Alternative Endings

Most true stories have only one ending.

In recent years it has been possible to buy movies with a selection of endings. If the story doesn't turn out your way in one playing, simply make a switch and see it end in another way.



I've been wondering about that. Is it good for us? Most conveniences which have been invented down through the ages have been either obviously good or at least adaptable to good uses. Many such things were invented for military purposes and then applied to manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, mining, or some other positive thing. Not to imply that military purposes are always evil. Far from it! In many cases, one side in a war is demonstrably more righteous than another. And the Lord has explained that he uses the wicked to punish the wicked on occasion. Thus, the vicious Assyrians are used to fulfill the prophetic warnings to the northern ten tribes of Israel, carrying them away into slavery and scattering them to the various parts of the world, beginning in 722 BC.



But Assyria's own day of reckoning was coming. No nation which is in the habit of impaling tens of thousands of the citizens of captured cities can long escape the wrath of our God.



Then there were the Chaldean Babylonians. In about 585 BC they fulfilled more prophetic warnings by killing or capturing the remaining tribes, chiefly Judah (or the Jews) and carrying the few who lived through the invasion away into slavery in Babylon. But the Chaldeans, too, had to face their day of judgment. The Persians conquered them and released the Jews to go home and rebuild their city and their temple. Of course, the temple they built was nice, but it never quite lived up to the standards of the magnificent temple of Solomon, son of David.



So the Persians had been tools in the hands of God to save his people after they had been humbled. He promised that he would not forsake them forever, and He told the truth. But the Persians, too, became proud and aggressive. They spent 20 years trying to reduce the Greek city-states to Persian control. But at Marathon, Thermopylae (where King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans held them back for days!), and at Salamis the Hellenes proved themselves capable of uniting temporarily for the salvation of all Greeks. Their war chest was kept on the Island of Delos. So their military alliance was called The Delian League. But after the Persian wars, one city-state, Athens, tried to dominate all the money and some of the other city-states. And so they fell into the Pelepponesian wars in which the cities of Attica (the upper part of Greece) fought with the cities of the Pelepponesus (the ear-lobe-like part of Greece which hangs down in the south.)



Athens happened to be going through its short "Golden Age." That's when they became as democratic as they ever would. Athens had become the inspiration of the known world. It had the greatest architecture, the finest teachers, the best playwrights, and the most democratic government of any city-state then in existence. But they were defeated by the city states from the Pelepponesus, led by Sparta. This led one of Socrates' students, a fellow named Plato, to lose his faith in democracy. If it was such a good form of government, he reasoned, then how had Athens and its allies been defeated in the Pelepponesian War by mere monarchies and oligarchies?



In the midst of this humility, Athens had to become wary of a threat from the north, Philip II of Macedonia. For years he spread his growing empire by taking first one and then another city. One great Athenian gave a series of speeches warning that Philip was coming and that, if they didn't get ready for him, even the great Athens would be not only defeated as it had been in the Pelepponesian War, but occupied and would lose its sovereignty. This series of warning speeches became known as "The Philippics." And to this day any such speech of warning about a military threat is called that. Winston Churchill gave many "Philippics" about Hitler, but most members of the British Parliament didn't believe him.



After Philip's assassination, his son Alexander, about 20 years old, took over the empire his father had built and multiplied its size many times over. He conquered all the known world, clear over to the Indus River from which India gets its name. Hence his historical name, Alexander the Great. He died young. His generals fought over and divided his empire. One of them ruled over an area that included Jerusalem. The Macabee family, led by the great Judas Macabeus, led a rebellion against Greek occupation and influence. But Greek influence under Alexander had been so forcefully stamped on the world that a simplified form of the Greek language (Koine Greek) was spoken through thousands of miles of the ancient world, resulting in improved trade among all the cities and kingdoms of the ancient world. That's why scholars and attorneys and respected men of business, like Saul of Tarsus, spoke not only Aramaic in the land of Israel but also Greek. No one could be considered truly educated who didn't speak and read Greek.



No one admired and looked up to the Greeks more than the people from the little cow town of Rome over on the Italian peninsula. They wanted to be like the Greeks. They wanted to have their own little pet Greeks living as slaves in their homes and teaching their little Romans to speak Greek and know the plays and epic poems of Greece. Such slaves were called Pedagogues, the same name that private tutors in Greece had always been called. The science or art of teaching is still today called pedagogy. Of course, the best way to get everything you want from the culture you admire is to conquer it and steal it. So that's what Rome did. Even the Spartans were unable to stand up to them.



As Rome made an effort to conquer ever-outward, largely because of their fear of invasion from without, a fear that was based primarily on their horrible experience in the Second Punic War in which Hannibal Barca stomped around Italy for 15 years and couldn't be slowed down, let alone stopped, it eventually took lands that had been taken by great conquerors before. They took parts of Persia and Parthia, although those were always having to be reconquered. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had defeated Spartacus in the slave rebellion about 7 decades before Christ's birth in the land near Jerusalem, was surrounded one day in Persia, cut off from his men, and then cut off from his head. This was then boiled clean and scooped out so that it could be presented to the Persian leader. A legend says that he ladled molten gold into the skull of Crassus, saying, "There Crassus, you Roman bastard, you always wanted our Persian gold. Now you have your fill of it." Did this really happen? I don't know. I know Crassus died there. The rest of it makes a great story, but I have my doubts about parts of it.



Saul of Tarsus not only spoke Aramaic and his native Jewish tongue and Koine Greek, he also spoke Latin and had gained Roman citizenship to go with it. This gave him the protection of Roman law wherever he went. Thus, whenever he was arrested for preaching the Christian Gospel (after his conversion and his taking of the name Paul the Apostle) his Roman citizenship often got him out of tough situations. At least for a few years.



And who destroyed the Romans? Well, they largely destroyed themselves by abandoning their moral, political, and educational traditions, but their actual invaders were various Germanic tribes with names like Lombards, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, and lots of others. They moved across the Rhine River and took up residence in areas that had for many years been controlled by Roman Legions. The Franks settled the area that today is called France. The Belgae settled Belgium. The Lombards settled that portion of Northern Italy which today is still called Lombardia (Lombardy in English.)



Four of the Germanic tribes moved across the channel and too Britannia away from the Romans who had controlled it for going on 4 centuries. One of the Romanized Celtic kings who tried to stop them was named Artorius. From him we get the stories of King Arthur. But the Germanic tribes just kept on coming, even for generations. Britannia was eventually possessed by the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Frisians. They didn't necessarily bring all of their people with them. Saxe still exists in Germany. There is an area of Holland where they still speak Frise, a language very much like English. But Britannia became known for the first of these four invading tribes, the Angles. It became Angle-land. Or England, today. Later came the Norse or Vikings for about 200 years of annual summer raids in which they killed Anglo-Saxon men, stole gold and food, and took Anglo-Saxon daughters off to Scandinavia with them to help them keep up the Viking population. Eventually, the Northmen settled in England, at least some of them.



Then came the French-speaking Vikings (Normans) in the year 1066 who conquered the Anglo-Saxons and made them second class citizens in what had been their own homeland for centuries.The Normans added 10,000 French words to English. By the time another 500 years had passed, you couldn't have understood the original Anglish or Saxonish languages if your life depended on it. Because by now, modern English had been created. By now, people like William Shakespeare were learning to make it into beautiful poetry and great drama.



This isn't really the direction I intended to go tonight. I intended to talk about some TV shows I've seen lately and how I could have wished for them to end. Maybe I'll do that soon anyway. I just got rolling on the History and it kept on rolling out of me. If there's anything here related to the title I started out with, it is that History, unlike movies, usually has one ending. You can interpret it in different ways, but those who are conquered or enslaved or killed or promoted or enthroned tend to stay that way. There are no alternative endings.