James Patrick Holding has “updated” (as of October 2006) his article regarding the archaeological data concerning the ancient city of Jericho. Unfortunately I was not aware of this update until recently and it has taken me a bit of time to research some primary source material before I could publish this reply. There is no mention of my original article in his update even though I know he is aware of my writings on The Skeptical Review." 1 There isn’t much added to his original article in this “update.” He claims in his original article to be “on the lookout” for any “adequate” refutations of the data he presented by Rohl and Wood. One might assume that Mr. Holding has indeed read my article and has rejected it as inadequate. That would be unfortunate. But since Mr. Holding has not penned a specific response to my critique –and yet I suspect is aware of its presence and rarely, if ever, passes an opportunity to skewer a poorly written or defended skeptical piece—I can only conclude that he chooses to ignore writing any response because, frankly, he knows he has no adequate defense. There certainly is no getting past the hard data I presented that refuted his original position. However, since I know my research is the stronger of our positions, I have no hesitation in responding to his extremely sparse October ‘06 “update,” again drawing attention to Mr. Holding’s inadequacies in defending the biblical story of Jericho as a historical event as well as calling into question his declaration to be always on the “lookout” for refutations such as mine.
What Mr. Holding’s “update” doesn’t do is deal with the wealth of archaeological data presented in my own article, refuting the claims of Dr. Wood. His update shows no awareness of the conflicting conclusions drawn by Wood against Rohl, a conflict which seems to have completely missed his attention. What the update fails to do is present any new data that would help solidify Mr. Holding’s claim that archaeological evidence suggests that “the events [regarding Jericho] reported in [the Bible] could have happened” and that archaeology as a whole has “settled into a more or less contented middle - one that establishes the basic veracity of the Bible's account.” These are large claims that Mr. Holding’s original article failed to establish and claims that his more recent “update” likewise fails to uphold.
Mr. Holding highlights his “update” at the lead of his article. He writes:
Updated 10/06 -- new material has come from Provan, Long and Longman's Biblical History of Israel [BHI].
Scanning his article, I found that this “new material” is merely a footnote-like mention of this conservative textbook on the Bible (Notice that the title of this textbook is very carefully worded. It is not a textbook on the “History of Israel,” but a textbook on the Biblical History of Israel.” This subtle but significant difference in title choice should alert attentive readers to the fact that Provan, Long and Longman are less interested in the view of Israel’s history from an objective perspective and more interested in how the Bible portrays Israel’s history, regardless of whether or not the biblical version lines up properly with known historical fact). Mr. Holding does not quote directly from the text nor does he give any indication that this source can add credibility to his original claims. His “update” consists merely of the following two sparse sentences:
To ignore Wood's case, as BHI notes, would be "obscurantist" [176] and to parade Jericho as an example of how the Bible has been disproven is "irresponsible." It remained to be fully evaluated as of the writing of BHI.
Hardly anything to get excited about, much less update an apologetic article with! And yet Mr. Holding’s appreciative but rapid acknowledgment of Provan, Long and Longman’s in this “update” left me curious. Indeed, ignoring Dr. Wood’s case wouldn’t be wise and that is why–unlike Mr. Holding’s parenthetical mention of Dr. Wood’s “several factors (ceramic data, scarab evidence, radiocarbon dating, and stratigraphical considerations)” supportive of the biblical version of Jericho’s destruction—I carefully examined each of Dr. Wood’s points of data and clearly showed them to be woefully lacking, based upon faulty analysis, or false in their interpretation. Why, however, either Mr. Holding or the authors of Biblical History of Israel believe Dr. Wood’s case has not been fully evaluated is a mystery. Dr. Wood’s assertions have been examined by other archaeologists–Beinkowski most notably—and they have been rejected for the reasons I detail in my analysis of Mr. Holding’s original article. And why, if Dr. Wood’s (and Rohl’s) position(s) have been found inadequate by the larger archaeological community (conspiracy theories not withstanding 2), and the archaeological evidence regarding the destruction of Jericho been shown not to line up with the biblical narrative, is such a demonstration “irresponsible” in showing how the Bible can be disproved? If the Bible claims an historical event, E, occurred at date Y1 or Y2 at place P, and P can be found in the sands of the desert but no evidence of E having occurred at P either in Y1 or Y2, why isn’t this a good example of the Bible being disproved in at least one of its historical assertions?
Mr. Holding's approval of Provan, Long and Longman’s text sent me to the local conservative seminary’s library to check out their Biblical History of Israel 3. What I found vindicated Mr. Holding’s own sparse representation of their work. As inadequate as Mr. Holding’s original article defending Dr. Wood and Dr. Rohl’s work regarding the plausibility of Jericho’s fall aligned with the biblical narrative had been, Provan, Long and Longman’s textbook was anemic in comparison. It’s no wonder Mr. Holding could only muster two meager sentences to represent their position for his “update”.
Biblical History of Israel’s [BHI] examination of the historical accuracy of the biblical tale of Jericho’s destruction begins on page 174 of the text and ends halfway down page 176. Hardly the space needed to defend Dr. Wood’s analysis against its critics from mainstream archaeology. But, to be fair, this is a textbook and not a journal to debate the fine points of archaeological theory or data. Nonetheless, the conclusion regarding Jericho and the biblical story of its destruction in BHI is the same as Mr. Holding’s: It could have happened–based upon Dr. Wood’s assertions—and there certainly is no archaeological data flatly refuting the biblical tale.
As I did with Mr. Holding’s original article, I want to look at the argument made in BHI to see if it really should stand as a sufficient “update” to Mr. Holding’s case in lieu of Mr. Holding taking a point-by-point examination of my entire article. Is there enough data there for me to reexamine my own position? Do the authors of BHI look at the “several factors” that build Dr. Wood’s case or even mention the contradictory studies I detailed in my own examination of Dr. Wood’s presentation? And, specifically, why did they leave the impression in Mr. Holding’s mind that Jericho should not be used as an example of a failure of a biblical historical claim? What evidence could they mount to at least leave Jericho an open archaeological question with enough room to allow the possibility of the biblical narrative's being true?
To begin, Provan, Long and Longman write that the archaeological evidence found at Jericho correlates “in many remarkable ways with the biblical account.” Echoing a strategy used in Mr. Holding’s article, they note such similarities between the biblical account and archaeological finds as:
“…evidence of collapsed city walls. There is evidence of burning. There is evidence even of the time of year that the burning must have taken place….”
These are points that Mr. Holding uses in his 1999 article that I fully covered in my original response, "The Walls of Jericho." None of these correlations, of course, are evidence of Jericho’s destruction at the hands of Joshua’s army. In fact, as I noted, the absolute lack of any military artifact at the site –broken spear heads, swords, shields, ammunition, etc.—argues strongly against the city’s destruction being at the hand of a conquering army. Provan, Long and Longman–like Mr. Holding—place great emphasis on the time of year that the burning of the city occurred. They note that is must have been in the Spring, “just after the harvest, since substantial quantities of grain have been recovered from the burned-out city by excavators.” Why this is surprising to the authors or Mr. Holding and other apologists is a mystery to me. As I noted previously, the rapid abandonment of the city–and its grain harvest—can be explained easily by a sudden natural disaster. As other archaeologists (including Dr. Wood!) have noted, the city walls likely fell because of an earthquake. (I wonder how many citizens left items cooking on the stove and boxes of oats unopened in their pantries in San Francisco when the earthquake hit in 1906? A large enough disaster to send people fleeing from their homes would certainly leave unattended and abandoned large stores of supplies if the population was too fearful to return or if returning proved to be too dangerous). As the authors of BHI observe, “The presence of grain also suggests that the city must have fallen quickly, and not as the result of a lengthy siege, because such supplies would surely have been exhausted had the city been besieged.” Earthquakes destroy human constructions very rapidly. In the matter of seconds entire structures can collapse to the ground. Again, with the lack of any evidence suggesting a military siege of the city, why do the authors (and Mr. Holding) believe the evidence of disaster at Jericho had anything to do with Joshua and his marauding army? This seems to be an obvious case of begging the question. No archaeological data has yet suggested that the ruins of Jericho were caused by a military siege, Hebrew or otherwise.
Provan, Long and Longman go on to say, “If we assume that the city’s destruction resulted not from a natural catastrophe but from conquest, then the fact that the grain was left in situ and destroyed, rather than being taken by the conquerors, is also a suggestive detail.” But the authors don’t explain why this is a suggestive detail specifically of Joshua’s siege. They merely want to “assume that the city’s destruction resulted not from a natural catastrophe but from conquest.” Such an assumption, however simply isn’t warranted. This is called fitting the evidence to a preconceived theory instead of letting the evidence stand for itself. In fact, the undisturbed grain would more strongly suggest a natural disaster rather than a military conquest, regardless of what the Bible says.
What the authors do next is seem to take a page right out of Mr. Holding’s book. They comment that all this archaeological data correlate “well with the biblical description of events and conditions surrounding the capture of Jericho,” and to this they add a “piece of unintentional evidence from the Joshua story.” That bit of “unintentional evidence” is a stoppage of the Jordan River. As Mr. Holding writes in his article,
Josh. 3:14-17 speaks of an earthquake causing the Jordan to be blocked. As recently as 1927 the same thing happened when a cliff collapsed and blocked the river for 2 1/2 hours. In 1267 a similar blockage for 16 hours allowed a Muslim sultan to build a bridge's foundations [46-7].
Provan, Long, and Longman also want to take this passage from Joshua and apply it to the archaeological data that remains in the region of Jericho. They assert,
Given that stoppages of the Jordan… have been attested several times over the centuries of recorded geological history, this incidental remark in the biblical texts attests an accurate geographical/geological knowledge of the area and provides a plausible explanation of how the reported stoppage in the time of Joshua may have been effected (174).
The text makes a note regarding this alleged “stoppage” of the Jordan, and it references Dr. Wood’s article 4, which Mr. Holding used as the foundation for his own argument. BHI notes,
Wood… quotes geophysicist Amos Nut of Stanford University as follows: “Today Adam is Damiya, the site of the 1927 mud slides that cut off the flow of the Jordan. Such cutoffs, typically lasting one to two days, have also been recorded in A.D. 1906, 1834, 1546, 1267, and 1160” (344).
It would seem that Provan, Long, and Longman are about as attentive to looking for “adequate refutations of these authors” as is Mr. Holding. This is to say that they are not attentive at all, for information exposing the fallacy of the 1927 mud slide was available prior to the publication of their textbook.
Mr. Holding reveals his lack of attention to this material as well since the documentation revealing the error of the mud slide claim was available four years prior to his “update” of October ’06. Relying on Provan, Long, and Longman proves that he merely borrows outdated work from other, equally inattentive apologists whose sole purpose is not to widen the general knowledge of the public but to lead readers down meticulously pruned paths of carefully selected data so as to arrive at a preconceived conclusion. Apologists like James Patrick Holding already know what they want their readers to believe, and so they carefully cull the literature for just that information which they can use to build an illusion of research which their audience will readily and happily assume is a well-documented and thorough examination of the available data.
Holding wrote his original article in 1999 and then updated it in 2006 as I have been discussing. He claims to be on the lookout for new material. Provan, Long, and Longman published their textbook in 2003. Both of these sources mention this 1927 “mud slide” that “cut off the flow of the Jordan” in a fashion reminiscent of the Jordan’s stoppage in the book of Joshua when the Israelites crossed the miraculously dried up Jordan into the Holy Land to begin their siege on Jericho and the rest of the settlements of Canaan5 . This is seen as a “piece of unintentional evidence from the Joshua story” for both the authors of BHI and Mr. Holding. However, apparently not on the list of data to check either by Provan, Long, and Longman in their quest to write a textbook on the biblical history of Israel or on the horizon of James P. Holding’s lookout for updated information, was the 2002 Journal of Seismology article, “Erroneous interpretations of historical documents related to the epicenter of the 1927 Jericho earthquake in the Holy Land,” co-written by none other than Amos Nur (along with R. Avin, D. Bowman, and A Shapira) whom Provan, Long, and Longman mention in their own text (as quoted by Dr. Wood)! The article certainly didn’t miss the attention of Eric H. Cline, author of the 2007 book From Eden to Exile. In his chapter on “Joshua and the Battle of Jericho” he writes,
…in 1993, a team of earthquake specialists, including Amos Nur, professor of geophysics at Stanford University and an expert on both modern and ancient earthquakes, published an article reestimating the epicenter of the 1927 Jericho earthquake, placing it about 12 miles south of Jericho, rather than 19 miles north.
…In 2002, the team published a second article confirming its original findings (104-105).
The researchers further discovered and reported that the story of the damming of the Jordan River during the 1927 earthquake was a fake. The story, heralded by apologists like James Holding and Dr. Wood as “proof” of the historicity of the biblical story regarding the conquest of Jericho, and recounted by Cline in his book, goes like this:
An earthquake at Jericho that occurred less than a century ago, in the early afternoon of July 11, 1927, is frequently cited to prove that an earthquake could have affected Jericho and caused the Jordan River to cease flowing. This quake measured 6.5 on the Richter scale; its epicenter was said to have been about 19 miles north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, by the modern Damiya Bridge.
…it reportedly caused a mudslide near the Damiya Bredige when the 150-foot-high embankment on the western side of the Jordan River collapsed, stopping the river’s waters from flowing south until cleanup crews could remove the earth some 21 hours later. Moreover, Damiya is generally indentified with ancient “Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan.” In other words, the 1927 earthquake supposedly resulted in the exact same situation as that described in the Hebrew Bible (103-104).
The discovery that the epicenter was not, as previously believed, north of Jericho but south of the site, and that the “mudslide” damming the Jordan is a product of fiction, not fact, is discussed at length in the 2002 article, published in the Journal of Seismology which I was able to obtain rather easily from my local library. The authors of the article note,
…doubts regarding the 1927 epicenter determination are related to the testimony of Braslavski (1938) about the collapse of the banks of Jordan River close to Damya, damming thereby the Jordan for twenty-one hours. The damming of the Jordan near Damya became a crucial evidence for locating the epicenter near Damya by Ben-Menahem et al (1976). However, upon close examination of Braslavski’s text, it becomes clear that he relied entirely on Garstang (1931), a study that tried to relate natural disasters to miraculous biblical events (471).
Garstang’s motivations sound suspiciously familiar! As the authors delve into Garstang’s motivation to report on the earthquake’s effect on the Jordan River, I couldn’t help but picture a line of biblical apologists dutifully ready to accept his story at face value and repeat it uncritically down through the decades. The article continues to paint a damning picture regarding how Garstang invented the “miraculous mudslide”:
Garstang (1931) is the only source reporting about the Jordan’s damming at Damya and it is important to examine the context in which Garstang indicates the event. Namely, his aim to prove that Damya is the biblical ‘city of Adam’, where the Israelites crossed the Jordan under the leadership of Joshua Ben-Nun. Thus, he provides a ‘scientific’ explanation i.e., the occurrence of an earthquake that enabled the crossing a flowing river without a bridge (Garstang, 1931). Garstang cites ‘the event of the damming of the Jordan River’ as an empirical evidence related to the 1927 earthquake. He recruits also the verse from ‘The Song of Deborah’ that connects, in his words, ‘the Exodus of the Israelites from Edom with an earthquake’ (472-473).
So, we now know Garstang’s motivation for wanting a mudslide north of Jericho. It sounds reminiscent of other such “researchers” who claim to have found “unintentional evidence” in the field linking it to the Joshua story. The evidence isn’t so “unintentional”, is it? But why should we doubt Garstang’s story of the mudslide? Surely, just because it miraculously lines up –“unintentionally”—with the biblical tale is not enough. The authors of the article continue:
Garstang himself was not in Palestine during the earthquake at all… his descriptions of the collapses along the banks of Jordan River seem be [sic] an unsuccessful copy of descriptions he had found elsewhere [of similar type events]. He cannot be regarded as an eyewitness….
…more significant than Garstang’s testimony, is the absence of any evidence supporting him. None of the documents we examined mention damming of the Jordan River: not the documents of the British Mandate Government and the British Police, not the press releases on the earthquake, not Brawer (1928), Abel (1927), Willis (1928) and not even one of the German researchers who studied the earthquake in the Holy Land (Blanckenhorn, 1927; Sieberg, 1932) (473).
So Garstang not only did not have any collaborating evidence to support his claim that the miraculous mudslide occurred, he wasn’t even in the country at the time to verify the story! From where could he have learned of such a mudslide? It appears it flowed purely from his imagination and has been picked up and carried on by apologists eager to argue for the “evidence of Jericho” ever since.
The authors of the article in the Journal of Seismology finish their examination of the mudslide claim by concluding,
…Besides its general unreliability, there are additional methodological grounds for rejecting Garstang’s testimony: Garstang has an ‘interest’ in adopting the story of damming the Jordan River in Damya: by calling on the earthquake-triggered bank collapse, he gets a scientific explanation for his thesis of crossing the Jordan River by the Israelites, at Damya toward Jericho. However, we adopt the accepted methodological rule in historical research, which states that a source with an ‘interest’ should not be accepted as evidence, particularly if it is without any support. Therefore damming of the Jordan River during the earthquake of 1927 in Damya cannot be regarded as reliable (ibid, emphasis mine).
If Garstang’s “interest” is a reason for rejecting his testimony, how about that of Dr. Wood’s research? As I noted in my previous article, Dr. Wood is not a dispassionate observer in the world of archaeology. He works with an agenda. As noted in my original article, Dr. Wood is connected to an organization known as the Associates for Biblical Research. According to their website:
Dr. Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research, has reexamined and reevaluated the excavated evidence from Jericho to better correlate that data with the Biblical story of Joshua's conquest as contained in the inspired Scriptures of the Old Testament (Joshua 6).
Such a statement took me by surprise. It claimed Dr. Wood “reexamined and reevaluated the excavated evidence from Jericho to better correlate that data with the Biblical story” (emphasis mine)
Doesn’t this sound exactly like what Garstang did with his assertion regarding the damming of the Jordan in 1927? Garstang’s story seems to “be an unsuccessful copy of descriptions [of similar type incidents] found elsewhere,” specifically conflated and concocted “to relate natural disasters to miraculous biblical events.” Garstang’s agenda was exactly “to correlate the data with the Biblical story.” He wanted to “prove that Damya is the biblical ‘city of Adam,’ where the Israelites crossed the Jordan under the leadership of Joshua Ben-Nun.” He fudged the data in order to provide “a ‘scientific' explanation” for the biblical events. It may be that Dr. Wood and J. Garstang also wear the same size shoe and perhaps share a sweet tooth for vanilla ice cream in waffle cups.
Certainly Mr. Holding should have been aware of this 1993 study calling into question the 1927 earthquake and subsequent damming of the Jordan claim when he wrote his own article in 1999 if, as he said, he was vigilant about researching evidence. Mr. Holding obtained a Master’s degree in Library Studies. Research should certainly be one of his strong points. Indeed, he has stated elsewhere6, “Critical evaluation of sources is what my education was all about.” But, if he somehow missed this report in 1999 when he wrote his original article, I wonder why his education failed him again and he wasn’t attentive to the 2002 confirmation report regarding this claim when he made his 2006 update? His education certainly didn’t fail him in locating such a hard-to-find text as Provan, Long, and Longman’s Biblical History of Israel which I could only turn up at my local conservative seminary’s library. How did Mr. Holding and the authors of the Biblical History of Israel pass along this refuted claim of the “damming of the Jordan” as a “piece of unintentional evidence from the Joshua story” if the claim was suspected to be false as far back as 1993? One can only speculate as to the sincerity of their intentions to objectively review the material “confirming” the biblical claims.
Now, does this mean that Jericho was not destroyed in an earthquake sometime around 1550 BCE (the date Kathleen Kenyon found for the destruction of the city layer under discussion and accepted by the vast majority of mainstream archaeologists) or that the Jordan could never have been dammed by a mudslide? Of course not. As the Journal of Seismology article notes, there have been other instances of the Jordan damming at other times in her history. The point here is not to discredit a natural explanation for the stoppage of the Jordan with an acknowledgment that that explanation was given a supernatural spin in the biblical tale. The point here is to emphasize how researchers and apologists can let their religious bias influence how they read material, how they present material, and how that bias guides or blinds them to particular data. It really isn’t Mr. Holding’s fault he missed the refutation of Garstang’s tale or the fault of the conservative authors Provan, Long and Longman. They have an agenda and that agenda doesn’t lead them to scientific journals uncovering the fiction of religiously motivated claims. But it should stand as a lesson to those who rely on apologetics that this isn’t necessarily the field in which to get objective, scientific truth. If Mr. Holding, Provan, Long, and Longman, or Dr. Wood cannot find material or reevaluate the evidence “to better correlate that data with the Biblical story,” then that data will not likely make it onto their radar screens, much less into any of their published articles or books. So if you’re looking for a biblical history of Israel, why bother with the apologists and like-minded researchers? You might as well just open the pages of the Bible and mutter, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” However, if you are looking for a history of Israel without the biblical tethers, you will need to get dirt under your fingernails and paper cuts across your fingertips. You will have to turn more pages than merely make up the books of a holy text. And you will have to care for the truth, the actual truth and not some reevaluated data that correlates better with a Biblical story.
After reading BHI as directed by Holding’s article, I found nothing that wasn’t already covered by Holding’s original article. And both apologetic attempts to buttress “evidence for Jericho” were extremely sparse and poor. Neither one, it appears, read anything regarding Dr. Wood after his published article in BAR in 1990. That was over 17 years ago. In that time, Dr. Wood’s pottery evidence, scarab evidence, radiocarbon dating and mudslide story–all of which were mentioned in Wood’s original 1990 BAR article and championed by Mr. Holding in his Jericho article as well as in BHI-- have all been shown to be false. I’m not a professional archaeologist or Bible historian, but even I found all the relevant data relatively easily to show why the larger community of scholars reject Dr. Wood’s “findings” and have done so for nearly two decades now.
In fact, the remainder of BHI is simply a parallel of Mr. Holding’s article, which I thoroughly refuted in my original reply. Amusing, however, is Provan, Long, and Longman’s defense of Dr. Wood’s article, noting that the “lack of success” of his 1990 BAR article “may be due in part to the fact that the publication of Wood’s more detailed scholarly study has been delayed.” Delayed? We are approaching the 20th anniversary of that article! Delayed? I wonder what could possibly delay such an important “detailed scholarly study” of the remains of Jericho in order “to better correlate that data with the Biblical story” for nearly two decades?
The bottom line here is Provan, Long, and Longman’s admission in one of the notes attached to this section of their textbook. They admit, “[W]e have noted already Bienkowski’s challenge and Wood’s response, and in our opinion Wood makes the better case” [344, n200]. Opinion hardly matters here, but it is important to point out that Provan, Long, and Longman are basing their opinion only on the original “dialogue” between Wood and Bienkowski in the 1990 BAR articles. Obviously, they were not “on the lookout” for any “adequate” refutations of the data presented by Wood post-1990. But, unlike Mr. Holding, they didn’t claim to be looking out for such material, either. Yet, I must confess that I find it somewhat refreshing to read these authors admit to their bias in accepting Wood’s dated conclusions on little more than their own personal feelings for the data rather than a detailed study of the contrary evidence, even if that admission is buried in a footnote.
Notes
1- I know Mr. Holding is aware of my work since he responded to my Population article. See here. Return to text.
2- Mr. Holding appears to believe that Rohl’s “New Chronology” is being ignored by archaeologists as a conspiracy. As I wrote in my original article: “Rohl’s “New Chronology” fell flat on the Egyptology community. Mr. Holding’s only hope, as he mentions elsewhere, is “to wait for the current generation of Egyptologists to die out before the new chronology gains wide acceptance.” Mr. Holding appears to be under the impression that the world of Egyptology has some sort of conspiracy set up against Mr. Rohl and that it will take the death of these conspirators to unfetter Rohl from the chains that have been hoisted upon him” (In the event the link to “elsewhere” doesn’t work, a screenshot of Mr. Holding’s belief in a conspiracy can be found here. Return to text.
3- I had to go to my local conservative seminary’s library as the Biblical History of Israel is not a title carried by my suburban library, my large metropolitan library or any of the other moderate or liberal seminaries in my area. Return to text.
4- B. G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence,” Biblical Archaeology Review 16, no. 2 (1990); 44-58. Return to text.
5- I did not research this erroneous citation of the 1927 mudslide in my first reply to Mr. Holding’s original article as I was following his lead that the slide was likely caused by an earthquake. My intent at the time was merely to point out that the biblical text gives no clues that the stoppage of the Jordan was due to anything other than a miracle of Yahweh. Surely the Hebrews were not so naïve as to have missed an earthquake! Even if they attributed the trembling ground to the work of the Lord, this shaking of the earth would have been mentioned alongside the stoppage of the Jordan. My aim was to remove the biblical tale from the clever hands of an apologist and to place it back into its original context. I was not looking at the historicity of the mudslide claim as I was during this second round. Mr. Holding's update took me to the Biblical History of Isreal textbook which made mention of Dr. Nur's work. It was from this citation of Dr. Nur that lead me to research his studies and uncover both Eric Cline's book and the study published in the Journal of Seismology. Return to text.
6- See this TheologyWeb post. (TheologyWeb, a discussion forum moderated by friends of Mr. Holding, often deletes messages. In the event that the above link doesn’t work, a screenshot of Mr. Holding’s claim that his education qualifies him to “critically” examine scholarly work can be found here.) Return to text.
Sources
Cline, Eric. From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. National Geographic Society, 2007.
Provan, I, Long, V.P & Longman III, T. Biblical History of Israel. John Knox Press, 2003.
Avni, R, et. al “Erroneous interpretation of historical documents related to the epicenter of the 1927 Jericho earthquake in the Holy Land,” Journal of Seismology, vol. 6, pp. 469-476. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
