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In the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, Judea launched two major rebellions against the Roman Empire. These revolts represented a major military challenge to Rome, but it suppressed them both with brutal efficiency. Rome's Jewish Wars had a tremendous impact on Jewish history, putting an end to Jewish sovereignty in Judea, precipitating the Jews’ 2,000-year exile from their homeland, and changing the practice of Jewish worship. But they also had an important impact on Roman history, by bringing about the final split between Jews and Christians. This transformed Christianity into a persecuted religion that eventually supplanted the Roman religion. For almost 2,000 years, Judaism remembered the rebel leaders as reckless zealots, nationalist hotheads, and promoters of a false messiah. They were seen as contemptible characters responsible for the brutal Roman suppression, the loss of sovereignty in the Land of Israel, the massive toll of death, dispossession, and enslavement, and the endless miseries that Jews’ subsequently suffered in the diaspora as a despised minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East. During the 20th century, however, the leaders of the Jewish rebellions were suddenly and retroactively transformed – rehabilitated in Jewish memory as heroic and admirable national role-models.

In 4:8, the text says that “Cain said to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.” It's an odd construction. What did Cain say, & more important, why does the author choose not to tell us what Cain said?

Most democracies have written constitutions, but also many non-democracies & dictatorships. If democracies do not ensure democratic accountability, then what is their function? What do they offer?

Why does no one suggest to Job that he will be rewarded for his suffering in the afterlife?

The Book of Job What is God's answer to Job? Why are the friends wrong in defending God against the charge of injustice? What is Job's reward? Is the happy ending a happy ending?

Why is the Book of Ruth in the Bible? What happened between Ruth & Boaz in that hayloft? Who is the leading character -- Ruth or Boaz? Book of Ruth (Chapts. 1-4)

The Satan character in the Hebrew Bible.

David's army chief. David's deathbed instructions to Solomon. Why does God (& we) love David? Is the Biblical author a pro-David propagandist?

Fathers & sons in the Book of Samuel. Wives & daughters too. Bonus: the reasons behind the commandments.

* David's shifting schemes to extricate himself from the Bathsheba affair. * Was Bathsheba a willing participant in the Uriah affair, or David's victim? * Is the story of Absalom's rebellion a story about a loving father & an ungrateful & bad son, or a tragic story of a son who is reluctant to rebel & a father who is reluctant to suppress the rebellion. * All of Michal’s mentions in the Bible: https://sarata.com/bible/verses/about/michal.html.

Modern accounts of Atlantic piracy depict the Royal Navy as an effective police force that, in the course of a generation (1697-1730), transformed the Atlantic from a violent frontier into a locus of orderly commerce. Scholars who see a sharp decline in piracy in the early-18th century argue that a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion produced a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy. A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the 19th century, with Britons persisting in seeing “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate despite imperial attempts to effect change. As early-modern European states were centralizing their bureaucracies, establishing ideologies of state and law, modernizing their finances, and enacting bureaucratic and commercial monopolies as tools of state building, seas and oceans experienced a different course of development. As national mercantilist economies emerged in Europe, oceans formed trans-imperial trade zones, which operated as free-trade zones, given that legal trade restrictions were easily and routinely violated. The vastness of the ocean allowed British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to retain an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and to resist legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building. The distance between imperial law and commercial practice corresponded to the distance between the seats of government and the myriad locations of Atlantic commercial activities. Governments’ efforts to bridge this ethical gap inevitably involved attempts to bridge the geographical gap as well, enhancing the presence and role of state agents in local jurisdictions and at sea. In this sense, statutory law was a form of propaganda regarding the reach of state authority – a proclamation of national governments’ policy aspirations, as well as their presumptions to jurisdiction and administrative sway in peripheral communities. Such propaganda remained unconvincing under governments that demonstrated to constituents that they did not have the capacity to enforce the law.

What did David want? How did Saul die? I Samuel 10:17-31:13 + II Samuel 1. Antony’s great speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bi1PvXCbr8.

II Samuel 5: 6-9. Michael Corleone settles all family business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelPe_T9Qr8.

why did God reject Saul after elevating him to the throne? I Samuel 10:17-31:13 & II Samuel 1.

Samuel's speech against monarchy. Does God know the future? I Samuel 8:11-18

Saul's 2 voyages. I Samuel 9-10.

Character construction in the Book of Samuel.

Is Samson the worst judge in the Book of Judges, or the best?

Is Samson the worst of the judges or the best of them?

Please read the first creation story -- Genesis Chapter 1 to Chapter 2:4.

The story of Jephthah (Yifftah): Book of Judges, Chapters 10-12