Evola and Lower and Higher Antinomianism

[Theomast]

To Cologero and the rest: Forgive me, I am not pure negativistic destruction.

After reading the statements and general spiritual tone here, I am indeed internally aligned with the "goals" of Gornahoor, more than I initially knew... Hyper-synthesis and "purification" of Christianity...a metaphysically-based PAX between the good-willed "pagans" and "Christians"...double Hegelian sublation of the antinomy between the real metaphysical possiblity of a "Noble Paganism" and a "Higher Christianity"...establishing non-dualistic relations, ideally, in a pagan-Christian Counter-Revolutionary Force with non-contradictory goals as Bearers of dharmic Order against the Chaos of modernity...

The only area where true trouble could sprout up is in this issue of the "Left Hand Path." Solving this metaphysical enigma will be potentially punishing...

The "Evola-critique" will be definitely postponed as pragmatically unhelpful. Everyone educated and involved in this area knows where he could be perceived as slipping into false-conscience and doing violence to integral moral theology... My "sword" is "sheathed" now...and I hope for the "noble pagan"-"higher-Christian" idea to blossom further...

[admin]

True, Theomast, we sense the ambiguity in your assessment of Evola and as we pointed out, Evola followed the path of excess to the palace of wisdom. It is difficult to balance those two opposing tendencies, which we see played out in the Greek mysteries from those of Dionysus to Orpheus to Pythagoras. The Dionysian elements are in tension with the Apollonian. The common mind wants to come to rest in one or the other.

Thus we notice in Evola the attraction to the likes of Dada and the "left hand path" on the one hand, yet on the other, he is praising pre-Jacobin Europe and Catholic reactionaries such as de Maistre, Donoso, or Primo de Rivera. The latter Evola opposes the forces of the Cosmos to those of Chaos. Yet the former Evola reminds us that the path to achieve it may not be as simple as we imagine.

Regardless, in spiritual realization we seek the underlying Principle that overcomes and dissolves such apparent dualities.

[Guest]

P.S. I am not "fond" of the Semitic; I AM the Semitic. Half-Jew, Half-Aryan, ultimate creative synthesis, yeah? Hitler had the same psychological predicament, just so you know...

Will this "creative synthesis" overcome the same fate of a Weiningerian? Although I am amused by the Freudian psychoanalysis of Evolas non-moral relativist "sociopathy" these oil and water mixes do have their negatives.
P.s Hitler had the same psychological predicament? That's news to the world.

[HOO]

In the ancient Hebrew tradition as in any other tradition there would a solar,
heroic, component and a lunar, passive, component. A solar symbolism would be
present in the events described in the book of Exodus, insofar as they are
"capable of esoteric interpretation" (RATMW) ; Eliha, Enoch, as well as Jacob,
would be heroic types. Yet, "these elements are sporadic and reveal a curious
oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt,
self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride
and rebelliousness" (ibid;) ; the Kabala, that is, the initiatory tradition that
is found in Judaism, "has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize
it at times as an `accursed science'" (ibid.) ; the same oscillation can be
noticed in the Jewish concept of kingship : on one hand, rulers such as David
and Solomon belonged to a stock of king-priests, but, on the other hand, "the
Jew saw in the full and traditional understanding of regal dignity a
disparagement of God's privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel's opposition
to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant)." (ibid.) In the
earliest conception of the afterlife in the Jewish scriptures, not even the king
can avoid to tread the lunar `path of the ancestors', the only path that can be
tread by all dead.

Furthermore, these traits of a positive, virile, spirituality turn out not to be
intrinsically Jewish (they are "most likely derived (…) from the Amorites,
whose non-Semitic and Nordic origin is sometimes argued") (TAOTJP), with one
exception : the idea of the king-messiah "had numerous common features with
purely Aryan conceptions and ideals, from which, besides, the Jews, in this
respect, often borrowed elements" (Trasformazioni del Regnum, La Vita Italiana,
1937) ; "the very idea of a `chosen people' destined to rule the world by divine
mandate... is an idea that can also be found in Aryan traditions, particularly
among Iranians, just as, among the latter, though with virile and non-passive
Messianic features, the type of the future `universal master', Shaoshyant, a
king of kings." (TAOTJP.) The only inborn characteristic of the ancient Hebrew
religion would be "the so-called `formalism' of the rites", insofar as it is
thought to have "more than likely" "the same anti-sentimental, active,
determinative spirit that... was the characteristic of the primordial and even
Roman virile Aryan ritual." (ibid.)

How could it have been otherwise on the religious plane ? How would the
religious belief and practices of the Hebrews not have reflected their composite
racial substance ? "Ethnically, and originally, very different bloods flowed
into the Jewish people ; the Old Testament itself speaks of many tribes and
races contained in this people and modern race research has come to admit, in
it, the presence of elements even of Aryan or non-Semitic origins, as seems to
be the case in particular for the Pharisees."
(http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id16.html ; see Ezekiel 16:3 ff) As "a
half-caste people... The Jew is essentially a mix of the Levantine or Armenoid
race and of the desert or Orientaloid race ; besides, he would also combine
elements such as the Hamitic race, the Black race, then the Mediterranean and
Alpine (Ostisch) race and of secondary races, whether Oriental or European...
The Jewish people is an admixture of races, not to say a detritus of
predominantly non Indo-European races." (Sulla Genesi dell'ebraismo come forza
distruttrice, La Vita Italiana, July 1941).

What gave shape and unity to the Jewish people was the Law. "... in ancient
Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to
dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by
establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its `form', and by making it
the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and
of the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred
and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the Torah to
the elaboration of the Talmud, the Jewish type arose as that of a race of the
soul [`race of the soul', and not `spiritual', as translated in the American
edition of `Rivolta'] rather than of a physical race." (RATMW) "It has been
said, by a Jew, that, just as Adam was formed by Jehovah, the Jew was formed by
the Jewish law, (…)." (http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id16.html) "This
`Law', in the Jew, replaces the homeland, the land, the nation, the blood itself
; this `Law' reacted to an original, chaotic and detrital racial mixture,
imposed a shape upon it, had it assume instincts and attitudes of a special
type, which would become hereditary through the centuries." (IMDS)

However, "Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be
understood as a punishment for `sins' committed, and thus an expectation
developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his
people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in
Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated
into an apocalyptic, messianic myth, and in the fantastic eschatological vision
of a Savior who will redeem Israel ; this marked the beginning of a process of
disintegration. What derived from the traditional component eventually turned
into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated
from real life." (ibid.) "... moreover, a connection was established with a
human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus
appear to him increasingly abstract and utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied
and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority...
so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution." (RATMW)

Now that a precise summary of J. Evola's views on the Jewish question in ancient
times has been given, it is time to subject them to a critical reading. The
problem of the historicity of the Bible, that of its dating, or, more precisely,
of the dating of the various books of the Old Testament, that of the successive
revisions they have undergone throughout the centuries, and that of its
translation into the languages of the Gentiles, and, more particularly, of its
first translation, the Septuagint, which was initiated and supervised by the
Jews themselves, will hardly be taken into account. They are inextricable.
Whether the authentic history of Israel only began with the monarchy (around
1000 BCE) or the earlier stories are mere allegories, whether the earlier
stories were transmitted by oral traditions or from literary circles of the
sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the extent to which the scriptural corpus was
reinterpreted, amended, corrected, over the centuries, are questions which
cannot be resolved positively in most cases from what we know at present, any
more than it is always possible to identify with complete certainty whether some
scriptures, whose study is however very important for the examination of J.
Evola's assumption that the concept of Messiah was distorted after the
destruction of the political life of Israel and the deportation of its
leadership, are pre-exilic or post-exilic. Even so, the whole Jewish scriptural
corpus, with a few exceptions that correspond to passages unanimously considered
as dubious, will be taken, as it was by J. Evola, as it is, as the Jews want non
Jews to perceive them.

According to Genesis, Japhet is the father of the white race, and, more
precisely, of the Indo-Europeans of Western Asia and of Europe ; Shem, the
father of the peoples of the Middle East and of Southern Asia, while the
descendants of Ham are the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Libyans and the
Canaanites, as well as the Black race. It is certainly not our intention to
discuss the ethnographic conceptions of the ancient Hebrews, in whose maze
biblical scholars themselves get mixed up. While much has been written about the
Table of Nations since Flavus Josephus, the most important thing, the main
point, may have been missed. It has been missed because most of those who have
studied it have focused exclusively on the question of its historical accuracy
and validity, thus overlooking the deep truth it contains, which should be
sought, so to speak, upstream, and not downstream. The starting point for
arriving at a clear view of the matter is not the lineage of Japhet, Ham, and
Shem, but the fact that "Ethnically, and originally, very different bloods have
flowed into the Jewish people ; the Old Testament itself speaks of many tribes
and races contained in this people..." (TAOTJP) In other words, the Table of
Nations should be read, so to speak, in reverse : it's not that the various
races come monogenically from the ancestors of the Jewish people, it's that the
Jewish people is made up of various races. Indeed, "... modern race research has
come to admit, in it, the presence of elements even of Aryan or non-Semitic
origins, as seems to be the case in particular for the Pharisees."
(http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id16.html) The results of later genetic
studies have confirmed that research unambiguously : "Haplotypes constructed
from Y-chromosome markers were used to trace the paternal origins of the Jewish
Diaspora. A set of 18 biallelic polymorphisms was genotyped in 1,371 males from
29 populations, including 7 Jewish (Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish,
Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian) and 16 non-Jewish groups from similar
geographic locations. The Jewish populations were characterized by a diverse set
of 13 haplotypes that were also present in non-Jewish populations from Africa,
Asia, and Europe." (http://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6769.full) As a matter of
fact, for example, "… members of the black, Bantu-speaking southern African
Lemba tribe, who have some rituals similar to Jews and have tribal origin
stories that they are descended from Jews, do indeed carry some Y-chromosome
markers that are undoubtedly of Semitic, probably Jewish, origin." A study "by
A. Oppenheim and her colleagues showed that about 70 percent of Jewish paternal
ancestries and about 82 percent of Palestinian Arabs share the same chromosomal
pool. The geneticists asserted that this might support the claim that
Palestinian Arabs descend in part from Judeans who converted to Islam" (Human
Genetics, December 2000) ; "In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian
scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely
related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the
Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested"
(http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1626606/posts) ; the haematological
research of A. E. Mourant shows that all Jews throughout the world have an
admixture of at least 5% to 10% of Congoid blood, findings which do not prevent
some contemporary White Supremacists who report them, such as R.P. Oliver, to be
adamant that "Jews are a race" ! Such nonsense is widespread, not to say
endemic, among suggestible anti-Zionist goyim who are led to identify Nuremberg
Laws, which, besides, did not refer exclusively to the Jews, with the mission of
enforcing the Torah ban on mixed marriages Ezra and Nehemiah were entrusted with
by the God of Israel following the close of the Babylonian captivity and the
return of some Jews to Israel. Miscegenation was as uncommon and was felt as
unnatural in early twentieth century Germany as it was seemingly widespread and
regarded as natural in pre-exilic Israel, judging by the avowed reluctance with
which the Israelites sent away their foreign wives and children, when urged to
do so by Ezra, by the readiness with which they began to intermarry again, by
the time Ezra had returned to his Babylonian dwellings, and by the unanimous
reaction of the Israelites, upon Ezra's return to Jerusalem to take further
measures to enforce his earlier legislation : "Nehemias (he is Athersatha) and
Esdras the priest and scribe, and the Levites who interpreted to all the people,
said : This is a holy day to the Lord our God : do not mourn, nor weep : for all
the people wept, when they heard the words of the law." (Nehemiah 8:9) : "And
shall we also be disobedient and do all this great evil to transgress against
our God, and marry strange women ?" (ibid. 13:27) It does not appear that
endogamy was the rule among Israelites in earlier times : Esau was married to
two Hittites (Genesis 26:34) ; Joseph was married to an Egyptian (Genesis 41:45)
; Moses – irrespective of his ethnicity and, for that matter, of his
historicity - was married to a Midianite (Exodus 2:21) and a Cushite (Numbers
12:1) ; David – who is portrayed as a descendant of a mixed marriage in the
book of Ruth - to a Calebite and an Aramean (2 Samuel 3:3) ; "And king Solomon
loved many strange women besides the daughter of Pharao, and women of Moab, and
of Ammon, and of Edom, and of Sidon, and of the Hethites : Of the nations
concerning which the Lord said to the children of Israel : You shall not go in
unto them, neither shall any of them come in to yours : for they will most
certainly turn away your heart to follow their gods. And to these was Solomon
joined with a most ardent love. And he had seven hundred wives as queens, and
three hundred concubines : and the women turned away his heart" (1 Kings
11:1-3), to mention but a few examples.

On that basis, how are we to explain that there are proscriptions of exogamy in
the Pentateuch and in the Deuteronomy ?

"Does this prohibition apply to all gentiles or only to the seven Canaanite
nations ? The answer is clearly the latter. Moses commands the Israelites to
destroy the seven Canaanite nations because they threaten Israelite religious
identity and live on the land that the Israelites will conquer. Intermarriage
with them is prohibited. The Ammonites and Moabites, somewhat more distant and
therefore somewhat less dangerous, were not consigned to destruction and
isolation ; they were merely prohibited from entering the congregation (Deut.
23:4). The Egyptians and Edomites were even permitted to enter the congregation
after three generations (Deut. 23:8-9). The meaning of the prohibition of
"entering the congregation" is not at all clear (…) but I presume that
originally, at least, it was not a prohibition of intermarriage. Other nations,
even further removed from the Israelite horizon, were presumably not subject to
any prohibition. Internal biblical evidence confirms this narrow interpretation
of Deut. 7:3-4." (S. Cohen, The Beginning of Jewishness).
Then, it would seem that Ezra's opposition to intermarriage did not result from
the racial ties of foreign wives, but from a concern about the effects that
their religious beliefs and practices would have on the relatively small Hebrew
community of the time. The issue may have been simply of the religious order, as
opposed to the racial justification of the Nuremberg laws. Solomon fell in
disfavour with Yahweh, not because, as David, he had intermarried, but because
"his heart was turned away by women to follow strange gods." (1 Kings 14)

The Jewish Encyclopaedia acknowledges, not only that "Whether regarded
politically or ethnologically, Israel must be considered a composite people.
This appears both from the genealogical statements of the Bible and from
recorded instances of racial amalgamation" (of the twelve sons of Jacob, two –
Judah and Simeon - married a Canaanite ; Joseph married the daughter of
Putiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's palace guard), but also that "early and late
Judah derived strength from the absorption of outsiders" ; of course, the nature
of this strength is not specified.

The mixed character of the early Israelites would inevitably be reflected in
their religious beliefs and practices. The early period of Israelite settlement
was characterised by a strong tendency towards syncretism with the religion of
the Canaanites, which had in turn borrowed heavily from their neighbours'. The
combination of different forms of belief and practice in the religion of Israel
in the period of the kings was so pregnant that M. Eliade was led to describe it
as the "culmination of syncretism." (History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas,
chap. XIV) "The Canaanites, with whom the Israelites came into contact during
the conquest by Joshua and the period of the Judges, were a sophisticated
agricultural and urban people. The name Canaan means `Land of Purple' (a purple
dye was extracted from a murex shellfish found near the shores of Palestine).
The Canaanites (…) absorbed and assimilated the features of many cultures of
the ancient Near East for at least 500 years before the Israelites entered their
area of control...
The religion of the Canaanites was an agricultural religion, with pronounced
fertility motifs. Their main gods were called the Baalim (Lords), and their
consorts the Baalot (Ladies), or Asherah (singular), usually known by the
personal plural name Ashtoret. The god of the city of Shechem, which city the
Israelites had absorbed peacefully under Joshua, was called Baal-berith (Lord of
the Covenant) or El-berith (God of the Covenant). Shechem became the first
cultic center of the religious tribal confederacy (called an amphictyony by the
Greeks) of the Israelites during the period of the judges…The Baalim and the
Baalot, gods and goddesses of the Earth, were believed to be the revitalizes of
the forces of nature upon which agriculture depended. The revitalization process
involved a sacred marriage (hieros gamos), replete with sexual symbolic and
actual activities between men, representing the Baalim, and the sacred temple
prostitutes (qedeshot), representing the Baalot. Cultic ceremonies involving
sexual acts between male members of the agricultural communities and sacred
prostitutes dedicated to the Baalim were focused on the Canaanite concept of
sympathetic magic. As the Baalim (through the actions of selected men) both
symbolically and actually impregnated the sacred prostitutes in order to
reproduce in kind, so also, it was believed, the Baalim (as gods of the weather
and the Earth) would send the rains (often identified with semen) to the Earth
so that it might yield abundant harvests of grains and fruits. Canaanite myths
incorporating such fertility myths are represented in the mythological texts of
the ancient city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) in northern Syria ; though the
high god El and his consort are important as the first pair of the pantheon,
Baal and his sexually passionate sister-consort are significant in the creation
of the world and the renewal of nature.
The religion of the Canaanite agriculturalists proved to be a strong attraction
to the less sophisticated and nomadic-oriented Israelite tribes. Many Israelites
succumbed to the allurements of the fertility-laden rituals and practices of the
Canaanite religion, partly because it was new and different from the Yahwistic
religion and, possibly, because of a tendency of a rigorous faith and ethic to
weaken under the influence of sexual attractions. As the Canaanites and the
Israelites began to live in closer contact with each other, the faith of Israel
tended to absorb some of the concepts and practices of the Canaanite religion."
(http://history-world.org/canaanite_cult ... ligion.htm) The ritual system,
the sacred sites and the sanctuaries of Yahwism were borrowed from the Canaanite
religion, and the Yahwist sacerdotal caste was modelled on the Canaanite's.
However, the external influences which imparted Yahwism as it took shape were
far from being limited to the worship of their closest neighbours, who were
themselves a mixed people, whose political organisation, too, as will be seen,
owed much to foreign influences.

"The initial level of Israelite culture resembled that of its surroundings; it
was neither wholly original nor primitive."
(http://history-world.org/history_of_judaism.htm) From an Indo-European
perspective, "… the idea that the ancient Jewish civilisation represented
something privileged and superior is absurd, since the stature of Israel appears
modest with respect to the ethics and the spirituality common to the ancient
Aryo-Hellenic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Roman, and Aryo-Iranian stocks." (Importanza
dell'idea ariana, in La Stampa, 13 XI-1942 ; now in I Testi de La Stampa, AR,
Padova, 2004) "This nation, despite what has been claimed, never had a
civilisation of its own any more than the Phoenicians did" (A. de Gobineau, An
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) "The Jews possessed neither arts,
nor sciences, nor industry, nor anything of that which constitutes a
civilisation. They have never made even the faintest contribution to the
edification of human knowledge. They have never surpassed that semibarbarous
state of peoples without a history. If they ended in having cities, it is
because living conditions, amidst neighbours which had arrived at a superior
level of evolution, made it a necessity for them. They were unable to build
themselves their cities, their temples, and their palaces, and, at the peak of
their power, under the reign of Solomon, they had to bring from abroad the
architects, the workers, and the artists, of whom no imitator could be found in
Israel and in neighbouring countries. During its long years of history, Israel
produced only one book, the Old Testament, in which only a few lyric poems are
worthwhile. The rest consists of hallucinations, of lifeless chronicles, and of
prurient and gory tales." (G. Le Bon, Les Premières civilisations) "If
Christianity had not triumphed, the history of the Jewish people would be more
foreign, more unknown, more indifferent to us, than that of the peoples of Asia
Minor, such as the Lydians, the Phoenicians and the Hittites, which have
certainly played in the ancient world an infinitely more important part than the
Jews, some small tribe with no culture, continuously defeated and conquered,
subdued and scattered. In fact, what is taught as `Sacred History' is completely
unrelated to the plane of history." (G. Batault, Le Problème juif, 1921)

"The tribal structure resembled that of West Semitic steppe dwellers known from
the 18th-century-BCE tablets excavated at the north central Mesopotamian city of
Mari ; their family customs and law have parallels in Old Babylonian and
Hurro-Semite law of the early and middle 2nd millennium. The conception of a
messenger of God that underlies biblical prophecy was Amorite (West Semitic) and
found in the tablets at Mari. Mesopotamian religious and cultural conceptions
are reflected in biblical cosmogony, primeval history (including the Flood story
in Gen. 6:9-8:22), and law collections. The Canaanite component of Israelite
culture consisted of the Hebrew language and a rich literary heritage -whose
Ugaritic form (which flourished in the northern Syrian city of Ugarit from the
mid-15th century to about 1200 BCE) illuminates the Bible's poetry, style,
mythological allusions, and religiocultic terms. Egypt provides many analogues
for Hebrew hymnody and wisdom literature. All the cultures among which the
patriarchs lived had cosmic gods who fashioned the world and preserved its
order, including justice ; all had a developed ethic expressed in law and moral
admonitions ; and all had sophisticated religious rites and myths."
(http://history-world.org/history_of_judaism.htm) Syncretism does not stop
there. The `trial of jalousy' (Numbers 5:11–31), a test of innocence or guilt
consisting for the priest in administering bitter water to a wife accused of
adultery by her husband, bears a certain resemblance to a similar custom among
the primitive tribes of Western Africa ; circumcision, one of the primeval rites
of Yahwism, seems to have originated among certain tribes in sub-Saharan Africa.
J. John Williams (Hebrewisms of West Africa, from Nile to Niger with the Jews)
reports that "Professor Keller of Yale University, relying in great part on data
gathered by William Graham Sumner, while treating of `Disguise and other Forms
of Mourning', places many West African funeral customs in the same class with
the ritual `sackcloth and ashes' of the Old Testament."
http://www.angelfire.com/ill/hebrewisra ... ewism.html provides an
overview of the striking resemblances of traditional African customs to some of
those which are described in the Ancient Testament.

It is important to bear in mind that no element whatsoever remains unchanged
when passing from one culture to another. This process has been extremely well
studied from a dynamic perspective by Sigmund Mowinckel (He That Cometh) with
respect to the institution of kingship in the early Hebrew community. In fact,
his clear and enlightening presentation, which will give us further insight into
the genius of the Jewish people and, more particularly, into the Jewish
Messianic idea, into the radical changes that were undergone in it by elements
borrowed from other cultures, is so relevant to the matter at hand and so free
of confrontational positions that it will be incorporated into this study almost
word for word, although in a pruned form, as a transition to the consideration
of the matter of Messianism.

The settlement in Canaan and, more exactly, in Schechem, involved an entirely
new way of life, whose inevitable consequences were a new social structure, and
new political institutions and agencies, which in turn called for new forms and
fashion. It was from the Canaanites that the Hebrews learned what a king was
like. In legal and commercial transactions they often had to resort to the
tribunal of these kings, and they had to use, or, of necessity, to submit to
regulations for trade and agriculture which they had not had to develop when
they were nomads. They learned that the monarchical system lay behind every
attempt to establish a great empire, and that only a monarchy had the power to
hold together scattered tribes and settlements, since only a king could have an
army big enough for the purpose. Together with the monarchy it was natural that
Israel should take over from the Canaanites a great many ideas and conceptions
of kingship, the royal ideology, the `manner (mispat) of the kingdom', its
etiquette and customs, the whole pattern of life which was bound up with it. The
Old Testament does not conceal the fact that in many ways it was a new and alien
`manner'. The ideal of kingship that the Hebrews took over from the Canaanites
was actually a special development of the common oriental concept of kingship.
The Canaanite kingship was not an indigenous creation, independent of foreign
influences. The entire culture of the country was in large measure composite,
mainly Syrian, but, like Syrian culture itself, subject to strong influence from
Mesopotamia (Hurrian-Mitannian), from Babylonia and Assyria, from Asia Minor
(Hittite) and from the neighbouring country of Egypt.

The god is thought of particularly as the god of fertility and creation. The
most important cult festival is that of the New Year, when the world is created
anew. In it the king goes through the humiliation and death of the god, his
resurrection, combat and victory, and his `sacred marriage' with the fertility
goddess, and thereby creates the world and makes its prosperity and blessing
secure for the New Year. It is though that this pattern left its stamp on the
cultic practice of the entire Near East, including that of Israel, but partly in
such a way that the pattern was `disintegrated', that is, interpreted,
re-interpreted and, at times, misinterpreted.

Behind this conception of kingship lies a thought which is found among many
primitive peoples, and particularly among the Hamitic tribes of Africa, with
whom the Egyptians had close ethnological and cultural connexions. The thought
is that of a mana-filled chief of the type called `rainmaker-king', who after
death remains a source of power, and who, inter alia, is incarnated in his
successor, though he himself also exists everywhere and acts in other ways. Yet
as early as the time of the ancient Sumerians, the idea of kingship differed
considerably from that of Egypt in many ways. We are dealing here not simply
with two variants of a common oriental ideology of kingship, but with a basic
difference of principle, in spite of many similarities in detail to Egyptian
phenomena. For instance, the individual has no prospect of lasting life, as in
Egypt. The aim of the cult is to safeguard the continued life of the world, of
nature, and of the race in `the land'. But even the gods need to be strengthened
and renewed by the `service' and `food' of which the sacrifices consist. The
gods created men to perform this service, and set a king over them. He is,
indeed, the `great man' (Sumerian, Lugal), but nevertheless a man like other
men. His task is to serve the gods, and carry out their will on earth. His
relation to gods is that of a worshipper, not an equal ; he represents his
people before them. Here too, of course, there is a background of the common
primitive ideas of the mana-filled chief and leader of the cult, in whom the
`power' of the community is concentrated ; he is the channel of divine life and
power to the community.

Even after the emergence of permanent personal rule, the rulers do not usually
call themselves `kings', but the `vicegerents' (Sumerian, ENSI ; Accadian,
ifiakku) and priests (sangu) of the god of the city. And when the position of
the king acquires a more political and military character, based as it is on
force, a distinction may arise in practice between the king and the vice-gerent
priest ; but it is still the king who is the link between the god and the
community. He has a sacral character, inasmuch as he is an intermediary between
the god and the people. As a rule he is presented as a man among men. Insofar as
the Babylonian king is endowed with divine powers and qualities, he may be
regarded as a `divine' being ; but he is not a god in the same sense as Pharaoh.
In accordance with the will of the god he administers and governs the whole
land, which is really the god's property, or the world and mankind, whom the
gods created for their own service. The dominant thought is that the king has
been designated and chosen by the gods, called by name, equipped with power,
thought of beforehand in the heart of the god. In accordance with a common
religious tendency, this divine election of the king is often regarded as
predestination. The election of the king implies that he has a definite vocation
and a definite task, namely to represent the gods before men and vice versa. The
king is the intermediary between gods and men. By means of oracles (asked for or
sent), he must discover the will of the gods and accomplish it on earth. He must
represent men before the gods, and govern his realm in accordance with the law
of the gods. In principle, therefore, he is also priest (sangu), even if there
are professional priests, who in practice carry out the daily routine which
forms part of his duties. He conducts sacrifices and performs rites. In relation
to the gods, he is `servant', subordinate to them and dependent on them. The god
is his `king' and `lord'. But the title of servant also implies that he has a
task to perform by the god's authority. He also represents the people before the
gods, and is responsible for relations between them. He must expiate and atone
for the people's sins, and must personally submit to the rites of atonement. He
may even have to suffer death for the sins and impurity of the people.

Through his good relationship with the gods, a relationship which is
strengthened and made effective by means of the cult, the king is able to convey
to men the blessings of nature, good crops, abundance, peace, and so on. The
Mesopotamian royal texts are full of effusive descriptions of the material,
social, and moral prosperity which abounds in the land when the rightful king
has come to the throne, or when he has performed his cultic duties in the right
and proper way, and complied with the will of the gods. But it is only after the
king, by his vicarious and representative rites in the festival, has atoned for
the impurity which has accumulated, that prosperity can be maintained.

It will have been noted that this characterisation of Semitic spirituality and
religions fully supports that which is articulated in `Three Aspects of the
Jewish Problem' and in `Revolt against the Modern World'.

Israel, S. Mowinckel goes on, did not take over either Canaanite religion, or
the sacral kingship which was connected with it, unaltered. In Yahwism the royal
ideology underwent profound changes. Even in the purified, Yahwistic form of the
tradition in the Old Testament, there are many indications that the forms and
ideas associated with the monarchy, which were originally adopted in the court
ceremonial of David and Solomon, were strongly influenced by common oriental
conceptions. Yet many ideas were adopted in a sense different from that which
they originally carried in Canaan or Babylonia. Many a cultic rite may have been
dissociated from its original context when it was appropriated for Yahwism, so
that it now appears either as a survival or with a new meaning.

It should also be clear that the Israelite monarchy also inherited traditions
from the old chieftainship of the semi-nomadic period and the time of the
settlement. In the traditions about Saul, the account of his simple household,
court, and bodyguard are reminiscent of the establishment of an ancient
chieftain rather than of an oriental king's court. The chieftainship was in a
measure hereditary. But the position of a tribal chief or sheikh depended
primarily on his personal qualities, his ability to lead, advise, and help, and
to settle disputes within the tribe or between tribes and clans. All the
traditions about the Judges show that they attained their position because, in a
given historical situation, they were able to rally the tribe, or several
tribes, around themselves, to beat off the enemy, and thus `save' their people.
This testifies to a more concrete aspect of the later "very visible effort on
the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and
turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of
its `form', and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity
of the common fatherland and of the common origins."

The comprehensive expression for all the chieftain's qualities and activities
was that he `judged'. He was `judge', i.e., ruler, and leader, and magistrate,
by virtue of his ability to do mispat, and his inherent `righteousness'. This
chieftainship has been called `charismatic', as dependent on Yahweh's
`grace-gift' ; and the legends often emphasise that the Judges were called to
the task of liberation by a revelation from Yahweh Himself. We also hear that
they performed their heroic deeds because Yahweh's spirit came upon them and
endowed them with unusual power and insight. When the spirit seized them in the
hour of crisis, the effect was ecstasy, a high tension of all the powers and
faculties of the soul. Then they `went in this their might', with Yahweh as
their protector and helper (Judges 6: 14; cf. I Sam. 10:1-7). There is no
mention of a permanent endowment with the spirit, but of an abnormal
communication of power from time to time.

In his activity the chief was dependent on the fact that he represented ancient
use and wont and conceptions of justice, and on the approbation of the leading
men of the tribe, `the elders'. He
had no independent power to enforce his commands. His authority was founded on
the trust he enjoyed, the spiritual influence he exercised, and the approbation
of public opinion and the common sense of justice. If he had the tribe or a
personal following behind him, he might also enforce his will on other tribes.

Besides his activity as a judge, the chief was also in charge of the public cult
of his tribe. The ancient unity of chief and seer-priest is reflected in the
traditions about Moses ; the chief Ehud
appears as the bearer of an oracle from Yahweh (Judges 3:19).

The Israelite monarchy is the result of the fusion of the traditions of the old
chieftainship with the laws, customs, and ideas of Canaanite kingship. Thence
arose the early attempts at tribal
kingship under Gideon and Abimelech. In contrast with these, Saul represents a
conscious attempt to create a comprehensive national kingship embracing all the
tribes ; and he probably had behind him the old Israelite amphictyony of ten
tribes. On the other hand, the kingship of David and Solomon represents a
national and religious syncretism. But in Israel the tension between the
traditions of chieftainship and those of kingship, and, in general, the
hostility of the `desert ideals' to the monarchy were always present. This is
evident in the opposition between the old standard of justice and the despotic
mispat of the new monarchy. In the affair of Naboth they clash in the persons of
Elijah and Ahab (I Kings 21). The opposition is still more plainly seen in. the
theory that Yahweh alone should be king in Israel, and in the clear awareness
that kingship was a Canaanite innovation, thoughts which find expression in one
of the collections of traditions about Saul and Samuel (I Sam. 8 ; 10; 12 ; 15).
When the cultic functions were transferred to the king, and the chiefs entered
his service, it was left to the circles of old seers and prophets to conserve
the traditions of nomadic times, or rather, what they believed these traditions,
which are thought to have been post-exilic idealisations, not to say
fabrications (Keith W. Whitelman, The Invention of Ancient Israel) to be. In the
traditions about Moses he is not, as has been maintained, a partial reflection
of the figure of the king : on the contrary, he represents the ideals and
traditions which were opposed to the monarchy. It was this prophetic opposition
which constantly renewed the claim that the king's task was to submit to and
maintain `the justice of Yahweh', and not to claim to be more than he was, or to
exalt himself over his `brethren'. It is emphasised that it was a warrior chosen
from among the people that Yahweh exalted when he made David king (Ps. 64:20).

The stormy and conflicting nature of the covenantal relation between Yahweh and
Israel is reflected, not only in this opposition, but also in the more or less
latent conflict between Yahweh and the kings, in the frictions between the
priests and the kings, in the infightings within the sacerdotal caste, in the
implacable and incessant conflict between Baal and Yahweh, and in the tension
between the nationalistic conception of religion and salvation and the
universalistic conception of God, between a cosmic religion and the faithfulness
to one God, which is illustrated by the contest Elijah demanded on Mount Carmel
between the powers of Israel's God and the powers of Jezebel and the priests of
Baal (1 Kings 18). The very establishment of a monarchy in Israel was not a
sinecure. Both Yahweh and Samuel first opposed it (I Samuel 8:10-18). However,
Yahweh had a change of mind and gave Samuel the responsibility of selecting a
king for the Hebrews, on the sole condition that the king was the servant of
Yahweh. Yahweh was praised as king. The idea of divine kingship did not depend
on the institution of monarchy. Yahweh is the master of the world because it is
Him who created it.

Yahweh was praised as king, so much so that, when he wanted to give guidance to
a leader, he often gave it through a prophet (David had the prophets Gad and
Nathan in his palace).
Kingship, whose opponents were highly critical of, was, as seen above, a foreign
institution, likely to have been imposed upon Israel, according to some
scholars, with the complicity of the Levites, a priestly group whose origins are
unclear but unambiguously reach back to the tribe of Levi, and which lost its
supremacy to the Zakodite priests of Jerusalem in the later monarchical period
(http://www.answers.com/topic/levite#ixzz1W8rR3xVW) ; the king, whose function,
by way of summing up the foregoing, was to maintain the cosmic order, to impose
justice, to protect the weak, and to ensure the fertility of the land, was only
the representative of Yahweh, his vicar, conceived as an entity distinct from
him, as is typical of Semitic religions ; before taking the throne, the king was
anointed by the prophet, who, besides, was himself previously anointed with the
holy anointing oil (1 Kings 19:16) - Anointing itself, the sacramental act which
more than anything else linked the king with Yahweh, seems originally to have
been borrowed from the Canaanites, and was probably also practised among the
Babylonians ; he was literally a crownless king ; in this regard, some psalms
seem refer to the non Indo-European symbolic ritual of death and resurrection of
the king – Yahweh, as to him, does not die and resurrect. The Temple, whose
architecture was based on a foreign model, became the residence of Yahweh among
the Israelites under the reign of Solomon and, therefore, the royal cult was
identified with the state religion, but not fully, since the kings were
criticised on certain occasions for having performed rites reserved for priests
– it has not escape your notice that the frictions between the Levites and the
kings, spurred by the fact that the latter encouraged the combining of the
religious ideas and practices which were those of the two sections of the
population, the Israelites and the Canaanites, are reminiscent of the medieval
conflict between the emperor and the pope over the question of the superiority
or not of the spiritual authority over the temporal authority. In the same vein,
the break up of the united kingdom resulted from one of those religious
conflicts for which early Israel is not renowned enough : "Solomon's policy,
late in his reign, of conciliating all the major influential political-religious
parties by granting them state recognition (1 Kings 11:1ff) was a significant
departure from the policy of his father David who granted state recognition only
to the political-religious cult-party of Yahweh (while making no attempt to
stamp out the other cults in his territory). Solomon's liberal policy provoked
the opposition of the exclusivist... Yahwist power caucus (1 Kings 11:9-13) and
provided convenient opportunity for the Ephraimite school of Yahwist prophets to
sow the seeds of disunity by instigating the ambitious Ephraimite Jeroboam to
rebellion (1 Kings 11: 28-40)."
http://www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the- ... e-prophets\
-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarch\
y-part-1/ Religious disunity, as medievalists know well, breeds political
instability : "The received wisdom of popular pious opinion is that which
correlates the periods of Israel's highest points of political, military and
economic prosperity with the ascendancy of the Yahwist religious-political
party. The entirety of the Books of Kings and Chronicles were written in defense
of the dubious but historically influential thesis that the prosperity of the
state of Ancient Israel hinged upon the loyalty of people and state to Yahweh,
and that national disaster was the consequence of disloyalty to the Yahweh. Yet
there is abundant evidence that rather than having been a source of stability,
the cult of Yahweh, for most of the history of Israel, played a major
subversive, divisive and politically destabilizing role and that the
uncompromising insistence of its religious cult on exclusive access to power and
state patronage generated unnecessary friction which heated up and destabilized
the polity, especially in periods of ascendancy of the opposition Baalist
political party. There is also evidence that the most effective and competent
dynasties of Kings in Israel's post-United kingdom history were Baalist, and
that the Yahwists consistently worked to stymie the efforts of the Baalist party
at stabilizing the kingdom
http://www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the- ... e-prophets\
-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarch\
y-part-1/

Yahweh's nature itself is universally known to be conflicting. He appears to his
own people as both loving and hateful, benevolent and merciless, charitable and
avenging, depending on the circumstances and, so to speak, without warning,
sometimes apparently for no reason. On one hand, He is "a consuming fire, a
jealous God" (Deuteronomy 4:24), and, on the other hand, He "is a merciful God :
he will not leave thee, nor altogether destroy thee, nor forget the covenant, by
which he swore to thy fathers." This bipolar disorder has been commented with
humour as follows : "Apparently from the very start, being chosen was a mixed
blessing because the God who did the choosing was himself mixed up" (Yahweh
versus Yahweh : the enigma of Jewish history, Jay Y. Gonen).

A god with no name before the Israelites settled in Canaan, `Yahweh', whose
actual pronunciation is disputed by those who are not in the know and whose
meaning is uncertain to those who are not in the know either, ended up with
seven names. The original nature of this god and even the emergence of Yahwism
are so shrouded in mystery that it is as though no effort had been spared to
muddy the waters. Since it is certainly not the place to review all the
hypotheses that have been formulated on these matters, it is only that to which
J. Evola made reference that will be explored here. "There are ancient
traditions according to which Typhon, a demon opposed to the Solar God, was the
father of the Hebrew ; various Gnostic authors considered the Hebrew god as one
of Typhon's creatures. These are references to a demonic spirit characterized by
a constant relentlessness, by an obscure contamination, and by a latent revolt
of the inferior elements" (RATMW). These references are however undermined by J.
Doresse's finding that in Gnosticism the values of Genesis underwent the same
inversion as had the Egyptian myths. After all, in the Book of Jacob, doesn't
Yahweh boast about the slaying of Leviathan, the personification of chaos in the
Canaanite myth with which this Biblical account shares similarities ? The matter
is nonetheless far more complex than appears at first sight. In fact, there is
no need to refer to Gnostic sources to realise that Yahweh can easily qualify as
a demonic force. While a dose of faith is needed to rationalise Psalm 137:9
("Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock") and
Isaiah 13:16-17 ("Their infants shall be dashed in pieces before their eyes :
their houses shall be pillaged, and their wives shall be ravished. Behold I will
stir up the Medes against them, who shall not seek silver, nor desire gold"),
there is still no consensus as to the interpretation of Exodus 4:24-26 ("And
when he was in his journey, in the inn, the Lord met him, and would have killed
him. Immediately Sephora took a very sharp stone, and circumcised the fore skin
of her son, and touched his feet and said : A bloody spouse art thou to me"), in
which commentators seem to be more concerned about finding out who is this
ambiguous "him" and the reason for the attack than about uncovering who or what
exactly "would have him killed". To Gershom, "We may be sure that Yahweh is no
more a concupiscent demon-god than Zipporah is a virgin mother" ; to Gregory of
Nyssa, an underestimated master of forgery, it is not Yahweh who encounters
Moses, not even the "angel of the Lord", but simply an "angel". `Clarifying
baffling biblical passages'
(http://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/CBBP_Chapter_5.pdf) does not clarify
anything in this regard, but does acknowledge that "It is a very ancient
primitive story that pictures a `demonic' Yahweh (…) The original story may
have concerned a demon or deity of the boundary between Midianite territory and
Egypt whom Moses failed to appease." (J. Philip Hyatt, Exodus) This is dismissed
flatly as nonsense by J.B. Jordan (Law of the Covenant), whereas Antti Laato and
Johannes C. de Moor reiterate that "the fact is that we do have examples in the
Old Testament where `evil' is attributed to Yahweh himself (…) and that these
passages have been regarded as difficult interpretive problems already in
ancient Judaism." (Theodicy in the World of the Bible)
http://www.fundotrasovejas.org.ar/ingle ... ible/Exodu\
s.pdf gives some more detail : "In its notes the Sagrada Biblia (Cantera –
Iglesias, BAC) suggests that the primitive narration, probably Midianite, "would
have referred to a local bloodthirsty demon later identified with Yahweh (see
Jacob's struggle with an "angel/God" Gen. 32:24-32). In the demythologizing
process, Yahweh replaced the demon, and the text was adapted to legitimize the
circumcision of boys." It should also be mentioned that there are a few texts
from the Greek magical papyri in which Iao (a Greek form of Yahweh) is
associated, among other divinities, with Seth-Typhon (Iao is identified with
Jesus in the Coptic magical papyri -
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6540917/Seth- ... kal-Texts#) . See also `God
at war : the Bible and Spiritual Conflict', p. 344 (
http://books.google.fr/books?id=Hj791_B ... demonic+go\
d%22+yahweh&source=bl&ots=utlO801LRt&sig=wX7mkCa1KBvOA7aygmuLiAABNA4&hl=fr&ei=9w\
B-Tvv1G8GnhAf1hpAR&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDwQ6AEwBg#v=onep\
age&q=%22demonic%20god%22%20yahweh&f=false)

Let us pass on the fact that there are many examples of magical practices in the
Old Testament
(http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-conten ... c-and-Divi\
nation-in-Ancient-Israel.pdf), despite the Deuteronomic condemnation of magic
and witchcraft, and that the cut-off point between magica licita and magica
illicita is set, as is definitely the case in early Christian writings, too, by
God (http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/Articles/article_88.pdf), in virtue of its
claimed and perceived normativeness. Let us also pass on the fact that even a
Biblical scholar who would swear on the Bible that "Moses and Aaron do not
employ magic of any kind in Exodus 7:8-12 and 15:1-18, " lets the cat out of the
bag in accepting that "the miracles they perform do have Egyptian analogs," and
in noting "that prior to the parting of the Reed Sea we find the mention of a
curse, not in connection with the magicians, but rather in connection with
Yahweh. As Exod. 14:20 informs us, the cloud of darkness that Yahweh created
`cast a curse/spell (rayw) upon the night, so that one could not come near the
other all through the night.' Though `rayw' as presently vocalized favors the
usual understanding of `cast light' rather than `cast a spell,' the original
consonantal text would have been ambiguous. Moreover, the ordinary
interpretation fails to explain why, if Yahweh cast light, `one could not come
near the other all through the night.' This is a description of darkness and not
illumination."
(http://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/P ... 0JANES%201\
996.pdf) What merits some attention is that the author, when examining the
question of magic in the Old Testament, unconsciously tapped into a key aspect
of Yahweh that is closely linked to his demonism : fear and dread : "It is this
fear and dread that magic ultimately invokes in the heart of the enemy if
affected properly.
When we return to Exodus 15 we find a similar concern with how the death of the
Egyptian at the Reed Sea brought dread upon Egypt's neighbors. Exod. 15:14-16
reads :
The peoples hear. They tremble
Agony grips the dwellers in Philistia
Now are all the clans of Edom dismayed
The tribes of Moab-trembling grips them;
All the dwellers in Canaan are melting
Terror and dread descend upon them;
Through the might of your arm they are as still as stone."
The connexion between magic in its lower form and fear in its most primal form
adds a whole new dimension to this spell of an `unbelievable' violence that is
cast at Gentiles : "And thou, O son of man, saith the Lord God, say to every
fowl, and to all the birds, and to all the beasts of the field : Assemble
yourselves, make haste, come together from every side to my victim, which I slay
for you, a great victim upon the mountains of Israel : to eat flesh, and drink
blood. You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and you shall drink the blood of
the princes of the earth, of rams, and of lambs, and of he goats, and bullocks,
and of all that are well fed and fat. And you shall eat the fat till you be
full, and shall drink blood till you be drunk of the victim which I shall slay
for you." (Ezekiel 39:17-18-19) Doesn't it ?

Magic in its lower form, however, can backfire : "Fear was the driving force
behind the recurrent and obsessive enquiry concerning each and all events
whether they were good for the Jews." (Yahweh versus Yahweh : the enigma of
Jewish history). Jay Y. Gonen, returning to seriousness, shares this view :
"Thus a dread of fateful duality runs throughout Jewish history in various
incarnations and reincarnations. It saturates the Jewish heritage. Its origin,
however, is the split image of Yahweh… It has become a shared fantasy that
conditioned the Jews' collective response and their expectations of history"
(ibid.). As the Jew, as any mixed people, is divided within himself, it should
be expected that, if the Jew may be in the image of Yahweh, Yahweh is without
any doubt in the image of the Jew.

It should be wondered whether the `dark side of Yahweh' could be linked to a
peculiarity displayed by most Semitic gods : "In the beginning, they defeated
the powers of chaos and death ; but every year these powers escape again, and
threaten life with drought, and flood, and all such things as make life
hazardous. The changes in the life of nature show that sometimes the god himself
falls into the power of the forces of chaos. This concerns not only the gods of
fertility and vegetation properly so called." Even more interestingly, the
Hebrew word for `god', elohim, could be used "of many kinds of subordinate
beings, such as the dead soul, the ghost that might be raised (…) The word may
also be used of a demon which causes disease" (Job. 19:22) (He That Cometh).

[HOO]

Demonic gods can be found in all pantheons, including the Vedic one and its
Greek, Roman, Slavic and Germanic counterparts. What sets Yahweh radically apart
from them is His unique status and function. The recasting of "age-old
mythological traditions amounts to the emergence of a new "myth", that is to say
of a new religious view of the world likely to become a model. The religious
genius of Israel converted the relationship of God with the chosen people into a
`sacred history' of a previously unknown type. At a certain point in time, this
`sacred history', which was apparently exclusively national, became an exemplary
model for the whole humanity. What distinguishes the biblical narrative is the
personal message of God and its consequences. Without having been invoked
beforehand, God reveals Himself to a human being, and makes a number of requests
followed by prodigious promises. This is a new type of religious experience :
the `Abrahamic faith'." (M. Eliade) In this regard, the resemblance with
Zoroastrianism is only superficial. "If, in Zoroastrianism as in Yahwism, the
new religion is revealed directly from God, Zoroaster, in accepting it, imitates
the primordial act of the Lord – the choice of goodness (cf. Yasna 32:2) –
and that is all he asks his followers. Basically, the Zoroastrian reform
consists in an imitatio dei. Man is summoned to follow the example of Ahura
Mazda, but he has free choice. He does not feel like the slave of God, as the
faithful of Yahweh or Allah do." (ibid.) Besides, this revelation is not the
foundation of any monotheism. What Zoroaster announces, presenting it as a model
for his followers, is the choice for God and other divine entities. Finally,
"the very conception of the character of `justice' and `blessing' had a
different basis in Babylonia and Assyria [as well as in Persia] from what it
had, for instance, in Israel. We may put it in this way : the gods stand above
justice ; `justice' or `blessing' is what the gods purpose ; but that is often
arbitrary and incomprehensible. It too often seems as if what seems to man to be
wise is contemptible in the eyes of the god, and what seems evil in the
judgement of man is good in the eyes of his god. In Israel, too, Yahweh is the
source of justice and blessing, and in the thought of the pious He is supreme
over these qualities. But the real belief of the reading minds is that Yahweh is
not arbitrary. There is a norm in His relation to mankind." (He That Cometh)
Here we have the actual reason underlying the belief of Israelites in the
superiority of Yahweh over all other gods, as well as the explanation as to why
exclusivism and internationalism go hand in hand in Yahwism and its offshoots.
Later, as a result of the dispersion and missionary activity, the tension
between the nationalistic conception of religion and salvation, and the
universalistic conception of God, was mitigated, and the universalistic elements
in the doctrine of God became more prominent and coloured the conceptions of
restoration and salvation.

A new type of god means a new type of man.

The tribal religion of the Patriarchs had a non cultic character, unburdened as
it was with the high level of detail and the complexity of the rules for the
construction and the decoration of altars and tabernacles that are attributed to
Yahweh in the Torah. The only rituals were bloody sacrifices (zebah) and that
which was linked to the massebah (standing stones), which, even though it was
condemned later by Yahwism, seems to have been shared by the ancestors of the
Hebrews. The two rituals that have played an enormous role in the religious
history of Israel are the covenant sacrifice and Isaac's sacrifice, which was
performed until Jeremiah's times and may have been borrowed from the Canaanite
cult. However this may be, as well seen by M. Eliade, Abraham did not have a
specific outcome in mind when he was preparing to sacrifice his son. He felt
bound to his God by `faith'. He did not `understand' the significance of the
actions that God had just asked him, whereas those who sacrificed their first
born to a divinity were perfectly aware of the significance and of the power of
the magic-religious ritual. "Abraham, M. Eliade continues, summing up his
considerations without seemingly suspecting the implications of this `lack of
understanding', did not perform a ritual (since he did not pursue any goal and
he did not understand what his actions meant) ; besides, his `faith' made him
certain that he was not committing a crime ; it seems that Abraham did not
question the `sacredness' of his actions, which was `irrecognoscible', and,
therefore, unknowable. The meditation on this impossibility of identifying the
`sacred' (since the `sacred' is completely identified with the `profane'), will
have enormous consequences", which, as we have just stressed, the Romanian
author did not seem to fathom in their subversive aspects. By all means, take a
pause for thought at this point and ponder over the significance of his
considerations.

Faith is central to Yahwism. It is important to examine its centrality with
respect to the cult and the worship of pre-exilic Israel. In propitiatory
sacrifices, "the sacrificial gift was thought to have great influence in
placating the angry Jehovah. But no special form of the propitiatory sacrifice
was required. Apparently any ordinary sacrifice might be used for the purpose of
making atonement ; Noah offered burnt-offerings (Gen. 8:20-22) ; David, burnt
offerings and peace-offerings (II Sam. 24:25). It remained for later generations
to develop an elaborate ritual for the specific purpose of atonement. In
addition to this reliance upon sacrifice we have seen that even in preprophetic
Israel the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man was thought to avail
much in behalf of the guilty."
(http://www.archive.org/stream/biblicali ... sofa00burt\
uoft_djvu.txt)
According to M. Weber, "The necessity for having access to Yahweh priests
knowing the law and ritual" increased ", in order to decipher God's will and the
transgression necessary to be expiated." Whilst the focus came to be put on
matters of rites and the rites became more and more complex, these were still
based on faith and belief, a belief in a single creator, a unique and
everlasting God, in His omniscience and omnipotence, a belief in the words of
the prophets, the faith that God had a great future in store for His people, the
faith that God's promises are genuine, and that God's purpose must be fulfilled,
the belief in the revealed and redemptive character of the Torah (the objection
that the concept of sin cannot be found in the Torah, since there cannot be sin
in law, but only crime, and that the only offence to the Commandments was non
observance, is a specious distinction, for the Torah is a set of moral codes and
imperatives, and sin is a transgression of a religious or/and moral law). The
pathos of the Babylonian rite of atonement is reflected in the penitential rites
of the New Year festival, during which the king, acting as the cultic
representative and embodiment of the people, bore Israel's sufferings, and
performed the atoning rites and prayers meant to induce Yahweh to intervene and
save. Atonement issues in the questioning of Yahweh as well as supplication
sacrifices already played a pivotal role in the pre-prophetic cult of Israel. In
post-exilic times, the Priestly Code of the sacrificial system developed into an
ordinance of atonement, reflecting the growing consciousness of sin and the
longing for atonement. (He That Cometh)

No matter how ritualistically correct the procedure had to be to be propitious,
it is thus clear that "The so-called `formalism' of the rites in the religion",
based it was on the faith factor, was unlikely "to have the same
anti-sentimental, active, determinative spirit that... was characteristic of the
primordial and even Roman virile Aryan ritual." (TAOTJP) It is irrelevant that,
to quote M. Weber, "... the primitive way of answering concrete questions with
"yea" and "nay" by throwing lots was burdened with an absolute minimum of
esoterics, emotional or mystic irrationalism." Psycho-analysts are even less
loquacious at work.

Yahweh was definitely a new type of god. He appeared as both inaccessible and
dangerous, and he said he brought salvation. He decreed that the mortality of
man was the consequence of original sin, particularly of Adam's attempt to be
like God. As a slave to Yahweh, man must live in the fear of his God. Since the
Law proclaims with precision God's will, the main thing is to follow the
Commandments, a set of moral precepts. In early Yahwism, divine order is thus
lowered to morality, that is to say, basically, to a purely human criterion, no
matter how spiritualised – Jewish scholars might claim that the meaning of the
word `Torah' is far deeper and wider than commonly thought, they do not seem to
be able to tell us exactly in what ways. A code of conduct existed, whether in
oral or in written form, in all ancient Indo-European peoples, without them ever
feeling the need to resort to a divine revelation to enforce it upon the
community and to make it clear to it. As to the Zoroastrian gathas, which were
described as "burdened with moral concerns" by G. Dumezil, it must be understood
that, no matter the translations he relied on, none of them appear to be
reliable : "No one who has ever read a stanza of [the Gathas] in the original
will be under any illusions as to the labour which underlies the effort [of
translating the hymns]. The most abstract and perplexing thought, veiled further
by archaic language, only half understood by later students of the seer's own
race and tongue, tends to make the Gathas the hardest problem to be attempted by
those who would investigate the literary monuments" (Moulton, James Hope (1906),
"Bartholomae's Lexicon and Translation of the Gathas (Review)", The Classical
Review 20 (9) : 471–472).

J. Evola pointed out that early Jewish Messianism bears some similarities with
the Zoroastrian concept of Saoshyant (bearing in mind that Persian influence on
the religion and culture of the East does not seem to begin until the sixth
century), with the Kalki avatar in Hinduism, and with the prophecy of Maitreya
in Buddhism. It is not the place to examine these similarities in detail, if
nothing else because they are supposed to be quite well-known ; nor is it the
place to dwell on the fact that, if, as mentioned by the Italian author, the
Aryan like conceptions of a purely heavenly paradise is also present in Judaism,
it is only described as such in the Apocalypse of Enoch and in other late
writings, and appears to be the result of Persian influence. Let us get straight
to the point by highlighting the main differences between the Aryan conception
of the saviour, or better `transfigurer', and the Jewish notion of redeemer. The
first difference is linked to the historicisation process that was undergone by
the themes and mythical characters of the cosmogony which was actualised in the
Yahwist New Year festival. Whereas Kalki, Maitreya, and Saoshyant are expected
to come to end the present age of darkness, making permanent and ever-lasting
the restoration that was meant to be performed only annually in the New Year
festival, there is, as paradoxical as it may sound, no strictly eschatological
dimension about pre-exilic Yahwism. In Yahwism, the New Year festival and its
pattern were, in fact, completely transformed. "Its basis in the natural order
is, indeed, still clear, even in Israel : what is created is, in the first
instance, life on earth, fertility, crops, the cosmos. But the Canaanite thought
that the god himself is renewed has disappeared ; and what the king obtains in
the cultic festival is not primarily new life and strength, but the renewal and
confirmation of the covenant, which is based on Yahweh's election and
faithfulness, and depends upon the king's religious and moral virtues and
constancy. To the renewal of nature there has been added another element of
increasing importance, the renewal of history. It is the divine acts of election
and deliverance in the actual history of Israel which are relived in the
festival. Election and the covenant are ratified. In the cultic drama the
historic events are experienced anew ; and victory over the political foes of
contemporary history is promised, guaranteed, and experienced in anticipation.
In Canaan the drama enacted the god's own fortunes, his birth, conflict, death,
resurrection, victory, and cultic marriage with the goddess. In Israel we find
no trace of the representation of the fortunes of Yahweh by the king. The
Jerusalem cult had its own drama, which presented vividly and realistically
Yahweh's epiphany, His conflict and victory, His enthronement, and His
re-creation of the world, of Israel, and of life on the earth. Probably Yahweh's
victory over the enemy was presented dramatically by means of a sham fight, as
was done among neighbouring peoples. But in virtue of the marked historical
emphasis which is characteristic of Yahwism from the beginning, it is not the
conflict with chaos and the dragon which is enacted (as, for instance, in
Assyria) but Yahweh's victory over His own historical enemies and those of
Israel." (He That Cometh). This is so true that "In the cultic drama, the
worshipper, undoubtedly often the king himself, does not here lament over
suffering and death which he undergoes symbolically in the cult, but over actual
present distress brought upon him by earthly enemies, foreign nations and
traitors within the state, or over ordinary illness and the danger of death."
The common oriental royal ideology underwent in early Israel quite fundamental
changes under the influence of Yahwism and the wilderness tradition, and many of
the forms which were borrowed acquired a modified or new content, whereby those
common features which do exist must not be interpreted solely in terms of the
meaning they had in Babylonia or Egypt, but in the light of the entire structure
and the fundamental ideas of Yahwism. Whether or not the rites originally
associated with the worship of the king were adopted in the Israelite cult
without any thought of their original meaning, it appears plainly that their
cosmic nature was deeply altered in the process.

It needs to be emphasised that "in the Old Testament, and particularly in its
older parts, the Messiah is not a supernatural being who comes from above. He is
indeed depicted in mythical
colours ; but we find not more, but rather less of the mythical style than is
usual in the ancient oriental conception of the king… the literal sense which
it may originally have conveyed was weakened in Israel ; and the divinity of the
king was not conceived as anything more (nor yet as anything less) than a divine
adoption of an ordinary man and his endowment with power. The natural aspect in
the mythical form was in Israel transferred to the PERSONAL AND MORAL SPHERE
[emphasis added]. That the king, in spite of his divine quality, was an ordinary
man of this world was not felt to be either a paradox or a problem. This is true
no less of the Messiah, the future king, the more so since it was not the older,
more mythical, Canaanite form of the conception of kingship which formed the
background of the idea of the future king when it emerged, but rather the
conception held in the later monarchy, or after the end of the monarchy, when
the influence of the prophets, the sole lordship of Yahweh, and the growing
sense of the distance between God and man had forced the mythical element in the
ideal of kingship ON TO THE MORAL PLANE [emphasis added]." (ibid.) It is
precisely in moral terms, as a result of an `original sin' and of the subsequent
fall, that the entire re-creation of mankind and nature is dealt with in the
eschatology of the Bible and of later Judaism. Clearly, many of the forms which
were borrowed acquired a modified or new content which is really the shadow of
what little traits of positive, virile, spirituality J. Evola thought he could
see from an Indo-European perspective in the Jewish concept of King-Messiah.

Genuine Messianic prophecies and those which speak of the idealised and
empirical king in Israel or Judah must be clearly distinguished. "The majority
of the passages which popular theology interprets as Messianic are in fact
concerned with the king of actual historical experience." (ibid.) However,
needless to say that there is a connexion between the two set of ideas… those
ideas which were associated in Israel with the king share all their essential
elements with the concept of the Messiah. The only essential difference is that
the ideal of kingship belongs to the present (though it clearly also looks
towards the future), whereas the Messiah is a purely future, eschatological
figure... `Messiah' is the ideal king entirely transferred to the future, no
longer identified with the specific historical king, but with one who, one day,
will come." (ibid.)
Within our framework, it is not relevant whether the `Messianism hope' derived
from the kingly ideology, as argued by Mowinckel, or vice versa, nor whether
"(according to the most probable critical dating of the sources) the genuine
Messianic sayings in the Old Testament belong to a relatively late period, most
of them (perhaps all) to the time after the fall of the monarchy." What is
relevant is that the conception of monarchy and that of Messianism (be it
`genuine' or not) are basically similar at any period in the history of the Jews
; they are based on the same tenets : the over-arching theme of the Law is that
Israel is the `chosen people' and that it is destined to dominate all the men,
all the lands, and all the riches, so that all kingdoms will have to obey
Israel. It runs through the whole Old Testament, in all the "Covenant between
the parts", i.e., between Yahweh and His People, from the Abrahamic covenant to
Deuteronomy 30:1-10, Deuteronomy 11: et al., 2 Samuel 7:8-16, and, finally,
Jeremiah 31:31-34. Not that it cannot be found in the edifying Adamic Covenant
(Genesis 3:16-19 ; Genesis 1:26-30; 2:16-17), too, as we shall see later.

The king, as the son of Yahweh, the God of all the earth, "has a rightful claim
to dominion over the whole world. In David's supremacy over the other small
states in and around Palestine, nationalistic religious circles in Israel and
Judah saw a foretaste of the universal dominion over the peoples, which as goal
and as promise was implicit in the election of the king as Yahweh's Anointed and
deputy on earth… At the anointing, on the coronation day, and, later, at the
great annual festival, the king received the promise of a filial relationship to
Yahweh, of victory over all his opponents, of world dominion, of `everlasting
priesthood'. Hence the prophetic author of Ps. ii can describe the situation at
the accession of a new king in Jerusalem as if in fact all the kings and peoples
of the world were plotting to throw off the yoke of Yahweh and His Anointed, but
were awed into submission by Yahweh's words promising the throne to the chosen
king, and threatening His opponents with destruction, unless they submit in time
and `kiss his feet with fear and serve him with trembling'." (He That Cometh)
"The righteousness of the king includes first of all the ability to save his
people from their enemies round about (i Sam. ix, 16; x, i). The chosen king is
the invincible warrior, filling the places with dead bodies. With his mighty
sceptre he rules from Zion in the midst of his enemies : Yahweh makes them his
footstool (Ps. ex, 2, 5f.)." Unchivalrously, "all his enemies will be clothed
with shame (Ps. cxxxii, 18). His hand finds out all his enemies. His right hand
finds out those that hate him. When he but shows his face, he makes them as a
fiery oven", a detail which Robert II of France, whose very favourite book,
according to his hagiography, was the Bible, must have missed, but that did not
escape the notice of R. Faurisson, ten centuries later according to Scaligerian
chronology. Speaking of will to extermination, "Their offspring he destroys from
the earth, and their seed from among the children of men. When they plot evil
against him and frame a malicious scheme, they achieve nothing ; for he makes
them turn their backs when he takes aim at them from his bowstring (Ps, xxi,
gff)." (ibid.)

Two passages cast in the same mould are quoted in extenso from Deuteronomy in
`Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem' : "And the Lord shall make thee the head
and not the tail : and thou shalt be always above, and not beneath : yet so if
thou wilt hear the commandments of the Lord thy God which I command thee this
day, and keep and do them (28:13)" ; "Thou shalt consume all the people, which
the Lord thy God will deliver to thee. Thy eye shall not spare them, neither
shalt thou serve their gods, lest they be thy ruin (7:16)." Thus, a strong
animus against Goyim already existed among the early Hebrews. No effort seems to
have been spared to cause the Jews to hate the Gentiles and vice versa. "Insofar
as their actual existence (the heathens') is admitted, D. Reed notes, with more
insight than is shown in other parts of `The Controversy of Sion', it is only
for such purposes as those stated in verse 65, chapter 28 and verse 7, chapter
30 : namely, to receive the Judahites when they are dispersed for their
transgressions and then, when their guests repent and are forgiven, to inherit
curses lifted from the regenerate Judahites. True, the second verse quoted gives
the pretext that "all these curses" will be transferred to the heathen because
they "hated" and "persecuted" the judahites, but how could they be held culpable
of this when the very presence of the Judahites among them was merely the result
of punitive "curses" inflicted by Jehovah ? For Jehovah himself, according to
another verse (64, chapter 28) took credit for putting the curse of exile on the
Judahites : "And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end
of the earth even unto the other... and among these nations shalt thou find no
ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest..."

2:25, 9:3, 9:11, 11:23, 12:2-3 are hardly less inspired, by Yahwist standards,
than 7:16. So much so that the moral commandments prohibiting murder, stealing,
coveting, bad neighbourliness, theft, false testimony, etc., end up being
nullified by a plethora of statutes requiring formerly the `chosen people' to
slaughter other peoples, to murder apostates, to destroy their cults and their
nations, and the like ; as well seen by K. Marx, in the Jewish religion, "man's
supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him
not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the
dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged. Jewish Jesuitism, the
same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of
the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of
which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws. Indeed, the movement
of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension
of law." Deuteronomy begins with a historical introduction, moves to a list of
laws and then to a long list of blessings and curses, and ends with the
appointment of Joshua and the death of Moses ; of the sixty-eight verses of
chapter 28, fourteen are blessings and fifty-four are curses, not just blessings
and curses, but blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience to God's
law. The blessings concern exclusively material prosperity, the defeat and the
extermination of enemies and dreams of world dominion. Fanaticism and
sectarianism are taken to a whole new level in Leviticus and in Numbers. In the
Leviticus ("But let him be among you as one of the same country : and you shall
love him as yourselves : for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the
Lord your God") as in Deuteronomy, the command to love one's neighbour turns
into its exact opposite : "And of the strangers that sojourn among you, or that
were born of them in your land, these you shall have for servants : And by right
of inheritance shall leave them to your posterity, and shall possess them for
ever. But oppress not your brethren the children of Israel by might."
(25:45-46). Other contemporary kings in the Middle-East were not at all shy
about emphasising their warlike exploits and boasting of having subjected
foreign nations and countries to the dominion of their gods, yet they did not
battle over world dominion in the name of their deity, nor did they plan a
genocide.

In the Books of Zechariah, who is supposed to have prophesised during the reign
of Darius the Great, six decades after the fall of Jerusalem, the substance is
still the same : "Zerubbabel will be king over the restored Jerusalem, and will
gain power and renown. From distant lands foreigners will come to join in
building the temple of Yahweh ; the hostile world power will be destroyed before
him ; for his sake Yahweh will again before long shake both heaven and earth and
overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the
nations, and overthrow the chariots and those that ride in them ; and horses and
riders will fall, every one by the sword of his brother Israel will again subdue
other nations. But these political ends will be attained only through Yahweh's
action, without the help of man : `not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit,
says Yahweh of hosts'. The message of Haggai and of Zechariah has nothing to do
with eschatology. What they are waiting for is a complete historical revolution
in the Near East, attributed, of course, to the guidance of Yahweh and to the
intervention of His miraculous power, but developing within the course of
empirical history and working through normal human means. `By His spirit' Yahweh
will guide events so that the world powers destroy each other in the chaos which
has arisen all over the east as a result of the death of Cambyses ; and Israel
alone will remain unscathed and will reap the benefit." (He That Cometh) This
might be described as a fantastic and unrealistic expectation, but the fact is
that that there is nothing eschatological stricto sensu about it : "In
Zechariah, the horses, riders, etc., are beings which really exist, and are
always at hand, working as Yahweh's instruments like the angels, but as a rule,
like Yahweh Himself, working behind and through natural agencies, whereas in the
Revelation they have become apocalyptic entities, which do not come into
existence, or, at least, into action, until the last times, their object being
to precipitate the final catastrophe."

There is thus some truth and some flaw in the claim that "It is not the former
Jewish Messianic idea, but its corruption and its materialisation, which is the
real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at destroying for
good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on
earth." (Trasformazioni del `Regnum', La Vita Italiana, 1937). It is incorrect
to speak of a "corruption" and of a "materialisation" of the former Messianic
idea, and, in any case, of the type of the `universal master' that can be found
in Aryan traditions, insofar as the earlier Jewish Messianic idea already
testifies to a materialist conception of Messianism, and materialism means
corruption. Furthermore, the intimate connexion between the early Jewish
Messianic idea and the thirst for earthly riches and goods right from the start,
and not just from Mosaic times, is fully recognised by the Italian author in a
later article : "... the `Kingdom' supposedly promised to the Jewish people was
not understood by any means in a mystical and supra-terrestrial sense, but as
that which is to possess all the riches of the world." (IMDS) "It has been noted
that the very way the Jews conceived of the relation between man and the
divinity, a relation that was based on a mercantile mechanism of service and
rewards, shows, de do ut est, a mercantilism that must have already constituted
the essence of Judaism in ancient times ; however, this spirit could not but
provoke the scorn of Aryan peoples, who were used to a different type of
morality and conduct. As is known, in the ancient Law, the Torah, the Messianic
idea was already intimately connected with earthly riches and goods, which would
give rise to capitalistic speculation, and, finally, to economics as an
instrument of power in Israel's plans." (Il Giudaismo nell'antichità ). It would
have been relatively more correct to state that it is not the former Jewish
Messianic idea, but its further corruption and its further materialisation,
which is the real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at
destroying for good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all
forces on earth ; we have said "relatively", since it should be borne in mind
that, while it is true that the Jewish Messianic approach resulted in the
crassest materialist praxis as soon as the Jews were scattered throughout the
world following the fall of Jerusalem, the concept of future kingdom, far from
undergoing a "naturalisation", a "materialisation", during the Diaspora, came to
be understood in religious and spiritualistic rather than in political and
concrete terms, with an emphasis on the miraculous divine character of the
kingdom, to be realised by God, not by His people. In the thought of the earlier
period, the restored Davidic kingdom was "`a kingdom of this world',
established, it is true, by a miraculous divine intervention, yet through
political means, through the historical and political circumstances of the age.
It was to be realized entirely within the `natural' course of world events,
within `natural' human history, which continued its course in accordance with
the same `laws' and `forces' as before." (He That Cometh) The concept of future
kingdom did not materialise any more than the actual future kingdom (which,
according to the Bible, extends far beyond the current borders of the state of
Israel) did, it "became an ideal conception based on religion and permeated by
religion." (ibid.) ; "the severance of the future hope from historical reality,
from the contingent, from any causal connexion with circumstances," and its
assumption of an absolute character, took place in Deutero-Isaiah. Nevertheless,
"it was never forgotten that the starting point for the future hope was faith in
the restoration of Israel as a free people among the other nations, on this
earth, in the land of Canaan. Thus there persisted in eschatology an unresolved
tension, a gulf between those elements which were political, national, and
this-worldly, and those transcendental and universal elements which belonged to
the world beyond." (ibid.) Of these two profoundly different conceptions of the
future, the former "is older and more truly Jewish than the other." (ibid.) "The
ideal of kingship at one and the same time belonged to the present and had a
future reference, and might at any time be applied to a historic person. The
difference is that in Haggai and Zechariah the Davidic kingdom has been
destroyed ; but they regard the new historical situation as its restoration by
Yahweh, and as already in process of being realized. The new ideal king of the
ancient line is already present." (ibid.) These two profoundly different
conceptions of the future - in the economy of which the Gentiles are looked upon
as a specific historical and political entity and as the manifestation of a
mythical, cosmic power, at enmity with God, respectively - were the breeding
ground for the dialectic of schizophrenia.

The Messiah figure did not undergo more significant changes than the Messianic
message did throughout the history of Israel. It is characterised by the Jewish
passion for humility and mania for self-humiliation. The king, as the deputy of
Yahweh, is completely dependent on and subordinate to Yahweh. Both at the
regularly repeated festivals and on special cultic occasions such as the days of
humiliation and prayer before war, the fact that the good fortune and blessing
of the king are dependent on his obedience to the will and law of Yahweh is
constantly emphasised. It is, therefore, entirely in accord with the Israelite
conception that the king's humility is also emphasised. Just as it is the king's
duty to sustain the humble and the oppressed, so he must himself be humble and
meek. Not splendour, but justice to the lowly is the essence of kingship. On the
days of humiliation and prayer and in the atonement liturgies, it is the king
who, as a corporate personality, vicariously bears and lays before Yahweh all
the misfortune, suffering, and distress which have befallen the people. They
become his personal suffering and distress, making him ill and weak. On the
other hand, in Europe, it was not until Christianity came to predominate that
humility, one of the central themes of all millenarian movements, "became a
`virtue' in a sense that is hardly Roman and was glorified as opposed to an
attitude of strength, of dignity, and of calm awareness... In ancient Rome, it
was considered as the exact opposite of `virtus'. It meant baseness,
wretchedness, lowliness, abjection, vileness, shame – so that death or exile
was said to be preferable to humility : `humilitati vel exilium vel mortem
anteponenda esse'... It was also linked to the idea of race or caste : `humilis
parentis natus' meant to be from a lower class background, of plebeian
extraction, as opposed to an aristocratic origin, and, therefore, something
quite different from the modern expression `of humble birth', especially as
nowadays social status is solely based on the economic criterion. In any case,
it would never have occurred to a Roman of the good old days to think of
`humilitas' as a virtue, let alone to boast about it and to preach it. As for
the so-called `moral of humility', it may be useful to recall the comment of a
Roman emperor that nothing is more deplorable than the pride of those who call
themselves humble." (Sfaldamento delle parole, in L'Arco e la Clava) History has
shown those who have a sort of sixth sense to identify the scum wherever it
hides what lies ultimately behind all the revolutionary movements whose
ideological watchwords refer to the protection of "the humble and the
oppressed".

The glorification of lowliness is brought to an entirely new level in the Songs
of the Suffering Servant. First, S. Mowinckel points out, the Servant is the
opposite of all that is humanly great and exalted, of all that is lordly, and
mighty, and masterful. He is not impressive or attractive ; he has no outward
glory or majesty, but is unclean, despised, and forsaken of men. The dirge does
not describe him, as is usual, as a flowering tree, but as a root in arid soil ;
not as a lion or an eagle (cf. 2 Sam. 1:23), but as a ewe, dumb before her
shearers. But when he has been `vindicated' (justified), he will be the
spiritual deliverer of Israel, and a light for the nations, who will be won for
the true religion by the miracle wrought on him by Yahweh. Then, the Servant's
task is to do the very thing which was not expected of the future king, and
which experience had shown that none of the historical persons such as
Zerubbabel, with whom the future hope was associated, could perform : to bring
Israel back to Yahweh. The Servant will do this, not as a victorious king, but
by his suffering and death. Finally, the main point is that the influence of the
Servant on the conception of the future leads to a very important result : the
Servant displaces the king, and himself becomes king. What no Messiah, as
conceived by the Jewish national religion, could perform, the Servant performs.
In connexion with the compelling shift of the Messianic idea we have pointed out
above from the manly realm of action to that of rhetoric, it is also typical
that his victory, not only over his opponents, but over the souls of men, is due
to his ability to win the hearts of his own people and of his enemies, as he has
already won the hearts of the poet-prophet and the prophetic circle.

These themes reach a climax in the Book of Jeremiah and in the Book of Ezekiel.
Jeremiah "is no longer his own master. Yahweh may even devastate his personal
life in order to use him in this way as a powerful `portent' to attain His
purpose. So it is with Jeremiah. Yahweh forbids him to marry and have children,
or to have any human or social intercourse with his neighbours, to go to a house
of mourning, or a party, or a wedding. In short, he cuts himself off from his
natural environment, from all the sources of his life, and sacrifices his entire
natural life, in order to be a vehicle of the message of doom which he has to
convey to his people. That he felt it to be a grievous disaster and curse is
evident from his complaints about his mission, as he sits alone because Yahweh's
hand is upon him, and he is filled with Yahweh's own indignation. In the same
way, Ezekiel has to swallow a scroll with lamentations, and mourning, and woe
written on the front and on the back. He has to let all the disaster which will
befall Jerusalem afflict his own person, lying bound three hundred and ninety
days for Israel, and forty days for Judah, and `bear their punishment'. `And
behold I shall put cords upon you, and you will not turn from one side to the
other, till you have completed the days of your siege.' During this time he will
eat bread by short weight, and drink water by short measure, and disregard the
rules of cleanness, because this will also be Jerusalem's lot during the siege.
Yahweh will take away from him the desire of his eyes, his wife ; and he may not
mourn for her, or do honour to her memory in accordance with customary decorum.
In this way, Ezekiel will be a portent to the Jews, indicating that the same
fate will befall them all, the loss of wives, sons, daughters, and kinsfolk
without their being able to lift a finger to help them. In this way, the
prophets often had to share the burden of punishment for the people's sin." (He
That Cometh) "The suffering and the martyrdom to which the prophets (…) were
exposed in fulfilling their mission, were endured by them because of the
people's sin, certainly not willingly, and with a strong sense of the injustice
of it, but still as a consequence of their efforts to bring the sinful people to
conversion, penitence, and salvation." (ibid.)
What is important about this development of the Jewish concept of Messiah is
that, the more the prophet is endowed with human characteristics or attributes
and individualised, the more, of course, his suffering and his abjection can be
portrayed with a profusion of increasingly sordid details, and the more he is
identified with the Jewish people as a whole. As is well-known, the last will be
the first (Mt. 19.30 ; 20.16 ; Mk 10.31 ; Lk. 13.30)

[HOO]

While J. Evola is thus right in saying that "Hebrew `prophetism'... originally
displayed traits that were very similar to the cults of inferior castes, and to
the pandemic and ecstatic forms of the Southern races" (RATMW), there is no
indication that "The `prophet' type (nabî), inspired or obsessed by God (…)
is substituted for the `clairvoyant' type (roeh)…" (TAOTJP ; see 1 Samuel
9:9), and that the nabî "was previously considered as a sick man" (ibid). In
fact, there is a consensus among scholars, whether Biblical or not, about the
contemporaneity of the roeh and the nabî. In 2 Kings 17:13, `seer' is used in
parallelism with `nabî', thus suggesting that the two terms were equated. "The
prophet (nabi') bore also the titles `ro'eh' and `ḥozeh' = `seer'" (I Sam.
9:9 ; II Kings 17:13)
(http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view. ... z1W8Xit1z1) .
"The word nabî expresses more especially a function. The two most usual
synonyms ro'eh and hozéh emphasize more clearly the special source of the
prophetic knowledge, the vision, that is, the Divine revelation or inspiration.
Both have almost the same meaning ; hozéh is employed, however, much more
frequently in poetical language and almost always in connexion with a
supernatural vision, whereas râ'ah, of which ro'éh is the participle, is the
usual word for to see in any manner."
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12477a.htm) In other words, as the roeh "beheld
the visions of God," so the nabî "proclaimed the divine truth revealed to him
as one of an official order in a more direct way", as a "spokesman for God,
mediating for God to man." (http://www.bible-history.com/faussets/P/Prophet/).
If a distinction is to be made between the nabî and the roeh, the former
`translated' the latter's visions into words, in the process of which, thus,
only the mode of revelation changed, while the state of revelation remained
unchanged in its ecstatic essence. What is certain is that the roeh and the
nabî were two different institutions. "The mass ecstatic Nebiim, under the
influence of Canaanite orgiasticism and the irrational and emotional forms of
magic", came from the North, and "the rational Levitical Torah and the rational
ethical emissary prophecy", came from the South (M. Weber, Ancient Judaism)

To M. Eliade, "... the institution of the `seer' (ro'eh), which dated back to
the nomadic times, was altered, after the conquest, under the influence of the
nabîim, whom the Israelites had encountered upon their arrival in Palestine. By
1000 BCE, the Yahwist `seers' (such as Nathan) still coexisted with the nabîim
(I Sam. 10:5). Both institutions merged gradually, and the final result was Old
Testament classical Prophetism." It is not wrong to state, as does M. Weber,
that the dualism between the mass ecstatic nabî and the rational ethical
emissary prophecy "ran covertly throughout Israelite history since the beginning
of the invasion. It became acute with the increasing rational character of the
mentalities of the two powers opposed to the orgy : the Levites and the prophets
of doom", provided that it is understood that the binary opposition no longer
existed between two different institutions, two antagonistic brands of
prophetism, but within the `prophets of doom' themselves, as well seen by M.
Eliade : indeed, "the Yahwism the prophets proclaimed had already assimilated…
elements of the Canaanite religion and culture, so bitterly abhorred by the
prophets." For example, the marital simile used by Amos (783 ? -740 ?) to
describe the relation between Yahweh and Israel, and which would become a
recurrent theme in all main subsequent prophets, is dependent upon the Canaanite
fertility cults he fought. (M. Eliade, History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas,
chap. VII). While the "abominations" of the Israelites which are stigmatised,
for example, in Isaiah 1:4, 8:9, 56:10-11, can be explained by "a curious
oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt,
self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride
and rebelliousness" (RATMW), this "curious oscillation", as paradoxical as it
may seem, is also found in the one who stigmatises them. For example, in
Jeremiah, thundering words of defiance and bellicose imprecations (1:10)
alternate with self-humiliating whining (20:7-8).

The ecstatic elements are present in the pre-exilic prophets as well as in the
post-exilic ones : "The earliest historical references to prophetism come from
the days of Samuel in the description of the ecstatic group encountered by Saul
(1 Sam. 10:5-13)" (J. Jensen, God's Word to Israel). Whether in pre-exilic or in
post-exilic times, whether in Amos or in Isaiah, the substance of the prophecies
remains essentially the same : the emphasis is on the stigmatisation of the sins
of Israel, and more specifically on the denunciation of the crimes of the rich
against the poor. Only the tone changes : severe and unsentimental in Amos, it
becomes fanatical and mawkish in Isaiah, and increasingly so in later prophets.
This change in tone results in all likelihood from a process of
individualisation of prophetism : "In Samuel's time, would arise the adoption of
the Canaanite practice of consecrating `high places' of worship to deity in
which sacrificial rituals were performed and song and dance ceremonies inducing
ecstasy by group hypnotic methods was practiced (1 Samuel 10:5;1 Samuel 10:10).
In Samuel 19:20ff, we are granted the opportunity of insight into the spirit
possession cultic practice of Samuel's prophetic schools... Here we see evidence
that there was a specific method or procedure of music, song and dance for
inducing collective excitement, ecstasy and raving behavior termed `prophesying'
(1 Samuel 19:20ff.)... With the independent prophets, the picture of things
would change. Rather than the group, there would be the individual, alone with
God. Elijah would set the standard of anti-cultic attitude of the new
independent prophets and spearhead a theological development beyond the
primitive conception of Levite tradition."
(http://www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the- ... he-prophet\
s-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarc\
hy-part-1/) The process of rationalisation and intellectualisation that was
undergone by the ecstatic elements as a result of the individualisation of the
prophetic phenomenon is exactly what J. Evola refers to when he speaks of a
connexion that was established in Hebraism with a human type who, because he is
not able to realise the values he upholds, tends to consider them as more and
more abstract and utopian (RATMW), an attitude which is closely akin to a
complex of symptoms that came to be known in modern times as bovarism,
understood as the comportment of those who are led by dissatisfaction to
ambitious reverie. However, this process was greatly facilitated by the fact
that "Hebraism, from the earliest times, developed [the] distinctly mathematical
and intellectualistic-pantheistic interpretation of the world" (Gli Ebrei e la
matematica, 1940) which ended up in the rationalism of modern times ; the
effects, or, so to speak, the applied consequences that the Jewish propensity
for abstraction, for visionary and unrealistic cogitation, have had in all
areas, whether economic, scientific, cultural, social, spiritual or political,
have been showed by J. Evola in all their further-reaching implications.

What did begin to materialise among the ambitious Jew in Babylon was the
tangible benefit Israelites could reap from practices such as money lending,
which they perfectly mastered and brought to perfection, once, from debtors,
they became creditors, upon their leaving Egypt : "... as the official report
narrates, they carried away what had been lent to them" (The Jews and Modern
Capitalism) : "And I will give favour to this people, in the sight of the
Egyptians : and when you go forth, you shall not depart empty." (Exodus 3:21)
"Thus the promise made by God was fulfilled, the promise that may rightly be
called the motto of Jewish economic history, the promise which indeed expresses
the fortunes of the Jewish people in one sentence." (The Jews and Modern
Capitalism) : "Thou shalt lend to many nations, and thou shalt borrow of no man.
Thou shalt have dominion over very many nations, and no one shall have dominion
over thee." The Jewish people "were divided into two sections, an upper wealthy
class, which became rich by money-lending, and the great mass of agricultural
labourers whom they exploited." (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) The business
only extended in the Diaspora. In the Hellenistic and imperial periods, "the
poorer Jews lent to the lower classes." (ibid.) "… the Arabs, to whom Jews
lent money at interest, ... regarded this business as being natural to the Jew,
as being in his blood." No matter how prosperous the Jews became in the
Diaspora, this prosperity was nothing like the unshared wealth Isaiah
prophesised Yahweh would bring them, once they gathered anew in Jerusalem and in
the Promised Land, coming from the four corners of the earth and bringing the
riches of the whole world with them (60:5b). The real point of reference for the
subversive forces which aim at destroying for good our civilisation and at
exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on earth rely on the post-exilic
form assumed by Jewish Messianism in the apocalyptic and rabbinic literature for
the simple reason that by then what the Jewish theologian Mordechai Kaplan
called the "pathology of chosenness" had passed from potentiality to act.
Pre-exilic Jewish Messianism and post-exilic Jewish Messianism are characterised
by a difference in degree, not in nature. This process of actualisation of
instinctively anti-goyim tendencies is exactly what is hinted at in the
following passage of `Il Mito del sangue' : "Just think of the feelings which
this certainty, this obsession with `chosenness' and with world dominion would
inevitably give rise, once Israel ceased to exist as a political power and, with
the triumph of Christianity, this people, that still felt `elected', was
regarded as the lowest of the low, as a cursed and deicide bloodline that only
deserved to be persecuted and condemned, by a fair punishment, to servitude. The
`potential' created by this idea of Law would then be inevitably reflected in a
deep and boundless hatred of all non Jews and crystallise into a snake-like
praxis", the only effective approach that could be taken by a people who, in
their central core, did "not forget the promise of the Regnum, in which Israel
will rule supreme over all peoples and will own all wealth on earth", in a world
where they had become nationless and where, as a result, they had no longer any
political centre and any military force. In this, they only made a vice out of
necessity, especially since they were more comfortable with words than with
swords ; even before the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE,
the Jews had not showed any warlike disposition, to say the least. On the other
hand, they were as fish in the sea in the intellectual, economic and
theologico-religious spheres, and, more generally, in the world of analytic and
abstract thought. They still are. "Between 1870 and 1950, in proportion to their
numbers in the population, Jews were represented 4 times more than would be
expected in literature, 5 times in music and visual arts, 6 times in chemistry,
8 times in biology, 9 times in physics,12 times in mathematics and 14 in
philosophy. Jews who are just two-tenths of 1% of the world's population won 14%
of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, 29% in the 2nd half, and,
so far, 32% in the 21st century."
(http://www.sifrumkin.com/pdf/jewishgeniusw.pdf) Faced with this reality, the
reaction of the overwhelming majority of contemporary anti-Semites is similar to
that of most of the anti-Semites of the pre-WW2 era, whose inconsistency J.
Evola highlighted, stating that, once they have observed a high percentage of
Jews in intellectual professions and in leadership roles in the economic and
scientific arenas, either they do not trouble themselves about finding an
explanation for this state of affairs, or they attribute this overpowering
success to their astuteness and schemes and to their money power, and adding
that, even if corruption and nepotism can explain their disproportionate
presence in such professions, they cannot account for the fact that, once in
office, they proved to be just as skilled and efficient as any White person, let
alone that it is an understatement to say that the meteoric speed of technical
advances, to which most White anti-Semites and racists are deeply attached and
with which they are always impressed, seeing it as the hallmark of Western
civilisation, are not constrained by the massive Jewish presence in the field of
applied sciences. "The alternative is thus posed : either to come to a
humiliating admission of inferiority or to undertake a total revision of values,
likely to undermine, in the name of higher ideals, everything that is connected
specifically with the pseudoélites of modern professional intellectuality, in
which there are so many Jews." (TAOTJP) Here, a total revision of values means,
as explicated by the Italian author in other writings, to take intelligence down
from the pedestal on which it was put in a prevaricating manner by the high
priests of the so-called education system that was developed at the end of the
nineteenth century in Western Europe and in the United States, in order to
subordinate it again, in accordance with the scale of values which is typical of
Aryan traditional scale of values, to character, especially as the `skills'
required for the vast majority of jobs in tertiary services, the ever-expanding
parasitical sector of economy, and, in fact, for all the new `professions' that
have been emerging as a result of the recent information technology revolution,
are directly linked to increasingly lower forms of practical intelligence.

"The superior races are distinguished from the inferior races by their character
as well as by their intelligence, but it is more especially by their character
that the superior races are distinguished from one another. This point has
considerable social importance, and it deserves to be clearly established.
Character is formed by the combination, in varying proportions, of the different
elements which psychologists are accustomed at the present day to designate by
the name of sentiments. Among the sentiments which play the most important part
must more especially be noted perseverance, energy, and the power of
self-control, faculties more or less dependent on the will. We would also
mention morality among the fundamental elements of character, although it is the
synthesis of somewhat complex sentiments. By morality we mean hereditary respect
for the rules on which the existence of a society is based. To possess morality
means, for a people, to have certain fixed rules of conduct and not to depart
from them… As these rules vary with time and place, morality appears in
consequence to be a very variable matter, and it is so in fact ; but for a given
people, at a given moment, it ought to be quite invariable. The offspring of
character, and in nowise of the intelligence, it is not solidly constituted
until it has become hereditary, and, in consequence, unconscious. The
intellectual qualities are susceptible of being slightly modified by education ;
those of character almost wholly escape its influence. When education does
affect them, it is only in the case of neutral natures, whose will is almost
non-existent, and who are ready in consequence to follow whatever impulse may be
given them. These neutral natures are met with in individuals, but very rarely
in an entire people, or, should they be thus observed, it is only in times of
extreme decadence.
The discoveries of the intelligence are easily transmitted from one people to
another. The transmission of the qualities appertaining to character is
impossible. They are the irreducible fundamental elements which allow of the
differentiation of the mental constitutions of the superior peoples." (The
Psychology of Peoples, G. le Bon -
http://www.archive.org/stream/psycholog ... eop00lebor\
ich_djvu.txt)

Since "The character of a people and not its intelligence determines its
historical evolution, and governs its destiny," it follows that the character of
a people must be broken before its society can be undermined and its destiny
destroyed. It is of course easier to nip it in the bud than to destroy it. Hence
the importance that compulsory schooling has always had in all subversive
schemes. Charlemagne's admiration for formal learning and educational
institutions is well-known – but much less well-known is the fact that the
very young Saxons he captured were sent to the abbeys of Fulda and Herzfeld to
be converted -, as is Napoleon Bonaparte's obsession with the centralised
control of the educational system. School was made compulsory at the end of the
nineteenth century in most Western Europe countries, at the instigation of
Free-Masonry and Jews, as demonstrated by the Masonic archives which were seized
a few months after France was liberated in 1939 (
http://www.the-savoisien.com/blog/index ... %C3%A9duca\
tion-nationale-L%E2%80%99emprise-jud%C3%A9o-ma%C3%A7onnique-sur-l%E2%80%99%C3%A9\
cole-fran%C3%A7aise) – presented with a fait accompli upon their coming to
power, National-Socialism and Pétainism did their best to mithridatise the
centralised educational system they inherited.

"The influence of character is sovereign in the life of peoples, whereas that of
the intelligence is in truth very feeble." As G. le Bon pointed out with great
insight, along the same lines as J. Evola "The Romans of the decadence possessed
intelligence far more refined than that of their rude ancestors, but they had
lost the qualities of character of the latter ; the perseverance, the energy,
the invincible tenacity, the capacity to sacrifice themselves to an ideal, the
inviolable respect for the laws which had made the greatness of their
forefathers."

Finally, let us not forget the important part that the emphasis placed on
intelligence by the high priests of the education system played in spurring
their flock to espouse the dogma of gender and racial equality and to actually
believe in the egalitarian credo : "A negro or a Japanese may easily take a
university degree or become a lawyer ; the sort of varnish he thus acquires is
however quite superficial, and has no influence on his mental constitution. What
no education can give him, because they are created by heredity alone, are the
forms of thought, the logic, and above all the character of the Western man. Our
negro or our Japanese may accumulate all possible certificates without ever
attaining to the level of the average European. It is easy to give him in ten
years the culture of a well-educated Englishman. To make a real Englishman of
him, that is to say a man acting as an Englishman would act in the different
circumstances of life, a thousand years would scarcely be sufficient. It is only
in appearance that a people suddenly transforms its language, its constitution,
its beliefs or its arts. For such changes to be really accomplished, it would be
necessary that it should be able to transform its soul." (The Psychology of
Peoples)

In Europe, the rise and glorification of rational, mathematical and practical
intelligence at the expense of character has gone together with the rise of
speculative capitalism, whose psychological roots, as has been recalled above,
are to be found in the Tanahk. Now, the proto-Communist millenarian tones of
Judaism must be duly unearthed and brought to light, to a light which is more
organic than that in which it is examined by Marxist historiography, and which
throws light on J. Evola's considerations on the "the two columns", "that of the
democracies, the financial international, Freemasonry, and Judaism, on the one
hand, and that of revolutionary Marxism, on the other"
(http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id48.html), while enabling one to see where
the "basic idea of the Protocols" "that, despite all, the capitalist and the
proletarian Internationals are in agreement, being almost two columns with
distinct ideas but which act in unison at a tactical level in order to achieve
the same strategy", comes from.

In this regard, Sombart's acknowledgment that the Jewish people were divided
into two sections, an upper wealthy class and the great mass of agricultural
labourers, as already were, three millennia before, the Ubadians (in this
proto-Sumerian matriarchal society in which it seems that lending at interest
originates, the two social classes were named the awilum - the Haves - and the
muskenum - the Have-Nots), should set us thinking. "... the sympathy of the
prophets, even of the most aristocratic among them, was entirely on the side of
the poorer classes… The edge of their invectives was turned against the
land-hunger of the landed aristocracy who "joined house to house and laid field
to field," till a country of sturdy peasants was turned into a series of great
estates ; against the capitalistic ruthlessness that "sold the righteous for
silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes," thrusting the poor freeman into
slavery to collect a trifling debt ; against the venality of the judges who took
bribes and had a double standard of law for the rich and the poor. This dominant
trait of their moral feeling reacted on their theology, so that it became one of
the fundamental attributes of their God that he was the husband of the widow,
the father of the orphan, and the protector of the stranger." (Christianity and
the Social Crisis) The stranger's "modern brother is the proletarian immigrant
of our cities." Walter Rauschenbusch's point is quite right indeed. He was just
not able to foresee that the stranger would gain full "share in the modern means
of production" and some "political power to protect his interests". "When the
prophets conceived Jehovah as the special vindicator of these voiceless classes,
it was another way of saying that it is the chief duty in religious morality to
stand for the rights of the helpless." (ibid.) "In Jeremiah and in the prophetic
psalms the poor as a class are made identical with the meek and godly, and
"rich" and "wicked" are almost synonymous terms" (ibid.), just as later in the
New Testament. The attitude of the prophets derived from specific historical and
racial factors. "When the nomad tribes of Israel settled in Canaan and gradually
became an agricultural people, they set out on their development toward
civilization with ancient customs and rooted ideas that long protected primitive
democracy and equality. Some tribes and clans claimed an aristocratic
superiority of descent over others. Within the tribe there were elders and men
of power to whom deference was due as a matter of course, but there was no
hereditary social boundary line, no graded aristocracy or caste, no distinction
between blue blood and red. The idea of a mésalliance, which plays so great a
part in the social life of European nations... is wholly wanting in the Old
Testament." (ibid.) "Like all primitive peoples, Israel set out with a large
measure of communism in land. It was used in severalty, but owned by the clan."
(ibid.) Ultimately, however, the land belonged to Yahweh. Without going so far
as to appeal to Gottwald's Marxist thesis that early Israel was an egalitarian
socio-political movement surrounded by hierarchical systems, it is undeniable
that pre-monarchical times were already characterised by an egalitarian spirit
and, correlatively, by the seditious humanitarian exaltation of the poor : "The
nature of YHWH kingship… is unexpected. He exercises his kingship on behalf of
the weak and oppressed. This is implied already in the Song of Moses at the sea
; what is being celebrated is precisely the liberation of an ethnic minority
community who had been undergoing economic exploitation, political oppression
and eventually a state-sponsored campaign of terrorizing genocide... the
startling claim in Deuteronomy 10 is, first, that this god who rules over the
entire universe has chosen Israel of all people as his covenant partner (v. 15)
and second, that the power of this God over all other forms of power and
authority, human or cosmic ("gods and lords") is exercised on behalf of the
weakest and most marginalized in society - widow, orphan and alien (v. 18)
(Christopher J. H. Wright The mission of God : unlocking the Bible's grand
narrative)

It's not just that the land belongs to Yahweh, that "In early Israel, Yahweh
alone was the landlord" (Deuteronomy and city life, Don C. Benjamin), it's that
the whole earth is Yahweh's due, as is implied in the Adamic Covenant. While the
tendency to "turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth"
(The Crisis of the Modern World) only developed in the late `Middle-Ages', the
initial call to conquer and "to reduce everything to the measure of man as an
end to himself" (ibid.) dates back to Genesis 1:28 : "And God blessed them,
saying : Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over
the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that
move upon the earth." What is called for here is the advent of the reign of
quantity, of an indefinite multitude of individuals. The biblical assignment of
world wide dominion to covenant-keepers involves population growth. World wide
dominion and population growth are closely linked. For various reasons, some of
which can be inferred from some considerations brought forward in `The Reign of
Quantity', population growth was a precondition for the empowerment of the
forces of subversion, and over-population is a prerequisite, not just for their
staying in power, but also for their very corporeal manifestation on our plane
of existence. Masses act, not just in a manner of speaking, as a pull factor for
the infra-human stuff the usual political schemers and influent `self-made-men'
are made of.

As mentioned above, the slave holds a special place in the ancient Israelite's
mind and Law. Every fifty years or so, a Jubilee was proclaimed, and any Hebrew
who was hold in slavery at that time was supposedly freed (Leviticus 25:9-10).
Hebrews were discouraged to own an Hebrew, and so were Gentiles ; on the other
hand, it is acceptable for an Hebrew to own a gentile. (ibid. 25:44-46). More
importantly, fugitive slaves were to be protected, as long as they were Hebrew
(Deuteronomy 23:16). Could it be a reminder of their purported enslavement in
Egypt and subsequent exodus ? What is clear is that both the Egyptian term `pr'
(spelled `Habiru' or `Apiru') and the Akkadian `Hapiru' applied to runaway
slaves (while, to Anson F. Rainey "the plethora of attempts to relate apiru
(Habiru) to the gentilic (i.e. biblical word) ibri are all nothing but wishful
thinking", to Weippert, on the other hand, the etymological relationship between
`Habiru' and `ibri' can be established reasonably securely). Apart from
etymology, the fact remains that, when the appellation `Habiru' "vanished from
the Western Asiatic historical area", the term `Hebrew' continued to be used in
Biblical Hebrew, and, when "examining the remaining biblical references in which
the designation `Hebrew' is used, one recognizes two distinct features
characterizing the original social position of the Habiru : (1) their status as
aliens who have migrated to places far from their homeland, and (2) their low
social status as enslaved and exploited workers."
(http://www.ericlevy.com/Revel/Intro2/Na ... 20and%20He\
brews-the%20transfer%20of%20a%20social%20term%20to%20the%20literary%20sphere.pdf\
) Let us add right away that the scholarly debate as to whether the `Habiru'
was a tribe, an ethnic group or a social class is quite sterile from our
perspective, a perspective which is strengthened by the results of the various
recent genetic studies which were hinted at the beginning of this examination.
The point is that the two theses are not mutually exclusive : the `Habiru' could
be a social group, or, rather, an infra-social group which formed sponte sua
from the amalgamation of infra-racial elements from various ethnic groups, of
(what is called in French) `forbans' of varied ethnicities, just like, for
example, the pirates (see message 1144), the closest word for `forbans' in
English, if we are not mistaken. There is empirical evidence that a social group
may form from elements of various ethnic and even racial backgrounds. Just as,
as rightly noted in `Metaphysics of sex', women tend to `socialise' much more
easily, much more instinctively with each other than men with each other in any
given situation, so – this is not the place to explain why this analogy is
perfectly legitimate - individuals uprooted from their respective original
social and political milieu, no matter their ethnicity or their race, have a
strong tendency to attract, to magnetise one another and to `coalesce', once in
a new environment and, so to speak, on neutral ground, especially as this new
environment is racially homogeneous. In any case, the results of various genetic
studies tend to lend weight to Greenberg's claim that "all Israelites were
Hebrews (Hapiru), but not all Hebrews (Hapiru) were Israelites" (Greenberg) and
to Albright's conviction that the Habiru "were a class of heterogeneous ethnic
origin, and that they spoke different languages, often alien to the people in
whose documents they appear."(in
www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/the_babylonian_woe.pdf) Even if, as more or less
conclusively argued by http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/17f.pdf), the `Habiru' were
listed as an ethnic group on the Memphis stele of Amenhotep II (1427?-1400?), a
booty list for his campaign in Canaan and Syria, this would still not prejudge
its composition.

"a mixt multitude of people" joined with "the children of Israel" (Exodus
12:37-38) as these marched out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Whether
this "mix multitude" was the result of mixed marriages that took place in Egypt
(Lev 24:10), a mixture of nationalities that were enslaved in Egypt together
with the Hebrews (Exod 12:29) or mercenaries from different countries (Ezek
30:5), the expression speaks for itself. Whatever happened to them next, the
following event, that is, the conquest of Canaan, gives us a great deal of
ammunition, as read by Albrecht Alt in `Die Landnahme der Israeliten in
Palästina', which "used the archaeological and literary evidence to show that
the picture of a lightning war of conquest, given by the Book of Joshua must be
abandoned in favour of a theory of infiltration. There was no lightning strike,
but a gradual infiltration of a new people, some of whom may have come from
Egypt under a shadowy figure called Moses. In fact the traditional `lightning
strike' theory is contradicted both by the Bible itself, which shows that the
conquest-stories apply only to the territory of the tribe of Benjamin and are
balanced by biblical admissions that Israel could not conquer the great cities
of the land until the time of David and Solomon. It is contradicted also by
archaeology." (www.henrywansbrough.com/Genesis%20wt%20pix.doc) Indeed,
infiltration has always been the favourite method of attack of the Jews, of
revolutionaries, throughout history.

It is typical and telling that the Jewish scholar R. Wolfe takes pride in the
lowliness, the restlessness and the rebelliousness of early Israelites and that,
still referring to these, he equates "bandits" with "revolutionaries intent on
imposing a new social order."
(http://www.newenglishreview.org/Robert_ ... A_The_Root\
s_of_the_Jewish_Tradition/) More generally, "In Jewish prophetism (and in
primitive Christianity), one can pick up a set of themes that compose what has
been called "religious communism" ; the typically millenarian scenario uniting
these themes is always the same : first, a curse on the rich and a call to
destroy them ; anathemas against private property and a valorization of poverty
; then, the announcement of a new society grounded on equality, in accordance
with God's will and breaking thoroughly apart from the present society ; last,
an attempt to work out the kingdom to be through the setting up of small
religious communities." (J.P. Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques
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http://books.google.fr/books?id=fU7KmrJ ... jewish+pro\
phetism%22&source=bl&ots=XpTo9h2w1I&sig=Y9LJTVg-YMqIb3RIODpnR-AswDc&hl=fr&ei=dah\
1TuKYAtSyhAeCkeCsDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=one\
page&q=%22jewish%20prophetism%22&f=false)