The Book of Daniel: Hellenistic Era
Presented on: Tuesday, January 22, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 6 of 54
The Book of Daniel: Hellenistic Era
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 22, 1985
Transcript:
...events of that time. It had given them an apprehension that the Torah, that is the Old Testament was going to be lost. There was also some consternation over the fact that the dispersed Jewish communities were rapidly mispronouncing the sacred texts, so that there was literally coming to be a confusion of tongues. So, they decided to standardize the Old Testament starting around the second century AD, and first of all, they standardized the pronunciation. Ancient Hebrew did not have any indications for certain vowels and inflections, certain consonants, and so everything had to be placed. And starting about the second century AD this standardized pronunciation was developed. This was the beginning of the Talmud. That is to say, Talmudic studies were based upon this common text.
Now medieval Jewry, about the ninth or tenth centuries AD, decided that literacy was becoming so precarious in their time that this standardized text would be written down. And so the Masoretic Text is this standard written text from the ninth or tenth centuries AD, and this text then was codified to the extent that every syllable was counted, every word sequence was counted, and all of this was entered and given a notation in the ninth or tenth centuries, so that the text, the Masoretic Text of the Bible of the Jewish Old Testament from the tenth century on is exactly today what it was then. It has not changed one iota. It is this characteristic of ultra conservative rule by tradition that creates Judaism of the present day. It was also the emphasis on counting everything and cross-indexing everything according to number that developed the first impulse towards Kabbalistic studies because one notices then recurrent number patterns happening again and again.
In other words, these were like the first statistical studies, word counts, concordances, and there were noticed to be patterns as one will. And the patterns were considered those which emerged hidden in sacred literature. If scripture has secret cycles in it, then by painstaking research and counting, we may draw out the hidden structure of the sacred text that what the words meant literally were for the people of that time. But what the words meant esoterically in terms of the hidden pattern was its eternal meaning. And so, the development of the Kabbalah comes out of the tenth century Masoretic Text.
Now, this Kabbalistic leaning, of course, is later as a development. And the Masoretic Text as I've said, comes down to us almost unchanged from that time. The Jewish tradition then, in rabbinical regard to the Old Testament, beginning with the second century oral codification of it, was that the law had been delivered once for all time, and there would be no more changes. There would be no more additions. What would be added in time was the esoteric understanding of the eternal patterns hidden in the text. So, this is a distinctly different outlook upon sacred writings.
This, of course, brought the development of the Masoretic Text, which happened under the aegis of Islamic power, into a direct confrontation with the idea that Islam, as well as Christianity, was a further development of the Old Testament. And so, from the tenth century on, one finds Islamic scholars tending to follow the Jewish lead and become transcendental seekers of mystical patterns. This reaches an apex in the mystical recitals of Avicenna. And of course, when it is translated into the philosophic amplifications, under the mystical books and writings of Ibn Arabi, we find the apotheosis of Islamic Talmudic studies, and one notices a great confluence at the time.
The greatest Jewish scholar at the time of Ibn Arabi is Moses Maimonides and Maimonides and Ibn Arabi, intellectual peers actually able to understand one another that the mystical Islamic tradition and the Kabbalistic Jewish tradition are seeing eye to eye. By the thirteenth century it was this original root in the desire of making an eternal text that led to this development of the Masoretic Text in the ninth and tenth centuries. But the key to it all was that the standardization, rabbinically, of the pronunciation for all synagogues and all temples everywhere in the second century AD is really the beginnings of all this.
Our subject tonight, the Book of Daniel, is in fact a turning point in the whole development of the Jewish spiritual psyche, and its probable date is around 140 BC. Actually, it's probably closer to around 146 BC. You will find disparate dates given from time to time, but this is probably the closest that we can come to it in the order. If you look at a standard King James Bible and you notice the Book of Daniel, the book preceding it is the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel is a closing out of an entire cycle of prophetic writings, and the Book of Ezekiel was composed somewhere between 593 BC and 568 BC, so that the Book of Ezekiel comes about 440 years before the Book of Daniel.
That is to say, if we look upon ourselves as being analogous to the Book of Daniel, the Book of Ezekiel would have come from the time of Martin Luther. And yet they are juxtaposed in the order of the Old Testament. The reason for this is that the Book of Daniel speaks within its context of happenings that were physically current and psychically nascent around the time that the Book of Ezekiel would have been composed. The Book of Daniel concerns itself with the scooping up of several of the most select young princes, Jewish princes, from the region of the Temple in Jerusalem, and this scooping of them up and carrying them off into exile, into captivity, was done by the rulers of Babylon, who were to last just two more generations, and then Babylon would fall to the Medes or the Persians, as they're known generally in history.
The first of those conquering Medes would be Darius, and his successor would be Cyrus the Great. The last two kings in the Babylonian chronicles are Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar. Daniel has a protagonist in the Book of Daniel that is set back in this historical time of the shift from Jerusalem and the rule of the temple, the time of the end of the prophets. Jeremiah especially. To that sudden discontinuity of being in the Babylonian exile. But the Babylonian exile also being in a temporary shift of power, that the Persians would come in so that we have a double motion in the Book of Daniel. That while the Jews are taken into exile, the captors of the Jews are also going to be taken into captivity. So, he who swallows will also be swallowed. There's this kind of double entendre.
What is implied here is that there is a progression of telescoping power descending upon the physical, upon the historical world. And in fact, one of the great themes of the Book of Daniel is that this is the beginning of a sequence, not the end. It is the beginning of a sequence whose final ramifications down the long corridors of history are going to produce a transcendental change in humankind. And the Book of Daniel is the record, as it were, of the beginnings of this movement that happened back in Persian times and the times of the Babylonian captivity, in terms of the great fulcrum of events that was currently happening around 150 BC.
Looking towards the culmination of this, and as the Book of Daniel recounts, there will be seven times a pass of motion over the seal on the contents of the book. If we take that as being seven generations, we come to the time of Christ very accurately in the Book of Daniel. The emphasis is always that the God of Truth moves his reality from generation to generation. Where is the gods of the false kingdoms? The false prophets extend themselves only in terms of space that they do not survive in terms of history, in terms of time, because only the eternal is able to sustain itself through the transmutations that time engenders, that history engenders. Yahweh is the God of history. I shall be what I shall be was his designation to Moses. And we have to understand here that Moses is the beginning of the prophetic tradition, just as Ezekiel is really the end of that whole skein of prophets.
Now, it's difficult to find trustworthy information on prophecy in our time. It seems to be the one subject that people go off the deep end all the time, more than any other. The best book done on it is by Abraham Heschel, simply entitled The Prophets. Now you'll find this in paperback from Harper Torchbooks in two paperback volumes, and this chapter that I'm going to refer to is in the second volume. In the paperback editions, I have just the hardcover first edition here, it's chapter 19 and the title is "Prophecy and Ecstasy."
Now, Heschel is one of the great Jewish intellectuals of our time. He was extraordinarily famous in his lifetime. And his regard has continued to grow since his death about 20 years ago. On "Prophecy and Ecstasy" Heschel has this to say. The headline of the beginning of this article, underneath the title is "The Separation of the Soul from the Body." "The Separation of the Soul from the Body." Do you see that the connection is that the God of history moves from generation to generation, because he is able to separate himself from the body of that generation, from the spatial limitations of reality as a horizon of operation, and develops a vertical dynamic, a time dynamic. And the reason for this is that he is an eternal manifestation that only appears to be moving through time from a spatial perspective. This is a very important distinction. Prophecy has everything to do then with determining the motion of eternity. And Heschel writes this,
"Of all the forms of religious experience, none has been as fascinating to both the psychologist and the historian as ecstasy. It has often been regarded as a universal phenomenon, the elucidation of which would solve the riddle of how religions have come into being. Prophetic inspiration was assumed to have been a form of ecstasy."
"The theory of ecstasy accomplished two things. First, it reduced biblical prophecy as well as other phenomena in the history of religion to a common anthropological denominator; the prophets were conveniently classified as a typical phenomenon of primitive or ancient society. [Second], it offered a psychological explanation of what seemed to be an enigma. Before analyzing the validity of that theory, we shall try to clarify the meaning and implications of ecstasy, as well as to sketch the history of that theory in the interpretation of prophecy."
"The Greeks, who coined the word ecstasy' (ekstassis) understood by it, quite literally, a state of trance in which the soul was no longer in its place, but had departed from the body, or a state in which the soul, escaping from the body had entered into a relationship with invisible beings, or became united with a deity. It was a way of ascending to a higher form of living, or at least a way which rendered possible the receiving of supernormal endowments."
So, it's a withdrawal of consciousness from the personal, from the personal center, and an extending of it out beyond the form of the person to a transcendental other. We have talked about this in previous lectures, and I'll leave Heschel on this and leave it with my recommendation that, along with what you are receiving here through this particular lecture, that you consult Heschel, chapter 19, on what I'm about to give you now.
If you recall, we talked in the Alexandria series about two months ago about the nature of the Greek gods and goddesses, about the esoteric understanding of that Olympic pantheon, and that there was a special relationship between Aries and Aphrodite, between Mars and Venus. That Mars was the God who embodied that transcendental realm of terror. And that Aphrodite was the goddess who embodied that transcendental realm of ecstasy. And that these two were a polarity, and not just the polarity of love and war. Not on a mundane level at all. We're speaking here of ecstatic, terrific states. Transpersonal states which are recognized, given a shape embodied, manifested in the forms of Mars and Venus or Ares and Aphrodite, in order that that polarity be kept in a balance. There was a third transcendental figure, Athena, who was a woman like Aphrodite, but who was armed like Aries, the armed feminine, who has no mother, who is born directly from Zeus himself. It is the occurrence of Athena as transcendental wisdom that holds transcendental terror and transcendental ecstasy in a balance, in an equilibrium, and changes the polarity that they had engendered and manifested. Changes that polarity into a complementarity. That the stability, then, of wisdom holds that together, and that when Athena balances Aphrodite and Aries, when ecstasy and terror are balanced by wisdom, they tend to produce a focus.
If we have to use language here, we call it a meta-transcendental focus. And the God who embodied that focus was Apollo. And Apollo becomes a great triadic god. He is concerned with art, which is very close to the realm of Athena. He's associated with medicine, which is very close to what Aphrodite represents, and he is also associated with prophecy, which is very close to the experience of the terror. Now, these basic structures focus as Apollo, but they also focus as Dionysius. And Dionysius was the unformed focus of the balance of these transcendental capacities. We today, searching for words to express what this might be, consistently have recurrence to a psychological jargon in order to model for ourselves, map for ourselves intellectually what we are talking about. And so, we'll begin with that.
These three figures are what we would designate as symbol formation play shapes. They occur to us not only in our personal sense, but also because of their very nature in a transpersonal sense. That is to say, they occur to us in that kind of intuitive realm, which we would call the prophetic condition. But because they are universal powers, because they are energies, they occur not only in an intuitive transpersonal, but they occur also in what we would call a subconscious transpersonal. Just as well they can occur either way, and very often it occurs together as a complement. But in our experience, we differentiate it, we differentiate it in our thinking capacity, our thinking function, and so they occur to us very often in terms of thought ideas and focuses. But they also, while occurring in our thought function, occur in our feeling function too. So that they occur in all four different functional horizons. They occur in sensation, they occur in feelings, they occur in thought, they occur in intuition. That is to say, these basic transpersonal, ecstatic, terrific wisdom experiences manifest themselves in different horizons of our nature, as it were, according to different functions. When they occur on the sensate, in the sensate function, they occur to us as the fearful triad: terror, lust, and anger.
You know, at the center of every Tibetan mandala of the Wheel of Life is a triad of figures the snake and the rooster and the pig, and they chase each other around. And this is the dynamic at the center. At the hub.
Are you all right now? Yeah.
Tune your mind. Turn your mind. This is difficult. The sensation horizon, the sensation function seems to be in appearance subconscious. To whom is it subconscious? To the thought function it is subconscious in and of itself. Actually, phenomenologically it is just as conscious as thought would be, but to the thought function. And that's the stance that we normally take in regarding these conditions and these phenomena. The subconscious level would be the sensation level, terror, lust, and anger. And when they occur in the sensation function in this way, they occur as phobic complexes. We psychologically experience them not as ideas, not even as images, not as purposes, but as compulsions, impulses, instincts on a phobic level of integration, on the feeling level. They occur as dream structures, and these dream structures change, amplify, transform just as the feeling function transforms the sensation function, and what was terror becomes hate, what was lust becomes greed, what was anger becomes delusion, and so the same triad. And this is the triad, which is eternal, as it were, from the human standpoint. Manifest itself in the feeling function as hate, greed, and delusion. When the feeling function amplifies itself and the thinking function comes into play, there is a transformation. There is a turning over of the qualities.
Now, just a footnote here. All of these qualities are humanly designated, and they are designated from a limited standpoint. Notice all the negative connotations so far. They are not negative in and of themselves. They are only from the designated standpoint appearing to be negative. Now all the other transformations will have them appear positive, as if they were now all positive. The only thing to note here is that this movement, from feeling to thought, changes the apparent polarity, the apparent energy charged purposiveness, but not the structure. The structure remains the same. And this is the point that we're going to find in the Book of Daniel. That the God who is true maintains his structure throughout all transformations. And that only by following through a cycle of transformations complete do we finally understand that he is not any one of those transformations, but is the energy eternal, which moves like a wind through them all. But we have to keep track long enough, patient enough, in order to see this as a whole. And this is what the Book of Daniel is delivering.
Quite distinct from the writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Daniel as a book is extraordinarily sophisticated in the thinking function. Hate transforms itself into intelligence, and greed transforms itself into faith. And delusion transforms itself into what classically is termed discursiveness, that is to say, the realm of the muses: history, song, poetry, dance, the basic structures of intelligible expression. On the intuitive level, in the intuitive function, intelligence transforms itself into courage so that finally terror becomes courage, and faith transforms itself into ecstasy. That is to say, in the full cycle, lust transforms itself into ecstasy. And the discursiveness transforms itself into wisdom so that anger transforms itself into wisdom. Only by experiencing the integrity of the relationship, the triadic integrity throughout all four of the functions, does one come to a twelve-fold understanding of reality. That a human nature experiences this wide and this deep a continuum, and that that is the full amplification, then, of any experience that happens, any experience at all per se, and any collected experience as an aggregate called a life moves through this kind of an amplification all the time.
Now this is radically different from worshipping a piece of metal or a piece of wood or a piece of clay. This is a totally different understanding of what divinity might be, and the scale upon which divinity might work, and the development needed by human beings to just get to the learning stage, to just get to the capacity where they could learn. This is why the refrain constantly in the Old Testament when somebody understands, "Forgive me, Lord, I didn't understand the depths of my iniquity. I thought I was just being bad. I didn't realize the extent to which I wasn't even in reality, not even beginning."
Now, the Book of Daniel makes this twelve-fold structure of reality feasible in terms of a historical progression, moving generation to generation, Later on, ages later, this will become the origin of what Eliphas Levi in the 19th century called the Kabbalistic gospel, that the twelve tribes of Israel are twelve facets of a total reality, and that all of them together, taken together as an ensemble, are the chosen people. Metaphor here.
It's as if someone would say to you in a standard astrological designation, that one must not be a particular sign of the zodiac, but one must be a zodiacal person and have gone completely through all twelve signs. Zodiacal man. That is celestial. That is, the chosen person is someone who is now cosmic in scope. This is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and almost no human being can achieve this. Thus, in the Book of Daniel is the prophetic envisioning of what that man might be. Who first does this? And he is described. He has given a portrait. And when we come to the Book of Daniel, here is a, here is a description.
"Then I lifted up mine eyes and looked, and behold, a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz." This is Chapter 10, Verse 6 [10:6] of Daniel. "His body also was like beryl and his face has the appearance of lightning and his eyes as lamps of fire. And his arms and his feet, like in color to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude. And I, Daniel, alone saw the vision; for the men that were with me saw not the vision, but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore, I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me for my comeliness was turned in me into incorruption, and I retained no strength. Yet I heard the voice of his words. And when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face and my face toward the ground. And behold, the hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands. And he said unto me, oh, Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright. For unto thee I am now sent. And when he had spoken this word unto me, I stood trembling. Then he said he unto me, fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that thou did set thine heart to understand, and to chastened thyself before thy God. Thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words."
That is to say, Daniel is reporting here that this was this figure appearing to him as a culmination in his prophetic capacity, intuitive capacity. The origins of it were in a deep subconscious sensate functioned inclination to understand. To throw himself in his liveliness as a man into the learning mode to learn about the divine. And this, of course, comes near the end of the Book of Daniel. This is a book ten out of twelve. When we look at the mathematic text of the Book of Daniel, at the origins of it in terms of languages, it occurs in three distinct languages. The main body of Daniel, in three distinct languages. The main body of Daniel, running from roughly the second book to the end of the seventh book, is in its original language, Aramaic, but the beginning of the Book of Daniel and the end of the Book of Daniel are in Hebrew. Distinctly different. There are also four additions to the Book of Daniel, which are in Greek, that do not occur in the Masoretic Text. They do not occur in Hebrew or Aramaic. They only occur whenever they are found in Greek.
So, the Book of Daniel is a very curious complex as a characteristic Hellenistic synchronistic text. But the peculiarity of it is the coherent ribbon of vision running through three separate languages and three distinctly different traditions, all coherent. And this, of course, is what the secret and the charm, the esoteric veracity of the Book of Daniel is, is that the power of this vision is not constrained by any language, by any ethnocentric history. It is a timeless message, and that its contract content is at least intercultural and probably transcultural. And that its purposes are not to make clear to the present either the truths of the present or the truths of the past but to make true to those who will come in the future, the truth of the past, this present and the present, which is our future. So, it hasn't totally radical fracture and a radical purpose, and consequently is extremely difficult to understand.
While the ground forces are not engaged in the north and south, they do not appear on the James. Go down and you shop on Fairfax, and you buy a Bible and the authorities toscanella. All fashion valor. But they occur under different. And the Greek marble that was put together in Alexandria. Times.
Now, the first two editions usually occur together with a little breathing hiatus between them. The first edition of The Prayer of Azariah [and Song of the Three Holy Children] put them onto a Babylonian exile. There are three companions that are taking up the...
I'm not on November 5th, two five. Number. A different and one of the compounds. Well, I'm. Four of.
Life occurs in the Third Book of Daniel.
And one of the companions was Azariah, and the Prayer of Azariah occurs in the Third Book of Daniel and extends from verse 24 through 45. Then there's a five-verse bridge, which has as its central imagery the preservation of the three companions of Daniel in the fiery furnace. Well, I'll get to that story in just a minute. You'd probably remember it from your childhood, but it'll be interesting to see how it is in this regard. So, the Prayer of Azariah, linked together by this little five-verse bridge, then comes into a hymn of the 3 Hebrews, a hymn of deliverance of praise, a prayer of beseeching, and a hymn of deliverance linked together by an image. And the image is a symbolic vision. It's almost like somebody would take a spiritual photograph and say, this is the core, this is the focus, this is the link that transforms the condition of the prayer of supplication to the hymn of rejoicing, because a condition has been manifested, a transformation has been affected that has never been done before. An alchemical transformation of man has happened on an intuitive level, which has energized itself to come down and descend to the visionary level, and that this motion will continue to penetrate until it extends itself into the very roots of man's sensate nature. The word becoming flesh, and this is the first movement. This is the finger of divinity, conferring the lightning of cosmic integrity onto the creation again through the good men, the just men, the saints who form a liaison here with angelic powers.
And that's what the Book of Daniel was describing here. Now, the situation that brought forth the martyrs of the fiery furnace Daniel and his three companions had were introduced in the first Book of Daniel as being excellent young men, tremendous princes in their Jewish homeland, forthright individuals. And they were brought young into the Babylonian court of Nebuchadnezzar, and they were apprenticed to become wisemen advisers, because the Babylonian and then the Persian Empire, much larger than that, depended upon importing talented people to help run this new, larger, amplified structure. They had enough indigenous talent to run a city-state, but they didn't have enough to extend themselves over a large geographical terrain. And when the Persians came and they extended themselves to many other cultures, they had to have individuals who were internationally cognizant, capable. And so very often Jewish intellectual people were taken for this purpose because they were the best international ambassadors. They could speak many languages. They had an international manner. And so, Daniel and his three friends are typical cream of the crop Jewish young men who are taken then to learn the wisdom of becoming advisers.
There comes a time, then, as the Book of Daniel in the beginning says, when Nebuchadnezzar the king has an awful dream, but it occurs just on the sensate level to him. It doesn't occur on the dream level and the feeling level. So, there's no image. All he has is the tremendous uneasiness, the phobic seed of it. And so, he collects all of his magicians, his astrologers, his soothsayers, the Chaldeans. What Daniel, the Book of Daniel designates as the Chaldeans, the wise men, the Magi, and Nebuchadnezzar asked them to interpret his dream. And they ask him, well, "tell us the dream, and we will interpret it." And Nebuchadnezzar tells them, "I don't remember the dream. It has gone from me. If you are wise men, you will know what I dreamed, and be able to then interpret it." And they tell him, "This is impossible. No man can do this." And so, Nebuchadnezzar orders the death of all wisemen throughout the empire - typical tyrant - but Daniel, hearing about this, is brought on his urgent beseeching before Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar says, "can you interpret this?" And Daniel says, "I can, but that I will not accept any reward, for what I speak to you does not come from me, it comes from some transpersonal element of me."
I'm paraphrasing Daniel now in terms of psychological contemporary. He's saying your dream happened on a subconscious level, and there's no way that thought or feeling is able to interpret this. But intuition being very close to this is able to interpret. And so, I will set myself to tune myself in on this transpersonal level. And intuitively I will see the dream that you had. I will feel the sensation that you have and energize it, so it rises into the level of feeling and forms an image pattern for me. And then I will further energize it and amplify it so it comes into my thinking level, and I will interpret it for you. And he sees this tremendous image of a colossal idol whose head is of gold, whose shoulders and breast of silver, whose thighs and knees of brass, whose calves and ankles are of iron, and whose arches and toes are of clay. And he sees a tremendous energy, focusing itself upon the feet of clay, and the whole ensemble of this multi-metal idol fall. And then he says to Nebuchadnezzar, no wonder it fled from you, because it's such a horrific image and because it's so close to you, not only what you are, oh great King, but what you represent for all time is going to fall. You are the head of gold, but everything after you, in terms of time, in terms of history, is going to degenerate until finally it becomes feet of clay. And there will come a time when this is completely decimated.
So, Nebuchadnezzar, relieved of this tremendous burden, it doesn't matter to him that Daniel has given him some very bad news about his descendants. He is relieved in an existential way, in a psychological way of some burden that had been pressing down on him, because this was like an undigested energy phobia, a free-floating anxiety, which had really grabbed a hold of him. And now it's dispersed because of Daniel's interpretive abilities, which were not only interpretive, but were transpersonal and able to bring out of the man. Don't think in terms of ESP or just of clever intuition.
The Book of Daniel is being very specific. This is a talent which this man is discovering in himself for the first time. So, Daniel is made the third adviser of the land that is under the king and the king's first deputy. Daniel is next in line for making decisions, so that the Babylonian exile was not a captivity of slaves but was actually a transformation of the young Jewish princes, of just being in a small tribal environment to an empire-sized environment which was soon to be transformed by the Persians into one of the first world great empires. And of course, that Persian Empire would be seized and grabbed by the Greeks through Alexander the Great and transformed into the entire Hellenistic world so that the experience of the education of Daniel's lineage is of young men learning to let go of the tribal father to son blood lineage and to acclimate themselves to a new kind of a lineage which was now to develop these capacities.
Well, now all the soothsayers of Babylon, the Chaldeans, the astrologers, the magicians, as usual, are jealous of Daniel and his companion. So, they connive, and they get Nebuchadnezzar to one day in his pridefulness as emperor, to pass a law that for 30 days nobody shall worship any image except the king. And of course, they discover right away that Daniel is praying to Jerusalem. And in the Book of Daniel the tradition is to pray three times a day towards Jerusalem. Very interesting. So, they bring him before the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar, and he frets over this because Daniel is his trusted advisor. He's the only man who can deliver him of this kind of phobic pain. He's the only one who can open up this anxiety and bleed it forth into some kind of an imagery. And here he's forced to kill him. But then Daniel assures him that his God will not let him die through this false machination.
Now, Daniel was supposed to be put in the lion's den, the pit, and he's put in and a rock is put over the cover. Notice the image of a cave with a rock over the front of it. This will be a timeless image. Daniel in the lion's den will transcendentally reoccur on its cosmic amplification as Christ after the crucifixion in the sepulcher with the rock in front of it. It's just an amplification, not just, but it is an amplification. Nebuchadnezzar cannot sleep all night, and at the first crack of dawn, according to his own law, he rushes in, has the rock removed, and Daniel comes out. He is unharmed. So, all the magicians and soothsayers are thrown into the lions, which of course are hungry, having not eaten all night, and they consume them.
The Book of Daniel is very complete. It says they threw in the wives, concubines, children, and relations of all these soothsayers, magicians. The Book of Daniel's, after completeness. And so, you have you have this in there, too. There comes another time when the three companions of Daniel are connived by more soothsayers, more magicians, more astrologers, and they figure they can't get Daniel, but they'll get his three companions, and they connive, and they get the three companions committed to being thrown into a fiery furnace. And the furnace is heated to seven times its normal temperature, and the three companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are thrown into the fiery furnace, but they are not consumed by the flames. In fact, when Nebuchadnezzar looks in, he sees the three companions walking around praying. Of course, in the traditional circumambulation manner of the Jewish tradition. And there is a fourth person with them, and when they look in this fourth person has a very peculiar aspect. The hair is like white fine wool, the eyes are fiery red, the coarse white wool garment, and there is this flame like contouring around him. And when the three companions are finally let out of the fiery furnace, there is no fourth that comes from the furnace.
Now what the Book of Daniel indicates here is that at this time of transformation, another plane of invisible to us, reality comes into play and takes that mundane plane and transforms it into this other plane where the invisible becomes visible. And where the ordinary spatial temporal laws of matter are completely transcended. And then man is returned seamlessly back to his own condition so that man now has achieved in the vision of the Book of Daniel, the capacity to exit from this world into the other, before death and return back. And this by implication and by further design engenders its complement, its polarity. That is to say that sense we can exit this world into the next and return to this one. Death has lost its permanency. That the death experience has become permeable to life and that there is life beyond death. Just as surely as there is life before death, and that there are now bridging perforations, osmotic transformative processes that have been initiated towards bridging this life and the next, and that the figure for this as an energy manifestation is a son of God. Nebuchadnezzar says he looks in and it looked like one unto a Son of God. This is 146 BC, and this is the very first time that anything like this at all is indicated.
Now we need to come at this from a slightly different angle for a moment. This is from a book called Jew and Greek: Tutors unto Christ: The Jewish and Hellenistic Background of the New Testament, published in England in 1937, [G. H. C.] MacGregor and [A. C.] Purdy. This is a wonderful book. And on page 76, under the chapter, "The Character of Judaism," "The Character of Judaism as a Religion," there are section for "New Doctrines and Emphasis in Judaism: Revelation and Development." And they have this to give to us.
"Theoretically, the doctrine of revelation as held in Judaism permitted no possibility of development. Actually, Judaism represents an important development of the religion of Israel, and the development of the greatest significance for an understanding of Christianity. Let us consider one aspect, perhaps the most important, of this development: the emphasis upon the individual in Judaism. The mission and message of the prophets was to the nation. They stressed the responsibility of the nation as a whole and the judgment of God upon this nation. National repentance alone could avert his judgment. The breakup of the national state confirmed the prophetic message. With the destruction of the state, religion became less a matter of course' and more a matter of choice.' Jeremiah and Ezekiel addressed this new situation and the individual emerged into importance."
But the individual now has to expand his capacities to that twelve-fold nature, which the nation as a whole, which the people as a whole embodied in the 12-tribe format. Later on, in sophisticated Hellenistic Judaism, this mystical doctrine will be known as the tables of the 12 Patriarchs [Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs], and when it reoccurs exactly as many years after Christ as before Christ, the same phenomena will reoccur. You will have the same twelve-fold structure as the initial ritual service of the early Christian church, the primitive Christian church. That the religious service of the early Christian church will be a twelve-fold transformation of the individual. When one gets into this, one can see that most religious masses and Christianity are truncated, shorthand versions of what the transformative process originally was, and that this was linked indissolubly to the esoteric Jewish understanding in late Hellenistic times, and that this gets its first conscious, visionary impulse in the Book of Daniel. He and we speak of he, as the book as a whole, is the first to envision this complete amplification of man. The three transcendental states through the four functions, making this twelve-fold possibility.
I don't have time to go through the entire Book of Daniel tonight for you, and we'll come back to some of this, but there is a term in here that I think you need to know in this Prayer of Azariah. There's a term in here which is called in the King James Version, "the watchers." The watchers. And I think let's see if I can find this here. It's in book three, verse ten. I believe that's it. The watchers are actually translated in the Anchor Bible, the Book of Daniel. And the Anchor Bible series that just came out a few years ago, the terms that they use instead of watchers is sentinel. The ancient Hebrew is actually a core syllable, Ear. Ear. It has an inflection on it. Ear. There's an inflection on the vowel here and a slight aspiration to the consonant. Ear. Like at the end of my name. The ear is a designation, it's a sacred syllable, it's a sacred syllable like om' would be a sacred syllable. And its designation is to awaken or to awake in transition. To awake. It's like the clap. This ear, then, is a sacred syllable, and it translates in the King James Version as watchers who watch in order to communicate.
You know this hermetic function, this mercurial function, is the communication function. The messenger angels then become messengers to man from divinity, in that they wake man up. The symbol of the angelic presence is always Gabriel with his horn. It's not so much what they say. It's wake up. And if it's wake up, not so much to what we say. What is it then? It's wake up to what can be said. In other words, wake up to expanding yourself now, your field of operation beyond just the thinking function, beyond the feeling function, beyond the sensing function, beyond even the intuitive function. Take it all together in all of its ecstatic, terrific wisdom extensions, and prepare yourself now for a cosmic scale of proportion that you're going to miss the whole message. You're not even going to be understanding the language.
In the Book of Daniel, the phrase is the angel says to Daniel, and Daniel says, you know, I'm the best there is at interpreting, but I can't understand this. And the angel says, these words are sealed up and at the end of time they will be unsealed. They are not to be understood by anyone now, because their fullness has not yet become real. Because this word that I give to you is so large that you have not yet evolved to the amplitude where it could occur with any kind of reality yet, but that time is coming. And that's why you are given this now because it has to start on the sensate level, on this phobic level, on this initial subconscious seed level, and has to grow. And when it grows, when it grows fully, that man will come, that Anthropos will come, that primal man will come, who will hear these words loud and clear in all of their amplification. And he will interpret what this means.
Well, you can see that this tremendous apocalyptic vision in the Book of Daniel given through many convolutions, was almost incomprehensible at its time. It was written down. It was packed away, taken out from time to time. And in fact, the elements that became most popular in the Book of Daniel were two of the Greek additions at the end that do not appear in the Masoretic Text. Those two stories from the Septuagint version of the Book of Daniel. The first one was Susanna and the elders, and the second was Bel and the dragon, or Bel and the great snake. The dragon here is equivalent to a great snake. Susanna and the elders is about adultery and Bel and the Dragon is about idolatry. And it shows Daniel understanding that in these judgments of primal importance for man, one cannot go by the rule of law. One has to go by justice and the sense of truth that if one goes by the rule of law, you are going to make a mistake. If one goes simply by the externals of evidence, by the procedures of what lawyers would present before judges, you are going to make a mistake, because that entire procedure falsifies by its very process the situation that you have to make a choice and opt for justice instead of rule of law, because justice operates towards revealing truth. And it's the inner inclination. It's the ultimate purpose to install in certain human beings the desire to find out the truth no matter what, regardless of the consequences, regardless of what the rule of law would dictate.
And it is this opting for the incomprehensible vision of truth as a choice of action, which begins to separate away an inner esoteric core among the Jewish people in Hellenistic times. And increasingly, the regular community falls into trusting a rule of law. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and that element which extracts itself as the Essenes become more and more committed to dealing with the incomprehensible in a just fashion, expecting that at some time in the future the truth of it will all be revealed and seen. Thus, the hope for a figure to reveal who will be truth personified, as opposed to the community addicting itself to the rule of law through distrusting the incomprehensible cosmic scaled magnitude swirls of what they would call the incomprehensible, irrational world.
Now the differentiation comes to this point that the Messianic Jewish communities, like the Essenes, became more and more committed to the idea of the personal individual freedom in the search of the incomprehensible for truth. They became more and more Greek, and the Jewish communities who went for the rule of law became more and more Romans, went for the rule of the nation-state. And so, by the first century BC, the Jewish experience was bifurcating itself on a split that was to become almost a gulf. There were a few several thousands who had become affinities to the Greek adventurous ways of the individual, but in terms of the world of the spirit. Whereas the vast community become addicted to the Roman ways the rule of law, the rule of power, the rule of fear, of peers and group ridicule, and so forth. All of this would come to a complete apocalyptic split when Augustus became the emperor of the world.
Well, next week we'll go on from the Book of Daniel, we're going to develop Hellenistic Judaism, and we're going to go to the Wisdom of Ben Sira [Book of Sirach], which comes about a generation after the Book of Daniel. And we will notice next week in the Book of Ben Sira Ecclesiasticus, as it is called in Latin, that there is a tremendous jump in comprehension in just one generation after the Book of Daniel is written, with all of its difficult esoteric strivings to try and reach out every which way and grasp something which was incomprehensible, like the Buddhist parable of all the blind men touching different parts of an elephant and not knowing what it was. In just one generation we find, in the Wisdom of Ben Sira, already a tremendous advance in consciousness, in capacity. Well, we'll get to that next week.
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