Talk:Omri

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On the Moabite inscription transliteration, the transliteration of the inscription is given: ‘mry mlk yšr’l But assuming that Moabite is essentially a dialect of Hebrew, shouldn't the s be a ś, since that is how it was likely pronounced in Ancient Hebrew (it's well-established that the letter shin had both the sh/ś sound in Hebrew)? I don't know enough about Moabite individually to know if it lacks the ś sound.

There is not proof that Omri and Israel have any connection. Native American Tribe Cherokee was in North Carolina. = Therefore North Carolina is all Cherokee and the entire state represents the boundaries of the Cherokee tribe??? Or the Reverse, any tribe that existed before the Founding of North Carolina, is still a citizen of North Carolina.

I understand people are trying to justify the existence of Israel, since it was cut from Syria by Britain in 1922 AD/CE. Then in 8 hours in 1948 the US invented a Jewish Religious State as a Nation or Country, by a cutting lines out of a drawing of "Palestine" in an unannounced-UN-meeting by only a few people at United Nations after 12am & then Harry S. Truman signed papers before Congress opened at about 8AM in the morning on a day in 1948 AD/CE. He may have had the papers all night and just made them official with the Presidents signature so that the United States could not debate his actions in recognizing something had had never existed before that morning.

It bothers me that people are running around rampant on Wikipedia declaring everything to be Jewish Hebrew or Yahweh. The Meshna Stele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha_Stele is in a different language. How would the tetra-gram be on it? It's not even in a Hebrew variation script? Some author claimed it had "four Greek letters" on it somewhere. But I looked at the stone. No one even bothers to circle the claim??? = "Look foreign language. God existed back then too." Yeah people had god's. Show me the name of "nine" in Hebrew. Even the Hebrew text Moses wrote says "I am that I am" and not YHVH, etc. The 4 letters aren't common until the Masoretic Text. 4WhatMakesSense (talk) 22:32, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We don't debate here if Israel deserves to be a country, see WP:NOT#FORUM. As you probably know, Wikipedia editors don't establish facts, facts are established by scholars who live by publish or perish and published in reliable sources. We simply render what the sources say. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:39, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have made a map of the area occupied by Omri and Ahab, based on what I have read. I'm not a historian so I hesitate to add it here before someone more knowledgeable has checked it. --EnSamulili 21:19, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It is misleading to present this theory as the most widely accepted as Israel Finkelstein and his camp represent a very small handful of people that put forth and accept this theory. The large majority reject his extremely low dating outright, along with his theories about the prominence of the Omrides that is spawned from said dates. When creating articles like this it must be important not to dishonestly put forth views only held by minorities as the most favored.

Finkelstein's views are representative of mainstream archaeologists - even William Dever broadly agrees. The ones who disagree are laregly conservative biblical (i.e. text-based) scholars. PiCo 12:20, 7 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This page is in need of considerable reconstruction. It is not the case that "conservative biblical" archaeologists are the only individuals who disagree with Finkestein's low-chronology, namely because it is completely contradicted by strata findings, pottery assemblages, our understanding of the regions history, etc.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.68.12.21 (talk • contribs)

Finkelstein is mainstream:

Herzog laid out many of the theories Finkelstein and Silberman present in their book: "the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land [of Canaan] in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united kingdom of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom." The new theories envision this modest chiefdom as based in a Jerusalem that was essentially a cow town, not the glorious capital of an empire. Although, as Herzog notes, some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, they are just now making a dent in the awareness of the Israeli public -- a very painful dent.

— Laura Miller, King David was a nebbish

Source: Laura Miller "King David was a nebbish." Salon.com. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:30, 24 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Tgeorgescu, did you happen to read that whole article from which you pulled your quote? Notice that it says, "Some of his colleagues find this theory unacceptable. Dever declares that Finkelstein is "the only archaeologist in the world" who advocates the redating. Lawrence Stager, a professor of the archaeology of Israel at Harvard and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, says "Ninety-five percent of the specialists in the field would disagree with him" and dismisses Phyllis Tribble, a professor of biblical studies who enthusiastically reviewed "The Bible Unearthed" in the New York Times Book Review, as someone who "doesn't know much about the Old Testament and archaeology."

And while Baruch Halpern, a historian who was a co-director of the Megiddo excavation with Finkelstein, describes the book as "excellent" and "challenging," he remains unconvinced by Finkelstein's redating of the Solomonic ruins because the theory relies overmuch on pottery seriation, a technique for dating sites using ceramic remains, which he distrusts."

While Finkelstein may be main stream, his views are certainly not the consensus nor are they the end all that this article has made them out to be if even his own co-director is unconvinced by his theory and techniques. It seems that this article is written more from watching NOVA and reading pop news articles (Laura Miller is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia") than sound archeological evidence and scientific enquiry. I second the motion to reword this portion of the article or present a counter point. Gingabox —Preceding undated comment added 08:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]

Agreed, Finkelstein is mainstream, but there is no consensus on such matters. See the following quotes:

Apart from the well-funded (and fundamentalist) “biblical archaeologists,” we are in fact nearly all “minimalists” now.

— Philip Davies, Beyond Labels: What Comes Next?

Let me reinforce this claim in respect to my own work. The mainstream view of critical biblical scholarship accepts that Genesis-Joshua (perhaps Judges) is substantially devoid of reliable history and that it was in the Persian period that the bulk of Hebrew Bible literature was either composed or achieved its canonical shape. I thus find attempts to push me out onto the margin of scholarship laughable.

— Philip Davies, Minimalism, "Ancient Israel," and Anti-Semitism

In other words, says archaeologist David Ilan, "Yossi has an agenda—partly ideological, but also personal. He's a very smart and ambitious guy. Finkelstein's the big gorilla, and the young bucks think he's got a monopoly over biblical archaeology. So they want to dethrone him."

— Robert Draper, David and Solomon, Kings of Controversy

Still, Finkelstein's theories strike an intellectually appealing middle ground between biblical literalists and minimalists.

— Robert Draper, op.cit.

The irony is that biblical archaeology's enfant terrible has become the establishment, a Goliath fending off upstart assaults on his chronological order.

— Robert Draper, op.cit.

Many archaeologists question whether the obsessive scramble to prove the biblical narrative is a healthy enterprise. One of them, Tel Aviv University's Raphael Greenberg, flatly states, "It's bad for archaeology.

— Robert Draper, op.cit.

The last quarter of the 20th century has also seen the development of a crisis in the historiography of ancient Israel, which shows no sign of abating in the early years of the 21st. This crisis takes the form of a progressive loss of confidence in the historical value of the biblical narratives. In the middle of the 20th century, English language scholarship on ancient Israel was dominated by the Albright school, which placed great confidence in the archeology as a a means by which to affirm the essential reliability of the biblical text, beginning in the time of Abraham. This approach found its classic expression in John Bright's History of Israel, an impressive attempt to contextualize the biblical story by interweaving it with what we know of ancient Near Eastern history. Even when Bright wrote, a more skeptical view prevailed in German scholarship, at least with regard to the early books of the Bible. But the scene has changed drastically in the last quarter century. In a book originally published in 1992, Philip Davies claimed that "biblical scholars actually know - and write - that most of the 'biblical period' consists not only of unhistorical persons and events, but even of tracts of time that do no belong in history at all.

— John J. Collins, The Bible after Babel. Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age.

For Kitchen, the biblical story (at least from the time of Abraham) is true until proven otherwise. Needless to say, he is not troubled by postmodernism or deconstruction, which he dubs "the crown of all follies." His critiques of Lemche, Thompson and others are not without substance, but his own views are too blatantly apologetic to warrant serious consideration as historiography.

More sophisticated, but ultimately equally apologetic, is another volume published in 2003, Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, entitled provocatively, A Biblical History of Israel.

— John J. Collins, The Bible after Babel. Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age.

He cites the fact—now accepted by most archaeologists—that many of the cities Joshua is supposed to have sacked in the late 13th century b.c. had ceased to exist by that time. Hazor was destroyed in the middle of that century, and Ai was abandoned before 2000 b.c. Even Jericho, where Joshua is said to have brought the walls tumbling down by circling the city seven times with blaring trumpets, was destroyed in 1500 b.c. Now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the Jericho site consists of crumbling pits and trenches that testify to a century of fruitless digging.

— Jennifer Wallace, „Shifting Ground in the Holy Land” Smithsonian Magazine

In this search, the Old Testament has quite literally been his guide. This approach was once common for archaeologists in Israel, but in recent years it has come to define an extreme position in a debate over whether the Bible should be read as historical fact or metaphorical fiction.

— Ibidem

So although much of the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible cannot in most cases be taken literally, many of the people, places and things probably did exist at some time or another.

— Jonathan Michael Golden, Ancient Canaan and Israel: new perspectives

The fact is that we are all minimalists -- at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA, the 'substantial historicity' of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land. These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view.

In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. ... In fact, though, 'maximalist' has been widely defined as someone who accepts the the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong. If so, very few are willing to operate like this, not even John Bright (1980) whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given.

— Lester L. Grabbe, Some Recent Issues in the Study of the History of Israel

I am certainly not insisting that authors of Western Civilization texts for university classes should agree with the suggestions made about ancient Israel in recent decades by scholars such as those whom I have cited. What I am saying is that it is bad scholarship, and bad pedagogy, simply to ignore an important body of recent work, offering adult students a literalist-leaning account that is by scholarly standards probably twenty years out of date. At the very least, textbook authors should include more critical scholars' works and some minimalist works in their recommended readings, so that students would have a chance to confront such arguments on their own.

The Hebrew Bible is simply not a reliable source for the history of ancient Israel, and the authors of the textbooks surveyed seem largely unaware of this fact. Writers of textbooks for undergraduates need to ask themselves: If we are content to provide students with mythical, legendary, uncritical histories of ancient Israel, how can we have any legitimate grounds for complaint or criticism when others are willing to provide mythologized, fictionalized histories of other peoples and places?

— Jack Cargill, "Ancient Israel in Western Civ Textbooks"

"...Zionism was created mainly by non-religious (sometimes anti-religious) people..."?!? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.111.49.92 (talk) 17:37, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The picture in the infobox was not of Omri, so I have deleted it. If it's of anybody, it's of some sixteenth-century C. E. European. I could draw an equally authentic picture of Omri. J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 23:21, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jdcrutch, obviously not a photo of him per WP:BLUE. You might as well remove pictures of paintings attributed to David in his article because clearly it's not him or a photo of him, or we could go and break the Statue of King David by Nicolas Cordier because it's clearly not him. Why do some article's use drawings from Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum if you ask? Because cameras did not exist and paintings, drawings, statues we the closest thing to being remembered as a monarch ruler or for those who had short reigns where archeological investigations or historical references couldn't indicate any monuments of remembrance of some sort, or simply an artist can express him/herself anyway they want to. Guillaume Rouillé's drawings are as notable as Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 00:10, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Who said anything about breaking stuff? I'm not advocating the destruction of Rouillé's drawings (though I rather doubt they're as notable as Leonardo's paintings). The Rouillé drawing (woodcut, I think) of Omri would be appropriate in an article on Rouillé, or on his Promptuarii, but it doesn't belong in an historical article on Omri, any more than a fanciful description of Omri by a Sixteenth-Century writer.

This isn't about photographs versus paintings: if Omri had sat for a portrait, and it survived, I'd be all in favor of putting it in the article, whatever the medium. I just don't think it adds anything to our knowledge of the man, to have a picture of some 16th C. French artist's model in the article, no matter what name the artist chose to attach to it. J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 00:51, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jdcrutch The Statue of King David by Nicolas Cordier in the infoxbox of David is there, and know one really knows what David's physical appearance is, shouldn't that be removed then? — JudeccaXIII (talk) 01:05, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, if somebody feels like doing it. I'm not on a crusade or anything.

There are a fair number of ahistorical decorations on the "David" page, fanciful representations of King David from various centuries, and if that statue weren't in the infobox (which is supposed to contain facts), there'd be little risk of anybody's thinking that it was a portrait. Also, the scientific consensus about David appears to be that, if he ever existed, virtually no historically reliable information about him survives, so practically everything we "know" about David is likely to be just as fictional as Cordier's statue. (Of course, the statue probably is a very accurate representation of somebody—just not King David.) Omri, on the other hand, is somewhat better-documented, and is unlikely to be purely or mostly legendary, so the article should make a greater effort to stick to the facts, as far as we can discover them.

Suppose Chaucer or Shakespeare had written a description of Omri. That description would be notable with respect to Chaucer or Shakespeare—it might be art of the highest order—but it would tell us nothing about the historical Omri, and it would be wrong to present it in the article on Omri as a description of that man. How is a picture any different? J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 01:59, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Even if there were some basic description of him, there isn't any physical monument or art work from his era to correlate with a written description. And I don't understand why this article only when so many other monarch info box articles do the same thing. I mean, a famous painter attributes a painting to a king who died 1000 years ago and an editor would put that painting in the info box of the article because it's related/attributed with some small description and no one would really complain about the artwork because there's a description, which is no different than what I'm doing with Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum Omri. I mean, obviously a 16c drawing from a legit published book of a 8c BC figure isn't really accurate because it's a piece of tribute artwork long after the death of of the actual figure. Basically, this is common sense per WP:BLUE. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 02:39, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have restored the picture. It has been a long-standing practice here to have pictures of biblical/historical characters, and they do not have to be at all "realistic" (whatever that means). That's not how art works. J. D. Crutchfield, if you are a notable artist and you release the picture with an appropriate license, we could you use your picture instead. StAnselm (talk) 03:15, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@JudeccaXIII: misses my point regarding a written description. I'm not talking about one based on a surviving, contemporary description of Omri, but a completely imaginary one, like the Rouillé woodcut. Pictures of monarchs are appropriate in their infoboxes if they're thought to represent life portraits, as here, or here, or here (even if they're idealized or stereotyped). Otherwise, they're purely decorative, and not encyclopedic. Why Omri? Because I happened to be editing the page, and noticed that the picture presented as his likeness was a fiction. As I said, I'm not on a crusade.

@StAnselm: condescends to lecture me on "how art works". He would have a point if Wikipedia were an art gallery, rather than an encyclopedia, but it's not. In an article on artistic representations of the kings of Israel through the ages, the Rouillé woodcut would be appropriate. In an historical article on Omri, King of Israel, it's not. The question is not of realism but of historicity. The statue of Amenhotep III isn't realistic (whatever that means—StAnselm chose the word and put it in quotation marks, but he's not quoting me). It's idealized and stereotyped; but it is a contemporary representation of the man as he wished to be seen, and therefore historical. The Rouillé woodcut of Omri, by contrast, is wholly imaginary (as a representation of Omri, that is), and therefore purely decorative, not encyclopedic.

At any rate, I've put all the time into this that I care to, so as far as I'm concerned the picture will stay. So much for consensus! J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 17:08, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said before, Not all Monarchs are going to have a image made during their time. Many royalty articles are going to have art as a representation of them in the info box but the content of the article might say ruled from something BC/AD or ruled long before a portrait was attributed to them. This is common practice on Wikipedia in general for Monarchs, Saints etc. This is common sense. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 18:54, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]