@K9Otaku you remind me of @Intellau_Celistic and @Khanivore
Blackpill The REAL Blackpill - The enemy is ISHTAR not human genes
What do you think the ubaidians were? @K9Otaku
Chapter 4 – Uruk – Part 3 of 3
In a village setting, such behavior would have been unthinkable. However, in the city, increasing specialization had taught people to mind their own business. The population increase had long ago put an end to the village-style face to face culture where peer pressure is the main driver of social conformity. Most of the participants in the growing tavern sub-culture were younger men from out of town who did not know anybody in the city. As a result, they were unrestrained by traditional social ties. The En and some of the wealthier citizens of Uruk seem to have been worried by this phenomenon and the same was true in Eridu. However, there were no cultural tools available for them to deal with the situation since it was entirely new. Everything in Eridu and Uruk revolved around the Houses of Enki and Anu respectively. As long as your economic dealings with the local House were in order and you were also paying proper respect to the deity during festivals, you were in the clear. You could do whatever you liked.
For the few years leading up to the events of 3709 BC., the relationship between Bilgaga and Uruk's En council had become strained. For several decades already, the Lukig had ceased to be an official appointed by the En but had instead increasingly become a kind of mercenary captain. He had turned into a military contractor of sorts who bargained hard with his En paymasters over his budgetary allocation. Since both cities were experiencing increased prosperity, it had been possible for the En councils of both Eridu and Uruk to allow this allocation to rise rapidly, which is what made Bilgaga’s parties possible, among other things. But Bilgaga was never satisfied by his current allocation and he had become increasingly rude and insolent towards his nominal superiors.
One day, on the 17th of March 3709 BC., the growing tension boiled over. On that day, a new set of buildings were to be inaugurated, with the usual ceremonies and feast. The new structures, constructed 200 meters to the North-East of the limestone building completed nearly 140 years before, were intended to become the new center of the House of Anu. They were spread over an area of nearly 3 hectares and included assembly halls, granaries, workshops and, of course, a central great hall destined to house the statue of the city's god. The citizens of Uruk, who had been participating in its construction for 7 years, already called it “E-Anna”, i.e. “The House of Anu”.
During the morning of March 17th, the En had been making offerings at the old limestone building and had prepared the statue of Anu for its journey to the new compound. They had first bathed it in milk and water. Then, after carefully drying it, they had clothed Anu’s effigy with a brand-new white linen garment decorated with colorful bands of embroidery on its edges. Finally, they had draped its neck with an overabundance of thick flower garlands. A little before noon, the god and master of Uruk started on his journey to his new House, borne on an elaborately decorated bier carried on the shoulders of the full En council of Uruk. Fifteen minutes later, it arrived at the entrance of the great square in front of the new E-Anna complex. Drummers and flute players preceded it as it made its way through the crowd, towards the steps leading up to the main hall.
Suddenly, soldiers started to appear on both sides of the E-Anna. As they poured into the square, they pushed the crowd back and forced it to free up some space at the base of the steps. The men, in full battle array, were accompanied by their own drummers who were making such a din that they forced the musicians accompanying the statue of Anu to stop playing. The En, who were still carrying the bier, could not see what was going on as they were pushed backwards by the crowd. The statue they were carrying seemed to be wavering for a few seconds, on the verge of being toppled over. Then it stabilized due to the En’s desperate efforts to keep it upright. As it stood there, motionless, in the middle of the crowded square, it looked like a becalmed ship in the midst of a sea of heads.
Bilgaga appeared, at the top of the stairs. He too was wearing his combat outfit, a leather cuirass, reinforced with copper plates, a short white linen tunic reaching down to the knees and a pair of high leather sandal boots. A copper sword, short and broad, was strapped to his belt and a round shield hung from his back. On his head, he wore a conical leather helmet adorned with a decorative motif that would feature prominently in Mesopotamian art for centuries to come: the figure of a standing man holding off two erect lions; one to his left and one to his right. Bilgaga's face was red and he appeared drunk. A few paces behind him, three of the most famous ladies of the port district, in full courtesan attire, were standing on the platform of E-Anna's main hall. Bilgaga motioned the drummers to stop playing. The whole square fell into near complete silence, only broken here and there by a couple of wailing infants. After surveying the crowd and finding it suitably cowed, Bilgaga addressed it thus:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna has demanded the Bull of Heaven from Lord Anu and her wish has been granted.
Up to this point, Inanna had been a stock character which appeared in many traditional stories and songs. She was not a goddess in the same sense as Enki and Anu were. She was just the archetypal girl who played the role of love interest in countless heroic tales and rustic poems. The Bull of heaven, for its part was a very old mythical motif, probably of Paleolithic origin, common to nearly all Neolithic Middle-Eastern cultures. It was associated with the sun, fertility, victory, and strength in general. It had never been connected to Inanna before and what Bilgaga was saying was probably far from clear to his audience. He continued:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna is the new mistress of Uruk. Anu has retired to the heavens and granted her the dominion of his beloved city. The Bull of Heaven will grant the lady strength and victory in all she does. She will crack open the skulls of all who oppose her, just as the furious bull gores the hapless cowherd. The Lady Inanna has favored me, Bilgaga. I have had intercourse with the Lady. She bends over and offers her furrow to me.
Things were clearer now, and not at all to the liking of everyone present. People started jeering: “Bilgaga, you inflated beerskin !”, “We did not hear Lord Anu say anything about this !”, “Which Inanna are you talking about ?”, and so on. “SILENCE !”, Bilgaga roared, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. He drew his sword and his men imitated him. The crowd recoiled backwards. The Lukig bellowed:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna is merciful. She does not repay insult with vengeance, at least for now. The Lord Anu is way too loftily placed to speak to you worms. He spoke to the Lady and the Lady spoke to me. I am the voice of the Lady. She will reside in the E-Anna that her father Anu has prepared for her. And I will visit her and mount her when she so desires. I will let you know whatever she wishes you to know.
A silence followed. Bilgaga had calmed down and his eyes were less bloodshot. He continued:
- BILGAGA: The Lady has gathered us today to celebrate her coming into her inheritance; her good city of Uruk. The Lord Anu has witnessed this and gave his assent. He will now return to his erstwhile earthly abode in the city whence he will take up his residence in the Heavens. Let the feast begin !
Bilgaga then ordered a detachment of soldiers to escort the En, and the bier carrying Anu’s statue, back to the limestone building. Once they had left the square, a group of girls moved forward into the space left empty by the crowd in at the foot of the steps and started dancing, to the sound of drums and reed pipes. After a minute or two, one of the courtesans which had been standing behind Bilgaga since the beginning moved down the staircase. From the lowest step, she began singing:
As the courtesan sang, her mood started to spread to her audience. Uruk’s citizen were becoming inebriated with lust and frenzy. The whole square was soon dancing to the rhythm of the drums. Much beer flowed that night, all over town. The whole city was one huge revelry. Dancing, copulation and brawls engulfed it like a sudden fire.
In the morning, there were 17 dead bodies lying down in the streets as well as countless broken arms and fractured jaws. Nobody cared. Everyone was fast asleep. The city was motionless and silent for a whole day as people bandaged their sores and recovered their composure. The day after, the city resumed its everyday routine but the citizens of Uruk knew that things would never be like before.
That morning, Bilgaga showed up at the white limestone building, followed by his now usual retinue of armed soldiers and courtesans. Inside, the En, who had been barricaded there for the last two days, saw him coming from a distance but did not open the door. Bilgaga called them out and motioned them to come and meet him. They slowly filed out of the building and formed a large semi-circle around the Lukig. The following exchange ensued:
- BILGAGA: The new E-ANNA will henceforth be the house of Inanna. You En will serve Anu in the old white building and Inanna in the new E-ANNA.
- CHIEF EN: This is unheard of. We ...
- COURTESAN No. 1 (interrupting): Who are you old man to question the word of lady Inanna. You have never known a woman and your penis is shrivelled like an old date. Why would the lady take any interest in you ?
- CHIEF EN: I ...
- COURTESAN No. 2: bir-gish (shrivelled-penis), bir-gish, bir-gish. The lady is not listening ...
- COURTESANS and some soldiers together: bir-gish, bir-gish, libir-zulum (old date), libir-zulum, bir-gish, ...
After the heckling died down, Bilgaga said:
- BILGAGA: Now you know the divine power of Lady Inanna, old man.
- CHIEF EN: Yes I do.
Bilgaga then dictated his conditions to the En, assembled in front of the white limestone building. First, he was now to be known under a new name, “Bilgamesh”, i.e. “my ancestors are heroes”, in Sumerian. This change, made possible by the polysemy of the word “bilga” (“fresh fruit” in “Bilgaga” and “ancestor” in “Bilgamesh”), clearly denoted dynastic ambitions. Also, his title was to be changed from Lukig (“man of orders”) to Lugal (“big man”). Apart from these onomastic diktats, Bilgamesh did not enact any organizational changes or anything that could be called a “reform” in modern terms. It is not that he lacked imagination. On the contrary, his elaboration of the character of Inanna into a fearsome and domineering goddess shows that his was quite fertile indeed. However, the idea that anything could be “reformed” was foreign to Sumerian culture at this point. The concepts of state, laws or institutions did not exist. The only cultural building blocks that did were that of “House” and of an undying, super-human “master of the House”. Henceforth, as Bilgamesh had explained, Uruk was going to have two Houses, the E-Anna for Inanna and the older complex of buildings surrounding the white limestone structure for Anu as before. Inanna was to be considered the new mistress of Uruk and her House was therefore to become the bigger one. Both houses were to be administered by the En council. However, it was obvious to everyone that supreme power had passed from the En to the newly minted Lugal. As the Inanna-gitlam (“Inanna’s lover”) and the gu-Inanna (“Inanna’s voice”), Bilgamesh was now clearly the highest authority in Uruk. The main symbol of this new political dispensation was the statue of Inanna, soon to be installed in the main hall of the E-Anna. Enthroned where the effigy of Anu should have stood, the image of the new mistress of Uruk was now to reign figuratively over the city, attended to by a select group of courtesans handpicked by Bilgamesh. These new “priestesses” were to assist the En in performing the daily rituals surrounding the effigy of the goddess.
Bilgamesh had just pulled off the first military coup in human history. He had also created a divine archetype which would eventually spread to nearly all world cultures and one which remains very much alive to this day. Inanna would be known as Ishtar in the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires, Anahita among Iranians, Astarte in the Bible, Aphrodite/Venus in the Graeco-Roman world, Durga/Kali in India, the “Lady of the West” in China. She would eventually morph into the “girl with guns” stock character found in modern action movies, mangas and comics.
In all her avatars, Inanna has consistently been depicted as an attractive young woman, either bedecked with ornaments or naked, according to shifting tastes. She wields weapons and is seated on, or stands besides, a lion (or tiger). In modern times, the lion has often morphed into a motorcycle, as in the character Trinity from “The Matrix” movie trilogy (especially in the second installment) or the Pamela Anderson eponymous character in “Barb Wire”. Despite this slight adaptation, the archetype remains essentially unchanged.
Binder X-48/04 ended with two documents:
— A short note written by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. of Harvard University, one of the two historians within the team.
— A report by Joseph Brady, complementing his findings about Eridu and extending them to the material gathered by the Uruk Project.
Here are both of them, in full (wait for the thumbnails to appear):
In a village setting, such behavior would have been unthinkable. However, in the city, increasing specialization had taught people to mind their own business. The population increase had long ago put an end to the village-style face to face culture where peer pressure is the main driver of social conformity. Most of the participants in the growing tavern sub-culture were younger men from out of town who did not know anybody in the city. As a result, they were unrestrained by traditional social ties. The En and some of the wealthier citizens of Uruk seem to have been worried by this phenomenon and the same was true in Eridu. However, there were no cultural tools available for them to deal with the situation since it was entirely new. Everything in Eridu and Uruk revolved around the Houses of Enki and Anu respectively. As long as your economic dealings with the local House were in order and you were also paying proper respect to the deity during festivals, you were in the clear. You could do whatever you liked.
For the few years leading up to the events of 3709 BC., the relationship between Bilgaga and Uruk's En council had become strained. For several decades already, the Lukig had ceased to be an official appointed by the En but had instead increasingly become a kind of mercenary captain. He had turned into a military contractor of sorts who bargained hard with his En paymasters over his budgetary allocation. Since both cities were experiencing increased prosperity, it had been possible for the En councils of both Eridu and Uruk to allow this allocation to rise rapidly, which is what made Bilgaga’s parties possible, among other things. But Bilgaga was never satisfied by his current allocation and he had become increasingly rude and insolent towards his nominal superiors.
One day, on the 17th of March 3709 BC., the growing tension boiled over. On that day, a new set of buildings were to be inaugurated, with the usual ceremonies and feast. The new structures, constructed 200 meters to the North-East of the limestone building completed nearly 140 years before, were intended to become the new center of the House of Anu. They were spread over an area of nearly 3 hectares and included assembly halls, granaries, workshops and, of course, a central great hall destined to house the statue of the city's god. The citizens of Uruk, who had been participating in its construction for 7 years, already called it “E-Anna”, i.e. “The House of Anu”.
During the morning of March 17th, the En had been making offerings at the old limestone building and had prepared the statue of Anu for its journey to the new compound. They had first bathed it in milk and water. Then, after carefully drying it, they had clothed Anu’s effigy with a brand-new white linen garment decorated with colorful bands of embroidery on its edges. Finally, they had draped its neck with an overabundance of thick flower garlands. A little before noon, the god and master of Uruk started on his journey to his new House, borne on an elaborately decorated bier carried on the shoulders of the full En council of Uruk. Fifteen minutes later, it arrived at the entrance of the great square in front of the new E-Anna complex. Drummers and flute players preceded it as it made its way through the crowd, towards the steps leading up to the main hall.
Suddenly, soldiers started to appear on both sides of the E-Anna. As they poured into the square, they pushed the crowd back and forced it to free up some space at the base of the steps. The men, in full battle array, were accompanied by their own drummers who were making such a din that they forced the musicians accompanying the statue of Anu to stop playing. The En, who were still carrying the bier, could not see what was going on as they were pushed backwards by the crowd. The statue they were carrying seemed to be wavering for a few seconds, on the verge of being toppled over. Then it stabilized due to the En’s desperate efforts to keep it upright. As it stood there, motionless, in the middle of the crowded square, it looked like a becalmed ship in the midst of a sea of heads.
Bilgaga appeared, at the top of the stairs. He too was wearing his combat outfit, a leather cuirass, reinforced with copper plates, a short white linen tunic reaching down to the knees and a pair of high leather sandal boots. A copper sword, short and broad, was strapped to his belt and a round shield hung from his back. On his head, he wore a conical leather helmet adorned with a decorative motif that would feature prominently in Mesopotamian art for centuries to come: the figure of a standing man holding off two erect lions; one to his left and one to his right. Bilgaga's face was red and he appeared drunk. A few paces behind him, three of the most famous ladies of the port district, in full courtesan attire, were standing on the platform of E-Anna's main hall. Bilgaga motioned the drummers to stop playing. The whole square fell into near complete silence, only broken here and there by a couple of wailing infants. After surveying the crowd and finding it suitably cowed, Bilgaga addressed it thus:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna has demanded the Bull of Heaven from Lord Anu and her wish has been granted.
Up to this point, Inanna had been a stock character which appeared in many traditional stories and songs. She was not a goddess in the same sense as Enki and Anu were. She was just the archetypal girl who played the role of love interest in countless heroic tales and rustic poems. The Bull of heaven, for its part was a very old mythical motif, probably of Paleolithic origin, common to nearly all Neolithic Middle-Eastern cultures. It was associated with the sun, fertility, victory, and strength in general. It had never been connected to Inanna before and what Bilgaga was saying was probably far from clear to his audience. He continued:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna is the new mistress of Uruk. Anu has retired to the heavens and granted her the dominion of his beloved city. The Bull of Heaven will grant the lady strength and victory in all she does. She will crack open the skulls of all who oppose her, just as the furious bull gores the hapless cowherd. The Lady Inanna has favored me, Bilgaga. I have had intercourse with the Lady. She bends over and offers her furrow to me.
Things were clearer now, and not at all to the liking of everyone present. People started jeering: “Bilgaga, you inflated beerskin !”, “We did not hear Lord Anu say anything about this !”, “Which Inanna are you talking about ?”, and so on. “SILENCE !”, Bilgaga roared, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. He drew his sword and his men imitated him. The crowd recoiled backwards. The Lukig bellowed:
- BILGAGA: The lady Inanna is merciful. She does not repay insult with vengeance, at least for now. The Lord Anu is way too loftily placed to speak to you worms. He spoke to the Lady and the Lady spoke to me. I am the voice of the Lady. She will reside in the E-Anna that her father Anu has prepared for her. And I will visit her and mount her when she so desires. I will let you know whatever she wishes you to know.
A silence followed. Bilgaga had calmed down and his eyes were less bloodshot. He continued:
- BILGAGA: The Lady has gathered us today to celebrate her coming into her inheritance; her good city of Uruk. The Lord Anu has witnessed this and gave his assent. He will now return to his erstwhile earthly abode in the city whence he will take up his residence in the Heavens. Let the feast begin !
Bilgaga then ordered a detachment of soldiers to escort the En, and the bier carrying Anu’s statue, back to the limestone building. Once they had left the square, a group of girls moved forward into the space left empty by the crowd in at the foot of the steps and started dancing, to the sound of drums and reed pipes. After a minute or two, one of the courtesans which had been standing behind Bilgaga since the beginning moved down the staircase. From the lowest step, she began singing:
As the courtesan sang, her mood started to spread to her audience. Uruk’s citizen were becoming inebriated with lust and frenzy. The whole square was soon dancing to the rhythm of the drums. Much beer flowed that night, all over town. The whole city was one huge revelry. Dancing, copulation and brawls engulfed it like a sudden fire.
In the morning, there were 17 dead bodies lying down in the streets as well as countless broken arms and fractured jaws. Nobody cared. Everyone was fast asleep. The city was motionless and silent for a whole day as people bandaged their sores and recovered their composure. The day after, the city resumed its everyday routine but the citizens of Uruk knew that things would never be like before.
That morning, Bilgaga showed up at the white limestone building, followed by his now usual retinue of armed soldiers and courtesans. Inside, the En, who had been barricaded there for the last two days, saw him coming from a distance but did not open the door. Bilgaga called them out and motioned them to come and meet him. They slowly filed out of the building and formed a large semi-circle around the Lukig. The following exchange ensued:
- BILGAGA: The new E-ANNA will henceforth be the house of Inanna. You En will serve Anu in the old white building and Inanna in the new E-ANNA.
- CHIEF EN: This is unheard of. We ...
- COURTESAN No. 1 (interrupting): Who are you old man to question the word of lady Inanna. You have never known a woman and your penis is shrivelled like an old date. Why would the lady take any interest in you ?
- CHIEF EN: I ...
- COURTESAN No. 2: bir-gish (shrivelled-penis), bir-gish, bir-gish. The lady is not listening ...
- COURTESANS and some soldiers together: bir-gish, bir-gish, libir-zulum (old date), libir-zulum, bir-gish, ...
After the heckling died down, Bilgaga said:
- BILGAGA: Now you know the divine power of Lady Inanna, old man.
- CHIEF EN: Yes I do.
Bilgaga then dictated his conditions to the En, assembled in front of the white limestone building. First, he was now to be known under a new name, “Bilgamesh”, i.e. “my ancestors are heroes”, in Sumerian. This change, made possible by the polysemy of the word “bilga” (“fresh fruit” in “Bilgaga” and “ancestor” in “Bilgamesh”), clearly denoted dynastic ambitions. Also, his title was to be changed from Lukig (“man of orders”) to Lugal (“big man”). Apart from these onomastic diktats, Bilgamesh did not enact any organizational changes or anything that could be called a “reform” in modern terms. It is not that he lacked imagination. On the contrary, his elaboration of the character of Inanna into a fearsome and domineering goddess shows that his was quite fertile indeed. However, the idea that anything could be “reformed” was foreign to Sumerian culture at this point. The concepts of state, laws or institutions did not exist. The only cultural building blocks that did were that of “House” and of an undying, super-human “master of the House”. Henceforth, as Bilgamesh had explained, Uruk was going to have two Houses, the E-Anna for Inanna and the older complex of buildings surrounding the white limestone structure for Anu as before. Inanna was to be considered the new mistress of Uruk and her House was therefore to become the bigger one. Both houses were to be administered by the En council. However, it was obvious to everyone that supreme power had passed from the En to the newly minted Lugal. As the Inanna-gitlam (“Inanna’s lover”) and the gu-Inanna (“Inanna’s voice”), Bilgamesh was now clearly the highest authority in Uruk. The main symbol of this new political dispensation was the statue of Inanna, soon to be installed in the main hall of the E-Anna. Enthroned where the effigy of Anu should have stood, the image of the new mistress of Uruk was now to reign figuratively over the city, attended to by a select group of courtesans handpicked by Bilgamesh. These new “priestesses” were to assist the En in performing the daily rituals surrounding the effigy of the goddess.
Bilgamesh had just pulled off the first military coup in human history. He had also created a divine archetype which would eventually spread to nearly all world cultures and one which remains very much alive to this day. Inanna would be known as Ishtar in the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires, Anahita among Iranians, Astarte in the Bible, Aphrodite/Venus in the Graeco-Roman world, Durga/Kali in India, the “Lady of the West” in China. She would eventually morph into the “girl with guns” stock character found in modern action movies, mangas and comics.
In all her avatars, Inanna has consistently been depicted as an attractive young woman, either bedecked with ornaments or naked, according to shifting tastes. She wields weapons and is seated on, or stands besides, a lion (or tiger). In modern times, the lion has often morphed into a motorcycle, as in the character Trinity from “The Matrix” movie trilogy (especially in the second installment) or the Pamela Anderson eponymous character in “Barb Wire”. Despite this slight adaptation, the archetype remains essentially unchanged.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Binder X-48/04 ended with two documents:
— A short note written by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. of Harvard University, one of the two historians within the team.
— A report by Joseph Brady, complementing his findings about Eridu and extending them to the material gathered by the Uruk Project.
Here are both of them, in full (wait for the thumbnails to appear):
The Ubaid people were the immediate predecessors of the Eridu people. They were late Neolithic farmers, which means they had some large villages and political structures that are generally called "complex Chiefdoms", but had not yet reached the level of "civilization" i.e. living in cities.
Chapter 3 describes how the En (chief servants) of an Ubaidian "complex chiefdom" (the Alulim family) transformed it into the first Temple-based god cult (Enki) and thus (involuntarily) gave birth to civilization.
Chapter 5 – Babylon – Part 1 of 3
After the completion of the URUK experiment, the Boffin section of project Philadelphia was beefed up significantly. James Conant, Vannevar Bush and Allan Dulles had been deeply impressed by the latest reports they had read. A closed meeting had occurred between President Truman and the three men in late September 1948 at Camp David presidential retreat. All four men later recalled being seized with quasi-religious awe as they discussed the future direction of “the project”, as it was invariably called by the few people in the know. It did not take long for them to decide that an increase in resources was warranted. From the last quarter of 1948 onward, the share of device usage allocated to the Boffin team was increased to 55% (up from 40%). Staff allocation was multiplied five-fold.
The staff increase was particularly welcome. As the Boffins were considering their options for the next step of their endeavors, they had been quick to realize that the highly detailed, narrowly focused approach they had used for Eridu and Uruk would be inapplicable to subsequent periods. From the early third millennium BC. onward, the historical development of Southern Mesopotamia was no longer centered on a single location, as it had been with Uruk in the fourth millennium, but split among several dozen petty states. There was also a marked increase in barbarian raiding and a sustained migration of Semitic-speaking people from the North and West throughout the period. All these phenomena had to be studied in parallel if one wanted to avoid a prohibitive inflation of the project schedule. As a result, it was decided to reorganize the Boffin team along more industrial lines to cope with the increased workload. The whole team was split into task groups. Each task group had its own linguists, a pool of typists, and a technical team in charge of the equipment that was now to be used in order to optimize the data acquisition process from the device. This process was organized as follows. At the beginning of each week, all task groups submitted requests indicating the time periods and locations they wanted to observe. These requests were aggregated to form a complete schedule for the device, which was operated around the clock. The data obtained for each time slot was recorded on magnetic wire for the sound and 70 mm film for the image. Magnetic wire and film were then distributed to the different task groups for analysis. In total, more than 500 people were working for the Boffin team at the beginning of 1949.
The number of task groups, and their individual focus, varied over time. The list below reflects the organization as it stood in the second half of 1949, which did not change much until the completion of the Babylon sub-project in early 1950:
• TG-1: 4th to 3rd millennium transition period. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: Ur in the first half of the 3rd millennium. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: A. Turing.
• TG-3: Nippur. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-4: The Guti and Lullubi. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-5: Elam. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-6: Uruk in the 3rd millennium. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-7: Akkad. Group leader: L. Wittgenstein. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-8: The Amorites. Group leader: A. Turing. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: Semitic migration into southern Mesopotamia. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: L. Wittgenstein.
• TG-10: 3rd dynasty of Ur. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: Isin, Larsa and Lagash. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: A. Ulam.
• TG-12: Babylon. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
Georges Dumézil, a renowned French linguist, had joined the Boffin team in late 1948, on the recommendation of von Soden and Landsberger. James Conant had also sent two officers to station Philadelphia, Major Hiram Stackhouse and Captain Matthew Piccolomino, who had been Leslie Groves’ deputies in the Manhattan Engineering District (the Manhattan Project's logistics organization). Their mission was to help the Boffins set up the new process and make sure it ran smoothly.
Their help was badly needed. Apart from Turing and Oppenheimer, who had experienced this kind of work environment through their activities during the war, the other members of the Boffin team had never functioned outside of an academic setting. Wittgenstein proved to be a spectacularly incompetent manager, holding his subordinates to impossible standards of exactness and berating them for the most immaterial of mistakes. On the 16th of December 1948, he wrote in his personal log-book: “This is worse than my schoolteacher days in the Alps”. Nonetheless, after a few difficult months, and thanks in large part to the expert advice from Stackhouse and Piccolomino, all twelve task groups were eventually up and running in a satisfactory manner by early 1949.
Initially, the plan was to cover only the 3rd millennium BC., ending with the 3rd dynasty of Ur. However, it was soon realized that this would lead to an artificial break right in the middle of a crucial event, the transition from Sumerian to Akkadian linguistic dominance. It was therefore decided to extend the project scope to include the rise of Babylon in the 18th century BC., and the reign of its famous king, Hammurabi. As a result, the scope of nearly all task groups was adjusted and the additional material was split between TG-8 and TG-12.
The Babylon experiment, as it was officially called, produced an enormous amount of data. The binders containing the reports from the different task groups, plus the final summary reports, filled an entire cabinet in Hut 19. I obviously could not read them all. Luckily, the first binder in the cabinet contained a summary report of the whole project, which I started reading (wait for the thumbnails to appear):
After the completion of the URUK experiment, the Boffin section of project Philadelphia was beefed up significantly. James Conant, Vannevar Bush and Allan Dulles had been deeply impressed by the latest reports they had read. A closed meeting had occurred between President Truman and the three men in late September 1948 at Camp David presidential retreat. All four men later recalled being seized with quasi-religious awe as they discussed the future direction of “the project”, as it was invariably called by the few people in the know. It did not take long for them to decide that an increase in resources was warranted. From the last quarter of 1948 onward, the share of device usage allocated to the Boffin team was increased to 55% (up from 40%). Staff allocation was multiplied five-fold.
The staff increase was particularly welcome. As the Boffins were considering their options for the next step of their endeavors, they had been quick to realize that the highly detailed, narrowly focused approach they had used for Eridu and Uruk would be inapplicable to subsequent periods. From the early third millennium BC. onward, the historical development of Southern Mesopotamia was no longer centered on a single location, as it had been with Uruk in the fourth millennium, but split among several dozen petty states. There was also a marked increase in barbarian raiding and a sustained migration of Semitic-speaking people from the North and West throughout the period. All these phenomena had to be studied in parallel if one wanted to avoid a prohibitive inflation of the project schedule. As a result, it was decided to reorganize the Boffin team along more industrial lines to cope with the increased workload. The whole team was split into task groups. Each task group had its own linguists, a pool of typists, and a technical team in charge of the equipment that was now to be used in order to optimize the data acquisition process from the device. This process was organized as follows. At the beginning of each week, all task groups submitted requests indicating the time periods and locations they wanted to observe. These requests were aggregated to form a complete schedule for the device, which was operated around the clock. The data obtained for each time slot was recorded on magnetic wire for the sound and 70 mm film for the image. Magnetic wire and film were then distributed to the different task groups for analysis. In total, more than 500 people were working for the Boffin team at the beginning of 1949.
The number of task groups, and their individual focus, varied over time. The list below reflects the organization as it stood in the second half of 1949, which did not change much until the completion of the Babylon sub-project in early 1950:
• TG-1: 4th to 3rd millennium transition period. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: Ur in the first half of the 3rd millennium. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: A. Turing.
• TG-3: Nippur. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-4: The Guti and Lullubi. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-5: Elam. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-6: Uruk in the 3rd millennium. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-7: Akkad. Group leader: L. Wittgenstein. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-8: The Amorites. Group leader: A. Turing. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: Semitic migration into southern Mesopotamia. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: L. Wittgenstein.
• TG-10: 3rd dynasty of Ur. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: Isin, Larsa and Lagash. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: A. Ulam.
• TG-12: Babylon. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
Georges Dumézil, a renowned French linguist, had joined the Boffin team in late 1948, on the recommendation of von Soden and Landsberger. James Conant had also sent two officers to station Philadelphia, Major Hiram Stackhouse and Captain Matthew Piccolomino, who had been Leslie Groves’ deputies in the Manhattan Engineering District (the Manhattan Project's logistics organization). Their mission was to help the Boffins set up the new process and make sure it ran smoothly.
Their help was badly needed. Apart from Turing and Oppenheimer, who had experienced this kind of work environment through their activities during the war, the other members of the Boffin team had never functioned outside of an academic setting. Wittgenstein proved to be a spectacularly incompetent manager, holding his subordinates to impossible standards of exactness and berating them for the most immaterial of mistakes. On the 16th of December 1948, he wrote in his personal log-book: “This is worse than my schoolteacher days in the Alps”. Nonetheless, after a few difficult months, and thanks in large part to the expert advice from Stackhouse and Piccolomino, all twelve task groups were eventually up and running in a satisfactory manner by early 1949.
Initially, the plan was to cover only the 3rd millennium BC., ending with the 3rd dynasty of Ur. However, it was soon realized that this would lead to an artificial break right in the middle of a crucial event, the transition from Sumerian to Akkadian linguistic dominance. It was therefore decided to extend the project scope to include the rise of Babylon in the 18th century BC., and the reign of its famous king, Hammurabi. As a result, the scope of nearly all task groups was adjusted and the additional material was split between TG-8 and TG-12.
The Babylon experiment, as it was officially called, produced an enormous amount of data. The binders containing the reports from the different task groups, plus the final summary reports, filled an entire cabinet in Hut 19. I obviously could not read them all. Luckily, the first binder in the cabinet contained a summary report of the whole project, which I started reading (wait for the thumbnails to appear):
Chapter 5 – Babylon – Part 2 of 3
I interrupted my reading and looked up from the binder. Finn was seated at the desk next to me. He was typing on his laptop.
- ME: I have a weird feeling. This Babylon report I am reading right now feels boring like an old history book.
- FINN: Yeah, I had the same impression when I read it. It is because Mesopotamian history from the 3rd millennium onward starts to look like any other period of history which we are familiar with. This king went to war with that king. This battle took place, then that battle, and so on. The interesting part of project Babylon is not in the historical facts but in the interpretation of it that the Boffin team developed, in the course of the project.
- ME: Should I continue reading the boring parts ?
- FINN: Yes, I would advise you to. Otherwise you will be lost when you read about the interpretation.
- ME: OK, you are surely right. By the way, where is Ekaterina ?
- FINN: She is having breakfast. It takes her quite a while because she has to cook exactly the kind of things she is used to having for breakfast. Otherwise, she will start the day on the wrong foot. At least I think this is what she told me when I tried to give her Corn-flakes.
- ME: I see. Do you think she will be a pain in the A*** ?
- FINN: No. She was quite apologetic and unobtrusive about the whole thing. She is just one of those people who have to stick to a routine in order to feel all right. Given the shock of discovering this place, I guess that a full-on Russian breakfast is what she needed to land back onto her feet.
- ME: Well, all right then. The last thing we need here is a ball-breaker.
Having uttered this piece of masculine wisdom, I returned to the Babylon report (wait for the thumbnails to appear).
As my eyes rose from the last page of the Landsberger report, I noticed Ekaterina hovering at the door, not knowing whether to enter or knock. I rose up and opened the door.
- ME: Come in. We are not going to eat you.
- EKATERINA: Thank you. This is the place where you read reports all day, yes ?
- ME: Yes, that is what we do. You should try it too. They contain amazing stuff.
- EKATERINA: I should go. People will be worried at Vostok.
- FINN: Ekaterina, I told you already. When you are here time stops outside. You have all the time you want. Aaron and I have been here for weeks.
- EKATERINA: I do not know how I can believe. I need go back.
- FINN: Ok, then. Go back to Vostok and see for yourself.
- EKATERINA: I will go.
- FINN: Your clothes are in the next room, where you left them.
Ekaterina left the room and came back 10 minutes later, dressed in her arctic clothing.
- FINN: Go ahead. When you come back, if you decide to do so, less than half an hour will have passed from our perspective.
- EKATERINA: I go. Paka.
Half an hour later, she was back, as predicted. This time, when she climbed the stairs of Hut 19, she had removed her heavy anorak and was thus not drenched in sweat as she had been the first time. As she opened the door, I noticed she looked a little different. She was the same serious-looking Ekaterina with her bun-tied auburn hair, high cheekbones, cute dimples and pale grey eyes, but something was changed somehow.
- ME: Hi Ekaterina. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but you look different.
- EKATERINA: One more year Aaron. I met you outside, at conference in McMurdo. You convince me to come here back. Before, I could not decide. It is so strange. I thought maybe I had hallucination.
- ME: What ?, but … Oh, I see. I will meet you there. It is in the past for you but in the future for me. Weird.
- EKATERINA: OK, I want to read reports now. Which I should read first ?
- FINN: Better start with the beginning, like Aaron did. In the cabinet to your right, on the top shelf, there is a binder marked X-47/01. It contains the reports about the first experiment which was conducted here in 1947. Also, it is not too long so it should give you a quick intro. You do not have problems reading English, do you ?
- EKATERINA: No. Reading English I do all the time. I will understand, I think.
- FINN: All right then.
And so, silence descended once again on our little office in Hut 19 as the three of us went back to reading the Philadelphia project documents, each with our own binder in hand.
I interrupted my reading and looked up from the binder. Finn was seated at the desk next to me. He was typing on his laptop.
- ME: I have a weird feeling. This Babylon report I am reading right now feels boring like an old history book.
- FINN: Yeah, I had the same impression when I read it. It is because Mesopotamian history from the 3rd millennium onward starts to look like any other period of history which we are familiar with. This king went to war with that king. This battle took place, then that battle, and so on. The interesting part of project Babylon is not in the historical facts but in the interpretation of it that the Boffin team developed, in the course of the project.
- ME: Should I continue reading the boring parts ?
- FINN: Yes, I would advise you to. Otherwise you will be lost when you read about the interpretation.
- ME: OK, you are surely right. By the way, where is Ekaterina ?
- FINN: She is having breakfast. It takes her quite a while because she has to cook exactly the kind of things she is used to having for breakfast. Otherwise, she will start the day on the wrong foot. At least I think this is what she told me when I tried to give her Corn-flakes.
- ME: I see. Do you think she will be a pain in the A*** ?
- FINN: No. She was quite apologetic and unobtrusive about the whole thing. She is just one of those people who have to stick to a routine in order to feel all right. Given the shock of discovering this place, I guess that a full-on Russian breakfast is what she needed to land back onto her feet.
- ME: Well, all right then. The last thing we need here is a ball-breaker.
Having uttered this piece of masculine wisdom, I returned to the Babylon report (wait for the thumbnails to appear).
As my eyes rose from the last page of the Landsberger report, I noticed Ekaterina hovering at the door, not knowing whether to enter or knock. I rose up and opened the door.
- ME: Come in. We are not going to eat you.
- EKATERINA: Thank you. This is the place where you read reports all day, yes ?
- ME: Yes, that is what we do. You should try it too. They contain amazing stuff.
- EKATERINA: I should go. People will be worried at Vostok.
- FINN: Ekaterina, I told you already. When you are here time stops outside. You have all the time you want. Aaron and I have been here for weeks.
- EKATERINA: I do not know how I can believe. I need go back.
- FINN: Ok, then. Go back to Vostok and see for yourself.
- EKATERINA: I will go.
- FINN: Your clothes are in the next room, where you left them.
Ekaterina left the room and came back 10 minutes later, dressed in her arctic clothing.
- FINN: Go ahead. When you come back, if you decide to do so, less than half an hour will have passed from our perspective.
- EKATERINA: I go. Paka.
Half an hour later, she was back, as predicted. This time, when she climbed the stairs of Hut 19, she had removed her heavy anorak and was thus not drenched in sweat as she had been the first time. As she opened the door, I noticed she looked a little different. She was the same serious-looking Ekaterina with her bun-tied auburn hair, high cheekbones, cute dimples and pale grey eyes, but something was changed somehow.
- ME: Hi Ekaterina. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but you look different.
- EKATERINA: One more year Aaron. I met you outside, at conference in McMurdo. You convince me to come here back. Before, I could not decide. It is so strange. I thought maybe I had hallucination.
- ME: What ?, but … Oh, I see. I will meet you there. It is in the past for you but in the future for me. Weird.
- EKATERINA: OK, I want to read reports now. Which I should read first ?
- FINN: Better start with the beginning, like Aaron did. In the cabinet to your right, on the top shelf, there is a binder marked X-47/01. It contains the reports about the first experiment which was conducted here in 1947. Also, it is not too long so it should give you a quick intro. You do not have problems reading English, do you ?
- EKATERINA: No. Reading English I do all the time. I will understand, I think.
- FINN: All right then.
And so, silence descended once again on our little office in Hut 19 as the three of us went back to reading the Philadelphia project documents, each with our own binder in hand.
Chapter 5 – Babylon – Part 3 of 4
Half an hour later, she was back, as predicted. This time, when she climbed the stairs of Hut 19, she had removed her heavy anorak and was thus not drenched in sweat as she had been the first time. As she opened the door, I noticed she looked a little different. She was the same serious-looking Ekaterina with her bun-tied auburn hair, high cheekbones, cute dimples and pale grey eyes, but something was changed somehow.
- ME: Hi Ekaterina. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but you look different.
- EKATERINA: One more year Aaron. I met you outside, at conference in McMurdo. You convince me to come here back. Before, I could not decide. It is so strange. I thought maybe I had hallucination.
- ME: What ?, but … Oh, I see. I will meet you there. It is in the past for you but in the future for me. Weird.
- EKATERINA: OK, I want to read reports now. Which I should read first ?
- FINN: Better start with the beginning, like Aaron did. In the cabinet to your right, on the top shelf, there is a binder marked X-47/01. It contains the reports about the first experiment which was conducted here in 1947. Also, it is not too long so it should give you a quick intro. You do not have problems reading English, do you ?
- EKATERINA: No. Reading English I do all the time. I will understand, I think.
- FINN: All right then.
And so, silence descended once again on our little office in Hut 19 as the three of us went back to reading the Philadelphia project documents, each with our own binder in hand.
In March 1949, as the Boffin team had settled in the routine of the new “industrial” process of Project Babylon, the contentious issue of how to interpret the events they were observing reared its head once again.
One night, some members of the team were relaxing, as usual, in their tiny lounge. Oppenheimer, Schlesinger, Kuhn and Quine were playing bridge in one corner while a few others, including Wittgenstein and Turing, seated on wooden swivel chairs, were drinking Port. After a long pause in the chit-chat, Satyendra Nath Bose, who was part of the second group, was heard asking, to no one in particular:
- BOSE: I wonder at what point we can start talking about religion ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, I have been asking myself the same question ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Can you clarify, Satyendra Nath ?
- BOSE: Well, during the Eridu and Uruk experiments, we all consciously avoided the word “religion” because it was clear that what we were observing did not fit what this word normally entails. The House-like temples of Enki and Anu were far more than places of worship. Also, it was clear that their activities could not be neatly divided into, say, a “religious” side, on the one hand, and an “economic” side on the other. They operated as undivided wholes and so we even avoided calling them “temples”, preferring the word “House” used by contemporaries. However, from the mid-3rd millennium onward, with the rise of the “worship-only” temples, it seems that something we may legitimately call “religion” is now making its appearance. The question is: where do we draw the line ?
- KUHN: Maybe we should try to agree on a definition of what constitutes religion first ?
- QUINE: Oh, no, please ! Not another “what is religion” debate.
- KUHN: At least we should try to state what the various assumptions about religions are. Even if we do not …
Wittgenstein had been staring at the ceiling since his earlier remark, not really paying attention. He interrupted:
- WITTGENSTEIN: Religion is masturbation.
A silence followed. Then Turing intervened:
- TURING: Is that one of your riddles Ludwig ? The word you used seems hardly appropriate.
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, Alan. We have to rotate our perception around the pivot of our real need. And our real need here is to understand what is going on before our eyes. We cannot limit ourselves to the same pontificating platitudes that we generally have to content ourselves with on the subject of religion. I think we all sense it. We are now witnessing the beginning of this thing that we usually take for granted. And thus we CANNOT take it for granted anymore. We need to understand what is happening.
- TURING: But how can this abject word you just used help us understand it ? Are we supposed to throw religion into the gutter to that extent ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Would you like the word “Onanism” better ? I certainly do not want to throw religion into the gutter. I am just trying to look at it from a biological perspective. The idea of masturbation is the only one which comes to my mind when I try to do that in earnest.
- BOSE: I think I sense what Ludwig is getting at. You are trying to say that all religion is self-stimulation, like yoga. Yoga has been called Onanism before and even if the Catholic missionaries who did that meant it in a disparaging way, I believe that they have involuntarily stumbled upon some valuable insight in doing so.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Indeed. I think we are seeing something emerge here. It has a far wider scope of application than just what we traditionally call “religion”. Masturbation, in the most general sense, seems to be one of the most fundamental traits of human nature.
- QUINE: Ludwig, if anything, you have just completely succeeded in ruining our bridge game. But please, do not hold us in suspense any longer. Start at the beginning.
- WITTGENSTEIN: We humans have this uncanny ability to train ourselves. Other animals, especially monkeys and primates, do also transmit some training to their offspring. But we have this capability to a tremendously higher degree than any other species. To such a degree that we are even able to bend our instincts, reorient them, and in certain cases, completely suppress them.
- QUINE: You are talking about sexual taboos, correct ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, but also about far more mundane ones like potty-training.
- BOSE: And religious food taboos ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: That too. All this instinct bending creates psychological pain. We are doing to our instincts what some upper-class Chinese families were still doing, not so long ago, to the feet of their daughters.
- OPPENHEIMER: Are you arguing against repressing our instincts ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, not at all. I am not even asking myself that question but simply making an ethological observation. Instinct-bending through training is what all humans do. I can hardly imagine a situation in which we could dispense with that unless we were prepared to revert to a simian lifestyle. And even then, it would probably not be feasible.
- QUINE: Some educationists are coming close to claiming that we can do such a thing these days.
- WITTGENSTEIN: But that is baloney. I think we can all agree on that, can’t we ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Yes, indeed.
- WITTGENSTEIN: We can also agree, I think, that all this foot binding-like pressure that we apply on our instincts causes us psychic pain. Yes ?
- QUINE: True enough, I suppose.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Now, we cannot live with this pain unless we offset it with some form of pleasure which offers us relief. Hence, we tend to seek pleasure wherever we can find it and this leads us, almost always, to behaviors in which we self-stimulate one or the other of our pleasure-inducing biological triggers. This is what I call “masturbation” in the most general sense.
- OPPENHEIMER: You surely have examples in mind ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, there is an infinite list of them. For examples, all young mammals, including humans, play. This is a form of “masturbation”. Also, we enjoy physical exertion, like running or jumping, just for the sake of it. This is masturbation too. And so is drinking alcohol, eating sweets, rearing pets, listening to music, and so on and so forth.
- QUINE: I thought Mammalian young engaged in play because it helps them train their sensorimotor functions.
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, this is not the reason why, it is a side effect. Mammalian young play because it is pleasurable. Then of course, sensorimotor training occurs as a side-effect of the playing; a beneficial one no doubt. This is why natural selection has retained and amplified this behavior by making it increasingly pleasurable. This distinction between cause and side-effect applies to all situations where masturbatory behaviors are observed. Pleasure-seeking is always the cause, while side-effects vary widely. These range from the very beneficial, like in playing, to the very detrimental like in excessive alcohol consumption.
- QUINE: I am still unclear about how you move from this to religion.
- WITTGENSTEIN: It is but a few steps away. You surely all remember how we emphasized trust as the essential language-enabling feature of our psyche. Brady made this brilliantly clear in his initial report on Eridu, I recall. We may thus say that our trust handling mechanisms are the instincts that make language possible. Like almost all instincts, these include a set of pleasure rewards which promote the appropriate behaviors. These pleasure rewards can be stimulated in one form or another of what I will call credit masturbation. Religion is one of those credit masturbation behaviors. Indeed, it is the most visible.
- OPPENHEIMER: How so ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: There are several different ways in which this occurs. The one most familiar to us is the Bible verse which says: “The righteous shall live by Faith”; I think it is in Romans. What this verse says is, in effect: “the religious man will take pleasure (and thus cope with life) by masturbating his faith-instincts, i.e. his trust-instincts”.
- OPPENHEIMER: This is Christianity. But what about other religions ?
Half an hour later, she was back, as predicted. This time, when she climbed the stairs of Hut 19, she had removed her heavy anorak and was thus not drenched in sweat as she had been the first time. As she opened the door, I noticed she looked a little different. She was the same serious-looking Ekaterina with her bun-tied auburn hair, high cheekbones, cute dimples and pale grey eyes, but something was changed somehow.
- ME: Hi Ekaterina. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but you look different.
- EKATERINA: One more year Aaron. I met you outside, at conference in McMurdo. You convince me to come here back. Before, I could not decide. It is so strange. I thought maybe I had hallucination.
- ME: What ?, but … Oh, I see. I will meet you there. It is in the past for you but in the future for me. Weird.
- EKATERINA: OK, I want to read reports now. Which I should read first ?
- FINN: Better start with the beginning, like Aaron did. In the cabinet to your right, on the top shelf, there is a binder marked X-47/01. It contains the reports about the first experiment which was conducted here in 1947. Also, it is not too long so it should give you a quick intro. You do not have problems reading English, do you ?
- EKATERINA: No. Reading English I do all the time. I will understand, I think.
- FINN: All right then.
And so, silence descended once again on our little office in Hut 19 as the three of us went back to reading the Philadelphia project documents, each with our own binder in hand.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
In March 1949, as the Boffin team had settled in the routine of the new “industrial” process of Project Babylon, the contentious issue of how to interpret the events they were observing reared its head once again.
One night, some members of the team were relaxing, as usual, in their tiny lounge. Oppenheimer, Schlesinger, Kuhn and Quine were playing bridge in one corner while a few others, including Wittgenstein and Turing, seated on wooden swivel chairs, were drinking Port. After a long pause in the chit-chat, Satyendra Nath Bose, who was part of the second group, was heard asking, to no one in particular:
- BOSE: I wonder at what point we can start talking about religion ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, I have been asking myself the same question ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Can you clarify, Satyendra Nath ?
- BOSE: Well, during the Eridu and Uruk experiments, we all consciously avoided the word “religion” because it was clear that what we were observing did not fit what this word normally entails. The House-like temples of Enki and Anu were far more than places of worship. Also, it was clear that their activities could not be neatly divided into, say, a “religious” side, on the one hand, and an “economic” side on the other. They operated as undivided wholes and so we even avoided calling them “temples”, preferring the word “House” used by contemporaries. However, from the mid-3rd millennium onward, with the rise of the “worship-only” temples, it seems that something we may legitimately call “religion” is now making its appearance. The question is: where do we draw the line ?
- KUHN: Maybe we should try to agree on a definition of what constitutes religion first ?
- QUINE: Oh, no, please ! Not another “what is religion” debate.
- KUHN: At least we should try to state what the various assumptions about religions are. Even if we do not …
Wittgenstein had been staring at the ceiling since his earlier remark, not really paying attention. He interrupted:
- WITTGENSTEIN: Religion is masturbation.
A silence followed. Then Turing intervened:
- TURING: Is that one of your riddles Ludwig ? The word you used seems hardly appropriate.
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, Alan. We have to rotate our perception around the pivot of our real need. And our real need here is to understand what is going on before our eyes. We cannot limit ourselves to the same pontificating platitudes that we generally have to content ourselves with on the subject of religion. I think we all sense it. We are now witnessing the beginning of this thing that we usually take for granted. And thus we CANNOT take it for granted anymore. We need to understand what is happening.
- TURING: But how can this abject word you just used help us understand it ? Are we supposed to throw religion into the gutter to that extent ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Would you like the word “Onanism” better ? I certainly do not want to throw religion into the gutter. I am just trying to look at it from a biological perspective. The idea of masturbation is the only one which comes to my mind when I try to do that in earnest.
- BOSE: I think I sense what Ludwig is getting at. You are trying to say that all religion is self-stimulation, like yoga. Yoga has been called Onanism before and even if the Catholic missionaries who did that meant it in a disparaging way, I believe that they have involuntarily stumbled upon some valuable insight in doing so.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Indeed. I think we are seeing something emerge here. It has a far wider scope of application than just what we traditionally call “religion”. Masturbation, in the most general sense, seems to be one of the most fundamental traits of human nature.
- QUINE: Ludwig, if anything, you have just completely succeeded in ruining our bridge game. But please, do not hold us in suspense any longer. Start at the beginning.
- WITTGENSTEIN: We humans have this uncanny ability to train ourselves. Other animals, especially monkeys and primates, do also transmit some training to their offspring. But we have this capability to a tremendously higher degree than any other species. To such a degree that we are even able to bend our instincts, reorient them, and in certain cases, completely suppress them.
- QUINE: You are talking about sexual taboos, correct ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, but also about far more mundane ones like potty-training.
- BOSE: And religious food taboos ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: That too. All this instinct bending creates psychological pain. We are doing to our instincts what some upper-class Chinese families were still doing, not so long ago, to the feet of their daughters.
- OPPENHEIMER: Are you arguing against repressing our instincts ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, not at all. I am not even asking myself that question but simply making an ethological observation. Instinct-bending through training is what all humans do. I can hardly imagine a situation in which we could dispense with that unless we were prepared to revert to a simian lifestyle. And even then, it would probably not be feasible.
- QUINE: Some educationists are coming close to claiming that we can do such a thing these days.
- WITTGENSTEIN: But that is baloney. I think we can all agree on that, can’t we ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Yes, indeed.
- WITTGENSTEIN: We can also agree, I think, that all this foot binding-like pressure that we apply on our instincts causes us psychic pain. Yes ?
- QUINE: True enough, I suppose.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Now, we cannot live with this pain unless we offset it with some form of pleasure which offers us relief. Hence, we tend to seek pleasure wherever we can find it and this leads us, almost always, to behaviors in which we self-stimulate one or the other of our pleasure-inducing biological triggers. This is what I call “masturbation” in the most general sense.
- OPPENHEIMER: You surely have examples in mind ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, there is an infinite list of them. For examples, all young mammals, including humans, play. This is a form of “masturbation”. Also, we enjoy physical exertion, like running or jumping, just for the sake of it. This is masturbation too. And so is drinking alcohol, eating sweets, rearing pets, listening to music, and so on and so forth.
- QUINE: I thought Mammalian young engaged in play because it helps them train their sensorimotor functions.
- WITTGENSTEIN: No, this is not the reason why, it is a side effect. Mammalian young play because it is pleasurable. Then of course, sensorimotor training occurs as a side-effect of the playing; a beneficial one no doubt. This is why natural selection has retained and amplified this behavior by making it increasingly pleasurable. This distinction between cause and side-effect applies to all situations where masturbatory behaviors are observed. Pleasure-seeking is always the cause, while side-effects vary widely. These range from the very beneficial, like in playing, to the very detrimental like in excessive alcohol consumption.
- QUINE: I am still unclear about how you move from this to religion.
- WITTGENSTEIN: It is but a few steps away. You surely all remember how we emphasized trust as the essential language-enabling feature of our psyche. Brady made this brilliantly clear in his initial report on Eridu, I recall. We may thus say that our trust handling mechanisms are the instincts that make language possible. Like almost all instincts, these include a set of pleasure rewards which promote the appropriate behaviors. These pleasure rewards can be stimulated in one form or another of what I will call credit masturbation. Religion is one of those credit masturbation behaviors. Indeed, it is the most visible.
- OPPENHEIMER: How so ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: There are several different ways in which this occurs. The one most familiar to us is the Bible verse which says: “The righteous shall live by Faith”; I think it is in Romans. What this verse says is, in effect: “the religious man will take pleasure (and thus cope with life) by masturbating his faith-instincts, i.e. his trust-instincts”.
- OPPENHEIMER: This is Christianity. But what about other religions ?
Chapter 5 – Babylon – Part 4 of 4
- WITTGENSTEIN: There is plenty of evidence there too. At a very fundamental level, all religions involve praising one or more deities. The Hebrew word for the book of Psalms is Tehilim, which means “songs of praise”, and this is also what the hymns of the Rig Veda, the most ancient book of Hindu Scriptures, are. The same can be found in Hesiodic poetry, that of Ovid and Virgil, etc. Praise, and its opposite, blame, is the most basic human behavior through which trust is maintained, built up, or erased. Ergo, religious praise is indeed a form of credit masturbation.
- OPPENHEIMER: What you are saying is that, for example, when these verses from the Baghavad Gita came to my mind, after the Trinity Test, I was credit masturbating ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: What verses ?
- OPPENHEIMER: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” and “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
- WITTGENSTEIN: This is indeed credit masturbation, I believe, but not necessarily of a religious kind. Here it seems to me that you were engaging in a form of culture masturbation. Being cultured is generally associated with the upper classes, hence to power, hence to credit.
- OPPENHEIMER: In other words, I was being a snob. That is what you are saying, right ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I am sorry, Julius. When our psychological innards are revealed to us, it is rarely pleasant.
- OPPENHEIMER: About that, you are right.
- TURING: But what about Love. Religion is about Love, is it not ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Love ! “Love” is a tricky word. Over the last few centuries, we have inflated its scope to such an extent that it is hard to ascertain what its meaning is anymore. It is a deceitful word. It ensnares our minds.
- TURING: What do you mean ? This word seems rather clear to me.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Is it ? Let us think about a few cases in which we might want to use it: a mother’s love for her child; the feeling which leads lovers to suicide; the love of a sport like cricket; or for ice-cream. What about the kind of "love" which leads to this urge to torture the “beloved” that modern novelists talk about ? Does it make sense to use the same word for all these things ?
- TURING: I guess that the meaning is clear in each case, on account of the context.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Well, let us try that on for size, shall we ? I guess some of you might have read the works of this French novelist, Marcel Proust. In one of his later novels, titled “la Prisonnière” (the female prisoner), he talks about a girl he was in love with, called Albertine. At first, the girl is a goddess. Proust talks about her in the tone of the mystic having an epiphany each time he sees her. Then he is taken by the horrendous anxiety of losing her and invents a thousand plots to keep her locked up (hence the title). Finally, he reaches a stage where all he wants is to see her dead. He never acts upon this urge and eventually Albertine escapes. But what kind of "love" is this ? Has it anything to do with what we mean when we say “for the love of God” ?
- TURING: But who cares about French novelists. Aren’t they all insane ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: This one is considered by many critics to be the greatest novelist that ever lived.
- TURING: Isn’t the “real” meaning of Love about something more noble ? Something akin to Platonic love.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Sure. Let us consider this if you so wish. In Cambridge, as you well know, Platonic love of the male kind flourishes. Let us consider the Apostles, for example, this club where these species of sentiments are known to flourish.
- KUHN: What is it ? I have never heard of it.
- WITTGENSTEIN: You need to have studied at Cambridge, “read” as they say, to know this sort of semi-secret society. Officially, it is a debating club. In reality, it is a peacock show where each bird tries to dazzle the others with the magnificence of his intellectual feathers. It is the starting point of many a male “Platonic” adventure.
- TURING: Ludwig! Why do you feel the need to drag everything into the mud ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I am going to make that clear, Alan, if you let me. What I mean is that the Apostles in particular, and the so called “Platonic” male species of “love” in general, is once again a form of masturbation; and a fairly disingenuous one at that. At the foundation of it all is a thick layer of snobbery, although its advocates claim otherwise in a rather strident but quite unconvincing manner. Then there is the whole procedure itself, the hiding behind cloister columns with a beating heart, the letters written and torn to shreds a thousand times, the anguish of a word taken the wrong way, the sleepless nights …
- TURING: But aren't all these the hallmarks of noble feelings ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: “Noble”. That is another tricky word. What do we mean exactly in this context ? That the one who experiences these feelings deserves a Peerage ? No, obviously not. So, it is not “real” nobility; it is a masturbation of nobility that we have in mind. The beating heart, the torments, the obsession; all these are the signs that we are in the process of deifying the person of our so-called “beloved”. What we think of him, the qualities we believe he possesses, have generally little to do with the human individual which serves as a pretext for our infatuation. What we are doing in fact is constructing an idol; an idol we will pursue and kneel before for a while, but an idol we will disown and burn eventually.
- TURING: Your whole world is black. How can you live with such gloom ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Alan, you are familiar with all this just as well as I am. And you know full well that the “Platonic” feelings always lead to a point where we use the other man’s anus as a literal masturbation implement. That moment is also when we generally realize the other man’s humanity, with all its frailty and pettiness. Our so called “noble” sentiments rarely survive this point and are soon replaced by disappointment and disgust, eventually spelling the doom of the whole affair.
- TURING: I do not know how you can live with yourself, Ludwig.
Turing stood up violently, toppling his chair to the ground. Without meeting anyone’s gaze, he left the room and slammed the door shut.
- QUINE: Was this a private tiff between you two or does it have a bearing upon the general issues we were discussing ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: It does. As I just said. These so called “Platonic” feelings are an attempt at deification, a quasi-religious urge. However, it would probably be more accurate to describe them as a form of deviant religion, a striving towards religion which deviates and comes crashing down when it hits the unyielding obstacle of the idol’s human nature. What religion can survive the realization that its god is a mere mortal ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Are you saying all this is specific to homosexuality ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: No. It probably manifests more starkly in that context nowadays because homosexual intercourse develops outside the usual social norms and is therefore freer to follow its internal logic to its conclusion. However, Literature has already depicted the same kind of quasi-worship in other contexts. I have mentioned Proust and his character Albertine but there are other examples. A number of Dostoevskyan characters behave similarly even in the absence of what we would usually call “love”.
- OPPENHEIMER: I think I see what you mean. However, all this seems somewhat remote from the mechanisms involved in the development of Babylonian society.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, but the distance is not as great as one might suppose. Modern idolatrous “love” and 3rd Millennium Babylonian religious emergence are part of the same continuum of human behavior, what I have called credit masturbation.
- QUINE: I think it would be worth for you to try and put all this in writing. Don’t you agree ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I have already started discussing with Ulam and Brady about a paper we might write in common. We should have a draft ready in a week or two.
- QUINE: We are all waiting for it in eager anticipation.
This conversation between Wittgenstein et al. had been reported in several of the Boffin team members personal logbooks. I had just finished reading Kuhn’s, which formed the greater part of binder L-49/19.
As I looked up from the pages, I saw Finn sipping his coffee and staring blankly out the window. I asked:
- ME: What do you make of this “Credit Masturbation” idea.
- FINN: It is probably the single most significant advance achieved by the Philadelphia team.
- ME: Really ?
- FINN: Yes. It unifies religion with a slew of other human behaviors. It brings clarity to a number of puzzling issues. Read on, you will see. The paper by Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein in binder X-49/36 is an absolute gem.
- ME: OK. By the way, what is going on with Wittgenstein and Turing ?
- FINN: It will get far worse. You will see. No spoilers.
- WITTGENSTEIN: There is plenty of evidence there too. At a very fundamental level, all religions involve praising one or more deities. The Hebrew word for the book of Psalms is Tehilim, which means “songs of praise”, and this is also what the hymns of the Rig Veda, the most ancient book of Hindu Scriptures, are. The same can be found in Hesiodic poetry, that of Ovid and Virgil, etc. Praise, and its opposite, blame, is the most basic human behavior through which trust is maintained, built up, or erased. Ergo, religious praise is indeed a form of credit masturbation.
- OPPENHEIMER: What you are saying is that, for example, when these verses from the Baghavad Gita came to my mind, after the Trinity Test, I was credit masturbating ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: What verses ?
- OPPENHEIMER: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” and “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
- WITTGENSTEIN: This is indeed credit masturbation, I believe, but not necessarily of a religious kind. Here it seems to me that you were engaging in a form of culture masturbation. Being cultured is generally associated with the upper classes, hence to power, hence to credit.
- OPPENHEIMER: In other words, I was being a snob. That is what you are saying, right ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I am sorry, Julius. When our psychological innards are revealed to us, it is rarely pleasant.
- OPPENHEIMER: About that, you are right.
- TURING: But what about Love. Religion is about Love, is it not ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Love ! “Love” is a tricky word. Over the last few centuries, we have inflated its scope to such an extent that it is hard to ascertain what its meaning is anymore. It is a deceitful word. It ensnares our minds.
- TURING: What do you mean ? This word seems rather clear to me.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Is it ? Let us think about a few cases in which we might want to use it: a mother’s love for her child; the feeling which leads lovers to suicide; the love of a sport like cricket; or for ice-cream. What about the kind of "love" which leads to this urge to torture the “beloved” that modern novelists talk about ? Does it make sense to use the same word for all these things ?
- TURING: I guess that the meaning is clear in each case, on account of the context.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Well, let us try that on for size, shall we ? I guess some of you might have read the works of this French novelist, Marcel Proust. In one of his later novels, titled “la Prisonnière” (the female prisoner), he talks about a girl he was in love with, called Albertine. At first, the girl is a goddess. Proust talks about her in the tone of the mystic having an epiphany each time he sees her. Then he is taken by the horrendous anxiety of losing her and invents a thousand plots to keep her locked up (hence the title). Finally, he reaches a stage where all he wants is to see her dead. He never acts upon this urge and eventually Albertine escapes. But what kind of "love" is this ? Has it anything to do with what we mean when we say “for the love of God” ?
- TURING: But who cares about French novelists. Aren’t they all insane ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: This one is considered by many critics to be the greatest novelist that ever lived.
- TURING: Isn’t the “real” meaning of Love about something more noble ? Something akin to Platonic love.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Sure. Let us consider this if you so wish. In Cambridge, as you well know, Platonic love of the male kind flourishes. Let us consider the Apostles, for example, this club where these species of sentiments are known to flourish.
- KUHN: What is it ? I have never heard of it.
- WITTGENSTEIN: You need to have studied at Cambridge, “read” as they say, to know this sort of semi-secret society. Officially, it is a debating club. In reality, it is a peacock show where each bird tries to dazzle the others with the magnificence of his intellectual feathers. It is the starting point of many a male “Platonic” adventure.
- TURING: Ludwig! Why do you feel the need to drag everything into the mud ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I am going to make that clear, Alan, if you let me. What I mean is that the Apostles in particular, and the so called “Platonic” male species of “love” in general, is once again a form of masturbation; and a fairly disingenuous one at that. At the foundation of it all is a thick layer of snobbery, although its advocates claim otherwise in a rather strident but quite unconvincing manner. Then there is the whole procedure itself, the hiding behind cloister columns with a beating heart, the letters written and torn to shreds a thousand times, the anguish of a word taken the wrong way, the sleepless nights …
- TURING: But aren't all these the hallmarks of noble feelings ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: “Noble”. That is another tricky word. What do we mean exactly in this context ? That the one who experiences these feelings deserves a Peerage ? No, obviously not. So, it is not “real” nobility; it is a masturbation of nobility that we have in mind. The beating heart, the torments, the obsession; all these are the signs that we are in the process of deifying the person of our so-called “beloved”. What we think of him, the qualities we believe he possesses, have generally little to do with the human individual which serves as a pretext for our infatuation. What we are doing in fact is constructing an idol; an idol we will pursue and kneel before for a while, but an idol we will disown and burn eventually.
- TURING: Your whole world is black. How can you live with such gloom ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: Alan, you are familiar with all this just as well as I am. And you know full well that the “Platonic” feelings always lead to a point where we use the other man’s anus as a literal masturbation implement. That moment is also when we generally realize the other man’s humanity, with all its frailty and pettiness. Our so called “noble” sentiments rarely survive this point and are soon replaced by disappointment and disgust, eventually spelling the doom of the whole affair.
- TURING: I do not know how you can live with yourself, Ludwig.
Turing stood up violently, toppling his chair to the ground. Without meeting anyone’s gaze, he left the room and slammed the door shut.
- QUINE: Was this a private tiff between you two or does it have a bearing upon the general issues we were discussing ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: It does. As I just said. These so called “Platonic” feelings are an attempt at deification, a quasi-religious urge. However, it would probably be more accurate to describe them as a form of deviant religion, a striving towards religion which deviates and comes crashing down when it hits the unyielding obstacle of the idol’s human nature. What religion can survive the realization that its god is a mere mortal ?
- OPPENHEIMER: Are you saying all this is specific to homosexuality ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: No. It probably manifests more starkly in that context nowadays because homosexual intercourse develops outside the usual social norms and is therefore freer to follow its internal logic to its conclusion. However, Literature has already depicted the same kind of quasi-worship in other contexts. I have mentioned Proust and his character Albertine but there are other examples. A number of Dostoevskyan characters behave similarly even in the absence of what we would usually call “love”.
- OPPENHEIMER: I think I see what you mean. However, all this seems somewhat remote from the mechanisms involved in the development of Babylonian society.
- WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, but the distance is not as great as one might suppose. Modern idolatrous “love” and 3rd Millennium Babylonian religious emergence are part of the same continuum of human behavior, what I have called credit masturbation.
- QUINE: I think it would be worth for you to try and put all this in writing. Don’t you agree ?
- WITTGENSTEIN: I have already started discussing with Ulam and Brady about a paper we might write in common. We should have a draft ready in a week or two.
- QUINE: We are all waiting for it in eager anticipation.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This conversation between Wittgenstein et al. had been reported in several of the Boffin team members personal logbooks. I had just finished reading Kuhn’s, which formed the greater part of binder L-49/19.
As I looked up from the pages, I saw Finn sipping his coffee and staring blankly out the window. I asked:
- ME: What do you make of this “Credit Masturbation” idea.
- FINN: It is probably the single most significant advance achieved by the Philadelphia team.
- ME: Really ?
- FINN: Yes. It unifies religion with a slew of other human behaviors. It brings clarity to a number of puzzling issues. Read on, you will see. The paper by Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein in binder X-49/36 is an absolute gem.
- ME: OK. By the way, what is going on with Wittgenstein and Turing ?
- FINN: It will get far worse. You will see. No spoilers.
The fact it has been means mods (at least some of them) see the value in having something on this site that is a little better than the usual "water is wet" drivel
@K9Otaku opinions on Younger Dryas & Gobekli tepe as proof for older civilizations
Gobekli Tepe is not an "old civilization". It is a series of Megalithic structures that mark the passage of the PPNA to the PPNB, i.e. from basic agriculture performed by women only, to advanced agriculture performed by both men and women. Gobekli Tepe is likely to have had something to do with the invention of Monogamy. Each circle chamber on the mound was probably erected by a male-only initiation-based society of a couple dozen men. These societies were anti-Chad beta-male associations headed by an incel-asperger shaman. As they grew in power, these groups were able to impose monogamy on chieftains (Chads) so that all members could have a wife to fuck. In parallel, this new situation made it possible to enact the fundamental male-female monogamous contract: "I am your alpha male and therefore will fuck you but in exchange, I will do agriculture in order to feed you and the kids". In other words, beta males accepted to pursue the female food gathering strategy (agriculture) in exchange for having exclusive fucking rights to one female. The aspie-incel shaman who was the leader of the beta-male association was doing magic and shit to scare the local Chad into accepting the new deal.
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Chapter 6 – Credit Masturbation – Part 1 of 3
Ekaterina was now fully integrated into our daily routine. In the morning, we would have breakfast, the three of us together, in a corner of the empty mess hall. What Ekaterina was cooking for herself was excellent and she would often make extra portions for Finn and I. On that day, we were talking about what Ekaterina had just read about the Socrates experiment:
- EKATERINA: I cannot believe Socrates is so bad. He is sharlatan; what is the word in English ?
- ME: You mean a charlatan ?
- EKATERINA: A doctor who is not really doctor.
- ME: Yeah, a charlatan, a quack.
- EKATERINA: This is so strange. Everybody thinks he is so much wise man. People believe him better than Jesus Christ.
- FINN: Yes, they do. People who no longer believe in Christ need idols. Socrates, and philosophers in general, play that role.
- ME: You compared him to Jesus. Do you consider yourself Christian, Ekaterina ?
- EKATERINA: Yes, I go to church every Sunday.
- ME: Oh. I thought it was rare in Russia.
- EKATERINA: Not anymore. Many people are going back to church. Even my parents. They are scientists and during Soviet Union they did not believe. But now they go to church. President Putin goes to church now.
- ME: Really !? But he was KGB.
- EKATERINA: Yes but now he goes to church. People change.
She said this as if it was a matter of simple fact. There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice; not a frown of cynicism on her brow. Breakfast was over. We all sat up and brought the dishes to the pantry. There was a big industrial dish-washer, which we started up before making our way to hut 19. When we arrived, I grabbed binder X‑49/36 and started reading what Finn called “The credit masturbation report”.
Ekaterina was now fully integrated into our daily routine. In the morning, we would have breakfast, the three of us together, in a corner of the empty mess hall. What Ekaterina was cooking for herself was excellent and she would often make extra portions for Finn and I. On that day, we were talking about what Ekaterina had just read about the Socrates experiment:
- EKATERINA: I cannot believe Socrates is so bad. He is sharlatan; what is the word in English ?
- ME: You mean a charlatan ?
- EKATERINA: A doctor who is not really doctor.
- ME: Yeah, a charlatan, a quack.
- EKATERINA: This is so strange. Everybody thinks he is so much wise man. People believe him better than Jesus Christ.
- FINN: Yes, they do. People who no longer believe in Christ need idols. Socrates, and philosophers in general, play that role.
- ME: You compared him to Jesus. Do you consider yourself Christian, Ekaterina ?
- EKATERINA: Yes, I go to church every Sunday.
- ME: Oh. I thought it was rare in Russia.
- EKATERINA: Not anymore. Many people are going back to church. Even my parents. They are scientists and during Soviet Union they did not believe. But now they go to church. President Putin goes to church now.
- ME: Really !? But he was KGB.
- EKATERINA: Yes but now he goes to church. People change.
She said this as if it was a matter of simple fact. There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice; not a frown of cynicism on her brow. Breakfast was over. We all sat up and brought the dishes to the pantry. There was a big industrial dish-washer, which we started up before making our way to hut 19. When we arrived, I grabbed binder X‑49/36 and started reading what Finn called “The credit masturbation report”.
But Ishtar is a cool ship
wiki.eveuniversity.org
best thing ever for nullsec ratting. If you do it with 2-3 Accounts at the same time in the same site. 10-15 heavy t2 drones and all the +1.1 million battleships in the gate-heavens and scantums pop in a few seconds. Set a radius of 80-100km around the BS that you killed last. Kill frigs and cruiser first. Number the BS for your fleet, except the BS you circle and kill in turn. So in every wave. And you will get rich! 130 Million ISK / h is normal with 2 Accounts. Pro Tpp: the chance for faction spawns loot and 10/10 escalations they bring you 100-200 million isk extra if you sell them grow extremly if you switsh the star system often. Some dasy I has earned 1billion + this way extra
Ishtar - EVE University Wiki
best thing ever for nullsec ratting. If you do it with 2-3 Accounts at the same time in the same site. 10-15 heavy t2 drones and all the +1.1 million battleships in the gate-heavens and scantums pop in a few seconds. Set a radius of 80-100km around the BS that you killed last. Kill frigs and cruiser first. Number the BS for your fleet, except the BS you circle and kill in turn. So in every wave. And you will get rich! 130 Million ISK / h is normal with 2 Accounts. Pro Tpp: the chance for faction spawns loot and 10/10 escalations they bring you 100-200 million isk extra if you sell them grow extremly if you switsh the star system often. Some dasy I has earned 1billion + this way extra
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I was a huge EvE nerd some years back, but I never liked the Gallente. I was Caldari all the way. Is it still good? Not too dead?But Ishtar is a cool ship
Ishtar - EVE University Wiki
best thing ever for nullsec ratting. If you do it with 2-3 Accounts at the same time in the same site. 10-15 heavy t2 drones and all the +1.1 million battleships in the gate-heavens and scantums pop in a few seconds. Set a radius of 80-100km around any BS that you killed last. Kill frigs and cruiser first. Number the BS except the one you circle for the flute and turn it off in turn. So in every wave. And you will get rich! 130 Million ISK / h is normal.
Chapter 6 – Credit Masturbation – Part 2 of 2
Upon completion of their report, Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein opted not to circulate it in printed form but instead to read it aloud to the assembled members of the team. There is no information in the personal log-books, or anywhere else in the project documentation, regarding the motivation of this decision. Did they want to gauge the reactions of their fellow Boffins as they discovered the text ? Were they anxious about possible misunderstandings and wanted to be able to address them as they arose ? We cannot say.
However, what is abundantly clear is that the meeting ended in a manner that was quite unusual, to say the least, even by the standards of the Philadelphia Boffin team. Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein had taken turns to read the various parts of the report and Ulam was the last to speak. As he finished reading the conclusion and stopped talking, a deep silence descended on the assembly, which lasted for over 30 seconds. Then, everyone started talking at the same time.
Several Log-books report hearing someone (Quine, according to some, Oppenheimer, according to others) exclaiming: "But we trust people only if they tell the truth !", to which Wittgenstein replied, at the top of his lungs: "No, no, NO. 'This is true' is merely a way to say 'I believe it'". At another point, the following statement (author unknown) was heard over the cacophony of exclamations and furious retorts: "And what about Beauty ?! Isn't Ishtar the goddess of Beauty too ?" Both Wittgenstein and Brady yelled something in response, but no one was apparently able to record what they said.
Then, Alan Turing, who had not been present during the reading, entered the room. In his hand, he held a revolver. The subsequent inquiry revealed that it was the standard-issue Webley he had received during the two weeks basic training he had gone through before joining Bletchley Park. He stood motionless at the door for a few seconds then moved towards Wittgenstein, raised his weapon and shot his former Cambridge colleague twice in the chest. Oppenheimer and Kuhn, who were seated closest to him, lunged at the revolver and pushed Turing out of the room. In the corridor, two MPs, who had heard the gunshots, grabbed him and threw him to the floor.
Wittgenstein's injuries were not immediately life-threatening. He suffered from a collapsed lung and a nicked artery which caused a haemorrhage and required an immediate transfusion. Thankfully, the base's medical station was well equipped and Wittgenstein's condition was stable enough 48 hours later to allow him to be airlifted back to the UK on the next bi-weekly USAF YB-36 flight. Wittgenstein was treated at King's College Hospital in London and had recovered enough six months later to resume some of his philosophical work. However, he was never able to re-join the Philadelphia team as his health was considered too fragile. He died less than two years after the shooting, on 29 April 1951. Prostate cancer was given as the cause of death but there is no doubt that the injuries suffered at the hands of Turing hastened his end.
Alan Turing, for his part, was also repatriated to the UK and held for three months at a secret MI5 facility near Edinburgh. His case was a tricky one for the authorities to handle as his wartime service and his knowledge of the Philadelphia project made the publicity of an ordinary trial an unacceptable security risk. Eventually, on the advice of psychiatrists who had examined him, he was released and returned to his teaching position at Cambridge. However, he remained under close surveillance and, in January 1952, was tricked into a homosexual encounter (then an illegal act in the UK) by an MI5 operative. Immediately caught by the police, he was convicted of "Gross Indecency" on 31 March 1952. Sentenced to a humiliating hormonal treatment which caused him to grow female breasts, he committed suicide in 1954.
As mentioned above, a board of inquiry was held immediately after the shooting. However, its findings were slim. No evidence of conspiracy or of Turing's involvement in any kind of network or group was found. Even though the circumstances of the shooting were abundantly clear, its motivation officially remained an unsolved question. Of course, several members of the team had their own theories about what might have triggered Turing's actions that day, but they were not able to put them to the test until much later.
Finn had told me that something between Turing and Wittgenstein was about to go down but I certainly did not expect that kind of thing. The members of the Philadelphia team were equally bewildered, by the murder, of course, but also by their own reactions. Even before Turing had entered the room, everybody had lost it. How could that happen ? Within a few days, after the "credit-masturbation report" had become available to the whole team in printed form, they had all read it and re-read it several times. It was innovative and thought-provoking, to be sure, but there was nothing in it that warranted the hysteria that had seized them all after the reading. How could they have gone overboard in such a fashion ? Personnal log-books were full of perplexed questions in this vein.
It had taken me around a week to read the material about the "credit masturbation report" and its aftermath. Once I had been done with it, I found a pretext to go on a long walk alone with Finn around the base. I did not want to discuss this matter within earshot of Ekaterina so as not to spoil it for her. Once we had turned the corner around the kitchen and the mess-hall, I asked Finn:
- ME: What the hell do you think happened at that meeting when Turing shot Wittgenstein; I mean, before Turing entered the room. What had gotten into them all ?
- FINN: You are asking why they were not able to keep it together after the reading was finished ?
- ME: Yes.
- FINN: Well, answering that very question turned into a full-fledged research project for the Philadelphia team later on. It is difficult to summarise the results in a few words.
- ME: Please try.
- FINN: Let us say that there is a parallel between the behaviour of the Boffin team at that meeting and what they were studying at the time, i.e. the emergence of "worship-only" religion in Mesopotamia, i.e. "Idolatry", in Jewish/Christian terms.
- ME: You mean that they were all idolizing Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein because of their report ?
- FINN: Yes, but the verb "idolize" is too crude to capture what was going on in a precise enough manner. In particular, there is a crucial element that is missing from the picture that this word creates.
- ME: What element ?
- FINN: If I try to describe it, this conversation will turn into a series of hours-long lectures and I will probably not be able to do justice to the matter anyway. I think it is better if you wait and read all of it directly from the horse's mouth, ... the binders, I mean.
- ME: Ok. What about Turing ? Is it the same thing ?
- FINN: Yes, Pretty much.
- ME: To be honest, I do not completely get why the other Boffins are so worried about their own attitude before Turing entered the room. After all, chaotic debates do happen sometimes.
- FINN: What worries them, and rightly so, is the parallel between their own behaviour and Turing's act. Since both took place almost simultaneously, it is impossible to miss the connection. It is as if they were somehow accomplices of Turing's. In the run-up to the next phase of the project, you will see that some of the Boffin team members make explicit parallels between their own group and what they had observed about Socrates' and Plato's period in Athens.
- ME: I see. Also, in the last paragraph of the report there is what looks like the beginning of a theory about socialism's appeal. I guess that the fleshing out of this theory will come later too ?
- FINN: Yes. This question is the basic mandate of the Boffin team's work, after all. They will come up with an answer in due course, although this answer will turn out to be of wider applicability than just to socialism.
- ME: It seems indeed that the deeper they dig, the wider the scope becomes.
- FINN: As it inevitably must. Studying "ideology" in isolation was never going to yield any kind of meaningful results. The failure of late XXth century academic scholarship to come up with anything but platitudes in that regard has amply demonstrated that.
- ME: I guess so.
- FINN: The credit masturbation report is truly an amazing piece of theorizing. It answers so many questions at once. For example, you may remember that you asked me about poetry when we were first talking about the role of trust in language ? Well, the answer to your question is right there in the report. Poetry is a form of linguistic masturbation. Because it is linguistic, it includes a credit masturbation component. When one listens to poetry our credit-handling instincts are aroused, tickled so to speak. As a result, a certain amount of counterfeit credit is created in our mind. This is how poets create gods.
- ME: You are talking about ancient poets, right ?
- FINN: Yes, Homer, Hesiod, the authors of the Psalms, the Edda, the Rigveda, etc.
- ME: But what about modern poets ?
- FINN: That explanation will have to wait. Here we are entering the realm of Proust and Dostoyevsky. This is what the Philadelphia team will grapple with when they finally unravel the mystery of Turing's act and of their own behaviour after the reading of the credit masturbations report.
- ME: I see. How far is that in the future ?
- FINN: Quite far. It comes near the end of the whole Philadelphia endeavour.
Upon completion of their report, Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein opted not to circulate it in printed form but instead to read it aloud to the assembled members of the team. There is no information in the personal log-books, or anywhere else in the project documentation, regarding the motivation of this decision. Did they want to gauge the reactions of their fellow Boffins as they discovered the text ? Were they anxious about possible misunderstandings and wanted to be able to address them as they arose ? We cannot say.
However, what is abundantly clear is that the meeting ended in a manner that was quite unusual, to say the least, even by the standards of the Philadelphia Boffin team. Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein had taken turns to read the various parts of the report and Ulam was the last to speak. As he finished reading the conclusion and stopped talking, a deep silence descended on the assembly, which lasted for over 30 seconds. Then, everyone started talking at the same time.
Several Log-books report hearing someone (Quine, according to some, Oppenheimer, according to others) exclaiming: "But we trust people only if they tell the truth !", to which Wittgenstein replied, at the top of his lungs: "No, no, NO. 'This is true' is merely a way to say 'I believe it'". At another point, the following statement (author unknown) was heard over the cacophony of exclamations and furious retorts: "And what about Beauty ?! Isn't Ishtar the goddess of Beauty too ?" Both Wittgenstein and Brady yelled something in response, but no one was apparently able to record what they said.
Then, Alan Turing, who had not been present during the reading, entered the room. In his hand, he held a revolver. The subsequent inquiry revealed that it was the standard-issue Webley he had received during the two weeks basic training he had gone through before joining Bletchley Park. He stood motionless at the door for a few seconds then moved towards Wittgenstein, raised his weapon and shot his former Cambridge colleague twice in the chest. Oppenheimer and Kuhn, who were seated closest to him, lunged at the revolver and pushed Turing out of the room. In the corridor, two MPs, who had heard the gunshots, grabbed him and threw him to the floor.
Wittgenstein's injuries were not immediately life-threatening. He suffered from a collapsed lung and a nicked artery which caused a haemorrhage and required an immediate transfusion. Thankfully, the base's medical station was well equipped and Wittgenstein's condition was stable enough 48 hours later to allow him to be airlifted back to the UK on the next bi-weekly USAF YB-36 flight. Wittgenstein was treated at King's College Hospital in London and had recovered enough six months later to resume some of his philosophical work. However, he was never able to re-join the Philadelphia team as his health was considered too fragile. He died less than two years after the shooting, on 29 April 1951. Prostate cancer was given as the cause of death but there is no doubt that the injuries suffered at the hands of Turing hastened his end.
Alan Turing, for his part, was also repatriated to the UK and held for three months at a secret MI5 facility near Edinburgh. His case was a tricky one for the authorities to handle as his wartime service and his knowledge of the Philadelphia project made the publicity of an ordinary trial an unacceptable security risk. Eventually, on the advice of psychiatrists who had examined him, he was released and returned to his teaching position at Cambridge. However, he remained under close surveillance and, in January 1952, was tricked into a homosexual encounter (then an illegal act in the UK) by an MI5 operative. Immediately caught by the police, he was convicted of "Gross Indecency" on 31 March 1952. Sentenced to a humiliating hormonal treatment which caused him to grow female breasts, he committed suicide in 1954.
As mentioned above, a board of inquiry was held immediately after the shooting. However, its findings were slim. No evidence of conspiracy or of Turing's involvement in any kind of network or group was found. Even though the circumstances of the shooting were abundantly clear, its motivation officially remained an unsolved question. Of course, several members of the team had their own theories about what might have triggered Turing's actions that day, but they were not able to put them to the test until much later.
Finn had told me that something between Turing and Wittgenstein was about to go down but I certainly did not expect that kind of thing. The members of the Philadelphia team were equally bewildered, by the murder, of course, but also by their own reactions. Even before Turing had entered the room, everybody had lost it. How could that happen ? Within a few days, after the "credit-masturbation report" had become available to the whole team in printed form, they had all read it and re-read it several times. It was innovative and thought-provoking, to be sure, but there was nothing in it that warranted the hysteria that had seized them all after the reading. How could they have gone overboard in such a fashion ? Personnal log-books were full of perplexed questions in this vein.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It had taken me around a week to read the material about the "credit masturbation report" and its aftermath. Once I had been done with it, I found a pretext to go on a long walk alone with Finn around the base. I did not want to discuss this matter within earshot of Ekaterina so as not to spoil it for her. Once we had turned the corner around the kitchen and the mess-hall, I asked Finn:
- ME: What the hell do you think happened at that meeting when Turing shot Wittgenstein; I mean, before Turing entered the room. What had gotten into them all ?
- FINN: You are asking why they were not able to keep it together after the reading was finished ?
- ME: Yes.
- FINN: Well, answering that very question turned into a full-fledged research project for the Philadelphia team later on. It is difficult to summarise the results in a few words.
- ME: Please try.
- FINN: Let us say that there is a parallel between the behaviour of the Boffin team at that meeting and what they were studying at the time, i.e. the emergence of "worship-only" religion in Mesopotamia, i.e. "Idolatry", in Jewish/Christian terms.
- ME: You mean that they were all idolizing Brady, Ulam and Wittgenstein because of their report ?
- FINN: Yes, but the verb "idolize" is too crude to capture what was going on in a precise enough manner. In particular, there is a crucial element that is missing from the picture that this word creates.
- ME: What element ?
- FINN: If I try to describe it, this conversation will turn into a series of hours-long lectures and I will probably not be able to do justice to the matter anyway. I think it is better if you wait and read all of it directly from the horse's mouth, ... the binders, I mean.
- ME: Ok. What about Turing ? Is it the same thing ?
- FINN: Yes, Pretty much.
- ME: To be honest, I do not completely get why the other Boffins are so worried about their own attitude before Turing entered the room. After all, chaotic debates do happen sometimes.
- FINN: What worries them, and rightly so, is the parallel between their own behaviour and Turing's act. Since both took place almost simultaneously, it is impossible to miss the connection. It is as if they were somehow accomplices of Turing's. In the run-up to the next phase of the project, you will see that some of the Boffin team members make explicit parallels between their own group and what they had observed about Socrates' and Plato's period in Athens.
- ME: I see. Also, in the last paragraph of the report there is what looks like the beginning of a theory about socialism's appeal. I guess that the fleshing out of this theory will come later too ?
- FINN: Yes. This question is the basic mandate of the Boffin team's work, after all. They will come up with an answer in due course, although this answer will turn out to be of wider applicability than just to socialism.
- ME: It seems indeed that the deeper they dig, the wider the scope becomes.
- FINN: As it inevitably must. Studying "ideology" in isolation was never going to yield any kind of meaningful results. The failure of late XXth century academic scholarship to come up with anything but platitudes in that regard has amply demonstrated that.
- ME: I guess so.
- FINN: The credit masturbation report is truly an amazing piece of theorizing. It answers so many questions at once. For example, you may remember that you asked me about poetry when we were first talking about the role of trust in language ? Well, the answer to your question is right there in the report. Poetry is a form of linguistic masturbation. Because it is linguistic, it includes a credit masturbation component. When one listens to poetry our credit-handling instincts are aroused, tickled so to speak. As a result, a certain amount of counterfeit credit is created in our mind. This is how poets create gods.
- ME: You are talking about ancient poets, right ?
- FINN: Yes, Homer, Hesiod, the authors of the Psalms, the Edda, the Rigveda, etc.
- ME: But what about modern poets ?
- FINN: That explanation will have to wait. Here we are entering the realm of Proust and Dostoyevsky. This is what the Philadelphia team will grapple with when they finally unravel the mystery of Turing's act and of their own behaviour after the reading of the credit masturbations report.
- ME: I see. How far is that in the future ?
- FINN: Quite far. It comes near the end of the whole Philadelphia endeavour.
Chapter 7 – Nabû-naʾid – Part 1 of 4
In the aftermath of the shooting, all members of the Boffin team were granted two months leave while the CIA and the other agencies involved in the project conducted their investigations. These investigations did not uncover anything of note, and it was concluded that Turing's act was the result of an individual psychological imbalance, hence not a security threat. Eventually, in September 1949, everyone was flown back from their respective countries and work resumed. There were a few loose ends that still required tying up regarding the Babylon experiment. This work lasted until late 1949 and even into January 1950 for some of the task groups. While this was going on, the team started considering what the next step should be.
Contrary to the previous “what to do next ?” discussions, this one was much more subdued. It was now painfully obvious to all that they were not detached observers casually investigating their object of study from a position of moral superiority. They were wretched human beings grappling with the terrifying mysteries of their own deeply veiled inner workings. As a result, there was no acrimony. The old partisan dichotomy that had pitted Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Brady on the one hand, against Quine, Oppenheimer and Turing, on the other, had vanished. There were some debates about dates, periods and locations but everyone now agreed that the approach first outlined by the Brady paper on Eridu and eventually expanded upon by the “Credit Masturbation Report” (although the Philadelphia team did not use that phrase to refer to it) was the proper framework for their investigation. Wittgenstein had been shot by Turing just as he was advocating for this approach. This fact alone seemed to validate it. Turing's act, and the tumult that had engulfed the whole company after the reading of the report, were felt to be clear indications that everyone's inner demons had been pricked into action by what was being said. Inner demons would hardly ever rear their heads in such a well-mannered crowd unless they had been put in the spotlight by some extra-bright glare.
The contents of the personal logbooks had taken on a distinctly introspective tenor during this period. Several of the American members of the team worried that an "European" mental disease had seized them all while the other members tended to use literary comparisons to try and put a name on what had happened. George Dumézil wrote:
Most of the debates regarding the project's next step revolved around Pharaonic Egypt and the rest of Ancient Mesopotamian history. Should any aspect of these two periods be investigated and, if so, which ones ? Eventually, Both von Soden and Landsberger convinced the team that none of them actually required their attention except one, the very last episode of Mesopotamia's independent existence before the advent of the Achaemenid Empire, i.e. the reign of Nabonidus, the last King of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Both German Assyriologists argued that the extensive investigation of the first Babylonian Dynasty, which was then near completion, had yielded enough data to get a good grasp on Mesopotamian culture as a whole since all the cultural patterns present in 1800 B.C. Babylon would remain without appreciable changes until the end of the period. Regarding Egypt, they were of the opinion that although this culture had a lot of idiosyncrasies in the realm of architecture and the visual arts, it was not different enough from Mesopotamia at its core to warrant a separate study.
The choice of Nabonidus's reign as the next milestone in the Boffin's teamwork might appear odd at first glance. Why study the last king of a declining civilization about to be overwhelmed and replaced by an entirely different one ? Landsberger and von Soden’s argument was that this late period of Babylonian history was the key to the the events that would unfold immediately after it, especially the emergence of the fully monotheistic Jewish theocracy in Jerusalem which was to emerge under Persian overlordship.
Some kind of Israelite polity had been in existence since around 1000 B.C., but it had never been truly monotheistic. There was a strong henotheistic faction among the Jewish priesthood, which promoted the exclusive worship of the syncretistic YAHWEH-ELOHIM deity. However, although this faction had been patronized by certain pre-exilic kings, it had never been dominant for long within the Jewish principalities before the Babylonian Exile. The temple of Jerusalem, in its primitive form, had hosted the worship of several other deities like, Ba'al or Astarte, at various periods of its existence. Israelite petty kings were cast in the old Babylonian mold which had now become the norm all over the Middle-East. They combined a “righteous ruler” persona, bolstered by the worship of first-tier gods like Ba'al or Yahweh, with an orgiastic warrior ethos fuelled by the cult of Astarte, the local variant of Inanna/Ishtar.
In other words, before the Exile, the northern and southern Israelite kingdoms were not much different from the many other petty states dotting the borderlands extending from the western Zagros to the Sinai. This area formed a buffer zone between Egypt in the South-West and the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the North-East. As Assyria expanded into the region, it conquered and destroyed the Northern Kingdom in 720 B.C. and soon vassalized the southern one, as it did with all the neighbouring petty kingdoms in the run-up to its conquest of Egypt in 671 B.C. Eventually the Assyrian Empire, weakened by internal strife and Median attacks from the east, was replaced by a resurgent Babylon in 609 BC. A decade later, the neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, while re-asserting the Empire’s influence in the Syro-Palestinian borderlands, finally destroyed the southern Kingdom of Judah in 597 B.C. Jerusalem was sacked, its temple razed and the upper strata of its population deported to Babylon. The exile of the Jewish elites started the chain of events which would bear fruit during the reign of Nabonidus. This would eventually turn the Jewish Nation from a petty backwater tribal kingdom into the founding people of three major world religious traditions.
The Nabonidus sub-project would eventually be run along the same industrial lines as the Babylon experiment. However, at first, the team was much smaller as they focused almost exclusively on the king himself in order to get enough data to decide what to investigate next. In late 1949, in parallel with the remaining task-groups working on 1800 B.C. Babylon, a small team centred around Wolfram von Soden and Joseph Brady started observing the last king of the same city, 1300 years later.
From now on, I will use the native form of the king's name, Nabû-naʾid, instead of “Nabonidus”, its Greek and Latin transliteration. Nabû-naʾid was a usurper. He had been an official in several of the previous kings’ administrations and had been brought to power in a palace coup, in 556 B.C. The king he replaced was the under-age and inexperienced Labashi Marduk. The group of courtiers to which Nabû-naʾid belonged felt that a steadier hand was required, given the challenges faced by Babylonia at the time. The biggest threat was the Achaemenid Persian expansion in the East. During the 550s B.C., the Pārsa, originally a vassal tribes of the Medes, had rebelled against their former overlords and managed to take over their dominions, which encompassed most of the Iranian Plateau. The Pārsa, known in the Greek and Latin sources as “Persians”, were headed by an ambitious leader known as Kūrauš (Cyrus, in classical sources) who gave every sign of having expansionist aims to the West. Kūrauš's lineage was reckoned to have been founded by one Hakhāmaneš, transliterated as “Achaemenes” in the classical sources, which gave the dynasty its name of “Achaemenid”.
One of the enigmas which had long puzzled historians regarding the reign of Nabû-naʾid is that his policies do not appear to have been focused on the Persian threat. Instead, he seems to have embarked on a religious reform of the Babylonian pantheon, triggering loud protests from the established clergy of Marduk, and then to have left the city of Babylon to spend a full decade in the middle of the Arabian desert, in the Oasis of Teima, well over 800 km away from his capital. During his absence, Nabû-naʾid's son, Bēl-šar-uṣur (Belshazzar in Hebrew sources) was handed over the reins of power by his father. The issue of Nabû-naʾid's motivation for his long stay in Teima had long miffed and divided historians.
The first goal of the Nabonidus project was to tackle this issue. After a few weeks of fruitless searches, von Soden and Brady were able to record the following events. A little over four months after his accession, and nearly a year before his departure for Teima, Nabû-naʾid was enjoying the cool evening breeze on the roof of one of the royal palace’ buildings. He was surrounded by a small group of close friends and advisers which included, among others, the head of his chancellery, Dāniyyēl, an exiled Jew who had risen in the ranks of the Babylonian bureaucracy over several decades, and Adad-Guppi, his mother, who belonged to the chief priestly family of the moon-god Sîn temple in Harran. In the distance, on the other bank of the Euphrates, the blue ceramic tiles of the Esagila gleamed in the setting sun. The following exchange was recorded:
- NABU-NAʾID: As some of you know, I feel that we are no longer faithful heirs to the greatness of Babylon. We bicker. We betray each other for trifles. Every man is like a treacherous reed which pierces the hand of anyone who tries to lean on it.
- COURTIER No.1: I heartily agree my Lord. Even under Ashurbanipal the great, the people of Sumer and Akkad were starting to falter. It is only on account of the mighty fear he put into their hearts that they were kept in line. Under Nebuchadnezzar it was far worse and I trembled that some terrible misfortune might befall us. Glory and thanks be to Marduk for protecting the great king.
- COURTIER No.2: When I lived in Nineveh, I met with some men of learning who said that we are no longer following the ancient lore faithfully and, as a result, the gods are abandoning us. These men said that they had gathered many tablets from before the flood and studied their contents.
- DANIYYEL: I have heard similar stories. Aren't they spread by clever people who peddle such tablets for gold ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: You are an ignorant foreigner, DANIYYEL the scribe. In Harran there are tablets that some learned men brought from the primordial abode of blessed Sîn in Ur; great is the name of the dwelling place of Nanna [Sumerian name of Sîn]. These tablets had been written in Eridu before the flood and collected at Ur when Eridu's ABZU dried up long before Hammurabi the great reigned in this city.
- DANIYYEL: I apologize for my ignorance and my lack of manners, m'lady.
- NABU-NAʾID: What do these tablets say, mother ? Do you know ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: You will have to ask the learned men of Ur, my son. Only they have kept the ancient lore intact in all its details. What I learned at the feet of my father, the chief priest of Harran, is that in the beginning there was only Eridu and its Lord was Enki. The land was green and free from diseases. Men and beasts multiplied like locusts and yet they always had food in plenty. Then the flood came and Eridu was ruined. People gave Enki other names, like Enlil, Sîn or even Marduk ...
- COURTIER No.1: M'lady, I fear for your blessed head. Aren't you blaspheming the name of Holy Marduk ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: No, young man. Do not fear for the old lady. Blessed Marduk is called the son of Father Enki, but he is in fact Enki himself in another guise come to earth in order to save us from the fury that shall not be named [TIAMAT].
- NABU-NAʾID: Mother, you are fount of wisdom, as usual, and you have greatly piqued my curiosity. I shall travel south to Ur at once.
- DANIYYEL: Isn't that premature, my Lord ? There is worrying news from the East.
- NABU-NAʾID: I value your advice DANIYYEL, but what is upon us is a worse threat than a few long-bearded horsemen. How can a people, however glorious and ancient, keep prospering if it disregards the old gods ? We have little time if we want to attract their favour once more.
In the aftermath of the shooting, all members of the Boffin team were granted two months leave while the CIA and the other agencies involved in the project conducted their investigations. These investigations did not uncover anything of note, and it was concluded that Turing's act was the result of an individual psychological imbalance, hence not a security threat. Eventually, in September 1949, everyone was flown back from their respective countries and work resumed. There were a few loose ends that still required tying up regarding the Babylon experiment. This work lasted until late 1949 and even into January 1950 for some of the task groups. While this was going on, the team started considering what the next step should be.
Contrary to the previous “what to do next ?” discussions, this one was much more subdued. It was now painfully obvious to all that they were not detached observers casually investigating their object of study from a position of moral superiority. They were wretched human beings grappling with the terrifying mysteries of their own deeply veiled inner workings. As a result, there was no acrimony. The old partisan dichotomy that had pitted Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Brady on the one hand, against Quine, Oppenheimer and Turing, on the other, had vanished. There were some debates about dates, periods and locations but everyone now agreed that the approach first outlined by the Brady paper on Eridu and eventually expanded upon by the “Credit Masturbation Report” (although the Philadelphia team did not use that phrase to refer to it) was the proper framework for their investigation. Wittgenstein had been shot by Turing just as he was advocating for this approach. This fact alone seemed to validate it. Turing's act, and the tumult that had engulfed the whole company after the reading of the report, were felt to be clear indications that everyone's inner demons had been pricked into action by what was being said. Inner demons would hardly ever rear their heads in such a well-mannered crowd unless they had been put in the spotlight by some extra-bright glare.
The contents of the personal logbooks had taken on a distinctly introspective tenor during this period. Several of the American members of the team worried that an "European" mental disease had seized them all while the other members tended to use literary comparisons to try and put a name on what had happened. George Dumézil wrote:
Il est difficile d'ignorer le parallèle avec "Le Rouge et le Noir". A. Turing est-il un nouveau Julien Sorel ? Celà en a tout l'air. La passion Stendhalienne conduit le héros au coup de pistolet comme dans le cas de Mme de Rênal. On ne brûle plus l'idole que l'on a adoré mais on la gratifie d'une balle. Personne n'a jamais vraiment compris le geste de Julien Sorel, d'ailleurs, et il est à parier que le romancier lui même n'était pas bien au clair sur les raisons qui l'ont poussé à écrire cette scène. Allons-nous devoir plonger dans ce genre d'interrogation ? C'est probable.
[English translation] It is difficult not to notice the parallel with “The Red and the Black” [a famous French novel published in 1830]. Is A. Turing a new Julien Sorel [A character from the novel] ? It seems to be the case. Passion, according to Stendhal [the novel's author], leads the hero to fire a gun like Julien does in the trial scene with Mme de Rênal [another character]. We no longer burn the idol once beloved but we now shoot a bullet at it. By the way, nobody has ever really figured out the motive of Julien Sorel's act. It is likely that the author himself did not have a completely clear understanding of the reasons that led him to write this scene. Are we going to have to tackle this kind of puzzle ? It seems likely.
Most of the debates regarding the project's next step revolved around Pharaonic Egypt and the rest of Ancient Mesopotamian history. Should any aspect of these two periods be investigated and, if so, which ones ? Eventually, Both von Soden and Landsberger convinced the team that none of them actually required their attention except one, the very last episode of Mesopotamia's independent existence before the advent of the Achaemenid Empire, i.e. the reign of Nabonidus, the last King of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Both German Assyriologists argued that the extensive investigation of the first Babylonian Dynasty, which was then near completion, had yielded enough data to get a good grasp on Mesopotamian culture as a whole since all the cultural patterns present in 1800 B.C. Babylon would remain without appreciable changes until the end of the period. Regarding Egypt, they were of the opinion that although this culture had a lot of idiosyncrasies in the realm of architecture and the visual arts, it was not different enough from Mesopotamia at its core to warrant a separate study.
The choice of Nabonidus's reign as the next milestone in the Boffin's teamwork might appear odd at first glance. Why study the last king of a declining civilization about to be overwhelmed and replaced by an entirely different one ? Landsberger and von Soden’s argument was that this late period of Babylonian history was the key to the the events that would unfold immediately after it, especially the emergence of the fully monotheistic Jewish theocracy in Jerusalem which was to emerge under Persian overlordship.
Some kind of Israelite polity had been in existence since around 1000 B.C., but it had never been truly monotheistic. There was a strong henotheistic faction among the Jewish priesthood, which promoted the exclusive worship of the syncretistic YAHWEH-ELOHIM deity. However, although this faction had been patronized by certain pre-exilic kings, it had never been dominant for long within the Jewish principalities before the Babylonian Exile. The temple of Jerusalem, in its primitive form, had hosted the worship of several other deities like, Ba'al or Astarte, at various periods of its existence. Israelite petty kings were cast in the old Babylonian mold which had now become the norm all over the Middle-East. They combined a “righteous ruler” persona, bolstered by the worship of first-tier gods like Ba'al or Yahweh, with an orgiastic warrior ethos fuelled by the cult of Astarte, the local variant of Inanna/Ishtar.
In other words, before the Exile, the northern and southern Israelite kingdoms were not much different from the many other petty states dotting the borderlands extending from the western Zagros to the Sinai. This area formed a buffer zone between Egypt in the South-West and the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the North-East. As Assyria expanded into the region, it conquered and destroyed the Northern Kingdom in 720 B.C. and soon vassalized the southern one, as it did with all the neighbouring petty kingdoms in the run-up to its conquest of Egypt in 671 B.C. Eventually the Assyrian Empire, weakened by internal strife and Median attacks from the east, was replaced by a resurgent Babylon in 609 BC. A decade later, the neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, while re-asserting the Empire’s influence in the Syro-Palestinian borderlands, finally destroyed the southern Kingdom of Judah in 597 B.C. Jerusalem was sacked, its temple razed and the upper strata of its population deported to Babylon. The exile of the Jewish elites started the chain of events which would bear fruit during the reign of Nabonidus. This would eventually turn the Jewish Nation from a petty backwater tribal kingdom into the founding people of three major world religious traditions.
The Nabonidus sub-project would eventually be run along the same industrial lines as the Babylon experiment. However, at first, the team was much smaller as they focused almost exclusively on the king himself in order to get enough data to decide what to investigate next. In late 1949, in parallel with the remaining task-groups working on 1800 B.C. Babylon, a small team centred around Wolfram von Soden and Joseph Brady started observing the last king of the same city, 1300 years later.
From now on, I will use the native form of the king's name, Nabû-naʾid, instead of “Nabonidus”, its Greek and Latin transliteration. Nabû-naʾid was a usurper. He had been an official in several of the previous kings’ administrations and had been brought to power in a palace coup, in 556 B.C. The king he replaced was the under-age and inexperienced Labashi Marduk. The group of courtiers to which Nabû-naʾid belonged felt that a steadier hand was required, given the challenges faced by Babylonia at the time. The biggest threat was the Achaemenid Persian expansion in the East. During the 550s B.C., the Pārsa, originally a vassal tribes of the Medes, had rebelled against their former overlords and managed to take over their dominions, which encompassed most of the Iranian Plateau. The Pārsa, known in the Greek and Latin sources as “Persians”, were headed by an ambitious leader known as Kūrauš (Cyrus, in classical sources) who gave every sign of having expansionist aims to the West. Kūrauš's lineage was reckoned to have been founded by one Hakhāmaneš, transliterated as “Achaemenes” in the classical sources, which gave the dynasty its name of “Achaemenid”.
One of the enigmas which had long puzzled historians regarding the reign of Nabû-naʾid is that his policies do not appear to have been focused on the Persian threat. Instead, he seems to have embarked on a religious reform of the Babylonian pantheon, triggering loud protests from the established clergy of Marduk, and then to have left the city of Babylon to spend a full decade in the middle of the Arabian desert, in the Oasis of Teima, well over 800 km away from his capital. During his absence, Nabû-naʾid's son, Bēl-šar-uṣur (Belshazzar in Hebrew sources) was handed over the reins of power by his father. The issue of Nabû-naʾid's motivation for his long stay in Teima had long miffed and divided historians.
The first goal of the Nabonidus project was to tackle this issue. After a few weeks of fruitless searches, von Soden and Brady were able to record the following events. A little over four months after his accession, and nearly a year before his departure for Teima, Nabû-naʾid was enjoying the cool evening breeze on the roof of one of the royal palace’ buildings. He was surrounded by a small group of close friends and advisers which included, among others, the head of his chancellery, Dāniyyēl, an exiled Jew who had risen in the ranks of the Babylonian bureaucracy over several decades, and Adad-Guppi, his mother, who belonged to the chief priestly family of the moon-god Sîn temple in Harran. In the distance, on the other bank of the Euphrates, the blue ceramic tiles of the Esagila gleamed in the setting sun. The following exchange was recorded:
- NABU-NAʾID: As some of you know, I feel that we are no longer faithful heirs to the greatness of Babylon. We bicker. We betray each other for trifles. Every man is like a treacherous reed which pierces the hand of anyone who tries to lean on it.
- COURTIER No.1: I heartily agree my Lord. Even under Ashurbanipal the great, the people of Sumer and Akkad were starting to falter. It is only on account of the mighty fear he put into their hearts that they were kept in line. Under Nebuchadnezzar it was far worse and I trembled that some terrible misfortune might befall us. Glory and thanks be to Marduk for protecting the great king.
- COURTIER No.2: When I lived in Nineveh, I met with some men of learning who said that we are no longer following the ancient lore faithfully and, as a result, the gods are abandoning us. These men said that they had gathered many tablets from before the flood and studied their contents.
- DANIYYEL: I have heard similar stories. Aren't they spread by clever people who peddle such tablets for gold ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: You are an ignorant foreigner, DANIYYEL the scribe. In Harran there are tablets that some learned men brought from the primordial abode of blessed Sîn in Ur; great is the name of the dwelling place of Nanna [Sumerian name of Sîn]. These tablets had been written in Eridu before the flood and collected at Ur when Eridu's ABZU dried up long before Hammurabi the great reigned in this city.
- DANIYYEL: I apologize for my ignorance and my lack of manners, m'lady.
- NABU-NAʾID: What do these tablets say, mother ? Do you know ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: You will have to ask the learned men of Ur, my son. Only they have kept the ancient lore intact in all its details. What I learned at the feet of my father, the chief priest of Harran, is that in the beginning there was only Eridu and its Lord was Enki. The land was green and free from diseases. Men and beasts multiplied like locusts and yet they always had food in plenty. Then the flood came and Eridu was ruined. People gave Enki other names, like Enlil, Sîn or even Marduk ...
- COURTIER No.1: M'lady, I fear for your blessed head. Aren't you blaspheming the name of Holy Marduk ?
- ADAD-GUPPI: No, young man. Do not fear for the old lady. Blessed Marduk is called the son of Father Enki, but he is in fact Enki himself in another guise come to earth in order to save us from the fury that shall not be named [TIAMAT].
- NABU-NAʾID: Mother, you are fount of wisdom, as usual, and you have greatly piqued my curiosity. I shall travel south to Ur at once.
- DANIYYEL: Isn't that premature, my Lord ? There is worrying news from the East.
- NABU-NAʾID: I value your advice DANIYYEL, but what is upon us is a worse threat than a few long-bearded horsemen. How can a people, however glorious and ancient, keep prospering if it disregards the old gods ? We have little time if we want to attract their favour once more.
He keeps tagging a mod asking "can you pin this?" and the mod just pins it.
Not the first time this happens.
Fucking shithole forum.
Chapter 7 – Nabû-naʾid – Part 2 of 3
The following day, Nabû-naʾid was on his way, accompanied by the usual retinue of several thousand attendants and soldiers. Dāniyyēl and Adad-Guppi stayed behind in Babylon, together with the 17 years old Bēl-šar-uṣur. Two weeks later, the royal party reached Ur, nearly 300 km south-east of Babylon, and headed for the governor's palace where the king would be staying while in the city. The morning after his arrival, Nabû-naʾid headed for the Egish-shirgal, the main Sîn shrine in the city and by far the oldest moon-god temple in Mesopotamia. The buildings were imposing but, next to them, the old Ziggurat was in a bad state of disrepair. It had crumbled over the years, leaving only its first layer standing.
The priests had been forewarned of the king's arrival and they were duly assembled in front of the main temple gate. After the usual ceremonies, culminating in a sacrifice to the temple’s chief cultic statue, the king was led to a side chamber where a throne had been set up for him. After the king had been seated and taken some refreshments, the chief priest moved forward:
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: The Lord Sîn is pleased by your visit to his abode in Ur and your offering has turned his heart in your favour. He is well aware of your family's relationship to him through your mother, the blessed Adad-Guppi of Harran. May I inquire as to the purpose of your visit to the Holy city of the Moon ?
- NABU-NAʾID: I wish to offer a modest contribution out of the Royal Coffers for the glory of Holy Nanna. I had been told that the Ziggurat needed repair but I did not realize how much this was true until I saw it on my way in. I cannot live one more moment knowing that the great Ziggurat of king Ur Nammu is in such a sorry state. Therefore, I have decreed that it will be rebuilt to a height of 200 cubits and with seven stages. My governor here in the city will personally supervise the work.
- THE GOVERNOR: Your majesty, I am honoured and humbled that you would entrust such a task into my hands. I will gather the best workers and order the best bricks gold can buy. I will start the work this very day.
- NABU-NAʾID: Also, I wish to know about the old tablets from before the Flood. The tablets from Eridu.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, I am not sure what tablets you are referring to.
- NABU-NAʾID: Do not test my patience, Chief priest of the Holy moon. I was told of these tablets by my mother, the blessed Adad-Guppi of Harran. Are you questioning her word ?
At this, the great priest became quite agitated. He directed his attendants to leave the room, together with the priests of junior ranks.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, do you give me your permission to humbly move near you and whisper in your ear ?
He prostrated himself to the floor and waited for the king's answer.
- NABU-NAʾID: You may approach.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN [whispering in Nabû-naʾid's ear]: Your majesty, these tablets are only for the elect to read. We will perform the appropriate rituals to induct you into the college of Ea's servants as soon as you give the order. Once this is done, you will see the tablets and our learned men will help you decipher them. They are written in very old Sumerian and quite hard to read.
- NABU-NAʾID: I order you to do as you said.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN [no longer whispering]: Very well your majesty. We will move to the house of Holy Enki that king Rim-Sin of Larsa built. It is barely 300 cubits from here. During the ceremony and afterwards you will have to be accompanied by deaf-mute attendants only.
All Middle-Eastern rulers of the time had some deaf-mutes among their staff to be used as guards during secret diplomatic meetings. Nabû-naʾid ordered his to be fetched at once. Once the royal party had moved to the nearby Enki temple, the three-hour long ritual began. Stripped to his undergarment, the king was bathed in water and laid on his back in a simulated burial ceremony. Beer, milk and honey were then poured into his mouth to “bring him back to life”. Two bulls were slaughtered outside the temple and their blood was brought inside in a large bronze vessel. Some of it was poured on the floor in front of Enki's statue. Finally, the Chief Priest of Sîn dipped his index finger into the blood and traced a vertical line with it on the king's forehead. Nabû-naʾid was now a duly initiated member of what the chief priest had called “the college of Ea's servants”.
In fact, the ritual Nabû-naʾid had just gone through retained the essential features of a very old shamanic initiation ritual dating back from the Neolithic. It had been amalgamated into the burgeoning Eridu tradition by the head shaman of the town when he was co-opted into the En council in 4172 BC. The death-and-rebirth ceremony had been in continuous use since then as the standard way to consecrate a new member of Eridu's En council. It signified the En's “death” to the world of men and his rebirth as an anonymous being solely dedicated to the service of Enki. In effect, Nabû-naʾid was now a duly ordained member of the En council of Eridu's venerable Great House.
Once the ceremony was complete, Nabû-naʾid retreated to the governor’s palace for the night. The following morning at dawn, he performed the ritual opening of the new Ziggurat building site, carrying a basket of earth on his head and laying a dedicatory brick, as was the custom. He then eagerly walked to the temple of Enki, followed by four deaf-mute guards and, at a respectful distance, by the rest of his retinue. In the temple, the Chief Priest was waiting for him. He led the king to a row of three large chambers, located to the right of the temple's sanctum. These rooms were filled to the ceiling with shelf after shelf of clay tablets.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, this is the archive of Enki's House at Eridu. The tablets were moved here when Eridu was deserted after the ABZU dried up. They have been taken care of by the college of Ea's servants ever since. Some of the tablets were copied over the years and the copies were sent to other temples of Sîn like the one at Harran, where the family of your blessed mother came to know about their content.
The chief priest then introduced Nabû-naʾid to a group of seven old men who were sitting on the floor in a corner of the farthest room. They were the other members of the college into which the king had just been inducted. Nabû-naʾid sat on the floor with the men and motioned to his guards to stand at the door. He then started listening in silence as the old men began telling him about the lore of Eridu. A group of four or five boys, some of the older scholars' pupils, were bringing them tablets whenever needed and earthen cups full of fresh water when they were thirsty. The king sat there in long daily sessions for the next two months, learning from and conversing with the keepers of the old tradition of Eridu.
By the time king Nabû-naʾid was learning about the Eridu lore from the old scholars of Ur, it was deeply wrapped in myth. However, most of the essential features of the original Eridu model could still be discerned. Eridu was widely known in Mesopotamian culture as a kind of primeval paradise. What the original Eridu lore added to this general picture were parables depicting the extraordinary growth in wealth that Eridu had experienced. Some tablets contained stories about loaves of bread left on Enki's altar at night only to become two loaves the next morning. Others told tales of miraculous fishing trips or of craftsmen learning from Enki the secret to making infinite amounts of gold. Furthermore, the Eridu archives made it clear that the town and “the world around it” had enjoyed such a prosperity because it had a single god, the Lord Enki who reigned in peace and made righteousness (níĝ-gi-na) flourish.
Even more tellingly, the Eridu lore was the only subset of Mesopotamian culture in which the memory of the intrusive nature of Inanna/Ishtar's cult was kept intact and its catastrophic consequences accurately remembered. Everywhere else, Eridu's ruin was said to have occurred on account of “the flood”, the cause of which was left mysterious. Here, in the Eridu archives, it was made painfully clear that Inanna was nothing but a scourge which had appeared one day in Uruk only to roam the whole world on her lion to set it all aflame and bring ruin to the House of Enki. This was the reason for the secrecy surrounding the college of Ea's servants. Given Inanna/Ishtar's unabating popularity and, above all, it's role as a key support of the monarchy, her portrayal as a purely evil goddess, which appeared at every turn in the Eridu tablets, could not have survived if it had been made public. Nabû-naʾid was shocked by this discovery, as any other educated upper-class Mesopotamian would have been. Like everyone else, he knew about the attenuated echoes of Inanna's evil nature which had gained currency around the time of Hammurabi, like the negative portrayal of the goddess in the reworked version of the Gilgamesh cycle or the story of Marduk slaying the female chaos dragon Tiamat. Now he knew the whole story because the priests of Sîn at Ur had gambled that he could take it without killing them all. To be fair, the priests had been helped in their decision by a letter they had received from Adad-Guppi, in which she had told them of her son's state of mind.
The priest’s gamble paid off. Far from considering their elimination and that of their Eridu archivist colleagues, Nabû-naʾid was elated and full of gratitude towards them all. Finally, he had found the answer to the questions which kept him awake at night. At last, he had a clear idea about what had made his civilization so worryingly brittle. His immediate reaction was to tell the Eridu scholars of his desire to make all their tales public and to reinstate the exclusive cult of Enki as the religion of the Empire. They reacted with horror at such a suggestion. Both they and the few priests of Sîn who were in the know, were well aware that the most likely outcome of such a move would be civil war and the assassination of the king (not to mention their own slaughter). After offering some resistance, Nabû-naʾid was eventually convinced by their wise advice. In further discussion with them, he hatched the plan of what would become his future religious policy: the gradual promotion of a syncretistic cult of Sîn which would slowly absorb all the other gods. To that end, he was supplied by the Ur scholars with a list of ancient texts which offered some justification to the identification of Sîn with other gods. Syncretism is a natural tendency of all polytheistic religions and, in the Mesopotamian theological tradition, there was plenty of tales and ritual hymns in which Sîn was equated with Nabu, Nabu with Enlil, so on and so forth.
Once this plan had been settled on, Nabû-naʾid decided that he should visit Eridu before going back to the capital. The site of the ancient town was but a short distance away from Ur and the royal party was able to reach it within a day. The only part of the old city that remained visible was Enki's temple complex and it was almost entirely ruined. This sight deeply saddened the king and filled him with foreboding. How could Babylon survive if it treated its only real protector that way ? As he had done at Ur, the king took immediate measures to have the entire complex rebuilt, including its unfinished 1500 years old ziggurat. However, that was not nearly enough. Even if he could not directly promote the cult of Enki to his subjects, Nabû-naʾid felt that he had to forge a personal bond with the old god if he was to have any hope of stemming the tide of Babylonian decline. To that end, he commissioned extensive digging on the site, before the start of the construction works, to find as many artifacts as possible from Eridu's oldest period. A number of statues, tablets, bronze vessels, and so on were thus dug up from the sand dunes of Eridu. Some of these were kept on site, to adorn the new complex, while others were to be brought back by Nabû-naʾid to Babylon where the king planned to display them in a wing of the royal palace for the benefit of his court. This has been described by modern historians as the first instance of an archaeological museum and earned Nabû-naʾid the title of “first archaeologist in history”. After a little over a month spent in Eridu, the royal party journeyed back to the capital, followed by a train of camels loaded with crated artifacts.
I was reading binder X-50/13, which contained an inventory of the objects dug-up at Eridu along with verbatim accounts of the comings and goings of Nabû-naʾid's servants as they were undertaking their new archaeological assignments. One question was bothering me. To what extent did the last king of Babylon understood what had happened to this town in the late fifth millennium B.C. ? Finn was at his desk, drinking coffee, while Ekaterina was at hers, poring over another binder. I asked:
- ME: Finn, to what extent does Nabû-naʾid understand what he is discovering at Eridu ? He cannot interpret it the way we do, right ?
- FINN: No, of course not. But what exactly do you mean ?
- ME: All the theorizing about Authority-S vs. the L variant; the role of Inanna as a biological engineering construct; all that escapes him, doesn't it ?
- FINN: Yes, naturally. From his point of view, all he has discovered boils down to a powerful insight about the true nature of the gods. For him, there is absolutely no doubt that the gods exist. What only matters is to know how to behave properly towards them.
- ME: But he has just learned that some gods might not exist at all: Sîn, Marduk, Nabu, Enlil ...
- FINN: That is probably not the way he sees it. From his point of view, what he has learned shows that these gods, rather than being independent entities, are closer to what Hindus would call avatars of Enki; guises that this god has appeared under at different points in time to intervene in human affairs. Inanna, for her part remains an independent being, albeit an entirely malevolent one. Nabû-naʾid is in the process of moving towards a dualistic theology, in which a good god, Enki, battles an evil principle, Inanna. This is not unheard of in Nabû-naʾid's time. The reforms of the old Persian religion enacted by Zoroaster, a few centuries before, were motivated by the same logic. Also, syncretistic assimilations to one god of a host of other deities were quite widespread in the first Millennium B.C. Middle Eastern religions as well. The henotheistic YAHWEH-ELOHIM cult of the Jews is an obvious example.
- ME: But the Jews are not monotheistic yet, right ?
- FINN: Nobody is fully monotheistic during the period in question. There are only varying degrees of henotheism/syncretism, with the dualist current in Persian religion exerting a strong influence in the Eastern part of the region.
- ME: I see. Something else is bothering me.
- FINN: what ?
- ME: Nabû-naʾid obviously feels that he has found the reason why his civilization is in decline. However, nothing of what he just learned, and, for that matter, nothing of what the Boffins have discovered at Eridu, Uruk or Babylon, explains why Mesopotamian civilization started declining when it did. I mean, it had ups and downs, to be sure, but it flourished for over 3000 years. Why did things start to go wrong in the mid-first millennium B.C. ?
- FINN: We do not have the answer to that question. Wittgenstein et al. reckoned that although the early Babylonian cultural synthesis was a costly societal model to run, and not a very stable one at that, it was workable because it kept some of its own self-destructive tendencies under control. That is about all we can say. Why had it stopped being workable in Nabû-naʾid’s time ? We do not know. The only thing we can do is speculate.
- ME: What do you mean ?
- FINN: For example, you may recall that Schlesinger noted that Hammurabi's synthesis involved a fundamental dose of hypocrisy. “An Ishtar-powered hand hidden within a glove of righteousness” ? Remember that ?
- ME: Yes.
- FINN: Well, it may be that this hypocrisy has corrosive effects in the long run. At first, it works fine because few people are aware of it. However, as time passes, some awareness that the whole system relies on a swindle may start to accumulate within society. As more and more people are conscious of this fundamental deceit, a threshold may eventually be reached where too many people become cynical enough to find it impossible to trust each other anymore. Since trust is the basis of language and of the whole societal construct, collapse eventually ensues. This is a plausible theory, but we are currently unable to put it to the test experimentally. Even the Boffins could not do that. They would have needed an enormous amount of additional resources and more fine-grained analytical methods than anything they had at their disposal.
- ME: I see what you mean. So, there will still be problems to solve for our descendants, I guess ?
- FINN: As there always will be.
The following day, Nabû-naʾid was on his way, accompanied by the usual retinue of several thousand attendants and soldiers. Dāniyyēl and Adad-Guppi stayed behind in Babylon, together with the 17 years old Bēl-šar-uṣur. Two weeks later, the royal party reached Ur, nearly 300 km south-east of Babylon, and headed for the governor's palace where the king would be staying while in the city. The morning after his arrival, Nabû-naʾid headed for the Egish-shirgal, the main Sîn shrine in the city and by far the oldest moon-god temple in Mesopotamia. The buildings were imposing but, next to them, the old Ziggurat was in a bad state of disrepair. It had crumbled over the years, leaving only its first layer standing.
The priests had been forewarned of the king's arrival and they were duly assembled in front of the main temple gate. After the usual ceremonies, culminating in a sacrifice to the temple’s chief cultic statue, the king was led to a side chamber where a throne had been set up for him. After the king had been seated and taken some refreshments, the chief priest moved forward:
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: The Lord Sîn is pleased by your visit to his abode in Ur and your offering has turned his heart in your favour. He is well aware of your family's relationship to him through your mother, the blessed Adad-Guppi of Harran. May I inquire as to the purpose of your visit to the Holy city of the Moon ?
- NABU-NAʾID: I wish to offer a modest contribution out of the Royal Coffers for the glory of Holy Nanna. I had been told that the Ziggurat needed repair but I did not realize how much this was true until I saw it on my way in. I cannot live one more moment knowing that the great Ziggurat of king Ur Nammu is in such a sorry state. Therefore, I have decreed that it will be rebuilt to a height of 200 cubits and with seven stages. My governor here in the city will personally supervise the work.
- THE GOVERNOR: Your majesty, I am honoured and humbled that you would entrust such a task into my hands. I will gather the best workers and order the best bricks gold can buy. I will start the work this very day.
- NABU-NAʾID: Also, I wish to know about the old tablets from before the Flood. The tablets from Eridu.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, I am not sure what tablets you are referring to.
- NABU-NAʾID: Do not test my patience, Chief priest of the Holy moon. I was told of these tablets by my mother, the blessed Adad-Guppi of Harran. Are you questioning her word ?
At this, the great priest became quite agitated. He directed his attendants to leave the room, together with the priests of junior ranks.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, do you give me your permission to humbly move near you and whisper in your ear ?
He prostrated himself to the floor and waited for the king's answer.
- NABU-NAʾID: You may approach.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN [whispering in Nabû-naʾid's ear]: Your majesty, these tablets are only for the elect to read. We will perform the appropriate rituals to induct you into the college of Ea's servants as soon as you give the order. Once this is done, you will see the tablets and our learned men will help you decipher them. They are written in very old Sumerian and quite hard to read.
- NABU-NAʾID: I order you to do as you said.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN [no longer whispering]: Very well your majesty. We will move to the house of Holy Enki that king Rim-Sin of Larsa built. It is barely 300 cubits from here. During the ceremony and afterwards you will have to be accompanied by deaf-mute attendants only.
All Middle-Eastern rulers of the time had some deaf-mutes among their staff to be used as guards during secret diplomatic meetings. Nabû-naʾid ordered his to be fetched at once. Once the royal party had moved to the nearby Enki temple, the three-hour long ritual began. Stripped to his undergarment, the king was bathed in water and laid on his back in a simulated burial ceremony. Beer, milk and honey were then poured into his mouth to “bring him back to life”. Two bulls were slaughtered outside the temple and their blood was brought inside in a large bronze vessel. Some of it was poured on the floor in front of Enki's statue. Finally, the Chief Priest of Sîn dipped his index finger into the blood and traced a vertical line with it on the king's forehead. Nabû-naʾid was now a duly initiated member of what the chief priest had called “the college of Ea's servants”.
In fact, the ritual Nabû-naʾid had just gone through retained the essential features of a very old shamanic initiation ritual dating back from the Neolithic. It had been amalgamated into the burgeoning Eridu tradition by the head shaman of the town when he was co-opted into the En council in 4172 BC. The death-and-rebirth ceremony had been in continuous use since then as the standard way to consecrate a new member of Eridu's En council. It signified the En's “death” to the world of men and his rebirth as an anonymous being solely dedicated to the service of Enki. In effect, Nabû-naʾid was now a duly ordained member of the En council of Eridu's venerable Great House.
Once the ceremony was complete, Nabû-naʾid retreated to the governor’s palace for the night. The following morning at dawn, he performed the ritual opening of the new Ziggurat building site, carrying a basket of earth on his head and laying a dedicatory brick, as was the custom. He then eagerly walked to the temple of Enki, followed by four deaf-mute guards and, at a respectful distance, by the rest of his retinue. In the temple, the Chief Priest was waiting for him. He led the king to a row of three large chambers, located to the right of the temple's sanctum. These rooms were filled to the ceiling with shelf after shelf of clay tablets.
- CHIEF PRIEST OF SIN: Your majesty, this is the archive of Enki's House at Eridu. The tablets were moved here when Eridu was deserted after the ABZU dried up. They have been taken care of by the college of Ea's servants ever since. Some of the tablets were copied over the years and the copies were sent to other temples of Sîn like the one at Harran, where the family of your blessed mother came to know about their content.
The chief priest then introduced Nabû-naʾid to a group of seven old men who were sitting on the floor in a corner of the farthest room. They were the other members of the college into which the king had just been inducted. Nabû-naʾid sat on the floor with the men and motioned to his guards to stand at the door. He then started listening in silence as the old men began telling him about the lore of Eridu. A group of four or five boys, some of the older scholars' pupils, were bringing them tablets whenever needed and earthen cups full of fresh water when they were thirsty. The king sat there in long daily sessions for the next two months, learning from and conversing with the keepers of the old tradition of Eridu.
By the time king Nabû-naʾid was learning about the Eridu lore from the old scholars of Ur, it was deeply wrapped in myth. However, most of the essential features of the original Eridu model could still be discerned. Eridu was widely known in Mesopotamian culture as a kind of primeval paradise. What the original Eridu lore added to this general picture were parables depicting the extraordinary growth in wealth that Eridu had experienced. Some tablets contained stories about loaves of bread left on Enki's altar at night only to become two loaves the next morning. Others told tales of miraculous fishing trips or of craftsmen learning from Enki the secret to making infinite amounts of gold. Furthermore, the Eridu archives made it clear that the town and “the world around it” had enjoyed such a prosperity because it had a single god, the Lord Enki who reigned in peace and made righteousness (níĝ-gi-na) flourish.
Even more tellingly, the Eridu lore was the only subset of Mesopotamian culture in which the memory of the intrusive nature of Inanna/Ishtar's cult was kept intact and its catastrophic consequences accurately remembered. Everywhere else, Eridu's ruin was said to have occurred on account of “the flood”, the cause of which was left mysterious. Here, in the Eridu archives, it was made painfully clear that Inanna was nothing but a scourge which had appeared one day in Uruk only to roam the whole world on her lion to set it all aflame and bring ruin to the House of Enki. This was the reason for the secrecy surrounding the college of Ea's servants. Given Inanna/Ishtar's unabating popularity and, above all, it's role as a key support of the monarchy, her portrayal as a purely evil goddess, which appeared at every turn in the Eridu tablets, could not have survived if it had been made public. Nabû-naʾid was shocked by this discovery, as any other educated upper-class Mesopotamian would have been. Like everyone else, he knew about the attenuated echoes of Inanna's evil nature which had gained currency around the time of Hammurabi, like the negative portrayal of the goddess in the reworked version of the Gilgamesh cycle or the story of Marduk slaying the female chaos dragon Tiamat. Now he knew the whole story because the priests of Sîn at Ur had gambled that he could take it without killing them all. To be fair, the priests had been helped in their decision by a letter they had received from Adad-Guppi, in which she had told them of her son's state of mind.
The priest’s gamble paid off. Far from considering their elimination and that of their Eridu archivist colleagues, Nabû-naʾid was elated and full of gratitude towards them all. Finally, he had found the answer to the questions which kept him awake at night. At last, he had a clear idea about what had made his civilization so worryingly brittle. His immediate reaction was to tell the Eridu scholars of his desire to make all their tales public and to reinstate the exclusive cult of Enki as the religion of the Empire. They reacted with horror at such a suggestion. Both they and the few priests of Sîn who were in the know, were well aware that the most likely outcome of such a move would be civil war and the assassination of the king (not to mention their own slaughter). After offering some resistance, Nabû-naʾid was eventually convinced by their wise advice. In further discussion with them, he hatched the plan of what would become his future religious policy: the gradual promotion of a syncretistic cult of Sîn which would slowly absorb all the other gods. To that end, he was supplied by the Ur scholars with a list of ancient texts which offered some justification to the identification of Sîn with other gods. Syncretism is a natural tendency of all polytheistic religions and, in the Mesopotamian theological tradition, there was plenty of tales and ritual hymns in which Sîn was equated with Nabu, Nabu with Enlil, so on and so forth.
Once this plan had been settled on, Nabû-naʾid decided that he should visit Eridu before going back to the capital. The site of the ancient town was but a short distance away from Ur and the royal party was able to reach it within a day. The only part of the old city that remained visible was Enki's temple complex and it was almost entirely ruined. This sight deeply saddened the king and filled him with foreboding. How could Babylon survive if it treated its only real protector that way ? As he had done at Ur, the king took immediate measures to have the entire complex rebuilt, including its unfinished 1500 years old ziggurat. However, that was not nearly enough. Even if he could not directly promote the cult of Enki to his subjects, Nabû-naʾid felt that he had to forge a personal bond with the old god if he was to have any hope of stemming the tide of Babylonian decline. To that end, he commissioned extensive digging on the site, before the start of the construction works, to find as many artifacts as possible from Eridu's oldest period. A number of statues, tablets, bronze vessels, and so on were thus dug up from the sand dunes of Eridu. Some of these were kept on site, to adorn the new complex, while others were to be brought back by Nabû-naʾid to Babylon where the king planned to display them in a wing of the royal palace for the benefit of his court. This has been described by modern historians as the first instance of an archaeological museum and earned Nabû-naʾid the title of “first archaeologist in history”. After a little over a month spent in Eridu, the royal party journeyed back to the capital, followed by a train of camels loaded with crated artifacts.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I was reading binder X-50/13, which contained an inventory of the objects dug-up at Eridu along with verbatim accounts of the comings and goings of Nabû-naʾid's servants as they were undertaking their new archaeological assignments. One question was bothering me. To what extent did the last king of Babylon understood what had happened to this town in the late fifth millennium B.C. ? Finn was at his desk, drinking coffee, while Ekaterina was at hers, poring over another binder. I asked:
- ME: Finn, to what extent does Nabû-naʾid understand what he is discovering at Eridu ? He cannot interpret it the way we do, right ?
- FINN: No, of course not. But what exactly do you mean ?
- ME: All the theorizing about Authority-S vs. the L variant; the role of Inanna as a biological engineering construct; all that escapes him, doesn't it ?
- FINN: Yes, naturally. From his point of view, all he has discovered boils down to a powerful insight about the true nature of the gods. For him, there is absolutely no doubt that the gods exist. What only matters is to know how to behave properly towards them.
- ME: But he has just learned that some gods might not exist at all: Sîn, Marduk, Nabu, Enlil ...
- FINN: That is probably not the way he sees it. From his point of view, what he has learned shows that these gods, rather than being independent entities, are closer to what Hindus would call avatars of Enki; guises that this god has appeared under at different points in time to intervene in human affairs. Inanna, for her part remains an independent being, albeit an entirely malevolent one. Nabû-naʾid is in the process of moving towards a dualistic theology, in which a good god, Enki, battles an evil principle, Inanna. This is not unheard of in Nabû-naʾid's time. The reforms of the old Persian religion enacted by Zoroaster, a few centuries before, were motivated by the same logic. Also, syncretistic assimilations to one god of a host of other deities were quite widespread in the first Millennium B.C. Middle Eastern religions as well. The henotheistic YAHWEH-ELOHIM cult of the Jews is an obvious example.
- ME: But the Jews are not monotheistic yet, right ?
- FINN: Nobody is fully monotheistic during the period in question. There are only varying degrees of henotheism/syncretism, with the dualist current in Persian religion exerting a strong influence in the Eastern part of the region.
- ME: I see. Something else is bothering me.
- FINN: what ?
- ME: Nabû-naʾid obviously feels that he has found the reason why his civilization is in decline. However, nothing of what he just learned, and, for that matter, nothing of what the Boffins have discovered at Eridu, Uruk or Babylon, explains why Mesopotamian civilization started declining when it did. I mean, it had ups and downs, to be sure, but it flourished for over 3000 years. Why did things start to go wrong in the mid-first millennium B.C. ?
- FINN: We do not have the answer to that question. Wittgenstein et al. reckoned that although the early Babylonian cultural synthesis was a costly societal model to run, and not a very stable one at that, it was workable because it kept some of its own self-destructive tendencies under control. That is about all we can say. Why had it stopped being workable in Nabû-naʾid’s time ? We do not know. The only thing we can do is speculate.
- ME: What do you mean ?
- FINN: For example, you may recall that Schlesinger noted that Hammurabi's synthesis involved a fundamental dose of hypocrisy. “An Ishtar-powered hand hidden within a glove of righteousness” ? Remember that ?
- ME: Yes.
- FINN: Well, it may be that this hypocrisy has corrosive effects in the long run. At first, it works fine because few people are aware of it. However, as time passes, some awareness that the whole system relies on a swindle may start to accumulate within society. As more and more people are conscious of this fundamental deceit, a threshold may eventually be reached where too many people become cynical enough to find it impossible to trust each other anymore. Since trust is the basis of language and of the whole societal construct, collapse eventually ensues. This is a plausible theory, but we are currently unable to put it to the test experimentally. Even the Boffins could not do that. They would have needed an enormous amount of additional resources and more fine-grained analytical methods than anything they had at their disposal.
- ME: I see what you mean. So, there will still be problems to solve for our descendants, I guess ?
- FINN: As there always will be.
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Chapter 7 – Nabû-naʾid – Part 3 of 3
In Babylon, Adad-Guppi, Dāniyyēl and the other courtiers were eagerly awaiting the return of the King. Various rumors had reached the capital. Those describing the King sitting on the floor of a back-room in a minor temple for months on end or digging up sand dunes in the middle of the desert had the court slightly worried. The day following his return, Nabû-naʾid gathered the same group of close advisers who had been present when he had taken the decision to go to Ur. He told them about the discoveries he had made and outlined his plans for the future religious policy of the Empire. Finally, he had them all swear an oath of secrecy regarding everything he had just told them about.
Unfortunately, this oath proved difficult to keep, especially for Dāniyyēl the Jew. He had been blown away by the King's revelations more so than any of the other courtiers. The similarities with the cult of YAHWEH-ELOHIM, of which Dāniyyēl was a devotee, were too obvious not to be noticed immediately. After all, the theonym “El” is the West Semitic rendering of “Ea”, the Akkadian name of Enki, and “Elohim” is nothing but El's plural of majesty. That night, after dinner, Dāniyyēl gathered his three sons on the roof of his home and told them everything he had learned from the king. Naturally, Dāniyyēl took the perfunctory step of making his sons swear an oath of secrecy too but he was well aware that this one was unlikely to be more effective than the pledge he had made himself just a few hours earlier.
Indeed, at the crack of dawn, Dāniyyēl's sons, in a state of utter excitement, ran straight to the house of their teacher, Shealtiel. This man was the son of Jeconiah the last king of Judah before the exile. He had been imprisoned after the fall of Jerusalem for over 35 years, together with his father and brothers, on the orders of Nebuchadnezzar. Released upon the accession of Nebuchadnezzar's successor Amel-Marduk, 8 years before Nabû-naʾid's own accession, he had been granted a small living stipend by the Babylonian Imperial administration. Nominally, he was the “Exilarch”, i.e. the head of the Jewish community in exile. However, this function was purely ceremonial and he therefore spent most of his time teaching to the children of those Jews like Dāniyyēl, who had found employment in the service of the Babylonian kings. He taught them Hebrew and the lore of their lost country.
Shealtiel was having breakfast in the small garden behind his house and he was surprised to see some of his pupils arrive so early. At first, he had trouble making sense of the excited exclamations and disconnected narration of Dāniyyēl's sons. Eventually, he realized that he had just received news of prophetic importance. Unlike his father, Shealtiel was a devout follower of the YAHWEH-ELOHIM priestly faction. While in prison, he had kept in touch with some of this group’s exiled leading figures, notably the prophet Ezekiel who had founded an influential theological school in a town near Nippur, less than a hundred kilometers away from Babylon. Ezekiel was now dead, but the influence of his school had continued to grow among the exiles. The now deceased master was famous for having prophesied that YAHWEH-ELOHIM would soon release the Jews from captivity and allow them to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The key tenet of his teaching was that captivity in Babylon was a punishment visited upon the Jews by YAHWEH-ELOHIM for “whoring after other gods”. Naturally, this meant that the exiles would only be allowed to return once they had become firmly committed to consecrating the new Temple and their whole country to the exclusive worship of YAHWEH-ELOHIM. At this point, the theology of Ezekiel's school was still based on the kind of henotheistic exclusivism that was also prevalent in other Middle-Eastern religious movements. As the "whoring after other gods" formula implied, there might be "other gods". They were just not good for the Jews.
After Shealtiel had sent Dāniyyēl's sons back home, with stern admonishments not to speak to anyone else about what they had just told him, he sent messengers to summon to his house as many Jewish religious men as he could find. The meeting took place that evening, in the same small garden behind Shealtiel's house where he had heard Dāniyyēl’s sons’ stories in the morning. Among those present were Haggai and Zechariah, two of the most prominent members of Ezekiel's school Babylonian branch. Zerubbabel, Shealtiel's 25 years old son, was also present. This is the transcript of the most significant part of the meeting, as it appeared in binder X-50/22:
- SHEALTIEL: I had a dream last night in which the Lord YAHWEH told me that he would send us a sign. This morning, the sign came to me, carried by three of my pupils. These boys, the sons of Dāniyyēl, head of the King's chancellery, told me what the King had revealed to their father. As you know, the King had been absent from Babylon for three months. During that time, he went to Ur, where he received a revelation from the god Sîn. The king was resting in his tent in the desert and the god appeared to him in a vision of glory. The god said to the King: “I am not Sîn. I am Ea, that the sons of Shinar called Enki. The Jews call me YAHWEH-ELOHIM. The name Sîn is merely a disguise that I took to wander among men.”
- HAGGAI: Are you saying that a king of the nations, and king of Babylon of all people, is a prophet now ?!
- ZECHARIAH: Hold your temper Haggai. The Lord can use anyone he wishes. He is showing us that we need to repent if we want Him to talk to us like he did before.
- SHEALTIEL: I told everything like I heard it from the boys. Not a word more.
Naturally, this is not exactly what Dāniyyēl's sons had told him in the morning. Retelling with embellishment is the modus operandi of religious creativity. The conversation continued:
- ZECHARIAH: We call the Lord YAHWEH, among other names, and sometimes just “Yah”, like at the end of my own name. In Egyptian, the mother tongue of Moses, “Yah” is the name of the moon god. I have heard some Midianite elders say that, in Egyptian, the name of Moses was "Ahmose", which means “Son of the Moon” ...
- HAGGAI: What do you mean ?
- ZECHARIAH: Nabû-naʾid, king of Babylon has revealed to Dāniyyēl that the very god worshiped by his mother, the moon god Sîn, is none other than our god ELOHIM. And it so happens that our god is also called “Yah”, which means “the Moon” in Egyptian. Isn’t that the mother of all signs ?
- SHEALTIEL: Blessed be the Lord. I shall bow before his altar seven times seventy-seven times.
- ZERUBABBEL: Father, blessed elders, the time has come for me to reveal a vision I had of the Lord. I was too afraid to tell anyone about it lest I'd be stoned. Now that this sign has come, I feel that the Lord is giving me permission to speak. The Lord appeared to me on his Merkabah; wheels within wheels and the wheels had eyes all around them. He told me “There are no gods but me. All other gods that men bow to are either demons or names that I have taken to appear to the nations. Only to the Jews have I revealed my real name, which is the four letters YHWH.”
- HAGGAI: Son, when did you have this vision ?
- ZERUBABBEL: Two months ago, on Rosh Chodesh.
- SHEALTIEL: This is when the King was in Ur and had his own vision ! Blessed is the Lord ELOHIM !
- ZECHARIAH: Our Lord has blessed us greatly today. He has made it manifest that far from being only our god he is in fact the God of all nations. Yet, we are His People, the only people he has made a covenant with. Let us repent and regain his favour in all haste. Let us raise our prayers to his divine ears; let him hear our supplications and extend his hand to return us to His City, Zion the Holy.
With these words, the meeting was adjourned. In the weeks that followed, both Zechariah and Haggai, together with their pupils, started developing what would eventually become the monotheistic theology of YAHWEH-ELOHIM that we find in the Old Testament today. It would be a long journey before this new account of the old god of Israel would be accepted by all Jews. Yet, it had a lot going for it from the outset. For one thing, it was enthusiastically supported by the Exilarch and his son. Above all, the world was ripe for it. As we have seen, syncretism and henotheism had been popular all over the Middle-East for quite some time. The crumbling state of Mesopotamian society, its increasingly severe fractiousness, were leading a great many people to the same question: “what went wrong ?” Monotheism was the answer, in its bold Gordian Knot-cutting simplicity. Beyond its allegorical and theological language, the only one that could be widely understood at the time, it advocated for nothing less than a return to the very beginning of civilization itself: Eridu.
Unfortunately for Nabû-naʾid, the enthusiasm of the Jews for the new theology of Enki/Ea/Yahweh-Elohim would have severe consequences for him. After the meeting in Shealtiel's house, the news of the King's trip to Ur was spreading like wildfire within the Jewish exiled community. Within a few days, it began to seep into the general Babylonian population. Soon, the whole city was aflame with rumor and unrest. Some were saying that the king wished to remove the statue of Marduk from the Esagila and send it to Harran. Others claimed that he was going to shift the capital to Eridu, while yet another small but vocal group were convinced that he had converted to the religion of the Persians. In the middle of all this, one of Nabû-naʾid's senior courtiers decided that the opportunity to stir up the proverbial hornet's nest was too good to be passed up. Having taken refuge in the Esagila and placed himself under the protection of the Marduk clergy, he made a lengthy speech to the populace assembled on the temple grounds. In his rambling but passionate address, the old courtier said that the rumors were partly true and that the King was indeed planning to raise the god Sîn above all others, including Marduk. He finally urged the crowd to protect the temple of the city's chief god at all costs and prevent any “blasphemous deeds” to be committed.
The rabble-rousing speech of the old courtier was a severe blow to the King. The man in question had been one of Nabû-naʾid's key supporters during the coup that had resulted in the previous king's ouster. His defection could well lead to another coup, this time at Nabû-naʾid's expense. A vigorous response was vital. Within 24 hours, the King issued a proclamation to be read on all market-places and major street corners. It was particularly scathing regarding the behavior of the Marduk priesthood:
This proclamation was a masterpiece of royal propaganda. It took its text almost verbatim from a letter of Samsu-Iluna, the son and successor of Hammurabi. This letter had become such a classic of Akkadian literature that it was included in the curriculum of all scribal schools. It established a clear precedent of royal authority over the priesthood and its hallowed antiquity made it hard for anyone to question. The proclamation had the desired effect of browbeating the Marduk priesthood into submission. They sent a delegation to the King the following day to seek his pardon and promptly delivered the trouble-making courtier, who was immediately beheaded.
However, Nabû-naʾid was not out of the woods yet. For one thing, his plans of religious reform were in tatters. It was far too dangerous to do anything in the present circumstances. Furthermore, there was still unrest within the King's own court. Many of the courtiers who had supported Nabû-naʾid's accession to the throne were now wondering whether they had chosen the right man for the job. The whole palace was filled with whispers of plots and counter-plots. After a week of this, in the absence of any sign that the situation was going to calm down on its own, Nabû-naʾid knew he had to do something drastic. An old hand at palace intrigue himself, he knew how to placate his peers and find a suitable compromise to rally the moderates and prevent them from being carried away to the extremes. He announced that he would go on campaign into the Western Desert for an extended period of time and would leave his now 18 years old son, Bēl-šar-uṣur, in charge of daily administration in the capital, under the supervision of an advisory council headed by his mother Adad-Guppi. Some of the key moderates in the court were strategically inducted into this council. The announcement did the trick. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and the court's affairs went back to normal.
On January 555 B.C., king Nabû-naʾid started his journey into the Western desert, accompanied by a medium-sized army of 6000 troops, mostly composed of camel-riders. His first objective was the oasis of Adummatu (known today as Dumat al-Jandal) in what is now northern Saudi Arabia. Officially, the reason for this choice was the necessity to pull the small desert kingdom firmly into the Babylonian orbit and get them to pay the annual tribute in a timely fashion. In fact, Nabû-naʾid had a much more personal motive. The Oasis of Adummatu had long been home to the chief sanctuary of Allat, the Arabian variant of Inanna/Ishtar. Now more convinced than ever that his reign would witness a cosmic battle between good and evil, the King had a burning desire to take revenge on Ishtar for the recent reverses that his Sîn-centric religious policy had suffered in Babylon. According to his dualistic worldview, whenever the side of goodness experienced a setback, it must be on account of the evil side's deity, Ishtar.
It took Nabû-naʾid's army nearly six months to secure the watering holes along the 600 km desert track from Babylon to Adummatu and to bring up enough supplies to support the final assault on the Oasis. When the time came for the battle, it was clear to everyone how lopsided it would be. The Oasis town was defended by no more than a few hundred troops and its outer defenses were not in a good state of repair. Within less than thirty minutes, the Babylonian soldiers had breached the wall in several places and were busy slaughtering the remaining defenders. Nabû-naʾid had given strict instructions. The town itself and its inhabitants were to be left unmolested but the soldiers were given a free pass to loot and sack the Allat temple complex to their heart’s content. The King had the deep satisfaction of watching the once proud sanctuary burn. Before leaving the city, he had it razed to the ground.
Nabû-naʾid's next objective after Adummatu was Teima, 250 km further to the south-west. On the face of it, the decision to capture this second oasis town made a lot of strategic sense too. Comparable in size to Adummatu, Teima sat on a busy trade route linking incense-producing Yemen to the Syro-Palestinian coast and was thus a potential source of lucrative customs revenue. However, once again, Nabû-naʾid's reasons were more personal. Teima was the traditional seat of Hilal, the Arabic moon god, who was known simply to the locals as al-ilāh, "the god". To Nabû-naʾid, this had tremendous symbolic value. After vanquishing Ishtar in Adummatu, he would now offer his protection to the desert abode of Sîn and make it flourish like no other.
Soon after the capture of Adummatu, the King received a delegation from Teima. Having heard of their northern neighbor's fate, the elders of Teima had come to offer tribute and implore mercy from the Babylonian ruler. They were astonished to discover how well disposed Nabû-naʾid was towards them. To their amazement each of them was offered a sumptuously embroidered robe, the kind of which was the mark of high rank in Mesopotamian courts. After being allowed to deliver their message of submission in front of a King whose face beamed with kindness and fatherly care, they were invited to dinner in Nabû-naʾid's very own tent. What the King told them during the feast was even more astonishing than the robes and the dinner itself. Teima was to become the capital of the Babylonian Empire for a time; the residence of its King. Above all, the sanctuary of their moon god was to receive royal patronage to an extent that would put it on par with Sîn's temples in Ur and Harran. Teima's elders could not believe their ears. On their way back from the King's camp they burst into a song of praise to their god Al-ilāh (which they pronounced Allāh) as they were riding their camels towards their home town.
For the next 12 years, Nabû-naʾid ran the oasis of Teima as a benevolently despotic theocracy. Every morning at dawn, he would walk to the temple of Allāh-Sîn and conduct in person the “waking up” ceremony in front of the god's idol. Year after year, the temple was growing bigger and the ceremony more elaborate. Every day without fail, the King would be there in the morning, officiating as high priest. Afterwards, he would hold court for three long hours, dispensing justice to all comers, without distinction of rank or wealth. After a short meal, he would then attend to the Babylonian affairs of state and dictate answers to the voluminous amount of mail which arrived daily from Bēl-šar-uṣur and the advisory council. After sunset, came the part of the day which he enjoyed the most, the conversations with the circle of theologians and scholars he had gathered from all corners the Empire. Naturally, the clergy of Ur and Harran had supplied the largest share of this group but there was also a Persian Magi, as well as several Jews and a few other Syro-Palestinians. Dāniyyēl was invited to join this circle three years after the King's arrival in Teima. The former head of the King's chancellery had been dismissed from his position and imprisoned after his role in leaking Nabû-naʾid's religious reform plans had come to light. However, the King had been quick to pardon him as he understood that the religious enthusiasm which had led to Dāniyyēl's lapse in judgment was kindred to his own.
Nabû-naʾid's theological circle usually gathered in the gardens of the royal palace under the canopy of a fig tree orchard that the King had bought from one of the town's elders. In the cool evening breeze, priests and scholars pondered over the doctrinal issues which arose as Nabû-naʾid's universal cult of Sîn/Enki was progressively fleshed out. The main sticking point was the degree to which the evil principle, Ishtar, should be considered to have an autonomous existence. There were two competing positions. Either Ishtar and Sîn/Enki were deemed to be on the same level and the destiny of the universe was seen as a battle between two forces of equal strength; one good and one evil, or Sîn/Enki was given a paramount position, as a creator god, and Ishtar became subservient to him. The first alternative, similar in spirit to Iranian dualism, had the advantage of offering a logically simple reason for the existence of both good and evil in the world. However, it ran into trouble when one considered that Enki had been sole ruler of Eridu before Inanna made her appearance at Uruk. Furthermore, it seemed to naturally lead to the idea that a third divine entity might exist above the two principles of good and evil, somehow controlling them both. From the existing Mesopotamian tradition, it was hard to determine the nature of such an entity. The second alternatives had problems of its own, in particular what would later be known as the theodicy; the question why a good god would have any reason to allow evil to exist. In other words, Nabû-naʾid and his circle of religious advisers were grappling with the same issues which would weigh on Augustine, nearly a millennium later as he considered the comparative merits of Manichaeism (a dualist religion) and of Christianity, a religion which had, like Judaism before it, opted for the concept of a single good god who somehow tolerates evil.
In effect, under Nabû-naʾid's rule, the far-flung oasis town had become a laboratory where the doctrinal building blocks of the future universal religions were being elaborated, tested, and refined. Through Dāniyyēl and the other Jews present at Teima, some of these building blocks would find their way into the new Jewish theological synthesis which was taking shape in Babylon within the schools headed by Shealtiel, Zechariah and Haggai.
In 543 B.C., the situations on the eastern borders of the Babylonian Empire having taken a turn for the worse, the King was forced to return in haste to the capital. While Nabû-naʾid was busy shaping the religious future of the world in Teima, Cyrus the Persian had been at work fashioning its short term political one. For the next four years, Nabû-naʾid was racing up and down Mesopotamia, trying to shore up the defenses of the Empire. To no avail. in 539 B.C., having engineered the defection of the governor of a border province to his side, Cyrus started his long-planned invasion of Babylonia. Within a few months, Nabû-naʾid was holed up in his capital, his armies defeated or having switched allegiance. Unwilling to see the old city put to the torch and looted, the last king of Babylon surrendered to Cyrus.
The Persian monarch had a reputation as a merciful victor. This reputation had proved a useful tool for Cyrus in the past to take cities without a fight. When Nabû-naʾid surrendered, he was duly spared and sent into a luxurious exile at the Persian monarch’s court in Ecbatana. Cyrus was far from the “long bearded horseman” stereotype that Nabû-naʾid had used to characterize him 15 years prior. He was the heir of a long line of Iranian rulers, both Medes and Persians, who had studied Mesopotamian culture for generations and turned their highland chiefdoms into a state capable of rivaling, and now even defeating, the old polities of the fertile lowlands.
Cyrus's mastery of Mesopotamian codes of royal conduct was strikingly demonstrated a few days after his entry into Babylon. Long before the war, he had been in secret contact with the Marduk priesthood, to whom he had sent hefty bribes at regular intervals. Now, the pontiffs of the Esagila were only too happy to crown the Persian monarch as the new “King of Sumer and Akkad” and bless him in the name of Marduk. Cyrus thus paraded in front of bewildered but relieved crowds of Babylonian citizens which lined the short processional way linking the temple to the royal palace across the river.
Cyrus scored another propaganda coup when, three weeks later, he “liberated” the numerous cultic statues which had been stored in the Esagila on the orders of Nabû-naʾid and sent them back to their respective home shrines across Mesopotamia. Although gathering the statues of the main gods in the capital during wartime, in order to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, had been standard practice for millennia, Cyrus presented their concentration in Babylon as a devious maneuver by Nabû-naʾid, motivated by the desire of the deposed king to implement his Sîn-centric religious policy. In a proclamation read all over Mesopotamia, and later inscribed on steles and clay cylinders, the new Persian “King of Sumer and Akkad” thus portrayed himself as the savior and protector of Mesopotamia's old gods.
Cyrus desired to be popular not only in Mesopotamia but also in the western Syro-Palestinian borderlands which he planned to use as a spring-board for a future invasion of Egypt. To that end, he freed all the exiled nations from that region which had been deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and his successors over the years. Among the Jews, this was naturally taken as the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecies and the rejoicing was tremendous. Shealtiel had died a few years earlier and the exilarch's mantle had passed on to his son Zerubbabel, now in his forties. The Persian policy was to rely as much as possible on local elites to govern the western borderlands and Shealtiel's son duly received his commission as an Achaemenid governor of Judah within a few months of Cyrus's coronation.
As soon as he was installed in Jerusalem, Zerubbabel commissioned a group of scholars headed by Zechariah and Haggai (later to be known as the “Great Assembly”) to “gather” the scriptures of the Jewish people, i.e. to re-write them in line with the new monotheistic theology of YAHWEH-ELOHIM. The output of this assembly is what we now know as the Old Testament. Given the central role already occupied by YAHWEH-ELOHIM in his previous henotheistic incarnation, the great assembly naturally chose to adopt a fully monotheistic orientation rather than a dualistic one. As a result, Ishtar was not singled out as the sole representative of evil but appeared only in the re-worked texts (under her West Semitic name of Astarte) as one of the now non-existent “other gods” that the Jews were “whoring after” before they were chastised by Yahweh. However, she was not forgotten and would reappear during the “inter-testamental period” in the works of several dissident Jewish groups. Eventually, she would find her way into the Book of Revelation as the “whore of Babylon”.
The Teima experiment had failed but its Jewish offspring would thrive. To be sure, there would be several decades of intense resistance on the part of the rank and file Jewish population, which had stayed behind during the exile. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish peasantry was not initially disposed to relinquish their home shrines and sacred trees. However, the Jewish elite returnees were not disposed to compromise. Zerubbabel justified his policy of religious cleansing by using the classic device of ante-dating its inception to some of the pre-exilic “righteous kings”. Eventually, with the backing of the Persian administration, Zerubbabel and his successors were eventually able to impose their religious views on the general population. In 515 B.C., the temple was rebuilt. Under the new religious dispensation, it became the only place in Judah where any kind of sacrifice was allowed.
Given that Judah was now a province of the Achaemenid Empire, to which it owed so much, it was impossible for the Jewish religious elite to acknowledge their debt to Nabû-naʾid openly. However, a significant fraction of the Great Assembly scholars were adamant that some clues must be inserted into the new scriptures to honor the memory of the deposed Babylonian king. This is how it was done. Before the exile, the mythical ancestor of the Israelites was reckoned not to be Abraham but Jacob a.k.a. Israel, following the immemorial tribal custom of having an eponymous ancestor. In line with Semitic naming conventions, this character had a patronymic composed of his father and grandfather's names. His full name was therefore: Jacob “Israel”, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. In pre-exilic Jewish lore, Abraham and Isaac were mere names, without any mythical roles. The scholars of the Great Assembly used these available personal handles to create a monotheistic pedigree for the Jews. In particular, the story of Abraham was created as a background to the pact concluded by Yahweh-Elohim with the Israelites according to the new theology. Naturally, Abraham was described as the first monotheist devotee of Yahweh in the period after the flood. However, this story was not only used for this etiological purpose. Some details were also added to the narrative that were not strictly necessary to it. Abraham was said to be a native of Ur and to have stayed in Harran with his father Terah until the latter's death. Why Harran and Ur ? These places are very far from Jerusalem and have obviously no place in a locally based tribal legend. However, they were, as we have seen, the two pre-eminent cultic centers of the god Sîn in the 6th century B.C. and were intimately connected to Nabû-naʾid's personal history. This is how the scholars of the Great Assembly embedded a cryptic clue within their work to acknowledge their debt to the last king of Babylon. Some members of the assembly even wanted to include Teima in the list of places visited by Abraham. However, this was judged to be too obvious (hence dangerous) and Abraham was eventually said to have gone to “Egypt” instead.
Dāniyyēl, for his part, was memorialized in the book that bears his name. A lot of material subsequently made its way into this text that has little to do with its namesake’s actual life. However, one version, preserved by a dissident Jewish sect, contains a direct reference to Nabû-naʾid and Teima, the so called “Prayer of Nabonidus” discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finally, the question of what to do with the name “Eridu” proved to be a difficult one. The scholars of the Great Assembly wished to avoid any direct reference to the existing “pagan” gods, but they could not simply ignore the location of God’s initial presence on Earth. After years of debates, the following solution was agreed upon. God’s earthly abode was named “Eden”, after the generic Akkadian word edinnu meaning “fertile plain”. “Eridu”, for its part, was cryptically encoded into the name of one of Adam’s early descendants, Jared. In the fifth chapter of the book of Genesis, Jared was said to be the father of “Enoch”, a Hebrew rendering of “Unug”, the Sumerian name of Uruk.
In Babylon, Adad-Guppi, Dāniyyēl and the other courtiers were eagerly awaiting the return of the King. Various rumors had reached the capital. Those describing the King sitting on the floor of a back-room in a minor temple for months on end or digging up sand dunes in the middle of the desert had the court slightly worried. The day following his return, Nabû-naʾid gathered the same group of close advisers who had been present when he had taken the decision to go to Ur. He told them about the discoveries he had made and outlined his plans for the future religious policy of the Empire. Finally, he had them all swear an oath of secrecy regarding everything he had just told them about.
Unfortunately, this oath proved difficult to keep, especially for Dāniyyēl the Jew. He had been blown away by the King's revelations more so than any of the other courtiers. The similarities with the cult of YAHWEH-ELOHIM, of which Dāniyyēl was a devotee, were too obvious not to be noticed immediately. After all, the theonym “El” is the West Semitic rendering of “Ea”, the Akkadian name of Enki, and “Elohim” is nothing but El's plural of majesty. That night, after dinner, Dāniyyēl gathered his three sons on the roof of his home and told them everything he had learned from the king. Naturally, Dāniyyēl took the perfunctory step of making his sons swear an oath of secrecy too but he was well aware that this one was unlikely to be more effective than the pledge he had made himself just a few hours earlier.
Indeed, at the crack of dawn, Dāniyyēl's sons, in a state of utter excitement, ran straight to the house of their teacher, Shealtiel. This man was the son of Jeconiah the last king of Judah before the exile. He had been imprisoned after the fall of Jerusalem for over 35 years, together with his father and brothers, on the orders of Nebuchadnezzar. Released upon the accession of Nebuchadnezzar's successor Amel-Marduk, 8 years before Nabû-naʾid's own accession, he had been granted a small living stipend by the Babylonian Imperial administration. Nominally, he was the “Exilarch”, i.e. the head of the Jewish community in exile. However, this function was purely ceremonial and he therefore spent most of his time teaching to the children of those Jews like Dāniyyēl, who had found employment in the service of the Babylonian kings. He taught them Hebrew and the lore of their lost country.
Shealtiel was having breakfast in the small garden behind his house and he was surprised to see some of his pupils arrive so early. At first, he had trouble making sense of the excited exclamations and disconnected narration of Dāniyyēl's sons. Eventually, he realized that he had just received news of prophetic importance. Unlike his father, Shealtiel was a devout follower of the YAHWEH-ELOHIM priestly faction. While in prison, he had kept in touch with some of this group’s exiled leading figures, notably the prophet Ezekiel who had founded an influential theological school in a town near Nippur, less than a hundred kilometers away from Babylon. Ezekiel was now dead, but the influence of his school had continued to grow among the exiles. The now deceased master was famous for having prophesied that YAHWEH-ELOHIM would soon release the Jews from captivity and allow them to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The key tenet of his teaching was that captivity in Babylon was a punishment visited upon the Jews by YAHWEH-ELOHIM for “whoring after other gods”. Naturally, this meant that the exiles would only be allowed to return once they had become firmly committed to consecrating the new Temple and their whole country to the exclusive worship of YAHWEH-ELOHIM. At this point, the theology of Ezekiel's school was still based on the kind of henotheistic exclusivism that was also prevalent in other Middle-Eastern religious movements. As the "whoring after other gods" formula implied, there might be "other gods". They were just not good for the Jews.
After Shealtiel had sent Dāniyyēl's sons back home, with stern admonishments not to speak to anyone else about what they had just told him, he sent messengers to summon to his house as many Jewish religious men as he could find. The meeting took place that evening, in the same small garden behind Shealtiel's house where he had heard Dāniyyēl’s sons’ stories in the morning. Among those present were Haggai and Zechariah, two of the most prominent members of Ezekiel's school Babylonian branch. Zerubbabel, Shealtiel's 25 years old son, was also present. This is the transcript of the most significant part of the meeting, as it appeared in binder X-50/22:
- SHEALTIEL: I had a dream last night in which the Lord YAHWEH told me that he would send us a sign. This morning, the sign came to me, carried by three of my pupils. These boys, the sons of Dāniyyēl, head of the King's chancellery, told me what the King had revealed to their father. As you know, the King had been absent from Babylon for three months. During that time, he went to Ur, where he received a revelation from the god Sîn. The king was resting in his tent in the desert and the god appeared to him in a vision of glory. The god said to the King: “I am not Sîn. I am Ea, that the sons of Shinar called Enki. The Jews call me YAHWEH-ELOHIM. The name Sîn is merely a disguise that I took to wander among men.”
- HAGGAI: Are you saying that a king of the nations, and king of Babylon of all people, is a prophet now ?!
- ZECHARIAH: Hold your temper Haggai. The Lord can use anyone he wishes. He is showing us that we need to repent if we want Him to talk to us like he did before.
- SHEALTIEL: I told everything like I heard it from the boys. Not a word more.
Naturally, this is not exactly what Dāniyyēl's sons had told him in the morning. Retelling with embellishment is the modus operandi of religious creativity. The conversation continued:
- ZECHARIAH: We call the Lord YAHWEH, among other names, and sometimes just “Yah”, like at the end of my own name. In Egyptian, the mother tongue of Moses, “Yah” is the name of the moon god. I have heard some Midianite elders say that, in Egyptian, the name of Moses was "Ahmose", which means “Son of the Moon” ...
- HAGGAI: What do you mean ?
- ZECHARIAH: Nabû-naʾid, king of Babylon has revealed to Dāniyyēl that the very god worshiped by his mother, the moon god Sîn, is none other than our god ELOHIM. And it so happens that our god is also called “Yah”, which means “the Moon” in Egyptian. Isn’t that the mother of all signs ?
- SHEALTIEL: Blessed be the Lord. I shall bow before his altar seven times seventy-seven times.
- ZERUBABBEL: Father, blessed elders, the time has come for me to reveal a vision I had of the Lord. I was too afraid to tell anyone about it lest I'd be stoned. Now that this sign has come, I feel that the Lord is giving me permission to speak. The Lord appeared to me on his Merkabah; wheels within wheels and the wheels had eyes all around them. He told me “There are no gods but me. All other gods that men bow to are either demons or names that I have taken to appear to the nations. Only to the Jews have I revealed my real name, which is the four letters YHWH.”
- HAGGAI: Son, when did you have this vision ?
- ZERUBABBEL: Two months ago, on Rosh Chodesh.
- SHEALTIEL: This is when the King was in Ur and had his own vision ! Blessed is the Lord ELOHIM !
- ZECHARIAH: Our Lord has blessed us greatly today. He has made it manifest that far from being only our god he is in fact the God of all nations. Yet, we are His People, the only people he has made a covenant with. Let us repent and regain his favour in all haste. Let us raise our prayers to his divine ears; let him hear our supplications and extend his hand to return us to His City, Zion the Holy.
With these words, the meeting was adjourned. In the weeks that followed, both Zechariah and Haggai, together with their pupils, started developing what would eventually become the monotheistic theology of YAHWEH-ELOHIM that we find in the Old Testament today. It would be a long journey before this new account of the old god of Israel would be accepted by all Jews. Yet, it had a lot going for it from the outset. For one thing, it was enthusiastically supported by the Exilarch and his son. Above all, the world was ripe for it. As we have seen, syncretism and henotheism had been popular all over the Middle-East for quite some time. The crumbling state of Mesopotamian society, its increasingly severe fractiousness, were leading a great many people to the same question: “what went wrong ?” Monotheism was the answer, in its bold Gordian Knot-cutting simplicity. Beyond its allegorical and theological language, the only one that could be widely understood at the time, it advocated for nothing less than a return to the very beginning of civilization itself: Eridu.
Unfortunately for Nabû-naʾid, the enthusiasm of the Jews for the new theology of Enki/Ea/Yahweh-Elohim would have severe consequences for him. After the meeting in Shealtiel's house, the news of the King's trip to Ur was spreading like wildfire within the Jewish exiled community. Within a few days, it began to seep into the general Babylonian population. Soon, the whole city was aflame with rumor and unrest. Some were saying that the king wished to remove the statue of Marduk from the Esagila and send it to Harran. Others claimed that he was going to shift the capital to Eridu, while yet another small but vocal group were convinced that he had converted to the religion of the Persians. In the middle of all this, one of Nabû-naʾid's senior courtiers decided that the opportunity to stir up the proverbial hornet's nest was too good to be passed up. Having taken refuge in the Esagila and placed himself under the protection of the Marduk clergy, he made a lengthy speech to the populace assembled on the temple grounds. In his rambling but passionate address, the old courtier said that the rumors were partly true and that the King was indeed planning to raise the god Sîn above all others, including Marduk. He finally urged the crowd to protect the temple of the city's chief god at all costs and prevent any “blasphemous deeds” to be committed.
The rabble-rousing speech of the old courtier was a severe blow to the King. The man in question had been one of Nabû-naʾid's key supporters during the coup that had resulted in the previous king's ouster. His defection could well lead to another coup, this time at Nabû-naʾid's expense. A vigorous response was vital. Within 24 hours, the King issued a proclamation to be read on all market-places and major street corners. It was particularly scathing regarding the behavior of the Marduk priesthood:
I have heard reports that the temple officials, the pašišu-priests, ne-šakku priests and the dingirgubbû-priests of Marduk in Babylon have taken to falsehood, committed an abomination, been stained with blood, spoken untruths. Inwardly, they profane and desecrate their god, they prattle and cavort about. Things that their god did not command they established for their god.
This proclamation was a masterpiece of royal propaganda. It took its text almost verbatim from a letter of Samsu-Iluna, the son and successor of Hammurabi. This letter had become such a classic of Akkadian literature that it was included in the curriculum of all scribal schools. It established a clear precedent of royal authority over the priesthood and its hallowed antiquity made it hard for anyone to question. The proclamation had the desired effect of browbeating the Marduk priesthood into submission. They sent a delegation to the King the following day to seek his pardon and promptly delivered the trouble-making courtier, who was immediately beheaded.
However, Nabû-naʾid was not out of the woods yet. For one thing, his plans of religious reform were in tatters. It was far too dangerous to do anything in the present circumstances. Furthermore, there was still unrest within the King's own court. Many of the courtiers who had supported Nabû-naʾid's accession to the throne were now wondering whether they had chosen the right man for the job. The whole palace was filled with whispers of plots and counter-plots. After a week of this, in the absence of any sign that the situation was going to calm down on its own, Nabû-naʾid knew he had to do something drastic. An old hand at palace intrigue himself, he knew how to placate his peers and find a suitable compromise to rally the moderates and prevent them from being carried away to the extremes. He announced that he would go on campaign into the Western Desert for an extended period of time and would leave his now 18 years old son, Bēl-šar-uṣur, in charge of daily administration in the capital, under the supervision of an advisory council headed by his mother Adad-Guppi. Some of the key moderates in the court were strategically inducted into this council. The announcement did the trick. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and the court's affairs went back to normal.
On January 555 B.C., king Nabû-naʾid started his journey into the Western desert, accompanied by a medium-sized army of 6000 troops, mostly composed of camel-riders. His first objective was the oasis of Adummatu (known today as Dumat al-Jandal) in what is now northern Saudi Arabia. Officially, the reason for this choice was the necessity to pull the small desert kingdom firmly into the Babylonian orbit and get them to pay the annual tribute in a timely fashion. In fact, Nabû-naʾid had a much more personal motive. The Oasis of Adummatu had long been home to the chief sanctuary of Allat, the Arabian variant of Inanna/Ishtar. Now more convinced than ever that his reign would witness a cosmic battle between good and evil, the King had a burning desire to take revenge on Ishtar for the recent reverses that his Sîn-centric religious policy had suffered in Babylon. According to his dualistic worldview, whenever the side of goodness experienced a setback, it must be on account of the evil side's deity, Ishtar.
It took Nabû-naʾid's army nearly six months to secure the watering holes along the 600 km desert track from Babylon to Adummatu and to bring up enough supplies to support the final assault on the Oasis. When the time came for the battle, it was clear to everyone how lopsided it would be. The Oasis town was defended by no more than a few hundred troops and its outer defenses were not in a good state of repair. Within less than thirty minutes, the Babylonian soldiers had breached the wall in several places and were busy slaughtering the remaining defenders. Nabû-naʾid had given strict instructions. The town itself and its inhabitants were to be left unmolested but the soldiers were given a free pass to loot and sack the Allat temple complex to their heart’s content. The King had the deep satisfaction of watching the once proud sanctuary burn. Before leaving the city, he had it razed to the ground.
Nabû-naʾid's next objective after Adummatu was Teima, 250 km further to the south-west. On the face of it, the decision to capture this second oasis town made a lot of strategic sense too. Comparable in size to Adummatu, Teima sat on a busy trade route linking incense-producing Yemen to the Syro-Palestinian coast and was thus a potential source of lucrative customs revenue. However, once again, Nabû-naʾid's reasons were more personal. Teima was the traditional seat of Hilal, the Arabic moon god, who was known simply to the locals as al-ilāh, "the god". To Nabû-naʾid, this had tremendous symbolic value. After vanquishing Ishtar in Adummatu, he would now offer his protection to the desert abode of Sîn and make it flourish like no other.
Soon after the capture of Adummatu, the King received a delegation from Teima. Having heard of their northern neighbor's fate, the elders of Teima had come to offer tribute and implore mercy from the Babylonian ruler. They were astonished to discover how well disposed Nabû-naʾid was towards them. To their amazement each of them was offered a sumptuously embroidered robe, the kind of which was the mark of high rank in Mesopotamian courts. After being allowed to deliver their message of submission in front of a King whose face beamed with kindness and fatherly care, they were invited to dinner in Nabû-naʾid's very own tent. What the King told them during the feast was even more astonishing than the robes and the dinner itself. Teima was to become the capital of the Babylonian Empire for a time; the residence of its King. Above all, the sanctuary of their moon god was to receive royal patronage to an extent that would put it on par with Sîn's temples in Ur and Harran. Teima's elders could not believe their ears. On their way back from the King's camp they burst into a song of praise to their god Al-ilāh (which they pronounced Allāh) as they were riding their camels towards their home town.
For the next 12 years, Nabû-naʾid ran the oasis of Teima as a benevolently despotic theocracy. Every morning at dawn, he would walk to the temple of Allāh-Sîn and conduct in person the “waking up” ceremony in front of the god's idol. Year after year, the temple was growing bigger and the ceremony more elaborate. Every day without fail, the King would be there in the morning, officiating as high priest. Afterwards, he would hold court for three long hours, dispensing justice to all comers, without distinction of rank or wealth. After a short meal, he would then attend to the Babylonian affairs of state and dictate answers to the voluminous amount of mail which arrived daily from Bēl-šar-uṣur and the advisory council. After sunset, came the part of the day which he enjoyed the most, the conversations with the circle of theologians and scholars he had gathered from all corners the Empire. Naturally, the clergy of Ur and Harran had supplied the largest share of this group but there was also a Persian Magi, as well as several Jews and a few other Syro-Palestinians. Dāniyyēl was invited to join this circle three years after the King's arrival in Teima. The former head of the King's chancellery had been dismissed from his position and imprisoned after his role in leaking Nabû-naʾid's religious reform plans had come to light. However, the King had been quick to pardon him as he understood that the religious enthusiasm which had led to Dāniyyēl's lapse in judgment was kindred to his own.
Nabû-naʾid's theological circle usually gathered in the gardens of the royal palace under the canopy of a fig tree orchard that the King had bought from one of the town's elders. In the cool evening breeze, priests and scholars pondered over the doctrinal issues which arose as Nabû-naʾid's universal cult of Sîn/Enki was progressively fleshed out. The main sticking point was the degree to which the evil principle, Ishtar, should be considered to have an autonomous existence. There were two competing positions. Either Ishtar and Sîn/Enki were deemed to be on the same level and the destiny of the universe was seen as a battle between two forces of equal strength; one good and one evil, or Sîn/Enki was given a paramount position, as a creator god, and Ishtar became subservient to him. The first alternative, similar in spirit to Iranian dualism, had the advantage of offering a logically simple reason for the existence of both good and evil in the world. However, it ran into trouble when one considered that Enki had been sole ruler of Eridu before Inanna made her appearance at Uruk. Furthermore, it seemed to naturally lead to the idea that a third divine entity might exist above the two principles of good and evil, somehow controlling them both. From the existing Mesopotamian tradition, it was hard to determine the nature of such an entity. The second alternatives had problems of its own, in particular what would later be known as the theodicy; the question why a good god would have any reason to allow evil to exist. In other words, Nabû-naʾid and his circle of religious advisers were grappling with the same issues which would weigh on Augustine, nearly a millennium later as he considered the comparative merits of Manichaeism (a dualist religion) and of Christianity, a religion which had, like Judaism before it, opted for the concept of a single good god who somehow tolerates evil.
In effect, under Nabû-naʾid's rule, the far-flung oasis town had become a laboratory where the doctrinal building blocks of the future universal religions were being elaborated, tested, and refined. Through Dāniyyēl and the other Jews present at Teima, some of these building blocks would find their way into the new Jewish theological synthesis which was taking shape in Babylon within the schools headed by Shealtiel, Zechariah and Haggai.
In 543 B.C., the situations on the eastern borders of the Babylonian Empire having taken a turn for the worse, the King was forced to return in haste to the capital. While Nabû-naʾid was busy shaping the religious future of the world in Teima, Cyrus the Persian had been at work fashioning its short term political one. For the next four years, Nabû-naʾid was racing up and down Mesopotamia, trying to shore up the defenses of the Empire. To no avail. in 539 B.C., having engineered the defection of the governor of a border province to his side, Cyrus started his long-planned invasion of Babylonia. Within a few months, Nabû-naʾid was holed up in his capital, his armies defeated or having switched allegiance. Unwilling to see the old city put to the torch and looted, the last king of Babylon surrendered to Cyrus.
The Persian monarch had a reputation as a merciful victor. This reputation had proved a useful tool for Cyrus in the past to take cities without a fight. When Nabû-naʾid surrendered, he was duly spared and sent into a luxurious exile at the Persian monarch’s court in Ecbatana. Cyrus was far from the “long bearded horseman” stereotype that Nabû-naʾid had used to characterize him 15 years prior. He was the heir of a long line of Iranian rulers, both Medes and Persians, who had studied Mesopotamian culture for generations and turned their highland chiefdoms into a state capable of rivaling, and now even defeating, the old polities of the fertile lowlands.
Cyrus's mastery of Mesopotamian codes of royal conduct was strikingly demonstrated a few days after his entry into Babylon. Long before the war, he had been in secret contact with the Marduk priesthood, to whom he had sent hefty bribes at regular intervals. Now, the pontiffs of the Esagila were only too happy to crown the Persian monarch as the new “King of Sumer and Akkad” and bless him in the name of Marduk. Cyrus thus paraded in front of bewildered but relieved crowds of Babylonian citizens which lined the short processional way linking the temple to the royal palace across the river.
Cyrus scored another propaganda coup when, three weeks later, he “liberated” the numerous cultic statues which had been stored in the Esagila on the orders of Nabû-naʾid and sent them back to their respective home shrines across Mesopotamia. Although gathering the statues of the main gods in the capital during wartime, in order to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, had been standard practice for millennia, Cyrus presented their concentration in Babylon as a devious maneuver by Nabû-naʾid, motivated by the desire of the deposed king to implement his Sîn-centric religious policy. In a proclamation read all over Mesopotamia, and later inscribed on steles and clay cylinders, the new Persian “King of Sumer and Akkad” thus portrayed himself as the savior and protector of Mesopotamia's old gods.
Cyrus desired to be popular not only in Mesopotamia but also in the western Syro-Palestinian borderlands which he planned to use as a spring-board for a future invasion of Egypt. To that end, he freed all the exiled nations from that region which had been deported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and his successors over the years. Among the Jews, this was naturally taken as the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecies and the rejoicing was tremendous. Shealtiel had died a few years earlier and the exilarch's mantle had passed on to his son Zerubbabel, now in his forties. The Persian policy was to rely as much as possible on local elites to govern the western borderlands and Shealtiel's son duly received his commission as an Achaemenid governor of Judah within a few months of Cyrus's coronation.
As soon as he was installed in Jerusalem, Zerubbabel commissioned a group of scholars headed by Zechariah and Haggai (later to be known as the “Great Assembly”) to “gather” the scriptures of the Jewish people, i.e. to re-write them in line with the new monotheistic theology of YAHWEH-ELOHIM. The output of this assembly is what we now know as the Old Testament. Given the central role already occupied by YAHWEH-ELOHIM in his previous henotheistic incarnation, the great assembly naturally chose to adopt a fully monotheistic orientation rather than a dualistic one. As a result, Ishtar was not singled out as the sole representative of evil but appeared only in the re-worked texts (under her West Semitic name of Astarte) as one of the now non-existent “other gods” that the Jews were “whoring after” before they were chastised by Yahweh. However, she was not forgotten and would reappear during the “inter-testamental period” in the works of several dissident Jewish groups. Eventually, she would find her way into the Book of Revelation as the “whore of Babylon”.
The Teima experiment had failed but its Jewish offspring would thrive. To be sure, there would be several decades of intense resistance on the part of the rank and file Jewish population, which had stayed behind during the exile. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish peasantry was not initially disposed to relinquish their home shrines and sacred trees. However, the Jewish elite returnees were not disposed to compromise. Zerubbabel justified his policy of religious cleansing by using the classic device of ante-dating its inception to some of the pre-exilic “righteous kings”. Eventually, with the backing of the Persian administration, Zerubbabel and his successors were eventually able to impose their religious views on the general population. In 515 B.C., the temple was rebuilt. Under the new religious dispensation, it became the only place in Judah where any kind of sacrifice was allowed.
Given that Judah was now a province of the Achaemenid Empire, to which it owed so much, it was impossible for the Jewish religious elite to acknowledge their debt to Nabû-naʾid openly. However, a significant fraction of the Great Assembly scholars were adamant that some clues must be inserted into the new scriptures to honor the memory of the deposed Babylonian king. This is how it was done. Before the exile, the mythical ancestor of the Israelites was reckoned not to be Abraham but Jacob a.k.a. Israel, following the immemorial tribal custom of having an eponymous ancestor. In line with Semitic naming conventions, this character had a patronymic composed of his father and grandfather's names. His full name was therefore: Jacob “Israel”, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. In pre-exilic Jewish lore, Abraham and Isaac were mere names, without any mythical roles. The scholars of the Great Assembly used these available personal handles to create a monotheistic pedigree for the Jews. In particular, the story of Abraham was created as a background to the pact concluded by Yahweh-Elohim with the Israelites according to the new theology. Naturally, Abraham was described as the first monotheist devotee of Yahweh in the period after the flood. However, this story was not only used for this etiological purpose. Some details were also added to the narrative that were not strictly necessary to it. Abraham was said to be a native of Ur and to have stayed in Harran with his father Terah until the latter's death. Why Harran and Ur ? These places are very far from Jerusalem and have obviously no place in a locally based tribal legend. However, they were, as we have seen, the two pre-eminent cultic centers of the god Sîn in the 6th century B.C. and were intimately connected to Nabû-naʾid's personal history. This is how the scholars of the Great Assembly embedded a cryptic clue within their work to acknowledge their debt to the last king of Babylon. Some members of the assembly even wanted to include Teima in the list of places visited by Abraham. However, this was judged to be too obvious (hence dangerous) and Abraham was eventually said to have gone to “Egypt” instead.
Dāniyyēl, for his part, was memorialized in the book that bears his name. A lot of material subsequently made its way into this text that has little to do with its namesake’s actual life. However, one version, preserved by a dissident Jewish sect, contains a direct reference to Nabû-naʾid and Teima, the so called “Prayer of Nabonidus” discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finally, the question of what to do with the name “Eridu” proved to be a difficult one. The scholars of the Great Assembly wished to avoid any direct reference to the existing “pagan” gods, but they could not simply ignore the location of God’s initial presence on Earth. After years of debates, the following solution was agreed upon. God’s earthly abode was named “Eden”, after the generic Akkadian word edinnu meaning “fertile plain”. “Eridu”, for its part, was cryptically encoded into the name of one of Adam’s early descendants, Jared. In the fifth chapter of the book of Genesis, Jared was said to be the father of “Enoch”, a Hebrew rendering of “Unug”, the Sumerian name of Uruk.
Chapter 8 – From Jerusalem to Rome – Part 1 of 3
In early March 1950, Brady and von Soden presented their early results about Nabû-naʾid to the rest of the team. After they had finished outlining the main episodes of the King's life and their ultimate impact on Jewish monotheism, the following exchange occurred:
- SATYENDRA NATH BOSE: I am not very familiar with Jewish history in the inter-testamental period. What happened after monotheism was established in Judah by Zerubbabel ?
- JOSEPH BRADY: Judah seems to have become very prosperous. In 539 B.C., when the exiles were allowed to return, the population of the whole Achaemenid province of Yehud Medinata was barely 50,000. Two centuries later, when Alexander the Great toppled the Persian Empire, The Jews numbered over 400,000, with nearly 250,000 of them living in Judea proper. The rest were spread over several large-scale expatriate communities located all over the Levant: Samaria, Galilee, Southern Syria, Phoenicia, Cilicia, etc. There was even a large community of Jewish mercenaries in Elephantine, at the southern border of Egypt.
- ARTHUR SCHLESINGER: How do you interpret this development ?
- WOLFRAM VON SODEN: I think it is quite simple. During the reign of Zerubbabel, Jerusalem had been transformed into a self-conscious replica of Eridu; a single god, a single temple and a committee of anonymous elders, the Sanhedrin, holding the reins of power locally. To be sure, Judah was part of the Achaemenid Empire, but the Emperor was very far away and his local representative, the governor, was only concerned with issues of taxation. So, in effect, there was no king. Judea in this period followed the Eridu model very faithfully. As a result, it thrived.
- BOSE: Are we sure that the mechanisms of this Judean period of prosperity are the same as those which were at work in Eridu ?
- BRADY: As much as we can be, yes. What is apparent is that Jewish society in this era developed what is, in effect, an early version of the rule of law. Most important economic transactions were governed by written contracts and conflicts were arbitrated by an increasingly sophisticated legal system. In other words, the telltale signs of Authority-L are present everywhere and Authority-S is nearly absent because there is no king. The potential of language, i.e. "the Logos", is unleashed and society thrives. Also, because of the relentless suppression of idolatry, the amount of imaginary credit production is kept to a minimum and the credit field is thus maintained in a fairly clean state; much cleaner than at any moment in the previous 3000 years of world history.
- ADAM ULAM: Are you saying that Jewish society is then completely free from credit masturbation ?
- VON SODEN: No, that would be impossible, I think. What happened is that in the Jerusalem of this era, the temple has the monopoly of credit masturbation. This is why the outlawing of sacrifice anywhere but there was so important. Because of this, all major imaginary credit-producing activities have to take place within the temple's precinct. As a result, all the imaginary credit stays concentrated there and all other locations can be kept (mostly) free from it. The Jews are very conscious that the temple contains something dangerous, which they call "the divine presence". The outer walls of the temple, like the confinement structure of an atomic pile, contain this dangerous energy, i.e. imaginary credit, and prevent it from damaging the world outside.
- BOSE: This is an illuminating insight into the idea of the sacred. The sacred precinct as a way to prevent imaginary credit from spilling out into the world.
- VON SODEN: Indeed. There are a great many words related to this idea in ancient languages which carry the notion of "cutting" in their etymological ancestry ("sacer" in Latin, "τέμενος" in Greek, "Qodesh" in Hebrew). Now we know why. The sacred precinct cuts off the credit masturbating area from the outside world.
- W.V.O. QUINE: This is all quite interesting, but where does that lead us ? What shall we do next ?
- SCHLESINGER: I wonder if we should not start looking at the early Greek city-states. After all they are also quite close to the Eridu Model. Each one had a single poliad deity and they were governed by councils of elders.
- QUINE: But Greek religion is polytheistic, isn't it ?
- SCHLESINGER: Yes, in the classical period, of course it is. But I wonder to what extent it was the case in earlier times. After all, Eridu itself never was explicitly monotheistic. It simply became a case of de facto local monotheism when Enki was introduced. I wonder if a similar situation did not prevail during the Greek archaic period. Almost all Greek city foundation myths give a central role to their poliad deity.
Schlesinger's suggestion that they should now focus on Greek city-states was accepted by the team without difficulty. This is a testament to how different the Boffin's worldview had become from the conventional wisdom of their time. In any other mid-20th century academic setting, the idea that Israelite monotheism and the birth of the Greek "polis" could have anything in common would have been cast aside with exclamations of disgust. To the Boffins, however, such an idea had become perfectly uncontroversial.
The choice of the early Greek city-states had an added advantage. It was very well suited to the "industrial" methods that the team had adopted and then perfected during the Babylon project. By mid-March 1950, the following task groups had been set up and started working within their assigned scope:
• TG-1: Athens. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: Sparta and the Dorians. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
• TG-3: Corinth. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-4: Thebes and Boeotia. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-5: The Cyclades. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-6: Miletus, Ephesus and the other Ionian cities. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-7: Crete and Cyprus. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: D. de Rougemont.
• TG-8: Magna Graecia. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: Carthage and the Phoenician thalassocracy. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-10: Etruria. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: Early Rome. Group leader: D. de Rougemont. Deputy: A. Ulam.
Denis de Rougemont, a Swiss anti-Nazi intellectual recommended by Georges Dumézil, had joined the team in February 1950. His recruitment had been approved by the CIA without difficulty as he had been one of the main OSS liaison channels with the Swiss government during the war. As the task group list above shows, the scope of the project had been extended to include Carthage, the Etruscans and the beginnings of the city of Rome. The rationale behind this decision was that what had happened to early Greek cities was obviously not unique to them but formed part of a wider pan-Mediterranean phenomenon.
The industrial methodology followed by the team had been perfected by now to a high degree of efficiency. As a result, it took barely three months for a picture to emerge regarding this new subject. In late June 1950, an interim synthetic report was compiled by Benno Landsberger and Thomas Kuhn. Here it is in its entirety:
In early March 1950, Brady and von Soden presented their early results about Nabû-naʾid to the rest of the team. After they had finished outlining the main episodes of the King's life and their ultimate impact on Jewish monotheism, the following exchange occurred:
- SATYENDRA NATH BOSE: I am not very familiar with Jewish history in the inter-testamental period. What happened after monotheism was established in Judah by Zerubbabel ?
- JOSEPH BRADY: Judah seems to have become very prosperous. In 539 B.C., when the exiles were allowed to return, the population of the whole Achaemenid province of Yehud Medinata was barely 50,000. Two centuries later, when Alexander the Great toppled the Persian Empire, The Jews numbered over 400,000, with nearly 250,000 of them living in Judea proper. The rest were spread over several large-scale expatriate communities located all over the Levant: Samaria, Galilee, Southern Syria, Phoenicia, Cilicia, etc. There was even a large community of Jewish mercenaries in Elephantine, at the southern border of Egypt.
- ARTHUR SCHLESINGER: How do you interpret this development ?
- WOLFRAM VON SODEN: I think it is quite simple. During the reign of Zerubbabel, Jerusalem had been transformed into a self-conscious replica of Eridu; a single god, a single temple and a committee of anonymous elders, the Sanhedrin, holding the reins of power locally. To be sure, Judah was part of the Achaemenid Empire, but the Emperor was very far away and his local representative, the governor, was only concerned with issues of taxation. So, in effect, there was no king. Judea in this period followed the Eridu model very faithfully. As a result, it thrived.
- BOSE: Are we sure that the mechanisms of this Judean period of prosperity are the same as those which were at work in Eridu ?
- BRADY: As much as we can be, yes. What is apparent is that Jewish society in this era developed what is, in effect, an early version of the rule of law. Most important economic transactions were governed by written contracts and conflicts were arbitrated by an increasingly sophisticated legal system. In other words, the telltale signs of Authority-L are present everywhere and Authority-S is nearly absent because there is no king. The potential of language, i.e. "the Logos", is unleashed and society thrives. Also, because of the relentless suppression of idolatry, the amount of imaginary credit production is kept to a minimum and the credit field is thus maintained in a fairly clean state; much cleaner than at any moment in the previous 3000 years of world history.
- ADAM ULAM: Are you saying that Jewish society is then completely free from credit masturbation ?
- VON SODEN: No, that would be impossible, I think. What happened is that in the Jerusalem of this era, the temple has the monopoly of credit masturbation. This is why the outlawing of sacrifice anywhere but there was so important. Because of this, all major imaginary credit-producing activities have to take place within the temple's precinct. As a result, all the imaginary credit stays concentrated there and all other locations can be kept (mostly) free from it. The Jews are very conscious that the temple contains something dangerous, which they call "the divine presence". The outer walls of the temple, like the confinement structure of an atomic pile, contain this dangerous energy, i.e. imaginary credit, and prevent it from damaging the world outside.
- BOSE: This is an illuminating insight into the idea of the sacred. The sacred precinct as a way to prevent imaginary credit from spilling out into the world.
- VON SODEN: Indeed. There are a great many words related to this idea in ancient languages which carry the notion of "cutting" in their etymological ancestry ("sacer" in Latin, "τέμενος" in Greek, "Qodesh" in Hebrew). Now we know why. The sacred precinct cuts off the credit masturbating area from the outside world.
- W.V.O. QUINE: This is all quite interesting, but where does that lead us ? What shall we do next ?
- SCHLESINGER: I wonder if we should not start looking at the early Greek city-states. After all they are also quite close to the Eridu Model. Each one had a single poliad deity and they were governed by councils of elders.
- QUINE: But Greek religion is polytheistic, isn't it ?
- SCHLESINGER: Yes, in the classical period, of course it is. But I wonder to what extent it was the case in earlier times. After all, Eridu itself never was explicitly monotheistic. It simply became a case of de facto local monotheism when Enki was introduced. I wonder if a similar situation did not prevail during the Greek archaic period. Almost all Greek city foundation myths give a central role to their poliad deity.
Schlesinger's suggestion that they should now focus on Greek city-states was accepted by the team without difficulty. This is a testament to how different the Boffin's worldview had become from the conventional wisdom of their time. In any other mid-20th century academic setting, the idea that Israelite monotheism and the birth of the Greek "polis" could have anything in common would have been cast aside with exclamations of disgust. To the Boffins, however, such an idea had become perfectly uncontroversial.
The choice of the early Greek city-states had an added advantage. It was very well suited to the "industrial" methods that the team had adopted and then perfected during the Babylon project. By mid-March 1950, the following task groups had been set up and started working within their assigned scope:
• TG-1: Athens. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: Sparta and the Dorians. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
• TG-3: Corinth. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-4: Thebes and Boeotia. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-5: The Cyclades. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-6: Miletus, Ephesus and the other Ionian cities. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-7: Crete and Cyprus. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: D. de Rougemont.
• TG-8: Magna Graecia. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: Carthage and the Phoenician thalassocracy. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-10: Etruria. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: Early Rome. Group leader: D. de Rougemont. Deputy: A. Ulam.
Denis de Rougemont, a Swiss anti-Nazi intellectual recommended by Georges Dumézil, had joined the team in February 1950. His recruitment had been approved by the CIA without difficulty as he had been one of the main OSS liaison channels with the Swiss government during the war. As the task group list above shows, the scope of the project had been extended to include Carthage, the Etruscans and the beginnings of the city of Rome. The rationale behind this decision was that what had happened to early Greek cities was obviously not unique to them but formed part of a wider pan-Mediterranean phenomenon.
The industrial methodology followed by the team had been perfected by now to a high degree of efficiency. As a result, it took barely three months for a picture to emerge regarding this new subject. In late June 1950, an interim synthetic report was compiled by Benno Landsberger and Thomas Kuhn. Here it is in its entirety:
With good navigation skills you have a aligin time of 6 sec. You will never get tackled with this ship in nullsec if you watch the local. The clue of this ship is, it use drone fpr damage. And the t2 drones cost only 1-2 million each. Even if the neut comes into the system and collects or destroys your drones out of boredom after you've docked, you don't need to care. Just wait and see and earn another 130-150 million isk/h later. Even interceptors can't warp fast enough to tackle you if you're careful. It's different when you're flying a Marauder. You quickly lose 1.5b+ just because you absolutely want to use fat cannons. Such an Ishtar fitted to drones does not cost 200 million.
Chapter 8 – From Jerusalem to Rome – Part 2 of 3
As I lifted my gaze from binder X/50-23, it fell on Ekaterina, who was reading at the desk opposite mine. No doubt she was pretty, in her own way, but she was definitely not my type. In High-School and College I had had my share of short-term flings, always with curvy blond types. Not necessarily top models but always blond and well endowed. I was not an Uber-Chad (in Incel parlance, I was an "upper-tier normie", bordering on "Chad-lite") and so I could not get the 9s and the 10s, but 7s and 8s were good enough, provided they had shapes in all the right places. In grad-school, I had gone steady with a girl from Arizona, Heather, and we had stayed together for over three years. But we had broken up before I left for Antarctica and so I was single again. Despite that, Ekaterina was really not my cup of tea. I just did not feel attracted to her.
My female evaluation musings were cut short by Finn's entrance. I remembered I wanted to ask him about a few things and said:
- ME: Hey, Finn. I just finished reading the report on early Greek city-states. Amazing stuff. Completely different from what we learned at school. I was just wondering about some of the cities like Athens or Knossos in Crete. Did they not exist long before the 8th century ?
- FINN: Yes, there had been a number of palace-towns on the mainland and in Crete during the Mycenaean period. But they had all been destroyed during the so called "Bronze Age collapse". During the following "Dark Ages", people had forgotten their true origins and only legends remained. In the 8th century some of the new cities were created in the vicinity of the old Mycenaean palaces but generally not exactly on the same site. In Athens, for example, the old palace site was the Acropolis, but the new 8th century town grew around the Areopagus.
- ME: So the period called "archaic Greece" is not the oldest era in ancient Greek history, right ? That’s confusing.
-FINN: Yeah, I know. The term "archaic" gained currency before the Mycenaean period was discovered. So now, the succession of eras in ancient Greek history is: Mycenaean, Dark Ages, Archaic (including "orientalizing"), Classical and finally, Hellenistic. The Mycenaean period extends from 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C. while the Archaic one starts in the 750s B.C. and ends in the fith century B.C. It is the time of the early city-states described in the report you just read.
- ME: There were no city-states in the Mycenaean period, right ?
- FINN: No. At best, we can call the polities of this era "petty states", in the sense given to this expression by Dumézil and Ulam. But in fact, they are more like isolated Pharaonic palaces. Culturally, they were a blind alley.
- ME: Is there a trace in Classical Greek legends of the role played by the Phoenicians in the emergence of the city-states ?
- FINN: Yes, for example, there is the legend of Cadmus, the mythical founder of Thebes. Cadmus was said to have been a son of the king of Tyre in Phoenicia. He was also generally considered to have been the inventor of the Greek Alphabet, based on the Phoenician model.
- ME: It is amazing how all this changes the way one sees Greece. In school, the Greeks were like these super-beings who had just arrived from another planet. Now they just appear as a peripheral development of Middle-Eastern culture. It makes a lot more sense.
- FINN: We have been idolizing the Greeks since the so-called "renaissance". It is one of the major cultural blinkers we have. Idolatry creates fake credit and fake credit blinds us. The fake credit given to Ancient Greece has erected a wall of darkness in Western culture which prevents us from seeing what we owe to Mesopotamia and, through it, to Eridu. We have to break this wall in order to re-gain an accurate worldview. This is what the Philadelphia Project achieved.
- ME: Is the Boffin team going to explain how early Greece eventually spawned the usual clichés, you know, the mythology, democracy, the Persian Wars, and all that ?
- FINN: Yes. As usual, all this boils down to the influence of Ishtar. The documentation is in X/50-25.
So I started reading binder X/50-25. In it I found a report, written by G. Dumézil and A. Ulam, summarising the findings of the team regarding the subsequent history of the Greek world up until the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire. Here it is:
As I lifted my gaze from binder X/50-23, it fell on Ekaterina, who was reading at the desk opposite mine. No doubt she was pretty, in her own way, but she was definitely not my type. In High-School and College I had had my share of short-term flings, always with curvy blond types. Not necessarily top models but always blond and well endowed. I was not an Uber-Chad (in Incel parlance, I was an "upper-tier normie", bordering on "Chad-lite") and so I could not get the 9s and the 10s, but 7s and 8s were good enough, provided they had shapes in all the right places. In grad-school, I had gone steady with a girl from Arizona, Heather, and we had stayed together for over three years. But we had broken up before I left for Antarctica and so I was single again. Despite that, Ekaterina was really not my cup of tea. I just did not feel attracted to her.
My female evaluation musings were cut short by Finn's entrance. I remembered I wanted to ask him about a few things and said:
- ME: Hey, Finn. I just finished reading the report on early Greek city-states. Amazing stuff. Completely different from what we learned at school. I was just wondering about some of the cities like Athens or Knossos in Crete. Did they not exist long before the 8th century ?
- FINN: Yes, there had been a number of palace-towns on the mainland and in Crete during the Mycenaean period. But they had all been destroyed during the so called "Bronze Age collapse". During the following "Dark Ages", people had forgotten their true origins and only legends remained. In the 8th century some of the new cities were created in the vicinity of the old Mycenaean palaces but generally not exactly on the same site. In Athens, for example, the old palace site was the Acropolis, but the new 8th century town grew around the Areopagus.
- ME: So the period called "archaic Greece" is not the oldest era in ancient Greek history, right ? That’s confusing.
-FINN: Yeah, I know. The term "archaic" gained currency before the Mycenaean period was discovered. So now, the succession of eras in ancient Greek history is: Mycenaean, Dark Ages, Archaic (including "orientalizing"), Classical and finally, Hellenistic. The Mycenaean period extends from 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C. while the Archaic one starts in the 750s B.C. and ends in the fith century B.C. It is the time of the early city-states described in the report you just read.
- ME: There were no city-states in the Mycenaean period, right ?
- FINN: No. At best, we can call the polities of this era "petty states", in the sense given to this expression by Dumézil and Ulam. But in fact, they are more like isolated Pharaonic palaces. Culturally, they were a blind alley.
- ME: Is there a trace in Classical Greek legends of the role played by the Phoenicians in the emergence of the city-states ?
- FINN: Yes, for example, there is the legend of Cadmus, the mythical founder of Thebes. Cadmus was said to have been a son of the king of Tyre in Phoenicia. He was also generally considered to have been the inventor of the Greek Alphabet, based on the Phoenician model.
- ME: It is amazing how all this changes the way one sees Greece. In school, the Greeks were like these super-beings who had just arrived from another planet. Now they just appear as a peripheral development of Middle-Eastern culture. It makes a lot more sense.
- FINN: We have been idolizing the Greeks since the so-called "renaissance". It is one of the major cultural blinkers we have. Idolatry creates fake credit and fake credit blinds us. The fake credit given to Ancient Greece has erected a wall of darkness in Western culture which prevents us from seeing what we owe to Mesopotamia and, through it, to Eridu. We have to break this wall in order to re-gain an accurate worldview. This is what the Philadelphia Project achieved.
- ME: Is the Boffin team going to explain how early Greece eventually spawned the usual clichés, you know, the mythology, democracy, the Persian Wars, and all that ?
- FINN: Yes. As usual, all this boils down to the influence of Ishtar. The documentation is in X/50-25.
So I started reading binder X/50-25. In it I found a report, written by G. Dumézil and A. Ulam, summarising the findings of the team regarding the subsequent history of the Greek world up until the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire. Here it is:
That's not the problem.
The problem is a mod pinning threads based on the user tagging him and asking for it to get pinned.
That's a sign of an incompetent moderator.
Chapter 8 – From Jerusalem to Rome – Part 3 of 3
That morning, the three of us were sitting in the mess-hall, eating the wonderful Russian-style breakfast that Ekaterina had prepared. It had been two months since any of us had been in the outside world. Our past, what we had been before we discovered this place, seemed as far away as if it had happened a century earlier. My life up to this point had been dominated by disappointment and anxiety. As I have said previously, I had had my share of female company since my teenage years, but it had never felt like the kind of bliss we are led to expect. The love we see in the movies had never happened to me. I had also been educated to think that science was the highest of callings and the answer to all questions. Eventually, I had ended up in Antarctica, my physics PhD under my belt, working as a glorified IT repairman on a project which, at best, only promised to fine-tune certain already known results. For over fifty years, theoretical physicists had been unable to come up with any new idea. No radically new experimental data had emerged either, as if we had been continuously looking under the same proverbial lamppost because there was light there.
By contrast, what I was discovering in the Philadelphia Station papers was genuinely new. It seemed as if I had been desperately looking for something, expecting to find it in arcane and remote places, while the real prize had been there all along, much closer to me than I thought. I had lived with the unspoken assumption that most of what had happened in the past was obsolete, irrelevant to our existence today. What I was slowly realizing now is that I had been anxious and unfulfilled because I had been raised to believe in legends; for example to think that science gave us access to super-human insight or that love was heavenly bliss. Legends do not keep their promises; hence the anxiety and the frustration. Fortunately, all these legends were now being demolished one by one as I went through the Philadelphia documents. Greece was no longer the pinnacle of reason and human dignity, as it was cracked up to be, but a mostly phony extension of Middle Eastern culture. Monotheism was no longer an irrelevant and vaguely sinister mythology from the dark ages but rather the best attempt so far at unleashing the power of the Logos (i.e. what Greece was supposed to be, but obviously was not). These discoveries were liberating. It felt as if a huge load had been lifted off my shoulders and that my eyes were seeing clearly for the first time in my life.
Finn was talking about the Bible with Ekaterina. He had already been through most of the documents about early Christianity; the group of binders I was myself just about to start reading. Ekaterina, for her part, was still absorbing the documentation about Uruk. I asked Finn:
- ME: I just finished the report on classical Greece and I noticed they barely mention Rome in it. Weren't they supposed to cover Rome in detail as well ?
- FINN: Yes, but TG-11 wrapped up its work on that after the report you just read was released. The relevant data is in a separate set of binders.
- ME: What is the gist of their findings ?
- FINN: Well, the biggest question about Rome has always been why they were so successful. After all, Athens had a kind of empire in the middle of the fifth century B.C., but it broke up after just a few decades and Athens started to decline after that. Why did Rome succeed where Athens had failed ? According to TG-11, the reason is that Rome is the only city-state which underwent a genuinely religious reform, and not just a "political" one, in response to the rise of the tyrants in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. TG-11's observations show that the Roman senate deliberately targeted the cults associated with the tyrants.
- ME: What did they do exactly ?
- FINN: A large temple complex dedicated to the Etruscan goddess Turan had been built at the foot of the Capitoline hill. The senators put it to the torch and razed it. At the same time, they had all the smaller shrines which covered the slopes of the Capitoline hill removed and they rededicated the old sacred precinct on top exclusively to the worship of Jupiter. In other words, what happened in Rome at the beginning of the Republican era looks somewhat like the monotheistic reform which had taken place in Jerusalem 50 years earlier.
- ME: I thought the Romans were polytheists, weren't they ?
- FINN: In the late Republican period, yes they were. The reform I was talking about did not go quite as far as what the Jews had done. The early Republican senators remembered the spirit of the New Prophecy better than most of the equivalent magistrates in other cities. They were trying to go back to the henotheistic worship of Jupiter which had led to the original synoecism. They wanted to rekindle the spiritual energy which had given birth to the city, and they largely succeeded. Afterwards, of course, polytheistic accretion resumed. But the early Republican religious reform had re-founded Rome on a much stronger footing than anything the Greeks came up with at about the same time. This is why the Romans were known in antiquity as "the most religious of all peoples".
- ME: What did that mean in practice ?
- FINN: The senatorial class was defined first and foremost according to religious criteria (and not political ones as is often assumed today). Senators were the only citizens who were allowed to serve in the highest priestly offices (Flamen, Pontifex Maximus, etc). Above all else, they were the guardians of the Roman religion, much like the Sanhedrin and the Levites in Jerusalem were the guardians of the religion of Yahweh.
- ME: How did that make them more successful than Athens, for example ?
- FINN: The Roman religious reform caused the spirit of the New Prophecy, i.e. a reflection of the Eridu model, to retain much more vitality in Rome than in any other Mediterranean city at the time. As a result, the usual Authority-L benefits were present to a far greater degree. In particular, the city of Rome was known to keep its word much better than others. In the fifth century, the instability of the Athenian political regime caused the city to behave erratically towards its allies, which resulted in the collapse of the Delian league. By contrast, Rome treated its own allies much more consistently and this is what enabled it to unify all of Italy under its banner. Also, individual personalities mattered much less in Rome than elsewhere. For example, Hannibal was able to beat several different Consuls in battle (often killing them in the process) and yet he could not prevail. Each time, the Romans would choose a different man to lead them and would resume the fight. This homogeneity and solidity of the Roman upper class goes a long way to explain their success. In other words, Roman leaders of this period were not Authority-S alpha males. They were invested with Authority-L and that made them extremely effective as a body.
- ME: But they succumbed to Authority-S, eventually, right ?
- FINN: Yes, in the late Republican era the instability caused by the rise of popularity politics led Rome down the same path as Greece. The "great men" of the first century were typical "tyrants" in the Greek sense. Both Pompey and Caesar claimed to enjoy a special relationship with Venus, the Roman Ishtar. Eventually, the only way to stabilize the situation proved to be, like in Greece, the recourse to the Middle-Eastern monarchic model. This is what we call the Roman "Empire".
After this exchange with Finn, I read the documentation from TG-11. A little while later, it dawned on me that there was a general pattern to ancient History. The Middle-East never managed to extricate itself from its Ishtar-fuelled monarchic model. Even today, it still rules the region. However, Middle-Eastern culture was able to formulate an antidote to it even if it was never able to apply this remedy to itself. The antidote first took the form of the New Prophecy. As it travelled westward, this movement brought prosperity in its wake. However, it was soon followed, by the Ishtar parasite, also travelling in a Westerly direction. The succession of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Diadochi kingdoms and the Roman Empire illustrates this westward movement.
The history of Graeco-Roman ancient times documents the rise of the New Prophecy movement, its striking effects in terms of prosperity and cultural advances, and its eventual reabsorption into the Middle Eastern monarchic model. In the end, the New Prophecy failed to provide a way for humanity out of the Ishtar plague that had been born in Uruk 3000 years earlier. Eventually, a way out would be found, more robust and more faithful to the original Eridu model than the New Prophecy had been: Christianity.
That morning, the three of us were sitting in the mess-hall, eating the wonderful Russian-style breakfast that Ekaterina had prepared. It had been two months since any of us had been in the outside world. Our past, what we had been before we discovered this place, seemed as far away as if it had happened a century earlier. My life up to this point had been dominated by disappointment and anxiety. As I have said previously, I had had my share of female company since my teenage years, but it had never felt like the kind of bliss we are led to expect. The love we see in the movies had never happened to me. I had also been educated to think that science was the highest of callings and the answer to all questions. Eventually, I had ended up in Antarctica, my physics PhD under my belt, working as a glorified IT repairman on a project which, at best, only promised to fine-tune certain already known results. For over fifty years, theoretical physicists had been unable to come up with any new idea. No radically new experimental data had emerged either, as if we had been continuously looking under the same proverbial lamppost because there was light there.
By contrast, what I was discovering in the Philadelphia Station papers was genuinely new. It seemed as if I had been desperately looking for something, expecting to find it in arcane and remote places, while the real prize had been there all along, much closer to me than I thought. I had lived with the unspoken assumption that most of what had happened in the past was obsolete, irrelevant to our existence today. What I was slowly realizing now is that I had been anxious and unfulfilled because I had been raised to believe in legends; for example to think that science gave us access to super-human insight or that love was heavenly bliss. Legends do not keep their promises; hence the anxiety and the frustration. Fortunately, all these legends were now being demolished one by one as I went through the Philadelphia documents. Greece was no longer the pinnacle of reason and human dignity, as it was cracked up to be, but a mostly phony extension of Middle Eastern culture. Monotheism was no longer an irrelevant and vaguely sinister mythology from the dark ages but rather the best attempt so far at unleashing the power of the Logos (i.e. what Greece was supposed to be, but obviously was not). These discoveries were liberating. It felt as if a huge load had been lifted off my shoulders and that my eyes were seeing clearly for the first time in my life.
Finn was talking about the Bible with Ekaterina. He had already been through most of the documents about early Christianity; the group of binders I was myself just about to start reading. Ekaterina, for her part, was still absorbing the documentation about Uruk. I asked Finn:
- ME: I just finished the report on classical Greece and I noticed they barely mention Rome in it. Weren't they supposed to cover Rome in detail as well ?
- FINN: Yes, but TG-11 wrapped up its work on that after the report you just read was released. The relevant data is in a separate set of binders.
- ME: What is the gist of their findings ?
- FINN: Well, the biggest question about Rome has always been why they were so successful. After all, Athens had a kind of empire in the middle of the fifth century B.C., but it broke up after just a few decades and Athens started to decline after that. Why did Rome succeed where Athens had failed ? According to TG-11, the reason is that Rome is the only city-state which underwent a genuinely religious reform, and not just a "political" one, in response to the rise of the tyrants in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. TG-11's observations show that the Roman senate deliberately targeted the cults associated with the tyrants.
- ME: What did they do exactly ?
- FINN: A large temple complex dedicated to the Etruscan goddess Turan had been built at the foot of the Capitoline hill. The senators put it to the torch and razed it. At the same time, they had all the smaller shrines which covered the slopes of the Capitoline hill removed and they rededicated the old sacred precinct on top exclusively to the worship of Jupiter. In other words, what happened in Rome at the beginning of the Republican era looks somewhat like the monotheistic reform which had taken place in Jerusalem 50 years earlier.
- ME: I thought the Romans were polytheists, weren't they ?
- FINN: In the late Republican period, yes they were. The reform I was talking about did not go quite as far as what the Jews had done. The early Republican senators remembered the spirit of the New Prophecy better than most of the equivalent magistrates in other cities. They were trying to go back to the henotheistic worship of Jupiter which had led to the original synoecism. They wanted to rekindle the spiritual energy which had given birth to the city, and they largely succeeded. Afterwards, of course, polytheistic accretion resumed. But the early Republican religious reform had re-founded Rome on a much stronger footing than anything the Greeks came up with at about the same time. This is why the Romans were known in antiquity as "the most religious of all peoples".
- ME: What did that mean in practice ?
- FINN: The senatorial class was defined first and foremost according to religious criteria (and not political ones as is often assumed today). Senators were the only citizens who were allowed to serve in the highest priestly offices (Flamen, Pontifex Maximus, etc). Above all else, they were the guardians of the Roman religion, much like the Sanhedrin and the Levites in Jerusalem were the guardians of the religion of Yahweh.
- ME: How did that make them more successful than Athens, for example ?
- FINN: The Roman religious reform caused the spirit of the New Prophecy, i.e. a reflection of the Eridu model, to retain much more vitality in Rome than in any other Mediterranean city at the time. As a result, the usual Authority-L benefits were present to a far greater degree. In particular, the city of Rome was known to keep its word much better than others. In the fifth century, the instability of the Athenian political regime caused the city to behave erratically towards its allies, which resulted in the collapse of the Delian league. By contrast, Rome treated its own allies much more consistently and this is what enabled it to unify all of Italy under its banner. Also, individual personalities mattered much less in Rome than elsewhere. For example, Hannibal was able to beat several different Consuls in battle (often killing them in the process) and yet he could not prevail. Each time, the Romans would choose a different man to lead them and would resume the fight. This homogeneity and solidity of the Roman upper class goes a long way to explain their success. In other words, Roman leaders of this period were not Authority-S alpha males. They were invested with Authority-L and that made them extremely effective as a body.
- ME: But they succumbed to Authority-S, eventually, right ?
- FINN: Yes, in the late Republican era the instability caused by the rise of popularity politics led Rome down the same path as Greece. The "great men" of the first century were typical "tyrants" in the Greek sense. Both Pompey and Caesar claimed to enjoy a special relationship with Venus, the Roman Ishtar. Eventually, the only way to stabilize the situation proved to be, like in Greece, the recourse to the Middle-Eastern monarchic model. This is what we call the Roman "Empire".
After this exchange with Finn, I read the documentation from TG-11. A little while later, it dawned on me that there was a general pattern to ancient History. The Middle-East never managed to extricate itself from its Ishtar-fuelled monarchic model. Even today, it still rules the region. However, Middle-Eastern culture was able to formulate an antidote to it even if it was never able to apply this remedy to itself. The antidote first took the form of the New Prophecy. As it travelled westward, this movement brought prosperity in its wake. However, it was soon followed, by the Ishtar parasite, also travelling in a Westerly direction. The succession of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Diadochi kingdoms and the Roman Empire illustrates this westward movement.
The history of Graeco-Roman ancient times documents the rise of the New Prophecy movement, its striking effects in terms of prosperity and cultural advances, and its eventual reabsorption into the Middle Eastern monarchic model. In the end, the New Prophecy failed to provide a way for humanity out of the Ishtar plague that had been born in Uruk 3000 years earlier. Eventually, a way out would be found, more robust and more faithful to the original Eridu model than the New Prophecy had been: Christianity.
And you spamming your autistic book here without punishment is another sign of a completely incompetent moderation staff.
This shit should get deleted for spam and for advertisment.
This is a reductionist statement that has no value outside of a philosophy debate. Good and evil are ultimately subjective concepts that need a point of view to actually exist, and as such, cannot be absolutely objective.
If we judge genes as good or bad according to their purpose - to be building blocks of an organism that ensure survival and reproduction, any gene or gene combination that reduces the probability of success of either of these things can be considered as 'bad'.
As an example, we as humans have genetic ilnesses and disorders, that vary from physical deformities to oncological diseases that vastly reduce the lifespan of a given person. In a more technologically primitive society many of these people would simply die out and not leave any descendants, which seems to be the purpose of the intricate machine we know as life, as best as we can tell.
About the Ishtar worship, the ancient goddess simply seems to be a represantation of a woman's true nature without any morality or higher power assigned by society being able to hamper her. Whimsical, cruel and manipulative, does that sound familiar?
I
Make it so that every time you open this site you get a popup message of this.
Beautiful people are always praised by people. It's in the human instinct. That's not a religion. People worship beautiful people because everybody like to look like Chris Hemsworth or Angelina Jolie.
Wtf is this cope post. Religion cannot compete with primal urges.
It's over.
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 1 of 6
The Boffin team members were no longer the conventional mid-XXth century scholars that they had been before the project started. As a result, they took the results of their investigations about Greece and Rome without so much as batting an eyelid. Early on in the project, the Socrates episode had been a warning that something was amiss with the mythical status that Classical Greece enjoyed in the Western cultural psyche. Even more significantly, the other phases of the project had shown that the long-term trends which dominated human cultural evolution did not point at all in the direction that the Ancient Greek model was supposed to embody. Therefore, having to reclassify Classical Antiquity as a side-show within the larger process of human civilization buildup was not felt to be particularly shocking.
The earlier discoveries made during the project had humbled the Boffin team members into accepting a complete overhaul of their psychological, historical and spiritual worldview. They had been re-awakened to the awe-inspiring power of the sacred. Naturally, this did not mean that they had become religious in a traditional sense. None of their observations had corroborated the received religious narratives. They had seen no gods interfering in the affairs of men, no prophets transported to high heaven, no dragons and no horned devils. But they had observed how powerful the hallowed stories were; how central a role they played in the shaping of culture and ultimately of all aspects of human behavior, for better or worse.
As a result, it is with feelings approaching devout reverence that the members of the Boffin team gathered, on November 18th, 1950, for the usual "what to do next" meeting following the completion of the Greece-related investigations. It was obvious that the next topic would have to be about the emergence of Christianity. But how to approach it ? Should they conduct detailed observations of early Christianity's environment before tackling the movement itself ? If so, how exactly should this "environment" be defined ? After much discussion, they decided to cut to the chase and start with a direct observation of the life of Jesus Christ himself. The reasoning was that once his personal trajectory had been identified, it would be easy to widen the scope and start to observe the social groups who were in direct contact with him and his early followers.
As it had been done in the early stages of the Nabonidus inquiry, a small pilot team was set up to perform the preliminary work. This team, headed by D. de Rougemont and B. Landsberger, was tasked with the mapping out of the main events in the life of Christianity's founder. Of course, no one expected to witness scenes straight out of the Gospels. However, both Landsberger and Rougemont became quite puzzled when, despite two full weeks of continuous search, they failed to observe any man even remotely fitting the description of the New Testament’s main character within the expected time period. They had started with a systematic inventory of executions by crucifixion conducted in Jerusalem, both by the Romans and the Jewish authorities, within a 5 year-wide window around 30 AD. There were plenty of such events; 783 in all (nearly 80 per year). However, none of these events seemed to correspond to the Biblical record of Jesus' death. Over half of the executed individuals were common criminals, with clearly established backgrounds in armed robbery, murder or piracy. Among the rest were some individuals involved in the never-ending plots surrounding the Herodian rulers of the period. Finally, around a third of the total was made up of anti-Roman agitators and guerrilla leaders linked with the low-level insurgency and general unrest which had plagued Judea ever since the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC. Many of these rebels had made some sort of religious claims (including to Messiah-hood in a handful of cases) but they were all militant zealots, a far cry from the pacifist and "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" Jesus of the Gospels. Among the sample of 783 crucified men studied by the pilot team, 28 were named "Jesus" (yēšūă‘ in Hebrew, a common name at the time) but none of them bore any resemblance to the Biblical character. Most of these Jesuses were common criminals and, among the three that were not, one was an eunuch who had tried to poison the sister of Herod Antipas, and the other two were bloodthirsty and violent insurgents closer to the figure of Barabbas than to anything else.
For two additional weeks Landsberger and Rougemont tried to widen the search both temporally and geographically. They scrutinized executions which had occurred in Caesarea, Damascus, Tiberias and even Gaza during a period extending from 20 to 40 AD. Again, they drew a blank. No man crucified in this area and time period corresponded to the Jesus of the Gospels, although the sample of executions studied had now risen to over 2000. A new meeting was held in mid-December 1950 to discuss the findings of the pilot team. During this meeting, the following exchange took place:
- LANDSBERGER: Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to identify any candidate even remotely corresponding to the character of Jesus as he is described in the Gospels. Should we conclude that the purported founder of Christianity is completely ahistorical, invented out of whole cloth ?
- ROUGEMONT: This seems a bit extreme to me, but I must admit that the data we have gathered is not encouraging. I am not sure how we should interpret this.
- SCHLESINGER: This would not be a completely unforeseen discovery. Some scholars have already claimed that Jesus is a mythical figure. The first to do so was Bruno Bauer, I believe, in the 1870s. More recently, Rudolf Bultmann, although a respected German Lutheran theologian, came close to the same conclusion.
- ROUGEMONT: But this position is not widespread at all, isn't it ? Very few Biblical scholars are mythicists as far as I know.
- SCHLESINGER: Indeed, but it seems that the minority position could be the right one in this case.
- LANDSBERGER: What should we do ? Continue to search for a hypothetical historical Jesus or look for something else ?
- QUINE: Maybe we could switch to Paul. Most scholars agree that the bulk of the Pauline Epistles were written by a single person. That person must have existed somehow.
- LANDSBERGER: I concur. The Pauline epistles also happen to be the earliest known Christian texts. As you may know, the epistles are generally dated to the 40s-50s AD. while the oldest Gospels are reckoned by most Biblical scholars to have been composed at least thirty to fifty years later.
Quine's proposal was accepted and, as a result, the efforts of the pilot team were redirected to mapping the life of the apostle Paul. Rougemont and Landsberger began by focusing on the small sectarian Jewish communities which existed in a number of Greek cities whose names appeared in the Epistles: Ephesus, Ancyra, Thessalonica, Corinth, etc. This new strategy soon paid off. Within a week, the man they were looking for had been identified and was first recorded as he preached, in September of 39 AD., to a mixed assembly of Jews and local Hellenized Thracians at a house in Philippi.
The historical Paul turned out to be quite close to his Biblical portrait. He was indeed a Hellenized Jew who had been born in Tarsus in Cilicia, where his father was a prosperous cloth merchant. In his late teens, he had been sent to Jerusalem to further his education and work with one of his uncles at the local branch of his family's business, which specialized in the heavy woolen fabric used to make tents, both for the military and Bedouin nomadic herders. The claim that he studied "at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22:3) turned out to be an embellishment. In fact, as an Hellenized Jew who could not read Hebrew, Paul was not able to attend the prestigious Rabbinical school of the Temple and instead took lessons with a master who taught Greek-speakers like himself, based on the Septuagint. Like many diaspora Jews, Paul's family was politically aligned with the Pharisee party. As a result, while still a student, Paul took part in some of the political scuffles of the period, on the side of this party. In particular he had a hand in several incidents during which members of various dissident Jewish groups were roughed-up by Pharisee vigilante mobs. The sectarian groups in question were not strictly speaking "Christian", as the Book of Acts makes them out to be (e.g. in the case of Stephen). Instead, most belonged to the galaxy of heterodox sects subsumed by contemporary authors (like Josephus and Philo) under the general name of "Essenes".
Although quite diverse in their teachings, the various sub-branches of the Essene movement all had some characteristics in common with what would later be known as "Christianity". More precisely, they believed in a "New Covenant" which superseded the old Mosaic Law and they revered a teacher whom they considered the founder of their creed. Unlike Jesus, however, this teacher was not a contemporary of Paul. He had lived a century earlier, under the late Hasmoneans, and had quarreled with them on a number of theological issues to the point of being eventually executed by them. Most Essene cells lived a form of semi-cenobitic life involving communal meals and the sharing of their members' possessions, in a manner similar to what is claimed in Acts 4:32-35 to have been the practice of the very first Christians. However, the similarities with Christianity ended there. Theologically, the Essenes were in general closer to the Zealots than to the future Christians. In particular, they awaited the coming of a warlike Messiah which would lead the Jewish people in a massive war of conquest and a universal victory over all the peoples of the Earth (including, of course, the Romans). In other words, the Essenes, like the Zealots, were "terrorists", in the modern sense of the word. They were a millenarian movement, in the manner of the modern ISIS, which lived in the eager anticipation of a coming apocalyptic Holy War. In many texts circulating within the Essene milieu, like the so called "War Scroll" discovered at Qumran in the late 40s, this future Holy war was described in lovingly meticulous detail. Indeed, the Jewish apocalyptic movement, of which the Essenes were one of the major components, is the direct ancestor of the Islamic apocalyptic Jihadi current whose worldview was heavily influenced by Jewish sources during the early centuries of Islam. Within the Jewish apocalyptic movement, the Essenes played a role similar to the modern "radical mosques", spreading the message to a wider audience, while the Zealots were the militant cells conducting assassinations and other attacks against the perceived enemies of the Jews.
Jewish society in the early first century AD was a powder keg, riven with rivalries, resentment and intense feelings of hatred directed both inside and outside the community. By contrast, several centuries before, under the Achaemenid Persians, The Jewish people had experienced a period of exceptional prosperity, well-being and contentment. Then, the newly established monotheistic cult of Yahweh, the heir of Nabû-naʾid's experiments, was yielding its bountiful fruits. Jerusalem under the Persians was truly the new Eridu; the new Eden. There was no king (apart from the far-away Persian monarchs, who never came to Jerusalem and had no influence on local affairs). Authority-L reigned supreme, in the form of a sophisticated legal system centered on the Sanhedrin. Above all, the Jewish population enjoyed an exceptional level of emotional balance. Since everyone was living in the shadow of the all-powerful Creator of the universe, who lived right there in his House on the Hill dominating the city and the surrounding countryside, there was no reason to be envious or frustrated. God was the one who decreed the fate of every man. Who could question his decisions ? If you were dissatisfied with the state of affairs, you could pray or offer sacrifice at the Temple. But there was no point in harboring ill-will towards your neighbor. As a result, people’s minds were at peace, agriculture thrived, population grew, commerce and industry prospered.
Then came the Greeks, as they and the Macedonians invaded the Achaemenid Empire in 332 BC. The larger than life character of Alexander dealt a mortal blow to the Jewish second-temple's spiritual balance. Here was a man of flesh and blood who, unlike his Achaemenid predecessor, was approachable and yet was worshiped like a god by millions. Was he a god ? Of course, the official Jewish theology could only answer this question in the negative. But not every Jew was fully convinced by this official pronouncement down to the deepest recesses of his soul. Alexander's magnetism was just irresistible and his aura as a world conqueror clearly rivaled the glory of Yahweh.
Under the Ptolemies, although the spiritual agony of second-temple Judaism had already started, there were no immediate material consequences. Jewish population continued to grow and to spread outside of Judea. By the end of the Hellenistic period, there were over a million Jews in Egypt alone and the Jewish community in Alexandria had become one of the major factions in late-Ptolemaic politics. However, after the Seleucids managed to wrest Judea away from the Ptolemies in 200 BC, the consequences of Jewish spiritual decline started to be felt in earnest. It began with a trend, among the Jewish elite, towards the adoption of Greek customs. This involved, among other things, practicing physical exercises in the nude at the Palaestra. Modern historians reckon that this violated Jewish decency norms, but it is not at all what the real issue was. What shocked observant Jews was that such people were thus openly playing at being Greek gods, who were often represented naked in statues and paintings. Not surprisingly, this kind of behavior resulted in factional tensions which quickly degenerated into a full-blown civil war between the "Hellenists" and the observant party. Assassinations and intrigue became the norm for the nominations to the post of High priest, which consequently lost much of its legitimacy.
During one of these bloody contests, in 164 BC, one of the contenders for the high priestly throne, Judas Maccabeus, managed to beat his Seleucid-backed rival in a series of battles against the Syrian Greek army. In the process, he made Judea de-facto independent from the then fast-declining Seleucid state. This was generally seen as a victory for the anti-Hellenist party and for those who championed the faithful observance of the Jewish traditions. However, quite paradoxically, the success of Jewish arms against the Seleucids was also the starting point of one of the most perverse theological developments in second-temple Judaism, the emergence of the belief in the Messiah. Officially, according to Jewish and Christian theology, the Messiah is supposed to have been announced by the old-Testament prophets, the Nevi'im. In fact, the Messiah narrative is of Greek origin. It is a copy of the Hellenistic world-conqueror mythology, retroactively justified by certain fairly unclear passages in Isaiah and others. With the emergence of the Messiah legends, Judaism now had its own Alexander-like character who would be sent by God at the End of times to turn the Jews into a world conquering race.
The Messiah myth is absolutely un-Jewish. In fact, it is in flagrant violation of the Eridu-inspired anti-monarchic ethos of early second-temple Judaism. The Messiah represents the return of the Gilgamesh-like hero within Judaic culture. Behind Gilgamesh lies the specter of Ishtar which, of course, could not be openly admitted in the context of the strictly monotheistic official Judean theology of the times. Therefore, the spread of Messiah-centered themes signals the beginning of hypocrisy within Jewish culture. Unable to openly worship the patron Lady of Authority-S, Judaism allowed its veiled re-introduction under the guise of the warlike, world-conquering, Messiah. This covert resumption of Authority-S worship had immediate and devastating spiritual consequences within Judean society. The usual side effects of the Ishtar cult, jealousy, envy, hatred and wanton violence, made a quick comeback among Jews. During the short lifespan of the Hasmonean state (less than a century) Judea was continually torn apart by factional strife and bloody succession crises. The Pharisaic party, which emerged during this period, is a perfect example of the troubled atmosphere of the times; either persecuted or among the persecutors according to its ever-fluctuating relationship with the ruling family. Among other things, this party was responsible for the transformation of the well-balanced Judean legal system into the addictive legal-masturbation practices which would subsequently have such a negative impact on later Judaism and, through it, on Islam.
The Boffin team members were no longer the conventional mid-XXth century scholars that they had been before the project started. As a result, they took the results of their investigations about Greece and Rome without so much as batting an eyelid. Early on in the project, the Socrates episode had been a warning that something was amiss with the mythical status that Classical Greece enjoyed in the Western cultural psyche. Even more significantly, the other phases of the project had shown that the long-term trends which dominated human cultural evolution did not point at all in the direction that the Ancient Greek model was supposed to embody. Therefore, having to reclassify Classical Antiquity as a side-show within the larger process of human civilization buildup was not felt to be particularly shocking.
The earlier discoveries made during the project had humbled the Boffin team members into accepting a complete overhaul of their psychological, historical and spiritual worldview. They had been re-awakened to the awe-inspiring power of the sacred. Naturally, this did not mean that they had become religious in a traditional sense. None of their observations had corroborated the received religious narratives. They had seen no gods interfering in the affairs of men, no prophets transported to high heaven, no dragons and no horned devils. But they had observed how powerful the hallowed stories were; how central a role they played in the shaping of culture and ultimately of all aspects of human behavior, for better or worse.
As a result, it is with feelings approaching devout reverence that the members of the Boffin team gathered, on November 18th, 1950, for the usual "what to do next" meeting following the completion of the Greece-related investigations. It was obvious that the next topic would have to be about the emergence of Christianity. But how to approach it ? Should they conduct detailed observations of early Christianity's environment before tackling the movement itself ? If so, how exactly should this "environment" be defined ? After much discussion, they decided to cut to the chase and start with a direct observation of the life of Jesus Christ himself. The reasoning was that once his personal trajectory had been identified, it would be easy to widen the scope and start to observe the social groups who were in direct contact with him and his early followers.
As it had been done in the early stages of the Nabonidus inquiry, a small pilot team was set up to perform the preliminary work. This team, headed by D. de Rougemont and B. Landsberger, was tasked with the mapping out of the main events in the life of Christianity's founder. Of course, no one expected to witness scenes straight out of the Gospels. However, both Landsberger and Rougemont became quite puzzled when, despite two full weeks of continuous search, they failed to observe any man even remotely fitting the description of the New Testament’s main character within the expected time period. They had started with a systematic inventory of executions by crucifixion conducted in Jerusalem, both by the Romans and the Jewish authorities, within a 5 year-wide window around 30 AD. There were plenty of such events; 783 in all (nearly 80 per year). However, none of these events seemed to correspond to the Biblical record of Jesus' death. Over half of the executed individuals were common criminals, with clearly established backgrounds in armed robbery, murder or piracy. Among the rest were some individuals involved in the never-ending plots surrounding the Herodian rulers of the period. Finally, around a third of the total was made up of anti-Roman agitators and guerrilla leaders linked with the low-level insurgency and general unrest which had plagued Judea ever since the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC. Many of these rebels had made some sort of religious claims (including to Messiah-hood in a handful of cases) but they were all militant zealots, a far cry from the pacifist and "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" Jesus of the Gospels. Among the sample of 783 crucified men studied by the pilot team, 28 were named "Jesus" (yēšūă‘ in Hebrew, a common name at the time) but none of them bore any resemblance to the Biblical character. Most of these Jesuses were common criminals and, among the three that were not, one was an eunuch who had tried to poison the sister of Herod Antipas, and the other two were bloodthirsty and violent insurgents closer to the figure of Barabbas than to anything else.
For two additional weeks Landsberger and Rougemont tried to widen the search both temporally and geographically. They scrutinized executions which had occurred in Caesarea, Damascus, Tiberias and even Gaza during a period extending from 20 to 40 AD. Again, they drew a blank. No man crucified in this area and time period corresponded to the Jesus of the Gospels, although the sample of executions studied had now risen to over 2000. A new meeting was held in mid-December 1950 to discuss the findings of the pilot team. During this meeting, the following exchange took place:
- LANDSBERGER: Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to identify any candidate even remotely corresponding to the character of Jesus as he is described in the Gospels. Should we conclude that the purported founder of Christianity is completely ahistorical, invented out of whole cloth ?
- ROUGEMONT: This seems a bit extreme to me, but I must admit that the data we have gathered is not encouraging. I am not sure how we should interpret this.
- SCHLESINGER: This would not be a completely unforeseen discovery. Some scholars have already claimed that Jesus is a mythical figure. The first to do so was Bruno Bauer, I believe, in the 1870s. More recently, Rudolf Bultmann, although a respected German Lutheran theologian, came close to the same conclusion.
- ROUGEMONT: But this position is not widespread at all, isn't it ? Very few Biblical scholars are mythicists as far as I know.
- SCHLESINGER: Indeed, but it seems that the minority position could be the right one in this case.
- LANDSBERGER: What should we do ? Continue to search for a hypothetical historical Jesus or look for something else ?
- QUINE: Maybe we could switch to Paul. Most scholars agree that the bulk of the Pauline Epistles were written by a single person. That person must have existed somehow.
- LANDSBERGER: I concur. The Pauline epistles also happen to be the earliest known Christian texts. As you may know, the epistles are generally dated to the 40s-50s AD. while the oldest Gospels are reckoned by most Biblical scholars to have been composed at least thirty to fifty years later.
Quine's proposal was accepted and, as a result, the efforts of the pilot team were redirected to mapping the life of the apostle Paul. Rougemont and Landsberger began by focusing on the small sectarian Jewish communities which existed in a number of Greek cities whose names appeared in the Epistles: Ephesus, Ancyra, Thessalonica, Corinth, etc. This new strategy soon paid off. Within a week, the man they were looking for had been identified and was first recorded as he preached, in September of 39 AD., to a mixed assembly of Jews and local Hellenized Thracians at a house in Philippi.
The historical Paul turned out to be quite close to his Biblical portrait. He was indeed a Hellenized Jew who had been born in Tarsus in Cilicia, where his father was a prosperous cloth merchant. In his late teens, he had been sent to Jerusalem to further his education and work with one of his uncles at the local branch of his family's business, which specialized in the heavy woolen fabric used to make tents, both for the military and Bedouin nomadic herders. The claim that he studied "at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22:3) turned out to be an embellishment. In fact, as an Hellenized Jew who could not read Hebrew, Paul was not able to attend the prestigious Rabbinical school of the Temple and instead took lessons with a master who taught Greek-speakers like himself, based on the Septuagint. Like many diaspora Jews, Paul's family was politically aligned with the Pharisee party. As a result, while still a student, Paul took part in some of the political scuffles of the period, on the side of this party. In particular he had a hand in several incidents during which members of various dissident Jewish groups were roughed-up by Pharisee vigilante mobs. The sectarian groups in question were not strictly speaking "Christian", as the Book of Acts makes them out to be (e.g. in the case of Stephen). Instead, most belonged to the galaxy of heterodox sects subsumed by contemporary authors (like Josephus and Philo) under the general name of "Essenes".
Although quite diverse in their teachings, the various sub-branches of the Essene movement all had some characteristics in common with what would later be known as "Christianity". More precisely, they believed in a "New Covenant" which superseded the old Mosaic Law and they revered a teacher whom they considered the founder of their creed. Unlike Jesus, however, this teacher was not a contemporary of Paul. He had lived a century earlier, under the late Hasmoneans, and had quarreled with them on a number of theological issues to the point of being eventually executed by them. Most Essene cells lived a form of semi-cenobitic life involving communal meals and the sharing of their members' possessions, in a manner similar to what is claimed in Acts 4:32-35 to have been the practice of the very first Christians. However, the similarities with Christianity ended there. Theologically, the Essenes were in general closer to the Zealots than to the future Christians. In particular, they awaited the coming of a warlike Messiah which would lead the Jewish people in a massive war of conquest and a universal victory over all the peoples of the Earth (including, of course, the Romans). In other words, the Essenes, like the Zealots, were "terrorists", in the modern sense of the word. They were a millenarian movement, in the manner of the modern ISIS, which lived in the eager anticipation of a coming apocalyptic Holy War. In many texts circulating within the Essene milieu, like the so called "War Scroll" discovered at Qumran in the late 40s, this future Holy war was described in lovingly meticulous detail. Indeed, the Jewish apocalyptic movement, of which the Essenes were one of the major components, is the direct ancestor of the Islamic apocalyptic Jihadi current whose worldview was heavily influenced by Jewish sources during the early centuries of Islam. Within the Jewish apocalyptic movement, the Essenes played a role similar to the modern "radical mosques", spreading the message to a wider audience, while the Zealots were the militant cells conducting assassinations and other attacks against the perceived enemies of the Jews.
Jewish society in the early first century AD was a powder keg, riven with rivalries, resentment and intense feelings of hatred directed both inside and outside the community. By contrast, several centuries before, under the Achaemenid Persians, The Jewish people had experienced a period of exceptional prosperity, well-being and contentment. Then, the newly established monotheistic cult of Yahweh, the heir of Nabû-naʾid's experiments, was yielding its bountiful fruits. Jerusalem under the Persians was truly the new Eridu; the new Eden. There was no king (apart from the far-away Persian monarchs, who never came to Jerusalem and had no influence on local affairs). Authority-L reigned supreme, in the form of a sophisticated legal system centered on the Sanhedrin. Above all, the Jewish population enjoyed an exceptional level of emotional balance. Since everyone was living in the shadow of the all-powerful Creator of the universe, who lived right there in his House on the Hill dominating the city and the surrounding countryside, there was no reason to be envious or frustrated. God was the one who decreed the fate of every man. Who could question his decisions ? If you were dissatisfied with the state of affairs, you could pray or offer sacrifice at the Temple. But there was no point in harboring ill-will towards your neighbor. As a result, people’s minds were at peace, agriculture thrived, population grew, commerce and industry prospered.
Then came the Greeks, as they and the Macedonians invaded the Achaemenid Empire in 332 BC. The larger than life character of Alexander dealt a mortal blow to the Jewish second-temple's spiritual balance. Here was a man of flesh and blood who, unlike his Achaemenid predecessor, was approachable and yet was worshiped like a god by millions. Was he a god ? Of course, the official Jewish theology could only answer this question in the negative. But not every Jew was fully convinced by this official pronouncement down to the deepest recesses of his soul. Alexander's magnetism was just irresistible and his aura as a world conqueror clearly rivaled the glory of Yahweh.
Under the Ptolemies, although the spiritual agony of second-temple Judaism had already started, there were no immediate material consequences. Jewish population continued to grow and to spread outside of Judea. By the end of the Hellenistic period, there were over a million Jews in Egypt alone and the Jewish community in Alexandria had become one of the major factions in late-Ptolemaic politics. However, after the Seleucids managed to wrest Judea away from the Ptolemies in 200 BC, the consequences of Jewish spiritual decline started to be felt in earnest. It began with a trend, among the Jewish elite, towards the adoption of Greek customs. This involved, among other things, practicing physical exercises in the nude at the Palaestra. Modern historians reckon that this violated Jewish decency norms, but it is not at all what the real issue was. What shocked observant Jews was that such people were thus openly playing at being Greek gods, who were often represented naked in statues and paintings. Not surprisingly, this kind of behavior resulted in factional tensions which quickly degenerated into a full-blown civil war between the "Hellenists" and the observant party. Assassinations and intrigue became the norm for the nominations to the post of High priest, which consequently lost much of its legitimacy.
During one of these bloody contests, in 164 BC, one of the contenders for the high priestly throne, Judas Maccabeus, managed to beat his Seleucid-backed rival in a series of battles against the Syrian Greek army. In the process, he made Judea de-facto independent from the then fast-declining Seleucid state. This was generally seen as a victory for the anti-Hellenist party and for those who championed the faithful observance of the Jewish traditions. However, quite paradoxically, the success of Jewish arms against the Seleucids was also the starting point of one of the most perverse theological developments in second-temple Judaism, the emergence of the belief in the Messiah. Officially, according to Jewish and Christian theology, the Messiah is supposed to have been announced by the old-Testament prophets, the Nevi'im. In fact, the Messiah narrative is of Greek origin. It is a copy of the Hellenistic world-conqueror mythology, retroactively justified by certain fairly unclear passages in Isaiah and others. With the emergence of the Messiah legends, Judaism now had its own Alexander-like character who would be sent by God at the End of times to turn the Jews into a world conquering race.
The Messiah myth is absolutely un-Jewish. In fact, it is in flagrant violation of the Eridu-inspired anti-monarchic ethos of early second-temple Judaism. The Messiah represents the return of the Gilgamesh-like hero within Judaic culture. Behind Gilgamesh lies the specter of Ishtar which, of course, could not be openly admitted in the context of the strictly monotheistic official Judean theology of the times. Therefore, the spread of Messiah-centered themes signals the beginning of hypocrisy within Jewish culture. Unable to openly worship the patron Lady of Authority-S, Judaism allowed its veiled re-introduction under the guise of the warlike, world-conquering, Messiah. This covert resumption of Authority-S worship had immediate and devastating spiritual consequences within Judean society. The usual side effects of the Ishtar cult, jealousy, envy, hatred and wanton violence, made a quick comeback among Jews. During the short lifespan of the Hasmonean state (less than a century) Judea was continually torn apart by factional strife and bloody succession crises. The Pharisaic party, which emerged during this period, is a perfect example of the troubled atmosphere of the times; either persecuted or among the persecutors according to its ever-fluctuating relationship with the ruling family. Among other things, this party was responsible for the transformation of the well-balanced Judean legal system into the addictive legal-masturbation practices which would subsequently have such a negative impact on later Judaism and, through it, on Islam.
It is more than that. Read the book. Chapter 4 deals with Ishtar.
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 2 of 6
Finn was passing in front of me with a stack of binders in his arms. I asked him:
- ME: Hey Finn, can I ask you a question ?
- FINN: Shoot.
- ME: What is your take on this idea that the Messiah legend is, as they say, "un-Jewish" ? I thought that waiting for the Messiah was like the core of Judaism.
- FINN: Well, in modern Judaism, it is central, yes, but what is called "Judaism" today is largely a misnomer. Contemporary Judaism is just as post-Jewish as Christianity.
- ME: What ? Please explain.
- FINN: In its proper sense, the word "Judaism" means "the religion of the Judeans". This religion existed between 516 BC and 70 AD while the second Temple stood in Jerusalem. According to the tenets of this religion, the only place where you can worship Yahweh is precisely this Temple and nowhere else. As a result, when the Temple was torn down by the Romans, the religion of the Judeans ceased to exist. Everything after that is one form or another of post-Judaism, in which the now impossible worship of Yahweh at the Temple is replaced by something else. For example, in Christianity, the Temple becomes Jesus Christ's body, i.e. the Church as a whole.
- ME: But what about people who call themselves "Jews" today ?
- FINN: They belong to the other main post-Judaic current that emerged after the destruction of the Temple. This current is mostly a continuation of the Pharisee party and it follows its own sacred text, the Talmud, which was written down at an even later date than the New Testament. There are two main post-Judaic groups alive today, the Christians, who follow the Torah (the old Testament) plus the New Testament and the so-called "Jews" who follow the Torah plus the Talmud. To be perfectly honest, the adherents of this second current should call themselves "Talmudians", not "Jews". The religion of the modern Talmudians is as distinct from second-Temple Judaism as Christianity is. Within genuine Temple-based Judaism, sacrifice was paramount and purity rules applied only to priests. In Talmudianism, these rules have been extended to everyone and have become the core of religious practice. This is quite far from the Erdiu-like spirit of original Judaism.
- ME: What about the Messiah ?
- FINN: In second-temple Judaism, The Messiah legend did not exist at all in the beginning and then developed as a fringe idea promoted by heterodox sects. The official priesthood of the Temple (the Sadducees) rejected it and the Pharisees were on the fence about it. It is a toxic idea. It is Nazism, to be fair. The Messiah is Hitler and Qumran's War Scroll is Mein Kampf.
- ME: How can you say that ? It is outrageous !
- FINN: Not if you look at it dispassionately. Germany committed suicide under the influence of Nazism in 1939-45 just like Judea committed suicide under the influence of Messianism in 66-70 AD, and again, even more so in 135 AD. Germans, according to Nazism were the "master race" destined to conquer the world, while the Jews were, according to Messianism, the "chosen people" destined to rule over all nations after defeating them all in battle. The expression "chosen people" had very different implications in original Judaism but Messianism reinterpreted it in this Nazi-like, world conquering way. Many modern historians have used words like "Messianic" or "apocalyptic" to characterize Nazism. These words were originally coined to describe Jewish heterodox sects of the late second temple period. The parallel between these sects and Nazism is an open secret of modern historical scholarship.
- ME: Well, OK. I had never thought about it this way ...
- FINN: Of course not. Saying such things is taboo in Academia today. That is why contemporary historians only use innuendos when broaching the subject. But the innuendos are there all right. Everyone knows.
- ME: I am now reading the binder about the apostle Paul's life. Does he turn out to be a Messianic Nazi too ?
- FINN: No, absolutely not. Actually, he found a way out of this temptation. But he definitely lived in a deeply troubled period. Judea in his time was like Weimar Germany. Everyone around him was spiritually sick and he was of course affected by this. The spiritual malaise of late second-temple Judaism is the direct cause of Christianity's emergence.
Paul had arrived in Jerusalem in 23 AD. Three years later, he was joined by his nephew Nathan. Nathan's mother was Paul's half-sister and much older than him. As a result, Nathan was only two years younger than Paul and they had grown up together as quasi-brothers in Tarsus. In Jerusalem, Nathan and Paul became inseparable as they worked, studied, and experienced the bustle of the tumultuous Jewish capital city together. In 28 AD, Paul was 22 years old and had lived for 5 years in Jerusalem. He had done well for himself. His studies completed, he had worked hard as a junior partner in his uncle's shop and amassed a little money from the commissions he received on the tent sales he made. He was now considering marriage and was corresponding with his mother back in Tarsus who had identified a handful of suitable prospective matches for him. The only cloud on the horizon was Nathan's behavior of late. After his arrival, Nathan had joined Paul on his escapades as an occasional Pharisee anti-sectarian vigilante. However, throughout the past year, he had grown increasingly reticent to participate in the rough and tumble expeditions, using various pretexts not to join. Finally, Paul had discovered that Nathan was in regular contact with an Essene cell, which he had been introduced to by their old teacher. Nathan was no longer studying with the said teacher but instead was regularly attending the assemblies of the heterodox conventicle.
Paul was busy with work at the shop and had done nothing at first, hoping that Nathan would realize that the sectarians' doctrines were folly and blasphemy. But Nathan had continued to attend their gatheings and now, on the 14th of Tishrei 339 A.G. (20th of September 28 AD), the day before Sukkot, Paul had decided to confront him. They met at the pool of Siloam, where they both often went for a swim at dusk after the long dusty and sweaty day in the old city. Paul did not mince his words:
- PAUL: I have heard that you have been associating with the Minim these last few months. What has got into you ?
- NATHAN: Who told you that ?
- PAUL: It does not matter who told me. Do you deny it ?
- NATHAN: No. I do attend the assemblies of the Yahad. You should come one day. The sons of light are the only righteous ones left in Israel today.
- PAUL: What nonsense is that ? We all follow the Law of Moses. Our Rabbis are the best at explaining the Torah.
- NATHAN: Really ?! what about the Eruvs and the Prosbuls that your so-called Rabbis are inventing every day to circumvent God's commandments. Do you think they can swindle HaShem like that with impunity for ever ?
- PAUL: I am no expert in the Law. But I know that those who are have the utmost respect for the commandments of the Almighty.
- NATHAN: You are a fool Paul, or maybe you do not want to see ? HaShem ordered that nothing can be carried in or out of a house on the Shabbat. So, what did our founts of wisdom decree ? That if you surround a whole block of houses with nothing more than a flimsy thread, it counts a single house. Do you remember how we always used to bring food from Aunt Rachel's house on the Shabbat ? We were supposedly allowed to do that because the whole Jewish quarter in Tarsus was surrounded by such a thread. That is what they call an Eruv.
- PAUL: Yes, I remember. But I am sure this regulation must be mentioned in the Torah somewhere.
- NATHAN: It is not ! The Torah only mentions plain ordinary houses regarding the Shabat. This Eruv business has been invented out of whole cloth by our so-called interpreters of the Law. They say it comes from the "Oral Torah" revealed to Moses and transmitted by word of mouth within the Levites' families until now. How convenient ! Oral Torah my ass. HaShem gave his Commandments to Moses in writing for a reason. He knew that the sons of Israel would become sinners down the line and make up laws that He did not decree. The Prosbul is even worse. Have you heard of it ?
- PAUL: No, I do not think so.
- NATHAN: Do you remember the loan our uncle made to this poor shepherd's family last year ? Those who had lost half of their sheep in a flood ?
- PAUL: Yes, I remember.
- NATHAN: Well the term for this loan is three years, starting last year, but this year is a Sabbatical year, where all debts are supposed to be cancelled according to HaSham's command. So, is our dear uncle's loan cancelled ? Not at all, because he went to the scribes and they made the loan a so-called Prosbul that is not cancelled on the next Sabbatical year on account of some legal wizardry. Did HaShem allow this kind of thing in the Torah ? Of course not. Once again, this is supposed to come from the ever convenient "Oral" Torah that they can expand as they wish. By the way, you know full well why our uncle made this loan, right ? He fully expects the Shepherd to default on it when it comes due next year so that he can seize what is left of his flock at a price well below market.
- PAUL: Nathan, I think you are sticking your nose in matters that you do not understand. You are 20 years old, for HaShem's sake. Don't you think the elders know better ?
- NATHAN: Don't use the Name in vain ! HaShem has revealed the Law in writing, so that everyone, young and old, can read it and understand. Do you think that older men are less sinful that the young ones ? They are just better at hiding their sins behind cleverly crafted words. That is all. Have you forgotten who we are, Paul ? We are HaShem's chosen people, not just any nation of sinners. We have a purpose, that HaShem is about to reveal soon. We are going to be seated on thrones and judge the world. Or at least those of us who are faithful to the New Covenant and follow HaShem's elect when he comes to defeat the armies of the nations.
- PAUL: What "New Covenant" are you talking about ? That's not in the Torah either, Nathan, and you know it. There are indeed a few obscure prophecies about the restoration in the line of David in several of the prophets. But they never spoke of thrones on which we would sit and even less of conquering the world. Doesn't HaShem say "vengeance is mine, I shall repay" ? (Deut. 32:35) Why would He need us to conquer the world ? If He wanted to destroy the armies of the nations he would just say "be destroyed" and they would be. Our rabbi warned us against these legends on the last Shabbat. These stories are the ravings of madmen.
- NATHAN: You are insulting the Teacher of Righteousness ! You must have been possessed by a spirit of uncleanness like the majority of this generation.
- PAUL: Hey Nathan, hold your horses, in HaShem's name. How can you call me unclean ? You were born of my elder sister. Are you calling your own family unclean ?
- NATHAN: The Teacher warned us that even in our own families there would be adherents of Beliar in the last days. Your father and your whole family have been corrupted by the leaven of the Greeks. You desire to be friends with them even though they make fun of your circumcised penis. You grovel in the dirt at their feet and seek their approval. You are all followers of the Wicked Priest who, although a Maccabee, sold his inheritance for a cheap price so that he could be a friend of the Kittim.
- PAUL: Nathan ! What are you talking about ?! You sound like a crazy person.
- NATHAN: You are accursed. I do not want to have anything to do with you anymore !
Nathan picked up his clothes and ran away, leaving a flabbergasted Paul standing by the edge of the Pool of Siloam. On the way back to his uncle's house, Paul was mulling over the incident and wondering how so much venom could have entered his nephew's head in just a few months. Nathan had always been a fun-loving boy and never much interested in religion. Then, Paul remembered how sensitive Nathan had always been to the slightest hint of mockery. This made him think about the remark about Greeks mocking circumcision. "That's it", Paul thought, "some Greek boys must have been making fun of his dick". It then occurred to him that there were hardly any Greeks in Jerusalem; "the only Greek-speaking people here are Jews like us", he thought, "no one would ever make that kind of joke, for sure". Paul had to admit that he was unable to make sense of his Nephew's behavior.
A few days later, on the last day of Sukkot, Paul was suddenly woken up by his uncle in the middle of the night.
- PAUL: Uncle ! What is going on ?!
- PAUL'S UNCLE: Your nephew Nathan has gotten himself into some nasty business with a couple of zealot hotheads. They set up an ambush against a Roman cohort which was coming up here from Bethlehem. They managed to kill a couple of soldiers but then they were all caught by the squadron of Numidian cavalry which was riding with the cohort. Nathan was killed on the spot. Now the Temple guards and the Romans are searching all over town for the family members of the plotters. We must leave.
- PAUL: But where ?! Where shall we go ?
- PAUL'S UNCLE: We should not stay together. I am going to Damascus. You should go south to Avdat in Arabia. A cousin of my wife lives there. I will give you a note for him. Quick ! pack your things.
Paul and his uncle's family were able to sneak out of the city through a small gate whose guards they had generously bribed. They separated at a crossroad a mile outside of the city, Paul taking the road to the south while the rest of his uncle's party continued east. When morning came, Paul hid in an olive grove, not willing to be seen on the road in daylight. He purchased a little bread from some Bedouins who were camping nearby. Two days later, travelling only at night, he crossed the border into the Nabatean kingdom near Beersheba. At dawn on the third day, he reached Avdat and started looking for his uncle's wife's cousin. When he found the man's house, the meeting did not go as planned:
- THE COUSIN: I cannot shelter you here. The town is crawling with Roman informants. They will report you (and I) within mere days. Do you want to have all of us slaughtered ?!
- PAUL: Where shall I go then ?
- THE COUSIN: Go to the canyon of Ein Avdat, north of here. There are plenty of holy men there, living in caves. You can easily hide among them.
- PAUL: But what shall I tell these holy men ? Why should they accept my presence ?
- THE COUSIN: Tell them you want to be initiated in their wisdom. Make up something !
That said, Paul's uncle's wife's cousin shut the door of his house in Paul's face.
Ein Avdat was barely an hour's walk away from the town. At the mouth of the canyon stood a pool of fresh water fed by several springs. Groups of Bedouins, encamped nearby were watering their flocks at the pool. Further up the valley, several cave openings were visible at various heights along the steep limestone canyon walls. Several hundred ascetics of various creeds were living there. Some of them depended on alms brought by the town's folks in exchange for amulets, magic spells, and the like. Others made a living out of some small-scale craftsmanship like basket weaving or woodcarving.
The ascetics of Ein Avdat were not all Jews. In fact, not even a majority of them were. Avdat stood on the incense trade route that linked Yemen to the Mediterranean coast. Its markets were also visited regularly by merchants from Egypt, Judea and Syria. As a result, the town was open to all the spiritual currents of the Middle East and beyond. Among the holy men living in the canyon, some belonged to the Persian Zoroastrian tradition while others were members of various Greek philosophical schools. The numerous Indian Sramana movements were represented as well by a sizeable contingent of adepts, most of whom came from Alexandria or from the former Indo-Greek kingdoms of Afghanistan and Punjab. Among the Jewish ascetics of Ein Avdat, some hailed from the Egyptian Thearpeutae tradition while others were linked to the same Judean Essene movement which had just caused so much grief to Paul's family. However, for many members of the Ein Avdat community, religious boundaries had become blurred. Some of the most highly esteemed masters there had built for themselves and their students an eclectic doctrine from elements of various traditions.
For the moment, however, Paul was hardly interested in such matters. All he wanted was to find a place to lay low for a while. He approached a group of old long-haired men who were washing their clothes in one of the streams that fed the pool at the mouth of the canyon. He asked them, in Greek, if they took strangers as pupils. One of the men, a tall dark-skinned wiry fellow with a long grey beard, replied in a heavily Egyptian-accented Greek, asking him whether he had a trade to support himself. Paul had not thought of that, but he replied that he could sow and repair tents, a skill he had had to learn in his uncle's shop. The man was apparently satisfied with Paul's answer. He introduced himself as Onofrios, born in Southern Egypt within the Jewish mercenary community that had settled on the Island of Elephantine in Achaemenid times. His parents had given him a Jewish name at birth, Haggai, but like most of the Coptic-speaking Southern Egyptian Jews, he had also been given a local Egyptian name, “Onofrios”, under which he was most commonly known (and which would later be borne by a famous Christian hermit). The Jewish community of Elephantine was not considered fully orthodox by Judean Jews, mostly because they had their own local temple of Yahweh and never came to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice. However, despite this particularity, their practices in other matters did not differ much from standard Judaism. They read the same version of the Torah and celebrated the same festivals. While still in his youth, Onofrios had travelled north to lower Egypt where he had joined a group of cenobitic Therapeutae ascetics with whom he had lived for thirty years. Eventually, he had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with three companions 6 years prior to Paul's arrival in Ein Avdat. He had finally settled in the Canyon with his three fellow monks on the way back.
That night, Paul sent a boy in town, with some of the money left from his savings, to buy the kit he would need for his new-found activity; several long and curved iron needles, a good length of hemp cord to be used as thread, as well as some bitumen and tallow for waterproofing. Onofrios showed him a flat rock under a white Poplar tree, a short distance away from the cave that served as his cell, where Paul could spread his reed mat and sleep. Thus started the Apostle Paul's stay in Arabia.
Finn was passing in front of me with a stack of binders in his arms. I asked him:
- ME: Hey Finn, can I ask you a question ?
- FINN: Shoot.
- ME: What is your take on this idea that the Messiah legend is, as they say, "un-Jewish" ? I thought that waiting for the Messiah was like the core of Judaism.
- FINN: Well, in modern Judaism, it is central, yes, but what is called "Judaism" today is largely a misnomer. Contemporary Judaism is just as post-Jewish as Christianity.
- ME: What ? Please explain.
- FINN: In its proper sense, the word "Judaism" means "the religion of the Judeans". This religion existed between 516 BC and 70 AD while the second Temple stood in Jerusalem. According to the tenets of this religion, the only place where you can worship Yahweh is precisely this Temple and nowhere else. As a result, when the Temple was torn down by the Romans, the religion of the Judeans ceased to exist. Everything after that is one form or another of post-Judaism, in which the now impossible worship of Yahweh at the Temple is replaced by something else. For example, in Christianity, the Temple becomes Jesus Christ's body, i.e. the Church as a whole.
- ME: But what about people who call themselves "Jews" today ?
- FINN: They belong to the other main post-Judaic current that emerged after the destruction of the Temple. This current is mostly a continuation of the Pharisee party and it follows its own sacred text, the Talmud, which was written down at an even later date than the New Testament. There are two main post-Judaic groups alive today, the Christians, who follow the Torah (the old Testament) plus the New Testament and the so-called "Jews" who follow the Torah plus the Talmud. To be perfectly honest, the adherents of this second current should call themselves "Talmudians", not "Jews". The religion of the modern Talmudians is as distinct from second-Temple Judaism as Christianity is. Within genuine Temple-based Judaism, sacrifice was paramount and purity rules applied only to priests. In Talmudianism, these rules have been extended to everyone and have become the core of religious practice. This is quite far from the Erdiu-like spirit of original Judaism.
- ME: What about the Messiah ?
- FINN: In second-temple Judaism, The Messiah legend did not exist at all in the beginning and then developed as a fringe idea promoted by heterodox sects. The official priesthood of the Temple (the Sadducees) rejected it and the Pharisees were on the fence about it. It is a toxic idea. It is Nazism, to be fair. The Messiah is Hitler and Qumran's War Scroll is Mein Kampf.
- ME: How can you say that ? It is outrageous !
- FINN: Not if you look at it dispassionately. Germany committed suicide under the influence of Nazism in 1939-45 just like Judea committed suicide under the influence of Messianism in 66-70 AD, and again, even more so in 135 AD. Germans, according to Nazism were the "master race" destined to conquer the world, while the Jews were, according to Messianism, the "chosen people" destined to rule over all nations after defeating them all in battle. The expression "chosen people" had very different implications in original Judaism but Messianism reinterpreted it in this Nazi-like, world conquering way. Many modern historians have used words like "Messianic" or "apocalyptic" to characterize Nazism. These words were originally coined to describe Jewish heterodox sects of the late second temple period. The parallel between these sects and Nazism is an open secret of modern historical scholarship.
- ME: Well, OK. I had never thought about it this way ...
- FINN: Of course not. Saying such things is taboo in Academia today. That is why contemporary historians only use innuendos when broaching the subject. But the innuendos are there all right. Everyone knows.
- ME: I am now reading the binder about the apostle Paul's life. Does he turn out to be a Messianic Nazi too ?
- FINN: No, absolutely not. Actually, he found a way out of this temptation. But he definitely lived in a deeply troubled period. Judea in his time was like Weimar Germany. Everyone around him was spiritually sick and he was of course affected by this. The spiritual malaise of late second-temple Judaism is the direct cause of Christianity's emergence.
Paul had arrived in Jerusalem in 23 AD. Three years later, he was joined by his nephew Nathan. Nathan's mother was Paul's half-sister and much older than him. As a result, Nathan was only two years younger than Paul and they had grown up together as quasi-brothers in Tarsus. In Jerusalem, Nathan and Paul became inseparable as they worked, studied, and experienced the bustle of the tumultuous Jewish capital city together. In 28 AD, Paul was 22 years old and had lived for 5 years in Jerusalem. He had done well for himself. His studies completed, he had worked hard as a junior partner in his uncle's shop and amassed a little money from the commissions he received on the tent sales he made. He was now considering marriage and was corresponding with his mother back in Tarsus who had identified a handful of suitable prospective matches for him. The only cloud on the horizon was Nathan's behavior of late. After his arrival, Nathan had joined Paul on his escapades as an occasional Pharisee anti-sectarian vigilante. However, throughout the past year, he had grown increasingly reticent to participate in the rough and tumble expeditions, using various pretexts not to join. Finally, Paul had discovered that Nathan was in regular contact with an Essene cell, which he had been introduced to by their old teacher. Nathan was no longer studying with the said teacher but instead was regularly attending the assemblies of the heterodox conventicle.
Paul was busy with work at the shop and had done nothing at first, hoping that Nathan would realize that the sectarians' doctrines were folly and blasphemy. But Nathan had continued to attend their gatheings and now, on the 14th of Tishrei 339 A.G. (20th of September 28 AD), the day before Sukkot, Paul had decided to confront him. They met at the pool of Siloam, where they both often went for a swim at dusk after the long dusty and sweaty day in the old city. Paul did not mince his words:
- PAUL: I have heard that you have been associating with the Minim these last few months. What has got into you ?
- NATHAN: Who told you that ?
- PAUL: It does not matter who told me. Do you deny it ?
- NATHAN: No. I do attend the assemblies of the Yahad. You should come one day. The sons of light are the only righteous ones left in Israel today.
- PAUL: What nonsense is that ? We all follow the Law of Moses. Our Rabbis are the best at explaining the Torah.
- NATHAN: Really ?! what about the Eruvs and the Prosbuls that your so-called Rabbis are inventing every day to circumvent God's commandments. Do you think they can swindle HaShem like that with impunity for ever ?
- PAUL: I am no expert in the Law. But I know that those who are have the utmost respect for the commandments of the Almighty.
- NATHAN: You are a fool Paul, or maybe you do not want to see ? HaShem ordered that nothing can be carried in or out of a house on the Shabbat. So, what did our founts of wisdom decree ? That if you surround a whole block of houses with nothing more than a flimsy thread, it counts a single house. Do you remember how we always used to bring food from Aunt Rachel's house on the Shabbat ? We were supposedly allowed to do that because the whole Jewish quarter in Tarsus was surrounded by such a thread. That is what they call an Eruv.
- PAUL: Yes, I remember. But I am sure this regulation must be mentioned in the Torah somewhere.
- NATHAN: It is not ! The Torah only mentions plain ordinary houses regarding the Shabat. This Eruv business has been invented out of whole cloth by our so-called interpreters of the Law. They say it comes from the "Oral Torah" revealed to Moses and transmitted by word of mouth within the Levites' families until now. How convenient ! Oral Torah my ass. HaShem gave his Commandments to Moses in writing for a reason. He knew that the sons of Israel would become sinners down the line and make up laws that He did not decree. The Prosbul is even worse. Have you heard of it ?
- PAUL: No, I do not think so.
- NATHAN: Do you remember the loan our uncle made to this poor shepherd's family last year ? Those who had lost half of their sheep in a flood ?
- PAUL: Yes, I remember.
- NATHAN: Well the term for this loan is three years, starting last year, but this year is a Sabbatical year, where all debts are supposed to be cancelled according to HaSham's command. So, is our dear uncle's loan cancelled ? Not at all, because he went to the scribes and they made the loan a so-called Prosbul that is not cancelled on the next Sabbatical year on account of some legal wizardry. Did HaShem allow this kind of thing in the Torah ? Of course not. Once again, this is supposed to come from the ever convenient "Oral" Torah that they can expand as they wish. By the way, you know full well why our uncle made this loan, right ? He fully expects the Shepherd to default on it when it comes due next year so that he can seize what is left of his flock at a price well below market.
- PAUL: Nathan, I think you are sticking your nose in matters that you do not understand. You are 20 years old, for HaShem's sake. Don't you think the elders know better ?
- NATHAN: Don't use the Name in vain ! HaShem has revealed the Law in writing, so that everyone, young and old, can read it and understand. Do you think that older men are less sinful that the young ones ? They are just better at hiding their sins behind cleverly crafted words. That is all. Have you forgotten who we are, Paul ? We are HaShem's chosen people, not just any nation of sinners. We have a purpose, that HaShem is about to reveal soon. We are going to be seated on thrones and judge the world. Or at least those of us who are faithful to the New Covenant and follow HaShem's elect when he comes to defeat the armies of the nations.
- PAUL: What "New Covenant" are you talking about ? That's not in the Torah either, Nathan, and you know it. There are indeed a few obscure prophecies about the restoration in the line of David in several of the prophets. But they never spoke of thrones on which we would sit and even less of conquering the world. Doesn't HaShem say "vengeance is mine, I shall repay" ? (Deut. 32:35) Why would He need us to conquer the world ? If He wanted to destroy the armies of the nations he would just say "be destroyed" and they would be. Our rabbi warned us against these legends on the last Shabbat. These stories are the ravings of madmen.
- NATHAN: You are insulting the Teacher of Righteousness ! You must have been possessed by a spirit of uncleanness like the majority of this generation.
- PAUL: Hey Nathan, hold your horses, in HaShem's name. How can you call me unclean ? You were born of my elder sister. Are you calling your own family unclean ?
- NATHAN: The Teacher warned us that even in our own families there would be adherents of Beliar in the last days. Your father and your whole family have been corrupted by the leaven of the Greeks. You desire to be friends with them even though they make fun of your circumcised penis. You grovel in the dirt at their feet and seek their approval. You are all followers of the Wicked Priest who, although a Maccabee, sold his inheritance for a cheap price so that he could be a friend of the Kittim.
- PAUL: Nathan ! What are you talking about ?! You sound like a crazy person.
- NATHAN: You are accursed. I do not want to have anything to do with you anymore !
Nathan picked up his clothes and ran away, leaving a flabbergasted Paul standing by the edge of the Pool of Siloam. On the way back to his uncle's house, Paul was mulling over the incident and wondering how so much venom could have entered his nephew's head in just a few months. Nathan had always been a fun-loving boy and never much interested in religion. Then, Paul remembered how sensitive Nathan had always been to the slightest hint of mockery. This made him think about the remark about Greeks mocking circumcision. "That's it", Paul thought, "some Greek boys must have been making fun of his dick". It then occurred to him that there were hardly any Greeks in Jerusalem; "the only Greek-speaking people here are Jews like us", he thought, "no one would ever make that kind of joke, for sure". Paul had to admit that he was unable to make sense of his Nephew's behavior.
A few days later, on the last day of Sukkot, Paul was suddenly woken up by his uncle in the middle of the night.
- PAUL: Uncle ! What is going on ?!
- PAUL'S UNCLE: Your nephew Nathan has gotten himself into some nasty business with a couple of zealot hotheads. They set up an ambush against a Roman cohort which was coming up here from Bethlehem. They managed to kill a couple of soldiers but then they were all caught by the squadron of Numidian cavalry which was riding with the cohort. Nathan was killed on the spot. Now the Temple guards and the Romans are searching all over town for the family members of the plotters. We must leave.
- PAUL: But where ?! Where shall we go ?
- PAUL'S UNCLE: We should not stay together. I am going to Damascus. You should go south to Avdat in Arabia. A cousin of my wife lives there. I will give you a note for him. Quick ! pack your things.
Paul and his uncle's family were able to sneak out of the city through a small gate whose guards they had generously bribed. They separated at a crossroad a mile outside of the city, Paul taking the road to the south while the rest of his uncle's party continued east. When morning came, Paul hid in an olive grove, not willing to be seen on the road in daylight. He purchased a little bread from some Bedouins who were camping nearby. Two days later, travelling only at night, he crossed the border into the Nabatean kingdom near Beersheba. At dawn on the third day, he reached Avdat and started looking for his uncle's wife's cousin. When he found the man's house, the meeting did not go as planned:
- THE COUSIN: I cannot shelter you here. The town is crawling with Roman informants. They will report you (and I) within mere days. Do you want to have all of us slaughtered ?!
- PAUL: Where shall I go then ?
- THE COUSIN: Go to the canyon of Ein Avdat, north of here. There are plenty of holy men there, living in caves. You can easily hide among them.
- PAUL: But what shall I tell these holy men ? Why should they accept my presence ?
- THE COUSIN: Tell them you want to be initiated in their wisdom. Make up something !
That said, Paul's uncle's wife's cousin shut the door of his house in Paul's face.
Ein Avdat was barely an hour's walk away from the town. At the mouth of the canyon stood a pool of fresh water fed by several springs. Groups of Bedouins, encamped nearby were watering their flocks at the pool. Further up the valley, several cave openings were visible at various heights along the steep limestone canyon walls. Several hundred ascetics of various creeds were living there. Some of them depended on alms brought by the town's folks in exchange for amulets, magic spells, and the like. Others made a living out of some small-scale craftsmanship like basket weaving or woodcarving.
The ascetics of Ein Avdat were not all Jews. In fact, not even a majority of them were. Avdat stood on the incense trade route that linked Yemen to the Mediterranean coast. Its markets were also visited regularly by merchants from Egypt, Judea and Syria. As a result, the town was open to all the spiritual currents of the Middle East and beyond. Among the holy men living in the canyon, some belonged to the Persian Zoroastrian tradition while others were members of various Greek philosophical schools. The numerous Indian Sramana movements were represented as well by a sizeable contingent of adepts, most of whom came from Alexandria or from the former Indo-Greek kingdoms of Afghanistan and Punjab. Among the Jewish ascetics of Ein Avdat, some hailed from the Egyptian Thearpeutae tradition while others were linked to the same Judean Essene movement which had just caused so much grief to Paul's family. However, for many members of the Ein Avdat community, religious boundaries had become blurred. Some of the most highly esteemed masters there had built for themselves and their students an eclectic doctrine from elements of various traditions.
For the moment, however, Paul was hardly interested in such matters. All he wanted was to find a place to lay low for a while. He approached a group of old long-haired men who were washing their clothes in one of the streams that fed the pool at the mouth of the canyon. He asked them, in Greek, if they took strangers as pupils. One of the men, a tall dark-skinned wiry fellow with a long grey beard, replied in a heavily Egyptian-accented Greek, asking him whether he had a trade to support himself. Paul had not thought of that, but he replied that he could sow and repair tents, a skill he had had to learn in his uncle's shop. The man was apparently satisfied with Paul's answer. He introduced himself as Onofrios, born in Southern Egypt within the Jewish mercenary community that had settled on the Island of Elephantine in Achaemenid times. His parents had given him a Jewish name at birth, Haggai, but like most of the Coptic-speaking Southern Egyptian Jews, he had also been given a local Egyptian name, “Onofrios”, under which he was most commonly known (and which would later be borne by a famous Christian hermit). The Jewish community of Elephantine was not considered fully orthodox by Judean Jews, mostly because they had their own local temple of Yahweh and never came to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice. However, despite this particularity, their practices in other matters did not differ much from standard Judaism. They read the same version of the Torah and celebrated the same festivals. While still in his youth, Onofrios had travelled north to lower Egypt where he had joined a group of cenobitic Therapeutae ascetics with whom he had lived for thirty years. Eventually, he had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with three companions 6 years prior to Paul's arrival in Ein Avdat. He had finally settled in the Canyon with his three fellow monks on the way back.
That night, Paul sent a boy in town, with some of the money left from his savings, to buy the kit he would need for his new-found activity; several long and curved iron needles, a good length of hemp cord to be used as thread, as well as some bitumen and tallow for waterproofing. Onofrios showed him a flat rock under a white Poplar tree, a short distance away from the cave that served as his cell, where Paul could spread his reed mat and sleep. Thus started the Apostle Paul's stay in Arabia.
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 3 of 6
In February of 1951, a meeting of the boffin team was held to review the early results of the pilot team. Those were encouraging, as we have seen. Paul was a clearly identifiable person, with a personal trajectory which could shed some light on how Christianity had emerged from the spiritual background of the first century Middle-East. His stay among the holy men of Ein Avdat, which was to last a little over four years, was obviously going to have a strong influence on him. It was therefore decided to put the entire team to work on the different thought currents represented in the Canyon in order to better understand their origins, their history and their spread within the peoples of the region. Three months later, this effort resulted in the following report:
In May of 1951, the Philadelphia team met, just after the publication of the Bose-Von Soden report, and set out to plan the rest of the investigations regarding the apostle Paul. It was decided to divide his life into chronological segments, each of which would be observed by a dedicated task group according to the following Schedule:
• TG-1: [[26]] 32-33 A.D. Paul's stay in Damascus. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: [[27]] 33-34 A.D. First stay in Antioch; meeting with Peter. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
• TG-3: [[28]] 34-36 A.D. Tarsus, Cyprus, Rhodes. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-4: [[30]] 36-39 A.D. Ephesus, Pergamon, Nicomedia, Ancyra. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-5: [[33]] 39-41 A.D. Miletos, Thessalonica, Philippi, Antioch. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-6: [[35]] 41 A.D. Paul's visit to Jerusalem; meeting with Peter and James. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-7: [[35]] 41-46 A.D. Ancyra, Tarsus, Antioch. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: D. de Rougemont.
• TG-8: [[40]] 46-48 A.D. Corinth, Delphi, Athens, Amphipolis, Philippi. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: [[42]] 48-51 A.D. Crete, Cyrene, Rhodes, Cyprus, Antioch. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-10: [[45]] 51-57 A.D. Antioch, Damascus. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: [[51]] 57-61 A.D. Cyprus, Crete, Syracuse, Rhegium, death in Tarentum [[55]]. Group leader: D. de Rougemont. Deputy: A. Ulam.
Each task group was to ascertain the details of Paul's life during its own period of observation as well as study the various social circles the apostle was in contact with and the impact his preaching had on them. Special care was to be paid to the traces left by Paul in each location and the possible links these might have had with the subsequent history of Christianity.
In the month of Adar 343 A.G. (March 32 AD) Paul decided to spend the coming New Year and the festival of Pesach with his uncle's family in Damascus. Four years had passed since the incident in which Paul's nephew Nathan had been involved and it was now largely forgotten. Unrest and general lawlessness were on the rise in Judea. Nathan and his little band of amateur insurgents paled in comparison with the far deadlier gangs of bandits [/i]cum[/i] rebel zealots who had become a serious thorn in the side of the Romans over the last few years. As the early investigations of the pilot team had shown, around 25 such individuals were crucified per year by the authorities in Jerusalem alone during this period.
Paul's uncle was naturally delighted to see his nephew again. They had kept in touch on an irregular basis through short notes routed through the cousin of Avdat, but it was the first time they were meeting face to face since that fateful day of Tishrei 339 A.G. (September 28 AD). Paul's uncle's circumstances in Damascus were much reduced in comparison to what they had been in Jerusalem. He had re-entered the tent trade in the Southern Syrian city but his network of relations was much less extensive there and business had been slow. He had been further hampered by the departure of his two sons, three years earlier, who were now active in the silk trade on the caravan routes between Roman Syria and Babylonia. Paul decided to stay a few months in Damascus and help his uncle at the shop so that he could gather the little money he needed for the trip he had planned to Tarsus in order to visit his parents. Beyond this trip, Paul had no specific personal plans. He had not decided whether he would return to Ein Avdat but there was no doubt in his mind that the rest of his life would be dedicated to spiritual pursuits. His former projects of marriage and of eventually setting up his own business seemed as remote as memories from another life. In the new ascetic parlance he had learned at Ein Avdat, he told himself that "the allure of the world and the enticements of the flesh" had no hold over him anymore.
Business at the shop being far from brisk, Paul had a lot of time on his hands. He used it to pursue the handful of contacts he had been given in the city by various Ein Avdat residents and visitors. Most of these contacts belonged to hard-line Essene sects with which over a third of Damascus' Jewish population had some kind of involvement. Such a high ratio was not surprising. After all, Damascus was the birthplace of the Essene movement. It is there that the entourage of the "Teacher of Righteousness" had sought refuge after their leader's execution in the early first century B.C.
Paul's interactions with the Yahad (the self-designation used by most Essene groups) did not go well. Most Yahad members were contentious and quick-tempered. They lived in constant fear of being outdone in purity and zeal by other individuals or groups within their own movement. To ward off this fear, they were constantly on the lookout for something they could use to condemn others before those could condemn them. Yahad assemblies were chiefly devoted to never-ending disputes over minute issues of ritual purity and ethics. These disputations were governed by debating rules which made them feel like imitation trials. In other words, they were legal-masturbation orgies, something Paul remembered having experienced in his native Pharisaic milieu, although not to the same extent.
With the new-found acuity that his training in Ein Avdat had given him, Paul was able to perceive the real motivations which lurked under the lofty facade of detachment cultivated in Essene circles. He could see how much craving there was for the approval of the crowd, despite the outward scorn for the opinion of "sinners". He could also sense the depths of despair and self-hatred into which any impression of having fallen short could suddenly throw Yahad members. The bitterness and rancor which resulted from all these poisonous attitudes could only be soothed by the endless rehashing of apocalyptic prophecies that each conventicle indulged in at every opportunity. The troops, the banners, the order of battle of the Messianic army, the imagined scenes of the carnage it would make of the nations; only these things could make Yahad members tolerably content.
After a few weeks of this, Paul was despairing of finding anyone in Damascus genuinely interested in mental purity. One night, he had a dream. He was taken up to the heavens, imagined in the usual Merkabah style, and an angel was addressing him:
- THE ANGEL: The Jews must be weaned off from their infatuation with the Messiah. This Messiah is not from God, it is an invention of Belial.
- PAUL: I know, but how to achieve this ? If one tells anybody that the Messiah (the one they believe in) does not exist, they will stone you before you can say anything else.
- THE ANGEL: You have to say that the Messiah dies, that the messiah is a failure. That way, the designs of Belial will be thwarted without having to uproot belief in the Messiah.
- PAUL: I do not see how to do even this. They are all so fond of this cursed warlike monster.
- THE ANGEL: God will show you a way. He will open a door for you.
Then Paul woke up. Two days later, one of the last contacts on Paul's list led him to yet another Essene group. This one had a slightly different set of beliefs. They considered that the Messiah had already come and was none other than the "Teacher of Righteousness" revered throughout the Essene movement. They envisioned his life on earth, over a century earlier, as the accomplishment of Isaiah's prophecies about the suffering servant. Eventually, this teacher-Messiah was supposed to return to the world of the living and complete his mission in the usual warlike fashion. Upon hearing this, Paul was immediately convinced that God had just opened for him the "door" promised in his dream. A week later, Paul had an opportunity to speak during an assembly of this group. He addressed the crowd thus:
[q]I bring you good news that HaShem has revealed to me in a dream. You are all saved already by the death of the Messiah. He took upon himself the sin of the world; all of it. HaShem made him a curse. As a result, when he died, sin died with him. He has been cleansed in death and he now sits at the right hand of HaShem in heaven. All who believe in him are baptized in his death and thus cleansed of sin too. When HaShem judges the dead and the living at the end of days, all those who have believed in the Messiah who died will be declared clean and will be allowed into the Garden.[q]
Naturally, Paul was thrown out of the building and told that he would be stoned if he showed up again. However, the following morning, while working at his uncle's shop, he was approached by a member of the group who told him that some at the assembly, including himself, had been moved by his speech. Paul was told by the man that, in Damascus, such talk would not meet with much success, but that he knew of a group in Antioch, which belonged to the same Essene branch, and where things might be different. The man who gave Paul this advice was a local Jew called Ananias. Someone bearing that name is mentioned in the Book of Acts in the passage relating Paul's stay in Damascus. However, the Biblical story has since been embellished beyond recognition.
That night, Paul packed his meager possessions and left the following morning for Antioch after telling his Uncle that he might come back but did not know when. The city on the Orontes was the third largest by population in the Roman Empire (after Rome and Alexandria) and by far the biggest Paul had ever seen. Like all major cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, Antioch was home to a large Jewish population and Paul had no trouble finding a place to stay. The day following his arrival, he went looking for the group of Essenes he had been told about by Ananias. There was no assembly on that day but Paul managed to locate one of the leading members of the group, a Cypriot Jew named Barnabas. Made circumspect by the incident at Damascus, Paul did not disclose any of his own opinions at first but asked Barnabas to tell him about the Antiochene group he belonged to.
The picture Barnabas painted was of an assembly riven by factional conflict. Initially, the group had been small and its membership exclusively Jewish. Then, they had been joined by a contingent of Hypsistarians who belonged to the Thracian expatriate community of Antioch. It was not uncommon for Jewish associations in Hellenistic cities to welcome the devotees of Theos Hypsistos at their assemblies. These quasi-monotheistic Greeks were called by Jews "friends of God", "God-fearing gentiles", and the like. In most cases, it was understood that Jews and Greeks in such mixed settings would remain separate and that the Greeks were not subject to Jewish Law. They could convert to Judaism if they wanted to but were not compelled to do so. However, in the group Baranbas belonged to, the idea that the "uncircumcised" could assemble with Jews had met with increasing resistance in recent years. In the 30s A.D., the extremist tendencies of the Essene movement were hardening. In Barnabas' Antiochene assembly, this had first given rise to grumblings about "pollution". Then, these grumblings had risen in intensity to the level of full-blown Philippics directed against those in the leadership who still supported the right of the "friends of God" to attend the weekly assembly. Barnabas was one of the leaders who had been attacked in such a way in recent months and he was obviously pained by the direction in which things had been moving. He told Paul that in his native Cyprus, he had attended synagogues for many years where God-fearing Greeks had always been welcome. He had initially been attracted by the rigor of the Essene movement, which contrasted favorably with the corruption and worldliness of the Jewish elites in Jerusalem, where he had lived for a while. However, he was distraught by the scorn and the vindictiveness which had become the hallmarks of the movement in recent years. For a long time, the Antiochene group had kept to the moderate side of the Essene spectrum, but it had recently been joined by an ever increasing flow of hardliners, which were now close to tipping the balance to the other end of that spectrum.
Upon hearing this, Paul thought to himself that God had just opened another door to him. He told Barnabas:
- PAUL: An angel of God has given me some good news in a dream and I believe that they are related to your situation.
- BARNABAS: What were you told ?
- PAUL: We Jews strive to follow the Law of Moses and to never stray from the path of the commandments contained therein. Yet we do sin at times, however hard we try not to. This is why HaShem gave us a High Priest so that he could sacrifice once a year to atone for our sins.
- BARNABAS: That is so, of course.
- PAUL: Yet the office of the High Priest has been defiled so often by wicked priests, in recent memory, that many are now thinking that the sacrifice has grown defective to the point that it has become incapable of atoning for our trespasses.
- BARNABAS: Yes, and this is why we are being told ever more vociferously that we have to strive for perfection by the extremists. You are not one of them, are you ?
- Paul: Not at all ! Quite the opposite. You believe that the Teacher of Righteousness who died under the Hasmoneans was the Messiah, do you not ?
- BARNABAS: Yes I do, may HaShem bless Him.
- PAUL: The good news that the Angel of HaShem gave me is that the Teacher, because he was indeed the Messiah, holds the key to everlasting salvation from sin and from HaShem's righteous anger at it.
- BARNABAS: How so ?
- PAUL: He told me that the Teacher's death was a sacrifice ordained by HaShem in order to atone for all sin, past, present and future; one sacrifice performed on the person of a sinless High Priest, once and for all. Everyone who believes in the Teacher as the Sacrificed Messiah is cleansed of all sin by a baptism not in water but in the death of the Teacher itself. Consequently, we do not need the yearly sacrifice performed by tainted priests anymore. We are declared righteous for the day of judgment by our faith in the Teacher's sacrifice.
- BARNABAS: But the teacher has to come back and defeat the nations before we can be saved.
- PAUL: Not so. His victory is already complete. Because the victory that matters is against Beliar, not against nations that HaShem can extinguish with one word of his mouth whenever he so wishes. Why would he need a son of man to do that ?
- BARNABAS: Hasn't this been prophesied ?
- PAUL: What has been prophesied, by Isaiah and others, is that the Messiah, the man of sorrows, would be victorious in the end. But the prophets never said against whom this victory would be won. What the angel of HaShem revealed to me is that his victory would be against Beliar himself, depriving him forever of the power of sin unto death. The nations are mere tools that HaShem uses to chastise us, as He did in the past. The stripes that we receive on our backs at the hands of the Kittim and others are for our benefit. They are meant to drive us to a form of despair pre-ordained by HaShem to leave us no option but to abandon all hope in our own strength and instead fall at His feet in complete submission. Only thus can we place all our faith in HaShem's Elect. When we do so, His victory is complete within our very soul and this is the only place where victory matters. When HaShem comes at the end of days to judge the living and the dead ...
- BARNABAS (interrupting): It is Messiah who will come to judge the living and the dead. He has been revived by HaShem after he died and he now sits at the right hand of the Almighty's throne.
- PAUL: Yes... er..., of course, you are right. When the Messiah comes to judge the living and the dead, those who have placed all their faith in Him will be declared sinless just as the Jews of old were declared sinless every year on the day of atonement as the result of the High Priest's sacrifice. Only this time, it will be forever.
- BARNABAS: And the angel of the Lord told you that there would be no battle against the Kittim ?
- PAUL: Not against them or anyone else. Did not HaShem say "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay" ? Does He need help from anyone to carry out his Will ?
Paul had guessed correctly that Barnabas was troubled and depressed enough to hear something new without rejecting it outright. After Paul's last sentence, he fell silent and kept staring at the floor in front of his feet. Paul suggested that they pray. Both covered their heads with their tallits and Paul said the following:
Barnabas remarked how different this prayer sounded from the ones he was used to. Paul told him he had learned it from his master (he used the word "Rabbi"), although he did not tell him anything about Ein Avdat and the extent of what he had discovered there. All this was too far from what Barnabas was used to and it would have sounded strange and threatening to him. Paul was glad that what he had said had not triggered an adverse reaction. He was not going to take any further risks today.
Two days later, Paul had another dream. This time, his was lead in the Heavens to "one like a son of man" (c.f. Daniel 7:13) whom he interpreted to be the Teacher of Righteousness-cum-Messiah he had told Barnabas about. This being told him:
- SON OF MAN: The things that you have learned from your masters in Ein Avdat cannot be disclosed to the believers. They were for your ears only because they are the secrets of HaShem, revealed to some like the Blessed Enoch in days of old, but not meant to be disclosed to the many.
- PAUL: Then, my Lord, what shall I say ?
- SON OF MAN: You shall speak in parables in order to lead believers gently towards salvation. If you speak too openly, you will only make Beliar's work easier.
- PAUL: Shall I speak of you, my Lord ?
- SON OF MAN: Yes, you may. What you have been telling to Barnabas so far is good, but do not reveal to him that what you are making him do is an exercise for the purpose of soul cleansing. Do not use words like "Yoga" or "Zugos". These words are correct but what they disclose is too much for the believers to bear.
- PAUL: What shall I say instead, my Lord ?
- SON OF MAN: You shall say that salvation is from the free grace of the Most High only. It is not the case, yet this is what my people need to hear. They will be saved by the exercises that you will teach them and the most important exercise that they shall perform is to deny that they are doing any exercises. They shall say that everything they receive on the road towards the full purity of the soul (which brings salvation) is from the Most High and not from their own efforts. They shall repeat that it is a free and undeserved gift. This way, they will not be puffed up with pride and the road will be made less burdensome to them.
- PAUL: As you say, my Lord. I will do as you command.
Naturally, neither this dream, nor the previous one Paul had had in Damascus, were recorded directly by the Philadelphia team. The device they were using did not have any mind-reading capability. What was observed, was Paul telling about these dreams to one of his younger disciples a short while before his death in 61 A.D. These accounts were not put in writing by the disciple in question but they became the starting point of a tradition which spread among Gnostic groups in the second century AD about "secret teachings" that Paul (and others) had received "from the Lord".
The dreams Paul was having reflected the soul-searching which the future Apostle was going through in this formative period. Paul understood that the plain language he had heard at Ein Avdat was unsuitable for most of his contemporaries. In particular, he rightfully perceived that the relativism of his second master Hippostratos was a self-defeating blind alley. Theistic mental cleansing techniques were founded on faith. How could one have faith in a Supreme Being who told different things to different people ? Isn't consistency in speech the prerequisite of credibility ? Of course, one could argue, as Hippostratos did, that God told everyone "what they needed to hear" and Paul had himself done some thinking along those lines, as his dreams attest. However, Paul correctly concluded that this kind of language would sound deceptive to most people and that it was thus a fatal mistake to use it. In order to be effective, theistic mental cleansing had to be promoted in the name of a single Supreme Being that would be known under a single name by everyone under the sun. In Paul's Greek-speaking world, this Supreme Being had to be called "Ho Theos", i.e. "The God" (implicitly: "The only God"). It is this idea that led Paul at a later stage to stop using the usual Jewish divine designation, "HaShem", in favor of "Ho Theos", which we shall render here as "God". As far as the details of his new, and still evolving, theology were concerned, Paul was not adverse to accepting input from others, as he had done during his first conversation with Barnabas regarding the identity of the End-times Judge. What mattered to Paul was the spiritual "Zugos", the mental exercises of purification, not the letter of the theological metaphors designed to inspire these exercises.
In February of 1951, a meeting of the boffin team was held to review the early results of the pilot team. Those were encouraging, as we have seen. Paul was a clearly identifiable person, with a personal trajectory which could shed some light on how Christianity had emerged from the spiritual background of the first century Middle-East. His stay among the holy men of Ein Avdat, which was to last a little over four years, was obviously going to have a strong influence on him. It was therefore decided to put the entire team to work on the different thought currents represented in the Canyon in order to better understand their origins, their history and their spread within the peoples of the region. Three months later, this effort resulted in the following report:
In May of 1951, the Philadelphia team met, just after the publication of the Bose-Von Soden report, and set out to plan the rest of the investigations regarding the apostle Paul. It was decided to divide his life into chronological segments, each of which would be observed by a dedicated task group according to the following Schedule:
• TG-1: [[26]] 32-33 A.D. Paul's stay in Damascus. Group leader: W. v. O. Quine. Deputy: J. Oppenheimer.
• TG-2: [[27]] 33-34 A.D. First stay in Antioch; meeting with Peter. Group leader: T. Kuhn. Deputy: S. N. Bose.
• TG-3: [[28]] 34-36 A.D. Tarsus, Cyprus, Rhodes. Group leader: J. Oppenheimer. Deputy: G. Dumézil.
• TG-4: [[30]] 36-39 A.D. Ephesus, Pergamon, Nicomedia, Ancyra. Group leader: J. Brady. Deputy: A. Schlesinger.
• TG-5: [[33]] 39-41 A.D. Miletos, Thessalonica, Philippi, Antioch. Group leader: W. v. Soden. Deputy: J. Brady.
• TG-6: [[35]] 41 A.D. Paul's visit to Jerusalem; meeting with Peter and James. Group leader: A. Ulam. Deputy: W. v. O. Quine.
• TG-7: [[35]] 41-46 A.D. Ancyra, Tarsus, Antioch. Group leader: B. Landsberger. Deputy: D. de Rougemont.
• TG-8: [[40]] 46-48 A.D. Corinth, Delphi, Athens, Amphipolis, Philippi. Group leader: G. Dumézil. Deputy: W. v. Soden.
• TG-9: [[42]] 48-51 A.D. Crete, Cyrene, Rhodes, Cyprus, Antioch. Group leader: S. N. Bose. Deputy: B. Landsberger.
• TG-10: [[45]] 51-57 A.D. Antioch, Damascus. Group leader: A. Schlesinger. Deputy: T. Kuhn.
• TG-11: [[51]] 57-61 A.D. Cyprus, Crete, Syracuse, Rhegium, death in Tarentum [[55]]. Group leader: D. de Rougemont. Deputy: A. Ulam.
Each task group was to ascertain the details of Paul's life during its own period of observation as well as study the various social circles the apostle was in contact with and the impact his preaching had on them. Special care was to be paid to the traces left by Paul in each location and the possible links these might have had with the subsequent history of Christianity.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
In the month of Adar 343 A.G. (March 32 AD) Paul decided to spend the coming New Year and the festival of Pesach with his uncle's family in Damascus. Four years had passed since the incident in which Paul's nephew Nathan had been involved and it was now largely forgotten. Unrest and general lawlessness were on the rise in Judea. Nathan and his little band of amateur insurgents paled in comparison with the far deadlier gangs of bandits [/i]cum[/i] rebel zealots who had become a serious thorn in the side of the Romans over the last few years. As the early investigations of the pilot team had shown, around 25 such individuals were crucified per year by the authorities in Jerusalem alone during this period.
Paul's uncle was naturally delighted to see his nephew again. They had kept in touch on an irregular basis through short notes routed through the cousin of Avdat, but it was the first time they were meeting face to face since that fateful day of Tishrei 339 A.G. (September 28 AD). Paul's uncle's circumstances in Damascus were much reduced in comparison to what they had been in Jerusalem. He had re-entered the tent trade in the Southern Syrian city but his network of relations was much less extensive there and business had been slow. He had been further hampered by the departure of his two sons, three years earlier, who were now active in the silk trade on the caravan routes between Roman Syria and Babylonia. Paul decided to stay a few months in Damascus and help his uncle at the shop so that he could gather the little money he needed for the trip he had planned to Tarsus in order to visit his parents. Beyond this trip, Paul had no specific personal plans. He had not decided whether he would return to Ein Avdat but there was no doubt in his mind that the rest of his life would be dedicated to spiritual pursuits. His former projects of marriage and of eventually setting up his own business seemed as remote as memories from another life. In the new ascetic parlance he had learned at Ein Avdat, he told himself that "the allure of the world and the enticements of the flesh" had no hold over him anymore.
Business at the shop being far from brisk, Paul had a lot of time on his hands. He used it to pursue the handful of contacts he had been given in the city by various Ein Avdat residents and visitors. Most of these contacts belonged to hard-line Essene sects with which over a third of Damascus' Jewish population had some kind of involvement. Such a high ratio was not surprising. After all, Damascus was the birthplace of the Essene movement. It is there that the entourage of the "Teacher of Righteousness" had sought refuge after their leader's execution in the early first century B.C.
Paul's interactions with the Yahad (the self-designation used by most Essene groups) did not go well. Most Yahad members were contentious and quick-tempered. They lived in constant fear of being outdone in purity and zeal by other individuals or groups within their own movement. To ward off this fear, they were constantly on the lookout for something they could use to condemn others before those could condemn them. Yahad assemblies were chiefly devoted to never-ending disputes over minute issues of ritual purity and ethics. These disputations were governed by debating rules which made them feel like imitation trials. In other words, they were legal-masturbation orgies, something Paul remembered having experienced in his native Pharisaic milieu, although not to the same extent.
With the new-found acuity that his training in Ein Avdat had given him, Paul was able to perceive the real motivations which lurked under the lofty facade of detachment cultivated in Essene circles. He could see how much craving there was for the approval of the crowd, despite the outward scorn for the opinion of "sinners". He could also sense the depths of despair and self-hatred into which any impression of having fallen short could suddenly throw Yahad members. The bitterness and rancor which resulted from all these poisonous attitudes could only be soothed by the endless rehashing of apocalyptic prophecies that each conventicle indulged in at every opportunity. The troops, the banners, the order of battle of the Messianic army, the imagined scenes of the carnage it would make of the nations; only these things could make Yahad members tolerably content.
After a few weeks of this, Paul was despairing of finding anyone in Damascus genuinely interested in mental purity. One night, he had a dream. He was taken up to the heavens, imagined in the usual Merkabah style, and an angel was addressing him:
- THE ANGEL: The Jews must be weaned off from their infatuation with the Messiah. This Messiah is not from God, it is an invention of Belial.
- PAUL: I know, but how to achieve this ? If one tells anybody that the Messiah (the one they believe in) does not exist, they will stone you before you can say anything else.
- THE ANGEL: You have to say that the Messiah dies, that the messiah is a failure. That way, the designs of Belial will be thwarted without having to uproot belief in the Messiah.
- PAUL: I do not see how to do even this. They are all so fond of this cursed warlike monster.
- THE ANGEL: God will show you a way. He will open a door for you.
Then Paul woke up. Two days later, one of the last contacts on Paul's list led him to yet another Essene group. This one had a slightly different set of beliefs. They considered that the Messiah had already come and was none other than the "Teacher of Righteousness" revered throughout the Essene movement. They envisioned his life on earth, over a century earlier, as the accomplishment of Isaiah's prophecies about the suffering servant. Eventually, this teacher-Messiah was supposed to return to the world of the living and complete his mission in the usual warlike fashion. Upon hearing this, Paul was immediately convinced that God had just opened for him the "door" promised in his dream. A week later, Paul had an opportunity to speak during an assembly of this group. He addressed the crowd thus:
[q]I bring you good news that HaShem has revealed to me in a dream. You are all saved already by the death of the Messiah. He took upon himself the sin of the world; all of it. HaShem made him a curse. As a result, when he died, sin died with him. He has been cleansed in death and he now sits at the right hand of HaShem in heaven. All who believe in him are baptized in his death and thus cleansed of sin too. When HaShem judges the dead and the living at the end of days, all those who have believed in the Messiah who died will be declared clean and will be allowed into the Garden.[q]
Naturally, Paul was thrown out of the building and told that he would be stoned if he showed up again. However, the following morning, while working at his uncle's shop, he was approached by a member of the group who told him that some at the assembly, including himself, had been moved by his speech. Paul was told by the man that, in Damascus, such talk would not meet with much success, but that he knew of a group in Antioch, which belonged to the same Essene branch, and where things might be different. The man who gave Paul this advice was a local Jew called Ananias. Someone bearing that name is mentioned in the Book of Acts in the passage relating Paul's stay in Damascus. However, the Biblical story has since been embellished beyond recognition.
That night, Paul packed his meager possessions and left the following morning for Antioch after telling his Uncle that he might come back but did not know when. The city on the Orontes was the third largest by population in the Roman Empire (after Rome and Alexandria) and by far the biggest Paul had ever seen. Like all major cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, Antioch was home to a large Jewish population and Paul had no trouble finding a place to stay. The day following his arrival, he went looking for the group of Essenes he had been told about by Ananias. There was no assembly on that day but Paul managed to locate one of the leading members of the group, a Cypriot Jew named Barnabas. Made circumspect by the incident at Damascus, Paul did not disclose any of his own opinions at first but asked Barnabas to tell him about the Antiochene group he belonged to.
The picture Barnabas painted was of an assembly riven by factional conflict. Initially, the group had been small and its membership exclusively Jewish. Then, they had been joined by a contingent of Hypsistarians who belonged to the Thracian expatriate community of Antioch. It was not uncommon for Jewish associations in Hellenistic cities to welcome the devotees of Theos Hypsistos at their assemblies. These quasi-monotheistic Greeks were called by Jews "friends of God", "God-fearing gentiles", and the like. In most cases, it was understood that Jews and Greeks in such mixed settings would remain separate and that the Greeks were not subject to Jewish Law. They could convert to Judaism if they wanted to but were not compelled to do so. However, in the group Baranbas belonged to, the idea that the "uncircumcised" could assemble with Jews had met with increasing resistance in recent years. In the 30s A.D., the extremist tendencies of the Essene movement were hardening. In Barnabas' Antiochene assembly, this had first given rise to grumblings about "pollution". Then, these grumblings had risen in intensity to the level of full-blown Philippics directed against those in the leadership who still supported the right of the "friends of God" to attend the weekly assembly. Barnabas was one of the leaders who had been attacked in such a way in recent months and he was obviously pained by the direction in which things had been moving. He told Paul that in his native Cyprus, he had attended synagogues for many years where God-fearing Greeks had always been welcome. He had initially been attracted by the rigor of the Essene movement, which contrasted favorably with the corruption and worldliness of the Jewish elites in Jerusalem, where he had lived for a while. However, he was distraught by the scorn and the vindictiveness which had become the hallmarks of the movement in recent years. For a long time, the Antiochene group had kept to the moderate side of the Essene spectrum, but it had recently been joined by an ever increasing flow of hardliners, which were now close to tipping the balance to the other end of that spectrum.
Upon hearing this, Paul thought to himself that God had just opened another door to him. He told Barnabas:
- PAUL: An angel of God has given me some good news in a dream and I believe that they are related to your situation.
- BARNABAS: What were you told ?
- PAUL: We Jews strive to follow the Law of Moses and to never stray from the path of the commandments contained therein. Yet we do sin at times, however hard we try not to. This is why HaShem gave us a High Priest so that he could sacrifice once a year to atone for our sins.
- BARNABAS: That is so, of course.
- PAUL: Yet the office of the High Priest has been defiled so often by wicked priests, in recent memory, that many are now thinking that the sacrifice has grown defective to the point that it has become incapable of atoning for our trespasses.
- BARNABAS: Yes, and this is why we are being told ever more vociferously that we have to strive for perfection by the extremists. You are not one of them, are you ?
- Paul: Not at all ! Quite the opposite. You believe that the Teacher of Righteousness who died under the Hasmoneans was the Messiah, do you not ?
- BARNABAS: Yes I do, may HaShem bless Him.
- PAUL: The good news that the Angel of HaShem gave me is that the Teacher, because he was indeed the Messiah, holds the key to everlasting salvation from sin and from HaShem's righteous anger at it.
- BARNABAS: How so ?
- PAUL: He told me that the Teacher's death was a sacrifice ordained by HaShem in order to atone for all sin, past, present and future; one sacrifice performed on the person of a sinless High Priest, once and for all. Everyone who believes in the Teacher as the Sacrificed Messiah is cleansed of all sin by a baptism not in water but in the death of the Teacher itself. Consequently, we do not need the yearly sacrifice performed by tainted priests anymore. We are declared righteous for the day of judgment by our faith in the Teacher's sacrifice.
- BARNABAS: But the teacher has to come back and defeat the nations before we can be saved.
- PAUL: Not so. His victory is already complete. Because the victory that matters is against Beliar, not against nations that HaShem can extinguish with one word of his mouth whenever he so wishes. Why would he need a son of man to do that ?
- BARNABAS: Hasn't this been prophesied ?
- PAUL: What has been prophesied, by Isaiah and others, is that the Messiah, the man of sorrows, would be victorious in the end. But the prophets never said against whom this victory would be won. What the angel of HaShem revealed to me is that his victory would be against Beliar himself, depriving him forever of the power of sin unto death. The nations are mere tools that HaShem uses to chastise us, as He did in the past. The stripes that we receive on our backs at the hands of the Kittim and others are for our benefit. They are meant to drive us to a form of despair pre-ordained by HaShem to leave us no option but to abandon all hope in our own strength and instead fall at His feet in complete submission. Only thus can we place all our faith in HaShem's Elect. When we do so, His victory is complete within our very soul and this is the only place where victory matters. When HaShem comes at the end of days to judge the living and the dead ...
- BARNABAS (interrupting): It is Messiah who will come to judge the living and the dead. He has been revived by HaShem after he died and he now sits at the right hand of the Almighty's throne.
- PAUL: Yes... er..., of course, you are right. When the Messiah comes to judge the living and the dead, those who have placed all their faith in Him will be declared sinless just as the Jews of old were declared sinless every year on the day of atonement as the result of the High Priest's sacrifice. Only this time, it will be forever.
- BARNABAS: And the angel of the Lord told you that there would be no battle against the Kittim ?
- PAUL: Not against them or anyone else. Did not HaShem say "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay" ? Does He need help from anyone to carry out his Will ?
Paul had guessed correctly that Barnabas was troubled and depressed enough to hear something new without rejecting it outright. After Paul's last sentence, he fell silent and kept staring at the floor in front of his feet. Paul suggested that they pray. Both covered their heads with their tallits and Paul said the following:
O HaShem, creator of the world and ruler over it all, forgive our trespasses. We are not worthy of appearing in your presence but a single word from you will make us clean. Give us the guidance that leads to life. Without it, we are lost like sheep scattered in the hills, ever at risk from the wolves of Beliar. Do not allow the Prince of this World to tempt us. You know how weak and helpless we are. Save us from the snares of the Evildoer and lead us back into your Garden forever. Amen.
Barnabas remarked how different this prayer sounded from the ones he was used to. Paul told him he had learned it from his master (he used the word "Rabbi"), although he did not tell him anything about Ein Avdat and the extent of what he had discovered there. All this was too far from what Barnabas was used to and it would have sounded strange and threatening to him. Paul was glad that what he had said had not triggered an adverse reaction. He was not going to take any further risks today.
Two days later, Paul had another dream. This time, his was lead in the Heavens to "one like a son of man" (c.f. Daniel 7:13) whom he interpreted to be the Teacher of Righteousness-cum-Messiah he had told Barnabas about. This being told him:
- SON OF MAN: The things that you have learned from your masters in Ein Avdat cannot be disclosed to the believers. They were for your ears only because they are the secrets of HaShem, revealed to some like the Blessed Enoch in days of old, but not meant to be disclosed to the many.
- PAUL: Then, my Lord, what shall I say ?
- SON OF MAN: You shall speak in parables in order to lead believers gently towards salvation. If you speak too openly, you will only make Beliar's work easier.
- PAUL: Shall I speak of you, my Lord ?
- SON OF MAN: Yes, you may. What you have been telling to Barnabas so far is good, but do not reveal to him that what you are making him do is an exercise for the purpose of soul cleansing. Do not use words like "Yoga" or "Zugos". These words are correct but what they disclose is too much for the believers to bear.
- PAUL: What shall I say instead, my Lord ?
- SON OF MAN: You shall say that salvation is from the free grace of the Most High only. It is not the case, yet this is what my people need to hear. They will be saved by the exercises that you will teach them and the most important exercise that they shall perform is to deny that they are doing any exercises. They shall say that everything they receive on the road towards the full purity of the soul (which brings salvation) is from the Most High and not from their own efforts. They shall repeat that it is a free and undeserved gift. This way, they will not be puffed up with pride and the road will be made less burdensome to them.
- PAUL: As you say, my Lord. I will do as you command.
Naturally, neither this dream, nor the previous one Paul had had in Damascus, were recorded directly by the Philadelphia team. The device they were using did not have any mind-reading capability. What was observed, was Paul telling about these dreams to one of his younger disciples a short while before his death in 61 A.D. These accounts were not put in writing by the disciple in question but they became the starting point of a tradition which spread among Gnostic groups in the second century AD about "secret teachings" that Paul (and others) had received "from the Lord".
The dreams Paul was having reflected the soul-searching which the future Apostle was going through in this formative period. Paul understood that the plain language he had heard at Ein Avdat was unsuitable for most of his contemporaries. In particular, he rightfully perceived that the relativism of his second master Hippostratos was a self-defeating blind alley. Theistic mental cleansing techniques were founded on faith. How could one have faith in a Supreme Being who told different things to different people ? Isn't consistency in speech the prerequisite of credibility ? Of course, one could argue, as Hippostratos did, that God told everyone "what they needed to hear" and Paul had himself done some thinking along those lines, as his dreams attest. However, Paul correctly concluded that this kind of language would sound deceptive to most people and that it was thus a fatal mistake to use it. In order to be effective, theistic mental cleansing had to be promoted in the name of a single Supreme Being that would be known under a single name by everyone under the sun. In Paul's Greek-speaking world, this Supreme Being had to be called "Ho Theos", i.e. "The God" (implicitly: "The only God"). It is this idea that led Paul at a later stage to stop using the usual Jewish divine designation, "HaShem", in favor of "Ho Theos", which we shall render here as "God". As far as the details of his new, and still evolving, theology were concerned, Paul was not adverse to accepting input from others, as he had done during his first conversation with Barnabas regarding the identity of the End-times Judge. What mattered to Paul was the spiritual "Zugos", the mental exercises of purification, not the letter of the theological metaphors designed to inspire these exercises.
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 4 of 6
Three days later, Paul met Barnabas again. The middle-aged Cypriot Jew was elated:
- BARNABAS: Thanks be given to HaShem in the heavens. I bow to his feet and kiss them seven and seventy-seven times ! I am saved ! I am a new creation ! A new man ! I could not sleep for two nights in a row and then the Lord appeared to me in person and told me I was saved because I believed in Him, and him crucified, just like you said.
- PAUL: He said "crucified" ? In my dream, He just said He had been killed. He did not say how.
- BARNABAS: Well, he was crucified. That is what he told me.
- PAUL: What else did he tell you ? Pray tell me.
- BARNABAS: He told me that I was killed together with Him and re-born with Him too. HaShem made Him rise from the dead after three days and sat Him at His right hand. As I was reborn with Him, according to what He told me, I was clothed in the holiness of HaShem and filled with his Holy Spirit. All my past sins were cleansed and my desire to sin was wiped out. Now, the only thing I want to do is to sing the praises of HaShem and his Anointed ("ho Christos" in Greek, synonymous with "Massiach" in Hebrew and Aramaic). I will sing a New Song (See e.g. Ps. 144:9, Ps. 96:1, etc.) to our Father in Heavens and to His Elect and I will shout the Good News ("Evangelion" in Greek) from the rooftops.
- PAUL: Amen and Amen. Let us both do that !
This is how Barnabas became Paul's first convert. As the exchange above demonstrates, Barnabas spontaneously came up with some of the key phrases that Paul was to use in his later preaching. Both men spoke the same spiritual language and partook in the same spiritual atmosphere. Barnabas was thus able to follow all of the hints that Paul gave him and respond to them with words of his own that were immediately understandable to Paul and to any other educated Greek-speaking Jew of the period.
In the month that followed, Paul and Barnabas made a few more converts within the membership of the latter's Essene cell. This naturally angered the hardliners within the group. Matters came to a head at the weekly assembly, three weeks after Paul had first met with Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas were subjected to vicious verbal attacks from the hardliners and, in their turn, made impassioned speeches in their own defense and in support of their "Good News" ("Evangelion"). Eventually, the fight became physical. Punches were exchanged and Paul, Barnabas, together with their little band of converts (9 in all), were thrown into the street. Thus was born the first recognizably Christian "Ekklesia" (Greek for "assembly", etymological origin of the word "Church"), as a splinter faction from Barnabas' erstwhile Essene group.
In the following months, Paul's new "Church" grew out of a steady trickle of converts, many of which were former members of Barnabas' former Essene group or close associates thereof (family members, slaves, etc.) Worried by this exodus, the new hardliner leadership of the group appealed to the top authorities within their Essene faction. As with most Jewish sectarian networks of the period, this top leadership resided in Jerusalem. The movement they headed was not a tight-knit hierarchical organization but a loose confederation of like-minded local chapters who shared the key belief in the Messiah-hood of the Teacher of Righteousness; a belief which, as we have seen, distinguished them from other Essene currents. When it came to doctrinal contentions, the Jerusalemite leaders enjoyed a lot of clout within the movement. The most senior of these leaders was a man named Simon, a former master-fisherman from Galilee, whose even-keeled and no-nonsense character had earned him the nickname of "Cephas" ("the rock" in Aramaic, translated as "Petros" in Greek, hence "Peter").
Over the past decade or so, Peter had embodied a middle-ground position between the hardliners within the movement and the older, more open-minded, members like Barnabas. His efforts to prevent the whole movement from splitting apart had been made increasingly difficult by the head of the hardliner faction, a man named "Ya'akov", known to posterity as "James". This man was called "James the Just" by his followers; a way to remind everyone of his superciliously pedantic insistence on "the Law". His faction referred to themselves in a figurative sense as "the brothers of the Lord" (the word "Lord" standing here for the "Teacher of Righteousness" understood as Messiah in the traditional warlike sense).
Peter was deeply embarrassed by the news of the split in Antioch. This was exactly what he had tried so strenuously to avoid for all those years and he was understandably anxious about a possible domino effect that would rent the movement down the middle like an old worn-out cloak. Without delay, he rushed to Antioch and initiated talks with all the parties involved. Naturally, James sent a handful of spies after him to make sure he did not deviate from the strictest Essene orthodoxy. This severely restricted Peter's freedom of expression and caused some awkward moments with Paul and Barnabas (C.F. Gal. 2:11-14). Nonetheless, a compromise was eventually reached. The rift was obviously impossible to mend and the only option left was to paper over it and pretend it did not exist. Peter, Paul, and the new leaders of the Antiochene community issued a common declaration to the effect that the movement stood "united" and that Paul would leave Antioch and preach henceforth "to the Gentiles". Barnabas was not mentioned and could therefore stay in Antioch and tend to the little flock that he and Paul had just assembled. Paul, for his part, was free to approach other communities within the movement (outside of Antioch and its region) where he would be welcomed as an "Apostolos" ("envoy", i.e. "missionary") on the face of his publicly acknowledged "friendship" with Peter and the Jerusalemite leadership. The phrase "to the Gentiles" used in the common declaration did not mean that he would have to speak exclusively to non-Jews but that the communities he would visit would have to be located outside of Judea and Syria, i.e. in the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Greece proper, Magna Grecia (southern Italy), etc.
On the 22nd of Shevat 344 A.G. (9th of February 34 AD), Paul left Antioch for what would later be called his "first missionary Journey". He was 28 years old. For a few months, he stayed in Tarsus, where he was reunited with his family. Paul's father was none too pleased with his son's association with a "heretical" group and with his abandonment of commercial pursuits. "So, you are a beggar, now ?", was his assessment of Paul's new ascetic lifestyle. Paul's mother was more sympathetic and she gathered a few of her female acquaintances, including her two sisters, to hear her son preach. One of Paul's Aunts eventually started a small church out of her own house.
From Tarsus, Paul traveled to Cyprus, Rhodes, Ephesus, Pergamon, Nicomedia and Ancyra in Galatia. In some cities, he stayed for a period of mere weeks, when his preaching did not meet with success. In other cases, he stayed for several months at a time and in one instance (in Ephesus), over a year. In Cyprus and Ancyra, the entire membership of the communities that Paul visited welcomed the "Good News" he was preaching and converted as a whole. In other cities, the same kind of schism that had occurred in Antioch took place, with only a fraction of the original community following Paul. In these cases, Paul made sure to send soothing news back to Jerusalem and Antioch to keep his side of the bargain which he had struck with Peter and to maintain the fiction of a "united" movement. To appease potential resentment, he also collected monetary donations from each group of his new followers and sent these to Jerusalem as a token of his loyalty. In Jerusalem, nobody really cared about what happened outside of Syria and Judea. Peter sent letters of thanks for the donations and did not make any further inquiries.
After Ancyra, Paul passed Through Miletos on his way to Thessalonica and Philippi in Macedonia. In all three cities, he was well received and made converts. In all, during his first missionary journey, Paul's preaching was heard by around 600 persons, about a third of which converted. Although Jewish communities were rather large in the area Paul visited (several thousand strong in every major city), the assemblies Paul was addressing did not belong to a mainstream movement and were thus small, numbering a few dozen members each. During this period, Paul was joined on several occasions by Barnabas and by several additional fellow-traveling disciples that he had acquired along the way.
In Kislev of 351 A.G. (December 41 A.D.), Paul was in Philippi, where he had spent the previous four months. He had been traveling in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Thrace for over seven years and was now 35 years old. Barnabas, who had just arrived from Antioch, explained to him that the situation within the "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction had changed significantly since he had left Antioch. News from Paul's successes in making converts had finally filtered back to Jerusalem where they had tarnished the reputation of the whole faction from the perspective of the rest of the Essene movement. Consequently, many hardliners had left and the overall membership of the faction had fallen. As a result, within those that remained, Paul's sympathizers were now in a majority. Peter was an old man now and not fundamentally opposed to Paul. In any case, the thinning of the hardliners’ ranks made his task of keeping a facade of unity easier. James, who was even older than Peter, was reduced to rehashing his grievances with a small group of core followers.
Three days later, Paul met Barnabas again. The middle-aged Cypriot Jew was elated:
- BARNABAS: Thanks be given to HaShem in the heavens. I bow to his feet and kiss them seven and seventy-seven times ! I am saved ! I am a new creation ! A new man ! I could not sleep for two nights in a row and then the Lord appeared to me in person and told me I was saved because I believed in Him, and him crucified, just like you said.
- PAUL: He said "crucified" ? In my dream, He just said He had been killed. He did not say how.
- BARNABAS: Well, he was crucified. That is what he told me.
- PAUL: What else did he tell you ? Pray tell me.
- BARNABAS: He told me that I was killed together with Him and re-born with Him too. HaShem made Him rise from the dead after three days and sat Him at His right hand. As I was reborn with Him, according to what He told me, I was clothed in the holiness of HaShem and filled with his Holy Spirit. All my past sins were cleansed and my desire to sin was wiped out. Now, the only thing I want to do is to sing the praises of HaShem and his Anointed ("ho Christos" in Greek, synonymous with "Massiach" in Hebrew and Aramaic). I will sing a New Song (See e.g. Ps. 144:9, Ps. 96:1, etc.) to our Father in Heavens and to His Elect and I will shout the Good News ("Evangelion" in Greek) from the rooftops.
- PAUL: Amen and Amen. Let us both do that !
This is how Barnabas became Paul's first convert. As the exchange above demonstrates, Barnabas spontaneously came up with some of the key phrases that Paul was to use in his later preaching. Both men spoke the same spiritual language and partook in the same spiritual atmosphere. Barnabas was thus able to follow all of the hints that Paul gave him and respond to them with words of his own that were immediately understandable to Paul and to any other educated Greek-speaking Jew of the period.
In the month that followed, Paul and Barnabas made a few more converts within the membership of the latter's Essene cell. This naturally angered the hardliners within the group. Matters came to a head at the weekly assembly, three weeks after Paul had first met with Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas were subjected to vicious verbal attacks from the hardliners and, in their turn, made impassioned speeches in their own defense and in support of their "Good News" ("Evangelion"). Eventually, the fight became physical. Punches were exchanged and Paul, Barnabas, together with their little band of converts (9 in all), were thrown into the street. Thus was born the first recognizably Christian "Ekklesia" (Greek for "assembly", etymological origin of the word "Church"), as a splinter faction from Barnabas' erstwhile Essene group.
In the following months, Paul's new "Church" grew out of a steady trickle of converts, many of which were former members of Barnabas' former Essene group or close associates thereof (family members, slaves, etc.) Worried by this exodus, the new hardliner leadership of the group appealed to the top authorities within their Essene faction. As with most Jewish sectarian networks of the period, this top leadership resided in Jerusalem. The movement they headed was not a tight-knit hierarchical organization but a loose confederation of like-minded local chapters who shared the key belief in the Messiah-hood of the Teacher of Righteousness; a belief which, as we have seen, distinguished them from other Essene currents. When it came to doctrinal contentions, the Jerusalemite leaders enjoyed a lot of clout within the movement. The most senior of these leaders was a man named Simon, a former master-fisherman from Galilee, whose even-keeled and no-nonsense character had earned him the nickname of "Cephas" ("the rock" in Aramaic, translated as "Petros" in Greek, hence "Peter").
Over the past decade or so, Peter had embodied a middle-ground position between the hardliners within the movement and the older, more open-minded, members like Barnabas. His efforts to prevent the whole movement from splitting apart had been made increasingly difficult by the head of the hardliner faction, a man named "Ya'akov", known to posterity as "James". This man was called "James the Just" by his followers; a way to remind everyone of his superciliously pedantic insistence on "the Law". His faction referred to themselves in a figurative sense as "the brothers of the Lord" (the word "Lord" standing here for the "Teacher of Righteousness" understood as Messiah in the traditional warlike sense).
Peter was deeply embarrassed by the news of the split in Antioch. This was exactly what he had tried so strenuously to avoid for all those years and he was understandably anxious about a possible domino effect that would rent the movement down the middle like an old worn-out cloak. Without delay, he rushed to Antioch and initiated talks with all the parties involved. Naturally, James sent a handful of spies after him to make sure he did not deviate from the strictest Essene orthodoxy. This severely restricted Peter's freedom of expression and caused some awkward moments with Paul and Barnabas (C.F. Gal. 2:11-14). Nonetheless, a compromise was eventually reached. The rift was obviously impossible to mend and the only option left was to paper over it and pretend it did not exist. Peter, Paul, and the new leaders of the Antiochene community issued a common declaration to the effect that the movement stood "united" and that Paul would leave Antioch and preach henceforth "to the Gentiles". Barnabas was not mentioned and could therefore stay in Antioch and tend to the little flock that he and Paul had just assembled. Paul, for his part, was free to approach other communities within the movement (outside of Antioch and its region) where he would be welcomed as an "Apostolos" ("envoy", i.e. "missionary") on the face of his publicly acknowledged "friendship" with Peter and the Jerusalemite leadership. The phrase "to the Gentiles" used in the common declaration did not mean that he would have to speak exclusively to non-Jews but that the communities he would visit would have to be located outside of Judea and Syria, i.e. in the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Greece proper, Magna Grecia (southern Italy), etc.
On the 22nd of Shevat 344 A.G. (9th of February 34 AD), Paul left Antioch for what would later be called his "first missionary Journey". He was 28 years old. For a few months, he stayed in Tarsus, where he was reunited with his family. Paul's father was none too pleased with his son's association with a "heretical" group and with his abandonment of commercial pursuits. "So, you are a beggar, now ?", was his assessment of Paul's new ascetic lifestyle. Paul's mother was more sympathetic and she gathered a few of her female acquaintances, including her two sisters, to hear her son preach. One of Paul's Aunts eventually started a small church out of her own house.
From Tarsus, Paul traveled to Cyprus, Rhodes, Ephesus, Pergamon, Nicomedia and Ancyra in Galatia. In some cities, he stayed for a period of mere weeks, when his preaching did not meet with success. In other cases, he stayed for several months at a time and in one instance (in Ephesus), over a year. In Cyprus and Ancyra, the entire membership of the communities that Paul visited welcomed the "Good News" he was preaching and converted as a whole. In other cities, the same kind of schism that had occurred in Antioch took place, with only a fraction of the original community following Paul. In these cases, Paul made sure to send soothing news back to Jerusalem and Antioch to keep his side of the bargain which he had struck with Peter and to maintain the fiction of a "united" movement. To appease potential resentment, he also collected monetary donations from each group of his new followers and sent these to Jerusalem as a token of his loyalty. In Jerusalem, nobody really cared about what happened outside of Syria and Judea. Peter sent letters of thanks for the donations and did not make any further inquiries.
After Ancyra, Paul passed Through Miletos on his way to Thessalonica and Philippi in Macedonia. In all three cities, he was well received and made converts. In all, during his first missionary journey, Paul's preaching was heard by around 600 persons, about a third of which converted. Although Jewish communities were rather large in the area Paul visited (several thousand strong in every major city), the assemblies Paul was addressing did not belong to a mainstream movement and were thus small, numbering a few dozen members each. During this period, Paul was joined on several occasions by Barnabas and by several additional fellow-traveling disciples that he had acquired along the way.
In Kislev of 351 A.G. (December 41 A.D.), Paul was in Philippi, where he had spent the previous four months. He had been traveling in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Thrace for over seven years and was now 35 years old. Barnabas, who had just arrived from Antioch, explained to him that the situation within the "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction had changed significantly since he had left Antioch. News from Paul's successes in making converts had finally filtered back to Jerusalem where they had tarnished the reputation of the whole faction from the perspective of the rest of the Essene movement. Consequently, many hardliners had left and the overall membership of the faction had fallen. As a result, within those that remained, Paul's sympathizers were now in a majority. Peter was an old man now and not fundamentally opposed to Paul. In any case, the thinning of the hardliners’ ranks made his task of keeping a facade of unity easier. James, who was even older than Peter, was reduced to rehashing his grievances with a small group of core followers.
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 5 of 6
Based on this news, Barnabas convinced Paul that it was time to visit Jerusalem, talk to Peter, and get him to officially recognize Paul's now dominant position within the movement. Paul agreed and set sail for Judea from Thessalonica the following month. Paul was accompanied by Barnabas and Titus, one of his early Antiochene disciples.
Peter had been made aware of Paul's teachings through several channels, although these had introduced some distortions and misunderstandings in the process. When he met with Paul, the latter had a chance to correct some of these. Eventually, Peter was not fully convinced yet not fundamentally repelled by Paul's doctrine. Notions like "baptism into the death of the Messiah" or being "reborn" could not make a dent into his practical, down-to-earth Judaism. On a personal level, Peter was content with waiting for the return of the Teacher of Righteousness-cum-Messiah, whatever his God-ordained mission would then be. Officially, he had no objections to recognizing Paul as a leading teacher within the movement. Doing so was merely acknowledging a fait accompli. Peter issued a circular letter of which Paul then had copies made and sent to all local chapters. In it, Peter acknowledged the legitimacy of Paul's teachings while formulating some minimal requirements regarding ritual purity. These requirements were extremely mild and this show of "laxity" horrified the last few hardliners who remained within this faction. Peter's sentence, in that regard, read: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality ("porneia" in Greek). If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell." (CF. Acts 15:28-29)
Having received this endorsement from Peter, Paul was able to greatly expand his preaching effort. Over the next five years, apart from a few short trips to Ancyra and Tarsus, he mostly resided in Antioch where he was able to train missionaries of his own, drawn from the original Antiochene church which had grown in the meantime to a little over 150 members. These missionaries were sent by Paul to the communities he had already visited as well as to some new ones within the "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction. Paul even sent some envoys to other Jewish sectarian groups he thought might receive them well. During the following twenty years, Paul's missionaries ("Apostoloi" in Greek) crisscrossed the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, adding several hundred converts to the growing movement.
In 46 A.D., now in his forties, Paul embarked on a new trip of his own (the "Second Missionary Journey" of modern Pauline Scholarship). He visited Corinth, Delphi, Athens, Amphipolis, Philippi, Crete, Cyrene, Rhodes, Cyprus and then returned to Antioch. By this time, Paul had become a somewhat well-known Jewish sectarian preacher and the audience at some of his homilies reached into the hundreds. This audience was also more mixed. It now included many Greek-speaking Jews and "God-Fearing Gentiles" who had no ties to the Essene movement but had simply heard of Paul through the larger Jewish Diaspora community. Within these wider circles, Paul made some converts, although the bulk of his followers remained former adherents of the erstwhile "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction, which increasingly referred to itself as "the assemblies of God" ("Ekklesiai to Theou" in Greek).
In 51 A.D., Paul was back in Antioch, where he stayed for the next six years. It is during this period that he wrote many of the letters that have come down to us as the Pauline Epistles. Many of the letters Paul wrote have been lost and those which eventually made their way into the Christian New-Testamental Canon have been somewhat altered. In particular, the name "Jesus", which is a later Christian development, was never used by Paul, who spoke only of "Christ" or "the Lord". It made its way into the epistles when these were copied in the course of the late first and second centuries A.D. However, by and large, the current text of the Epistles has not suffered deep structural alterations. Its contents still reflect Paul's doctrine in a faithful manner.
In 57 A.D., aged 51, Paul embarked for Magna Grecia (Southern Italy and Sicily), a region he had wanted to visit for many years. After short stops in Cyprus and Crete, he visited Syracuse, Rhegium and Tarentum, where he fell ill and stayed for the last three years of his life. During this period, the pace of his preaching activities was somewhat reduced but his epistolary output was not. He kept in touch with the missionaries who were still active all over the Greek World in his name and wrote letters of encouragement or rebuke to many local communities (especially to Corinth which had always been a trouble spot). When Paul died, in 61 A.D., what we can now legitimately call the earliest network of "Christian" churches included several dozen local communities and a little under two thousand members. Christian tradition has Paul dying in "Rome", probably because the southern Italian city of Rhegium was not that well known yet was in the same general area as "Rome" from the perspective of most Eastern Mediterranean inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, stories of persecution and martyrdom were grafted onto this "Roman" death.
In parallel with the recording of Paul's missionary career, which I have quickly summarized above, the Philadelphia team also meticulously tracked the development of his doctrine and its attendant practices. Each shift in vocabulary, each new parable was described, put in context and linked to the overarching architecture of Paul's emerging teachings. The following document is the final summary of this detailed survey:
Based on this news, Barnabas convinced Paul that it was time to visit Jerusalem, talk to Peter, and get him to officially recognize Paul's now dominant position within the movement. Paul agreed and set sail for Judea from Thessalonica the following month. Paul was accompanied by Barnabas and Titus, one of his early Antiochene disciples.
Peter had been made aware of Paul's teachings through several channels, although these had introduced some distortions and misunderstandings in the process. When he met with Paul, the latter had a chance to correct some of these. Eventually, Peter was not fully convinced yet not fundamentally repelled by Paul's doctrine. Notions like "baptism into the death of the Messiah" or being "reborn" could not make a dent into his practical, down-to-earth Judaism. On a personal level, Peter was content with waiting for the return of the Teacher of Righteousness-cum-Messiah, whatever his God-ordained mission would then be. Officially, he had no objections to recognizing Paul as a leading teacher within the movement. Doing so was merely acknowledging a fait accompli. Peter issued a circular letter of which Paul then had copies made and sent to all local chapters. In it, Peter acknowledged the legitimacy of Paul's teachings while formulating some minimal requirements regarding ritual purity. These requirements were extremely mild and this show of "laxity" horrified the last few hardliners who remained within this faction. Peter's sentence, in that regard, read: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality ("porneia" in Greek). If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell." (CF. Acts 15:28-29)
Having received this endorsement from Peter, Paul was able to greatly expand his preaching effort. Over the next five years, apart from a few short trips to Ancyra and Tarsus, he mostly resided in Antioch where he was able to train missionaries of his own, drawn from the original Antiochene church which had grown in the meantime to a little over 150 members. These missionaries were sent by Paul to the communities he had already visited as well as to some new ones within the "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction. Paul even sent some envoys to other Jewish sectarian groups he thought might receive them well. During the following twenty years, Paul's missionaries ("Apostoloi" in Greek) crisscrossed the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, adding several hundred converts to the growing movement.
In 46 A.D., now in his forties, Paul embarked on a new trip of his own (the "Second Missionary Journey" of modern Pauline Scholarship). He visited Corinth, Delphi, Athens, Amphipolis, Philippi, Crete, Cyrene, Rhodes, Cyprus and then returned to Antioch. By this time, Paul had become a somewhat well-known Jewish sectarian preacher and the audience at some of his homilies reached into the hundreds. This audience was also more mixed. It now included many Greek-speaking Jews and "God-Fearing Gentiles" who had no ties to the Essene movement but had simply heard of Paul through the larger Jewish Diaspora community. Within these wider circles, Paul made some converts, although the bulk of his followers remained former adherents of the erstwhile "Teacher of Righteousness as Messiah" Essene faction, which increasingly referred to itself as "the assemblies of God" ("Ekklesiai to Theou" in Greek).
In 51 A.D., Paul was back in Antioch, where he stayed for the next six years. It is during this period that he wrote many of the letters that have come down to us as the Pauline Epistles. Many of the letters Paul wrote have been lost and those which eventually made their way into the Christian New-Testamental Canon have been somewhat altered. In particular, the name "Jesus", which is a later Christian development, was never used by Paul, who spoke only of "Christ" or "the Lord". It made its way into the epistles when these were copied in the course of the late first and second centuries A.D. However, by and large, the current text of the Epistles has not suffered deep structural alterations. Its contents still reflect Paul's doctrine in a faithful manner.
In 57 A.D., aged 51, Paul embarked for Magna Grecia (Southern Italy and Sicily), a region he had wanted to visit for many years. After short stops in Cyprus and Crete, he visited Syracuse, Rhegium and Tarentum, where he fell ill and stayed for the last three years of his life. During this period, the pace of his preaching activities was somewhat reduced but his epistolary output was not. He kept in touch with the missionaries who were still active all over the Greek World in his name and wrote letters of encouragement or rebuke to many local communities (especially to Corinth which had always been a trouble spot). When Paul died, in 61 A.D., what we can now legitimately call the earliest network of "Christian" churches included several dozen local communities and a little under two thousand members. Christian tradition has Paul dying in "Rome", probably because the southern Italian city of Rhegium was not that well known yet was in the same general area as "Rome" from the perspective of most Eastern Mediterranean inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, stories of persecution and martyrdom were grafted onto this "Roman" death.
In parallel with the recording of Paul's missionary career, which I have quickly summarized above, the Philadelphia team also meticulously tracked the development of his doctrine and its attendant practices. Each shift in vocabulary, each new parable was described, put in context and linked to the overarching architecture of Paul's emerging teachings. The following document is the final summary of this detailed survey:
Chapter 9 – Paul – Part 6 of 6
Outside the windows of Hut 19, the icy Antarctic landscape was bathed in the same bright but grey light as it always was. Through the window to the left of the entrance door, I could make out what looked like a snow-covered peak, in the distance. Was it a genuine mountain that existed somewhere in Antarctica ? I had no idea.
Finn was at his desk, as usual, and I now felt the familiar urge to ask him some questions for clarification on the report about Paul which I had just finished reading.
- ME: Finn, I have a couple questions about the Paul report; actually, more than a couple. Is it ok if I ask them now ?
- FINN: Go ahead.
- ME: The report does not mention speaking in tongues and other similar practices that charismatics are so fond of nowadays. Does that mean that Paul's followers did not engage in such things after all ?
- FINN: They did, but certainly not at Paul's urging. Ecstatic outpourings had become popular in several of the heterodox Jewish groups long before Paul became involved with any of them. The "Teacher as Messiah" Essene faction that he eventually joined was one of these. However, Paul was not keen on such practices, because they were not helpful in any way with respect to what he was trying to achieve. However, he was never able to completely eradicate them during his lifetime, although he made every effort to keep their use to a minimum.
- ME: The report describes Paul's discipline as a tool of mental cleansing, but it seems to me that it goes a little further than that. Once Paul has crushed his followers with his guilt-sledgehammer, it appears to me that he forces them into a position of utter subservience, of complete metal dependence. Is that really necessary ?
- FINN: Yes. It is.
- ME: How so ?
- FINN: Because complete trust (faith) and total subservience are one and the same. It is our modern addiction to rebellion-masturbation which has obscured this equation in our mind. Complete trust in God (which excludes self-confidence) implies the complete abandonment of one's own judgment as a guide for action, which is what we mean by "utter subservience". Of course, Paul does not enjoin this to his follower as a real-life practice but only as a yoga, i.e. as a masturbatory exercise. Paul's disciple masturbates his capacity for complete faith in God and thus masturbates himself into a position of total subservience to the deity. However, this holds true only in the masturbatory sphere. Precisely because the believer has complete faith only in God, he is not completely subservient to anybody else. Christians render unto Caesar what is his, but they do not necessarily obey him if he tries to make them deviate from their creed. Hence the martyrs.
- ME: Kuhn and Rougement say that Paul has to deliver his Yoga instructions under the cloak of a coherent narrative, but I don't find the narrative particularly coherent. This is the usual problem with Christianity. For example, why does God find it necessary to "save" humanity from a propensity to sin that he has himself created in them ?
- FINN: This problem arises, and it has arisen many times over the past 2000 years, only when one forgets that the purpose of Paul's story is to be a Yoga manual. Of course, if you focus only on the story itself and lose track of its purpose, you will find it to be incoherent. But this is not what Paul's early followers were doing. They were eager to find relief from mental anguish, not to hear a lecture on theology. Thus, Paul's narrative only had to be coherent enough on the surface to be plausible to an assembly of moderately educated middle-class Jews when they heard it for the first time. Once a practitioner of Paul's discipline started to experience its psychological benefits, he would care about the story's logic even less. The so-called “problem of the Theodicy”, which is what we are talking about now, only bothers people who are not practitioners of the Christian (i.e. Pauline) form of Yoga. To those who do practice this Yoga, this issue is irrelevant.
- ME: The biggest problem I always had with Christianity, and I felt the same while reading this report, is the idea of God's "love". "God is Love" ! It sounds so corny and insincere ...
- FINN: The problem is what we have done to the word "Love", not with what Paul taught in that respect. Today, in English, we can say both: "God is love" and "Love is mean and love hurts" (the latter is a line from a song by Lana Del Rey). There is also the usual translation of 1 Cor 13:4, "Love is patient, Love is kind, ...". How can "Love" be both "mean" and "kind" ? What is going on here ? In Paul's time, there was no such problem. The Greek word he used, agape, has quite a specific and straightforward meaning that perfectly suited his purpose. In particular, it would have never occurred to anyone to confuse it with the other word usually translated today as "love", Eros. In Greek, you could both say: "Eros is mean and eros hurts" and "Agape is patient, Agape is kind". No confusion was possible. Our word "Love" has become overburdened with contradictory meaning to a ridiculous degree. No wonder it sounds so fake in a religious context. The history of how this catastrophic confusion came to be will be dealt with by the Philadelphia team during their later study of medieval heresies, I believe. For the moment, what I do is try to keep in mind the word "agape" each time I hear about "love" in a Christian context.
- ME: How was it in Latin ? Our modern religious vocabulary mostly comes from Latin rather than Greek, right ?
- FINN: Correct. In Latin, "agape" was rendered as "caritas" (hence "charity") and "Eros" corresponded to "amor" from which words like "amour" in French or "amore" in Italian are derived. The confusion between "caritas" and "amor" first occured in these languages around the year 1000 AD and then seeped into the English word "love".
- ME: Oh, I see ... This is where "Charity" comes from. Ok. However, there is another thing that bothers me with this idea of "God's love". It is His Wrath. Why does God has to be so harsh if he loves everyone ?
- FINN: Again, this is a Yoga matter. Paul's goal is not to frighten his hearers simply for the sake of it. He just uses the idea of a vengeful and terrifying God, which was already well established in Judaism, to lead them to guilt-induced collapse, which is the core of his technique.
- ME: But why ?! Why does he have to use this guilt bludgeon ?
- FINN: Because it is the most effective mind cleansing force. Other Yogas can use less brutal techniques because their practitioners are specialists who can devote a lot of time to their cleansing exercises. Paul does not have that luxury.
- ME: But why guilt ? Isn’t there anything else he could have used ?
- FINN: Perhaps, but guilt does the job pretty well. Its effectiveness comes from its evolutionary origin. It is the natural feeling experienced by humans when nature tells them that they need to revise their beliefs. Paul leverages the Jewish cultural tools at his disposal to amplify this feeling beyond its normal intensity and therefore triggers a breakdown of his follower's consciousness. This is necessary because the said consciousness is saturated with masturbation-induced fake credit. The cultural constructs which produce this fake credit are also based on amplified instincts and can therefore be effectively counteracted only by a tool of equal force. Traditional Indian yogis can afford to use an ordinary broom to cleanse their minds. They have all the time in the world. By contrast, the constraints of Paul's environment forced him to use something more akin to dynamite: amplified guilt.
- ME: Ok, this sounds plausible. But how to square it with the idea of "God's Love"
- FINN: Within Paul's worldview, like that of any yogi, the most valuable thing in human existence is mental cleansing, i.e. Moksha. Since the means to bring this about is guilt, induced by God's wrath, it follows that the latter, as paradoxical as it may seem, is in fact the most valuable gift of God to humanity. In theistic terms, God only bothers to show his wrath to those he wants to save, because he loves them. Others, he lets wallow in sin undisturbed.
- ME: You just said that God only loves those he saves. I thought he loved everyone ...
- FINN: This is exactly the kind of inconsistency that practitioners of Paul's discipline do not worry about at all.
- ME: All right. There is one last thing I am unsure about. In the conclusion of the report, it is said that Paul is the founder of a tradition that holds faith/credit to be the foundation of everything valuable, instead of truth. I do not really see what tradition they are talking about.
- FINN: This is because of our warped modern perspective on Western intellectual history. Since the so-called "renaissance", we believe that Christianity has been an unfortunate, but thankfully insignificant, interruption in the "real" Western Philosophical tradition that began with the Greeks. In modern philosophical parlance, the label "Christian" is generally used dismissively, to refer to a "medieval" kind of thought stunted by the material conditions of the "Dark Ages" and suffocated by "obscurantism". Of course, this is completely ridiculous. Christian thought is the foundation of 99% of Western thought and it had far more influence on our culture overall than is generally realized.
- ME: Christianity is dead now. Are we screwed ?
- FINN: In the short term, probably; and the Boffins were well aware of that. By the time the report on Paul was written, the Philadelphia team had realized this and they had come to think of themselves as the torch-bearers of the "Pistis over Sophia" (Trust over Truth) tradition. They reckoned it their duty to keep alive this tradition beyond the outward form of Christian language, in order to ensure that it would survive the demise of the Christian religion itself, which seemed to them, rightfully I believe, to be inevitable.
Outside the windows of Hut 19, the icy Antarctic landscape was bathed in the same bright but grey light as it always was. Through the window to the left of the entrance door, I could make out what looked like a snow-covered peak, in the distance. Was it a genuine mountain that existed somewhere in Antarctica ? I had no idea.
Finn was at his desk, as usual, and I now felt the familiar urge to ask him some questions for clarification on the report about Paul which I had just finished reading.
- ME: Finn, I have a couple questions about the Paul report; actually, more than a couple. Is it ok if I ask them now ?
- FINN: Go ahead.
- ME: The report does not mention speaking in tongues and other similar practices that charismatics are so fond of nowadays. Does that mean that Paul's followers did not engage in such things after all ?
- FINN: They did, but certainly not at Paul's urging. Ecstatic outpourings had become popular in several of the heterodox Jewish groups long before Paul became involved with any of them. The "Teacher as Messiah" Essene faction that he eventually joined was one of these. However, Paul was not keen on such practices, because they were not helpful in any way with respect to what he was trying to achieve. However, he was never able to completely eradicate them during his lifetime, although he made every effort to keep their use to a minimum.
- ME: The report describes Paul's discipline as a tool of mental cleansing, but it seems to me that it goes a little further than that. Once Paul has crushed his followers with his guilt-sledgehammer, it appears to me that he forces them into a position of utter subservience, of complete metal dependence. Is that really necessary ?
- FINN: Yes. It is.
- ME: How so ?
- FINN: Because complete trust (faith) and total subservience are one and the same. It is our modern addiction to rebellion-masturbation which has obscured this equation in our mind. Complete trust in God (which excludes self-confidence) implies the complete abandonment of one's own judgment as a guide for action, which is what we mean by "utter subservience". Of course, Paul does not enjoin this to his follower as a real-life practice but only as a yoga, i.e. as a masturbatory exercise. Paul's disciple masturbates his capacity for complete faith in God and thus masturbates himself into a position of total subservience to the deity. However, this holds true only in the masturbatory sphere. Precisely because the believer has complete faith only in God, he is not completely subservient to anybody else. Christians render unto Caesar what is his, but they do not necessarily obey him if he tries to make them deviate from their creed. Hence the martyrs.
- ME: Kuhn and Rougement say that Paul has to deliver his Yoga instructions under the cloak of a coherent narrative, but I don't find the narrative particularly coherent. This is the usual problem with Christianity. For example, why does God find it necessary to "save" humanity from a propensity to sin that he has himself created in them ?
- FINN: This problem arises, and it has arisen many times over the past 2000 years, only when one forgets that the purpose of Paul's story is to be a Yoga manual. Of course, if you focus only on the story itself and lose track of its purpose, you will find it to be incoherent. But this is not what Paul's early followers were doing. They were eager to find relief from mental anguish, not to hear a lecture on theology. Thus, Paul's narrative only had to be coherent enough on the surface to be plausible to an assembly of moderately educated middle-class Jews when they heard it for the first time. Once a practitioner of Paul's discipline started to experience its psychological benefits, he would care about the story's logic even less. The so-called “problem of the Theodicy”, which is what we are talking about now, only bothers people who are not practitioners of the Christian (i.e. Pauline) form of Yoga. To those who do practice this Yoga, this issue is irrelevant.
- ME: The biggest problem I always had with Christianity, and I felt the same while reading this report, is the idea of God's "love". "God is Love" ! It sounds so corny and insincere ...
- FINN: The problem is what we have done to the word "Love", not with what Paul taught in that respect. Today, in English, we can say both: "God is love" and "Love is mean and love hurts" (the latter is a line from a song by Lana Del Rey). There is also the usual translation of 1 Cor 13:4, "Love is patient, Love is kind, ...". How can "Love" be both "mean" and "kind" ? What is going on here ? In Paul's time, there was no such problem. The Greek word he used, agape, has quite a specific and straightforward meaning that perfectly suited his purpose. In particular, it would have never occurred to anyone to confuse it with the other word usually translated today as "love", Eros. In Greek, you could both say: "Eros is mean and eros hurts" and "Agape is patient, Agape is kind". No confusion was possible. Our word "Love" has become overburdened with contradictory meaning to a ridiculous degree. No wonder it sounds so fake in a religious context. The history of how this catastrophic confusion came to be will be dealt with by the Philadelphia team during their later study of medieval heresies, I believe. For the moment, what I do is try to keep in mind the word "agape" each time I hear about "love" in a Christian context.
- ME: How was it in Latin ? Our modern religious vocabulary mostly comes from Latin rather than Greek, right ?
- FINN: Correct. In Latin, "agape" was rendered as "caritas" (hence "charity") and "Eros" corresponded to "amor" from which words like "amour" in French or "amore" in Italian are derived. The confusion between "caritas" and "amor" first occured in these languages around the year 1000 AD and then seeped into the English word "love".
- ME: Oh, I see ... This is where "Charity" comes from. Ok. However, there is another thing that bothers me with this idea of "God's love". It is His Wrath. Why does God has to be so harsh if he loves everyone ?
- FINN: Again, this is a Yoga matter. Paul's goal is not to frighten his hearers simply for the sake of it. He just uses the idea of a vengeful and terrifying God, which was already well established in Judaism, to lead them to guilt-induced collapse, which is the core of his technique.
- ME: But why ?! Why does he have to use this guilt bludgeon ?
- FINN: Because it is the most effective mind cleansing force. Other Yogas can use less brutal techniques because their practitioners are specialists who can devote a lot of time to their cleansing exercises. Paul does not have that luxury.
- ME: But why guilt ? Isn’t there anything else he could have used ?
- FINN: Perhaps, but guilt does the job pretty well. Its effectiveness comes from its evolutionary origin. It is the natural feeling experienced by humans when nature tells them that they need to revise their beliefs. Paul leverages the Jewish cultural tools at his disposal to amplify this feeling beyond its normal intensity and therefore triggers a breakdown of his follower's consciousness. This is necessary because the said consciousness is saturated with masturbation-induced fake credit. The cultural constructs which produce this fake credit are also based on amplified instincts and can therefore be effectively counteracted only by a tool of equal force. Traditional Indian yogis can afford to use an ordinary broom to cleanse their minds. They have all the time in the world. By contrast, the constraints of Paul's environment forced him to use something more akin to dynamite: amplified guilt.
- ME: Ok, this sounds plausible. But how to square it with the idea of "God's Love"
- FINN: Within Paul's worldview, like that of any yogi, the most valuable thing in human existence is mental cleansing, i.e. Moksha. Since the means to bring this about is guilt, induced by God's wrath, it follows that the latter, as paradoxical as it may seem, is in fact the most valuable gift of God to humanity. In theistic terms, God only bothers to show his wrath to those he wants to save, because he loves them. Others, he lets wallow in sin undisturbed.
- ME: You just said that God only loves those he saves. I thought he loved everyone ...
- FINN: This is exactly the kind of inconsistency that practitioners of Paul's discipline do not worry about at all.
- ME: All right. There is one last thing I am unsure about. In the conclusion of the report, it is said that Paul is the founder of a tradition that holds faith/credit to be the foundation of everything valuable, instead of truth. I do not really see what tradition they are talking about.
- FINN: This is because of our warped modern perspective on Western intellectual history. Since the so-called "renaissance", we believe that Christianity has been an unfortunate, but thankfully insignificant, interruption in the "real" Western Philosophical tradition that began with the Greeks. In modern philosophical parlance, the label "Christian" is generally used dismissively, to refer to a "medieval" kind of thought stunted by the material conditions of the "Dark Ages" and suffocated by "obscurantism". Of course, this is completely ridiculous. Christian thought is the foundation of 99% of Western thought and it had far more influence on our culture overall than is generally realized.
- ME: Christianity is dead now. Are we screwed ?
- FINN: In the short term, probably; and the Boffins were well aware of that. By the time the report on Paul was written, the Philadelphia team had realized this and they had come to think of themselves as the torch-bearers of the "Pistis over Sophia" (Trust over Truth) tradition. They reckoned it their duty to keep alive this tradition beyond the outward form of Christian language, in order to ensure that it would survive the demise of the Christian religion itself, which seemed to them, rightfully I believe, to be inevitable.
@Moroccancel2- @Intellectual @lotus2345 @DenHaag @ElTruecel @solblue @TheProphetMuscle @Mortis @Ahnfeltia @LesscoBlob @Intellau_Celistic @Transcended Trucel @MarquisDeSade Chapter 9 is available.
We don't need to ascribe genes to be good or bad. They are just objectively good or bad.
If you have a genetic defect ("bad" genes) it can detrimental to your survival.
While genetic gifts can be beneficial for survival thus they are "good"
@JayGoptri am I wrong?
What I meant is that foids are behaving badly not because of their genes but because of something wrong in our culture (Ishtar worship) There is no genetic determinism in human affairs. It is culture and therefore religion that matters.
@spasticbuddy Chapter 9 is available.
In a manner of speaking, yes you are wrong. Aesthetic preference being fulfilled (especially during today's times) can and does serve as a major beneficial boost in many ways. But the part you may be wrong about is that it's not necessarily hard wired that way for preferences beyond what exists in cultural expectations. And that is cultural software NOT genetic Hardware! This is similar to what @K9Otaku was explaining above.
@K9Otaku
Are you denying the influence of female nature? Or are you advocating the control of female nature trough religion, and culture?
True. And then consider those who have such bad genetics that they are constantly sick and in chronic pain. Who is the enemy here? This is nothing that society can change through faith in religion.
[1] --> No
[2] --> Yes
"female nature", just like "male nature" or "human nature" is a set of instincts. These exist, no doubt. Culture and religion make civilized life possible by suppressing certain instincts and encouraging others. Depending on what religion the majority follow, a given culture will be more or less good at controlling female nature, and human nature in general. Bad religions, like Ishtar worship, make things worse instead of improving them.
The whole of human history proves the opposite
Believing in God removed tumors and changes the biology of pain?
Or do you mean it somehow reprograms the brain to feel less pain? It can potentially alleviate it a little for some people, depending on how much delusion/hope that human is capable of. Is that what you mean?
B
Who the fuck pinned this blue pilled garbage?
B
@gymletethnicel look at this fucking dumb nigger saying genetics don't matter. JFL
And the thread got pinned.
And the thread got pinned.
Seethe, dumbass. This means that this forum is starting to get smarter than you are. You should think of retiring. You will soon be obsolete.@gymletethnicel look at this fucking dumb nigger saying genetics don't matter. JFL
And the thread got pinned.
Genetics don't matter by themselves. They matter insofar as they serve as a basis for culture. It is culture + genetics that matter. The Nazis failed to understand that and that is why they lost the war. Let us make sure that we incels do not make the same mistake.
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