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Iron chariots


The Hebrew Bible mentions iron chariots in the following contexts:

The perceived incongruity of these passages inspired the 1921 expedition by archaeologist and University of Pennsylvania museum curator Clarence Stanley Fisher (1876–1941), in which he traveled to the Holy Land seeking physical evidence of these iron chariots.

Skeptics have cited Judges 1:19 in particular as an example of biblical self-contradiction regarding the omnipotence of the Judeo-Christian God. On this premise a group of atheists launched the counter-apologetics site IronChariots.org in 2006. Scholars and apologists however have given various ways to reconcile the apparent discrepancy, which is excused as arising from the ambiguity in the English translation of the text.

The Douay-Rheims Bible differs from all other known translations by including one extra instance of this phrase:

However this error can be attributed to semantic reduplication and false cognates. The KJV translates the Hebrew word as harrow, evoking some agricultural device for tilling soil. While חריץ is transliterated in the Latin alphabet as chariyts, it comes from a root word meaning "to cut" or "to sharpen" and is pronounced much differently, whereas the English word chariot (similarly to car, carriage, etc.) originates from the Latin carrum via Old French.


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