Anicient Israel/Modern ISIS/Al Quida

[MrMacSon]

Thanks for the comments and links. As I said in the OP I'm not a scholar. I
I don't know why people think it's playing tricks asking questions. I think if one cant answer or provide some other opinion to the questions in the OP they just shouldn't bother to answer.

I wasn't sure what you were referring to but, wrt the ISIS/Al Queda references, I figured the Irgun scenario was interesting, especially as I had read somewhere the view that Islam desire to war or extremism had virtually disappeared until the Irgun became active.

[andrewcriddle]

From The Mythic Past by Thomas L. Thompson

.................................................................
p. 66

. . . in the close of Moses' second sermon on the mount at the end of Deuteronomy 28: 66. Here, Moses is referring to the time in the future when Israel will lose the land and be scattered 'from one end of the world to another'. He marks his rhetoric starkly, with threats of degradation and humiliation: 'Yahweh will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey which I promised that you should never make; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, hut no man will buy you.'' The closing phrase is important to mark well, as it strikes a note of scornful sarcasm. This is not a reference to an enslavement in Egypt from which Yahweh had once saved Israel - the motif with which Moses' second sermon begins (Deut. 5: 6) - but to far worse. The scorn and ironic diatribe lift this closure of Moses' sermon out of its narrative context. Departing from the specific literary references of old Israel and tradition, the text engages a subtext of political commentary involving the real world of the author. Who are these people who go back to Egypt by ship? Are they, like Solomon before them, buying horses, marrying foreign women and preferring to gain wealth at the expense of their religion? Are they known to the narrator's implied audience? Do we here have a thinly veiled, Taliban-like polemic against the substantial number of diaspora Jews living in Egypt at the time that Deuteronomy was written? There is abundant evidence of Jews living in Egypt. In his Antiquities, the first century author Josephus refers to many Jews who moved 'back' to Egypt, and especially to Alexandria, during the course of the third century BCE. Does the story talk about a present, which is projected into the past it creates?

IMO a more likely historical reference is the captivity of Jehoahaz in the reign of Pharaoh Necho c 608 BCE see 2 Kings 23 (Necho created the Egyptian sea-going navy.)

Andrew Criddle