THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIA: EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD Book

I'm not really reviewing this book, I'm explaining why I abandoned it pretty early on. This book is not for me, and personally I feel it shouldn't be for anyone, but you can draw your own conclusions.

I abandoned this book when it became excruciatingly obvious that Johnson was cherry-picking historical arguments to find archaeological and historiographical support for Biblical events, and reducing more than a century of criticisms of this approach to Biblical archaeology to straw man caricatures.

I honestly did not know there are still historians working today who regard the Flood Tablet of the Gilgamesh epic as evidence for a historical flood. Johnson raises and then ignores the compelling archaeological counter-evidence - that major floods in Mesopotamia occurred at different times in different places. But he does not consider the equally important comparative counter-evidence - that the motif of a civilization-ending flood sent by the gods to purge a bungled humanity is a wide-spread motif, found not just among the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Jews, but the Mayans.

If he had at least suggested that he was aware of problems such as this instead of relentlessly ignoring them, I would have no objection, but as it is, his fundamental posture shows itself through this and many more examples to be studiously anti-empirical and theoretically anachronistic.

His analysis of Mesopotamian precursors to Moses show similar staggering weaknesses of omission. I abandoned the book when he considered the historical evidence for Abraham having actually come from Ur, without pausing to even consider the question of whether or not there was in fact such a historical personage.

No one who is not already powerfully sympathetic to the historicity of Biblical events, or unaware of the last century of scholarship in this arena, could find this book persuasive. We would not entertain an astronomy book that spoke from a geocentric paradigm; neither should we accept an engagement of Biblical archaeology that ignores what we know of folklore, depth psychology, comparative religions, anthropology, and archaeology, except insofar as they lend support to its conclusions.