Reddit reviews On the Reliability of the Old Testament

This is sort of one of my pet areas of interest, I've tried to read both the secular side and the Christian side, in the end I think these are the best books on the subject:

Kenneth Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament - He is one of the world's top Egyptologists and wrote this book to defend the OT.

https://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962

James Hoffmeier's Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai - another one of the world's top Egyptologists.

https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Israel-Sinai-Authenticity-Wilderness/dp/0195155467/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=

https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Egypt-Evidence-Authenticity-Tradition/dp/019513088X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526660677&sr=1-1&keywords=israel+in+egypt

Provan, Long, and Longman's Biblical History of Israel is very good too:

https://www.amazon.com/Biblical-History-Israel-Second-ebook/dp/B01CUKCXFW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526660730&sr=1-1&keywords=a+biblical+history+of+israel%2C+second+edition

Also, James Hoffmeier edited another book that I would recommend to any Catholic interested in biblical studies:

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Matters-Matter-Faith-Postmodern-ebook/dp/B007IJY9YO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526660787&sr=1-1&keywords=do+historical+matters+matter+to+faith

There are many bad books out there, but these are very good and trustworthy by good scholars.

Many people will argue from a book called The Bible Unearthed that the Scriptures are not reliable, but quite frankly the arguments used in there are not very good. Kenneth Kitchen refutes them pretty in depth in his book.

I've heard great things about this book, might want to give it a look as it may help with your question: On the Reliability of the Old Testament by K.A. Kitchen.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802803962/?coliid=I349U78PJ5CWDI&colid=2KQI2IA4VRDZA&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Hello there /u/drac07, as a person who has studied the Exodus, such a topic matter is divided among people (even some Christians). Certainly from what you've said that some people seem desperate, I would agree with you on that. Though not all are.
I recommend the scholarly works of James K Hoffmeier and Kenneth A Kitchen who are experts in the field of Egyptology and Biblical Archeology.

Israel in Egypt
On the Reliability of the Old Testament

Hopefully this will help you to understand the historicity of the Exodus, other events and also answering sceptical scholars objections to the Exodus.

>> Again, the evidence is scant, but to demand "something compelling" is not realistic.

> Why not?

It was three thousand years ago; there is really not very much from that era that has survived the ravages of time. The Egyptian climate has been very favourable to the preservation of documents, but not everywhere; Kenneth Kitchen believes the Exodus departed from Pi-Ramesses, where the damp soil of the Nile Delta destroyed whatever documents were once there. What literary evidence will tell us is limited not only by literature loss, but by the interests of the class of people who were able to write: "I laid waste the Assyrians" is important to get written down for posterity, but "I was laid waste by the Assyrians" is probably not. Archaeological evidence is likewise uneven, and often ambiguous when we find it. People argue that we don't find any trail of Israelite artifacts between Egypt and Canaan, but we find Egyptian mines in Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim with no trace of how the Egyptians got there or back, so why do we need to find Israelite camp sites before the Exodus narrative can possibly be true?

Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence where there is a reasonable expectation of evidence. Maybe we can hope for yet undiscovered evidence of something that happened so long ago, but I at least don't find anything suspicious in a failure to find it.

>If you don't like wikipedia as a source, feel free to click through. Nothing in that article is missing citations.

Okay, how about this one:

>The Delta is an alluvial fan of mud deposited through many millennia by the annual flooding of the Nile; it has no source of stone within it. Mud, mud and wattle, and mud-brick structures were of limited duration and use, and were repeatedly leveled and replaced, and very largely merged once more with the mud of the fields. . . . The mud hovels of brickfield slaves and humble cultivators have long since gone back to their mud origins, never to be seen again. . . . And, as pharaohs never monumentalize defeats on temple walls, no record of the successful exit of a large bunch of foreign slaves (with loss of a full chariot squadron) would ever have been memorialized by any king, in temples in the Delta or anywhere else. On these matters, once and for all, biblicists must shed their naïve attitudes and cease demanding ‘evidence’ that cannot exist." p. 246 (Kenneth Kitchen is one of the most preeminent scholars of ancient Egypt, having authored hundreds of journal articles and books.)

So absence of evidence is ... absence of evidence. How underwhelming and obvious.

>Your argument is just an argument from personal incredulity.

No, it's an argument to the best explanation. This is called abductive reasoning.

>As for the difficulty of getting a whole bunch of people to believe a story that is purported to have been a thousand years earlier? Why not. Who from a thousand years earlier was there to contradict the story?

Everyone:

"Hey everybody, look what I have. This document explains the moral code, legal system, ontology, and history of mankind that G-d gave our ancestors."

"How come we've never heard of it before? What does 'circumcision' mean? On the seventh year we do what with our crops?! Yeah, this makes sense. Let's all start doing this! We agree with this document that portrays us as slaves, idolaters, malcontents, and worse. We especially like the feces-god some of us worshipped in Numbers 25. Nice touch! From this day forward we will all devote our lives to the perpetuation of this book. Thank you, Not-Moses! Let's kill everyone who doesn't go along with this."

I have a better explanation.

Kenneth Kitchen's "On the Reliability of the Old Testament" is a decade old but remains excellent.

The historical and archaeological evidence for Moses is skant. I have studied the Bible enough to believe it to be very reliable, so I believe that Moses was a real person.

I checked with a historian who works on the related archeology and Pentateuch studies. Here's what he said:

> there are many Christian and Jewish scholars who do not believe Moses is a myth. The debates about the evidence often boil down to a "glass half full" vs. "glass half empty." Pro-Moses scholars point out the evidence that makes his existence plausible, and anti-Moses scholars point out the lack of direct external proof of his existence. I belong to two consortiums of scholars in Pentateuch studies, each composed of about 20-40 scholars, all of whom believe there was a Moses. They are all internationally qualified Ph.D.'s.

Recommended resources:

The video documentary Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus, which is very balanced and well-done: http://patternsofevidence.com/

Secondly, Kenneth Kitchen's book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament:
https://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962

Thirdly, the work of Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier:
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Egypt-Evidence-Authenticity-Tradition/dp/019513088X
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Israel-Sinai-Authenticity-Wilderness/dp/0199731691

See John Walton.

Kitchen's Reliability of the Old Testament also has some comparative studies -- the most significant being his assertion that suzerain treaties in contrast to the Pentateuch fundamentally undermine the Documentary Hypothesis.

If you're looking for primary sources only, I'd recommend Old Testament Parallels

Well, that will depends entirely on the definition of "historically accurate"...

To put it simple, if the definition means

1) you always need outside sources for confirmation, to accept it as "historically accurate".
Then you have a huge problem. Since most historical accounts (ancient, greek, egypt, middle ages, etc..) come from single sources written (or oldest known manuscripts) way after the event. Basically most ancient (and sometimes even not so ancient) history we learned in school was then fantastical bullshit.

2) a text is deemed "historically accurate" as long as no archeological findings & other sources tell a different story.
Then it will depend on a) how much content is disputed
b) which source has more credibility
c) how good is my text overall (1 wrong part, will not disprove 100 verified ones)
d) how good is my archeology

So I treat the OT/NT text as a historical text. That can be critizised/analyzed/studied like any other manuscript.
Personally I belief the supernatural stories about god, Jesus, are true also, but that cannot be verified historically. That's, like in any religion, a matter of belief... But practically a lot of old manuscripts & "writting on stones" (egypt, greek, ...) contain supernatural sayings, and god(s) who interfere. If you would discredit the OT/NT text on that basis, most of ancient history that you learned would have to be discarded as well.
And all that personal stories, like "he said this" & "she answered this", you will be never to prove/disprove anyway. Only the surrounding text (language,names) and factual information (knowledge of time period, locations, etc...)

When it come to the OT/NT text so far, most things that can/could be verified archeologically seem to support the bible as an accurate historical text.
In the NT especially Acts as a mainly historical book stands out...

In the OT, the farther back you get, the fuzzier the answer will be. My problem with most criticism, like Finkelsteins, is that it depends heavily on "evidence not found" coupled with "time dating the site" (="no evidence at the time wehre I date the event").

This approach has 3 problems:
1) exact locations (cities, places, etc.) are often highly disputed. We often don't know the verified exact locations of roman and sometimes even middle age battles in Europe. So it seems a little strange, when some archeologist says for events 1000-2000 years earlier, this is definitively the site (while he most definitively never looked 2 miles to the west...).
2) Dating in Egypt, Israel, heck the whole Middle East ist pretty much a mess of its own for the OT time period. First there are not too many "datable" artefacts, and secondly Finkelstein & Co don't believe in C14 carbon dating. O.K. that's highly simplified and blatantly wrong. The truth is: the "established standard timeline" based on Egyptology practically never corresponded really to C14 dating (a couple of hundred years difference). Since a few years back they think they can solve this technically (and with some hypothetical explanations), but it means that practically any C14 dating that doesn't fit the wanted result gets ignored. Basically a lot (mostly older) archeologists of that time in Egypt & Middle East are ignoring C14 dating results for that purpose. There is a battle between archeologists fought here...and C14 seems to be winning lately...
3) dating OT events is always speculative, there are competing arguments e.g. for the time of the exodus (1450-1200) and some dispute the event it at all.

This means personally for me, that while archeological findings in OT times are fun, interesting and sometimes truly awesome, any claim based on "at that time Israel did not exist, the city was not inhabited, long destroyed, we found no evidence" depends too much on "I accurately dated the site/event".
And the absence of findings does not really disprove the existence of something historically. The question quickly becomes one of trusting the underlying assumptions. So far I haven't found much that contradicts the confutable historical narrative parts of the OT/NT text. Archeological research that depends on "exact" location/time dating offers questions and definitive mistakes in the text. But the time/place dating of this research depends often highly on other factors and interpretations, and is mostly disputed.



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Kitchen (On the Reliability of the Old Testament) is "the standard" book about your question.
http://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

But for some fun (about the disputes on dating) read "Centuries of Darkness". Kitchen does't agree with them (and I lean more to him honestly), but then who agrees really about anything for that time period :-)
http://www.centuries.co.uk/index.htm

I just checked the wikipedia page about it and I am not sure if that is a good unbiased source.

Further searching showed me this book. Have you read this one? https://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Old-Testament-K-Kitchen/dp/0802803962

Why is Christianity ridiculous? I suggest you reading

http://biologos.org/common-questions/human-origins/were-adam-and-eve-historical-figures

http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/is-there-a-historical-adam

or Kenneth Kitchens book "On the Reliability of the Old Testament ".

It's been years since I've read it, but I remember enjoying K.A. Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament in my undergrad years.

> The Bible is the 'claim'

This makes no sense.

The Bible is collection of 66 different book, written by many different writers, in three different languages, in many different genres, on many different topics. How is that a "claim"?

There are not claims, they are sources.

People make claims based on an examination of those sources.

>So they all have the same, identical goal of declaring God and Jesus true. They are not independent sources.

So when two cosmologists [or historians, or ...] build on each others work they are not independent sources and should be rejected?

How do you know when an someone says that the Garden of Eden, Noah's Arc, the 2 million Jews escaping Egypt didn't exist/happen are telling you something that is true? Or more likely to be true?

How do you verify those claims?

>Anyone can cite anyone else's work, but that does not verify the first work nor prove it to be true.

Do you use this same level of skepticism when you read everything else? What "independent sources" do you use to verify the WW2 or the Ferguson protests have happened? Or who won the first Super Bowl or 1968 World Series?

You can't, according to you, use one source to verify another.

>Did you read your own source ??? That number, 5800, notes the number of COPIES in different languages of SOME of the OT and NT stories. That number does not represent 5,800 individual, independent books, each unique. So your reference is extremely misleading.

You think that every copy is going to be a complete Bible???? Do you not realize that they were separate books? Do you not realize that just the environmental exposure will cause some of the manuscript to disintegrate?

>... there is no proof of any of the Bible outside the Bible stories.

This is false. One can look at K. A. Kitchens On the Reliability of the OT or Walter Kaiser's The OT Documents - Are They Reliable and Relevant? or Craig Bloomberg's The Historical Reliabilitiy of the Gospels or F.F, Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? or Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony