As strange as it may sound, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, has been repeatedly likened to Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – c. 530 BC), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The comparison between Trump and Cyrus the Great is especially popular among evangelical Christian Trump-supporters in the United States, but it also has some prominence among Israeli Jews. Let’s take a look at who Cyrus the Great was, why Donald Trump is being compared to him, and why these comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Continue reading “Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Cyrus the Great?”Category: ancient Judah
Famous Classical Authors Who Were Probably Not What We Would Consider “White”
Classical studies has long been perceived as the study of “dead white men.” This is a reputation that has certainly greatly injured classical studies as a discipline in recent years. I remember reading a rather disturbing answer on Quora a while ago written by a history professor in which he argued that, since we are now living in a modern, racially diverse world and classical studies is nothing more than the study of dead white people, universities should stop teaching the classics and, instead of hiring classics professors, only hire professors to teach subjects dealing with non-white history, like East Asian history or Latin American history.
One thing that many people do not realize, however, is that the ancient Mediterranean world was actually much more racially diverse than it is often portrayed. In fact, a very large number of the most revered classical authors were probably not what we would call “white.” Many of them came from lands all across the Middle East and North Africa, including the lands that are now the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.
Continue reading “Famous Classical Authors Who Were Probably Not What We Would Consider “White””The Motivations behind Human Sacrifice
For people today, the fact that so many peoples throughout history have practiced human sacrifice seems absolutely baffling and horrifying. We tend to think of human sacrifice as the ultimate act of barbarism, an act that epitomizes everything savage and uncivilized about our species. Nonetheless, it is important for us to understand why people have historically engaged in this practice.
Human sacrifice has occurred in virtually every part of the world at some point in time and has occurred in some part of the world during every historical time period. Thus, whether we like it or not, understanding the motivations behind human sacrifice is a part of understanding what it means to be human.
Continue reading “The Motivations behind Human Sacrifice”What Happened to the Ark of the Covenant?
The Ark of the Covenant is an artifact that has been sought after by thousands of treasure-hunters throughout history. Various hunts for the Ark have been portrayed in popular books, films, and television shows. In nearly all of these portrayals, the Ark is portrayed as hidden somewhere in a secret, remote location for treasure-seekers to find. But what really happened to the Ark of the Covenant? Is it really hidden somewhere for someone to find? Was it destroyed? Did it even exist at all? In this article, I intend to answer these questions.
Continue reading “What Happened to the Ark of the Covenant?”Was King David a Historical Figure?
As many of my readers are probably already aware, an article that I published on this website back in March 2018 about the historicity of Jesus recently stirred up quite a bit of controversy and criticism—some of it constructive, some of it not so much. As I noted in one of my comments under that article, the historicity of Jesus seems to be perhaps the one subject in the entire field of ancient history that is the most capable of consistently inciting outrage and controversy. The historicity of King David, on the other hand, is a bit less contentious, since David is not nearly as important a figure in Christianity as Jesus is. I certainly hope that this article does not provoke quite so much outrage as my Jesus article, but I suspect it will probably just lead to more nasty comments telling me how everything I write is rubbish and how I will never be a real scholar. In any case, here we go.
Continue reading “Was King David a Historical Figure?”Three Times the Winners Did Not Write History
“History is written by the victors” is a saying so commonplace that it has become almost a platitude. It seems as though everyone has simply come to accept it and believe it. The problem is that it is not actually always true. Strictly speaking, history is not, in fact, written by the victors. History is written by the people who write history. These people are often the victors, but not always and not necessarily. There are examples throughout history of history being written by the people who lost. In this post, we will explore just a few of the occasions when the victors did not write history.
Continue reading “Three Times the Winners Did Not Write History”