I compared it to ancient Greek literature and I just see the Hebrew Bible as totally devoid of empathy except in Genesis. The Greeks acknowledged and depicted the brutality of war but there is always a sense of the suffering that the losers have to go through, even when they’re the enemies of the Greeks. In the Hebrew Bible it’s just so psychopathic toward people the Jews are fighting and unrelentingly vindictive like, “blessed is he who smashes thy little ones’ heads against the stones.”
>>24741293Because Jews are deranged backward barbarians who used to literally sacrifice their children to the same war-storm-fire god that Phoenicians and Carthaginians used to burn their kids in bronze bulls and fires for. Biggest missed opportunities was Babylonians not killing them all, Alexander dying early and subsequently not preventing even the e potential emergence of Abrahamic religions, and Hadrian not pulling a full hitler and killing every last fucking Jew in existence.
>>24741314>>24741293Find another site to sully you evil cowards
>>24741314Phoenicia is not a real place. Phoenicians did not exist you absolute retard. It's literally le ancient jews and gypsies put together. There is no evidence whatsoever of a phoenician culture. Because it never fucking existed.
>>24741314>be Persia>take pity on the Jews>free them and rebuild their temple To this day Jews won’t let them stop regretting it
>>24741327It's a term of convenience for the northern branch of Canaanite culture that survived the Bronze Age collapse. Just because they didn't call themselves Phoenician doesn't mean they didn't exist.
>>24741293I never thought about it, but you are kind of right. The illiad shows the enemy Trojans in a sympathetic light.Greek myths show the gods as cruel and kind of arbitrary, but they are not the source of moral rules.The Bible never shows the enemies of Israel as human, they are either cruel tools of Yahweh's vengeance against his people or vermin to be exterminated. I guess that the greeks were a joyful, successful conquering race unlike the conquered, humillated israelities seething with resentment and dreams of power and vengeance.
>>24741293Think about the way history turned out. The whole reason that Christianity and the New Testament exist in the first place was to supersede the mentalities seen in the Old Testament such as where Joshua is explicitly called to murder every living Canaanite soul including infants. It totally inverted the scripture and understandably said that this was not the correct way to live. Thousands of years later after Christianity transformed the globe and its adherents outnumbered Jews exponentially, Christians are now in a position of serving the Jews as they enact another mass slaughter against a different tribe while citing the Old Testament as inspirationIn the end the cold brutal myths of Judaism ended up winning out over all other religions and worldviews. They made Christians, the very people who arose to topple the depravity of the Jews, bend the knee to them despite their exceedingly small number. Power and violence are all that matters, any time spent scrutinizing those things will plunge you into failure. Jews are the only ones to understand this and it's why they survive past all the shit they get for being the way they are.
>>24741513To me, Judaism is very passive-aggressive toward God, the constant exploiting of loopholes reminds me of a slave deliberately misconstruing what his master orders but in a way his master can’t obviously blame him. There is this tension throughout the Hebrew Bible of a sort of resentment toward God, despite believing in him. Christianity takes God and makes him suffer what humans have to go through, thereby transforming him from an object of resentment into an object of pity. Still the vindictiveness is there but it is taken from this world and placed in the next. Instead of a psychopathic, dehumanizing bloodlust here, there is the consolation of everlasting torture
/pol/ has ruined this board beyond repair
>>24741293>In the Hebrew Bible it’s just so psychopathic toward people the Jews are fighting and unrelentingly vindictive like, “blessed is he who smashes thy little ones’ heads against the stones.”Not to put too fine a point on it, but the quoted phrase is from a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and the quote isn't generalized, but directed toward those very conquerors, who themselves lacked what you see in the Greeks. And don't forget that the Greeks had their share of bloodthirst, such as the the treatment of the Spartans toward the Helots and their destruction of Plataea, the Athenian destruction of Scione and Melos, the Sicilian slaughter of surrendered Athenians, the slaughter of the Athenians by the 30 Tyrants, and the Macedonian destruction of Thebes. Homer's ity for the Trojans was more ideal than practiced.
>>24742062You say it’s just directed toward those conquerors but judging by the book of Joshua, the Jewish idea of conquest was much worse than the Babylonian. Babylon relocated conquered ethnicities (like the Jews) to destroy their identity and ability to fight insurgencies as well as local number ratio. Jewish idea of conquest is killing every man, woman, child and even animal
>>24741293>In the Hebrew Bible it’s just so psychopathic toward people the Jews are fighting and unrelentingly vindictive like, “blessed is he who smashes thy little ones’ heads against the stones.”We don't have the writings of the condemned peoples but suffice it to say killing was likely a mercy compared to perpetual work, sex, and idolatry slavery practiced by their enemies.
>>24742062Also of note is that Greek literature could be very critical of Greek cruelty. The Trojan Women is considered by many to be a commentary on the sack of Delos, and Plutarch, in his Life of Lycurgus, praises Sparta awhile at the same time saying how they treated the Helots was shameful and repugnant.I’m not suggesting the Greeks treated conquered people better than Jews did, although they absolutely did, that’s without question. That’s not my point. I am saying that Greeks could put themselves in the shoes of their enemies and understand their suffering and humanity. Even while killing people they empathized with them to some extent. But throughout Hebrew literature I see none of this beyond Genesis. Enemies of the Jews are just regarded as less than animals
>>24742077Meant to say Melos.
>>24742070so babylon was basically globohomo and jews are le based trad nationalists?
>>24742073There is nothing whatsoever to suggest it is about mercy, especially since in one instance Moses commands that the girl children are to be kept alive for the men’s use but the boy children are to be killed. Which I am not saying is unusual for the period but I am saying I don’t see any empathy for the people subjected to this in Hebrew literature whereas Greek tragedy very frequently dwelt on the plight of enslaved women in conquest, and portrayed the suffering of male children being massacred
>>24742080Egypt was the only nationalist state of the ancient world
>>24742081In Greece it was the opposite, the girl children were slain and the boy children were kept alive for the men's use. That's why they saw the killing of boys as such a tragedy.
>>24742084at least half their empire was african american though
It's something I noticed about Jewish culture in general. The Talmud literally says Jesus is boiling in a pot of shit. They all have a similar essence to Gilbert Gottfried doing the Aristocrats joke but as an entire people and culture. Even their vernacular is gross. "Schmaltz," "chutzpah," "kvetch"... It's all nasty.
>>24741997>anons having a passionate civilized discussion about literature and culture>fag has to chime in about muh /pol/
>>24742104The efforts have been nonstop to turn this board into an anti-Semitic cesspit for a long time and it is now quite easy to recognize
>>24742080jews have always been the source of fascist politics and all attempts to create fascism in gentile populations is the cause of bitter seething at what jews seem to have naturally (cohesion)
>>24742098"Schmalz" is the German word for lard. "quätschen" means "to crush" in German. A lot of what you think of as Jewish words are actually German words that were used by people like Hegel, Goethe, Beethoven, and Bismarck."Chutzpah" is 100% Semitic however.
>>24742126Guessing you haven’t read about Jewish insurgencies against the Romans wherein various Jewish factions were constantly fighting among each other and killing each other
>>24742126Mussolini was pretty tolerant towards jews until he became Hitler's bottom though
>>24742134Is schmalz pronounced the same as schmaltz?
>>24742139Yes, "Schmalz" is pronounced shmaltz. "quetschen" is pronounced kvetchn.
>>24742070>You say it’s just directed toward those conquerors but judging by the book of Joshua...Because the "smash thy little ones'" passage isn't about every national type, it's from a specific poem concerning a specific circumstance. I'm not going to deny the coldness and cruelty of the book of Joshua, and we could discuss the the issues involved, but I don't think there's merit to abstracting a passage as if it didn't matter.>>24742077As for this, we would have to take up the matter of the role of the "holy land". In Exodus 19:5-6, God lays out his intent for Israel as a priestly kingdom, in Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Moses relates to the Hebrews that their laws are meant to be an example for other nations without any imperium beyond the land God decides for them, and in Deuteronomy 9:4-6, Moses bluntly tells the Hebrews that they aren't receiving land on account of innate superiority and their foes' innate inferiority. And the Bible, being a messy anthology, takes this up at several points, such as the non-Hebrew Job's piety, David's Moabite ancestor Ruth, God's message to the Ninevites via Jonah, and laws protecting sojourners in Exodus and Deuteronomy. This isn't even getting into archaeology and the historicity of Joshua, where the likeliest truth is that the Hebrews WERE the Canaanites, and the invasion from out of Sinai was a post-exilic invention to preserve a national character in light of totally crushing defeats at the hands of Assyria and Babylon.W/r/t the Greeks, I think my point still stands. *Thucydides* could afford to feel awful for Plataea, Scione, Melos, etc., but the Greeks on the ground still killed all the men and enslaved the women and children. Is that better because Thucydides and much later Plutarch decried that vs. Jews larping that they were holy invaders?
>>24741293Get your T checked lil bro
>>24742215All of these words and you completely ignore what this board is about, let alone what this thread is manifestly about in the title. Jewish literature does not have a shred of empathy toward enemies of the Jews. Whereas Greek literature does empathize with enemies of the Greeks and even tries to see things from their perspective. That’s the whole crux here. Why is that?
>>24742230>All of these wordsAnd yet you you failed to read any of them? Do you think that the books of Jonah and Ruth are savage toward Assyria and Moab? That the piety of the non-Hebrew Job and the laws concerning foreigners are irrelevant? That the book of Judges doesn't end on a note observing and criticizing the Hebrews' savagery toward each other? That David isn't criticized for conniving to kill a loyal foreign mercenary to cover up sleeping with that man's foreign wife?And again, you're letting yourself get confused between how Thucydides writes about something and characterizing the Greeks as a whole according to that, as if he weren't presenting himself as exceptional to the attitudes of his age. You're equating a sympathy found in authors with the attitudes on the ground that don't match up.
>>24742258Jonah and Job are absolutely not enemies of the Jews, and neither is Ruth, certainly, being a Jewish convert.
>>24742258A thread about literature on a board scout literature but literature isn’t the point, it’s “attitudes on the ground”, something that is mostly speculative and neither here nor there? It isn’t even just Thucydides, as I mentioned before, The Trojan Women by Euripides is considered by many academics to be a commentary on the sack of Melos, as Euripides liked to use drama for social commentary It is strange that you keep trying to shift the focus from literature, which is measurable and can be examined, to opinions which aren’t in literature and Hereford can’t be, but what makes it even stranger is you try to do this in a thread explicitly focused on literature on a board explicitly focused on literatureWhat is the purpose of trying to shift the conversation *away* from literature?
>>24741293>OMG it's too violennnntttttbeta male take
>>24742264Are you forgetting the big conflict in Jonah? It's entirely about God having to break a stiff-necked prophet because Jonah thinks the Assyrians don't deserve mercy while God begs to differ. And Ruth is about how even a woman from Moab, a regular national enemy of Israel, can nonrtheless be good enough to be the ancestor of Israel's celebrated royal lineage, and Job as a non-Hebrew is relevant insofar as OP imagines that there's no fellow feeling with outsiders in the Bible. What else do you call it but empathy when a book of the Bible is wholly devoted to the sufferings of an ethnic outsider?>>24742270I'm engaging with what's leveled, which is a strawman caricature of attitudes in the Bible. To be clear, I both have the strongest possible preference for the Greeks over the Bible, and I object to how you aren't contesting anyone else in this thread generalizing from Greek literature to the overall attitudes of the Greeks as a whole vs Biblical attitudes reflecting on Hebrew attitudes as a whole. It's a very selective choice on your part. But if you're arguing that passages like "You shall not cheat a sojourner and you shall not oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt," don't magically count as the empathetic recognition of foreigners as fully people, then you're arguing speciously.
>>24742081>There is nothing whatsoever to suggest it is about mercy, especially since in one instance Moses commands that the girl children are to be kept alive for the men’s use but the boy children are to be killed.Cite the passage where this happens--I believe you're mistaken.>Which I am not saying is unusual for the period but I am saying I don’t see any empathy for the people subjected to this in Hebrew literature whereas Greek tragedy very frequently dwelt on the plight of enslaved women in conquest, and portrayed the suffering of male children being massacredYou might want to read a Church Father closer to them in time (Clement of Alexandria for example); there is a relatively strong conviction among early Christians (circa. 100-250 AD), that Plato had read or studied Moses with the Jews and if we assume Moses is 1,200-1,500 BC and add in the moral perfecting of the prophets we https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Hebrew_prophets see:>Hosea 6:6 — “For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”About ~300 years before Plato and thus the mercy of God precedes Greek understanding of it, if not outright informs it. Keep in mind, moral progress is faithfully delivered to humanity through God's most valid covenant and sometimes breaks into other areas--the current area for that is the Catholic Church most perfectly through the Roman Pontiff. Part of the mystery of the ancients is that there is FAR more cross-pollination than we want to admit and to say that the Jews were totally sealed off from the Greeks is likely incorrect. God's punishments are Him reluctantly revealing you your errors>Ezekiel 33:11 — “As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.”, 597 BCAs the Jews lost political might and power God very, very quickly revealed Himself as merciful and even then those killed by divine command are not necessarily in Hell.>St. John Chrysostom — “God seeks not to punish but to heal. For this cause He threatens, not that He may bring punishment, but that He may bring men to repentance.” (Homilies on the Gospel of John)
