I hesitate about writing this, having come in late; and for fear of flame...
"blame the jews" has got to be wrong
i am not so sure though about "blame the israelis"
it's dodgy, of course and may be a camouflage for what is called
anti-semitism - it needs to be "blame Israeli foreign policy" or something
like that... but there is a place called Israel which has a set of policies
so there is an entity one can criticise; which is entirely different to
nonsensical world wide jewish conspiracies
*whenever I have asked what the moral justification for the destruction of
Palestine was, whoever I have asked, 1 of 2 things have happened
1) Lawrence, you don't understand
2) In one way or another the bible is used as proof either as a genuine
statement of property rights including permission to murder the previous
inhabitants, very rare, or as a thing believed in metaphorically, a belief
of a different kind to all others, invalidating any counter belief
If there is no causal link between Bronze and Iron Age accounts of warfare
in the Old Testament and the Israeli state *including its savagery, on what
basis was the Israeli state founded where others already lived?
NB I am not asking about the acceptance of the de facto Israeli state. I am
not asking about the right to a home of those born since 1948 in what is now
called Israel .
It has seemed to me that the only basis for what happened was the belief of
a few that they had a biblical right to be there. Is there any other basis?
It is an important question because the many questions of Palestine are not
to be separated from all other major geopolitical questions.
I hope not to be abused; but I would like an answer. If there is one
L
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 28 September 2001 01:58
Subject: Re: Letter to a leftist friend/the real mystics/innocents
| Probably pointless, altho I'm always wary of anything that could be read
as
| "blame the jews." See the very slightly veiled antisemitism of Sevanthi
| Ragunathan's post proposing a causal connection between the Bronze and
Iron
| Age accounts of warfare in the Old Testament and the savagery of the
modern
| Israeli state: "This tradition in treating enemies, starting with Moses,
is
| well preserved in the Gush Emunim, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Rabin (who
| several years ago as Defense Minister authorized the Isaeli forces to
| enter Palestinian homes and 'break bones.')" Rather like seeing the Koran
| as continuous with the bloodthirsty behavior of various Caliphs and
Sultans
| or the NT with the behavior of Crusaders or for that matter the Klu Klux
| Klan. Or the Toin with the IRA. Or the Iliad with the Greek colonels.
|
| Do you mean the Christian or the Jewish apocrypha as commonly understood?
| Jews have always kept the Jewish ones separate--if I remember, all or most
| are known only in Greek, and they postdate the canonical books. Different
| Christian sects regard the Jewish apocrypha differently--Catholics and
| Orthodox include them, Protestants don't. And of course different
Christian
| sects deal with the Christian Apocrypha differently--Ethiopians and some
| Copts.
|
| The Old Testament as we now have it contains no more nor less (nor
| different) books than did the Septuagint, thought to have been compiled by
| 150 BC, indicating that there was some agreement about the canon by that
| date. It's generally thought to be the OT as Christ would have known it.
| You may mean the Masoretic Text, which supplies vowels for the Hebrew.
| Hebrew writing traditionally consisted only of consonants, which leaves a
| fair amount of room for disagreement (particularly among verb tenses and
| moods, which are often indistinguishable without the vowels. According to
| tradition the Masoretic Text was compiled circa 500 AD. It wasn't printed
| until book printing reached the West. It has been the subject of
| controversy forever--those who follow the Vulgate or Septuagint account
for
| some of the divergences from the Hebrew by claiming that the Masorites
| sometimes got it wrong.
|
| Jews have been obsessive about the accuracy of their transmission of the
| OT, especially of the Pentateuch. The scroll is hand-written. If a scribe
| makes even one mistake he may not scratch out the letter and write it
over,
| he has to discard the whole work and start over. But it was universally
| thought among scholars that transmission of scripture must have been prey
| to the scribal errors that have plagued all other transmission. The Dead
| Sea Scrolls came as quite a shock--they affirm a very high degree of
accuracy.
|
| As to degree of sacredness, to the best of my knowledge no Jewish
| theologians, from ancient times to now, have interpreted anything but the
| Pentateuch as divine law.
|
| I don't know about early Christians being "far less interested," but what
I
| said is I believe a truism of the scholarship of the early church. It
| mattered to early Christians because they were addressing their
| coreligionists. The Romans couldn't have given a rat's ass about Isaiah's
| prophecies or continuity with a Biblical past. Think about Christ's family
| tree in this context.
|
| Mark
|
|
| At 05:47 PM 9/27/2001 -0400, you wrote:
| >Not sure what angle you're taking relative to Alison's and my respective
| >observations, but it's important to be careful to keep the historicism
| >historical, and your interpretation of some of these relations seems
| >anachronistic. The authors of the NT didn't really have the OT, as such,
did
| >they? My understanding is that the Jews of the period had an assortment
of
| >texts all of which counted more or less as Scripture and that the Gospel
| >writers were far less interested in expanding that collection than they
were
| >in establishing Jesus as the Messiah by emphasizing whatever he'd said or
| >done that could be argued as having fulfilled one or more of the
Scriptural
| >criteria for Messiahship. They and their legatees were also perhaps our
| >first religious censors to the extent that they actively suppressed the
| >Apocrypha from the work which became the New Testament because it
diverged
| >at so many points from the party line on Jesus they were proselytizing.
| >What those Jews meant when they called themselves Christians, especially
in
| >the context of Roman rule and its subsequent Christianizing, is a world
away
| >from modern Christianity and was as much a political identity as a
religious
| >one in their times (again, according to my understanding, but I'm no
expert
| >on these matters).
| >
| >Islam's relationship to Judaeo-Christianity, and the Koran's to the OT
| >versus the NT, are both complicated and complexified by Jesus' prophet
| >status in Islamic theology, so to that extent your "Christians in re OT"
| >analogy would seem to hold, if somewhat tenuously. I'm just unclear about
| >its point(?).
| >
| >Candice
| >
| >
| >
| >> It's handy to remember that the authors of the NT, every one of them
| >> Jewish, saw themselves for the most part as adding to, not replacing,
the
| >> OT. Most of them--certainly Mark and Matthew, and probably Luke,
considered
| >> themselves Jewish and Christianity a new and improved kind of Judaism.
| >>
| >> Mohammed's relationship to OT and NT is somewhat more complex, but he
| >> incorporated both into Islam, tho--like the Christians in re OT-- he
set
| >> the terms for the incorporation.
| >>
| >> Mark
| >>
| >> At 04:50 PM 9/27/2001 -0400, you wrote:
| >>> Not sure which two texts you have in mind, since the Koran has
different
| >>> genealogical relationships with the Old and New Testaments, but your
own
| >>> distinction between genealogy and history is certainly well-taken.
It's
| the
| >>> "nothing more than" here that gives me pause. Nothing LESS than a
"deep
| >>> genealogical [OR historical] relationship"?
| >>>
| >>> Candice
| >>>
| >>>
| >>>
| >>>> I'd say the convergence is nothing more than the deep genealogical
| >>>> relationship between these two religious texts - interesting also to
| >>>> compare them with the Juadaeic spiritual writings -
| >>>>
| >>>> A
| >>>>
| >>>>
| >>>>>
| >>>>> What chilled me about those two passages was their convergence with
| Bush's
| >>>>> militant/military plans (or the rhetoric thereof), almost as if
Islam
| had
| >>>>> long since anticipated what would be in store for (some of) them,
| or--more
| >>>>> chilling yet--almost as if Washington were drawing on the Koran for
| >>>>> strategy. Note my "almost as if" before denouncing me as paranoid. I
| don't
| >>>>> think this convergence is anything like this literal, but it's
| >> suggestive of
| >>>>> such momentous historical dovetailing--at this moment at least--as
would
| >>>>> make anyone weep, I'd have thought.
| >>>>>
| >>>>> Candice
| >
|
|