Month: December 2025

Psalm 2 occupies a peculiar place in Jewish and Christian tradition. It is one of the classic Messianic psalms: in Judaism often read as a prophecy of the coming anointed king, and in Christianity reinterpreted as a vision of Christ’s ultimate victory at the Second Coming. Its language is confident, absolute, and unapologetically violent. Kings are smashed, rebels annihilated, and divine laughter rings out over futile resistance.

That tone sits uneasily with the image of Christ many modern readers prefer: gentle, pacifist, turning the other cheek. Psalm 2 offers no such comfort. It is triumphalist, confrontational, and steeped in the logic of domination. Precisely for that reason, it has often been spiritualized, allegorized, or pushed toward the edges of liturgical attention.

I first became acutely aware of this tension during my university years. I was sitting in the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, listening to Händel’s Messiah, while at the same time studying the ancient Near East and the ideology of kingship and empire. When the baritone began to sing “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”, I was supposed to hear biblical prophecy set to magnificent music. Instead, something else leapt out at me immediately.

It sounded oddly Assyrian.

The impression was instant. As the music unfolded, the choir hurling out “Let us break their bonds asunder,” and later the tenor proclaiming “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron”, I could not shake the feeling that Psalm 2 was not merely religious poetry. It was speaking the language of empire.

In what follows, I want to explain why Psalm 2 sounds so “Assyrian,” line by line, and to suggest — carefully, but deliberately — that it may have been composed as a theological response to Neo-Assyrian royal propaganda.

Continue reading “Psalm 2: the “Assyrian” hymn”

If we could step into a time machine and set the date to 24 December, AD 325, we would find ourselves in a world where Christmas existed, but only in a very rudimentary form. There would be no decorated trees, no carols, no nativity scenes, no exchange of gifts. Instead, in the coastal city of Myra (in modern-day Turkey), a small Christian community gathered in a basilica to take part in a modest liturgical service marking the birth of Jesus.

Presiding over that service may well have been Nicholas, bishop of Myra, a historical figure who would later inspire one of the most enduring characters of Western folklore. This imagined Christ’s Mass offers a useful lens through which to explore both early Christian worship and the dramatic transformation Christianity had undergone in the early fourth century.

Continue reading “Christmas with Saint Nicholas (AD 325)”

Every winter, Hanukkah is celebrated as a story of resilience. A small religious community, threatened by persecution, refuses to abandon its faith. An empire tries to suppress Jewish law and worship, a priestly family rises in revolt, the Temple is reclaimed and rededicated. A single day’s worth of lamp oil burns for eight. Light triumphs over darkness.

It is a powerful story, and not an untrue one. But historically speaking, the reality behind the Maccabean Revolt was more complex — and more unsettling — than a simple tale of good versus evil. What unfolded in the 2nd century BCE was not just a clash between Judaism and foreign oppression, but a crisis produced by cultural globalization, internal division, and imperial interference in the very heart of Jewish religious life.

Continue reading “The Maccabean Revolt: how Judaism was forged in crisis”

On the evening of 9 November 1989, a mid-ranking East German border officer named Harald Jäger made a decision that changed the world.

Jäger had no authority to open the Berlin border. No one in the East German leadership intended it. But when thousands of citizens pressed against the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint, demanding to cross into West Berlin after a muddled government announcement, he found himself trapped between orders from above and a volatile crowd below. His superiors refused to take responsibility. The situation grew dangerous. And so, under immense psychological pressure, he did the unthinkable: he ordered the gates open.

Historians often explain the fall of the Berlin Wall by pointing to long-term structural forces: economic decline, political paralysis, popular dissatisfaction, the bankruptcy of the state. Yet in the end, the decisive moment came down to one man, at one gate, making one choice. And like all of us, Jäger acted according to his worldview: his sense of authority, safety, duty, human dignity, and the limits of obedience.

Macro-history meets micro-history in moments like this.

Continue reading “Meet Bēlšunu”

When I look back on my university days at VU Amsterdam, one of the figures who left a lasting impression on me was my professor Bert van der Spek. Anyone who studied the Ancient Near East under him will recall his unshakable conviction that Hellenistic Babylonia — so often treated as a footnote between Alexander the Great and the Parthian Empire — was an extraordinary period in its own right. As students, we regularly heard about the massive project he was working on: the edition of the Hellenistic chronographic texts from Babylonia, those fragmentary but invaluable cuneiform accounts that offer a uniquely Babylonian view of the Seleucid and early Parthian world.

At the time, however, this enthusiasm did not quite reach me. I was more interested in what I thought of as “real” Mesopotamia: the world of Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar II. The world before Hellenism complicated matters, before the “purity” of ancient Mesopotamia was — so I believed — “polluted” with imported Greekness. I was frustrated with classicists who ignored Near East influences of Graeco-Roman civilization, but ironically blind to the richness of the very period that brought these worlds even closer together. It has taken me a decade and a great deal of reading to realize just how naïve this was. The Hellenistic period in Babylonia was anything but a watered-down afterthought. It was a moment of profound cultural transformation. And now, with the publication of Babylonian Chronographic Texts from the Hellenistic Period, the results of many decades of work have finally seen the light of day. Tomorrow, Van der Spek will present his work at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.

Continue reading “A new window onto Hellenistic Babylonia”