Black Nationalists Now Claiming that Jerusalem Was Really in Africa

I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.

There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.

But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.

But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.

This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.

Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.

There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.

This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.

King David and the Foundations of Solomon’s Temple

Yesterday’s reading was 1 Chronicles 29:1-9. This describes how David gave some of his own great wealth to the Temple, and encouraged his leading courtiers, generals, and the wider Israelite people to do the same.

King David ruled from 1000 to 965 BC. According to the Bible, he established an empire stretching from the Negev in the south to the Euphrates in the north, comprising most of Palestine, transjordan, with the exception of the Philistine cities on the coastal strip, parts of Syria and some of the Phoenician coast. No contemporary texts exist for this period of Israel’s history apart from the Bible, and the archaeological evidence is sparse. It is difficult to date precisely buildings or objects to the beginning of the 10th century, and some of the buildings attributed to him may have been built by his son, Solomon. As a result of this, some of the Biblical minimalist historians have claimed that King David was either mythical, or if he existed at all, then he and Solomon, were merely pastoral clan chieftains rather than the rulers of a rich and impressive kingdom. This view was discredited by the discovery of the Tell Dan stele in 1993 and the decipherment of part of the inscription on the Moabite Stone by the French linguist, Andre Lemaire, in 1994. The Tell Dan stele had been put up by King Hazael of Damascus to commemorate his victory over northern Israel. In it Hazael claims that he defeated ”[Jeho]ram king of Israel and kill[ed Ahaz]yahu son of (gap) [I overthr]ew the house of David”. The Moabite Stone was put up by King Mesha of Moab to celebrate his successful rebellion against Israel’s king Ahab, during which Mesha had sacrificed his own son to the Moabite national god, Chemosh. The Stone was broken up into small fragments by the bedouin, who found it in order to gain more money from European archaeologists. Studying a 19th century copy of the text before it was smashed, Lemaire found a reference to the ‘House of David’. Literary examination of the Biblical texts shows that much of this was written either in David’s or Solomon’s time, and so represents a reliable witness to the events of their reigns. Although the archaeology does not support the image of King David as the founder of a great empire, it is consistent with Biblical accounts of his reign, which do not describe him as engaged on any great building operations.

The philistine town of Megiddo, stratum VIA and the Canaanite town of Tell Qasile stratum X were destroyed by fire, possibly by King David. The first half of the 10th century BC saw the Israelites establishing an urban culture. A number of small village sites have been attributed to David’s reign. There was a roughly circular settlement at Khirbet Dawara defended by a casement wall. Stratum VII at Tell Beer-Sheba consisted of several dwellings built around an open area. New types of pottery also appeared at this time, with different shapes and a distinctive hand burnished red slip.

David also conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites in 995 BC. Jebusite Jerusalem was situated on the hill of Ophel, between the Kidron Brook and the Tyropoeon valley. Excavations on the eastern slope of this spur above the Gihon spring revealed a ‘stepped structure’ with walls surviving to a height of 16.5 metres (c. 49 1/2 feet). This may have dated to the tenth century. It supported a monumental structure, which has not survived. The Israeli archaeology Yigal Shiloh showed that this was built on top of ruins dating from 1300 to 1200 BC. The ‘Stepped Structure’ itself dates from the 10th century BC. In 2005 another Israeli archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, ,discovery a large stone building at the top of the Hill of Ophel associated with the ‘Stepped Structure’. Pottery found with this building dated to the 10th century BC or earlier. This indicated that the building may have been the ‘Fortress of Zion’ occupied by King David after he took Jerusalem.

David appealed to the Israelite people to donate to the Temple’s construction, not because it needed more money, but so that as many people as possible would be involved in its construction. This truly made the Temple of the Jewish people, rather than a place built purely for the service of the monarchy. It was a practical demonstration that God’s call is not just for the few, but to all.

The Temple later built by King Solomon was a massive rectangular structure of 50 x 100 cubits, about 25 x 50m. This is larger than any known Canaanite or Phoenician temple. It was also very tall, at 30 cubits in height. Its walls were 12 cubits in width, similar to the Middle Bronze Age temple at Shiloh. The interior was divided into three sections: a porch, ulam, the sanctuary, hechal, and the Holy of Holies, debir. The entrance to each of these was along the Temples central axis. On either side of this was a series of auxiliary chambers, which probably acted as the kingdom’s treasury. In its plan and interior decorations, the Temple was similar to other, pagan temples in Palestine and the Ancient Near East, particularly those at Ebla, Megiddo, and Tell Mumbakat and the Bit Hilani palace and its attached temple, the last two both in north Syria. The use of cedar wood was similar to the Philistine and Canaanite temples at Lachish and Tell Qasile. The Temple’s cult objects included the sacrificial altar and and the ‘molten sea’. This was a huge bronze basin supported by 12 bulls. These can be reconstructed finds and depictions from Phoenicia, Cyprus and Palestine. The Temple’s two columns, Jachin and Boaz, are similar to column bases at the Late Bronze Age temple at Hazor and those on the pottery model of a similar shrine found at Tell el-Far’ah. The cherubim which sat above the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies were very different from our modern view of cherubs. Instead of chubby, cute babies, these were sphinx-like, with the body of a lion or bull, wings of an eagle and head of a man. This was a well-known figure in Canaanite, Phoenician and Syrian Bronze Age art. The Temple was also decorated with palmettes, network designs, fringes and chains. These also appear in Phoenician images of the 9th and 8th centuries BC. Many art historians consider the 10th century BC a Dark Age in the art of the Ancient Near East. The only example of monumental arat from this period is the sarcophagous of Ahiram, king of Byblos, in modern Lebanon. The Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple is thus important evidence for the existence of monumental art in the 10th century BC.

Sources

James K. Hoffmeier, The Archaeology of the Bible (Oxford: Lion 2008).

Kathleen Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land, 3rd Edition, (London: Ernest Benn Ltd 1970)

Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000 – 586 B.C.E. (New York: Centre for Judaic-Christian Studies/ Doubleday 1990)