Ancient Tales to Modern Struggles

Day after day, we are all subjected to Europeans cosplaying as Israelites straight out of the Book of Joshua carrying out Old Testament massacres with 21st Century weapons. It should be noted that the massacres detailed within that book very likely did not happen—the archeology does not back them up.

These modern massacres, however, are all too real, as we’ve all seen waking nightmares live-streamed to us every day. In the coming years, the full horror of the Gaza Genocide will be known. There will be those who wonder how it could have happened, and there will be those who support it now who will claim they always opposed it in the future. It should be known there are those of us here and now that oppose it and see it for what it is. We condemn it and the illegitimate entity carrying it out. We also condemn our own governments that support it.

As I write this, the Zionists are planning to bomb Baalbek in Lebanon, a World Heritage site. The city is famous for its ancient Roman temples and has been inhabited for upwards of 11,000 years. It serves as a reminder that the indigenous people of Palestine and Lebanon have a deep and ancient culture. Before Islam and Christianity and even before Judaism, they had a mythology as rich as Egypt, Mesopotamia, or ancient Greece, even though most of the Levantine myths survive in a fragmentary form.

But in those texts, we see stories of gods and heroes alike slain to be avenged by their sisters. Haddu, the Storm God, was killed by Mot, the god of Death. Mot’s threats—“If you do not give me one of your brothers to eat, I will consume the multitudes of the Earth!”—would not be out of place in a Netanyahu speech.

I know this is small comfort to the people of Palestine and Lebanon. And it is small comfort to me knowing that nothing I do here and now will save any lives over there. And in our powerlessness to stop this atrocity, it can be hard to find any hope at all. But these stories give me hope.

The Storm God’s sister, the warrior goddess Anat, then seeks out Mot and “split him with a sword, winnowed him with a sieve, burned him with fire, ground him with millstones, and sowed him in the fields.” The act of sowing likely led to her brother’s resurrection (the text is fragmentary here). Originally, it was probably a seasonal myth, but I see seeds of the resurrection of Palestine and Lebanon. I see women like Rania Khalek and Ghadi Francis and all the other unnamed and unknown Palestinian and Lebanese women giving so much more, and like Anat, confronting Death himself.

The people of Palestine will endure horrible suffering (which we will witness), and there is little those of us in the West can do about it. But we will see Lebanon and Palestine rise again. While just knowing that may not do much today, or probably tomorrow, holding on to that gives us courage to tell others about it and open their eyes. Caitlin Johnstone says it better than I do: “The more eyes are opened to what’s going on, the more hands we will have working toward the task of waking up the others. This allows for the possibility of nonlinear growth, which means things could move very quickly from looking impossible to looking inevitable.”

And on that note, I’ll end with Haddu’s message to his sister Anat:

“Remove war from the Earth,
set love into the ground,
pour peace into the heart of the Earth,
tranquility into the heart of the fields.”1

ENDNOTE:

1Ilimilku the Scribe, trans. by Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith in Stories From Ancient Canaan.

Andrew M. Johnson is an artist and writer living in Arizona. Read other articles by Andrew M..