3. Israel, Egypt, and the Ancient Near East (Remastered)

Israel, Egypt and the Ancient Near East

R.J. Rushdoony

As I indicated last week, what I shall be doing in these lectures is not to repeat the material that you will have in your notes. I will expect you to read the notes and ask any questions that come to your mind concerning them. What I shall do is to parallel the notes with comments, which will be designed to bring out the meaning of that particular aspect of history, or to throw some light from literature of the period on the goals and the purposes of men. 

Our first chapter deals with Israel, with the history and the Old Testament period; God and Israel. Our source for this history is the Bible. It is customary nowadays even in so-called ‘evangelical’ circles to say that the Bible is not a textbook of history, and it’s not a textbook of science, and we should listen to scientists and historians and what they have to say which make correct or supplement Scripture. This kind of division of faith and history is not Christian, it is Barthian, it is a heresy. The Bible, in fact, is the best history book in the world and the source of our only infallible knowledge of history because it is the inspired and infallible Word of God; this is its own claim. 

Now, of course, at this point if I were lecturing to a group of say college professors, they would immediately raise the question that has been raised over and over again, “Well, what about all the other books that claim to be inspired books, all the books in the world that claim to be the Word of God? Why should we believe that this one in particular is the true Word of God rather than those of other religions?” The answer to that is a very obvious one. Are there, we may ask, many books of many religions claiming to be the inspired Word of God? The answer is very definitely “no.” In fact, virtually all religions in the world are non-theistic; that is they do not hold to a supreme absolute and perfect God. In fact most of them do not even affirm that there is a God. 

Thus, Buddhism has no God. In Buddhism it is not God who rules the world but nothingness is ultimate. Daoism does not have a god. It says that basically there are two forces in the universe; the yang and the ying, the male and the female impulses, and so there’s no right or wrong, but that which is fitting at a particular time sometimes drive an initiative and sometimes to yield and to give in. These are the things that govern history, these two basic drives are impulses. For Hinduism, like Buddhism, nothingness is ultimate. Jainism, another powerful religion in India, has no God, it simply worships life and believes in the transmigration of souls and the Jains are the ones who go around with a veil before their faces lest they should, by accident, inhale a gnat or some other insect and kill it. For the gnat could be their grandmother or grandfather reincarnated. They have no concept of God, and so on. As you go around the world and examine the religions of the ancient world, outside of the Bible there is none, not one, that affirms the belief in God, a sovereign absolute God. Oh yes, they talk about ‘gods’ but the ‘gods’ were not anything that we would call even ‘gods.’

As Tertullian said to the Romans, Tertullinan, one of the Church Fathers, he said, “Your gods are made or unmade by Senate. The senate passes a resolution and says that emperor so-and-so who died last year is now a god by act of senate.” And he said, “What kind of god is one who is made or unmade by act of Senate?!” In a very real sense, the term to apply to the gods of paganism was the word ‘hero,’ and, in fact, a hero was a semi-divine man, someone probably on his way to being fully a god. 

As a result, there was no god in them, they were just deified men. And, of course, this is very clear in such religions as Shintoism. The gods are the ancestors and Shintoism is essentially ancestor-worship. So the idea that any of these pagan religions had a Bible in which God claimed to be speaking or the writers of it said that God was speaking is ridiculous. In the Bible we are told again and again, “The Spirit of the Lord said thus and so.” “These are the words of the Lord, through the mouth of the prophet so and so.” Now, what are these pagan books are going to say? “The spirit of nothingness sees me,” or, “Nothingness said to me?” Well, the idea is ridiculous! And so, the objection of these people that all these other religions have sacred books in which the god speaks or gods speak is nonsense. 

As a matter of fact, we are the ones who gave their books, their religious books the name of ‘Bible,’ we call them the ‘Bibles’ of these various religions, which is nonsense. They don’t think of them that way. They don’t think of them as inspired infallible words of God because, first of all, they don’t have the concept of an inspired infallible word or any belief in a god who speaks. The Bible therefore is very clearly unique, no religion has what claims to be the Word of God except Biblical faith. 

Now, having said that, we must state that although the Bible has no rivals it has imitators. In the Christian era there have been imitation Bibles. But no civilization, no culture, no religion independently of Christianity has ever produced a book that claims to be the Word of God. The Bible is unique. But after Christianity began to make known its message, then there were imitations. And of course, the first and greatest one was Islam, Islam. The Koran, the Koran of Mohammed. But it’s a pseudo-Bible. It has no verified prophecy, it has no verified history, there is nothing in it of any character that stands. Whereas the Bible at every point where archeology is done or any excavating it has been confirmed, to the very minute detail. Its prophecies have been fulfilled. But the Koran is just the endless statements about things by Mohammed, and very often where he touches on history, very clearly wrong. 

Another pseudo-Bible or imitation Bible is the Book of Mormon. Here again we have a very sorry work. Very few people are aware of the fact that the Book of Mormon, since it was produced by Joseph Smith by 1900, had been revised over two thousand times. Over two thousand revisions in it. Why? To create very obvious and glaring blunders. One of the worst blunders that Joseph Smith worked into his book of Mormon was he had somebody supposedly a Hebrew writing about 600 B.C. quote Shakespeare! Of course, those older editions of the Book of Mormon had been recalled and virtually all destroyed, they’re exceedingly rare. But you can see why they had to revise it so many times between Joseph Smith’s day and the end of the century. It was a pseudo-Bible, an imitation Bible. The concept of the Word of God is unique. It belongs to the Bible only and it gives us a historical revelation; one which is abundantly at every point historical and relates to the problems of this world.

I’d like to quote here from Gordon Clark’s Study of Historiography. Now this is basically a study of the philosophy of historical writers, but he has something to say about the difference between the Greek writers and the Hebrews, the Biblical writers. And he says Plato, Cicero and Aristotle and other such historians had no sense of history. 

“Plato apologetically remarks that human affairs are hardly worth considering; Cicero asserts that the gods attend to great matters, and neglect small ones; Aristotle teaches that the gods are not concerned at all with the dispensation of good and bad fortune [and with reason, they are not personal - RJR]. Then in powerful language maintained over a dozen pages Dr. Heschel [he’s referring to another scholar - RJR] impresses on his readers the prophetic abhorrence of evil and God’s concern for his people [in the Bible - RJR]: ‘To the prophet, however, no subject is as worthy of consideration as the plight of man. Indeed, God himself is described as reflecting over the plight of man rather than as contemplating eternal ideas. His mind is preoccupied with man, with the concrete actualities of history rather than with the timeless issues of thought— The prophet’s concern is not with nature, but with history.’” ¹

Now this is the difference. Go to these pagan so-called ‘sacred’ books and they’re talking about abstractions. Basically, what they’re asking is, “Is life worth living or not?” and their basic answer is that it really isn’t, and the goal is to be dead and finished with it all. But what does the Bible tell us? That the very hairs of our head are all numbered. That not a sparrow falls but our Father in Heaven knows it. That He has a total concern with man and with the world.

There is nothing in all the religions of the world like it, and this is exactly why the Bible is a unique book, why it is historical. It begins by telling us the creation of the world, and it goes on to tell us the history of the world in terms of God’s covenant with His people. And it tells us that that covenant is going to include finally all peoples, tribes and tongues. And that God’s order is going to prevail over the entire earth and then the end. We thus have something radically different in the Bible then in all other religions, and you only have true historiography where Christianity has been, nowhere else. 

Before the Christians went to the Orient did they teach history? Not at all. You could study Confucianism or Buddhism or Daoism or Shintoism, but history? No. Who was concerned with history? Or the welfare of men or the salvation of men? No! That didn’t concern anyone. Why should it? The one concern was how to escape from life. China was a country filled with Buddhism and Mohammadism and other religions, but travelers there in the last century, in fact up until the time that the Communists took over said that if somebody fell overboard on a boat on the Yellow River, no one would stop, no one would save his life, who wanted the liability of somebody’s life? Life wasn’t worth that much. So history was meaningless because life to them was meaningless. Thus, the humanistic historians who despise Christianity are despising the very thing that has made the teaching of history and interest in history at all possible. 

It would be tempting to spend more time on this but since we have borrowed the present to cover, let’s pass on now to Egypt, our second chapter. Now, on page nine of our chapter on history, I call attention to the fact in the second paragraph, the sixth line from the end of the second paragraph that John A. Wilson has observed in the symposium Before Philosophy, the Egyptians were monophysites. 

“…it is not a matter of a single god but of a single nature of observed phenomena in the universe, with a clear possibility of exchange and substitution. With relation to gods and men the Egyptians were monophysites: many men and many gods, but all ultimately of one nature. ” ²

Now, the word ‘monophysite’ literally means one nature, one nature in all things. Therefore all things are divine; the gods, the Egyptian gods, and the men, and so on. As I point out in that chapter they sometimes would have an onion in their temple and you worshipped the onion because you were thereby indicating that there was one nature in all things. But all things were also evolving upwards, and, as a result, the gods themselves spoke of evolution; evolution is a pagan concept. 

On page ten the third paragraph about the middle of the page:

“This development of man was simply a reflection of the evolution and development of the gods. The god Neb-er-tcher declared, “I evolved the evolving of evolution. I evolved myself under the form of the evolutions of the god Khepera, which were evolved at the beginning of all time. I evolved with the evolution of the god Khepera; I evolved by the evolution of evolutions - that is to say I developed myself from the primeval matter in which I was made. I developed up myself to the primeval matter. My name is Ausares (Osiris) the germ of primeval matter.” ³

As a result, they had a concept of evolution, everything evolving. The onion had the same nature as you did, and you and the onion had the same nature as the gods and the world to come, and when you died if you had evolved properly during life by good works, you would become a god. And in the Book of the Dead it is described how when you pass all the tests and the examinations, if you were not destroyed because your bad works were greater than your good works, you would stand there and you would say ‘I feel the hands of myself becoming the hands of a god and I feel the hair of myself becoming a god’ and so on, a long ritual celebrating the fact that you were now a god. 

It was thus an evolving society, but it was also a fixed society in a certain respect. What does that mean, both evolving and yet fixed? Well, it was fixed in that it was like a pyramid and the pyramid was the symbol of Egypt. The pharaoh, who was the god-man, was at the top, and down at the base were all the masses of the common people and around them the world of nature. As man progressed he began to move upward on that pyramid until finally he went into another pyramid, inverted, which was the realm of the dead or the realm of the gods. But it was a fixed thing so that there was a static social order, unchanging, and in that framework man evolved. 

All of pagan antiquity was evolutionary in its thinking. Evolution has no evidence. It is a faith. Now creationism is a faith too; we believe in God, therefore we believe His Word when He declares that He created all things and that in the space of six days. Now, we can say we believe there’s more evidence for our position than the evolutionary position, but basically we accept it on faith. Only a few scientists will admit that their position is basically a faith. But it is! And it’s an ancient pagan faith. 

Now, some societies were in continual flux. We shall see that when we come to the Babylons and the Assyrians. They were always changing as part of their evolutionary thinking. But the Egyptians were not. There couldn’t be change in the framework because they had a line that had kind of a ‘Henry Ford’ concept. Now Henry Ford standardized the Model T at a certain point, and he thought, “I might make from year to year minor changes to the motor, but basically it’s the same thing. The motor cars developed to a certain point, and I’ve got it to a certain point where it’s a terrific seller, it gives people what they want, and I don’t have to advance it. So any customer can have any color provided it’s black. And it’s going to be standard year in and year out.” Well, he made a fortune that way, but of course, things didn’t stand still, you see. But he tried within a framework to standardize and then have minor changes within the framework. It’s basically been a profitable idea for the Volkswagen Company too. Up to a point they could do it, but now they’re feeling that things are leaving them behind so they’ve got to change their standardization, but you get the idea. You freeze the form, and you make minor changes within it. And you say “Well, you can have any color as long as it’s black, and within that frame work we’ll tinker around, but we won’t change the basic framework.” Well, that’s what Egypt believed. You made the basic framework, the pyramid of society, and you did not change it. Well, they made it work for quite a while. Egypt and the ancient world was a very great power and a very proud power. It was at the crossroads of the world. Three continents touching each other more or less in that area; Europe, Asia and Africa. And in those days North Africa was rich lush country, the Sahara in those days was not desert. Partly the weather moved northward, and partly men turned it into a desert.

You know there’s some parts of the Middle West, in the Dakotas for example, that get as much rain as some parts of the Sahara, but look at the difference between them! And then when the French had North Africa, they were in areas that were once rich civilizations with millions of citizens, beginning slowly to replant and reforest the area with certain types of trees. Now, again, it’s going downhill. But more than once man has turned some portion of the world into a desert. But in those days it was very populous, there were more people living in the Mediterranean world in the days of the Roman Empire and earlier than are living now, and they were not overpopulated. That area still has tremendous potentialities, in the right hands. After all remember North America was in the hands of three hundred Indians, some people say twice that, but nobody says more than a million, and they lived not only poorly but they starved to death almost every winter and resorted to cannibalism regularly. It was poor country as far as they were concerned, and now look how rich it is! Egypt was tremendously rich and fertile. 

I point out to you now the second chapter that the soil along the Nile basin is one of the richest in the world, tremendously rich. Egyptian cotton is by the way the best cotton in the world. But they’re still one of the poorest people in the world today. India and Egypt are perhaps the countries with the most insoluble problems of any country today. Egypt, incidentally, is no longer ruled by Egyptians but by Arabs. It was conquered by the Muslims, and the Arabs have ruled it ever since, except of course when the Turks and the British had it, but basically within the country Arabs have been dominant and the Copts, the ancient Egyptians, are in the minority.

It is interesting that one of the words used for Egypt in the Bible is Mizraim, and we are told that the Egyptians descended from one of the descendants of Noah whose name was Mizraim. Someone who went to Egypt told me that it was an interesting thing after reading his Bible and knowing it, to realize that the Egyptian Airlines is called the Mizraim airlines, they still use that name there. But with the Egyptians their faith, because it was a statist faith, because it was a faith in which the state was god on earth, and in which man had no life outside of the state, it was one in which there was no real hope. And so, it is interesting to read Egyptian documents and to see the pessimism that gradually overwhelmed them. But first some Egyptian instruction. These are from the vizier Ptah-Hotep about 2450 B.C., and he wrote instructions as to how to live. And some of it is rather interesting and good sound advice. 

“If thou art a man of standing and foundest a household and producest a son who is pleasing to god, if he is correct and inclines toward thy ways (200) and listens to thy instruction, while his manners in thy house are fitting, and if he takes care of thy property as it should be, seek out for him every useful action. He is thy son, whom thy kaengendered for thee. Thou shouldst not cut thy heart off from him.

(But a man’s) seed (often) creates enmity. If he goes astray and transgresses thy plans and does not carry out thy instruction, (so that) his manners in thy household are wretched, (210) and he rebels against all that thou sayest, while his mouth runs on in the (most) wretched talk, (quite) apart from his experience, while he possesses nothing, Thou shouldst cast him off: he is not thy son at all. He was not really born to thee. (Thus) thou enslavest him entirely according to his (own) speech.… He is one whom god has condemned in the (very) womb.…” ⁴

Good hard-headed advice and listen to this:

“If thou art a man of standing, thou shouldest found a household and love thy wife at home, as is fitting. Fill her belly, and clothe her back; ointment is the prescription for her body. Make her heart glad, for she is a profitable field for her lord. Thou shoulds’t not contend with her at long and keep her far from gaining control. Her eye is her storm wind, let her heart be soothed through what maketh accrue to thee, it means keeping her long at thy house.” ⁵

Then another bit of advice from him:

“Do justice whilst thou endurest upon earth. Quiet the weeper; do not oppress the widow; supplant no man in the property of his father; and impair no officials at their posts.Be on thy guard against punishing wrongfully. Do not slaughter: it is not of advantage to thee. (But) thou shouldst punish with beatings and with arrests; this land will be (firmly) grounded thereby—except (for) the rebel, when his plans are discovered, for the god knows the treacherous of heart, (50) and the god condemns his sins in blood. … Do not kill a man when thou knowest his good qualities, one with whom thou once didst sing the writings. He who reads in the sipu-book…” ⁶

Then for a little advice of another sort, this from the instructions of from the eleventh to the eighth century B.C. probably. 

“(iii 1) … Take to thyself a wife while thou art (still) a youth, that she may produce a son for thee. Beget [him] for thyself while thou art (still) young. Teach him to be a man. A man whose people are many is happy; he is saluted (respectfully) with regard to his children. ⁷

“(13) … Be on thy guard against a woman from abroad, who is not known in her (own) town. Do not stare at her when she passes by. Do not know her carnally: a deep water, whose windings one knows not, a woman who is far away from her husband. ‘I am sleek,’ she says to thee every day. She has no witnesses when she waits to ensnare thee. It is a great crime (worthy) of death, when one hears of it.…

(iv 1) Do not talk a lot. Be silent, and thou wilt be happy. Do not be garrulous.” ⁸

And then a little later: 

“(vii 7) … Thou shouldst not express thy (whole) heart to the stranger, to let him discover thy speech against thee. If a passing remark issuing from thy mouth is hasty and it isrepeated, thou wilt make enemies. A man may fall to ruin because of his tongue.…” ⁹

And then a little further:

“(ix 1) … Thou shouldst not supervise (too closely) thy wife in her (own) house, when thou knowest that she is efficient. Do not say to her: ‘Where is it? Fetch (it) for us!’ when she has put (it) in the (most) useful place. Let thy eye have regard, while thou art silent, that thou mayest recognize her (5) abilities. How happy it is when thy hand is with her! Many are here who do not know what a man should do to stop dissension in his house.… Every man who is settled in a house should hold the hasty heart firm. Thou shouldst not pursue after a woman [that is, another woman - RJR]; do not let her steal away thy heart.…” ¹⁰

The Egyptians thus were a very practical people, very pragmatic and very hard-headed in their practical wisdom. As a result, because of their very practical, pragmatic way, they did build up a very firm enduring empire, a very successful one and a very prosperous one. Incidentally, we tend to think of people who lived long ago as having been more or less half-savage and not like us. It may surprise you that in Moses’ day, and remember Moses was a prince of the realm because Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him, according to what scholars have learned, Solomon probably in the evening, in the cool of the day took a walk around the palace grounds with other gentlemen wearing a top hat and having a gold-headed walking cane. So it’s a little different then we imagine. But this is the way they lived, it was an advanced culture. But its pragmatism killed it. It was a culture without any real faith except in that which was practical and ultimately it was not able to stand.

Then our third chapter deals with some of the ancient near eastern cultures. Again, very briefly to touch on some of these, I have shown these pictures to some of you previously, but I think they’re well worth seeing again. We fail to realize that man, the minute we find him on the scene of history, is a very highly-civilized man. But the idea of a primitive, a ‘caveman’ is unknown to history, so that to understand what man is, we have to recognize that he was created in the image of God, and when we first meet him, he has knowledge, and he builds a civilization quickly. The Minoan civilization goes back about three thousand B.C. to about fourteen hundred B.C. It built a tremendous civilization. It may be a surprise to some of you that they had hot and cold running water and flush toilets and so on. This is a portion of one of the great palaces and here is a portion of the interior. Hardly the kind of thing you associate with primitivism. And these are ruins, just a shadow of what they once were. Now, this is the Minoan civilization on Crete, three thousand B.C. to fourteen hundred B.C. 

Now the religion of most of these countries, if not virtually all of them that are dealt with chapter three, was a fertility-cult religion. And Baal worship was a form of fertility-cult worship. And fertility-cult worship is a highly sexual worship. As a matter of fact, the temples would have ritual prostitutes attached to them. And there would be worship which would require sexual acts so that you would go there and as a part of your worship at the temple there were no congregational meetings, incidentally, outside of the Bible. Some have imitated it, Buddhists nowadays have congregational meetings. But in no pagan religion was there any such thing as one day of worship or a congregational service. You went to the temple to ‘buy insurance,’ as it were, and you did it through various ritual acts and a payment. But an important part of that worship was a sexual act with a sacred prostitute. It could be a homosexual, or it could be a woman, and it could be an animal, bestiality was a part of these cult religions. Again what we must say these were not primitive religions. The evolutionists try to portray these fertility cults as though they represented an early stage in the development of religion. In reality, they represented a stage of decline, of decadence, of cultural collapse.

Just as today we have as we are declining and collapsing a tremendous amount of sexuality and sex worship, many of the black masses and magical groups their worship is a worship which is no different than the old fertility cults. In all of these today, it’s a mark of cultural decay. The point is a very important one because man, when he is helping, when he is prospering, does not see sex as primary in his interests. He is concerned more with work, with calling, with status, with property, with exercising dominion, this is the basic urge in man. But when you have a cultural collapse and men cease to be men in the true sense of the word, then sexuality replaces man’s normal interests with an abnormal interest in sex. Now, he may be less virile, but he is more intensely interested then. 

Thus, it has been shown again and again in times of war for example during World War II, when people were in prison camps, after they lost hope, those who were without faith as they faced starvation, became, just before the time period that they became too weak to function, so intensely and insanely interested in sex that it was just almost unbelievable. Why? Being without faith and without hope, sex had replaced the normal God-given desire in man to exercise dominion through a calling, through his position as head of a household and so on, so that, whenever you have a fertility-cult in a culture, you know that instead of a culture that’s low on the evolutionary scale it is a culture that is collapsed, that is decayed.

This is true whether you deal with, say, cultures like the ancient cultures of the near East or with the tribes of Africa. It’s a very interesting thing but there are evidences among the tribes of Africa of ancient Egyptian civilization, very definite traces of it. The African was not originally an inhabitant of the whole continent. Even when the white man landed in South Africa, it was still practically uninhabited, the whole lower half, virtually, of that continent. Only a few tribes of wandering Bushmen and Hotenttots, who could be numbered in the hundreds, could be found in the northern part of what is now the union of South Africa. They had not moved very far into Central Africa. And there are remnants even down into Rhodesia of stone fortresses and all, which they don’t know much about. But at one time various peoples had ruled, and we know of Arab empires that ruled down in some areas of Central Africa. So that many of the practices of the modern African represent the cultural decline and collapse of superior cultures that were there before and ruled over them, and they just have the dregs of it now. This is true elsewhere in the world. Thus, when we first meet with the cultures of the Near East in the Bible, as well as in the historical records, they were far gone.

It would have been centuries after the Flood, after they had been established, they had declined. It’s always interesting to go to an ancient culture and look at its documents. Let’s take a look at some of the writings of some of these peoples that I deal with in chapter three. In one instance, I can’t locate the passage, we have one culture looking back on Dilmun as the golden age. And I wanted to cite it, a very interesting one, they look upon it as paradise and of course Dilmun, of which Jeffrey Bibby has done some very interesting work on, was an ancient civilization before Crete’s day that was very powerful, very prosperous, very wealthy. We’re just learning a little bit about it. And so, they looked back on that as paradise, but they had significantly a backward look, so that in some of the earliest inscriptions, we have found men look back and say, “Those were the good old days, back when we had a good order, law and order, prosperity, peace and so on.” 

Now, going centuries later to 1728 to 1686 B.C. to the Code of Hammurabi, it’s very interesting to see the kind of law they had. And I’m going to read from the Code of Hammurabi and from Hittite law and then comment on it. Now from the Code of Hammurabi:

“129: If the wife of a seignior [a citizen - RJR] has been caught while lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water. If the husband of the woman wishes to spare his wife, then the king in turn may spare his subject” ¹¹

Very interesting. They had a sense of justice. Remember, they all had the original revelation to all people in Noah’s day. But if the husband wanted to spare the wife then the adulterer had to be spared, too. Justice had to be even handed. If the finger was pointed at the wife of a seignior because of another man, but she had been not been caught while lying with the other man, she may throw herself into the river for the sake of her husband.  Women’s Lib’ would not like that. In other words, she was to protect her husband’s reputation if she was talked about, not exactly my idea of a just law. 

Then

“133: If a seignior was taken captive, but there was sufficient to live on in his house, his wife [shall not leave her house, but she shall take care of her person by not] entering [the house of another].” ¹²

In other words, she cannot remarry as long as there’s something to live on, but if he was captive and there’s nothing to live on, she’s free. 

“133a: If that woman did not take care of her person, but has entered the house of another, they shall prove it against that woman and throw her into the water.” ¹³

This was a favorite way in Hammurabi’s day, apparently. 

Then to cite a few more, to give an indication of the life of the times:

“181: If a father dedicated (his daughter) to deity as a hierodule, a sacred prostitute, or a devotee and did not present a dowry to her, after the father has gone to (his) fate, she shall receive as her share in the goods of the paternal estate her one-third patrimony, but she shall have only the usufruct of (it) as long as she lives, since her heritage belongs to her brothers.” ¹⁴

This is a very interesting law in that it deals with a very common practice of the day that was regarded as a very holy practice; for people to dedicate their daughters to the temples as sacred prostitutes.

Then to pass on into Hittite law. To give you a idea of the culture, I’m just giving a sampling, every type of thing was covered with very minute regulations so that they had a highly urban civilization with all kinds of laws for control of merchandising, of trade; everything. This from the Hittite law:

Our time is limited, but I want to continue now with the next chapter, chapter seven on our board: Jesus Christ and the Beginning of Christianity. Again, contrasting the basic religious premise behind the history so that we can see first the movement of the events in the text as we read week by week, and then something of the meaning, the religious meaning of these movements. 

Now, as against all these pagan views, and especially as against the Greek view, we see in Scripture God as the Creator. And as against the ultimate perversity of the universe, we have our Lord declaring very early in his ministry, in Matthew 10:25-34, the total government of God. “Not a sparrow falls, but your Father in Heaven knows it.” “If a house be divided against itself, it cannot stand.” Fear them not, therefore. Why? Because of the absolute government of God.

And in that passage what our Lord is saying is that the house, the universe, is under God, not under Satan. The universe is not ultimately perverse as tragedy would have it, but it is under God. Now, remember when he was writing, Greek was the second language which every Hebrew, every Jew spoke. Greek culture was very powerful in the land, Greek gymnasiums were all over Jerusalem. And the Sadducees were extensively influenced by Greek thinking. Every person in the land had a second name which was Greek. So when you read the New Testament, when you read the words of our Lord, remember, this was the environment, this was the kind of thing He was talking against. The intellectuals around Him, the ‘educated people,’ had read Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they had grown up in that world. And He declared:  “The house, the universe is under God and not under Beelzebub. Fear them not, therefore. All things shall be revealed,” he said. “All shall be judged, all shall be punished or rewarded. There is nothing hidden that shall not be torn down.”

The universe is absolutely governed by God from the very hairs of our head to the Fall of every sparrow. God’s government and care are total.  “He who confesses me before men, him will I confess before my Father in heaven. Confess me therefore and battle against the enemy, and I will confess you before God.” “Think not that I am come to bring peace, I am come not to bring peace, but the sword.” “I am come, not to unite Good and Evil in Persian fashion, or in pagan Greek fashion, but to divide and to destroy evil, to bring about a separation, to summon men to regeneration, and to build afresh all things in terms of My Word.”

Now, looking back on what we see in the pagan civilizations we have studied last week and tonight, then studying just these words of our Lord in Matthew 10:25-34, and you see the direction of His ministry, the direction of His words, of His teaching, do you see why a knowledge of history is important? So that we can see the issues as our Lord presented them against the whole backboard of history, and you can see this as it is again lining up because again we have the tragic view of life of Ancient Greeks. Again we have the Persian view, “Tolerate both Good and Evil.” Again we have the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian view of Chaos as the source of regeneration. And we must therefore again find our personal and societal regeneration in Jesus Christ, all things must be made new in terms of His words. So that, on this battlefield of history, we hope we shall see in the weeks ahead, progressively more and more clearly and sharply the nature of the battle, the work for us, and the direction of the future. 

Let us bow our heads in prayer before we have the question period.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that all things begin and end in thee, that thou art He who didst make all things, and did ordain and determine therein. We thank thee, therefore, that in this confidence we can face the battle of the ages, knowing that we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes.

[Audience Member] You were talking about the movement of people, the scattering of people, do we have that whole thing going on today? 

[Rushdoony] Yes, in my book, Politics of Guilt and Pity I have a chapter on The U.N., a Religious Dream, in which I speak of their ideas of mass movements of peoples in Babylonian fashion, and Assyrian fashion. 

Yes?

[Audience Member] Mr. Gordon of the Tootsie Roll corporation is financing that, according to some credible material I have in a magazine. 

[Rushdoony] He is financing this kind of migration?

[Audience Member] Yes

[Rushdoony] Well, I would say the whole has disappeared from the Tootsie Roll and gone into Mr. Gordon’s head. 

Yes?

[Audience Member] Question relating to Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. 

[Rushdoony] Yes, Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson. Nebuchadnezzar was the grandfather of Belshazzar. Now, Belshazzar was made the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and vice king under Nabonidus, you see. Because he was quite young when his father, when his grandfather died, Belshazzar was too young, so they made his father, even though he was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, the king. And then they made the young king the second king, vice king, or ‘vice president’ in our terms. So Nabonidus was also made an adopted son, as it were, of Nebuchadnezzar. So, strictly he was both grandson and legal son.

Yes?

[Audience Member] What’s the difference between tragedy and realism? ¹

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, of course, Sophocles thought he was being realistic you see. What is realism? Realism is determined by your faith. You can go back through the centuries, and you can find writers were always claiming to be realistic in terms of their faith. So the realism that you find in the modern novel, and the modern movie, and the modern television series, is always a realism in terms of their religious faith, which is a belief in tragedy. The deck is stacked against them, this is their faith. It is a bitterness against the universe; things weren’t made right, and the only hope is that man can re-make everything. But you get a steady diet of tragedy to tell you what a mess God has made of the universe. “It is an ugly world, there is no meaning, no purpose, no God behind it.” So, it isn’t realism. 

How much of the kind of thing that you see on these tragic television programs have you ever seen in real life? You see, everything is bleak and black, and poor innocent man is always the victim, never the sinner. So it is realism in terms of their religion.

Yes?

[Audience Member] What are we to make of the tongues movement? ²

[Rushdoony] The tongues movement? Well, of course there is no such thing as the tongues movement today because first of all, the tongues movement in the Bible we are told is something whereby they spoke a specific language, and people who were foreigners understood them. This was a gift in the apostolic age, whereby they communicated with people and carried the Gospel to them. There is no record today of any speaking in tongues. Again and again these tongue meetings have been taped, no one has ever spoken in tongues. What they do is to get hysterical, and they repeat one or two syllables over, and over, and over again hysterically.

And in fact it has been taped, and they put it down in black and white what they repeated, two or three syllables over again. It may be, “duh duh duh duh duhh” or: ‘Abadabbah, abadabbah, abbadabbaabah” something like that, nonsense. Now, that is not speaking in tongues. 

Moreover, in ancient times, you had that kind of thing, which is glossolalia, this hysterical babbling of syllables in pagan religion. You had it in the jungles of Africa. The first time tongues came in, about the third and fourth century, it came in to Christianity from Phrgyia, from a pagan group. The modern tongue movement or Pentecostalism began with Negroes, I believe it was in Azusa or Covina, this is where it began, among Negroes. And it is basically a pagan thing. You can find this tongues movement among, as I say, the tribes; you can find it among the Hindus, you could find it among the American Indians in the old days, you could find it among the Buddhists. It is pagan, it is not speaking in a language. 

All across country you had scholars taping. Now, one particular man, not that I particularly care for the man, but he had some real research here, is Dr. Wilmers, who is an OPC minister, and also a professor at UCLA. And he had done extensive taping here. And there have never been even a hint of anything of a word in any of it, just repetition of some syllables.

[Audience Member] It is held in these groups that speaking in tongues is proof of having the Holy Spirit. ³

[Rushdoony] Well, of course they don’t speak in tongues, that is my point, it has never been proven, and it has been subjected to intensive investigation. And second, instead of having the Holy Spirit, most Pentecostal groups have a very low moral caliber, a very low moral caliber and this is notorious. Now, anyone who has a very close contact with those groups, and I know that Drewby Wacker has vouched for their very low moral character which appears even in the clergy, some of their shenanigans.

[Audience Member] What about these people who speak in tongues believing that you have to be given a special gift to interpret them? ⁴

[Rushdoony] They claim that they can interpret, and they get up and give something that is essentially the message. But all of this as I say has been taped, so that we do have a great deal of documentation at this point concerning the tongue movement, and they have not been able to verify a single claim concerning the tongues movement. And their only answer is that they that feel either you don’t have the Holy Spirit, or you refuse to submit to it yourself. In other words, it isn’t the objective evidence, you have to experience it yourself, and then you’ll know. 

It is a dangerous thing to get into the tongues movement because you will be milked of your money. 

To change the subject now, a question was raised last time about an Atlas. Now, I don’t have all my books unpacked, so I can’t recommend some of the Bible atlases, but if you go to a Bible bookstore, you can probably find two or three fairly good Bible atlases. But this, as a historical atlas is a gem, it is a paperback for $2.95 Historical Atlas of the World and it is published by Barnes and Noble in New York, and you can get it if there is a college book store near you, or you can order it. Historical Atlas of the World and the number in their paperback list is number 249. Barnes and Noble are the publishers.

Now, what this does is to begin very early in history and give you a series of maps. The first one is the spread of civilization to A.D. 200, but after that it goes back to the Pyramids and ancient Egypt, and the near East, 1400 B.C., and it gives you pictures of kingdoms, their extent like which Mitanni was a pretty powerful realm, a very powerful one. And also of Canaan, the entire Near East and coming up through history, Rome, Europe, early Europe in 1100 and so on, right down to the present. So that it is quite a useful atlas, it is not as big in its maps as perhaps one would like, and they are not detailed maps, but it does give you an idea of the extent of realms. 

For example, I mentioned that there was a time when Lithuania extended over a tremendous area; from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Well, you see that as you go through here, how powerful and wide a realm it was. And it will give you a picture of how many little states there were in Germany for example, for a long, long time as you look at these maps. So If you are interested in maps, this historical atlas of the world put out by Barnes and Noble is really a little gem. 

Yes? 

[Audience Member] Mr. Rushdoony, was there a time in history when all this knowledge was lost? ⁵

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is an amazing thing, a great deal of knowledge was lost when the printing press was invented. When the printing press was invented, it was at the time of the Renaissance, the contempt of Christianity, the contempt of the Middle Ages, and a contempt, therefore, of the past; and so anything therefore that wasn’t printed was obviously old and worthless. So it was amazing how much knowledge about the past was lost when the printing press was invented. It was a great step backwards because it came precisely at a time when men were looking down their noses at the past, therefore it was the new, the modern, the printed book. And the number of volumes with very rare and important data that were destroyed, because, “Well, they are old hand-written things.”

You remember I discussed once in a book Sunday morning the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings? And how he found the extensive knowledge of the entire world in maps long before Columbus, long before Columbus, and maps from very early ages that indicated that shortly after the flood the whole world had been mapped, even the Artic areas before the ice set in. And they had at that time a knowledge of longitude and latitude both, which they couldn’t compute again until the eighteenth century. It is Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Hapgood is not a fly-by-night, he was coauthor of an important work with Einstein. And he began this study of a particular map at the request of the Pentagon when they found maps before Columbus’s day which clearly showed South and North America very accurately drawn, and the Artic areas, with the lakes and all which are now under ice in the artic areas. 

Yes?

[Audience Member] Was there a reason why the Renaissance? 

[Rushdoony] Right, exactly. Yes. They went back to them because they were non-Christian, they were humanists, and as humanists they saw to them, and they called the intervening period the Dark Ages. Later they called only a short part of it the dark ages, and the rest the Medieval period, the middle part, the kind that you kind of jump over. So they forgot everything that was learned at that time. 

They actually had anesthetics during the Medieval period, which was forgotten until it was rediscovered in this century. We really don’t know a great deal of our history. Of course, we don’t have time to go into all of that, but a great deal of man’s knowledge was lost because he turned his back on the Christian era and said: “Nothing connected with that can be any good.” His medical practice went downhill, his knowledge of the world went downhill because he wasn’t going to learn anything from a Christian!

Yes?

[Audience Member] Can you explain the dates of the birth of our Lord being fixed in 4 or 6 B.C.?

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t have the confidence to do it because I don’t think anyone really knows, but there are some scholars, a great many, who believe that when a few centuries after when the Christians triumphed, they began to create a Christian calendar, but they miscalculated by four to six years in setting the beginning of the Christian era because what they did was to date everything after Christ and before Christ from the year of His birth. So they began this after Rome fell, and perhaps a little before that they had begun to move in that direction of a Christian calendar.

Well, our time is up, and we shall continue next week with our study of the Rise and Fall of Rome, the Republic and the Empire, chapters eight and nine, and chapter ten, The Early Church Confronts the World. We may get started on Byzantium, although I am not sure. But try to get started on chapter eleven if you can. But certainly through chapter ten. 

Now, with that we are adjourned.

Now let me see, is it two weeks from tonight that it is Thanksgiving week? So we are not meeting that week. So we will be meeting next week and the week after, but will not be meeting the week of Thanksgiving. 

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