LSURep864

Alright, credit where due, that's a real citation. But go read what Gray actually says. The shared slm element "suggests the probability" that Salem was Jerusalem's old local god. That's one scholar floating a possibility in 1965, which is exactly the minority reading I granted you in my first comment. You picked your best source and it describes my position. Gray also has Shahar and Shalem as dawn and dusk, the morning and evening star. So the sun god story is dead by your own citation, and now you're calling Shalim the god of dawn, which isn't right either. Dawn is his twin brother. This little known fact has had three different identities in one thread.

Here's the bigger issue though. You're now saying Shalim wasn't worshipped in the Iron Age. But your whole argument for the name was that it gave the king legitimacy with the people. Legitimacy from a god nobody worships? Solomon reigned in the Iron Age. So which is it? If the cult was alive, we're right back to the silence problem, because not one prophet or inscription ever mentions him. If the cult was dead, then the name is just a leftover, no more meaningful than Los Angeles meaning the angels. This is the second time you've taken both sides of your own argument, after telling me Solomon embodied Shalim and then telling me the king was the incarnation of Yahweh.

And Nehushtan actually works against you. When the writers had an embarrassing cult memory, what did they do? They named the thing, admitted people worshipped it, and described Hezekiah smashing it. Right there in the text. They did the same to Solomon, calling out Ashtoreth, Milcom, and Chemosh by name. So your theory asks me to believe those same writers pulled off a perfect silent erasure of one single god, while leaving his supposed name on two books of the Bible and on two later kings called Shallum that nobody touched. And sure, read Milcom for Molech in 1 Kings 11 if you want. The list of named gods is still there and Shalim still isn't on it.

On David, look at your own three posts. First it was most secular scholars think he was ginned up. Then it was hardly conclusive but the best evidence. Now it's neither of us know with certainty. That's a consensus claim quietly dying over three posts without you ever admitting it was wrong. After Tel Dan, the mainstream accepts a historical David, Finkelstein included. The full deniers are the fringe you were selling as the majority.

So after four posts of little known facts, here's what's still standing: no sun god, no sun gate, no divine embodiment, no consensus against David, no Iron Age cult, and one 1965 proposal that Jerusalem's name might preserve an old Bronze Age god. Which is genuinely interesting, and it's what I said from the start. You could have just opened with that.

Honestly, there's not much left to debate. I never claimed there are no data points that trouble a strict Moses-wrote-every-word view. There are, and I've known about them for years. Ugarit, the divine council, Kuntillet Ajrud, all of it. Christian scholars like Mike Heiser spent entire careers absorbing exactly this material and built defensible scholarly positions without losing the faith. The data was never the issue. The issue is what you do with it, which is an epistemology question, and everyone brings their priors to that, you included. My problem from the start was never the evidence. It was you taking a grain of truth, a genuine minority discussion in the scholarship, and confidently asserting it as established fact to stir the pot. I saw BS and I called it. That's the whole thread.

Signing off of this debate for good.

Still no source for the sun-gate story after two tellings. Which tablet? Give me a KTU number. The only real Shalim text is KTU 1.23, and there's nothing in it about helping Shemesh haul a red orb through a western gate. That gate imagery comes from Mesopotamian Shamash iconography. You've bolted Ugaritic characters onto Babylonian scenery and called it a little known fact.

Your embodiment theory dies on your own examples. You listed Josiah and Hezekiah as parallels. So was Hezekiah Yahweh incarnate? Of course not. A theophoric name honors a god. The king stays a man. Shalmaneser means "Shulmanu is preeminent," which tells you what the Assyrians thought of Shulmanu, same grammar as Hezekiah. And Assyrian kings ruled as vice-regents of Ashur. Divine kingship was an Egyptian thing you're dragging into Mesopotamia and then into Israel.

The etymology runs the wrong direction. Shalamu, be whole or be well, is an ordinary verb in every branch of Semitic, including Akkadian. Saying the whole root came from one dusk god is like saying the English word dawn came from a goddess named Dawn. And if no vowels makes words identical, then Suleiman and Islam are theophoric for Shalim too. You don't believe that, so drop the argument.

Here's the bigger problem. If Shalim had a Jerusalem cult big enough to name the dynasty's greatest king, where is he? The prophets rail against Baal, Asherah, Molech, Chemosh, Tammuz. Never Shalim. Not one Shalim name in the Hebrew inscriptions either. A cult important enough to name Solomon but invisible to every prophet and every ostracon exists only in your post.

Also, "most secular scholars think David was ginned up" is just wrong. After the Tel Dan stele even Finkelstein accepts a historical David. Full denial is the Copenhagen school, an actual fringe. You're doing exactly what you accused me of.

As for "unbiased secular scholars," name one. I gave you Stamm, Cogan, and Sweeney. All three are critical scholars, zero apologists among them, so that dodge won't stick. You've cited nobody. And the whole idea of an unbiased scholar is a fantasy anyway. Everyone brings assumptions to the evidence, religious and secular alike. Dropping religion just swaps one set of priors for another. Which is fine. The only real check on anyone's bias is citations other people can verify. I've given you names you can check. Give me one. And cite the tablet.

Step back and look at your method. One respectable finding, Jerusalem as foundation of Shalim, buried under a stack of speculation: Shalim becomes a sun god, kings become gods, a pan-Semitic root becomes his invention, David becomes fiction. Confidence goes up each layer while evidence goes down. Challenged, you disqualify every scholar who disagrees and promote the result to "as factual as it can be." A young earth creationist runs the same play and you'd laugh at him for it. A fact comes with a source. Two posts in and you still haven't produced one.

I am sure they won’t have a disc drive as well but damn Sony just tossed XBOX such a softball. They need anything to get some momentum back and gain market share next gen.

It won’t happen but it should.

Aliens: We are so advanced that we have mastered the ability to traverse billions of lightyear, traverse wormholes or travel faster than the speed of light via unknown means.

Also Aliens: We loose all ability to pilot our super advanced ships when we get close to this tiny rock in space.


I am not denying there are things flying around we don't know about. I am absolutely calling BS that "DOZENS" of these things have crashed. That is logically absurd.

quote:

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This is a game I will pick up when it hits 20/25 like most Capcom stuff.

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Exactly what I told myself. This will be a perfect pallet cleanser or drought game to jam out for a while once its on sale for 29.99 in two years.

Taiwan going down would make the Iran Oil situation look like economic prosperity.

Would absolutely destroy the entire world economy. It would be just as bad as attacking American infrastructure.

I have been a “panican” on Iran but we would have to fight for Taiwan. Full stop.

I mean even 2-5k people on TD giving $10-20 is literally not an insignificant amount of money. Keep this going. Maybe we can try to start some matching program. Where some of us agree to match in non rich folk amounts.

The best flavor of crow.

Oh sure sure

Try harder man. At least find a legitimate theological question.