Vicious Cycle (Article) by Abidan Paul Shah

VICIOUS CYCLE (Article) by Abidan Paul Shah

(Published in the Newspaper Daily Dispatch, Henderson on February 9, 2019)

“The Bible will come alive for you! It will be a life-changing trip!” I could tell that my mentor really wanted me to go on a tour of Israel. Few years later, we took him up on it. Since then, my wife and I have visited the Holy Land several times and it is truly everything and more than you can imagine! In our last tour in January, along with the usual sites (Galilee, Jordan River, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, etc.), we visited six Middle Bronze Canaanite cities in Israel (Megiddo, Hazor, Tel Dan, Beth Shan, Jericho, and Jerusalem). In the chronology of the Levant, the Middle Bronze period is between 1800BC-1550BC. Although scholars disagree over the precise terminology, this is the time period when the land God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was occupied by the Canaanites and the Amorites. These were the cities that God told Moses to lead the people of Israel to go in and possess. 

Typically, we think that the reason God wanted to drive the Canaanites out of the land is because they were primitive savages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s what we found:

1. They were master builders. In order to protect their cities, they first built massive free-standing walls (some places 50 ft tall) around the city. This was followed by a massive embankment with crowning walls. All this was psychological warfare to discourage an invading army from wasting their time.

2. They understood hydraulics and built massive water storage facilities, underground drainage, and irrigation lines.

3. They were very good farmers, pottery makers, and metal workers. They learned how to make bronze by alloying copper with tin. Now they had weapons that could be shaped and sharpened. They even had an export business with Egypt.

4. They created the ancestor of our English alphabet. Unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mesopotamian cuneiform, their descendants (the Phoenicians) standardized the 22 signs for each sound that we use to this today.

Nonetheless, as advanced and prosperous as these people were, something was not right with them. Deuteronomy 12:29-31“When the LORD your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them…for every abomination to the LORD which He hates they have done to their gods; for they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.”In other words, they practiced every kind of perversion imaginable but worst of all, they sacrificed their babies to their god Molech! Although literary evidence from Canaan is scant, there is plenty regarding the Phoenicians, the Canaanites who established a colony in North Africa. Siculus, a Greek historian, wrote – “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”Plutarch, another Greek writer, added that “the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people.” Historians and archaeologists would deny these accounts claiming that it wasn’t possible for such an advanced culture to do something so heinous. In 2014, Dr. Josephine Quinn of Oxford University along with a team of scholars confirmed these accounts as absolutely true based on further research.

Here’s the point: God wiped out the Canaanites because they chose to kill their children. What do you think God thinks of America today? Over 638,000 are being killed each year. Will we repeat the vicious cycle and face God’s wrath or will we speak out for the innocent and the voiceless? It is much more than a political issue. Jesus said “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:14)