Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Does Israel Have No Roots There in History? By Richard Elliott Friedman
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
On Sept. 24, the president of Iran informed reporters
that Israel has "no roots there in history" in the Middle East. Now a
lot of good jokes come to mind at the expense of this clueless man, but,
seriously folks, he has at least conveyed an important truth: he
recognizes that Israel's historical presence in that world since
antiquity matters -- matters enough to deny it. Now, the Bible pictures
an Israelite-Jewish population and government there starting in the
12th century B.C.E. and continuing until the end of the Bible's history
about 800 years later. But how do we know if this is true? As scholars,
we can't just say, "The Bible tells us so." We need to see evidence
that could be presented to any honest person, whether that person be
religious or not, Jewish or Christian or from some other religion or no
religion, or from Mars.
In the first place, the land is filled with Hebrew inscriptions, so I
begin with that. These are not just an occasional inscription on a
piece of pottery or carved in a wall. Nor should we even start with one
or two of the most famous archaeological finds. Rather, there are
thousands of inscriptions. They come from hundreds of excavated towns
and cities. They are in the Hebrew language. They include people's
names that bear forms of the name of their God: YHWH. This means names
like:
Hoshaiah, which means "YHWH Saved"
Ahijah, which means "YHWH is My Brother"
Shemariah, which means"YHWH Watched"
The inscriptions also refer to their kings. They include stamps and
seals from official documents. They come from tombs where that land's
people were buried. They name people who are mentioned in the Hebrew
Bible. They include wording that also appears in the Hebrew Bible.
They reflect a widespread community whose dominant language was Hebrew,
who didn't eat pork and who worshipped a God named YHWH.
I happened to be present at the time of the discovery of another
important inscription in Jerusalem. Right below the Church of Scotland
in Jerusalem, in a Jewish tomb from the seventh century B.C.E., was a
silver cylinder with the words inscribed in it: "May YHWH bless you and keep you. May YHWH make his face shine to you and give you peace." It is the words of the Priestly Blessing in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers
6:24-26). That's just one inscription. The distinguished scholar
Jeffrey Tigay of the University of Pennsylvania sums up:
"The names of more than 1,200 pre-exilic Israelites are known from
Hebrew inscriptions and foreign inscriptions referring to Israel." Of
these, 557 have names with YHWH as their divine element, 77 have names
with El.
As for those foreign inscriptions, texts from the neighboring lands
refer to the people, to their kings, to their government, to their
armies and to their cities. The basic fact: everybody knew that Israel
was there: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arameans,
the Moabites, the Persians. Pharaoh Merneptah (1213-1203 B.C.E.) refers
to the people of Israel in a stone stele. Pharaoh Shoshenk I (c.
945-924 B.C.E.) describes his campaign in which he refers to cities in
Israel (including Ayalon, Beth-Shan, Megiddo, Rehob and Taanach).
Assyrian King King Shalmaneser III names King "Ahab the Israelite" among
his opponents in his Kurkh monument and names and pictures King Jehu on
his Black Obelisk. Seven other Assyrian emperors also refer to Israel
and Judah and name kings who are also mentioned in the Bible.
The
Babylonian sources, too, refer to the Jews and their monarchy in the
years after the Babylonians replaced the Assyrian empire. And the record
continues when the Persians replace the Babylonians, as documented in
the Cylinder of Cyrus, the Persian emperor. Cyrus' decree in 538 B.C.E.,
let the exiled Jews return to their land; it was followed by an influx
of Jewish population. There was population growth from the reign of
Darius I to Artaxerxes I. The country that the Babylonians had conquered
was reestablished as a state of Judah (yehud medintha) within
the Persian umbrella. You want irony? Persia, now called Iran, the
country that re-established the Jews' country in biblical times, now has
a president who says that Israel has no roots there.
Also from that period come the Elephantine papyri, a collection of
documents that include letters from the Jewish community in Egypt in the
fifth century B.C.E. to the Jewish community back in Jerusalem. Closer to home, right across the Jordan River from Israel was Moab, in
what is now Jordan. In the ninth century B.C.E., its King Mesha erected
a stele referring to Israel and its King Omri. He also refers to the
royal House of David. An inscription erected by an Aramean (what is
today Syria) also refers to a king of the House of David. In all, these
ancient texts refer to 15 kings of Israel and Judah who are known from
the Bible, and all are referred to in the right periods.
Material culture (in other words: stuff) fills out this picture.
Thousands of people have now walked through the Siloam Tunnel under
Jerusalem. It is a major feat of engineering. It is a passage nearly
six football fields long underground. A tremendous project like this
and others that we shall see reflect a major organized society with a
government that could bring such an undertaking off. If it were done
today, the governor would be there for photo opportunities, and the
architect and builder would be honored. When it was done 2,700 years
ago, it took a substantial number of workers and tremendous cost.
Likewise, when my students joined in the City of David Project
archaeological excavations of Jerusalem under the archaeologist Yigal
Shiloh, they uncovered the now visible "stepped stone structure."
Whatever purpose it served -- defense, soil or water retention, a
platform for some other major structure -- it was a huge project. It
wasn't something that a couple of friends assembled. It required
community organization, planning, design, a large number of construction
workers and funding. The archaeologist John S. Holladay, Jr. thus speaks
of the "archaeologically discernible characteristics of a state" from
the 10th century B.C.E. on. These include a pattern of urban
settlements in a hierarchy of size: cities, then towns, then villages,
then hamlets.
They have primary seats of government (i.e., capital
cities): Jerusalem and Samaria. Then they have major cities as regional
centers: Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer and Lachish. They have centralized
bureaucracy. They have frontier defenses. They have standing armies.
They have economics based on tribute, taxes and tolls. They have a
writing system. Holladay lists all of these and more in showing how we
know that there was a populous society with a central government from
this early stage of the biblical period. Holladay published this in
1995. We can now add more: central planning of the architecture and
layout of towns, a distinctive alphabet, standard weights and measures.
And we can add that the Israelite sites lack pork bones. The archaeologist Elizabeth Bloch-Smith seconds the point, that the material culture is clearly Israelite starting from the Iron II period (950-600 B.C.E.) at the latest.
We can also see the changes in the Hebrew scripts on the inscriptions
developing through time, and we can actually date texts based on this.
(An eighth century letter aleph doesn't look the same as a seventh or sixth century aleph.)
The study of these scripts and the inscriptions is called epigraphy.
Many biblical scholars go through training in this field. The point is
that this doesn't happen overnight. It takes centuries for these
scripts to go through all these changes. So (1) we can date texts, and
(2) we know that the Hebrew of these inscriptions was the language of
the people of Israel and Judah, not just for a year or a decade or a
century, but for many centuries.
In parallel, we can trace the development of the Hebrew language as
found in the Bible and the other ancient texts. We didn't move from
Shakespearean English to Valley Girl English overnight. That takes
centuries. Likewise, the Hebrew of the Song of Miriam and the Song of
Deborah, which are the two oldest texts in the Bible, is different from
the Hebrew of the late book of Nehemiah. Hebrew existed as a language
that went through all the natural stages of development that we find in
any language that people continuously speak and write over very long
periods of time.
And then there is the literature itself. What we now know of who wrote
the Bible reflects, conservatively, that there were 75 to 100 authors
and editors of the Hebrew Bible, and quite possibly a lot more. The
literary study of the Bible that has blossomed in the last 40 years has
revealed the artistry in so many of these works. Such a huge quantity
of prose, poetry and law did not pop up overnight. Or in a year. Or in
a century. It had to take centuries and a thriving culture to compose.
Great literature (like a bacillus) can only develop in a culture. It
is not chance that Russia produced so many superior novels, or that the
British isles produced so much superior poetry. For ancient Israel to
have produced so many fine authors required a culture that welcomed and
fostered such literature over centuries. And the linguistic evidence
confirms this, and so does the epigraphic evidence, and so does the
archaeological evidence.
The point of this is how vast the array of the evidence is.
This is not
a vague hypothesis. It is not formulated by overestimating or
overinterpreting a single little find. It is not like an Indiana Jones
movie (though we love them), in which the archaeologist goes looking for
a single object. This is a civilization: between 400 and 500 cities
excavated, hundreds of years, thousands of items in writing, millions of
people. This evidence was not discovered by an individual or even by a
small group. It was assembled by hundreds of archaeologists, with tens
of thousands of workers, coming from many religions and many countries.
Some archaeologists hoped to confirm the Bible. Some seemed to take
pleasure in throwing the Bible into doubt. There have been frauds, and
there have been mistakes, aplenty, as in any other field. But the mass
of the evidence remains available to all. We can see and continually
refine a picture of ancient Israel.
We can (and do) have a million arguments about almost every aspect of
the Bible. But what we cannot deny is the existence of the world that
produced it. That fact is not true just because the Bible says so. It
is true because practically everything says so.
We don't all agree on matters relating to the present politics of Israel
and its neighbors. That's OK. It's even healthy. But let no one
repeat this nonsense about Israel not having its historical roots there.
One cannot understand the Jews or Israel if one displaces the first
1,000 years of their history.Huffington Post
