Israel | Israel
Feb.06.2012
As I read about the ancient kingdoms of Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Akkad, etc, it's amazing how world politics don't seem to have changed. Kingdoms that grew strong enough to overpower a larger kingdom did so. Babylon, which was once a glorious kingdom was eventually laid to waste as a "backwater of...
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Feb.03.2012
An ark is a chest. The Ark of the Covenant is a wooden chest the ancient Israelites made to hold the Tablets of the words of "the law". The story goes that the chest was made because of a command the Lord gave to Moses. It is also called The Ark of God, Ark of God of Israel, Ark of the Testimony,...
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Feb.03.2012
Groundhog's Day cast a sinister shadow upon our future today. No, not that large rodent -- but Leon Panetta, our sad looking Minister of Defense. He speculated in private, and then in public, that Israel, in its refusal to allow Iran an atomic program, intends to attack Iran in...
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Jan.30.2012
A couple thousand years ago there was a "country" called Aram. It was part of Syria. The people who dwelt there were Semitic and called Aramaeans. Their language was Aramaic, which Jesus spoke. But the term Aramaean later came to denote those who were Pagan; the Christians took the title of Syrians...
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Jan.24.2012
It's the Old Testament. Before it was the OT, it was the Old Covenant. The covenant existed between God and the children of Israel. It is a treaty between these two. Then later, the Christians created a new "treaty" which we know of as the New Testament.
Suellen Ocean is the author of The...
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Nov.19.2011
CETUS TOTEM
One could say that the planet goes apart and people don’t yet know the position of their own natal Sun, but the equation is actually vice-versa namely, the planet is going apart precisely because people don’t know themselves. Whale slaughter happens because nobody knows one’s own...
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Oct.17.2011
It makes me wonder if George Lucas didn’t borrow a little from the Old Testament when I see the word Jehudi, an ancient Hebrew word for Jew, which is an English word. Jew is a sort of English “nickname”, used to designate a man from the Kingdom of Judah (or Judea). The true meaning of a Jew is “a...
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Oct.15.2011
In the photograph I am in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. If you look carefully you can see my hand is in a hole; the hole which, according to legend, held the cross on which Christ was crucified. I am in the heart of Jerusalem, steps from the Western (“Wailing”) Wall. We...
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Oct.05.2011
Two days ago I arrived in Istanbul and, after checking on to the ship, headed off for the highly-recommended Four Seasons hotel to have a drink on at their rooftop restaurant across from the Hagia Sophia mosque, close to the Blue mosque, with a view to the Bosporus. Quite the...
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Oct.01.2011
I must confess, hero though he now is to me, Kafka was not a childhood hero. My loss. In fact, I had no interest in literature or books as a child. Kafka came to me in university (as did Leonard Cohen, another childhood hero mentioned here).
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Franz Kafka, at age...
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