An American citizen was detained by security forces in the museum after being observed shattering the statues, which he claimed were "in violation of the Torah."
For anyone interested in why the guy lost it, it’s because similarities between the Ancient Greek stories and stories found in Hebrew scripture used to be explained away some Jewish followers as “Both were independently inspired by (my) God and it is testament to His Power”.
They claimed that there were almost no Greeks in ancient Israel, and that no worship was of other religions was really tolerated by the rulers then anyway, so the Greeks couldn’t have even have had their own temples even if there were enough followers of a Greek god. If there were enough people for it to be a thing, there would be… you know, archaeological evidence of Greek temples and religion and worship in Israel predating the Judeo-Christian split. Right?
The followers claimed that because of all that, when the Talmud was written by a group of rabbis arguing about what the exact teachings of God really were (because it used to only be handed down through spoken word and Christians were being all “lol no, He never said that”), each Rabbi who contributed to the Talmud could not have been influenced enough by man-made beliefs for it to have hugely affected what the group agreed God definitely said and did. And they definitely couldnt have put things from multi-god religions in there. Therefore the basis of modern Judaism is and always has been rock solid, even though there is a huge chunk of time between when it happened and when it was written down.
And all was well… until 1978 when someone dug up the 2.5m tall statue of Athena imported from Greece and attached to a purpose-built Greek temple in Beth Shean / Scythopolis from 200 years earlier than the Talmud, 37km / 22mi from Nazareth (in the opposite direction of Greece) - in a pretty unavoidable place on the road to Jerusalem. Oops.
tl;dr You got your many-God filthy religious icon in my certainly pure, true, and original single-God belief system that we declared 200 years afterwards!
Edited to add: a little extra context. This Museum keeps the Dead Sea Scrolls and has an entire separate building of the museum, away from the archaeology collection, that is very religiously targeted where those Scrolls are shown. The Scrolls have also not been on display for a long while because of conservation work, but they just started exhibiting them again. So this guy was likely a religious zealot who came to see the Scrolls exhibit, but he stumbled into the archaeology department where they’re a little more… science and evidence-based. And the museum is state funded. And the government owns the statue, Scrolls, and basically every Jewish religious artifact in existence. There are a lot of layers here, like everything in the region’s history.
Humans have emotional and often destructive reactions to information that conflicts with what they were always taught. No belief system or culture anywhere in the world is immune to that. Some cultures are a bit more flexible because their belief system doesn’t go as hard on the “this is the only possible truth” line, but there are still times when it happens.
For anyone interested in why the guy lost it, it’s because similarities between the Ancient Greek stories and stories found in Hebrew scripture used to be explained away some Jewish followers as “Both were independently inspired by (my) God and it is testament to His Power”.
They claimed that there were almost no Greeks in ancient Israel, and that no worship was of other religions was really tolerated by the rulers then anyway, so the Greeks couldn’t have even have had their own temples even if there were enough followers of a Greek god. If there were enough people for it to be a thing, there would be… you know, archaeological evidence of Greek temples and religion and worship in Israel predating the Judeo-Christian split. Right?
The followers claimed that because of all that, when the Talmud was written by a group of rabbis arguing about what the exact teachings of God really were (because it used to only be handed down through spoken word and Christians were being all “lol no, He never said that”), each Rabbi who contributed to the Talmud could not have been influenced enough by man-made beliefs for it to have hugely affected what the group agreed God definitely said and did. And they definitely couldnt have put things from multi-god religions in there. Therefore the basis of modern Judaism is and always has been rock solid, even though there is a huge chunk of time between when it happened and when it was written down.
And all was well… until 1978 when someone dug up the 2.5m tall statue of Athena imported from Greece and attached to a purpose-built Greek temple in Beth Shean / Scythopolis from 200 years earlier than the Talmud, 37km / 22mi from Nazareth (in the opposite direction of Greece) - in a pretty unavoidable place on the road to Jerusalem. Oops.
tl;dr You got your many-God filthy religious icon in my certainly pure, true, and original single-God belief system that we declared 200 years afterwards!
Edited to add: a little extra context. This Museum keeps the Dead Sea Scrolls and has an entire separate building of the museum, away from the archaeology collection, that is very religiously targeted where those Scrolls are shown. The Scrolls have also not been on display for a long while because of conservation work, but they just started exhibiting them again. So this guy was likely a religious zealot who came to see the Scrolls exhibit, but he stumbled into the archaeology department where they’re a little more… science and evidence-based. And the museum is state funded. And the government owns the statue, Scrolls, and basically every Jewish religious artifact in existence. There are a lot of layers here, like everything in the region’s history.
“I must destroy anything that preceded by religious obsession”. So ISIS aren’t the only barbarians.
Humans have emotional and often destructive reactions to information that conflicts with what they were always taught. No belief system or culture anywhere in the world is immune to that. Some cultures are a bit more flexible because their belief system doesn’t go as hard on the “this is the only possible truth” line, but there are still times when it happens.