Reza AslanVerified account

@rezaaslan All power is fleeting. Were tribes of Saul or Solomon truly that powerful or was one society destabilized elsewhere by a force?

@rezaaslan I truly appreciate most of your insights but this seems a bit of historical reach, a rather anachronistic approach.

@rezaaslan How can we read so deeply into ancient societies to understand precisely how information/knowledge was exchanged?

@rezaaslan Let not the lens that prejudices how modern societies steal from one another color how ancient ones learned or exchanged.

@rezaaslan When people wrote/edited ancient texts, writers & readers shared a common interpretive problem, viewing a society in isolation.

@rezaaslan Ancient Israel socio-centrically viewed itself as wantonly attacked by outside forces w/o realizing wider geographical context.

@rezaaslan Many societies tend to crumble more from social forces w/i making them inherently vulnerable to external powers & circumstances.

@rezaaslan Query: If one society "stole" such technology from another, which end of the sword forced them to steal it? #historicalcontext

@rezaaslan Let's take Palestinian society today. Could one blame it for taking technology fr/ an abusive, authoritarian version of Israel?

@rezaaslan Lastly, we cannot view survival so long ago in the same ethical social contracts that should be possible in today's world.