Hittites

[dreamer_easy]

Mucking about with tags, I found a posting I made in 2004 in which I said:

At the library I saw J. Stephen Lang's What the Good Book didn't say: popular myths and misconceptions about the Bible (2003) which triumphantly mocked those who call the Bible fiction for mentioning the Hittites, a people for whom evidence has never been found. I'd already heard of them, and not from the Bible, by the time I saw Ghostbusters in 1984 - perhaps because they've been known to archaeologists for over a century. I suspect Mr Lang might've been a bit desperate for material there.

I still want to know exactly who said what and when about the Hittites indicating that the Bible was made up. Neither Lang, nor the countless Web sites which make the same claim, give a source. It seems more likely that the discovery of the Hittites startled the heck out of everyone, and this was retroactively turned into a told-you-so. (Apparently it's unclear whether archaeologists were correct in identifying the people they'd found with the Biblical Hittites anyway - but this doesn't actually affect my point.)