Word: sum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long as polytheism reigned, there were lots of those prophets. At one point, Israel contained "400 prophets of Asherah" and "450 prophets of Baal," the Bible reports darkly. Josiah's cleansing of the Temple was good strategy in a zero-sum game: the less influence these prophets had, the more...
...Babylon after conquest by the neo-Babylonian Empire. In passages from Isaiah that are thought to have been written during the exile, Yahweh says unequivocally, "Besides me there is no god." Does this extreme intolerance of other gods - the denial of their very existence - flow from a zero-sum view of Israel's environs...
Happily, after the exile, life got more non-zero-sum. The Babylonians who had conquered Israel were in turn conquered by the Persians, who returned the exiles to their homeland. Israel was no longer in a bad neighborhood. Nearby nations were now fellow members of the Persian Empire and so no longer threats. And, predictably, books of the Bible typically dated as postexilic, such as Ruth and Jonah, strike a warm tone toward peoples - Moabites and Assyrians - that in pre-exilic times had been vilified...
...zero-sum, isolationist worldview had moved Israel from polytheism to belligerent monotheism, but now, as Israel's environment grew less threatening, belligerence was turning out not to be an intrinsic part of monotheism. Between second Isaiah's angry exilic exclamations and P's more congenial voice, Israel had segued from an exclusive to an inclusive monotheism...
...millennium later, this same dynamic - swings between zero-sum and non-zero-sum - would have a similar impact on Islamic monotheism, moving it back and forth between belligerence and tolerance...