I was struck by these key similarities between heroic literature and the imaginings of the religious right while I was reading Maria Headley’s new translation of Beowulf. I have always been impressed by the essential similarity in values portrayed in heroic poems like Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the Muallaqat, across the boundaries of civilizations. Now I see the values of the radical right reverberate with those heroic epics.

Consider this: Beowulf the hero is famed for his masculine strength. He regales us with narcissistic accounts of his exploits, like spending an entire night underwater hunting down sea-dragons to make the shipping lanes safe, single-handedly! He kills the monster Grendel by tearing out his arm, and then decapitates Grendel’s grieving monster-mother after death-defying combat. His reward: gifts of bejeweled weapons from the palace plunder. Winners are glorified and enriched; losers dispossessed and disemboweled. Beautiful queens exist to serve the heroes mead and sex. Action gives life meaning; monsters and dragons stand by and the gods (and God; the setting is Christianizing Europe) stand back. The fulcrum of existence is muscular power; to kill or be killed; to amass treasure by raiding weaker neighbors.

Like Beowulf in Europe, heroic poetry survived Islam’s inception, not only the exploits of Antār in the Muallaqat (hung in the Ka’abah) but the deeds of Alexander (Iskandarnamah, referenced in the Qur’an) and the ‘descent’ of Persian Kings (Shahnamah). Heroic kings, such as the Caliphs Omar (Conquest of Jerusalem) and Harun Al-Rashid (Thousand and One Nights), colour Islamic history. In 1970s Jordan every guest room displayed two photographs, one of King Hussein and one of Gamal Abdul Nasser – so guests could bask in their glorious gazes.

Valour without Forethought

Heroic literature thrives in hopeless times. When people feel abandoned by age-old precepts and established rituals, heroic literature fills the void with imagined victories of muscle over monster, celebrated in epic song. Today’s society, feeling bereft by corruption and distraught by catastrophe, is ready for the promise of tough words delivered by manly men wielding assault weapons or shouting from bully pulpits and “resolute” desks promising mighty deeds to defeat modern monsters and daemons in cleansing battles on blood-soaked fields at Dabiq or Armageddon. Muscles flex, bullets fly, words clatter, but thought is ignored, absent.

In the novel Grendel, John Gardner retold Beowulf through the eyes of the monster Grendel, the ravager of King Hrothgar’s palace. Grendel, spying on palace life between bouts of cannibalistic mayhem, is mystified by the never-ending cycle of military raiding and brain-fogging mead-drinking he witnesses, and realizes that human lives are even more senseless than his own. Then, when in the raging combat Beowulf tears off his arm, Grendel flees, not cowardly, but from overwhelming futility. Reluctantly we feel sympathy for the bloodthirsty but self-questioning Grendel, and disgust for the heroic but self-aggrandizing Beowulf.

With Grendel Gardner overturns my prior notion that the imaginary worlds of epic poetry preceded philosophy as civilization emerged from the mythic past (Before Philosophy, Frankfort). Emulation of the heroic is a choice for action against thought and science that recurs in history. Understanding this helps explain the anti-intellectual behavior of rightwing religious movements. Both radical Islam and Christianity identify thought-based religious and civic institutions (dubbed “apostate” and “secularist” respectively) as the enemy requiring heroic defeat in epic battle.

Headley’s earlier book, Mere Wife, a feminist retelling of Beowulf in a gated-community setting, similarly portrays Grendel’s monster-mother more sympathetically and the “queen” (a gated-community socialite) as a power-scheming materialist. Epic conflict here is not the gnostic good-evil struggle portrayed in the Assassin stories of Islam or the Superman comics of America, but a tragic struggle against self-aggrandizing, greed-driven quests for status and power tempting all of us. In interviews Headley called Beowulf “an epic for our time.”

Vainglorious Death

Heroic death in epic poetry, like Beowulf’s immolation in flaming dragon breath, is a tragic consequence of hubris. In both early Christianity and Islam, heroic death was associated with martyrdom in God’s war against Satan. Shi’ite Islam memorialized the murder of Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, much as Christians remember the stoning of Stephen.

In radical Islam those who die in the wars against “apostates” and “infidels” are portrayed as martyrs in elaborately staged suicide mission ceremonies for media consumption. (Salar Abdoh’s Out of Mesopotamia gives graphic portrayals of institutionalized martyrdom). In terrorist tactics, for example, al-Qaeda’s Trade Center bombing, assassins on suicide missions are rewarded martyrs’ post-mortem fame. My Muslim friends in Jordan simply reject such rituals, saying, “These are not Muslims.”

Though North American Christianity has a less strident tradition of martyrdom, “Evangelical” right notions of heroic death play out in the imaginary world of conspiracy theories and racist paranoia. Symbols of the heroic have a distinct “poseur” quality: disdain for the death of others in refusal to obey COVID-19 precautions; a veneration of assault weaponry; war-mongering nationalism. In short, the manly men of the Christian right tend to be heroes with words rather than heroes in deed.

Conclusion

Radical Islam and militant Christianity share significant characteristics. Marty and Appleby concluded from a comparative study of globe-wide religious fundamentalisms in the 1990s that such similar responses are due to similar stress conditions. I assert further that this shared pattern of response entails the aura of the militant heroic male, in the past celebrated in epic poetry.

Epic celebrates tales of fabulous feats as alternatives to a present that appears mundane and hopeless to overcome what Robert Lifton has called “reality fatigue” (Losing Reality, 158-159). Heroic epic posits a dreamworld framed in poetry sung in celebration of an imagined heroic past to sublimate a bleak present. In the end, heroic tales cannot be replicated in reality, and they do not console, but only offer escape into glorious adventure or entice misguided mimicry.

Headley and Gardner tease a new meaning out of Beowulf: it warns blaming the other (the monster) for our own self-destructive arrogance. Both radical Islam and militant Christianity imagine the mainstreams of their respective religions as the dragon to be slain.

Understanding the futility of male-dominant militant, arrogant personality cults will enable us to reaffirm the promise of the Peace of God offered and shared by both Islam and Christianity. Faith in that invites repair of societal rifts and restoration of mutual tolerance and civility. Mainstream Muslims and Christians each in their own way see doing that as their mandate and let glory be to God.

Find Works Cited in a Recommended Reading List in Part I of this article.

Featured image: Minaret and steeple in Bethlehem.

Reprinted from Christian Courier Canada with the author’s permission.

Radical Minorities

( Christian Courier Canada) – In both Islam and Christianity, the mainstream has understood the core teachings of their founding prophets as proclamations of the Peace of God on earth. In each, the “way” has been characterized by peaceful interaction in societies that welcomed coexistence with religious minorities. While both have had their historic “bad moments,” the operative goal has been tolerant pluralism rather than militant exclusivism (Out of Many Faiths, Patal).

Regrettably, historic wars have triggered accusations that violence is embedded in the very core of these respective faiths. For example, Muslims have stereotyped Christianity with the Crusades, and Christians Islam with the Conquests. Recent instances such as the World Trade Center bombing of 2001 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 have reinforced these caricatures. Religion-tainted civil wars in Afghanistan and Syria and ideological conflict in the U.S. continue to rip societies apart. Incendiary name calling like “Axis of Evil” and “Great Satan” have enflamed lslamophobia on one side and violent anti-Christian behavior on the other.

Today these movements counter the ideal of peaceful coexistence with claims of uncompromising exclusivism: their fundamentalist theologies counter the Peace of God with “cultish” exclusivism in forms ranging from racist nationalism to outright militarism.

Politicizing Religion

Islamic radical religious movements have often been embroiled in acquisition of political power . Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was largely anarchist in its opposition to existing power structures, particularly the U.S.’s 1991 invasion of Iraq to which the World Trade Center bombing was a response. Its successor, the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS), fought to establish a religio-military state, absurdly dubbed “Caliphate” by self-anointed “Caliph” Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, bent on defeating the “secular” regimes of Iraq, Syria and the U.S. ISIS distorted the concept of ummah, which in the Qur’an meant the community of believers in the religious sense, to mean a super-state in the political sense.

The American radical religious right, coalescing under the “Evangelical” banner, has morphed into a militant nationalist movement, as Katherine Stewart writes in The Power Worshippers (reviewed in here), Islamophobia merged with Dispensational Zionism, and fear of loss of European “caste” supremacy, traded the self-sacrificial benevolence of Jesus for the “malignant narcissism” (Caste, Wilkerson) of the U. S. president. “Evangelical” handlers – Paula Whit e, Mike Pompeo, William Barr – tout him as the “Chosen One” sent by God to defeat the “Demonic Network” purportedly controlling American democracy.

Even though the two cultures traveled different, even opposite paths to their present sense of nationhood – one anticolonial and the other colonial – these radical right movements both abandoned strictly religious observation for militant nationalism in the name of their respective religions.

Gospels Of War

Most readers are familiar with portrayals of the final apocalyptic battle at Mount Megiddo portrayed in popular fantasy writing like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and LaHaye and Jenkins’ Armageddon (Volume 11, Left Behind series). These modern retellings of the Biblical apocalyptic battles between Michael’s angels and Satan’s demons triggered a warlike pop culture perpetuated in film and video games, in which ordinary Christians imagine themselves as epic heroes and Jesus as their sword-wielding general.

Ironically, the same apocalyptic fantasy fuels the war-cult ideology in radical Islam (Landscapes ofJihad, Devji). Whereas Revelation used the folk memory of the frequent historic battles between the ancient Egyptian and Hittite Empires at Megiddo, Palestine, the locale of the

final battle in Islam recalls historic war against Rome/Byzantium (Rom in Arabic) at Dabiq on the North Syrian frontier. In its magazine Dabiq, ISIS-Da’esh casts its war against Iran and the West as the finale of this centuries-long war against Rome/Rum. (Iranian theocratic Shi’ism turns on a similar apocalyptic story.)

In both, the current death levels (whether by bullets or COVID-19) are nothing compared to global slaughter portrayed in these fantasy literatures. In the process, they reject the essential peacefulness of prophetic messages of the Jewish Bible, the Christian Gospels and the Islamic Qur’an. (For understanding the gruesome banality of the bloodshed, I recommend Abdoh’s 2020 novel Out of Mesopotamia, which views the war against ISIS through Iranian eyes.)

Warrior Patriarchies

The “militant masculinity” of radical Christianity is rationalized through literal reading of Old Testament conquest literature, in which the honorific title for the Israelite male warrior caste was “Mighty Man of Valour” (Josh. 1:14 and Judges 6:12). Kristin Du Mez, in her Jesus and john Wayne, ( reviewed by Katherine Stewart), gives eloquent testimony to the uses of this Biblical imagery for bolstering the aura of white male power in pop-culture traditions adapted by “evangelicals” in America. Especially after 9/11, these self-styled Christian “Mighty Men of Valour” trained their war rhetoric on radical Islam Jesus and John Wayne, Ch . 13, “Why We Want to Kill You”).

Radical Islam also justifies its militant masculinity from literal interpretations of Scripture (Qur’an and Hadith) in the salafi notion of a “return” to the “pure” conditions of early Islam. This salafi idealism in the Middle East and lslamophobic stereotyping in the West both obscure the Qur’an’s predominant teaching of peacefulness (salam, Abu-Nimer). Instead, Arabian nomadic tribal converts merged their pre-Islamic male warrior aristocracy into the war-cultures of the Roman and Persian empires they defeated ( Muhammad : Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, Cole). This war-like inheritance rather than Mohammad’s teaching inspires radical Islam’s militant masculinity.

Female Submission: Different Faces, Same Effects

Female submission (Du Mez, Ch 3, “God’s Gift to Man”) has been a visible complement to this emulation of masculinity in the American religious right. The anti-feminist “rules” include an inordinate stress on beauty standards modeled on the culture of Hollywood. This stress on made-up beauty is not the opposite of, but an equivalent to, female total veiling in radical Islam.

Radical Islam’s female submission, stressing traditional seclusion, intensified at the same time. Older radical Islamic movements such as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia had taken female seclusion to extremes, and in the Islamic revival which began in the 1980’s most women in all social strata who had been adopting western fashion now adapted the trappings of seclusion, hair covering (hijab) for most, and full-face veils for some. But these extremes became the model for the warrior patriarchies of radical movement like ISIS and have served lslamophobes as stereotypes.

In each radical sphere, women escaped submission by accepting its norms: In America the self-styled prophetess Paula White serves as the U.S.-President’s “spiritual advisor.” In Syria Ahlam al-Nasr, a young poetess, who began by writing anti-Assad regime poems, became ISIS’ war-propaganda poetess after she was forced to flee Damascus.

Death Of Civility

The following is a brief list of similarities flowing naturally from those described above. To me, these are not mere abstractions garnered from books, but lived experiences. While I feel the breakdown of civility in my own American social environment, I also experience it through the eyes of my Muslim friends and colleagues in Jordan and Syria, as we do archaeology and dream of making peace together. Now, ironically, we’re seeing the “Peace of God” we’ve lived for destroyed “in the name of God .”

Predilection for authoritarian political structures centered on cult-like devotion to populist leaders like Osama bin Laden and Donald Trump. We ask: What happened to democracy?

Anarchic attacks on established political and civil order. In both bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and Trump’s America, the religious right’s primary enemy is the mainstream of their own religions, which are branded as apostate and secular, respectively. We ask: What happened to civility?

Acceptance of extreme narcissism as the standard for relating to other people. Benevolent sharing and respect for the culture, possessions and lives of others is replaced with racist disdain, constant grifting, arbitrary dispossession and death-dealing cruelty. We ask: Where is the compassion? Where is the justice?

Rejection of intellectual heritage and critical thinking in favor of literal, uncritical readings of the Bible and Qur’an to dictate knowledge and action. Both falsify reality with disdain for intellect, mythic conspiracy theories, melodramatic action, and clever media manipulation. We ask: Where is the science?

That radical Islam and militant Christianity are contemporary movements with surprisingly similar characteristics is not mere coincidence. Intertwined origins and frequent cross­ cultural relations link them. However, the similarities can be explained more meaningfully by seeing them as a larger pattern of responses to a shared set of intercontinental circumstances.That is the subject of the second installment: Part 11, Heroic Values (to be published on November 9).

Part II in this short series will be published online and in print November 9, 2020.

Further Reading, Parts I And II

• Abdoh, Salar. Out of Mesopotamia. Akashic Books, 2020.

• Abu-Nimer, Mohammad. Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam: Theory and Practice. University Press of Florida, 2003.

• AI-Hibri, Azizah, “War in Islam;” Gender in Islam.” Jellema Lectures at Calvin College, 2002.

• Cole, Juan, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires.Nation Books, 2018.

• Devji, Faisal, Landscapes of Jihad. Cornell University Press, 2005.

• Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. W.W. Norton, 2020.

• Esposito, John L. and Dalia Mogahad, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Gallup Press, 2007.

• Frankfort, Henri et al, Before Philosophy. Pelican, 1960.

• Gardner, John. Grendel, Vintage Books, 1971.

• Gardner, John and John Maier. Epic of Gilgamesh. Random House, 1985.

• Headley, Maria Dahvana. Beowulf: A New Translation. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020.

• Headley, Maria Dahvana.The Mere Wife. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018.

(For full bibliography see the original article .

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Christian Courier Canada

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

New America: “Extremism: What is it and How Does it Relate to Violence?”

( Christian Courier) – While living in Jordan, my wife Sally and I fell in love with Syria and its people through many visits stretched over four decades. Our last adventure in 2006 was to Aleppo, when we stayed in a converted khan in the middle of its souq (market), which sold traditional hand-crafted goods, inlaid wood, beaten copper, loom-woven silks and braided gold. We saw Syria through the eyes of besotted tourists and barely noticed the unrest roiling under the surface.

We can’t help but wonder: “Where are they now?” Bert met these three boys in Aleppo in 2006. Photo credit: Bert de Vries.

Today that Aleppo souq and entire cities are reduced to rubble, barrel-bombed by Bashar al-Assad’s air force targeting rebel troops entrenched in residential neighborhoods. Half of Syria’s population of 23 million has fled from home, eight million inside Syria and four million into surrounding countries. Since 2011, over 400,000 people have died, many after torture in government prisons. When we ask our refugee neighbors in Jordan why they are not returning, they tell us that life back home is more miserable than stateless life as a refugee.

A birds-eye-view of Syria’s Orontes Valley agriculture, west of Hama. This photo was taken pre-civil-war in 2006, just before the drought of 2007-2011. Photo credit: Bert de Vries.

The end of religious pluralism
On the eve of the civil war in 2011, Syria was a multi-religious state, with a Sunni Islamic majority (74 percent), Shi’ite splinter groups (13 percent), Eastern Christians (10 percent) and Druze (three percent). During Ottoman Turkish rule, tolerant co-existence was formalized by making the religious leaders the legal representatives of their communities. The result was peaceful co-existence, especially in traditional cities like Aleppo, where citizens of various religious affiliations worked elbow-to-elbow in its market economy. However, when post-World-War-I French colonial rule installed Western democracy, the minority rights were suddenly subject to majority fiat. By 2011, after decades of independence, Syria had not solved the problem of inequality resulting from political modernization.

Baath socialism and Assad autocracy
An alternative to religious pluralism was pan-Arab nationalism, which underlay the secular Baath socialist party formed in the 1940s. Membership gave the religious minorities a new platform for protection from the Sunni majority. By 1970 the Baath used its parliamentary majority to abolish all other parties, and Syria became a one-party totalitarian state in which citizens’ votes are meaningless. The demonstrations of 2011 included pleas to restore popular democracy.

Hafez al-Assad, who used cronyism and force to claw his way to the top, ruled Syria as its Baathist dictator from 1970 until his death in 2000 using universal surveillance, jail, torture, targeted killing and mass murder. Fearful submission infused the population like an incurable viral infection. Ironically, through Baath membership and despot cronyism, the Alawite minority, in consort with Christian and some Sunni colleagues, now ruled over the Sunni majority.

After Hafez’s death in June 2000, the Minister of Defense gathered the top military advisors to propose the extra-constitutional succession of Bashar, his son. Sam Dagher reports that the Minister had soldiers stationed outside the meeting room poised to kill any dissenters. No one left (Assad or We Burn the Country, 97). On the eve of that succession, Sally and I visited Damascus, which was plastered with Hafez and Bashar posters proclaiming “Father’s” ascent into heaven and the inception of “son’s” enlightened rule. Though Syrians hoped for relief from oppression, by 2006 all they got was crony-owned internet services and continued suppression, hidden behind a façade of progressive chic. The son’s rule proved to be a mere mutation of the father’s deadly virus.

The Arab Spring
By 2011 urban residents lived in mismanaged and overcrowded tenements, rural villages were devastated by a prolonged drought, and all lived in fear of Bashar’s spies, jailing and torture (Sabouni and Daoudy). The Arab Spring reached Syria, beginning with popular demonstrations in Dera’a. But the Assads met the cries for liberty with a cacophony of gunshots fired into unarmed crowds. In the ensuing civil war this murderous reassertion of despotism at all costs remained clear, while frenzied violence and factional fragmentation obscured the insurgents’ initial clarity of purpose. Syria’s Arab Spring is over, even as the civil war continues nine years later, in 2020.

A stage for global politics
As these internal forces worked their destruction, Syria also became a theater for longstanding foreign power rivalries: France, the U.S.A., Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq (ISIS), Lebanon (Hezbollah), Jordan and Israel. All these entered the fray, in ways reflecting their earlier histories of intervention. Because space does not allow full enumeration, I mention here the interventions of the two superpowers.

Cowed by the still raw trauma of Libya, the Obama administration reneged on its threat of punitive action after Bashar Assad’s heinous 2013 poison-gas massacre of 1,400 Syrians (Coll and Power). America’s backing away opened the way for the Russian air force to swoop in and save the Syrian army from almost certain defeat. Instead, joint Syrian-Russian intense bombing burned Syria to give Assad the “victory” (Dagher), with the near annihilation of Idlib Province earlier this year barely noticed as COVID-19 loomed. Finally, President Trump’s impetuous order for American withdrawal from northern Syria in October 2019 was not only a shameful betrayal of its Kurdish partners in the defeat of ISIS, but also an abandonment of internal refugees now exposed to the vengeful wrath of Assad’s soldiers (Morgelson). After that, Trump blocked entry into the U.S. to all refugees from Syria under the pretext of COVID-19.

To be sure, surrounding countries, especially Jordan, have hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees, and western countries, especially Canada, Germany and Norway, have sheltered many generously. For more on Norway, see Naguib’s testimony to compassionate generosity (see sidebar). Nevertheless, the net effect of outside interventions has been the amplification of conflict: piling on of weapons, the total ruin of cities, vast increases in death and displacement, the blocking of non-violent resolution, the support of despotism over human rights, and agony without end for the people of Syria (Khalifa, Death is Hard Work.)

As Syria goes. . .
In July of 2018 the doors of our house in Umm al-Jimal, Jordan rattled constantly from the percussion of bombs falling on villages just across the border. On July 8, the black smoke from burning houses darkened our skies and produced a blood-red sunset. That sight has become my icon of the misery inflicted on the people of Syria. As refugees escaping carnage continue to crowd into open fields and mud-floored tents, now they are painfully exposed to a new invader: COVID-19. Syria is the only country not reporting virus statistics to the W.H.O. to cover up, as Jordanians tell me, that its spread is rampant.

Living among the refugees at Umm al-Jimal has familiarized us with Syria and Syrians in profound ways; our awareness has penetrated far below the touristic veneer of earlier trips into the country. It has taught us more intimately that Syrians are fellow humans with lovely families, struggling heroically to raise their children in a Mad-Max world, homes reduced to rubble, living in tents mired in mud, clutching famished newborns, freezing to death, hoping for a better future but stuck in the status of refugee in a COVID-riven world. Meanwhile, the Assads and their cronies worked investment scams to take possession of 70 percent of the country’s wealth and are now fighting over the spoils amongst themselves like dogs over roadkill (Dagher and al-Yafi).

The case of Syria presents a model for seeing where any of us anywhere could end up, especially as we see the infection of autocratic rule and sycophant opportunism spread across the globe and at our doorstep. We are not immune. Therefore, I entitled this essay “As Syria Goes . . . ”

In my teaching of Islamic civilization, the deep tradition of tolerant religious communal pluralism was always a high-water mark. There were breakdowns, but always followed by a restoration. I pray that this could also be the way back for the people of Syria.

Four sisters from East Ghouta, Syria. This photo was taken in Umm al-Jimal, Jordan in March 2019. Photo credit: Bert de Vries

Cited materials & recommended reading

• Al-Yafi, Faisal, Syria turns on the man who bankrolled the war. Asia Times (May 16, 2020)
• Dagher, Sam. Assad or We Burn the Country. How one Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria. (Back Bay Books, Little Brown and Company, 2020).
• Cockburn, Patrick. War in the Age of Trump. (OR Books, 2020).
• Coll, Steve. “The Struggle for Better.” Review of Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (Dey Street 2019) in The New York Review of Books (May 28, 2020): 22-24.
• Daoudy, Marwa. The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Khalifa, Khaled. No Knives in the Kitchens of this City. (Arabic Edition 2013; English Edition, Hoopoe, 2016)
• Khalifa, Khaled. Death is Hard Work. (English Edition, Faber, 2019).
• Morgelson, Luke. “Abandoned: Many Syrians Thought the U.S. cared about them. Now they know better.” New Yorker (April 27, 2020): 32-45.
• Naguib, Nefissa. “Middle East Encounters 69 degrees North Latitude: Syrian Refugees and Everyday Humanitarianism in the Arctic.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 49 (2017): 645-660.
• Perlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled. (Custom House, 2017).
• Power, Samantha. The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir. (Dey Street, 2019).
• Sabouni, Marwa. The Battle for Home. The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria. (Thames Hudson, 2016).

Contact Bert for more information on any titles in this list.

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About the Author

Bert de Vries, Author

Bert is Professor Emeritus of History and Archaeology at Calvin University where he taught Middle Eastern History and Archaeology from 1967 to 2018.

Reprinted from Christian Courier with the author’s permission.