Above is a link to an article concerning findings of an archaeologist in Israel. Archaeologist Adam Zertal has good reasons to believe that he and his team may have found an altar erected by the Hebrew (They would not be referred to as Jews until much later) leader who succeeded Moses after the death of the man who lead the Exodus. The article describes the details of the findings and notes how they correspond to the descriptions of the place of worship found in the Old testament.
The main point of the article is that, although Professor Zertal made this finding 27 years ago (Made public 20 years ago), almost no one, including myself, has ever heard of the event at all. It describes the plain refusal of University Authorities to admit that there may possibly be a chance that this find is what Professor Zertal thinks it is. Not only are his theories dismissed outright, they are not even challenged; a cunning way to bury the work, its implications, and to keep the rest of the world ignorant.
Why hide this? Does the existence of this find risk challenging the claims of Jewish people that they entered this region at the time specified in their scriptures? That's what we have been trained to think. According to the prevailing dogma of Leftist Academia, pretty much everything that we believe occurred never really happened. Either that, or, well, something did happen, but the traditional conclusions about it are all wrong.
Current Leftist dogma holds that any new find, be it textual or archaeological, can only prove that what has been believed up until that point was wrong. It does not allow for any new finds to either prove or support previously-held positions or beliefs.
This find is being actually (figuratively) reburied precisely because it supports the Old Testament account of the entry of the Hebrews into then-Canaan. From the design of the altar and worship area, the pottery found on the site, the types of animals sacrificed there, right down to the actual point on the map on which it rests, we have a find that matches the scriptural account in a startling manner.
Note this detail of the find:
"An Egyptian scarab seal was found toward the beginning. It was a big surprise. It was a seal of Raamses II, who is considered the Pharaoh of the exodus from Egypt. Afterward, another one was unearthed. Both were from the last third of his era, between 1250 and 1220 B.C.E. Few scarabs of that type have been found in the region – only at the altar, which had been sealed off from outside interference (a sealed locus) since the time it was hidden away."
Even Carbon-14 dating placed the site to the time period of the biblical entry of the Hebrews into Modern-Day Israel.
One begins to asks himself how this could be. Israeli Jews have held, and I hold rightly so, that their tribal ancestors were ordered to enter, conquer, and settle in this region. For the sake of argument, we will simply take the position of Israeli Jews from an historical perspective and summarize it from that angle.They hold, from written and oral tradition and their scriptures, which have to be allotted some degree of historical value (We know that almost all religious texts, such as the Vedas, began as accounts of past events), that their ancestors, whom we know to have been nomadic shepherds for generations, entered Modern-day Israel and gradually drove out and/or subdued the peoples who had lived there previously.
Unfortunately I have to switch gears; the people who were driven out an/or beaten by the Hebrew Tribes were not Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, and no Arabs lived in this region at that time. Although the Hebrews and Arabs are both Semites, neither of them form the base group from which all Semites sprung. The Semitic group comprises many peoples, including modern Lebanese and Syrians (Although these are Arabized today). The Hebrews* begin with the children of Jacob, the Grandson of Abraham, an Amorite (Another Semitic Group) tribal leader. Below is a link that treats the subject in more detail:
* This link (Just below) served two purposes. One was to treat the "One-State" movement championed by the Left. This concept serves to pressure Israel to give of their sovereignty and incorporate with all of the Palestinian Arabs. The other purpose was, in a detailed but brief manner, to refute the claim that Jews are Arabs:
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/03/israel-one-staters-tell-them-to-be.html
Note that the top article mentions that University Archaeologists in Israel refuse to admit that the Hebrews ever "came out" of Egypt, In denying this as a possibility (or probability) they fail to take into account that even the word Hebrew itself may very well derive from the Egyptian word "Apiru", which was used to describe nomadic herders, especially those on the eastern edge of their domains (Semites):
"He quotes the archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, who says that it is “obvious today” to researchers that we were never in Egypt, we never left Egypt, we were never in Sinai, we never entered the Land of Israel and monotheism was created at the end of the monarchy, close to the destruction of Jerusalem, many centuries after the Bible says it was. "
The preceding quote and outlook is no outlier, it is what the party line is in Israeli Academia. The Left knows that their agenda(s) cannot take root as long as a people knows who they are. They need to do all that they can to excise every shred of knowledge of a nation's or people's history, memories, and identities. Leftist thought does not allow for the existence of sovereign nation-states. Those have to go. A nation that maintains a sense of identity cannot be treated as a blank slate, therefore, it cannot be brought back to "Year Zero"**. I have noted that Western Nations have seen their historical records, disparaged, excised, mocked, and simply ignored for many years. The result is exactly what a Leftist would want, an ignorant adult who knows nothing about the five base sources from which Western Society developed. I submit that these are Greek, Roman, Northern European, Christian and Jewish (I separate the two since much Jewish thought reached us directly, especially in the US, and was not filtered through Christianity).
Contributions of these cultures, such as the sciences, philosophy, theater, the arts, religion, law, societal roles, work ethic, senses of courage, sacrifice, and duty to one's nation without submerging the big nemesis of the Left, The Individual, have all been removed from our textbooks and collective memory. In their place is taught the Leftist version of history; all successful peoples were and are bad by association, they prospered at the expense of others, and they falsified in a wholesale manner their histories to justify the wrong their ancestors wrought.
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)
"The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is deemed largely irrelevant, as it will (as an ideal) be purged and replaced from the ground up."
When someone comes across a casket/reliquary that bears the name of "Yeshua, son of Joseph", Academia and the Media join in procession proclaiming that they found the burial vessel of Jesus of Nazareth, thus proving that, aside from the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian Gospels are a bunch of malarkey. It matters not that Yeshua and Joseph were extremely common names among Jews of that period. When evidence of the destruction (Or even the very existence) of Troy is found, we find those of the Left climbing over each other to be the first to deny what it is. No one even steps up to attempt to obtain different conclusions; they simply tell you what the find is and go back to working on erasing the past. Jesus of Nazareth never existed. If he did, he was just an itinerant preacher whose teachings were wrecked by those followed after him. The successful revolt of the early Romans against Etruscan rule? That never happened. The preservation of Greek liberty of the individual following the Greco-Persian Wars? That did not have any effect, things would have been no different had the Persians conquered Greece. The preservation of literacy and learning by the Church after the Fall of Rome? The Church was as barbaric as was the rest of Western European society of that time..
We have even been fed a steady diet of the accomplishments of Islamic Society*** in medicine, science and mathematics. What we are not told is that virtually all of these were gleaned directly from India, ancient Greek sources, and the works of Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian subjects of the early Islamic Caliphate. Even actual Muslims who advanced these ideas were hardly devout or Orthodox Muslims. These were often ignored and harassed by their coreligionists and, once the pool of acquired-by conquest learning dried up, Islamic Society, culture and learning stagnated. Also ignored is the fact that the Byzantine Empire was the great repository of Greek learning and that, as her end drew near and her people left Constantinople to safety in the West, a number of the documents went with them and (Along with the advent of movable type) contributed to fuel the Renaissance.
***http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/10/islam-christian-europe-and-greek.html
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/10/fjordman-medieval-muslim-scholars--.html
As I noted in an earlier post, my High School son learned absolutely nothing about Jewish, Christian, Greek, Roman, pre-Islamic Middle Eastern, or any pre-French Revolution Western European history. Boy, did he learn about Colonialism, though. This was in a World History Honors Class. In a Year Zero mentality, none of these should have any bearing nor should a student even know anything about his culture's past. Being aware of such things has a dangerous effect of making one somewhat impervious to the Leftist version of history. Even worse, it may allow for a student to have something for which he or she is proud. We are told that Western Europeans, their daughters-nations, and Jews have no culture. In the event that one has to admit that a shred of culture exists, that culture must be labeled as inherently bad.
Even the Western manner (This includes the manner of learning Hebrew) of teaching reading is under assault:
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/01/common-probably-all-too-common-theme-of.html
Early in the top-linked article, Professor Zertal was asked why he thought his work has been ignored and not even introduced to University Students for critical treatment. His response is basically that he does not know and adds to "Ask Bibi" [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu].
I have to think, that, being required to navigate the labyrinths of diplomacy, the Israeli leadership is reluctant to do anything that could possibly cause more eruptions of Palestinian anger and violence. Unfortunately, being reluctant to encourage the study of, or even lend moral support to, evidence that the history of the Jewish people is actually what we have always thought plays right into the hands of the Left. Out of all Leftists who seek to undermine the culture, history, ethics and beliefs of their own nations and peoples, I find those who also happen to be Jewish to be the most malevolent offenders.
Of all of the peoples of that region, Edomites, Ammonites, Phoenicians, etc., the Hebrews/Jews were the most successful at maintaining their identity as a people. This survived the kulturkampf of the Seleucid Kingdom when Antiochus IV Epiphanes, in panic mode due to the decline of his kingdom, tried to force the Jews to become fully Greek in manner as opposed to Greek-influenced. It also outlasted the attempts of Rome, an Empire that very nearly lost Judea in the Jewish revolts (The Left hates the thought of free peoples), to disperse the Jews in the hopes that their would lose their identities by assimilation on other parts of the Empire.**** Jews were able to maintain their identity in Medieval and later Europe through all sorts of periods of pogroms, expulsions, and seizures of property. They endured possibly the most horrid and thorough genocide known to history not even 70 years ago. When abandoned to mostly their own devices in the face of well-equipped and terribly belligerent armies, the survivors carved out a nation. More wars came but they held out. Yet, here we have the children and grandchildren of those who made it out of Europe alive and fought to establish a State in which they could live securely who, from the comfort of their offices, dishonestly but conceitedly seek to deny the very justification for Israel's existence.
The Left is motivated by intellectual pride, jealousy, and worst of all, a self-loathing attitude. We must resist all of their agendas and insist that our children know who they are, whether it be Western Europeans, those of its daughter-states, or Jews.
****This is another reason to stress that the very name Palestine was given to that region to remove Jewish place-naming from the region. After dealing with the revolts, the name Judea had to go. In its place came the Roman name for the Philistines, people that had disappeared long before. Incidentally, the Philistines were almost certainly displaced Achaean Greeks, possibly with admixtures of Phrygians, who fled the upheavals following the Dorian Greek entry into Greece. That also was around 1200BC. The name Palestine, again, had nothing to do with Arabs. Arabs were not to arrive in this region until much later.
http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/canaanites-and-philistines.asp
Note that you will have to scroll down past the paragraphs on the Canaanites to read the strong arguments for the Greek or mostly-Greek component of the Philistines.
Ahhh..... the "religion" of peace sings again.
ReplyDeleteIt is time for a new crusade.