Class from January 2o

Doesn't twenty look cooler written as 2o than 20? I accidentally typed 2o instead of 20 for the title of this post and think I am going to keep it. Anyways.........

Sorry this is from like 4 days ago. I suck. I know. Please accept my apology.

We went over 2 Samuel, why Jerusalem is sacred (kind of a major theme in the class), the temple of Solomon, Solomon in general, and thats pretty much it.

I think its very cool that the description of the Temple of Solomon (from now on Temple 1) matches other temples from the area of similar times. This type of evidence is called comparative evidence. For instance, Tel Arad has pillars standing inside, similar to what is described in I think 1 Kings. Scholars argue about what these pillars were meant for, perhaps phallic symbols like anything else. Perhaps monuments to other deities that Solomon was trying to please. Perhaps just decoration. While Solomon was wise, and not a warrior like his father David, he had many wives from all across the region. Naturally not all these wives were "Jewish." (I think at this point we can call the Israelites/Hebrews/ people of David and Solomon and Judah and Israel Jews. There is debate about this, whether it was with Abraham, at Sinai, during the United Kingdom period, but for the sake of simplicity, Am Yisrael will now be Jews.) They were on the religion of their local places of origin and so Solomon tried to accommodate this, even at the expense of his own relationship with God. I remember learning about the fertility goddess Astarte while on EIE. Astarte, she goes by other names, was the goddess of fertility that many people prayed to and they found statues of her in and around Jerusalem from around the time of Solomon. Once again, not evidence of the existence of Solomon but they statues are some form of historicity to perhaps give some credence to the biblical account.

We also talked about Ain Dara. At Ain Dara, archaeologists discovered large footsteps leading to the main alter. The first slab had two foot prints and the second slab only one. Some think that it could be God walking into his temple. I don't know how this matches the description of Solomon's Temple but it could be evidence of similar concepts regarding the Temple. The Temple was supposed to be the place that God physically resided, like a house. If the footsteps at Ain Dara were supposed to be the footsteps of a deity, then it shows that the people of Ain Dara believed that their God resided in that temple. Again, this shows similarities between Solomon's Temple and the other places of worship in the region.

Last thing- 2 Samuel 7 is apparently the most important verse in the bible for messianism, In 2 Samuel, God promises that his throne will last forever. Of course, it doesn't and Temple is destroyed and the Jews are exiled and all that. So why did God lie? Or did he? And how do people reconcile these broken promises? Well, 2 Samuel has been a basis for messianism, and some people look to as evidence that Jesus is in the line of David.

OK, I'm done. I hope you enjoyed this.

Joey