Quotes About Near East

traditions. In the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world, with the mixture of good and evil. But in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions.

The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness

Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere...

Of course slavery and the Muslims were deeply implicated in the slave trade, Islam was an Imperialist religion which destroyed Christianity in the Near East, yet nobody mentions those facts.

In 1908 a French archaeologist declared that a Great Goddess concerned with death and fertility had been worshipped by all the Neolithic peoples of Europe and the Near East, and that her cult had been focused above all on images of her eyes and breasts. This enabled him to use any figure or symbol on a Neolithic site which could be interpreted as representing an eye or a breast as proof of that cult.

Throughout this book I will be presenting what can be understood about the cognitive environment of the ancient Near East and interspersing "Comparative Explorations" to consider specific similarities and differences found in Israel.

Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.

As the God of the ancient Near East stemmed from ideas of supernaturalism, our concept of a modern God could stem from modern ideas divorced from supernaturalism. [...] A natural God need not intervene in human history, nor be the cause for religious wars such as witnessed through human history.

One could say that he (Jesus Christ) himself was the ripe fruit of antiquity; he gathered up in himself the essence of the wisdom of the Near East, contained the juice of Egypt and of Greece, and came together with the mob. And that caused a great whirlwind which moved masses and formed them, which brought about that form which we call Christianity. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1032)

Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?" Day mumbled something that sounded like "Ancient History of the Near East and Greece." "Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork, "Come with me and see the Near East.

Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.

when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any.

Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.

When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other.

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.

The breakup of the old order in the Near East, according to Sufi tradition, reunited the 'beads of mercury' which were the esoteric schools operating in the Egyptian, Persian and Byzantine empires into the 'stream of quicksilver' which was intrinsic, evolutionary Sufism. The

It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh).

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In the ancient Near East people were created as slaves to the gods. The world was created by the gods for the gods, and people met the needs of the gods.