June 2023

On Genesis, Part 18: The Hebrews

In our last presentation, The Shemites, we had asked a few questions which we had only answered in part, such as “what defines a Semite? And what is a Hamite, or a Canaanite?” Those we answered by stating, perhaps in different words, that the only proper classifications of those people are along Biblical terms, in agreement with Genesis chapter 10, since Genesis is the very source of those terms. But then we also asked another question, which is related to these because of the manner in which modern academic sources classify languages, and that is “what language is Hebrew?” This question we shall address presently, before proceeding to discuss Eber, the first Hebrew.

All throughout the Christian epoch, the history of the ancient Near East has been viewed through exclusively Jewish eyes, and this has had a profoundly damaging impact not only on Biblical studies, but on all modern historical, archaeological and linguistic inquiry into the cradle of civilization found in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant. But as Paul of Tarsus had also explained, in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, the Old Testament cannot even be understood unless one is a Christian, and therefore no Jew can possibly understand it. But Christians, if they follow Jews, they will also fail to understand it, as Christ had said of the Pharisees of His Own time, in Luke chapter 6, “39 … Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Collectively, Jews have innate biases which naturally restrict their understanding, and lead them to errant identifications and faulty conclusions regarding history, language and archaeological findings, along with a tendency to pollute everything they study with their own Talmudic reasoning, which is always naturally antithetical to God.

On Genesis, Part 17: The Shemites

In our recent discussion of the Hamites and the description of Nimrod and the first Adamic empire, of which ancient Akkad was a part, we had discussed the first Akkadian empire and the presence of a historical Cush in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Then in our separate discussion of the accursed tribes of the Canaanites, we had described the rise of several Canaanite empires in the early 2nd millennium BC, namely the Babylonian Empire of the Amorites, the Hittite Empire, and the Mittani Kingdom of the Hurrians. These Canaanite empires were relatively short-lived, as compared to those of Egypt and Assyria, but it is quite possible that they were not the only Canaanite empires which existed in ancient history.

For example, there is ancient Ebla, the importance of which was not even discovered until the site of the city was excavated after its discovery in 1964. Evidently, Ebla had dominated what is now northwestern Syria from the mid-to-late 3rd millennium through most of the 2nd millennium BC. Ebla was about 34 miles southwest of Ḥalab, or Aleppo, which is said to have been the seat of another kingdom, Yamhad, although it is apparent that the empires of Yamhad and Ebla had each covered the same general territory at the heights of each of their power, along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in modern northwestern Syria. As a digression, in this sense an empire is only a city-state which subjects to itself other city-states within a particular region, whose inhabitants were not necessarily of the same tribe, and these empires were quite small compared to the empires of later history.