Some two centuries ago French and British adventurers, explorers, and just plain antiquities hunters descended upon the middle east. They came with the certain knowledge that they would quickly find the confirmation of the entire Old Testament. And they did that for nearly a century.

In the beginning they had an easy task. Everything old that was found was necessarily confirmation of the Bible therefore all they needed to do was find which stories it fit. They were not encumbered by a strong ability to read the inscriptions found as reading them was the realm of antiquarians and they had at most a passing knowledge.

Finding relics related to the Bible in the middle east had been finding relics since Constantine's mother made the first popular pilgrimage in search of relics. One could almost guarantee the discovery of what one came to find if one got out the word and how much they were willing to pay.

Also in favor of discoveries was the antiquities finders set the standard for how ancient objects should look. The Europeans did not start their own digs until well into the 19th c. and only towards the end of the century did they begin to establish proper controls for their digs.

And with all of that in favor of finding things to confirm the bible only the handful of items previously discussed were found and survive more or less as originally announced to this day. While I strongly suggest they need re-examination and certainly those without provenance should be discarded that is not very many. Perhaps more telling is that when archaeology became a real science and the number of digs greatly increased not a single discovery was made after 1904.

By the 20th c. people stopped looking to confirm the bible and looked for what things were really like. This became the norm after it was realized the bible got everything wrong about ancient Egypt. Common forgeries were dealt with in the only possible manner, only items actually coming from digs conducted by professionals were permitted. That is the artifacts had to have provenance, a known source not some antiquities dealer cum forger.

Perhaps most importantly the scientific method required an object be described only for what it is has to be consistent with other finds from the same place and age. In fact it is observance of this rule today which separates real archaeologists in bibleland from religious diggers regardless of their academic degree. An artifact is described as from the 10th c. BC by an archaeologist and as from the time of Solomon by a religious digger. So also terms like first temple period and Babylonian captivity are used by religious diggers not by credible scientists.

A scientist would not use such terms as there no evidence of any first temple nor of when the temple known in history -- called the second -- was actually built. Nor is there any evidence of any captivity in Babylon and it is highly unlikely in the first place regardless of what you may have read.

At this point start making accusations of atheism and worse but this is the same thing that is done in all other digs in all other places. They have only the bible to fall back on as an authority. The problem with the bible is there is no sign of any civilization in bibleland which might have produced it prior to its conquest by the Greeks. It is only after the Greeks arrive that the Septuagint in Greek appears and only after that are Judeans (Jews) mentioned in the region.

And with this begins the evidence we do have of bibleland. We have consistent evidence of an agrarian society without cities or anything larger than the kind of small town found in farming country that does its main business at the harvest where surplus crops are traded for things farmers can't make for themselves like metal objects.

There is no sign of any profligate amount of writing on the contrary there is next to none at all. This is not to say there is much written material to be found any place in the pre-Greek world and there is precious little from the Greek world. By estimates from works mentioned in surviving Greek writings which we do not have we can reliably estimate we have less than 1% of the works that were considered important to mention.

But when it comes to bibleland we find next to nothing and what is found is clearly from other known cultures. This would not be considered worth mentioning were it not for the fact that people want to believe these farmers were keeping the written records that make up the bible. One might compare this to modern England with no writing at all, any place except for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In those days writing was for the rich. It took time to learn to read and write and to pass on the skill. Writing materials were expensive. Parchment is leather and has the price of leather. What we would expect is a society advanced enough to need writing and many things in writing like inscriptions on the stone walls of palaces. In bibleland we do not find palaces or even stone walls.

The very popularity of digging in bibleland is also the undoing of believers. Not only has it been a favorite destination for a century and a half the government of Israel is eager to find evidence to cement the Jewish claim to the land. This is in addition to Christian groups around the world willing to fund digs there.

One might argue they are only looking where they expect to find things and are overlooking unlikely places. This is not a strong argument as with well over a century of experience and all the modern tools including satellite imagery it is not reasonable they have overlooked something. There are things found in unexpected places in Egypt so it is not impossible.

But just in case artifacts are hiding in unexpected places we have Israel itself. Not the Israel funding digs but the Israel with a population of over 7 million people living to modern standards. We are not talking simple stone houses but multi-story buildings with deep foundations and underground parking garages. We have hundreds of square miles being swallowed up by suburbs. The homes have foundations and even basements, underground plumbing and wiring and storm sewers. They have streets among them and larger highways connecting them with other large developments. In occupied territories Israel not only builds sqattertowns for some 600,000 people (Jerusalem is occupied territory) but also Jews Only highways cutting across land with the shortest distance for rush hour traffic and without regard to the land owned by the non-Jews.

And for all of this, Israel has found nothing to show more than the agrarian society that has been known to exist in ancient times for nearly a century.

If you follow this in the news you likely have a different feeling for what has been found. The reason for that is the same was it was back in the 19th c. Everything that is found is described in a bible story context. One of the first tests is to find something which sounded convincing and read it again.

For the future here is all you need to do. Find the physical description only of what has been found and ignore everything else. If there is nothing in the actual physical description which connects it to something in the old testament then all the description around it is invented. It is a throwback to what I described above, making up a story to put anything found into a bible context.

So what is really found? Images of the goddess Ashara and Yahweh for one. Ashara is the consort of Yahweh found in a collection of writings from Ugarit which are dated from about the 12th c. BC. These objects are dated from the 3rd c. BC to the 2nd c. AD in bibleland. Starting to find them would coincide with the arrival of Greek civilization when real cities started to appear. We would expect images for indoor use to start replacing outdoor shrines.

These images are obviously not yet organized for a proper presentation. When you see what appears to be a throne for two, that is for the divine pair. Some of the images are close-ups of the common symbols associated with these gods. Notice a lion (the "Lion of Judah"?) is one of them along with the dove and a palm tree. There are some passing references to trees which might be to outdoor shrines to Ashara in the OT but they do not do justice to the real images. But we do read of other unexplained symbols such as the Lion of Judah as we read of the Shofar horn made from a horn of the Ram-headed god, Amun/Yahweh.

Amun and Yahweh and the king of Egypt are all intertwined as the ruler of Egypt was a god-king and people prayed to all the gods including the living ones. Consider for the moment the idea of a god carrying a symbol of being a god is one of the most unusual. Thor had a hammer but it was not the symbol of being a god. Zeus used lightning but it was not his symbol. God kings used symbols, the scepter being the most common.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Spare the flail and spoil the child.

Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me.
Thy flail and thy staff shall comfort me.

The god-king of Egypt is always depicted with a flail and a staff.

That is a digression worth an article of its own one of these days. For the moment keep in mind that the way we think of god(s) today is not the way they were thought of in the past. They are not omniscient, all powerful much of anything we have in our god(s) today. The OT god is outsmarted by people, has to walk to get around, has to travel to Sodom to learn what is going on and so forth.

In those days the gods used messengers which is the meaning of the word angel. Gods send their messenger of death and kings sent their messenger of death who were decidedly not supernatural. Their gods were in fact legitimately supernatural in the sense we still see it in TV and movies. It was beyond the natural but not "omni" anything.

So when we look for evidence it has to be in terms of how the people at the time thought about their gods. We cannot look for our ideas which did not exist in those days. So when powers are parceled out among the gods we are not surprised to need both Ashara and Yahweh as a minimal set for a culture.

But with the digression I have not opened up much to identify additional finds in bibleland. It lets in a little Septuagint material as above from Proverbs and Psalms but only to show its source material is not local. The Psalm with "May his light shine upon you" is also Egyptian when Amun and Ra the sun god had become Amun-Ra and "his light" refers to the sun god.

We know the Promise to Abraham of the land from the Nile to the Euphrates was a promise to become the god-king of Egypt as that was the extent of the New Kingdom, the last expansion of Egypt and likely the only one known to the creators of the Septuagint. But it cannot have been an old record else the writers would have known it was a promise to become an god-king or at best an ancestor ascended to god-hood.

But in all of the possible connections to ancient history we still find nothing in evidence but of an agrarian society before the arrival of the Greeks. And after the Greeks who also ruled Egypt we find the creation of the Septuagint in Greek. We can open it to all the possible gods and to the New Kingdom Egyptian rule of bibleland and to the Persians and Assyrians and still we find nothing in the archaeological record.

Anyone who questions this can google all the Israeli museums and find they have nothing of interest. The oldest are agrarian with a few rare Egyptian seals. The Persian influence might as well be non-existent. There is a very little from the Greek period. You will find most of the material from the Roman period and that is where the Israelis lose interest in the history of the land.

Notice I said museums and by that I mean real museums not creationist museums. I mean the kind that have both academic and Jewish affiliation and if government funded so much the better. Academic keeps them honest and Jewish means they are not going to hide anything. Jewish means they are eager to interpret things in their favor if it is academically honest.

And I also mean what the museums say about their exhibits not what people unaffiliated with the museum say about their exhibits. If someone tells you the evidence is there demand the URL else you have only their word for it. No matter how much you want to believe, it they cannot produce the URL to the museum's opinion of it they don't have Jack.

Beware of strange claims
One of them is the coastal cities had decorated pottery and the discovery of undecorated pottery supports the "modern" infusion theory where a simpler people replaced the city folk. There is a major problem with that. In those days farmers always made their own pottery. It takes mud and fire and it is servicable although won't last very long. Farmers have no time to waste on decoration. So this entire idea is based upon the fact that farmers make their own pottery but we are not supposed to know that.

Believers today are willing so say Solomon was an illiterate savage ruling a hill called Israel to salvage bible stories. The kernal of truth idea is fine but it means there was no biblical Israel. Nor does it permit anything which follows from that hilltop kernel. You can't get from that savage to a Judea suddenly appearing but which goes unmentioned by the outside world until the 2nd c. BC.

Why would they be mentioned? If you believe the modern interpretation of the Septuagint they were the strangest people in the entire world. They had only one god. But no one including Herodotus who collected strange tales bothered to mention them. Even after they do appear in history there is no mention of one god.

There are no Roman mentions of it despite putting down three full scale revolts and at least one minor one by the Samarians before it got started. The only details we have are from Josephus who was a priest of one of the gods but who never says there was only one god for the Judeans. It is difficult to imagine a unique thing like that going unmentioned by everyone including one of the priests of that god. On the other hand Josephus does mention that is religion has only 22 sacred books so Judaism has changed a lot since his time.

If this were some strange religion in some foreign land and no one we knew was a member of it such as the Sunni/Shia divide in Islam, we would simply take the remarks of Josephus as no more than an example of old versions having died out. But as Judaism is deep in our culture people try to argue away Josephus and the other odd things we find about Judaism. The difference is call "arguing to a conclusion" which has been identified as a logical fallacy for at least 2500 years.

To bring in modern society while we are at it. An atheist can find all kinds of "jewish" support for questions about Jesus but let him touch Solomon or Israel and you get the kind of response I get from those very same Jews who also claim to be at least agnostic if not atheist. Whatever their deist orientation, Judeans/Jews have to remain an ancient people even though there is no sign of them in real history until the 2nd c. BC. Tribal pride no doubt even though most are Ashkenazi whose ancestors are unrelated to real Jews. Even if the real Jews are "ancient" they have no connection to them but the religion. And if they are even agnostic they have no connection to them by religion.

Silly people claim to be the strangest things.