Two items appear below:

How would a logician respond if, from a list of those places named in the Old Testament and independently confirmed, someone predicts that eventually every location named in the Bible will be validated?

About 311 Old Testament places and locations now have archaeological or other confirmation. About 228 more named locations have been tentatively identified. A list is supplied [below] with the tentatives identified by a question mark.

The total number of countries, tribal areas, cities, villages, mountains, mountain ranges, plains, valleys, wildernesses, seas, rivers, cisterns and wells named in the Old Testament comes to 897.

In addition about 2,889 people are named in the Old Testament. About 50 have definite or tentative historical support. These estimates for the numbers of people are revisions of estimates published in Investigator No. 47.

The reasons for the discrepancy are:

1 Some names are used of many different individuals. The Old Testament mentions about 30 different men named Zechariah, 27 named Azariah, 26 named Shemaiah, 21 named Meshullam, 20 named Maasaiah, 19 named Shimei , etc.

2 Some individuals have two different names.

3 Some names of villages apply to three or four different villages.

4 Some names apply to both a person and a village.

5 A few names are symbolic and do not apply to a real person or place.

6 A few names in some Bibles are mistranslations or otherwise wrong due to reliance on different manuscripts.

7 Some names have slightly different spellings in some Bibles.

8 Sometimes it is uncertain whether a name is used of two persons or just one, or two locations or just one.

The places marked tentative in the list are tentative because:

1. In some cases there are two or three archaeological sites in close proximity and it is uncertain which is the one named in the Bible.

2. In some cases only one site is known but archaeologists disagree whether it is the one named in the Old Testament.

All the definites and most of the tentatives are actual places and locations we can go to and see. Bible names repeated by other writers such as Josephus, but without physical remains, are mostly excluded from my list.

For example the Moabite Stone, written by King Mesha of Moab, was discovered in 1868. The Stone includes the names of about 20 places also named in the Old Testament. Of these 20, three are not on my list. Simply being recorded by King Mesha, without physical remains, did not qualify them for my list.

The list of 539 names was put together from Bible dictionaries, Bible encyclopedias, and archaeological books and journals. A recent copy of Archaeological Diggings, for example, described a visit to Endor – where King Saul of Israel consulted a “witch”.  Endor is included in the list.

With over 300 Old Testament locations now validated, and over 200 more with tentative identification, skeptics face the possibility that more and more will be confirmed.  We’re dealing with an ongoing and long-term trend. Skeptics should wonder whether the score will eventually be 100%! I would reason inductively and actually predict an eventual 100% score!