Wisdom of Solomon (Part 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, February 5, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 8 of 54
Wisdom of Solomon (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 5, 1985
Transcript:
Due to a malfunction of a tape recorder. The first half of Roger's lecture on Tuesday night on the Wisdom of Solomon was lost. Now what follows is the second half of the lecture.
... for those who trust him without question and makes himself known to those who never doubt him. Dishonest thinking cuts men off from God, and if fools will take liberties with his power, he shows them up for what they are. Wisdom will not enter a shifty soul, nor make her home in a body that is mortgaged. Sin. So, wisdom is personified. Sophia is personified as a feminine, and the man of integrity is he who would be able to welcome her into his home. What is his home in the largest imminent sense, his spiritual being, of which his mind is a guiding light. Do you notice how incredibly subtly Greek rationalism has been transformed into a spiritual principle? The Jewish genius of taking the Greek rationality and not just working it in or blending it in but making it a structural flower blossoming on the very trunk of Jewish wisdom. 30 BC, about 20 years before Yeshua is born. And we skip over here to. This is a description of how the world treats a man of integrity. Down with the poor and dishonest man. Let us tread him underfoot. Let us show no mercy to the widow. And no reverence to the grey hairs of old age. For us let might be right. Weakness is proved to be good for nothing. Let us lay a trap for the just man. He stands in our way a check to us at every turn. He girds at us as lawbreakers and calls us traitors to our upbringing.
He knows God, so he says he styles himself the child of the Lord. Can you see how the interplay on one side, it's the rhetoric of the rant of the of the crowd who believe in power, but it's the insightful probing of the external conditions that are manifesting because an inner volcano has let loose. That is to say, something invisible and structural is mobile in the world, and something visible and content is being moved around and transformed by it against its will, largely against its will. And so, the very next section emphasizes rewards and punishments. But the souls of the just are in God's hand, and torment shall not touch them in the eyes of foolish men. They seem to be dead. Their departure was reckoned as defeat, and their going from us as disaster. But they are at peace. For though in the sight of men they may be punished. They have a sure hope of immortality, and after a little chastisement they will receive great blessings, because God has tested them and found them to be worthy of his like gold in a crucible. He put them to the proof. This is the first alchemical reference in Jewish literature. This is the first time that it's mentioned, and the reason that it's mentioned here is because the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon is an Alexandrian sophisticate who understands that restructuring the world has its eminent techne - to use the Greek terms - there is a technique for doing this.
And right at the very end of the Wisdom of Solomon, after he has laid the whole stage, he discloses the essential technique which was discovered in the Essene communities for restructuring the world. We'll get to it. Now because wisdom is personified as a feminine. A great deal is made in The Wisdom of Solomon, of the purity of the feminine. The integrity of the man, the purity of the feminine. There are, in fact, in The Wisdom of Solomon, twenty-one specific attributes of Sophia seven times three. This is a time honored, uh um, litany. I'm not using litany in the derisive sense, but this enumerating the twenty-one characteristics of pure spiritual wisdom is a traditional element. It appears in Zoroastrianism. It appears in Babylonian literature. It appears here in The Wisdom of Solomon. It is distinct from the Mahayana, where in the Mahayana they, uh, figure that became Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, is given thirty-two attributes rather than twenty-one. So, the Buddhist tradition is somewhat different. But the Persian, the Babylonian, the Chaldean, the Hebrew, the Egyptian, all of this is the same in twenty-one. Here is as you can recognize from the Major Arcana of the tarot.
So, the good man must remain integral, and the good woman must remain pure. And it reads here, "But the good man, even if he dies, an untimely death will be at rest. For it is not length of life and number of years that bring the honor due to age. If men have understanding, they have gray hairs enough, and an unspotted life is the true ripeness of age. There was once such a man who pleased God, and God accepted him and took him. While still living from among sinful men. He was snatched away before his mind could be perverted by wickedness, or his soul deceived by falsehood. Because evil is like witchcraft, it dims the radiance of good and the waywardness of it. Desire unsettles an innocent mind. In a short time, he came to the perfection of a full span of years. His soul was pleasing to the Lord, who removed him early from a wicked world. The mass of men see this and give it no thought. They do not lay to heart this truth, that those whom God has chosen enjoy his grace and mercy, and that he comes to the help of his holy people."
Now the man they're speaking of here is not Jesus, but is Enoch, Enoch. And we'll get to the Book of Enoch, and we'll see that the Book of Enoch is written even before [The Wisdom of] Ben Sira that the tremendous archetypal divination done by the authors of the Book of Enoch foresaw, in a visionary sense the occurrence that this phenomenon, given a noumenal structure, would reoccur again in historical time, just because the noumenal eternal structure was in play in such a way that it was going to come back up to the surface again, but they didn't know when.
The writer of The Wisdom of Solomon in 30 BC is hearkening back subtly. He doesn't mention Enoch because he assumes that everybody who is an audience for this knows darn well what he's talking about because this book was written from a sophisticated Alexandrian to those who were in the Essene communities, who were going to take themselves out of the Essene communities and go into the Roman Empire, because they realized by that time that there had to be a counter movement. They heard the call. It's time to leave the desert communities. You've been there for three generations. It's time to come back to the cities. Some would stay in the communities, but so many would come back into the cities that only a few of the communities would still be operative.
One of the few communities still operative that we discovered was the one at Qumran, where the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea, which was a strategic position as they could find. It's like Emerson building his house next to the Concord Bridge, where the Minutemen fired at the British troops - the shot heard round the world. He wanted to live right there on that spot. The Essene community at Qumran wanted to be right there where the Jordan River emptied into the Dead Sea. And of course, directly across the Dead Sea from them, exactly across was the prison of the King Herod, where John the Baptist would be beheaded. Because these are large, meaningful structures that have eternal polarities in them, eternal complementaries nascent in them, it was possible by an inner yoga to determine exactly how things were going to play out, and so they positioned themselves generations ahead of time, exactly where they, as the Greek terms would be the denouement where the final kicker would happen, coming back into the cities.
These scenes in that first flush of coming out of the desert were completely out of place. There were like people who had lived on esoteric lands out in the wilderness and suddenly are brought back into Los Angeles. The contrast between the striving that they were having to master spiritual techniques and coming into large, decadent cities was catastrophic. And this, of course, is exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to constellate this catastrophic earthquake, as it were, psychic earthquake, spiritual earthquake. And the best way was to let people in the cities see what man looked like. Primal man, completely unhabituated, completely unfearful, completely outside of all the habit structures which they assumed were natural to man. It was like seeing some old sourdough ride a mule into town on the freeway.
The contrast was unbelievable, and the first reaction was hate. Just like the Book of Solomon says, just like the Wisdom of Solomon, the first thing they do is they hate you. You're different. Not only different, but you show us up. We were doing all right, and here you come along, and now we don't feel quite right about it. Who the hell are you, anyway?
That sort of an outlook. It was this reaction, this tremendous upheaval, that was the context in which Jesus was born. And as soon as he was born, of course, because of the tremendous exactness of the moment, all of the astrologers, all of the Magi, all of the wisemen knew that the moment was there. This is why all the babies were killed. This is why Herod ordered all the babies to be killed. When did that happen? Before all the babies were ordered to be killed, back in Moses's time, the same thing happened again, and it was a sign. It was an omen of the most penetrating eminence that there was going to be a new Torah. Not just an addition to the old Torah, but a new Torah.
And I have to skip over because of lack of time. And the reason was this given in the... And I'm sorry to have to skip over a lot of this, but I will just simply come back to it next week and catch up with it. The reason was this at the end of the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, the author gives us a most interesting contrast. I'll read you two versions of it and see if you can make it out.
This is the Cambridge version. So, "punishment came upon those sinners, not unheralded by violent thunderbolts. They suffered justly for their own wickedness, for they had raised bitter hatred of strangers to a new pitch." Can you see how you can understand it now?
"There had been others who refused to welcome strangers when they came to them, but these made slaves of guests who were their benefactors. There is indeed a judgment awaiting those who treated foreigners as enemies; but these, after a festal welcome, oppressed with hard labor men who had earlier shared their rights. They were struck with blindness also, like the men at the door of the one good man, when yawning darkness fell upon them, and each went groping for his own doorway." And this is it... "For as the notes of a lute can make various tunes with different names, though each retains its own pitch, so the elements combined among themselves in different ways, as can be accurately inferred from the observation of what happened. Land animals took to the water and things that swam migrated to dry land; fire retained its normal power even in water, and water forgot its quenching properties. Flames, on the other hand, failed to consume the flesh of perishable creatures that walked in them, and the substance of heavenly food, like ice and prone to melt, no longer melted." They had mastered the transmutation of matter through yogic power.
This is the Anchor Bible and its headline transposition of the elements. "For as the notes of a psaltery vary the beat [the key] while holding to the melody, so were the elements transposed, as can be accurately inferred from the observation of what happened. For land animals became aquatic, and things that swam migrated to the shore. So, fire retained its own force in the water, and water forgot its quenching properties. Conversely, flames did not waste the flesh of perishable creatures that walked among them, nor was the easily melted, ice-like type of heavenly food dissolved."
In the very end of the Wisdom of Solomon is, "For in every way, O Lord, you exalted and glorified your people, and did not neglect to assist them in every time and place." It just simply ends with that sentence after the revealing of the transmutation of matter, that capacity. And so, we have a very odd situation. As of about 20 BC, Roman power was restructuring the external world, and at the same time a little kindling flame blowing in from the desert in the personages of highly trained, uh, yogic Jewish sages, were coming back into the cities. And the discrepancy was producing static waves that were beginning to affect everybody around. And it was in this context exactly at this time that Jesus was born.
Well, let's stop there. I've got about twice as much to give you, but we'll get to it. Nobody ever tells these stories, right. This time we'll tell them right, okay?
END OF RECORDING