}}}WOW! This is fascinating! Also, this makes ideas about various peoples in other places like Western Europe being descended from the lost tribes of Israel seem much more plausible. If they sailed with the Phoenicians to the Americas, why wouldnt they also have gone up into Western and Northern Europe?{{{ A stone in a dry creek bed in New Mexico, discovered by early settlers in the region, is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in the Western Hemisphere. It contains engraved on its flank the entire Ten Commandments written in ancient Hebrew script! Hebrew scholars, such as Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis University near Boston, have vouched for its authenticity. I visited the site of the huge boulder, near Las Lunas, New Mexico, in 1973 and photographed the Hebrew inscriptions. A local newspaper reporter guided me to the mysterious site, located out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. We watched for rattlesnakes, as we hiked in to the spot where the boulder lies, unmoved and in situ for who knows how many mysterious centuries. Who put it there? Who wrote the incredible inscription of the TEN COMMANDMENTS in an ancient Hebrew dialect? In his new book The Origins and Empire of Ancient Israel, author-historian Steven M. Collins points out that the “Las Lunas Stone” inscription in archaic Hebrew was written in the Hebrew letters of the style of the Moabite Stone, dated to about 1,000 B.C. This would place the writing on the stone to the time of the kingdom of ancient Israel under its most affluent and powerful king, Solomon, who reigned from 1014 B.C. to 974 B.C. ... We will demonstrate later in this article that sea voyages around the world were fairly common during the time of king Solomon, the son of David, during Israel’s “golden age.” Solomon’s incredible wealth also strongly points to the Las Lunas stone inscription as having been carved during his reign. Financing sailing voyages of discovery and maritime trade is no small feat. Vast sums and investments are required. Solomon was the wealthiest king who ever lived, and undoubtedly had the resources to fund such far reaching and dangerous voyages. Also, during his reign Israel was in league with the other major world powers of the day, including Tyre and the Phoenicians, and the nation of Egypt (Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh, thus cementing that alliance). Steve Collins writes: “Another factor powerfully supporting a dating of this ancient Hebrew inscription to the time of Solomon are the economic and logistic realities in the ancient world. Transoceanic expeditions and colonization efforts in the ancient world required a very large commitment of monetary and human resources. The source of such resources had to be the king of a wealthy nation. Because the New Mexico inscription is in ancient Hebrew, the sponsor for that ancient expedition had to be a very wealthy king of the ancient Israelites! Solomon was the wealthiest ancient King of Israel, and he reigned at a time when the Israelites kept the Ten Commandments” (ibid., page 220). triumphpro%2Famerica-before-chris-solomon-fleets.pdf&h=4AQHzqbuD&s=1
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 02:11:13 +0000