Latest Hammurabi Podcast Episodes

Purim: The Same Old Story

CONTEXT - March 03, 2015 00:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Megillath Esther tells the story of a close call for the Jews, when a great threat, posed by the evil minister Haman, was thwarted by the beautiful Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai. The Purim story describes what would become a template for future cycles of anti-Jewish hatred. In t...

Paris - Still Burning

CONTEXT - January 28, 2015 00:00 - 16 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
The phenomenon of Jews returning to Israel did not start after World War II, it began hundreds of years earlier. After the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms in the 13th century, Jews started returning to Israel. The driving force behind this migration was the growing anti-Jewish agita...

January: A Time For Reformation

CONTEXT - January 12, 2015 00:00 - 18 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
In January of 1518 Martin Luther's "95 Thesis", an attack on the sale of Indulgences by the Catholic Church, was translated and distributed through a revolutionary technology - the printing press. Martin Luther captured the spirit of the moment with his thesis. The publication of this tr...

Time And Space For The New Year

CONTEXT - December 29, 2014 00:00 - 15 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
The official practice of numbering the years in sequence started with the emperor Seleucus. He chose 311 B.C.E., the year he came to power, as the year One. The Seleucid system was adopted by the Jews of Babylon who referred to this newly accepted practice as the "era of dating legal doc...

Jesus: Another Jewish Over Achiever

CONTEXT - December 22, 2014 00:00 - 16 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
This episode of Context explores the Jewish character of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. Dr. David Neiman reads passages from the New Testament that paint a portrait of Jesus as a normal first century Jewish boy from a modest, traditional Jewish family. The words of Jesus, as recor...

It's All Greek To Me - The Complicated Story of Hanukkah

CONTEXT - December 14, 2014 00:00 - 38 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
It’s no surprise that winter holidays around the world have light as their central theme. So too is the case with Hanukkah where we celebrate the miracle of the olive oil that fueled the Menorah at the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Maccabees in 164 B.C.E. But as you migh...

When Empires Weaken

CONTEXT - December 08, 2014 00:00 - 15 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
The Muslim conquests of the 7th Century marked the definitive end to the power of Rome. By the time of Muhammad, Rome had been engaged in a war with the Persian empire that had endured for more than a hundred years. Rome and Persia were worn out. They had exhausted their resources. The c...

The "A" word with Dry Bones – Yaakov Kirschen

CONTEXT - November 24, 2014 00:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Anti-Jewish prejudice existed before Islam and before Christianity. Opinions critical of Jews were recorded in ancient, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. To discuss the issue of anti-Jewish hatred, or the "A" word, I am joined via Skype, with Israeli cartoonist, Yaakov Kirschen, creator of the D...

A DNA match with history

CONTEXT - November 18, 2014 00:00 - 16 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
This episode was inspired by recent study that was conducted by Columbia University and published in the journal, Nature Communications. The researchers found that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a 350 person “bottleneck” that occurred a mere 600 to 800 years ago. The idea seems i...

Stepping in a Kurd

CONTEXT - November 13, 2014 00:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Six years ago I posted a video on YouTube about the ancient kingdom of Assyria. I had no idea what a firestorm of comments this video segment would ignite. It seems that the mention of the geographical region of "Kurdistan" was incendiary. Since the video was uploaded, pages and pages of...

31.7780° N, 35.2354° E - The Dome of the Rock

CONTEXT - November 13, 2014 00:00 - 11 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
If there ever was an energy vortex on this planet, it is the rock in the center of The Dome of the Rock. Jews believe it is the place where Abraham took Isaac for sacrifice. Muslims believe that it was Ishmael who was chosen by Abraham for the same task. Jews believe it is the site of ...

CONTEXT: The Lord, The Land, The Law

CONTEXT - November 11, 2014 00:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Father Felix F. Talbot, SJ was a colleague of my father’s in the theology department at Boston College, a Catholic university outside of Boston. “He likes to make up clever little devices to help his students remember things”, my father told me. “The lord, the land, the law” was the mne...