Where Am I?

Words:1722

This country I hail from is one of the most beautiful landscapes of the entire region. As in most countries there are differences in the northern and southern parts of my land. It is noted the Northern area is a garden due to being well-watered and fertile. There is an abundance of agriculture producing volumes of corn, grapes, olives, and fruits. Let me not forget to mention the flowers that are lush and fragrant in this area of my land.

There are numerous springs, brooks and green pastures for the domestic and wild animals to revel in. There is a great variety of birds here too.

I live where many have come as an alternative to trading on the river.

The inhabitants of this land are mostly very simple, hard-working people who make their living out of fishing, agriculture, local and small trade. They also glean a living serving travelers, passengers and itinerant merchants.

Many of these come from the upper part of the country which has no cities in it. It's rural, it's remote. It's located in the highest hills of the land...a very remote area with high mountains and very, very treacherous terrain, extremely isolated by reason of topography and the nature of the land itself.

There are three major routes coming to the cities of my land. I was born in an area of waters and can never get enough of the smell of the rivers and seas. It was the largest of these cities. During the time of King David, the thriving city served as the capitol of the kingdom of Geshur. It is already an ancient place.

The northern part of my land is more conservative and the lower less conservative and more open to change, and that is reflected by the road system and all the other traffic that's going on there.

My country has become a center of, not only social dissent, but economic protest. There seems to be a rise of what we might describe as social banditry. So it a quiet, rustic, peaceful little tranquil place?

Those of my land are generous, impulsive, simple in manners, full of intense nationalism free of traditionalism. There are many gentiles here. My people have been described as very bold and rough. We are very religious contrary to the thoughts of the Rabbis.

Rabbis hold us in contempt based on our manner of speech, colloquialisms and lack of their definition of what should be characteristic of our culture. They accuse us of neglecting the traditions. They are probably just envious because my land is so beautiful.

This land is ruled by one of Herod's sons. So it was ruled much as his father's kingdom had been, as a kind of small client kingdom. This means that local politics in this region were a little different than those further South under the Roman Governors.

...In a client kingdom, the King, himself, is the absolute overlord. He's given a lot of freedom by Romans, insofar as all he has to do, basically, is raise his own taxes. And then he's in charge of everything else. So the control of the north was, in some ways, more independent, and indeed the trade and commerce that we see in this northern region shows us the degree to which the intersection of the different cultures of the north were really starting to become very important in the developing life of this region.

Again, is my land a quiet, rustic, tranquil little place?

It looks that way, sure. But the region was known for being a hotbed of political activity and some of it violent. It has a reputation for being the hotbed of radicalism. But in historical context this region was always a contested region.... From very early times... there were always a mixture of peoples in the northern region, especially when one moves to the coast....

It has a tradition of political autonomy. The northern traditions that go into the Hebrew Bible are informed by this political sensibility of autonomy. It's a kind of ideal, that this loose tribal confederacy is ruled directly by God. And those ideas and that ideal continues to be alive and well in northern area. Now some scholars argue about this, but we can trace a line from the historical moment that's depicted in the Book of Judges, not when the Book of Judges was written necessarily but the kind of historical moment that it purports to depict, through the cycle of Elijah and the Elijah traditions, 1st Kings, that talk about King making and King breaking, all the way down to this very time. Not necessarily an unbroken line, but a centuries old tradition of political autonomy under the God of Israel. And so this makes foreign imperialism a very problematic proposition in the northern area. I think that's the major element by which can explain the unusual political restiveness in this place I reside in.

This word bandit is very problematic. It has all kinds of pejorative connotations. And one man's banditry may be another man's terrorism. And it's difficult to tell under certain economic and political conditions where banditry as we usually define it leaves off and where terrorism begins. If you're just robbing people on the highway, I mean that's banditry, as most people define it. But if you're robbing from the rich to give to the poor, that's not quite banditry. Or at least that's banditry with a political edge to it, that means it just can't be dismissed as a problem of law and order per se. And I think this is the difficulty that we enter when we try to historically reconstruct what was going on there. I mean some people were engaged in violent resistance against the status quo and that means under this regime, as most, certain kinds of lawbreaking.

So what the Romans or the authorities might have defined as lawbreaking might have had a social or political content to it?

The Romans have this view: some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he's the Messiah or something. Or he's a prophet and he gets a group of people to follow him. He says we're going to go out in the desert and we're going to an empty place. We're going to go out there and we're going to wait for God to do something for us. So a whole bunch of people may go with him, maybe thousands, go with him out to this deserted, unsecured place, and they wait for what they call "the tokens of their deliverance." And the Romans send a vicious police action out there and kill everybody.

When that kind of police action is perpetrated against what we might consider harmless fanatics, the Romans are really giving us a very good historical lesson in how DOMINATION works. They didn't honor the right of assembly. Any group of people that large, even if they were out there for a picnic, constituted a threat to Roman security, and the Romans responded accordingly....

The Romans response to this is to prove they deal with them and dispatch them quickly.

And what say I? My people and I have longed for the day when the coming of the Messiah will bring Roman occupation of the land to an end. I am a Jew who sees the Messiah's coming as such redemption. There are other Jews who do not have the same views.

There are Pharisees who are zealous of the law. they consider themselves separated by superior knowledge and observance of the law.

The chief rivals of the Pharisees are the Sadduccees. They are a sect with very little following among the people but include most of the priestly aristocracy.

The Pharisees accept the Authority of the traditions of the elders as a tool for intrepreting and extending the law while the Sadduccees do not.The Sadduccees are mainly concerned with the temple worship practices and the Pharisees are primarily scribes, who intrepret the scripture according to oral law, which they maintain is as ancient as the written law. The Sanhedrin are part of the Sadduccees. The Pharisees and Sadduccees both strive for influence at court and conrol over the temple, which will give them the power to exercise an important role in naional affairs.

The third faction are the Essenes who broke away from the high priestly group and moved into the desert looking for a kingdom of the new age. John was sometimes considered as an Essenes becausse he learned of their ways living in the desert and he seems to be not concerned with traditional observance of the law.

Let us not forget the Gentile. Who are they you ask? Why they are any person who is not a Jew. Some say though it is only in the plural it is used to mean heathen(gentiles). I am not a very learned man so you be the judge.

Again, I am not a learned man, but I know what I know! I am a man of conviction.

I will do as John the Bapist and proclaim that this man who has come among us is the Messiah, the one who is to deliver us, through our own repentance. Though these Romans may drag me to prison, torture me, have me stoned or otherwise killed, I shall tell all that they must repent and change their actions, their lives, their hearts! I believe as John does we are not covered under the blanket that we are children of Abraham. It is time is time for the child to become a man and accept responsibility for his actions. Possibly more important, this is available to Gentile and Jew alike. The messiah has come!!

**Note**
Research from:
The New Testament by John Stott
The Ancient Way by J. Franklin Ewing
The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible edited by Bruce M. Mezger and Michael D Coogan
Writings of Dennis Bratcher
????????? and the Ministry of Jesus around ????????(sorry folks that would have let the cat out o the bag)By Professor Rami Arav
Articles by Eric Meyers: Professor of Religion and Archaeology Duke University
Articles by L. Michael White: Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin
The Holy Bible by Dad himself