[Avodah] Archaeologists discover 7, 000-year-old Jerusalem settlement

Lisa Liel via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Thu Feb 18 15:00:06 PST 2016


On 2/19/2016 12:36 AM, Micha Berger wrote:
> : On 2/18/2016 4:50 PM, Marty Bluke via Areivim wrote:
> : >http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Archaeologists-discover-7000-year-old-Jerusalem-settlement-from-Chalcolithic-period-445206
>
> Or <j.mp/1QMwhlv>.
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 08:13:19PM +0200, Lisa Liel via Areivim wrote:
> : Since the Chalcolithic was the time of Avraham Avinu, this could be
> : associated with Malkitzedek.
>
> To save someone else the effort of Googling. "Chalcolithic" comes from
> the Greek words khalkos + lithos = copper + stone. It refers to the
> period after people only made tools from stone but did yet know that by
> adding tin to the copper, a much harder metal, bronze, could be made. It
> is counted as early Bronze age, not Stone Age.
>
> According to Bereishis 4:22, Tuval-Qayin "loteish kol choreish nechoshes
> uvarzel". Either the person who launched the Chalcolithic era, thus the
> father of all metal workers, or the one who ivented Bronze, the one who
> launed working with nechoshes with another metal as a unit. (Tin is iron
> colored, no?)

He was antediluvian.  We don't know what metallurgical techniques were 
lost because of the Flood.  Or which ones at least took a while to be 
implemented again.  Personally, I'm inclined to understand iron as iron 
and not as something iron colored.  But you know me, I'm a fundy.


> According to the Seder Olam, Avraham was born in 1948, just under 3,000
> years ago.

4,000 years.  -Ish.

> That's a 4,000 year difference, no? How would you explain a
> 75% error in their dating methodology?

A 3,000 year difference, actually.  But you know, we have very little 
historical anything from before the Middle Bronze Age.  So why is the 
Chalcolithic considered to have been so early?

1. The actual time of the beginning of the Chalcolithic according to 
conventional chronology is the late 5th millenium BCE (check 
Wikipedia).  So someone saw that and concluded that it was 5000 years 
(-ish) BCE, or about 7000 years ago.  But just like the Maccabean revolt 
happened in the late 1st millenium BCE, the late 5th millenium BCE is 
closer to 4100 BCE, which brings us down another thousand years.

2. Why is the Chalcolithic considered to have lasted about 1000 years?  
Because it's a nice round number.  No, I'm not kidding you. There's no 
actual reason for it.

3. Why is the Early Bronze Age considered to have begun around 3100 
BCE?  Because that's the conventional dating of the 1st Dynasty in 
Egypt, and in the Middle East, Egyptian chronology is the yardstick 
that's used.  But as I've discussed before, that yardstick is stretched 
out artificially.  The end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, with the fall of 
the 6th Dynasty, is dated conventionally to around 2100 BCE, but that is 
certainly the time of the Exodus, which was in 1476 BCE by that 
reckoning.  And the Old Kingdom (including the Predynastic Period) was 
all postdiluvian, and considerably shorter than conventionally viewed.

(It was actually 1311 BCE, but the issue of the Persian Period isn't 
relevant here.  The difference occurs mostly after the destruction of 
Jerusalem, so all of history slides up and down as a single block 
regardless of whether you use 587 BCE or 421 BCE for that destruction.  
The conventional chronology uses 587, so in explaining where their 
chronological differences come from, that's what I'm using here.  
Without prejudice.)

Ignoring the overlapping of dynasties in the Old Kingdom stretches it 
out artificially by about 400 years.  The end of the Old Kingdom being 
dated too early stretches it out another 600+ years. Basically, we're 
down to the "1000 years" between the Chalcolithic and the beginning of 
Egyptian history.  And that's just a figure of convenience, because 
there's no way to know if it was 3 months or 5000 years.

>     We also recovered a few bones of sheep/goat and possibly cattle,
>     she said. These will be analyzed further in the IAA [Antiquities
>     Authority] laboratories, permitting us to recreate the dietary
>     habits of the people who lived here 7,000 years ago, and enhancing
>     our understanding of the settlements economy.
>
> How did they date the finding anyway? Carbon dating these bones? Or is
> there some way to assign a date to flint, basalt and pottery, other than
> the circular reasoining of "we know tools and building of this style
> date to X, so this must too..."

I'm fairly sure it's the latter.  Radiocarbon dating is a scam, of 
course.  When you submit samples for C14 dating, you have to tell them 
your target date or date range so that they can throw away results that 
are too many standard deviations away from that as "contaminated".

Lisa




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