Politics Israel, Palestine, and Stuff

Prevailing archeological and genetic evidence suggests that the traditional paradigm of a massive bidirectional deportation between Samaria and Mesopotamia is apocryphal and that today's Jews and Samaritans are closely related relative to neighboring groups, having a shared descent from a Y-chromosomal Aaron dating back to the Assyrian conquest of the northern Israelites.
The age of the Samaritan Pentateuch relative to the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint appears to be a subject of wide academic controversy, but its antiquity based on its deviations from each of those texts is reportedly corroborated by other manuscripts such as those of the Vitus Latina and Dead Sea Scrolls.

Intermarriage with or without proselytism would have resulted in centuries of admixture between ethnic Jews from the Kingdoms of Judea and Israel and the non-Jewish denizens of surrounding kingdoms. What leads you to claim that most of their descendants renounced Judaism by the time of Jesus' birth? As far as I've found, the proportional demographic breakdown of Roman Palestine is unknown.

Thank you for your enlightening analysis of the philosophies and practices of Jesus. While this evidence doesn't say anything definitive of his ancestry or racial origins, it may make it highly probable that at least some of his immediate family members were ethnically Judean. Because the scholarship knows so little about his origins however, the possibility that he or any of his ancestors were taken up and reared by another family cannot be discounted.

And yes, Canaanite is an umbrella term for all indigenous inhabitants of the biblically demarcated land of Canaan, which would encompass a number of ethnic groups including nomadic peoples such as the Shasu and Habiru and possibly some assimilated Egyptians. These groups seem to have been united under a uniquely Canaanite culture in that region, which included the Canaanite religion, itself a syncretization of Akkadian and Sumerian beliefs. By the time the Yahwistic monoltry emerged, a distinct Canaanite culture had developed from the convergence of all preceding ethnic influences, a culture which wholly and directly gave rise to the first Israelite settlements.

 

You mean Judea, which was only called "Palestine" after the ethnic cleansing of its native inhabitants by a foreign colonial power? Your slip is showing Wye.

 

No, I don't mean Judea. A majority of historians agree that Jesus was born in the region of Galilee rather than the region of Judea as the Gospels claim, and only after Jesus' death was Galilee incorporated within the Roman province of Iudaea. I used the term Roman Palestine because it refers to all the Southern Levantine regions conquered by Rome, including Galilee, which was held by the Roman Empire as a client state during Jesus' lifetime.

The imperial Romans were not the first to call the Southern Levant by the name Palestine. In the mid-fifth century BCE, the preeminent Greek historian Herodotus referred to the coastal region between Phoenicia and Egypt as Palaistinê in the first and third books of his Histories. In the mid-fourth century BCE, Aristotle used the same name in describing the location of the Dead Sea and its distinctive salinity in book two of his Meteorology. This name was later adapted from Greek to Latin as Palaestina and widely used by major writers in the early empire including Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, and Plutarch.

What is my "slip" as you see it?

 

Israeli PM Netanyahu is fighting for his political life today after having failed to form a coalition government earlier this year.

In a desperate plea to Israeli voters yesterday....

Netanyahu advises supporters that voting is more important than sex

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Fingers crossed for a Blue and White Party (Benny Gantz) victory but would never underestimate Netanyahu.

As an aside, I miss the posts and insights of Levite , our resident rabbi, and hope he is doing well.

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Update....

Netanyahu accused of violating election laws ...

Israel Election 2019: In 'Emergency' Move, Netanyahu Repeatedly Breaks Election Laws Hours Before Polls Close

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Latest Update...

Approaching 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning in Israel and no clear winner according to exit polls. Neither Netanyahu nor Gantz have a working coalition that would reach the 61 seat majority needed.

This is why I am not a fan of mutli-party parliamentary systems where, in the end, a small fringe party could become the "power broker" and put either candidate over the top.

With Gantz and the Blue and White party having a slight lead in the exit polls, he should be given the first opportunity to create a working government coalition.

This could be the end of the Netanyahu era...but again, not a done deal yet.​