by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
14 May 2008

from Sott Website

 

Comment: Considering what we have all been learning about Dominionism since the selection of Fundamentalist Sarah Palin as VP candidate, SOTT thought it would be appropriate to re-run this article about the historical background of Israel and Judaism, the creators of the Bible on which the three monotheistic religions that are destroying the planet are based.

The reader needs to keep in mind that religious fanatics who believe in what is, essentially, a collection of fairy tales, are attempting to take over the world based on what they perceive to be their instructions from a mythical god of war, death and destruction.

A few years ago, when The Secret History of the World was published, I rashly promised that volume 2 would soon be completed and ready for publication. After all, I pretty much knew what I wanted to zoom in on - the topic of Moses and the creation of Judaism - and I already had a good hypothesis and had tons of supplementary support material.

 

I even had a title: The Horns of Moses (triple entendre!) It should be a piece of cake, I thought. And so, I sat down to write.

I had a pretty good flow going, Moses was coming to life on the computer screen, and then... well, then I started to have doubts. I knew that I knew a lot about Moses from the theological point of view and from the point of view of a lot of alternative research.

 

I even knew a lot of what the scholars knew - the people who spend their lives studying and analyzing the Biblical texts. But I still felt uneasy. So, I went searching for more source materials and discovered that there was a whole lot more I needed to read before I could complete this project. That's pretty much what I have been doing for the past year or two: reading stuff that nobody except specialists ever reads, and collecting piles of data.

What has been shocking to discover is exactly how much IS known among the scholars that is not known by the general public. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since I have discovered this to be true in other fields, but when the subject is the foundation of religion - stuff people believe in and stake their lives on and use to determine their actions in life - well, it's pretty bad.

 

In the process, I've learned a lot about the creation of Judaism which is pretty much the "foundation" of Western Society.

• Gee, don't you find that odd?
• A religion created by an obscure Middle Eastern tribe - basically a tribal god - somehow got elevated to be the "God of the Cosmos" and became the model for the Western view of "Godly being"?

And this was done at the expense of the perceptions of spirit that were common to Western Europe before the imposition of the Middle Eastern gods.

• We are taught that Europe was a savage, uncivilized place; but is that true?
• How could it be true when there is so much evidence around us in the form of hundreds of thousands of megaliths, that the ancient Europeans did things that the Middle Eastern civilizations never did?

Well, anyway, as I branched out in my reading to include other references,

• I found that the creation of Christianity is closely associated - even in time, which could be a shocker for some - in some very interesting ways with the creation of Judaism
• there is a direct link between the texts of the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and certain ideas that became "Christian property"
• bit by bit, with horrifying sureness, I have come to realize that there is nothing more evil on this planet than the monotheistic religions born in the Middle East.

At some point, of course, I want to explore the role that cometary bombardment may have played in the creation of religion and then to examine the role religion has played in the fostering of lies and deceptions in our world.

 

After all, today we consider - can't say I'm celebrating - the "birthday of Israel," an event that has brought more misery and suffering into our modern world than any other event since the Global Holocaust of World War II. In fact, the two events are so intimately connected that you could say that the Holocaust has continued as a consequence of the "Birth of the State of Israel."

 

But there have most assuredly been other Judaism created holocausts throughout the two thousand year history of Western Civilization; the crusades and witch persecutions come immediately to mind.

Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel." The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe.

 

Niels Peter Lemche, a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, writes:

For some years, a discussion has raged within biblical - particularly Old Testament - studies between a position called "maximalist" and a second position, usually dubbed "minimalist." This controversy is over the amount of historical information that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament: not much, the minimalist would say; a lot more, the maximalist would argue. [...]

And, of course, the "maximalists" are true believers... those who have controlled the study of the Bible for a very long time; those who created archaeology for the sole purpose of proving the history in the Bible is true...

 

But archaeology is, little by little, becoming more scientific, and as it has done so, as it has freed itself from the control of True Believers, it has revealed that the Bible is not a historical source.

I approached the subject by first analyzing the biblical accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, and the sojourn in the desert - in short, the narratives in the books of Genesis through Numbers. After that, I compare the image of the past created by the biblical writers with ancient sources of information from the civilizations of Syria and Palestine in the Bronze Age, which is usually considered as the historical setting of the pentateuchal stories.

It will be shown beyond question that there is very little correlation between the biblical portrait of the past and the non-biblical evidence from actual Bronze Age cultures. We must conclude, however, not that the biblical authors were unsuccessful historians but that they were not at all interested in providing anything like a historical report of the past. They wrote for other reasons, and they used history as the vehicle for their message.

When approaching the literature of the Old Testament, people of modern times must realize that the ancient authors did not write primarily for posterity, that is, for us, but for the benefit of their contemporary audience. They followed the moral and aesthetic expectations of their time; they would have had no idea of the rules that govern modern historical studies and interests. [...]

Is the Exodus narrative historical reflection or literary fiction?

If we insist that the Exodus narrative is not referring to a historical event, then we must be prepared to withstand opposition of a far more serious kind than was the case when we deconstructed the historicity of the patriarchal narratives.

Solid reasoning underlies this critical opposition. The social setting of the Exodus story is vastly different from that of the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, which deal with the fate of a particular family. [...]

Unlike the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, Exodus does not describe the fate of a single family. Now the narratives turn to a larger question: the liberation of a nation. The string of narratives that began with Joseph's family migrating to Egypt ends with several hundred thousand people leaving it. The patriarchs are now no more than the distant ancestors of this nation. ... Later Israelites must accept the acts of that liberated generation [of the Exodus] as their own for the sake of national solidarity and continuity.

They are part of the national heritage. A saying from the exile underscores the relationship between past and present:

"The fathers ate sour grapes, and their children's teeth feel blunt!"

(Jer 31:29)

It reflects the idea that the liberation of their ancestors ("fathers") from Egypt provided freedom for generations yet unborn, that is, the "children." These children and those ancestors are one people. The Israelites perceive themselves as heirs, identifying with their deceased ancestors, their people.

This also means that the ancestors have determined the fate of their descendants because every successive generation relives for itself the experience of its ancestors.

It is interesting to compare this concept - that the Exodus as the liberation of the Jews provided freedom for generations to come - with the concept of the vicarious remission of sins by the crucifixion of Jesus whereby future generations are "set free" by this act.

 

They are, essentially, the same; peculiar Eastern ideas that have no place in a civilization that originally took personal responsibility quite seriously.

The liberation from Egypt is a critical moment in the history of Israel. A nation and its religion depend upon it. Without it, Israel's nationhood would have been a historical footnote, and its faith in Yahweh as the God of Israel would have remained insignificant. The Exodus represents more than a national liberation: it marks the birth of a nation and justifies that nation's very existence.

Two other events become important "foundation legends" for the Israelites: the revelation at Sinai, and the occupation of Canaan.

 

The Exodus marks the beginning of the people and the source of its identity, but the people also need a religion and a land. Without both, the people cannot survive but will face annihilation. A national identity requires a concrete, physical space within which to develop. Without its religion, the people would wander aimlessly through the wilderness like ghostly figures.

At Sinai, Yahweh presents himself as the God who liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage - the very same God who at the beginning of history entered into an exclusive relationship with the patriarchs and promised them a beautiful land.

Keep in mind that the stories of the patriarchs were re-written by those who were seeking to create a new nation after the Babylonian exile and the promises of land were put into the mouth of God to show that the manufactured Exodus story was just a step in the fulfillment of God's plan.

Finally, at Sinai, Yahweh becomes Israel's God in concreto. A contract or "covenant" seals this bond between a people and its God. Thus, the law of Yahweh becomes the legal basis for the nation and for the Israelites' everlasting obligation to their God. Two principles of this covenant inexorably solidify their religious identity.

First, the collective religious consciousness of the Israelites confirms that Yahweh is and always will be their God. Second, all Israelites must now and forever conform to the lay of Yahweh, in effect, Israel's "constitution." Thus, the law simplifies what it means to be an Israelite, under God's protection. And anyone who fails to obey is no longer a member of that people.

As for the land, the fulfillment of that promise lies in the future. Yet God makes a pledge at Sinai: if they adhere to the stipulations of the law, the people will inhabit the land and own it. This is not merely a story about a divine revelation; rather, it represents a program for the future of the Israelite nation. Until the people finally live in the "land," one cannot truly call the people "Israel."

In this way, the denial of the historicity of these bedrock elements of the Israelite historical narratives comes close to a denial of the very existence of the Israelite people. Thus, dismissing the Exodus narrative as a historical source is far more serious than taking a critical view of the historical content of the patriarchal tradition. [...]

Predictably, many conservative Christians and Jews become troubled by skeptical voices that question the historicity of the Exodus narratives.

 

Both Christians and Jews consider themselves Israel's true descendants; therefore, to them, these criticisms represent "negative" or even heretical opinions. They do not view these theories as objective analyses of the Exodus or the revelation at Sinai; they see them as attacks on their own religious identities.

If, however, we disregard such concerns - it is after all not the purpose of a critical investigation to protect the presumed identity between the living and the dead members of a certain religious community - it is quite obvious that the Exodus narrative is largely made up of literary elements that closely resemble the ones already found in the book of Genesis. ...

The book of Exodus represents a literary quilt, pieced together from the fragments of universal and timeless adventure stories and legends. These are examples of narrative art rather than specifically Israelite folk literature. Appreciating the utility of their plots and characters, the biblical authors appropriated these universal tales and reconstituted them with their own Israelite template. [...]

[W]e can see in the biblical stories images of a familiar narrative style, and perhaps that type of mimicry contributed some measure of credibility to an ancient historian's message. [...]

Exodus 1-19 represents a coherent narrative unit that describes the Israelite wanderings from Egypt to Mount Sinai. Yet many literary substrata appear within those chapters - individual vignettes strung together to create "scenes" within the larger Egypt-Sinai complex. The unit begins with Moses' birth and miraculous rescue and ends with his escape to Midian, where God outlines his future mission. The next contains the long section about the plagues that lead ultimately to Israel's liberation.

Finally, a third periscope describes how the Israelites left Egypt and headed toward Sinai.

I would, of course, suggest that the story of the plagues of Egypt is a memory of cometary bombardment, but biblical scholars do not include such speculations in their analyses and so, are somewhat handicapped in interpreting what may or may not be historical.

Initially, this Exodus-Sinai complex seems like a coherent narrative unit. Yet upon further examination, the events and legislation at Mount Sinai represent the narrative's literal and figurative high points.

The importance of the Sinai event is so profound that it disturbs the narrative balance of the Exodus-Sinai complex. Sinai simply disrupts the narrative that takes the reader from Egypt to Canaan. Without regard for the narrative consistency, Mount Sinai bursts into the Israelites otherwise uninterrupted march from the Sea of Reeds to the Jordan River.

For years, Old Testament scholars have recognized the narrative discontinuity between the Sinai complex and the Pentateuch's overall narrative scheme.

They have based this observation not on the narrative itself but on such texts as the brief credo in Deut 26: 5-9

5. And you shall say before the Lord your God, A wandering and lost Aramean ready to perish was my father [Jacob], and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.
    
6. And the Egyptians treated us very badly and afflicted us and laid upon us hard bondage.
    
7. And when we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and our labor and our oppression;
    
8. And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great (awesome) power and with signs and with wonders;
    
9. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
   (Amplified Translation, Zondervan)

These brief recollections of Israel's early history, its liberation from Egypt, and its conquest of the promised land completely ignore the Sinai events. While Israel's life in and migration from Egypt remain pivotal topics, Sinai is never mentioned.

Thus, almost sixty years ago, Gerhard von Rad suggested that the Sinai complex is not one of the original narrative components of the Pentateuch.

For him, these are two originally independent narrative units, on the one side the Exodus and wilderness stories, and on the other the Sinai revelation. They were written independently and only later joined together. (See von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in "The problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays - trans. E.W. Trueman Dicken; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

For von Rad, the borderline between the Exodus narrative and the Sinai revelation is in Exodus 14 (Exod 15, the renowned "Song of the Sea," is an independent unit and not part of either complex).... clearly, the Exodus narrative is related to the Passover, and Sinai to the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). The two traditions merge much later.

The inclusion of the Sinai revelation into the narrative string of the Exodus and wilderness stories must perforce be later than the composition of a credo text such as Deut 26: 5-9.

Of course, the late combination of two originally independent narrative units does not exclude further elaborations and additions, especially those which create smooth literary transitions between the Exodus and Sinai material. Each narrative complex carries its own religious meaning and background. They arose independently and came together at a later date. Consequently, we must consider their historicity separately. If we confirm the historicity of one complex, we cannot assume the historicity of the other.

Moses, the towering figure of the narrative, guarantees the fundamental unity of the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Moses himself functions as the glue that holds together the Exodus-Numbers tradition, each episode of which is inexorably linked to and defined by its hero. There is, however, reason to doubt that Moses is also the historical link between the Sinai revelation and its surrounding narrative complex.

From a historian's vantage point, it might be questionable to see one and the same person as the center of two originally separate narrative units. This observation is important because it is almost impossible to separate Moses from either unit and consider him primary to one of them while secondary to the other.

 

What is the Exodus narrative without Moses? Could Israel accept the tablets of the law from anyone other than Moses himself?

Everything points to the narrative units' having been composed from the beginning with Moses in mind.

When they wrote their stories about Israel's past, the authors and the collectors of tradition saw Moses as more important than any of the narrative elements that they combined into the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Thus, from the moment of its composition, Moses dominates the Exodus - Numbers complex.

 

As a consequence of Moses' being an integral part of the narrative units in Exodus-Numbers, it must be concluded that he did not participate in any of the events recorded, which is a paradox since the narratives would not live without his presence. [...]

This uncertainty about Moses' identity surfaces again when we consider his many different roles. In some narratives he is portrayed with a multitude of characteristics, while other narratives characterize him more uniformly. The infant Moses' rescue from the river foreshadows his role as Israel's liberator, the figure of a prototypical ancient Near Eastern adventurer-hero. Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of tales about such child prodigies, a noteworthy example being the Akkadian hero-king Sargon. [...]

The legendary tales of Moses and Sargon foretell the future greatness of two marvelous heroes. Their authors used the rescue theme to distance their heroes from ordinary people. In this way, the hero is allowed to transgress the social conventions that normal people must follow. Without this freedom, no hero would ever succeed in radically changing the fortunes of his nation. [...]

When we consider the several components of the image of Moses in the Pentateuch, his role as the creator and legislator of the Israelite religion is clearly central. At Sinai, Moses mediates the covenant between Yahweh and Israel and conveys the content of God's law to the Israelites. That Moses should also function as Israel's supreme judge and ruler with the same power as the later Israelite kings will, in light of his other functions, hardly come as a surprise.

Moses is simply the unifying literary component in the Egypt-Sinai wilderness complex. Thorough him the authors spin a red thread that connects all the different episodes belonging to this complex of narratives. Yet one question persists: does any of this relate to a historical person called Moses? As we already noted, the Exodus-wilderness complex on the one hand and the Sinai periscope on the other were originally two independent literary units. Unity between them was only reached by introducing the figure of Moses to both narrative complexes.

Before that happened, these narratives developed independently; without Moses, their authors would hardly have succeeded in bringing them together.

It is frequently said that the history of Israel's origin and religion presupposes one central and historical individual and is totally unfathomable without that person. Thus, it is quipped that if there had been no Moses, somebody would have to invent one! They say that Israel's early history is inconceivable without a genuine architect The answer is easy: yes, they did in fact invent Him! [...]

Sinai presents another dilemma. Where exactly did God appear to the Israelites?

The ecclesiastical tradition that connects the present-day Jebel Musa (the Arab name means "mountain of Moses") with the biblical Mount Sinai only partially conforms to the biblical tradition. In the late narrative that begins in Exodus 19, a mountain appears. However, the description of the journey as well as other hints preserved by the narrative - does not point in the direction of Jebel Musa... [but] rather leads toward the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and, more precisely, to the oasis Kadesh-barnea.

[A]nother problem persists. The divine revelation at Sinai described in the Old Testament cannot be reduced to a part of the history of early Israel. Such a revelation simply goes beyond what is from a historian's point of view acceptable, because God cannot be the subject of historical reflection ... they must rely on empirical facts. By nature, the Sinai revelation is not a historical subject. [...]

[This] applies as well to the desert wanderings. They must also conform to the criteria and scrutiny of scientific research. ...

Already, problems arise. The census in Numbers describes a massive migration composed of several hundred thousand people, who wandered the desert for forty years. And yet the general description in the Old Testament of the Israelite's desert sojourn has little in common with living conditions in such a place; it rather looks like a snapshot of a religious procession within a settled culture. The number of participants is astonishing. How could so many people survive in the desert?

Already the biblical authors were met with such questions and they knew very well how to answer them clearly and absolutely: God provides for his people! Literature can handle miracles, history cannot. The biblical authors interject an intriguing answer to Israel's desert dilemmas, namely, God. Repeatedly, God solves the wanderers' problems with a series of mighty deeds... [...]

So the depiction of the desert wanderings found in Exodus through Numbers is a tradition that does not relate historical circumstances of immigration or life in the desert. This narrative is no more and no less than a literary fiction that has only one goal, namely, to move the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Only the most dedicated believer clings desperately to the notion that hundreds of thousand of humans survived forty years in the desert: clearly a barren and inhospitable environment.

To justify the historicity of the desert wanderings, we must modify the number of refugees leaving Egypt and tone down God's miraculous deeds so that we can analyze the historicity of the events they describe. Ultimately, the results will do violence to the biblical descriptions. Why? Because they run counter to the biblical version that not a few persons but a whole nation took part in those events. [...]

If we reduce these stories in the usual, but unlikely, way - taking them to be the memory of only a very small and unimportant group of Asians who escaped from Egypt sometime in the late second millennium BCE - then we must conclude that the Old Testament narratives are unhistorical. The Israelite people never lived in ancient Egypt. The authors of the Biblical narrative may have borrowed from the remembrance of a small group of persons who once had been in Egypt. This group eventually might have become part of the Israelite nation and their tradition a part of the national heritage.

When scholars accept a "small group" hypothesis, they do so to bypass the many historical problems raised by this narrative. Consequently, it is impossible to prove that such a group of emigrants from Egypt ever existed. By drastically reducing the number of people involved in the escape from Egypt, Scholars have made them invisible to the historian. [...]

Ultimately, the authors of the book of Exodus created the narratives as we know them. These writers - just like the authors of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis - created their own narrative universe. They wrote about places and events that never existed... they describe a literary world, not historical facts. [...]

[T]he Exodus and Sinai narratives were combined in a religious environment where the Law - the Torah - was already dominant, in other words, in an Israelite, or preferably Jewish, context. [...]

In other words, the stories were combined, glossed, adjusted, re-written, at a time when they were needed to underpin certain religious and political objectives, a time when the Law was already in place, undoubtedly after the Babylonian exile, or even later.

 

Some experts suggest that these stories were created under Hellenic influences because quite a few of the Bible stories indicate borrowings from Hellenic sources and concepts.

In spite of the preceding observations, we cannot dispute every last historical connection for the Sinai narratives. Both the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern sources provide circumstantial evidence of Yahwistic practice at Sinai, although the god Yahweh only later came into possession of a major temple in Palestine.

The book of Exodus tells us how Yahweh reveals himself initially to Moses and then later to all of Israel.

The revelations take place south of the border of ancient Palestine, where we should probably look for Yahweh's original home. Most of the Old Testament evidence appears in material dating from a relatively late literary period; however, other Old Testament passages refer to the mountain of God. As we noted previously, in 1 Kings 19 Elijah ventures into the desert and encounters God at Mount Horeb, evidently a second name for Mount Sinai.

 

In Judg 5: 5 Yahweh is "the one from Sinai."

In such texts, Yahweh is also seen as an immigrant from the south, ultimately from Edom or Seir.

Furthermore, Yahweh is mentioned outside the Old Testament narratives. Egyptian sources relate stories about an area known as "Shasu Yahweh", inhabited by Shasu peoples. According to the Egyptian sources from the second millennium BCE, the nomadic Shasu lived in Syria-Palestine, east of the Jordan, and on the Sinai Peninsula.

 

In this context, Shasu Yahweh is located in the Sinai Desert....

Long before scholars began to interpret the Egyptian clues about Yahweh, many tried to find the historical background for Moses' visit to Midian, the first place Yahweh confronted Moses. Apart from the question of the historicity of Exodus 3, one unique feature stands out in this Moses-in-Midian story: if Yahweh appeared in Midian, then Israel's God lived in a foreign land and mingled with foreigners (the Midianites). Evidently this was the case.

Second Kings 5 provides an example of the important connection between Yahweh and a land: the Aramaean Naaman, who had converted to Yahwism, had to bring a "piece" of the land of Israel back to Damascus. On this piece of land he could continue to worship Yahweh. Thus it is only possible to worship Yahweh "in" (i.e. "on") his own land.

This is a curious fact. It reminds me of the legends of vampires that could only sleep in a box of earth from their native land. Connection?

Clearly, the Old Testament consciously connects Yahweh with the southern Palestine, indicating the originality of the information contained in these narratives. These historical kernels in the Exodus narratives suggest that either the Israelites lived in southern Palestine or Midianites (according to other biblical information, the Kenites) brought the worship of Yahweh to Palestine.

 

Consequently, Yahwism spread throughout the region until finally Yahweh became Israel's national God. In support of such a theory scholars refer to the evidence that Moses' father-in-law was either a Midianite of a Kenite. [...]

Here I must interject a bit about the Kenites:

In the ancient Levant, the Kenites were a nomadic clan sent under Jethro to priest Midian. According to the Hebrew Bible, they played an important role in the history of ancient Israel. The Kenites were coppersmiths and metalworkers. Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, was a shepherd and a priest of the Kenites. The Kenites apparently assimilated into the Israelite population, though the Kenites descended from Rechab maintained a distinct, nomadic lifestyle for some time.

The Kenites were the descendants of Kenan, but have been understood as the descendents of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murdered his brother, Abel.

Moses apparently identified Jethro's god, El Shaddai, with Yahweh, the Israelites' god. According to the Kenite hypothesis, Yahweh was originally the tribal god of the Kenites, borrowed and adapted by the Hebrews.

(Wikipedia. See also: Jewish Encyclopedia entry)

In other words, according to their own stories, the Jewish god is the God of Cain - the marked murderer - who slew his brother Abel.

 

That leads to a whole other area of thought and we won't go there now, but it certainly gives us pause to think, to consider the "Mark of Cain" as being integral to Judaism.

 

We certainly can take note of the fact that, in Christianity and Judaism, the curse of Cain and the mark of Cain refer to the Biblical passages in the Book of Genesis chapter 4, where God declared that Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, was cursed, and placed a mark upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God.

• What kind of god would protect a murderer that way?
• And does this suggest that the Jews writing the bible were fully conscious of this connection and wrote that part into the Genesis story to intimidate others?
• A sort of pre-emptive accusation of "anti-Semitism"?
• One even wonders if circumcision is the fabled "Mark of Cain"?

[T]he Old Testament authors knew that Yahweh once "came out of Sinai" and was a Midianite or Kenite deity. In the re-emerging biblical narratives, Yahweh remains the same, although he chooses another people as his own. [...]

Or the Kenites ARE the Jews.

This study demonstrates that the biblical portrayals of Israel's earliest history - set in the larger contexts of Mesopotamia, Syrian Palestine, and Egypt - are literary compositions rather than historical sources. The biblical authors consulted various ancient tales and legends, but did not approach them with a critical eye. ...

A literary analysis of the Pentateuch proves incontrovertibly that its narratives are not reliable sources for the study of antiquity; rather, they are works of art. Without regard for exact historical data regarding the development of their people, those writers used every weapon in their literary arsenal to create powerful and dramatic narratives. ...

 

One cannot reconstruct Near Eastern history from these narratives; rather, we must be content with what they are: adventure stories and legends, crafted and written by late author-compilers to discuss "the old days" with their audience. Clearly, that audience did not measure the historic by historical standards.

(Niels Peter Lemche: Prelude to Israel's Past, excerpts through page 63)

Well, that is damning enough when one considers the claims of the modern state of Israel - the lies they told and the myths they created - that justified their stealing the land of the Palestinians.

 

What is even worse is that, by trying to impose the false image of an 'ancient Israel' that never existed on the land of Palestine, the true history of the land and the people has been not only covered up, it has been categorically denied.

 

As Keith W. Whitelam writes:

The history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization. [...]

The search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archaeology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel.

A quick glance through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in 'secular' universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than faculties of theology.

Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in departments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient Israelite history is the domain of Religion or Theology and not of History. [...]

Biblical studies has been dominated from its inception by a concern for the history of ancient Israel as the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible. It has been of fundamental concern for Christian theology since Christianity is conceived of as a religion based upon revelation within history. Philip Davies has demonstrated, however, that the 'ancient Israel' of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a misreading of the biblical traditions and divorced from historical reality. [...]

[T]here are so many facets of history that our political and theological histories do not address. ... Much of the data that pertain to these areas of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of the project [of producing a factual history of ancient Palestine]. However, it is the network of connections in which these scholarly investigations are set which is the greatest hindrance. ...

The cultural and political factors that have dominated biblical studies discourse on ancient Israel have denied the development of a strategy for investigating such issues. Ironically, much of the archaeological work, the regional surveys and site excavations, which have contributed to the paradigm shift are colored by the overwhelming search for ancient Israel, the material reality which, it is presumed, will help to illuminate the Hebrew Bible. ...

It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped historical research in biblical studies.

(Keith W. Whitelam: The Invention of Ancient Israel - The Silencing of Palestinian History.

But that is not to say that there aren't historical elements in the Hebrew Bible as we have already seen!

 

In fact, if the historians and historians of religion would read their texts with an awareness of both Ponerology and Cometary bombardment of the planet at periodic intervals, what they are seeing that has been, until now, so puzzling, would suddenly begin to make perfect sense.

Considering Ponerology, yesterday I wrote an editorial that included a long quote from psychopathy expert, Martha Stout, in an effort to explain why so many people are susceptible to the machinations of psychopaths.

 

In that article I mentioned Nachman Ben-Yehuda's exposure of the fraud of Masada, the myth created in the early part of the 20th century, that was utilized to unify (by terror and mind control) Jewish immigrants to Israel, and turn them into efficient killing machines so that they would not feel any pangs of conscience over dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their lives.

If the reader will take a few moments (heck, it'll take an hour, but it's worth it!) to read The Masada Myth and The Masada Fraud - The Making of Israel Based on Lies, you will have an exact picture of how the Bible itself was written. It is composed of various texts that were written at various times with various political and social agendas similar to those behind the creation of the Masada myth. Some facts are retained, others are suppressed, and there are complete inventions superimposed on the whole.

 

Voila! You have the Myth of Masada and in the same way, you have the Old Testament and the New Testament!

On the subject of mythmaking and religion, Burton Mack writes about this topic extensively in his analyses of the New Testament. Many of the scholars of the Old Testament also point to myth-making as the reason for its existence but Mack makes it pretty easy to understand.

 

He writes:

That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a "once upon a time," the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened.

 

And that means that the story cannot be "myth."

 

It may help some to note,

1. that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity
2. that early Christian mythmaking was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation
3. that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstance, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested. [...]

Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their achievements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time.

 

Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. [...]

Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light. Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable. The present institution is then worth celebrating.

And we saw exactly this process in the discussions of the making of the Myth of Masada.

Naturally, both the past and the present may be highly romanticized or idealized, for epic is myth in the genre of history. The stories of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations were epic. For the Greeks, Homer was epic. Pindar's poetry of illustrious family lines was epic on a small scale.

 

The local histories of shrines, temples, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period were epic on a medium-sized scale. And the history of Israel, which, from the very beginning of the world aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, was epic for the Jews.

When the [alleged] second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the Jews had a problem on their hands. Not only their ancient history, contained in the five books of Moses, but an immense body of literature from the Hellenistic period documented their intellectual investment in the temple-state as the proper goal of human history from the foundation of the world. Christians also had a problem. They had no right to claim the history of Israel as their own.

 

But early Jewish Christians had wanted to think of themselves as the people of God, heirs of the promises to Israel, or even the new Israel for a new day. ... All of the early myths about Jews were attempts to paint him and his followers in acceptable colors from the Israel epic. But these attempts were fanciful, ad hoc, and incapable of competing with the obvious logic of the Jewish epic.

 

The Jewish epic was a history that aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, not a Christian congregation. When the temple's end came, however, and the epic's logic was in total disarray, Christians had their chance to revise it in their favor. It was then that revising the Israel epic became a major focus for early Christian myth-making. [...]

And then, from the middle of the second century on, the fur really started to fly. Both Jews and Christians wanted to read the history of Israel in their favor, and each needed the Jewish scriptures as documentation for social formations that did not match the temple-state at the end of Israel's story. Two myths were devised then, and they are still playing havoc with what otherwise might be a reasonable conversation between Christians and Jews about the texts we sometimes call the Hebrew Bible, sometimes the Old Testament. [...]

Just as with each separate writing, so the Bible itself came together at a certain juncture of social and cultural history. The reasons for the selection and arrangement of writings in the Bible cannot be found in any of the individual books read separately. The reasons have to be taken from the Christian authors of the second to the fourth centuries.

 

Only at the end of this period, when we finally catch sight of the Bible as we know it, will we see that it demands a particular way of reading the history of Israel, puts a special spin on the appearance of the Christ, and grants uncommon authority to the apostles and their missions. By then it will be clear to us that the book was important because it gave the church the credentials it needed for its role in Constantine's empire. We may then call it the myth of origin for the Christian religion.

 

It will be the Christian myth in the form of the biblical epic that granted the Christian church its charter. It will be that epic that determines the Bible's hold upon our American mind. The Bible's mystique is oddly mis-named by calling it the "Word of God." We must come to see that, or we shall never be able to talk about the Bible in public forum when discussing our cultural history and its present state of affairs.

(Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament)

We have to keep in mind that the event that triggered the creation of the Christian Bible which, ultimately, led us into the trap of the Judaic god of Cain, the murderer, was the conversion of Constantine which, very likely, was at a time of cometary bombardment and extreme social stress.

 

(Do have a look at the list of Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls to get an idea of how these events have influenced our history, creating social chaos which is the ideal breeding ground for psychopaths and their ascent to power.)

Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and called the first council of Christian bishops to meet in Nicaea in 325 CE. Constantine knew a unique opportunity when he saw one the same way that Shmaria Guttman saw that Masada was the ideal story to transform into a myth of Jewish ruthlessness.

When, finally, the Jewish scriptures and the "apostolic" writings were combined in a single book, the church was off and running; it had its story straight. The Hebrew bible could be used to claim extreme antiquity for the Christian religion, and served as the "Christian Epic." Having claimed all these texts, traditions, and ancient history, the Christian church achieved honor in the eyes of the Greco-Roman world. (Which is why they did it!)

 

Without the Old and New Testaments together, the Christian church would not have had an appropriate pedigree in the eyes of 4th century people. And, of course, that history was amazing! Never mind that it was created by schizoidal psychopaths who wanted to create a Jewish Temple State in Israel with the help of the Persians, or that parts of it were used to justify the kingship of the Hasmoneans.

 

It had been revised and adjusted so many times, that whatever history had ever been incorporated was now lost in layers of manipulative gloss.

Christianity was driven by two schizoidal urges:

• to continue the expansion of Christendom by whatever means necessary
• to "return" to the Holy Land where all the significant events of the founding of the religion were supposed to have taken place

The thrust of Christianity is thus, backward in time, inward toward a psychological repeating of the founding events, and toward a specific location: Israel.

There is a certain irony to this because the original claim that Christianity made on the epic that belonged to Israel was based on the fact that Jerusalem was desolated and destroyed, so of course, God had abandoned it and chosen a new people - Christians - on whom he would bestow his favoritism. It was the destruction of Jerusalem that made it possible for Christians to steal the Jew's epic "history" and interpret that destruction as God's desire to expand his territory to include the whole world.

 

So why, one might ask, would Christians want to go back to Jerusalem? That's not logical.

But, not to worry: an explanation was soon forthcoming! It was declared that God logically wanted Christians to redeem Israel.

And so, finally, the Global Temple State had a chance to come into being under Christianity - the Catholic Church was positioned at the apex of power; even princes bowed to the pope. The power of God was in its hands and the intent was to shape the minds of all humanity from kings down to the lowliest serf.

The Christian church claims to represents the kingdom of God on earth and its whole rant is that people must prepare for a future life in heaven under threat of an apocalyptic alternative. How's that for mind control? The church can call society to task for not living up to God's standards, all the while pointing to some other time and place (never now, of course), when that kingdom of God will finally manifest.

But, the church itself is exempt from critique!

 

The church has the Bible as its charter and the Bible has the universal plan, and the Bible is exempt from analysis. The fact is, without the Bible, and the belief in the bible by the masses of humanity as, at the very least, divinely inspired, the church would look pretty stupid. The Bible is the only object in the Christian religions that all forms of Christianity have in common.

 

For almost 2 thousand years, the church has forced people after people into alignment with the Biblical epic and "history" and the history of Western Civilization that is the result of that ancient epic. The traditions and customs of culture after culture have been subsumed, eradicated, erased from collective memory, and those people have been forced to adopt the Epic of Israel as their own - as if it were their own history. To become a Christian means that one must accept this epic as the only one that matters.

 

Saying "yes" to the Epic of Israel is the price one pays to become part of Western Civilization.

Additionally, the Bible functions as America's Epic, the dream of creating "One Nation, Under God, indivisible..." One doesn't even have to be a Christian to think that way. One only needs to think of America as the "flowering of Western Civilization" - but don't forget that the roots of that civilization are supposed to be firmly planted in Israel.

Are you getting the impression that Christianity was created to serve Judaism?

Well, that's not exactly the case. Israel was literally created by Christianity in order to fulfill the Christian apocalyptic agenda.

 

As Keith Whitelam writes:

The production of a "master story" of ancient Israel has formed part of a theological enterprise conducted mainly in faculties of theology and divinity in the West.

The biblical epic of Israel seen through the lens of Christianity, is based on a worldview that is universalist in scope, monolinear in history, hierarchical in power, dualistic in anthropology, and it requires miracles, breakthroughs and other cosmic dramas at regular intervals to rectify social situations that have run amok.

The fact is, the adoption of the Epic of Israel by Western Civilization has created more problems throughout history than it has ever solved.

We cannot go on destroying other peoples and cultures in order to "save them." We cannot go on exploiting our planet because "God gave it to us to do with as we wish". And unless we, as a culture and civilization, really come to grips with the fact that we have believed a pack of lies for over 2000 years, we aren't going to get out of the mess we are in.

Criticism of the Bible has always been considered subversive.

 

But, the fact is, the Bible is a masterpiece of invention, the product of energetic mythmaking very much like the making of the Masada myth, the sacrificing of Truth. And this sacrificing of Truth is what has shaped the soul of Western Civilization.

 

As Burton Mack writes:

My own fantasy is to enter a hall and find high ceilings, lovely chandeliers, walls lined with bookshelves, wines in the alcove, hors d'oeuvres by the windows, and a wide table down the middle of the room with the Bible sitting on it. And there we are, all of us, walking around, sitting at the table, and talking about what we should do with that book. Some rules are in order. Everyone has been invited.

 

Christians have not been excluded, but they are not the ones in charge. All of us are there, and all of our knowledge and expertise is also on the table. There are historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, but also politicians, CEOs and those who work in foreign affairs. The ethnic communities of Los Angels County are all well represented, as are women, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and all the voiceless who have recently come to speech.

 

Merchants are there, and workers and the airline pilots. Everyone is present, and everyone gets to talk and ask questions. No one has a corner on what the Bible says. We blow our whistles if anyone starts to pout or preach. What we are trying to figure out is why we thought the Bible so important, whether it is so important, how it has influenced our culture, what we think of the story, whether we should laugh or cry at the "ending," how it fits or does not fit our current situation, and whether the story should be revised in keeping with our vision of a just, sustainable, festive, and multicultural world.

Wouldn't that be something?

Why can't we learn to talk about religion and culture in public as we look for ways to imagine and create the sane societies we desperately need in our multicultural world? If we want to do that, and I think we must, the taboo on the Bible that is now in place will have to be broken. [...]

 

The taboo is the sign that we all are complicit in the unacknowledged agreement to let that story stand. It is time to find out whether we think that wise.

(Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?)

It's pretty easy to cast most of the blame on Israel for all the horrors of our world today; it's obvious.

 

But we have to remember that it would all grind to a halt in an instant if Christianity would withdraw its support for the re-creation of Israel which they see as necessary to "initiate the Eschaton." One ought not to forget that it was the Bible Thumping British who started all this with the Balfour Declaration. Of course, one can think that there was blackmail - unusual and excessive pressure - exercised by the Zionists to get what they wanted.

 

But that doesn't excuse the choices made by Western leaders under the influence of their own pathological, apocalyptic agenda.

And so, what we see, in the end, is a psychopathic minority at the top of all the governments of the world using the faith of Christians and Jews alike (and Muslims) to pursue their rapacious goals of seeking ever more power and plunder.

 

They do not even realize that they, themselves, or their offspring, will soon find themselves with nothing.

 

As Lobaczewski writes in Political Ponerology:

The following question thus suggests [itself]: what happens if [psychopaths seek] power in leadership positions with international exposure? ... Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest, ...

 

They do not understand that a catastrophe [will] ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.

It may be the birthday of the State of Israel, but there is no cause for celebration.

 

Today Israel celebrates not the birth of nationhood but a 60-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of an innocent and defenseless people, justified by a 2000-year-old lie.

 

Rather than celebrate, let us recognize and mourn the fact that the whole world has been made slaves to this Judeo-Christian doctrine of demons and subjects of the synagogue of the vengeful and wrathful god of Cain, the murderer, that seeks to rob us of our humanity, and let us resolve to no longer tolerate the public spectacle of wanton cruelty that is the US, UK-backed Zionist entity and its systematic brutalization and murder of the Palestinian people.

 

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