Word: babylonian
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Named for the 3rd century Babylonian Gnostic Mani, who taught that the Creator is an evil being opposed to the good God, Manichaeans viewed the world as bad and salvation as escape from it. Modern Manichaeans are those whose hunger for the spiritual leads them to disdain the material; they try to make the leap of faith without having their feet planted firmly on the ground...
...book's hero is Daniel Tiamat, an Irish-American newspaperman (his name is that of a doomed deity, the mother of the gods in Babylonian mythology). The book tells how Tiamat arrives at young manhood in full vigor of mind and body, with a crapshooter's wrist, moral faculties unblunted by use, and a more than Hearstian knowledge of what makes news paper readers salivate. By middle age he is reduced to physical paralysis and the ignominy of writing an agony column un der the pseudonym of Miss Friendship (clearly a fictional cousin of Nathanael West...
...style of Russian diplomacy has not fundamentally changed since the 16th century, when a local Cossack leader addressed the Turkish Sultan Mahomet III in a letter whose milder passages read: "We will lick you on land and sea, you hostile son-of-a-bitch . . . You Alexandrian goatherd, you Babylonian cook, you Macedonian wagonmaker, Jerusalem's traitor, Kamchatka cat, Podolian villain, swindler of the world, and evildoer of the underworld...
...Tell Goliath, as it came to be called. On top they found a largely Arab cemetery. Below it were traces of Greek and Persian influence. Even lower was an Israelite layer, which showed signs of a great fire that Yeivin thinks may have raged in 586 B.C., during the Babylonian invasion under Nebuchadnezzar. Beneath was a city of the Canaanites, who occupied the Promised Land before Joshua's invasion...
...orphans be beggars, that no one should pity him, and that God always remember against him the sins of his parents. Even more "devilish," says Anglican Lewis, is the verse in the beautiful 137th Psalm in which "a blessing is pronounced on anyone who will snatch up a Babylonian baby and beat its brains out against the pavement...