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face of Vespasian, whose armies had destroyed their temple,
Jews had conducted to protect their austere monotheism against the allurements of Greece.
isn't this interesting. Makes sense. mammon ?
he could hear the sophisticated philosophers from Athens arguing with the awkward Jews; he could hear the tempting rationalizations of those who followed Zeus and Aphrodite as they clashed against the immovable monotheism of the Jews; and he could visualize the struggle in which Hellenism, one of the most spontaneous civilizations in history, had tried to smother Judaism, one of the most rigid.
love this sharp distinction
“We kibbutzniks represent only about four per cent of the total population of Israel. But we have supplied about fifty per cent of the national leadership. In all fields.
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the tell contained seventy-one feet of accumulation laid down during eleven thousand years, and that meant less than eight inches added per century.
vanity , all is vanity...
Carbon-14 content in a sample by counting the number of Carbon-14 disintegrations per minute per gram of ordinary carbon. Living samples give off 15.3 such disintegrations a minute; those that died in 3535 B.C.E. give off half that number, or 7.65; and those that died in 9035 B.C.E. yield 3.83 disintegrations per minute.
Symphonies and cathedrals are not built by the children of upper-middle-class families. They’re built by the units we saw tonight. You need these people very much, Cullinane, but we can’t spare them and you’re too frightened to take them.”
The rock was barren; it contained absolutely nothing, not even a carving or a pile of stones to mark some deity, for in those infinitely distant ages gods had not yet been called forth by the hunger of men. It was simply a rock, large enough to form in the future the foundation of a Canaanite town
Every hundred years or so new experiences would accumulate, requiring the invention of new words; but this was a slow process, for Ur and his neighbors were extremely cautious and the utterance of a new word might upset the balance of nature and call into being strange forces that were better left at rest, so words tended to be restricted to the same sounds that time had made familiar.
theory of the birth of language
Men had not yet discovered that the forces of the world could be propitiated by conscious acts of subservience;
hmmmmmmm ;-)
Having partially conquered nature, they were now a prey to it.
When u care, u lose a bit of freedom
he saw his wife doing a most perplexing thing. “Wife,” he shouted, “what are you doing?” And as she threw handfuls of wheat into the swirling waters she explained in a low voice, “If the storm has left us our wheat, the least we can do is offer him some in thanks.”
Sacrifice seems embedded with r experience of suffering. Or is it experience with investment and gratification?
discovery must have come very late indeed—within the last ten or twelve thousand years, Cullinane guessed—in what might be termed the age of speculation.
sure, i'm in the age of speculation, but also in 'modernism' , the age of intense alienated subjectivity... Ask Virginia Woolfe.
accurate to imagine earliest man as living for most of his first two million years within an insulation of stupidity, not fully differentiating himself from the physical world, the spiritual world, or the world of the other sentient animals.
and then there are Trump voters...
Hittites and Amorites from the north, by Sumerians and Akkadians from the Land of the Two Rivers, later known as Mesopotamia, and by Egyptians from the Nile. Even the predecessors of the Sea People,
possible that she would bring the tall slave girl, too. In that strange mixture of death and eroticism which marked so much of the thinking in that age, Urbaal lay on his couch listening first to his son’s even breathing, then dreaming of the slave girl whom he yearned for with such passion. Death and life pervaded his thinking, as they did the room and all of Makor.
Not very elegant or edifying explanation. Weak michener. Im seeing the man behind the curtain...
arose. The citizens of Makor were eager to adopt him, partly because his demands upon them were severe, as if this proved his power, and partly because they had grown somewhat contemptuous of their local gods precisely because they were not demanding.
is this why Jordan Peterson is electrifying people today?
In fact, there was something grave and stately in the picture of a father willing to sacrifice his firstborn son as his ultimate gift for the salvation of a community; and in later years, not far from Makor, one of the world’s great religions would be founded upon the spiritual idealization of such a sacrifice as the central, culminating act of faith. At Makor it was not death that corrupted, but life.
oy, here we go...
The concept of man and goddess working hand in hand in the population of the world and in the feeding of it was one of the notable philosophical discoveries, both ennobling and productive; of only a few religious patterns could this be said.
i thought it was rather typical. hellinism, hinduism
But ingrained in this enchanting concept was a spiral more swift and sickening than any which operated in the case of Melak, the god of death. The homage that Astarte demanded was so persuasive, so gentle in its simplicity, that all were eager to participate.
The spiral of Astarte was a succession of the loveliest things man knows, except that any sensible man could see where it must end, for once Makor gave itself over to worshiping the principle of fertility it became inevitable that the rites must finally be celebrated in the only logical way.
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was obvious that only a god could have called forth such a commodity, and the one who had done so should be cherished; such reliance created a psychological assurance that men of a later age would not know.
ahhhhh
if you visualize Israel merely as a stopping place along a fertile crescent where placid farmers rested on their way to Egypt, you miss the whole point. It wasn’t like that at all. It was a meeting place of dynamisms. And because we Jews were at the focus of forces we became the most dynamic of all. We had to. To stay alive. We were spun in a terrible vortex, but because we were Jews we loved it. On the faces
priests had coached her to look shy: “Keep your fingertips close to your knees and your eyes lowered. When you look sideways try to press your chin into your shoulder.”
princess di
She was reluctant to think that the moral structure of a town could determine the kind of people who lived therein, but that appeared to be the case.
he was the first Habiru to
El-Shaddai, lived. In later generations people who spoke other languages would translate this old Semitic name, which actually meant he of the mountain, as God Almighty, for through devious changes El-Shaddai was destined to mature into that god whom much of the world would worship.
Devious?
nomads had to trust a god who saw the entire desert and the hills beyond. Reliance upon El-Shaddai, the unseen, the unknown, was a religion requiring the most exquisite faith, for at no point in their lives could these lonely travelers be sure; men often came to water holes that were dry. They could only trust that if they treated El-Shaddai with respect, if they attuned their whistling harps to his, he would bring them home safely through the bleak and empty spaces.
FAsinating. Nomad faith is different . (love the 'harmony' metaphor for life. )
he told of his ancestor Noah, who had escaped the great flood, or of Nimrod the hunter, whose exploits were renowned, or of Jubal, who invented the harp. For hours he would speak of these men, telling this story and that, but each day he came to some episode in the life of Abraham, who had been the first to travel in this desert—“He passed by these very rocks on which we sit this day”—and
the circumcised man had better fight to the death because for him there was no masking his identity. The Hebrews were therefore strong warriors who were sometimes defeated but rarely demoralized, and for much of this cohesive spirit the desert rite of circumcision was responsible.
ohhhhh
sculptured by the hand of El-Shaddai. How sweet the waters were when they were found, how cruel the scorpions in the midday sun. It was the desert that tested a man, that issued the dreadful challenge, “Come upon me and see if you have courage.” It was this desert of illimitable magnitude that encouraged a man to consider the ultimate questions: not the matter of food tomorrow, nor the child to be born next week, nor the battle in the offing, but the questions beyond that and then far, far beyond that, too. Why, in the infinity of the desert, does this small speck called man have the
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harmony again. but as contrasted with the thin edge of survival vs death in a harsh landscape. Could jews EVER have developed in say, Tahiti? :-)
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
“If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder … thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”
“It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today.”
came upon that quiet yet singing declaration of faith that is the core of Judaism,
quiet yet singing declaration...
“We Jews persisted in history … where are the Babylonians, the Edomites, the Moabites with their multitudes of gods? They’re all gone, but our tenacious little group of Jews lives on. And we do so because what you’ve been reading in Deuteronomy is to us a real thing. One crucial passage you must have noticed. It has an historic actuality, whether you Gentiles and we Jews like it or not.” “Which one?” Without consulting the Torah, Eliav quoted, “ ‘For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.’
yah Buddy, where are the Edomites today???? ;-)
He was the more thoughtful, the more dedicated in his spiritual life, and the one better adjusted to nature. The Canaanite was by far the more civilized and the better educated. His service with the Egyptians had also given him a better understanding of contemporary society.
Interesting contrast in great men
judged on the spot that Makor would prosper with such a man as part of its complement.
old man’s eyes glowed with an intense fire such as he had never seen before—the passionate fire of zealotry—and
looooook outtttttttttt
If the Hebrews wanted water their women would have to climb the ramp, pass through the zigzag gate, walk down the main street, exit by the postern gate and walk along the dark corridor to the well. Daily they would pass to and fro, and Hebrew would become intimate with Canaanite and each would come to know how the other lived, and how he prayed, and in time there would have to be marriages—it simply couldn’t be avoided when beautiful Hebrew girls passed handsome Canaanite men day after day—and before long the superior culture of the town must inevitably conquer the rude vitality of the desert.
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Wow. Just wow
El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place. Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend.
true. thats why so many people love a monarchy, whiule others think its ridiculous.
they had treated El in contrasting ways, for the Canaanites had consistently diminished his universal qualities. Being townspeople, they captured El and made him a prisoner inside their walls; they fragmented him into Baal and Astarte and a host of lesser gods. They seemed determined to drag him down to their level, where they could know him personally and give him specific jobs to do until he dissipated his force. The Hebrews, on the other hand, beginning with the same god having the same attributes, had freed him of limiting characteristics, launching a process that would ultimately
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The town was filled with men who had never worked in open areas tending sheep and discovering for themselves the actuality of their god; these men sat cramped before a wheel making pottery. They wrote on clay which they did not dig and sold wine which they had not pressed. Their values were warped and their gods were of a trivial dimension. As Zadok looked at the frightening town he remembered the instructive history of two former members of his clan and he could hear his father Zebul telling their story: “Your ancestor Cain was a man of the town and when he brought his gift to El-Shaddai, the
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same as hebrew class
One group survived intact. The Hittite charioteers had been ranging far outside the town when the fire started, and now they wheeled their horses homeward, returning in triumph to a town that no longer existed. They studied the desolation for a moment, made sharp calculations, and then like practical mercenaries turned their chariots around and galloped off to the east, down the Damascus road, their bloody scythes revolving in the sunlight. And they were seen no more.
;-)
he dispensed an impartial justice which protected men in their ownership of fields and property. According to the ancient laws of the Hebrews the weak had rights, the pauper had a claim upon the charity of his neighbors, taxes were allocated fairly and punishment could not be capricious.
brilliant
This maturing of Yahweh was another instance in which a challenge had produced an illumination which an easy acceptance could not have.
hmmm. the road less traveled baby!
The complaisant town of Makor with its amiable gods could never have produced Yahweh; that transformation required the captivity in Egypt, the conflict with the Pharaohs, the exodus, the years of hunger and thirst in the desert, the longing for a settled home and the spiritual yearning for a known god … these were the things required for the forging of Yahweh.
was, “Jerusalem with a yoke around your neck is nothing to yearn for.” “I shall not be going with such a yoke,” she said firmly. “You’re burdened with it already,” he said. “A far heavier one than I wore that day.”
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