ANCIENT ISRAELITES, BIBLICAL ISRAELITES, AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The Bible is quite possibly the most influential body of literature from Antiquity. It is an ancient library written in a land--interchangeably called Canaan, Palestine, and Israel - - that has been under imperial rule or occupation for millenia. Its collection of myths, legends, stories, parables, poetry, oracles, and other literary types present a wide gamut of discourses generated in the midst of empire. From indifference to apathy, from collaboration to passive resistance, from reform to revolution. 

The Bible paints a future where swords will be beaten into ploughshares. The same Bible also paints a vision where ploughshares will be turned into swords.

The Bible, despite its pluriformity and multivocality, is a literary production of the privileged and the learned. Archeology and its allied disciplines provide us a much bigger picture. 

Archeology has shown us that, like many of its neighboring peoples, the Ancient Israelites were polytheistic and were descendants of the Canaanites. They worshipped El, Yahweh, Asherah, and other deities. Archeology thus helps us better understand the contexts that produced the texts that many now call sacred. 

Archeology and its allied disciplines help us delineate between the Ancient Israelites and the Biblical Israelites. Both are at least 2000 years old!

Now, most Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. Unfortunately, these same Christians do not read the Bible!

Many literalists weaponize the Bible, like Trump and his ilk, and have no qualms about its use to support and justify settler colonialism. Many Bible-believing Christians feel no remorse over the genocides committed against the First Peoples of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Liberia, and many more, as long as there are prooftexts that explain such crimes as part of carrying out God's great commission. 

Many Bible-believing Filipinos don't even know about the US-sponsored settler colonialism perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of Mindanao, the "Land of Promise" (almost the same time it was being carried out in the "Promised Land"). 

Now, these three remain: Ancient Israelites, Biblical Israelites, and the State of Israel. The first two are intertwined. The last has no connection to either. 

Friends, the State of Israel, created in 1948, is an imperial project. This historically-verifiable statement of fact requires no special pleading. Its decades-long, US-sponsored systematic, racist, violent, and dehumanizing erasure of the Palestinian People needs to stop now. 

It needs to stop now!

#ChooseJustice

#FreePalestine

#Endtheoccupation

#CeaseFireNow

AND PHARISEES

The Bible is not a book. It is a library with 66 books if you're Protestant, 73 if you're Roman Catholic, 81 if you're Orthodox, and 24 if you're a Jew. Those 24 books (or scrolls) which make up the Hebrew Bible was Jesus's library. Christians have appropriated the Hebrew Bible, turned the 24 books into 39, and call it Old Testament. The New Testament is 27 diverse interpretations of Jesus and what it means to follow him.

Sunday's lection, from Matthew 23. 1-12 with its shorter parallels in Mark and Luke, clearly illustrates this diversity in Scripture. Whose voice are we hearing? The Historical Jesus of the 30's, Mark's Jesus of the 70's, or Matthew's Jesus of the 90's? The synoptics points out the hypocrisy of the teachers of the law or the scribes. Matthew's version adds "and pharisees."

That's how we know that Matthew's extended discourse addresses the growing conflict between the Jews and the Christians in the 90s. After the Roman Jewish War of the early 70s that destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, two Jewish communities began to take different yet parallel paths. One was Rabbinic Judaism, with its synagogues, grounded on the written and oral Torah. The other group was made of Jews who believed that the Messiah has arrived and whose community eventually expanded to include the uncircumcised.

This explains the several "and pharisees" in the passage. In other words, Matthew was saying, if Jesus were here he would be saying all these things against these pharisees.

We do something similar all the time. We try to make Jesus address our contemporary situations. If Jesus were here, what would Jesus do? If Jesus were here, would he support Netanyahu and the IDF? If Jesus were here, would he not be in Gaza among the Palestinians right now? If Jesus were here, would you be on the same side? We have actually pushed this appropriation too far by proclaiming JESUS IS THE ANSWER to every question.

Dear friends, if Jesus were here and he was the answer, he'd probably be executed within a year because he would not be the answer most of us want him to be.

*art, "Christ Teaches Humility" by Robert Scott Lauder (1803-1869), from the vanderbilt divinity library digital archives,