Traveller Manifesto
75. Israel - Today

Israel Today.

Israel Traveller Mission Summary by Professor William Cowen

Israel Traveller is more ambitious than any Traveller mission to any time or place. When faced with the option to test more than one Transporter and therefore take Travellers further back in time, one could not help but consider the land which was once called Palestine or Judaea, indeed the Land of Israel. For this land is the heart of spiritual belief of more than half of humanity, where billions, be they Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, can trace the origins of their conviction to this tiny, insignificant patch of dusty land.

What made this mission so appropriate is the relevance of historical knowledge as it pertains to the nation of Israel itself. For it has been almost politically impossible to excavate in certain areas of Israel with any shred of independent thought. Many dig through the stories of the Old Testament, equipped with linguistics, epigraphy and logic, seeking evidence of the oldest versions of Biblical tales.

In Israel Traveller we have used four Transporters. The Transporters were links in a chain into the past. The first, in the 21st Century was placed in a protected wadi on land that is encompassed by the Israeli Defence Forces’ Hatzerim Airbase. This ensured current activity would be secure and hidden from public view and because of its isolated location, would reduce the incidence of accidental discovery in the times we aimed to explore.

The Transporters were managed as follows:

Transporter One took our team to the period circa 1000AD – actually it was 1025 – where we established Camp Alpha.

Summary: This time period was insignificant. Aside from a small, dusty settlement in the location of Beer Sheva, or as we Americans called it, Beersheba, there was nothing of significant historical interest. A reconnaissance of Jerusalem by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, showed a small, walled town that had not yet experienced the extensive wars and building projects that would typify the Crusades. It was decided to make better use of mission resources to explore subsequent Traveller locations.

Transporter 2 took our team to circa 20-25AD and was designated Camp Beta.

Summary: A patrol led by Major Paul Anderson made contact with a Roman military patrol. Only his quick thinking and heroic action prevented conflict. Our camp was later attacked by a small Roman army. After their Jewish auxiliary cavalry was decimated, Major Anderson again, only after the most courageous action, single-handedly prevented further deaths. We now have a standing agreement of non-interference with the Romans, though to prevent further risk of conflict our patrols, both human and UAV, are on high alert.

Because of the horrific battle, we were able to collect uniforms, arms and armour of the Jewish auxiliary cavalry soldiers and their mounts used in the attack. A per our standard medical process, blood and tissue samples of all fatalities, human and non-human, were collected for analysis.

UAV’s have proved invaluable for these missions, especially at Camp Beta. The craft effectively mapped and photographed the approach to our base as well as the Roman camp in Beersheba. Through longer range reconnaissance, the UAVs provided intelligence on most of the other settlements in the region, including Jerusalem.

Of all replaceings in Israel Traveller, one will have the most significant effect on modern Jews, for we have footage that confirms the presence of the most holy Temple, along with the Citadel and Royal Palace as built by King Herod the Great. The footage is clear and unambiguous, displaying these wonderful structures in all their glory. This flies in the face of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s assertion that the Temple was a modern fabrication that has no verification in real history. This vision of the Temple is of most significance to all Jews and I encourage that the footage be released for global view as soon as possible. Full descriptions and images related to these replaceings have been detailed in my reports and summarised in a number of academic papers awaiting approval for publication. Here alone is a lifetime of academic work.

No patrol has been sent to Jerusalem due to the potentially hostile presence of Roman legionnaires. I request that consideration be given Camp Beta’s use of the manned drone currently being tested at Camp Delta. If we can fly a team to the precinct of Jerusalem, researchers can see the Temple with their own eyes. Such an event would be most significant to the State of Israel and to Jews globally.

Transporter 3 took our team to circa 1000BC, designated as Camp Gamma.

Summary: This era gave some of our historical researchers the most concern as this was allegedly the time where the land was ruled over by King David.

That narrative is familiar to any student of the Bible. A young shepherd named David from the tribe of Judah slays the giant Goliath from the enemy tribe of the Philistines, is elevated to king of Judah following the death of Saul at the close of the 11th century B.C., conquers Jerusalem, unites the people of Judah with the disparate Israelite tribes to the north and thereupon amasses a royal dynasty that continues with Solomon well into the tenth century B.C. But while the Bible says David and Solomon built the kingdom of Israel into a powerful and prestigious empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and from Damascus to the Negev, there’s a slight problem—namely, there are glaring discrepancies in these narratives. Despite decades of searching, archaeologists had found no solid evidence that David or Solomon ever built anything. To make matters worse, our patrol to Jerusalem of the year circa 980BC showed nothing that could be tied to the Biblical narrative. There was no evidence of King David or a Jewish empire, but there was mention of a leader of the Jebusites in the town. Elhanan was said to be the leader and some scholars suggest this might have been the true name of King David. However, there are too many discrepancies not to require further extensive research and evaluation.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many of the Traveller missions, the data we collected flies in the face of accepted historical research, where too many archaeologists unapologetically worked with a trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Be warned, the absence of anyone we can identify as King David is a most contentious issue. There is now an argument regarding the incorrect dating of such a narrative, an opinion led by controversial historian Israel Finkelstein, who has made a career out of merrily demolishing many commonly held historical assumptions. He and other proponents suggest that the dates posited by Biblical scholars are a century off. The “Solomonic” buildings excavated by biblical archaeologists over the past several decades at Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo were not constructed in David and Solomon’s time, he says, and must have been built by kings of the ninth-century B.C.’s Omride dynasty, well after David and Solomon’s reign. During David’s time, as Finkelstein described it and as we indeed found, Jerusalem was little more than a ‘hill-country village,’ David himself was described as a raggedy upstart akin to Pancho Villa and his legion of followers more like ‘500 people with sticks in their hands shouting and cursing and spitting’— not the stuff of great armies of chariots as described in scripture.

In view of our replaceings, this final assertion appears to be more likely, though it is doubtful it will be readily accepted.

The real issue, that King David is not as described in the Bible but is significantly less, or a myth altogether is, to many, unthinkable. If we take David and his kingdom from the Bible you have a different book. If there was never any real Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah, the narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction. And then the rest of the Bible is just a propagandistic effort to create something that never was. And if you can’t replace the evidence for it, then it probably didn’t happen.

The stakes are high.

So, what did we replace? Nothing really. Certainly not a dazzling king with a glorious Jerusalem indelibly linked to modern Israel. While belief in legends may have been a convenient tool for creating national identity, to have seen and recorded the past and found the legends as untrue leaves us with a conundrum. For King David is the founding father of Israel. If proved non-existent, the replaceings will rock the world of not only modern Israel but also of the major religions. In the Quran, David is a link in the chain of prophets who preceded Muhammad and is far from a marginal figure in Islamic thought.

Remember, virtually no written records survive from the times of King Solomon or earlier. The ancient Israelites, unlike many of their neighbours, wrote on perishable papyrus rather than durable clay. Yet almost everyone has a stake in Scripture. Jewish and Christian ultraconservatives don’t like hearing how any parts of the Bible could be fictional. Atheists can’t wait to prove that the whole thing is a fairy-tale. And even for the moderate majority, the Bible underlies so much of Western culture that it matters a great deal whether the popular narratives are grounded in truth. To suggest that many things in the Bible are not historical is one thing, but to lose biblical history altogether is to lose many of our traditions.

Which brings us to our next camp.

Transporter 4 took our team to Camp Delta – Circa 1980BC or 4000 years into the past.

Summary: This leg of the mission was always considered ambitious. Featuring significant UAV reconnaissance, the purpose for establishing this camp was threefold:

Because we could. To place Travellers 4000 years into the past is boldly ambitious.

Because this was the era of the Biblical Patriarchs

The region is surrounded by bronze-age Empires and peoples of which little or nothing is known.

Most scholars suspect that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Judaism’s traditional founders, never existed. Many doubt the tales of slavery of the House of Israel in Egypt, and the subsequent Exodus, and relatively few modern historians believe in Joshua’s conquest of Jericho and the rest of the Promised Land. In the most extreme view, all of the above are complete fabrications, invented centuries after the supposed fact.

Our mission so far has shown us nothing that could argue for or against these more ancient Biblical accounts. There is no direct evidence, other than the Bible, to suggest that Abraham’s exploits; his rejection of idolatry, his travels to Canaan, his rescue of his nephew Lot from kidnappers in the Canaanite city of Laish, later renamed Dan, ever happened. Critics contend that several of the kings and peoples Abraham supposedly encountered existed at widely separated times in history. As we’re not of a role to vindicate the Bible as history, there is little chance that our mission to the era of circa 2000BC will replace Abram / Abraham and his family or any other characters or items that will cause the ardent believer to breathe any easier.

Our preliminary aerial reconnaissance has revealed a network of highland villages, each of around 100 to 200 farmers and herders who appear to be of the Canaanite or Philistine cultures. We’ve seen no evidence of violent invasion or even the infiltration of a clearly defined ethnic group. Instead, these people may be the first Israelites. One alternative to both the Biblical military conquest narrative is that the Israelites emerged through a kind of peasant revolt against their Canaanite lords, while Canaan, part of which later became known as Israel, was dominated by the New Kingdom of Egypt from around 1550 to 1180. Yahweh, the national god of both Israel and Judah, might have originated in Edom and Midian in southern Canaan.

Let’s take this a step further. Biblical narrative suggests the great Flood took place around 2100BC. Our 2000BC visit would see strong evidence of such an ecological upheaval, but there was no sign of any flood or similar cataclysm, even if it was localised.

But enough comparison to the archaeological understanding of this remarkable region. That’s why we are here, to understand the truth of the Time. Though archaeologists have worked assiduously to understand the Times we’ve visited, to actually visit has been a revelation. We have much to learn of the Times when our camps have been established.

And let us never forget, that we are the first!

We’ve been the first to use the Transporters to Travel back more than 1000 years. This strategy alone will open up the opportunities to study the deep past. Though we still have to labour through the limitations of thousand year blocks, imagine what other Traveller missions can achieve.

But to Travel to the area the world knows at the Holy Land, to visit the great city of Jerusalem itself, that is a world-changing mission that can never be duplicated.

Regardless of the results, when historians examine our replaceings as our brave Travellers explore these legendary lands, we can only be grateful for their on-the-ground perspective. Ground-breaking technologies will allow us to better examine the nations around our location, for we plan to document the peoples and settlements of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, early Persians, Greeks and others who inhabited the region. This is the Middle Bronze Age, so we also hope to discover more on the mysterious Sea Peoples, one of the greatest riddles of Ancient History.

Modern historical scholars have been beset upon by the many unknowns of this era and we now have the keys to unlock those mysteries.

There is so much that we will learn.