Freund - Digging through history: archaeology and religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust

Digging through History

Digging through History

Archaeology and Religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust

Richard A. Freund

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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Copyright 2012 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freund, Richard A.

Digging through history : archaeology and religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust / Richard A. Freund.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-0882-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-0884-1 (electronic)

1. Archaeology and religion. 2. Excavations (Archaeology) 3. Antiquities. 4. Mysteries, ReligiousHistory. I. Title.

BL65.A72F74 2012

200.9dc23 2012023525

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to

Judy Freund

Howard Berkowitz

Beatrice Freund

Aaron Stovitz

CONTENTS

Your way was through the sea and Your path through the mighty waters; but Your footsteps left no prints.

Psalms 77:20

T his is a book about some of the worlds great mysteries of religion and how archaeology has helped us understand the meaning of these mysteries. I have been using chapters of this book in my courses at the University of Hartford for the past decade. This book is intended for students and for the general public who often struggle with many of the mysteries of religion and wonder if archaeology has produced answers to help resolve some of the most fundamental questions of history. Writing a book called Digging through History is a daunting task, but it started because I could not find a single book that utilized archaeology to encompass the full sweep of history, from the ancient period to the modern period, for my survey course. Even this book is not comprehensive. It is episodic history that extends from the ancient period to the modern period, focusing on critical junctures or events that illustrate great principles of history. Out of this, Digging through History was born.

But history is very long, so the question is this: Where do you begin? Human history is much older than the period from Atlantis to the Holocaust, which is the main thrust of this book. This book covers perhaps only six thousand years of human history, and my focus is on how this history played itself out in the life and times of the ancient Israelites and later the Jews. This is all a small part of the vast human history that has existed on the planet. Geologists write about a history of the earth using a framework of billions and millions of years. Paleontologists use the gauge of millions and hundreds of thousands of years. This book covers only a small fraction of the much shorter human history, focused upon a few illuminating subjects, areas of the world, and peoples who inhabit the earth.

I was in South Africa while I was finishing this book, and it gave me a perspective on just how difficult it is to look at human history. The caves around Drakensberg, South Africa, contain cave paintings that the locals say go back thousands of years. These early artistic renderings by ancient peoples tell us something about who they were and what their lives were like, but we have no texts about their lives that we can compare the paintings to. In this book, I compared how textual information and material culture together help us understand events in history. Although the cave paintings are attempts to create and transmit human culture, it is nearly impossible to know what they were trying to say since we do not have any textual information to compare it to.

I have been involved in excavations that have textual information associated with them. This is both good and bad. It is good because we can compare and contrast the textual information with the material culture. It is bad because we inherently never know if the site we have chosen is indeed the site associated with the text. I have tried to connect texts with the different sites discussed in this book so that readers can see how you can take the text seriously as a source to help understand the past, even while you are not reading it literally.