Peter Sean Bradley

The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC by Henry T. Aubin

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In 701 BC, the Assyrians were on the verge of doing to the Judahites what they had done to Isreal a few decades earlier, i.e., eradicate it and remove its people from history. Instead of that fate, the Assyrians mysteriously called off their siefe and left Jerusalem chastened but intact. The Judahites were permitted to develope their monotheism for another century until Babylon did to them what the Assyrians had intended in 701 BC.

Author Henry T. Aubon points out that the extra century was vital for history. Without that century, the unique theology of the Hebrews would not have been as developed, allowing them to survive Babylon and return to Jerusalem with a richer and more developed monotheism.

I've read this thesis in other histories and it sounds right.

What Aubon adds to the mix is the thesis that the miracle of the Assyrian withdrawal from Jerusalem in 701 BC - the “Deliverance” - was due to the intervention of Egypt, which, at that time, was under the control of the 25th Dynasty. The 25th Dynasty was a Kushite - Sudanese - dynasty that had conquered Egypt and briefly revitalized Egypt as a world power. Aubon's argument is that the Kushite strategy was to protect Kush by protecting Egypt, which turned out to involve sending military forces into the Levant, or “Khorr” as Aubon calls the area that included Juda and surrounding territories.

Aubon makes a strong case based on minimal sources. He uses a handful of sources, including Isaiah, 2 Kings, and Assyrian records, to construct the case that after a desultory battle between Egypt and Assyria, a Kush force surprised the Assyrians, sending them in flight out of Khorr.

Like most people, I had always heard that the Assyrian withdrawal was caused by a plague in their camp, which the Bible characterized as the Angel of the Lord killing 185,000. Aubon, though, has convinced me to consider his argument with the simple point that the Assyrians never returned for decades after 701 BC. If it had simply been a plague, well, then, plagues happen and they would have returned, but it looks rather like Assyria ceded Khorr to another power with interests in the area.

Aubon also supports his argument with an analysis of Isaiah and Kings, which, frankly, do make “reports” of something, probably military action as a factor in the withdrawal. There are many other arguments that support Aubon's thesis, but these two seemed to be the strongest.

This book might be dissatisfying on two accounts. First, Aubon is firmly in the camp of those who maintain that Judah in 701 BC was polytheist and that Yahweh was one of many deities they recognized. Aubon accepts this view as a given, which is fine because his argument does not turn on the theology of the Jews at that moment.

Second, Aubon seems to turn his argument into a matter of identity politics in arguing that the modern world is very racist and has obscured the role of the Kushites for racist reasons and that the recovery of role of the Kushites will be blow to racism or something. Ok, again, fine but history is supposed to be objective and not a matter of identity politics. The facts are the facts even if they make people feel sad or happy.

On the other hand, and at the same time, he has a couple of chapters that do a very solid job of demonstrating how historical perception is influenced by identity politics. Thus, he points out that Calvin and others easily conceded the role of the Kushites in preserving Jerusalem and that it was only after the “scramble for Africa” that historians began to down play their role.

I don't have enough knowledge on any of these issues to make an informed judgment. All I can say is that the text was generally interesting and seemed to be well-supported by logic and data. I could be wrong, but I will factor Aubon's argument into the general stock of my knowlege on the subject.

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In some ways this is the counterpoint to The Great Gatsby. The author, John O'Hara, points out that the main character, Gloria Wandrous, would have been a flapper if she had been born ten years before. As it was, she was twenty years old in 1930, the depression had the nation in its grip, and the life of the Jazz Age flapper had turned into a continuing round of drinking and bed-hopping.

Gloria is, to put in bluntly, a slut. She knows she's a slut. She knows that it makes her spoiled goods to any decent man. Nonetheless, for all that, she is a good-hearted person, not a prostitute, not mean, but too often drunk and too often waking up in the bed of a strange man.

That is how the story starts as Gloria wakes up in the bed of Weston Liggett, a married man she met in a New York speakeasy. Weston has abandoned her to go to his family in the country. the night previous he had ripped her dress so he leaves her $60 for the dress, but Glora decides to take the wife's mink coat in compensation. This provides a hook for Weston to look for glorian and, eventually, to realize he is smitten with her. For her part, Gloria understands that Weston is old enough to be her father (he's 40), but she is beginning to think that her life is not going anywhere.

This is a character-driven novel. The characters seem to live their roles in Prohibition-era New York. The glimpse of that New York was endlessly fascinating. Also, interesting, there were pages that seemed to be influenced by John Dos Passos USA Trilogy, with the stream of consciousness approach to setting the background with a barrage of daily news.

Gloria is the main character. We learn about her history of abuse that put her on the road to being a drunken slut. There are other characters, that mostly seem to come in pairs, although the role they play in developing the novel seems superfluous. The story begins with a long section that develops the relationship of writer Jimmy Malloy and his girlfriend Isabel Stannard. This section is so long that a reader might think these were the central characters, although the drop out of the story shortly after Malloy explains that as a “Mick,” he will always be an outsider to genteel society. Malloy does return at the end, but this is a cursory return at best.

Then there is Gloria's best friend, Eddie, who loves Gloria, but does not have sex with her, and Gloria loves Eddie but does not want to reduce Eddie to the relationship of the men she lives with. Eddie learns through the novel that he, in fact, loves his girlfriend, who is nothing like Gloria, but is good wife material, and decides to marry the girlfriend.

Then, there is the Irish-Catholic Farley couple, who get quite a build-up at the beginning, but ultimately are reduced to being stood up after Weston is beat up in a speak-easy.

O'Hara based this story on the notorious story of a flapper found dead in the East River in 1929. The denoument of O'Hara's story is not a neat tying up of Gloria's life. Whether she died in an accident or by her own intent is not spelled out by O'Hara, and, frankly, the end of Gloria's life did not seem foreshadowed by her life. The open-ended nature of the resolution of the story may be unsatisfying for some, but it is thought-provoking.

As a matter of plot and craftsmanship, the story has problems. As I noted, some character development of minor characters could have been left out without harming the story. Character motivation is also problematic. Weston's attraction to Gloria seemed simple lust, despite the authorial pleading that it was something more. Nonetheless, the characters seemed alive and interesting.

For me, the best part of the book was simply that it seemed to be an authentic portrait of the dying Jazz Age. The speak-easies, the Depression, the casual racism, all seemed to be a slice of real life, written close to the time of the novel by someone who was there.

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Until I listened to Professor Harls' lectures from the Great Courses about [[ASIN:1629970352 The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes]], I had always taken the steppe nomads for granted. They seem to sweep in from stage right - if you're Europe - or stage left - if you're Chinese (but actually “stage north” from the nomads' perspective, as Professor Harl points out), but I had never considered them as a subject in themselves.

The reality is that the steppes have always played a huge role in human civilization, a role that covers 6,000 years and 6,000 miles. The steppes impinge on the civilized peoples of the world of Persia, Rome, China, and their successors. Ignoring steppe history is simply foolish.

This book is an excellent follow-up on Professor Harl's lectures. The author, Christopher Mott, has an overriding thesis about how the geography and culture of the Steppes formed the political culture of the steppe barbarians. Mott's essential point is that the huge, open area of the steppes, with the diversity of cultures and language, and the fluidity of population created by a horse culture without cities, shaped the successive steppe empires into a common method of empire that involved fluid military tactics, rule through local elites, the maintenance of some strong points, and a generally more tolerant approach to rulership than was found in more static cultures. After making this argument, he visits virtually every culture that formed on the steppes from 2,000 BS to the modern day.

It is a fascinating story. I learned more about the peoples of the steppes and their civilizations, kingdoms and empires than I ever have. More importantly, I was able to start connecting events with each other and to gain an appreciation for the Transoxanian cultures that today we tend to view as insignificant and unimportant. As penance for my prior attitudes, I have made a game of memorizing the names of the 5 Muslim former-Soviet states in order from west to east - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. (Thank you, Spellcheck!)

What was particularly interesting was Mott's observations on how the steppes are eventually subjugated by the Russia and China, and the future of the steppes. Russia has a lot of underpopulated steppe and forest country, while China has a lot of population. China has historically hegemonized former non-Chinese territory by sending Han Chinese into Xinjiang. Might that be a future strategy for an upsurging China and a declining Russia?

This is a fairly short, informative and well-written book. I recommend it, perhaps in conjunction with the Harl lectures.

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This is an erudite and informed book about the answer to the problem of secularism. Keller's knowledge and use of sources to make his points is impressive. Keller has read and thought about the issue of modernity and religion through Charles Taylor, Richard Bauckham, Thomas Nagel, John Updike, Terry Eagleton, Heidegger, Chekov, Camus and others. Every page reflects an engagement with some thinker or writer in a way that illuminates the subject.

This book is a self-conscious prequel to Keller's earlier “The Reason for God.” In this book, Keller seems to be adopting the method of Pascal by trying to explain why a person should start the journey toward God by inciting the desire for God. The way that Keller seeks to incite that desire is by pointing out the shortcomings of a purely secular human existence. Keller's thesis is that by itself humanity is left with purely secular meaning - fixed only on the here and now - and purely human identity - fractured and crushed - and purely human values - unconnected to anything transcendent. Keller makes his case in a practical way that explains things we all know, if we are honest, from our own experience.

Keller's writing is subtle, inductive and engaging. Here he discusses the problem with meaning:

“Let's look first at the issue of consistency. Terry Eagleton points out that when postmodernism denounces all absolute values and inherent meanings in the name of freedom, it “secretly smuggles . . . an absolute into the argument.” 26 Why, for example, is freedom so important? Why is that the absolute, unquestioned “good”— and who gets to define it as such? Are you not assuming a value-laden standard that you are using to critique all other approaches to life? And are you not, then, actually giving a universal answer to the Meaning question, namely, that the meaning of life is to have the freedom to determine your own meaning? Are you not, then, doing the very thing you say should not be done?
So the postmodern approach to meaning is not very consistent. However, is it workable at a practical level? Eagleton finds it wanting at this level as well. He finds the “life is what you make it” view “seems troublingly narcissistic. Do we ever get outside of our own heads? Isn't a genuine meaning one which we feel ourselves running up against, one which can resist or rebuff us? . . . Surely life itself must have a say in the matter?” 27 He questions whether we can really take anything in life and “construct” a meaning around it of our own. “Nobody actually believes this,” he answers, and gives an example. You could try with all your might to “read” tigers as animals that are coy and cuddly, but if you try to do that, you would “no longer be around to tell the tale,” because to some degree the world is “independent of our interpretations of it.” 28
I once knew a young man who had grown up to be far below average in height, size, and weight. Yet he wanted to play football. He was continually injured as he competed with players who were far bigger than average. His parents tried to dissuade him from football, but he reminded them that all his life he had always been told by his teachers that he could be absolutely anything he chose to be and that life was what he made of it. “And didn't you see the movie Rudy?” he asked them. Someone should have gently but firmly given him Eagleton's illustration and conclusion. Life isn't simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits in with the world as it is.”

Keller distinguishes between “discovered meanings” and “assigned meanings”:

“But I also say no. Secular people are often unwilling to recognize the significant difference between what have been called “inherent” and “assigned” meanings. Traditional belief in God was the basis for discovered, objective meaning— meaning that is there, apart from your inner feelings or interpretations. If we were made by God for certain purposes, then there are inherent meanings that we must accept.
The meanings that secular people have are not discovered but rather created. They are not objectively “there.” They are subjective and wholly dependent on our feelings. You may determine to live for political change or the establishment of a happy family, and these can definitely serve as energizing goals. However, I want to argue that such created meanings are much more fragile and thin than discovered meanings. Specifically, discovered meaning is more rational, communal, and durable than created meaning.”

Keller concludes that the post-modern failure to distinguish between the two, or, worse, to privilege “assigned meaning” is problematic:

“If this life is all there is, and there is no God or life beyond this material world, then it will not ultimately matter whether you are a genocidal maniac or an altruist; it won't matter whether you fight hunger in Africa or are incredibly cruel and greedy and starving the poor. In the end what you do will make no difference whatsoever. It might make some people happier or sadder for a brief time while they are on the planet, but beyond that, your influence— good or bad— will likely be negligible when viewed on any grand scale. Everything you do, and everyone you have done things with and to, will be gone forever. Ultimately, everything we do is radically insignificant. Nothing counts forever.
Now, as we have said, many people in the postmodern culture believe we should train ourselves to not ask this “metaquestion” about the point of life. We should discipline ourselves not to think about the ultimate outcome of all we do, which in the secular view is sheer nothingness. We should put that out of mind and concentrate on today. But this establishes my first point. When secular people seek to lead a meaningful life, they must have discipline to not think so much about the big picture. They must disconnect what their reason tells them about the world from what they are experiencing emotionally. That is getting a feeling of meaningfulness through a lack of rationality, by the suppression of thinking and reflection.
The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote to a friend and said that if one “thinks coldly,” a modern person has to admit that there is “no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” By this he meant that if the modern secularist thinks out the implications of his view of a strictly materialistic world in which all life evolved randomly and accidentally, human beings have no importance at all. But then he added that when he begins thinking like this it is time to “go down stairs and play solitaire.”

Without saying it, Keller is making the point made previously by Aristotle and Aquinas and Joseph Pieper that prudence - the ability to perceive reality as it is - is the first virtue because without it no one virtue is possible.

Likewise, Keller also points toward the virtue of Christian hope which is the answer to the hopelessness of modern identity.

“The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all. “The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind— asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.” 19 Why not? Elsewhere Lasch points to the example of African slaves in America. How did they keep hope alive? As Eugene D. Genovese and other historians of slavery have made clear, “it would be absurd to attribute to slaves a belief in progress.” It was Christianity, Genovese showed, that gave them “a firm yardstick” with which to measure and judge the behavior of their masters and “to articulate a promise of deliverance as a people in this world as well as the next.” 20 Hope does not require a belief in progress, only a belief “in justice, a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, [that] the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.” 21 Hope that stands up to and enables us to face the worst depends on faith in something that transcends this world and life and is not available to those living within a worldview that denies the supernatural.

This also follows Aquinas' point that Christian hope is the virtue that is opposed to despair.

There is a lot in this book that bears pondering.

Don't Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari

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If you are a language nerd, then you will start finding that books on linguistics begin to run together. They often make the same revelations and cover the same territory. This book had a lot of that going on.

Nonetheless, each such book has its own nuance. This book had enough new details to make it stand out. For example, to boil it down to a nub, it seems that Noam Chomsky's universal grammar is probably passe. The author makes the point that language is a tool and we should expect tools to work in certain ways if they are to get their job done. That is the reason, rather than some deeply buried genetic grammar gene, that languages have similar features. As a dabbler in this area, I hadn't realized that Chomsky was passe (or maybe going passe.)

Shariatmadari also made some interesting points about language density. People can comprehend only so much, so denser languages are slower, and faster languages are less dense.

Shariatmadari's writing was accessible. I enjoyed his presentation and the material in this book.