Originally posted by Sir Eric
Can I suggest a little bit of research into Egyptian thinking before making wild assumptions?
Your reply seems more centered about Hebrew thinking...
Did the writers of the bible have access to specialists who had made egypt and its history (such as things two thousands year in the past by then) their life study?
The Bible isn't a history of other cultures but the Hebrew one ONLY! So they aren't going to go in to detail about irrelevant ( to them anyway) details.
More or less my point. The people who wrote the bible didn't care wheter or not what they said about egypt et al would be accurate.
Hence why we could well today know better than them about the pyramids-era egypt, even though there's been a further 3000 years.
Did the writers of the bible have a pro-Israeli, anti-everyone not with them bias? Given the circumstances of the writing, more than probably.
Even a cursory glance at the Bible will show you that the Isrealites recorded all of their history both bad and good. In fact if you spend a bit of time in the book of Kings and Chronicles you will notice that Isreal had some pretty rotten Kings, Even David their greatest king had all his failures recorded for us all to read.
This hardly sounds like it is biased?
Yet nearly all the time any "bad" that is recorded either serves to :
A)Explains why some calamity fell on the Israeli (who are, after all, God's chosen people - so they think). "We did this bad thing, that's why that bad thing happened to us."
B)Serves as a moral lesson (IIRC, David's "failure" only serves to show how properly remorseful he was afterward, doesn't it?)
In addition, any book that present a group as "God's chosen people" is, by definition, biased in favor of that group - unless it's a satanic book, anyway.
If the Authors of the bible were biased toward their country they certainly wouldn't record their failures?
Unless recording these failures served to explain away some of their moral points. See above.
The Egyptians on the other hand did. Have you heard of a pharoah by the name of Hatschepsut? She was wife to Pharoah Thuthmoses and when he died his son was too young to reign so she reigned as regent until her son eventually deposed her.
After her death all her images in her mortuary temple near the valley of the kings was defaced and all records of her removed. She was even left out of the record of the Kings in a temple in Abydos. Does this sound biased to you? Do we have a record of the Egyptians recording their mistakes? Perhaps you might want to check out my personal fav Akhenaton (Ahmenhotep lV). A man definetly worth researching.
Never said the egyptians were honest. Never even thought so ; to assume any country is honest with its past is ridiculous. Japan gloss over its darkest moment, America does it, France does it - EVERYONE does it, and everyone did it in the past.
Did the researchers have a massively pro-egyptian bias? There's no reason to assume so.
Now this one I just dont understand. If someone is passionately involved with something it is very hard for them to be subjective all of the time.
True, to some extent. However, I'll still hold that there are more chances of a religious book being off-track on its history records than there are chances of archeology being off-track in the same situation.
If and when modern history - based on facts and proof - disagree with the bible on the history of the world, I'll trust historians and archeologist.
The historian MAY have a private agenda other than finding historical knowledge. The point of the bible was never to be an history record to begin with, hence I simply won't expect unbiased historical interpretation from them (religious book are written to expose religous believes, not to be historic records), whereas unless proven otherwise I'll expect historians to at least try to make an effort to hold back any bias he might have. Of course, they won'T always suceed, and as often as possible one should turn to a source which has the less emotional stake in the matter as possible (ie, a French historian of long time french ancestry would probably be less biased on history of the Japan people than either Korean or Japanesse historians), while still being somewhat knowledgeable about it..
In some ways we do know more than the people who lived a couple of thousand years ago, but to assume that they couldnt know something that we now know or dont still know, leads us to believe that history cant teach us a thing.
Agreed - but if what information modern science has (quite literaly) unearthed disagree with what information they had in the bible, I would tend to believe what modern science tells us first and foremost - there is no guarantee of how the information used for the bible was found (when dealing with non-hebrews group especially), whereas we know how our modern information was obtained.
Did the writers of the bible have a pro-Israeli, anti-everyone not with them bias? Given the circumstances of the writing, more than probably.
I would like to know what "circumstances" you are reffering to? [/B]
Exile to Babylon. When a group is faced with terrible circumstances, nationalist (or "group-ist") feelings tend to run very strong. See for an example : United States of America, since 9/11.