CADRE Comments

A few days ago, Bill posted an article here on the Cadre (or just beneath this one if you're reading this on the index page) discussing the claim announced by some archaeologists earlier in June this year that they may have found the site of Dalmanutha on the shore of Lake Galilee, one of the few remaining Biblical references for the region that doesn't have at least a plausible archaeological identification. Bill (BK's) article wasn't mostly about the details of this tentative possible identification, but about the subsequent rejection by a radical hypersceptic who thinks GosMark was merely literary fiction so there's no reason to go looking for Dalmanutha to begin with. Details of all this can be found (with further links) in Bill's article. While we're on the topic, I thought I'd write up a slightly expanded (and corrected) version of a couple of footnotes I supplied to that scene in my "To The Puppies!" harmonzation entry in March of 2...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) Lots of plotnotes to this entry, for various reasons; starting with some observations helpful in understanding what happens up in Syro-Phoenicia. Tyre and Sidon were two major port cities of the old Phoenician Empire, along the southern Syrian coast of the Mediterranean Sea, north of the Galilee region of Palestine. The cities were under Roman Empire rule at that time, of course, along with everything else around "the Sea Amid the Land". These cities still exist and are still major ports for the nation of Syria. In deep antiquity, traders from Phoenicia established port cities further south along the Mediterranean Coast, forming the semi-independent territory of Canaan (Hebrew for 'trader'); often warring with the Hebrews, and eventually defeated and assimilated. At the ti...