FURTHER COMMENTARY ON MARK 7:24

[Addendum to my post:

https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/02/jesus-jews-are-masters-of-phoenician.html]

I have asked several Christian clergymen about their interpretation of the story of the Phoenician-Greek-Syro-Canaanite woman, in which any common sense reader can see that Jesus was at the very least prejudiced against non-Jews and clearly declared his mission to be the salvation of the Jewish people and not anyone else. Their embarrassed response generally plays on word meaning and translation issues. Many translations from the original Greek suggest that the Church in general was not comfortable with this passage, as it shows Jesus as a Jewish racist supremacist who really didn’t care about delivering his message to non-Jews.

Some try to minimize the shocking impact of acknowledging Jesus’s Jewish nationalism and perhaps racism by resorting to translations and interpretations. One Catholic clergyman from Poland tried to explain his way out of the dilemma by saying that when Jesus compares Phoenicians to the dogs of the Jewish masters/children, he means “cute little doggies” or pets as a term of endearment and did not intend to disparage non-Jews. I am not surprised by this priest who idiotically equates a modern day "western" attitude to pets with the attitude of Bronze Age Near Eastern people. He's Polish after all: Stupid and ultra-conservative Catholics who, not long ago, declared Jesus to be King of Poland [See re-posted piece from 2016 archives: [https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/04/2016-archives-poles-turn-right-back-to.html ]. 

Indeed, several English translations of this passage deliberately and unethically insert the adjective “little” before the word “dogs”. Fact is, to the present day, a “dog” in the Semitic Near East is a derogatory term. Calling someone a dog in this part of the world could get you in trouble. It is injurious and insulting and generally refers to someone who is submissive, without dignity and honor, capable of base and vile actions. That is, in my opinion, what Jesus meant: To disparage the Phoenicians, at the time the neighbors of the Hebrews, to show them as lowly creatures who come begging him, the supreme Jewish lord claiming to be no less than the son of God, for a few misery crumbs of his supposed “divine” powers. Note that the Phoenicians are also a Semitic people, probably the closest to the Jewish Hebrews in their culture, language and religious practices, and that poor "dog" woman apparently spoke the same language, Aramaic, as the arrogant Jewish "master" Jesus. Imagine if that woman was an African or an Asian or a European... Jesus might have ordered his disciples to stone her to death per Jewish tradition.

So, to dispel any ambiguities, I have researched the original Greek text and placed side-by-side a literal English translation next to the Greek text, specifically to avoid any embellishment or alteration of the text for aesthetic or grammatical reasons, but instead to leave the text as raw and as close to the intent of the author as possible.

Mark’s gospel was written in Greek, and many agree that it was written some 100 years after the supposed existence of Jesus (certainly after 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem). Also, there is consensus that it was written anonymously (i.e. no one knows who the author is), and the name “Mark” was made up by the early Church to grant the text some authority. [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark] for details. For the Greek text below, I have used the “Berean Greek New Testament 2016” out of several options available on the site shown below. I do not read Greek, but I am flabbergasted that all these church experts and bible scholars cannot even agree on the original Greek text as it was written. I suspect they disagree perhaps on translating from ancient to modern Greek? It’s mayhem, I tell you, that the so-called “word of God” is so metamorphic that one wonders about the fallacy of it all. 

(Matthew's version of the story is even worse. See: Matthew 15:21-24)
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From https://biblehub.com/texts/mark/7-24.htm

Mark:7-24
Greek:
Ἐκεῖθεν δὲ ἀναστὰς ἀπῆλθεν εἰς τὰ ὅρια Τύρου. Καὶ εἰσελθὼν εἰς οἰκίαν οὐδένα ἤθελεν γνῶναι, καὶ οὐκ ἠδυνήθη* λαθεῖν·

Literal English:
From there also, having risen up, he went away into the region of Tyre and Sidon. And having entered into a house, no one he was wishing to know, and not he was able to be hidden.

Mark 7:25
Greek:
ἀλλ’ εὐθὺς ἀκούσασα γυνὴ περὶ αὐτοῦ, ἧς εἶχεν τὸ θυγάτριον αὐτῆς πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον, ἐλθοῦσα προσέπεσεν πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ·

Literal English:
But immediately, having heard a woman about him, of whom had the little daughter of her spirit unclean, having come, fell at the feet of him.

Mark 7:26
Greek:
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἦν Ἑλληνίς, Συροφοινίκισσα τῷ γένει· καὶ ἠρώτα αὐτὸν ἵνα τὸ δαιμόνιον ἐκβάλῃ ἐκ τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς.

Literal English:
Now the woman was Gentile, Syro-Phoenician by race, and kept asking him that the demon he should be cast forth out of the daughter of her.

Mark 7:27
Greek:
Καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτῇ “Ἄφες πρῶτον χορτασθῆναι τὰ τέκνα· οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ⇔ καλόν λαβεῖν τὸν ἄρτον τῶν τέκνων καὶ τοῖς κυναρίοις βαλεῖν.”

Literal English:
And he was saying to her, “permit first to be satisfied the children, not for it is good to take the bread of the children, and to the dogs to cast it.”

Mark 7:28
Greek:
Ἡ δὲ ἀπεκρίθη καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ “〈Ναί〉, Κύριε· καὶ τὰ κυνάρια ὑποκάτω τῆς τραπέζης ἐσθίουσιν ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων τῶν παιδίων.”

Literal English:
- but she answered and says to him, “Yes, Lord, even the dogs under the table eat of the crumbs of the children.”

Mark 7:29
Greek:
Καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ “Διὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον ὕπαγε, ἐξελήλυθεν ἐκ τῆς θυγατρός σου τὸ δαιμόνιον.”

Literal English:
And he said to her, “because of this – word, go, he has gone forth out of the daughter of you the demon.”

Mark 7:30
Greek:
καὶ ἀπελθοῦσα εἰς τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς εὗρεν τὸ παιδίον βεβλημένον ἐπὶ τὴν κλίνην καὶ τὸ δαιμόνιον ἐξεληλυθός.

Literal English:
And having gone away to the home of her, she found the child lying on the bed, and the demon having gone out.
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As you can see, there is "reducing" Jesus's racism towards the Phoenicians by inserting "little" before "dogs". By referring to the Phoenicians/Greeks/Canaanites as dogs, Jesus reveals his deep-seated hatred of non-Jews, the goyim.

So exalt yourselves, my dear Christian friends, for following a racist Jewish rabbi from antiquity, whose existence may have been invented by his equally racist Jewish followers who wanted to topple the superpower of the time, the Roman Empire. Worse yet, they had had the audacity to declare him nothing less than the son of a god that exists nowhere else but inside their ignorant skulls of Stone Age barbarians. There is much in the story of Jesus that resembles the elevation by humans, especially fundamentalists, of their leaders since time immemorial to divine status (e.g. the Pharaohs, English and French Kings, Lenin, Stalin, and the divine Korean trinity of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-Un, etc.). It's our human condition, but reasonable people understand it to be so and do not succumb to it.

Lebanon on the Brink

IMF warns Lebanon at 'very dangerous moment' 

For decades, Lebanon's militant civilian organizations both inside and outside the country  warned the international community that the Mafia nowadays in power was itself the maker of the 1975-1990 civil war, that it amnestied itself of the war crimes and crimes against humanity it committed, then was backed into power under the Syrian occupation by crooks in the international community (Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Jacques Chirac, among others). The international community was driven by either political stupidity, intellectual jaundice, simple cowardice in the face of regimes like the Syrian Assad regime and Islamic terrorism, or was simply trading Lebanon to appease the Muslim Arabs and keep siphoning cheap Arab oil.

Money in the billions was knowingly poured into the corrupt pockets of the ruling establishment as aid to Lebanon. Year after year, we reminded the world of its obligation to support genuine grassroots agents of change, and back a new generation of educated economists, scientists, jurists and others in order to lift Lebanon out of the morass of ultra-religiosity, tribalism, feudalism and sectarian identities. But it was all "blowing in the wind". Convenience, just as the French are doing today, drives Western posture vis-à-vis Lebanon: "Let's put a temporary lid and get 'stability' for a while at any cost". So they bribe the ruling Mafia into hurriedly signing half-ass deals, without a shred of due diligence, like the Taef Agreement (1989), the Doha Agreement (2008), and other similar band-aid solutions which they know provide only a temporary reprieve and do not address the fundamental structural problems of the country.

To address these fundamental problems requires imagination and courage, neither of which it seems is available in the minds of western decision-makers and definitely not in the minds of the feudal-religious-tribal cabal in power today.

So when we hear a visiting International Monetary Fund delegation Thursday saying that Lebanon is "at a very dangerous moment",  and criticizing slow progress on reforms needed to unlock billions in loans, we are not surprised, neither should the IMF and other international instances like the UN and its various agencies or the global West (US, France, etc.) be surprised. For decades they had many opportunities, including two major uprisings by a desperate Lebanese population (2005 and 2019) demanding real change, but each time - like right now - the "convenient" and "I have no time for this Lebanese crap" attitude leads again to pushing for a temporary respite, only for the problem to surge back in another decade or so. 

Right now, in the midst of the stalemate over the presidential election, there are several good candidates - successful civilians from the educated, professional, non-sectarian segments of Lebanese society. Yet, the international community, including perfidious France, is trying to impose a "compromise" feudal president with a "compromise" sectarian government, a tune that has never worked in the past and which in fact has led the country to its present demise. The Lebanese people are NOT asking the international community for money, like the ruling class is doing. We are asking the international community to do one of two things:

1- Either endorse, with diplomatic pressures, good marketing, and protection the advent into power of representatives from that educated, professional, non-sectarian segment of Lebanese society, which is standing against the ruling feudal-tribal-sectarian class, since this is the only long-term solution for the new generation of Lebanese;

2- Or fuck-off and get off our backs. Refuse to provide any assistance so long as the current ruling class remains in power. Name the corrupt politicians, investigate them, shame them... instead of sending envoys to negotiate with them.

Corrupt Lebanon and the IMF reached a conditional agreement in April 2022 on a $3-billion-dollar loan needed to save the country's economy, in free fall since 2019. But nearly a year after Beirut signed the agreement, these corrupt officials have yet to enact the substantial changes required to kick-start the 46-month financing program.

"We think Lebanon is at a very dangerous moment, at a crossroads," said Ernesto Ramirez Rigo, the genius head of the IMF delegation in Beirut, warning that continued "policy of inaction is going to leave Lebanon in a never-ending crisis .... Time has gone by. It's almost a year since we have reached an agreement," lamented poor Ernesto, as he urged the corrupt leaders to implement the reforms swiftly, knowing that the corrupt do NOT want, will NOT, and canNOT reform themselves. So why does the IMF continue to negotiate with thieves, criminals and murderers?

In September the IMF had already condemned Beirut's "very slow" progress on implementing these reforms. "The country is in a significant crisis. One would have expected a lot more in terms of implementation," Nobel Prize for Intelligence candidate Ramirez Rigo said. How does he expect more reforms from the same corrupt people his institution and allied institutions have backed for decades, knowing they were stealing the money and were not willing to do any reform? 

Why do these things take geological time in Lebanon? Years go by while the cesspool continues to ferment in this vicious cycle of "collapse-aid to the corrupt who steal the aid-leading to collapse, etc.". Why is it that Sri Lanka got assistance from the IMF and reformed itself within a few weeks after its Chinese-infected economy collapsed? I think we all know the answer: Since it has no resources, Lebanon is a sideshow, a toy country where as long as the economic-financial stakes don't matter, all the protagonists around the globe play a risk-free game: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, France, Turkey, Russia, the US, etc... Except the Lebanese people who have been tormented for five decades by this dynamic between an indifferent international community and a barbaric ruling class. Lebanon is like Afghanistan, minus the turbans and the burkas. Every asshole country around the world has a hypothetical interest in this finch's ass of a country that has no resources to offer them.

Lebanon's meltdown has pushed most of the population into poverty while the political elite, backed by the international community for decades and widely blamed for the country's financial collapse, has failed to take action. Since last year, the country has had no president and only a caretaker government, amid persistent deadlock between rival factions -- while the country plunges deeper into a crisis dubbed by the World Bank as one of the worst in recent global history.

Ramirez Rigo said any solution for Lebanon must include an adjustment of fiscal policies, address banking sector losses and strengthen anti-corruption measures. Lebanese banks have imposed draconian withdrawal restrictions -- essentially locking depositors out of their life savings. "Adjustment"? "Address losses"? "Strengthen anti-corruption measures"? I think qualifiers like "radical, in-depth, complete makeover, upside-down, inside-out, revolutionary, etc...." are more appropriate. The Lebanese people have had it with temporary dainty measures. If the primary interest of Europe and the West in "assisting" Lebanon is to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from taking the sea and land routes to Europe and the West, the half-ass tiptoe measures the IMF and its consorts are proposing will lead to an even worse civil war that will drive millions of people into refugeedom. 

Just like the International Court of Justice has, within a year of his invasion of Ukraine, issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin (who inspires Lebanon's rulers with his macho criminality, except they don't have nuclear weapons), we want the international community to go after everyone of the petty little dictators who control this tiny tormented country and who have stashed their money in Europe and the West !! It should be really easy to do so. After 20 years of proceedings, the Special Tribunal of Lebanon in the Hague found two lowly individuals "associated" with Hezbollah guilty in the 2005 killing of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, himself an imposing part of the corrupt establishment. But the cowardly justice of STL did not frankly name Hezbollah and Syria themselves as the operators behind the guilty individuals. Fear of terrorism? Cowardliness? Avoidance behavior? Who the hell knows. The two guilty individuals remain free under the protection of Lebanon's Hezbollah government itself, which in principle should arrest them and hand them over.

Lebanon has been hijacked and kidnapped by a cabal of sectarian blood-thirsty feudal merchants of death who keep the Lebanese people herded inside tightly-controlled religious concentration camps. We implore the international community to deal with real agents of change and not with the traditionalist feudal criminal warlords whom it should track and prosecute. This is no time to, again, make deals with the fox over whether it should continue to guard the hen-house: It is time to shoot the goddam fox and liberate the hens.

The Two Lebanons

We hear that the French have a plan for the presidential stalemate in Lebanon: a Syrian puppet for president (Sleiman Frangiyeh) and a Saudi puppet for prime minister (Nawaf Salam). Nice balance, but no, thank you, Mr. Macron, because this means continued obstruction and impasse. You may have so many other problems to deal with that you have no time for the Lebanese cesspool. But it is time for the Lebanese to come to terms with real democracy, i.e. field as many candidates for president as there is, go to parliament and vote on the basis of the existing rules and laws. And whoever wins gets to serve for the next 6 years. If the cerebral density of the Lebanese people is beyond repair, then they get who and what they deserve.

Unfortunately, there are two Lebanons on this tiny piece of useless real estate, each the result of hundreds of years of history and cultural development. These two Lebanons occasionally seem to fuse into one homogeneous country, but the religious phantoms of our archaic past have a long shelf-life and continue to undermine such a convergent evolution.

One Lebanon, which I'll call, for lack of a better term, Patriot-Lebanon, is based on a sense of self-identity. This Lebanon is heir to a nucleus of former leaders who, since the mid 1500s, sought and managed to snatch independence from the Ottoman Turks, with important milestones in 1840, 1860 and up to 1919. This is the Lebanon that strove for accommodation and power-sharing, and that remained faithful to the National Pact by dissociating itself from Western custody and becoming a country with one self-defined identity. This is the Lebanon that gained independence in 1920, then kicked out the French in 1943 with the same vigor it displayed in previously kicking out the Ottoman Turks.

The other Lebanon, which I'll call Anti-Lebanon, views itself primarily as part of the wider Islamic Arab world, and sees Lebanon only as a temporary transitional identity definer. This is the Lebanon that originally did NOT want to be part of the independent Lebanon born after WWI, preferring instead the rule of King Faysal's fantasy Arab Kingdom of Syria. Although it reluctantly joined the post-WWI Lebanon, it eventually agreed - or seemed or pretended to agree - to the National Pact according to which it said it would dissociate itself from the Syrian/Arab world, in exchange for Patriot-Lebanon rejecting a western-leaning identity. It was hoped that, together, these two dissociations would by default establish a neutral country, develop over time a strictly Lebanese identity, and keep this small and diverse country stable and prosperous. 

While Patriot-Lebanon demonstrated goodwill - though grudgingly and under Arab pressure - by reaching out to Anti-Lebanon and adopting most of its political platform, becoming a full-fledged Arab country with no Western affiliations, in the hope of forging a common identity, Anti-Lebanon did not reciprocate and did not follow the same convergent path of seeking a unique Lebanese identity. To the contrary, it saw in Patriot-Lebanon's wilful compromise posture a weakness to be further exploited. Instead of rewarding Patriot-Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon dug its heels deeper and instead of neutrality it adopted a hardline posture of further arabization, islamization, and alienation from the West. For example, while Anti-Lebanon never complained about the 400 years (1516-1918) of harsh Muslim Turkish Ottoman occupation, yet it continues to date to nag about the 20-year-long French mandate as an imperialist colonialist enterprise. The reality is that Lebanon was a Turkish colony for 400 years, but it was never a French colony like, say, African French colonies. In fact, Patriot-Lebanon led the charge during WWII to evict its French protectors: the Vichy French first, then the Free French, bringing an end to the French Mandate and gaining full independence in 1943. But no sooner had Patriot-Lebanon chased its French protectors out of the country to demonstrate its thirst for genuine independence and its goodwill for compromise and neutrality, that Anti-Lebanon began reneging on the National Pact and driving the country further into a pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Western posture. Every time an Arab cause raised its head in the region, Anti-Lebanon waged a domestic war against Patriot-Lebanon: 1958 with Egypt's Abdel-Nasser Arab unionist movement; 1961 with the coup d'état fomented by the fascists of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the SSNP; 1965 with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO of Yasser Arafat, that devastated the country; 1979 with the Hezbollah terror organization as the military arm of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. 

This history of the country in the second half of the 20th century clearly shows that Lebanon's Muslims never really intended to build a cohesive neutral country with the Christians. Their occasional "nationalistic" stances (e.g. Rafik Hariri's pretenses) were lies behind which was a hidden, then with time overt, objective to turn Lebanon into a primarily Muslim country that tolerates its Christians as second class Dhimmi citizens, to be used as mere powerless storefront dummies with which to pretend to be multicultural and inclusive.

Patriot-Lebanon has been on the defensive since the inception of the country, while Anti-Lebanon has been on the offensive to violate the agreed-upon National Pact. Patriot-Lebanon managed to steer the country to prosperity between 1943 and the early 1970s, yet the continued assaults of Anti-Lebanon against the National Pact and against Patriot-Lebanon eventually succeeded in dismantling that prosperity and openness. Today's failure and collapse of Lebanon as a state and the stalemate it faces in electing a president are the direct result of the cumulative victories of Anti-Lebanon. The chasm between these two Lebanons continues to widen to the point where the experiment of attempting a fusion appears by all measures to be headed for an utter failure. 

The French proposal for a "cohabitation" of the two camps as a way out of the crisis will only prolong the crisis and continue the disintegration of whatever is left of the country. I don't think the French deliberately seek this path for Lebanon, but theirs is a "I have no time for this pathetic tiny piece of shit called Lebanon" posture, and its proposal is an off-the-cuff idea without any serious consideration for long-term consequences. In fact, this has been the western modus operandi vis-à-vis Lebanon for the past 5 decades. It's just too complex and too uninteresting (no oil, no rare earth metals, etc.) for the mercantile and Cartesian western mind to comprehend and deal with. So nothing serious was ever undertaken by the West to lift Lebanon out of its miseries, a good measure of which is externally caused.

Georges Naccache understood the deep chasm between the two constitutive elements of modern Lebanon that were forcibly joined together in 1920, when he said, "Deux négations ne font pas une nation" (Two negations do not a nation make). By attempting to build a nation out of two rejections (Patriot-Lebanon rejecting Western references and Anti-Lebanon rejecting Arab references to identity), the two Lebanons never really converged and it is time to admit that they failed to become a nation. Unless the Lebanese abandon their religious references in the constitution and in the conduct of their public affairs, there is little hope that the long-desired convergence will materialize. Like in a bad marriage, it is perhaps better to separate, at least for a while and until the two sides are mature enough; if only to save the children from further abuse.