The post-Shoshenq age

From Paleojudaica: Earth's magnetic field in baked clay.

This has been used to validate several events in the later books of "Reigns" - or "Kings", for Masoretes. It starts with the invasion of "Shoshaq", "Shy-Shack" in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here Tel Beth Shean; UPDATE 1/6/23 Gath fell later, to Damascus.

Other Latin spellings are possible from the defective Aramaic consonants which the "Kings" version has brought to us; the Greek "Reigns" calls him Shoushakim. Back home the Middle-Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes dropped the N; I expect demotic dropped it all the time and that's whence the Hebrew.

Because Israel's datings start in the Shoshe[n]q era, they haven't touched that whole David / Solomon thing. Mostly what we got here is validation of the method itself for the first-millennium BC in the eastern Med.

I suggest using this method in, er, Egypt. If the dating of Biblical events is problematic (I personally think better of it, post-Shy-Shack) the chronology of contemporary Egypt is a total mess. Over the many first-millennium dynasties surely some city or other might have been abandoned and/or destroyed.

SEE SEE SEE?? 10/26: The boomers are on the case: a growing body of evidence that the Bible is a true, accurate, and a historical text. Sigh. This is better evidence for the propaganda of the later Pharaohs: Sheshonq listed his conquests accurately - omitting Jerusalem - which the books of Reigns do not. Also we hear nothing of the Elijah-Elisha cycle. All that is vindicated is, I repeat: the post-Shoshenq age in the narrative framework of Reigns.

Look. I am a Christian too. But some of us really do need to Slow Our Roll.