3 ms·

We have a lot of documents from Ugarit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit This is mostly a matter of excavating the te

We have a lot of documents from Ugarit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit This is mostly a matter of excavating the tells we can see with our eyes. The history is easy to discover, but there's very little interest, so it doesn't get done. Note that the initial wave of archaeology in Mesopotamia was fueled by popular interest in the Bible. That sputtered out when archaeology turned out not to support most of what the Bible said. So now there isn't interest from people who'd like to see the Bible confirmed, and there also isn't interest from the general public who have no particular connection to the region.

bawolff 2y ago
Maybe with enough atheists the bible will turn from religion to mythology and people will become interested again. Personally at least i find the cultural context the bible sprouted up in to be really interesting.
achierius 2y ago
This isn't really what happened. Plenty of Christians are still interested in levantine excavations, and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls -- but there are now fewer Christians per capita in the West and the middle east has become significantly less stable.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls That's not what people wanted. The Pilate stone records the existence of a person named Pilatus. We infer that this was Pontius Pilatus, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that. But it does nothing to confirm a Biblical narrative. Calling it "satisfying evidence" is similar to picking a fight with someone, losing as badly as you can imagine, and then issuing a press release afterwards to the effect that that outcome was what you wanted all along. By contrast, a major controversy arising from Mesopotamian archaeology was the discovery of the Mesopotamian flood myth, which severely undermined the Bible by being the obvious source of the myth of Noah while contradicting it in pretty much every particular. That's the kind of thing that destroyed popular interest in Mesopotamian archaeology.

bawolff 2y ago

Maybe with enough atheists the bible will turn from religion to mythology and people will become interested again. Personally at least i find the cultural context the bible sprouted up in to be really interesting.

achierius 2y ago

This isn't really what happened. Plenty of Christians are still interested in levantine excavations, and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls -- but there are now fewer Christians per capita in the West and the middle east has become significantly less stable.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> and plenty of satisfying evidence has been found for biblical narratives -- eg the Pilate stone and the dead sea scrolls That's not what people wanted. The Pilate stone records the existence of a person named Pilatus. We infer that this was Pontius Pilatus, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that. But it does nothing to confirm a Biblical narrative. Calling it "satisfying evidence" is similar to picking a fight with someone, losing as badly as you can imagine, and then issuing a press release afterwards to the effect that that outcome was what you wanted all along. By contrast, a major controversy arising from Mesopotamian archaeology was the discovery of the Mesopotamian flood myth, which severely undermined the Bible by being the obvious source of the myth of Noah while contradicting it in pretty much every particular. That's the kind of thing that destroyed popular interest in Mesopotamian archaeology.