Stephen said:
Given that the clear conclusions of archeology seem to be that the Israelites were indigenous Canaanites who separated themselves out by cultural practices, what makes me curious is why they built their cultural mythology on a conquest narrative? They could have easily imagined occupation of a deserted wasteland. Was that the only form of hegemony and validation they could understand? Military conquest?
One can’t help but think it was the form most easily understandable in the region.
In trying to find information on the topic, I turned to AI, which gave me unbelievable quotes that would have validated that position. Sad to say, it seems to have taken a tab or two of LSD (Just Say No) as when I searched the transcripts they were nowhere to be found.
The ** you do not have permission to see this link **, however, does look interesting.
Israelites were indigenous Canaanites who separated themselves out by cultural practice
And this surprises me to see that this is indeed the Wikipedia position currently.
DeepSeek tells me it’s because archaeologists just find four-room houses and lipped pottery in that period of Canaan, with no distinctive minority material culture.
And I replied, um but they’re in tents with wineskins lmao. It’s all biodegradables.
And Deep Seek was like LMAO and I’m right and all that.
They’re not settled in that way until they get formal king investiture, which happens after the Judges period (imho Horemheb’s Judges system) when Solomon married into the Egyptian royal family, a rarety and a prerequisite bc the Egyptians claimed Syrio-Palestine.
So you aren’t looking at c. 1200-1000 BCE for Israelite stone houses and clay sherds , which is what I think Mark E. Smith has as the boundary points. David the herder, which implies a nomadic life, is actually after that, and Solomon after that.
There aren’t any monuments or kingly scarabs for the 1200- period unlike that of Jacob-El, because with the Exodus, only the priestly chieftan class left from Egypt into the Levant.
And the large number seems to be a mistranslation of Egyptian factorials.
As in, the direct descendants of Moses (who I believe was Thutmose the Overseer of Foreign Lands, not to be confused with Thutmose the Pharaoh) are not settled back into the Levant, and imo there also seems to continue to be a Semetic admixture in Egypt, because the full center of government moves to Avaris/Tanis. The era of Hyksos scarab evidence in Canaan, like with Jacob-El, does not continue because the pecking order of government gets more centralized.
Oh man, I went to the Wiki Exodus page again and it’s just basically The Jews are Lying.
Like I didn’t even use Jewish dating to find the Egyptian records for Moses. I simply looked up what the administrative title would be for Guy In Charge Of Semetic-Speaking People would be – scroll, scroll, scroll, and found that Thutmose the Overseer of Foreign Lands for Amenhotep III through to Akhenaten. And maybe Ay – I think Thutmose The Overseer becomes damnation memoraed around there, because part of his wall with career achievements seems to be scrubbed off at the end.
Found that he’s unusual because he disappears at the end, meaning no tomb and the wall scrubbing of the end of his career. There’s also damnatio erasure on his statuettes (but still readable), and the time matches when the Semetic priestly community district gets razed in the ship show that is the Post-Amarna Period .
The primary deity is Seth Baal (Asiatic Seth) there , but upon its restoration by Horemheb, he installs a small tribute to Khonsu-Iah worship (Iah called Yah by the Hyksos).
Like every detail I could find for Thutmose, his victory in Kush or him being an Overseer of Brick-Making or Whatever, just matches the Biblical account, and importantly, Manetho’s account for the period.
Like I was never expecting the Hebrew Bible to be accurate at all.
I’m gueeeeeesssing that the reasoooooooon that priestly scholars don’t pop up and say ‘hey that’s the stelae’ is because they are over a barrel. It would easily show that the God in the Bible is the honorific for the current god-king, where Pharaoh indicates less reverence, like when there are simultaneous Egyptian rulers, and then, revealing the personal name seems to be a way to put them down.
By the Jerusalem centered religions keeping it all mystical in the current day, they receive patronage by empire.
So the fantastical elements of the Moses story seem to be the same idk as the Legion pig story in the New Testament. Like I think they just bundle up the fiction and the fact for the period and call it an anthology.
Since Thutmose The Overseer is also King’s Son of Kush, there’s a really big stone picture of one with TWO magical snake staffs, and I think that impressed people who couldn’t read the cuneiform. I’m not certain but the premise that these snake staffs gobbled the other snake staffs just sounds like palace politics. Horemheb the Generalissimo is a future Lord God, and so he’d be spoken of that way even before becoming so, and is low-key vying for Ay’s throne. He damnatio’s Ay afterwards. Ay is rare in that he isn’t fully divinized and that seems to be reflected in the story of priestly magic which seems to just be pestilence created by the opposing party because Josephus describes animals being raised that way.
Because the Generalissimo has control over the infrastructure, he can do things like dump the Canal of the Pharaoh onto Ay’s personal guard.
The idea that there’s no record of Egypt being mad that slaves are gone is because it’s authorized by the usurper, Horemheb. But does that fulfill the letter of the law? There is a penalty for stealing slaves from the royal house in the Abydos Stelae, and it’s 200 lashes and imo that’s why you see Jesus/his substitute per Gnosticism get lashes to redeem the Israelites.
I don’t think that my reverse engineering is uncovering things that like elite priests are completely unaware of, it’s that they may think their populations behave better when they believe a Miraculous God.
Some people would find it a sign of great modern transparency if it was revealed there was bribed prisoner substitution (occurs in Asia even in the modern day) and that showdowns like Elijah’s fire were simply naptha, but idk
>> what makes me curious is why they built their cultural mythology on a conquest narrative?
Pure speculation, and pretty thin at that, but I wonder whether it couldn’t have been to create a moral justification for later hostility.
I’m thinking of the way the feud with the Amalakites appears to have been added to the early history in order to justify David’s ruthless and unprovoked raids on them (raids which were much later and may actually have been historical).
Granted the Amalakites are sui generis, but there could be a similar logic driving the conquest narrative.
Can anyone make the case for why the Jewish historical record is considered a lie by scholarly consensus then?
Using my dates, all the conflicts occur in the right towns.
Btw I’m using Deep Research to dissect, line-by-line, the legal forms of address and ritual that must occur for Jesus to enact the Sar Puhi Substitute King Ritual under Roman law and it returned like a 100 points of concurrence lmao.
Per rules discussed in Josephus’ books, both Pilate and Antipas need to jointly acquire the shining robe that is the first robe before the red-or-purple robe that Jesus is investitured with, for example – that’s how they become friends that day imo, Pilate lets him in on it. Pilate the hand-washing ablutionist that early sources say secretly follows Jesus.
This takes the lunar eclipse omen off the Herodian line.
Simon of Cyrene is “Of The Farm” — and the Substitute in the Substitute King Ritual is called The Farmer/Gardener.
Here’s a cool fact for ANE substitutionary atonement, you can swap in a substitute for the substitute, but there’s a legal chain-of-custody where the last one is preferred to be foreign (to take the omen off the country) and agricultural (not elevated).
So Herod Antipas being called KING Herod in gLuke, technically he was supposed to be king in the will and is called King by his people but receives Rome’s formal title of tetrarch.
Importantly, the Gospels (and potentially important others) acknowledge him as King, therefore he is definitely the one that must dress Jesus in the shining robe because in the Sar Puhi Substitute Ritual, the King must be present when the royal clothes go to the substitute. That is likely part of why in the Gnostic Great Treatise of Seth, Jesus is still in the area.
The moment, the sentence after this robe is no longer on Jesus, hello Simon of Cyrene!
Herod Antipas/Herod Agrippa would definitely believe in the omen – notice that his dad Herod the Great is like omgosh where! on the astral omen of Jesus. Well, Herod the Great gets his only royal blood from being matrilineally Nabataean (gentle people, he gets his feistiness from the Edomite side) and Nabataeans have these really cool astral stelae.
So in the Gospels there are TWO robes and TWO events with Pilate acknowledging as king because there’s two substitutes – Jesus for Antipas, Simon of Cyrene for Jesus.
Hi Porphyry! I kind of shoehorned in an exciting response that I got from Gemini Deep Research where I’m using it to check the Gnostic claim that Jesus was substituted in the Crucifixion by Simon of Cyrene. And the Quran saying the Crucifixion was “made to appear as if Jesus was crucified” and that Jesus did not experience it.
There’s also the Mandaean claim of Jesus as deceiver, which I just chalk up to the Mandaeans following more of the original Sumerian lore where Enki is a plain wisdom god, and not his later form as Ea, where he uses that wisdom to become a wholesome tricky god.
There’s a book I haven’t read yet where a prominent Mesopotamian scholar, Simo Porpola, claims that Jesus himself is the substitute for someone else, because the Crucifixion events mirror the Sar Puhi ritual, the Ritual of the Substitute King.
I haven’t read this book. So I’m asking AI to comb sentence by sentence and it’s pulled up cool things like Simon being “Of The Farm” when the title for the Substitute is the Farmer/Gardener. And how the swap is sealed by the passing on of clothes, which coincides with Jesus being returned to his original clothes that proceeds Simon of Cyrene’s narrative entrance. There’s also the find of the alt translation of the judgment seat (throne) that I didn’t know about.
So there’s no precedent for putting priceless robes (two of them) on a nobody, but there is precedence in that virtually every one of Jesus’ claimed ancestor’s feigns an identity.
“Their legend” vs “actual events.”
I just think that Josephus, the First Century historian’s books are so stuffed with accounts of real-life identity switcheroos and set-ups that I began wondering.
I also know that couching events that cannot be safely discussed publically in a spiritual or literary context has been the human standard for forever.
I also know that the founder of Rabbinical Judaism, Rabban ben Zakkai: ** you do not have permission to see this link ** is lauded in-depth in the Babylonian Talmud for faking his demise to escape his fellow Jews and partner with Roman Vespasian – why can’t this type of secret collaboration be explored for Pontius and Jesus?
What absolute nobody gets a private one-on-one audience with the governor? And two priceless robes that could get bloody — just for laughs?
Does anyone have a link to an academic source that refutes the possibility with high-quality logic?
** you do not have permission to see this link **his is the book co-written by a top Mesopotamian scholar that I haven’t read bc it costs $10 on Kindle:
This short book resolves the mystery of why Jesus chose to call himself Son of Man. Far earlier, the first Son of Man–the prophet Ezekiel–had met death as a Babylonian substitute king. Professor Simo Parpola’s expert exposition about Assyrian substitutes prepares readers for the sacrifice first of Ezekiel and then, far later in time, of Jesus. Ezekiel was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah chapter 53, and had perished as a substitute to redeem the lives of his rebellious countrymen. Understanding Ezekiel’s fate, Jesus chose the Son of Man title to exemplify his own redemptive mission. The authors of Mark, Luke, and Matthew subsequently framed their passion accounts so as to describe the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a latter-day substitute king. Most of this will come as news to students of both testaments of Scripture.
Thomas de Wesselow, _The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection_ (2012), 448pp., on 333
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Page 333 — We began this book by asking what sparked Christianity, and we can now provide a very simple, if surprising, answer:
the Turin Shroud.
Finding a peculiar image on the inner surface of his burial cloth, the followers of Jesus became convinced he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven.
This belief led to the emergence of a new sect within Judaism— Christianity-to-be.
The real founder of Christianity was not Peter or Paul or even Jesus, but the Shroud.
The Shroud of Turin is carbon-dated to the 13th Century, right?
So my next question about a movement that might possibly value secret followers (like Nicodemus), “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” and even conscious obscuring to the public with Jesus’ “the Parables are made to conceal, not to reveal” explanation is this —
why do we think that there are not organized groups of people that believe themselves to be the inheritors of this in the modern day?
Some people say that the modern religion are things like rock stars, Star Wars, Star Trek. Until you’ve had Mark Hamill walk you into a room then surprise you by quickly closing the door without turning on the lights, with just the light of a crescent moon that happens to be in frame of one small, narrow trailer window, then stare into your eyes wordlessly for what might have been an entire minute, hearing your own heart beat it is thumping so loud, and then having him declare with this profound theatricality and import that you *are* [royal title], I am still thinking about it, yes.
But that isn’t the end of these experiences.
Then I started researching this, then I noticed that in an early interview, Lucas credits a very obscure spiritual society for giving him this idea and turning him on to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. But because Joseph Campbell is that much more public, it is Joseph Campbell that then receives the credit by journos as the inspiration.
Then I found out that the Grammy-nommed musician that I also had the same kind of experience with was also linked thru his touring partner with the same society. She recently wrote a clear dedication song to the founder that all her fans, who never clocked her before as associated with something like this, have now pivoted to accepting that she wrote this plain, unencoded biographical song about the society’s 19th C founder because duh, she also bought and lives in the founder’s mansion.
And the way more important question is, is revealing the move (because they believe in Christian incarnation, and may be looking for someone with inherent knowledge to be an example of that) or is showing them that I can honor the um not revealing the right way to make friends?
“The Shroud of Turin is carbon-dated to the 13th Century”
Thomas de Wesselow, _The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection_ (2012), 448pp., on 333, 341
amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0525953655/
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Page 333 — And what about the 1988 carbon-dating result?
This is a question that keeps niggling, even after you have delved into it and discovered how easily the result is undermined.
Faith in a scientific verdict supported by popular opinion is difficult to shake off.
The temptation to abandon a “heretical” line of thought and simply accept what you have been told— and what everyone else believes—is extremely strong.
It is not an impulse that affects only the religious.
Page 341 — The only apparent problem with the Shroud theory is the 1988 carbon dating.
Skeptics, no doubt, will pin their colors to this rickety mast.
I have shown why we should have no faith in this uncorroborated result, although it is impossible, as yet, to determine what might have gone wrong.
One badly conducted scientific test proves nothing.
As Oxford’s Professor Ramsey insists, the 1988 carbon dating was far from definitive and needs to be reassessed in the context of a multidisciplinary research program.^2
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Lev February 28, 2018 at 6:44 am
Are you familiar with the story of Raymond Rogers who was the Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project?
He studied the Shroud in 1978, and he was convinced that the Carbon 14 tests in 1988 proved it was a medieval forgery.
That was until the year 2000 when a couple of amateur researchers published a paper showing a seam from a repair attempt running diagonally through the area from which the C14 sample was taken.
When Rogers saw the paper by Marino and Benford, his reaction was that they were not scientists, their theory was ridiculous, and that he still had fibre samples he had taken from the Shroud that could disprove their theory.
You can probably tell where this is going…
Upon examining the fibres under a microscope, Rogers concluded that, as they had hypothesized, a cotton patch had been woven into the linen fibres and then dyed to match the colour of the linen.
The C14 tests were correct, but they were from a medieval sample, not an ancient one.
Rogers was dying of terminal cancer, but was able to conduct further chemical tests and just weeks before he died he was able to publish a peer-reviewed paper that concluded the shroud was 1,300-3,000 years old.
More here: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Perhaps the Shroud of Turin provides us with an image of Jesus after all.
BDEhrman March 1, 2018 at 4:32 pm
Death bed conversion!
But, of course, if it was 1300 years old it would be what people have claimed, a medieval forgery.
Lev August 29, 2019 at 11:53 am
I thought you might be interested in this recent development over the Shroud of Turin:
[July 24, 2019
Study of data from 1988 Shroud of Turin testing suggests mistakes
** you do not have permission to see this link ** ]
“A team of researchers from France and Italy has found evidence that suggests testing of the Shroud of Turin back in 1988 was flawed.
In their paper published in Oxford University’s Archaeometry, the group describes their reanalysis of the data used in the prior study.
After studying the data for two years, the new research team announced that the study from 1988 was flawed because it did not involve study of the entire shroud—just some edge pieces. Edge pieces from the shroud are rumored to have been tampered with by nuns in the Middle Ages seeking to restore damage done to the shroud over the years.
In a recent interview with L”Homme Nouveau, Tristan Casabianca, team lead on the new effort, claimed that the raw data from the 1988 tests showed that the test samples were heterogeneous, invalidating the results.”
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January 20, 2005: A peer reviewed scientific paper by Raymond N. Rogers, retired Fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is published in the journal _Thermochimica Acta_, Volume 425, Issues 1-2, Pages 189-194.
Titled “Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin,” the paper concludes:
“As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the Shroud.
Pyrolysis-mass spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin.
The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the Shroud.”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
30. Raymond N. Rogers, “Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin,” _Thermochimica Acta_ Vol. 425, Issues 1-2, 20 January 2005, Pages 189-194
PDF:
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“In trying to find information on the topic, I turned to AI, which gave me unbelievable quotes that would have validated that position. Sad to say, it seems to have taken a tab or two of LSD (Just Say No) as when I searched the transcripts they were nowhere to be found”
AIs have been known to hallucinate, and some of those hallucinations have even appeared in opinions issued by judges.
Two Federal Judges Apologize For Issuing Opinions With AI Hallucinations – 10.24.2025
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In July, I wrote about Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, who withdrew an opinion that used generative AI.
Judge Henry T. Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi likewise withdrew an opinion that used generative AI.
Both opinions included made-up citations, which were obvious hallucinations.
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