Our Ancient Israelite Soldiers Fighting Standards

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

               Deborah (1150 BCE) wife of Lapidoth,  was a Judge   capable of rousing the Israelite tribes to revolt under Barak, son of Abinoam,  against the Canaanite king, Jabin of Hazor, and Sisera, his ally and commander (Judg.4). How she did it:  She told Barak that the glory of defeating Sisera would not go to him, but to a woman—a prophecy fulfilled when Jael killed Sisera. Jael (Judges 4): In the exact same story as Deborah, the defeated Canaanite general, Sisera, fled the battlefield and hid in the tent of a woman named Jael. While he was asleep, Jael killed him by driving a tent peg through his temple. Some translations or poetic     descriptions (like the Song of Deborah in Judges 5) figuratively describe her crushing or "smiting off" his head, but it was done with a hammer and a tent peg, not a sword. The Israelites had a song of victory, and claimed she was the originator of that.  Barak defeated the league, then Hazor was rebuilt by King Solomon.  Defeating Canaanite Oppression: She summoned the Israelite general Barak and directed a successful military campaign that liberated Israel from King Jabin and his commander Sisera after 20 years of subjugation

When Joshua had been their national leader and died, Israelis or Hebrews were left without a leader and every man did what was proper in his own eyes (Judges 17:6)

 Early Israelite combatants (soldiers) frequently utilized basic or repurposed agricultural implements (such as ox-goads or sickles) alongside slings and wooden staves due to limited access to metalworking.

Elders of the community acted, leading their own people.  Afterwards, the soldier-leader, priest or prophet assumed in  addition to his chief function, that of Judge.

Ancient Israelite fighting standards combined tribal militia obligations, evolving weaponry, and strict religious and hygienic codes of conduct. They followed the Mosaic Code laid down by Moses himself.  

When at war with your enemies; and feel lust,  and see  beautiful woman, and desire her, you my take her to yourself for a wife.  You shall bring her to the middle of your house, she shall shave her head and let her nails grow, she shall remove her clothing and sit in your house and she shall cry for her parents for one month.  After that you may come to her and live with her.  But if you do not desire her, then you shall send her on her own, but cannot sell her for money. You shall not enslave her because you have afflicted her.  (Deut.21) This law enabled the lustful soldier of age 20  to cool down and not sin.  This can also show us how our DNA became mixed with other neighboring peoples.  Wartime, as it still goes on from WWII.  

Localized Mobilization: A judge, people who were leaders before kings were invented, such as Deborah or Othniel, Ehud,  Joshua, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, ,  rarely commanded the entire nation. Instead, they summoned coalitions of nearby tribes. For example, Deborah and Barak called upon the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun to face the Canaanites, while Gideon rallied Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali against the Midianites.

Spiritual Purity: According to biblical tradition, armies were required to maintain ritual cleanliness and moral obedience, viewing victory as dependent on divine favor.

Rules of Engagement: Armies were instructed to offer terms of peace before a siege. During sieges of distant cities, enemy combatants were targeted, while non-combatants who surrendered or fled were generally spared under specific Deuteronomic guidelines.

 Soldiers maintained sanitary field camps by carrying a small spike or paddle to bury human waste. Laws also restricted the wanton destruction of food sources, such as fruit-bearing trees, during a siege. 

Early organization relied on general levies of able-bodied men aged 20 and older, structured by tribal affiliations and led by tribal or religious figures. 

Exemptions: Mosaic law provided exemptions from military service for practical and morale reasons, such as men who had recently built a house, planted a vineyard, or betrothed a wife, as well as the fearful.          

              King Saul the 1st king of the Israelites

                                    Jonathan taking out an arrow for his bow

Jonathan: Saul’s son who launched a surprise attack on a Philistine garrison at Geba and routed their forces at Michmash with his armor-bearer.

              David,  an armor-bearer to Saul at age 25, friend of Saul's son Jonathan, displayed his military prowess in war with the Philistines;  a one-man army against Goliath when just a kid, able to use a sling-shot to his advantage and hit the enemy in the head. He became the leader we still admire and sing about, our KING !.  

 During the United Monarchy (11th–10th centuries BCE), leaders like King Saul and King David shifted reliance from decentralized militias to more centralized, professional core units, royal guards, and institutionalized chariotry. 

     Tactical Evolution: Over time, access to iron expanded, and tactics evolved to incorporate coordinated infantry, archers, and eventually royal chariot divisions under centralized royal command. 

Technological Disadvantage: Neighboring groups like the Philistines held early monopolies on iron metallurgy, leaving Israelites reliant on bronze, stone, wood, and improvised weapons during the early periods.  They had to use their brains, instead.

Edited:  9:07am, 9/25/26 

Resource:

AI

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

Who Founded Jerusalem ?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Jerusalem wasn't built by a single person; it was continuously constructed and reshaped by various civilizations over 5,000 years. Its earliest foundations were built by Canaanites and Jebusites. The city is first mentioned in Egyptian execration texts around 2000 BCE as "Rusalimum." By the 17th century BCE, Jerusalem had developed into a fortified city under Canaanite rule, with massive walls protecting its water system. . During the 14th century BCE, the city was an independent Canaanite stronghold ruled by Egyptian vassals, as documented in the Amarna Letters.During the Late Bronze Age  Jerusalem became a vassal of Ancient Egypt, as documented in the Amarna letters.                      

  The Amarna Letters are a cache of nearly 400 clay tablets discovered in 1887 at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt. Dating to the mid-14th century BC, this royal archive records diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs (mainly Amenhotep III and Akhenaten) and the rulers of neighboring kingdoms and vassal states.The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian; one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24—was written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.

The city's importance grew during the Israelite period, which began around 1000 BCE when King David captured Jerusalem and made it the capital of the united Kingdom of Israel

Major builders include King David (ruled from 1010-970 BCE) and King Solomon (961-920 BCE) , and then King Herod I(37-4 BCE) son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean mother,  and the

Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled from 1520-1566) who was a Muslim  with Muslim Ottoman  rulers holding it for the last 400 years to WWI where they lost it.  

The Canaanites and Jebusites (ca. 3000–1000 BCE): The first settlements trace back to the Early Bronze Age. It was later fortified and inhabited by the Jebusites before its conquest.  They lived in he hill region around Jerusalem and called it Jebus.  Joshua, the leader that Moses had to take over the Exodus, defeated the Jebus coalition but Israelites only lived there during the reign of King David.  (II Sam. 24:15.).  Jebus people had a king, the last being Araunah.  His people remained in the city under David and became tributary under King Solomon, David's son.  They were assimilated into the Israelites.                                 

                      First Temple by Solomon

King David ruled for 40 years and King Solomon ruled for 41 years=81 years (ca. 1000–950 BCE): King David captured the city, making it the capital of the ancient kingdom of Israel. His son, King Solomon, significantly expanded the city and built the First Temple. 

Herod the Great ruled  as King of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE;  for 33 years . He was appointed "King of the Jews" by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE , but his actual reign began in 37 BCE after he successfully captured Jerusalem and ousted his rivals.  Under Roman rule, King Herod the Great heavily developed Jerusalem, expanding the Temple Mount and rebuilding the Second Temple. King Herod I ("Herod the Great") was a practicing adherent to Judaism. However, he was not ethnically Jewish by birth; his ancestral background was Idumean (Edomite) and Nabatean Arab. His relationship with Judaism was complex and widely debated by his contemporaries: Herod the Great   was the ruler who ordered the "Massacre of the Innocents" (the killing of young boys in Bethlehem ) in an attempt to eliminate the prophesied infant king. This is when Moses was placed in the bullrushes, a hidden area.  

• Ancestral Conversion: The Idumeans were an ancient neighboring people who had been forcibly converted to Judaism a generation prior under the Hasmonean dynasty. Because he followed Jewish law, he was legally considered a Jew and observed Jewish customs, which allowed him to rule over Judea.

Jewish Revolt Against occupation of Romans-66-70 CE, Romans took Jerusalem, starved the Jews, took them as slaves, killed them, some got away- were threatened to never come back to Jerusalem-now a Roman fortress or face death.  

The Romans (135 CE): Following the Jewish revolt, the Roman Emperor Hadrian entirely rebuilt the city as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina. 

Suleiman the Magnificent (ca. 1537 CE): The iconic walls surrounding Jerusalem's Old City today were commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.

 Ottoman forces defeated the Mamluks and gained control of Jerusalem in 1516 -1917= 401 years. 

Brief Interruption: The empire lost the city for nine years between 1831 and 1840, when Muhammad Ali of Egypt occupied it before Ottoman authority was restored .

End of Rule: British forces, led by General Edmund Allenby, captured the city in December 1917 during World War I, permanently ending Ottoman control.

Resource:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herod-king-of-Judaea

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

Causes of Knowing Right From Wrong Part II

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. Socrates was born in 470 or 469 BC to Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, a stoneworker and a midwife, respectively, in the Athenian deme of Alopece; therefore, he was an Athenian citizen, having been born to relatively affluent Athenians. He lived close to his father's relatives and inherited, as was customary, part of his father's estate, securing a life reasonably free of financial concerns. His education followed the laws and customs of Athens. He learned the basic skills of reading and writing and, like most wealthy Athenians, received extra lessons in various other fields such as gymnastics, poetry and music. His family religion was to believe in many gods who lived on 

Mt. Olympus and 

acted pretty  much like people on earth.  Although he never outright rejected the standard Athenian view of religion, Socrates' beliefs were nonconformist. He often referred to God rather than the gods, and reported being guided by an inner divine voice.

Religion is one way of conditioning people to understand right from wrong.  Another is something we all should be born with, and that is our conscience.  Knowing right from wrong has been the topic of conversation ever since the Greeks with Socrates.  

Conscience. is , a personal sense of the moral content of one's own conduct, intentions, or character with regard to a feeling of obligation to do right or be good.  It's developed by the ethics of the family one belongs to, usually.  

Historically, almost every culture has recognized the existence of such a faculty. Ancient Egyptians, for example, were urged not to transgress against the dictates of the heart, for one “must stand in fear of departing from its guidance.”  They understood it to be something we're born with to guide our behaviors.  We find today that there are people who have missed that gene, and seem to be amoral--without a moral compass, and that certainly is a sickness as they do get in a lot of trouble.  

Being amoral  appears in the late 1800s. The prefix a- means "not" or "without," as in atypical or asymptomatic. The dictionary definition of amoral is "having or showing no concern about whether behavior is morally right or wrong"—compendiously, "without morals." For example, an infant, unlearned in what is right and wrong, is amoral; someone who lacks the mental ability to understand right or wrong due to illness might be described as amoral. These are illustrative examples, however; amoral can be used to describe any person, or his or her actions, who is aware of what is right and wrong but does wrong anyway and responds indifferently about it.  Amoral can describe those actions with no moral consequence or intention. 

Immoral, on the other hand, describes those actions with bad or harmful intent or consequences. 

Obviously moral would then describe the actions stemming from good intentions.

 In some belief systems, conscience is regarded as the voice of God and therefore a completely reliable guide of conduct:

 Among the Hindus it is considered “the invisible God who dwells within us.” Among Western religious groups, the Society of Friends (or Quakers) places particular emphasis on the role of conscience in apprehending and responding through conduct to the “Inner Light” of God.

A growing number of researchers now believe  that babies are in fact born with an innate sense of morality, and while parents and society can help develop a belief system in babies, they don’t create one. A team of researchers at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, known as The Baby Lab, showed us just how they came to that conclusion.

Dr. Karen Wynn runs the Baby Lab, and she and her team have been studying the minds and behaviors of babies for decades. About eight years ago they began running a series of studies on babies under 24 months to see how much these babies understand about good and bad behavior.

Paul Bloom, author of “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil” and a professor of psychology at Yale, says these studies show that even before babies can speak or walk, they judge good and bad in the actions of others because they are born with a rudimentary sense of justice.

But Bloom, who is married to Wynn, says this sense of justice is “tragically limited.” Although babies are born with an innate sense of morality, they are also born with flaws.

Thus the need to be raised in a condusive environment praising good and reflecting disappointment in evil acts.

I can't help but think of the act of the Aztec Indians of Central America who manually ripped hearts out of living prisoners for sacrifice.  How could anyone watch this and think it was morally okay?  One thing, they all must have been scared to death.

Canaanite Baal worship-an idol that is a bull and considered their god. This worship included human sacrifice.  How could they watch such an act and not feel pain; empathy for the victim?  

Therefore, the environment that one is raised in is most important as to their ethics and how they came by them in order to continue them, even though we supposedly are born with a conscience.  At least we are given something to build upon.  

Believe it or not, it was very hard for our prophets to stop people from attending such ceremonies and act and take part in this belief system. Something so horrid should have made their stomachs curdle.  Idol worship ultimately led to cruelty in some form or other.

 How did Nazis justify their killing of Jews?  How did they live with this knowledge?  6 million people were killed because of their religion.  This is the most horrible act ever on this planet by man.

Resource:

https://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/baby-lab-morals-ac360/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/using-unmoral-immoral-nonmoral-amoral#:~:text=The%20dictionary%20definition%20of%20amoral,due%20to%20illness%20might%20be

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/socrates#:~:text=Although%20he%20never%20outright%20rejected,by%20an%20inner%20divine%20voice.