Summary of King David's reign in Jerusalem

David’s reign in Jerusalem could be briefly summarised as following:

 

(1). ‘David’s… greatness was characterized by great territorial gains for Israel (2 Samuel 8:1-14). Within a relatively short period of time, he ruled from The Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in the The Tigris-Euphrates Valley (2 Samuel 8:3-13)’ (http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/david.htm).

 

(2). On the other hand, ‘David’s success was focused too heavily on material gains, and it corrupted him. His committing of adultery with Bathsheba, and the murder of her husband Uriah in an attempt to cover it up was perhaps the darkest event of his life’ (ibid).

 

(3). Furthermore, ‘His many wives and children were constantly in fierce competition with each other within the family’ and one of such conflicts even ‘triggered a civil war’ (ibid).

King David

 

He reigned as king of Israel for forty years and six months (2 Samuel 5:5) and when he died at the age of seventy, it is said that he ‘was buried in the city of David (1 Kings 2:10-11)’ (ibid).

 

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/the-ark-of-covenant-and-the-reign-of-king-david/

The Ark of Covenant: from the House of Abinadab to Jerusalem

Abinadab and his father Saul were both killed by the Philistines in the battle of Gilboa and this took place ‘Thirteen years after the Ark was placed in the house of Abinadab’ (http://globalchristiancenter.com/lesser-known-bible-people-series/the-house-of-abinadab-and-the-ark-of-god.html). It followed by seven years of the civil war, before David finally became to anointed king for all over Israel, by defeating Ish-bosheth, the sole surviving son of Saul. Then, he decided to move his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem and he managed to conquer the city by attacking the inhabitants there called Jebusites. At this point, the Ark was still located in the same place and even though Abinadab had been killed over seven years ago, the place was still called ‘the House of Abinadab’ (2Samuel 6:3).

Now, the city of Jerusalem is prepared to be brought in the Ark of Covenant. However, during the procession of the Ark, another mysterious tragedy takes place. When ‘Uzzah sees the cart lurch, and stretches out his hand to steady the Ark’, in order to keep it from falling, ‘Fire from heaven strikes him dead (2 Samuel 6:6-8)’ (ibid). This incident terrified David enough to be ‘afraid to have The Ark in the City of David, so he left it in the house of Obed-Edom, a Philistine from Gath (2 Samuel 6:9-11)’ (Blank). It took him three months to make up his mind to relocate the Ark to ‘a new tabernacle that David set up for it’ (ibid).

Death of Uzzah

 

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/the-ark-of-covenant-and-the-reign-of-king-david/

The Ark of Covenent; how it ended up to the house of Abinadab

The Ark of the Covenant was originally made (Exodus 40:20) for containing the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, which had been handed to Moses from the God himself. During the time of priest Eli, probably about a hundred years later from the time of Moses, The Ark was temporary captured by Philistines, enemy of the Israelites, and was kept by them for about seven months (1 Samuel 6:1).

When Philistines decided to return the Ark to Israelites due to the spread of plagues, the Ark was moved to a town called Beth-shemesh. Although the Ark ‘was unloaded by Levites (1 Sam 6:15); and sacrifices were offered before it that day’ (http://globalchristiancenter.com/lesser-known-bible-people-series/the-house-of-abinadab-and-the-ark-of-god.html), ‘the Beth-shemeshites incurred upon themselves the curse of God, in which 50,070 men were slaughtered (1 Sam 6:19)’ (ibid) because they openend it and looked inside of the Ark. Therefore, the people there decided to send the Ark to ‘the people of Kirjath-jearim, who were slaves and serviced the House of God with water and wood, to come and fetch the Ark. (1Sa 6:21)’ (ibid).

The Ark of Covenant

The Old Testament continues that 'the men of Kirjath-jearim came, and fetched up the Ark and ‘brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and sanctified… his son to keep the ark of the LORD (1Samuel 7:1)’ (ibid). The web  site above additionally quotes from the following verse, saying ‘The Ark remained in the house of Abinadab for 20 years (1Sa 7:2)’ (ibid). It gives further details about the place and person in question; whilst ‘The village of Kirjath-jearim was grouped with Gibeah, Gibeon, Ramah and Jerusalem (Joshua 18:25-28)’ (ibid) and the area belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, Abinadab was a son of King Saul, who was ruling Israel at that time.

 

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/the-ark-of-covenant-and-the-reign-of-king-david/

Michael Ventris and his deciphering of Linear B

Following the circulation of his “Mid-Century Report” on Linear B in 1950, Michael Ventris ‘gave up his architectural job to work full-time on Linear B’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/). In his attempt for deciphering, Ventris ‘wondered about the repeated groups of symbols identified by (Alice) Kober as evidence of inflection’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). Then he began to work – in his words, ‘rather like doing a crossword puzzle on which the positions of the black squares haven’t been printed for you’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/) – assuming the characters as a syllabic system and focused on finding some place names because these are ‘exactly the kinds of thing you’d expect to crop up all the time, especially on official palace documents. And place names often don’t change much, even after centuries’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). By February 1952, ‘he wrote to (John) Myres about the Knossos place names’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/) he had deciphered in the script and by May, ‘he felt the code was “breaking” and that, to his astonishment, the Linear B documents were, after all, written in Greek’ (ibid). Then, Ventris was invited to talk about Myre’s publication on the BBC Third Programme and he ‘took the opportunity to announce the decipherment and it was broadcast to the world on 1 July 1952’ (ibid). The broadcast enabled Ventris to collaborate with John Chadwick, a professional philologist – especially an expert on early Greek – who heard the programme, and they worked together closely for deciphering the script for a next few years.

Michael Ventris

As a result, it turned out that Linear B was ‘a form of ancient Greek, which had been taken to Crete by invaders from the mainland. The Greeks themselves did not develop an alphabet until centuries later, but at Knossos their language was written down for the first time, using an ancient script indigenous to the island’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). It would be worth to mention that ‘In a lecture after he had cracked Linear B…Ventris did however give substantial credit to Kober for her contribution – but this acknowledgement went largely unnoticed’ (ibid). Some argue that ‘Ventris would never have been able to crack the code, had it not been for an American classicist, Alice Kober’ (ibid) whilst others ‘question whether Kober would have had the creative spark to jump the final hurdle’ (ibid). Long before answering to this question, Michael Ventris ‘died in a tragic car accident on 6 September 1956’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/), while he was ‘At the height of his fame and just weeks before the publication of his great joint work with Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek’ (ibid). The accident ‘has never been fully explained (and) some believe it may have been suicide’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/

Michael Ventris and his predecessors: Sir Arthur Evans and Alice Kober

Michael Ventris’s early careers can be summarised as following: he ‘was born on 12 July 1922 to an Indian Army officer and the daughter of a wealthy Polish landowner. He was educated on the continent and at Stowe School in England. He spoke several languages at an early age and showed a precocious interest in ancient scripts, having bought a book on Egyptian Hieroglyphs when he was seven.

His interest in Linear B began in 1936 when he went with a school group to an exhibition celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the British School at Athens. Sir Arthur Evans, then 85 years old, happened to be present in the gallery and showed the boys his finds from Knossos, including the Linear B documents. His teacher remembers Ventris asking: “Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?” Thus began a life-long fascination with “the Minoan problem”.

Ventris wrote to Evans — who kindly wrote back — and soon published his first article on the subject, when he was just 18 years old. This came out in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1940. The same year, Ventris began a course at the Architectural Association School in Bedford Square to embark on his chosen profession as an architect’ (http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/research_groups_and_societies/mycenaean_epigraphy/decipherment/life_of_ventris/).

During the WWII, Ventris ‘served as a navigator’ (ibid) while Sir Arthur Evans died ‘just in time to be spared news of the occupation of Crete’ in 1941. But Ventris ‘never forgot the Aegean scripts problem’ (ibid) and after the death of Evans, he ‘corresponded thereafter with Sir John Myres, who had been entrusted by Evans with the publication of Scripta Minoa II, the Linear B tablets of Knossos’ (ibid).

Sir John Myres

After the war, it still took Ventris a few more years to settle things back on track. He was further mobilised to Germany due to this excellence in 1946, and after that he had to concentrate for his architect degree, which he finished in 1948. Through these years, Ventris visited John Myres in Oxford twice and in both occasions he had to decline the invitation for helping publication of Scripta Minoa II due to his busyness. Interestingly, Ventris had an opportunity to meet Alice Kober, who was brought in by Myres, in the second occasion on August 1948. Though this was the sole opportunity for Ventris and Kober to see each other, it is said that the meeting ‘was not a great success, and… It has been said that Ventris withdrew because, as an amateur, he was intimidated by academia’ (ibid) while it would be worth adding that ‘many academics themselves found Kober and Myres rather formidable!’ (ibid) Furthermore, other factors that made this meeting unsuccessful are allegedly pointed out as it follows: there was a crucial ‘disagreement over how the tablets should be classified’ (ibid) between Ventris and others and in this, ‘he was justified’ (ibid) when ‘a new set of transcriptions were later prepared by himself, (John) Chadwick and (Emmett) Bennett’ (ibid). As for compatibility between Ventris and Kober, some argues that ‘each underestimated the other deeply… She underestimated him because he was an amateur, and he underestimated her because she was a woman’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620).

Fore reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/

Alice Kober's conrtibution for deciphering Linear B

After the death of Sir Arthur Evans, his ambition for deciphering the clay tablet scripts known as Linear B was left to surviving scholars, experts and individual researchers. Among them was an American female classicist, Miss Alice Kober. According to Margalit Fox, an author on Linear B, Kober ‘was an assistant professor at Brooklyn College in New York where she taught Latin and Greek classes all day’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22782620). She ‘lived with her widowed mother, and there is no record in her papers of a social or romantic life of any kind. Instead, for almost two decades (in 1930s and 40s), Alice Kober devoted herself to trying to crack this mysterious Bronze Age script’ (ibid). Through her ‘hours and hours of unseen labour’, Fox adds, ‘She turned herself into the world’s leading expert on Linear B’ (ibid). On top of Latin and Greek, she also learned Egyptian. Akkadian. Sumerian, and Sanskrit – partly due to the academic climate on Linear B where, ‘Greek had been ruled out by scholars at the time’ (ibid) – but she also rigorously refused ‘to speculate on what the language was, or what the sounds of the symbols might be’ (ibid). Instead, she established her own methods and poured her efforts described as following:

‘… she set out to record the frequency of every symbol in the tablets, both in general, and then in every position within a word.
She also recorded the frequency of every character in juxtaposition to that of every other character.
It was a mammoth task, performed without the aid of computers. In addition, during the years surrounding World War II, writing materials were hard to come by.
Kober recorded her detailed analysis on index cards, which she made from the backs of old greetings cards, library checkout slips, and the inside covers of examination books.
By hand, she painstakingly cut more than 180,000 tiny index cards, using cigarette cartons as her filing system’ (ibid).

Alice Kober

 As a result of her hard work, she ‘spotted groups of symbols that appeared throughout the inscriptions – groups that would start the same, but end in consistently different ways. That was the breakthrough. Kober now knew that Linear B was an inflected language, with word endings that shifted according to use’ (ibid). Despite her marvellous achievement and the fact that she was ‘on the verge of deciphering Linear B’ (ibid), misfortune fell on her before she could complete the work. Alice Kober ‘fell ill, suddenly, and died soon after. The cause of her death is not known for sure, but it may well have been a form of cancer. It was 1950, and she was 43’ (ibid). At the point, where Kober ‘had correctly deciphered around one third of the Linear B characters’ (ibid), the mission was left for the third person – Michael Ventris.

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/

Sir Arthur Evans and Linear B

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans 'also discovered a number of parallels between the Cypriot script, which had been deciphered, and Linear B (newly discovered by his excavation at the Palace of Knossos in Crete). This indicated that the language represented by Linear B was an ancient form of Greek, but he wasn’t prepared to accept this, being convinced that Linear B was used to write Minoan, a language unrelated to Greek.
In 1939, a large number of clay tablets inscribed with Linear B writing were found at Pylos on the Greek mainland, much to the surprise of Evans, who thought Linear B was used only on Crete’ (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/linearb.htm).

With the hindsight that has been available after the deciphering of Linear B, now the puzzlement Evans faced can be explained as following: ‘Linear B was used between about 1500 and 1200 BC to write a form of Greek known as Mycenaean, named after Mycenae, where Agamemnon is said to have ruled’ (ibid). It is said that Mycenaean ‘adapted the Linear A alphabet to allow them to write down their own language, and that the language spoken in Crete at least by the rulers and their officials after 1450 BC was Greek, lending further credence to the theory that the island was conquered by the Mycenaeans’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A765146). In the meantime, Linear A was used by the previous rules of Crete, who built the palace of Knossos but ‘all attempts to decipher the Linear A texts have failed’ (ibid) because nobody knows the language in its spoken form. Sir Arthur Evans died in 1941 at the age of 90, before Linear B was deciphered. Evans ‘is constantly admired for his intuition, his creative imagination and his profound scholarship. It is to him that we owe the discovery of the marvellous Minoan Civilisation, which until his time was only dimly reflected in Greek Mythology’ (http://archpropplan.auckland.ac.nz/virtualtour/knossos/22more.htm).

Sir Arthur Evans

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/discovery-and-deciphiering-of-the-crete-inscriptions-liner-b/