The Jewish religion is the outgrowth of the experience of the Jewish people through events to which they ascribe transcendent meaning. Every people has a history, but many people pay no attention to their own history. It is meaningless to them. The Jewish people know that their history is more than a series of fortuitous events; it is the enactment on this earth of a divine plan. The history of the Jews has a goal; the Jews have a destiny. That destiny is not to have fun, be happy, or even live in peace, it is to fulfill our historic Messianic role.

Jews invented history as we know it today. Most cultures have been ahistorical; they did not think in historical terms. They merely noted events, but saw no connection between them. They did not perceive that history had a direction. The ancient Egyptians, for example, would write chronicles: “In the fifth year of King So, there was a war; in the seventh year, there was a famine.” But the royal chroniclers made no attempt to link these events together, explaining their cause-and-effect relationships, noting the flow of events.

Egyptians, Hindus, and Greek philosophers considered truth universal, static, and unchanging. Events were the stuff of poetry, of epic story-telling, but they were not the source of truth. They had no religious value. They indicated no purpose. Events are unique, not universal; they are relative, not absolute; they are subjective experiences, not objective science. Only Jews found the truth of God in human history.

History was invented three times: by the Jews in the Tenth Century BCE (Before the Common Era), the oldest historical work, being the Book of Samuel; by the Greeks in the Fifth Century BCE starting. with the history of Herodotus; and in the Second Century BCE by the Chinese, with Ssu­ma T’en’s great history of the rise of the Han Dynasty, The Shih Chi. India never did develop independently a concept of history because its sages were concerned only with the eternal and the unchanging underneath all the superficial variety. Not until a very late date did the Hindus import the concept of history from the........

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