Archive for June, 2007

I remember the Six Day War as vividly as any news event in my life, more vividly than even the JFK assassination, which for my generation is the “benchmark” of public memory. I was 21 years old, living temporarily in Abilene, TX, newly married with pregnant wife, just back from a year in Europe after graduating from college and preparing to head out to California to work on an M.A. at Pepperdine University. I was riveted to the radio and television and little else was on my mind throughout that hot first week of June.

June 7, 1967 is emblazoned in my mind, just as June 6, 1944 was to my parents before I was born.

Over the years I have timed a few trips of mine to Israel to coincide with the June 7th Anniversary. I went there for the 30th anniversary in 1997 and sat for hours overlooking the Old City and thinking about it all. When I began my book, The Jesus Dynasty, in 2005, I also began the preface on June 7th, in the Old City, at the American Colony hotel. I have always been that way about dates, marking them, noticing them, and just thinking about them, especially as they pertain to biblical events or modern events in the history of the State of Israel.

This year was no exception. I knew we would be digging in Israel on Mt. Zion and the times are flexible, mostly set based on my academic schedule and that of the students. Months ago it looked like we would end up there on first week of June. And so it was. I wanted to be in Israel, in Jerusalem, on the 40th Anniversary of the Six Day War–particularly on June 7th itself. I had thought about this years ago, intending to somehow be in Jerusalem on the 40th anniversary.  As it turned out, with the Mt Zion dig, it was easy to schedule. I realize that Israel celebrates “Jerusalem Day,” as they call it, based on the Jewish Calendar, on Iyyar 28th, which fell on May 16th this year. I understand the reasons for this but as an historian the more accurate “marker” of the Gregorian date appeals to me more–so June 7th was the date that was on my mind last week in Jerusalem.

I took my group to stand at the Zion Gate, where you can still see the bullet marks from the 1948 and 1967 War. We walked down to the Wall and I related the story as best I knew it. I had interviewed in the past Rabbi Ariel, who was a young man in his 20s at the time, a soldier, who made it early on to the Wall. I was able to relate to the students some of the things he had told me about the sights, sounds, and feelings of that heady afternoon when Jewish soldiers and later rabbis and others rushed down to the Wall for the first time since 1948.

I was not in the US for the 40th anniversary this year but I picked up here and there from the world news media a lot of revisionist thinking about the Six Day War, especially in Europe. In these circles Israel is to blame for an unnecessary war, deliberately provoked in order to mask their failed domestic policies. According to this line of thinking the Arabs had little to do with the outbreak of hostilities and Israel blew out of proportion the Arab threat to justify its actions. These views were recently published by Tom Segev in his book 1967 and they have been picked up with relish by an anti-Israeli press. Michael Oren, whose book Six Days of War, effectively counters this line of thinking with a careful examination of now declassified documents from the period. The truth is clear. Not only did Israel feel its very existence was in the balance, they were deeply fearful of military confrontation and desperate to avoid conflict. The victory left them reeled back on their heels in utter wonder and surprise. The truth is, no one anticipated the events of June 6-9th, and the capture of the entire West Side of the Jordan and Sinai by the Israelis, and the Old City of Jerusalem, left everyone thinking of the words of Psalm 126, which many Jews knows by heart from the Hebrew chanted in the synagogue:

When the LORD turned the returnees of Zion
We were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
And our tongue with shouts of joy;
Then they said among the nations,
The LORD has done great things for them.
The LORD has done great things for us,
And we are glad.

One has to remember that 1967 was just 20 years after the Holocaust and Israel was an adoloscent State indeed, just stirring itself into adulthood with the first generation of 1948 pioneers still dominant on the scene. I could not help noticing last Shabbat in Jerusalem that the Torah and Haphtarah readings were, respectively: Numbers 13:1 through 15:41 and Joshua 2:1-24. I should remind everyone that these readings have nothing to do with the Gregorian calendar, and that they would fall on the anniversary of the June 6th Six Day War is purely “happenstance.” The readings have indeed to do with a 40 year period, yes a 40th year anniversary, back in the time of Moses and the Exodus. One has to do with the beginning of a 40 Year period after the amazing victory over Egypt, and God basically “handing the Land” to Israel. But Israel became fearful and would not enter in. The second, has to do with the period 40 years later, with the second generation–when they did finally enter the Land, after the old generation has passed. As I sat in my hotel room last Sabbath morning thinking of this periodization I could not help but think of the rough parallels. Israel now stands on the brink of a new era. The old generation is indeed passed or passing, and a new Day has come. What the future will bring is in the hands of us all I suppose, directly or indirectly, but the situation has so drastically changed from 1967 it is hard to imagine what things were like then.

I was corresponding with Robert Eisenman last week, on the 40th Anniversary. He has a new book soon to be out, not about Jesus or the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a wonderful book of poetry that I have had the privilege to read in manuscript form titled New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario 1959-1962. It is wonderful stuff, his personal writings as a young man traveling the world. I highly recommend it and it will show those who don’t know him personally his wonderfully passionate soul and his sharp sense of observation and philosophical insight. In the back of the book he has a longer poem, written later than the rest, worth the price of the book alone, on the Six Day War. I hope you will order his book or get it when it comes out.

Finally, for something a bit more crazy and bizarre. It has been characteristic of apocalyptic groups, both ancient and modern, to try and make some sense out of the prophetic periods or numbers in the book of Daniel. We find indications of such in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, in Rabbinic literature, and other ancient texts. They referred to these prophetic numbers as “the times and the seasons.” Moderns groups, particularly the heirs of William Miller, but others as well, have also delved into such things in an attempt to project the numbers of Daniel into our own time. Sir Isaac Newton was more interested in such matters of biblical and prophetic chronology than he was in physics and he spent many years working on such calculations. Modern scholars would of course see this as a vain enterprise, since the numbers of the book of Daniel seem to be well rooted historically in the period of the Maccabees. However, such historical readings have not deterred those who see these prophecies as having a kind of “dual” application, in the past but also projecting into the future. Some years ago I was reading the classic commentary of Adam Clarke, the 19th century Methodist biblical scholar, on Daniel. He commented, writing in 1831, that according to his calculations, based on the 2300 day/year prophecy of Daniel 8, Jerusalem would be “vindicated” in 1966, precisely 2300 years from the defeat of the Persian king Darius (the Ram) by Alexander the Great (the He Goat) in 334 BCE, when Jerusalem lost its sovereignty to a series of Greco-Roman powers. Since it is rare for anyone involved in “Bible Prophecy” to ever predict something long ahead of their lifetime, it stuck me as strange and a bit daring. He had made one error in his calculations. In moving from 334 BCE, which he saw as the beginning of period Jerusalem’s loss of sovereignty, when Alexander defeated the Persian ruler Darius, 2300 years forward, he had forgotten to add a year since there is no year zero. Hence his corrected prediction would be 1967 as the year when Gentiles would no longer exercise sovereignty over Jerusalem. Also, something Clarke did not know, but others have since pointed out, is that the battle at the Granicus River in 334 BCE took place on the Olympiad calendar corresponding to May/June.

JDT