Message: 8
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:22:44 -0000
From: "aron"
Subject: Mari


Herman Hoeh writes:"In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Europeans became aware of the treasures of the TELLS or mounds of
the Mesopotamian flatlands. Archaeological expeditions cut into many of
the most impressive ones. Hoards of private and public documents were
discovered -- most of them lying to this day untranslated in the basements
of European museums. A multitude of undreamed of facts were disclosed for
the first time. But how were the archaeologists and historians to
interpret these facts? How would they arrange the dynastic lists of
hitherto unknown kings?

Unfortunately the key to a true knowledge of history was being
discarded at the very time excavations began in Mesopotamia. That
key is God in history. Without God -- and hence without the Bible -- there
were no bounds to curb historical speculation. A deliberate conspiracy to
interpret every possible fact in opposition to the Bible was summarily
begun. The literary critics quickly seized the opportunity. The Babylonian
accounts of creation and the Flood were interpreted as the originals of
Genesis. Moses, they claimed, patterned the law after Hammurabi's Code.

No one questioned whether Hammurabi lived BEFORE or AFTER Moses. Or
whether Genesis was written before rather than after the idolatrous
Mesopotamian accounts of creation and the great Flood. Everyone
assumed that the ancient arrangements of the dynastic lists of kings and
city-states were in proper sequence. That the scribes might have
deliberately arranged their history to make Babylonia appear older than
any other part of the world did not dawn upon the first critics.

Then came the astounding discovery. Business documents, public
monuments, literary classics were translated which made kings
contemporaries who were separated by hundreds or thousands of years
in the dynastic lists of kings. What were the historians to do?

Wrote Leon Legrain in 1922: "The problem of parallel dynasties is
one of the most troublesome for Babylonian chronologists"
(Publication of Babylonian Section of University of Pennsylvania,
XIII, 17). Weldner of Austria forced the historical world to
recognize the problem despite themselves. His famous articles
pointing out that several successive dynasties were in fact
contemporary appeared in 1923 in "Archiv fuer Keilschriftforschung"
(I, 95), and in 1926 in "Archiv fuer Orientforschung" (III, 198).

But the strongest evidence against the modern interpretation of
history was discovered by the French at Mari on the Euphrates River. There
it was discovered that during the lifetime of Hammurabi -- who was
mistakenly dated by historians to the time of Abraham -- the Benjamites
were in control of Palestine and men like David were famous! (See Werner
Keller's "The Bible as History", pages 49-52).

How were the historians and archaeologists to interpret these
astounding discoveries? Were they to date Hammurabi properly to the
time of Saul and David? Not at all! Rather, they cleverly assumed
that Benjamites were in Palestine long before Benjamin was born --
that the name of David was famous for nearly a thousand years before David
was born! They hoped thereby to keep their interpretations of the king
lists and reject the history of the Bible.

It is time such nonsense were banished from history. It is time that the
truth of history were made plain. "