Conversations: To Palestine, With Love... Ancient & Biblical History of the Levant w/ Dr Chance Bonar

Liv speaks with ancient and biblical scholar Chance Bonar about the history of Palestine and the ancient Levant. This conversation examines the history of the place and the people, people which included Jews and Judaism co-existing with others who have called that land home since the Bronze Age, those same people the west seeks to erase. There is no attempt to delegitimize Jewish history in the region, only to examine how many peoples existed there and for how long. We look at the myth of the Roman Empire "inventing" Palestine and all the many crimes the Romans did in fact commit against the people in that region, primarily the ancient Jews and Judaism itself. The love being sent to Palestine here is not excluding Judaism but embracing all of the people who have called that land home. Everyone deserves to live freely on their ancestral land and no country should exist where one group has more rights and freedoms than another. Submit to the quarterly Q&A at mythsbaby.com/questions http://mythsbaby.com/questions and get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Further reading: Everyday Orientalism's Palestine primer https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/eopalestine/; Rashid Khalidi's Hundred Years War on Palestine. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 1:39Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv. I'm trying to keep these intros short and sweet. This episode means a lot to me. It was a long time in the works because I really wanted to do it right. Today, I've spoken with Dr. Chance Bonar, who is a classicist and also a biblical scholar. His work really spans everything I wanted for this episode, just looking at the very long and storied history of Palestine, of the ancient Levant from the Bronze Age up until...

• 2:24Liv Albert?

  The Roman Empire and a bit later, we're looking at, at the archaeological record, how it aligns or doesn't align with the biblical record, with the historical record, all of those things, and how they go together to, to make up the history of this incredibly ancient land and incredibly ancient people. We had a really great time. It's a really interesting episode. It is important to know that it was recorded just a day or two after the ceasefire was announced. I think that's important to keep that in mind.

• 3:15Liv Albert?

  Conversations to Palestine with Love, A History of the Ancient Levant with Dr. Chance Bonar.

• 3:37Liv Albert?

  Why don't we start, can you tell me kind of what you specialize in, so we have a kind of background on, on, you know, where you're coming from in your research of, of this, this region of the ancient world, say broadly for now?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, so I got into this originally in undergrad that I did a triple major in classics, religion, and ancient studies, which is really just a double major, let's be honest, when all of those things end up being kind of the same.

• 4:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  But in doing so, I got really invested in the history of the Bible and biblical scholars are weirdly equipped to talk about Israel, Palestine, the coastal Levant, in part because that's where most of our training is taking place, right? We have to know about the history of Greece and of the Roman Empire and a little bit of Egypt and Mesopotamia. But really, we spend a lot of our time thinking about the region of Palestine from the Iron Age down to the Roman Empire.

• 4:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  In order to kind of cover, you know, traditionally called the Old and New Testaments. So I kind of got into this in part through biblical studies and being really fascinated with how people interpreted Christian writings in particular, in part through a love of the Greek language. And since then have kind of developed in certain ways in my interest that I especially right now do a lot in ancient Mediterranean slavery studies. So really invested in the kind of the intersection of religion and slavery in antiquity.

• 5:09Liv Albert?

  Well, I might have to have you back on the show now that you've said that. So we might, we'll talk in the future because that also sounds interesting.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  That sounds great.

• 5:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay. So I'm so interested in that because I don't, you know, we've, we've talked about this before, but I don't have any background in biblical anything. I am a baptized Catholic and that's about the extent of my religious background as a human. But I'm so interested in how that would tie in, like, obviously you have, you know, your knowledge, not only in biblical studies, but also the ancient Mediterranean. So like, how does, how does it work when you're looking at biblical verses, like say archaeological, like material history, like, you know, I imagine there's a big discrepancy between those. Like how are, how do you navigate? This is a very broad question. So maybe just like a simple, because it's, it, it, it's interesting to me to consider those two sides of quote unquote, history.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right. So this is something that I'm really fascinated with and really passionate about in my own work because, you know, if we go back 150 years, in the 19th century, biblical studies and classical studies were the same discipline, right? We were all doing this work because that is what especially Europeans, North Americans were really invested in is understanding kind of building this legacy of ancient history and how it connects to modern Europe and modern, in modern North America.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  And of course, those started to diverge over time, and we started to get the field of classics, which specifically kind of was rejecting the idea of being involved with the Bible or theology and biblical studies, then kind of became its own discipline, separate from that. But there's actually, you know, a lot of work happening right now to start to bring these back together, especially since so many classics departments are really invested right now, sometimes for really practical reasons of wanting to stay afloat, sometimes for other more theoretical reasons of realizing that the ancient world is really interconnected, that we're starting to do this work again of saying, oh, yeah, we should really pay attention to like, what's going on in the Eastern Mediterranean and how Greece and Rome are just the center of everything,

• 7:13Speaker 02

  but are participating in this much larger world. And I think for ancient Palestine in particular, that's what's really fascinated with me, right? Is that this is a place where if you're studying this region, even within kind of the traditional bounds of biblical studies, right? You have to learn about the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans, right? That all of these people are political actors in the Levant and are part of the history of this region. So especially it being kind of such a, well, a crossroads of Afro-Eurasia, but also a place that is deeply impacted by imperialism and colonization,

• 7:58Speaker 02

  that ancient Palestine is a really fascinating place to have to think about as a biblical scholar.

• 8:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, I mean, just the whole of the ancient Mediterranean being, you know, something that we look at collectively has been something, or I try to do it more and more in my show. Like, obviously, I have, you know, a real, my grounding is in Greek, but especially through guests, like, I want to hear about the whole of the ancient Mediterranean because they were so connected, because isn't that way more interesting that they were? So that's perfect, you know, stepping stone then directly into, like, what do we? I want to go back to the Bronze Age because, you know, that's the earliest that we've got, or at least. The most reasonable place to start. Um, so what do we know about that region during the Bronze Age? I know that I did a Bronze Age series last year and, or maybe the year before, time is a flat circle.

• 8:49Liv Albert?

  But I did a Bronze Age series recently and, you know, I was looking at all of these maps of, of the Bronze Age and its collapse. And one of the things I noticed, particularly because I was doing this in, you know, 2024, I was noticing that Gaza is on so many maps of like, you know, movement in the Bronze Age and, and, and the collapse itself and all of this. So like, what do we know about ancient Palestine during that Bronze Age period? That earliest time?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. That we, so we know a good amount, especially about Gaza, right? That, um, especially the area that today is known as Gaza City, um, was already around in the Bronze Age. It was occupied at the time by Canaanites, um, who were there already sometime around, or maybe a little bit before, like 3,000 BCE. So they, they've been around for a while. Uh, and this was a kind of a major trading hub, um, unsurprisingly, again, being on the coast and being kind of, especially with Gaza being kind of right on the corner of, uh, the Asian continent and the African continent, right? That there's, uh, this is a major trading hub, especially for Canaanites and Egyptians. But it has this really complex history throughout the Bronze Age.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Sometimes it's, um, the region of Gaza is abandoned. Sometimes it's resettled. Sometimes it's occupied by the Hiksa, right? These, um, people that we don't really know that much about, uh, these, they're often sometimes associated with sea people or they're, they're the ones who ruled Egypt for, um, a period of, I think sometime in the 18th to 16th centuries BCE.

• 10:22Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  But they're this kind of mysterious group that, uh, took over Egypt for a little while and also kind of settled and occupied all the way out to, uh, to Gaza. But in the area around what, uh, what was and is now Gaza, um, Egypt had a lot of substantial sway up until the Bronze Age collapse, up until the 12th century.

• 10:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Um, when it seems like Philistines were inhabiting the area. And that's when we get to kind of biblical history as we know it, thinking about like the Israelite monarchy and the Kingdom of Judah.

• 10:56Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  And these later biblical kings. But I think along with that, what's really fascinating is that we actually get the name Gaza really early on, especially in Egyptian literature.

• 11:09Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  We, we have an early name for it in the New Kingdom. So by the 15th century BCE, there's a, some military records under one of the pharaohs, Thutmose III, that refers to this as Hazat or Hazati. So already in the 15th century, we have some early name for Gaza. And this gets repeated elsewhere in the Amarna Letters, another kind of famous collection of Egyptian texts and gets picked up by Assyrians and Babylonians after that.

• 11:39Liv Albert?

  That's, see, that's, I mean, that's just so interesting. I love when we can, you know, see these connections to the ancient world or to the ancient words and just they're so similar and they, you know, I, I just find that so lovely. It reminds me of, so, okay, maybe this is a perfect kind of way to lead into this, which is, you know, the earliest form of Palestine as its, you know, closest relation to the English word is coming from Herodotus in, you know, the 6th century BCE. And he describes very clearly, he's like, "The land between Syria and Egypt is called Palestine." And I love that for him. He makes it a very clean and clear to the point.

• 12:19Liv Albert?

  But I know that there are forms of where that word comes from that are coming from earlier languages and the Egyptians specifically and like, but we can see those connections to the Greek Palestina. So do you know about those, you know, how, how the name evolved into Palestina?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean, it's really fascinating, right? Because Herodotus is one of our go-to examples to say, "Look, this is one of the earliest cases we know of what we would recognize as the name Palestine." And also helps us kind of debunk a really common myth today that like the Romans invented Palestine. Right? The Romans started everything. I mean, the Romans did a lot of bad things and they, well, we can talk about that more. They definitely do use the term Palestine in kind of anti-Jewish ways. So that's worth unpacking. Yeah. But to know that there is this longer history to the term before that. So, you know, what these people are called and what they call themselves is a little messy.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  We often know that like the names for the people of this region from like Egyptian or Assyrian or Babylonian records. Often those records from people on the outside that are interacting with them often call them things like, yeah, the Hazat, like the Gazans, or the Palastu, Palashdu. So there's some early version of Palas. Yeah. There. And even like really, it gets really messy because even like,

• 13:47Speaker 02

  if we're thinking about biblical history for a second and how we talk about the people of this region and how they named themselves, even really famous examples of self-naming, like the names of the different tribes associated with the king of Judah. They varied over time. Even within the Hebrew Bible, these names of these tribes, these people groups, aren't actually all lining up all the time. There are different tribes labeled at different times with different names, that they're still collectively making sense of who they are.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  But just to give us an idea of like kind of what this looks like, that we have the Palashdu, we have. So we really, we first get like the first occurrence of something like the term Palestine from an Egyptian source, again, from the reign of Ramses III in the 12th century, that he's talking about this people group that existed at the time that he calls the Pelaset. So again, we have some kind of like Pelus

• 14:50Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Consonants already existing in the 12th century. And we think that these are probably affiliated with the the Peluset is referring probably to the Philistines. So this is around the time of the Bronze Age collapsed and he's probably referring to the inhabitants of this region in the coastal Levant, trying to make sense of who they are. And that this becomes this later term for the Palash, too, as the Syrians called them. And by 10th or 9th century BCE, Egypt, we have actually with a statue of an Egyptian official that describes him as an envoy to Canaan in Palestine, which is

• 15:34Speaker 02

  written kind of like P R S T. So something like Preshet. I mean, there's a little bit more that happens here that like we start to have Aramaic and Hebrew texts that refer to these people as sometimes themselves, or sometimes as another people group, as the Palestine. So like this starts to become a formal title. And it seems like this is what someone like Herodotus picks up as he hears some version of this and says, oh, these are the people of Palestine or the Palestine.

• 16:05Liv Albert?

  That's yeah, OK. I this is so fascinating. And it's just, I mean, I think it obviously applies to so much of the ancient world, which is sort of the context I'm trying to phrase my way into right now, which is, you know, I think

• 16:19Liv Albert?

  you know, when it comes to a place naming itself, we can get a little worked up or a little confused by how many different names are coming from the outside. And, you know, that kind of thing can often lead to the same kind of devaluation, you know, of of the names that we call it now. It's making me think of, there was, you know, some nonsense video that went around sometime last year where someone was like Palestine can't, you know, have been a real place before because Arabic doesn't have a P. And I, you know, my reaction was to just laugh and be like, yeah, well, Greek doesn't have, isn't called Greek in Greece. So like, you know, that's just how language works.

• 17:01Liv Albert?

  But I imagine something like this of, you know, these names coming from the outside and being put together. Like, that's happening with most of the people in the region, right? Like, this is an exclusive to Palestine.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, this is not exclusive. And, you know, we have to be okay with the fuzziness of this that like, there are different terms that become more prominent for a region at different times. So especially depending on who has political power at a certain time. I mean, you know, this is even the case of like, you know, for example, my partner's German. And of course, Germany refers to itself as Deutschland. We refer to it as Germany because of the Romans, right? That they encountered one tribe, the Germania, and said, oh, this must be the name for all of the people here.

• 17:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  So like, we have to be okay with like, knowing that like, people have different names for themselves than others call them. Sometimes these names become generalized, sometimes they're really local. And especially in a place like the coastal of, like, this is a region that, I mean, just to give us like an example, um, between like the, say, like the 15th and 8th centuries BCE. Like, there are so many different West Semitic languages being spoken here at this time. This is like an incredibly diverse linguistic region, too. Like, we have early Canaanite, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Moabite, Hebrew, Edomite. Like, all of these different languages, which also, to some degree, represent slightly different people groups. That we also have to take into account that, you know, there are a bunch of people living here.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  That it's not just the ancient Israelites by, you know, the 10th, 9th and 8th centuries. It's not just the Canaanites, but that, this is a really diverse and complex place.

• 18:40Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, and it's funny, because, you know, so much of that is true of ancient Greece as well, which obviously we hold on to as this like pillar of Western civilization and the same with the Romans. And so it's just, it's funny to me when, when I hear, you know, that, that kind of, of, you know, argument, in whatever way you could call it, that, you know, against this. Of legitimacy, because like you said about Germany, which I actually didn't know was coming just from, but of course it is from Germania. But you know, and it's same with like the word Greek is Latin for the Greek people. But they obviously refer to themselves and did back then, or when what kind of collective culture they had as as Hellenic, as the Hellenes like. That that's true of everyone, you know?

• 19:24Liv Albert?

  And so it's just, it's a funny thing to me. And I understand the the need, the desire to blame the Romans. But if we want to blame the Romans, you know, we have to blame them for so many places that do form like the basis for quote unquote, Western civilization.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think one thing we can do, so I think we can blame the Romans for popularizing the name Palestine.

• 19:44Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Because of the way that they applied it. Because like, if we're looking at how people called this region previously, like Egypt tends to call it Canaan. Assyrians tend to call it something like the West. Babylon called it Yahadu right after. After it's kind of the people of Judah. Persia followed suit by calling it Yahud. The Seleucids came in and said, okay, Judea, we get it. Yeah. And then Romans with. We'll talk about the war a little bit later on, but Romans after warfare with Jewish people decided to rename it partially Palestine in order Palestine in order to kind of de Judeaize the region.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  So they, they, they helped popularize it, but they aren't the inventors of the term at all. They're pulling on a long, long tradition.

• 20:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay. Um, you've said this word once or twice, and I know that it has connections. And in my head, it's like a very biblical word, but Philistine, like to me, that's also like so clearly just like. I mean, another, it sounds like Palestine too. So, you know, where is that coming in? What is that? Yeah. Who were these people?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Who are the Philistines? So the Philistines are associated with the people who live kind of on the southern coast of Canaan, or what we call, you know, the coastal of Palestine, that they are there sometime in the Iron Age, that they're kind of, they associate themselves as the Philistine people, Philistia. So they're basically where like Gaza is today. So they're in that kind of southern area, just west of Jerusalem. And these are the people that are associated in part with the Bronze Age collapse, which means, of course, there's all the messiness around this history

• 21:33Speaker 02

  of like, who are these people? Where are they coming from? Are they sea people coming from some of the Greek islands that are in the Aegean? Are they coming from elsewhere?

• 21:44Speaker 02

  But these people, the Philistines, are around for a long time. So they, they stick around and are there through the rule of the Assyrian Empire in the area. So through kind of the

• 21:59Speaker 02

  eighth and seventh centuries BCE, and are really famous also for being in conflict with other people in the region. That famously, they have a lot of conflict with the Israelites, who are their next door neighbors. They also have conflict with the Canaanites, who are still around. So again, one of the fascinating things about this area in antiquity is that there are so many different people groups here. All of them are kind of locally vying for power, but also are dealing with the fact that like, as they're having these local battles, they also have these kind of superpowers of Assyria, or Babylon, or Egypt, kind of right outside their door, who often come in and try to turn them into vassals of some

• 22:43Speaker 02

  sort, or reuse them for their own political purposes.

• 22:47Liv Albert?

  Are they connected to the Phoenicians? Or is it sort of coincidental that the name ended up sounding vaguely similar in English? Do you know?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  This is one of the big questions is.

• 22:55Liv Albert?

  That sounds like, yeah, Bronze Age collapsed questions.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Exactly, the Bronze Age's collapsed question is like, they might be connected.

• 23:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:02Liv Albert?

  They might all be sea people. I don't know. Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. As someone who's not completely a Bronze Age historian, it's beyond me to say for sure. So, but it is, it's connected to that problem of like, are these people partially the Phoenicians? Who of course, live a little bit further up the coast, especially around Tyre. So, and are also part of biblical history and are, you know, Phoenicians are part of the people in the coastal area that Israelites and Judaits are interacting with and having conflict with at times.

• 23:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and I know them so, you know, tied to Tyre for mythological purposes. Cause I, one of my introductions into Greek mythology was falling in love with the story of Cadmus. And, and his sort of, you know, mythologically Cadmus is, is born in Tyre. And then it travels to Greece and founds the Greek alphabet. Because the ancient Greeks were very clear on it. Their alphabet came from the Phoenician alphabet, which is coming from Tyre, southern Lebanon.

• 24:02Liv Albert?

  Insert, you know, people can assume what's also happening there because it's all, you know, all deeply interconnected. But yeah, it's, it's so interesting, especially in that little stretch of the Levant where we, I mean, it makes sense that it would have ended up with so many people from such an early time and so much movement. Because it is such a connector hub. Like you were saying, you know, it's connecting Africa to Asia, but it's also connecting with Europe via Cyprus. I know there was like a lot of transmission from Phoenicians and beyond to the Greeks through Cyprus and, and through Crete too. I'm not sure where this is ending up as a question. I guess I'm just sort of adding in more information.

• 24:45Liv Albert?

  But it just fascinates me the way that these places are so interconnected. And I suppose my, I'm just sort of rambling out of the frustration of, of, of the modern need to like establish that like one group has more or less right to a space. But when it comes to the ancient world, like particularly the ancient Med, we're not talking about, you know, any peoples that really stayed in one place or that, you know, existed. I don't know how I'm phrasing this. I'm trying not to make it sound worse. Um, yeah, uh, maybe wrap up my thought.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I get what you mean, right? Cause like, there is this kind of major question of like, how can we talk about the issue of like first come, first served in a region when like, especially given the history, I mean, without even talking about the history of the Levant, right? Talking about the history of Greece and the fact that, you know, there were people who came down from the north and became the Greeks, um, rather than the people who were living there beforehand.

• 25:40Liv Albert?

  And there's lots of theories that even that maybe didn't fully, like there's the Dorian invasion, quote unquote, or there's the migration or, you know, did the Dorian's come from anywhere or, you know, yeah. And, and, and no one is trying, you know, there, there's never anyone out there saying that like the Mycenaeans were the true Greeks and, you know, uh, the, the people who came later and we think were not the same as the Mycenaeans, you know, don't have claim and it, you know, we're talking about something that's so long ago that we can't fully conceptualize, you know, how many different groups and how they were related because we're talking like 5,000 years and a place that was inherently made for migration and movements and,

• 26:23Liv Albert?

  and then of course, then add to that, the Bronze Age collapse and, and all the issues that they probably had with climate change and moving around and things. And, and so it was just always this place of incredible movement, but also, you know, I mean, yeah, incredible movement and shifting and also sharing cultures. I guess what I want to say is that there was, they, they were very, you know, as much as they often were warring with each other too, but there was like a cultural, a sharing of culture in this region quite a bit.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Agreed, agreed.

• 26:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So like, you know, I'm just now I'm just saying things. Um, but you know, important things, but it's okay. I, I am interested in the biblical side of it because I know there's so much, um, there's so much obviously coming from the Bible in terms of, you know, the, the current situation. I don't know why I'm trying to walk around it. Everyone knows how I feel on the show, but we're, you know, um, so it, where is this bit like, what is the biblical story? I guess is what I'm asking of that, the whole issue was happening in the Bible in this region.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Sure. So, I mean, just to give us-

• 27:26Liv Albert?

  It's a tiny question. I know.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Tiny question. Yeah. The story of the Bible. Um, yeah. Uh, I can give us kind of a short version of it, but, um, also to show us like how. How this story plays out and also some of the complexity around it.

• 27:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  So the biblical story portrays the Hebrew people. This is complex because it starts out with Abraham. Abraham is originally a guy from out in Or, Chaldea.

• 27:53Liv Albert?

  So modern Iraq.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  So modern Iraq, yeah. So he's from modern Iraq and God appears to Abraham and says, you're going to go elsewhere. There's a land that your descendants will be in. So one of the most complicated things for the study of the history of the idea of Israel as a place, as an ideal, is that it starts off with this foreigner who's told, you're going to move to this land. This will be the land of your people. And of course, the story continues where Abraham makes his way further west, but ends up, the just descendants ends up in Egypt and we'll get to the story of the Exodus in a second.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  But it's really complex because the, this group of people develop different senses of identity over the centuries that they start out as being known as Hebrews. This is true up to the time of Moses within the biblical narrative. Later they become Israelites or Judaists, that they become kind of associated with

• 28:58Speaker 02

  a certain kind of social and political entity in that way when in the coastal Levant and later becoming Judeans. But yeah, they start off as in the biblical story with Abraham leaving his father's house, going to new land. And he's told that he's going to become a great nation through whom all these families of the earth are going to be blessed. This is kind of early on in the book of Genesis. Abraham and Sarah, his wife, end up settling in Egypt for a while. And eventually God has Abraham settle in what's today the coastal Levant and says that is promising land between the river of Egypt, which in this case actually isn't the Nile.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  We'd think that would be really clear, but it's actually a little wadi near modern Deir Rafa and the Euphrates. So this is a promise from God that Abraham's descendants will have this land that's also inhabited by a bunch of other people at the time.

• 29:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, all the way to the Euphrates is.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty far.

• 30:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, and even within the book of Genesis, it says, well, yeah, there are all these other people here, the Canaanites, the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Jibazites. There are all these other inhabitants in the land that's promised to Abraham and his descendants. And yeah, that's a huge swath of area. And we can get into that, too. But after this point, right, there's

• 30:26Speaker 02

  some of Abraham's descendants end up in Egypt, being enslaved to Pharaoh, according to this story, and then make their way back out. Famously, scholars aren't really convinced by the history of the Exodus narrative because we have so little evidence of this kind of mass slavery of ancient Hebrew people in Egypt.

• 30:46Liv Albert?

  So that's an interesting question. So there is a lack of evidence for that. Well, yeah, for that as the starting point.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't have any kind of other archaeological or literary evidence that points to this. Our best theory is that there probably was a small group of people who were enslaved in Egypt and made their way up into ancient Palestine and incorporated themselves into this early group of Hebrews or Israelites. And in doing so, their story about their own escape from Egyptian slavery became part of this larger tradition within Jewish history.

• 31:25Liv Albert?

  That makes sense. And also, that's nice. Yeah, it would become a bigger, a bigger story because they sort of respected what, what those people went through.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And it makes sense to us, too, because like, you know, we have some early records about what the Israelites were up to. There's a famous Egyptian stele called the Neptah Stele. That is one of our first mentions of Israel as a people group. And it doesn't talk about them as leaving Egypt en masse. But it's like, yeah, there are these people that are out there that Egypt is interested in controlling.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Along with that, we, so when the Exodus narrative happens in the biblical storyline, Moses famously leads his people out of Egypt and waltzers around the desert for forty years, and he doesn't get to enter the promised land, but his second-in-command Joshua does. And so the Exodus narrative ends, unfortunately, with ethnic cleansing and genocide. Joshua killing many of the Canaanites in the region. And again, this is another story where we actually don't have kind of other archaeological literate evidence that helps us kind of corroborate the biblical story, especially because this

• 32:45Speaker 02

  is mostly set during and around the Bronze Age collapse, which adds to the complexity of it. And the cities that Joshua is said to have destroyed in the biblical story aren't the ones that we have archaeological evidence for being destroyed. Like even a fairly famous case, like, right? He walks around Jericho in order to make the walls fall down. But we don't actually know for sure if Jericho was occupied during the time that he supposedly brought the walls down.

• 33:13Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

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• 36:01Speaker 03

  So but so the region, the stories like that. So, you know, I don't know what I'm asking. Basically, I want to, I want to ask about how like what the level of genocide in the biblical story, but I don't want to make it too like I'm

• 36:20Liv Albert?

  Pointing this out. Do you know what I mean?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, this is so this is something that there are scholars today who work a lot on who talk about this in especially in the case of Joshua and the settlement of Hebrew people in Canaanite lands. That this is a big question is how do we talk about the fact that the settlement of this region of the promised land is

• 36:49Speaker 02

  in part described in genocidal terms. That it that is this fantasy of genocide of being able to wipe out the people of the region in order to control it.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  That if we can get into that in more complexity, but there's there are kind of two main cases of this. One is famously the Joshua narrative. And the other is dealing with this figure called Amalek. Amalek is he's first mentioned in the book of Genesis in chapter thirty six. He's one of the grandchildren of Esau, so he's part of this lineage that goes back to Jacob, Isaac, Abraham.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  So he's he's imagined in the story to be the great, great grandchild of Abraham. And he shows up a few times that he tries to ambush the Israelites during the Exodus when they're still wandering out of the desert. But by the time that the Israelites kind of make their way and have a space in the coastal Levant. The Alamelites, so the people of Amalek are around and the Israelites are commanded by God to kill every single one of them to in the way that it's put in Deuteronomy twenty five to blot out their memory from under heaven. After having taken the promised land as retribution for this attack that happened during the Exodus.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  So just to give us that as well, that there's kind of this, these two major stories that happen early on in kind of the biblical story as it's portrayed in texts like Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy that are complex because part of this story around the migration of the Hebrew people into the land of the coastal event involves killing others in the area and being able to kind of cleanse the area of Canaanite or Amalekite people.

• 38:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, that's just very descriptive. The blot out the memory is, you know, it's, it's not to put it lightly, but it's giving damnatio memoriae kind of thing.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:10Liv Albert?

  Just get rid of the memory. Yeah. Wow. Um, so it's so, the biblical stuff is so, both so interesting. And also I'm like, I don't totally know how to phrase my questions around it because it's such a sort of different realm, but also it isn't, um, you know, but I, and I don't, I don't want to like miss out on, on covering too much of that. But also, you know, we want to get into the, the Roman period of it all.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 39:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Where, where this narrative is coming from that Rome, you know, invented Palestine, that Rome is sort of the, I mean, Rome is to blame for a lot of things.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:48Liv Albert?

  The Roman Empire did a lot of terrible, terrible things. And I'm sure that that is true in this case, but obviously the narrative then becomes, you know, that, that the Romans, quote unquote, invented Palestine, that, that, that somehow delegitimizes, you know, the, the modern region that, that holds the same name and, and history. So yeah, what, what is kind of happening there?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 40:14Liv Albert?

  It's a big question.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Let's, let's do like a, a speed run of the next few centuries to get us up to there really quick.

• 40:20Liv Albert?

  Wonderful, thank you.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  So yeah, so we have, right, within the biblical story, we have the Hebrew people arrive, take part in, take hold, settle part of the promised land and start to establish these tribes and kingdoms, right? Famously, 12 tribes that make up the entirety of this region. We have kind of, within biblical storytelling, we have one major time when these tribes are all united under a single king, under a single monarchy, under King David. And then everything falls apart after that because King David is the only one that can actually pull this off. So his son Solomon doesn't pull this off. We have a divided kingdom. So now we have the Kingdom of Israel, Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.

• 41:03Liv Albert?

  Oh, they are two different things. This is great information for me. Thank you.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  They are two different things.

• 41:07Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  I know, right? Which is, which is really important because one, one falls to the Assyrians and one falls to the Babylonians. So they actually, they do have very different histories where one falls in, I think it's like the 720s, the other in like the 580s.

• 41:25Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, so they have kind of their own distinct histories. And it's complex too, because the, the biblical texts that make up what Christians call the Old Testament, what Jews call the Tanakh, are all texts from one of these two kingdoms. So that also makes it really tricky, right? That we're hearing in, in essence, part of the story of all of these people.

• 41:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It reminds me just to connect it for my listeners too, that, you know, how so much of what we conceptualize as ancient Greece today, like so much, you know, that's changing now, but historically so, so much of what we conceptualize as the whole of ancient Greece is coming very specifically from Athens, which was not at all, you know, going the same as the rest of, of Greece. So it's like this very biased, but also just like very small bit of a much larger story.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So we're getting, most of this material is from one of these two kingdoms. So we really don't have kind of the full picture of how everyone felt about, for example, by the time of one specific king named Josiah. Josiah's the one that really kind of. Institutes monotheism in a way. Um, he, he supposedly finds the book of Deuteronomy, uh, hidden away in a corner that's, uh, people have forgotten about and then uses it to, uh, basically say, nope, there's, there's one God, there's one temple, um, we're gonna get rid of everything else that's in the way of that. And a lot of scholars think that he was basically, um, consolidating power, right?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Um, trying to make Jerusalem the key place for everything within his kingdom. Um, but as this goes on, uh, eventually, right, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, uh, defeat Israel and Judah, uh, conquer these spaces, uh, and after this point, we have, of course, famously Alexander the Great coming through the area, um, doing his thing. So we start to see the Hellenization of the region. Uh, and at this point, we have, of course, after Alexander dies, a division of Alexander's kingdom and

• 43:43Liv Albert?

  This is big drama we'll cover sometime.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yes, there's a big drama there. Um, and of course, being, um, at the crossroads, it's a really interesting area again, because this is an area of Alexander's world that, uh, is mostly controlled by the Seleucids, one of these kings, one of these kings and kingdoms that kind of takes over, but it's really close to Egypt and really

• 44:03Liv Albert?

  I was gonna say, it's so close to the Ptolemies, yeah. You're so you're, e- even then, you're dealing with sort of i- i- two Hellenist groups, but kind of, you know, intermingling or, or I imagine causing more confusion.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So even there, you have kind of local rulers in this place at this point, thought of as Judea, that, you know, talked about as Judea, that's kind of balancing the fact that it's kind of being tugged between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies at times, and sometimes trying to take advantage of those, um, those kingdoms fighting with each other for their own advantage.

• 44:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And to get us up close to the Romans, we have famously, uh, the Maccabean revolt and the Hasmonian rule. So these are ways of saying that, um, there was one family in particular, uh, the Maccabees, who as far, um, basically led a, um,

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Led a revolt against Seleucid rule, especially in the second century B.C. to say, "We don't like how things are being Hellenized. We prefer a different type of rule and more political and religious autonomy," which led to what's usually referred to as the autonomous Jewish kingdom under the Hasmoneans. This gets complex because a lot of research happening right now on the history of the Hasmonean Jewish kingdom is actually showing that it's not as autonomous as previously believed. But this is in the mythology of ancient Jewish history.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  This is a really, really important moment because this is, I mean, for one, this is the story that gives us Hanukkah, but also...

• 45:49Liv Albert?

  I recognize one word in that from pop culture. Thank you.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yep. This is where we get Hanukkah from, but also is often looked back at today as to say, "Look, these are the types of Jewish leaders and Jewish culture that some people want to see revived today," to say, "Look, the Hasmoneans, the Maccabees, they are the people who should be emulated because they fought so strongly against corrupt Greek culture in order to revive a Jewish state."

• 46:19Liv Albert?

  It's interesting, sorry, because I just am trying to decide just how deep I'm going to go into this thought process. I might just present it to the listeners to think of. But it's interesting to me how many stories tie in with the word revolt, because I think it's a very interesting word when we're talking about history and simultaneously a word we would never use today, even though we might be describing an incredibly similar event. And maybe that's what I'll say.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Fair enough, right? It's a politicized question to decide what's called a revolt. That's one of my current book projects right now is on slave revolts in antiquity. And that's one of the big questions is how do we define what counts as a slave revolt? It's, yeah, huge question for how resistance works.

• 47:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and I mean, I think about this a lot. I mean, I think a lot about, you know, the phrasing that we use in this world of today and in the world of the last, let's say, 25 years. You know, the words that we use to describe resistance as compared to how we would use, how we would describe resistance 200 years ago, you know, in, because we see those things very differently after the fact, when they become a full-blown, you know, history where no one survives. It's an interesting thing to talk about. Yeah, the way we phrase, the way we phrase resistance, revolts, and otherwise.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Definitely. So to get us up to the Romans, we're so close. Basically, at this point, we have this semi-autonomous Jewish kingdom, but there becomes a lot of infighting, other problems that arise. The different descendants of the Hasmatians that are in charge of this kingdom start to split up power between themselves. So some want to be more kind of kingly rulers, some want to be more priestly rulers. And then they start calling on the Romans to help them figure out their disputes. We know this because of hindsight, but you should never call on the Romans to help you figure out your politics because they will just take over. And that's exactly what happened. They called on Pompey and Pompey said, sure, I'll just take over the region.

• 48:37Liv Albert?

  Wow. Yeah. God, the Romans were great. They definitely don't resemble a current, the current world at all, though.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 48:45Liv Albert?

  No.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  So that's really where we can start to think formally about the Romanization of Judea. That's, and it's complex early on because we have this question, especially in the first century B.C., which is, how much should this fall under Roman rule? So some sections of Judea fall under, or...

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I don't want to say Judea because that's confusing with that being also a specific region within this larger area that also includes like Samaria and Galilee, uh which are probably more familiar names.

• 49:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Um, that are are not Judea, but within this larger region of um.

• 49:24Liv Albert?

  The Levant.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  The Levant.

• 49:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  First century B C Palestine.

• 49:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Um, we have um these different kind of local rulers that are set up by the Romans, probably the best known one, right, the the Vassal King of Rome, King Herod.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Um, who and Herod's sons eventually become rulers of different parts of this ancient Palestinian landscape.

• 49:47Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  But um, so some aspects of or some parts of this first century Palestinian landscape were controlled directly by Rome, some were kind of run semi independently through these Vassal rulers like Herod, uh but eventually the Romans get tired of that because they don't like the Herods and all of uh his Herod and all of his descendants, the Herodians, who are running some of these regions and say, no, actually, we're just gonna make this like directly make it a province. Um, so made into the province of Judea.

• 50:22Liv Albert?

  Hmm, oh, so they called it the province of Judea, though.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is the province of Judea in um in the first century C E.

• 50:29Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  So to get us that far, this is when we have a very famous human in in world history who comes into the picture.

• 50:37Liv Albert?

  I think I've heard of him.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  I think I've heard of Jesus.

• 50:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Jesus shows up in the middle of this, right, in um basically is in uh the colonized coastal Levant, um, living mostly in Galilee and then ends up in Judea um at the time of his crucifixion, uh.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  And this is, this is the point where we start to get to the closer to the, the story of how, how did Judea become Palestine? How did the Romans do this? So Jesus was one of many different kind of apocalyptic.

• 51:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, sure. Sorry, just I want to make, I want to, the way you phrase that, I wonder if it becomes more confusing of saying Judea became Palestine? Because we're also saying that Palestine was Judea before it was Palestine.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 51:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So like, I'm just thinking of how to phrase it. So, you know, we, it, it was Palestine before, and then the Romans made it Judea. And then the Romans made it Palestine again.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Palestine was still a name that was being used for it during that time period, but wasn't as prominent as, especially within kind of Roman sources, Roman literary sources.

• 51:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, the little more technical Roman terminology at that time would have been Judea.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  And I think that's the hardest way to think about it, as we have to be like, multiple names are existing for this place at the same time.

• 52:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and also like, it's a big space and there would have been lots of multiple names on the inside, like a smaller, you know, and that's so true of the ancient world, but it's really, it's a lot harder, I think, when we're looking at biblical and stuff, because then there, there's added confusion, you know, from those sources. And then also obviously all of the, the, the issues that go on top of all of that. But yeah, like, you know, all of these places had a ton of different names all of the time.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 52:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically as, you know, with Roman colonial and imperial presence, lots of inhabitants of the Levant didn't exactly enjoy that. And Jesus is one of many of these Messiah figures that appeared, especially around the first century BCE and CE, who were saying, hey, like, we're not happy with how things are going. We need to find ways to renew this space, often phrasing it around like bringing, bringing God's kingdom here.

• 52:58Liv Albert?

  Some more resistance to the colonial powers.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And this resistance leads to three different wars. So famously, the first Roman Jewish war that happened in the 60s and 70s CE. This is probably best known because this is when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans. So this is the moment when we have a major change in kind of the history of Judaism. When there's no longer a temple to go to, sacrifices can't be done anymore. And this is, although it's a little anachronistic to talk about this way, this is also kind of like a major moment in the development of rabbinic culture. Because what do you do when you don't have a temple? You find other ways to do your Judaism, right?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  To be Jewish, and that often involves for the rabbis, thinking through other forms of book culture, of ritual practices.

• 53:57Liv Albert?

  That's interesting. And also, like, you know, don't want to understate how terrible it would be as a, for your culture and the religion associated with your culture to have the temple destroyed in that way. Like, that's, yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, like this is, as someone who works on kind of slavery in ancient Palestine, this is a time when tens of thousands were enslaved and murdered by the Romans. And the funds that were taken from, both from like the things that the Romans stole from the Jerusalem temple and the slave labor that they took from ancient Palestine was literally the stuff that constructed the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus in Rome. Like, that is, that is built out of the enslavement and murder of people in Judea.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  So it's intense.

• 54:45Liv Albert?

  Romans.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Romans.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that happens, huge moment in the history of the Judean province, province.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  But after that, there are still two other major moments. So we have this moment often referred to as, sometimes it's called the Second Jewish Roman War. Sometimes it's called the diaspora revolts. This happens under Trajan, so around like 115, 116 CE.

• 55:13Liv Albert?

  I see where we're getting to.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that we have a bunch of.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Different people in the Jewish diaspora rise up for, we don't know whether it's the same reason or different reasons, so I'm gonna leave that aside. But especially in Egypt, in North Africa, and in Mesopotamia, we have all of these different Jewish communities that rise up and revolt as Trajan's doing his thing. And end up not being successful, but do cause quite a stir. And cause the Romans to really worry about whether or not there's going to be, both with the first Jewish Roman War and with these diaspora revolts, there's a lot of concern of like, oh, are they trying to reclaim Judea? Are they going to call on people in the Jewish diaspora that are in Mesopotamia, beyond the Euphrates?

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Because there are still people from, uh, living out there that might be interested in supporting fellow Jews. So all of this is reaching a boiling point, which we really hit under Hadrian. Famously called the Barcoopa Revolt, or the Third Jewish Roman War. Barcoopa is one of these other messianic leaders who attempts to revolt against the Roman Empire, ultimately fails. And it's really under Hadrian that we get what is now the birth of this story of the Romans in Palestine. Because what Hadrian does is, I think, I'm trying to remember if it goes under H N S P S as well.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  But in the 130s and by 140, we have this shift in the area where the Roman Emperor says, okay, we're going to raise most of Jerusalem to the ground and rename it Ilya Kapitalina. So it's going to be purposefully raised and then repopulated with Roman soldiers and veterans.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  At this time, also Jews are barred from entering the city of Jerusalem. Which continues up until 636, when Muslims take over Jerusalem and allow Jews to re-enter the city.

• 57:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's really interesting.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Right?

• 57:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Romans and the Christians continue that, during their rule over Jerusalem through late antiquity.

• 57:34Liv Albert?

  Right, and Islam allows them back in.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  And at this point, too, the Romans erect a temple of Jupiter, Jupiter, and what's now the Temple Mount, right? So after the destruction of the temple, it lays barren for a couple decades. Temple Jupiter is built there. And this is also when the Roman Empire says, we're no longer going to call this province Judea. We're going to kind of combine it a little bit with our province just north of there, Syria, and we're going to call it Syria, Palestine.

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  And so this is Hadrian who does this, right?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  This is primarily Hadrian who does a lot of this.

• 58:09Liv Albert?

  So I'm really fascinated by this. This is not some, I mean, I know I've, you know, taken in that it's mostly Hadrian who kind of really does this, but I never connected that the thing that I find interesting about Hadrian is of course that he was completely obsessed with Greece, and I find that relatable. And so do you think that's part of that is coming in is that he the the earlier form of that? I mean, obviously, it was called Palestine in lots of different ways for a thousand plus years, but very specifically, Palestine is the Greek name for that place. And that feels like a very Hadrian thing to do.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  I think that's part of it because basically in Hadrian's reign, right? Because Hadrian came into came into power 117 and reigned through 138. So he comes into power right as the diaspora revolts are ending. Famously, Trajan dies and Hadrian takes over and is like still kind of stuck having to deal with the aftermath of these Jewish diaspora revolts. And then later on, you know, a decade and a half into his reign, he's again dealing with Jewish revolts happening this time, not in the diaspora, but in the providence, the province of Judea itself. And so this is, I think, part of him kind of doing his own Hellenization campaign in Judea and also

• 59:30Liv Albert?

  Which he did everywhere. That's the thing to really point out, too. Like, he really wanted to Hellenize as much as humanly possible.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. So this is part of his larger agenda. And here we really see it come to the foreground because for him, it's, you know, his entire, his entire reign as emperor was, you know, from kind of beginning to end was shaped by Jewish revolt. So for him, this is also a moment to use his Hellenization campaign to try to put down these revolts and say, we're never going to allow, we, the Roman Empire, will never let this happen again.

• 1:00:04Liv Albert?

  Wow, it's so, it's just, it's interesting. You know, that old phrase that definitely isn't relevant here, but history repeating itself?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I'm, yeah, that's so, yeah, it's so interesting. And I know when it comes to that, so obviously Hadrian is trying to like really stamp this down, like the, these, this resistance, you know, the, the colonial empire is really looking to ensure that, that revolts don't happen. And so, you know, he, he's probably going on a bit of a campaign of erasing a lot of that. And so how does that tie in with, with the Jesus of it all? You know, that's, that's my very non-Christian way of, of phrasing it. But Jesus, you know, would have been a Jewish man born in Palestine. So like, what does that look like in that period? Like, what kind of identity is associated with that?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack here. And I think it's worth like, even just like pausing on these terms, right? Because like, yeah, right. So one of the, the things that today we now take as obvious as we say, Jesus was Jewish. And this, you know, every scholar in biblical studies agrees on this, no question. But also to recognize that this has a complicated history even behind that statement, that this statement emerged in part, at least became really, really prominent after World War II and after the Holocaust, as scholars were wrestling with the fact that especially Nazi historians and Nazi biblical scholars were really, really insistent that Jesus wasn't Jewish.

• 1:01:40Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:01:41Liv Albert?

  So I don't know any of this. Yeah, I didn't know any of that part. So what kind, like, did they just not talk about his kind of religion before that? Like, where was that coming from? Because yeah, I'm definitely of the like, obviously, Jesus was Jewish. That's the whole deal. Like, yeah, what came before?

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Part of it is a mixture of earlier biblical studies trying to divide Judaism and Christianity to say, well, clearly, Jesus was doing something different than the other Jews, right? So it's already kind of antisemitic in its portrayal of. Christianity as not Jewish.

• 1:02:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Um, and part of it too is that Jesus is Galilean, right? If we think about these different kind of, um, these different smaller areas within first century Palestine.

• 1:02:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  You know, there's Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Peria, and a few others.

• 1:02:27Liv Albert?

  So regionally, like, sorry, where, you know, is this all in, you know, what then? What we know now as ancient Palestine? Or are these going into Lebanon, into Syria? Like where, you know, how kind of small of a space were we looking at for these different parts?

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, we're looking at, I mean, we think about this way, this is, um, so when we think about like Judea as the province that's around Jerusalem today, um, Galilee, of course, being further north, near Nazareth, um, Tiberias. Um, and above that Phoenicia, which is Tyre, Sidon.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  And then beyond that, we have things like the Decapolis, the, the, the ten cities that are in what today is now Jordan, kind of just across the Jordan River, um, along with places like Peria and Nabatae. So we have all of these different like kind of sub areas within this broader area, this broader Roman province.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  So we're not, we're not extending up into Lebanon necessarily, um, within the province of Judea.

• 1:03:36Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Um, but we are extending a little bit into what's now Jordan.

• 1:03:39Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 1:03:42Liv Albert?

  Interesting, yeah. I mean, it's all like, that's just like looking at an ancient map. It's, and you know, that, that's just how the ancient world worked. But it's interesting to know that it was, there were these different regions. There's a lot of things that are like words I know from taking in, you know, biblical, anything over the years, but also that I've never considered necessarily on a map, you know? I, Galilee being one of them is all, so, yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, and I think, so really what happens here is in part that, um, Why the idea of Jesus being Jewish was controversial for Nazi historians, biblical scholars was that they tried to say, well, Jesus was Galilean, he wasn't Judean, right? Because he's not from Judea, he's not from the area around Jerusalem, he's from up north.

• 1:04:25Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  And there were questions around whether Galilee was more Hellenized than Jerusalem and Judea proper.

• 1:04:31Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  So there was this kind of, this biblical history-making that Nazi historians were doing to try to say Jesus wasn't actually Jewish because he wasn't Judean.

• 1:04:42Liv Albert?

  It sounds utterly absurd.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's exactly what, so the best book on this is by Suzanne Heschel, a biblical scholar who wrote The Arian Jesus, where she really unpacks how this myth came about in Nazi historiographical writing. But of course, as we said, post-World War II, post-Holocaust scholars start to look back at this and say, that's not a great model to write our histories on, that's not ethical in any way, just to start with. So we've done a lot more in the following decades to talk about Jesus's Jewishness and to unpack it.

• 1:05:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it's so wild to me on its face, right? And I come, you know, coming at this from looking at ancient history, you know, we were not saying Herodotus wasn't Greek because he was born in Halicarnassus, which is modern Turkey. Like, that's ridiculous. Like, we're not saying that Herodotus didn't, you know, associate with the Olympian gods because he was from modern Turkey. So it's like, of course, Jesus could be Jewish and not from Judea, because, I mean, there's just lots of reasons why that's wild. So I just want to break down some of them.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  And part of that, of course, is like the, the problem and question of how do we define Judaism, right? Is this an ethnicity, a religion? Is it associated with a place? And these are, of course, huge questions for religious studies and religious studies scholars. But that is really relevant here because that's part of how Nazi historians were able to kind of try to divorce this, to say, oh, if Judaism is really connected to the province of Judea, to Jerusalem, And these people in the, you know, not even even like Jews in the diaspora in like Alexandria, but even someone as close as Galilee could be deemed non-Jewish in their kind of racist way of trying to tell this story.

• 1:06:34Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, it's like, obviously, no one can actually rationalize groups like the Nazis, who try to, you know, it seems like intentionally misunderstanding history in order to, you know, make your point, especially because like, I mean, just again, there are so many reasons why mentalities like that seem so absurd when you think about them, you know, from the outside. But like, also, like, if Judaism has been around longer than Judea, then like, okay, again, we're looking at, like, obviously, that's fine, you know?

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Uh huh, uh huh.

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• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so even to bring this back to your question of like, how do we talk about Jesus as Jewish and Palestinian?

• 1:08:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  I think one of the ways is that, so there's debate around this because, you know, we talked a little bit already, what does it mean to call Jesus Jewish? But also, what does it mean to call Jesus Palestinian? That I think it Depends because there are different ways that people use that term. But sometimes people use saying things like Jesus was Palestinian as kind of a descriptor of trying to say Jesus was from the first century coastal Levant, right? He's from this broader region that we can collectively call Palestine because Palestine is larger than just the province of Judea. Or that it includes places like Galilee and Samaria, right? That we can't really call Jesus Judean in the sense of him being like from that specific province from Jerusalem proper.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  But we can talk about him as being part of this broader coastal Levantine culture.

• 1:09:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, Athens versus Greece, like.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, same kind of, yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  And along with that, it, but I think what makes it messy is also that, of course, there are people who are using Palestinian in a political sense. A good example of this is, uh, there's a, the father of black liberation theology, James Cone, used to talk about Jesus being black. And he specified in his writings, he's like, I don't mean that Jesus was a black person, that Jesus had dark skin, like people from certain parts of the African continent and those, their descendants. But I do mean that he is black politically and that he cares for the oppressed, he's part of the oppressed, et cetera. So sometimes Jesus is Palestinian, that statement is being used in a political sense to say he identifies with the political strugglings of Palestinian people today.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  And this becomes really interesting because sometimes when you put these two words together to say Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. In modernity, right, there are people who become really uncomfortable when those two terms are put next to each other. That's, for example, like, uh, there was a research paper that I did, uh, during my PhD where I looked at how this was brought up most Christmas times throughout the years. And how both American and Israeli newspapers would deal with the question of when either Palestinians or others would, or, you know, those who supported them said, Jesus is a Palestinian Jew, he was born in Palestine.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  How, what the response looked like. And often the response was saying, no, he's Jewish, not Palestinian. As if those are contradictory.

• 1:10:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Right. And that's where it gets really interesting, right, to say like, how are our modern um political and geographical and religious boundaries then being mapped on to someone like Jesus? To say he can't be a Jewish man from the region of Palestine. Um, and to imagine that Jew and Palestinian are um totally antithetical or could never be in the same person's identity.

• 1:11:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and it's so interesting because, you know, we have so much, um, you know, I I've learned so much about the strength of Christianity in in Palestine, in, you know, the occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem, like, the the Christians that have been there this whole time and and just along with, you know, the the Muslims, that it's just an interesting thing, like, i- it's obviously that so have Jewish people, like, we know, you know, there's lots of evidence of people talking about Jewish people living in Palestine and and living alongside the Christians and the Muslims um for like, you know, a couple thousand of years. So it's it's it's interesting to then

• 1:11:52Liv Albert?

  want to negate, you know, Jesus, like, obviously, there, you know, there's so much behind why that would happen. But it's just, it's just an interesting thing, even if, you know, e- even if we just go on utter face value of like, before nineteen forty-eight, it was Palestine, like, you know, well, then then anyone lived there, then you could be Jewish and and um and and Palestinian as well. Before that point, I don't know if that's, you know, uh, getting too broad or anything, but it just seems it's interesting to me.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Agreed, agreed.

• 1:12:25Liv Albert?

  Um, so, I mean, there's something that I've come across, and I don't know if this is too wild or too potentially contentious or icky. Um, but do you know anything from that that biblical side, but I think it's pretty evangelical, specifically, um, the where some of the like darker ideas of uh like Jesus coming back and that connecting with?

• 1:12:52Liv Albert?

  The modern, uh, like the, yeah, the ish, the, yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's a, there's a lot to unpack here with what, well, Jesus coming back and how this is connected to like the modern nation state of Israel, right? Um, so there's a couple of different ways this is talked about. Um, the best framing, um, out there among scholars is talking about it as a branch of Christian Zionism. Right? So Zionism and not, and this is also to help dispel the myth that like Zionist is just a code word for any Jewish person or for Judaism, right?

• 1:13:25Liv Albert?

  Terrible and a hor, like, yeah, not, not true.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is not true and not, not actually helpful for this discussion, especially, um, when we talk about Christian Zionists being a huge collective of people, especially in the United States, um, actually outnumbering the amount of Jewish inhabitants of the United States.

• 1:13:44Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Um, that Christian Zionism is part of this conversation because it's this kind of, um, political religious ideology that, um, is partially invested in, um, the return of Jewish people to the land of Israel in order to bring about the end times. Um, and this is where it gets really, um, kind of troubling and problematic is because, and scholars often talk about it in terms of, um, both antisemitism and philosemitism, right? To say you're both like opposed, you know, there's Jew hatred involved here and also to use philosemitism, Jew loving happening here.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  But they're combined in this really atrocious way, right? That is basically an imagination that, um, this kind of emerges, especially in the 20th century.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  And gets kind of combined with, um, Jewish Zionist interests in returning and creating a national homeland in the state, in the nation state of Israel. Uh, that some Christians kind of saw themselves as part of this and said, we will support you in part because once Jewish people are back in Israel, once the third temple is built and the temple mount is kind of given back to the Jewish people, then Jesus will return and will bring about the end of the world, at which time everyone will be judged and if you haven't already converted, good luck. Um, so it's one of the big problems of Christian Zionism is also kind of a, um, I mean, not just a weaponization, but like, um,

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Almost like objectification of Jewish people.

• 1:15:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like they're there to serve a purpose.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  They're there to serve a purpose that is bringing Jesus back and and there's the assumption that not if if those Jewish people that are used for this political religious purpose purpose don't convert to Christianity, then that's the end.

• 1:15:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I'm glad I asked that question. It's not ancient, but like it is so wild to me that that kind of connection because I mean, it it obviously ties it all together with, you know, ancient and modern colonialism and and sort of the the way I think a lot of colonization utilizes even the colonizers in a way that could. I mean, it it's just it. I don't even know how to phrase it because it's just so wild and troubling and um.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's something that I mean, there are kind of small snippets of it that start off in the period of the Reformation that start to become kind of philosophistic in this way where it becomes really supportive of Jews returning to the Holy Land, but has developed over the last couple centuries into this model that even today, like there's Christians and some Jewish Zionists work together to plan for the return of the temple with like, for example, creating the implements that would be needed to put in the third Jewish temple when it's erected. And that, I mean, most famously, there's a giant golden menorah that's often stationed kind of outside of the the Western Wall in Jerusalem that is

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  usually in a glass case and is there in part to say, we are waiting to return and put this menorah into the temple.

• 1:17:02Liv Albert?

  Well, and I know there's like farmers in Texas that are raising red red heifers.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  The red heifer, of course.

• 1:17:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, I I don't want to get too dark too into that, but like, yeah, it's just, it's been interesting to me to learn the the connections between specifically, yeah, Christian Zionists in the States and and that link to the the modern state of Israel. Yeah. Now, to bring it back to ancient. Do we have, I mean, it's hard with when it comes to this kind of of like record keeping, I would imagine. But, you know, pre Roman Empire, even probably pre Seleucids, you know, do we have a, I mean, I guess there's a so there's always so much conquest and everything, but I just am curious if we have any kind of.

• 1:17:50Liv Albert?

  Knowledge about how the cultures did kind of intermingle in that region, you know, um, it in in any kind of, I don't know how I'm asking this. But yeah, do we have any evidence of like them living peacefully? I guess is what I'm trying to talk around, but like living peacefully pre anything?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah, I mean, you know, and this is one of the hardest things for us is that like, you know, a lot of our biblical literature is focused on warfare and on creating a self-definition of who the Israelites, the Judaites, and later the Judeans are. Right? So of course it's going to be kind of antagonistic towards others because it's working on it's it's literature that's helping work through that self-definition.

• 1:18:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  But I mean, a good example is, you know, the from what we know archaeologically, trade in the region and sharing of kind of pottery cultures. Yep, there's sharing, there's, I mean, even something as basic as like the development of the Hebrew language and Hebrew alphabet, right? That that the the language is one of many northwest Semitic languages. So it's one that's kind of develops in part in conversation with other Semitic languages in the area like Aramaic, like Syriac.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  And of course, has a more distant connection to Arabic. As well as that we have, I mean, as well as something as basic as the alphabet, right? That this is the Hebrew alphabet that we use today and was used for much of antiquity is an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. So there's definitely cultural and intellectual exchange that's happening. And of course, this gets more complex when we also factor in the fact that like after the fall of the kingdoms of Judah and of Israel, that we start to have Jews who are living in Syria or Babylon, who start to gain different cultural practices, cultural exchanges with those cultures.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  And even when there's this return from exile in the sixth century and the building of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, not everyone returned and also not everyone left. That mostly it was elites that were forced into exile. And of course, through their literature, they make it sound like they're the only people in the world. But there are other people who are around this whole time. There are other people who. For example, the group of Babylonian Jews that did not return from Babylonian exile, who also just become part of, both part of Babylonian culture, but also create a distinct Jewish identity separate from those who went and developed a distinct Jewish identity in Jerusalem

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  and the area of Judea.

• 1:20:33Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, well, and it's so interesting to me to hear, you know, that it was the Muslims that allowed the Jewish people back into, or rather, I suppose, the sort of official allowing back in. It makes sense that it would be the elites getting kicked out because, you know, the everyday person, you know, likely wasn't, they just weren't as much of a concern. But it's interesting that that they were allowed back, you know, under that reign. And do you know anything about, just interested in the Babylonian Jews and how they would have also adapted or been kind of integrated into Islam? I don't know. That may be too broad of a question, but.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  So one of the big questions here with the legacy of Babylonian Jews is how they become part of kind of Iraqi Jews at a later point in history. And it gets messy too, because like, you know, Judaism was practiced in Babylon, but also it becomes a problem under the Sasanian Empire because Zoroastrianism is the state religion of the Parthenon Sasanian Empires. And so Judaism, even in the region of Babylon, also experienced forms of persecution or minoritization.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  So it also kind of underwent a kind of complex history, but also.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Within late antiquity, right, that the famous two types of the Talmud that appear are the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. These are the two main, kind of, uh, two of the huge rabbinic texts that emerged from this time period. Um, so to also think that we're talking about these two major centers of Palestine and Babylon that are, um, key places of Jewish thought in late antiquity.

• 1:22:26Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That's really interesting. I am curious, so, I mean, o- obviously, um, the Jewish people over centuries and centuries have experienced so much of this, um, you know, uh, exile, there's so much more to it, but, you know, what you were saying of, of minoritization and all of that, um, I'm wondering how, like, I want to just make clear that I know that very specifically Jewish, Jewish people and Judaism generally has, has received so, so much of that in so many different places. But I'm curious specifically when we're talking about the Roman Empire, because obviously at that earlier time, they were also really trying to, like, tamp, stamp out the, the Christianity.

• 1:23:08Liv Albert?

  So, w- was, were they doing kind of similar things to Christians that they were Jewish during this period of, of Hadrian and, and sort of what came after?

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, so, um, yeah, there's some really interesting moments about, uh, the ex-treatment of Jews under Roman rule. Um, maybe the most interesting, helpful way to think about this is that, like, um, so generally, under Roman rule across the Roman Republic and later under the Empire, um, the Jews actually were deemed an exception to most of, uh, the typical laws around, um, for example, like, um, paying certain taxes, having to worship Roman deities, um, that there were certain clauses basically saying Jews are exempt for this because of the antiquity of their religion.

• 1:23:56Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Even though they're monotheists. It's fine. They're cool.

• 1:24:01Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Which is good.

• 1:24:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, just also relating to like because of the antiquity of their religion, like, oh, that's that's high praise, even from the Romans.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. They looked, they they were like, yeah, this makes sense to us. Why would we? Why would we get in the way of this?

• 1:24:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  But part of the issue that starts arising is that there are moments in Roman history where Jews were sometimes persecuted, and that has to do in part with, but sometimes that's connected with Christianity, sometimes not. So just to give us a run through what this looks like,

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  that we know in 139 BCE Jews were expelled from Rome and were accused of being missionaries that they were trying, you know, they were trying to convert Romans and that became too much for the Roman Republic. They said, no, get out of our city. Same thing happens again under Tiberius in the newly formed Roman Empire, that he expelled Jews from the city for supposedly defrauding Fulvia, one of the noble women, and sent most of them to Sardinia. Not a great place for you to be if you are living in the first century. Sardinia is, you know, famously

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  complicated. Yeah, famously backwater.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  But part of this also has to do with, I think the 139 ban also had to do with concern over both Judeans and Chaldeans, that both of these were considered like these, you know, mystical eastern people who were coming into the city and kind of like ruining Roman religion and Roman culture.

• 1:25:37Liv Albert?

  You've got to love how the colonizers love to colonize, but then they're really mad when the people they colonize, like, come to the colony, like, it's it's unhinged the way that that, I mean, I'm thinking of it in line with like modern colonization. And then the racism that comes when like the people of the coloni, like, when the people of colonized India went to the England and then they're suddenly all mad and you're like, well, you colonized them. Like, what do you, what do you think is going to happen? And also, like, you're unhinged for, you know, feeling this way generally, but it just reminds me of that, like, the Romans colonized the hell out of the regions and then they're like, well, these people are bringing their eastern ways into our city.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. That's.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  It's, it's the problem of colonization is trying to say, we want to control you, but also don't you never bring your culture here.

• 1:26:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's part of the issue of, um, but so this does continue in part with Christians getting into this mess. Most famous example, I think is Suetonius, who tells us this, that, um, it's either Suetonius or Tacitus, one of our two Roman historians.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  That tell us about during Nero's reign, that, you know, famously the great fire in Rome under Nero, uh, which burnt down a lot of the city and gave him a chance to rebuild how he wanted to. But.

• 1:26:59Liv Albert?

  Boy, did he.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. But as part of these stories, um, we're told that, um, that Nero blames Jews who follow Crestus.

• 1:27:10Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, so it's this, this early.

• 1:27:13Liv Albert?

  Both of them.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Liv Albert?

  I realize I'm just saying Jesus has like an exclamation, but it's very true now.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  You know, especially in the first and second centuries, Jews and Christians look very similar.

• 1:27:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Because, right, these are, um, these are people that were Jewish, who are Torah observant, who happen to also think that Jesus is the Messiah, or they are, you know, um, Gentiles, non-Jews, who are kind of Jewish adjacent and think that Jesus is the Messiah. Who often would go to synagogue and, you know, even though they're not circumcised, they are part of other Jewish practices.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  So, yeah, at this early stage in the first and second centuries, we also have Christians thrown into the mix. And, um, there's this messiness of, yeah, who's, who's primarily being persecuted? Is it Christians? Is it Jews? It's a little unclear because that boundary was really fluid, um, at this point.

• 1:28:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I think that's true of, I mean, well, I don't think, it a hundred percent is true of, of so much of the ancient world. And that's what makes it, I mean, to me so interesting, but also obviously it makes it, you know, sometimes trickier to piece things out. But yeah, just the way that there were no boundaries, just like there were no borders, like, you know, we, we love to talk about. These ancient places as if they were, you know, in this set region over the entire time or whatever, or as if they had borders like we consider borders now. But of course, like, none of that, you know, was true. Greece wasn't what we think of as Greece now, and it was, you know, and it's the same for for these ancient regions. Like, all of this was kind of amorphous and constantly moving and changing.

• 1:28:54Liv Albert?

  And, yeah, I mean, it makes it hard to pin down, but also, like, why it's fun to study.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed, agreed. The messiness and fuzziness of it is exactly what makes this worthwhile, because then you have to get into the weeds and try to figure out what's going on.

• 1:29:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and adding in, you know, biblical history on top of everything else, you know, about the ancient Med is just, it's another level that I rarely think about a lot, but it's so interesting in its own right, or rather, as like this one part of a whole, you know, of like, this whole region was so interconnected. It's why, you know, we should be studying the ancient Med as a whole and not just Greece and Rome as these like progenitors of the West, you know, because it was so interconnected and it was this like, you know, shared culture, even when they were at war with each other, they were often still sharing parts of their culture.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. And this is also part of why, you know, as someone who kind of sits between biblical and classical studies, that like, I think it's real important to, at least to us, to do both, because, I mean, one way that I phrased it recently is that, you know, at least in the US, white Christian nationalists don't care about this distinction between classical history and biblical history. Both are useful for their agenda, so why would we not want to also study and understand both in order to counter the way that both the Bible and classical history are being used?

• 1:30:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it is so important, and it's, you know, especially just in the ways that, you know, Biblical everything has been used to justify some of the most horrific atrocities in modern history, you know, i- i- in all of these different ways, like i- i- even in the way where you you were saying earlier about, you know, the the way the Nazis tried to separate, you know, Jesus from Judaism and and so therefore to separate Christianity from Judaism, like just these ways that we we use biblical history to separate humans and to to to cause wars and to commit genocides. Um, but yeah, like have connecting them in in terms of study

• 1:30:58Liv Albert?

  and everything is so important. So, okay, you mentioned the Euphrates earlier, way, way back, um, in in terms of, you know, the the biblical history of, I forget which, you know, terminology would be used, but yeah, i- i- so can we talk about Greater Israel? And also, ah, that's just my ak sound.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 1:31:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, yeah. So Greater Israel is this idea that emerges in part from a couple different biblical verses. Um, this idea of basically there are different points in the Hebrew Bible where God promises land to his people and also clarifies what that stretch of land consists of. So we talked about earlier, um, Genesis, chapter 15 talks about this stretching from the river of Egypt, that is this little wadi near Rafa, all the way to the Euphrates. Uh, but there are two other times where, uh, the limits of the promised land are described, um, one time, or I guess three times, but two are kind

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  of the same. Um, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47 both say, well, here's like the limits of the land that's promised to you. It's basically where the 12 tribes of Israel live is the land that's promised to you. And then Deuteronomy, chapters one and 11 are a little bit more expansive. They say, to quote from it, "Every place where you set your foot will be yours, from the desert, from the desert to Lebanon and from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea."

• 1:32:34Liv Albert?

  From the desert to Lebanon.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Yes, so presumably from like the the Negev, so kind of the lowest part of what is today the nation state of Israel, probably like, you know, kind of the right where it starts to hit the Arabian Peninsula to Lebanon, and then from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea. You might say from the river to the sea.

• 1:32:55Liv Albert?

  You might.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  You might hypothetically.

• 1:32:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Um, so this is where this comes from, that that there are these different biblical verses that talk about the land that's give the promised land and what its limits are.

• 1:33:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  And this still plays out today in part of the ideology of thinking through what land, how especially Israeli politicians are thinking through what land should belong to the nation state of Israel. Good example of this is that circulated a little while back, but there was a IDF soldier that had a patch that depicted the greater Israel all the way up to the Euphrates, just below his Israeli flag flag patch.

• 1:33:40Liv Albert?

  And just to, because I had to do this, I'm going to add in, because I was like, am I getting wrong where the Euphrates is? I need to make sure. But no, so the Euphrates is very, very, very deep in Syria.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:52Liv Albert?

  Yes, and so, so to the listeners, I just, I had to pull this up because I wanted to make sure I was not, you know, misunderstanding how, where the Euphrates is. I might was going off of my knowledge of Mesopotamia, and I was like, well, that's between two rivers, and one of them is Euphrates, so it's pretty far. And so, yeah, no, the, you know, the Euphrates is is deep, deep in in Syria. And of course, when when we talk about from the river to the sea, in relation to historical Palestine, we're talking about the Jordan River and just, yeah, what, you know, well, what is the modern state of Israel, but was historically up until 1948 Palestine.

• 1:34:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Liv Albert?

  So the Euphrates.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Euphrates. Yeah, so this is, um, this is also part of this longer history of biblical interpretation that, uh, readers of these passages from Genesis, Numbers, Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, uh, look at these passages. And sometimes these, in this case, these can are sometimes deployed in order to make a political and geographical arguments to say that, um, God did not just promise the current land of the nation-state of Israel to God's people, but also all the way up to the Euphrates. So this is something just to be aware of that, um, if, if and when there are, um, you know, political, just like political arguments that use the Bible's justification for certain

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  actions, saying, um, the necessity of attacking Jordan, or Iraq, or Syria, um, that sometimes the idea of Greater Israel is evoked as part of that.

• 1:35:28Liv Albert?

  It's so, I know that this is something that I will never be able to grasp, you know, and so it's so, it's so difficult, but like, the, the idea of using like a line or two from the Bible as justification for expelling, I mean, I'm not even, you know, obviously I'm talking about Palestine here, but I'm also talking about Syria and Lebanon, and, uh, I imagine Jordan would fall into all of this as well. Like, the idea of, of using this one or two lines, um, from a, a text that's nearing on 3,000 years old, to justify removing the people who have been there for

• 1:36:12Liv Albert?

  those 3,000 plus years is just so wild to me. And I know, you know, it's because it's not coming from like a reasonable point of view. Um. But I just, yeah, that that's that's enormous and terrifying.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's something that biblical scholars are paying a lot of attention to right now is how biblical verses are evoked. Even going back to the idea of Amalek, right, these this ruler and his people, the Amalekites, who were whom God told the Israelites to genocide, gets evoked a lot. For example, Yasser Arafat was called to quote "the Amalek and Hitler of our generation." And Yatan, just last year, Netanyahu, when responding to the ICJ claiming that he incited genocide, mentioned Deuteronomy 25, which is this passage about blotting out the memory of the Amalekites.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  So this is something that biblical scholars are really invested in understanding and critiquing, is how Bible verses are being deployed in order to make political arguments and to justify certain actions such as murdering Palestinians.

• 1:37:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I it's, I mean, and again, it's it's it's because it can't be wrapped around. But yeah, the the the idea of of, I mean, the idea of of calling Yasser Arafat the Hitler, that's another, a whole other level. I mean, one is at least got these biblical aspects. But yeah, it's just, it's a really, it's a really interesting thing to me that we can or that people can use phrases like that when whilst simultaneously committing one of the most horrific mass murders of people and obviously genocide broadly. But just the, I mean, I mean, we can and should use the word genocide,

• 1:38:08Liv Albert?

  but also to imagine the the true volume of deaths, which we'll probably never know. But, you know, hopefully we'll get a better sense and and the West will have to come to terms with what they've done. But simply the, I mean, the volume that we're seeing and the way that that that is justified, apparently through these these forms, when, you know, the next closest atrocity in modern history is, of course, the Holocaust.

• 1:38:38Liv Albert?

  And, yeah, it's, this has been very interesting, though. Like, I I don't quite know how to pull it together now. And everything, but I mean, I think it's so important to look at it from this ancient history aspect to look at, you know, where these ideas are coming from, how they're used, but also so specifically to look at just how long this region has been Palestine and how long these people have been there. And I say these people, and I mean, I mean, Muslims now and Jews and Christians and, you know, or, or anyone in between, obviously. You know, these people, people love to blame Muslims, they love to blame Islam because

• 1:39:21Liv Albert?

  the West has taught us that we should blame Islam for everything. But, you know, then we hear, we hear stories of the Islamic people being the ones who allowed Jews back into Jerusalem, but also just this nature of, I mean, everyone lived there. Also, like, Islam came quite a bit later in the grand scheme of, of modern history. And so, you know, we are talking about a region that was and is Palestine inhabited by Jews and Christians for hundreds and hundreds of years, where sure, the big, the Romans were there fucking shit up, but they, you know, that, that's a whole separate issue from

• 1:40:02Liv Albert?

  the idea of these people living in peace and then continuing to leave, live in relative peace, you know, along with the Muslims. I love, I've seen a lot of videos of, of older, I imagine, I might poorly generalize, but to my knowledge, visually Hasidic Jews, talking about living in that region before 1948. And, and, you know, the one that really stuck with me was talking about how people shared childcare before that time and, and how the Muslims would bring their kids over to the Jewish people's houses, you know, for holidays. And then the, the Jewish people would bring their kids over to the Muslims'

• 1:40:45Liv Albert?

  houses for their holidays and just like sharing this load and, and almost really utilizing the shared culture and the, the sort of utilizing the fact that there are these two religions in one place, or three, obviously, with, when it comes to Christianity too. But, you know, and, and how that, that actually can be really beneficial to everyone when everyone just lives together and recognizes everyone as human.

• 1:41:07Liv Albert?

  Which I, yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think the way that I've been thinking a lot about it with like, how to talk about pre-Balrian Palestinian history and ancient Palestine is, so Edward Said in his work uses the phrase Palestinianism when he's trying to describe a way of viewing history that recognizes kind of the multicultural, multi-religious life of Palestine, broadly speaking. And I think that's really meaningful also for bringing into the past to say, yeah, I mean, as we saw today, right, this, we covered a lot of history and throughout those years, there are so many different people living here, sometimes in peace, sometimes in conflict. But this is a really complex crossroads of the ancient world, and we should

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  be willing to talk about that.

• 1:41:57Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, it makes it more interesting. It makes everyone's stories more valid, I think, you know, from any and all religions or religions or cultures to to connect to this history and talk about how people did live together. I mean, it, yeah, it, yeah, I don't know much more to say on it, but that it's just, it's really, really interesting, and I'm very glad we talked about it. I, yeah, it's so, it's so hard to wrap up now because I just, also, I tend to laugh through my horror when I don't know what else to say. But, but I mean, at least we have all the fascinating parts of history to go alongside. Yeah, and just remind us what what has happened and what existed

• 1:42:41Liv Albert?

  before everything that that we're witnessing now. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. I, yeah, I, I hope, I hope you got to say everything you wanted to say, but also just, I really appreciate you doing all of this.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  Definitely. Thanks so much for having me on. This was great.

• 1:43:14Liv Albert?

  Thank you nerds so much for listening. I really hope, I really hope that this episode taught you all something. It definitely taught me a whole ton of things. And it's really important that I think we have this kind of background knowledge and just an understanding of the region, the complexities, and just a firm reminder that

• 1:43:41Liv Albert?

  nothing justifies genocide, I guess. We'll keep it simple as that. This, this episode was recorded, like I said at the top, like right after the ceasefire was announced, this introduction, and it is being released a week or two in. And while it's holding in theory, I think we should all be aware that Palestinians are still getting bombed, children are still being killed, even though there is a ceasefire. Lebanon is still being bombed, people are still being killed, even though there is a ceasefire. And on top of that,

• 1:44:22Liv Albert?

  this, the violence has now moved to the West Bank because of the ceasefire. And there is an ongoing practice of ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank in Palestine. But in the occupied West Bank, another whole level of histories we should all be aware of. And unfortunately, it's not ancient. So I don't think I can justify teaching it all to you, but I want us all to learn on our own, I guess. Just be aware that, that this isn't over. The fight for freedom for Palestinians, for just human dignity and human rights is not over. And I hope you enjoy learning

• 1:45:06Liv Albert?

  at least a little about the history of the region. And I hope you take away from it that no human is illegal. And very, very clearly, no human is illegal on stolen land, no matter who stole the land.

• 1:45:26Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening. Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangowish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Find ad-free episodes and so, so, so, so much more via the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/MythsBaby or get a simple and to-the-point, ad-free feed of new episodes and slowly adding old episodes on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for my newsletter, mythsbaby.com/newsletter. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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