"Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ"
Just got the latest Scholars BookShelf catalogue - lots of great surplus stuff. They introduced a series on Daily Life in Antiquity: Periclean Greece, Aztecs, India, and of course...Israel, with the title above.
Grr. This title strikes me as antisemitic on two counts:
1) The Land of Israel was not called "Palestine" at the time of Jesus, it was the Roman province of Judaea, so-called after the Jewish kingdom of Judah which had still existed there, albeit under subjugation, when the Romans took over from the Greeks (Remember King Herod? What was he king of? The Sturgeon King? No, that's Barney Greengrass).
It was called Palestine only after the Bar-Kochba Revolt was defeated in 135 CE, more than a century after Jesus' death, as a direct slap at the few remaining Jews - it was named after another ancient tribe that had once been in the area, the Philistines.
2) If you're going to pick an anachronistic name, pick Israel - that's the name of the current country/political entity that has sovereignty over the area. To call it Palestine is to delegitimize the State of Israel - calling after either the
Roman-Byzantine-Arab-Crusader-Arab-Turkish-British name for the area, or the name used by the Arab enemies of Israel.
If one is writing a book on life in antiquity, one cannot but be aware of the history of the area. Using "Palestine" is a direct slap at the Jews and their State, the State of Israel.
Just got the latest Scholars BookShelf catalogue - lots of great surplus stuff. They introduced a series on Daily Life in Antiquity: Periclean Greece, Aztecs, India, and of course...Israel, with the title above.
Grr. This title strikes me as antisemitic on two counts:
1) The Land of Israel was not called "Palestine" at the time of Jesus, it was the Roman province of Judaea, so-called after the Jewish kingdom of Judah which had still existed there, albeit under subjugation, when the Romans took over from the Greeks (Remember King Herod? What was he king of? The Sturgeon King? No, that's Barney Greengrass).
It was called Palestine only after the Bar-Kochba Revolt was defeated in 135 CE, more than a century after Jesus' death, as a direct slap at the few remaining Jews - it was named after another ancient tribe that had once been in the area, the Philistines.
2) If you're going to pick an anachronistic name, pick Israel - that's the name of the current country/political entity that has sovereignty over the area. To call it Palestine is to delegitimize the State of Israel - calling after either the
Roman-Byzantine-Arab-Crusader-Arab-Turkish-British name for the area, or the name used by the Arab enemies of Israel.
If one is writing a book on life in antiquity, one cannot but be aware of the history of the area. Using "Palestine" is a direct slap at the Jews and their State, the State of Israel.
