Magi Mike’s Blog

The idea that a single, spectacular finding can reverse the course of modern research and save the literal reading of the biblical text regarding the history of ancient Israel from critical scholarship is an old one. Its roots can be found in W F Albright’s assault on the Wellhausen School in the early 20th century, an assault that biased archaeological, biblical and historical research for decades. This trend—in different guises—has resurfaced sporadically in recent years, with archaeology serving as a weapon to quell progress in critical scholarship. Khirbet Qeiyafa is the latest case in this genre of craving a cataclysmic defeat of critical modern scholarship by a miraculous archaeological discovery.

I Finkelstein and A Fantalkin

During recent archaeological excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified city in Judah adjacent to the Valley of Elah, professor Yosef Garfinkel, the Yigal Yadin Professor of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and colleagues, uncovered assemblages of pottery, stone and metal tools, and many art and cult objects. Three large rooms were revealed that Garfinkel says were cultic shrines corresponding in their architecture and finds to the time of King David. He adds that this discovery is extraordinary for it is the first time that shrines from the time of the first biblical kings—Saul, David and Solomon—have been uncovered, and shed light on how a cult was organized in Judah at the time of King David. These shrines pre-date the construction of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem by 30 to 40 years.

The discovery is indeed extraordinary, about as extraordinary as finding the Bat Cave of Batman and Robin under the streets of New York City, which was, of course, called Gotham City in those days, as everyone knows from the popular myth! Saul, Solomon and Solomon’s famous temple are all myths with not a single piece of material evidence for any of them, and king David, the father of the mythical Solomon, has the equivocal testimony of an highly contentious piece of a broken inscription. So all three of the earliest kings of Judah are as real as king Arthur, Dr Faustus and William Tell… they are not!

The expedition to Khirbet Qeiyafa has excavated the site for six weeks each summer since 2007, with co-director Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Located approximately 30km southwest of Jerusalem in the valley of Elah, Khirbet Qeiyafa was a border city of the Kingdom of Judah opposite the Philistine city of Gath. The city, which was dated by 10 radiometric measurements (14C) done at Oxford University on burned olive pits, existed for a short period of time between ca. 1020 to 980 BCE, and was violently destroyed. The revolutionary results of five years of work are presented in a new book, Footsteps of King David in the Valley of Elah, published by Yedioth Ahronoth.

The architecture found at Khirbet Qeiyafa at this date is quite refined, and is interpreted by Garfinkel as evidence of royal activities, and therefore of state formation. An elite social level and urbanism existed in the region eleventh century Judah. Garfinckel seems convinced that it strengthens the historicity of the Jewish scriptures, and that their description of the architecture of the palace and Temple of Solomon is authentic:

This is the first time that archaeologists uncovered a fortified city in Judah from the time of King David. Even in Jerusalem we do not have a clear fortified city from his period. Thus, various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong.

The Jewish bible relates how the people of Israel had a cult different from all other nations of the ancient Near East, being monotheistic and aniconic—free of human and animal figures—and having an aversion to pork. Garfinkel continued;

Over the years, thousands of animal bones were found, including sheep, goats and cattle, but no pigs. Now we uncovered three cultic rooms, with various cultic paraphernalia, but not even one human or animal figurine was found.

No human or animal figurines were found, suggesting the people of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed the biblical ban on graven images.

It suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two biblical bans—on pork and on graven images—and thus practiced a different cult from that of the Canaanites or the Philistines.

However, the Hebrew Univerity press release is clear that no one is sure when these aniconic and monotheistic practices began, during the Israelite and Judahite monarchies (10-6th centuries BC), or only later, in the Persian or Hellenistic eras. The claim that images of humans or animals were absent in the three shrines is, on the face of it, evidence that worshipers here differed from the Canaanites and the Philistines, who made images of their gods.

The three rooms, part of larger building complexes, are supposed to have been separate shrines. In this respect they are different from Canaanite or Philistine cults, which were practiced in temples—separate buildings dedicated only to rituals. Garfinkel supposes that because the bible speaks of the portable ark being stored in private houses (2 Samuel 6) that it was worshiped in private houses. Yet there was only one such ark at a time, so it could hardly have been worshiped in three separate rooms. Indeed, three separate shrines in one larger building suggests polytheism, the different rooms being devoted to different objects of worship. Indeed cult objects found include five standing stones (Masseboth), two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines. Canaanites commonly worshiped masseboth, stones, and even the bible suggests the Judahites and Israelites did, though they were not supposed to according to Moses. It is deeply entrenched. Jews today still worship stones!

Two portable shrines or “shrine models” were found, one made of pottery, c 20cm high, and the other, 35 cm high, of stone. These are boxes shaped like miniature temples, which could be closed. The stone shrine is made of soft limestone and painted red. Its façade is decorated by two elements—seven groups of roof beams, three planks in each. This architectural element, the “triglyph”, is known in Greek classical temples, like the Parthenon in Athens. Its appearance at Khirbet Qeiyafa is the earliest known example carved in stone. The second decorative element is the recessed door. This type of door or window is known in the architecture of temples, palaces and royal graves in the ancient Near East. It was a typical symbol of divinity and royalty at the time.

Similar triglyphs and recessed doors can be found in the description of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:5;31-33) and in the description of a temple in Ezekiel 41:6. These biblical texts are replete with obscure technical terms that have lost their original meaning over the millennia.

For the first time in history we have actual objects from the time of David, which can be related to monuments described in the Bible.

Now, the stone model helps us to understand these obscure technical terms in the description of Solomon’s palace as described in 1 Kings 7:1-6. The text uses the term “Slaoth”, which were mistakenly understood as pillars and can now be understood as triglyphs. The text also uses the term “Sequfim”, which was usually understood as nine windows in the palace, and can now be understood as triple recessed doorway.

Most of these injudicious claims of Garfunkel’s have been severely criticized as biblicist nonsense, even by biblicists! I Finkelstein and A Fantalkin have slated the interpretations and the amateurish methodology of the excavation. Thomas Verenna commented on this reporting of Garfinkel’s excesses:

“Will these finds settle the debate over the historical David? Garfinkel would like to think so. ‘Various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong’.”

MSNBC coverage on Qeiyafa

Really? Because you found a couple of regional house shrines in a fortified city? Because you have an ostracon with some writing on it? What hubris this is, when someone can so blatantly claim that certain scholars are wrong because you’ve found common ancient Near Eastern artifacts (which have been misidentified) at a dig in the Near East. if anything this only shows the lengths that certain individuals will go to try to prove their presuppositions. They are willing to fabricate whole cultural contexts that never existed so long as in the end they can say they’ve found the facts behind their biblical truth. It is both tragic and disgusting: tragic because most people will never question the validity of the article or the claims therein, and disgusting because it is permitted to happen.

He has a fuller piece on this nonsense here. And even biblicist, George Athas, is skeptical.

J C Flugel, an eminent psychologist of the mid twentieth century, pointed out (Man, Morals and Society):

When those who assert the existence of God, at the same time reveal that they ardently desire Him to exist, we are justified in feeling a little skeptical.

The skepticism arises because one has to suspect “wishful thinking” is the basis of their assertion. The desire that God exists burns so furiously in the believer’s busom that they convince themselves it must be so. It is a self deception.

There is another, a better reason for skepticism, that of the scientist. The scientist is skeptical on principle about any claim that is not tested until such time as it is adequately tested and shown to be so. It is a principle that excludes all self deception and gullibility, which otherwise would lead us to accept whatever we choose or prefer out of the many available explanations whether possible or impossible.

Added to the skeptical principle in science is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, introduced in the later middle ages by a cleric in an attempt to eliminate what might be called Sufism—the multiplication of “explanatory” entities—from Christian theology. It found its most valuable place in science in successfully keeping scientific hypotheses to a minimum of complexity.

So, for example, the believer will say the postulation of God explains inexplicable things like the existence of the universe, why we are here, what we do after death, and so on. It does no such thing, and violates both the skeptical principle and Ockham’s Razor.

Take the case of the creation of the universe. We can certainly observe the world in which we live, but we cannot observe a God. The believer invents an entity, God, for which there is no direct evidence, to explain a very large and evident entity that we know does exist, then says that the nonentity created the large and evident entity, QED. On the skeptical principle, we have to reject the argument because there is still no evidence for the imaginary entity, God, other than our new conjecture that He created the universe. That is circular. God is a fudge! His imagined supernatural nature is another fudge, one which explains why God cannot be detected!

And we now have two entities to consider, the universe which we confirm in our daily lives, and God, which is a fudge to explain the universe, but otherwise leaves no traces anywhere. We are actually no better off, because, even if we are convinced by the fudgy explanation, we still have something to explain—God. Contrary to the clerical Razor of Ockham, we have mutiplied entities from one to two, and are left as badly off as before with an explanation for one of them still needed.

That, of course, is no problem to the Christian, devoid of any need for principle, but overflowing with Sufi answers. The existence of God needs no explanation because He is eternal, He lives forever and is the Prime Mover of everything else. Yet God is explained by introducing a new principle, that of an eternal life for God. But, if God, the imaginary entity, can be eternal, we are left with the question of why the universe itself could not be eternal, again using Ockham’s razor to cut out the superfluous entity with the astonishing properties it has to have for it to perform all these miracles.

The universe is before us. If it were eternal, then that would suffice to remove the need for the postulate of God. The believer will jump forward full of agitation, telling us that science has shown the universe has a beginning in the Big Bang. It is not eternal, so we must go for the believer’s hypothesis of God. Well, if believers could formulate God mathematically, we might begin to be convinced, but so far they cannot. Science however has found and tested a large number of mathematical theorems that can still offer us naturalistic explanations, even if they are getting more and more wonderful, beginning to look like Sufi science, perhaps, with the difference that these mathematics work!

The discovery of complex numbers allows physicists to postulate virtual events, events that take place in complex time. Maybe complex time is God, for the Big Bang has been explained as no bang with the use of complex time. We think of time as being linear, starting from the Big Bang, but complex time yields a multidimensional time, not just the linear one, and that means time need not begin at all. The linear time that we experience is an illusion, and what seems like a bursting forth of vast amounts of energy in linear time is more of a continous pulsation in virtual time.

Then again, there is the theory of quantum mechanics which has led to truly wonderful things, not least of which is the notion of the multiverse. It seems that all events possible can happen somewhere in this multiverse which therefore is indeed conceptually infinite, though there may be a limit set by the graininess of space and time themselves, but even so there could be so many universes withing the multiverse, that even God would need assistance. Unless of course we postulate a multitude of Gods serving each possible universe, and perhaps a multi-God in change of the lot!

Science is apparently confirming that something transcends the universe we can observe directly, just as believers have believed. It is the multiverse. Perhaps that is God, but it is not a personal God at all. If anything, it is like the God of the Stoics and the Deists, a set of transcendent laws that even the believer’s local God must be subject to.

The Bible is in two parts, one is the Old Testament and is Jewish—the Jewish scriptures—the other is the New Testament and is Christian. Just what is the point of the New Testament for Christians when they incessantly cite the Jewish scriptures? If they prefer the Old Testament, why not become a Jew?

The point of the New Testament for Christians is that it refined the Old Testament. The Old Testament had become bloated with ordinances that allowed the temple priests to screw the ordinary Jew, and the original law had become mixed, confused and too complicated. Jesus was a Jew and did not reject Judaism, but he said he came to fulfil the law by advocating the law of love your neighbor. Whatever in the Jewish scriptures contradicts Christ’s law is not Christianity, for the Christian must prefer Christ’s new formulation of the law to the old Jewish one, or they might as well, indeed, become a Jew!

Nor is it enough to claim, as Christians do, that the Old Testament is also God’s word. Christians, as I understand it, consider Christ to be God incarnated—Christ is God—so the law of Christ is the law expressed by God Himself. Jews consider the Mosaic law to have been passed to them via Moses, a man.

The New Testament has God Himself, Christians tell us, speaking from his own lips, telling his followers how they must behave to be Christians. It follows that the New Testament takes primacy over the Old Testament, and Christians, to be Christians, ought to prefer the New Testament to the Old Testament, especially where the sentiments differ greatly. Love is meant to be the Christian criterion of moral rectitude, not ancient and primitive Iron Age sentiments like many of those in the Jewish scriptures… Killing people suspected of witchcraft is primitive, and certainly cannot be considered to be love at all. Leaving the poor to scrabble around in fields for a grain of barley is scarcely loving them either.

“Love” in our English gospels, as any Christian will know, translates the Greek word “agape“, which in turn equates with several words in Hebrew, mainly “aheb“. These words are not related to passionate love generally, but more to “liking”, “respecting”, “being content with”, “being kind towards”, and “caring for” and being willing to help them when they are in need. To repeat, it is being the Good Samaritan! It is being social, being the good neighbor, being kind.

Archaeologists digging at Tel Shikmona, on the southern edge of Israel’s city of Haifa, starting only at the start of 2011, have uncovered signs of settlement from the late Bronze Age (sixteenth century BC) to the Moslem occupation of the seventh century AD, including a well preserved “four room” house from the time of the Kingdom of Israel (900-700 BC), a Persian city (about 400 BC) and a Byzantine town (about 500 AD). The site was excavated about 40 years ago by the late Yosef Algavish but neglected and piles of rubbish, and construction waste were piled over the site for the decades, and vehicles have ploughed over it. Dr Shay Bar and Dr Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, explained:

We had seen the structure in the old photographs, and were sorry that such a rarely preserved finding had disappeared due to neglect. We were not even sure that we would be able to find it again. It was practically a miracle that we managed to locate and uncover it and that it is still so well preserved.

The photographs of the 1970s excavations he speaks of show a “four room” house dating around 700-800 BC. It is a house typical of Canaanite houses of the time, but which biblicists all too often assign exclusively to Israel, taken to be the “Ancient Israel” of the bible. The state of Israel in that period was itself typically Canaanite with an essentially Phœnician culture and language, Hebrew being a Canaanite dialect. Evidence is a personal seal found in the same excavation, showing an inscription in Hebrew or Phœnician. The archaeologists hope to determine whether the inscription is Phoenician or Hebrew, a bit like wanting to know whether a recording of a New Yorker’s accent is Bronx or East Side.

Hundreds of murex mollusc shells were also found at the site, the source of the purple dye called “Tyrean Purple”. Sherds of purple colored ceramic from pitchers evidently used to store the dye extracted from the snails. Imported luxuries from Cyprus and the coast of Lebanon arrived in fine, delicate vessels of high quality ceramic, evidence of extensive trade with neighbors in the region and even overseas. It was the Canaanites of the coastal towns of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Arad who were the seamen, not the Israelites, but for a short period before it was annexed by Assyria, Israel was prosperous, perhaps because it controlled trade between the interior and Arabia and the coastal cities.

The Phœnicians (a Greek name for them) were noted traders and merchants and accomplished sailors who traded throughout the Mediterranean and provided the Mediterranean fleet for the Persian shahs. Elsewhere on the site evidence of the Persian settlement of the area was found including a Persian building (fourth century BC) with an oven, clay loom weights and storage pitchers. It was only with the arrival of the Persian colonists towards the end of the fifth century that the Jewish temple state based on Jerusalem began. The colonists identified themselves with, the now defunct but once prosperous, state of Samaria (Israel) to give themselves a mythical history, as the Askwhy website explains.

Above the Persian layer on the eastern side of the tell were Byzantine terraces (fourth-seventh centuries AD) bearing houses with mosaic floors and storage rooms. Dozens of ceramic vessels there were found intact, and many coins, ornaments, pendants, weapons and glass vessels also, suggesting a wealthy people. It seems the area was wealthy from Canaanite times until the Moslem conquest. When Pompey arrived in Palestine in the first century BC, it was still a prosperous, fortified city, but after the Bronze Age and before the ninth century BC it was sparsely settled. It was a long period of drought.

Jewish and Christian Fundamentalists think God wrote their bibles, and as God is perfection, the bible cannot be wrong—it is inerrant. Even less extreme Jews and Christians think the Torah or Pentateuch, the five books of Moses were written by Moses. Others think the various books were written by the authors cited—Daniel wrote Daniel, David wrote the Psalms, John wrote John, and so on.

Modern biblical scholarship suggests biblical text was written by different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles, and such idiosyncracies as the different names they used for God. Some of the books were written by priests after the temple had been well established, and they were keen on maximizing their revenue and influence. Other parts reflected a period before the temple was properly established, and before the state of Judah had been set up as a temple state. The Christian part of their bible was obviously written with a view to establishing Christianity.

A computer program for analyzing text—a subset of artificial intelligence known as authorship attribution—developed by Israeli scholars led by Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, shows the joints in the bible where the different authors texts joined together. It picks out differences in style and word choice to show which parts of a single text were written by different authors.

The program confirmed that the Pentateuch could be split into two parts internally related but different from each other, that 90 percent matched the scholars’ division into priestly and non-priestly authorship. Thus it confirmed in minutes what had taken the scholars one to two centuries of meticulous study, effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes. The program indicated differences with scholarship in about ten percent of the text, a notable example being Genesis 1. Scholars had called this priestly but the program did not agree. Similarly, scholars had long believed that Isaiah consisted of three texts concatenated, with the join between the first two being at Isaiah 39. The program points to the join being at Isaiah 33. Of course, it might be the program that is wrong!

The program recognizes Hebrew equivalents, and synonyms. It will notice the use of the word “makel” for “staff” as distinct from “mateh” with the same meaning. As a test, the developers of the program randomly jumbled Ezekiel and Jeremiah into one text. The program sorted out the two components “almost perfectly”, undoubtedly an excellent performance, though the styles and language of the two books are very different.

What the algorithm won’t answer, say the authors, is whether the bible is human or divine. Three of the four authors, religious Jews, belief that the Torah was dictated to Moses in its entirety by God. He just chose to write in a mixture of different styles! For academic scholars, arbitrary changes of style—changes for no good reason such as to suggest a change of mood—indicate cutting and pasting human authorship. Koppel insists:

No amount of research is going to resolve that issue.

He serves to show that belief in God destroys all reason, even in otherwise intelligent people.

Steve Cornell, a senior pastor of Millersville Bible Church in Millersville, Pa, wrote in The Washington Times a short column telling God what he means in respect of murder and punishing it. It is curious that every Christian knows what the bible means, and it is God’s holy word, is it not? so what God means. The unseemly celebrations at the death of a man, albeit a man considered to be responsible for multiple deaths, Osama Bin Laden, is perfectly Christian. Pastor Cornell says that it is the bible that tells us to execute murderers, and joy is the appropriate response, after all Proverbs says so:

It is joy to the just to do judgment, but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.

Proverbs 21:15

Quite a number of passages in the Jewish scriptures approve of death for murder, and there are some, too, in the Christian appendix to the Jewish scriptures, the New Testament, but none of them are uttered by Christ, the Christian God incarnated, excepting one occasion when he is simply citing the scriptures to make a point about Pharisaic hypocrisy.

Deuteronomy 19:21 and Exodus 21:24 require application of the lex talionis “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. It would, it seems, perfectly well justify the assassination of Bin Laden, but who, in the civilized western world nowadays, would consider such a barbaric form of justice as just? We read that Iranian judges wish to apply the Sharia Law to a man who threw a strong acid into the face of a woman who had spurned his proposals of marriage. It is the self same lex talionis, literally in this case an “eye for an eye”, because the acid burnt the womans face horribly and destroyed her eyes. The judges, having found the man guilty, have ruled that the woman can pour a similar acid into the culprit’s eyes, thereby doing to him what he had done to her. Western newspapers are shocked and horrified that the Moslem bogeymen can do anything so barbaric, yet the Jewish and Christian bible has exactly this same law, repeated for emphasis.

More to the point is that the law was to be applied, according to the Jewish scriptures, justly! The crime had to be heard before God, meaning his judges, in those days the temple priests. The Iranian acid thrower was arraigned before judges, and the case proved. Osama Bin Laden was summarily shot, and only then was a DNA sample taken to prove that they had shot the right man. It seems they had, although there is doubt about how they were able to be so sure without his own DNA having been taken before hand to compare with that of the dead man, or DNA from his father and mother, or several brothers and sisters instead. We read that only samples from a couple of half siblings was available. In any case, had the man been shown not to be Bin Laden, then what? The body was quickly disposed of at sea, and no photos of the victim are to be released. The fact is that we cannot be sure the right man was killed, and the procedure is flawed indefensibly because, even if he was, he could easily not have been! The alleged Bin Laden was not given the chance of a trial, and due process had not been followed. It was not justice, whatever this supposedly Christian pastor claims (a “just punishment” by a human government) with his barbaric biblical citations at hand.

No this pastor even thinks that today governmental “roles” have expanded beyond “national boundaries”. Would that be all governments, or just the biggest and most powerful? If it is the role of all governments to expand its powers overseas, does that mean some country, perhaps Iraq, or Aghanistan, or Libya or Pakistan, can rightfully demand that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama be accused of illegally murdering their nationals, in some cases many thousands of them, and demand that the guilty men be brought before the International Court of Justice for their crimes? They would, at least be getting a fair trial, which is more than Bin Laden got, and more importantly, more than all those many thousands of mainly innocent women, children and eldery folk in those foreign countries got in lex talionis vengeance. Yes indeed Reverend Cornell:

Neighborly love compels people of goodwill to act on behalf of helpless victims of international crime.

It does not mean they should be the criminals! The Christian pastor, has noticed that Christ’s rule of loving your enemies is not easily reconcilable with killing them. Here, as usual, the Christian is happy to revise the bible, despite its inerrancy, and not only that, he is happy to correct the impression that the incarnate God of the Christians gave while he spent his brief life on earth. Cornell knows God’s brain! He is not speaking of loving lawbreakers, nor of the appropriate response to it by rulers:

If applied to criminal justice, it would rule out all punishment and contradict the God ordained role of government to punish evildoers (1 Peter 2:14).

The “good” pastor cites here a passage, from the letter attributed to Peter which may be genuine, as if Peter is setting out a universal concession to governments to punish criminals, and even murderers. He is doing no such thing. He is telling the Christians who will be venturing into the wider Roman emperor to be Christians, even though there are people who will use their powers against them, given the chance. The Christian missionaries were to be Christians, that is follow the example and teachings of Christ, loving others, and not to react or provoke retaliation. They were not to give rulers and governors, magistrates, and so on, the chance to punish them.

Peter is not giving these officials any God given right to do anything. He says Christians have to obey these officials “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13), because “it is God’s will that by doing right you will silence the ignorance of foolish men” (1 Peter 2:15). The foolish men are the rulers and their officials whom Peter prophesies—as Christ did, according to the gospels stories—will use their authority to try to silence Christ’s message of love. If Jesus had been teaching that Christians must obey their rulers, then he would have been justifying his own punishment by the Romans, and the acts of Caiaphas and the Jews. He had been acclaimed as king of the Jews, so it was right to punish him under the law as a traitor to the emperor, and right to turn him in.

Minister Cornell thinks the state is not bound by the morality of the individual person, and so can murder without it being criminal, so the state ought not to be accused of “killing” Bin Laden. Rulers of states cannot be criminals! So any man who manages to get into the position of ruler can murder people because when enemies are “killed” by the state, it is not murder—it is the execution of a murderer. It is the reasoning of tyrants everywhere. Gaddafi is not a murderer—he executes murderers because he represents the state of Libya. Saddam killed no one in Iraq, but executed them because they were murderers, and he it was who was the state of Iraq.

According to this principle, the USA had no reason to “kill” them for they were not murderers but executioners as the leaders of independent states. So for Cornell it is right that the Christian leaders of the USA can take it upon themselves to decide what is murder and what is execution. The USA only executes, but other people are murderers and can be executed by the world’s policeman, the USA.

If the USA claims the right to dispense international justice unilaterally, Americans must recognize that there is no legal principle involved. The principle being used is “might is right”. To be consistent, what applies to the goose applies too to the gander, the uncontested bully in the yard can kick whoever he likes, but can hardly be surprised when occasionally he gets kicked back.

Apparently Bin Laden thought the USA were a mass of murderers, because as a democracy, they had elected their chosen rulers who had the right to execute those whom they deemed murderers abroad. He declared the people of the USA as murderers and determined to execute them, and succeeded in executing some. Well, he was not a ruler of a state, and so he was a plain muderer, if 9/11 is indeed what he had aimed to do. He claimed in several videos released after the atrocity that he had had nothing to do with it, and the evidence was that a bunch of mainly Saudi Arabians did it.

Reverend Cornell is ultimately correct that society has the right to protect itself, to preserve itself. In primitive times, those who took advantage of others for selfish reasons could be expelled from the tribe. Even in relatively recent times, they could be exiled. Now it is no longer possible to expel people, so instead they have to be confined to prison. Even murderers do not have to be killed, confinement is worse. But whatever the crime, they must have the right to defend themselves, and the state has to have ways to ensure it has the person responsible for the crime. The proper way to elicit the truth is by a trial.

In the US, the greedy are richly rewarded, and reward others for defending them, not least right wing clerics. So, the “good” Christian for whom killing is a grievous sin, tells us:

The death penalty is needed to protect civilized society.

Without it we descend into “barbaric anarchy”. Strange then that the USA seems to be descending into barbaric anarchy despite widespread judicial murder, and is rapidly loosing every bit of respect it once had in the world.

US Christians ought not to cherry pick what they like in the bible while leaving aside what they do not like, meaning almost everything that their own God taught. They are not interested in morality or justice, the principle of “might is right” appeals to all religions too. Christians want to rule the USA, and will do and say whatever they think will help them in their goal. That is why the USA is no Christian nation. It is ruled by greedy liars, and it is hard to comprehend how any supposedly moral God can sanctify liars, or be expected to, especially by so-called believers. No society can be built on lies, and it certainly cannot stand on lies.

The USA has become a lying state, a greedy state, an immoral state, not because it lacks Christianity but because it is deluded into thinking that it is a Christian nation, deluded by its lying, greedy, immoral pastors. Society has to protect itself from lying, greedy, and immoral people because morality is what keeps society worth living in. Already the USA is becoming horrible to live in for too many of its people. It is horribly divided between two tribes, one beguiled by greed and immorality while imagining they are Christians. Pastors like Cornell pander to this ignorance for their own aggrandizement. Cornell is a Christian who loves people so much that he believes in one of the most primitive forms of law there is—an eye for an eye—the savage principle that is enshrined in Sharia Law. Do the pastor’s congregation realize it.

Tudor Parfitt is a London University Hebrew scholar who likes to write astonishingly unscholarly potboilers about the myths of the Jewish scriptures. The reason they are unscholarly is that they pretend that the Jewish myths are real so that he can gad around the world solving alleged mysteries like this one—“Where is the Lost Ark of the Covenant?”. The real mystery is why does everyone think the old Jewish folk tales, like this one about the Ark of the Covenant, are somehow true when other ancient folk tales from the Grendel to Tiamat, or the Midas touch to the Elixir of Life, are accepted as the myths that they are. Children of all ages like mystery and fantasy, but scholars are not expected, these days, simply to accept tales like these as being true uncritically, and even to write books about their phony wild goose chasing scholarship supposedly in search of non-existent mysteries often aimed at misleading the general public to part with their hard earned cash. For such is the “Lost” Ark of the Covenant.

The Christian and Jewish scriptures are full of utterly impossible tales—donkeys and burning bushes that talk, rivers and even seas that open up to let the Chosen People pass them dryshod, storms being quelled, and even people who come back from the dead!—yet are believed because they have been given—by no one who knows—the caché of being written by God Himself. The well known amateur encyclopedia on the internet, Wikipedia, in its article on the Ark of the Covenant, complains that “this article needs attention from an expert on the subject”.

Professor Parfitt, the Indiana Jones of London University’s SOAS, can, perhaps, claim to be more of an expert than those of us who only comprehend English. For he purports to be an expert in Hebrew and so can read the actual Hebrew originals, if, indeed, they were originally in Hebrew. Yet this is an ideal subject for an amateur encyclopedist because there is only one source of information about the Ark of the Covenant and everyone has access to it. It is the Jewish bible. There are no contemporary references to the Ark outside of the Jewish scriptures. In fact, there are no references to most of the content of the Jewish scriptures outside of their own scope.

Over a hundred years ago, the higher critics of the bible realized that there were several authors with their own characteristsic in the early parts of the Torah. In one called J because God is most commonly called Yehouah (Jahweh) the Ark is hardly important, whereas in a parallel series of passages called E because God is most commonly called Elohim, the Ark has an important role. The two sets of passages are reconciled with the hypothesis that essentially the same myths were told by two sets of people, some of whom called God Yehouah while the others called God El. This division matches the bible in that the people chosen by God lived in two separate kingdoms in the biblical myth, the northern one, Israel, at some stage calling God El, while the southern one, Judah, calling God Yehouah.

In fact, there is little independent evidence of Judah until Israel was on the verge of destruction, so it seems that Israel was actually the only country involved for most of the period of independence of the Israelites, Judah being set up by the Assyrians as a puppet breakaway to destabilize Israel prior to annexation, rather as the USA today favors “rebel” governments to destabilize modern states whose governments they do not like.

More probably, the earliest colonists sent into Judah by the Persians, the ones who failed to set up a suitable state, worshipped El and had no central sanctuary, but instead had a movable one—the Ark of the Covenant—which travelled in procession from Shiloh to Shechem to Jerusalem and other local centers with the intention of centralizing worship on the Canaanite high god, El, but rivalry and dissension disunited the state. Then, in the fifth century, the Persians sent in a determinhed body of colonists expressly to set up a united temple state for Jews, worshippers of the god, Yehouah, centered on Jerusalem. The older—failed tradition of the movable Ark dedicated to El was incorporated into the newer myths devised to unite the people of the new state.

By the time that the temple state of Jerusalem was set up, the Ark was already history, had probably already been destroyed in the inter cultic violence that had gone before, but which was mythically placed in the inner sanctum of the temple to establish continuity and preserve unity between Elohists and Yehouists. So, in the Jewish myths the Ark plays no part after the time of Solomon, when it was placed in the Temple. While the Ark figures in Deuteronomy, the book of the law brought by Ezra, a Persian chancellery minister, that was mythologized as the law of Moses, and in the later priestly legislation, devised to benefit the temple as a cash cow, it did not actually exist. The Holy of Holies of the temple was allegedly empty. And, indeed, the Ark never appeared among the treasures of the so-called “second temple”, certainly in actuality the first temple to Yehouah. The victorious Romans took away the treasure of the Jewish temple but no Ark was among it. Biblicists—not “historians” as they are often called by other biblicists— have decided that the Ark was destroyed or captured by Babylonian when Jerusalem fell in 586 BC. It simply shows how they patch the Jewish myths to hide the rips in the fabric, the gaps and incoherence of “sacred history”.

Critics of the bible, from the close examination of the text called higher criticism, have concluded that many of the present biblical stories were rewritten long after the originals. Thus they might say the tales about the Ark were set down “long after the Exodus”. But the Exodus itself is a late addition to the biblical corpus. Why otherwise are Jews in the bible never called Moses? It is simply because Moses was invented almost at the end of the cycle of mythicization that yielded the Jewish scriptures, probably only in and after the second century BC, and perhaps then only in Greek initially.

Who was responsible? it was the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt who were collecting the great Alexandrine library. They it was who first wrote the scripture in essentially the form we have it today. The earlier, Persian historical tale about the Ark as a mobile sanctuary preceding the establishment of the temple state expanded, the Ark being described as one of the similar shrines known in Egypt, and therefore suitable for the story they invented of the Israelites being products of Egyptian culture. Sacred processions involving Arks, boats, or mobile shrines were popular among the Egyptians, and are illustrated on the walls of temples and described even in the Rosetta stone. The Ptolemaic Egyptian priests who rewrote the bible in the third century added a deal of Egyptian flavoring to support their propaganda that the Jews were once Egyptians. It has been believed ever since.

Anyway, the “scholarship” of professor Parfitt led him to conclude that the Biblical Ark of the Covenant was some sort of weapon of mass destruction which was simultaneously a musical instrument—a drum, an astonishing hybrid.

Parfitt follows a trail from Palestine to Yemen to East Africa and eventually to Zimbabwe trying to find this WMD. He found an African tribe called the Lemba who have among their traditions some, such as circumcision, and some Semitic sounding names. Well, of course, they must be one of the lost tribes of Israel! Parfitt has written about the lost tribes of Israel, and often sounds a lot more skeptical than he does in this potboiler, showing, if anything, how cynical he is.

Well, this tribe has a legend that they came from a distant city called Senna. They travelled by boat to east Africa founded a city of the same name, then gradually moved inland to Zimbabwe. Curiously, the migrants were all male, so by breeding with African women, they have ended up loooking African, but have retained some of their Jewish culture, for these men were Jewish priests, Kohanim, apparently expelled from the Yemen. At one time, the Yemenis took to Judaism as their official religion, and retained it for 200 or so years before the Moslems took over. So, the Lembas could conceivably have come from Yemen originally.

Now, the male Y chromosome obviously cannot belong to a woman. In like fashion, the Kohanim were necessarily male. So any genes in the Y chromosome that are characteristic of the Kohanim would pass down the male line and can be seen still. Tests of the Lembas show that many of them do indeed have a set of genes characteristic of many Jews bearing the name Cohen or its cognates. Thus Parfitt and his scientific co-workers have shown that the legend of the origin of the Lemba is feasible.

It is not certain though. Many Cohens do not have the supposed characteristic genes and some are not Jews! And any male that had the genes would pass them on to their male offspring. Moreover, the Canaanites themselves were believed by the ancients to have originated in Africa, so some Jews might have had the genes from their African origins. Supposed aspects of Jewish culture, like circumcision, could have been adopted from contacts with Moslems, or even ancient Egyptians, and Semitic names could have come from contacts with Arabic Moslems too.

What, though, of the Ark of the Covenant? Needless to say, Parfitt finds it in a museum in Harare as an unspectacular exhibit. It is a drum, not a boat or a box, but a musical instrument of a sort, and it is damaged! The damage shows it was a WMD! Seriously! Carbon dating, however, showed it was made of wood that was only 700 years old, not the necessary 3,200 years for the Mosaic Ark. Well, naturally a drum that was a WMD, could not have lasted all that long, so when it was used in warfare, it had to be replaced, but always by incorporating a core of the older one.

Maybe Parfitt’s novelistic scholarship can be justified as an innocent way of earning a crust, but it hardly rests easily with any claims he has to being genuinely scholarly. Pseudohistorians can get away with it because readers accept they have no real pretensions at scholarship. They are indeed closer to novelists, exploring the fringes of history and psychology via speculative fiction. Parfitt’s book has been admired as a combination of travelogue and history, but a novel is a better description. He is the center of attention in his Indiana Jones role. He stereotypes his characters rather as Dennis Wheatley, the author of occult novels half a century ago, did. Wheatley painted the rich as scented, noble and elegant—the typical Englishman—and the poor as scruffy, smelly criminals or halfwits—the typical Welshman, and any other human type unless they are nobility—and Parfitt effectively does the same. He has friends among Zionistic Jews and and anti-Semitic Moslem Arabs, and makes it plain whom he prefers. He has fabulously sexy girlfriends, and has sexy maidens or whores throw themselves at him—for a dollar or two—and he implies he has shady connexions with intelligence services.

It is all very comic strippy, like Indiana J himself, a giggle maybe but infantile as fiction, morally doubtful, and, in itself, quite ignoble in its prejudices. Is it impossible, these days, for scholars to be humble and honest in their devotion to scholarship? Must everyone be a Flashman? Can universities take more care whom they employ, or must we put up with rogues everywhere?

Christianity had certain advantages over most religions of the Roman empire before it. One was its missionary activity—its proselytizing. Pagan religions generally did not proselytize. Members thought to be valuable as members would be approached or recommended, but on an exclusive basis. They had to be morally acceptable, but Christianity was glad to accept those whom the Pagan religions rejected. Novice Pagans were taught by a hierophant what was expected of them and what they were required to know and do as full members. Christian catechumens were similarly instructed, for several years, by a presbyter. With full membership, the mystoi had secret objects revealed to them, and similarly, catechumens had the local Church’s creed revealed to them. The Churches had no united creed until after the Nicene Council, and it was an unpopular move among some bishops to remove its secrecy before catechumens had been instructed correctly.

Not all Pagans followed a religion. Also popular, especially among intellectuals, were the philosophies that offered a world outlook like Stoicism, Epicureanism and Neoplatonism, each of which offered codes of morals and methods of pursuing virtue. Even so, some philosophies had religions associated with them like the Pythagoreans whose religion, Orphism, was to purify the mind, but which also had expiatory rites like the eastern mysteries. So some Pagans sought membership of religions by living lives acceptable to their gods, while others, like the noble emperor, Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic, sought virtue by living a life of philosophical morality.

Christians had a different approach to morality. Its members did not have to be virtuous to become Christians, but instead had to stop being a sinner, and thereby enter communion with God. By rejecting sin—crimes against the will of God—Christianity aimed to make morality central by vigorously preaching sinlessness, with the open threat that sinfulness means the withdrawal of the Holy Communion, and the permanent loss of the afterlife reward of perpetual bliss with God.

Christians’ motives for virtue, despite their modern obsession with free will, was not a fair choice, as it was for Pagans, it was coercion. The Christian God of love was a mask for the wrath and jealousy of a more basic, cruel and primitive Old Testament God. The misery of this life was to be compensated—for the compliant Christian—by an eternal life of bliss, but only when the convert had succeeded in pleasing God. Christ had explained how strict the rules were. The least sin could mean the loss of the eternally blissful life. It was much easier to miss out on the reward than it was to receive it.

Not only that, though. Although the Revelation of John is clear that consignment to the fires of hell constituted a rapid final and permanent death for the sinner, the idea of a never ending torture without death in perpetual flames was a more effective way of ensuring compliance and obedience among the considerable riff-raff that comprised much of early Christianity. The enormity of the consequences of even minor sins was driven into the poor people and slaves who had become Christians in the hope of life offering them something more than constant suffering in their tortured lives. It proved to be a powerful incentive to conform with the rules of the Church, long before anything certain was known about psychology.

W E H Lecky summarized the difference in approaches of Pagans and Christians:

The eye of the Pagan philosopher was ever fixed upon virtue, the eye of the Christian teacher upon sin. The first sought to amend men by extolling the beauty of holiness, the second by awakening the sentiment of remorse.

A History of European Morals

The Christian negative approach has been and still is, as Christians like to boast, sometimes succesful in bringing those who are thoroughly depraved and apparently impossible to reform to such a state of guilt and remorse in the face of the fear of Judgement that they have broken down and promised to abandon their objectionable behavior. The trouble is that the cure is based on promises that are so far from being verifiable as to be opportunistic lies. The Christian seeks to avoid sin in the hope of an eternal reward by living a life of lies.

Moreover, to control the whole of the membership of the Church, the clergy had to maintain that sinfulness was the norm for all human beings by Original Sin—so that the utmost self sacrifice for others could not absolve even the best human being from the need for clerical intervention via the application of the magical sacraments which soon became as essential as or even more essential than sinlessness or repentance for the sinner to qualify for the ultimate reward.

Humanity whose nature and basic instincts are to be concerned for the welfare of other human beings—and even animals—was denounced by Christians as perpetually depraved and sinful unless immunized by the magic and mumbo jumbo of the mass.

Murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.

S Cyprian (d 258 AD), Epistle to Donatus

More evidence, should it be needed, that our Christian leaders know so little about Christian morality that they can have no claim to be Christian. Bush and Obama in the US, and Blair, Brown, and now Cameron, in the UK, have all “committed wholesale” murder and perpetrated “cruelty on a grand scale”, apparently believing they are entitled to do it with impunity because it is virtuous in the eyes of God. This Christian saint, who presided over seven Church Synods, so must have known something about Christian moral dogma, begs to differ from today’s smug and mendacious paragons.

Is it any wonder that the Christian nations throughout history have been so monstrously callous, aggressive and warlike—even though Christ was, according to the gospels, not at all aggressive, rejecting swords, refusing to retaliate and rebuking a disciple who did—when the teaching of the man Christians believe to be God Himself are distorted into their opposite. S Paul is considered by most Christians to be the author of Ephesians, and we read at Ephesians 6:11 that we must “put on the whole armour of God”. Now, in defence of Paul, even a non-Christian can see that this is a metaphor not to be taken literally, but the trouble is that Christian priests and pastors are only too ready to let their flocks of Christian sheep believe otherwise.

Not all though. In a sermon, the Reverend Jane Florence, First United Methodist Church, Omaha is reported as having said:

I’ve cringed to see children’s Sunday school classes take this passage quite literally by having children cut out kid sized paper swords, shields, breastplates and boots of military apparel. They then decorate the cutouts with crayons and tape the pieces to their pint-sized bodies while singing songs about “marching in the infantry, riding in the cavalry, shooting the artillery” and shouting the chorus, “’cause I’m in the Lord’s army”.

Indeed the hymn, Onward Christian Soldiers by S Baring Gould, remains popular still. How can a man who considered swords in a bad light possibly want his followers to imagine themselves as soldiers, to the extent that they dress up their children in Christian soldier suits? The Reverend Jane continues:

The nonviolent message that Jesus taught about resisting social and political oppression became the battle cry for just the opposite.

This Methodist minister is right to maintain that modern Christians have in general lost the metaphorical aspect of this passage and similar passages, so the girding on of swords and armour ought not translate today into indiscriminate use of “AK-47 assault rifles, explosive tennis shoes or smart bombs”. The armour is spiritual armour, as the passage makes utterly clear, and the battle is a spiritual battle, not a material one.

Unfortunately the metaphor is all the more confused because Paul was here being at his most Gnostic, and Christians early on rejected Gnosticism as a heresy. It was, though, already too late to reject Paul whose distortions of Christ’s message filled much of the New Testament. Paul speaks of “the rulers of the darkness of this world”, as the King James’s Version has it, making it sound as if Christians have a duty to take out the evil living rulers of this world in Christ’s name!

Yet, in the very same verse, the sense is repeated as “spiritual wickedness in heavenly places”. The confusion is that the belief understood here is that the ruler of this world is the Devil Himself, not God, so the rulers of the darkness of this world are the Devil and his attendant demons. John 14:30 refers to “the prince of this world”, and the temptation of Christ suggests the same when the Devil offers Christ all the kingdoms of the world, but he refuses the offer (Mt 4:8-9). Gnostic duality existed at the very root of Christianity, but Christians should have nothing to do with it, if the early tradition is to be accepted.

Zoroastrianism was clearer. Anyone had responsibility for one spiritual fight only—one’s own. It was your own personal fight to preserve your life against wickedness. If everyone won that single battle, the world would be good. Nevertheless, the same is true of Christianity, for it derived much of its teaching from the Zoroastrianism that preceded it. To presume you are God and make judgements on others meant you had lost your personal war against wickedness—it was the sin of hubris, pride. Christians have to be humble, and humility is not swanning around claiming to be already saved, when that is another judgement to be made by God.

The Christian is not allowed to correct faults in others until he has corrected his own faults—they must not try to remove a mote from a neighbor’s eye when they have a plank in their own. In short, how can they pick out tiny faults in other people when they cannot see clearly through the huge faults they have themselves? To think otherwise is hubris.

Nor must Christians judge—for the same reason: “The one among you without sin, let him cast the first stone”. Judgement is God’s job, and if anyone should judge others adversely, then God will judge them adversely. It all cautions Christians that their battle is a personal one, and that is hard enough for anyone to have to concentrate upon without imagining that they can tell others what they ought to do.

All of this is what Christians should believe, because the teaching of the Christian God is a clear and easily comprehended morality that even a child can follow. Even an atheist can follow it! Why then cannot Christians? It is what is necessary for society to thrive, and has evolved as a moral instinct for that reason. Jeremiah said the covenant of God was to be written in anyone’s heart—it is inborn into all of us that are fully human, and when we try we can feel it there.

Why then are so many Christians apparently not fully human? And not just Christians. It is because they have allowed their clergy, their priests and pastors, to dictate for their own benefit and that of imperialistic churches, what morality is, rather than encouraging them to use their instinct.

To teach that morality means sexual abstinence is absurd. That is a simple choice. To accept and even endorse that one man should seek to put down or exploit another as capitalism requires is against Christian teaching because it is counter instinctual. To promote greed as a human virtue suits the capitalist but ought not to suit any Christian. Christ favored the poor!

A healthy society requires us to rely on—and therefore trust—the honesty, goodwill and empathy of our neighbors. Christ called it love!