Posted by panch from customer-148-233-93-71.uninet.net.mx (148.233.93.71) on Friday, March 07, 2003 at 12:58PM :
The Siloam Tunnel or...
If You're Going To Buy Bullshit By The Gross...why quibble over a little more.
Asstians (Assyrian Christians) compensate for their self-loathing and the constant drubbing the Assyrian Heritage has received from the chosen people of, "Their Lord", by pointing out that Yahwe DOES like them...for lo and verily, He did manage to find some usefull things for them to do...and then He DID include them in the General Amnesty he issued to his own darling thugs....which they, and not we, needed desperately.
Every time a Hebrew made a mud pie back then it was an "astounding feat" and every palace an Assyrian built was just testimony to the bloodthirstiness of the kind of people who WOULD create a magnificanet civiliztion.
Here's another quote from Gordon and Rendsburg's book, "The Bible and the Ancient Near East" which, if there was any justice in the world, or Assyrians worth the name, would have been titled, "The Ancient Near East, and the bible". Listen up...
"In 2 Kings 20:20 we read that Hezekiah constructed a tunnel to bring water into the city. This watercourse known as the Siloam Tunnel, was found by early explorers in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, complete with a Hebrew inscription telling how the tunnel was hewn (Seems them Hebrews could dig a hole that STAYED dug, by gum!). The workers began at separate ends, eventually they heard each other through the stone, and then they joined their two sections as water flowed through the tunnel. The watercourse, moreover, is not a direct line; Instead, it cuts through the rock in an S-shape course. It remains A MARVEL OF ENGINEERING (Emphasis mine...to point out the authors EMPHASIS...which you aren't supposed to notice as "emphasis"...just more every-day Jew "miracles" and "marvels")...and scholars still debate how the two crews of workers met one another."
No one ever accused scholars of having a whole lot of useful things to do. Okay...so what do we learn...I mean take away the self-promotion...the desperate attempt to appear to be Players in the Ancient Near East, even if it meant glorifying a hole in the ground...like the Solomonic buttress to a hillside... the trully "Miraculous" effort to make the most of the least the authors "breathlessly" tell us about in this miracle of engineering...(and you thought the Hanging Gardens were something!) and you have just exactly...what?
I get the feeling from re-reading this book several times that the authors are conflicted, as in, "How much do we dare try to get away with at one sitting". They sort of know they have to serve the over-riding goal...which is to promote the residents of one piss poor city in Canaan and the bloody people that occupied it...but on the other hand they aren't complete fools either who also know they must not appear to be too obviously dealing in whoppers and exaggerations...cause the bible can't take too much more of "stretching". I picture one of them saying to the other, after they completed that marvelous and miraculous tunnel bit of "creative writing", that they better at least add a footnote to kind of tone the thing down...counting on the fact that no one is going to bother to read it...so pig happy are you all whenever anything "miraculous" is told by and of them Jew Foreskins of yours that gave you "Your Lord".
And indeed there is just such a footnote...and you'll find once again that the incidental, yet telling comment should have received top billing...and the "miracle" should have been the "footnote".
Here's the footnote, in all its stark candor...not a strong point in Hebrew Hoohah...
" The most likely hypothesis (see, I like that...with them Hebrews indigestion couldn't just be a gas attack from eating sweetened bugs...I mean why waste the chance to have an "epiphany", why NOT make a fart into a "revellation"...just like a simple explanation has to be dressed up as a "Hypothesis") is that they followed the natural fissures in the rock. This would have made their task of hewing the rock easier, and it also assured them that they would meet somewhere in the middle."
This is a footnote?
Aw DAMN!...there goes one more perfectly useful miracle...there goes the "Siloamonic" tunnel...there goes Hebrew "inventiveness" and "engineeringness"...there goes one more perfectly good example of what them Hebrews did best...what they REALLY "gave you"...the SHAFT baby...the grand, lovely, well oiled, indispensible (if you're gonna get into Jew Heaven and see the Author of all these manifest and paltry miracles and what-nots) SHAFT!....another word for which just happens to be TUNNEL!
Stay tuned for my next book..."How I Became a Christian and Got The Siloamonic Shaft Up My Tunnel"
-- panch
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