Holy Blasphemy

www.biblemap.org is an amazing website; a bible student’s dream come true, with cool widgets and history and trivia and facts – all built over a map of Israel and the middle East. You can select any part of the Bible by book and verse number, and all the geographical places mentioned in the text will show up on the map. A student of history or culture should also be interested – whether or not you believe that the Bible is literally true. You can find pretty accurately where the nomadic tribes of the Old Testament came from, which people inhabited the lands before them, which cities where huge metropolitan centers and had lasting influence on the Jewish legends that were included in the Bible. For example; the patriarchs mostly came out of the area that is now Iraq and Syria – and the lifestyle lived by them, the culture and dress, nomadic wanderings, tents, herding, etc., is pretty much the way many Arabs continue to live (a reminder that the “real Jews” were probably inseparable from Arabs, until they migrated to Europe and America for 2,000 years and then decided to come back and claim ‘their’ land in the 20th century).

At any rate – a useful tool, with one grave exception: no doubt the purpose of this tool and its primary role will be to justify/prove that the Bible is historically valid. That the places mentioned in the Bible really existed, and therefore the author is reliable and we should believe all accounts as likewise factual, is a common apologetic argument. It’s also stupid. It’s the exact same as saying that Troy is a real, archaeological site, and that therefore all the mythological elements in Homer’s “Iliad” probably happened.

I’ll say it again: archaeological evidence that confirms places mentioned in the Bible only proves that the storyteller was a real person trying to tie his myth in with contemporary events, to make it seem realistic. It cannot not possibly prove any supernatural event also described in reference to that location.