The Dangerous Power of American Sunday School Pseudo-History

Eye-rack. Eye-ran. And a visit to Armageddon.

The largest buildup of American firepower in one place since 2003, 40 to 50 percent of the nation’s deployable air power, is clustered around Iran right now. Yesterday the State Department started evacuating the embassy in Beirut. And the Washington Post reports the Pentagon can’t figure out what to do with an additional half a trillion dollars Secretary Kegseth has acquired from American taxpayers.

What is going on? While the media is riveted on credible evidence that the DOJ is hiding FBI interviews with a Trump accuser (reported by the Freakshow last week) will Trump use the State of Union to announce some diversionary Hellfire on the Middle East?

I never was a Tucker Carlson fan. Frat boy smirk, platforming a Hitler stan, Neanderthal views on women and men - although I am neutral on ball-tanning. But since Fox turfed him out he seems to have hit his stride with courageous hardball interviews of performative Christian warmongers. He exposed Ted Cruz’s ignorance about Iran, whose destruction the Texas Senator has been cheerleading for a decade.

Last week, Carlson sat down with Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and for two hours challenged our man in Jerusalem’s Bible Belt pseudo-history of the Middle East. To his credit Huckabee did not flee, even though occasionally in visible panic as he explained American policy with fifth century B.C.E. legends.

The entire interview is worth watching for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the End-Times mythology and bloodthirsty Biblical lunacy undergirding American policy as we verge on an attack on Iran for no other reason than that it is Israel’s last regional foe.

Among the gaffes: to the horror of our allies in the Middle East - who have officially objected - Huckabee proclaimed that although the Bible says God promised the Jews an Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile (“It would be fine if they took it,” he said), he believes Israel would settle for the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

“River to the Sea” is of course what some pro Palestinian protesters have been heard to chant - to great criticism and college speech clampdowns. But anyone who has been to Israel knows river to sea is also a phrase religious nationalists and Christian Zionists do expect to define the borders of Israel.

Carlson also got Huckabee, nominal follower of lamb-protecting Jesus, to repeatedly excuse murder and maiming of children in Gaza with, either they were armed by Hamas, or just, “that’s war.” At least he didn’t look Tucker dead in the eye as Sen. Lindsay Graham did last week when asked about Gaza, and say, “Flatten It”.

Will the most powerful military in the history of the planet once again be applied to back policy rooted in an American Sunday school teacher’s history of the Middle East? Seems possible.

Watching Huckabee fish around in his head for Bible verses, I was reminded of an incident while researching my 2006 book about archaeological forgery Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land. To report the book I spent months in Israel, drove to archaeological sites from the Galilee to the Negev, and interviewed secular and religious experts in archaeology, epigraphy and related fields.

I also spent time with a few busloads of Christian tourists delivered by preachers to Biblical sites. One afternoon I tagged along with a group visiting Tel Megiddo, better known to eschatologists as the site of the final battle, Armageddon. Armageddon of course is the end of the world, predicted in Revelation, which evangelical Christians believe will happen when all the Jews have returned to Israel. For that reason, Megiddo is a standard stop on the religious tours that traverse the Holy Land, hourly, daily, weekly, year-round.

I tagged along with a group of white South African pilgrims whose tour had already taken them through the Galilee, into Nazareth, dipped into the River Jordan and was headed to Jerusalem later that afternoon.

I already knew there was a political/archaeological dispute about the meaning of some of the finds at Megiddo. The first archaeologists to excavate Megiddo from the University of Chicago in the 1920s focused on the pre-biblical societies whose remains were at the bottom of the tel. Israeli diggers in the 1980s worked a bit higher on the mound, and were more interested in Biblical history, specifically the story that King Solomon built Megiddo and that the city became the center of the so-called United Monarchy that officially brought the people of ancient Israel together as one nation.

The Israeli archaeologists dated newly excavated ruins to the time of King Solomon, and soon they were being used to support the claim that Solomon had created a united Jewish nation as described in the Bible. But in the 1990s, a prominent Israeli archaeologist named Israel Finkelstein challenged the Biblical interpretation of Megiddo. Finkelstein, head of the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University, then co-wrote a book, in English, re-casting the dates of the ruins at Megiddo to a hundred years later. He challenged the notion that palatial ruins at Megiddo were the Biblical Solomon’s palaces. In doing so, Finkelstein brought down upon himself the wrath of both religiously-inclined archaeologists who pegged him as having an atheist agenda, and the resentment of Israeli nationalists, who questioned his patriotism.

This little conflict was on my mind as I followed the tour guide up the tel. And while the Christian guide seemed knowledgeable on archaeological terminology, he either didn’t know about or didn’t care to share the competing theories with his band of pilgrims. Instead, as we ascended the tel, he described its history in terms of the Bible’s stories.

He reminded us that in the New Testament, Jesus stopped at Megiddo while he was walking south on the road from Nazareth, and met a Samaritan lady by the well near Megiddo (the crowd softly mm-hmmm-ed). “The Samaritan – a pagan – doesn’t like Jesus and she might have poisoned him but he assumes she won’t and she doesn’t.” The guide then launched into the Biblical history of Megiddo, starting with “the time of Solomon, when Megiddo was built up as a large royal city.” As we walked, one of the pilgrims pointed to an incline and said, “That’s Solomon’s ramp.” A sign near some ruins suggested that the style of palace remains were similar to Solomon’s palace in Jerusalem.

Eventually, the guide led his group to the peak of the tel, and a covered viewing deck. From this vantage point, the view was immense. The Jezreel Valley, Israel’s breadbasket, spread out gloriously almost to the horizon, divided into neat squares of agricultural bounty. The Upper Galilee hills of northern Israel – bordering Hezbollah territory - were visible far beyond the plains. To the east, in the haze, hundreds of miles away in the haze, was the edge of ancient Persia – modern Iran.

The guide pointed out the direction of Iran and then shifted into a cinematic tone of voice, befitting the majesty of the view. “Friends, it happened here!” he announced. “The great fight. Would it be the land of the Philistines [sea people] or the land of Israel? Lucky for us David did battle and it became the land of Israel. Will Armageddon be physical or virtual? Who knows, it’s up to the believers. But standing here, in your visionary eyes, you can see the two superpowers, on this great plain.”

A member of the group opened a Bible. After prayer, one of the tourists opined to the group, while pointing in the general direction of Iran, “There is no question they are developing into the sons of darkness and the Judeo-Christians are the sons of light.”

The Megiddo tour guide I had followed was nowhere near as colorful as some who lead the other tens of thousands of Christians pouring out of the buses in the parking lot daily, year-round. “Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?” the tour leader of Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc. said to his traveling flock while a reporter for Vanity Fair was along. American Gary Frazier was riffing off a passage in Revelation predicting that Christ will wreak bloody havoc on his enemies in the end times, so that blood flows out of “the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”

With the reporter watching, Frazier, a colleague of the bonkers Rapture novelist Tim LaHaye, gestured to the Jezreel valley below and calculated: “That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people.”

For further context on the political and financial uses of Biblical archaeology, read my book, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land.