This is a sermon I gave Sunday April 28 at a service held at the encampment for Gaza at Princeton University. The service was organized by students from Princeton Theological Seminary.
By Chris Hedges
In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.
These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits—a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. I set my life by the standards they set.
You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Iganacio Ellacuria, who was gunned down by the death squads in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.
To resist radical evil, as you are doing, is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.
Ruling institutions — the state, the press, the church, the courts, universities — mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. All of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. This was true during the genocide we committed against native Americans, slavery, the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the fight against the apartheid regime of South Africa. The most courageous are purged and turned into pariahs.
All institutions, including the church, the theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make.
The theologian James Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”
Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”
Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what their heart expected.”
This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you will be treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.
The radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan — who was sentenced to three years in a federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam — told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.
I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.
James Baldwin, the son of a preacher and briefly a preacher himself, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses of worship.
This is not to say that the church does not exist. This is not to say that I reject the church. On the contrary. The church today is not located in the cavernous, and largely empty houses of worship, but here, with you, with those who demand justice, those whose unofficial credo is the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God. Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus, if he lived in contemporary society, would be undocumented. He was not a Roman citizen. He lived without rights, under Roman occupation. Jesus was a person of color. The Romans were white. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets, lock them up in cages or slaughter them in Gaza. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.
The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.
There is nothing easy about faith. It demands we smash the idols that enslave us. It demands we die to the world. It demands self-sacrifice. It demands resistance. It calls us to see ourselves in the wretched of the earth. It separates us from all that is familiar. It knows that once we feel the suffering of others, we will act.
“But what of the price of peace?” Berrigan asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood.”
“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
Bearing the cross is not about the pursuit of happiness. It does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress. It is not about achieving status, wealth, celebrity or power. It entails sacrifice. It is about our neighbor. The organs of state security monitor and harass you. They amass huge files on your activities. They disrupt your life.
Why am I here today with you? I am here because I have tried, however imperfectly, to live by the radical message of the Gospel. I am here because I know that it is not what we say or profess but what we do. I am here because I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same.
These men and women, who may not profess what I profess or believe what I believe, are my brothers and sisters. And I stand with them honoring and respecting our differences and finding hope and strength and love in our common commitment. At times like these I hear the voices of the saints who went before us. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who announced that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” Or Henry David Thoreau, who told us we should be men and women first and subjects afterward, that we should cultivate a respect not for the law but for what is right. And Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” And the great 19th century populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” And General Smedley Bulter, who said that after 33 years and four months in the Marine Corps he had come to understand that he had been nothing more than a gangster for capitalism, making Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba safe for banks and pacifying the Dominican Republic for sugar companies. War, he said, is a racket in which subjugated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed. Or Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Rabbi Heschel, who when he was criticized for marching with Martin Luther King on the Sabbath in Selma answered: “I pray with my feet” and who quoted Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.” And Rosa Parks, who defied the segregated bus system and said “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” And Philip Berrigan, who said: “If enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.” And Martin Luther King, who said: “On some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take a stand because it is right.”
Where were you when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there to halt the genocide of Native Americans? Were you there when Sitting Bull died on the cross? Were you there to halt the enslavement of African-Americans? Were you there to halt the mobs that terrorized black men, women and even children with lynching during Jim Crow? Were you there when they persecuted union organizers and Joe Hill died on the cross? Were you there to halt the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II? Were you there to halt Bull Connor’s dogs as they were unleashed on civil rights marchers in Birmingham? Were you there when Martin Luther King died upon the cross? Were you there when Malcolm X died on the cross? Were you there to halt the hate crimes, discrimination and violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers and those who are transgender? Were you there when Matthew Shepard died on the cross? Were you there to halt the abuse and at times enslavement of workers in the farmlands of this country? Were you there to halt the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese during the war in Vietnam or hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan? Were you there to halt the genocide in Gaza? Were you there when they crucified Refaat Alareer on the cross?
Where were you when they crucified my Lord?
I know where I was.
Here.
With you.
Amen.
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Comments
7 responses to “Sermon for Gaza”
It’s critical to understand that these beautiful and uplifting anti-genocide protests were seeing today are extremely different from the Soros ID politics obsessed BLM riots and violent mayhem of 2020.
With the BLM chaos and vandalism, it was obvious that that culture war trip had the unvarnished support and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the pro-Israel dominated Wall Street and corporate America. Even institutions of the federal government’s “deep state” supported BLM to the hilt. We saw millionaire investment bankers, Congresspersons, and thousands of cops literally genuflecting as monuments were destroyed and cities ablaze.
With today’s amazing and heartening anti-genocide demonstrations, we witness respected professors harshly tossed to the ground by heavy handed police, we see pleasant students in tents uprooted and forced to flee, we see major corporate employers threatening the students with a McCarthyite employment blacklist.
During BLM the rioters were allowed to torch cities and businesses with virtual impunity. During these pro-Palestine protests one’s barely allowed to say “from the river to the sea” without the threat of possible eviction or unemployment hovering in the background.
Nice ‘sermon’ from Mr. Hedges, who, as most of us likely know, is an ordained Christian minister. His sermon seems to be the transcript of an address he’s given to some group of ‘resistors’, but it’s a shame that group is not named. Considering that he is publishing this against the backdrop of the current resistance movement on American college campuses, perhaps we might presume that his sermon was addressed to an assembly of such people?
I am not a Christian, per se, though I do revere Christ’s teachings, and have read, with reasonable care, the Four Gospels of the Christian section of the Bible, which are called the New Testament, to separate them from the Jewish segment of the Bible, called, of course, the Old Testament.
Mr. Hedges is grossly inaccurate when he writes:
“Jesus, if he lived in contemporary society, would be undocumented. He was not a Roman citizen. He lived without rights, under Roman occupation. Jesus was a person of color. The Romans were white. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets, lock them up in cages or slaughter them in Gaza. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.”
He rather egregiously misunderstands the historical role the Romans played in the Western World at that time, which, under Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and designated heir, Octavian, who became known as ‘Augustus’, was the beginning of an extended period of peace and prosperity throughout the region over which the Romans held administrative power, by means of conquest, due to their superior military technology. This period of peace and prosperity became known, of course, as the Pax Romana.
The Romans bore no animus against “people of color”. The Romans had brought most of Europe under their control as well, having defeated the myriad warlike tribes of European Caucasians, ending their habitual bloody territorial warfare. In all the regions that Rome subdued under its administrative control, the lives of the people improved dramatically over the lives they had lived before the Romans conquered them.
The Romans did not in any way target people of color. It was rather just true that their Mediterranean centered Empire included both white people to the north, who the Roman’s subjected, as well as people of color in Northern Africa and into West Asia. In all regions that Rome conquered, whether inhabited by people of color or by white people, those people’s lives immediately improved during this period. With the deadly miseries and suffering caused by constant warfare abated by Roman control, life became much improved, and MUCH more prosperous for those native peoples, both white and darker skinned.
Jesus was not ‘undocumented’. That assertion is patently ridiculous. Jesus was not, of course, a Roman citizen, but he was born, of course, in Bethlehem, and raised in Nazareth. He was a native citizen of the Roman province of Judea. He was doubtless duly listed in the census roles, which the Jewish authorities themselves kept very carefully, as a basis for their collection of taxes. He was thus a ‘documented’ citizen of Judea.
The Romans did NOT “peddle” any version of “white supremacy”, As many white people, perhaps more, lived under their administrative authority as people of color. Once they subdued people under their authority, the Romans were noted for their application of justice and fairness among the people they ruled over.
Jesus was arrested and prosecuted not by the Romans, but by the Jewish Sanhedrin, which were the highest authorities, a combination of secular and religious authorities, in the theocratic Jewish society.
Jesus DID have rights, granted under Roman authority, as clearly evidenced by the fact that the Sanhedrin lacked the authority to summarily execute him themselves, as they likely would have had they had that authority. Jesus had the legal ‘RIGHT’, under Roman administration of the law, however, to a trial before the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate.
The Sanhedrin prosecuted Jesus before Pilate. Pilate actually defended Jesus, saying he saw no way that Jesus had violated any Roman law, and therefore he did not deserve to be executed. But the Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin, forcefully insisted that Jesus must be executed. They made certain threats about the social unrest that could ensue if their authority was abrogated, and thus Pilate only very reluctantly acceded to the Sanhedrin’s demands, and condemned Jesus to be executed.
The Romans of that period did NOT fear “the Christian Gospel”, which at that time they had barely even heard of, and had little to no awareness of or concern about. It was the Sanhedrin, it was the Jewish theocratic authorities, that greatly feared “the Christian Gospel”, and prosecuted Jesus as a ‘insurrectionist’ against THEM. That’s why the Jewish Authorities dragged Jesus to stand trial before the Roman Governor, and prosecuted Jesus so hatefully, that despite defending Jesus, Pilate agreed to show deference to the Jewish Sanhedrin by sentencing Jesus to be executed.
I think Mr. Hedges, our good ordained Christian minister, would do well to study up on the actual Gospels. All four, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John, all give a similar account. It was his fellow Jews who arrested and prosecuted Jesus, then put pressure on the Roman Governor Pilate to reluctantly condemn him.
To temper his obvious zeal for pandering before the Woke Cult crowd, Minister Hedges would do well to ‘study up’ on the Pax Romana, initiated under Augustus, and to especially ‘study up’ on the Christian Gospels themselves.
The stark ignorance he displays here, the ignorance of the actual facts, as far as we know them from reading the Four Gospels, and as far as we know the history of that period, is shocking, (to say the least).
The Romans of that period were known for the ‘justice’ with which they governed the people they had conquered, greatly improving those people’s lives, from the lives they had led beforehand. The Romans of that period were NOT “white supremacists”. Yes, they were themselves Caucasians, but they were ‘equal opportunity’ conquerors of the constantly warring tribes, both among white people to the north, and among the people of color around the Mediterranean Rim, that characterized human ‘civilization’ at that time.
In the later centuries of the Roman Empire, social decadence did come to characterize Roman rule, and Christians did begin to gain power in resistance, until eventually, the Roman Emperor Constantine actually converted to Christianity, circa 312 AD, as a means of securing the favor of the Empire’s people, among whom the new Christian religion had widely spread. By that time the Empire had split, and its primary capital was no longer in Rome, when Constantine himself moved it to Istanbul, which he renamed “Constantinople”.
Anyway… Many thanks to Minister Hedges for his Woke Sermon… despite the shocking ignorance he displays, in order to pander before Woke Cult ideology.
As much as we all welcome and celebrate this new ‘movement’ among American students, the fact that so many of them are adherents to the Woke Cult is likely going to prevent this movement from becoming the vanguard of something far more impactful. The students themselves seem to be reluctant to understand that they are doing much more than merely protesting a government policy, and the policies of their schools. They are engaging in an open ‘revolt’ against the authority of the Jewish-dominated Tyrants who have captured our nation under their raw fascist power.
If they are resolute in their resistance, their consciousness will hopefully expand quickly, as the fascist police state forces of the Jewish-dominated Ruling Tyrants are set upon them.
The Oil Barons would not have the power to unleash this coast to coast repression on these students. If they were climate activists, this degree of repression could not take place.
The Jewish faction of the Ruling Tyrants do not rule over us alone, but they are by FAR the dominant faction. No other faction has the raw power to unleash the coast to coast repression to be set upon these courageous young students.
The Jews are holding Americans by the neck. Americans are only allowed to breath, on university campuses at least. Jews are fighting to do the same for the rest of the world. Any opposition to the ongoing Palestinians Genocide is a taboo. Israel has killed over 37,000 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children (not counting the mass graves where people buried alive) and wounded more than 78,000 – in what is certainly the worst televised mass murder of defenceless civilians in human history. Shamefully, most nations are turning blind eye to the Palestinian suffering because they are fearful of the power of the Jews. If the political history of the 1930s and 1940s is true, the Nazis have failed to eradicate the disease.
“To temper his obvious zeal for pandering before the Woke Cult crowd, Minister Hedges would do well to ‘study up’ on the Pax Romana, initiated under Augustus, and to especially ‘study up’ on the Christian Gospels themselves.”
Excellent comment!!! I’m delighted to see you straighten out Minister Hedges with respect to Roman history, which he got dead-wrong! No one could have done it better and you saved me the trouble of taking it on…THANK YOU! Being of Italian descent, I don’t like to see Roman history twisted and mangled to such an extent, especially to curry favor with the so-called “Woke Cult,” which, for many reasons, I truly despise!
“The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The prophet, because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what their heart expected.”
The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich.”
Albert Einstein, whose name has become synonymous with intelligence said –
“If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.”
I cannot speak for Einstein, but I think part of what he was referring to was the fact that the ‘Bible’ is a compilation of writings, not a book, and the doctrines of the HBRW bible cannot be any more accurate than the writers or their sources. Anything that requires complicated rituals, special dress, artifacts or sacrifices is taken from man’s own past pagan practices, and can all be traced back historically, if you have an interest to do so.
Its really the advent of Islam in the Semitic world that masks the fact that the preistly ‘castes’ that are central to the form of OT religious doctrine – ‘Cohen’ / ‘Levite’ – are not in any way original to Judaism. The ‘Kahan’ of Arab pre-Islamic middle east Semitic religions is the same (very profitable) preistly office as a ‘Cohen’, but, unless you know that, most assume that these were specific directions given by ‘God’ to the practitioners of Judaism.
If you go to the foundational HBRW book, it early on makes a (now veiled) reference to the earliest Sumerian King eNMeR.kar, under the mistranslation of NiMRo(d) (‘mighty hunter’), likely because of the intermediary ‘Nimrud’. This is not the only early warning that these are Sumerian stories, because the Land of ‘Shinar’ (Sumer) and Abraham’s emergence as an Amorite inhabitant of ‘Ur’ also confirm this.
This allowed me to climb into the mind of the writer of Genesis when I was a kid, because it tells you something very important – the writer of Genesis had read, and was familiar with the Akkadian (derived from the Sumerian writing system) story of ‘Gilgamesh’. This is because the star of this story written in cuneiform – Gilgamesh – was the son of ‘King Enmer.kar’. By some account, he was the adopted son to the King, which is also important to how the Moses story developed as well.
Genesis was the creation of a similar epic story of the creation, kingship and fall of man into mortality, along a similar path as the cuneiform tale that its author had clearly read/mimicked, and he was seeking to create a tale for his own (kingless) people, who aspired to develop in the manner of the empires of the Sumerian and Akkadian-Semite dynasties.
Until the last century, no one had any knowledge of Sumerian civilization or culture, because it had been extirpated, however it is foundational to the early Old Testament stories, which the Gilgamesh-reading author used to rework and author his HBRW tales.
Cuneiform is much older – by Millennia – than the Phoenician text used to write the early OT, and while we can identify the stories the OT writers reworked to create their own ‘books’, no record of the HBRW bible exists in cuneiform – this means that while HBRW stories can come from cuneiform, early cuneiform stories cannot come from the books incorporated into the HBRW bible.
The HBRW bible stories are – importantly – commonly (and ominously) ‘REVERSALS’ from the lessons we find in their original Sumerian Cuneiform version.
In the Sumerian Garden of Eden, the God Ea/Enki is a mischievous, hungry thief, who is himself cursed for eating the delicious plants growing in the garden, tended by the Lady ‘Ti’ (rib) who among other injuries, heals the rib of cursed God Ea with her healing knowledge.
(The rib is recycled into the HBRW tale of Garden of Eden, in which God uses mans rib to create woman.) In the HBRW version, however, the angry God curses man/woman for eating of the fruit in the garden, and gaining knowledge.
In the Sumerian Cuneiform story of the Tower of Babel, the God of the abyss, Ea/Enki urges man to build him a great temple as brought down from the heavens, which belongs to his father An/Anu. He promises to unite them into one people and one speech, to worship him.
In the HBRW tale, rewritten from the cuneiform account, the God splits man into warring tribes of different speech and seeks to stop them from unifying to build this structure into the heavens.
As the bible infers, some of these stories also take parts of their story line from ancient Egyptian tales as well – The Egyptian story of the Two Brothers, comes from the 19th Dynasty (following the development of the monotheist AhMOSE-descended Ahkenaten 18th dynasty) In the original Egyptian story, the younger brother serves his older brother who treats him like a son – he refuses to be seduced by his older, stronger brothers wife, who then falsely accuses him to her husband –
Egypt – 19th Dynasty –
1)”Strength is great in you, for I see your strength daily.” And she desired to know him as
to know a young man.
2)”And then she seized him, and she said to him, “Come, let us spend an hour lying down. It will be beneficial for you. Then I will make beautiful clothes for you.”
3)When he came to fetch seed for you, he found me sitting alone, and he said to me, ‘Come, let us spend an hour lying down.
HBRW Genesis 39 –
1)Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance.
2)And it came to pass after these things that his master’s wife [e]cast longing eyes on Joseph, and she said, “Lie with me.”
3)He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice.
In the HBRW version, Joseph is portrayed as a slave to a kind owner, and master of the house, who he serves. The Hat Trick – Joseph was known in the later HBRW stories for his ‘beautiful coat’ that evoked jealousy in others, which – as we can see – also had its origin in the Egyptian original tale, in which the promise of making the beautiful clothes for the younger brother was used originally to entice him.
Before I write a full book, I am going to stop now, but the fact that we are brutalising each other and killing children over stolen tales most of which concern what is essentially a powerless, opportunistic god of the underworld, and no one seems to realize this and is happy to go along, is hard for me to understand.
The commandments of Jesus boil down to, love your neighbor as yourself, including those with differing religious practices (Samaritans), and love God. There is not a need to build temples, make intricate ceremonies, icons or sacrifices. This is a true break away from the demands of the preistly class that had ruled mankind, going back through the Sumerians, well into the time of Jesus.
I am inclined to go with Einstein’s assessment, based not only on his own judgement, but on my own two eyes.
“The love that would be annihilated rather than be treacherous has already made death impossible.”
Israel’s a racist state that uses Nazi like tactics against the Palestinians.
Let me repeat that: the Zionist project is racist to the core and extremely Nazi like in its exclusivity, use of violence, and hegemonic designs.
Sincerely,
Drew Hunkins
Madison, WI