The way of imagination

       Babylon: the word is, literally, in the context of Gn. 1—11 [1] , the stuff of legend.   If Genesis was indeed composed and/or redacted around the time when the Judahites were exiled by the neo-Babylonian empire of the 6 th century [2] , it clearly demonstrates just how long a shadow “Babylon” cast over the totality of Hebrew Scripture. [3]   “Babylon” was, in the Israelite imagination, a cipher for (pagan) empire. [4]   Indeed, with the (western) exceptions of the ancient Roman republic (6 th —1 st centuries) and 5 th -century Athens, the almost universal approach to “politics” in the ancient world was that of empire.   The people of God, for their part, were almost always on the receiving end of imperial power.   Indeed, the story of Israel as a nation is told as beginning with the departure of Terah and his son Abram from the general vicinity of Babylon to journey westward toward Canaan (Gn. 11.31-32).   The redactor of Genes...

  I’d like to tell you a story.   It all began with a very long walk.   In a city in a land far, far away in a time long, long ago, a family decided to pack their bags, load their camels, gather their flocks and head west.   This was the family of a man named Abram.   As they say, the rest is (literally) history. So begins the tale of the ancient Israelites.   It is no farce that the Jews had a very different notion of time compared to that of their Ancient Near Eastern neighbours.   Abram’s departure from Babylonian civilization, where time was understood to be eternally cyclical, to chart a course into the unknown, all the while conceiving of time in a linear manner – i.e. to believe that “the future” could be different from “the past” – was a timely revolution. Ancient Babylonia, like all other ancient cultures, not only had a cyclical view of time, but also reasoned in circles – this is the way things are because this is the way the gods ordain...

       Hanukkah [1] was inaugurated on (what westerns call) December 25 th , 164 B.C. (cf. 1 Maccabees 4.52), [2] following the cleansing of the Jerusalem Temple by the Maccabees to purify it of the desolations of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” who had ruled one of the empires that had emerged after the death of Alexander the Great in the year 323.   The Maccabean Revolt had been provoked by Antiochus’ program of forced assimilation to Hellenic culture, which had included the banning of circumcision as well as the observance of both the Sabbath and the kosher laws (cf. 1 Maccabees 1—4).   The fact that the Jews had (successfully) fought to defend their “right” to observe the Mosaic Law just a couple of centuries before Jesus’ baptism (c. AD 30) goes a long way towards explaining the Pharisees’ attitude towards strict observance of those conventions for which blood had been shed during the Revolt against Antiochus IV.   The Jews have alway...