Friday, January 07, 2000
The end is near - maybe
Scholars dispute Bible's 'final battle'
BY LUCY MAY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UC professor Eric H. Cline thinks end-of-the-world talk might help sell his new book, The Battles of Armageddon.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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Just because Jan. 1, 2000, passed without the world ending doesn't mean we've dodged Armageddon — the final battle between good and evil that some predicted would come with the end of the millennium.
If you believe our calendar, the new millennium starts Jan. 1, 2001, said Eric H. Cline, a University of Cincinnati adjunct classics professor and an expert on the Israeli site Megiddo. (Scholars say Armageddon, where the Book of Revelation predicts the final battle will take place, is a reference to “Har Megiddo,” or the hill at Megiddo.)
Dr. Cline figures the end-of-the-world talk will start up again once people start to think about the 2001 millennium change. He's banking on it to help sell his book The Battles of Armageddon, to be published this summer by University of Michigan Press.
The topic of Armageddon is hot these days, and not just among those who think it's reason to build a bunker and buy powdered milk and canned meat.
Archaeologists and biblical scholars of all sorts are abuzz over recent findings at the Megiddo site that call into question whether the Bible accurately reflects the history of Israelite royalty.
In the November/December issue of Archaeology magazine, the co-directors of the Megiddo Expedition explain that the new dating of ruins and pottery at the site call into question whether King Solomon had as vast and glorious an empire as the Bible describes.
Dr. Cline is a senior staff member of the expedition, which consists of archaeologists, anthropologists and other scholars who spend time every other year sifting through layers of thousands of years of history at the site.
Raising questions about the Bible's accuracy becomes “a very heated discussion” among scholars because so many people know so much about Megiddo and how it relates to the Bible's accounts, said Paula Wapnish, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who also is a senior staff member of the Megiddo Expedition.
“For some of them, it's still validating points made in the Bible,” she said. “For some, it's going to be very hard to give up.”
Dr. Wapnish said she thinks the findings that question King Solomon's greatness eventually will be validated.
UC's Dr. Cline said he doesn't know what to think.
“The jury is still out. I'm on the fence,” he said. “It's far too early to determine who's right and who's wrong. That's in part why we need to keep digging.”
Dr. Cline is among the scholars going back to Megiddo this summer and is looking for local volunteers willing to pay the necessary fees to help excavate the site. Check the Web site www.digmegiddo.com for more information and application forms.
The Megiddo tel, or mound, linked Egypt in the south with Syria to the north and Mesopotamia to the north and east. Its strategic location is one of the reasons Dr. Cline documented 34 different battles at the site, which he describes in his new book.
“Pretty much anybody who came through the area fought at Megiddo,” he said. “You name it, they fought a battle there.”
The first recorded battle in history occurred there in 1479 B.C. between Egyptian King Thutmose III and a rebellion of Canaanite kings and princes. Napoleon fought there in 1799. And several battles were fought in and around Megiddo in 1948 during Israel's war for independence.
Learning about all those battles helped Dr. Cline understand why the author of the Book of Revelation would expect the final battle between good and evil to be fought on the site, he said.
“Personally, as a scientist, no, I don't think it's going to happen,” Dr. Cline said of the awful war described in the Bible. “But you never know.”
Of one thing Dr. Cline is certain: Armageddon won't happen with the coming of the new millennium. Despite the whole debate over whether it started in 2000 or starts in 2001, we're already three years into the new millennium, he said.
Our calendar, he noted, is actually about four years off. So the new millennium came and went Jan. 1, 1997, without fanfare and without a final battle between good and evil.
He doesn't think that will hurt book sales, but he hopes it can ease the minds of people already fretting about the next New Year.
“There's going to be a big hoopla (about 2001),” he predicted. “But people don't have to be worried.”
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