All Together Now

Following the assignment to create a group post/video we came up with the following video. (Turn your speakers all the way up, we are amateur movie makers!)

Now we would just like to put in a few words more on the topic of Story and Song. In the video we talked about each other's civilizations and how they all relate through the theme of water in their origin myths, and stories in general. Maddie shared a little bit more on this theme here. What we didn't get to is how this important oral knowledge is shared, or the structures for sharing it.

All that we've learned: Oral Knowledge

From US Embassy New Delhi on Flickr

For those of you counting on this post to go up Friday morning, sorry despite the rumors I'm not perfect. This post took a little more research than I originally intended. As our discussion of oral knowledge winds down I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at all of that we've learned and discussed on this blog. Although our instructors have given us many interesting topics to learn about in this unit, I've enjoyed the themes that we pulled out here on our blog.

Samaritan Synagogues

In the ancient land of Samaria, the citizens of the land established synagogues to further God's word among them. These places of teaching and prayer, however, had many similarities with the Greek open-air theaters of the time period. Because of the structural similarities, I have been wondering what other similarities that may exist.

Stories of Samaria

The city of Samaria,prior to 884 BC, was a wine and oil manufacturing area. In 884 BC, this city, situated on the summit of a rocky hill, was chosen as Israel's capital.

The Samaritans were descended from both the house of Israel and Assyrians after the beginning of the Assyrian captivity of Israel. At the end of the Babylonian captivity in 538 BC, the Jews returned to Israel and tension between the two groups mounted. What possibly began was a quarrel between the sons of Israel led to two peoples who completely rejected one another. Jews considered Samaritans to be half-breeds and traitors to the covenant of Moses. Both Jewish and Samaritan leaders taught that it was wrong to have contact with the other group, including speaking to each other or entering each others' territories. Understanding this antagonism is important in understanding the stories of Christ that take place in or near Samaria.