My position is the opposite: trying to make nice with an openly hostile country like Iran and throwing them a bone is what makes open war with them inevitable. It was 300+ drones and missiles this time. Nothing bad has happened to Iran yet. So next time it'll be 1500+ drones and missiles. And as...
This reality reflects the US's lack of deterrence. Iran wouldn't have even considered the idea of attacking a close US ally if it knew the US, a global military powerhouse, was likely to hit back with full or even half force. That the US okayed a medium-scale attack and then demanded Israel not...
Not exactly. The Iranians wanted to retaliate for Israel killing one of their top generals, but they also wanted to make sure that their attack wouldn't bring an extreme reaction from the US. So they essentially asked the US (via a third party, Turkey), if they could go ahead with the attack...
I think that the US policy towards Iran just pushes off the inevitable, and will be harmful to the US (never mind the rest of the world) in the long run (which at this point is the fairly near future). IMO the US should put a stop to Iran's nuclearization ASAP. Bomb the oil factories, etc. On...
Both and more: Israelis themselves are divided on the topic of sovereignty, and if sovereignty, should the Arabs receive citizenship or just residency? As stated previously, it doesn't really matter as long as the Israeli government isn't willing to budge. Meanwhile, yes, and not just Arabs and...
Palestine ≠ Israel.
The world has our hands tied on this. I'll try to summarize the topic.
In 1947 the UN okayed the partition plan which gave some of Mandatory Palestine to the Jewish population and most of it to the Arab population. The Jews took the deal, the Arabs didn't and declared war...
As I've stated countless times on this site, non-Jewish citizens are treated equally in the eyes of the law. In fact, in some places you may find affirmative action in favor of minorities (e.g. Arabs have an easier time getting accepted into med school than Jews). Equality for non-Jews was put...
It's more about vowelization traditions than scribal error. Vowel points only appeared on the scene in the Islamic period, so scribal error is only relevant from the time of the Masoretes who created the first vowelized chumashim. Proving a certain pronunciation in Hebrew is difficult (perhaps...
Well, we all know which chag is coming up after Purim...
Last night I came across a cool paper by Dr. Aton Holzer. Holzer is a medical doctor who's taken up writing scholarly-level, Torah-related papers in recent years.
In this paper he discusses the question of the Israelite right to the...
Well, technically he wrote the stone becomes a gem, not grows into it. That's what he wrote about the human. He didn't clarify how the stone becomes a gem.
I agree that that's the case on some levels. But I'm not sure it's true that "most scholars have to respect the earliest source material". The solution to a text a scholar doesn't like is to date it to a later time than a more preferable text.
I wrote to you in private why I was unavailable. This post is kind of rude and unnecessary, considering you didn't message me to see what was going on with me.
I didn't respond directly because it wasn't clear to me what was the thread's topic and what I was supposed to be agreeing to.
Are you...
I don't understood. Mitzryaim ≠ Egypt?
We do know that Egypt had different names in pre-Hellenistic antiquity, it wasn't just variants of MSR. For example, Kemet. That's a vastly different name. One could easily argue that in the Persian period Hodu was another name for Egypt.
Note that I'm...
Arguably, that's not proof because you'd need a living, breathing, Persian period ancient Hebrew-speaker to tell you that Hodu = India. There's no evidence from the text itself that demonstrates that when ancient Hebrew-speakers from the Persian period said "הדו" they were referring to the...