The Bible's narratives evidently share much of the cultural heritage of ancient Syria and Mesopotamia but zoom in for a more detailed study and one arguably sees many signs of a distinctively Greek influence. That's the argument of Russell Gmirkin in Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. Previous posts in this series that include explanations of how Greek sources could have influenced the biblical authors are:

1. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible
2. The Pentateuch's Debt to Greek Laws and Constitutions — A New Look
3. David, an Ideal Greek Hero — and other Military Matters in Ancient Israel
4. Some preliminaries before resuming Gmirkin's Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Nothing is more essentially "Biblical Israel" than its Twelve Tribes. Genesis is for most part the story of the origins of these twelve tribes. The history of Israel is a history primarily of the tribes of Israel, mostly twelve at first, but then divided into two kingdoms of ten and two. One of the tribes was assigned for the priesthood and therefore not given a territorial allotment, but two of Joseph's sons were each given land areas to maintain the all-important twelve inheritors of the land while the sons of Levi became a thirteenth tribe. Always twelve, though sometimes ten and sometimes thirteen.

So very "biblical", yet so very Greek as known about Athens and various Greek colonies from the writings of Plato and Aristotle housed in the Great Library of Alexandria.

A historian claims to have discovered skeletal remains of what is believed to be a larger-than-usual man in a cave in Pulau Upeh, off the coast here.

Mohd Fuad Khusari M. Said, who was appointed by the Malacca go­vernment to search for new historical sites, said he discovered some bones partially exposed above the ground in Pulau Upeh.

He also found two other unusually large graves some 1.2km outside the cave.

The graves measuring about 5m by 0.5m are located about 15m to 20m away from each other.

"I have reported the findings to the authorities because we have no right to excavate the site without permission," he told The Star yesterday.

New fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been found in the Cave of the Skulls by the Dead Sea in Israel, in a salvage excavation by Israeli authorities. The pieces are small and the writing on them is too faded to make out without advanced analysis. At this stage the archaeologists aren't even sure if they're written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic or another language.

"The most important thing that can come out of these fragments is if we can connect them with other documents that were looted from the Judean Desert, and that have no known provenance," says Dr. Uri Davidovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, among the scientists investigating the caves.

Israel Antiquities Authority vs. UN

The head of the Israel Antiquities Authority has recently (Times of Israel Oct. 20) compared UNESCO unflatteringly 'to Islamic State jihadists', for its October 13 resolution calling into question 'the link between Judaism and the Western Wall' (as Haaretz put it): the view that the Wall is a surviving feature of the pre-70 CE Temple Mount.

However the IAA's own view, formed in reaction to new evidence, itself deserves to be questioned.

Old and new replies: Coins, Herod, Agrippa II and Josephus

It is generally agreed that Herod the Great, King of the Jews, began work on the Temple in or near 20 BCE. According to a statement 'Building the Western Wall' published by the IAA through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on November 23, 2011, 'every guide and every student grounded in history', when asked 'who built the Temple Mount walls?' will 'immediately reply 'Herod". However, there should now, the IAA continues, be a new reply in the light of archaeology. The New Reply runs, 'the work was completed in the reign of Herod's great grandson Agrippa II' - i.e. in or around 62 CE, when the chain of events that would lead to the destruction of the Temple in 70 was just starting.

The IAA firmly invokes Josephus' authority for its favoured date, using - misusing, I think - a passage from his Antiquities Book 20, never hinting that he says other things by which the Old Reply, Herod built the Western Wall, might have been encouraged. This misuse was once favoured, as I'll note later, by Christians arguing against Jews.
The reason the Israel Antiquities Authority came up with the New Reply was the discovery in 2011 (described in the same IAA document) in a cistern space under the Wall of four coins, the latest dated to around 17 CE, in the governorship of Valerius Gratus, twenty years after Herod's death. 'This bit of archaeological information illustrates the fact that the construction of the Temple Mount walls... was an enormous project that lasted decades and was not completed during Herod's lifetime,' the IAA concedes.

Islamic State would not have enjoyed the success it did if Saddam Hussein had remained in power, John Nixon, the former CIA agent who grilled him, claims. Nixon says the West should deal with leaders it "abhors" to have a stable Middle East.

Nixon was the first to debrief Saddam after his capture in December 2003, 13 years ago. His book, entitled Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, is a first-hand account of what the invasion of Iraq and the execution of Saddam Hussein have entailed.

While leftist Jaime Roldos Aguilera went on to become Ecuador's president, he was later killed in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances.

Previously classified documents released earlier this week on Operation Condor have shed further light on how the U.S. controlled and meddled in Latin America politics in the 1970s, showing how the U.S. was tossing up the idea of "tinkering" with the outcome of elections in Ecuador as the victory of a left-wing president appeared likely.

The latest release of the Cold War-era documents detailed intelligence from July 24, 1978, where the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency looked into committing fraud in Ecuador's 1979 election after left-wing candidate Jaime Roldos Aguilera won the most votes in 1978 but not enough to avoid a second runoff election scheduled for April 1979.

According to the source, embassy reports showed that Ecuador's navy and president at the time, Alfredo Poveda, who came to power in a military coup, were "determined to have a clean election." Ecuador's military was also "determined to allow Roldos to participate in a runoff election," according to reports from the Embassy and DIA.

Newly declassified files including documents from the CIA and the US Secretary of State reveal details of targets for "liquidation" during Operation Condor in Argentina, and provide insight into US relations with Argentina's former military dictatorship.

Some 500 pages of documents have been released by the US government as part of the Argentina Declassification Project to shed light on human rights abuses in Argentina during the period of the so-called "Dirty War" by military dictatorships from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

During a visit to Argentina in March, President Obama announced on the 40th anniversary of the military coup that his administration would declassify documents from its military and intelligence services relating to Argentina's 1976-83 military dictatorship.

More than 4,000 State Department Cables and other documents were released by the US government in 2002, however this is the first time that CIA or FBI documents relating to the matter have been published.

Calcoene, Brazil — As the foreman for a cattle ranch in the far reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, Lailson Camelo da Silva was razing trees to convert rain forest into pasture when he stumbled across a bizarre arrangement of towering granite blocks.

"I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon's own Stonehenge," said Mr. da Silva, 65, on a scorching October day as he gazed at the archaeological site located just north of the Equator. "It makes me wonder: What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil's jungles?"

After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.

Their findings, along with other archaeological discoveries in Brazil in recent years — including giant land carvings, remains of fortified settlements and even complex road networks — are upending earlier views of archaeologists who argued that the Amazon had been relatively untouched by humans except for small, nomadic tribes.

Instead, some scholars now assert that the world's largest tropical rain forest was far less "Edenic" than previously imagined, and that the Amazon supported a population of as many as 10 million people before the epidemics and large-scale slaughter put into motion by European colonizers.

In what is now the sparsely populated state of Amapá in northern Brazil, the sun stones found by Mr. da Silva near a stream called the Rego Grande are yielding clues about how indigenous peoples in the Amazon may have been far more sophisticated than assumed by archaeologists in the 20th century.

"We're starting to piece together the puzzle of the Amazon Basin's human history, and what we're finding in Amapá is absolutely fascinating," said Mariana Cabral, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who together with her husband, João Saldanha, also an archaeologist, has studied the Rego Grande site for the last decade.

June 12, 2003 - Updated December 15, 2016

Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons
George Bush, US President 18 March, 2003

Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit
Tony Blair 28 April, 2003

We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd
Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003

It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy them prior to the conflict
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary 28 May, 2003

The role played by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon in the Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 and the establishment of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet is still overlooked by the mainstream media, Pablo Sepulveda, the grandson of ousted President of Chile Salvador Allende told Sputnik.

Last Saturday Henry Kissinger, an American diplomat and former US Secretary of State attended the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway; on the next day the 93-year old delivered a speech at the Nobel-connected forum. However, the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 1973 was "greeted" by demonstrations in Oslo with slogans saying "Kissinger is a war criminal," the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, reported.

"For many politicians, especially in the US government, the acquisition of the Nobel Peace Prize has become the way to whitewash their record and rewrite history so that their crimes, genocide and murder would be less visible," Pablo Sepulveda, the grandson of former President of Chile Salvador Allende, told Sputnik Spanish.

In 1973 Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile, was toppled in a coup d'état sponsored by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and died in shooting. The dictatorship was established in the country headed by a military junta presided by Augusto Pinochet.