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Post by The Ninevite on Dec 20, 2023 17:48:26 GMT -8
It's not always obvious that a city in Israel especially has more than one name. Jerusalem is also known as Troy, which was what Homer called it, and a Jew from the same time might have called it Babylon. The name of a city reflects the prevailing political allegiance of the majority of its population. Jerusalem was built on the site of Ai, which had contained the infamous "high place" of Baal. Unfortunately, the double entendra or linguistic paradox here is both exceedingly difficult and deliberate, but careful reding of the prophet's works does show that an appointed prophet always addressed Israel, which was the state he served, and he spoke only to its people. The Biblical Hebrew prophets only spoke "to Israelites", "about Jerusalem", wherein was the Temple. Anyone else who called it something else, wasn't an official prophet, and may well have been speaking a language other than Hebrew. Nebuchadnezzar looked around Jerusalem and thought it was "great Babylon that he had built", but Nebuchadnezzar had nothing to do with the temple.
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