When we consider the modern sexual politics of the Catholic Church they are, in comparison to those of the broader secular world, quite conservative. What many don’t realise is that much of what makes up the contemporary sexual politics of the Catholic Church stems from the works and thinking of one man: St. Augustine. This essay will explore the life and works of St. Augustine and how it was that he profoundly affected the thinking of both the Catholic Church and the broader secular community right up to the present day. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been noticing that we’ve been getting a lot of traffic from http://noahdavidsimon.blogspot.com to this article. If that’s how you came here I appriciate your interest, but you should know that I denounce that moron and everything he stands for. He wholesale re-imagined this piece and bent it to his own delusional, misogynist agenda. I hope that, should you read this article, you can see that it’s really got nothing to do with sexual politics of the ancient near east, rather the ties between the common mythic traditions of Mesopotamia and the early ancient Israelites. I hope you enjoy the piece and can appreciate my desire to not be affiliated with religious nut cases.

When we turn to significant landmarks in human cultural history it is often easier to acknowledge that a landmark occurred than it is to pin down the specific details of that landmark. It is an oft touted idiom that “history is written by the victor” and, even when we are not concerning ourselves with military victories, the same phenomenon of historical whitewashing occurs with cultural revolutions. While historians agree that the Western world is a predominantly democratic one, one would be hard pressed to find two who reached a consensus about the origins, birth and development of the concept. Did it begin with the Ancient Greek senate or was that such an alien form of democracy from that which we practice today that it doesn’t bare comparison? The same problems arise for any historian that attempts to trace the origins of the momentous cultural development that was Israelite Monotheism. This article will attempt to trace the roots of Monotheism in Ancient Israel and assess the speed with which it was adopted. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to what is, I hope, the first of many history articles on Wonderbread. In completing a double major in cinema and history I’ve learned many interesting things and would love to share some of them with you. Some of my fellow history students will also be contributing articles, so keep your eyes on the History category. I’d like to open with an article I wrote earlier this year for a class on Ancient Israel. It explores the similarities between the Ancient Israelite creation and flood stories and those of the Babylonians before them. Ultimately, we can see that there is common mythic tradition in the Ancient Near East.

-Morgan

When we examine the narrative and thematic structure of Genesis 1-2:4a we can see a structural and thematic core which appears to originate from a broad mythic tradition which existed in the Ancient Near East, long before the Israelites codified their scripture in writing. The central parallels exist in the Babylonian texts of the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis epic. We can find elements of each of these ancient stories present in Genesis, however, it is the differences (rather than the similarities) in these narratives that reveals to us the details of the philosophy of the Iraelites which distinguished them from their contemporaries. It is worthwile, however, to consider the similarities because these provide us with useful information about the collective experience of life in the Ancient Near East. Read the rest of this entry »