(May 12, 2012 at 5:45 am)KichigaiNeko Wrote: Quite advanced those Assyrians .... Yes??
Yeah - in a looting, pillaging, murdering, raping kind of way!
What they were doing was a precursor to the US government's movement of Indian tribes onto reservations. These reservations were generally a long way from the lands and climates that the culture had evolved in. The idea was to break the association with the land of the conquered people. We probably got the idea from the Assyrians.
I have a good friend who is a baptist ( we don't talk about religion much and when we do it is in the guise of "history" rather than religion) but I asked her one time if she knew when "Galilee" was brought back into the so-called "Jewish fold." She did not know what I meant. I explained that both her bible and archaeology/history had confirmed the Assyrian policy of moving conquered peoples around the empire. The bible with its grandiose numbers insisted that ALL the people were moved out which is silly and much of the bible is simply silly but the Assyrians were more reasonable. New Peoples and presumably new cults were moved in. After the Assyrians came the Babylonians then the Persians then the Greeks. So when did this area revert to Judaism? She did not know. I looked it up. It was not until the Hasmonean kings, John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus c 102-100 BC that Jerusalem was finally able to exert its power even as far as the Sea of Galilee and the population was "forcibly converted" to Judaism. This unhappy state of affairs lasted two generations. Pompey and his legions came rolling through in 63 BC. But it into this marginally "Jewish" area that the writers of gospel fiction placed their hero. Just interesting shit.
