Week 5! Half way there :)

 Much of this week lecture focused on the rise of literacy in Jerusalem and its effect. We also talked about the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE and how religious believers dealt with the fall of the City of David.

Firs,t we began with talking about the Lanchish Letters, which showed that literacy was spreading and more and more people were learning how to read and write. Next we talked about the Ostracon and how the writing on the pottery can be tied to scriptures such as Exodus and Amos. These texts referred to the writing down of laws and about people taking advantage of others. We then talked about the 2 silver emulates that were found. The emulates are important because they showed that literacy was spreading so much that people were wearing it. And, further, how by writing stuff down it can now be analyzed and they last longer than human’s, literacy changes everything.

The second half of lecture dealt with the fall of Jerusalem. Jerusalem fell in 586 BCE to the Babylonians. The Babylonians took over the city and exiled all the nobles, leaving just the poor in the city. With the fall of the Temple and Jerusalem we saw what is called cognitive dissonance. For years the people of Jerusalem believed that God was protecting the city and because of God’s promise to David, the city would never fall. But when the city did fall, people had no idea what to do because their beliefs contradicted reality. Some chose to abandon religion all together and others reinterpreted the promise to David and transformed their beliefs, in a way, to match reality. We ended with the discussion of Psalms and Lamentations all which related to the fall of Jerusalem and the people’s way of dealing with cognitive dissonance.

I feel like the end of today’s lecture was really interesting and could even be applied to life and religion now. How do people who believe in God deal when something horrific happens to them? Do they abandon religion or do the reinterpret it to match what is occurring? As someone who is not very religious at all I find it fascinating how people never seems to blame God, they look at themselves and often claim that they did something to deserve this, that they were in the wrong.