The Truth Unvarnished
Peeling away centuries of patina
Author’s Note: sorry folks, this is a long one. If you find it compelling or useful, you may want to take it in bites and let it digest.
The American Society of Theatrical Religious Spectacle (ASTRS Inc.) has for decades been well paid to promote an absurdity commonly called “Israel,” with the official name of Zion Inc. Banking on the profound ignorance of the general population and their lack of motivation to actually study history, Zion Inc. has convinced millions that it has exclusive rights to a strip of desert formally known since AD137 as Palestine.
The greatest of the myriad absurdities is the idea that YHWH is the Christian god. A quick reading of John 8:44 should put that to rest, but ASTRS Inc. assiduously avoids focusing on inconvenient passages in their sacred texts, in order to sell a fairy tale of critical military and geopolitical importance.
The second greatest absurdity peddled by Zion Inc. is the idea that “Israel” is the homeland of the “Jews”. Again, actually reading the four canonical Gospels should dispel that illusion, but again the obvious is carefully avoided in service of an intricately constructed narradigm. The truth is, Judah and Israel were two completely separate kingdoms, with Israel being the rebellious tribes that rejected the Davidic line of kings.
But alas! We’re moving too far too fast. Let’s build this story from the ground up so that the absurdities become self-evident to any rational human.
The Second Beth-Shean Stele of Seti I, dated around 1300BC, mentions Seti I subduing a bunch of rowdies in Canaan called the Apiru or Habiru. The later Victory Stele of Merneptah, dated around 1200BC, mentions wiping out the rabble-rousing Ysrir people in Canaan, with the words “his seed is no longer”. These references are generally interpretted as “Hebrew” and “Israel,” and the location in Canaan would be correct. That both groups were considered rebellious hellions seems apropos.
Note here that the two main theories of the supposed exodus from Egypt place those events somewhere between 1446BC and 1250BC. This is trying to shoehorn a completely different story into actual historical events. The real story of the exodus is completely different from the fairy tale.
Not much factual history is known until around 930BC, when Solomon’s son Rehoboam came to power. He refused to end the forced labor and high taxes that Solomon instituted for his building campaign (Temple and palace)—standard authoritarian behavior. The northern tribes broke away and formed the kingdom of Israel, rejecting the Davidic bloodline. The southern kingdom then became the kingdom of Judah, which is the origin of the term “Jew”.
It should be obvious at this point that a “Jew” claiming “Israel” as a homeland is an oxymoron, but there’s plenty more fun to come.
In 732BC, Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III conquered much of Israel/Galilee and deported part of the population. Israel was reduced to a small vassal state.
Judah/Judea fell to Babylon in 586BC—more precisely, Jerusalem was destroyed in 586BC, by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II. The Jews were taken into captivity for three generations. The Judeans were allowed to return after Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon in 539BC. Significant parts of the Old Testament were borrowed versions of Babylonian mythology that were picked up, edited, and merged with Judean texts and stories during this time.
A Judean community was re-established in Jerusalem and Judah, with permission to rebuild the Temple. Politically, Judah became Yehud/Yehud Medinata, a small province within the Persian Empire, not an independent monarchy. Cyrus allowed the exiles to return and rebuild, but he did not restore the Davidic kingdom.
This is the Temple of Jesus’ time, and many of his contemporaries thought that he was going to restore the Davidic bloodline (with Mary Magdalene) and the kingdom of Judah. That is the underlying origin and meaning of the Jewish messiah narrative. Jesus had other ideas.
Iran War, anyone? Is the whole thing based on a 2,500-year-old dispute that never involved modern “Jews” or the kingdom of Israel? Could it be a convenient narradigm to justify continued chaos in the region to ensure the Muslims can’t organize another Ottoman empire?
Rome took control of Judaea/Jerusalem in 63BC, when Pompey the Great captured Jerusalem during the late Roman Republic. At that point it was not “Yehud” in the Persian sense; it was the Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea. Rome then ruled indirectly through client rulers and high priests before later making Judaea a directly administered Roman province. Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas are examples of Roman-installed or approved characters of the time.
Jerusalem and the Second Temple were destroyed in AD70 by the Roman army, during the First Jewish–Roman War. The commander on the ground was Titus, son of Vespasian. The Jews were driven out of the territory and scattered into the surrounding regions. They eventually mounted the Bar-Kokhba rebellion in AD135.
Bar Kokhba was killed and the rebellion was crushed. The final major rebel stronghold was Bethar/Betar, southwest of Jerusalem. Roman forces under Sextus Julius Severus, acting for Emperor Hadrian, wore down the rebels and destroyed the last centers of resistance. Ancient sources list the casualties as 580,000 Jewish war dead, not counting famine and disease.
If we assume the Hibiru and Ysrir were the Hebrews and Israelites of legend, then by AD140, given the propensity for rape and pillage after victories, those people were part Egyptian, part Persian, part Babylonian, part Syrian, and part Roman, and bore little connection with the original ethnic populations outside of traditional stories and texts.
In any case, Judaea was devastated and depopulated. Large areas were destroyed, many Jews were killed, enslaved, or expelled, and the old Judaean heartland was badly weakened. This was not merely a failed rebellion; it was the end of Judaea as a serious Jewish territorial power.
Jerusalem was refounded as a Roman pagan city. Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, redesigned on Greco-Roman lines, with Roman civic architecture and pagan temples to Jupiter and himself on or near the Temple site.
The region was renamed Syria Palaestina, usually placed after the Bar Kokhba revolt of AD132–135. The exact administrative date is a little fuzzy, but the standard answer is Hadrian renamed Roman Judaea as Syria Palaestina after crushing the revolt.
The exiled Jews intermarried with the Phoenicians and Bedouins around the region. The Hebrew language died out as a native tongue around AD800, and Judea ceased to exist as a land or a people. The Phoenician Jews eventually emigrated to Spain and Italy, where they became the Sephardic Jews of today. The Bedouin Jews eventually founded Islam and carried many of the old traditions, like circumcision, bloody sacrifice and dietary restrictions, with them, while amalgamating several regional religions into one.
The Ottoman Empire eventually captured Palestine in AD1516–1517, during Sultan Selim I’s war against the Mamluk Sultanate. The empire held the territory until 1917, when Britain captured it during the First World War (see Lawrence of Arabia). The British gave France control over Lebanon and parts of Syria as spoils of the war.
Together, Britain and France hatched a plan (Sykes-Picot Agreement) to sell Palestine as a “Jewish” homeland to get rid of problematic populations in those countries, as well as create a means to sow chaos in the region and keep the Muslims from reforming the empire. Large numbers of “Jews” emigrated to Palestine, and promptly caused chaos on cue.
The US took control of Palestine as part of Britain’s payment for pulling their bacon out of the fire in the Second World War. The US immediately set about creating the Holocaust Narradigm to help create sympathy and political support for a sovereign state called “Israel”.
This is not holocaust denial. This is recognition of Holocaust Inc. and Anti-Semitism Inc. as political psy-ops to gin up support for the creation of “Israel”. Thus, “Israel” became a base of operations for American hegemony in the region, while keeping it at arm’s length and providing plausible deniability for those operations.
We’ll stop here, because most people vaguely know the rest of the story, and because this is getting way too long. The Ashkenazim are an entirely different story for another time, but they are not “Jews” in the genetic sense of descendants of Judeans.
To clean up the mess, “Israel” vanished 3,000 years ago. Judah vanished around 1,800 years ago. The Hebrew language vanished 1,200 years ago. All of it sank into the desert sands until a mysterious group of New York lawyers hired a Kansas con man by the name of Cyrus Scofield, and ASTRS Inc. was born, which feeds into our current geopolitical situation.
This story may ruffle some feathers, but it is nonetheless factual and documented by ancient and modern sources. ASTRS Inc. is not Christianity in any historical or traditional sense. It is fabricated out of whole cloth using carefully selected and reinterpreted ancient texts that traditional Christianity sees as defunct, except as proof of Jesus’ legitimacy and divinity. And it was Jesus himself, as quoted in John 8:44, who called YHWH “the devil and a liar”. That, too, is for another day.
Bonus fun fact: the modern “Temple Mount” is actually Solomon’s palace. The “Wailing Wall” sits below the old stables and next to the Dung Gate, for obvious reasons. The actual Temple sat in the center of the City of David, about 200 meters south of “Temple Mount”. This is a closely guarded secret because there’s something important hidden in the City of David ruins.
Si mundus vult dicipi, ergo dicipitatur.
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For your edification and viewing pleasure, I offer you Masada (1981), a TV miniseries starring Peter O’Toole as the Roman general Flavius, and the setting is the final days of Jerusalem in AD70. The production values are very high and there’s some great performances. The story is Hollywooded up, but after reading today’s article, you’ll know where the fluff is. Hard to track down, but worth the effort.
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I'd read much of the 'temple mount' complex is Roman military ruins.
Amazing how few know these things. We are sheep, and the wolves have just about locked the gates.