DCHindley wrote: ↑Sat Jul 31, 2021 4:07 amNow in the 1980s among the Hutu population of Rwanda there were extremists who had decided that to overthrow the long-time domination of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority, "*All Tutsi must die!" This was what folks were caught on camera saying as they hacked their neighbors to death with machetes...
1994! Yugoslavian violence also erupted in the 1990s - I vacationed (!!!) in Croatia in Aug 1990 and it had not yet begun.
If literate and educated 'Americans'/anglophones* miss simple facts within their own lifetimes, how much more is lost 2,000 years ago??? (*I don't know the ethnicity/nationality of DCH; I would guess less than 5% of Americans could identify and explain even rudimentary facts about that genocide.) This is exactly my point.
In the multiple kingdoms/satraps of the Near East, we 'want to' assume
a) there were basically no violent sectarian incidents amongst the Jews, because few/none were recorded. (Rummy's 'Known Unknowns' are not 'Unknown Unknowns')
b) 'Jews tolerated one another' because ethnic/religious affinity, etc. (Unsupported belief, from bias/'positive prejudice')
c) the successful Roman Empire controlled everything, ergo there wasn't (internecine) conflict. (Wrong Thinking).
My point, and what I'm grappling with, is how to gauge the underlying conflict
between Jewish factions in Egypt - where a million Jews just 'disappeared' in the period 38-118 AD. Admittedly, this is a different Diaspora case, in a distant area (than Saul/Paul), etc. but I wonder if some of the same factors came into play. Saul is believed to have persecuted the Assembly of God; it is useful to try to understand what that meant, exactly. Egypt is a much more dramatic case: I do think there was a true genocide of the Egyptian Jews c.116 AD - ignored, forgotten, too awful to admit - but internecine factors (however inconvenient) and darker complexities must also be considered. Philo's writings hint at secret organizations and nefarious antinominian preachers - I suppose some conflict existed. **I presume there were no 'Pharisees' in power in Egypt. Their equivalent were ...?** And such an internecine conflict may have set the stage - or helped precipitate? - the 'disappearance' of a million people. Its almost unfathomable, really.
Another example: I don't believe the 'sicarii' appeared overnight. Misunderstandings around this mysterious 'faction' are discussed by Steve Mason,
Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary: Judean War 2, 1b, [2008] n.1604:
Certain sicarii, still carrying this name that Josephus connects with a technique for urban assassination (not with an ideology), will go to Masada under Eleazar’s leadership (4.400, 516; 7.253-311); yet after the reportedly complete self-destruction of the group there, a substantial number of sicarii (600-1,000?) escape to Alexandria from somewhere to cause further trouble (7.410-419). Yet again, after they have been removed to a man (7.416), “the madness of the sicarii” reappears in Cyrene—in the odd form of a general trouble-maker (not apparently an urban dagger-assassin) named Jonathan (7.437-444; for analysis, Brighton 2005: esp. 194-201). Even in the present passage, Josephus describes former friends using concealed knives to eliminate each other as part of the same social problem (2.254, 255-256): this does not sound like a political or militant organization, but only a means of killing; the label sicarii seems to lack content.
I think the vague term 'sicarii' may conflate Zealots/nationalists, terrorists/anarchists, opportunists/gangsters, psychopath beserkers and common murderers. See Marijn J. Vandenberghe, "Villains Called Sicarii: A Commonplace for Rhetorical Vituperation in the Texts of Flavius Josephus" in
Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period Vol. 47, No. 4/5 (2016), pp. 475-507.