OLD
TESTAMENT
CHARACTERS and INDUCTIVE
REASONING
Anonymous
(Investigator
117, 2007
November)
PREVIOUSLY I estimated the Old
Testament includes the
names of about 2,889 people. (# 50; 61) I listed 62 confirmed or
tentatively
confirmed by archaeology and predicted more will be found.
TWO MORE Recently I noticed two more. 25km south-west of Aman (Jordan), in an area called Iraq el Amir meaning Cave of the Prince, is evidence for Tobiah. Tobiah was the Ammonite official who, in the 5th century BC, opposed the return of the Jews to Israel. (Nehemiah 2:10) In the early 1990s a team from Jordan's Department of Antiquities and the French Institute of Archaeology surveyed the remains of some 2nd century BC buildings. Nearby are cliffs with eleven caves on two levels. At the entrance of one cave is an inscription of the name Tobiah in Aramaic. The name appears again in the adjacent cave. The inscription is dated to the Persian period 541-331 BC and therefore could refer to the Ammonite official of the Bible. (Archaeological Diggings Volume 1, June/July 1994, p. 29) Another discovery may be "Sarsechim", an official of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. (Jeremiah 39:3)
The British Museum has a
collection of 130,000
Assyrian cuneiform tablets. On the Internet, Nigel Reynolds reports
that
one tablet appears to be: "a receipt for payment made by a figure in
the
Old Testament":
In the King James
translation Jeremiah 39:3
reads:
And all the princes of
the king of Babylon
came in, and sat in the middle gate, even Nergal-sharezer, Samgar-nebo,
Sarsechim, Rab-saris, Nergal-sharezer, Rab-mag, with all the residue of
the king of Babylon.
Many Bibles have "nebo" attached to the wrong name. It should not read "Samgar-nebo, Sarsechim…" but rather "Samgar, Nebo-sarsechim…" Some translators have made the correction including the NIV and RSV. Hebrew writing did not use vowels. Therefore Nebo is the same as Nebu and Nabu. It was the name of a Babylonian god and prefixed the name of various humans such as Nebu-chadnezzar and Nebu-zaradan. (2 Kings 25:8-11) This still leaves the biblical "sarsechim" different to "sharrussu-ukin" on the cuneiform tablet
This need not be seen as
an error, but rather
the conversion of the Babylonish name into Hebrew – comparable to
Petrus
in one language becoming "Peter" in another.
READERS COMMENTS
PROOF OF THE BIBLE?
The comment
about the
Bible being "self authenticating"
seems nonsensical. People who make this claim should write something
"self
authenticating" down to show us what "self authentication" means and
how
it beats scientific evidence.
Some
commentators
rightly point out that
one confirmed point does not prove the whole Bible, just as one
confirmed
point in a Babylonian inscription does not prove Babylonian religion.
INDUCTIVE LOGIC To research the accuracy of the Bible, or any other document that makes claims about the world, we need to check its claims by consulting relevant scientific literature and news reports. If the Old Testament names about 2,889 people and one by one we see them confirmed by archaeology, then a valid hypothesis is that the trend will continue and more will be confirmed. We thus have a prediction that future science will refute or support. From 64 confirmed or tentatively confirmed OT persons some of us may even predict that all 2,889 existed. Inductive reasoning is when an observed trend is generalized. If an observer sees some white pigeons and concludes that all pigeons, including the ones he can't see, are white he is reasoning inductively. If an employer trusts an employee because the latter has always been reliable he is reasoning inductively. If you open your mouth to speak, you do so because on past occasions when you opened your mouth to speak you succeeded and therefore anticipate success again. Once more, it's inductive reasoning. Similarly, if many points in the Bible become confirmed and this happens again and again, then we can generalize. We can reason inductively and predict that more of the Bible – perhaps even all of it – is true. Besides archaeology and history I've demonstrated, in Investigator, confirmations of Bible statements in about 15 scientific disciplines including astronomy, archaeology, psychology, medicine, genetics, zoology, biology, geology and oceanography. In one instance – whether cobras and other snakes can hear, which science had denied – the Encyclopedia Britannica was revised. (Investigator 94) Nowadays it's common knowledge that snakes hear. New Scientist for example reported: "horned desert…vipers have internal ears that can hear frequencies between 200 and 1000 hertz." The viper detects vibrations through the lower jaw, which stimulate the internal ears. (17 March, 2007, p. 13) Some Bible statements that are now confirmed are of world-shaking importance – for example the threat of asteroids to civilization. (#62) I investigate the Bible bit by bit, anything testable, by consulting science. Every name or phrase confirmed strengthens the inductive conclusion that: "The Bible, as originally written, is 100% accurate, inspired by God." Christians often start with this claim as an assumption and disparage evidence for and against which is irrational – whereas I go to science to get the facts. Is it possible to
prove the Bible by relying on science and logic? |