The Rock and the Hard Spot

The definition of the impossible puzzle

RADIO FAR SIDE

^{Genesis 32:27} The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

²⁸ Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have wrestled with YHWH and with humans and have overcome.”

²⁹ Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

³⁰ So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I have met YHWH face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

There are some 14th century BC documents called the Amarna Letters that refer to a region known as Canaan, along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Among the many groups of people who lived there were the Philistines, in a city-state called Philistia, from which we get the name Palestine.

The Letters reference a group of people called Habiru, which some claim is a variation of “Hebrew”. These folks were always creating a ruckus in the southern Canaan area, conquering a number of city-states and generally causing havoc.

An inscribed stone called the Merneptah Stele, which dates to around the 13th century BC, refers to a people called “Isrir” within the Canaan region. The stele says that the “Isrir” people were vanquished and wiped out by Pharaoh Merneptah, presumably because those annoying folks wanted more living space and less Egyptian meddling in their affairs.

Note well that “Habiru” and “Isrir” are generally regarded today to refer to Hebrews and Israel, but other than some phonetic similarities, there is no extant connection between the inscribed words and the modern ones. It is akin to claiming that Philistia and Phoenecia, or the Han and the Hun are the same people. There is also no way to connect those ancient people to anyone living today. Any claim to having a genetic connection is spurious at best, and baseless at the least.

From the years 586 BC to 538 BC, the Judeans were enslaved by Babylon, so we are told. The only reliable non-biblical texts referencing the Babylonian Exile include the Babylonian Chronicles and the Cyrus Cylinder. The Chronicles mention some folks called Judah, but the Cylinder makes no specific references. In both cases, the Judeans were just one of many peoples in captivity.

What we do know is that the Torah/Old Testament/Tawrit was a reworking of the Babylonian belief system to support a monotheistic faith. This seems to have been done by the character we know as David, in order to consolidate power by giving himself Divine Right, and especially centralizing tithes to the many temples in the region, with a single temple across from his palace (of course).

David’s palace, by the way, is what we generally call Temple Mount, and the Wailing Wall was part of his stables.

In any case, by this time in history, the Habiru, or Hebrews if you prefer, were long gone, wiped out by the Egyptians centuries before. Their replacements in the region were the Judeans, who may or may not have kept any of the preceding culture, other than some verbal traditions and Babylonian texts. They were thoroughly mixed with other peoples by the end of the Exile, though, and thus unrelated in any provable way to the Habiru.

The Romans began conquering what was by then known as Palestine (Filistia in Arabic) in 63 BC, when Pompey the Great captured Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem and the area around it was known then as Judea, which is the origin of the name “Jew”. By 6 BC, Judea was firmly established as a Roman province under the rule of Herod Agrippa, who was the last Jewish king of Judea.

The kings of Judea were subordinate to the Roman governor, one of whom you may have heard of, despite being otherwise an unremarkable placeholder - Pontius Pilate.

We zoom through a couple of thousand years of Crusades, Byzantium, and Islamic conquests to arrive at the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century. We should note that ancient references to the region mention its volatility, constant wars and uprisings. We should also note that the reason everyone wanted this land was not for religious reasons - that was the distraction - nor for ancestral claims, but because it was the literal cross-roads of all land-based trade routes east to west, and north to south. Lots of goods and money flowed through there for thousands of years. It was a cultural melting pot made wealthy by a bunch of middle-men traders.

It wasn’t until the famous T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) in World War One that any of the warring tribes in the Levant and Arabian peninsula had any form of unity, much less national identity.

Judea did not include all of Palestine, and there were a number of different peoples claiming various parts of the region. It wasn’t until the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 (Britain and France), that the region had any national boundaries of any kind.

The ruins of the Ottoman Empire we know today as the Middle East were colonized by European and Russian powers, creating “nations” out of whole cloth. The only consistently settled and culturally unified region anywhere in that part of the world is Persia, now called Iran (from Aryan), which is currently berated as a “rogue” nation because they pursue their own course and interests.

The British, who claimed Palestine, subsequently issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, supporting a “Jewish homeland” in the area - mostly as a means to shuttle Jews out of England, and Europe in general, much like the United States did with Liberia a century before. The Nazis also provided financial incentives for European Jews willing to resettle in Palestine.

Cut to a parallel story…

In the 6th century AD, Someone Whose Name We Cannot Mention (SWNWCM) formed a socio-political movement that was essentially a mish-mash of different cultures and religions found along the primary East-West trade route, known as the Silk Road. This included the Judean people and religion, and absorbed many Judeans after the Romans levelled Jerusalem in AD 70, leaving a great many refugees looking for a place to settle down.

SWNWCM decided his people were of the direct lineage of Ibrahim, just like the Judeans. The Judeans, he said, were descended from Isaac, and his people were descended from Ismael, Ibrahim’s son by the maid. Since the Judeans had a copyright on the name YHWH, SWNWCM declared the name of his god would be Allah. The difference between YHWH and Allah is essentially the same as between the Greek Zeus and Roman Iupiter.

When SWNWCM died in the 7th century AD, his followers split over whether the disciples should lead the new religion (Sunni), or whether the blood line of SWNWCM would be the rightful leaders (Shi’a).

About the same time, Rome was being resurrected as a theocracy ostensibly based on another offshoot of the Judean religion called Christianity. All three religions claimed Jerusalem as their holiest monument, and naturally this led to centuries of war and atrocities that have yet to be resolved after 1,500 years.

All three religions claim to be the spiritual inheritors of the character YHWH, and anyone who has objectively read the Torah (a.k.a Old Testament or Tawrat) knows the horrific blood-lust, genocide and moral turpitude that the character YHWH embraced. It is therefore no surprise that religions and cultures based on YHWH’s example have also embraced such behavior - eye for an eye, that sort of thing.

We should note at this point that Iran and Hezbollah are primarily Shi’a, while Hamas, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are predominantly Sunni. Clearly the Muslims in the region disagree with each other, as much as with any other religions.

The Palestinians control/administer the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century AD. It is claimed to sit atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple (which is actually on Mount Sion across the way) and the point where SWNWCM ascended into the heavens. This makes it clear that Jews (Judeans don’t exist as a distinct genetic or cultural group now) have had little or no control over Jerusalem for at least 1,300 years, until after AD 1948.

The “Jews” as we know them today are dominated by the Ashkenazi, an Eastern European people from the region of Galicia in western Ukraine (yup), and eastern Germany and Poland. “Ashkenaz” is the name for Germany in Medieval Hebrew. The other major group is called Sephardic, which denotes Jews from Spain who are mixed with Moorish blood. Somewhere around 90% of all Jews in the world are Ashkenazi and have no Semitic bloodlines at all. The Sephardic Jews make up about 9%, while small culturally distinct Italian and Ethiopian Jews round out the numbers.

The Semitic peoples are in fact the Palestinians and Arab populations in the region. We also note with interest the last four letters of the word “Ashkenazi”. Given that Ashkenaz means Germany, it is a curious irony that the Nazis are remembered primarily for their treatment of the Ashkenazim.

As we can appreciate, the Levant is a seething cesspool of conflicting interests, all claiming ancestral rights to various lands and landmarks, and all based on ambiguous claims in ancient texts, whose provenance is questionable at best. The ancient rivalries are further exacerbated by European meddling with arbitrary boundaries based on colonial claims and interests. And all of it is based on the wealth generated by the Cross-Roads of Continents, in spite of any other claims to religion and culture.

What is clear is that there was never in all of history, up to AD 1948, a nation called Israel that encompassed the region of Canaan/Philistia, much less including Judea. At best, the Judeans, if any still exist, have an ancestral claim to Jerusalem and a few surrounding hectare. Even that, as we know from the Torah, was taken by a group of nomads called Habiru, under the command of some character called YHWH, who ordered the extermination of the existing populations to claim the land for himself and his followers.

All of the foregoing is the long way around to saying I am not the least bit lathered up over current events in the modern political state of Israel. Since the dawn of written history, that region has been bathed in blood and marred by atrocities that even a cursory reading of the histories leave one nauseous.

It is all the more exacerbated by a group of nominal Christian dispensationalists, who think their interpretation of a text titled “Revelation” (a.k.a. Apokalypsis) means they are divinely ordained to manipulate human events and force the Second Coming of Christ, not to mention attaining wealth and power in the process.

For this reason, they have furiously and blindly defended the creation of a political state called “Israel” (which never existed before AD 1948), fostered strife and conflict to launch Armageddon, and done everything they can to destroy the Dome of the Rock, with plausible deniability, in order to “rebuild” Solomon’s Temple (in the wrong place).

It is interesting to note in this timeline that Vatican City was created in AD 1929, nine years after the Balfour Declaration, after the old Papal States of Italy gave way to a unified secular government we know today as Italia.

There is no solution to the situation in “Israel”. All the competing interests are entrenched and unyielding. Their religious ideologies are founded on slaughter and ethnic cleansing, and they are hide-bound to continue that tradition.

It is also clear that the current situation is a direct result of meddling by Britain, France, Italy, and Russia. Israel was created by the Balfour Declaration, mass explusion of Ashkenazim from Europe, and a war initiated by European “Jews” to forcefully take Palestine from the indigenous population.

Every man’s death diminishes me, but that in no way implies that I agree with or even care why he died. It is a tragedy that so many must be slaughtered over interpretations of some old texts. I have no sympathy for the why, but I am profoundly saddened that the poor souls were aggrieved over something as pitiful and inconsequential as a book - especially in the era of mass printing and distribution of bespoke books.

In any case, we can safely say that events in the Mideast are part of a long-running fraud, using narradigms, and actors designed and deployed to create fear and anxiety among the uninformed and credulous. Everything about the current “crisis” reeks of false provocation. It is part of an escalating series of events, beginning in the homeland of the Ashkenazi, that are supposed to lead to global war, so that our civilization can be torn down and rebuilt in “their” image.

It will likely get worse, and if no one buys it, Taiwan is next. Each iteration will be more horrifying than the last, and yet we see the same tired propaganda about babies that we have heard over and over, from the reign of the Kaiser to yesterday’s headlines. There is real death and destruction, but it is all part of a staged production to destroy rationality and fuel emotionalism.

I don’t buy it, but it does have one advantage for rational people. We know that anyone reflexively waving flags is a Non-Player Character that we can safely ignore.

One final note - I have yet to find any non-biblical source that witnessed a nomadic people being led by a pillar of fire and carrying a gold box shooting lightning bolts. It seems to me that such events would be notable enough to mention somewhere in the contemporaneous histories.

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Source: Radio Far Side