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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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At first sight Ventura makes a convincing case. But there are issues. First we do not expect epigraphic sources to be evenly divided. Certain times and people are always very strongly over represented. So it is not surprising to find a very important Biblical story represented in a stela rather then an innocuous unknown one. Also if that objection were true, why does it nor apply to the genuine Kerak fragment that just happens to mention the very people on the Mesha stele? For an elaborate forgery to make sense at all it seems to me that reverend Klein would have had to be an accomplice or the whole operation was a costly failure. Third the Isaiah quote sounds somewhat forced and unnatural. It could be the other way round with Isaiah making a pun of the still remembered place name.
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Cheddadi et al. is a welcome confirmation but their results are not as novel as they claim. In fact the overlap of winter and summer rain in the latitudes of today’s full desert has been taught at Cologne university for decades.
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