Note: this summary includes some points that aren’t amplified anywhere else in this series (yet). Check back for more information, as this entire series is a work in process.
1. Originally, the Jews were a poor tribe of southern Canaanites, the Judeans (and Benjamites). They might have been named after either a mythic or real patriarch named Judah. They were polytheistic, similar to their more northerly Canaanite neighbors such as the Israelites, Ugarites, and so forth. All Canaanites were Semites, a much broader classification including most Middle Eastern peoples.
2. The Old Testament demonizes these Canaanites as children of Ham, who (it is implied) did something perverse with his naked and drunken father, Noah. The (later) Jews were told that they were not, and never had been, Canaanites. Instead, the new propagandic texts created a special (fictional and exalted) racial identity for them as conquering ex-slaves. Their (unreformed) Canaanite neighbors were to be either enslaved and/or transplanted. Abraham, allegedly the ancestor of the Hebrews, actually doesn’t seem to have been of the same racial or ethnic heritage as his subjects. Instead, he is portrayed as an elite Hittite from Urfa/Edessa.
3. Immediately after Canaan and his seed are condemned to slavery, Shem’s non-Semitic relative, Japheth, starts ‘dwelling in Shem’s tents’, and poor Canaan must serve Japheth as well. Once again, a foreign body is being inserted into the Semitic identity, and profits in status by this ‘enlargement’. Japheth is the biblical brother of Shem and has many offspring, one grandson being Ashkenaz, thus leaving many other possible brothers to sleep in Shem’s tents (before the ‘Khazar’ conversion episode in the late first millenium CE).
Eventually, rule over the Israelites was given to the Levites, who held the cities. These Levites were descended from Moses and Aaron, who were allegedly Jewish — although strangely enough, Moses joined Pharaoh’s household after having been rescued from a basket found floating on the Nile. Several Biblical allusions to Moses’ white coloration, give us pause to wonder whether Moses and the Levites were really ethnically identical to their subjects.
4. Thus, the Biblical view of the Judaic, Canaanite and Semitic ethnic identities is a scam. We believe this was deliberate and central on the part of the authors and redactors, who recorded the brutal methodology of the associated, centuries long conversion process in great detail. All this perpetrated by a foreign elite, just as the texts clearly state. The grossly exalted nature of the Jewish national identity appealed to Jewish vanity while generally incurring enmity from all others. Misfortunes were interpreted as their divine punishment, and paradoxically providing evidence of their god’s existence and power. Thus they became a useful foil and tool for their veiled sponsors.
5. The invention of monotheism began when priests in Egypt, India (or Bharat rather), Persia and Assyria, began expressing the idea that many gods could or should be subsumed into one. Aton, Agni, Ahura Mazda and Marduk began to be seen as the greatest of the gods. Other gods were seen as parts of the respective new Ones’ bodies, aspects of their natures, or as their servants. This happened before the cultural ‘experiment’ of national monotheism in Judea was undertaken.
6. Jacob and Joseph were younger sons who rose to prominence. This departs from the usual expectation that a king’s oldest son will inherit the kingdom. The typology symbolizes the (promised) unexpected rise of the Judeans, and not the Israelites, to regional and then global preeminence. However, each case also involves some morally dubious behavior, thus ensuring future drama. Furthermore, the barrenness of the metaphorical wives, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all require divine intervention to resolve.
7. The Old Testament tends to conflate the identity of the (southern) Judeans and (northern) Israelites. However, the Israelites (the so-called Lost Tribes) were actually a distinct tribal polity from the Judeans. They were conquered by the Assyrians, and their very name was taken over by the Jews and their sponsors, long after the original Israelites had ceased to exist as a people.
The name Isaac (yitzaq) means laughter, which is possibly a cynical reference to the re-invention of the Jewish identity by the Persians. Or, the laughter might also have been because Pharaoh was Isaac’s father, not Abraham. The story that Abraham and Sarah laughed because she was too old to have children seems to be a rationalization, or even a signal to a critical reader that the surface narrative is to be ignored in favor of the subtext. The major import being that Isaac is really a metaphor for the synthetic transformation of Israel and its now ‘Judaic’ people. Isaac’s son, Jacob, even has his name changed to ‘Israel’, signifying the substitution of a different people and theology.
8. The synthetic creation of the Jewish national identity was accomplished by Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian and Persian rulers, collectively known as ‘the Lord’. The redacted Old Testament states that the vassal Jewish nation is allegedly destined for global hegemony, as discussed in Isaiah 11 and Psalms 72. However, the veiled human ‘lords’ are the ones truly destined for hegemony.
The creation of Judaism probably happened in several steps. First, the native Canaanites were dominated by the arrival of an external elite, as recalled by the Abraham story. Next, this elite established an alliance with Egypt. Perhaps, as Hyksos, they came to dominate northern Egypt as well. After the failure of Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment in Egypt, missionaries from Amarna were sent to Canaan (and further) with an eventual mission to impose monotheism on the Canaanites. This became the basis of the Noah/Ham legend, as well as the Judean view of themselves as former slaves who became righteous (if flawed) conquerors. Finally, the Judeans were conquered and controlled by the Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians and Persians in turn. All we have is the final redaction of the texts accumulated during this process, making it difficult to establish the results of each step independently.
During this conversion process, the general region of the Canaanites was a geopolitical football field with ever shifting power alliances between various combinations of vassal states and whomever was perceived to be the most advantageous partner du jour of the surrounding powerful states. Under the rule of these powerful states, the Hebrews came to develop their own national character. However, this peculiar nationality was not so much in their own interests, but rather it made the Jews into a proxy foil, expressing and advancing their powerful neighbors’ plans for global hegemony.
9. The book of Hosea contains internal clues that would date it to the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. However, it may actually come from the later Achaemenid conquest, as it seems to describe the merger of Israel with Judea. Just as Jacob was a metaphoric representation of Israel (father of the twelve tribes) in an earlier phase, so Hosea conceives the next metaphor, his son Jezreel, whose name is a contraction of Judea and Israel. The child is Hosea’s son with a whore called Gomer, whose name is recycled from the Genesis 10:2-4 genealogy, where a man of this name was the father of the Ashkenazi, and a son of Japheth (see item 3 above).
Thus, we have an explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible statement of Hosea 1:10 — “… that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.” The explanation is that the former chosen people of Judea and Israel have been replaced, and shall henceforth consist of a cross-breed of Hebrew and Gomerites, but not necessarily the Ashkenazi – who seem to arrive in the Judaic camp in the late first millenium CE. Both the Assyrians and Achaemenids deported many native Canaanites and replaced them with immigrants. ‘Jezreel’ seems to be a very apt metaphor indeed.
10. The final redaction of the Old Testament narrative probably happened during the period after the Babylonian Exile, and under the Persians. This completed the unification of several pre-existing local narratives, and several pre-existing local Gods, including El and Yahweh.
Cyrus, arguably the first of the great emperors with hegemonic designs, was solidly behind the monotheizing plan, as a Zoroastrian with a theology not that distant from Judaism. He even allowed the Jews to assert their superiority over everyone, including the Persians. Hence Cyrus became the first Jewish (grand) messiah, to be followed by Julius Caesar.
11. Josiah, king of Judah, allegedly discovered “the missing holy texts” of the Torah, approximately 20 years before Judah fell to the Neo-Babylonians. Josiah then perished in battle against the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II. The entire process was said to have cleansed the Judeans of impure practices. Most curiously, Yahweh was said to be fighting with Necho and against Josiah. The so-called impurities included the worship of Asherah, wife of Yahweh. In other words, Josiah was really no monotheist, and the story of the discovery of the Torah under his reign is most likely a crock.
12. As polytheistic Canaanites, many Judeans rejected the religion of Yahweh. They continued their old Canaanite cultural practices, and continued to intermarry with neighboring Canaanite cultures. This was bitterly denounced as sinful idolatry, as recorded in the Biblical texts. Ironically, the term ‘backsliding’ is close to the truth, because these ‘conservative’ people wanted to hang onto their original cultural beliefs and practices that were, to their view, divinely ordained.
13. Ever since the Neo-Babylonian conquest, there has never been a truly independent Jewish state. During ancient times it was always a puppet state, whether under the Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, or Romans. (We dispute whether the Hasmoneans were ever independent from their Roman allies.) And in its modern incarnation, we maintain that the Jewish state is vassal to the Romano-Venetian-Anglo-American alliance. (Again, we dispute any claims that the synthetic Judaic tail is now wagging the dog.)
This Jewish puppet state has always retained its victim stance, as well as its pretensions of being destined for global domination. This makes it an ongoing dialectical foil for (so-called) ‘Gentile’ society. In other words, the Jews are alternately an irritant, a target for blame, and a source of inspiration for the global aims of the gentil ‘Gentiles’.
14. According to the Roman foundation narrative, their elite Sabine tribe insinuated themselves into power in the aftermath of the “Rape of the Sabine Women”. This unlikely tale was probably offered as propagandically inverted ethical justification for a more brutal seizure of power by the newcomers. (Later, the Romans paid cultural homage to the Greeks even as they enslaved them.) These Sabines claim to have arrived as refugees from the Homeric battle of Troy. We have no reason to doubt this, as we were told that the ‘Trojans’ came from Anatolia, home of the Hittite empire. The Sabines seem to have had rather ‘Judaic’ cultural sensibilities, which makes sense if the elite Jews and Sabines share common origins, and an affinity with Hittites such as Abraham. Also, we are told that Aeneas, the Trojan hero, wooed and then rejected the Phoenician queen Dido of Carthage, before traveling on to Italy.
Aside from the later ‘identity scam’ — the Canaanites, Phoenicians and Jews were all the same people.
15. Thus we end up with the creation of synthetic, non-organic, societies for the Jewish, Spartan, and Roman (Sabine) peoples. The Jews and Romans, at least, were created via the insertion of either ‘elite’ puppets or colonists as their vanguard. This is the basis for what we know as Western Civilization. We suggest that this long process all seems to begin with the imprimatur of the Egyptian court. Later, we find that the very first Roman emperor, Octavian Augustus Caesar, also assumes the official and divine mantle of Egyptian pharaoh.