By Lawrence Erikson
A Brief Summary of the Carthaginian Theory
For those who have not read the article, the Carthaginian theory perfectly solves a strange puzzle with regard to modern Jewish origins. Unz summarizes the puzzle as follows:
“Most mainstream experts seemed to quietly concede that Sand was correct in arguing that by the time of the Roman Empire the overwhelming majority of the Jews living along the shores of the Mediterranean were probably of convert stock, having little ancestry from the Israelites of Palestine. Yet the genetic evidence painted a very different picture for the major subsequent Jewish populations.
As mentioned, the Ashkenazi Jews seem to derive from Middle Eastern males who took European wives in the centuries after the Fall of Rome. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews of Muslim Spain are also of Middle Eastern ancestry, and they were the wealthiest and most numerous component of Jewry throughout much of the Middle Ages prior to their 1492 expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella. So, if only a small fraction of Jews had roots in Palestine, it appears quite odd that these would have become the progenitors of both the Sephardic and male Ashkenazi lines. Genetic evidence seems to conflict with strong literary and historical evidence.”
These seemingly contradictory bodies of evidence are brought together by the Carthaginian hypothesis. The Carthaginians/Phoenicians were a Canaanite people, closely related to the Judeans, and so the difference between the two would not be picked up by our insufficiently precise genetic testing. Carthage also had a massive empire of roughly four million people, and so it would’ve provided an ample source of converts around the Mediterranean. After the destruction of Carthage by Rome, the defeated and stateless Carthaginians would’ve found the religion of their devout cousins very attractive, given that it prophesized a messiah that would save their people. The Carthaginians were also known for being excellent merchants and urban-dwellers, similar to modern day Jews, but quite different from the peasants of Judea. As we will examine below, this theory would also connect modern Jews with the Canaanite ancestors of the Carthaginians.
People of the Book?
“And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
-Genesis 9:25
The Bible uses the term “Canaanite” to refer to the indigenous pagan tribes in the land of Canaan (modern day Israel and Lebanon). The story of the Canaanites begins with their namesake, Canaan. The Bible describes how Canaan’s father, Ham, witnesses Noah naked and tells his brothers about it, rather than helping cover Noah up. As punishment, Noah curses Canaan in Genesis 9:25. Canaan’s descendants settle in the land of Canaan, and they are condemned for practicing incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and child sacrifice (Leviticus 18). God eventually commands the Israelites to remove them from the southern portion of the land (modern day Israel). While some are under the impression that the Canaanites were completely annihilated, the Bible states in Judges 3 1:4 that the Canaanites in the north (modern day Lebanon) were allowed to survive so as to test future Israelites in battle.
While the Bible describes the people of this land as Canaanites, the Greeks had a different name for them: Phoenicians. Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians as a colony in the 9th century BC, roughly three centuries after modern scholars believe the Canaanite displacement at the hands of the Israelites occurred. However, there is little reason to think these Phoenicians/Carthaginians were anything other than the direct descendants of the Biblical Canaanites. Ephraim Stern, chairman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology, stated that the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Biblical-era Canaanites, some of whom were forced out of Palestine by the Israelites around 1200 BC. Already, an incredible irony presents itself. Modern scholars subtly acknowledge that the vast majority of Roman Jews never left Palestine, meaning that modern Palestinians are the closest descendants of the ancient Israelites. Others have already pointed out how ironic it is that the entire Zionist project justifies itself off the claim that they are the descendants of the Israelites, but in reality, they are expelling the actual descendants of the Israelites from the holy land. The Carthaginian theory further deepens this already remarkable irony. Zionist settlers are not just a foreign entity attacking the true Israelites, but are actually the descendants of the people that were cursed and explicitly ordered for removal from the land by God, according to scriptures that religious Zionists themselves believe in. They do have a connection to the holy land, it’s just not the one they want. From a Christian perspective, the story of modern Zionism is the story of a bitter people attempting to reverse God’s judgment upon them without Christ, and who have been allowed to exist so as to test Israelites in combat. This ends up remaining true theologically, in the sense that Christians are the new Israelites and Christian societies have been seized by Jewish organizations, and it’s also become true again literally, in the sense that Israelite descendants are now physically in combat with Canaanite descendants in the holy land.
Defining Modern Judaism
It is commonly believed that modern day Jews are followers of the Old Testament, only differentiated from Christians by their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. The Hebrew scriptures seem to clearly point to Jesus as the Messiah, leaving Christians frustrated for centuries over the Jewish refusal to accept this. However, the scholarship of Prof. Israel Shahak has shown that the modern Jewish religion includes a wide variety of strange, seemingly pagan practices. Many have accused them of general devil worship, but Canaanite origins could provide greater clarity as to the essence of their beliefs. As we covered earlier, the Canaanites in the Bible engaged in a host of disturbing pagan practices, including child sacrifice. One might be tempted to think that three thousand years is too long for any link to remain; perhaps the migration to Carthage resulted in significant change to the Canaanite culture, or perhaps the destruction of Carthage and mass conversion to Judaism resulted in an overhaul of their religious practices. However, the historical record shows that this is not the case. Despite the distance between Carthage and Phoenicia, the Phoenician Carthaginians retained an unsevered connection with their native religion, and this included the practice of child sacrifice. For many years it was doubted that the Carthaginians actually sacrificed children, but recent findings have provided overwhelming evidence that they did. An article in Haaretz provides a useful summary:
“Though they dispersed throughout the western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians remained united by their religious practices. For centuries, Carthage sent a delegation to Tyre each year to sacrifice at the temple of the city-god Melqart. In Carthage itself, the chief deities were the divine couple Baal-Hammon, meaning “Lord of the Brazier,” and Tanit, identified with Astarte. The most notorious characteristic of Phoenician religion was the practice of child sacrifice. The area around the western Mediterranean (Carthage, Western Sicily, Southern Sardinia) is littered with burials of sacrificed children, but in truth, the practice was commonplace in the Phoenician cities all over the Levant. Diodorus Siculus reports that in 310 B.C.E., during an attack on the city, the Carthaginians sacrificed over 200 children of noble birth to appease Baal-Hammon.”
The scholarship of Prof. Ariel Toaff shows that this practice also did not end with the destruction of Carthage, and that European Jews practiced child sacrifice well into the Middle Ages. The existence of Carthaginian child sacrifice strongly supports the accounts of Canaanite child sacrifice in the Bible, as well as Prof. Toaff’s research, and shows a significant link between Rabbinic Judaism and Canaanite paganism.
Another intriguing continuity is the role of Saturn in Jewish culture. The historian Eusebius records that the Phoenician supreme deity, El, was deified as the star Saturn. The Romans also linked Saturn with the Carthaginian supreme deity, Baal-Hammon, possibly reinforced by the fact that Saturn ate his children in Roman mythology. Roman and Medieval Jewish sources attest that at least some form of Saturn/Baal-Hammon worship remained even after the Carthaginians mass converted to Judaism. Shlomo Sela, a professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at Bar Ilan University, analyzed the works of Abraham ibn Ezra, a prominent Medieval Jewish commentator, who wrote a lengthy work attempting to defend the link between the Jews and Saturn. Sela wrote that this link is “historically vouched for in almost all the sources which have been presented above to demonstrate the persistence of the Saturn-Jewish connection from antiquity till the Middle Ages. Thus, both Tacitus and St. Augustine asserted that the Jews made the Sabbath their rest day in order to honor or worship Saturn.” Lest anyone think that this was just Roman or Christian propaganda, Sela also states: “That Jewish society of the Talmudic period recognized the same association is shown by the fact that the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 156a) refers to Saturn as Shabbetai, i.e., the star of Shabbat (Saturday).” Ibn Ezra himself did not deny that the Shabbat (Sabbath) was related to Saturn, but defended it by saying that Jews rested to protect themselves from Saturn’s malignant influence, which was supposedly strongest on that day. The Jewish newspaper, Forward, also admits the link, but claims that the Jews named Saturn after the Sabbath simply because the Romans believed the Jews were resting in honor of Saturn. Both of these explanations raise serious questions. The Old Testament clearly and repeatedly states that God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy, and that it’s to be dedicated only to God (Exodus 20:8-11). If devout Jews rest for Saturn, even if we are to believe that it’s to protect themselves from Saturn, this would be religiously errant at the very least. Along with that, one would think that pious Jews would be deeply offended by the Roman accusation that they dedicated the Sabbath to a malicious pagan deity and would strenuously resist such a connection given the severe scriptural warnings against idol worship. Instead, they appear to have had no problem with naming Saturn “the Sabbath star”, casting doubt on the idea that the Romans were wrong about this. Given that Jews have resisted conversion to Christianity for two-thousand years under enormous pressure, and that they even use a different mathematical plus sign because ours looks too much like a cross, a misnomer here would seem like quite the oversight.
Along with the historical evidence, Prof. Shahak also pointed out something interesting in his book Jewish History, Jewish-Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years:
“Perhaps the most sacred Jewish formula, ‘Hear 0 Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’, recited several times each day by every pious Jew, can at the present time mean two contrary things. It can mean that the Lord is indeed ‘one’; but it can also mean that a certain stage in the union of the male and female deities has been reached or is being promoted by the proper recitation of this formula.”
After having read this initially, I was baffled, and wondered how such an odd belief could have ended up in modern Judaism. With the Carthaginian context though, it makes perfect sense, as the Carthaginians worshipped a divine couple, the male Baal-Hammon and the female Tanit, as mentioned above.
Assuming that the Carthaginian theory is true, the evidence suggests that the modern Jewish religion is a sort of hybrid between genuine Torah Judaism and Canaanite paganism. This should be unsurprising, as the Phoenicians were a proud people with an empire that had lasted a millennium, and they were probably reluctant to totally shirk their own religion in favor of one coming from their impoverished peasant cousins. This also foreshadowed their eventual refusal to accept the Christianity that the rest of the Roman Empire (even Judea) adopted, with the bitter memories of Roman conquest further entrenching their obstinance.
The Pharisees and the Star of Remphan
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.”
-Matthew 23:15
By the time of Christ’s conflict with the Pharisees almost two centuries after the destruction of Carthage, the bulk of the Carthaginian conversions had likely already happened. The impact of this on Jerusalem was probably substantial, especially given the influence that modern Jewish populations tend to exert over urban areas. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that converts became “increasingly numerous in Palestine” during this period, and there were many who “observed one or more Jewish practices without being fully converted.”
The prominence of the Pharisees may itself have been an example of this impact, as they were defined in large part by their rejection of Greek influence and their eager overseas proselytizing, so their movement would’ve been closely linked with Carthaginian converts who resented the domination of the Greco-Roman civilization. Prof. Shahak pointed out how modern Judaism is fixated on rituals, sometimes without regard to whether God or Satan is being worshipped. This obsession with ritual over substance is also something Jesus condemned the Pharisees for, and it could be evidence that they compromised with their new allies. One can easily imagine how the Pharisees may have started off with good intentions in their mission to convert the Carthaginian masses, but found them more stubborn than hoped. Tempted by the wealth and power that these potential new converts could bring them, the Pharisees essentially made a Faustian bargain with the Carthaginians, downplaying differences of theology and emphasizing areas of less controversy, such as superficial rituals and the coming of a messiah. As a result, Carthaginian Saturnism gradually infected the Pharisees, and this new syncretic religion blinded them to the Messiah that would not revive the empire.
A tragic fall in this fashion would really just be a rhyming of history, as the Old Testament includes many stories of the Israelites being negatively influenced by surrounding pagans. St. Stephen appears to allude to this in his speech to the Sanhedrin (Acts 7), where he compares their actions to those of disobedient Israelites in the Old Testament, including some who decided to worship Moloch and Remphan over God:
“Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.”
-Acts 7:43
Remphan (or Rephan) is the Egyptian name for Saturn. Stephen is referencing Amos 5:26 when he refers to the star of Remphan:
“But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.”
-Amos 5:26
Chiun is the Hebrew name for Saturn, and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary on this verse states that Saturn was probably represented with a star symbol: “Probably there was a figure of a star on the head of the image of the idol, to represent the planet Saturn; hence “images” correspond to “star” in the parallel clause.” It seems quite possible that Carthaginian influence led to a revival in the usage of this star of Saturn symbol, and is what led Stephen to refer to this specific verse. When asking ourselves what this star symbol may have looked like, there is of course one very obvious candidate: the Star of David. Not many Christians seem to be aware of this, but there is no mention in the Old Testament of any sort of “star” of David, a star symbol for David, or anything else that could plausibly link David with the modern Jewish symbol. Theories for the origin of the Star of David are vague and varied, but the Jewish Virtual Library’s page on the topic interestingly says that “The oldest undisputed example is on a seal from the seventh century B.C.E. found in Sidon.” Sidon was a major Canaanite/Phoenician city, and the 7th century BC is just a century after the prophet Amos is said to have lived. The page also states that Arab and Jewish sources referred to the hexagram as “the seal of Solomon” and that this connects the symbol with early “Judeo-Christian” magic such as the first-century magical work The Testament of Solomon. In this non-canonical work, God gives Solomon a ring engraved with a pentagram that allows him to control demons, and the story ends with Solomon worshipping Moloch and Remphan in exchange for sex. This seems to be the earliest documentary source for the Star of David, which happens to be from the time Stephen lived and happens to also link the symbol with Saturn/Remphan. Were Amos and Stephen speaking of the Star of David when they condemned this star of Saturn symbol? We may never be able to confirm this, but given that the oldest example of the Star of David is from around the time of Amos, in a major city of Saturn worshippers, and its first documented appearances also associate it with Saturn in the time of Stephen, this seems highly likely. It also seems highly likely that Carthaginian pagan influence played a role in the Jewish corruption that led to Christ’s crucifixion, as Canaanite influence did with the spurning of Amos.
What I will engage in now will be pure speculation, and it might seem outlandish, but I do think it logically follows from Christian belief. If you’re a Christian, you believe that God spoke to and revealed many things to the Israelites in the Old Testament, and you also believe that Satan is real and does engage with humanity at least occasionally. Keeping that in mind, the Jewish Virtual Library states a revealing motive behind the widespread usage of the Star of David: “The prime motive behind the wide diffusion of the sign in the 19th century was the desire to imitate Christianity. The Jews looked for a striking and simple sign which would “symbolize” Judaism in the same way as the cross symbolizes Christianity.” Christians have long seen the sun as a natural symbol of God, and if God created a natural symbol of Satan, Saturn would be a logical choice. Saturn is the most distant planet from the sun that the ancients were aware of, and is also quite literally chained by its rings. In 1981, the Voyager mission made the remarkable discovery of a giant hexagonal storm on Saturn’s north pole, something the ancients could not possibly have been aware of, which makes it very coincidental that a hexagram ended up representing Saturn.
In Greek mythology, Saturn was also chained by Jupiter, another coincidence given that the ancients were also unaware of Saturn’s rings. Did Satan reveal aspects of Saturn to entice the Canaanites to idolatry? Did he then revive the symbol they created, so he could counter the cross after Christ’s resurrection? Of course this is purely speculatory, but this is a series of coincidences that I think is worth pondering for any believing Christian.
Far from being a simple origin story of the Jewish people, the Carthaginian theory recontextualizes thousands of years of Christian-Jewish relations and Biblical history. Zionists would find themselves the villains of their own story, and the past three millennia would look like a continuous tale of combat between the people of God and a wicked Saturnian cult. Instead of a principled commitment to the Hebrew scriptures that Rabbinic Jews claim is their reason for rejecting Christ, the real reason would look more like pagan corruption, combined with an undying grudge against Rome and its Church, which stole their empire from them in the same way that the Israelites banished them from their homeland. Rome succeeding the Israelites in this fashion would prefigure the Roman Church as the new Israel. Instead of joining the new Israel, Jews still seek the old one, completely unaware that it was never even theirs. Perhaps, with better knowledge of their origins, they could finally find the humility to end their wandering in the wilderness.
Notes
https://thomistica.net/letter-to-margaret-of-flanders#:~:text=Thomas%20Aquinas%27s%20Letter%20to%20Margaret,other%20issues%2C%20as%20well).
https://www.worldhistory.org/Carthaginian_Religion/#google_vignette
https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/phoenicia-and-its-special-relationship-with-israel/
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2016-07-28/ty-article/did-the-phoenicians-even-exist/0000017f-eab1-ddba-a37f-eafff7340000
https://www.academia.edu/38440339/Abraham_Ibn_Ezras_Appropiation_of_Saturn pg. 40
https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/saturn-and-jews
https://forward.com/news/9794/the-sabbath-planet/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/Hellenistic-Judaism-4th-century-bce-2nd-century-ce
“The rise of the Pharisees may thus be seen, in a sense, as a reaction against the more profound Hellenization favoured by the Sadducees, who were allied with the philhellenic Hasmoneans”
“The eagerness of the Pharisees to win converts is attested in The Gospel According to Matthew (23:15), which states that the Pharisees would ‘traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte.’”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/Hellenistic-Judaism-4th-century-bce-2nd-century-ce
https://www.internationalstandardbible.com/R/rephan.html
https://biblehub.com/commentaries/jfb/amos/5.htm
https://www.gotquestions.org/star-of-David.html
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/magen-david#google_vignette
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Book-of-Amos
https://web.archive.org/web/20190503205000/https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/guestlectures/harding/
https://trisagionseraph.tripod.com/Texts/Cicero2.html
