Browsing Tag

Christian school

World History and Cultures: The Middle East

I sat down to start working on this week’s World History and Cultures post at 2pm. It is now almost 5– that’s how long it took me to factcheck seventeen pages, not including writing this review.

Inaccuracies:

Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Jerusalem, not Nebuchadnezzar I.
Babylonia was not the first empire in the Near East after Sumer, Assyria was.
Babylon may be one of the oldest cities, but in a credible list of “first cities,” Babylon doesn’t even make it into the top 10.
Historians note that Assyria used iron weapons most decisively in combat, not the Hittites.
Whether or not Cyrus or Darius established the Persian postal system is unclear (they claim it’s Darius, evidence seems to point to Cyrus) but the first postal service was in Egypt, not Persia.
The countries with the most biodiversity and variations in climate and topography are Ecuador, India, Mexico, etc., Israel doesn’t even come close.
Two of the “main highways of the ancient world” -The King’s Highway from Egypt to Syria, or the Silk Road—completely bypass Israel, with termini in Tyre, Lebanon; Antioch, Turkey; and Damascus, Syria. It was certainly not “the great trade route linking continents, nations, and cultures” when my brief survey found at least eight other trade routes that did so in biblical times.
Israel was not “the greatest nation in the world around 1,000 BC.” That was the zenith of the Egyptian New Kingdom, for one, and close to the height of Olmec Civilization in Mexico—the Zhou Dynasty also stretched across most of central China at the time, as well.
Pages 28-33 relates the “history” of Israel as evangelicals and fundamentalists articulate it. If you’d like to dig into this topic, I recommend The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeology and the Myth of Israel by Thomas Thompson.
The Roman Empire was divided in 285 CE, not 395.
Salvation in Islam is not attained by reciting the shahadah 125,000 times (?!), or even by the Five Pillars of Islam, which they reference—but by repentance and belief.
The half sentence we get about the Iranian Revolution is … hummm. So. Bad. If you’d like to understand more about what happened in Iran and what lead to the Revolution, please read All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer.

Wild Assertions:

The Enuma Elish was written “in order to exalt Babylon and its chief god, Marduk” (23).
Babylonian scientists were “too immersed in the naturalistic superstition of astrology to develop the science of astronomy.”
“Without laws and a governmental structure to enforce them, it would be impossible for people to live together peaceably.”
“Justice is the use of authority and power to uphold what is right, just, or lawful. It reflects the principle that every man is responsible for his own actions and should be treated accordingly” (24).
“Unbelieving critics, including the French infidel Voltaire, ridiculed the Word of God and insisted that no such nation [Hittites] had ever existed.”
“The name Assyria became synonymous with terror, cruelty, and oppression among all the peoples of the ancient Middle East” (25). (This is also an inaccuracy, since this “reputation” appears among 20^th century scholars and has been discredited.)
“…the ruins of Babylon bear testimony to the judgment of God against the pride, idolatry, and immorality of the once proud city” (26).
“The Persian Empire prospered for over two centuries, probably because of its tolerant, generally beneficent treatment of God’s people, the Jews” (27).
“Although the Persian kings practiced the false, pagan religion of Zoroastrianism, they had a much higher regard for the sanctity of law than did the haughty Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs.”
Moses is “one of the greatest men in world history” (28).
“Byzantium was increasingly threatened … by the rise of a fanatical, militant new religion in the Arabian Peninsula—Islam” (34).
“Muhammed combined elements of a corrupted Judaism and a distorted Christianity in a legalistic religion that looked to him as its ultimate authority” (35).
“Because Islam is such a fanatically anti-Christian faith, the progress of modern Protestant missions in the Middle East has been extremely slow and difficult.”
Britain took control of Palestine, etc, “in order to prepare these Arab states for independence” (36).
“…the Middle East will continue to be a center of international tension and conflict as the world nears history’s last great battle, the Battle of Armageddon” (38).

Assumptions:

Not only does the Bible relay accurate historical information, what it relays indicates the significance and superiority of its contents over other cultures, nations, cities, persons, and events.

***

This was my face as I read this chapter:

I knew when I started WHAC that things were bound to get interesting, and I suspected that their chapter on the “Middle East” was going to be … is there a word that combines “hilarious” and “troubling”?

I think the most important point to highlight about chapter three is this: how much time WHAC gives to certain items is indicative of its point of view. I mentioned above that they see the biblical narrative as not just accurate, but as a source for understanding God’s priorities. If God didn’t mention it in the Bible, then it’s not that important– and if he did, well then it must be incredibly important.

We see this in their section on the Hittite Empire: the Bible exalts the Hittites to a fabled, mythic stature. They’re portrayed as allies of Israel (Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba’s husband, is one of David’s mighty men, and the Empire is the source for many of the building materials for the Temple), and as powerful allies at that. Consequently, Abeka makes a mountain out of their iron forging ability, even though from the research I did indicates it’s likely the Hittites only had access to a form of wrought iron, which is not that much stronger than bronze. The historians I was reading pointed to Assyria, not the Hittites, as using iron weapons successfully … but that doesn’t align as well with the Bible’s recorded emphasis on the Hittites, so WHAC lies. They also call Voltaire an “infidel” for being skeptical of its existence, which … alrighty then.

Not only that, we also get two entire pages on the Old and New Babylonian Empires and not even a whisper about some of the other empires that existed in the same time frame. It’s obvious from their constant references to Scripture that they’re giving this much space to Babylonia because the Bible does.

Another example is that we get two paragraphs about some missionaries that I feel like I’d never even heard of, even though WHAC was my textbook in highschool … and a single half-sentence on the Iranian Revolution. WHAC spends five pages giving us an “Update” on the modern near east, but one of the most significant events in modern history, something that has had massive consequences on world politics for decades, the Iranian Revolution, gets 12 words while four little-known missionaries get 121. That is literally ten times as much attention.

The text is also incredibly Islamaphobic. I didn’t even know what Islamaphobia was when I was reading this in high school, but it’s no wonder that I thought the worst possible things about Muslims, given what I was told. They make Islam seem beyond absurd– their “explanation” of Islamic theology is reductionist in the extreme as well as being actively deceptive. They claim that Muslims have to repeat the shahadah (“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”) 125,000 times in order to be saved from hell, a claim I could find absolutely nowhere else. They also do not correct anything they’ve lied about in the third edition, published 12 years after 9/11.

They’re not just being biased against Islam the way we’ve seen hundreds of our religious and political leaders be over the last 15 years, they’re lying. For all they claim that the 10 Commandments are “universal” and “eternal principles” in this chapter, they must not think that applies to “bear no false witness against thy neighbor.”

Students are required to memorize and regurgitate the text’s Islamaphobia, as well. Of the 78 review questions, 28% ask students to answer questions like “Describe the origin of Islam and its effect on the Middle East” or “define Islam.” The answers: “Islam’s fanatical anti-Christian beliefs don’t allow missionaries to spread the gospel” and “Islam is a man-made religion that teaches people to rely on their own efforts” (35).

***

I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I did want to direct your attention to one of the “wild assertions” above:

“Justice is the use of authority and power to uphold what is right, just, or lawful. It reflects the principle that every man is responsible for his own actions and should be treated accordingly.”

If you’ve ever wondered why Christians are so comfortable completely abdicating their responsibility to love their neighbor, or are completely oblivious to God’s emphasis on liberation, or believe that the United States has every right to slaughter Black men and women and call it justice–

This is why.

***

Lastly, I want to bring out something that may seem rather minor compared to the flagrant Islamaphobia, Eurocentrism, and racism in this chapter. When talking about the Persian Empire, they assert that “Darius established the world’s first postal service over the numerous roads he built to connect the empire.” This point gets six more lines, including a quote from Herodotus.

They completely ignore that there’s some uncertainty on who, exactly, expanded couriers into an early mail system. Many historians say it was Cyrus, and use a quote from Xenophon, a Greek historian, to back them up. Some others say no, it’s Darius, and argue the Herodotus quote (“neither snow nor rain…”) applies to his reign. Most of what I was reading say things like “It’s unclear whether…” when discussing this subject, and relay the above information.

World History and Cultures, however, can’t do that.

In the authors’ framework, there is nothing uncertain about history. There is no place for doubt, no place for questions, no place for exploration and growth. In a previous chapter they made the claim that a single man near-miraculously “cracked the code” of Sumerian cuneiform, instead of rightly attributing it to many scholars and the work of decades. In their world, there’s no slow progress from not knowing to we think this is right, at least the best answer we have right now. We are haplessly ignorant until God reveals the answers, and then those answers are incontrovertible.

This perspective even gets projected onto their philosophical opposition: Voltaire’s skepticism isn’t the result of a person who doesn’t believe in things there’s no evidence for, and would have gladly changed his mind if he’d been alive in 1906, when Winckler uncovered Hattusa. It’s not that historians study and grow and learn and expand knowledge; instead, they “deny God’s truth” because they’re “infidels” until God sees fit to “vindicate” the Bible.

This is why I’m arguing that World History and Cultures doesn’t exist to educate, but indoctrinate. They’re not interested in giving students a sense of wonder, curiosity, or learning. All they want is to make sure students stay inside the fundamentalist ideological box.

August 21, 2018 by SamanthaField

Social Issues

World History and Cultures: Sumer

I am hoping that, in the future, I will be able to do more than one chapter at a time. For health reasons, though, I have to limit myself to just one for today.

Inaccuracies:

The timeline: Sumer originated in 4500 BCE, not 2300 BC. The Akkadian Period (they refer to it as “Old Akkadian”) begins in 2350, not 2200.
Map: the “fertile crescent” they highlight excludes Egypt, extends too far south.
The wheel was “invented” by independent cultures, but the earliest record of a wheel was found in Slovenia, not Sumer.*
Sumer was not the first culture to practice animal husbandry; the Kazakhs domesticated the horse and began breeding programs in northern Kazakhstan/lower Russia.*
Henry Rawlinson did not solely “break the code” of cuneiform in 1849– he based his translation work on Burnouf and Lassen, and there were multiple people who identified key words and phonograms dating back to 1602, including a basic alphabet.
Sumerians were not the first astronomers; early lunar calendars have been found in England and Germany.*
The political position of ensi did not ultimately lead to a monarchy headed by a lugal; instead, ensis seemed to have existed under the authority of a lugal.
The Bible is not the oldest preserved work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh is.
WHAC says that Sumerians only had a “vague, shadowy belief in life after death” when in reality they had a complex belief system about the underworld, what it was like, and what was needed to enjoy it.

Wild Assertions:

Pyramids, ziggurats and Maya Temples are supposedly so similar because there was a single culture that spread from the Tower of Babel.
Sumerians studied astrology because “they rejected the natural revelation of the one true God,” and “turned to the stars and planets for knowledge of the future” (19).
“the religion of the Sumerians led to hopelessness and purposelessness” (20).
Civilization cannot occur without “mastering the food supply” through “effective agricultural techniques” like crop irrigation (17).
WHAC says history cannot be preserved without a written language; however, we know that indigenous peoples in Australia have an accurate oral history that extends as far back as 10,00 years.

Assumptions:

The Garden of Eden was located in the Fertile Crescent.
“Writing has a conservative influence on culture,” and conservatism is crucial to development of civilizations (16).
Cultures can supposedly be ranked and categorized, from undeveloped to “highly developed” (17).

***

The most cursory and briefest of glances through my “Inaccuracies” section reveals a fundamental problem with World History and Cultures: in order for it to be internally consistent and to stay true to its claim that their fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible is historically, literally accurate, they are required to lie. They cannot tell students the truth about almost anything regarding the ancient world– to be honest, they’d be forced to acknowledge either that a) their interpretation and application of the Bible is flawed or b) the Bible is not accurate.

The chapter launches with a huge whopper of a lie: the “Rise of Sumerian civilization” was in 2300 BC– a full two thousand, two hundred years too late. However, they’ve already stated that the earth was created around 4,000 BC, which is five hundred years after the beginnings of Sumer.

They also have to assume that the Garden of Eden was a physical, historically real place and that it was located in Middle East. From there, Noah had to have landed in Turkey, and his descendants had to have traveled down the rivers to Mesopotamia and spread their culture from there. The fact that calendars, languages, schools, and technologies all arose independently in multiple cultures around the world proves that their understanding of history is not possible … so they have to lie. They have to deliberately mislead their students into believing that Sumer and only Sumer was the first to achieve lunar calendars, the wheel, schools, etc.

That they are willing to do this, and to go to this extent– 10 falsehoods in a single chapter, more than one lie per page– is disturbing.

***

In the section where they discuss the Sumerian government, they claim that Sumer was a “primitive democracy,” and then use Samuel Kramer to argue that power was in the hands of “free citizens,” that decisions affecting the entire city were made collectively. In the next paragraph, they say that “it became necessary for the city-states to adopt a strong, monarchial [sic] form of government” (19).

Untangling this actually took some digging, but first I want to point to the logic chain here. When Sumer “faced internal dissension and external threats,” a strong monarchy “became necessary.” To break it down: civil unrest and threats to national security make “strong” leaders– kings, tyrants, dictators– both necessary and, from the surrounding context, a good thing.

Again, I’m looking around at my country right now and thinking well that explains a lot. These authors aren’t just relaying history, they’re teaching a philosophy of government that bends toward authoritarianism.

There’s also a second thing happening here that isn’t immediately visible– you have to go fact-checking to discover this. They use the term “primitive democracy” to describe early Sumerian government. However, the “free citizens” who had political power in the first cities? They were they men who controlled the military power. They were the men with access to weapons and and who led fighting units. I won’t deny it makes sense that those sorts of men would control the political power in an early culture like Sumer, but it is interesting that WHAC describes this system as a democracy and not the “primitive oligarchy” it actually was. Not every person residing in the city-state had a political voice, and the authors think that this is enough to call a system a democracy.

No wonder they have no qualms oppressing voters, gerrymandering, or denying suffrage to whole classes of people. They think “democracy” and “oligarchy” are the same thing.

***

One of the main goals of this chapter is to teach that civilizations are only civilizations when they look and act like European civilizations. They give a definition of civilization that students are asked to write down verbatim several times in the section and chapter reviews:

A civilization comes into being when a people’s culture begins to include a specialized division of labor, a written language, a written code of laws, an organized form of civil government, and the developement of arts and sciences. Before any of these developments can take place, however, there must be a mastery over the food supply. All civilizations begin with the development of effective agricultural techniques. (17)

Lots of scholars argue that only one of these is necessary: writing and keeping written records. Some add other components, like social stratification or architecture. Abeka’s sticking point is “mastery over the food supply,” and they describe Sumer’s crop irrigation system at length. It’s not enough for WHAC that large groups of people can feed themselves, they have to do it in a particular way. That way looks like irrigated fields and the steady planting and harvesting of crops. It doesn’t include, for example, the way many Native American tribes practiced forestry before the arrival of European colonizers. North America wasn’t an “untamed wilderness” before the arrival of the colonizers; it just didn’t look suitably “mastered” to white people.

Abeka’s whole concept of “civilization” is deliberately exclusive, and it will be important to identify exactly who they’re excluding and why.

I didn’t identify any changes in the 3rd edition. The Fertile Crescent map in Since the Beginning is slightly more accurate; there is also more discussion of the evils of secular humanism in Sumerian culture than appears in the 10th grade version, as well as more focus on Abraham’s story.

*Some of these items are more recently discovered than the publication of World History and Cultures 2nd Edition, but have not been corrected in the latest edition.

I am on Patreon! Please consider supporting my work and becoming a Patron.

July 26, 2018 by SamanthaField