Asking the question about trees is kind of old isn’t it?
I did’nt really try to debate you about the accuracy of the Torah.
See the last post we had about this you seemed to be trying to articulate Theory that the Torah was written at the time of Yoshia.
The theory you articulated happens to one of four basic theories advanced by “bible Critics” the one you wrote about seemed to be the one advanced by Finkelstien.
Do you know why there are four not one?
Because the problems with each of them are so vast that it makes them seem silly. problems that make the questions of “tree rings” pale in comparison since it’s pretty easily understood that a0 there are plenty of ways explaining them (Hashem made the world grow back pretty quickly after the Mabul in an unnatural way amongst others)
The one of the “emergence” of the torah at the time of Josia is acknowledged to be problematic because of several problems
a) it is built around several pesukim in the Torah essentially saying that the Torah is littered with lies ch”v excluding those few lines.
b) It fails to account for the dissapearence of the Cannanite tribes suddenly with no explanation.
c) discounting the Mabul leaves no method of explanation how so many ancient cultures had a tradition of a Flood destroying the Earth with a single survivor that are uncannigly similar to the Mabul, even though these cultures seemingly had no contact with each other.
d) there is an actual archeolgical find of a recording of Sanncherib’s (Taylors Prism, found by Col. R. Taylor)battles that seemingly exactly verifies the accuracy of the account in Tanach which preceaded the story of Josiah indicating that it was very real. In addition
e) There is no logical explanation why the Torah records the “defeats” and failings of the the Jewish People in such great detail when the practice of all Kings at the time was to record a National History that included only triumphs.
f) The more that is dug up the more is found to verify the accuracy of the Torah in a historical sense.
Ex. 1)At one time it was thought the Torah speaking about the Hittite empire was a “myth” yet a hundred odd years ago the remnants of the Hittite empire were found and confirmed.
2) The Toah repeatedly gives detailed lineages and archeologists have acknowledged repeatedly that the Historical record shows the names used were current only in the time period they were given but were cmpletley forgotten hundreds of years later making it hard to believe that the text using those names could have been written later.
3) The theory is requires theat in a sense the Jewish people at the time of Josiah were small and not very literate in order for the hoax to be pulled off the proponents of the Theory claim David and Shlomo were in a sense “tribal Chieftans not Kings of Empires.However recent Historical finds have increasingly point to the extremley tenous possiblity of that.
4) If Dovid HaMElech and Shlomo HaMElech were made up then there is no explanation why Nach goes into such great detail about aveiros they commited again something that was comletley contrary to the practice of the period.
5) there is ample evidence of various events described in detail in the Nach such as the fall of Yericho. Yericho was acknowledged to have been found and the dig revealed a city that had been destroyed exactly as described in Yehoshua. True Kenyon claimed the dates were off however Wood has a host of reasons pointing as to why her dating methods were wrong (they were based on the absence of age specific pottery and radio-carbo testing has in fact verified Wood’s dating that the downfall occured in the proper time frame.
To sum it up there is a whole host of problems that can only be rsolved by accepting the historicty of TaNach from an archeological sense there is very little that has ever been found to contest TaNach. What has been found repeatedly actually verifies the accuracy of TaNach most of the questions are more from lack of evidence the actual evidence against. However the amount unexplored is pretty astonishing there are tens of thousand of cuneform tablets that have been found and only a fraction that have been explained.