Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth- Israel's Claim On Palestine

Started by stromboli, January 01, 2016, 11:04:12 PM

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stromboli

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/03/israeli-scholar-disputes-founding-myth-4/

QuoteTwin myths undergird the claim by Israeli hardliners that they own the land of Palestine: the Biblical stories about the Exodus and the ancient kings of Israel and the claim that the Romans forced the Diaspora of Jews to Europe, a fiction that a brave Israeli scholar exploded, as Morgan Strong reported in 2009.

The founding narrative of the modern State of Israel was born from the words of Moses in the Old Testament, that God ordered the Jewish people to conquer the land of Israel and that it was to be theirs for all time (a promise supposedly given originally to Abraham).

Then, there was the story of the Diaspora â€" that after Jewish uprisings against the Romans in the First and Second centuries A.D., the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and dispersed throughout the Western world. They often were isolated from European populations, suffered persecution, and ultimately were marked for extermination in the Nazi Holocaust.


Finally after centuries of praying for a return to Israel, the Jews achieved this goal by defeating the Arab armies in Palestine and establishing Israel in 1948. This narrative â€" spanning more than three millennia â€" is the singular, elemental and sustaining claim of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation.

But a 2008 book by Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand challenges this narrative, claiming that â€" beyond the religious question of whether God really spoke to Abraham and Moses â€" the Roman-era Diaspora did not happen at all or at least not as commonly understood.

In When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, says the Diaspora was largely a myth â€" that the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later. (Sand’s book was published in English as The Invention of the Jewish People.)

Thus, Sand argues, many of today’s Israelis who emigrated from Europe after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the land. According to Sand’s historical analysis, they are descendents of European converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D.

The descendants of the Khazars then were driven from their native lands by invasion and conquest and â€" through this migration â€" created the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, Sands writes. Similarly, he argues that the Jews of Spain came from the conversion of Berber tribes from northern Africa that later migrated into Europe.

The Zionist Narrative

Sand, himself a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.

However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a national history to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.

The Zionists also invented the idea that Jews living in exile were obligated to return to the Promised Land
, a concept that had been foreign to Judaism, Sand states.

Like almost everything in the Middle East, this scholarship is fraught with powerful religious, historical and political implications. If Sand’s thesis is correct, it would suggest that many of the Palestinian Arabs have a far more substantial claim to the lands of Israel than do many European Jews who arrived there asserting a God-given claim.

Indeed, Sand theorizes that many Jews, who remained in Judea after Roman legions crushed the last uprising in 136 A.D., eventually converted to Christianity or Islam, meaning that the Palestinians who have been crowded into Gaza or concentrated in the West Bank might be direct descendants of Jews from the Roman era.

Despite the political implications of Sand’s book, it has not faced what might be expected: a withering assault from right-wing Israelis. The criticism has focused mostly on Sand’s credentials as an expert on European history, not ancient Middle Eastern history, a point that Sand readily acknowledges.

One critic, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, attacked Sand’s credentials and called Sand’s thesis “baseless,” but disagreed mostly over Sand’s assertion that the Diaspora story was created as an intentional myth by Zionists seeking to fabricate a direct genealogical connection between many of the world’s Jews and Israel.

“Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions,” Bartal wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely. …

“The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews’ exile from their homeland is pure fantasy.”

In other words, Bartal, like some other critics, is not so much disputing Sand’s historical claims about the Diaspora or the origins of Eastern European Jews, as he is contesting Sand’s notion that Zionists concocted a false history for a cynical political purpose.

But there can be no doubt that the story of the Diaspora has played a key role in the founding of Israel and that the appeal of this powerful narrative has helped the Jewish state generate sympathy around the world, especially in the United States.

“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom,” reads the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Reality from Mythology

In January 2009, as the Israeli army bombarded Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel, the world got an ugly glimpse of what can result when historical myths are allowed to drive wedges between people who otherwise might have a great deal in common.

After the conflict ended â€" with some 1,400 Palestinians dead, including many children and other non-combatants â€" the Israeli government investigated alleged war crimes by its army and heard testimony from Israeli troops that extremist Rabbis had proclaimed the invasion a holy war.

The troops said the Rabbis brought them booklets and articles declaring: “We are the Jewish people. We came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

In his book â€" and in an interview with Haaretz about his book â€" Sand challenged this core myth. In the interview, he said:

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land â€" a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country.

“The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

The True Descendants Asked if he was saying that the true descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians, Sand responded:

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents.

“The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-1939], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled.

“Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

Sand argues further that the Jewish people never existed as a “nation race” but were rather an ethnic mix of disparate peoples who adopted the Jewish religion over a great period of time. Sand dismisses the Zionist argument that the Jews were an isolated and seminal ethnic group that was targeted for dispersal by the Romans.

Although ruthless in putting down challenges to their rule, the Romans allowed subjects in their occupied territories a great many freedoms, including freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

Thousands of Jews served in the Roman legions, and there was a sizable Jewish community in Rome itself. Three Jewish descendants of Herod the Great, the Jewish Emperor of Jerusalem, served in the Roman Senate.

Jewish dietary laws were respected under Roman law, as well as the right not to work on the Sabbath. Jewish slaves â€" 1,000 carried to Italy by Emperor Titus after crushing the first Jewish rebellion in 70 A.D. â€" were bought and set free by Jewish families already long settled into Roman society.

After the final Jewish rebellion, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 A.D., historians say the Romans placed restrictions on Jews entering Jerusalem, which caused other areas, such as Galilee in northern Palestine, to become centers of Jewish learning. But there is little or no evidence of a mass forced relocation.

Sand says the Diaspora was originally a Christian myth that depicted the event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

Genetic Evidence

There has been no serious rebuttal to Sand’s book, which has been a bestseller in Israel and Europe. But there were earlier genetic studies attempting to demonstrate an unbroken line of descent among Ashkenazi Jews in Europe from the Hebrew tribes of Israel.

In a genetic study published by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews were compared with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. It found that despite long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.

Although the study also demonstrated that 20 percent of the Ashkenazim carry Eastern European gene markers consistent with the Khazars, the results seemed to show that the Ashkenazim were descended from a common Mid-Eastern population and suggested that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.

However, a monumental genetic study entitled, “The Journey of Man,” undertaken in 2002 by Dr. Spencer Wells, a geneticist from Stanford University, demonstrated that virtually all Europeans males carry the same genetic markers found within the male population of the Middle East on the Y chromosomes.

That is simply because the migration of human beings began in Africa and coursed its way through the Middle East and onward, stretching over many thousands of years. In short, we are all pretty much the same.

Obsessive Delusion


Despite the lack of conclusive scientific or historical evidence, the Diaspora narrative proved to be a compelling story, much like the Biblical rendition of the Exodus from Egypt, which historians and archeologists also have questioned in recent years.

It is certainly true that all nations use myths and legend for sustenance; some tales are based on fact, others are convenient self-serving contrivances. However, when myth and legend argue for excess, when they demand a racial, ethnic or religious purity to the exclusion of others â€" so that some prophecy can be fulfilled or some national goal achieved â€" reason and justice can give way to extremism and cruelty.

The motive for creating the state of Israel was to provide respite for the Jews of Europe after World War II, but that worthy cause has now been contorted into an obsessive delusion about an Israeli right to mistreat and persecute Palestinians.

When right-wing Israeli Rabbis speak of driving non-Jews out of the land that God supposedly gave to the Israelites and their descendants, these Rabbis may be speaking with full faith, but faith is by definition an unshakable belief in something that taken by itself cannot be proven.

This faith â€" or delusion â€" also is drawing in the rest of the world. The bloody war in Iraq was an appendage to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as is the dangerous rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region.

There is also now the irony that modern Israel was established by Jews of European origin, many of whom may be ethnically unconnected to Palestine. Another cruel aspect of this irony is that the descendants of the ancient Israelites may include many Palestinians, who are genetically indistinct from the Sephardic Jews who were, like the Palestinians, original and indigenous inhabitants of this ancient land.

Yasir Arafat told me quite often that the Israelis are really cousins of the Palestinians. He may have been wrong; they are more likely brothers and sisters.


Talk about throwing gasoline on the fire. Exodus and the diaspora effectively bracket the claims made by Israelis to Israel. Exodus has long been considered to be mythical and historic evidence indicates that Judaism grew up in ancient Canaan; after the Babylonian captivity, a monotheistic religion grew out of a polytheistic one.

By the same token, the diaspora/scattering of the Jews and being driven from Palestine is a key element in their claim to Israel. The fact that genetic evidence shows the current population to be of largely European descent, versus any claim by lineage of Jewish DNA inherited from middle east sources, certainly puts a damper on any right to the land claims.

I suspect this will get buried rather than promoted, because it is, to say the least, highly controversial.

Hakurei Reimu

Hebrew is semitic, same as Egyptian and Arabic. I'm not actually surprised.
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stromboli

Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on January 02, 2016, 12:08:41 AM
Hebrew is semitic, same as Egyptian and Arabic. I'm not actually surprised.

Me neither. The big revelation to me is not the European vs Semitic lineage, but as the Diaspora being a fiction. It makes sense when it is pointed out. Never really thought about it before. So now we are back to tribes fighting tribes- one Semitic tribe fighting another Semitic tribe. The lols are endless.

Baruch

National or ethnic foundation myths ... as are religious foundation myths ... are myths.  If history is propaganda (with a few facts thrown in for verisimilitude) then what are myths?  Myths are closer to fairy tales or fantasy.  Archeology tells the truth on the ground, but it is mostly mute.  Fact is, in the late 2nd millennium BCE ... there was a change of domestic culture in the Palestine hill country.  But it wasn't monotheistic, and it did avoid pork.  But avoiding pork is a common Semitic practice ... these could be Arabs instead of Hebrews ... and I suspect back then, that distinction didn't matter.  And part of the population could have been Canaanites converted to a more desert way of life (Canaanites like Egyptians ate pork).

So of course, based on this general principle ... the national foundation myth of ancient Israel, or modern Israel, are both false.  We simply don't know the truth (aside from archeology).  The idea of ethnicity, given the general lack of confirming genetic evidence (except in the isolated case of kohens (Jewish priests) is also mythological.  This is not to say that the majority of modern Jews hail from Kazaria ... we simply don't know.  And religious foundation myths are the most fairy-tale like stories we tell ourselves.

Of course this applies to Arabs, Muslims, Americans, Mormons etc ... basically everyone.  People tell stories.  Why do we tell the particular stories we do?  Also in economics ... with the Horatio Alger or Adam Smith bullshit.  Since I am freethinking (and thus mostly free from propaganda) this study is not news to me.

As far as land claims go, these are always based on military power.  And if your military power fades (as it usually did for people living in between Iraq and Egypt) ... you get booted out.  Nobody has any legitimate claim to any land at all, unless you accept theft and violence as your primary principle.  And I do ... I don't have to be a SJW unless I want to, and I choose not to, just as I choose not to be a feminist or other Left liberal.

My connection with Jewish culture is primarily religious rather than national or ethnic or genetic (I may have a Jewish ancestor coming to the US 200 years ago).  And if I had access to absolute power, I could go take some country from someone else, and kill anyone trying to stop me ... just like my American ancestors did.  Just like the modern Israelis did.  Just like the Arabs did before them.  And of course Native American tribes didn't start where they ended up when Columbus arrived ... Native Americans have their own bullshit narrative too ... Native Americans enjoyed killing and displacing their own tribes for over 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived.

Freethinking = take everything you are told as bullshit, unless someone can produce a really good argument (which mostly won't happen).  And learn to enjoy the bullshit, or be sad all the time.
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Baruch

Here is the best current study of the archeology and history of early Judaism ... new stuff will cause a rewrite as it happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW9x-Z3u2Lo

But political archeology is what happens over the last 150 years.  Biblical archeology is a Christian view.  Anti-archeology is the Palestinian/Muslim view.  Rabbinic/Zionist propaganda is the Jewish view.  Rabbinic/Zionist Jews for instance are indifferent to archeology, unless it reinforces their ideology ... which is why they didn't care about the Dead Sea scrolls ... because most of that material doesn't support the rabbinic/Zionist position.  Muslims as a practice, eliminate all history and culture and language ... of anyone they conquer.  History etc restarts from year zero when they take over ... it is as if you have always been Arab, always have been Muslim ... they are like Borg.  So no, the Palestinians are probably more Jewish than Arab biologically speaking, they are Am HaAretz from Biblical times ... who were mostly not Hebrew, but Canaanite etc.  Religiously, the Samaritans are closer to Mosaic religion than almost any modern Jew, but they are not counted as Jewish in spite of that.  It is all politics, old and new.
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Hydra009

QuoteSand argues further that the Jewish people never existed as a “nation race” but were rather an ethnic mix of disparate peoples who adopted the Jewish religion over a great period of time. Sand dismisses the Zionist argument that the Jews were an isolated and seminal ethnic group that was targeted for dispersal by the Romans.

Although ruthless in putting down challenges to their rule, the Romans allowed subjects in their occupied territories a great many freedoms, including freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

Thousands of Jews served in the Roman legions, and there was a sizable Jewish community in Rome itself. Three Jewish descendants of Herod the Great, the Jewish Emperor of Jerusalem, served in the Roman Senate.

Jewish dietary laws were respected under Roman law, as well as the right not to work on the Sabbath. Jewish slaves â€" 1,000 carried to Italy by Emperor Titus after crushing the first Jewish rebellion in 70 A.D. â€" were bought and set free by Jewish families already long settled into Roman society.

After the final Jewish rebellion, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 A.D., historians say the Romans placed restrictions on Jews entering Jerusalem, which caused other areas, such as Galilee in northern Palestine, to become centers of Jewish learning. But there is little or no evidence of a mass forced relocation.
I'm reading a pretty massive book about Roman history right now and there's no mention of a Jewish diaspora from Roman territory.  A souring of relations and a couple revolts that got put down, but no mass relocation.  Meanwhile, wiki has stuff like this alleging "mass execution of Judean population and diaspora of survivors".  Strange.

Baruch

Not strange ... Wiki isn't up to date, and is political.  Just read the bios of the Bush family ;-)

The Roman impact was limited ... initially no Jews in Jerusalem (renamed Aelia Capitolina) after 135 CE.  But the massacre of revolting Jewish folks ... was what Romans did to anyone who revolted.  The Romans weren't diplomatic or pacifist.  Of course there were already Jews outside of Palestine in Roman times ... because of Greek trade, and Babylonian trade.  In the Glastonbury mythology, there were Jews in S Britain not long after the Roman troops.  The two great trading networks were by language ... Greek in the West, and Aramaic in the East.  And Hellenized Jews knew both languages, which gave them special advantages in trade.  There would have been Jewish traders in the 2nd century CE, from Britain all the way to S India.  The initial Greek trade route was from Alexandria ... down the Red Sea, down E Africa, across S Arabia and over to S India.  Eventually the Arabs took over the Greek routes.  The land route from Antioch Syria to the Pakistan was controlled by unfriendly Persians.
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josephpalazzo

Just about every ethnic culture is based on mythology. So this is no surprise.

drunkenshoe

Quote from: stromboli on January 01, 2016, 11:04:12 PM
Exodus has long been considered to be mythical and historic evidence indicates that Judaism grew up in ancient Canaan; after the Babylonian captivity, a monotheistic religion grew out of a polytheistic one.

I think another related two points to all this are that the relatively new archeological evidence in Egypt about the life style of the builders which are supposedly accpeted as Jewish slaves.

1. Western archeologists think that all those astonishing amout of monuments weren't actually built by slave power contrary to the common belief.

They have found special sites built close to monuments for builders -who also built their own tombs for their own- and forensic anthropolgists found that bodies in the tombs had suffered typical injuries people in that occupation would have and what's crucial is that they have been treated very efficiently -which is fascinating if you think this happened more than 3000 years ago- and highly likley these people were treated special and had a health plan designed for them. They also state that considering the majority of the population work in irrigation, working as a builder is a cushy job compared to a lot of other jobs in Ancient Egypt.

2. The more they reveal about Ancient Egypt; how its system actually worked, the picture changes in a rational outlook.

Ramses the 2nd, the likely candidate to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus didn't declare himself a god to compete with Jewish minority or for just kicks and giggles. As always, there is a bigger functional political real life agenda to keep the balance of this incredible scale of an Empire and its system.

Pharaohs have an identity as a ruler that is consisted of two parts. One, the defender of the Empire; the militarist hero to wipe out the enemies and the dangers that threaten Egypt. The second one is their divine personality that is connected to gods. So one foot in this world, the other foot is on the other side.

As Egypt in his period was a super power, Ramses 2 'runs out of enemies' to support his defender status; keep it as an active power and his reputation gets in to jeopardy as a ruler. So he decides to embrace the other one fully to save the earthly one that failed. He declares himself god and has a temple built to show himself as equal to other Egyptian gods; Abu Simbel.

It's a genius political construct, esp. considering that Egyptian religion is a funeral cult. The scale of the Empire, its power  and what's at stake. And as always has little to do with religion itself.

But this came to be considered as a part of an Exodus story, just a means to subjugate a certain slave population by challeneging its god, while there is an enormous empire to direct and maintain as if Jews of the time had a different culture than the main cult.

So highly likely Exodus was made up much later as a complicated parable-root story to isolate the tribe from outer influence and keep it together. Again, a good clever political agenda and the practical usage of religious fairy tales that have survived for thousands of years AND STILL functional today. Well played. And has little to do with religion itself, more like constructing an identity of a tribe.






"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

Solomon Zorn

Fascinating, Strom. Thanks for posting it.

Quote from: Baruch on January 02, 2016, 01:39:01 AMOf course this applies to Arabs, Muslims, Americans, Mormons etc ... basically everyone.  People tell stories.
According to a Mormon genealogy one of my relatives had traced, my family arrived in America in 1767. I have often wondered how reliable that date was.
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stromboli

Quote from: Solomon Zorn on January 02, 2016, 07:24:20 AM
Fascinating, Strom. Thanks for posting it.
According to a Mormon genealogy one of my relatives had traced, my family arrived in America in 1767. I have often wondered how reliable that date was.
:confuse:


Actually, having done my genealogy to the entry into the US, modern- say after the establishment of colonies- dates are fairly reliable because of ship manifests and other records. I know personally the dates my great whatever grandparents arrived, from both ship manifests and port records- every ship after the colonies that wasn't a smuggler- which had become commonplace by the 1700s- was recorded, because of cargoes delivered. Assuming records were not destroyed by some calamity, there is a fairly comprehensive record of who and what came to this country.


stromboli

@Drunkenshoe: Pharaonic and Egyptian records of events based on known periods in Egypt give a better accounting than any record left by anyone who would have been a slave, which makes sense. Likewise a culture that valued their monuments and built them to such purpose would not use slave labor because that does not provide skilled craftsmanship. Historic reenactments that I've seen of how the pyramids were built showed not only skilled craftsmanship but also that those craftsmen were likely a guild or even families that passed their skills on to the next generation. In other words, not slaves.

stromboli

@Baruch: The use of myth as political leverage is made apparent here. There was surely a lot more going on than the Diaspora in terms of how the Jewish population was being dealt with or not; as noted, Jewish people lived in Rome and served in their military. I never really thought about the Diaspora in any way because I have personally not seen anything written before now that contradicted it, but then I wasn't looking for any.

I was aware of the (K)Cohen/high priest by lineage issue. One of the conspiracy theories that is popular among Christians is that the Ark of the Covenant (mentioned nowhere but in Jewish Torah and the Bible, so far as I know) is housed in Aksum in Ethiopia and that the lineage of the Kohens there also, but other evidence points to the lineage also being found in Eastern Europe, and other places. Everything from Indiana Jones fueled stories to the Ark being buried under the Temple Mount to it being buried in the floor of a church in Scotland or some such. Amazing how far you can go with a myth.

And Wikipedia is reliable only as much as the objectivity of the topic. There is a war going on between Mormon apologists and revisionist (ex-Mormon) historians over the facts surrounding the creation of the church and Joseph Smith's history, which is checkered, to say the least.

And yes, land claims are based on military power. Ask any Native American about that. Also who you side with politically. Had not factions in both Britain and the US been behind Israel and their efforts to become a nation, it might not have happened.

The more I learn about historic events of the period just after to the so-called advent of Jesus, the more I see how much it was meddled with. The old historian saying that the winner writes the history once again is proven true.

drunkenshoe

Quote from: stromboli on January 02, 2016, 08:49:48 AM
@Drunkenshoe: Pharaonic and Egyptian records of events based on known periods in Egypt give a better accounting than any record left by anyone who would have been a slave, which makes sense. Likewise a culture that valued their monuments and built them to such purpose would not use slave labor because that does not provide skilled craftsmanship. Historic reenactments that I've seen of how the pyramids were built showed not only skilled craftsmanship but also that those craftsmen were likely a guild or even families that passed their skills on to the next generation. In other words, not slaves.

Agreed. (Did you see the temple they uncovered in the Central Egypt? Akhmim. One place thought to have no archeological monuments is turning out to be the new Luxor.)

Another interesting thing about Ancient Egyptian culture is that after the system broke down, although they have been subjected to hundreds of years of invasions, somehow these people managed "to conquer their conquerers" as the archeologists put it. And for a long time they converted their attackers into their culture-religion. Fascinating civilisation, it is just crazy. The technology and 'science' they achieved aside, they manage to defy a few of basic principles of human culture on the way.




"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

Baruch

Historically speaking, the Egyptians weren't bad guys, and Jews didn't build the pyramids.  They may have helped build (as Exodus says) the cities in the E Delta of Egypt aka Goshen.  But princes of the desert, then or now, don't do manual labor.  Basically herdsmen vs farmers.  And Egyptians were pretty much non-racists ... if you adopted their culture and language, they didn't care what you looked like (with the possible exception of the family of the Pharaoh).  And usually Egyptians weren't even militant ... except when they needed to build a buffer in Canaan.

The Bible propaganda is like the US propaganda ... after all, the American version is based on the Biblical version.  One group of people is exceptional ... the others are losers.  Generally speaking the Biblical version is about a less powerful, less successful people however.  The Arabic empire, was basically messianic, it was Biblical people making good, in a time when the main non-Semitic empires were weak (Byzantines and Persians).  But its own success destroyed it as usually happens with empires.  Two hundred years more or less is the limit for empires.  The US is at the end of its run.
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