Modern-day model of Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon (10th century BCE)

In World History 1, the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about the period after the “Bronze Age Collapse” in the Mediterranean world (which wasn’t really a collapse elsewhere). One of the elements of the era we’ve been covering is a phenomenon described by German psychologist/philosopher Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age. The way he understood history, there seemed to be a flowering of religious and philosophical thinking throughout the world, which changed the ways people understood themselves and their places in the world. Jaspers saw similarities between ideas from the Upanishads and early Greek philosophy, or between Zoroastrianism and the traditions that became Judeo-Christianity. It almost seemed like some supernatural shift in the global zeitgeist happened around the sixth century BCE, he suggested.

But only if you squinted. Zoroastrian ideas go back about 3,500 years and were nearly a thousand years old when Cyrus the Great became a sort-of patron of the Hebrews whom he released from their “Babylonian Captivity”. So the idea of monotheism and of a cosmic dual between good and evil wasn’t new. The shift away from the Vedic “varna” or caste system by “renouncers” such as Mahavira and the Buddha was a change, but the majority of Indians remained Hindu. And while the ideas of Maya, Parmenides’ doxa, or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave all seem a bit “Matrix-y”, it’s not clear to me that there weren’t natural explanations for the spread of ideas between India and Greece before Alexander.

It does seem a bit suspect to me, actually, that this idea of an “axial” shift in consciousness happened to occur just at the moment that a lot of records were produced that are available to modern scholars. If we had the benefit of abundant literature from five centuries earlier, what would we discover? Is the idea that all these interesting philosophical and religious innovations happened at that particular time mostly a function of availability bias and wishful thinking?

In any case, addressing this idea of an Axial Age was (I hope!) a useful way to line up all these religions and philosophies and talk about them. It also gave me an opportunity to talk a bit about religious traditions that are taken as history. I used the example, almost “ripped from the headlines”, of the putative history of the Hebrew people. It’s timely, if a bit controversial, because it has just been used by the US Ambassador to the modern nation of Israel to assert “it would be okay” if its military conquered and occupied all the land between the Nile River and the Euphrates, based on a claimed covenant with their god described in their scripture.

Does it need to be said that if any other religious group in the world claimed that their god had ordered them to invade a land or make war on a rival people, that the reaction would be different? One of the big problems with biblical “history”, which I mentioned to my students, is that events that are believed to have happened, such as the covenant between YHVH and the Hebrew people or the Moses story, were not written down until about half a millennia after they supposedly happened. But there’s a lot of confusion, such as the claim that the first five books of the Torah (the Pentateuch), which seem to have been written between 900 and 600 BCE, were authored by Moses, who supposedly lived about 1300 BCE.

There does seem to be archaeological evidence that settlements began to appear in the Levant of people who shunned eating swine. But these communities lived alongside other communities that did eat pigs, which suggests that the newcomers did not completely overrun and displace the Canaanites (cousins of the Phoenicians) or the Philistines (descendants of the Sea Peoples). I wonder what David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got Here, would say about the genetic evidence? He’d probably avoid looking at the question, for fear of the controversy.

The argument between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee was absurd on several levels. First, because Carlson apparently doesn’t really question the validity of using religious texts to make historical claims, he just questions whether the people who claim to be carrying on the covenant are actually who they claim to be. He does at least observe that there are plenty of people who are currently being targeted for displacement or worse, who were very probably indigenous to the region. But part of his counter-argument seems to be that the “new covenant” to which he adheres replaces and invalidates the previous one. Again, why is it so difficult for us to imagine how the rest of the world react if any any other faith group based decisions of national policy, war and peace, on supernatural claims?

Carlson also exposes the shifting nature of the justif...