Wisdom of Ben Sira
Presented on: Tuesday, January 29, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 7 of 54
Wisdom of Ben Sira
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 29, 1985
Transcript:
Continuing with trying to reconstruct Alexandria for ourselves. And we have a working thesis now that may help us conceptualize. We're going to use a little Jungian terminology for a few minutes, just because it quickly positions the mind. Not that it's a final word, or that its accuracy is all that can be taken as a shorthand notation. It's actually a jargon and should be dealt with as such.
The Alexandrian period of human history is an archetypal substratum for modern man. The last Renaissance of that world, which lasted from Dante until the end of the enlightenment is like the subconscious. These two areas, psychic areas, historical areas, tend to manipulate the ignorant and without having some understanding of our subconscious tendencies and our archetypal purposes, we flounder, we are crippled. We are doubly blinded. The subconscious is usually referred to as an instinctual, an impulsive, a compulsive. It's like the fire under the pot. It's the drive, the push behind. The archetypes are larger and more comprehensive. They're like the overriding purposes. And they pull us in between this push and this pull. We are rather like corks on the ocean. It takes a an extremely sophisticated human being to be an entity by themselves, without the push of the subconscious and without the pull of the archetypal unconscious.
All right. So much for jargon, so much for a position. Now, the Alexandrian period has, for its sense, synthesizing thread, the Jewish tradition. Yes, there are great traditions. Yes, there are Egyptian traditions. Yes, there's a Roman influence. Yes, there's even a Buddhist influence. But the synthesizing thread in Alexandria is the Jewish tradition. So that without the Jewish tradition, it's going to be impossible for us to understand Alexandria. It's going to be impossible for us to understand the archetypal structure. Whose purpose is still pull us very strongly. You ask anybody in a European setting if there's going to be a second coming, and nine out of ten will either vehemently say yes or no. Only about 1 in 10 will be indifferent or have equanimity. These archetypal patterns pull us out of our personal shape because, specifically because they involve the development of the individual. And no individual in this cultural mode in this cultural history has developed very adequately. Very few have. But most individuals have developed along the archetypal lines. That's why the pull is so tremendous. It is both subtle and massive. It's both transcendent and immanent. And so, we need to understand where does this come into focus? What can we tell about its development? And that's what we're up to tonight, continuing with what we started last week with the Book of Daniel.
Now we come to the Wisdom of Ben Sira, but we need to understand here because with Ben Sira we see the struggling between the Greek and the Jewish, the Greek mind and the Jewish mind. Between the Greek individual and the Jewish individual and we will find that in the context of Ben Sira. The immediate context for that book is the Maccabees, and we will find in the Maccabees the beginning appeal by the Jewish elders to Rome for arbitration over their Hellenistic troubles. They will send, under Judas Maccabee, under Jonathan Maccabee, and under Simon Maccabee. Envoys to Rome to ask for the Romans to form an alliance with the Jewish people to become their protectors. Simon Maccabee will even send [a golden shield weighing a thousand minas] to the Roman Senate, and the Roman Senate will send out letters to all of the Hellenistic kings: We have accepted this gold shield; Rome will protect the Jews; anyone who makes war on them will make war on Rome. What was a negligible occurrence in terms of daily affairs - it wouldn't have made the TV news - became the root invitation that drew Rome to the east and set up the trigger for the massive amplification of the Jewish tradition into its Christian flowering, which used the Roman Empire as its vehicle.
And so, we're dealing here with the first little roots that form this massive tree, but it's important to position our appreciation. It's important for us to understand that the Jewish tradition is more ancient than Moses - that Moses is a late comer - that Moses is already subject to archetypal happenings that exceed him by almost as much distance as Alexandria exceeds us back in time. It's only by having this kind of perspective that we can appreciate the massive land sliding of meaning that occurred in the first century BC in Alexandria, because of the Jewish insistence that man be who he really is, it was this primal insistence that there is a reality to man. That his wisdom. Is intimately connected with the wisdom of the Almighty. And by clear, direct, experiential inference man's wisdom is also capable of being infinite. This was the trigger that was pulled by the advent of the Christos, a cosmic man, not just a world conqueror, but a cosmic man.
We have to understand this. And so, we go back now. We take our minds back. You sink back into history. The first great Semitic figure in history is a man whose name was Sargon, and he lived about 2300 BC, and he is the first Semitic individual to become a great king. Not just a king, but a great king, probably the greatest conqueror of the archaic world as opposed to the ancient world further back the archaic world ever knew. Sargon, in fact, is a rendering in Hebrew of the term which originates in the ancient Akkadian and is carried through in the Assyrian language, Assyrian, and the name is, sharrukin - S-H-A-R-R-U-K-I-N, sharrukin. And sharrukin is a throne name, just like a cartouche name in Egyptian hieroglyphics. This would be a cuneiform throne name and it means "the king is legitimate."
This phrase, which becomes the name of the great individual Sargon - Sargon - holds a mystery and in order to understand this mystery, we now have to understand kingship and a little bit deeper mode. We have to understand that the kingship implicitly conceals within itself the mystery of time development that the kingship is a time phenomenon, a time lineage, which penetrates through the present, which links the past to the future via its penetration through the present, and thus the king line is the time element and creates history that only when there is a true king, only when the king is legitimate, does history really happen. When the king is not legitimate, we flounder precisely because real historical time does not occur. And it's like a swampy backwater - the present is unshaped, it becomes murky, it becomes dense, nothing happens, it becomes dank and stagnant, the kingdom becomes sick, man's sense of reality becomes distorted. And in this miasma of non-movement, of no history, he enters into a limbo which is the worst hell imaginable - nothing is meaningful - so that the overriding purpose, then, is to find the real king. Thus, the name of Sargon - "the king is legitimate" - is an extraordinarily powerful phrase, and in terms of Sargon's mythos, it's extremely revealing.
Now, we didn't know much of Sargon. Nobody has known much of Sargon for 4000 years or more. There were traditions. There was a Sargon the Second who took his name, and he ruled from 721 to 705 BC, some sixteen hundred years after him. He was just a name. It was only in the 20th century that archaeology slowly uncovered and discovered royal libraries of cuneiform tablets, and the slow, patient process of deciphering the ancient languages. In fact, we should use the terms archaic here, because these are languages that are ancient to the ancient languages, they are archaic.
Now Sargon spoke a language called Akkadian, and the Akkadian people in 2600 BC roughly invaded the Mesopotamian region. And what had been a pattern of small kingdoms became eventually, under Sargon, the first great international empire. He united, in fact, the entire Fertile Crescent for the first time, from sea to sea, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. And Sargon's tremendous throne capitol Agade has never been discovered - we have yet to find Agade. The only place that we have a biography of Sargon, because all this is so recent, is in the Cambridge Ancient History, the third edition of volume one, part two, published in 1971, chapter 19, "The Dynasty of Agade [and the Gutian Invasion]," and the first section is "The reign of Sargon." Here is an extract paragraph from that short biography which has been pieced together. See if you recognize something archetypal in this:
"A miraculous or a mysterious origin is essential to superhuman characters, and Sargon was the first to show that the taste of the ancient eastern peoples was to be for the latter. Like several notable successors he had, and did not disguise, an obscure birth and a humble beginning. The account of this is not only explicit, but conveyed in a form which purports to be his own words. Only the first few lines are preserved of Assyrian tablets, which begin I (am) Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade', and go on to relate the birth and earliest years of the speaker, name in broken lines some of his subsequent conquests and then break off. It is not, indeed, likely that the words are an authentic utterance of the great king; the class of composition to which this text belongs was regularly cast in the form of personal record, as though taken from an inscription, but there is much to suggest that they were the productions of a later age, having a didactic bent and perhaps a certain philosophy of history. One such recorded inscription even purported to recount, in the god's own words, the life and beneficent achievements of the god Marduk, the great Lord'. Despite this element of [possible] forgery, these accounts were certainly based upon authentic tradition, and there is nothing incredible in the statements attributed to by this legend' to Sargon. According to this, therefore, his mother was a priestess, his father an unknown wanderer. He was born in secret at an obscure village on the Euphrates called Azupiranu, [which means] perhaps Saffron Town', from the local product which has kept its name almost unaltered. His mother, to rid herself of the child, enclosed him in a basket, which she covered and made fast with pitch, and launched it upon the river. Miraculously preserved from drowning, he was carried downstream and fished out by one Aqqi, a labourer in a palm-garden, who noticed the basket as his bucket dipped in the water. [He] took the child and reared him as his own, making him to follow the same profession."
The legends of Sargon go on, and fortunately, we have a portrait of the man, and I'll pass it around for you - those with the cassettes, I'm sorry that you can't see this - but you'll be able to see for yourselves what a royal figure looks like: the unmistakable grandeur, self-confidence, and tremendous power. Not so much the power of a hand, but the power of the comprehension of the hand. Sargon, in his development, laid the seeds for the king who not only lets history develop, let's time really be, but who creates a new era, a new epoch, a new aeon, that the energy or energizing level of man's experience en masse takes a quantum jump. That kingship changes the meaning and the significance of the whole line, and thus history is radically reinterpreted.
Now we have king lists in Akkadian, and they list up to 98 kings. So, there is an ocean of time. The next great king in this lineage was named Shamshi-Adad. Shamshi-Adad the First [Shamshi-Adad I], and he lived about 2000 BC, roughly 2000 to 1900 BC. He was a contemporary of Abraham. In fact, the only place that we find a reference that links Genesis with the archaeological record is in Genesis 25, verse 3. It is stated that Adad was the ancestor of the Abimelech, further making this Adad a grandson of Abraham. The Jewish tradition obviously makes him the chieftain of a nomadic tribe, which journeyed around with Abraham between Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Now, this Adad is mentioned in connection with the king lists, the chronology, the Assyrian king lists. Shamshi-Adad reunited most of the kingdom of Sargon. Not quite as extensive as Sargon, Sargon had international relationships. His reign lasted 56 years. He was king for 56 years, and his contacts stretched out all the way to Crete and probably Greece, all the way up to Badakhshan in upper northern part of Afghanistan - what is now southern Soviet Union - and all the way to India. The Fertile Crescent by linking ocean to ocean, sea to sea like a manifest continental destiny, gave him an ocean route down the Persian Gulf to the Indus River, communities across the Mediterranean Sea, to the Minoan communities, and contact down to the early Egyptian dynasties so that Sargon's reach was enormous.
Shamshi-Adad, in bringing back somewhat this character, adds a further touch. Sargon's capacity to unite the kingdom was based on communication, was based on the tremendous development of roads linking cities from sea to sea, and ships, and a coherence of communication. Shamshi-Adad introduced for the first time massive military strategies. At one point, the tablets record at a certain siege that Shamshi-Adad in 2000 BC mustered over 60,000 men for a military operation. Now, if you can imagine the logistics of being able to move and feed and clothe and arm 60,000 men 4000 years ago you can understand the tremendous growth, the tremendous jump, in competition. It would be a thousand years before there was any comparable move. And then the Greeks moving to Troy with some 800 or 900 men, would consider that a huge undertaking. So, when we go back in time now to Sargon and go back to Shamshi-Adad, even though we're going back to incredibly ancient times, we're dealing with a scale of human ingenuity that is hardly guessed at and certainly was never dreamed up before archaeology in our time uncovered it.
Shamshi-Adad faced a situation consciously that Sargon had not accomplished, and that was: how to pass the power on. Because when you are a king, when you are manifesting time, when you are making history, when the sense of reality is flowing because of your achievements, one of the great crises in your responsibility is how and to whom to pass it on to. And so, the problem of tradition, the problem of lineage, the problem of sons becomes paramount.
Now remember, Abraham is a contemporary of Shamshi-Adad. He would have been sensitive to the whole notion of passing something on to his sons, or finding the son to whom he could pass on his reality-making capacity, his history-enduring facility, his technique for maintaining his kingly power, and the ritual occurrences which must be followed in order to ensure that the lineage is passed on and maintained in its fullness - the Jewish tradition. He is primarily of concern with this integrity of the link. And in fact, the earliest of the collections of the earliest of Gospels - the very first section of the Gospel of Matthew, which was five distinct community gospels put together and collected together. The first one in there makes sure that the kingship lineage of the tribe of Judah runs exactly to Jesus. And not only that, but in an exact cycle of 14 generations.
Now this is overlooked very frequently and not paid attention to. I'm stressing it here simply because we will find a lot of material that leads us astray, away from understanding and comprehending this detail. For instance, normally the intelligent books written about Hellenistic Judaism, or attempting to write about Hellenistic Judaism previous to the Second World War, distort the situation. I have here a book called Hellenism by Norman Bentwich, published by the Jewish Publication Society, 1919, in Philadelphia. It was in its day one of the best books on Hellenistic Judaism. He did a wonderful book on Philo of Alexandria [Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria], which I have. But when we come to understand what happened, the viewpoint of the person and of the ignorant conditions under which he had to put his material together, distort the situation so that we're unable to see it and unable to understand its significance. You have to realize now that this was endemic in human nature, even early in our own century. Even people who are alive today were products of an epidemic of ignorance. They didn't know. They had no idea of the tremendous significances that were unfolding right before their eyes. They had ideas of what it might mean. Here's how Bentwich writes.
"Legend soon gathered itself about an event fraught with such importance to the destinies of the Jewish people and to the whole of civilization. The Hellenistic writers, Aristeas, Josephus, and Philo, and likewise the Talmud, recount a story of seventy-two sages sent by the high priest from Judea to Alexandria at the request of King Ptolemy Philadelphus (about 250 BCE) [Before the Common Era], and lodged in the island of Pharos opposite Alexandria, each in a separate cell, till they had completed the translation of the five books. Each of the versions, it is said, agreed word for word, which proved the divine inspiration of the translation and its authoritative character. The story bears the impress of [tendenz] fiction, no less than another legend recorded in the Talmud - which originated some centuries later, when bitter experience had given a new significance to the event - that while the translation was being made, a plague of darkness hung over Palestine."
The fact is that we have now a tremendous array of materials recovered, discovered, and recovered. We have here a publication done just this past year called The Other Bible [The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudoepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha, Gnostic Gospels], which runs to 735 pages. We have enough volumes to probably fill a good-sized bookshelf, which have been recovered and translated and made available, and the pictures that we have are extraordinarily clear. The first volume of The Cambridge Ancient History, when it first came out in 1920s, was about 800 pages. The first volume now is close to 3000 pages, but the accuracy has jumped even further. So, we're in a position now to understand tremendously the situation that occurred in those times.
Now, two of the best sources for us to consider. One of them is by E. R. Goodenough, and it's part of a 13-volume series called Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. I put a complete set of this into PRS [the Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles] in their library and they have it locked away in one of the rooms up there. So, you'll have to ask for it. But I managed to find an extra copy of volume 12, which is the summaries, and as soon as I can, I'll replace the set in our own library here. Goodenough spent his entire life putting this set of books together. He writes this, and this was written in 1965.
"We have no adequate material for tracing the Hellenization of Judaism. It might seem to have begun with the settlement of Jews at the founding of Alexandria, but this was by no means the first time Jews had lived in Greek cities, and it may have begun much earlier. A full analysis of the Hellenization, which lay behind the Septuagint and is represented in it, has never been made, and to do so would be extremely difficult. In translating Hebrew words without philosophic implications translators of the Septuagint often used Greek words with such implications. Did they do this to introduce Greek mystic and philosophic ideas into the Scriptures; or was it merely that by their very task the translators had to use Greek approximations for the Hebrew, and that they did so with the plainer rather than the more philosophic implications of the words in mind? This question can be answered, if at all, only after having carefully studied the whole body of the Septuagint from that point of view, a work of many years which no one has attempted, to my knowledge. To discuss the matter in terms of a few passages, accomplishes nothing. The fact is, however, that the Jews in the Diaspora could have needed a Greek translation only because they had become a Greek-speaking people, to whom the Hebrew original was unintelligible."
When we come to the Wisdom of Ben Sira. The first thing that Ben declaims to us is that this book is being translated into Greek, out of Hebrew, and that it's a very tricky thing because there is a lot of forcefulness in the Hebrew which doesn't come through in the Greek. Ben is writing this about 132 BC. Now keep the mind of Goodenough current - he's an extremely accurate scholar and what he says is true, but we need to balance it out and see that what Ben Sira is saying is paradoxical in face of what the world's greatest scholar and Hellenistic Judaism is saying. It's true that Hebrew has not the philosophical connotative-ness of Hebrew, but it is just as true, and conversely, as poignant that Greek does not have the incredible forcefulness of Hebrew. And that part of the mystery that is here is that the intelligibility of Greek depends upon syntax. The tremendous sophistication of Greek as a language is all in the tremendous syntactical structures that can be spun and woven and wrought with the language. But any of the writers in Hebrew have always stressed that the alphabet under which Hebrew is made as a language was created before the language, and that the alphabet independently has an archetypal nature, as we would speak today, that the alphabet is mysterious and so the words are mysterious from the inside, not from their outside structure so that one has to have experience in order to amplify by resonance in oneself the meaning of the Hebrew. One cannot read a text in Hebrew and expect, through examination of the syntactical structure, to understand the subtleties. One must be able to position those words in one's experience for the subtleties to do their work.
Greek is like an exercise which you have to go through externally and Hebrew is rather like a pill, which you have to swallow and take internally for it to have effect. This is a radically different view of the individual. The Greek view of the individual as free because he is mobile, is quite distinct from the Hebrew idea of the individual being free, because his experience is pure, and he is able to understand the words correctly. He is able to hear the law, that the meaning of the law is perhaps more in the purity of the individual than in the accuracy of the externally written law. This became a great problem for the Hellenistic Jews because they became Hellenistic, they became Greek, they became interested in language and the view of the law became a real problem. And just on this issue, it split the Jewish community into a triad. First of all, it split it into the polarity of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Pharisees believed in the Oral Law, the primacy of the Oral Law, which could be delivered to the people. The Pharisees believed aristocratic in. Implying. That only a few could master, and especially those who were given the name of the tribe of Levi, that was given the lineage of Aaron, of being free to interpret the law, The Torah, triumph of human. It will definitely demand that the kingship, the changes in the Sadducees split, which was given the line of the kingship.
Now the Pharisees and the Sadducees split over this Greek-induced polarization. But as we have talked before, not only does the polarity come into being, but there's always a third. There's always a hidden third, an esoteric third, and the third party created by this polarity between the Sadducees and the Pharisees were the Essenes. And the Essenes put their faith, their confidence, not so much on the Oral Law or the written law, but upon the revelatory experience of purity that manifest the law regardless of the mistake in copying, regardless of mistakes and opposition. But the law is in peril and thus can reappear on the pristine [acrophobe?] at any time.
[The temple was moved to Tara and from India into time anywhere it chooses, until the above disappearance was declared bankrupt, was arrested for filing for a certificate of medical. The wisdom of. Fun fact the. Up until this symmetrical technocrat. One benefit of working on. Ethanol fuel from natural fibers from. An integral part of the. Change of. For the. Climate change throughout the.?]
But it had originally leant over towards the Sadducees. But because of the inherently mysterious accuracy in the writers, the original writer Ben Sira, and his translator - his grandson - there was a possibility which was developed out of the unseen third side. And it'll take us a whole month of lectures in order to patiently unravel this tremendous complication. And it's difficult to unravel it because it is white hot with archetypal significance for us. And we're going to have to peel off the layers. We're going to have to take a whole week and look at the prophecies of Enoch, the Books of Enoch, the two books of [China?]. We're going to have to take a whole week to look at the Testaments of the Twelve Tribes [Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs]. We're going to have to take a whole week to look at the book of the Wisdom of Solomon. And we're probably going to have to take a whole week just to look at the movement of the Essenes through the eyes of Philo, who is one of the few people who ever described them accurately. But we'll do it, because without this, there is no chance at all to wake up from the ignorance which is subconsciously pushing us along blindly towards an apocalyptic event which is also drawing us with magnificent power. And the only way to not go that way is to wake up. It doesn't matter anybody's political views, anybody's religious leanings.
These pushes and pulls are quite real, and the dilemma is profound, and there is no other resolution in Ben Sira. He writes at the beginning, since many great things have been communicated to us through the Law and the prophets and the others who followed after them, for which we must give Israel the praise due to instruction and wisdom. Now notice here that there's the Law. There's the prophets and the others who came after them. There's, the Law is the Torah - the five books of Moses - the Pentateuch.
The prophets are the way in which the prophetic capacity... The prophets are the way in which the prophetic capacity brought history and the kingship line into play. If you remember now, the archetypal priest is Aaron, who's with Moses. But the archetypal king is David, who comes much later in time from Aaron, because David had to be made in a consecrated way, because before David could become king, Samuel had to create the holy conditions under which David could become king and without Samuel there would have been no David. And Samuel is the first of the great prophetic figures in Jewish tradition. And David is king because Samuel is a true voice of the divine and the kingship is always then descended from David, just as the priesthood is always descended from Aaron. Those two lineages, then, are quite distinctly different. Notice that even though Moses writes the Torah, the kingship of Aaron is the key to the priesthood and not Moses. Moses is excerpted from the entire lineage as zero is excerpted from the cardinal number sequence because he is the indispensable context, like Samuel is.
It's only because of Moses that there was a priesthood at all. Moses guarantees the efficacy of the priesthood, as Samuel guarantees the efficacy of the kingship. Now, people that wander off in their daydreams about the secret key of Solomonic magic and don't know anything at all about Samuel are wasting their time. Samuel's by far the most important figure in that. And it's through Samuel then, that the whole development of the prophets come in and is the prophet who then is the key mysterious figure holding the lineages together.
And we find time and time again in, say, the Maccabees, where there are basic questions of man's relationship to the divine. They are always set aside in pre-Maccabean and Maccabean times. They are always set aside, never referred to the priesthood. The priesthood are interpreters of the Torah. But when there are new situations that come up, the situations are held in abeyance until a true prophet will come along and will unravel this for them, that the priesthood can only interpret the Torah, the Law. They cannot deal with a present new circumstance. They cannot deal with new circumstances in the present. They cannot deal with radical alterations. Small or large, there was nothing the priesthood could do with the Christ. Nothing. It wasn't their function.
There was nothing, as you can now understand, that the Romans could do either because they were in the same position. The only people who were in any position at all were some of the free-thinking Greeks, the Athenians. And a few international spirits from India. They were the only mobile spirits at the time. As we will see and patiently unravel this, so you can see that there were very few people who could understand this. So, Ben Sira says, many things have been given to us: the Law, the prophets, the things that come after the books of wisdom. And since not only must those who read become experts themselves, but those who love learning must be able also to be useful to the uninitiated, both in speaking and in writing.
Notice the subtle indication here of a split, both in speaking and in writing, both to what will become the Pharisees and what will become the Sadducees. The community already has this bifurcation starting to come in. My grandfather Yeshua. And Yeshua, of course, is Hebrew for Jesus. The rabbis who put the Talmud together struck out the name Joshua. That's why it's just called in, uh, rabbinic learning Ben Sira, the Book of Ben Sira, not the wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach. The C-H that you see sometimes is just put in Greek - Sira with a C-H just means that the name Sarah cannot be declined. It doesn't have different forms to it. You don't have to pay any attention to that. Ben means son. Ben Sira is the best way to refer to it. Or to be exact, "The Wisdom of Jesus."
Ben Sira - My grandfather Yeshua - after devoting himself for a long time to the reading of the Law, and the prophets, and other books of our forefathers, and after attaining considerable proficiency in them, was led to write on his own account something in the line of instruction and wisdom, so that lovers of learning and persons who become interested in these things might make still greater progress in living in accordance with the Law. What is being given here is radically new. You cannot increase the Law, but you can increase by living experience the applicability of the Law. Man's increased capacity to experience has given a new amphitheater to the way in which the remnants of the Law is going to be found and this is the beginning of a whole new movement because if Hellenistic Judaism is anything at all, it is an explosion of individual capacity.
We find an almost asymptotic jump in the capacity of the Jewish individual to experience international relatedness. At this time, we will find that the Jewish community of Alexandria is one of the most sophisticated communities in the world in terms of individual human beings, able to experience life in its fullness, in its completeness. This is an amazing event, and you have to understand here, it's not so much an amplification of consciousness as an amplification of life. It's not an amplification of mine so much as it's an amplification of experience, the capacity to have experience.
This is what is evolving and manifesting and what is new. And Ben Sira is one of the first indications that this is happening. He writes, you are therefore invited to read it through with favorable attention, and to excuse us for any failures we may seem to have made in phraseology, and what we have labored to translate for things once expressed in Hebrew, do not have the same force in them when put into another language. And not only this book, but the Law itself, and the prophecies and the rest of the books differ not a little in translation from the original. Now, by 132 B.C., the Septuagint had been circulating for more than a century, 120 years. Ben Sira's also saying, suddenly many people are beginning to understand the importance of this tradition. Many people who are not of our lineage are trying to understand this, and I am translating this book out of Hebrew to help all of our international brethren together.
There's no anti-gentile sentiment in Ben Sira. He is opening everything up for everyone because he is convinced that what has been given here in the tradition, because it is eternal, applies to all men, and that no one should be exempted from the chance to increase the subtlety of his capacity to experience, increase his live-ness by having the infusion of the real tradition, and thus he writes this book. And he says, "for after I came to Egypt in the 38th year of the reign of King Euergetes," that's Euergetes the Second [Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II], "and spent some time there, I found a copy of no small educational value, and thought it absolutely necessary I should devote myself diligently and with labor to the translation of this book, devoting long hours and expert knowledge in the intervening time, to the task of completing the book and publishing it for those also who and the land where they are visiting, being already prepared in character to live in accordance with the law. Desire to advance in learning."
These are very complicated phrases in this sentence. It's filled with everything. It's filled with Sir Francis Bacon's emphasis in The Advancement of Learning...
Someone out there have them come in. It's distracting. Tell her to come in, please. Let's wait until she comes in. Turn off your machine gun, Helen. Helen. Oh, let's stop here for a moment and let this settle in. I guess we're going to have to have more lectures than I thought on that.
It's very difficult for us in our time to understand anything. The mirror of the understanding mind has been broken. So that if we go colloquially by what is called common sense or natural intelligence all that we perceive are fragments that are unconnected. We connect them together by threads of expectation much like people would go around collecting favorite little bits of glass and stone and bone and making little necklaces of these. That's really what the emotional image base gives us in our time.
Anybody who attempts to master meditation or a course in real logic or development of the mind in our time comes into possession of the experience of being absolutely flabbergasted at the incoherent state of human beings in our time. We are all a mess. It's difficult for us to address ourselves to poignant material like this. Not only because we see it in a fragmented fashion, but because it really glows white hot with lures for us and has resonances in our subconscious tendencies and impulses so that we're triply caught as it were, in these schemes. It's very difficult for us.
So, when we come to something like this in Ben Sira and he begins to string the language together and he says, "being already prepared in character to live in accordance with the law, desire to advance in learning. The Law of the Torah is God's Word eternal, but it has been manifested already in a lineage, which is the priesthood, in a lineage, which is the kingship, in a lineage, which are the prophets who make possible both the priest and the king."
And it is the prophet lineage which has run out. It ran out in historical time. There seems to be prophets in Israel. After Ezekiel, there's a break. And it bothered the Jewish character no end because it presaged a mystery. What's going to happen to us? We still have the priesthood. Yes, we still have the kingship. Yes, but that doesn't seem to be working. The people are constantly going astray. What did the prophets always say? The people are going astray. And now we come to a point where there's no one bringing us back. So, in place of the profits which had ensured the integrity of the kingship, and thus the sense of the reality of history and those that had ensured the priesthood, and thus the integrity of the application of the Law to any given time, sort of the spatial element of it, the transcendental impress of it. This is what the priesthood does. The priesthood makes sacred the present space by introducing the true divine elements into it and the kingship carries that through time.
So, the priesthood and the kingship are like time and space to man's spiritual reality. But what guarantees its accuracy? The navigators to the whole operation are the prophets, and when they cease to occur or cease to prophesy, is when the wisdom literature began to appear - the Book of Job, the [Book of] Proverbs, the Wisdom of Ben Sira. Almost all of this wisdom literature were men, were individuals who were attempting to raise man's wisdom up to that level that the prophets had had, naturally. They were trying to piece together, and they realized that it was incumbent upon man now to raise himself up to the prophetic level.
Now, if you remember last week - and I realized we have to go over this many times because it's very complicated - we talked about the twelve-fold nature. We talked about the four different levels, like four levels of sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition. We talked about how dreams are in the feeling mode. We talked about how visions are in the thinking mode. We talked about how phobias are in the sensation mode, and we talked about how prophecies are in the intuition mode. When God comes down to man in the Hebrew tradition, man prophecies, he becomes the mouthpiece of the Lord - it is not he who is speaking, he doesn't have to have the vision, the Lord has the vision, he is the mouthpiece.
Moses in this sense is the originator of the prophetic; with Ezekiel, it closes. And so, the wisdom literature, which Ben [Sira] is a part of is attempting to raise man up to trigger his intuitive level so that he can reach up and again begin to prophesy. This is why, in the Christian tradition, the Christ was the first man who raised himself up to that intuitive prophetic level and thus delivered a new Torah, a new Law, and started a whole new lineage of the prophetic capacity not given by God to man, but achieved by man unto God, a whole different outlook.
Now I guess it's time to talk about testament here. A testament was classically, traditionally in the Jewish tradition, something that you gave just before you died: last will and testament. And we'll see with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are the last will and testament of the twelve founders of the twelve tribes of Israel - the twelve sons of Jacob.
So, a testament is given just before a death so that the lineage can be passed on because in the testament are all the particulars of how it's going to be passed on and to whom. So that understanding the New Testament as a testament, we have to understand that it could only occur because there had been an enormous death. That's the only way it becomes a testament. A testament is of the wisdom book genre, but of that specific last will and testament death presaged impact. Now I have to come back to Ben Sira. I'm leaving a lot of things hanging, but you'll just have to... You'll just have to stay in there and understand this now.
So, Ben Sira then gives us this prologue, this introduction, and then he starts his book, and the very first sentence is, "All wisdom comes from the Lord and remains with him forever." If it remains with him forever, how does it ever come to us? It can only then be an apparent movement from him to us. There can only be an apparent gulf between us and him. It must not really exist. If all wisdom is with him and remains with him forever, and we are able to achieve wisdom, it is like proof positive that we were never, ever separated from him, that it was only an apparent illusion that separated it and was not real. This is a very important idea, and it comes right at the beginning of Ben Sira.
Incidentally, Ben Sira was one of the most popular books in the Hellenistic Jewish world. There were copies all over the place. He writes, "The sands of the sea, the drops of rain, the days of eternity - who can count them? The height of the heavens, the breadth of the earth and deep wisdom - who can track them out? Wisdom was created before them all, and sound intelligence, from eternity. To whom has the source of wisdom been revealed, and who knows her devices? There is but one who is wise." A very terrible one seated upon his throne. The king is legitimate. Sargon. It is a throne name. "The Eternal King never leaves his throne. Wisdom is feminine; he is created by her wisdom. The Lord himself created her. He saw her and counted her and poured her out upon all he made upon all mankind as he chose to bestow her. But he supplied her liberally to those who loved him, to fear the Lord as a glory and a ground of exaltation, a joy, and a crown of ecstasy. To fear the Lord delights the heart and brings gladness and joy and long life. The man who fears the Lord will have a happy end."
To fear the Lord as the source of wisdom. Is this just what we would call the kind of edification writing that a lot of self-help books take in our time as in all times? Is it just that what is profound here, what is circulating here? There are three distinct qualities - fear, love, and wisdom - that are intertwined here, and that Ben Sira is talking about in such a way that they interweave themselves into a unity. And this brings us back and harkens back to those three primordial transcendental modes: terror, ecstasy, and wisdom; Aries, Aphrodite, and Athena. And in the Greek tradition, where their focus was Apollo Dionysius, the movement between them was Zeus. In the Hebrew tradition, Yahweh is the only center of that. He is different from Zeus in that he is undifferentiated. He is the All. Zeus is a king of gods. But Yahweh is not a king of gods. He is the All; he is the supreme. He confers the coherence of kingship but is himself not a king.
Keep it in mind, because when we get to Jesus, you'll see that the Pharisees and the Sadducees keep asking Jesus, are you the King? Are you the King of the Jews? And the Romans will even put the crown of thorns and say, he's the King of the Jews. And Jesus will say, forgive them, for they don't understand because they are not even in the ballpark that their capacity to understand doesn't even exist on the scale that is actually happening. They are unable to experience in the freedom of an expanded life sense the actuality of man becoming not a divine king, but manifesting divinity. This becomes a great issue, as you can see.
I think because of the lack of time I'll have to come back to this next week, and I'll try and pair up the Book of Wisdom with the rest of Ben Sira. The Book of Wisdom was written about 50 BC, about 70, 80 years after Ben Sira in Alexandria, and there's a tremendous jump in focusing on the figure of wisdom, who becomes, in Greek, of course, Sophia. Sophia. And after we do the Book of Wisdom next week, I will then go back and do Enoch, and I may have to do two weeks on Enoch, because there is Enoch, and then the Secret Books of Enoch. And then I'm going to do a week on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. And right after I'm going to do the Christian version of the twelve patriarchs, which is the twelve apostles. And the rituals of the twelve apostles was the early Christian church service - it was the mass - because only by going through this whole pattern and this cycle - the efficacy of the mass, like the efficacy of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, was cosmically to be willing to sacrifice oneself to die unto the world each time so that one could be reborn anew as an undifferentiated wholeness which was divine. That was the kingdom, and it was paradoxical to speak of it as a kingdom, because it was a kingdom that was never not a kingdom.
It was, as you can see, we're beginning to broach the mysterious and we've just gotten down to 132 BC. These complications preceded an increase, and in fact, they preceded an increase for the next 300 years. There was almost no respite, no letting up. And as the spiritual cognition and recognition grew, the psychic pressure was devastating. Remember the words of our Roman friend Livy, writing in 19 BC, who said, we can no longer stand our vices and we can no longer stand the cure. When we see the Roman world break psychically in the first century AD, it doesn't break from military might, it breaks from the inside. The Roman mind was pulverized by the psychic pressure that was being generated.
The only thing I can encourage you to expect is that those archetypes are still very active, but we have tremendous capacity to awaken ourselves and understand their significance. But it will take continuity because this is very complicated. As you can see, I've gotten again only to about a third of what I wanted to get to, but I will keep at it. If you will keep coming, please try and be on time, because as you can see, it's very difficult for an individual like myself who is not a professional rabbi, not professional philosopher, not divinely inspired, to be able to maintain this level week after week. But I'm willing to do it simply because of you. If you weren't here, I wouldn't do any of it.
So, let's have a break and have our food.
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