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Sunday school and Shule do not disabuse us of the Hollywood image of a
pristine Holy Land. The neat and clean buildings in Jerusalem are as
deceptive as Hollywood westerns without horse manure in the streets. They
gloss over the primitive nature of the religion and society by saying the
times were primitive. The times were not primitive.
Those were times of high civilization, levels which were not reached again
until the 18th century. The earth was round, the planets really were
planets, and all revolved around the sun. The sciences were born, philosophy
was a high art and intellectual freedom was a high ideal.
In the middle of that civilization there existed a pocket of primitive
barbarism. Were it to exist today we would expect to find it far from
civilization and rarely visited by the outside world, rural Afghanistan
perhaps. When our civilization meets a primitive one it usually adopts
modern ideas quickly and within a few generations their elders worry about
losing their ancient traditions.
The armpit of the empire was Judea in Roman times. It is correct for the
times when compared not only to Rome or Athens but to all but the very
fringes of the empire in a very few places. But it was not on the fringes
but just a couple days walk from Tyre and Damascus and less than a week away
from Egypt.
Compared to Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome this region had never
at any time in its history produced any contribution to civilization. It
produced no centers of learning, no philosophy, no art, architecture or
science. It was a cultural wasteland. Were it not for its connections to
religion its only mention would be among the many attempts at revolt against
Rome perhaps notable for being the only one doomed to certain failure by its
location.
Compared to the Romans the Judeans were primitive savages. Their male deity
was bloodthirsty and genocidal. He commanded war and the total destruction
of people he declared to be enemies. No god in Greek, Roman or Egyptian
society ever did such a thing.
In the civilized world mutilating the body was considered primitive and
savage. The Christian ideal against body mutilation arose from the Greeks.
The Judeans indulged in ritual genital mutilation of male children.
Civilized Greeks and Romans looked upon them the same way we today look at
uncivilized tribal people who mutilate their genitalia. In the days before
sanitation the infection and death rate must have been horrendous. That it
was a matriarchal culture is hardly surprising.
The people lived by a complex set of rituals and taboos. The food taboos
were most obvious. Their ideas of unclean prohibited them from indulging in
the common socialization custom of sharing food and drink if the other
person was not a Jew. Their everyday lives were governed by rituals which
caused them to be disdained by civilized peoples who considered themselves
free men.
The civilized people of the time would likely have been as tolerant or
amused at such a people as we are of primitive people today were it not for
one thing. They applied the death penalty for the most trivial violations of
the religious ritual/taboo system. Their laws and justice system were rather
like Islamic law as applied by their fundamentalist sects.
This patch of land lay on the trade route between Egypt and lands as far
away as China from the time silk appeared in Egypt between 2000 and 1500 BC.
Every human who left Africa from far prehistoric times had passed through
this land. Trade between the great civilzations passed through this land for
those thousands of years. And yet not a trace of those civilizations was
assimilated by these people. Yet the coast was lined with the advanced
cities of Greeks, Phoenicians and Palestine Syrians. This civilization
did not migrate even thirty miles inland.
The Phoenicians started colonies in the land but nothing passed off to these
people. The great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon fought to control it
and not even writing took hold. Alexander brought the Greek civilization at
its height to these people and they rejected it as well as the later Roman
civilization.
These primitives never grasped the concept that these civilized people did
not in fact worship the statues of their gods. They could not comprehend the
abstraction and insisted people more civilized than themselves in fact
worshipped stone. It was like a remote tribe in Borneo two centuries ago
believing the British worshipped their king and telling the British they
really did worship their king and would hear nothing else. These people were
that primitive.
In the civilized world religious worship had long abandoned animal
sacrifice. The gods of civilized people were satisfied with incense, singing
and prayer. It simply was not done by civilized people but these people
would have nothing else. Civilized people looked upon them as we would look
upon people sacrificing an animal to the great god Mumbo Jumbo.
Is it any wonder the first thing Paul did was strip his message of all
genital mutilation, food taboos and animal sacrifice? Sharing a meal was the
centerpiece of his religion. His was a civilized form of Judaism. Of course
he wrote centuries before the 150 or so competing and contradictory
variations on Christianity were consolidated at the Council of Nicea.
The believers and the archaeologists they fund like to point to anything found as evidence. Their
blindness is such that when asked for archaeological evidence of the
biblical kingdom of Israel some will talk about Roman coins.
Many artifacts have been found in the region but they are all identified as
belonging to other cultures. Nothing has been found which cannot be
associated with known cultures.
Ruins of cities have been found which some claim are biblical yet the sole
basis for identifying them as biblical is a vague circular reference to the
Bible. Nothing has been found in any of them which directly identifies
without reference to the Bible not even the names the residents gave their
own cities.
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