The Civilization Of Ancient Egypt Review

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(More customer reviews)I just came off of reading another book by Paul Johnson, "A History Of The American People", so this was quite a switch! Once again, Mr. Johnson has impressed me with his erudition and pleased me with his smooth style. Right up front, let me say that I was as ignorant as you can get concerning this subject before I read this book, so my knowledge level had nowhere to go but up! If you already know a lot about this subject you may not find this book worthwhile. That being said, if you don't know much about ancient Egypt this book is a good starting point. Mr. Johnson gives you some actual history as far as talking of events and dynasties, etc. but the majority of the book deals with the religious beliefs of the Egyptians and their art, and how the two were intimately connected. There is also an excellent chapter on hieroglyphs. One of the strong suits of the book is how it gets you into the mind of the ancient Egyptians and you start to see things the way they might have. Mr. Johnson explains such things as why, on wall paintings, people were shown in profile rather than giving us a frontal view and why the Egyptian artist intentionally chose not to use aerial perspective. (Sorry, you'll have to read the book to find out!) Suffice it to say, when you look at things after knowing what the Egyptians believed you will be able to appreciate their achievements all the more. The book is also useful in showing the link between Egyptian art and religion and what came later (Greek and Roman culture; Christianity; Judaism, etc.) Highly recommended!

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A leading historian and bestselling author re-creates the growth, decline, and legacy of 3,000 Years of Egyptian civilization with an authoritative text splendidly illustrated with 150 illustrations in full color.

Ancient Egypt, with its legacy of pyramids, pharaohs and sphinxes, is a land of power and mystery to the modern world. In The Civilization of Ancient Egypt Paul Johnson explores the growth and decline of a culture that survived for 3,000 years and maintained a purity of style that rivals all others. Johnson's study looks in detail at the state, religion, culture and geographical setting and how they combined in this unusually enduring civilization. From the beginning of Egyptian culture to the rediscovery of the pharaohs, the book covers the totalitarian theocracy, the empire of the Nile, the structure of dynastic Egypt, the dynastic way of death, hieroglyphs, the anatomy of perspective art and, finally, the decline and fall of the pharaohs, Johnson seeks, through an exciting combination of images and analysis, to discover the causes behind the collapse of this, great civilization while celebrating the extra-ordinary legacy it has left behind.


Paul Johnson on Ancient Egypt and the Egyptians


"Egypt was not only the first state, it was the first country.... The durability of the state which thus evolved was ensured by the overwhelming simplicity and power of its central institution, the theocratic monarchy."

"The Egyptians did not share the Babylonian passion for astrology, but they used the stars as one of many guides to behavior. No Egyptian believed in a free exercise of will in important decisions: he always looked for an omen or a prophecy or an oracle."

"The development of hieroglyphics mirrors and epitomizes the history of Egyptian civilization. . . . No one outside Egypt understood it and even within Egypt it was the exclusive working tool of the ruling and priestly classes. The great mass of Egyptians were condemned to illiteracy by the complexities (and also the beauties) of the Egyptian written language."

"The affection the Egyptians were not. ashamed to display towards their children was related to the high status women enjoyed in Egyptian society."

"If we can understand Egyptian art we can go a long way towards grasping the very spirit and outlook on life, of this gifted people, so remote in time. The dynamic of their civilization seems to have been a passionate love of order (maat to them), by which they sought to give to human activities and creations the same regularity as their landscape, their great river, their sun-cycle and their immutable seasons."

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Jesus the Misunderstood Jew: What the New Testament Really Says about the Man from Nazareth Review

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(More customer reviews)Raised as a Christian who recently became a Jew by Choice and is teaching a Religious Belief and Disbelief course,I couldn't put this book down. The book happens to support a view I find personally intriguing. But I never realized that the New Testament did too.
The power of Kupor's approach is in using the most official Christian sources to make his Jewish case--Jesus exhorting Jews to become more spiritual and devout as Jews, following their Jewish precepts. At most the discrepancy ebtween de facto Jewish practice and his teachings created a new Jewish sect, similar to the Essenes but also less rigidly orthodox. Christianity, by contrast with either sects, was more likely started by Paul (Saul of Tarsus)who never met Jesus and radically altered Jesus's teachings.
Christians arguing against Kupor's case--say fundamentalists relying on a literal biblical interpretation--would have no leg but his to stand on. But unlike them, he uses the literal meaning of the Bible when it was written, not reinterpreted later. This is as literal as one can get. Those arguing from Church doctrine against a Jewish Jesus would also be recruiting Kupor's own position. He squares his New Testament reading with the Church's. And those relying on faith, aided by these two sources, would find themselves as faithfully Jewish as Kupor shows Yeshua to be. There is hardly a more powerful way to convince critics than to argue to them on their own grounds.
What Kupor challenges is the proprietary right Christians feel over Jesus, defining him based simply on the idea that they like him so much and claim him as their own. It's as if saying his name (in the wrong language) and repeating his citations from the Torah is enough to make them Yeshuans. It's unclear they are even Christian since `they say yes to God, but do not do his will.' Only the evangelicals, as far as I can see, spend a significant part of each year in full-time service to the poor. And `by their deeds will you know them.'
According to Kupor's Jewish Jesus,we must love God with our whole heart our whole soul and our whole strength and love our neighbor as ourself. These are the two greatest commandments. But who actually lives by these precepts among either the Christians (bad Jews) and the Jews (also bad Jews). Not only does Kupor offer a new account of Jesus--the Christian account of Jesus as a Jew, but an account of Christians' would-be Judaism.


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"We must understand that some of the early Christians [in the decades after Jesus' death] saw the message of Jesus largely within the context of Judaism. Indeed, Christianity might have remained as a sect within Judaism ... In this initial stage there was little or no thought of any dividing line between Christianity and Judaism."—The Catholic Study Bible (written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ruling body of the American Roman Catholic Church)
*****
When the world's largest Christian denomination acknowledges that early "Christianity" was merely a sect of the Jewish religion—both during Jesus' life and for years thereafter—isn't it time to reexamine what the New Testament really says about the Man from Nazareth?

The Roman Catholic Church monopolized the New Testament for over fourteen hundred years, forbidding laypeople from reading or interpreting it. Although this monopoly was shattered by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, knowledge about Jesus' first-century world was too sparse for anyone to understand the New Testament in its proper context. Today, we know more about Jesus' times than ever before. Yet Christian religious leaders have been reluctant to disseminate these new insights—largely because they reveal that Jesus was a Jewish prophet who insisted on adherence to traditional Judaism. In Jesus the Misunderstood Jew: What the New Testament Really Says About the Man from Nazareth, Dr. Robert Kupor illuminates the New Testament in a way that allows both Christians and Jews to understand this seminal document in a startling new light. Jesus the Misunderstood Jew will surprise and enlighten you.

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Ancient Israel's Faith and History: An Introduction to the Bible in Context Review

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(More customer reviews)George E. Mendenhall has been described by eminent students of the Bible as one of the most creative American scholars of the ancient Near East in the twentieth century. Yet his fundamental work is largely unknown outside the guild of professional historians, philologists, and archaeologists. Now a comprehensive account of his reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel is available in a beautifully edited, attractively produced form. It can be understood and appreciated even by those who haven't mastered the technical tools of the professional scholar.
His pre-eminent interest, studied over a period of some six decades, has been the origins of ancient Israel. In Mendenhall's view, it is in Israel's origins that we find the essential clues to the interpretation of all subsequent Israelite history-including the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth and the early Christian Church some 1200 years after the time of Moses. A brief review such as this cannot hope to do justice to the enormous wealth of material in this superb book. I will attempt only a sketchy summary of each chapter.
Introduction
First he posits several illuminating general principles for understanding the phenomenon of religion, which are applied throughout the following chapters to Israel's particular historical phases.
Abraham to Moses
Then Mendenhall surveys the later part of the Bronze Age (2500-1200 B.C.) in the Eastern Mediterranean, covering the rise and fall of empires. He also characterizes (the main thrust of the chapter) the emergence, from at least 2000 B.C. onward, of numerous groups of "Apiru"--people who altogether disavowed political loyalties. He cites linguistic reasons for associating "Apiru" with "transgressor" or "outlaw." Apiru groups, lacking any legal protection, survived via banditry, mercenary militarism, or by converting agricultural assets to movable livestock and escaping to uninhabited regions inaccessible to political authorities. The less fortunate among them were prey to enslavement as state laborers--as were thousands of Apiru in Egypt.
Moses and the Exodus
Moses' leadership of the "exodus" of a few hundred Apiru from Egypt is tied in Biblical tradition (correctly, in Mendenhall's view) to two revolutionary religious innovations: monotheism in which the defining characteristic of God ("Yahweh") is ethical concern; and the use of a new form for the mediation of this Yahwism--the Covenant, derived by analogy from the forms and functions of international suzerainty treaties in use already for a millennium.
The Twelve-Tribe Federation
Mendenhall continues his historical reconstruction to the formation in two stages of the Twelve-Tribe federation of ancient Israel, created and sustained by the Mosaic Covenant, which put into practice the seemingly exotic notion of a state-less society.
David and the Transition to Monarchy
The federation functioned for about two centuries; pressure by Philistines accelerated the decline in morale and prompted desires for the institution of a political state capable of dealing more effectively with them. Samuel himself foresaw this move as the repudiation of Yahweh and the Covenant. Mendenhall illuminates the ingenious strategy then employed by David and the pagan bureaucrats inherited from the defeated Jerusalem to construct a synthesis of Yahwism and paganism, for which he adopts the term "Yahwisticism".
The Legacy of King Solomon
With King Solomon the "re-paganization of Israel" reached new heights. Mendenhall relates how Solomon's building program--involving the imposition of the corvée labor from which the Apiru slaves had escaped with Moses!--provided a new Phoenician Temple for the theologians and a swell Hittite palace for the king. "Yahweh," once the repudiator of coercion, had become merely the new "Baal," the Bronze Age hypostasis of state legitimacy and power. Mendenhall limns the intricate, unscrupulous struggles among Solomon's successors, and correlates the poetic oracles of Hosea and Amos to the ongoing upheavals of state, bringing into relief their invocation of the old covenantal elements.
Josiah Reforms the Imperial Religion
Mendenhall next turns to the fate of the kingdom of Judah and the biblical literature catalyzed by its history. He presents the historical preparation for Josiah and the latter's reforms. He also offers insights into the perverse consequences of the failure of Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem during Hezekiah's reign (the unwarranted confidence that Yahweh's highest priority was the protection of Jerusalem and its Temple).
Destruction and Exile: The Creative Reform of Yahwism
The destruction of Jerusalem predicted by Jeremiah (and Ezekiel) was a catastrophe for Israel-as-Davidic-Dynasty and produced enormous suffering for countless hapless individuals. Meditations on it by some of the greatest religious geniuses of history are enshrined in various Biblical writings, especially Jeremiah and Ezekiel; Job (the book is worth having for this section alone); and "Second Isaiah." But the universalizing re-expression of Israel's covenant faith by these writers was just one response to the Exile. With the return of the exiles to Palestine under the Persian Cyrus, Ezra and Nehemiah wrote another new chapter in the evolution of Yahwism.
Jesus and the New Testament Reformation
Reading the New Testament in the light of the Old Testament makes it clear that Jesus' message hearkens back to the Covenant faith and the inspired re-expressions and adaptations of it by the great prophets. In a word, it was a creative reformation movement within the tradition of Israel's faith. Mendenhall throws a flood of light on "the Kingdom of God," "Messiah," "Law," and on "covenant" itself as it reappears in the Christian Eucharist.
Summary
This magnificent book by one of the towering figures in Biblical scholarship throws an arresting new light on the universal significance of the ancient ethical-religious vision of Moses and pre-monarchic Israel. It shows how, despite the ever-changing vicissitudes of Israel's history, this vision reappears, creatively readapted, in the prophetic legacy, in the Exile, in Jesus and the early Church. It is well worth having just for the fascinating word-studies to be found throughout the text. No one who takes its insights seriously can look at either the Bible or the surviving religious institutions in the same way. I believe it should be read and deeply pondered by all who are committed to the life of faith.

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The author's magisterial survey leaves no scholarly stone unturned and no discipline disregarded. Findings from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, historical analysis and social theory are all combined to paint a complete picture of Ancient Israel - a picture that is detailed and nuanced, yet presented in an accessible style. While careful not to move beyond the comprehensive evidence he has assimilated, the author does not shy from providing an account of the theological dimensions of both of Israel's history and the beginnings of the Christian faith.

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Secrets of the Exodus: The Egyptian Origins of the Hebrew People Review

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(More customer reviews)The collaborative effort of Messod Sabbah and Roger Sabbah (two French-Jewish researchers, who are themselves descendants of a long line of high-ranking rabbi), Secrets Of The Exodus: The Egyptian Origins Of The Hebrew People presents the boldly stated hypothesis that the ancient Hebrew people described in Exodus were not slaves from another nation, but rather Egyptian followers of that monotheistic pioneer and iconoclast -- Pharaoh Akhenaten. Secrets Of The Exodus deftly examine decades of linguistic and archaeological research that started a tremendous uproar in France when it was first published in 2000. A unique and seminal contribution to Egyptology, Secrets Of The Exodus may contain controversial ideas, but the authors approach them rationally and are well grounded in logical methodology.

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