Category Archives: Society

The Promised Land, 3 – do Jews really believe that?

The land promised to Abraham by his god (in exchange for exclusivity of worship) was “from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates”. In modern terms this includes not just Israel/Palestine, but Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, half of Iraq, a large part of Egypt, and an undefined part of Saudi Arabia. (You could even argue that it includes the entire Arabian peninsula, as falling within the coast between the Euphrates and Egypt.)

Map of the Promised Land as defined in Deuteronomy

If you don’t think that fundamentalist Jews and Messianic Christians believe in such a massive expansion of Israel, look at this map on this website.

If you don’t think that the Arabs are aware of the fundamentalist Jewish vision, then look at this blog. This blog includes references to Jews claiming the full territory in the writings of Theodore Herzl and in 1947 testimony to the UN.

And notice that they are using the same map (misspelling ‘Caspian’, and showing Israel as including both Lebanon and the Sinai peninsula). How nice that they can agree about something.

Of course, only a very few Jews and Christians make these preposterous claims to own the whole “Promised Land”. Similarly, only a very few Muslims want to eradicate the state of Israel. Most people on both sides, as most people everywhere, simply want a better life for themselves and their children, and to feel that they are living in a fair and just world. As the bumper sticker says, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

It would be nice for Palestinian constitutions to renounce the idea of the eradication of Israel. Israel could show the way by renouncing, in its constitution, the idea of the Promised Land “from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates”.

The Promised Land, 2 – the people already living there

Of course, a whole lot of people were already living in the Promised Land when Moses showed up with the Children of Israel. It was good land.

According to Moses, GOD had two sets of rules for warfare with cities, depending on whether the target cities were outside the Promised Land (“very far from you”), or inside it (“cities of the nations here”).

For the first ones, GOD says, offer them peace as slaves. If they accept, enslave them. If they don’t accept, then besiege the city, capture it, kill all the males, and keep the women and cattle as booty. You can afford to be this generous, because it’s outside the Promised Land.

But if the city is inside the Promised Land, you have to kill everything – men, women, children, animals – “in order to prevent them infecting you with their immoral practices”. I kid you not.

"You shall save alive nothing that breathes."

Here are the rules, from Deuteronomy 20, verses 10-15 for the first lot, 16-18 for the second.

[10] When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.
[11] And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.
[12] But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it;
[13] and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword,
[14] but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.
[15] Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.

[16] But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes,
[17] but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Per’izzites, the Hivites and the Jeb’usites, as the LORD your God has commanded;
[18] that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God.

Having got control of Palestine for 1500 years through genocide and ethnic cleansing, religious Jews (including Jesus, obviously) were in no mood to have the idolatrous, polytheist, pig-eating Romans come in and run the country. Their duty was to wipe the Romans out.

Unfortunately that thinking is still alive today among religious Jews. Even if Palestinians are neither idolatrous nor polytheist nor pig-eating, the more fanatical among the Jews do not see them as worshiping the same God, and want to wipe them out. But God is said to have promised the land to the descendants of Abraham – and Arabs, too, claim descent from Abraham. So the promise of the Covenant is fulfilled if Jews or Arabs live in the Promised Land… from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.

Best guess at Jesus’ family

When she married Joseph, Mary was pregnant with Jesus by someone else. Rumor had it that the father was a Roman soldier called Pantera, but the rape (or affair) was covered up. Joseph originally intended to divorce her (Matthew 1: 19), but changed his mind and left Galilee to go back to his family in Judea for Mary to have the child.

Joseph and Mary on the way to Bethlehem

The couple subsequently had several more children. In his 30s Jesus preached in his hometown of Nazareth, and people dismissed his claims to authority, saying “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?
Aren’t all his sisters with us?” (Matthew 13: 55-56). None of Jesus’ half-brothers should be confused with other followers of his with those names, other than James who became the leader of the disciples in Jerusalem some time after Jesus’ execution.

Some Christians deny that “brothers” and “sisters” means that they were Mary’s children – though clearly from the context it’s a nuclear family. Catholic and Orthodox Christians, especially, profess the perpetual virginity of Mary, and have created a backstory of Joseph having had an earlier marriage to a woman named Salome. She died, leaving Joseph with half a dozen children for him to raise. You have to wonder why the older kids are never part of the creche scenes of the baby Jesus in the manger… Mary, Joseph, Kings, Angels, Shepherds, farm animals… but no brothers and sisters?

No, Jesus had at least six siblings, and they were all younger.

Monotheism and polytheism – desert and forest

Studies have pointed out that there are interesting correlations between the geographic extremes of Forest and Desert on the one hand, and a whole range of cultural predispositions on the other.

The basic claimed comparison is the table below, and the highlight is that Forests = polytheism, and Deserts = monotheism

FOREST

DESERT
Dispute resolution Non-violent Tendency to warfare
Social structure Egalitarian Stratified
Sexuality Tolerant Taboos punishable by death
Women’s rights Substantial Male-dominated
Religion Polytheism Monotheism

This is simplistic. For example, we now equate the Sahara-Asian deserts with Islam, but historically the Arabian peninsula was overwhelmingly polytheistic, right up until Muhammad began trying to change it in 610 AD. (For an extensive critique of these ideas, and of the groups that disseminate them, see Steven Dutch’s page at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.)

However there are two lines of thought that can support the ideas of polytheism seeming more natural in a Forest environment, and of monotheism finding an easier reception in a Desert.

  1. A Forest has abundant resources; a resource dispute can be solved by one party moving away. But the limited resources of a Desert will favor the party that uses violence to control the resources, and the need for violence will favor male power and stratified decision-making. A society dominated by a single powerful male will be more receptive to the idea of the Universe being under the control of a single powerful God.
  2. In a Forest, nature has many aspects: trees, rivers, delicious fruits, poisonous fruits, animals you can eat, animals that will eat you, patches of sun, frequent rain, and so on. Nature is diverse, and its gods are diverse. In a Desert, nature is dominated by the sun – omnipresent, all-seeing, harsh, unforgiving, and an easy symbol for the domination of life by a single God.

    The sun - the inspiration for monotheism?

So a more complete comparison might be:

FOREST

DESERT
Environment Complex Sparse
The sun Elusive, welcome Constant, unforgiving
Basic resources Abundant Limited
Dispute resolution Distraction, relocation Retribution, clan warfare
Social structure Egalitarian Stratified
Sexuality Tolerant Taboos punishable by death
Women’s rights Substantial Male-dominated
Religion Polytheism Monotheism

Does this mean that the Celts and Anglo-Saxons and Vikings coming out of the northern forests were non-violent? Hardly! But they were definitely more egalitarian, sexually tolerant and polytheist than the Latin cultures which subsequently dominated them.

You are unlikely to see Scandinavians stoning anyone to death for sexual promiscuity, or for pregnancy outside marriage.

Jesus and the dangers of being illegitimate

The issue of Jesus’ father was problematic for his attempt to be recognized as Messiah – just as it was for his parents before he was born.

Mary is described by a word which can mean either ‘virgin’ or ‘girl of marriageable age’ – but strongly carries a meaning of ‘not married’.

The Gospels state that Joseph discovered that Mary was already pregnant when he married her, and, being a just man, decided to divorce her quietly rather than make a public example of her. But, after dreams changed his mind, he chose another reasonable solution: go to a different town (Bethlehem, where his own family was from) for a few months, let her have the baby where no one knew when they had married, and then return home (Nazareth) where no one knew when the baby had been born. That way the fiction of Jesus’ legitimacy could be maintained.

Stoning people to death for sexual misconduct is an ongoing tradition of monotheism

It was important for a child to have been conceived within marriage. Even if the parents subsequently married, if the child was conceived outside marriage it was considered a bastard. The laws in Deuteronomy are clear and harsh:

  • married woman has sex with another man, both stoned to death
  • betrothed virgin raped in a town, both stoned to death (she, for not having called for help)
  • betrothed virgin raped in the countryside, only the man stoned to death
  • unbetrothed virgin raped, the rapist has to pay the victim’s father fifty silver shekels and marry her.

So, depending on quite how young Mary got pregnant, her life was in danger. Assume Joseph loved her – he needed to be creative to protect her.

The problems of illegitimacy came up again when Jesus was making his play for Messiah and King. As Deuteronomy 23:2 states: “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD.”

Not surprising, then, that his followers grasped at whatever unlikely explanations they could think of, in order to explain away the embarrassing rumors!

Best resources – Archaeology and History

Every week David Meadows, aka The Rogue Classicist, assembles links to every archaeology-related story that he comes across for his Explorator mailing list, sorting them into:

  • Early Humans
  • Africa
  • Ancient Near East and Egypt [This is where the Jews are… and the Romans, sometimes]
  • Ancient Greece and Rome (and Classics) [This is where the Romans are… and the Jews, sometimes]
  • Europe and the UK (+ Ireland) [Note: don’t ask me why he calls it that…]
  • Asia and the South Pacific
  • North America
  • Central and South America
  • Other Items of Interest
  • Touristy Things
  • Blogs
  • Audio/Video News
  • Crime Beat
  • Numismatica
  • Exhibitions, Auctions and Museum-Related
  • Performances and Theatre-Related [yes, David’s Canadian, if you’re wondering about the spelling]
  • Obituaries
  • Podcasts

In a good week, a single section may look like this:

EARLY HUMANS

Using ‘foodprints’ to determine the diet of early humans:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-hominin-diet-20111022,0,7613706.story

Pondering the short legs of Neanderthals:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-mysteries-short-legged-neandertals.html
http://www.livescience.com/16623-neanderthal-short-legs.html

We can apparently blame backbone fractures on evolution:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/cwru-bbf101911.php

On the evolutionary roots of ‘culture’ in humans and apes:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-culture-humans-apes-evolutionary-roots.html

A Neanderthal find from the Netherlands … so far the coverage is only in Dutch:
http://www.nu.nl/wetenschap/2643248/werktuigen-neanderthalers-gevonden-in-limburg.html
http://www.blikopnieuws.nl/bericht/135825/Honderdduizend_jaar_oude_werktuigen_Neanderthaler_gevonden.html
http://www.limburger.nl/article/20111017/REGIONIEUWS06/111019666/1021
http://www.wetenschap24.nl/nieuws/artikelen/2011/oktober/Gereedschappen-Neanderthalers-ontdekt-in-Limburg.html
http://www.hartvannederland.nl/nederland/limburg/2011/bijzondere-archeologische-vondst/

Feature on figuring out where the various ‘ape men’ fit on the family tree:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2011/10/how-africa-became-the-cradle-of-humankind/

… and the mutation which may have led to the genus homo:
http://www.nctimes.com/news/science/article_cf0b51dc-531b-5a9a-9ef1-b2cb9fbeb21a.html

More on the blades (and their implications) found in that Qesem Cave ‘production line’:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-archaeologists-blade-production-earlier-thought.html
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I strongly recommend it. It ranks right at the top of my favorite reading for the week.

No room in the kataluma

In ancient farm households in many parts of the world, animals are kept under the house in the winter or at night. The advantages are that it keeps them safe, and that they provide heat for the family above.

Sheep kept under the house in a modern small farm

In the ancient Greek world, the upstairs living and dining area was called the ‘kataluma‘. This is the word used in the story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels, but commonly translated into English as ‘inn’.

When Joseph went to visit his family in Bethlehem towards the end of Mary’s pregnancy, there was ‘no room in the kataluma‘ – and no privacy for childbirth either – so naturally Mary had the baby downstairs and put him in a manger. Again, the manger was a logical choice: off the ground, and away from the animals that were out in the fields with the shepherds (and angels…) It wasn’t winter, or the sheep would have been inside; it was the spring lambing season, or the shepherds wouldn’t have been so attentive.

A fairly substantial traditional farming house: kataluma upstairs, manger in a room underneath

And if anyone has better pictures of a kataluma, please share!

BC and AD… BCE and CE… AUC and AM…

Historically, people created a fresh calendar after a significant event. Sometimes that was the coronation of a new king, and everything was counted as “in the tenth year of King Henry’s reign” and so on.

The Roman calendar was originally structured on the phases of the moon.

The Romans used AUC (“Ab Urbe Condita”, From the Founding of the City), dating everything from the founding of Rome in 753 BC. Note: not necessarily historically accurate.

Many Jews still use AM (“Anno Mundi”, In the Year of the World), dating everything from 1 Tishrei 1 AM, or Monday, 7 October 3761 BC… which is about a year before the creation of time and space on the Jewish traditional date of Creation, 25 Elul AM 1. Try to figure that one out!

The Jewish calendar's reference point is traditionally held to be about one year before the Creation of the world.

There are two problems with the standard calendar terms BC and AD, “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini – In the year of the Lord”.

The first is that many non-Christians object to referring to Jesus as either the Christ or the Lord, and aren’t impressed with using his birth as the basis for a global calendar.

The second is that Jesus was not born at midnight between 1 BC and 1 AD. Under our calendar, he was probably born in the spring of 6 BC, rendering the BC and AD terms ludicrous. Our calendar is now so thoroughly established, however, that it is easier to rename than to renumber. So now people are starting to write about our Common Era (CE) and, before that, Before Current Era (BCE).

Of course, we could just keep the initials BC and AD, and rethink the meaning of them to, say, “Before Current” and “After Dat”. I mean, really, who cares?

“Who is my Neighbor?” The Good Samaritan

Let’s assume that, as in the previous two blog posts, Jesus told his followers to obey the Shema (“Hear, O Israel…” Deuteronomy 6:4-9) and treat all “the children of thy people” well and “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18).

One question that arose was, Who is my neighbor? The uncertain boundary for Jesus appears to be the Samaritans – followers of a slightly different version of Mosaic Law, and without loyalties to Jerusalem or its Temple. Not Jews exactly, but almost… and living in the Jewish heartland, halfway between Jerusalem and Galilee, so that Jews and Samaritans inevitably went through each other’s territories.

Samaria, the region halfway between Galilee in the north and Jerusalem in the south

Although the Samaritans were not receptive to Jesus’ focus on the Temple at Jerusalem, he considered a charitable Samaritan to be closer to God than an uncharitable Jewish priest or Levite.

In some ways, the Samaritans appear to be in a very similar position to the Palestinians of today – monotheists, claiming descent from Abraham, respecting the Torah but following slightly different traditions, with their own non-Jewish holy sites, and with a historical right to live where they live, regardless of what Jewish fanatics think.

And in fact, some of the Palestinians of today are Samaritans. Some 700 live at Mount Gerizim and in Tel Aviv.

Mount Gerizem, West Bank, April 19, 2008. Samaritans gather around fire pits as sacrificed sheep smolder during a ritual of Passover, the annual Jewish holiday marking the liberation of Hebrews from slavery in ancient Egypt.

Jesus’ Message, 2: “Love thy neighbour…”

Jesus is quoted as saying that the second most important commandment is “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. This may be accurate, but not the whole story.

Because the phrase isn’t among the Ten Commandments, many Christians have the impression that it’s a Jesus original, expressing love towards the whole world. When you see it in its original context, though, it has a slightly different message. Jesus was quoting Leviticus 19:18 –

“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.”

Love thy neighbour - Leviticus 19:18

The commandment is for Jews to love their fellow Jews. It says nothing about loving gentiles. It certainly says nothing about loving the idolatrous pig-eating beard-shaving military occupation forces, no matter how St. Paul would later try to twist the teachings of Jesus to fit his own pro-Roman agenda.

Taken together, the two greatest commandments say “Think of and obey the God of Israel constantly, and look after your fellow Jews”.

Jesus was not preaching a universal message.