From: Jan de Koning (jan@dekoning.ca)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 11:31:40 EDT
At 10:48 AM 20/10/2002 +0000, Jim Eisele wrote:
>Hi Jan,
>
>I am very sorry about your uncle. My mom once gave me the
>definition of history as a record of man's inhumanity to man.
>
>Obviously, my post was not a personal attack.
>
>It was intended to be a commentary on the incredible amounts of
>garbage that I have been discovering recently in the name of
>"scholarship."
>
>I hate to say it, but scholarship has it's biases. This is a
>generalization, but liberal scholarship doesn't take the Bible
>seriously enough. Conservative scholarship, um, is arrogant.
In reply:
Jim,
I agree with most of what you wrote. As a member of a synodical study
committee I studied these issues. Our report to the Christian Reformed
Synod 1991,pages 367-430. Our conclusion was that Gen. chapters 1 - 11,
were not history in the modern sense of the word. They are more like a
general introduction.
Generally speaking, the Bible tells us history, yes, but history-telling in
Old Israel (and for that matter in old Western Europe) is not the same as
scholarly researching and telling of history.
My uncle concluded on the basis of the biblical texts and the reading of
the El-Amarna tablets (he read both in the original as far as they were
available) that the Israelites entered Canaan in 1380 BC. However, I
personally believe that the date was not that important.
For me that book was important, since I was in High School and my uncle
quoted my geography teacher. So, I read through the book to see where and
when and if he was quoted more than once. I learned a lot about Israel's
entering Canada, and got high marks in geography, because I could
"intelligently" talk with my teacher, even without studying
geography. That is where my interest in the early OT stories started.
Jan
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