Southern Levant

4% from the Horn of Africa, which seems to be like East Ethiopia, East Somalia.

You know what? 4% Southern Iraq, 33% Arabian Peninsula, and then 2% Israeli, which they label as Southern Levant, which I've never heard that term before.

And to their credit, it's not...

That's the most politically

The origins of it are somewhat unknown and debated.

The Song of Songs is often called the Song of Solomon because it's mythically associated with the mythical figure of Solomon during the Davidic lineage or reign of a unified Israel that was wistfully longed for after the Judean elite were taken by the Babylonians into captivity and out of their traditional homeland in the Southern Levant.

Of particular interest to Bernard and of many mystics after is chapter 5 of the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon.

I come to my garden, my sister, my bride.

These are the sorts of impulses that lead to religious formulations in which a reward of heaven in which the total removal of all flesh and suffering results in a kind of otherworldly paradise that is far away from this realm of fallenness and suffering and sin so that in such a place there is almost nothing to do with or no connection to this materiality.

This would be something exemplified by a Gnostic type faith in which first century, second century AD, you have a number of Christians who formulate an idea of an afterlife that is totally different than the one that had been formulated by some in the Jewish faith of a bodily resurrection, something that honors this world.

and a redemption of the actual ancient Near East, of the Southern Levant, as a actual political entity.

A political entity in this world, of this world, in which there is a renewal of a fallen political, social, cultural reality.