similar customs varying only in name and detail were practiced by the Semitic tribes south of Syria who filled the land with their confusion of tongues it was forbidden the Jews to make their children pass through the fire but occasionally they did it nonetheless Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac and Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia were but resorting to an ancient rite and attempting to propitiate the gods with human blood measure king of Moab sacrificed his eldest son by fire as a means of raising a siege his prayer having been answered and the sacrifice of his son having been accepted he slaughtered 7,000 Israelites in gratitude throughout this region from the Sumerian days when the amorite roamed the plains of a muru circa 2800 BC to the time when the Jews fell with divine wrath upon the king of knights and Sargon of Assyria captured Samaria and nebuchadrezzar captured Jerusalem 597 BC the valley of the Jordan was drenched periodically with fratricidal blood and many Lords of hosts rejoiced these Moabites Canaanites Amma writes [ __ ] Philistines and Arameans hardly enter into the cultural record of mankind it is true that the Fertile Arameans spreading everywhere made their language the lingua franca of the Near East and that the alphabetic script which they had learned either from the Egyptians or the Phoenicians replaced the cuneiform insel a breeze of Mesopotamia first as a mercantile then as a literary medium and became at last the tongue of Christ and the alphabet of the Arabs today but time preserves their names not so much because of their own accomplishments is because they played some part on the tragic stage of Palestine we must study in greater detail than their neighbors these numerically and geographically insignificant Jews who gave to the world one of its greatest literature's two of its most influential religions and so many of its profoundest men chapter 12 Judea won the Promised Land Palestine climate prehistory Abraham's people the Jews in Egypt the Exodus the conquest of Canaan a buckle or a Montesquieu eager to interpret history through geography might have taken a handsome leaf out of Palestine 150 miles from Dan on the north to Beersheba on the south 25 to 80 miles from the Philistines on the west to the Syrians Arameans ammonites Moabites and [ __ ] on the east one would not expect so tiny a territory to play a major role in history or to leave behind it an influence greater than that of Babylonia a Syria or Persia perhaps greater even than that of Egypt or Greece but it was the fortune and misfortune of Palestine that it lay midway between the capitals of the Nile and those of the Tigris and Euphrates this circumstance brought trade to Judea and it brought war time and again the harassed Hebrews were compelled to take sides in the struggle of the empires to pay tribute or be overrun behind the Bible behind the plaintive cries of the psalmist's and the prophets for help from the sky lay this imperiled place of the Jews between the upper and nether millstones of Mesopotamia and Egypt the climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing civilization is and how its great enemies barbarism and desiccation are always waiting to destroy it once Palestine was a land flowing with milk and honey as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it Josephus in the first century after Christ still speaks of it as moist enough for agriculture and very beautiful they have abundance of trees and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated they are not naturally watered by many rivers but derive their chief moisture from rain of which they have no wand in ancient days the spring rains that fed the land were stored in cisterns are brought back to the surface by a multitude of wells and distributed over the country by a network of canals this was the physical basis of Jewish civilization the soil so nourished produced barley wheat and corn the vine drove on it and trees bore olives figs dates or other fruits on every slope when war came and devastated these artificially fertile fields or when some Conqueror exiled to distant regions the families that had cared for them the desert crept in eagerly and in a few years undid the work of generations we not judged the fruitfulness of ancient Palestine from the barren wastes and timid oasis that confronted the brave Jews who in our own time returned to their old home after 18 centuries of exiled dispersion and suffering history is older in Palestine than Bishop Ussher supposed Neanderthal remains have been unearthed near the Sea of Galilee and five Neanderthal skeletons were recently discovered in a cave near Haifa it appears likely that the musterion culture which flourished in Europe about 40,000 BC extended to Palestine at Jericho Neolithic floors and hearts have been exhumed that carry back the history of the region down to a middle Bronze Age 2,000 to 1600 BC in which the towns of Palestine and Syria had accumulated such wealth as to invite conquest by Egypt in the 15th century before Christ Jericho was a well walled city ruled by kings acknowledging the suzerainty of Egypt the tombs of these kings excavated by the Garstang expedition contained hundreds of bozos funerary offerings and other objects indicating a settled life at Jericho in the time of the Hyksos domination and a fairly developed civilization in the days of hatshepsut and Tut most the third it becomes apparent that the different dates at which we begin the history of diverse peoples are merely the marks of our ignorance the tell el-amarna letters carry on the general picture of Palestinian and Syrian life almost to the entrance of the Jews into the valley of the Nile it is probable they're not certain that the Habiru spoken of in his correspondence were the Hebrews the Jews believed that the people of Abraham had come from or in Samaria and had settled in Palestine circa 22,000 BC a thousand years or more before Moses and that the conquest of the Canaanites was merely a capture by the Hebrews of the land promised them by their God the amra field mentioned in Genesis chapter 14 verse 1 as king of Shannara in those days was probably am appalled father of Hammurabi and his predecessor on the throne of Babylon there are no direct references in contemporary sources to either the exodus or the conquest of Canaan and the only indirect reference is the steely erected by Pharaoh Merneptah circa 12 five BC part of which reads as follows the Kings are overthrown saying Salam wasted histah he knew the Hittites land is pacified plundered is Canaan with every evil Israel is desolated her seed is not Palestine has become a widow for Egypt all lands are united they are pacified everyone that his turbulent is bound by Kingma nepeta this does not prove that Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus it proves little except that Egyptian armies had again ravaged Palestine we cannot tell when the Jews entered Egypt nor whether they came to it as free men or a slaves perhaps they followed in the track of the Hyksos whose semitic rule in egypt might have offered them some protection Petrey accepting the bible figure of 430 years for the stay of the Jews in Egypt dates their arrival about 1650 BC their eggs at about 12:20 BC we may take it as likely that the immigrants were at first a modest number and that the many thousands of Jews in Egypt in Moses this time with the consequence of a high birthrate as in all periods the more they afflicted them the more they multiplied and grew the story of the bondage in Egypt of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises their rebellion and escape or emigration to Asia has many internal signs of essential truth mingled of course with supernatural interpolations customary and all the historical writing of the ancient East even the story of Moses must not be rejected offhand it is astonishing however that no mention is made of him by either Amos or Isaiah who's preaching appears to have preceded by a century the composition of the Pentateuch Manito an egyptian historian of the 3rd century BC as reported by Josephus tells us that the exodus was due to the desire of the Egyptians to protect themselves from a plague that had broken out among the destitute and enslaved choose and that Moses was an Egyptian priest who went as a missionary among the Jewish lepers and gave them laws of cleanliness modeled upon those of the Egyptian clergy Greek and Roman writers repeat this explanation of the Exodus but there are anti-semitic inclinations make them unreliable gods one verse of the biblical account supports Ward's interpretation of the Exodus as a labor strike and the king of Egypt said unto them wherefore do ye Moses and Aaron let the people from their works get you unto your burdens Moses is an Egyptian rather than a Jewish name perhaps it is a shorter form of ammos professor Garstang of the Marston expedition of the University of Liverpool claims to have discovered in the royal tombs of Jericho evidence that Moses was rescued precisely in 1527 BC by the then princess later the great Queen Hatshepsut that he was brought up by her as a court favorite and fled from Egypt upon the accession of her enemy Tut most the third he believes that the material found in these tombs confirms the story of the fall of Jericho Joshua chapter 6 he dates this fall circa 1400 BC and the Exodus circa 1447 BC as this chronology rests upon the precarious dating of scarabs and pottery it must be received with respectful skepticism when Moses led the Jews to Mount Sinai he was merely following the route laid down by Egyptian turquoise hunting expeditions for a thousand years before him the account of the forty years wandering in the desert once looked upon is incredible now seems reasonable enough in a traditionally nomadic people and the conquest of Canaan was but one more instance of a hungry nomad horde falling upon a settled community the conquerors killed as many as they could and married the rest slaughter was unconfined and to follow the text was divinely ordained and enjoyed Gideon in capturing two cities slew 120,000 men only in the annals of the Assyrians do we meet again with such hearty killing or easy counting occasionally we are told the land rested from war Moses had been a patient statesman but Joshua was only a plain blunt warrior Moses had ruled bloodlessly by inventing interviews with God but Joshua ruled by the second law of nature that the superior killer survives in this realistic and unsentimental fashion the Jews took their promised land to Solomon in all his glory race appearance language organization judges and kings Saul David Solomon his wealth the temple rise of the social problem in Israel of their racial origin we can only say vaguely that they were Semites not sharply distinct or different from the other Semites of Western Asia it was their history that made them not they who made their history at their very first appearance they are already a mixture of many stocks only by the most unbelievable virtue could a pure race have existed among the thousand ethnic cross currents of the Near East but the Jews were the purest of all for they intermarried only very reluctantly with other peoples hence they have maintained their type with astonishing tenacity the Hebrew prisoners on the egyptian and Assyrian reliefs despite the prejudices of the artist are recognisably like the Jews of our own time there too are the long and curved hit height nose the projecting cheekbones the curly hair and beard though one cannot see under the Egyptian caricature the scrawny toughness of the body the subtlety and obstinacy of spirit that have characterized the Semites from the stiff-necked followers of Moses to the inscrutable Bedouins and tradesmen of today in the early years of their conquest they dressed in simple tunics low crowned hats or turbine like caps and easygoing sandals as wealth came they covered their feet with leather shoes and their tunics with fringed captain's their women who were among the most beautiful of antiquity painted their cheeks in their eyes were all the jewelry they could get and adopted to the best of their ability the newest styles from Babylon Nineveh Damascus or Tyre Hebrew was among the most majestically so ngerous of all the languages of the earth despite its gutturals it was full of masculine music for anon described it as a quiver full of arrows a trumpet of brasses crashing through the air it did not differ much from the speech of the Phoenicians of the Moabites the Jews used an alphabetic into the Phoenicians some scholars believe it to be the oldest alphabet known they did not bother to write vowels leaving these for the sense to fill in even today the Hebrew vowels are mere points adorning the consonants the invaders never formed a united nation but remained for a long time as 12 more or less independent tribes organized and ruled on the principles not of the state but of the patriarchal family the oldest head of each family group participated in a council of elders which was the last court of law and justice in the tribe and which cooperated with the leaders of other tribes only under the compulsion of dire emergency the family was the most convenient economic unit in tilling the fields and tending the flocks this was the source of its strength its authority and its political power a measure of family communism softened the rigors of paternal discipline and created memories to which the profits harked back disconsolate Li and more individualistic days for when under Solomon industry came to the towns and made the individual the new economic unit of production the authority of the family weakened even as today and the inherent order of Jewish life decayed the judges doom the tribes occasionally gave a united obedience were not magistrates but chieftains or warriors even when they were priests in those days there was no king in Israel but every man did that which was right in his own eyes this incredibly Jeffersonian condition gave way under the needs of war the threat of domination by the Philistines brought a temporary unity to the tribes and persuaded them to appoint a king whose authority over them should be continuous the prophet Samuel warned them against certain disadvantages and rule by one man and Samuel said this will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you he will take your sons and appoint them for himself for his chariots and to be his horsemen and some shall run before his chariots and he will appoint them captain's over thousands and captain's over fifties and will set them to ear his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his instruments of war and instruments of his chariots and he will take your daughters to be confectionaries to be cooks and to be bakers and he will take your fields and your vineyards and your olive yards even the best of them and give them to his servants and he will take your men servants and your maid servants and your goodliest young men and your asses and put them to his work he will take the tenth of your sheep and ye shall be his servants and he shall cry out in that day because of your King which he shall have chosen you and the Lord will not hear you in that day nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel and they said nay but we shall have a king over us that we also may be like all the nations and that our King may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles their first king saw gave them good and evil instructively fought their battles bravely lived simply on his own estate at Galia pursued young David with murderous attentions and was beheaded in flight from the Philistines the Jews learned then at the first opportunity that Wars of succession are among the upon inches of monarchy unless the little epic of Saul Jonathan and David is merely a masterpiece of literary creation but there is no contemporary mention of these personalities outside the Bible this first king after a bloody interlude was succeeded by David heroics lair of Goliath tender lover of Jonathan and many maidens half-naked dancer above wild dances seductive player of the harp sweet singer of marvellous songs and Abel King of the Jews for almost forty years here so early in literature as a character fully drawn real with all the contradictory passions of a living soul as ruthless as his time his tribe and his God and yet is ready to pardon his enemies as Caesar was or Christ putting captives to death wholesale like any Assyrian monarch charging his son Solomon to bring down to the grave with blood the [ __ ] head of old shimei who had cursed him many years before taking Uriah's wife into his harem incontinently and sending Uriah into the front line of battle to get rid of him accepting Nathan's rebuke humbly but keeping the lovely Bathsheba nonetheless forgiving Saul almost seventy times seven merely taking his shield when he might have taken his life sparing and supporting metha bowshot the possible pretended to his throne pardoning his ungrateful son Absalom who had been caught in armed rebellion and bitterly morning that son's death and treasonable battle against his father oh my son Absalom my son my son Absalom would god I had died for the e o Absalom my son my son this is an authentic man of full and varied elements bearing within him all the vestiges of barbarism and all the promise of civilization I'm coming to the throne Solomon for his peace of mind slew all rival claimants this did not disturb Yahweh who taking a liking to the young King promised him wisdom beyond all men before or after him perhaps Solomon deserves reputation for not only did he combine in his own life the epicurean enjoyment of every pleasure and luxury with the stoic fulfillment of all his obligations as a king but he taught his people the values of law and order and blurred them from discord and war to industry and peace he lived up to his name for during his long reign Jerusalem which David had made the capital took advantage of this unwonted quiet and increased and multiplied its wealth originally the city had been built around a well then it had been turned into a fortress because of its exalted position above the plain now though it was not on the main lines of trade it became one of the busiest markets of the Near East by maintaining the good relations that David had established with King Hiram of Tyre Solomon encouraged Venetian merchants to direct their caravans through Palestine and developed a profitable exchange of agricultural products from Israel for the manufactured articles of tyre and sidon he built a fleet of mercantile vessels on the Red Sea and persuaded Hiram to use this new route instead of Egypt in trading with Arabia and Africa it was probably in Arabia that Solomon mined the gold and precious stones of Oh fear probably from Arabia that the Queen of Sheba came to seek his friendship and perhaps his aid we are told that the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold and though this could not compare with the revenues of Babylon Nineveh or Tyre it lived in Solomon to a place among the richest potentates of his time some of this wealth he used for his private pleasure he indulged particularly his hobby for collecting concubines though historians undramatic Lee reduces 700 wives and 300 concubines to 60 and 80 perhaps by some of these marriages he wished to strengthen his friendship with Egypt and Phoenicia perhaps like ramses ii he was animated with the eugenic passion for transmitting his superior abilities but most of his revenues went to the strengthening of his government and the beautification of his capital he repaired the citadel around which the city had been built he raised forts and stationed Garrison's at strategic points of his realm to discourage both invasion and revolt he divided his kingdom for administrative purposes into twelve districts which deliberately crossed the tribal bow juries by this plan he hoped to lessen the clannish separatism of the tribes and to weld them into one people he failed and Judea failed with him to finance his government he organized expeditions to mine precious metals and to import luxuries and strange delicacies for example ivory Apes and peacocks which could be sold to the growing bourgeoisie at high prices he levy tolls upon all caravans passing through Palestine he put a poll tax upon all his subject peoples requiring contributions from every district except his own and reserved to the state a monopoly of the trade and yarn horses and chariots jazz emphasis shows us that Solomon made silver as plentiful in Jerusalem as stones in the street finally he resolved to adorn the city with a new temple for yaver and a new palace for himself we gather some sense of the turbulence of Jewish life from the fact that before this time there had been apparently no temple at all in Judea not even in Jerusalem the people had sacrificed to Yahweh and local sanctuaries or uncrewed altars in the hills Solomon called the more substantial burgers together announced his plans for a temple pledged to with great quantities of gold silver brass iron wood and precious stones from his own stores and gently suggested that the temple would welcome contributions from the citizens if we may believe the chronicler they pledged for his use 5000 gold talents 10,000 silver talents and as much iron and brass as he might need and they would some precious stones were found gave them to the treasure of the house of the Lord the site chosen was on a hill the walls of the temple roads like the Parthenon continuously from the rocky slopes the design was in the style that the Phoenicians had adopted from Egypt with decorative ideas from Assyria and Babylon the temple was not a church but a quadrangular enclosure composed of several buildings the main structure was of modest dimensions about 124 feet in length 55 in breadth and 52 in height half the length of the Parthenon a quarter of the length of Chartres the Hebrews who came from all Judea to contribute to the temple and later to worship in it forgive ibly looked upon it as one of the wonders of the world they had not seen the immensely greater temples of Thebes Babel and Nineveh before the main structure Rosa porch some 180 feet high overlaid with gold gold was spread lavishly about if we make credit our sole authority on the beans of the main ceiling on the posts the doors and the walls on the candelabra the lamps the snappers the spoons the sensors and a hundred basins of gold precious stones were inlaid here and there and two gold-plated cherubim guarded the Ark of the Covenant the walls were of great square stones the sealing posts and doors were of carved cedar and olive wood most of the building materials were brought from Phoenicia and most of the skilled work was done by artisans imported from Sidon and tyre the unskilled labor was herded together by a ruthless corvée of 150 thousand men after the fashion of the time so for seven years the temple rose to provide for four centuries a lordly home for yave then for thirteen years more the artisans and people labored to build a much larger edifice for Solomon and his harem merely one wing of it the house of the forest of Lebanon was four times as large as the temple the walls of the main building were made of immense stone blocks 15 feet in length and were ornamented with statuary reliefs and paintings in the Assyrian style the palace contained halls for the royal reception of distinguished visitors apartments for the King separate quarters for the more important wives and an Arsenal as the final basis of government now the stone of the gigantic edifice survives and its site is unknown having established his kingdom Solomon settled down to enjoy it as his reign proceeded he paid less and less attention to religion and frequented his harem rather more than the temple the biblical chroniclers reproach him bitterly for his gallantry in building altars to the exotic deities of his foreign wives and cannot forgive his philosophical or perhaps political impartiality to the gods the people admired his wisdom but suspected in at a certain centripetal quality the temple and the palace had cost them much gold in blood and were not more popular with them than the pyramids had been with the working men of Egypt the upkeep of these establishments required considerable taxation and few governments have made taxation popular when he died Israel was exhausted and the discontented proletariat had been created whose labour found no steady employment and whose sufferings were to transform the warlike cult of Yahweh into the almost socialistic religion of the prophets 3 the God of hosts polytheism yave henotheism character of the hebrew religion the idea of sin sacrifice circumcision the priesthood strange gods next to the promulgation of the book of law the building of the temple was the most important event in the epoch of the Jews it not only gave Yahweh a home but it gave Judea a spiritual center and capital a vehicle of tradition a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries of wandering over the earth and it played its part in lifting the Hebrew religion from a primitive polytheism to a faith intense and intolerant but nonetheless one of the creative Creed's of history as they first entered the historic scene the Jews were nomads better ones who feared the djinns of the air and worship rocks cattle sheep and the spirits of caves and hills the cult of the bull the sheep and the lamb was not neglected Moses could never quite win his flock from adoration of the golden calf for the Egyptian worship of the bull was still fresh in their memories and yave was for a long time symbolized in that ferocious vegetarian in Exodus chapter 32 verses 25 to 28 we read how the Jews indulged in a naked dance before the golden calf and how Moses and the Levites or priestly class slew 3,000 of them in punishment of their idolatry of serpent worship there are countless traces in early Jewish history from the serpent images found in the oldest ruins to the brazen serpent made by Moses and worshipped in the temple until the time of Hezekiah circa 720 BC as among so many peoples the snake seemed sacred to the Jews partly as a phallic symbol of virility partly as typifying wisdom subtlety and eternity literally because of its ability to make both ends meet Bale symbolized in conical upright stones much like the Linga of the Hindus was venerated by some of the Hebrews as the male principle of reproduction the husband of the land that he fertilized just as primitive polytheism survived in the worship of angels and saints and in the teraphim or portable idols that serve as household gods so the magical notions rife in the early cults persisted to a late day despite the protests of prophets and priests the people seem to have looked upon Moses and Aaron as magicians and to have patronized professional diviners and sorcerers divination was sought at times by shaking dice for him and threw him out of a box even a ritual still used to ascertain the will of the gods it is to the credit of the priests that they opposed these practices and preached an exclusive reliance on the magic of sacrifice prayer and contributions slowly the conception of Yahweh as the one National God took form and gave to Jewish faith a unity and simplicity lifted up above the chaotic multiplicity of the Mesopotamian Pantheon's apparently the conquering Jews took one of the gods of Canaan Yahoo and recreated him in their own image as a stern warlike stiff-necked deity with almost lovable limitations for this God makes no claim to omniscience he asks the Jews to identify their homes by sprinkling them with the blood of the sacrificial lamb lest he should destroy their children inadvertently along with the firstborn of the Egyptians he is not above making mistakes of which man is his worst he regrets too late that he created Adam or allowed Saul to become king he is now in them greedy irascible bloodthirsty capricious petulant I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy to whom I will show mercy he approves Jacobs use of deceit in revenge in himself upon Laban his conscience is as flexible as that of a bishop in politics he is talkative and likes to make long speeches but he is shy and will not allow men to see anything of him but his hind parts never was there so thoroughly human a God originally he seems to have been a God of Thunder dwelling in the hills and worshiped for the same reason that the youthful gorky was a believer when it thundered this book is continued at this point on the other side of this cassette please reverse or turn the cassette Oh
