Are We More Like the Roman Empire than We Care to Admit?

David Carr, Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York, is the author of "Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins," which was just published by Yale University Press.


The world history that is often taught is a story of great empires, leaders and their intentions. But there is another history to be written of the long lasting effects of the trauma caused by those same empires—Babylon, Rome, and others. Western culture, especially Western religion, is not just the product of great thinkers and religious leaders. It is also deeply shaped by traumas inflicted by long dead imperial powers.

The Bibles of Judaism and Christianity bear the imprint of such traumas, and they bear it as much in what they avoid talking about as in what they explicitly describe. The Old Testament contains a history extending from creation up through the origins of Judaism. Yet it omits explicit description of a crucial fifty-year span when the founders of Judaism were in exile in Babylon (587-538 BCE). Babylon had destroyed the holy city of Jerusalem and burned its temple. The Babylonians exiled thousands of the surviving inhabitants of Judah, forcibly resettling them hundreds of miles away in Babylon.


http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/157981


Interesting religious take here and some thought provoking views, but feel the religious take is what is wrong here to base on.