I have not read this book, but it is a title I will add to my reading list. It’s called Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, available here. One may read more about the title here. Littman Books writes:
This fascinating book investigates time in ancient Judaism. After a comprehensive study of the Rabbinic sources Stern is forced to conclude that time as a concept simply did not exist in ancient Jewish society. Time-wasting for example is never mentioned as a bad thing, calendars are predicated on the idea of a sequence of events not on the idea of time, indeed there isn’t even really a word for time in Jewish Hebrew and Aramaic sources. The book examines the implications for this in the study of Ancient Jewish society, and looks at the impact of Hellenic culture on these issues. Ultimately Stern concludes that this shows the Near Eastern rather than Mediterranean context of Jewish thought. 144p (Littman 2007)
For Muslims, on the other hand, time renews itself each day. For Muslims, their calendar begins with Mohammed’s journey to Medina in the year 622 AD. His flight marks Year 1 of the Islamic calendar, which was immortalized in Islam as the Hegira. The Islamic calendar is only 1,386 years old.
This is why Muslims destroy archaelogy when provided with irrefutable archaeological evidence that proves the pre-existence – and therefore the legitimacy – of the Jewish people who want to live near their Jewish religious holy sites.
If Jewish archaelogy and its artifacts therein are not a legitimate argument for the Jewish people to be able to live amongst their holy sites, and the left wants to embrace Islam by defending it with anthropology instead, then I say let’s go at it. Let’s talk about what Andrew Bostom correctly frames as the archetypal Jew hatred from the Koran, which include verses labeling Jews as enemies of Islam (5:82), and slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61), and apes and pigs (5:60).
If we can’t live in our own land, near our Holy Temple, amongst our forefather’s tombs, at the base of our holy mountains, close to the cemetaries where we buried our dead, the rivers with which we watered our animals, and in the villages from which we were exiled and to which we have returned, then we have every damn right to deconstruct the left’s arguments that Islam is peaceful and that the “occupation” is the cause of all the strife in the world. The lefty libtards can’t have it both ways.