Semitic vs Greek Primacy for the New Testament

I've talked about my thoughts on New Testament Linguistic Primacy disputes before, but I've perhaps slightly changed my mind on some things since then, I'm going to give a sort of Tier list style break down here.

New Testament books that based on their stated original audience and/or who wrote them I am 100% certain were originally written down in Greek.

Luke-Acts, all 13 Epistles that Explicitly Self identify as being written by Paul, 1 Peter and Revelation.

Books that I think were more likely then not written in Greek but are at least open to dispute.

The Fourth Gospel and the 3 Epistles definitely by the same author as the Fourth Gospel, 2 Peter and Jude.

Books that I feel are 50/50 on if they were Greek or something else.

Mark and James.

Books that based on what the oldest Church Sources say on the subject I am 100% certain were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Matthew and Hebrews.

For Greek texts I still favor Textus Receptus Primacy and for Semitic Texts I favor Peshita Primacy not random Medieval Hebrew manuscripts of dubious origin.  And the Latin Mark theory I've already talked in depth about.

Capitalism is Atheistic in Nature.

The current Justifying Ideology of Capitalism is what I mainly mean by Capitalism for the purpose of this post.  

Adam Smith is often called the "Philosopher of Capitalism" as if he is to Capitalism what Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels are to Communism. Adam Smith was also an Atheist, there is some dispute about this technically, some try to argue he was more a Deist (which was basically Atheism with plausible deniability) but from my research he was definitely an Atheist.

Before Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments which was basically an attempt to explain the development of morality naturalistically.  His Economic Philosophy was built on this secular moral philosophy.  David Hume was an English Economic Philosopher who came just a little before Smith and overlapped with him, in some ways his ideas are more inline with the beliefs of modern apologists of Capitalism them Smith's and he was even more of an Atheist.

A French laissez-faire Economist contemporary with Hume and Smith was Paul d'Holbach who was also an Atheist, as was Denis Diderot and Jacques-Andre Naigeon, meanwhile Voltaire and Montesquieu were Deists and also didn't speak much on Economics directly.  The Physiocrats were also definitely Secularists though exactly what they believed about Religion I can't pin down.  And don't think you can pretend Voltaire could have bene a socialist, he was a Bourgeoise intellectual who "never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants".  The only Socialist among the major French Philosophs was Rousseau who was also the most Christian of them.

The most actually religious Economist of the late 18th early 19th Century was Thomas Malthus, but while some of Malthus's most well known ideas were influential on future Capitalist Economists he himself was not one, he was critiquing the rise of Capitalism from a more old fashioned late Feudalist perspective.

Later in the 20th Century a woman named Ayn Rand would develop a philosophy that is essentially Capitalism in it's purest most unrestrained and unapologetic form.  She was also a rabid Atheist who was frequently enraged at seeing American Christians try to co-opt her ideas to serve their Christianized Capitalism.  Rand was also a stated influence on the philosophy of Anton Levy the founder of the Church of Satan, which is exactly the Satanism people mean when they say Satanists are actually Atheists and Satan is just a symbol to them, their Satan is a symbol of Capitalist Individualism.  Another influence on Levy was the 1896 individualist text Might Is Right.

Between Smith and Rand it continued to be Atheists making vital contributions to Individualist philosophy, from the Atheist Existentialist Philosophers cited in Josh McNamee's Man of Steel video, to Charles Bradlaugh to Nietzsche and Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, to H.L. Mencken, Charles Lee Smith, James Hervey Johnson and Irving Fisher.  John Stuart Mill was also an Atheist though this wasn't publicly known while he was alive, between Mill and Smith were Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place and James Mill.  And to more specifically look at mid 20th century Economists, whether you're looking at the Austrian School, the Keynesian School or the Chicago School, secularists like Milton Friedman, Keynes, Murry Rothbard and Hayek are always at the center.  

Capitalism as a Mode of Production was very much forming already before we reach Hume, d'Holbach and Smith, but that happened because of economic developments that were not exactly pre-planned or premediated.  The Philosophers of Liberalism who came before them were not thinking much about economics but mostly focusing on what they and the Socialists had in common, opposing Absolute Monarchy.  The 1640-1660 English Revolution was Socio-Economically speaking an internal dispute within Feudalism as it had been operating in England for Centuries, the only group involved in all of that who were calling for a total reworking of how society is Economically structured were the Diggers lead by Gerrard Winstanley who were Anarcho-Communists, and they were basing their ideas on The Bible.

John Locke is the one commonly cited exception to all that, he is frequently given the credit for truly innovating the modern Capitalist notion of Private Property.  But James Tully in A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries showed that what Locke actually said is more compatible with Socialism.  David Hume was actually quite critical of Locke, the problem is Locke's Labor Theory of Value would be co-opted by d'Hollbach, Smith and their followers.  The Labor Theory of value is often associated with Capitalism because of it's association with Locke and Smith, but the truth is only Socialists and Communists believe in it unconditionally, Capitalists keep needing to qualify it.

Nicolas Barbon was another Christian Whig who contributed to economics, but he was mainly advocating for Paper Money which in the short term Communists are more supportive of then Austrian School Liberals.  John Law continued his work in that regard.  Their ideas were first put into practice in a Proto-Capitalist context but still not necessarily inherently Capitalist.

Some people both for and against it like to tie the origins of Capitalism to the "Protestant Work Ethic", and yeah to a certain extent early Primitive or Proto Capitalism emerged in Protectant parts of Europe earlier then it did in Catholic countries.  You could even parallel different forms or elements of Capitalism to different forms of Protestantism, Lutheranism was it still mixed with late Feudalism, Arminianism the hyper Individualism, Calvinism would be Fascist-Capitalism, and then Britannia is where they all mixed together before being transported to her Colonies.   

But it's important to remember that during the first 2 or 3 centuries the Reformers really wanted to be seen as more rationalist then the Catholics and rejecting of their superstitions, that's why Cessationism was invented by the Reformers and why for a long time they didn't do Exorcisms.  

And that in turn is why a lot of things Atheists believe in are partly protestant in origin but simply taking the next step.  A lot of the bad history New Atheists perpetuate began as protestant myths to demonize the Catholic Church, the Hypatia and Library of Alexandria stuff came form Edward Gibbon (as does many bad ideas about how and why Rome fell) and the comparative mythology stuff started with Alexander Hislop, and the Christmas is actually Pagan stuff started with the Puritans.  As I've said on this blog before, Existentialism is basically Atheistic Arminianism, and others have called Objectivism Prosperity Gospel for Atheists.

All that said I also have a lot of skepticism of the "Protestant Work Ethic" thesis.

A lot of Internet discourse over the last decade or so has been tied to how the Skeptic Community on YouTube and other New Atheists revealed their true reactionary colors (Christopher Hitchens' Legacy is lucky he passed away just before all this started, because if you look into him you'll see he'd absolutely have been with them), and that came with them being bold evangelists of Capitalism, seeing Capitalism along with Democracy as a great Enlightenment accomplishment of Secularism overthrowing the "Dark Ages" of Feudalism which they incorrectly blame on religion.

Atheists on the True Left still exist, but people making Atheism the first thing they care about, the core of their identity, are even when trying to distance themselves from the Reactionary New Atheists usually Social Democrats at best.  

New Atheism isn't actually new, Antitheists co-opting Gibbon's bad history began with Voltaire.  And then during The French Revolutions the immediate successors of d'Holbach were the Hebertists who showed a lot of Proto-Fascistic tendencies with their forced Dechristianization campaign and helping send many of the Communists (called the Enragés at the time) or even just Liberals who wanted to Redistribute Property like the Girondins to the Guillotine.  

Even the Antifeminism that started the 2011 downward spiral was already there in how they Martyred early Feminists like Olympe de Gouges, she was beheaded 7 days before the Festival of Reason and she was later used specifically as an example to silence other women by supporters of the Dechristianization campaign.

Then in the 19th Century Bruno Bauer began popularizing the absurd thesis that Jesus did not exist which went hand in hand with his well known opposition to Karl Marx.  You see Marx and Engels were Atheists but like sane Atheists they believed Jesus existed and that the Early Christians were ancient Proto-Communists and thus part of his thesis of all history being Class Struggle.  So to Bauer refuting the very existence of Jesus was an attack on the Marxist understanding of History as much as it was mainstream Christianity.  Bauer was also the Anti-Semite who wrote The Jewish Question.

And speaking of the Marxist understanding of history, every time a New Atheist talks about Wars being caused by Religion, that is fundamentally incompatible with a Marxist analysis of history which always looks for the economic causes and sees them as the primary cause.  And in turn Evangelical/Conservative Christians seeking to "debunk" the notion of Religious Wars by emphasizing the Economic Causes are unwittingly engaging in Marxist analysis.

Max Stirner was another Atheist Individualist Philosopher who connected Christianity and Communism in his opposition to both.  

Another problem with letting yourself get lost in the nominal Anti-Religionism of Marx and Engels is that Marx actually had a lot of good things to say about Capitalism, he considered it an improvement over Feudalism and a good contributor to Human advancement that was simply now beginning to outlive it's usefulness.  Contemporary Christian Socialists like Philpe Buchez, Edward Vansittart Neale and Frederick Denison Maurice were actually more Anti-Capitalist then Marx was though sometimes they did have their own problems, I have come to believe there's a lot Christian Communists can and should learn from Marx and later Marxists, but I still disagree with Marxism on some key issues.

Marx and Engels "Opiate of the masses" quote is misunderstood, at that time no one thought of Opium mainly as a harmful addictive drug but rather it was still most well known for it's medicinal use.  Neither meaning of "Opiate of the masses" fits how New Atheists view Religion however, they see it as Crack.

Honestly I'm growing skeptical of Marx and Engels even being as Atheist as they seemed. After all Liebknecht family tradition says they were Karl Liebknecht's God Parents at his Baptism at the St. Thomas Lutheran Church.

Christian Capitalists exist because since we became the Mainstream Religion of The West we've made it possible to force anything to be compatible.  But when it comes to Socio-Economic Systems it's always been clear Capitalism is the most difficult to make fit given everything The New Testament says, the truest Reactionary Christians inevitably give away that they really want to go back to Feudalism where the ruling class had some incentive to at least pretend they cared about those beneath them, Noblesse oblige.

There are degrees to how much various kinds of Christians in the modern era have embraced Capitalism.  Megachurches and the Prosperity Gospel are Capitalist Christianity at it's worst, to me they are the modern Laodicea.  But I find it interesting how many Christians on YouTube seeking to preach agaisnt them are unwilling to straight up say or admit that Capitalism is the root of the Problem, like a Secular Centrist they don't want to admit that you can't separate that extravagant Greed from our Socio-Economic Mode of Production, everything about how the world works encourages it, they are people eager to condemn the most egregious symptoms but unwilling to address the root cause of the Disease.

Then maybe you'll have some willing to go a bit further then that.  They might say "Christians shouldn't be Capitalists but the world is certainly less evil under Capitalism then it is when it's COMMUNIST".  Or maybe they'll say "yes Capitalism is bad but that doesn't mean we should support SOCIALISM".  The problem is opposing Capitalism without supporting Socialism leads to Fascism, Nazism or Neo-Feudalism.  You need to also promote the good alternative.

And there is also the way that these people preaching agaisnt Laodiceanism will focus on it's Aesthetics just as much if not more then the Substance of what's wrong with them and wind up tying their Social Conservativism into it, including the Sexual Morality that comes from Plato not The Bible.

The branding of Communism as Godless and Capitalism as Godly was the result of Cold War Propaganda. Communism was inherently Christian for 100% of it's history until The French Revolution when some Communists started borrowing from the Atheism of the Liberals they were fighting alongside against the Monarchy and Feudalism.  Capitalism is what wouldn't exist without the Secularism of the Enlightenment, and now thanks to the Climate Crisis the entire world is paying the price for the Godlessness we embraced.

The YouTube Channel Praxis & Theodicy has a series on the Sin of Usury and how Capitalism as a system is dependent on Usury.

Update August 2023: I rewatched a bunch of the Anime Tanya The Evil recently and that show is kind of aware of what I'm arguing here, the main character absolutely connects their Atheism to their "Free Market Principals". [Update 2026: And in the Movie and Season 2 their Rabid Anti-Communism becomes more apparent.]

You should also check out the sister post to this The Reformation and The Resurgence of Democracy.

https://solascripturachristianliberty.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-reformation-and-resurgence-of.html

Calling Zionism Colonialism is completely Backwards.

Zionism means the belief that the Jews have the right to self determination and sovereignty over their ancient homeland.  If you replace “Jews” with any other group of people traditionally marginalized in the Western world, the Left is inclined to agree with that statement.  Treating Zionism differently is pure Antisemitism, I don’t care what your excuse is.

I am a Labour Zionist and a Communist, that means I wish Israel (like every other nation) was a Proletarian Direct Democracy.  I absolutely consider the Israeli State’s handling of the Palestinian situation in both Gaza and the West Bank to be pretty bad. 

I'm undecided on the Two State Solution.  

Until we have a Global Communist Utopia the Jews need a state that is their own, and I feel the same about other Marginalized Stateless groups like the Kurds.  

The Palestinians kind of already have a State, it’s Jordan, they are over 80% of the population of Jordan, the British Mandate originally covered both Israel and Jordan, Jordan was pealed off to be the Muslim State.  And that’s just one of many Arab states, the Arabs are not a people lacking Nations where they are the privileged ethnic group.  If Jordan were a direct Democracy the Palestinians it would be unambiguously a Palestinian state. 

Calling Zionism Colonialism is backwards because it’s actually if anything Decolonization, it was the Colonialism of Ancient Empires that removed the Jews from their homeland and placed Geco-Roman Christian and Muslim populations and places of worship there.

There is a common perception out there that it is anachronistic to use the term “Colonialism” to describe the actions of any pre-1492 Empires.  Rome especially tends to be popularly depicted as always simply invading and conquering people with no high minded excuses at all.  This is a very Modernist bias, the notion that it took till the Renaissance for Imperialism to ever start trying to disguise itself as something more benevolent.

What supposedly separates Colonialism from other forms of Imperialism is the claim that it’s simply about founding colonies in new lands but leaving the local populations to govern themselves while we trade and peacefully coexist with them.  But of course that peaceful coexistence always eventually turned out to be a sham.  Well guess what, that is how Rome operated in some parts of their Empire, especially in Judea.

Cities like Caesarea Martiima were the settlements while the Jews had carefully controlled nominal self rule via the Sanhedrin, the Priesthood and the Herodian monarchs.  In time even those were taken away over the course of various failed rebellions, and after the Bar Kochba Revolt Hadrian banned them from even setting foot in Jerusalem and rebuilt that city as a Roman colony named after himself.  And the Christian Emperors maintained that policy throughout their rule over Jerusalem.  However the Jews always had some presence within the borders of Modern Israel, especially in the Galilee where Jewish Rebellions against Christian Roman rule in Israel were chiefly based.

The Qurran is actually a Zionist text, Muhammad never intended his Arab State to extend beyond Arabia.  But while Umar and the other early Caliphs after him were violating Muhammad’s intent in their conquests, they still at first by and large let the local populations govern themselves, especially the Jews and Christians in Judea.  It was Umar who in fact allowed the Jews to finally return to Jerusalem after being denied access for five centuries of Roman rule.  The earliest references to Muslim presence on the Temple Mount I believe can be interpreted as Muslims actually allowing the Jews to worship on the former site of The Temple.

It was under Abd Al-Malik this began to change.  He began building the Dome of The Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque while Mecca was under the control of Rebels to be an alternative to Mecca. The modern notion that they are the third and fourth Holiest sites in Islam after Mecca and Medina (too Shiites they’re not even that highly ranked being topped by several sites in Iraq) is later cultural white washing of the actual origins of those structures.  That said I do not believe the actual proper site of Solomon’s Temple is either of those exact locations so a Third Temple could peacefully coexist with them.

Anti-Zionists either pretend Israel had no Jewish presence between the Bar-Kochba Revolt and the First Aliyah in the early 1880s.  Or as I saw on Tumblr recently will claim that “before the Zionists came Muslims, Jews and Christians all lived peacefully together in Jerusalem”, that is literally a Pre-Lapsarian Utopia fantasy, Leftists should no better then to make such claims, in any other context we’d call it out as being part of a fundamentally reactionary world view.

Karl Marx himself, who wasn’t a Zionist, debunks that fanciful claim in a piece he wrote in relation to the Crimean War in 1854.

“the sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople. Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, the quarter of dirt, between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated – the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren. ”

Mark Twain would later confirm that Jews were over half the Population of Jerusalem already well before the First Aliyah.  And they had presence in more than just Jerusalem but also in Tiberias in the Galilee and down in Hebron.

In the early 1880s it wasn’t just Jews migrating to Israel, increased waves of migration of Muslims to this region from other Ottoman lands also started then, under Imperial encouragement.  So a good deal of the Muslim population of the region can’t even claim to go back to the original Arab Conquests.

The origins of the Zionist movement are very Socialist, with Moses Hess being a pre-Marx Socialist and the author of one of the first modern Zionist texts in 1862.  Later two Labour Zionist parties would be founded during the truly modern Zionist movement, one Marxist the other non-Marxist, they were the most popular parties all through the Cold War.  The earliest Zionist settlements were Communes.  One important Labour Zionist was Albert Einstein.

The association with Britain is the main basis for calling it Colonialism, everything else Britain was doing at this time was Colonialism at its worst after all, and their influence is largely why Israel was founded as a Capitalist state despite the Socialist parties overwhelming popularity.  However the Jews under the British Mandate never truly felt that the British authorities were actually on their side.  Brittan used the mandate as an excuse to continue controlling the region during a period when old fashioned Colonialism was waning in popularity and starting to be phased out.  It took the outcry of Jewish sympathy in the wake of the Holocaust to make them take it seriously, and that's why Holocaust Denial is specifically Anti-Zionist in origin.

Plenty of Arabs and Muslims in the region at the time supported Zionism, like Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali and his son, King Feisal of Hijaz and then of Iraq, as well as As'ad Shukeiri, a Muslim scholar ('alim) of the Acre area, the mayor of Haifa, Hassan Bey Shukri and Sheikh Musa Hadeib. 

But more important than those figures who you could dismiss as privileged collaborators with the British, is the support Zionism had and still has from certain entire Muslim communities in Israel, the kind who would still be just as demographically marginalized under a Palestinian State as they are under a Jewish one.  The Negev Bedouins who are in fact the oldest Arab population west of Jordan, the Druze who are often not counted as Muslims but I consider them essentially an offshoot of the Shia, and the Circasian Muslims who migrated to Israel as refugees in the 1800s to escape the Genocide that was being carried out agaisnt them by Tzarist Russia, so under circumstances similar to the Jews.

The people of Abu Gosh also supported the Zionists during the Israeli War of Independence.

That’s the thing, the Arab Nationalists opposing Jewish migration to the region during the 1880s through 1940s are to me just the same as European Nationalists refusing Jewish Refugees at the exact same time.  It’s the same Xenophobia and Antisemitism that was going on in Europe, only here in Islamic dressing rather then Christian.

Now some Right Wing defenders of Zionism on the Internet talk a bit too much about the Arab Nationalists who colluded with the Nazis during WWII, Amin al-Husseini is not solely responsible for giving the Nazis the idea to do the Holocaust, that was Hitler’s stated goal from Mein Kamf and anything that was pragmatically holding him back from it became irrelevant when the War started.  And they will often ignore the Muslims and Arabs who fought on the Allies side of the War, but the important fact here is that the Muslims who sided agaisnt the Nazis were the same ones who already supported Zionism.

Most of the Arab Nationalist leaders who allied with Nazi Germany did so just as begrudgingly as Mussolini, they knew Hitler was just using them and didn’t actually care much about what happens in the Middle East at all.  But not Amin al-Hussein, he was given the Honorary Aryan status and actually helped SS Leader Harun el-Raschid Hintersatz organize Muslim SS units in Bosnia, he was a true Arab Nazi, and during the 50s and 60s he had the backing of Nasser.

Stalin supported Zionism between the end of the War and 1948 then stopped, I feel he simply gave up on Israel having a Communist Revolution too quickly. However the USSR did not truly start backing Arab Nationalists till after Stalin, it began with Khrushchev's alliance with Nasser.  Nasser was a member of the Young Egypt Party also called the Green Shirts who were Egypt’s openly pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi party of the 1930s.  He also employed surviving SS Officers including Johann von Leers, Otto Skorzeny and Leopold Gleim as key advisors.  Leers and Skorzeny were already important even before the Nazi regime fell.  Khrushchev is a figure even many Tankies don’t like, TheFinnishBolshevik has argued he had Stalin murdered.  Nasser had banned Egypt’s Communist Party, Khrushchev asked Nasser to legalize them again but he refused, yet Krushchev kept the alliance anyway.  Nasser used quasi Socialist rhetoric that a lot of modern “Anti-imperialist” MLs like Caleb Maupin fall for, but this was no more legit Socialism than the National Socialist Workers Party.  François Genoud was the Nazi Regime’s Swiss banker who spent his post war life financing both Neonazis and nominally Left Wing Arab Nationalists, openly standing by his support of Hitler till he died in the 1990s.  

It is my thesis that the truest Nazis are those for whom the Antisemitism was their main driving motivation, everything else is in service of that.  During the first half of the 20th Century Antisemitism and Anti-Communism frequently went together because as a marginalized group many Jews were inclined towards Communism.  Some people were Anti-Communists because they were Antisemitic, and some were Antisemitic because they were Anti-Communist.  But during the 1950s as it became clear that Israel and the Soviet Union were going to be on opposing sides of the Cold War, this began to shift.  Otto Ernst Remer was a former high ranking Nazi Official who in the 1950s lead a Neonazi Party in West Germany called the Socialist Reich Party that was financed by the USSR.

In the United States there were two men who literally worked for the SD during the War and became Neonazi leaders after the War and developed ties to Remer, Leers, Skorzeny and Amin al-Husseini and began arguing that USSR was not controlled by Jews anymore thanks to Stalin and Khrushchev's purges and that the Far Right and Far Left should work together against their common enemies of Israel and the United States, they considered American Style Capitalist society far worse and more degenerate than the Authoritarianism of Stalinist Russia.  They were H. Keith Thompson and Francis Parker Yockey, there is evidence Yockey possibly traveled to Russia and even spoke with Soviet leaders.  In the US their brand of Nazism didn’t catch on, The American Right is over all more Anti-Communist then Antisemitic, so George Lincoln Rockwell’s firmly anti-Communist American Nazi Party was more popular, but in Europe Yockey’s approach was very influential including on Alexander Dugin.  Willis Carlo carried on the legacy of Yockey and became a close associate of Lyndon LaRouche.

That is the origin of the NazBol Vortex, but the modern Anarchists, LibComs and Breadtubers who oppose the NazBols still keep falling for the Anti-Zionist propaganda they popularized. 

Nazis of the Rockwell variety were still too Antisemitic to support Israel, they generally tried to convince people that Israel was secretly actually with the Soviets.  And yeah Socialist parties were still popular in Israel, but after the developments of the 50s none of them were Bolsheviks.

The current head of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority is Mahmoud Abbas a known Holocaust Denier.  In fact his most recent quotes are the worst kind of Holocaust denial, which is not denying it happened but alleging that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to make it happen.  He is the leader of the movement you are claiming solidarity with when you Tweet "Free Palestine".

Update January 2026:There are no descendants of the Philistines still alive today.  

Whether or not anyone technically has some biological genealogical descent form Ancient philistines, their Language, Culture and Religion were dead centuries before the Common Era.

Even before what I'm about to list it can be argued the Philistines had already been pushed back to just Gaza by David.

Gath was destroyed by Hazael of Aram-Damascus around 830 BC as documented in II Kings 12:18, and further by Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26:6-15

Ashdod was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 605 BC, but before that it was also destroyed by Uzziah at the same time as Gath.

Ashkelon/Ascalon and Ekron were destroyed, burned and depopulated by Nebuchadnezzar in 604 BC.

Gaza was destroyed by Alexander The Great in 332 BC, one of only three times he completely destroyed a city and only time wiping out the entire population.  The city was then repopulated with Bedouin Arabs and became Nabatean by Roman times.

Hadrian renamed the entire land of Israel Palestine as a deliberate move to De-Judaize the province.

And in modern history Gaza has once again been an outpost of Egyptian within the land of Israel, being occupied by Egypt from 1948-1967, and the base of operations of Nasser's SS trained fedayeen, one of whom being the Egyptian Yasser Arafat, and home to offshoots of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Same with the Canaanites, if any descent from ancient Canaanites still exists today, it's via those who were absorbed into the Israelite population. 

Judeo-Menshevism

Too many online Leftists today want to minimize the Jewish Contributions to Socialism and Communism for the sake of refuting the Nazi Judeo-Bolshevism Conspiracy theory.  

That's a shame, I feel we should be proud of the influence of Jews and other marginalized peoples.  

And perhaps Jews are overrepresented among the philosophers of The Left because of the overlooked support for Communism in the Hebrew Bible, a book many Conservatives also consider Sacred.

But sadly mainstream Christians have trouble accepting the Communism even in the NT much less the Old because of how they've been influenced by Neo-Platonism and Rome.

The irony of the Judeo-Bolshevism narrative however is that the Bolsheviks were the least Jewish of the many factions of the 1917 Russian Left, in terms of their leadership at least. 

Perhaps the USSR's failures could have been avoided by being more Jewish?

Early Socialists who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Moses Hess

Karl Marx (his family converted to Lutheranism when he was a child)

Ferdinand Lassalle

Paul Lafargue

Paul Singer

Eduard Bernstein

Luise Kautsky

Victor Adler

Laura Marx

Eleanor Marx

Charles Rappoport

Rudolf Hilferding

Daniel De Leon

Victor L. Berger

Morris Hillquit

Meyer London

Aaron Zundelevich

Gesia Gelman

Marie Goldsmith

SRs who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Mikhail Gots

Avram Gots

Grigory Gershuni

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum aka Volin

Isaac Steinberg

Yakov Blumkin

Mark Natanson

Fanny Kaplan

Jewish Socialist Workers Party

Mensheviks who were Jews or had Jewish Ancestry

Pavel Axelrod

Lev Grigorievich Deutsch aka Leo Deutsch

Julius Martov

Lydia Dan

Fyodor Dan

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia

Haim Kantorovitch

Bolsheviks who were Purged by Stalin or Krushchev

Leon Trotsky (Former Menshevik)

Adolph Joffe (Former Menshevik who switched with Trotsky)

Lev Kamenev

Grigory Zinoviev

Karl Radek

Béla Kun

Shmuel Weizmann 

Maria Weizmann

Polina Zhemchuzhina

Michael Metallikov

Bronislava Poskrebysheva

Solomon Mikhoels

Alexei Kapler

Ignace Reiss

Alexander Parvus

Louis Shapiro

Noah London

Walter Krivitsky

Lazar Kaganovich

Gyorgy Lukacs

Spartacus League

Rosa Luxemburg

Leo Jogiches

Paul Levi

Mathilde Jacob

Bavarian Soviet Republic

Kurt Eisner

Ernst Toller

Gustav Landauer

Erich Mühsam

Eugen Leviné

Other German Socialists who had Jewish Heritage

Otto Landsberg (Only Jew among the Bad SPD)

Hugo Haase (SPD)

Alexander Parvus (SPD)

Kurt Rosenfeld (SPD)

Werner Scholem (KPD)

Ernst Heilmann (SPD)

Arkadi Maslow (KPD)

Ruth Fischer (KPO)

Gerhart Eisler (KPD)

The Frankfurt School also had some Jews but I'm not gonna list individuals since I don't like their pessimism.

Some might want to accuse me of simply labeling everyone outside Russia as non Bolshevik, but Rosa Luxemburg criticized Lenin when she died before he did most of what anti Lenninists later condemn him for.  

Ernst Thalmann and Walter Ulbricht were the German stooges of Stalin, they were both Gentiles and the Weimar KPD declined under their leadership.  Ulbricht and Stalin would turn their back on Thalmann during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact making no attempt to get him released from Prison.

Labor Zionism

Aaron David Gordon

Ber Borochov

Nachman Syrkin

Joseph Trumpeldor

Jean Longuet (Grandson of Karl Marx)

Leon Blum

Albert Einstein

Oskar Cohn

Jacob Lestschinsky

Angelica Balabanoff

Haim Arlosoroff 

Zeev Latsky

Shmuel Niger

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi

Yosef Sprinzak

Ya'akov Zerubavel

Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi

Berl Katznelson

Meir Ya'ari

David Ben Gurion

Moshe Sharett

Zalman Shazar

Levi Eshkol

Golda Meir

Ya'akov Hazan

Moshe Sneh

Meir Talmi

Victor Shem-Tov

Yigal Allon

Yitzhak Rabin

(Camille Huysmans was a Gentile leader of the Second International who also supported Zionism) 

American Anarchists

Emma Goldman

Alexander Berkman

Paul Goodman

Murray Bookchin

Noam Chomsky

David Graeber

Property is actually irrelevant to the Definition of Communism or Socialism.

The definition of Communism is a Moneyless, Classless, Stateless society.  The definition of Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.  Under those definitions a Communist society will inevitably qualify as Socialist but not every hypothetical Socialist society will qualify as Communist.  But neither definition is directly about "Property" per se.

Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto acknowledged that Property is technically irrelevant to the definition but still argued that in our then current situation (January of 1848) abolishing Capitalism would require abolishing private property.  And maybe that was correct in 1848 but given how much what ownership even means has functionally changed entirely since then, it's an issue that's worth revisiting.

Some Socialist thinkers like to make a distinction between "Private Property" and "Personal Property".  What I'm focusing on in this post is more specific then either of those however, this is specifically about land, is it compatible with Communism or Socialism to allow individuals or families some sense of ownership of the land they live on or house the live in?

Land ownership can be compatible if it's regulated.  If not all land is privately owned but rather preferably most is common land.  If there is a limit to how much one person can own, but also a minimum, every person or family should own their own home, home ownership shouldn't be something you have to "earn".  And any thing produced from that land should still be shared with the community.

People thinking of whether or not there is or isn't private land property as the key cornerstone to defining Communism is why people keep thinking Kalliopolis in Plato's Republic or Thomas Moore's Utopia qualify as Communist societies even though they are absolutely Class based societies.

And it's also why people think it's absurd for me to call modern Dengist China the most Capitalist nation on Earth, "they don't have private property", they have worse Labor laws then even the United States and a Market based economy, I really don't care who owns what, that's pure Capitalism.

But it's also why people think you can't describe the system The Bible depicts The Israelites as living under during the Judges period as a form of Socialism.  These American Conservative Christians make a big deal out of how much The Bible talks about Property, however there were regulations on that property ownership that make it not compatible with the "Property Rights" philosophy held by modern Anarcho-Capitalists, Libertarians, Conservatives and Objectivists.  The Gleaning rights, the Tithes, the Sabbatical year and Jubilee laws, all paint the picture of a society the prioritizes making sure everyone's needs are provided for.

That applies in turn to certain separatist Christian sects, like the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites who descend from the Anabaptists, that some may allow individual ownership of the house you live in is irrelevant, they are all Anarho-Communist societies.

That leads us to John Locke, John Locke is often thought of as the father of Liberal/Capitalist conceptions of Property, but what he actually said was left unclear in many areas.  James Tully in 1980 argued that Locke's views on Property can be compatible with Socialist values.  Locke stressed the Labor Theory of Value, something which today only Socialists believe in unconditionally.  Locke also clearly said someone's right to claim exclusive ownership of something was only valid if it didn't disadvantage someone else.  I think the Left needs to stop letting Libertarians and Conservatives get away with claiming Locke exclusively for themselves.

Nicola Bonneville and Thomas Paine during the French Revolution proposed forms of Communism that involved regulated land ownership.

Also here's an official statement of the Communist Party USA that was active during the Cold War.

Many myths have been propagated about socialism. Contrary to right-wing claims, socialism would not take away the personal private property of workers, only the private ownership of major industries, financial institutions, and other large corporations, and the excessive luxuries of the super-rich.^[35]

This Party's split from the solder Socialist Party USA was entirely that they were more pro USSR.

Are there valid successful Socialist States?

That question seems be a key dividing issues in the modern American online Left's factional infighting.  And like many such fights few are willing to actually bring any nuance to the conversation.  On the one side are people insisting Socialism has still never been tried (which includes Anarchists who think a benevolent state is not even hypothetically possible).  Then you have your MLs who think criticizing any state or party with a claimed Leninist lineage "serves imperialism".

For States in existence today I consider both Cuba and Vietnam legitimate examples of successful Socialist experiments.  Their societies still aren't perfect, under the model of Socialism they're going for the "higher phase" won't be possible till the entire world is Communist.  But they are still Revolutions that have improved the conditions of their working class and are not guilty of most of the crimes the western media seeks to level against them.  And I'm willing to say the same of Eva Morales in Bolivia.

However Modern China and North Korea are Fascist Ethno-States, Mao may have been legit, but China as it is now is an authoritarian Ethno-State.  The Baath Party and Fatah parties are also Fascist parties.  Caleb Maupin doesn't even limit his apologetics to dictators claiming to Communists, he even defends Nasser, a Green Shirt who hired multiple high ranking SS Officers and banned Egypt's Communist Party, Khrushchev asked him to unban it but he refused.  There is a video on YouTube of a speech where Nasser sounds like he's defending Socialism, but it's the same wishy washy abstract "socialism" you get from Social Democrats calling them Democratic Socialists.

Maupin also spreads this "color revolution" narrative, seeking to discredit Left Wing resistance movements within States he likes by pointing to their CIA backing.  Empires like the US will often back revolutionary movements within enemy nations simply to cause instability, even though the ideologies of those groups are ones they will also be opposing if they take power.  That does not discredit those movements as legitimately Leftist.  Because guess what, you can pull that same card on Lenin himself, Lenin was only able to get back to Russia in 1917 because of the assistance he got from the Kaiser.  The CIA may very well also wind up backing a revolution they shouldn't have.

So that leads me to finally talking about the USSR.  I believe that the Russian Revolution should have went a different route, the Socialist Revolutionary Party I think had the right ideas for Russia given how much Russia was still Feudal and Agrarian unlike the Industrialized states Marx and Engels were mainly thinking of when they wrote their theories.  The Left SRs would have handled the Kulak situation differently.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to demonize Lenin or even Stalin, in fact I disagree with separating them, whatever Stalin did you object to Lenin would have probably done the same.  And if anything Stalin was better since he ended the state persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is actually one of George Orwell's criticisms of Stalin expressed in Animal Farm.  They did make Russia better, much of what's said to vilify them are lies, but they did do things I feel they shouldn't have.

As far as the Holodomor goes, I do believe the Kulak situation should have been handled differently, but calling it a Genocide is absurd.  Under the Tsars Russia had a famine about every decade, Socialists don't claim they can magically make the conditions that cause Famines disappear, none the less after having three Famines in the first 35 years of Bolshevik rule Russia had none between the end of WWII in 1945 and Gorbachev's Neo-Liberal reforms in 1985.  40 years of no Famine is considering Russia's material conditions absolutely impressive.

Spiritual and Heavenly, what do they actually mean?

This post is kind of a follow up to God and The Universe.

The problem with all this talk from Platonized Christians of various forms about how Scripture is supposed to be interpreted "Spiritually" rather then "Carnally" is that the modern English connotations for words like "Spirit" and "Heaven" don't truly fit the original meanings of the Hebrew and Greek words being used in those verses.

The word "Sky" rarely appears in English translations of The Bible, because the primary Hebrew and Greeks words used to refer what we call the Sky are translated "Heaven", also "Celestial" in the KJV is the same Greek word as Heavenly. The Ancient Platonists referred to the World of Forms where their transcendent God lived not as Heaven but as "A Place Beyond Heaven". Some Bible verses even refer to the Dew as being of Heaven in the same way Fruits are of The Earth, as if the Ancient Hebrews were not entirely ignorant of the Scientific fact that what we are looking at when we look at the Heavens is the same air we inhale when we breath.  

Which leads us to how the words translated "Spirit", "Ghost" and in the Hebrew at least "Soul" are also words for "Breath" and "Air", as is the word for "Life" when Leviticus 17 says the Life is in The Blood.  Leviticus is actually quite literally alluding to the scientific fact that our blood caries the oxygen we inhale from our lungs to other parts of our body chiefly the brain, but translations obscure that to modern readers.  Adam became a living Soul when God breathed the breath of life into him.  And that same imagery describes the future Bodily Resurrection in Ezekiel 37.  The phrase translated "give up the Ghost" really just means to stop breathing, The Bible constantly refers to death as being asleep, not separate from the Body which is built on a misuse of one verse in 2nd Corinthians 5.

Even in Gentile Greek thinking the strict Dualism of Pythagoras was still a minority view in Paul's time, and those who were Pythagoreans or Platonists in the 1st Century didn't use the word Pneuma for the intangible realm they believed it.  In Anaximenes Pneuma is synonymous with the element Air which in his theory was the first element from which all the others were formed.  In Greek medical texts this meaning remains but also became associated with being how the different parts of the body communicate with each other.  In Aristotle the "connate pneuma" was the "air" in the sperm that passes on capacity to the offspring, sounding a lot like what would become the the Christian Doctrine of Traducianism.  The Stoics then greatly developed the concept of Pneuma to refer to "unseen" manifestations of the Divine but still very corporeal.

The Greek word translated Soul is Psyche a word we still use in modern English but with a seemingly completely different meaning to how we use Soul.  Most people aware of this assume it's the Psychological meaning that has no relation to Ancient Greek usage, but I feel the truth is closer to being the opposite.  Plenty of early Christians like Justin Martyr argued against the Immortality of the Soul as taught by Plato, Pythagoras and Origen.

So when in some contexts The Bible calls The Kingdom of which Jesus is King a Kingdom of Heaven rather then Earth, or uses Spiritual as a contrast to the Carnal/Physical/Natural, those are symbolic uses of those words that still derive from what they refer to materially.    

Now in 2nd Corinthians 12 Paul refers to a "Third Heaven", the popular view today is that the first two Heavens are the Sky and Outer Space but the Third Heaven is actually Plato's "Place Beyond Heaven".  I however would argue the Third Heaven is still part of the Universe simply not within the 4 Dimensions we can currently mortally perceive.  According to E. W. Bullinger, the Greek says "caught away", not "caught up" possibly reflecting Jewish beliefs that Paradise was somewhere other than the uppermost heaven.(A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek "2, 14, To this "Third heaven" and " Paradise " Paul was caught away, 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4, (not " up," see under " catch,") in "visions and revelations of the Lord," 2 Cor. xii. 1. One catching away – with a double revelation of the New heaven and the ...")

The Dualistic Platonist/Pythagorean senses of these words are maybe in mind in how Paul uses them more then any other NT writers, but Paul while engaging with the Greeks is seeking to deconstruct that dualism.  People take out of context from 1st Corinthians 15 the "flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven" and the contrasts that are made.  But what they build up to is saying the Bodily will put on the Spiritual, the Mortal will put on the Immortal, the separation between the Material and Divine caused by the Fall is undone in The Resurrection.

So one Full Preterist YT video I watched part of went on about how in John's Gospel the "Jews" kept interpreting what Jesus said "Physically" or "Materially" while the narrative voice informs us Jesus really meant something "Spiritually".  Jesus often used metaphors and symbolism and figures of speech, that doesn't mean those metaphors need to be interpreted in a Spiritual vs Physical paradigm.  

Like when Orgasm is called a "little death", that expression is using one physical event to analogize another physical event. I started writing this thinking it was specifically Male Orgasm called a "Little Death" because visually that analogy instantly makes sense to me while I always thought of Female Orgasm as well the opposite.  Bur upon researching it for this post it seems La petite mort is used pretty gender neutrally.  The expression in it's French origins is mainly supposed to be about the sense of exhaustion, it is after all not uncommon to go to sleep right after.

Likewise when Paul refers to the dead as being asleep, that is one physical state being analogized to another, but the point lies in how the basic difference between death and sleep is that sleep is temporary, Paul is communicating that The Gospel is that Christ has made death temporary.

The quote from John's Gospel about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood is obviously meant to be understood in terms of The Eucharist, the Last Supper depicted in the Synoptics and referred to by Paul, where His Body and Blood is symbolized by Bread and Wine.  So there are layers of symbolism there, when He was tempted by Satan He speaks of the true Bread of Life being the Word of God, the Scriptures, which is a part of the Material world.

The beginning of this theme is the Born Again teaching from John 3.  I disagree with most casual usage of the Born Again phrasing, but I'm no longer happy with my prior post on the subject, so I may have to redo it. Point here is the Birth imagery is indeed symbolic, it's symbolic of Resurrection.  Our conversion is merely when we're Begotten again.

And that Birth imagery being associated with Resurrection itself points to a physical Resurrection.  It has it's roots in Isaiah 26:19 in many translations saying "the Earth shall give birth to her dead", terminology that refers to Revelation 20 talking about Hades and the Sea giving up the Dead that are in them.  And those translations of Isaiah 26:19 must be the correct ones because all translations are setting up this birth imagery in verses 17 and 18.

There are three different Hebrew words for "dead" as in words you'd use to refer to dead people, all three are in Isaiah 26:19, as if YHWH through Isaiah really wanted us to get that there is no sense of Death not included in this Resurrection.  One of the words is frequently translated very specifically as  words like Corpse, being the word Leviticus uses when talking about being made unclean by touching a Carcass.

In this Birth metaphor the Earth is the mother, our dead corpse is the seed which enters her after our "big death" and our Resurrected perfected form is The Man Child of Revelation 12.  The Mother is also Israel in that Chapter, but Israel is tied to her Land(Ertetz), Hephzibah and Beulah of Isaiah 62.  I've also proven with Revelation that Sheol/Hades is a physical location of bodies and that Grave is an accurate translation.  If the Earth is the Mother and the dead body is the Seed, then Sheol would be the Earth's Womb.

That is also complimented by the sowing imagery Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15:37, our mortal Body is the Seed that is planted in the Earth and from which our future Resurrection Body will sprout.  So yes our current bodies and future bodies are sometimes referred to as separate bodies, but that's not because they are completely separate things, there is still a continuity, just as in a sense I'm not the same person I was 15 years ago.  1 Corinthians 15:44 is clear that the Natural Body and Spiritual Body are the same matter, simply changed.

2 Corinthians 5 doesn't in any translation say "to be absent from the body is to be present with The Lord".  But either way in the context of what's set up at the start of the Chapter and what Paul had earlier taught to this same community in 1 Corinthians 15, "the Body" being spoken of just means our body in it's current mortal state before we put on immortality.  Nothing Paul says implies we are absent from the body when we Die, instead Paul consistently refers to physical death as being asleep.

The word translated "Naked" in Genesis 2:25 is not the same as the word being translated Naked repeatedly in Genesis 3, they are arguably similar but not the same.  The word used in Genesis 2 is the same as a word translated Cunning, Crafty and Subtle, in Genesis 3:1 that word is used to describe what The Serpent is more of then any other beast of the field. When Jesus says believers should be "wise as serpents" the Greek word for "wise" being used there is an equivalent to this Hebrew word. Likewise the word for "ashamed" in 2:25 is elsewhere translated "confounded".  The irony is the West has spent centuries acting like the sense in which Adam and Eve were "Naked and unashamed" in Genesis 2 symbolizes childish innocence and naivety when the actual etymology of the words used says the opposite.  Later Hebrew Scripture definitely does use this word for "naked" as in not wearing clothing, but never in the Pentateuch, that I believe was a development of the word's usage in later Hebrew.

The word for "naked" used in Genesis 3 is the more proper word for Naked, and based on 2 Corinthians 5's discussion of how we are currently Spiritually Naked until we are clothed in The Resurrection, I believe the reason Adam and Eve didn't "know" they were Naked before was because they weren't really, they might have seemed to be Naked to how we in our current state perceive that concept, but that's because they were clothed in this Immortal Oiketerion.

When we Put On Immortality at The Resurrection, it's not us ceasing to be Material, it's the Material being upgraded, improved, perfected.  Some may find this weird, but I think a good visual analogy would be like a Transformation in a Magical Girl Anime.