Ancient "non-utilitarian" metal bow found in Arabian Peninsula

[JarMan]

You'll never guess what time period it dates to. 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160310080816.htm

[snowflake]

If only they were not models but real weapons........and found in the new world........and made of steel instead of bronze......

 

[USU78]

4 minutes ago, snowflake said:

If only they were not models but real weapons........and found in the new world........and made of steel instead of bronze......

Now  ...  if only the Hebrew for bronze and steel could help us out of this pickle:  http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5154.htm

 

Quote

2 Samuel 22:35
HEB: וְנִחַ֥ת קֶֽשֶׁת־ נְחוּשָׁ֖ה זְרֹעֹתָֽי׃
NAS: can bend a bow of bronze.
KJV: so that a bow of steel is broken
INT: bend A bow of bronze my arms

 

Edited March 11, 2016 by USU78
could not cold

[JarMan]

23 minutes ago, snowflake said:

If only they were not models but real weapons........and found in the new world........and made of steel instead of bronze......

 

You do realize Nephi had a steel bow when he was on the Arabian Peninsula, not in the new world, don't you?

[canard78]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

You'll never guess what time period it dates to. 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160310080816.htm

Bronze, non-utilitarian bow and quiver. Yep, Book of Mormon bulls eye!!

(Sounds more decorative to me).

You do know that "non-functional" probably means "not designed to actually fire arrows, nice to look at," don't you?

Edited March 11, 2016 by canard78

[snowflake]

17 minutes ago, JarMan said:

You do realize Nephi had a steel bow when he was on the Arabian Peninsula, not in the new world, don't you?

Absolutely, this discovery is clear evidence that supports the BOM narrative..........

[JarMan]

21 minutes ago, canard78 said:

Bronze, non-utilitarian bow and quiver. Yep, Book of Mormon bulls eye!!

Your words, not mine. Was the pun intended?

[JarMan]

19 minutes ago, snowflake said:

Absolutely, this discovery is clear evidence that supports the BOM narrative..........

So your observation is that they were non-functional. I identified that, already, in the title of the thread.

[canard78]

2 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Your words, not mine. Was the pun intended?

Haha... Unintentional but I like it.

Seriously though, how does this constitute evidence for the Book of Mormon?

[USU78]

27 minutes ago, canard78 said:

Bronze, non-utilitarian bow and quiver. Yep, Book of Mormon bulls eye!!

(Sounds more decorative to me).

You do know that "non-functional" probably means "not designed to actually fire arrows, nice to look at," don't you?

Mebbe  ...  on the other hand, maybe we're in the land of poetics and not of one-to-one correspondences:

 

Quote

Psalm 18:34
HEB: וְֽנִחֲתָ֥ה קֶֽשֶׁת־ נְ֝חוּשָׁ֗ה זְרוֹעֹתָֽי׃
NAS: can bend a bow of bronze.
KJV: so that a bow of steel is broken
INT: bend A bow of bronze my arms

The text, accordingly, doesn't require an actual steel or even a bronze/brass bow  ...  only that Nephi's was the best one of all the brothers' and the idiot found a way to break it.

[Nevo]

29 minutes ago, JarMan said:

You do realize Nephi had a steel bow when he was on the Arabian Peninsula, not in the new world, don't you?

Nephi didn't have a steel bow in Arabia either. Nobody had a steel bow in 600 BC. Steel bows wouldn't come into use for another thousand years. William Hamblin tries to salvage the plausibility of the broken bow story by suggesting that Nephi's "steel bow" was "an ordinary wooden weapon decorated or reinforced in certain parts . . . with bronze," but even that is a stretch. As others have noted, "metal plating of the body, even of ornamental kind, would undermine its pliability, increase its weight, and hamper aiming without adding any advantages." Any bronze(d) bows in Arabia in Iron Age II would have been strictly ceremonial and non-functional.

[JarMan]

21 minutes ago, canard78 said:

Haha... Unintentional but I like it.

Seriously though, how does this constitute evidence for the Book of Mormon?

I haven't claimed that it's evidence for anything.

I do, however, think it's interesting that an approximately half-size bronze bow was found on the Arabian Peninsula dating to 900 BC - 600 BC.

I'm half expecting somebody to say that the text doesn't require that the bow was used to shoot beasts, only to hunt them. Maybe Nephi got ahold of one of these miniature bronze bows and used it to club rabbits and that's how he broke it. No wonder his brothers were mad at him.

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, canard78 said:

..........................................................   

Seriously though, how does this constitute evidence for the Book of Mormon?

Archeological evidence is always incremental.  It never stands on its own.  This discovery simply shows that the technology to make such weapons (bow, quiver, and arrows) existed in Lehi's day in South Arabia.  There was heretofore no such direct evidence, something which the naysayers always demand.  Of course, we already knew that such technology existed in Judah in Lehi's time.

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, Nevo said:

Nephi didn't have a steel bow in Arabia either. Nobody had a steel bow in 600 BC. Steel bows wouldn't come into use for another thousand years.

These just discovered models alone show how dubious your self-assured statement is, first because steel bows likely already existed in India by the 4th century B.C.,* second because high carbon steel was already being made in both Judah and South Arabia by circa 1,000 B.C.,^@ and finally because a Mormon metallurgical engineer has pointed out that the construction of such a steel bow is not a problem (you can read his description and rationale).^#  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

William Hamblin tries to salvage the plausibility of the broken bow story by suggesting that Nephi's "steel bow" was "an ordinary wooden weapon decorated or reinforced in certain parts . . . with bronze," but even that is a stretch. As others have noted, "metal plating of the body, even of ornamental kind, would undermine its pliability, increase its weight, and hamper aiming without adding any advantages." Any bronze(d) bows in Arabia in Iron Age II would have been strictly ceremonial and non-functional.

One does not need the very reasonable observations of Bill Hamblin and Kevin Barney to opt for an actual steel bow.^&

*  D. Elmy, “Steel Bows in India,” Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquarians, 12 (1969), online at http://margo.student.utwente.nl/sagi/artikel/steelbow/steelbow.html .

%  Gus W. Van Beek, Hajar Bin Humeid: Investigations at a PreIslamic Site in South Arabia.  Publications of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969).

#  David S., ByCommonConsent, March 15, 2006, online at http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/02/20/on-nephis-steel-bow/ .

&  Kevin Barney, “On Nephi’s Steel Bow,” ByCommonConsent, Feb 20, 2006, online at http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/02/20/on-nephis-steel-bow/ .

 

[Nevo]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

These just discovered models alone show how dubious your self-assured statement is

Not at all. There's no evidence that anyone ever used a steel bow before the Middle Ages. And the bronze scale models of bows and arrows from the article (even the bow strings are bronze!) were no more functional than my bronze baby shoes.

What is dubious, in my view, is the suggestion that Nephi's bow was fashioned from meteoric iron and had an 80–100 pound pull. Yet somehow Nephi still managed to break it—even though, as Hamblin notes, such a bow "would be essentially impossible to break by human muscle power alone." I guess Nephi didn't know his own strength! Or perhaps the originator of the story was influenced by the KJV's (mis)translation of Psalm 18:34 (cf. 2 Samuel 22:35).

Edited March 12, 2016 by Nevo

[canard78]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Archeological evidence is always incremental.  It never stands on its own.  This discovery simply shows that the technology to make such weapons (bow, quiver, and arrows) existed in Lehi's day in South Arabia.  There was heretofore no such direct evidence, something which the naysayers always demand.  Of course, we already knew that such technology existed in Judah in Lehi's time.

I agree with your point about evidence being incremental, but this isn't incremental evidence. 

The technology to make an ornamental bronze bow only shows that they had the technology to make... an ornamental bronze bow. 

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, canard78 said:

I agree with your point about evidence being incremental, but this isn't incremental evidence. 

The technology to make an ornamental bronze bow only shows that they had the technology to make... an ornamental bronze bow. 

Well, if you take the hidebound anti-archeological approach, that would be true.  But in the real world, we know a technology when we seen mere models of it., and archeologists regularly extrapolate from such discoveries. Yesteryear, we had not even models of bows, arrows, and quivers in South Arabia, even though we had steel manufactured locally.  We had good reason to think that bows were made of many other materials then.  This brings us much closer to the very sort of article described in I Nephi.  Each excavation adds to the sum of our knowledge.

For example, in this same French excavation in Oman, there was found a bronze serpent -- very much as described in the Mosaic Exodus account, and in the Book of Mormon.  That does not prove the Mosaic and Lehite accounts true, but it does add to the sum total of the evidence, and certainly makes it more likely.  We never deal in absolute proofs (there is no such thing), but rather with plausibility and the preponderance of evidence.

There was a time when Nephi's description of the steel Sword of Laban seemed as fantastic as Arthur's Excalibur, but then archeologists began finding nearly identical swords in the Near East even earlier than the time of Lehi & Nephi.  People used to say that the South Arabian evidence was pretty thin.  Then a whole series of discoveries made it clear not only that Nahom fit where it should, and that the description of Bountiful fit the Yemeni and Omani coastline, but that even the name of the best site for Bountiful "Kharfot, Kharifot" actually carries that meaning in local Mehri.  Once upon a time, people were critical of the notion that Israelites might use Egyptian to keep their records (such as the Plates of Brass or Book of Mormon).  Then we recently discovered that professional Israelite scribes regularly used Egyptian hieratic.  We have found similar very important discoveries in chronology, calendar, cultural sequences, names, linguistics, geographical correlations, etc,   We have learned, somewhat incrementally, that some things that critics once found to be anachronistic in the Book of Mormon, are not anachronisms at all.  It has been very difficult to find an anti-Book of Mormon critic on this board who is willing to actually deal with such issues in a substantive way.

[canard78]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Well, if you take the hidebound anti-archeological approach, that would be true.  But in the real world, we know a technology when we seen mere models of it., and archeologists regularly extrapolate from such discoveries. Yesteryear, we had not even models of bows, arrows, and quivers in South Arabia, even though we had steel manufactured locally.  We had good reason to think that bows were made of many other materials then.  This brings us much closer to the very sort of article described in I Nephi.  Each excavation adds to the sum of our knowledge.

For example, in this same French excavation in Oman, there was found a bronze serpent -- very much as described in the Mosaic Exodus account, and in the Book of Mormon.  That does not prove the Mosaic and Lehite accounts true, but it does add to the sum total of the evidence, and certainly makes it more likely.  We never deal in absolute proofs (there is no such thing), but rather with plausibility and the preponderance of evidence.

There was a time when Nephi's description of the steel Sword of Laban seemed as fantastic as Arthur's Excalibur, but then archeologists began finding nearly identical swords in the Near East even earlier than the time of Lehi & Nephi.  People used to say that the South Arabian evidence was pretty thin.  Then a whole series of discoveries made it clear not only that Nahom fit where it should, and that the description of Bountiful fit the Yemeni and Omani coastline, but that even the name of the best site for Bountiful "Kharfot, Kharifot" actually carries that meaning in local Mehri.  Once upon a time, people were critical of the notion that Israelites might use Egyptian to keep their records (such as the Plates of Brass or Book of Mormon).  Then we recently discovered that professional Israelite scribes regularly used Egyptian hieratic.  We have found similar very important discoveries in chronology, calendar, cultural sequences, names, linguistics, geographical correlations, etc,   We have learned, somewhat incrementally, that some things that critics once found to be anachronistic in the Book of Mormon, are not anachronisms at all.  It has been very difficult to find an anti-Book of Mormon critic on this board who is willing to actually deal with such issues in a substantive way.

You can be delightfully condescending at times Robert.

Like I already said, I agree with the principle of incremental evidence. There's a very good list of it. You've mentioned a couple of them. There are lots more. 

In order for the library of evidence in favour of the Book of Mormon to have credibility you need to show evidence of good judgement in what you include and what you exclude. 

Brant Gardener has always impressed me with his work in, respectfully, eliminating some of the evidences in favour. 

If you consider a bronze ornament to be in any way supporting of the steel bow, then it makes me question your judgment in assessing other evidences. 

[Nevo]

8 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

There was a time when Nephi's description of the steel Sword of Laban seemed as fantastic as Arthur's Excalibur, but then archeologists began finding nearly identical swords in the Near East even earlier than the time of Lehi & Nephi.  People used to say that the South Arabian evidence was pretty thin.  Then a whole series of discoveries made it clear not only that Nahom fit where it should, and that the description of Bountiful fit the Yemeni and Omani coastline, but that even the name of the best site for Bountiful "Kharfot, Kharifot" actually carries that meaning in local Mehri.  Once upon a time, people were critical of the notion that Israelites might use Egyptian to keep their records (such as the Plates of Brass or Book of Mormon).  Then we recently discovered that professional Israelite scribes regularly used Egyptian hieratic.  We have found similar very important discoveries in chronology, calendar, cultural sequences, names, linguistics, geographical correlations, etc,   We have learned, somewhat incrementally, that some things that critics once found to be anachronistic in the Book of Mormon, are not anachronisms at all.  It has been very difficult to find an anti-Book of Mormon critic on this board who is willing to actually deal with such issues in a substantive way.

I don't consider myself an "anti-Book of Mormon critic" per se, but I've addressed a number of these points, as well as several others, on this board: Nahom, Khor Kharfot, hieratic script, writing on metal plates, the Brass Plates, autobiographical writing, scribalization of prophecy, etc. RT at Faith-Promoting Rumor has compiled a massive list of arguments against the historicity of 1 Nephi (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The cumulative case he makes is, I think, devastating. But as far as I can tell it has been greeted with silence from you and just about every other apologist. Jeff Lindsay, to his credit, attempted a response, but was way out of his depth.

Edited March 12, 2016 by Nevo

[thesometimesaint]

20 hours ago, canard78 said:

Haha... Unintentional but I like it.

Seriously though, how does this constitute evidence for the Book of Mormon?

That people in the Saudi Peninsula knew about metal bows.

[Nevo]

4 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

That people in the Saudi Peninsula knew about metal bows.

Evidence that mid-twentieth century Americans wore metal shoes:

[thesometimesaint]

5 minutes ago, Nevo said:

Evidence that mid-twentieth century Americans wore metal shoes:

No. That object just means that mid-twentieth century Americans knew about shoes.

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, canard78 said:

You can be delightfully condescending at times Robert.

Like I already said, I agree with the principle of incremental evidence. There's a very good list of it. You've mentioned a couple of them. There are lots more. 

In order for the library of evidence in favour of the Book of Mormon to have credibility you need to show evidence of good judgement in what you include and what you exclude. 

Brant Gardener has always impressed me with his work in, respectfully, eliminating some of the evidences in favour. 

If you consider a bronze ornament to be in any way supporting of the steel bow, then it makes me question your judgment in assessing other evidences. 

I am willing to leave such judgments to disinterested third party professionals who actually understand archeology.  As for New World Mormon professionals like Brant Gardner, Mark Wright, John Clark, John Sorenson, et al., they do provide a very realistic purview.  Apart from that, personal value judgments play a big role, often subject to preconceived assumptions.

[Nevo]

18 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

No. That object just means that mid-twentieth century Americans knew about shoes.

Right. And bronze replicas of bows and arrows show that Iron Age II inhabitants of Arabia knew about bows and arrows. That's it.

Edited March 12, 2016 by Nevo

[UtahTexan]

8 hours ago, canard78 said:

You can be delightfully condescending at times Robert.

Like I already said, I agree with the principle of incremental evidence. There's a very good list of it. You've mentioned a couple of them. There are lots more. 

In order for the library of evidence in favour of the Book of Mormon to have credibility you need to show evidence of good judgement in what you include and what you exclude. 

Brant Gardener has always impressed me with his work in, respectfully, eliminating some of the evidences in favour. 

If you consider a bronze ornament to be in any way supporting of the steel bow, then it makes me question your judgment in assessing other evidences. 

Sometimes, delightful condescension is required and enjoyed.  And the "if you say this your judgment is in question" argument is pretty silly and totally uncalled for, but used a lot here when someone makes a judgment others dislike.  People use their own minds to form judgments based on a plethora of influences.  Just because you are unable to reach the same judgment as Robert does NOT speak to his judgment anymore than it speaks to your inability to form intelligent conclusions.