Posts Tagged ‘judaism’
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
2500 years of this BS? Time for a change
So now we come to the writings on the god we’ve come to call God, and his supposed activities, nature and purpose.
I’m no biblical scholar, and this is a daunting prospect, but here are some questions I need to ask myself. When? What language? Who? How many authors? Is ‘the Torah’ the same as ‘the Pentateuch’? Don’t look for too many answers here.
The first five books of the Bible, and presumably all of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was written in Biblical Hebrew, and this is important to always keep in mind for English readers, who so often fail to realise they’re reading translations of translations. The first traces of Biblical texts discovered, the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, date back about 2600 years. They are fragments from Numbers, the fourth book. Of course we may never know if these are the oldest texts, but it’s unlikely they’ll find anything too much older. They date, therefore, from a little before the Babylonian exile, written up in various books (Jeremiah, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Daniel). According to Wikipedia and its sources:
The final redaction of the Pentateuch took place in the Persian period following the exile, and the Priestly source, one of its main sources, is primarily a product of the post-exilic period when the former Kingdom of Judah had become the Persian province of Yehud.
There were multiple authors, it seems. Famously, there were two origin stories, written presumably by separate persons. They’re designated as Gen 1 and Gen 2, and they each use a different name for the creator. The first, starting at Genesis 1:1, uses the Hebrew word Elohim, whereas the second, starting at Genesis 2:4, uses a tetragrammaton, YHWH, for Yahweh. Stylistically, they’re also very different. The first is fairly tightly organised and brief. Importantly from my perspective, the god, though male, is described as creating ‘man’ in its two forms, male and female, together. Here’s the the King James English version:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepers upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:26-27).
The second story begins immediately after the first story ends, and it is more detailed and lyrical, describing the garden of Eden, the river out of it, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the lands fed by the rivers, divided from the original, flowing from the garden. God spends a lot of time chatting with Adam (the name suddenly pops up), getting him to name all the beasts of the fields and the fowl of the air that he, the god, conjures up. He also tells him that he will create a help-meet for him, but Adam has to remind him of this later. So, the great moment arrives:
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:21-23).
So the male has the naming rights, and the woman provides unspecified help, and they quickly notice that they’re both ‘naked’ – though what might that mean? – but it didn’t apparently bother them – because, it seems, they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), a useful tree for any garden. Clearly, none of this makes sense from a modern perspective, but the story goes on, with a talking serpent, who addresses the as-yet unnamed woman, convincing her that she should eat from the TKGE, to become wise. This sounds like good advice, and the woman judges the fruit of the tree to be good, and so she eats, and gets the man to eat, and they’re ashamed, and they hide from the god, who, being omniscient, eventually finds them. He asks why they’re hiding and Adam explains that they’re naked – sophisticated language already! – to which the god asks the very interesting question, Who told you you were naked? There’s no answer, and the god assumes that they’ve eaten from the TKGE. But he doesn’t appear to be sure, he has to ask them. So Adam blames the woman, who blames the serpent, though of course there’s no explanation as to why ignorance is bliss and devouring knowledge is bad.
Most important for my purposes here is the god’s treatment of the woman:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16)
So that sets the pattern of male-female inequality in Judaism. Pretty flimsy, needless to say.
Now to turn to the warrior god, who is also a jealous god (which is certainly not the same thing). The god of the Israelites, essentially YHWH, is deliberately mysterious, and amorphous. He must not be represented (this is called aniconism, against icons), to make a graven image is toto forbidden. The religious historian Christophe Lemardelé, in an essay of great complexity, finds that the tension between a jealous god, who seems in some kind of marital relation with his people, and a warrior-god seeking to save his people and fight for them, as in the books of Exodus and Judges, can best be resolved by examining the anthropology of the peoples who created this god:
The figure of the patriarch Abraham echoes a pastoral population located in Hebron and therefore leads to suggesting that the patriarchal ideology of Genesis—a book of Judean and rather late origin (Persian period, around the 5th century)—would have its background in the family and kinship structures of these nomadic groups. It seems difficult to us to envisage, without any migration, a late Iron age diffusion, however slow, of the Yahweh’s religion from south to north through these groups. The divine covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not at the origin of God’s privileged relationship with Israel but rather one of its final elaborations.
It seems the god evolved with an increasing patriarchy – the origin stories were by no means the first written, and their misogyny, such as it is, is partial witness to an increasingly endogamous patrilineal society. This god, through the stories of Judges, Deuteronomy and Exodus, becomes more tightly bound to his chosen people, increasingly jealous of other gods, and increasingly demanding and unforgiving. Such is the legacy of the Abrahamic religions, if you want it.
There is of course a great deal more to say and learn, but the WEIRD world continues to move away from these tales and life examples, into hopefully something more bonoboesque, something more in keeping with our actual and potential human nature. The religion that reinforced over a millennium of misogyny is failing, all too slowly, in its Western European heartland, and it would be nice if we could speed that up. We understand our world now well enough to know that keeping women out of positions of power, demeaning them, pretending that they are inferior, or that their roles should be circumscribed, has been disastrous. Nothing short of disastrous. I want to argue for a worldwide release of female power, and a promotion of female dominance. It’s happening slowly, but I’m impatient. I want to present the evidence and I want to continue to see changes bearing fruit. There are parts of the world that are going backwards, certainly – in Afghanistan, in Burma, in China and many other regions. We need to show them by example how good it can be. We need to work to reduce the macho thugocracies (the majority of the world’s nations), and find ourselves in a less brutal, more collaborative, more caring, inclusive and thoughtful world. The rise of female power, I believe, is absolutely central to that transition. Without which not.
References
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/two-creations-in-genesis
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
It has long irritated me that people ask the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ or ‘why don’t you believe in God?’, assuming that there’s only one deity, a cultural assumption that reveals a fair degree of ignorance. Obviously there are many gods, or spirits, or powers or forces, because many many cultures have developed over many thousands of years in isolation to each other.
For example, I’ve been reading Cassandra Pybus’ book Truganini, which relates the horrors suffered by the Aboriginal inhabitants of what was then Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s and 30s. One particular spirit – Raegewarrah – was considered mostly responsible for the disaster that had befallen them with the advent of Europeans, but there were many other gods and spirits associated with places, activities and so on. Speaking more generally, I recall one spiritually inclined friend saying that these different gods or spirits are all different interpretations of God, or the godhead or some such thing, but it doesn’t take much anthropological research to discover that so many of these creatures have different characters, powers, relationships and fields of agency. There are malevolent and benevolent gods, there are capricious, unpredictable gods, there are regional gods, seasonal gods, gods of love and gods of war, gods of the sea, gods of the forest, squabbling and/or incestuous families of gods, hierarchies of gods, and gods of the other peoples over the mountains or on faraway islands.
It’s stated on some websites that there are between 8000 and 12000 gods on record, but records require writing, and religious beliefs surely predates writing, as for example those of Aboriginal Australians. And we have as little idea of when religious belief in humans began as we do of the beginning of human language. It’s likely though, at least to me, that the origins of human language and religion are connected.
But returning to God, rather than gods, this is a reference to the Judeo-Christian god, as I live in a country colonised by Christians. He (and he’s very male) is also referred to as the Abrahamic god, who unites the three associated religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in monotheism, or sort of. Christianity differs from the others in that there’s two gods, father and son, who sort of compete with each other for the attention of belevers, being, apparently, quite different characters.
Anyway, this Judaic god wasn’t, strictly speaking the first monotheistic god, though he was at the foundation of the first successful monotheistic religion that we know of. We can’t of course be certain of how many monotheisms have been tried in history or ‘prehistory’ but we do know of the attempt by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, some 3,300 years ago – some 750 years before the rabbis of Judah got together to institute their monotheism. Akhenaten tried to compel his subjects to worship the Aten, the Sun God, but only through him, the pharaoh. It was an attempt to impose monotheism in a very hierarchical way, to consolidate the pharoah’s power, and it would’ve entailed the essential abolition of over a hundred other Egyptian gods, so it didn’t survive Akhenaten’s death – in fact, there was a fierce reaction to it afterwards.
Now of course the rabbis of Judah knew nothing about this when they began to develop their monotheism. It’s likely that the Judaic religion existed centuries before it turned monotheistic. It was one of several Canaanite polytheistic religions of the region, and the various Semitic cultures probably shared their different deities, leading to confusion at times about their identities and roles. Much of this will always be speculative as we have few written records from the time, but the name El, from which the Arabic name Allah derives, comes up in slightly different forms in Ugaritic, in Aramaic and in so-called proto-Semitic languages to describe a god who may are may not be the same god in each case. Sometimes El seems to represent a special or supreme god among gods. Other times it seems like a prefix to some particular god, such as El-Hadad. So basically, the name El, and its derivatives, comes up in so many language-forms and in so many contexts that it’s virtually impossible to characterise the god in any coherent way. If you don’t believe me, look up the comprehensive Wikipedia entry on this god, or this descriptor.
So during the Bronze Age (about 5300 to 3200 years ago) the land of Canaan, of which Judah was a a small part, was occupied or influenced by the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Hurrian Mitanni and the Assyrians, among others. So there were all sorts of cultural and religious influences and pressures that I’m not scholared enough to sort out, but the gods that most stuck with or appealed to the Israelite tribes of Judah and surrounding regions were Yahweh, a warrior-god, the aforementioned El, the mother goddess Asherah, and Baal, who by the time of Iron Age 1 (3200-3000 years ago) had come to replace El in parts of Canaan as the master god. Baal was particularly a fertility god, associated especially with rainfall, which was crucial to the region. The scholarly term is monolatristic worship – with many gods, but one god being more prevalent or important.
However, over time, and probably due to the regular incursions into and occupation of Israelite regions by other cultures, Yahweh became the more favoured god, a being to rouse the embattled Israelites against their various oppressors. The most serious oppression came from the Babylonians during Iron Age II (about 2600 to 2550 years ago) when the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem and deported the most prominent Judeans, taking them captive to Babylon. Jerusalem, the city, was apparently destroyed, though much of the rest of Judah remained untouched. It was likely this trauma (much relieved a few decades later by the defeat of the Babylonians by Cyrus II of Persia, and the return from exile) that turned the Judean people inwards, and caused them to see Yahweh, their warrior-god, as their sole god, under whom they needed to unite as his chosen people.
Which brings me to the complex writings of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. I feel daunted at the thought, so I’ll focus mostly on Genesis, the origin. I have very little interest in the endless abstrusities of Judaism or any other religion, but the tight hold that ‘the one true God’ still has on millions of people has fascinated and disturbed me for decades, especially considering what we’ve come to know about our universe in the past few centuries. It seems knowledge percolates slowly, even when confined to the so-called ‘WEIRD’ world.
I don’t believe that science and religion are in any way compatible – they offer completely different programs, if you will, for understanding the world and our place in it. The science program is endless, or opened-ended, if you will – with new facts or findings leading to new questions, which, when answered lead to further questions with no end in sight, whereas the religious program (and I’m specifically focussing on Abrahamic religions) has an end, in God, He who cannot be questioned. The old Stephen Jay Gould attempt to evoke NOMA (non-overlapping majesteria), the idea that science and religion can live happily together, (about which I’ve written here), always struck me as frankly ridiculous.
Of course I understand that religion comes wrapped in culture, which comes wrapped in religion, and all this forms a great part of the identity of many people, and I have no wish to belittle or take from people their culture. It’s a vexed issue, and I don’t have all the answers. I do think there are heavy cultures, which can be damaging, and I notice this damage especially when it comes to gender. Bonobos again. And since the god called God is so very very masculine, I cannot help but feel great discomfort about the Abrahamic religions.
So my next post will look at the Hebrew Origin myth and the nature of the god as shaped by the writers of the earliest texts.
References
https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg19125641-200-how-many-gods-are-there/
Truganini: journey through the apocalypse, by Cassandra Pybus, 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah
Stephen Jay Gould, NOMA and a couple of popes
the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy – a timeline 1
Every time I start writing about something I feel vaguely guilty that I’m not writing about something else. Pretty silly but there you go. I hope to get back to sciency stuff after this….
I’m going to try writing a timeline of events and data leading up to the current situation in Palestine/Israel, which will never be comprehensive but…
- c9000 years ago the region we may now call Palestine or Israel didn’t have a clear name. It was inhabited by agricultural communities practising various religions. There was at least one concentrated centre, Jericho, regarded as one of the world’s oldest towns, successively inhabited for the past 11000 years.
- c7000 years ago – evidence has recently been discovered that Jerusalem was inhabited at this time (the Chalcolithic era). The Israeli press made much of this, but there’s no evidence of course that Judaism dates back that far. I should add that, in considering the history of the people of the region, I make the reasonable assumption that ‘holy texts’ are propagandist and of extremely limited reliability.
- c6000 years ago – the region from this time is generally known as Canaan, at least by historians and archaeologists – though the first known use of the term comes much later (we’re at the very beginnings of rudimentary writing). The inhabitants spoke a variety of Semitic languages and dialects. We’re talking here about a large region encompassing much of modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
- c4500 – 4000 years ago – the region’s population grew – it benefitted from but was also threatened by surrounding civilisations, such as the Egyptians to the south, the Sumerians and Akkadians in Mesopotamia, and later the Assyrians, Babylonians and other peoples. These infiltrating groups also influenced religious beliefs.
- c3500 – 3000 years ago – small city states had developed, and the region, particularly in the south, came under increasing control of Egypt. one of the principal languages was Eblaite, in the north. The Hittites of Anatolia were another major influence. During this period, a number of towns and cities still known today came into being, or into prominence, including Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Jaffa, Beirut and Hebron. The Canaanite religion, from which the Israelite religion essentially derived, was polytheistic but hierarchical, and among the many deities worshipped in a very diverse and volatile region were Dagon, Ba’al Hadad, Anat, Astarte, El Elyon and Moloch.
- c2800 years ago – by this time there were a number of distinct kingdoms in the region, including Israel/Samaria, whose principal god was Yahweh, Judah (also Yahweh), Moab (Chemosh), Edom or Idumea (Qaus), and Ammon (Moloch). Each of these gods headed a pantheon of lesser gods.
- c2700 years ago – around this time the Judaic religion began to take full form. Israel and Judah had become vassals of the Assyrian empire. Israel rebelled and its kingdom was destroyed. Refugees who fled to Judah, particularly the elite, promoted Yahweh as a supreme god, the only one to be worshipped. The sudden collapse of the Assyrian empire and the support of a new king of Judah (Josiah) helped the ‘reform’ to succeed. The old covenant, or treaty, between Judah and Assyria was replaced by a covenant with its new overlord, Yahweh. However, we cannot know how many people in the kingdom adhered to the new monotheism.
- 586 BCE – the Babylonians sacked Judah’s capital, Jerusalem, and the elite were taken captive. It’s impossible to know how many lives were lost. It’s claimed that the ‘first temple’, supposedly built under the reign of Solomon, was destroyed at this time, but there is no evidence of the existence of this fabulous structure.
- 539 BCE – the Persians under Cyrus the Great captured Babylon and many exiles returned to Judah. They regained control of the kingdom (now called Yehud) and brought with them a more ascetic, exclusivist form of the religion, very probably influenced by Zoroastrianism, a Persian form of monotheism. It was at this time that the Torah or Pentateuch was written. However, Yehud/Judah was now a part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, and remained so for over 200 years. The region was considerably smaller and less populated than suggested in Judaic holy texts – it was situated south of Samaria, bordering the Dead Sea to the east, but not quite stretching to the Mediterranean in the west.
- 332 BCE – Alexander the Great conquered the region, but died shortly thereafter. The Ptolemies, descendants of one of Alexander’s generals, gained control of the region.
- c 200BCE – another Greek dynasty, the Seleucids, based in Syria, gained control of the region. Clearly the people of the southern Levant region, among whom were people we might now call the Jews, had never really experienced autonomy, which might explain something of the modern situation. The Seleucids were keen to either suppress Judaism or to Hellenise it, leading to increased tensions with the ruling powers, and between traditional and ‘modernising’ Jews.
- 167-160 BCE – This was the Period of the ‘Maccabean Revolt’, involving a series of battles which eventually led to a semi-autonomous Jewish state, the Hasmonean dynasty.
- c110 BCE – with the weakening of the Seleucids, the Hasmonean dynasty became autonomous and expanded its territory into Samaria and Galilee in the north, Idumea to the south, and Perea and Iturea to the west. It should be noted however that this was a kingdom, not a religious state. The state was always reliant on more powerful states, such as the Roman Republic and the Parthian empire.
- 63 BCE – the region became a client state of Rome after invasion, and the Jewish territory was again reduced. The Hasmonean dynasty came to an end in 37 BCE when Herod, an Idumean, took over the throne. The Hasmonean period has been used for propaganda purposes by Zionist nationalists to claim modern rights to the land governed by the Hasmoneans before the Roman invasion.
- 6 CE – the first Roman governor/prefect of Judea – a Roman province – was appointed. The region was still a kingdom, but most power was in Roman hands.
- 66-73 CE – during these years a major rebellion broke out against Roman rule. The second temple was destroyed by the forces of the future Roman Emperor, Titus, and the first major diaspora of Jews occurred – though Jews were already starting to migrate to Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
Okay, this first part of the timeline, taking us to the beginnings of the Christian era, has clearly more information about the Jews and Judaism than about the other peoples of the region. That’s largely because there’s more information out there about the Jews than the other cultures/religions. It’s virtually impossible to get reliable information about the population of the region in toto, let alone the proportions of different peoples, their range of occupations, the number and sizes of towns, the degree of co-operation and rancour between disparate groups etc etc. In any case, we’ve now covered the period which the most hardline Zionist nationalists say is the basis of their claim to a Zionist monocultural state. From this point on, the Jewish diaspora will be a feature, as well as the ever-changing situation in and around the southern Levant, or Palestine.
Palestine 2: more recent ancient history
Jacinta: So the so-called Kingdom of Judah, from archaeological evidence, was not a particularly developed region, from a modern perspective. Jerusalem, always regarded as its most significant city, and central to all Zionist aspirations, came into being as a small village between 5000 and 4500 years ago. From about 4000 years ago, it seems to have been a vassal state of the Egyptian empire, but there’s scant archaeological evidence from the period, though there was clearly an increase of building construction under Ramesses II a little over 3200 years ago. Some 2700 years ago, the region became a part of the Assyrian empire, and then the Babylonians conquered the region only a century or so after that, largely destroying Jerusalem.
Canto: Right, and the Babylonians brought about a diaspora of sorts, which was soon reversed when Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return and rebuild their temple. Now this temple was a symbol of Judaism, and its destruction by the Babylonians struck at the heart of their religion, suggesting that it was well established 2600 years ago…
Jacinta: Yes, we’ll get back to the actual population of the region and their religion shortly. Persia remained in control of Judea until the time of Alexander the Great 2350 years ago (we’re avoiding the BC/AD designations) and remained under the control of his Seleucid successors until a local revolt led by Judas Maccabeus gave it semi-independence for a time under the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties. The Romans by this time were the great power, and Judea became a client state, but when the population rose in revolt 1950 years ago, Jerusalem was sacked, and, after another revolt 70 years later, the troublesome province became an increasing target of Roman authorities, leading to a major diaspora that wasn’t reversed until the 20th century.
Canto: And that’s when our story really hots up, but getting back to that temple – you know it was built on this supposedly triple-holy site called the Temple Mount, current home of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, both of which are very holy of holy to Islam. Of course it’s no accident that Moslems built this dome about 1320 years ago just where the second Jewish Temple had stood…
Jacinta: Which, by the way, is the very place where, so says fundamentalist Judaism, their god created Adam, haha.
Canto: Yes yes and where he created the World as well, for old Adam to stretch his legs in. I mean it’s typical for a new religion to set its base camp on the ruins of an older one – just as the Christians did at ‘pagan’ sites when the Roman Empire turned Christian. But let’s look briefly at the history of the temple itself, since its first construction might be said to mark the beginning of Judaism as an organised religion. It has been called Solomon’s Temple, and there’s much bullshit in the Old Testament about Solomon being the ruler of a mighty empire, but absolutely no evidence has been found of his existence outside of those texts. My uneducated guess was that he was a local chieftain grossly exaggerated in his power by Old Testament propaganda. He supposedly lived around 2900 years ago, so believers assume the temple was built around that time. It’s noteworthy that the Israelis haven’t allowed any archaeological research to be done at the site for decades. But let’s be generous and assume from their own stories that Judaism is about 3000 years old.
Jacinta: And it seems that one of the tenets of Zionism is return to an ancient homeland. But a homeland isn’t a nation, quite. Australia’s Aborigines have had a homeland here for up to 60,000 years, but they didn’t have a nation in the modern sense of a state with institutions of government etc. Some Zionists, especially the religious ones, would use their holy books to argue for having an ancient nation-state under David and Solomon etc but that doesn’t sort with any evidence. Other Zionists though would argue that the region was overwhelmingly Jewish before the diaspora caused by Roman repression. That would be the basis of their demand for the creation of Israel as a nation, right?
Canto: That and their claim to be a uniquely oppressed people in their adopted countries, which was made more cogent after the Holocaust. The problem of course is that the region, one of the oldest humanly inhabited regions in the world, has never been exclusively Jewish, or Israelite or whatever you want to call it. Was it overwhelmingly Jewish during early Roman times? Perhaps so – I’m certainly willing to concede that, but I’m not sure what that counts for. The British Isles 2000 years ago, when Romanisation began there, was predominantly made up of Celtic tribes, migrants from Europe. The USA at that time was settled by a number of highly developed regional cultures, that tend now to be grouped under the heading ‘native American culture’. The Celts don’t have a nation, nor do the native Americans, or the Kurds, the Catalans, the Rohingyas…
Jacinta: But some of them have put forward cogent arguments for their own nation-state.
Canto: Yes, but the Zionist movement and its arguments were different – not necessarily more cogent – for a number of reasons. Zionism had a more international feel, due to the diaspora. It was locally active and felt in many parts of the world, unlike say, the Catalan movement. Also, It was a call to ‘return’ of a profoundly oppressed people – and this was before the rise of Nazism, after which it was able to take advantage of western guilt big-time. And for the religious Jews there was the whole thing about Jerusalem and the temple…
Jacinta: Okay, so we’re going to switch to the modern situation, but before that let’s look to the distinction made between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewishness. Ashkenazi Jews currently represent around three quarters of the Jewish population. The Sephardim are descended from those who settled in the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the diaspora – Roman times – but were then infamously expelled from the region under the Alhambra Decree of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, and a similar decree by the Portuguese monarchy in 1496.
Canto: Not to mention the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England under Eddie I. They all appeared to say ‘Go East, young Jew, or we’ll have your guts for garters’, or words to that effect.
Jacinta: The Jews descended from those who remained in the Levant and the Middle East during the diaspora are called Mizrahi Jews. The Ashkenazim’s descent is complicated. Actually the whole story is really effing complicated. For example the Ashkenazim were also pushed eastward during the late Middle Ages due to persecution. By the early Middle Ages they had settled in Northern and Central Europe, for example in settlements along the Rhine, where they developed the Yiddish language, from German mixed with Aramaic, Hebrew and other Eastern elements.
Canto: Yes, and they were pushed eastward, but also pushed into being more integrated into local cultures. This led to a kind of modernising movement, a Jewish Enlightenment known as the Haskalah, which revived Hebrew as a literary language.
Jacinta: But the point is that the Ashkenazim were, according to some observers, at the greatest remove from the Jews of the old spiritual homeland, due to their European integration and their Enlightenment values. On the other hand, it was above all the Ashkenazim who suffered under the Holocaust. So there was this post-Holocaust tension in the west between relieving itself of its guilt by acceding to the, largely Ashkenazi, push for occupation of the Southern Levant, there to recreate the nation of Israel, and questioning the bona-fides of their claim to this land.
Canto: Yes, and as a sidebar to all that, Paul Heywood-Smith claims in The Case for Palestine that there’s ‘considerable evidence’ that the Ashkenazim are ‘substantially derived from the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in or about 805 CE’. He goes on:
The Khazars were Turkish nomads who occupied that land between the Black and Caspian seas (called the Caucasus today), including parts of eastern Turkey, north-west Iran and Georgia. Khazaria seems the likely source of the Jewish influx into Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Europe – and from there, into Western Europe.
But the authors of the Wikipedia article ‘Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry’ claim there is ‘meagre evidence’ for the hypothesis. In any case, the controversy is an indication of how fraught the Zionist issue is. You could say the Jewish claim to the Palestinian lands is stronger than the British claim to Australia ever was, but then the eighteenth century was a lot more lawless about such things than the twentieth, and a lot more contemptuous of native claims to their own land, insofar as they ever even considered the matter. In today’s more human rights oriented world, the fact that there were non-Jewish Palestinian people living in Palestine for centuries before the Zionists started making their claims in the late nineteenth century makes what has happened in recent history to create and maintain the state of Israel a source of concern to many of us. After all, we could have been one of those Palestinian people.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Judah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews
Paul-Heywood-Smith, The Case for Palestine, 2014
Palestine, an introductory dialogue, trying to sort out some ancient history
Canto: Currently I’m reading stuff about Palestine, and wondering why it is that the Palestinian people and their plight appears to be so ignored in the west, at least by governments, and certainly by the Australian government, whether conservative or liberal. We seem to follow the USA rather religiously on this matter.
Jacinta: Yes, I believe the USA is nowadays firmly captured by the Jewish lobby, a far cry from the days when anti-semites like Henry Ford and Charles Coughlin were feted as American heroes.
Canto: Well I think you mean a certain kind of Jewish lobby – maybe better to say the Zionist lobby. But we’ll explore such terms as zionism and anti-semitism in the course of these dialogues, which given the complexity of this issue, and its rich but sad history, will probably cover several if not scores of blog posts…
Jacinta: My god.
Canto: Well I don’t know about your god but certainly the Jewish god will play his role, along with the Arabic god, but hopefully not too big a role since they’re arguably the same person, which would just confuse everyone.
Jacinta: So is Palestine considered a nation? I believe Australia is playing Palestine in the Asian Cup tonight, so doesn’t that prove that Palestine is a nation?
Canto: Maybe it proves that FIFA thinks Palestine’s a nation, so good on them for that, but certainly Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine’s nationhood. The fact is that a clear majority of UN member countries recognise Palestine as an independent state – essentially, a nation – but the situation on the ground is that this ‘state’ is broken into two unequal bits, the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast to the south, and the much larger West Bank region, which sort of includes the highly contested city of Jerusalem. The West Bank is more or less completely occupied by Israel, apparently against international law, and Jewish settlements are continually being built there, again illegally, but with the clear consent of the Israeli government. The Gaza Strip is under Israeli blockade, so the people there don’t seem to be regular members of any kind of independent state that’s worthy of the name.
Jacinta: Yes, and, looking at a map of the nations that recognise Palestine, Sweden and Iceland appear to be the only Western European nations that do so. Western Europe, along with other nations with a European history such as Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada, are siding with Israel in opposing Palestinian nationhood. Interesting, because those are the nations that seemed most invested in setting up Israel after WW2, the nations with sizeable Jewish populations, right?
Canto: Yes, though the case of Russia is interesting. It has, or had, a large Jewish population, but anti-semitism, or anti-Jewish sentiment, to be euphemistic, has long been a feature of Russia (now officially known as Putinland). So it’s hardly surprising that Putinland supports Palestine.
Jacinta: Of course Putinland’s official policy would simply be ‘take the opposite side from the USA in all foreign affairs issues’.
Canto: That’s true too. But we need to understand the history of the Levantine region, and something of the history of the Jews, and the history of European colonialism – the tendency of powerful and ambitious nations, some of them not so ancient themselves, to draw up the boundaries of new nations – Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel etc – for more or less self-serving reasons, in order to understand what’s at stake in this conflict.
Jacinta: So the Jews go back a long way and are traditionally associated with this region, right?
Canto: Yes, but you have to try and dissociate the story the Jewish people tell about themselves, specifically in the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, and what we know of history, objectively speaking. After all, this is all about land, and who it belongs to.
Jacinta: Well, we’re both evidence junkies, so it’ll be interesting to see where the evidence takes us. But I must say that my own possibly naive take on land questions is that land in general, constantly changing over the millions of years that tectonics have operated on it, belongs to nobody but itself. We’re nowadays obsessed with private property, and land first and foremost. But in a million years who will own the land that people spill their guts over today?
Canto: Yes, but that’s taking a rather long view of things, and we humans aren’t much into that. So let’s take a slightly shorter view and go back a few thousand years. The region currently in dispute was then known as Canaan. Now of course there were no defined boundaries to this region, and it wasn’t anything like an organised state, so the term Canaanites referred to an agglomeration of peoples with a variety of gods, beliefs and practices. Generally, though, they spoke a Semitic language…
Jacinta: Right, and this is interesting, in relation to the term ‘anti-semitism’. Hebrew is a Semitic language, but so is Arabic, which is much more widely spoken today, so to call Arabic people ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t make much sense in the proper understanding of the term, though of course many Arabic people are anti-Jewish. But the term semitic is quite recent, first coined by German historians in the late 18th century, based on the Koine Greek pronunciation of Noah’s son Shem. It’s based on the proto-alphabetic scripts used by these languages – among the oldest written languages in the world.
Canto: So the Canaanites were polytheistic, and only a few of their gods are remembered today – Baal, Moloch and El, for example. The latter was a supreme god and might have been the model for Judaic monotheism, but I don’t want to get into that. The real point is that a diverse lot of people lived in the region of the southern Levant, or ancient Canaan. So let’s start the story some 3,400 years ago when various powerful empires or civilisations converged in terms of their interest in this region – the Egyptians of north Africa, the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and the Mittani of the northern Levant and southern Anatolia. Now, we can get bogged down for ages in exploring the cultures, lifestyles and languages of these Canaanites…
Jacinta: Yes, let’s do so – I want to be thorough.
Canto: Well, however intrinsically interesting it all is, I’m not sure if it helps us to understand the current disaster in the region.
Jacinta: I’m sure it will – it’s just that understanding might not solve the situation. The people with the power today don’t much care about understanding. Anyway, you’ve started at 3400 years ago, and of course the land had been inhabited for thousands of years before that. Judaism presumably didn’t exist at that time?
Canto: No, it’s generally believed to have emerged later. The Torah, the first-written of its essential texts, was written between 2600 and 2400 years ago according to most scholars, presumably based on stories handed down about Jewish history – but many of those stories, such as that the Jews were once the captives of the Egyptians and escaped to the ‘promised land’ where they proceeded to slaughter its inhabitants, aren’t backed up by much in the way of archaeological evidence.
Jacinta: I suppose what I’m trying to get at is – when, if ever, did the region known as Canaan become something like ancient Israel, or Judaea, with a population that professed Judaism, predominantly?
Canto: Well, it’s very confusing. The land of Canaan, which we might call the Levant, was more or less the same as the region called Phoenicia by the Greeks, as far back as Homer, and we’re not sure when, or whether, Homer existed. But the Greeks also used the term ‘Palestine’, at least from the time of Herodotus 2500 years ago. These different names probably derived from different local languages. The Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – doesn’t mention Phoenicia, which appears to be more a reference to the northern Levant – perhaps modern-day Lebanon. However, it has to be remembered that the Old Testament may be a guide but can’t be relied upon as serious history.
Jacinta: So how can we test the Zionist claim that this region is their natural homeland?
Canto: Well I’m trying to get to that, but the difficulty is that Zionism tends to be an exclusivist, nationalist movement, sometimes with religious overtones, and we’re inclusivist, transnational humanist types, so I’m struggling against my biases to give a fair rendering of the history. So let’s look at Judea, or Judah – and even that is confusing because Judea is a modern or revived term for a part of southern Palestine, and Judea is a Graeco-Roman adaptation of the term Judah, which refers to a territory of one of the Israelite tribes, later called the Kingdom of Judah, associated with such names as David and Solomon. However, insofar as the Kingdom of Judah existed, it was a small, sparsely populated mountain region of the southern Levant between Samaria in the north, the Dead Sea in the east, and the ‘Phillistine States’ in the west. I should point out that the Samaritans, a tiny ethnic group still in existence today, have their own religion distinct from Judaism, though they like to think it’s the true Judaism, as is the way with religious disputes between neighbouring tribes. The Phillistines were supposedly an Aegean people who settled in the region now more or less covered by the Gaza strip a little over 3000 years ago. According to the Hebrew Bible they were constantly doing battle with the Israelites, so you could say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a continuation of a tradition.
Jacinta: Haha that’s not funny. I can’t wait to hear more next time…
the good friday myth – death in the afternoon?
I actually don’t mind a day off from pubs, restaurants, shops and, of course, work, on one day of the year – holidays, days of chillaxin every now and then are well worth having – the ancient Romans loved em I hear – but to commemorate the putative crucifixion of someone who, as the incomprehensible narrative goes – died for our sins, or that we might be set free or have eternal grace, because he was a god or the son thereof but at the same time a human being or a symbol of all the sufferings of humanity and so on and on, well I get a little resentful of having that sort of shite imposed on me. So I’m just wondering, as this country’s Christian religiosity diminishes day by day, how much longer the good Friday saga will last. At least this morning’s ABC news breakfast program was much more about easter eggs than crosses, though it did feature a kindly Father Bob, a Catholic apparently, and a tireless worker amongst the poor Of Melbourne. In recent years he’s become something of a media celebrity, especially on radio. In the breakfast program interview, which I admit to only half listening to, he heaped praise on the new pope and then presented a somewhat incoherent metaphysics of faith. Well, long may he continue in his good work.
Easter has been with us for quite a while, but not, of course, from the day of crucifixion. However, though the gospels are more or less completely unreliable as history, they’re a little more date-conscious, or at least time-of-year conscious, in respect of Jesus’s death than they are with respect to his birth. Jesus’s birthday could’ve been celebrated at any time, so vague and contradictory are the two gospel stories of that event. The one possible seasonal reference was to shepherds watching their flocks at night at the time (Luke 2:8), which would count as evidence against a December birth in the northern hemisphere. The mention of a census conducted at the time, which required people to move to their birthplaces (but this story is almost certainly false, there’s no evidence of any Roman census ever requiring such movement), also argues against a winter birth. You just wouldn’t ask people to move around en masse in the depths of winter in those pre-electric, pre-public transport times.
In any case, the date at which December 25 was fixed as Christmas is unclear, and there were many competing dates in the early years (and dating methods in any case were various and messy). In fact some early Christian thinkers, such as Origen, rejected the very idea of celebrating Jesus’s birthday, claiming that birthday celebration was a nasty pagan practice. So, long live that one. Jehovah’s Witnesses today, by the way, refuse to celebrate Christmas presumably for the same reason as Origen, but who knows, and who cares?
But let’s return to Easter, whose events were much more significant to early Christianity. As it happens, the gospels give two slightly different accounts upon which to base the dating. John 19 presents the decision to crucify Jesus as having been made at ‘the preparation of the passover’, which might be the eve, though it also says, ‘about the sixth hour’. Sixth hour from what, midnight? Some translations change ‘sixth hour’ to ‘noon’, suggesting that it’s the sixth hour from dawn – in any case before the paschal or passover lamb is slaughtered, which had to be between 3pm and 5pm according to ancient Judaic law. This gives time for Jesus to be taken off to Golgotha and ‘sacrificed’ in the afternoon. The lamb had to be eaten by midnight on the same day (Nisan 14, according to the Hebrew calendar). The synoptic gospels on the other hand present the death as occurring on Nisan 15, with the Last Supper being in fact the Passover meal, and a huge amount of scholarly ink has been wasted in reconciling every mention of the hour in each of these texts.
To me, as a thorough-going sceptic, it seems bleeding obvious that Jesus’s death was written by these gospellers as occurring at Passover, the most holy day in the Jewish calendar (though another piece of nonsense, as it celebrates an event that is entirely mythical – the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, and their subsequent slaughter of the earlier inhabitants of the ‘promised land’). New religions are generally keen to take over the most important dates of a religion they’re keen to supersede, and that is surely why Jesus is made to refer to himself as ‘the lamb of god’ (John 1:29, 1:36), sacrificed for a very different purpose than the paschal lamb. It’s significant that this description is in John, because the chronology in that gospel fits perfectly with Jesus being killed at the same time that the lamb is killed. John, the later gospel, ‘got it right’ improving on the synoptics who merely tried to hijack the passover meal for the purposes of the last supper, an occasion which could never be as important as the actual crucifixion. In other words the dating and timing of Good Friday was all about symbolism, not about truth. Of course there’s no evidence, outside of the gospels, that Jesus was crucified at all, let alone that he just happened to be crucified at the most important time of year for the Jews, against whom the new sect wished to assert themselves – most unpleasantly by describing them as killing their hero (John 19:14-16, Mark 15:9-15, Matthew 27:21-26, Luke 23:20-25). Matthew drives it home: ‘All the people answered, His blood is on us and our children!’ (Matt 27:25).
So it’s worth remembering this on Good Friday. It’s dating was, from the start, designed to stick it to the Jews, and to stake Christianity’s claim as a rival religion, and of course the Good Friday story, recounted in each of the gospels, marks the beginning of two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism.