God's Peoples by Donald Harman Akenson

Israel is in the news again - Ashkelon and Ashdod are among the Israeli cities which have been hit by long range rockets. Do a search on BibleGateway.com for Ashkelon and you get eight interesting Old Testament references, from Samson going there and killing thirty men who had co-operated with Samson's first wife in a scheme to deceive him, to this verse in the book of Amos - and this verse from Zechariah reads like a press release on tomorrow's breakfast news.

I've been picking through this book again today (which I've blogged about before) - there's some great stuff in it. It compares the cultures of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, the Presbyterians and Ulster-Scots of Ulster, and the Jews/Zionists of Israel.

"...the major component of the Ulster-Scots mindset has been the conceptual grid that the Presbyterians of Ulster assimilated from the Hebrew scriptures... for the Ulster-Scots, the Hebrew scriptures served as an entire cultural cupboard..."

from the chapter The Covenantal Culture of the Ulster-Scots, page 103