Hi readers.
Although I’m not of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tribe [and sub-tribes] I do love studying the Bible. There’s a lot of wisdom to be found there, a lot of history, and it’s jam-packed with all sorts of things we humans and products of western civilization probably ought to recognize about ourselves. At least if we ever aspire to cease being smart two-legged omnivores and become human beings.
There mightn’t be any better case study past/present of humanity than modern secular Israel and the gene-pool of those folks as they behaved in ancient times. Fact is, OT Hebrews struggled along as bronze-age barbarians killing, robbing, enslaving and generally hating their neighbors for a debatably long time. Never got along with anyone who wasn’t among their tribes. And eventually paid the price by revolting against the Romans once too often.
Those miles of crosses along the Appian way outside Rome that Christians are fond of taking ownership of were actually predominantly Jews the Romans managed to catch. And those they couldn’t catch were scattered from hell-to-breakfast across Europe and the Middle East for the next 2000 years. The ‘diaspora’.
You’d think a self-defined tribe would learn something from all that. But those ancient Hebrews weren’t all that different from the rest of us. So, when the major European powers and the US developed a sentimental kinship for the descendants of the ancient Hebrews and decided to let them return to the Middle East to a formal Israeli nation, the tribe had to fight their genetic cousins of different religious persuasions to take it away from them.
It all might have worked. accommodations and compromises could almost certainly have been made. The Muslims had a long history of toleration for their Jewish cousins. Far more tolerant than Europeans. As far as I’ve ever been able to discover there was never a single Muslim pogrom, attempt to exterminate Jews on any scale comparable to what always existed in Europe.
Fighting at the beginning was inevitable, but once it was all established a person would assume the modern secular state of Israel would begin battening down the hatches, finding any way it could to keep the neighbors happy, make them happy to have those Jews back in the neighborhood.
But Jews being human beings and a lot of them with a long European cultural history as baggage, spent the next 65 years doing exactly what their ancestors in ancient times had done. Even though they were badly outnumbered. They knew they had the upper hand, knew they had friends of super-power status to fend off any new diaspora.
So they flew the ‘Don’t Give An Inch’ flag and went through a series of wars wars wars, same as the rest of us of European stock. Which we might well have partly learned by venerating their holy book.
The Bible’s been well-studied for 2000 years now, both by Christians and by Jews. But there’s every reason to believe we haven’t learned a damned thing from it.
Old Jules
From bronze-age barbarian to nuclear warhead rocket-rattler. Same as the rest of us.
So Far From Heaven 