(March 2, 2010) …If you know the history of this Land, as I do, you find this kind of funny because it is so bizarre, as bizarre as it is ignorant. In ancient times the Land was not called the West Bank as it is here, and Nablus cannot be of any historic interest to today’s so-called Ancient Palestinians because it’s a Greek word. It is just the word Neapolis mispronounced. The Romans built this “New City” which is what the word means next to Shechem, the first city the Patriarch Avraham came to when he arrived from Ur Casdim on a mission from the G-d of the Universe.
Nablus is the same name as Naples, the English corruption of the Italian Napoli (you can even hear the “b” there) which is the Italian corruption of the Greek Neapolis. Although the Romans built this New City, they didn’t give it a Latin but a Greek name probably for the same reason English Quakers named their principle colonial city Philadelphia, to give it some class. The Romans looked up to the Greeks… |
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