GOD (PART III: Cock Fight)
Prologue:
During my freshman year of college I paid a young lady $30 that I
could've spent on three cases of Haffenreffer (and still had six
bucks in change. Haffenreffer: Twice as Green - Twice as Mean…and over
100 times more damaging to your brain cells and internal organs ) to
give me three, one hour, Hebrew lessons (no, that's not a euphemism for
some strange sex act …but it would make a great one: "How much for a
'Dirty Sanchez' and a 'Hebrew lesson'?")
Why was I so Bil Keane to learn Hebrew? Well, I've always been fascinated
with non-Latin alphabets (this because mildly dyslexic might be I'm) and
my last name (my other last name) is Hebrew for "He who lives by
the swamp."
Anyhoo, towards the end of my second lesson my teacher turned to me and
said, "Have you ever considered becoming a Jew?"
"Is there some sort of Membership Drive going on?"
"Seriously. You have a knack for Hebrew. Besides, it's not like you
believe in Jesus."
"True. But I don't believe in God, either."
"Neither do I. In fact, I consider the Old Testament to be a weird
collection of dietary laws mixed in with some strange story about some
guy who leads the 'Chosen People' to the only spot in the Middle East
where there's no oil."
I was stunned. The best I could do, to express my confusion was to say,
"But your so Jewish." Sure, it sounds like a stupid thing to say
but she was "so Jewish." The Israeli Board of Tourism had fewer
posters depicting the Holy Land on its walls that she had plastering her
tiny dorm room. She had even found a way to combine "Spin-the-Bottle" and
"Spin-the-Dradle" Besides, I could've have been the first person to say
it because she had an answer ready.
"For thousands of years there have been attempts to exterminate my people.
I'm not going to aid that effort by abandoning my culture. Look, for me,
it's not about faith: it's about tradition."
536 BCE: A group of Jews who don't consider the Old Testament to be a weird
collection of dietary laws, but the unerring Word of God" are returning to
Jerusalem. Fifty years earlier, Judea had been conquered by the mighty
Babylonian empire; the Temple of Solomon pounded into dust; and almost the
entire ruling class cated over the border. It's those exiles who are
returning.
"The Holy Seed", as the returning exiles call themselves, have been given
permission to make the pilgrimage back by to Judea by the Emperor of Persia
following his country's conquest of the Babylonians. The Holy Seed have had
a half century of isolation in which to perfect their brand of Monotheism
and now they plan to put its tenets into practice. The Holy Seed want
nothing to do with the Jews who were allowed to stay behind. They even
refuse to allow the locals to assist them in their efforts to rebuild the
Temple. And so it goes…
Until 334 BCE when the Persians, who conquered the Babylonians, who
conquered the Jews, are conquered by Alexander the Great. And thus did
Classical Paganism come to the Promised Land.
Today, the word "Pagan" tends to drum up images of smelly Hippies praying
to trees and overrunning the fence around Stonehenge. Classical pagans or
"Hellenes" were a Pegasus of a different color. To the Hellenes, religion
was something you turned to in order to discover the Meaning of Life:
that's what philosophers were for. Nor were the gods beings to be emulated
(the entire Greek pantheon being one large dysfunctional family); they
were there to help you on a day-to-day basis. Need a job? Sacrifice to
Hephaestus. Big test tomorrow? Athena. Interested in a "Dirty Sanchez" or
a "Hebrew lesson"? Aphrodite. The Hellenes had a god for almost everything.
If they didn't there was no problem because they eagerly incorporated the
gods and goddesses of the lands they conquered into their own pantheon:
that explains how Alexander could be the son of both Zeus and Amon.
Along with this uber-tolerant attitude towards foreign religions, the
Hellenes also introduced the Jews to Greek philosophy, literature, and art.
So seductive was this combination that it wasn't long before Jerusalem was
almost indistinguishable from Athens. It even featured a Greek-style
gymnasium where Jews and Greeks worked out in the nu…
Oh boy. Once upon a time, when Jewish and Gentile guys got nekkid
together, it was very easy to tell the men from the goys. Embarrassed by
their advance approach to penile hygiene and whishing to be accepted by a
culture they were rapidly embracing, many Jewish men of the Hellenistic
period attempted to hide the results of their circumcisions by (fellows,
you might wanna skip over this part) cutting and pulling the loose skin
of the penis (called the "epispasm". Wow, there really is a word for
everything) forward to form a partial foreskin. If anybody needs me,
I'll be in the corner, weeping.
It's very likely that had things continued along this path the Jews might
have been completely absorbed into the Hellenistic culture and abandoned
Monotheism (thus making it no longer necessary for them to mutilate their
wee-wees in order compete in the discus throw). Unfortunately, Alexander
the Great was also Alexander the Lush: He drank himself to death in 323
BCE. Many historians believe that he was depressed because he'd run out
of lands to conquer. Others think that he never quite got over the
prediction by the Oracle of Delphi that "One day, the glorious story of
your life will be turned into a steaming pile of shit by a drooling man-
child named Oliver Stone."
Upon his death, Alexander's empire broke up into warring factions. In 301
BCE Judea was conquered by Egyptian Greeks (the Ptolemies) who, in turn,
were kicked out the region by Syrian Greeks (Seleucids) in 200 BCE.
If Hellenism was a giant punchbowl from which people of all different
beliefs were invited to drink freely then Antiochus IV, the king of Syria,
was the turd in that punchbowl. Antiochus (215 - 164 BCE) really, really,
really hated Jews. In particular he hated the Hasidim (the "Pious Ones")
who refused to recognize the Greek pantheon. Antiochus expressed this
hatred through the following series of atrocities:
He stole treasure from, had a statue of Zeus installed, and ordered
"unclean" animals to be sacrificed at the Temple of Solomon. He banned
observance of the Sabbath (and not just the line up with Ronnie James Dio)
and the Kashrut (those weird dietary laws).
Antiochus also had issues with circumcision: he outlawed the practice.
Mothers who had their sons circumcised were strangled to death. In a
Hellenistic spirit of inclusion, Antiochus also ordered that the
circumcised infants also be put to death and hung around their dead
mothers' necks.
This sort of batshit behavior is bound to stir up rebellion (except in
America, where we just keep on takin' it). That rebellion came in the
form of the Maccabees. The Maccabees took their name from their leader,
Judah, who was nicknamed Maccabee ("the Hammer") during his brief stint
in the World Wrestling Foundation. Judah's father, Mattathias, kicked off
the rebellion when, ordered by a Syrian officer to perform a sacrifice to
the pagan gods, he not only stabbed the Syrian but also a fellow Jew who
had compliantly stepped forward when Mattathias had stepped aside.
Now, a great deal as been written about how the Maccabees opened a Kosher
can of whoopass on the Syrians. Much less publicity has been showered on
the Maccabees battle with just about every other Jew they bumped into. For
example, there was their campaign of forced circumcision (again with the
schlongs. This entire period of history should be known as "The War of the
Dicks") and their tendency to kill anyone who even slightly disagreed with
them.
In 164 BCE the Syrian army was defeated by the Maccabees and Judea was free
for the first time in nearly four hundred years. In a wonderful twist of
irony, the new kingdom was not a strict monotheistic Theocracy. The new
kings of Judea tended to speak Greek, dress like Greeks, adopt Greek names,
and wholly embrace Hellenism. This didn't sit well with the Hasidim and, by
the beginning of the fist century BCE, civil war broke out: making it very
easy for the next players in this drama to step in.
The Romans marched into Judea and set up shop in 63 BCE, installing a "King
of the Jews" by the name of Herod the Great. Under Herod, the Romans
continued to enforce the tradition of religious tolerance they'd picked up
from Alexander the Great. While a golden Roman eagle was placed outside the
Temple of Solomon, no statue of Zeus was placed inside and it was decreed
that any Roman legionnaire caught entering the Temple's inner courtyard, in
defiance of the Jewish tradition, would be put to death. 
Now would be a good opportunity to mention who much the Temple of Solomon,
with it ongoing animal sacrifices - as prescribed in the Torah - and
following it's remolding by Herod, resembled most pagan temples.
In 4 BCE Herod the Great died of the must disgusting disease in history and
his kingdom was divided among his sons. It was around this time when the
Romans began encountering Jewish resistance fighters called the Sicarii.
The main tactic employed by the Sicarii was to stroll around a crowded
marketplace until they spotted a Jewish collaborator. They would then stab
this person with their daggers (called a "sica", hence the name "Sicarii")
before blending back into the crowd. Today we call this sort of antisocial
behavior "Terrorism". The historian Josephus coined a new name for the
Sicarii: he called the "The Zealots". This is why, when I call someone a
zealot, I do it from a safe distance.
In 66 CE the Zealots rose up, en masse, against the mighty Empire of Rome
and managed to keep the battle going for four years. No small
accomplishment when you consider that the Roman army was the greatest
fighting force that the world had ever known. In 70 CE the Romans seized
Jerusalem and engaged in the ancient tradition of destroying the Temple of
Solomon. They also slaughtered nearly all of the resistance fighters and
scattered the rest. The Jews were, once again, without a country. Gone was
the Temple where animals were sacrificed. Gone was the Priestly Caste. And
then a very curious thing happened…
While Jerusalem was being attacked by the Romans, a man named Yohanan ben
Zakkai had himself smuggled out (some historians say he hid in a coffin)
and then he sought the protection of a Roman general. Once safe, Yohanan
ben Zakkai asked the general for permission to found a yeshiva. It was in
Yohanan ben Zakkai's yeshiva that the books of the Hebrew Bible were
finally canonized in 90 CE. The Rabbis who taught at this and other
yeshivas soon changed the focus of their teaching to the importance of
keeping the Sabbath (original lineup) and obeying those weird dietary laws
and they began to ignore the ignore the parts of the Bible which commanded
Jews to take up arms against pagans.
Without an army to enforce mandatory circumcision and with their new
emphasis on quiet study in the yeshiva Jews, once the dreaded enemy of the
mighty Roman Empire, were becoming harmless…and cute: like today's
Amish. Shit Lutherberg, during the first century CE, Rome was swept with a
sort of Jew-mania. Pagans, intrigued by pious Jewish devotion to this One
True God fellow, began piling into synagogues: many of which had to be
enlarged to accommodate the crowds.
Of all the groups that made up the Roman Empire, the Jews were the only
people officially permitted to pray for the Emperor rather than
to him. After all, it wasn't like the Jews posed any real threat to
Rome. In order to join their ranks Romans would not only have to give up
their gods and goddesses, but also the thing they loved most of all…pork.
And then there's that part of having to get your foreskin sliced off. "Why
yes; I'd love to join your religion. First I have to do what to my
what???"
Once again, Pagan and Monotheist were able to live side-by-side in relative
peace. And it might have stayed that way, allowing the Jews to avoid the
horrors of Crusades, Inquisitions, Pogroms, and the Holocaust, had it not
been for one Jew who used to wander around the Sea of Galilee, preaching.
We'll talk about Him next time.
Postscript:
One day, a few years ago I was living in South Philly, I was lucky enough
to catch the Procession of Saints. Among the older Italians shouldering the
statues of St. Stabbedalot and St. Boiledinleadandthennailedtoamule I
noticed several of my Jewish neighbors. Later I asked one of them why he
was carrying a Christian icon up Seventh Street. He just shrugged and said,
"I live in South Philly. I'm part of this community. For me, it's not about
faith: it's about tradition."
Godscore:
Placebo (No Deity Used) * 0
Zues 1
Ashera 0
Yahweh 1
Hera 1
Emperor Claudius 1
Sekhmet 0
Hecate 0
Hephaestus 0
* In place of not using a deity you could always substitute Ben Schumin.
Recommended reading:
God Against The Gods by Jonathan Kirsch
A History of God by Karen Armstrong
Secret Origins of the Bible by Tim Callahan
The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein
Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman
Rodney on 07.17.05 @ 01:00 AM EST [link] [No Comments]
