Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Yesterday, I interviewed a refugee Ukrainian family in transition from their homeland looking for a permanent place to settle. They were being visited by evangelical church friends. Since I was teaching a course on current world conflicts, the conversation turned to Palestine/Israel where a number of references were made to Babylon and Jeremiah.
After leaving them, I researched Babylon and evangelical beliefs and read the familiar story of captives taken from Jerusalem and forced to reside in Babylon in 567 BC. A generation later Cyrus conquered the city and allowed the captives to return. The passage referenced by the Evangelicals was: “Tell this news to the nations!/Wave a flag to make sure that people listen!/Do not try to hide anything/ …the people of Israel and Judah will return to their land/They will weep because of their sins… / Babylon has been like a gold cup of wine in the Lord’s hand/The nations of the world had to drink that wine/It made everyone become drunk/and so they all became crazy/But now Babylon will quickly fall/An enemy will destroy it/so weep for it!/Find some medicine that will make its wounds better/Perhaps it will become well again/Wave a flag and prepare to attack Babylon’s city walls!/ Bring plenty of guards to watch all around the city/Put soldiers to catch anyone who tries to escape/Yes, the Lord will now do everything that he has decided/He will punish Babylon’s people, as he said he would do/you people of Babylon, who live beside many rivers/it is now time for you to die…..”.(Jeremiah 50:1-51)
From their point of view, evangelists view all forms of “wickedness and evil” in the world as symbolized by “Babylon”. To some, America is a modern version of Babylon. But how is it that Babylon became associated with confusion, yet was known in classical times as being accepting of many languages and customs?
Babylonian references are widespread among the 24% of American adults who consider themselves evangelical. The negative references are not related to Hammurabi of Babylon who provided a “code of laws”, nor to Cyrus, who conquered Babylon and allowed the Jewish captives to return to Jerusalem; His story was chronicled by Xenophon in the Cyropaedia. “Cyrus was a Persian, a leader in the Achaemenid Empire who defeated the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC. Aramaic became the official language of the Persian empire, and its official religion was Zoroastrianism. Cyrus’s enlightened policy put an end to the Assyro-Babylonian practice of deporting conquered peoples and trying to destroy all local nationalisms.”
According to the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, much of the Bible was composed in Jerusalem in the 5th century BC, following the return from the “Babylonian captivity”. Those who composed the Books of the Bible amplified ancient battles in order to magnify the power of their monotheistic God. Relatively small battles became exaggerated into massacres for the purpose of impressing the listener or reader to the power wielded by Yahweh.
“ The book of Revelation describes Babylon the Great as the dominant superpower in the world of the end times—so dominant, that it actually shapes the culture and economy of the world as it exists at the start of the tribulation period. The nature and scope of Babylon the Great’s dominance is such that only one such entity could ever exist in the history of the world, and there is no doubt that the United States of America is this entity. (Rev 17:6; 18:20, 24; 19:2). by Steven Anderson in Bible prophecy
“Babylon,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland 3
After having a discussion with my class concerning Babylon, I introduced them to Plato’s Cave, a story associated with classical Greece in the 5th century BCE. Plato’s description of the cave was an analogy depicting two versions of reality. In the shadowy recesses of the cave people were shackled to benches while images floated by, projected by a priesthood displaying images of deities while pacing behind a fire that cast images on a wall in front of the shackled spectators. The viewers were mesmerized by the images, but periodically one viewer made the decision to unshackle themselves and exit the cave to encounter the sun of truth.
I posed a question to the class: “Are there opportunities for all the cave dwellers to unshackle themselves?” The philosopher, Heidegger, whose book “The Essence of Truth”, considered the unshackling the most important part of the myth, which the class agreed with. They became absorbed by the implications of this story and how it could apply to those who supported the conventional “history” espoused by evangelicals, and the cynically disposed Israelis and Americans who were complicit in the genocide taking place in daily images; the virtual reality of destruction transmitted throughout the world by the technical wizardry of modern media.
Plato’s (and Heidegger’s) explanation of those shackled in the cave was that they ceased to see what is taking place and are bound by their biases and beliefs to the “unhidden” nature of reality. Dissociation and a dulling of moral sensibilities are the lot of those shackled to benches in the cave which can be compared to the Israeli activists and intellectuals who exit the shadow world of the cave and become Illuminated by the sun of truth.
Are those dwelling in the cave bound by biblical beliefs or deliberately ignoring the massacres taking place in Gaza? The Amalekites in Exodus were massacred as a reprisal for an attack against Israelites after crossing the Red Sea? Yahweh “vowed to blot them out from under heaven”, thus becoming a primal source for the justification of genocide by the more militant members of Israeli society, who compared Amalekites to modern Palestinians. A question addressed was: do “mythic histories”, which are, to some extent, historical fabrications, provide reasons for tribal vengeance and on-going genocide?
Our class discussed these questions and the disjunction between two truths, one dealing with light emanating from the sun of truth and the other portraying the darkest aspects of biblical passages relating to mythic history. The result portrays a nation incarcerated in a cave of mistruths and misinformation, still shackled to hallucinatory images and unwilling to accept the consequences of the massacres that have been taking place in their name; Nor have they been able to empathize with the calamitous nature of the suffering caused by the deliberate bombing of women and children; Nor are they ready to atone for the moral shame causing generational traumas to the 16,000 children slaughtered by bombs provided by America, the “Great Babylon”. Such moral catastrophes will have to be confronted in the times to come, since they have not yet become crystallized, except to those who have exited the cave of shadowy images and confronted “the essence of truth.”
