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Destroying Monuments Is As Old as the Pyramids!

Condemning Statues

By Simon Connor

The summer of 2020 gave us the occasion to observe a phenomenon as old as the hills and yet more witnessed than ever in the current climate: the destruction of images. At the heart of the events linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, many statues around the world have been the target of polemics and physical attacks.

 

Kneeling statue of Hatshepsut found buried in a pit in front of her temple (in the so-called ‘Senenmut Quarry’), after being smashed into pieces under the reign of Thutmosis III. New York, MMA 29.3.1. Granite. H. 261; W. 80; D. 137 cm. Systematic targets on Hatshepsut’s statues are the uraeus, nose and beard, as well as the wrists. The statues are also usually beheaded. Attacks on the eyes, visible on this statue, are less frequent. (Photo: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MMA excavations, 1927–28, Rogers Fund.)

Altering three-dimensional images that stood in squares, courtyards or public gardens was tantamount to punishing the characters depicted, now considered dishonorable because they have become symbols of slavery, colonialism or racism. Treated just like actual human bodies, these effigies have been disfigured, decapitated, mutilated. Even in contemporary societies, where it is generally accepted that no soul or spirit inhabits a body of stone or bronze, monuments and sculptures are not seen as mere ornaments. They have a role, they represent ideas, whether similar to those originally intended or not.

Pharaonic history provides us with well-documented cases of condemnation of the memory of specific individuals – what we today call damnatio memoriae, a Latin term created in the 17th century to label Roman memory sanctions. For example, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, considered a usurper after her death, was erased from the official memory and removed from all her monuments. A few generations later, Akhenaten’s figure was also eradicated from the monumental landscape, following the failure of his Atonist revolution. However, in the large panorama of Egyptian art, many other causes than the erasure of someone’s memory led to the destruction or mutilation of images, and one should not be too quick to conclude on the motivations that may have led to their alteration.

When considering an altered monument, one should first address the following three questions:

– Is the mutilation intentional? How can this be ascertained?

– Is there any evidence allowing to date the mutilation? A few hours as well as several centuries or millennia can separate the installation of an image from its end.

– What sources are available to interpret this alteration?

When getting to this third question – the most difficult – three points should be considered:

– Who was the figure or entity represented? How was he/she perceived over time and how can we trace the evolution of this consideration?

– When and why was this image produced and/or installed?

– What were the motivations of those who harmed it?

When dealing with ancient and sometimes poorly documented monuments, it is difficult to answer the questions we have asked, but we must keep in mind that such a multiplicity of points of view is always a possibility. The perception of an image by its deteriorators may have been very different from the perception of the people who produced it, as well as that of the people who have been in contact with it over the centuries.

This kind of practice can be observed throughout Pharaonic history. Even more than in our modern societies, images were endowed with a strong “agency.” They were performative, served as potential bodies in which the entity represented could take place, and they were therefore capable of action. An acting image could bring benefits – for example, it could serve as an intermediary between a worshipper and the figure represented, whether it was an ancestor, a deity or the reigning king – who was himself of divine essence. An image could also carry danger. For this reason, to avoid any risk that this image would take action, it was advisable to deactivate it by depriving it of its organs of life, its limbs or its inscriptions that conferred it an identity. A mutilated bas-relief or statue deprived of its arms and legs, its nose or even its face would go back to its first nature as a block of stone.

Mutilation or destruction of an image could serve many purposes. For example, the intention may have been to remove from view what one no longer wanted to see. The very performance of the destruction may also have been the goal of the act, whether it was performed in front of an audience or in the framework of some kind of ritual. This act of destruction was itself a producer of images, even if mental ones. Sometimes, too, the intention may have been to ostensibly leave visible the injuries brought to a figure.

Let us mention the well-known case of Hatshepsut. The many statues from her temple at Deir el-Bahari were found mutilated at specific points (always the nose, beard, and uraeus; sometimes the eyes, the entire face, or limbs) before being broken into several pieces and buried in two pits in front of the temple. These statues did not remain visible for long in their mutilated form. We will never know if their destruction took place in front of an audience – we may assume so – but their destruction certainly followed a very systematic procedure. We know enough about the political context that led to the proscription of the female pharaoh’s memory to be able to date the event to the end of the reign of Thutmosis III.

The case of Akhenaten is also well documented. At the end of Dynasty 18, with the seizure of power by Horemheb, a campaign of proscription seems to have taken place against the rulers attached to the memory of the Amarna revolution: Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their successor Neferneferuaten, Tutankhamun and Ay. When exactly did this proscription take place, how long did it last, how systematic was it? The rock-cut statues of the boundary stelae of Amarna remained clearly visible in their mutilated, outrageous form, as if to serve as a warning to those who, like Akhenaten, would fail in the mission entrusted by the gods. The countless statues of the royal family in Amarna and Thebes were all mutilated, often reduced into pieces and buried. The blocks covered with reliefs were reused as filling in the masonry of new temples.

Continue reading…

From ASOR, here.

Uncovering Sefer Yirmiyahu

New Book: Uncovering the Book of Jeremiah

I should note at the outset that the title of this post is incorrect, for there is no book with such a name. But therein lies an important reason for writing this post in the first place: English readers are not apt to discover a book entitled Uncovering Sefer Yirmiyahu when searching for commentaries and writings on Jeremiah.

The author is Rabbi Yehuda Landy, a former neighbor of mine in the Judean hill country, though we did not meet then and have not since. But I stumbled across his excellent book on Purim and the Persian Empire (recommended if you’re studying Esther), and somehow we got connected by email, and he alerted me to his new book on Jeremiah. That was good, because I wouldn’t have found it by searching Amazon for Jeremiah.

 

Uncovering Sefer Yirmiyahu: An Archaeological, Geographical, Historical Perspective: Rabbi Yehuda Landy: 9781680254075: Amazon.com: Books

According to the book jacket, the series is intended for the “Jewish reading public,” and that explains why the title is (partly) in Hebrew. But the subtitle reveals why this book is of interest to this audience: “An Archaeological, Geographical, Historical Perspective.” Readers, pastors, and teachers who want to go beyond a standard text commentary will learn much from this book about the sites, material culture, and historical background of this prophetic text.

The basic facts of the book are these: hardcover, 390 full-color pages, lavishly illustrated with photos and maps, published by Halpern Center Press in Jerusalem, $35 on Amazon. The Hebrew edition was published in 2015; the English edition is somewhat revised and was published in 2019. The author is a rabbi, Israeli tour guide, and a PhD candidate at Bar Ilan University, in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology.

The 75 chapters are divided into two sections. The first section provides a historical review with chapter titles such as:

  • Jerusalem in the Days of Jeremiah
  • The Spiritual State of the Jewish People at the Time of Josiah
  • Archaeological Evidence of Pharaoh Necho’s Campaign
  • Nebuchadnezzar Arrives at Jerusalem to Suppress the Rebellion of Jehoiakim
  • The Exile of Jehoiachin
  • The Judean Exiles in Babylonia
  • (Note: I’ve anglicized the names here. See below.)

The second half goes through Jeremiah chapter by chapter, providing an “explanation of concepts” for nearly each chapter.

I have not read the entire book, but I’ve made note of some valuable insights I’ve gleaned as I have read, including:

  • Jeremiah may have been the brother of Azariah the high priest whose seal impression was found in the city of David.
  • Anathoth was the closest priestly city to Jerusalem. This reality may signify the prominence of Jeremiah’s priestly family.
  • One rabbinic tradition says that Josiah hid the ark of the covenant under the Chamber of the Wood. Another tradition says that it was carried off to Babylon.
  • One rabbinic source suggests that Josiah’s error in confronting Pharaoh Necho (who killed him) was that he did not consult Jeremiah for the Lord’s counsel. Another rabbi argues that he did not obey Jeremiah’s command to turn back.
  • Jeremiah may have traveled through a secret passage recently discovered in excavations at the City of David in order to meet King Zedekiah.

Readers who haven’t studied Hebrew will have to learn a little bit of new vocabulary, for though the book is written in English, many names and terms are in transliterated Hebrew, including Beis HaMikdash (temple), HaNavi (prophet), and Nevuchadnetzar (Nebuchadnezzar).

I recommend this book to anyone studying Jeremiah for four primary reasons: (1) this resource is carefully researched and provides a lot of useful historical background; (2) the work is up to date with regard to archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem; (3) the numerous photos and maps are an aid to understanding (and are usually lacking in commentaries); (4) the perspective of a Jewish rabbi and tour guide will provide a fresh approach for many Christian readers.

From BiblePlaces.com, here.

The Miracle of Economic Faith

The Faith of Entrepreneurs

By 

Mises.org

May 5, 2021

Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the “miracle” of the marketplace or the “magic” of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity that can support exponential increases in population and ever higher living standards.

There was no German miracle after World War II, he used to say; the glorious recovery was a result of economic logic working itself out through market forces. Once we understand the relationship between property rights, market prices, the time structure of production, and the division of labor, the mystery evaporates and we observe the science of human action making great things happen.

He is right that understanding economics does not require faith, but there are actions undertaken by market actors themselves that require faith (and Mises would not disagree with this)—immense faith, faith that moves mountains and raises up civilizations. If we accept the interesting description of faith by St. Paul (“evidence of things unseen”) we can understand entrepreneurship and capitalist investment as acts of faith.

Everyone who is in business understands this. It requires a thousand daily acts of seeing the unseen future to be in business. The reality of the marketplace is that the consuming public can shut you down tomorrow. All they need to do is to fail to show up and buy.

This is true for the smallest business to the largest. There is no certainty in any business. Nothing is a sure thing. Every business in a market economy is only a short step from bankruptcy. No business possesses the power to make people buy what they do not want. All success is potentially fleeting.

Success does yield a profit, but that provides no comfort. Every bit of profit you take for yourself comes out of what might otherwise be an investment in the development of the business. But neither is this investment a sure thing. Today’s smash hit could be tomorrow’s flop. What you perceive to be a solid investment could turn out to be a short-term craze. What you see, based on past sales, as having a potential mass appeal could actually be a market segment that was quickly saturated.

Emperors can rest on their laurels but capitalists never can.

Sales history provides nothing but a look backwards. The future is never seen with clarity but only through a glass, darkly. Past performance is not only not a guarantee of future success; it is no more or less than a data set of history that can tell us nothing about the future. If the future turns out to look like the past, the probabilities still do not change, any more than the probability of the next coin toss landed on heads increases because it happened previously five times in a row.

Despite the utter absence of a road map, the entrepreneur-investor must act as if some future is mapped out. He or she must still hire employees and pay them long before the products of their labor come to market, and even longer before those marketable products are sold and turn a profit. The equipment must be purchased, upgraded, serviced, and replaced, which means that the entrepreneur must think about today’s costs and tomorrow’s and the next day’s saecula saeculorum.

Especially now, the costs can be mind boggling. A retailer must consider an amazing array of options concerning suppliers and web services. There must be some means of alerting the world to your existence, and despite a century of attempts to employ scientific methods for finding out what makes the consumer tick, advertising remains high art, not positive science. But it also an art with high expense. Are you throwing money down a rathole or really getting the message out? There is no way to know in advance.

The heck of it too is that there are no testable causes of success because there is no way to perfectly control for all important factors. Sometimes not even the most successful business is clued into what it is, precisely, that makes its products sell more as compared with its competitors. Is it price, quality, status, geography, promotion, psychological associations people make with the product, or what?

Back into the 1980s, for example, Coca Cola decided to change its formula and advertise it as New Coke. The result was a catastrophe as consumers fled, even though the taste tests said that people liked the new better than the old.

If the historical data are so difficult to interpret, think how much more difficult it is to discern probable outcomes in the future. You can hire accountants, marketing agencies, financial wizards, and designers. They are technicians, but there are no such things as reliable experts in overcoming uncertainty. An analogy might be a man in a pitch-black room who hires people to help him put one foot in front of the other. His steps can be steady and sure but neither him nor his helpers can know for sure what is in front of him.

“What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people,” writes Mises, “is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”

It is for this reason that an entrepreneurial habit of mind cannot be implanted through training or education. It is something possessed and cultivated by an individual. There are no entrepreneurial committees, much less entrepreneurial planning boards.

The inability of governments to engage in the entrepreneurial act of faith is one of many reasons why socialism cannot work. Even if a bureaucrat can look at history and claim that his agency could have made a car, dry wall, or a microchip, that same person is at a loss to figure out how innovations in the future can take place. His only guide is technology: he can speculate about what might work better than what is presently available. But that is not the economic issue: the real issue concerns what is the best means given all the alternative uses of resources to satisfy the most urgent wants of consumers in light of an infinity of possible wants.

This is impossible for governments to do.

There are thousands of reasons why entrepreneurship should never take place but only one good one for why it does: these individuals have superior speculative judgment and are willing to take the leap of faith that is required to test their speculation against the facts of an uncertain future. And yet it is this leap of faith that drives forward our standards of living and improves life for millions and billions of people. We are surrounded by faith. Growing economies are infused with it.

Mises forgive me: this is a miracle.

From Lew Rockwell, here.

Demography Is Destiny: The American Birth Rate…

US Births Drop To The Lowest Level Since The 1970s

2:45 pm

The years-long U.S. baby drought worsened last year, with births dropping 4% from 2019 to the lowest level since 1979.

The provisional data for 2020, at 3.6 million births, marks the sixth annual drop in a row. The decline will likely continue in 2021, when the brunt of the impact from the pandemic will be recorded — with a nine-month delay.

Fears of contracting the virus while pregnant, or while in hospital to give birth, combined with job insecurity and government measures limiting social contact and business activity, dissuaded Americans from having babies, according to surveys by Ovia Health, a women’s health technology company.

Read more at NEWSMAX.

From Matzav, here.

Six-Day War: At Least Now Jews Aren’t Murdered Upon Entering the Temple Mount!

The Murder at the Temple Mount

Monday, April 05, 2021

This article appeared originally at the Jerusalem Post Magazine and I’ve added more graphics here:

The Murder on the Temple Mount

On April 11, 1947, Asher Itzkowitz, along with his acquaintance – and despite the shared family name no family connection – Yitzchak Itzkowitz, walked from entered the Old City through the Damascus Gate and continued on towards the Western Wall.  It was Asher’s first time visit.

For some reason, perhaps first-time disorientation, they turned left towards a gate and proceeded towards the Temple Mount. Asher never made it to the Wall and never left the Old City alive.

–  – –

It was either during the late Ayyubid 1187-1250, or the early Mamluk (1250-1517) period, or perhaps from the time of Saladin’s victory over the Crusaders in 1189, that a ban was instituted forbidding non-Muslims from entering the compound of the Temple Mount.

Islam’s tenet was it was the sole true religion rather than Christianity or Judaism. It alone carried on the heritage of Abraham. That ban was extended also to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in the form of the infamous ‘seventh step’. It is quite possible that despite Jews visiting the Temple Mount in the previous centuries, notably, Maimonides, that ban was sublimated into later Rabbinic prohibitions on Jews from entering the site.

Nicholas Tavelić, Peter of Narbona, Deodatus of Ruticinio and Stephen of Cuneo became the first Franciscan martyrs of the office of the Custody of the Holy Land when, having been in Jerusalem since 1384, they decided to take their charge to spread their faith to the Qadi of the city who was singularly unimpressed.

On November 11, 1391, they entered the Temple Mound compound, appeared before the Qadi’s gathering and began to preach. They were arrested, refused an option to convert to Islam and near the Jaffa Gate on November 14, they were executed, beheaded, their bodies blown up and their remains completely burned. Their ashes were scattered. In June 1970, they were declared Saints in the Vatican Basilica by Pope Paul VI.

In May 1818, Sarah Belzoni disguised herself as a Muslim female and, retaining the services of a 9-year old Muslim boy in order to facilitate entry, she managed a peek inside the Dome of the Rock. On November 13, 1833, the English architect Frederick Catherwood dressed up as an Egyptian officer and entered the sacred precincts, eventually spending six weeks “investigat[ing] every part of the mosque and its precincts” and made the first complete survey of the Dome of the Rock.

In 1839, following the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman administration, non-Muslims were permitted to enter Temple Mount on receiving the special permit from the governor. In the 1850s, an Italian military engineer named Ermete Pierotti was engaged as architect and engineer to the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem, a position that provided him unrestricted freedom to study the Temple Mount. His 1864 book, Jerusalem Explored, describes his findings.

In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, toured the Temple Mount while club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur guards were locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June that year, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg Empire, also was permitted entry.

As for Jews, Moses Montefiore and his wife Judith toured the site on July 26, 1855 including the underground Ancient Al-Aqsa to the Southern Wall and, apparently, on other occasions. The Palestine Exploration Fund got Charles Warren of the Royal Engineers into the area in 1867 and his diary entry of April 8, 1869 begins, “I visited the Dome of the Rock.”

–    –    –

On Wednesday, January 29, 1873, the 56-year old Yosef Assa, like Asher Itzkowitz six decades later, erred while walking to his study session at an Old City bet midrash. Being blind, he missed a turning perhaps and entered to Temple Mount. As reported in HaLevanon on February 5th, his body was found the next day, seemingly tossed over the ramparts into the valley below. Obviously, unauthorized entry was an extreme danger.

In the few years prior to World War One and just after, matters were more relaxed. We know that Tel Aviv’s Herzliya school pupils toured the site during Passover 1912 as did others during the Second and Third Aliyah periods. Rahel Yannait did so in 1908, Berl Katznelson in 1918 and Uri Tzvi Greenberg in1924.

Asher Itzkowitz, most probably born in Ivanovice in the Máramaros district of north-east Hungary in 1927 although another source has his birthplace as Drohobycz, was taken to Auschwitz during the war. His parents, from whom he was separated, did not survive the Holocaust but a sister did. Making his way to Budapest, he joined a Dror Zionist youth group despite being religiously observant, boarded the Yagur clandestine immigration ship and was sent to a Cyprus detention camp. He arrived in Israel in late 1946. He lived in Tel Aviv and worked as a carpenter.

On the last day of Passover, Shvi’I shel Pesach, April 11, 1947, he walked from the Beit Yisrael neighborhood with a friend (but not a relative), Yitzhak Itzkowitz, 36, to the Western Wall. Becoming perhaps disoriented in the alleyways unfamiliar to them, they walked down David Street and missed the right-hand turn to the Western Wall.

They approached the Chain Gate at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon. The presence of non-Muslims so close to the Haram precincts incensed the crowds. Some records note that the Moslem holiday of Nebi Mussa, always a heightened time of potential violence since 1920, was coetaneous that day. Both were set upon by over 30 rowdies. They were beaten with heavy sticks, called nabbot, metal rods, stoned and stabbed. The newspaper reports were contradictory as to what happened next.

The first information was that they had unwittingly entered the Temple Mount. Such an act would have been cause for such violence. Indeed, as reported in this paper on December 16, 2020, over 70 years later, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, a Palestinian Authority appointee, declared there is “no place for non-Muslims in any way in this mosque, whether through schools, churches or other places of worship.”

In fact, the Palestine Government press office had issued a press release that was broadcast over the official Mandate’s Voice of Jerusalem radio that the murderous assault indeed took place inside the compound. Subsequent items appearing in the press related that they were attacked outside.

Yitzchak was saved by an Arab policeman, a corporal, who dragged him into the courtyard who then closed the gate on the mob. Asher was left outside to be finished off. Suffering severe loss of blood and critical head injuries, Asher died. The HaTzofe newspaper indicates the corporal, who was on duty inside the sacred compound, at the police station on the north side of the raised platform, found them inside the gate when he rushed over in response to the shouting.

Asher’s funeral service was conducted Saturday night in the courtyard of the Bikur Cholim Hospital and was addressed by Rabbis Aryeh Levin and Zalman Brizel. From there, his bier was carried through Meah Shearim until the police intervened and insisted it be placed in a van. Shouting and shoving then ensued. Eventually, the procession made its way to the Mount of Olives where Itzkowitz was buried. If you seek out his grave, you will find a barely recognizable plot with the text illegible.

The “Situation Committee” of Jerusalem’s Jewish Community Council decried the murder and demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice. At the same time, they called for restraint on the part of Jews as on the Shabbat, two Arab ice cream vendors along Aggripas Street were beaten moderately by a crowd. The previous week, in a retaliation against the Palestine Police for the murder of Moshe Cohen on April 7, the Lechi underground had shot the 20-year old Basil Forth, who had been in the city but a week, killing him.

Most papers did not carry the story on their front pages. By the following Monday, he murder disappeared from the pages of the Yishuv’s press. The Communist organ, Kol Ha’Am, devoted but seven lines to the incident. Other news, of the escape of Geula Cohen and the forthcoming hanging of Dov Gruner and his legal battle were more prominent.

There is no memorial plaque near where he was murdered. He lies in a forsaken near-unmarked grave. He has no progeny. He is a forgotten martyr.

Continue reading…

From My Right Word, here.