9 or 10 Basic Models of History

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9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Sep 09, 2020 5:26 pm

Lloyd made an interesting remark on an earth history thread that I thought would make a wonderful topic of discussion. He said,

by Lloyd » Wed Aug 19, 2020 7:51 am
RELIGION

Brigit, the psychology of suppression of memories of terror is a significant part of Catastrophist literature, as you know. You can do a search at https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/sea ... oom_query= on terms like psychology, collective amnesia, religion etc to find a lot of good info.
I would agree with Lloyd, suppression of memories of catastrophes is a significant part of Catastrophist literature. I think this is because Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky was a psychiatrist who had studied under the German psychologist, Freud. He saw the memories of past planetary instability in the solar system as a collectively held, and a collectively suppressed, traumatic memory. He saw the passionate reactions against the idea of past planetary instability as additional evidence of a repressed, traumatic memory.

It is true, Velikovsky's hypothesis that the earth once had another sun is startling, and difficult to imagine or take in, mostly for cultural reasons -- and probably from sheer habit of thought.

For those who are willing to examine the scientific case for a wandering brown dwarf star having penetrated the Sun's heliosheath, and then having subsequently been captured by our Sun, the idea never really does cease from being deeply unsettling. It is also true that the opposition to Velikovsky's work was not just hostile but extraordinarily so. So in all of this we see all kinds of psychological and emotional reactions at play. Nevertheless, it is 2020, and the space age has revealed that brown dwarf stars, and brown dwarf binaries, and their satellites, are every bit as plentiful as the other stars in the Galaxy.

Velikovsky's work included searching for leads in world wide myths, examining the many flaws in traditional dating and archaeology, and amassing astonishing examples of sudden burial and preservation -- which did not fit the by-then ossified Lyellian dating. If the hostility and opposition to his work was extraordinary, so were his labors; he may even have been motivated and inspired by the institutional antagonism which was directed at him. (That happens a lot.) But one thing is clear, he was inspired in part by his psychoanalytical background and training. This is the subject of his book, Mankind in Amnesia.

As a topic of a thread, I thought it might be a fun and interesting to explore the various models of history which historians use in presenting to us their versions of the events of the past -- including the psychoanalytical model of history.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Sep 09, 2020 6:39 pm

A quick -- almost off-the-cuff -- summary from a Signet paperback history book, published in 1962.

There are eight basic ways of viewing history, each from a different vantage point. Generally, a historian selects a face of history to his liking, thus stressing the viewpoint which seems best to him. We will make use of all of these faces of history except the first one, the "unhistoric" or "Henry Ford" way. It was Ford who once declared that "history is bunk," and if he wanted to know anything he could always hire a professor who would tell him. This view sees all events as unrelated occurrences, a mishmash of dates, names, and battles, from which nothing can be learned or divined. 

The second way of looking at history might be termed the "political interpretation." Here, history is looked upon as a succession of dynasties, laws, battles. Kings are strong or weak, wars won or lost, laws good or bad, and all events are presented in neat order form A to Z, from 2000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. This, as a rule, is the type of history taught in schools. 

A third face is the geographic one. According to this school, climate and soil determine formation of character. This idea originated with the Greeks. Even today there are many who contend that the only scientific way to explain man's social institutions is to study his physical environment, such as topography, soil, climate....

The fourth way to interpret history is an economic one. This is the Marxian school. It says that history is determined by the way goods are produced. Let us suppose, says the Marxist, that the economy of a feudal system is being changed to capitalism. This new capitalistic mode of production, says the Marxist, will change that country's social institutions -- its religion, ethics, morals, and values, in order to justify and sanctify and institutionalize the new way of economic life. In the same way, if a capitalist country were transformed into a communist society, it would automatically begin to change its cultural and social institutions to conform with the new way of producing things until the new way of life became part of everyday behavior. 

The fifth is an even newer concept than the economic interpretation of history. Founded by Professor Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, this school holds that social institutions and human history are the result of a process of repressing unconscious hostilities. Civilization, says the psychoanalytic historian, can be obtained only at the price of giving up the lusts that lurk in our unconscious -- unbridled sexual gratification, murder, incest, sadism, violence. Only when man has mastered his impulses can he turn his energies into creative, civilizing channels. Which impulses man represses, how severely he represses them, and what methods he uses for this repression will determine his culture and his art forms, says the psychoanalyst. 

The sixth face is the philosophical one. Its three most famous followers are the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, the Prussian philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler, and the British historian Arnold Toynbee. Though these three philosophical interpreters of history differ widely, they have this in common. They see history not as a series of isolated happenings, but as a flow of events having continuity. Each civilization, they hold, follows a more or less predictable pattern. They think of each civilization as a living thing, which, like a human being, has an infancy, childhood, adolescense, maturity, old age, and finally death. How long a civilization lasts, they say, depends upon the ideas and ideals by which that civilization lives. The philosophical interpreters of history try to discover these forces within a civilization in order to find their common element.

In Spengler's view, civilizations are foredoomed to death. Civilizations go through the Spring of their early origins, mature into the Summer of their greatest physical acheivement, grow into the Autumn of great intellectual heights, decline into the Winter of their civilization, and finally die. Writing in 1918, when England was at the height of her prestige, and Russia and China but fifth-rate powers, Spengler predicted in his book The Decline of the West that Western civilization was in the Winter of its cycle and would die by the twenty third century, to be superseded either by a Slavic civilization (Russia) or a Sinic one (China), which were in the Spring of their development. This way of viewing history is known as "cyclic," because each civilization has its own beginning, middle, and end. 

cont'd
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Sep 09, 2020 7:13 pm

the sixth view of history, Signet history paperback, 1962, cont'd

In contrast to the cyclic view, we have Toynbee's "linear" concept, as expressed in his A Study of History. Toynbee holds that a civilization is not an independent totality but a progression -- an evolution -- from lower to higher forms. So, for instance, in his view the Islamic civilization was derived from lower Iranic and Arabic cultures, which in turn were given birth by something he calls the "Syriac society." Thus, the Islamic civilization need not have died, Toynbee holds, but could have evolved into an even higher culture had it responded properly to the challenges with the right responses....

The "cult of personality" is the seventh face of history. Proponents of this school hold that events are motivated by the dynamic force of great men. If not for Washington, they say, there would have been no American Revolution; if not for Robespierre, there would have been no French Revolution;... Men create the events, claim these historians, in contrast to the economic interpreters who insist on the exact opposite, that events create the men.

The eighth face of history, the religious, is both the oldest and the newest concept. The Bible is the best example of this type of historical writing in the past. This way of viewing history looks upon events as a struggle between good and evil, between morality and immorality.....[and so on and so forth. He continues]...The circle is complete. Beginning with God as the Creator of history, man invented other explanations -- an anarchic one viewing history as a series of blind events, a philosophic one looking at history as a series of purposive events, an economic one holding productive methods as a determinant force, a psychological one giving priority to unconscious drives, a "great man" theory hewing to the idea of man himself as the creator of his historic destiny, and, finally, with God back at the helm.

Dimont, Max I.. Jews, God and History, 1962
Signet, cover price 95 cents
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Thu Sep 10, 2020 1:12 am

There is actually something to be said for the "unhistoric" or "Henry Ford" model of history, the stance that all events are "unrelated occurrences, a mishmash of dates, names, and battles, from which nothing can be learned or divined." It is at least useful and interesting as a comparative model.

When I was teaching my oldest two, I tried to remind them to always ask the question, "Compared to what?" And in history, the unhistoric model can be useful as an aid in picturing the raw materials of history. For example, there are many archaeological digs which have turned up thousands of cuneiform tablets, many of which are receipts and contracts, adoptions, title deeds and taxes, along with a few cures, lists, and the odd myth, poem, or legend. A big mess, in Henry Ford's view, and in a way he is right. It requires much labor to translate these, and if the tablets were translated word for word and published as is, there are very few who would be interested.

And this is where historians come in -- he or she is a nerd, willing to dedicate years of work to a pile of ancient receipts. This is because, much like a scientist, these individuals are inspired by not only the subject and the data, but the sense that can be made of it. He is inspired by a hypothesis, theory, or by the larger picture which he sees. Historians, like scientists, can always be found to be using a certain vantage point. "Generally, a historian selects a face of history to his liking, thus stressing the viewpoint which seems best to him." And so we find they are middlemen, inspired by their theory to plow through mountains of data and documents, and report their version of events.

mid·dle·man
/ˈmidlˌman/

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a person who buys goods from producers and sells them to retailers or consumers.
"we aim to maintain value for money by cutting out the middleman and selling direct"
a person who arranges business or political deals between other people.
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“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Thu Sep 10, 2020 1:59 am

Is it always wrong for the individual historian to be inspired by his own personal views, theories, and passions? I don't think so. In the same way, an individual scientist might be inspired to prove a theory; but his methods of actually performing the experiments and field work is open to rational review and replication at all times. It is not really necessary to cross-examine what led him to the experimental set-up. It may have been a wonderful hunch (like Faraday's Radiant Matter) or a sudden vision after thinking of a problem for a long time (like Tesla's alternating current) -- the process that led up to the experiments are often very personal, and those subjective reasons do not necessarily make him less of a scientist.

What is a problem, in Karl Popper's view, is the persistent myth that scientists are sitting down before all the facts and objectively drawing conclusions from what they see. The same applies to historians. It is only a problem if the reader believes the historian sat down before thousands of texts and simply reported the facts in an objective manner. In short, with all middlemen, there is a transactional cost.

Now back to Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky's doctorate in psychiatry, and his correspondence with his colleague, Sigmund Freud. It is expected that Velikovsky was deeply inspired by the psychoanalytical model of history, and it is interesting that he saw a material explanation for many of Jung's collective archetypes. (Apparently there was trouble in Materialist Paradise between Freud and Jung.) But in the end, his field work, research, successful predictions, and physical evidence for planetary instability in the solar system are what matters. If it is true that Saturn was a brown dwarf star or binary or trinary, with satellite earth in tow, and if it is true that it crossed the sun's heliospheric boundary and was captured by the sun, that is not a validation of psychoanalytic theories.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Sat Oct 17, 2020 9:01 pm

Picking up again with the "unhistoric" view of history, and finding it useful as a comparative model, I want to look at some examples that might illustrate that, in fact, history is made up of "unrelated occurrences, a mishmash of dates, names, and battles, from which nothing can be learned or divined."

Let's limit this illustration of the "unhistoric" model only to examples involving written historical records for the time being, and leave out all history that lacks a written record. History that lacks any written record is inferred, by professionals, from other sources of evidence such as burials, architectural ruins, city layouts, everyday domestic items, small votive offerings, destruction layers, etc etc. This limitation, in my view, eliminates at least 99% of what we call ancient history as published today.

One country which has a lengthy history, and which seems to have always possessed the art of writing, is Egypt. It should have long annals and chronicles to which we can refer, expounding its long history as a nation with borders, and subsequently as an expansive militaristic empire, but does it? At this time, no original Egyptian narrative of its own lengthy ancient history has been discovered. Rather, the written records are limited to individual dynasties, and more often than not, to individual Pharoahs.

Here is an interesting entry describing the rise and development of "History" in the Encyclopedia Americana 1959:
While clamatic conditions made Egypt a veritable archaeological museum, or as James Henry Breasted has termed it, "a vast historical volume," and made possible the preservation of very valuable and extensive sources of historical information in the remains of architecture, the engineering feats, the plastic art, and even the inscriptions cut on the stone surfaces of tombs, palaces, temples, and monuments, there have been few or no Egyptian historical records preserved. With the exception of a few fragmentary annals, such as the "Palermo Stele" no native Egyptian historical writings have been discovered except the garbled and incomplete work of Manetho. One may safely agree with Harry R. H. Hall that "no real historian is known to us in Pharoanic Egypt, nor is it likely that one will ever be discovered."
While the true historical narrative can scarcely be held to have originated with the Babylonians or Assyrians, they certainly made a closer approximation to this achievement than the Egyptians. The earliest historical writings of the Babylonians, dating back to the third millenium BC, were the votive inscriptions, giving the names of the kings, their geneologies and a record of the buildings they erected....
In the period following Hammurabi there were important writings of the kings setting forth their achievements, but in an epic rather than a truly historical manner.
The second Babylonian kingdom of the 6th century BC contributed some important chronicles epitomizing some much earlier narratives, which are now preserved only in fragments, and lists of the Babylonian kings.
cont'd
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
~Homer

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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Sat Oct 17, 2020 10:03 pm

The author, H. Elmer Barnes, having discussed whether Egypt or Babylonia (I or II) have a native historical narrative, goes on to show a lack of historical narrative under the Assyrians. He concludes,
Finally, from Assyrian sources there are the above mentioned lists of limmi or the eponym canon, covering the period of 892-704 BC.

The Babyloninan counterpart of Manetho's work, Berossus' history of Babylonia in three books, written about 280 BC, was the first systematic historical narrative produced by a Babylonian or Assyrian scribe. It has, unfortunately, been lost and only survives in scanty references in Josephus, Eusebius and a few other later historians.
Whatever its value, its date shows that true historical narrative was not a product of the period of the height of ether Babylonian or Assyrian culture.
Now back to Egypt. It is a well-known problem, for historians and hobbyists alike, that the primary written sources from ancient Egypt are commissioned by Pharoahs. And Pharoahs tend to exaggerate (read: fabricate) their victories abroad and their achievements at home. Further, succeeding Pharoahs within a Dynasty may obliterate records of previous Pharoahs. If not, than certainly a new Dynasty seeks to extend its legitimacy to rule by erasing the names of previous Dynasties from buildings and records. In short, what is written by Egyptian Pharoahs is notoriously less than reliable.

Someone else may like to parse this out in another way, but for purposes of illustration I think Egypt can make a fine example of the "unhistoric" view of history. In other words, Egypt's native history is made up of unrelated occurrences, a mishmash of dates, names, and battles, from which -- of the truth and order of events -- only a very little can be learned. And this is interesting, because we take for granted the ability of a people to recount its own history as a continuous narrative. This is not so in the case of the Egyptians. To have a continuous, native, historical narrative there must be some unifying ideas across time that gives a continuity to events. (Or perhaps you could say, a "character arc" to a nation across time.) Among many other reasons, the transitions of power between Pharoahs and Dynasties appear to have prevented any native historical Egyptian narrative from being written, and certainly not a systemic one.

More than that, for the Egyptians and the Babylonians (I & II) and the Assyrians, "the true historical narrative was not a product of the period of the heights of their cultures."
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Sat Oct 17, 2020 10:45 pm

So this leads to the question which Karl R Popper continually and maddeningly asked about history, in his criticism of historicism (that is, the idea that there is a plot to history).

Is there a plot to history?
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by paladin17 » Fri Oct 30, 2020 2:41 pm

This video deals with the fundamental aspects (and problems) of history, including some of the mentioned here (plots etc.).
Also there is an interesting concept of "quantum history", which is (in its different aspects) described here.

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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by moses » Sat Oct 31, 2020 2:09 am

"Is there a plot to history?" Brigit

Like is there something inside us all that makes us all walk down the same roads following the same story again and again. Some trauma in the past that has a story that gets imprinted in all of us ?

Cheers,
Mo

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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Nov 11, 2020 10:37 pm

by paladin17 » Fri Oct 30, 2020 7:41 am
"This video deals with the fundamental aspects (and problems) of history, including some of the mentioned here (plots etc.)."

Thank you for that intriguing video on history, what it is, and who writes it (and who re-writes it).

In the first segment, Eugene discusses literary devices which a historian might use in order to make history intelligible. The example he uses is of a historian illustrating how a historical moment, called the situation x, might go through a certain process, and emerge as situation y.

It is up to the historian to provide the elements of situation x that he needs in order to produce situation y, after the crisis -- which he likely also provided.

In that sense, history in its most basic form is effective storytelling. A good story teller or movie maker wastes nothing. Every detail comes to have meaning (usually material, but also very often symbolic) as the story unfolds through the crisis and comes to rest in a kind of resolution. The good historian is making history intelligible to people who are far removed in time, through a type of story telling. But this is true of any person as well: each individual is in many ways communicating the story of his recent experiences with those closest to him, and also with various distant circles of people. He may be a gifted story teller or he may simply recount events in a just-the-facts manner; and he may need to share a different narrative depending on the audience (for example, a resume requires different dates and events than a discussion with a friend, but both may be true histories).

Now it also happens that there is a cognitive test which is based on a person's ability to share his own past as a narrative. The idea of the test goes something like this. In healthy individuals events, personalities, dates and circumstances are integrated and can be related in a narrative. In traumatized individuals, events are more disconnected, and they are less able to give a cohesive narrative of their own life.**

I would like to suggest that this is true of individuals and that it can be extended to nations as well. I would like to submit that a healthy nation knows its own history, and recounts it in the form of festivals, holidays, sayings, sculpture (statues and memorials), and in books, and can also relate its own laws and customs to that history -- just as a healthy individual can retell his own life story, and why he has chosen certain rules of life for himself.

To sum,
  • history may use literary devices,
  • history may be considered to be a genre of literature; and,
  • history is a natural expression arising from literate people who share a language, and is not necessarily an activity unique to a professional class.
**ref:
Siegel, Daniel J. (1999). The Developing Mind.
Narrative:
Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
integrative function of
interidividual integration and
making sense of others and
memory and
remembering self and
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Nov 11, 2020 11:14 pm

Models of History subtopic: literacy and historical narrative

by paladin17 » Fri Oct 30, 2020 7:41 am
"This video deals with the fundamental aspects (and problems) of history, including some of the mentioned here (plots etc.)."

In another segment of this video, Eugene touches on the idea that history was really only possible for the individual nation-state, and that it only emerged in the Modern Age (1500) for most of the world. (Please correct me if that is not a fair paraphrase or date.)

I have agreed with him in the above post. I compared the recording of history by a nation-state to the individual's cognitive ability to relate his life in a cohesive narrative. I wanted to say that the writing of a unique national narrative is a natural activity, and that it is not necessarily a task relegated only to a professional class of historians. The writing of history is a natural undertaking by literate people who share a language and past.

This may answer why national histories seem to appear only after the Modern Age, at the time when people began to reject and rid themselves of the custom of writing only in Latin (thus keeping literacy within a small caste), and began to read and write in their own respective languages, thus allowing more and more people to read and write. Examples of writers who used colloquial languages include the English copyists of the Bible called Lollards, Dante and Chaucer, Galileo and Leeuwenhoek.

But suppose the histories all have that wrong; suppose there were hundreds of literate people in small states during the Bronze Age? In that case there would have been books and histories written by these nations also. My reason for suggesting this is that the Bible itself, that is, the Old Testament, is a cohesive national narrative, beginning in 1440+- and being completed by c. 440s. We know that it survived many concerted and brutal attempts by both the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire to eradicate it. Therefore, we may explore the idea with some confidence that most other national writing did not survive the Greek and Roman conquests.

But in either case, whether national narratives arose in the Bronze Age, or whether they did not emerge until the Renaissance, the question still revolves around general literacy, around who could read and write at a given place and time, and therefore around the real history of the Alphabet.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Thu Nov 12, 2020 12:22 am

Models of History: the real history of the Alphabet, literacy

By getting the history of the alphabet wrong, it is easy to make paternalistic put-downs about whether the Syrians/Hebrews of the Bible could have recorded their own family and national history, as well as their civil and ritual laws, in the 15th c. BC.

But I would like to take a series of events and personalities, which the historians of the Jews found to be of great historical significance, and test it for its historical quality. This is a small section of history from the northern territory of Israel, around the early to mid 800s BC. It is taken from from the Book of Kings.
  • 1 And it came to pass after these things that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard which was in Jezreel, next to the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. 2 So Ahab spoke to Naboth, saying, “Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near, next to my house; and for it I will give you a vineyard better than it. Or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its worth in money.”

    3 But Naboth said to Ahab, “The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you!”

    4 So Ahab went into his house sullen and displeased because of the word which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken to him; for he had said, “I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.” And he lay down on his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no food. 5 But Jezebel his wife came to him, and said to him, “Why is your spirit so sullen that you eat no food?”
  • 6 He said to her, “Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite, and said to him, ‘Give me your vineyard for money; or else, if it pleases you, I will give you another vineyard for it.’ And he answered, ‘I will not give you my vineyard.’ ”

    7 Then Jezebel his wife said to him, “You now exercise authority over Israel! Arise, eat food, and let your heart be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.”
  • 8 And she wrote letters in Ahab’s name, sealed them with his seal, and sent the letters to the elders and the nobles who were dwelling in the city with Naboth. 9 She wrote in the letters, saying,

    Proclaim a fast, and seat Naboth with high honor among the people; 10 and seat two men, scoundrels, before him to bear witness against him, saying, “You have blasphemed God and the king.” Then take him out, and stone him, that he may die.
  • 11 So the men of his city, the elders and nobles who were inhabitants of his city, did as Jezebel had sent to them, as it was written in the letters which she had sent to them. 12 They proclaimed a fast, and seated Naboth with high honor among the people. 13 And two men, scoundrels, came in and sat before him; and the scoundrels witnessed against him, against Naboth, in the presence of the people, saying, “Naboth has blasphemed God and the king!” Then they took him outside the city and stoned him with stones, so that he died. 14 Then they sent to Jezebel, saying, “Naboth has been stoned and is dead.”

    15 And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, “Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead.” 16 So it was, when Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, that Ahab got up and went down to take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
~Homer

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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Nov 18, 2020 6:45 pm

Now the one thing we all might agree on is that there are many ways to approach this historical record.

And of course, the approach will be determined by the model used by the historian.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: 9 or 10 Basic Models of History

Unread post by Brigit » Wed Nov 18, 2020 6:47 pm

For fun, we might even look at a few interpretations, using the same event.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
~Homer

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