Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

85. Micah, the next of the prophets, took as his main target what historian Bruce Vawter calls ‘Judahite capitalism’, the growth of large estates (confirmed by archaeology), the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, relegating the rest of the population to the status of ‘helpless dependants’, though priests were attacked for the personal gain they put before all else, and because, in collaboration with the Assyrians, they turned away from Yahweh-worship to other gods. Micah was active between 750 and 686 BC, and so as late as this Yahweh-worship was not settled in Israel. Vawter, Op. cit., page 154.

86. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 183; Vawter, Op. cit., pages 165–166.

87. Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History, London: Cape, 1999, page 56. Vawter, Op. cit., page 170.

88. Vawter, Op. cit., page 175.

89. Ibid., page 75.

90. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 187 and 191; Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 253. Vawter, Op. cit., page 75.

91. Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 219ff. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 297.

92. Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, page 206.

93. Ibid., page 222.

94. Ibid., page 119.

95. Ibid., page 120.

96. Ibid., page 49. See also: A Nietzsche Reader, selected and translated, and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1977, especially pages 71–124, on morality.

97. Brandon, Op. cit., page 96.

98. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 210.

99. Eliade, Op. cit., page 309.

100. Since the primitive daevas all at some time or another practise deceit, Zarathustra demands that his disciples no longer worship them. In envisaging the ‘way of righteousness’, Zoroastrianism prefigures both Plato (in his concern with Good), Buddhism and Confucianism. In demanding that his disciples no longer worship the daevas, his ideas may have helped the Jews move from henotheism (the belief that only one god out of many is worthy of worship) to true monotheism (the belief that there is only one god). Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 183.

101. Ibid., page 210.

102. Ibid.

103. Eliade, Op. cit., page 308.

104. Ibid., page 312.

105. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 195.

106. Eliade, Op. cit., page 330.

107. Pat Alexander (editor), The World’s Religions, Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1994, page 170.

108. Ibid., page 173.

109. Ibid., page 174.

110. Karen Armstrong, Buddha, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, page 15.

111. Ibid., page 19.

112. Ibid., page 23.

113. S. G. F. Brandon (editor), The Saviour God, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963, page 218.

114. Ibid., page 86.

115. Ibid., page 89.

116. Ibid., page 90.

117. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 41.

118. Ibid., page 42.

119. Ibid.

120. R. M. Cook, The Greeks Till Alexander, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1962, page 86. See also: Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 45.

121. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 46. See Cook, Op. cit., page 41 for the way Plato modified his theories.

122. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 48.

123. Ibid., page 49.

124. D. Howard Smith, Confucius, London: Temple Smith, 1973. John D. Fairbanks, China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, pages 50–51.

125. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 25.

126. Ibid., pages 33–34.

127. Brandon, Op. cit., page 98.

128. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 43.

129. Ibid., page 45.

130. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 63.

131. Ibid., page 66. See also Bouquet, Op. cit., page 180.

132. Benjamin I. Schwarz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, page 193. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 179.

133. D. C. Lau, Introduction to Lao Tzu, Tao te ching, London: Penguin, 1963, pages xv–xix.

134. Schwarz, Op. cit., page 202. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 180.

CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINS OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMANITIES

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, London: Penguin, 1987, page 369.

2. H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks, London: Penguin, 1961.

3. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, pages 24.

4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World, New York and London: Vintage, 1999, Part II.

5. A. R. Burn, The Penguin History of Greece, London: Penguin, 1966, page 28.