Chapter 1 : A Nation Sacrificed to History

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Chapter 1

Chapter 1: A Nation Sacrificed to History

Singularly and paradoxically destined, like the Jewish people: the Books or Biblia, which under the name Bible founded the Hebraic mythology, which, raised up by the elective glory of a unique God, aspired to reign over all of humanity. Invested with an eternal and universal truth, each person entered into the design only to lend him or herself to YHWH, at the cost of an effacement in time and space, of which no nation offers such an unhappy example.

Born within a Statist centralism that rallied [together] the nomads, hastily sedentarized on newly conquered territories, the arrogance of the God of the holy wars — by a cruel irony — would not cease to puff itself up with the wind of prophet-ism to the extent that the temporal power of the Hebrews, far from seizing the world so as to propagate obedience in it to YHWH, would succumb under the blows of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and would find itself extirpated from the very places in which it had been established over the course of nearly two millennia.

That a nation unanimously placed its lot in the hands of a God and [yet] everywhere and for so long experienced hostility, hate, scorn — its strange specificity doesn’t lie in this. But what surprises is the fact that this nation kept faith, confidence and accredited a deity that was quite the contrary to it.

Situating themselves in a mythical history, the temporal aspect of which was only the shadow of a divine will, the Jews have undergone it as a malediction to which they subscribed by advancing a historical exclusion that they only brought forth in the Twentieth Century by obliterating the religious under the trademark of social preoccupations. Today, few believers deny that the army and the cooperative system offered to Israel are better guarantees than YHWH.

It’s about time. Vilified, oppressed, massacred, imprisoned in the ghettos, they had not ceased to interpret the nightmare in an exegetical way. The malediction confirmed their status as the Chosen People; it conferred upon them — through the water, fire and blood of sacrifice and redemption, the ordeal and salvation, expiation and redemption — an existence that was thus metaphysical, sub specie aeternitatis.[16]

Expelled from Palestine in 135, after the collapse of their last insurrection, the Jews would be cast aside at the same time that their religion would be taken up by Christianity (which issued from Judaism), the political career of which would emerge in the Fourth Century under a Catholicism that conducted pogroms.

* * *

There isn’t space enough here to make clear the detours by which a swaggering will kills itself through resignation, nay, dereliction, but it isn’t useless to emphasize what one can call the subdivision of Hebrew expansionist ambition.

While a succession of reversals, saluted by prophetic agitators as just divine punishments, swelled with anger and blood the unmerciful myth of the God of Israel, a more pacific conquest made itself clear. Namely, a diaspora swarming to the four corners of the world colonies of Jews who, due to the intransigence with which they dwelled on the question of the unique God, did not find it repugnant to compromise when necessary to safeguard their right to asylum and financial interest. It was here, in the overture of the spirit that imposed the laws of commerce, that the cruel YHWH gave way to a more compassionate God, insofar as Mosaic rigor would accommodate a relaxation of its rituals. It was here that the “treason” of Judaism would foment itself, would implant Essene Judeo-Christianity by Hellenizing itself.

The Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman imperialisms included in their politics of expansion the recognition of the gods honored by the vanguished nations. Nevertheless, after the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem and proscribed the cult of YHWH, he admitted of no other God than himself.

* * *

Once it accomplished the conquest of the territories of Canaan, the young and precarious Hebrew state remained on the defensive. It took root in an agrarian structure. Reassembling the nomads, it cemented the nation in a monotheistic bloc in which God, in solidarity with his people, created the Earth so that they could cultivate it and impose his law everywhere.

YHWH was still a God in formation when the Babylonian invasion in the Seventh Century [B.C.E.] brought down a serious blow upon the unitary myth, already dented by the schism between Judea and Samaria. YHWH began to carefully distinguish himself from the Canaanian God “El,” a God endowed by women and children, and whose plural form, “Elohim,” would not be foreign to the future dualism of Samaritan Jewish gnosticism.

The local branches of the diaspora did not constitute the bridge heads, the billeting of the troops prompted to mark out paths for the merchants. But the Jews were no less enslaved where the synagogue represented the Temple of Jerusalem. Although they were proselytes, these slaves isolated themselves in a defensive crouch, as if the immobility of the sacerdotal caste that was all the rage in Judea, Samaria and Galilee was weighing them down.

The dynamism of the industrious Jewish classes got entangled in the nets of the Sadduceean bureaucracy, the aristocratic caste of the functionaries of the Temple. Its conservatism concretized this God of conquest who had struck his faithful with powerlessness and who held as a salutary expiation the gift that they made of it every day of their existence.

The development of the modernist party, Pharisaism, arrived too late, when the Jewish nation was no longer a colony that the successive empires negligently inherited. The Phariseeans came up against it, in addition to the revolts of the extremist type that circumscribed their project of massacring the goyim, or nonbelievers, and adoring YHWH. When Essenism broke with the Yahwehism of the Temple, it undertook to promote an ascetic rigor[ism] that would nourish the madmen/guerrillas of the Zealots against the Roman occupation and Pharisian collaboration.

Lacking a bite on history, the Jewish people, made toothless by an all-powerful God who chose them, condemned themselves to the time of the holocaust.

* * *

Many times re-written and revised, the original kernel of the first biblical texts date from the 10^th and 11^th centuries before the Christian era, shortly after the establishment of the Hebrews in the land of Canaan.

They lived there as semi-nomads and in a mosaic of City-States of the tribes of the Semitic race. Nomads themselves, the Hebrews, the tribes of which had visited Mesopotamia and Egypt, and gleaned from them religious beliefs and techniques of organization, seized hold of a part of the land of Canaan under the leadership of a person whom their mythology gave the name Moses.

The formation of the Jewish nation worked around the priest/warrior, who presented himself as the instrument of a patriarchal and creative divinity.

The victorious combat against the raids led by the “people of the sea,” the Philistines of the Bible, reinforced the political unity of Hebraic tribes and designed, with the grand stature of this El who would become YHWH, the triumphant symbol of Hebraic power reduced to annihilating the Semitic nations and their archaic gods: Dagan (the Dagon of the Bible), Astoreth or “Astarte,” Baal-Zebub, popularized much later under the diabolical traits of Beezelbub.

Perhaps around 1,000 [B.C.E.] King David inaugurated monotheistic syncretism, because Statist centralism needed a transcendent power to impose its cohesion on the tribes, which traditionally had been independent. He arrogated to himself the function of the great priest, the temporally sacralized monarch, his power to guide the people chosen by El, the Father, creator of the universe and mankind, conceived so as to be obeyed.

The legend attributes to Solomon, son of David, the construction of the first Temple of Jerusalem, symbol of the faith and supremacy of the Jews, monument to monotheism, which hastened to destroy the invaders and that one day would be substituted for by the Basilica of Rome.

Nevertheless, the tyranny of Solomon provoked the secession of the northern tribes. Upon his death, they refused obedience to his son and, strong with the consent of Egypt, founded in 900 [B.C.E.] an independent kingdom in which the cult of El-YHWH, imperfectly implanted, clashed with the partisans of the ancient gods.

From then on, Palestine was split between two rival regions: in the south, the kingdom of Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital; in the north, the kingdom of Israel, including Samaria and Galilee (today Jordan).

Over the centuries, hate and scorn pitted Judea against Samaria, the former sheltering itself in the jealous cult of YHWH; the latter, more tolerant, offering itself to new ideas and Greek influences.

Because the Samaritans weren’t part of the Judean tribe, the Judeans considered them, not Jews, but goyim, nonbelievers, generally associated with the anathema “May their bones rot.”

The opposition between Judeans and Samaritans explains an important part of the Hellenization of Jewish Gnosticism, omnipresent in the first Christianities. It especially explains the anti-Judaism that animated the “Men of the Community,” the Essenes, and that Greco-Roman racism would disguise as anti-Semitism.

Priding themselves on being the true children of Israel, they only retained as sacred the Books of the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

On the mountains of Ebel and Garizim, which were estimated to be more powerful than the Temple at Jerusalem, were raised the places of the cult. For them, YHWH, God of war and conquest, had not abolished El, the father, from whom he issued, nor the tetrad that he originally formed with his wife Asterath (Astaroth, Astarte), and their sons and daughter.

For the Samaritans, two feminine divinities subdued the merciless patriarch whom the Judeans claimed for themselves. So it was not by chance that women occupied a preponderant place in the philosophy of the physician and philosopher Simon, to whom all the varieties of Christianity — and Catholicism in its turn — would impute the origin of a thought radically hostile to the religious spirit.

* * *

In 722 [B.C.E.], Samaria succumbed to Assyrian invaders. The population, reduced to servitude, took the road of exile. Thenceforth, foreigners reigned over the territories that the legendary Moses decreed “the Promised Land” and into which Joshua led his people.

In 586 [B.C.E.], Nebuchadnezzar seized the kingdom of Judea, razed the Temple and destroyed Jerusalem. Among those who survived, the notables and rich people were led away as slaves and “there only remained very few people [...]. The historians designate communally under the name of Judaism the form taken by the religion of the Jewish people after the destruction of the First Temple and the captivity in Babylon.”[17]

This defeat — the first in a long series — at the same time brought forth an apology as desperate as it was frenzied from the all-powerful God, as well as an exacerbated feeling of collective guilt. At each reversal, the litany of wandering prophets exalted the grandeur of YHWH, going over and over again in the psalmic fashion the calling of the Jewish people to dominate the world and to prove in its heart the just expiation of its lack of faith.

Thus, biblical mythology resounds with hymns to expansionist bragging as much as (in counterpoint) it takes offense at the sour harmonies of a guilt that is endlessly harped upon. The beating of guilt rhythms the Bible and the fluttering of the wings broken by Hebraic power.

Without too much difficulty, polytheism revoked one or the other of the divinities who were incapable of satisfying the prayers that were addressed to them. Does the supplicant not dare to threaten vexatory measures to the god who maladroitly does his job? But when it is a question of a unique God, the father of a national family whose children must fear, tremble, venerate and love, as well... Because YHWH would multiply the Chosen People as much as there are grains of sand by the sea; he would guarantee to them a prosperity without parallel; all peoples would incline themselves before the grandeur of Israel and would serve it without a murmur. That history continues to ruin the promise of such a brilliant glory — this is not what embarrasses the believer, who is little disposed to accuse the just and terrible YHWH of perjury, powerlessness or perversity.

No, it is evident that the guilty ones were the Jews themselves, unworthy men, who — by their split between the kingdoms of the North and of the South — profaned the heritage of David, while the weakness of their zeal drew down the just wrath of the Lord. The cruelest of enemies — the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans — wove between the hands of the Eternal the net of unhappiness and redemption. Because, if the children of Israel amended themselves, resigned themselves, graciously, to misfortune with a morbid joy — claiming their unshakable confidence in the fire of the ordeal — then divine mercy would bring down upon them his perpetual grace. Such is the essential message of the biblical prophets and the sacralized texts; men are invited to cover themselves with imprecations so as to redeem the incongruous conduct of a God whom, having chosen to overwhelm an emerging empire with opprobrium, no longer hesitated to annihilate the universe that he created.

There is no doubt that this is a unique phenomenon in history — a State, possessed by an invincible God and dispossessed of any victory, in which germinated the project of a universal theocracy, a millennium sanctifying the earth, a holy war in which the combatants have no arms other than the teardrops of their bodies to confront the enemy.

Once more, it was in Samaria that, against Yahwist intransigence, there emerged the dualism that opposed a good God, unknowable, ungraspable and not of this world, to the God of war, the Demiurge, creator of a bad world; which was an idea later adopted by Christianity of the Nazarene type, as well as by the hedonistic gnostics of the Carpocratian school.

* * *

Where the political and military development of Judea ends, there begins the myth of religious imperialism.

A veritable cursed saga, remodeling the most ancient texts, inscribed itself on the steps of the Temple sacked by the Babylonians. For past heroes it had the “Judges,” priests and warriors charged with leading the holy war in the name of YHWH. They were helped — and here there was the heritage and recuperation of the pre-Yahwist cults — by women, prophetesses, such as Deborah, who commanded the tribes of the north. The nazirs [nonbelievers], ascetics and combatants devoted to God — Samson, for example — composed the shock troops.

The traditional rivalry between the temporal prince and the priest shows through in the fate reserved for kings: honored in the narrative books [of the Bible], they were shamed in the prophetic books and the Psalms. For the fanatics of holy war, God is king and has no need to lead his people to the type of victory won by a head of state. Nevertheless, it happens that a particularly pious king dressed up in the traits of a saint and was called Messiah, “anointed by the Lord,” which the Greeks translated as Christos.

Eli and Elise propagated the cult of YHWH in the towns and countrysides against the sectarians of Baal and the ancient gods. Jeremiah, agent of the Assyrian party against Egypt, preached the uselessness of the struggle against Nebuchadnezzar. He placed the stubborn defense of religion above political preoccupations, as if the unquestionable supremacy of God implied the infallible grandeur of people among whom growing misery was only the secret sign of a triumph that was all-the-more assured by its delays in manifesting itself on the derisory level of human temporality.

Under the Roman occupation, the Pharisaian party would not act otherwise, collaborating with the enemy for the greatest glory of the God who tested it. Situating itself under the eternal gaze of the divinity, the spirit of Judaism became ahistorical. Prophets and heroes changed names and dates by remaining the same. Adam, Moses, Joshua, and Esaie did not end up being present at every moment.

* * *

Around 550 [B.C.E.], the Babylonian empire could not resist the assault of the Persians. In 536 [B.C.E.], Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their native land and reconstruct the Temple. Only the poorest remained in Palestine. Many exiles enriched themselves in Assyria and Babylon as merchants, entrepreneurs and bankers — to Nippour, the Murashu bank offered a perfect example of the successful Jew. They [the Jews] felt themselves to be among their coreligionists, re-grouped in little communities.

Thus, there began the phenomenon of pacific expansion — a mix of forcible exile and voluntary emigration — that the Greeks would give the name diaspora.

The diaspora offered the particularity of founding the Jewish branch-offices that constituted so many enclaves of monotheistic Judaism in goyische territory. The theology closed off from the agrarian myth doubled itself thanks to the spiritual overture that implied commercial practice and the circulation of commodities.

Implanted in polytheism, the synagogue represented the Temple of Jerusalem, but was disentangled from the sacerdotal despotism of the Sadduceans and consequently more receptive to religious innovations. This is the place where the Pharisaian party and the diverse Esseno-Christian tendencies confronted each other in the First Century.

* * *

The end of exile did not involve the reestablishment of a monarchy. Under the control of the Persians, the Jewish state transformed itself into a theocracy. The Great Priest of Jerusalem directed a sacerdotal bureaucracy that, leading a dissolute existence, employed itself in collating and revising the ancient texts, of which the corpus would sanctify the unity of the nation under the shephard’s crook of the supreme God, the only one called upon to reign over the world that he had created. The end of the power rivalries in the leadership caste would, much later, produce the Sadducean party, conserver of orthodoxy in the kingdom of Judea that claimed a monopoly over Judaism.

The people of the Temple, for whom rapacity was matched with a ritualism that replaced faith, sometimes responded with the indifference and passivity of those who submitted to despotism, and other times with an outburst of religious vehemence, appeals to purification, mortification and asceticism propagated by the prophets who were prompted to inflame the latent revolt of the artisans, small merchants and plebeians. By the revelations or “apocalypses” (as the Greeks say) of the fanatic illuminati who announced in a great cry the imminence of the end of time and easily gained the adhesion of these crowds in which shoemakers, carpenters, woodworkers and bakers did not disdain from playing the Rabbi and lending to their claims the cheap finery of religious speculation. Such would be the ferment of the future sects.

From before 450 [B.C.E.], the old Samaritan schism engendered dissidences with Yahwehism. The Letters from Elephantine (Assouan), re-written on the occasion of a frontier skirmish between Israeli mercenaries in the service of the king of the Persians and the Egyptians, showed the importance to the Fifth Century of the religions distinct from Judean monotheism.[18] One honored it in the God Iao, derived from El but seemingly different from YHWH. Sometimes confused with the demiurge Ialdabaoth, Iao would be invoked much later by many Gnostic sects, including the Sethians. His name found itself frequently mentioned in the magical conjurations, rituals of spells, notebooks of execration, and talismanic stones called abraxas. And also celebrated the goddess Anath Bethel, from whom the mysterious Barbelo of the non-Christian Gnostics may have issued. Assim Bethel, child of Iao and Anath, already passed for the Son of God.

* * *

In 400 [B.C.E.], the Persian empire crumbled under the power of the economic, political and cultural imperialism of Greece. In 331 [B.C.E.], the victory of Alexander marked the end of Persian domination.

Upon the death of Alexander in 323 [B.C.E.], the Hellenic empire exploded, Egypt passed into the hands of Ptolemy, and Syria and Palestine ran aground at the Seleucides.

It was at this time that the antedated books were drafted so as to halo them with the prestige of ancient times. The Catholic Church, too, would move back the dates of its canonical Gospels for identical reasons.

Deuteronomy, falsely dated back to 622 [B.C.E.] and inspired by the return from Babylon, would re-define itself in the more ancient framework of the exodus so as to accentuate the role, in some sense re-actualized, of Moses, around whom was restructured the unitary myth that operated in a synthesis of the three great currents of thought: royal, sacerdotal and prophetic.[19] Ezekiel, which had been projected back between 586 and 536 [B.C.E.], presented its heroes as if they were prophets and sacerdotes, even though the sacerdotal function did not yet exist. The priests described were identical to the “Sons of Sadoq,” a sect founded around 300 [B.C.E.]. The last part of the Book of Ezekiel proposed a religious and nationalist eschatology: a great river flowing underneath the Temple so as to irrigate the holy earth while the final struggle against Gog, the enemy of Israel, whom Torrey identifies with Alexander.[20]

The Book of Proverbs betrays, in its first nine chapters, a Hellenic influence: several traits recall a book by an Egyptian [called] The Sage of Amenope. It is significant that, little by little, the counsels of politeness and everyday civility dressed themselves up in a religious ritualism.

Favored by Hellenization, the poetic books [les livres sapientaux] founded a tradition that would play an important role in the Second Century redaction of the Logia, that is, the remarks attributed to Joshua/Jesus.

Through perpetual re-writing, the corpus of the sacred books — the Greek plural noun biblia that ends up in the singular noun Bible as if to suggest the idea of a unique book dictated by the unique God — wanted to be a celestial monument dedicated to the absolute power of YHWH, sculpted with bitterness, hate, dereliction and megalomania, which secreted a mindset resigned to support the foreign yoke and which drew from suffering its reason to exist. And this book has only ever reflected the ignominy imposed on its scribes, the generations that proposed it as a model to more than half the world.

Sadduceism would impute to the epic hero Moses the care of having prescribed, in all their details, the rites, costumes, frocks, and objects of the cult around which the sacerdotes moved, instilling the omnipresence of God in the routine of gestures and comportments. The most ancient texts, legendarily attributed to the same “Father,” would thus be periodically reviewed, nay, corrected by prophets such as Dosithee, who, in the manner of many, characterized himself as the “new Moses.”

Antedating him as well, the text known under the name Esaie II contains a part entitled “The Songs of Servitude to YHWH” (50–53), the theme of which inaugurated the legend of the suffering Messiah. The Servant, a man resolved to sacrifice himself and die for the salvation of nations, was scorned and misunderstood: “We rejected him, we did not make anything of him. Nevertheless, they were our sufferings that he carried [...] The punishment that gave us peace fell upon him. And it was by his bruises that we were cured” (53). Here appeared for the first time the literary prototype of the envoy of God who dies for the salvation of all. The Essenes applied this model to their Master of Justice, who was put to death around 60 [B.C.E.], before the Nazarenes and their enemies of the Pauline school invested the Messiah that they called Joshua and the Greeks called Jesus.

* * *

Encouraging the refusal of obedience of Samaria to Judea, the Greek occupation allowed the Samaritans to erect in the region of Ebal and Garizim a temple distinct from the one in Jerusalem. They thus encountered in the north the welcome that Judea refused to give. In Samaria, from the conjunction of Judaism and Greek philosophy was thus born a thought oriented around the knowledge of self and the world — Gnostic thought — that took root as much in religious speculation as in a feeling for life that revoked all forms of religion to the profit of a magic hermeticism, nay, a somatic analysis, such as that of Simon of Samaria.

Such a spirit of modernity would easily propagate itself in the communities of the diaspora, in the Jewish colonies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Rome and the Gauls.

From the Samaritan schism derived the sects that opposed different conceptions of Judaism: Sadduceans, Pharisaians, Esseno-Baptists who would form the original Christianity that spread throughout the Nazarean and Ebionist groups.

The Samaritans did not recognize any sacred texts other than the Pentateuch and the book that Joshua promised to a certain future under the name of Jesus. The manuscripts discovered at Qumran contained similitudes that accredited the close relationship between the Samaritans and the Essenes; they differed from the Masoretic texts, which were exegetical enterprises on the sacred books written by Masoretes or Jewish physicians.

From 300 to around 165 [B.C.E.], the Hellenization of Palestine impregnated the religious literature of a thought that was radically foreign to the Jewish mindset. Two civilizations clashed: one based on an agrarian economy and the commercial activities that situated themselves at the exterior of the frontiers, in the branch-offices and communities based upon an intransigent monotheism; the other, essentially mercantile, propagated its logic and rationality everywhere that its system of exchange penetrated.

Nothing is more antagonistic than the mythic, analogical and ahistorical spirit of the Jews and the Greek Logos, the linear time of the historians, the usage of syllogism, analysis and synthesis, a reality in which the Gods drew their splendor from the capricious facets of destiny.

The Indo-European structure of the Greek language very imperfectly rendered Hebraic idiomatics, with its atemporal verbs, word play, magical sounds, phonetic equivalences, numerical values attributed to letters — elements that lent to the pre-evangelical midrashim significations that developed the Kabbalistic speculations, but that, all things considered, were a dead letter for the Greeks and ended in mistranslations. (”Midrash: Jewish (or Samaritan) exegesis. Term derived from the Hebrew DRS, ‘to look, to search.’ Among all the rabbinical midrashim, commentaries on the Torah, and then the Bible in its entirety, it is fitting to cite the Midrash Rabbah, the Great Midrash, a Hebraic compilation of which certain portions date back to an epoch much before the First Century.”[21])

Although it attests to the universal curiosity of the Greeks, the translation of the so-called “Septante” (because it was legendarily attributed to seventy translators) of the Biblical texts appeared to the Masoretes and Jewish physicians as a sacrilege and a betrayal of the Biblical message. It is here — it is not useless to say — that Joshua found himself, for the very first time, translated by Iesous, Jesus.

After the Alexandrian epoch, two literary genres were diametrically opposed, but both entered into the fabrications of the novels about Jesus: the “wisdom” that bore the stamp of Hellenic morality, and the “apocalypses” or “revelations” (prophecies that were hostile to the Greeks and then to the Romans) that were rooted in the Hebraic myth of the all-powerful God, for whom punishments were the wages of love and redemption.

Issuing principally from Egypt, “wisdom” Hellenized itself in Palestine through two texts headed for a great radiance: The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira or, more precisely, Wise Instruction and Proverbs polished by Simeon, son of Jesus, son of Eleazar, son of Sira. Although the Pharisians excluded it from their canon, the Talmud cites it nearly 80 times. The Catholics would make it one of their books of predilection under the title that was imposed around 250 [C.E.] by the Bishop of Carthage, Cyprian: the Ecclesiasticus liber, in French, the Ecclesiastics. (Not to be confused with the Qohelet, “He who speaks in the assemblies,” called Ecclesiastes by the Catholics — in Greek, “assembly” is ekklesia, Church — , a text from the Fourth Century before the Christian era that communicated unusable banalities about the bitter destiny of man and the ignominy of woman.) The epistle falsely attributed to Jacob borrows from it a great number of expressions; thus the Logia were attributed to Jesus; Simeon, who become Simon-Peter, also figured in them.

An early Hebrew manuscript from the Eighth Century [B.C.E.] was exhumed in 1896 from the gennizah (a reserve in which the sacred books that were no longer used were stored) in a synagogue in Cairo. The authenticity of the text was confirmed by the discovery, in 1964, at Masada — the high place of the Zealot resistance to the Romans — of a scroll that contained important fragments in their original Hebraic versions. (Yadim situates the redaction of the text in the pre-Herodian period, around 400 [B.C.E.], between Esaie I and the Manual of Discipline.[22]) The work was attributed to Rabbi Sira (around 190 [B.C.E.]). His young son Joshua/Jesus had it translated into Greek around 117 [B.C.E.]

In the era of Rabbi Sira, the Seleucides — masters of Syria and Palestine — attempted to break the monotheistic rigor of the Jews by forced Hellenization. In 165 [B.C.E.], the revolt led by Mattathias Maccabee and his son, Juda, demonstrated one more time that State tyranny never puts an end to religious tyranny, but reinvigorates it with the same authoritarian principles that must destroy it. Insurrection would offer a model of heroic and desperate holiness to the struggle that the Zealots — on the initiative of Juda of Gamala and his two sons, Jacob and Simeon — would much later conduct against the Romans.

By prohibiting the exercise of the cult in the Temple, the Seleucide King Antiochus IV Epiphane (215–163 [B.C.E.]) succeeded in convincing the Jews of the vanity of terrestrial empires and the interest of celestial knowledge, the imminence of which prophetic agitation proclaimed.

The author of the Wisdom did not reject Hellenism, but strove — like Philo of Alexandria, but much later — to assimilate it into Judaism. His faith in the final victory of the Chosen People was not rejected by the luminaries of Greek thought.

The true son of Israel was a sage. Wisdom [sagesse] would save it, because “he who seizes the Law receives wisdom” (15, 1). Crowning messianic hope, sophia (wisdom) played the role of great mediator between God and man: “She appears as a mother, like a virginal wife she welcomes him, she nourishes him with the bread of prudence, she gives him the water of wisdom to drink.”

The Greek word Sophia, which translates the Hebrew word Hochma and the Aramaic word Achamoth — two feminine terms that also designated the Spirit — assumed a considerable importance in the Esseno-Christian gnosticisms and the hedonistic currents in which figured, under a great variety of names and forms, that which provides salvation to men. Wife, mother and virgin, Sophia was at the origin of Myriam-Mary, the virgin mother and her companion Mary of Magdala (as presented in the Gospel attributed to Thomas), but also the Holy Spirit descended upon the Messiah.

Drafted around 50 [B.C.E.], the Wisdom of Solomon allied with Judeo-Greek thought a magical conception that would be known in the Hermetic current and would become all the rage, in particular, in Alexandria. Flavius Joseph recalls in Judaic Antiquities that “God even accorded to him [Solomon] the comprehension of the art against demons in the service of the usefulness and healing of men. Having composed incantations thanks to which sickness is relieved, he left behind the exorcism formulas by which the possessor chases away the demons so that they may never return.”[23]

An extract from the Wisdom attributes to Solomon the knowledge “of the power of spirits and the thought of man, varieties of plants and the virtues of roots” (7, 20).

One has wanted to detect here the ideas of an Essene community of the Mareotis Lake, which Philo names Therapeutes, and it is true that Judeo-Greek magic is not absent from the texts of Qumran.[24] Christian Gnosticism of the First and Second Centuries included thaumaturgic groups by which the diverse evangelical novels concerning Jesus were inspired, so as to disguise their heroes as exorcists, healers and schemers of miracles.

Rejected by the Pharisaian synod of 80–90, the Wisdom of Solomon would enter into the Catholic canon. The Platonism in which Biblical mythology seemed to melt lets one glimpse the supercession of Judaism, for which the Hellenized Christianities of the second half of the Second Century worked.

* * *

On the other hand, the hostility to Judaism in the encounter with Hellenization was exacerbated through a mode of original expression: “revelation,” better known under its Greek form, “apocalypse” — a term that much later assumed the meaning “universal catastrophe.”

A cyclical thought that curls around in the vivid foreshortening of birth and death, the origin and the end of time, the alpha and omega of a world created so as to annihilate itself in its terrestrial form and be reborn in a cosmic beyond, the apocalypse drains in a sudden rage the multiple reasons for finishing with an existence that is condemned to unhappiness. Its suicidal resolution has avenging accents, because none of the powers would escape from the egalitarian leveling of the death that it announces. Over the centuries, the oppressed creature would discover in apocalypse a panacea for the malediction of injustice, the end of the centuries, which founds the hope for the Great Night and the days after it, which sing. It is the song of an immobile history, fixed in its glaciation, that can only shake [loose] a total explosion. Born in the rupture of archaic Judaism with history, it reappears every time that hopeless oppression explodes under the blows of a hopeless revolution.

Judaic and Christian literature contains 50 apocalypses. Two of them twinkle with a particular glimmer in the speculative torrent that would furrow the historical landscape in which Christs and Messiahs proliferated.

Under the name of the legendary patriarch Henoch, the Parables contain an apocalypse, the influence of which marked the myth of Jesus among the Christians. At the end of an ascension that leads him to the Kingdom of the Heavens, Henoch sees the Son of Man, that is to say, Adam, and discovers his true nature: the Son of Man collaborated in the creation of the world as an integral part of YHWH; he then sits at his right hand and, at the end of time, which is imminent, he returns to earth to deliver mankind from its pitiful condition.

The Apocalypse attributed to Daniel reflects the struggle of religious Jews against the political Hellenization of Antiochus IV Epiphane. By an artifice that betrays less of the deliberate lie than a cyclical vision of history, this work aspired to a previous epoch and thus foresaw the future. The author antedated the prediction of events that in fact took place under his own eyes, around 165 [B.C.E.], during the revolt of the Maccabee family and their partisans, the defenders of faith.

Obeying a mythical logic, thus conforming to the structure of Hebrew — which hardly accords with the rationality of Greek, which sinks to render Hebrew — the recitation transposed the political situation to the divine plane. Michael, the chief of the angels and the protector of Israel, used his power to save his people. The visionary prophesized the ruin of four great oppressive empires: the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Persian and the Greek. The effective disappearance in 165 [B.C.E.] of the first three, of course, augured the ruin of the fourth, and revived the ardor of the combattants by demonstrating that God would never surrender his people to an impious domination. The fact that (once again) the crushing of the Jewish insurgents threw a bitter shadow on the anthem “the time is near for His power and His justice to restore Israel to its glory” did not exhaust the source of a type of inspiration that, far from being discouraged, was stimulated by failure.

The last Jewish apocalypse would also be, under its harshly Christianized form, the only one that was retained by the Catholic canon, despite those who flourished up to the Sixth Century. The original Jew (lost) no doubt stigmatized the Roman politics of Tiberias, who from the year 19 [C.E.] encouraged the pogroms in Rome and prohibited the Jewish religion in Italy.

The Greek version, attributed to John, adopted the schema of all of the revelations: evil has perturbed the divine order; the revelation means to restore this order so as to propagate on earth the kingdom of the heavens and the saints. The unleashing of calamities sounds the announced hour of the Days of the Savior, the extermination of the wicked, and the glory of Jerusalem. The era of prosperity, peace and paradisical happiness would coincide with the triumph of the “communities,” the Essene churches.

By claiming that only blind faith in God would vanquish the enemy, the Apocalypse attributed to Daniel dressed up in divine emanations the manifesto of the Assideans, the fanatical observants of Mosaic law and the shock troops of the Maccabean insurrection. The Apocalypse tardily attributed to John resounds, in parallel fashion, with the echoes of the Zealot program; perhaps the rage to destroy Rome was not foreign to the fire of 64 [C.E.], which has been so unreasonably imputed to Nero.

The Maccabean wars also date the Psalms, songs of praise to God by the devoted, the rhythms and repetitions of which are obeyed with care so as to impregnate spirits and comfort faith.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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The Resistance to Christianity — Chapter 1 : A Nation Sacrificed to History

By Raoul Vaneigem (1993)

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Author : Raoul Vaneigem

Chapter 1: A Nation Sacrificed to History

Author : Raoul Vaneigem

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