sex. What the Bible Really Says (1st ed.). New York, Boston: Twelve. Hachette Book Group. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-446-54525-9. Retrieved 5 May 2011. Jerusalem was no exception, except that it was barely a city—by our standards, just a village. In David's time, its population was only a few thousand, who lived on about a dozen acres, roughly equal to two blocks in Midtown Manhattan. So, he agrees that David's Jerusalem could fit on five or six rugby fields.

So, yup, Israeli archaeologists produce grandiose reconstructions, but in reality the capital of the United Monarchy fitted upon at most six rugby fields. Yup, that would be a disk with a diameter of 250 meters or 820 feet.

There is no miracle of reinterpretation: each scholar using the term United Monarchy has to say what he/she means by it and what's the evidence for it. Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) is not the same as the "United Monarchy of Jerusalem and some Canaanite villages from Shephelah".

And every Levantine archaeologist seems to understand that without new, spectacular evidence, Finkelstein will win the game by default. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so we won't know what will be found in the future. Finkelstein's fate will be decided then, not now, as Wdford explained with an example of Johnson and Macron at [1]. What Finkelstein has done is spreading organized skepticism all over the field of Levantine archaeology. And, of course, scientists and historians love that. Only positive evidence will demolish Finkelstein's POV.

I mean: even if in the end he is proven wrong, he was still right in spreading organized skepticism over the field, since that's what science is about.

The author admits that Jerusalem in those days was too small to be a regional force. The author also admits that the total population of all of Judah and Benjamin in the Iron IIA period would have been at most about 20,000 people, and that this horde "provides a sufficient demographic basis for an Israelite state in the 10th century BCE." At least half of those people would have been women, and at least half would have been children, so even if every able bodied man and boy able to wave a stick were drafted, the army would have been maximum 5000 strong. Hardly the regional super-power of the Bible stories.
— User:Wdford

Wdford writing about a paper by Amihai Mazar.

Also, you should not think that Finkelstein rejects king David. Finkelstein is more intelligent and cunning than the average archaeologist, and he realized he cannot have king David in 1000 BCE. So, he pushes another chronology. tgeorgescu (talk) 04:48, 19 April 2022 (UTC)