Has The Bible Been Proven Correct As A Major Historical Text?

(Left: Joshua’s Tomb in Jordan)

Far from being the seemingly insane ramblings of some irrelevant desert dwellers, the Bible is the historical account by the winners of the greatest military campaign in Antiquity.

Moses prepared Israel for the onslaught, but it would be Joshua who led the invasion. Joshua and his men took on the three greatest Empires of the day. And they won. They vanquished Egypt, the Assyrians, and utterly annihilated the Hittites, who were never heard of again.

With this stunning new perspective, Joshua must be considered by far the greatest General of Antiquity. Only Alexander, a thousand years later, can stand in his shadow.

If you haven’t been introduced to the subject at hand, than please read the previous article ‘Encore: Israel Caused The Bronze Age Collapse!’ first.

By Anthony Migchels for HenryMakow.com

A Prelude: The Battle Of Kadesh

The oldest battle in Antiquity that we have serious documentation of, is the Battle of Kadesh in 1279. This is only a hundred years before the Bronze Age Collapse, and in the same area, and gives a good idea of how far back we’re actually talking.

The legendary Battle of Troy is said to have taken place somewhere in the 13th to 12th Century BC, so about the same time as Kadesh. And Troy is really ‘myth’ territory: that’s where Heracles (Hercules) and Achilles fought. The Battle undoubtedly happened, but what we we know is from the oral tradition, and often seems fantastic.

Imagine that: we’re really discussing the outer edges of what is actually known and documented in human history.

The fog of war and history is intense, and this is why all this is historically/scientifically so monumental.

What was Kadesh about? While the Bronze Age Empires were stable for maybe up to 1500 years up to their collapse, there was eternal Great Power Rivalry. Egypt had been colonizing Canaan in the centuries before, and there had been ongoing tensions between the Hittites and the pressing Egyptians in the north of Canaan, the South of the Hittite territory.

Egypt had been going through a period of growing power, and Ramses II was planning on leaving a name for himself by dealing with Hittite insolence once and for all.

His invasion certainly was a severe test for the Hittites, led by Muwattali II. The latter had used all his influence, and called in help from all his allies, and vassals, to defend against the onslaught.

The Battle turned out to be the Kursk of its day: it was the greatest clash of chariots ever, both Kings had thousands of them.

Ramses II left an account claiming a glorious victory. But so did basically also Muwattali II. Debate has been raging ever since, about who won, but it seems to have been a stalemate: Ramses II was not destroyed, but he was also unable to seriously weaken Hittite positions in the area.

Reality is, that the Hittite Empire continued, and consolidated its positions in Canaan’s North, while Egypt did the same in the South. And these results are consistent with an indecisive outcome.

The Battle of Kadesh is famously concluded by the first official peace treaty that we know of.

The resulting balance of power in the region was basically the situation that Israel assaulted a century later.

All this does show how the fog of war, conflicting accounts of both sides, and three millennia obscure things. The same is predictably true of Joshua’s account of his invasion and those of other sources.

But just as with the Battle of Kadesh, the resulting political situation speaks volumes of what happened: after Joshua, Israel and Judah appeared as the supreme powers in the area. So quite clearly, Israel won the war, just as they claim they did.

On The Eve Of Battle
Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and are the last speeches of Moses. Scholars don’t really believe that Moses himself was the only author, it is a text that evolved over time, and had several authors.

And this is problematic, because the Synagogue of Satan, the Elders, the Pharisees, directed by the Money Changers & Lenders have been messing with the text, there seems little reason to doubt this.

But we’ll go with the text as it stands, for now. Moses accounts the trials and tribulations of the tribes over the last few decades, and extensively discusses the task at hand, the invasion of Canaan, and the coming annihilation of the Amorites and the Hittites, and others. And the duty to stick to the Law as the key condition for victory and future security in the Promised Land.

Moses gave these speeches in Moab, which is the East bank of the Jordan. This would be the base from which Israel would strike.

Here is a map to show where Moab is located. This map is not of the same era that we are discussing, it just shows where the Israelites were at the start of the campaign.

Moses dies in Moab, and he is tragically not allowed to lead Israel in the taking of the Promised Land. This honor falls to Joshua (Hoshea).

It’s interesting that MOAB is currently known as the Mother Of All Bombs. Well, Israel was going to land the Mother Of All Blows on the Great Powers, that’s for sure.

This is an important observation: according to the Bible, the Israelites had been staggering through the desert for 40 years. Now, this has always amazed me, and it seemed rather far fetched.

But in fact: Arabia is an enormous sea of sand. It spans 2 million square kilometers. Even if Israel  only wandered through the North of it, the Desert would have easily accommodated a few score thousand semi nomadic men and their families. Low population density, political organization, slow communications would have allowed for this. It does not mean that it took Israel forty years to get from Egypt and Canaan, it means they were preparing, and just lived their lives accordingly. The Book of Numbers relates how God and Moses wanted to attack earlier, and how the Israelites refused, in fear of the seemingly insurmountable odds. God next let a generation come and go, until the next stock would attack.

Just a 100 km trip through the desert would have taken days, and would have been risky for anybody not intimately associated with the territory. This is simply how people lived at the time. The Israelites would have been perceived as mostly unremarkable and not threatening by surrounding powers.

Now let us return to this map (here’s a bigger view)

Joshua succeeds Moses as the leader of Israel, and the Book of Joshua is the sixth book of the Bible.

Here is what God says to Joshua will be his conquest, after Moses dies:
“² Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan (from where they are standing in Moab, AM), thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.

³ Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.

⁴ From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.” Joshua 1:2-4

It couldn’t be more clear: Canaan AND the land of the Hittites is for Israel, including all the land west of the Euphrates.

Moses relates that God directly commands to attack and completely destroy the Canaan tribes, and the Hittites, and Joshua is given the exact geographic extent of the conquest.

Note that God does not demand the destruction of Egypt and Assyria, but he does demand the removal of their influence in Canaan, all the way up to the Euphrates.

Also note, that Moses and Joshua do not claim to have been behind the attacks on the Greek territories. And the map also clearly has others attack the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. These attacks were committed by a clearly distinct People, not mentioned by the Bible (for as far as I can tell now), but called the Dorians by Mainstream History.

While it were the Hittites and Egyptians that militarily and politically directly dominated Canaan, the Assyrians throughout history have had a major impact on the area. Mesopotamia and the Levant together are the Golden Crescent, and the rivers, the trade routes, they all conspire for it to be so, right up to this day, when Iraq and Iran are still central for the fates of all players in the Levant.

Previously, I noted that the Texts do not claim the attacks on the Assyrian cities, but here with God’s orders to Joshua, it is clear that Israel is behind the attacks. They were not intended to outright destroy the Assyrians, but a couple of their cities were annihilated to deliver the message: stay out, or else. And the Assyrians were more than happy to escape with a bloody nose, that’s for sure, they wouldn’t bother Israel for centuries. The Assyrians were weakened, but they lived, and maintained the bulk of their city states.

The same is true of Egypt in Canaan’s South: their positions were demolished, but the goal was not to destroy them as a People or Empire, but only to push them out of Canaan. They too never fully recovered, but they lived.

This in marked contrast to the Hittites, who were to be entirely genocided.

So now, with all this, can we not conclude that the battles as shown in the map, which is the mainstream account of events, matches to a tee the claims of Moses and Joshua?

The only difference between the map and the mainstream account, and the Bible, is that mainstream account speaks of ‘sea peoples’, based on the accounts of the losers: what is left from Hittite and Egyptian sources. These accounts, by the way, are pretty tragic, there is a letter of Hittite commander to a family member, where he describes the carnage, the great losses, and the brutality of the invaders. But they do not call them Israel.

But is this really such an issue? We have seen from the Battle of Kadesh, how the different accounts of the two protagonists are fueling discussion up to this day. We are dealing with an enormous time span. In the eyes of the powerful states that were being attacked, Israel would have been an entirely unknown quantity, that came seemingly out of nowhere. Israel’s completely uncompromising severity and ruthlessness shook them to the core, and there was no reasoning at all, only slaughter. They never knew why they deserved this terrible fate. The situation is further obscured for those on the receiving end, by the fact that they are being attacked by several others too: the Greeks by the Dorians, the Egyptians also have to deal with forces coming out of Libya. The Hittites were also attacked by the Thracians.

There are going to be questions, for sure. Inconsistencies in different accounts, perhaps the accounts of Moses and Joshua are unfair on their enemies, and overrating their own virtue. Perhaps not. But that does nothing about the main facts.

Nothing can dispel that both Joshua’s claims in terms of the geographic conquest, and Moses claims concerning the peoples to be wiped out, are completely consistent with the map of the Bronze Age Collapse as shown. Moses and Joshua describe genocide, which is what archaeology confirms.

Next, Israel and Judah are the successor Kingdoms in the Area, which is consistent with an Israelite victory.

The Mainstream Perspective On Joshua
The Mainstream claims that Joshua must have lived around the 13th century BC, so just before our proposition: about 1177 in the official timeline. They simply claim that there is no proof of his narrative, and that it is all made up. There are no known written records of any events in the 13th century, it’s just before written history begins.

But they completely ignore that Joshua and Moses claim exactly what happened in the Bronze Age Collapse. Joshua and Moses simply outright claim to have taken Anatolia and Canaan, all the way to the Euphrates, and to have killed everybody that they met. Their claims and description fit exactly the Mainstream narrative of the Bronze Age collapse, and is historically simply consistent, the more so since Israel was the next power in the area.

In short, neither Mainstream history, nor biblical scholars make the obvious connection, they are just in the dark as to when Joshua actually lived, and thus cannot validate his account.

Conclusion
It’s a major paradigm shift. The Bronze Age Collapse is not a mystery. Israel did it. Their conquest was an astonishing geopolitical feat of the very first order. They completely destroyed any opposition to their claims in the Promised Land. They caused a total collapse in the international system that had dominated over an immense area for almost two thousand years. A dark age ensued, and in the centuries after the fact, they slowly repopulated and colonized the area, with settlements of growing importance. By 1000 BC two strong states were clearly recognizable.

The odds they faced seemed insurmountable: what was a rag tag bunch of tribes going to do against a series of super powers who had been consistently crushing any revolts against their authority for centuries? For years they diddled and dared not, but when they struck, they did the impossible.

Think what you will of their claims to have been directly led by God, that’s a wholly different matter, and God knows that typically people will say God is on their side when they go to war. Although the sheer magnitude of their feats will lend credence to these claims, no doubt about it.

But what matters is that we transpire to have the first hand account of those that crushed the Bronze Age Empires, and next dominated the area for centuries to come.

Not only that, we are talking about a People that is even to this day absolutely central to the human condition. Not just the Jews, but also the lost tribes, who must be somewhere. And of course, there are many theories about who and where they are.

It is also clear that we are at a crossroads here in the centuries old struggle between the Bible and its message, and the Powers that Be, and their Scientism Religion.

Because if all this is true, Science can no longer ignore the Bible as a first rate text of history, suddenly shedding bright daylight on a previously dark age.

It seems reasonable to assume that a thing of this magnitude is a cover up, and not just blindness.

And again: I’m not saying this as a ‘Bible Believer’, because I’m not. This is the correct, objective scientific, historical evaluation of the situation.

I’d love to hear any reactions from serious historians and/or Bible scholars/theologians. I’m sure skepticism will be the main attitude, but the above deserves very serious scrutiny.

Previously:
Encore: Israel Caused The Bronze Age Collapse!
Israel Caused The Bronze Age Collapse: War On The Nephilim

At Henry Makow’s:
Did Israel Genocide The Bronze Age Empires?

This is a useful introduction to what the Mainstream has to say about the Bronze Age Collapse. The Wiki entry is also decent.
A Popular Presentation Of The Mainstream Narrative