Is Old Testament historicaly correct?

[Twigler]

Did the Assyrians ever assemble a force of 185,000 in one place? I mean, outside of official propaganda? I could see the Persians or the Romans managing it, but I don't think the Assyrians had that kind of population or logistics.

They were fairly well organised for armies in their time with a professional core of soldiers, supplemented by levies in time of need, but those numbers are fiction.
It's estimated that the whole Assyrian armed forces were maybe 200,000 soldiers, with an maximum army size of around 50-70,000. There are stone tables which lists the food transports going to the armies and based on the daily rations assigned to a soldier they managed to extrapolate the estimated size. This includes all the support staff and non-combatants travelling with the army, so the actual fighting numbers would be lower.

Pretty much all army sizes mentioned in the old testament suffer from serious over-inflation. And that's being euphemistic.

[Edi]

Almost everything in the Old Testament is seriously bullshit, because it is based on oral histories that were only written down decades or more often centuries after the actual events. This lead to such things as backward projection, meaning that the people who wrote down the text assumed that the living conditions, population size, cities and so on and so forth were the same in the past as they were at that time. This leads to a collection of three mudbrick huts becoming a great city, 50 men becoming an army of 15,000 and similar inflationary bullshit, which permeates the entire text.

For example, Jericho didn't have walls at the time of the alleged siege, as verified by archeological evidence.

So about the only things the OT is useful for is referencing what places were located where and when certain mythological people (possibly) lived. You can get a lot more out of it if you can trace the origin stories backward and it can give some clues as to what kind of influences came from where.

A lot of this stuff appears incidentally in the book AlphaBeta by John Man (EAN 9780553819656) because it is relevant to the history of the development of the western alphabet. Seriously, if you can afford this book, buy it. I have an earlier edition of this one, from several years ago, though this newer edition was published roughly one year ago.

[Simon_Jester]

In other words, the vast majority of the Old Testament is nonsense, but small scraps of it are useful ... but the only way to know which parts are useful is to confirm them against other sources. It certainly can't be relied upon itself. And the Iliad is less useful ... because there are no other sources to confirm it against, so it represents the only source on the era it describes. Sorry but I don't see how this makes it less useful.

With the Iliad, we have no way to piece it together and figure out which parts are real and which parts are made up. That means that everything in the book has a low probability of being true. There's no way to separate the gems from the crap.

For example, maybe there really was a Trojan Horse, but since the only sources we have are the Odyssey and the Aeneid, we have no way of knowing, since the same sources describe the Greek gods intervening on the battlefield and islands populated by one-eyed giants and such. We know Homer and Virgil put those things in because they sounded good, not because they were true; we can't rule out the possibility that they put the stuff about the Trojan Horse in that way too.

With the Old Testament, historians can separate the gems from the crap. Most of it is crap, with inflated numbers and divine intervention all over the place. We discard that, and are left with some useful pieces. But the only reason we can even find the useful pieces (without which the whole thing is useless) is because we have other sources that we can use to check up on the Bible's claims about ancient history in the Middle East. That lets us identify the rare, happy spots where those claims turn out not to be bullshit (Channel72 mentioned the books of Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah), and discard the more numerous ones where they are (say, the Pentateuch).

[Serafina]

With the Iliad, we have no way to piece it together and figure out which parts are real and which parts are made up. That means that everything in the book has a low probability of being true. There's no way to separate the gems from the crap.

For example, maybe there really was a Trojan Horse, but since the only sources we have are the Odyssey and the Aeneid, we have no way of knowing, since the same sources describe the Greek gods intervening on the battlefield and islands populated by one-eyed giants and such. We know Homer and Virgil put those things in because they sounded good, not because they were true; we can't rule out the possibility that they put the stuff about the Trojan Horse in that way too.

With the Old Testament, historians can separate the gems from the crap. Most of it is crap, with inflated numbers and divine intervention all over the place. We discard that, and are left with some useful pieces. But the only reason we can even find the useful pieces (without which the whole thing is useless) is because we have other sources that we can use to check up on the Bible's claims about ancient history in the Middle East. That lets us identify the rare, happy spots where those claims turn out not to be bullshit (Channel72 mentioned the books of Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah), and discard the more numerous ones where they are (say, the Pentateuch).

But doesn't that actually say nothing about the documents worth by itself?
Because if i get you right, you are saying that the Bible is usefull because we have other references and the Iliad isn't because we don't - but that has nothing to do with the document itself, does it?

[Simon_Jester]

The value of a historical source may have everything to do with context, I'd say. I don't really see the problem with this.

I mean, a decree from Ptolemy V tweaking the tax code and telling people to put up some statues isn't inherently very useful. But if it's engraved on a rock in three languages and we can use it to deduce the alphabets of two of those languages by knowing the third, it becomes very useful indeed. Which is why the Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous artifacts in the history of archaeology, rather than just being a random curio forgotten in the back of a museum.

Context allows us to pluck the few bits of the Old Testament that are useful from the sea of useless myth, because the Bible describes events that occured in a literate setting where other parties documented what was going on. Context does not allow us to do the same for the Iliad.

[Channel72]

With the Old Testament, historians can separate the gems from the crap. Most of it is crap, with inflated numbers and divine intervention all over the place. We discard that, and are left with some useful pieces. But the only reason we can even find the useful pieces (without which the whole thing is useless) is because we have other sources that we can use to check up on the Bible's claims about ancient history in the Middle East. That lets us identify the rare, happy spots where those claims turn out not to be bullshit (Channel72 mentioned the books of Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah), and discard the more numerous ones where they are (say, the Pentateuch).

Right; and because of our ability to validate or invalidate certain portions of the Old Testament, we can often assess whether or not a particular statement is likely to be true even without direct verification, depending on which part of the Old Testament it comes from. For example, just about any passage from the Torah is probably false. However, many statements made in say, Ezra, are probably true, even if we can't directly verify them, because the scholarly consensus here is that this book was written by a contemporary and the subject matter is entirely mundane (it's basically about some administrative difficulties surrounding a construction project to rebuild the temple.)

Plus, the decree from Cyrus to send exiled peoples back to their homelands and restore their temples is directly verified by Persian sources. So the book of Ezra demonstrates precisely why the Old Testament can be useful to historians; it provides direct, first-hand insight into the situation surrounding Cyrus's decree to end the Babylonian diaspora, and how it effected the people of that time. It also shows the beginnings of strict religious reforms in Judea that ultimately culminated in the Rabbis and Pharisees of later times.

[Vendetta]

In other words, the vast majority of the Old Testament is nonsense, but small scraps of it are useful ... but the only way to know which parts are useful is to confirm them against other sources. It certainly can't be relied upon itself. And the Iliad is less useful ... because there are no other sources to confirm it against, so it represents the only source on the era it describes. Sorry but I don't see how this makes it less useful.

Whilst it's been a long time since I studied history, I was of the understanding that no primary source can be relied upon by itself, every ancient historical source available is a product of oral mutation, repeated copying and translation, not to mention original authorial bias (In ten thousand years, history may remember Barack Obama as a Kenyan Muslim, if historians of the time are not careful about their use of sources).

The only thing even an original copy of a primary source can definitely tell is that someone wrote these words using these methods at a given point in history. Assigning any truth value at all to the words themselves is only possible where they can be corroborated against another source.

[Omeganian]

The book of Genesis, for example, doesn't tell us a lot about history (the parts which can be considered historical - since Abraham - mainly concern small groups of people). But it coincides rather well with what we know of the contemporary laws - the details of levirate marriage, second wife...

[Cecelia5578]

I think people are forgetting that the OT/Hebrew Bible covers events that took place over a very long period of time; I have no problem with believing that much of the Torah is historically iffy, but the later books certainly do have verifiable historical references. Since the majority (Catholics, Orthodox) of the world's Christians consider 1 and 2 Maccabees to be OT canon (or, rather, deuterocanonical) I'd nominate them for being pretty historically accurate, even though they have a distinct bias against the Hellenizers among the Jews of the time.