Wisdom of Solomon (Part 2)
Presented on: Tuesday, February 12, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 9 of 54
Wisdom of Solomon (Part 2)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 12, 1985
Transcript:
We're in a course of reviewing the whole civilization of ancient Alexandria, and we have discovered that we cannot just tell the story of Alexandria, but that we have to include a number of tangential stories, subsidiary stories. One of them we have already told, and that is the rise of Rome. We spent a month and a half just looking into the rise of Rome, up to the point where, at the end of the Third Punic War, in 146 BC, Rome effaced from the earth the Carthaginian competition. We have also discovered that the Roman mind was peculiarly different from the Greek mind. And we discovered that the Roman mind, in fact, was what we would call a group effort.
So, to tell the story of Alexandria completely, we've discovered that we have to tell four or five subsidiary stories along with it. So, we've suspended Alexandria proper some two months ago, and we took a month and a half to develop the story of Rome, and in particular the Roman mind, the way in which the Roman mind was essentially not the mobile individual that the Greek mind was, but was a collective, agrarian-based mind that sought to stabilize its collective actions by setting up a superstructure of laws and customs that were the stability of the Greek individual as a mobile person in the world was his capacity for daring and for mental agility. The Roman stability was in a superstructure and esoteric structure of law. The phrase law and order is a Roman phrase, it is not a Greek phrase. But then it became much more apparent to us that the Alexandrian mind was neither Roman nor Greek but was an amalgamation. And in the Ptolemaic Alexandria it was the amalgamation of Greek and Jewish elements; and in the Roman period the Roman superstructure caved this amalgam in upon itself and produced Christianity.
We'll see that in fact, the first gospel written was the Gospel of Mark, and that it was written in Alexandria, and that it was in fact, at its genesis, a secret gospel. And that all traces of this secret gospel were completely effaced by the church committees in later centuries because it produced too clear a bridge and revealed the origins of Christianity in a crushed structure. But fortunately for us, in our time, these documents have surfaced again. They have been found and Morton Smith's great Harvard University Press volume on The Secret Gospel of Mark [Clement of Alexandria and a secret Gospel of Mark], translating again fragments that survived the millennia on the back of sheets of papyrus. And we have, of course, the Gnostic material, the Nag Hammadi material.
And we will see again when we get to it, but it became apparent to us that we have to go back and trace the development of the Hebrew tradition. That we have to go back before the Hellenistic development, before the syncretism that tried to meld the Jewish and Greek ideas together, traditions together. Ostensibly at first under the aegis of an Egyptian ecumenical, the early Ptolemaic rulers like Soter or Philadelphus or Euergetes styled themselves in the Egyptian way they built temples at Philae and the Nile River. They built Dendera. All of this was to ensure that the Greek hegemony over Egypt was permanent, and that the Egyptians would then respect them.
But we saw with an illustration from the Cambridge Ancient History that if you took a map of Egypt from 200 B.C., they showed us in black all the Egyptian towns and the Egyptian roads. And then they showed us in red all the Greek towns and the Greek roads. And it was two distinct countries, one on top of another. The Greek colony was disseminated throughout Egypt, and while the Egyptian population had their own native tradition to sustain them, the Greeks were sustained by a power center in Alexandria. And so, Alexandria became a daring intellectual center, holding together this Egyptian Greek balance, this teeter-totter, and under Philadelphus a conscious attempt was made to glue the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, religions especially, together because it was a religious amalgam that they sought to initially make.
And the reason for translating the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint, was to bring a learned population of Jewish scholars from Jerusalem to Alexandria to form a nexus of a community, so that the Jewish community would form the international element and blend the Greek and Egyptian elements together to intellectual empire builders like Philadelphus and Euergetes. They saw the utility of a cosmopolitan Jewish colony in Alexandria because they were able to hold an intelligible relationship with all parties. They had centuries of experience at this time of dealing with all the different nationalities in the Fertile Crescent. And we saw, in fact, that the first great king in the Fertile Crescent, in the Mesopotamian Crescent, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, the first great king was a Semite, was Sargon the Great in 2300 BC. And we saw that magnificent portrait of Sargon. So that some 2000 years later it was quite natural for the Ptolemaic dynasty heads to consider having an intellectual Jewish population as the melding element, the catalyst to bring the population together. And in fact, it worked, it did happen, and the Jewish population did grow. And we know that in Philo's time by 30 BC, that the Jewish population was about one third of the city of Alexandria, and Alexandria was about 2 million people, so that there was somewhere near three quarters of a million Jewish persons in Alexandria, and almost all of them were literate, were intelligent internationally, were neither Roman nor Greek, and discovered, to their great embarrassment, that they were no longer purely Hebraic in their tradition, and this produced an unsettling, anxious goad which had repercussions in the Holy Land - in Israel, in Jerusalem, in the temple.
And what we're trying to understand now, we're at this point of developing the Jewish tradition. We're trying to understand the tremendous pressures that came to bear at the close of the first century BC and split the Jewish community in Jerusalem into three parts. Two of the parts were polarities. One, they were like political parties, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. The Sadducees, who went by written Law, and the Pharisees, who went by oral Law. And balancing these polarities, a third party that rejected the basic foundation, the efficacy on law, and went for personal experience. And this was the Essene communities. And the Essene communities used a time-honored Jewish tradition that the individual has a right, in a time of crisis, to take himself in his own experience and have a moment of hearing directly with the powers that affect him most eloquently restated in the Book of Job. Job says, would that there were some ire between thee and me, someone who could call a halt to my sufferings and give me a fair hearing. I know that I cannot do it, but I have the right to expect that such a condition could obtain, in view of all understanding of justice and capacity.
We have seen that that was developed in the document, which often is translated as the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Jewish tradition known as Qohelet and generally known scholarly as The Wisdom of Ben Sira. Written by Jesus Ben Sira, the grandson of Ben Sira, and that this document came out somewhere around the time of the Maccabean wars because we have seen that the revivified Jewish community in Jerusalem specifically produced a drive that the Maccabees with Judas Maccabee and Jonathan and his brothers brought back the kingship element into Jewish life. And from about 165 BC to about 130 BC, the revivified Jewish community in Jerusalem recognized that there were not just the two traditional ways to go, but a third way. There was not just the way of the prophet, and there was not just the way of the priest, but there was the third way, the way of the king and the revivified king.
Revivifying of the image of the kingship, of the divine kingship line in the Jewish tradition at this time made apparent to the Essene faction, if we can speak of them in this way. The Essene faction began looking for the esoteric kingship, and then last week, which didn't record, in which we have to now go back for about ten minutes and recap. It became apparent that the kingship in the Jewish tradition emerged with David - David is the first real king. Yes, Joshua is a great general, but he is not a king. Moses is a prophet; he is not a king. Aaron is a priest; he is not a king. David is the first king and the integration by David is the beginning of the kingship line.
And the first time that David passes the kingship on, that next king is Solomon. And so, Solomon became proverbial for wisdom because it was understanding the second king engenders a kind of a consciousness about the process, a self-consciousness about the process. David's integrity is to be himself; Solomon's integrity is to understand his father and himself. And in that relationality came the proverbial sense of wisdom, of proportion, of justice. And so, we see after The Wisdom of Ben Sira, many of the books of Scripture would be Scripture that were written in Jerusalem at this time have to do with Solomon. There are Psalms of Solomon, there are Odes of Solomon, there is The Wisdom of Solomon. There are the beginnings of commentaries on the Song of Songs, the beginning of the probings into the Proverbs.
So, Solomon becomes of great importance at that time. But for our sense, we have to understand here that David is made a king because of Samuel, and instead of looking at Solomon right away, we have to look at Samuel for a moment, because David is legitimately made a king and made the origin of the kingly line in Judaism because of Samuel's efficacy. In fact, Samuel becomes rather what we would talk today in using the language of analytical psychology. Samuel becomes an archetype later on in esoteric Christian lore, thousands of years later, Merlin will become very much like Samuel, and King Arthur will be made by Merlin. King Arthur does not make himself. Not only is Arthur trained by Merlin, but Merlin makes the conditions which lead to the genesis of King Arthur. And in this way, we have to understand that Samuel makes David happen, and it is because of Samuel's integrity that David never loses his capacity for integrity. And we have to go to first [1] Samuel chapter 16 in order to get an insight into just how this was expressed.
If I can read to you for just a moment, Samuel has prayed constantly for his strength, and he has made the point in his expression that it is better to do good works than to make sacrifices. That he has understood that to sacrifice to the Lord is excellent and fulfills the Law, but to obey and do good in an existential way is better, better than the Law. It makes life happen, and not in terms of a law, but in terms of a real relationality, and this is the key concept - if we can use that kind of language - this is the key concept in the kingship. The king, by his spiritual integrity, not by being an object, but by being a focus of all the relationships that structure the kingdom. By keeping that integral, he ensures the health and safety of the kingdom. If he becomes but an object, a figurehead, it means the relational energies are dead and the kingdom atrophies.
This is the perfect understanding of idol worship. An idol is sacrilegious because it stops the flow of energy and all the relationality that are needed to keep man whole and wholesome. So only a living God can do that, and Samuel understands that in the tradition of a living God, a prophet, then a holy man must be a living representation of this. And so having understood that, then this evolves, and,
"The Lord said unto Samuel, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill thy horn with oil and go; I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided me a king among his sons.' And Samuel said, how can I go? If Saul hear it, he will kill me.' And the Lord said, take a heifer with thee, and say, I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.' And call Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show thee what thou shalt do, and thou shall anoint unto me him whom I name unto thee'."
So that Samuel does not move on his own recognizance. He is given the mission. He's given the tab to go and do this. He doesn't even know who it is. But he is urged here to institute a king in the tradition of the living God, in the tradition of the living energy focus. And David becomes that kind of a king. David the man who can dance before the Lord with all his might. He makes mistakes, plenty of mistakes, but David always comes back. But one thing that David never lets go of in, and this is Job-like in his wisdom, he has the wisdom of life. He never lets go of the integrity of the reality of the process. The mistakes he makes are the mistakes of simply not knowing how things are going to work out. They are not the mistakes of failure to act, or failure to participate in life. And so, in this sense, in a very strange way, David is very much an Odyssean Greek hero, and there's a lot of correlation later on that comes in in that way.
So that the emblem of the integrity of a new Israel is the Star of David, is not the shofar. It's not the ram's horn; it is not the Torah; it's not the Decalogue. It is the Star of David, because it is the integrity of the kingship, of the focus of heaven and earth. All of its focus is brought to a living man who presents the focus of a living God, a living tradition. It's this notion of the kingship, then, that will eventually obtain in the Essene speculation since in the deserts outside of Alexandria, just to look ahead, we can see in Matthew. And Matthew, of course, was five different collections held by separate communities and put together about 50 BC, 50 or 60 BC, for safe keeping together. And the very first one, the very first document in Matthew is the recounting of why it was that Jesus is in the Davidic king-line, and they go here through every single name, every single generation. And they summarize it. This is Matthew chapter 117. So, all the generations from Abraham to David are 14 generations. And from David until the carrying away into Babylon are 14 generations. And from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are 14 generations. And so, in three great leaps we have this tremendous push, then of structure, an architecture.
We have to use the terms now architectonic, that an architectonic of a living esoteric tradition has come into being, and at its nodes are David, and Jesus, and the Babylonian captivity. And we see that this is a product, this is a product of the Essene communities of about 30 to 50 AD. And we notice that in the Babylonian captivity period at that time is the focus of the Book of Daniel, and that the Book of Daniel was written during the Maccabean times, written about the same year that Rome decimated Carthage - about 146 BC.
The Book of Daniel, we saw, developed the capacity of divining life, and it chose as its protagonist Daniel, who proverbially was a wiseman during the Babylonian captivity, so that Daniel is the balance between David and Jesus. And Daniel is a specialist in interpreting visions, and the Book of Daniel shows us that, first of all, Daniel was a specialist in interpreting dreams. He's very good at interpreting dreams, but more than that, Daniel could interpret the live depths of life. And as opposed to dreams which occur in the human mind, visions occur in the natural amphitheater, or in the mind of God. And so, Daniel shows that his capacity was to see not only into the mind of man, but into the mind of nature, as it were, the mind of the divine, which meant that man then had achieved in the Davidic kingship line by Daniel's time the capacity to take himself directly to the divine without any intermediaries whatsoever - no priests, no prophets.
And we see again and again in the first century before the common era [1st century BCE] all of the documents that we reveal constantly are alluding to the fact that there are no prophets in the book of the Maccabean wars, the First or the Second Maccabees again and again they go to Jerusalem. The temple has been desecrated. They gather up the stones of the altar. They don't know how they should treat it because they can't re-sanctify it. And so, they are counseled by Jonathan: "Put them aside, save them until a prophet comes and can tell us what to do with this." There were no prophets. There were no holy men like Samuel around. And the priestship had been split, had been bifurcated - they had become politicized. And so, the only thing that was left was to experiment with oneself, with a group of like-minded people, and to go out into the deserts, to go out into the wildernesses, to try and find their way.
But not all of these questing groups went to the wilderness. The most powerful of those groups stayed in Jerusalem and stayed in Alexandria. There were urban ascetic communities, and we'll have to see. In about another month we'll trace, because there is an Indian tradition that comes in here from Philo and from Josephus and from Plotinus. We can see the little thin red line of yogic practice come in. In fact, those who were following on Saturday might recall the fact that I read in contiguous fashion the middle of the Bhagavad Gita and the opening of the Gospel of Thomas. And they talked the same way. And that Thomas, of course, was sent to India, was buried in India. His churches have survived for 1900 years in India. And the Gospel of Thomas is a yogic expression of the Essene community's way of wisdom apperception. I guess we have to use that term that direct envisioning of reality to the person. This became, for the Alexandrian population, a very scary item because more and more, the Greek daring individual personality was magnetized to this kind of a development. And more and more the intelligent Greek individual was drawn to the Jewish community, and more and more the Jewish community saw that the difficulty was not so much with the Greeks as with the Romans, and it was the Roman false Law that became more and more the unbearable new Babylonian captivity. The new Babylon was Rome, not Athens, not even Alexandria. And so, we have these tremendous tensions that are coming into focus.
So, now we come to the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, and The Wisdom of Solomon is written around 30 BC. And the reason it's written at that time is because Augustus Caesar finally ended the Alexandrian tradition. The whole Ptolemaic dynasty tradition ended with the death of Cleopatra. She was the last one, and the whole attempt to reestablish a Republican Roman alternate to the Caesars was ended at the very same time. And so, all of a sudden, after years of preparation, after decades of machination, after centuries of glacial movement, all of a sudden, the event happened, and Augustus Caesar was in control of what would become, within a few years, the Roman Empire. The Wisdom of Solomon is an outcry against the fact that this re-enslavement, this re-captivation of the spirit of man by a monolithic set of false legal structures. They were saying, you thought we had problems with the Sadducees and the Pharisees who are forcing the Torah on us in their terms, wait till you see the Romans, because they're not just dealing in terms of where we can go within reasonable limits. They control the world for all intents and purposes. They controlled from Ireland all the way to India.
And so, The Wisdom of Solomon is a very esoteric document. It reveals a spiritual assessment by free individuals. We have to almost use the terms liberated individuals and the individual writing. This is harkening back to Solomon, harkening back to the idea that we have a relationality which has been revivified, and we're almost on the point now of bearing fruit. We've got the sap flowing. The fruit of the true vine is about to come and manifest itself. And just at this precarious moment, we have this whole cage dropped on us. What is going on here? What is happening?
And The Wisdom of Solomon is the last calm book that's written after that, after this document is when we begin getting the apocalyptic literature one after another, the Gnostic literature. And that literature has a completely changed character. There's no longer the international quiet intellectual assessment with the vivified life natural sense. There's only the reaching up for grand metaphysical, desperate straws to try to save the day at the last moment. So, the book of The Wisdom of Solomon is the last clear picture we have of the equilibrium of this Alexandrian Jewish tradition.
It begins trying to put the reader and the writer into the quest for the promise of immortality. And he begins, "love, justice, you rulers of the earth, set your mind upon the Lord as is your duty, and seek him in simplicity of heart, for he is found by 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 to sin. This Holy Spirit of discipline will have nothing to do with falsehood. She cannot stay in the presence of unreason and will throw up her case at the approach of injustice. Wisdom is a spirit devoted to man's good, and she will not hold a blasphemer blameless for his words, because God is a witness of his inmost being. So, we have this tremendous telescoping and condensation of enormous developments, curlicues of insight that have been going on for centuries, brought down into a very small, powerful focus.
The feminine Sophia wisdom, the feminine spirit of nature, is the intelligence of life. And that that is the relational energy that flows from the individual to the divine. And that man's mind is like the faucets, like the spigot. And when he has bad feelings, it turns off that relational possibility and the feminine relationality of natural reality no longer obtains. And so, a man cut off, then, has only these, uh, feeling images to deal with. And so, he sets his mind to those images and begins then building up a false structure, a false sense of what he is, of what is going on.
And it is this process that is held up artificially, as it were, by the crutches of external law, so that there's a revolutionary dynamite built into this tension. The only way to reestablish contact with the divine is to shatter that exterior structure, or adversely, if that exterior structure shatters, it will be the precondition upon which men will rediscover their divinity. And of course, we will see that during the reign of Nero and Caligula the Roman structure fractured. It was never really put back together. It was sutured by Hadrian and Trajan, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, but it never held again.
And it was exactly at that time we'll see that the Roman mind in its desperate, frantic searching grabbed on to the Jewish archetypes. We know the names of the very Roman emperors, the generals who did this, Vespasian, and his son Titus. They were the ones who sacked Jerusalem. They were the ones who destroyed Jerusalem like their ancestors had destroyed Carthage. They tore everything down and they carted everything away. They carted away the symbols of power. The huge menorah from the temple in Jerusalem was taken to Rome, along with all the other accoutrements, and it was a grasping at spiritual power from an exoteric standpoint. And Vespasian suffered delusions of grandeur. He felt that he was the Messiah. And this is when Josephus began writing his histories to try to make sense [e.g., Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish Wars].
How does this happen? The Romans say they are tutored on Greek civilization, and as soon as there's a crisis of the Roman, Greco-Roman civilization, the first thing they do is they try to grab Jewish symbols for their salvation. "What is going on here?" Josephus says. And so, he writes his huge history to try and unravel this. And at the same time, we'll see a little bit of Tacitus, who writes from the Roman side [The Histories]. And we've already seen Livy [The History of Rome]. Livy, who in 19 BC said of the Roman mind, "we can neither stand our vices any longer, nor can we stand the cure that's necessary for them."
All of this comes to a focus in the tremendous development here in The Wisdom of Solomon. I'm going to skip over here. So, we have to understand the book of The Wisdom of Solomon. And we have to understand wisdom, that wisdom is a primal relationality is not an object. It is not a thing. It's not a code of documentation. It is a relationality that flows. And when it flows, the two ends of that dynamic become contiguous - the divine and the personal. The personal human being is not an ambiguous general relationship between the divine and the human. It's a specific relationship between you as your person and the divine as it's personal. And this bringing together by wisdom is a holy marriage, as Jung would say, this is a Mysterium Coniunctionis. And so, the praise of wisdom runs in this fashion. And this is addressed, of course, to the Romans, to the fallen kings, to those who are grabbing power. And it was happening around them here.
"Then you kings, take this to heart." Notice it's the kingship that's being addressed here because this is the living tradition here. "Then you kings take this to heart. Learn your lesson lords of the wide world. Lend your ears, you rulers of the multitude whose pride is in the myriads of your people. It is the Lord who gave you your authority. Your power comes from the Most High. He will put your actions to the test and scrutinize your intentions. Though you are viceroys of his kingly power, you have not been upright judges. You do not stand up for the Law or guide your steps by the will of God. Swiftly and terribly will he descend upon you, for judgment falls relentlessly upon those in high places."
What's being alluded to here is that the kingship of the living God is set up in a tradition which is running its architectural life-wave through time, space, and that Augustus says that he is the chosen one. Well, if he is the chosen one, then he will exemplify this personal relationship to the divine. He will in fact be a king then in this line, which of course he cannot do. This was the whole point. This is why it was called Caesar. Later on, it became an epithet of the like we would say of the greatest false image that man can set up. The false man god, Augustus.
Incidentally, when Augustus consolidated his power, he became almost fanatical about gathering together all of the pages of prophecy that were scattered throughout the world at this time, the Sibylline Oracles and the, all the Jewish prophecies that could be had. And it was like a state law that all of these documents had to be in Rome and had to be in Augustus's personal hands. And he built a temple for all of these documents, the Temple of Eternal Peace, the Ara Pacis, right in the center of the Roman Forum. It still exists today in a cavern underneath the Roman Forum. And there was a frieze, a mural, of painted sculpture around the whole periphery. And where it came together, there was an image of a woman sitting royally on a throne. And she was called in Latin, Tellus Mater, Mother Nature. It was the esoteric understanding of wisdom, but there was no understanding that there was a vibrant, living, esoteric reality that was operating here. This is why later on the contrast between the living God and the dead letter that controls everything became so tremendous.
Then there's a description of wisdom because the writing of this book was so important. He describes wisdom with twenty-one separate adjectives, just like the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, arranged in three groups of seven. And these were the names that filled in the relational developments that joined together and made Sophia, made the wisdom, the prime current. For in wisdom there is a spirit, intelligent and holy, unique in its kind, yet made up of many parts, as many parts. But they come together in a uniqueness and the emphasis is on the uniqueness. And you have to understand this in, in terms almost of a strict Plutonian unity, that the integration of the many kinds of wisdom are like the braiding together of many energy currents into one direct impulse. When they are integrated together, there's no way to take them apart. They are that unity; they move as that unity.
And in fact, the movement of that unity has nothing to do with movement in time and space, because the bringing of them together in an integration together is the movement. It's like all of the electricity runs together, and as soon as it runs together, its integration is the movement itself. And that this was the mystery of the exchange of selves. The coniunctio, is not an interchange so much as an exchange of selves. One does not give oneself to another so much as the other becomes oneself and one's self becomes the other. And that this instantaneous conversion demonstrates, because of its displaceable accuracy, the occurrence that there must have been something even more primal than identity, there must have been unity for this to occur, because it doesn't happen with any kind of speed. It doesn't happen in any kind of time or any kind of space. And that this was the, this was then the mystery that was being talked about here. For wisdom moves more easily than motion itself. This is how the book of wisdom says it, so great,
"For wisdom moves more easily than motion itself, she pervades and permeates all things because she is so pure. Like a fine mist, she rises from the power of God, a pure effluence from the glory of the Almighty; so, nothing defiled can enter into her by stealth." There's no way to manipulate any access because it just won't happen. "She is the brightness that streams from everlasting light, the flawless mirror of the active power of God and the image of his goodness. She is but one, yet can do everything; herself unchanging, she makes all things new; age after age she enters into holy souls and makes them God's friends and prophets, for nothing is acceptable to God but the man who makes his home with wisdom. She is more radiant than the sun and surpasses every constellation' compared with the light of day, she is found to excel; for day gives place to night, but against wisdom no evil can prevail. She spans the world in power from end to end and orders all things benignly."
So, this image then, of the feminine as a primordial, primordial relationality in reality between man as a person and the divine, as a personable as we have to remove the article here as personableness. The individual discovered that his person occurred because the person will in us in fact exists, and that through wisdom this relationality occurs in its occurrence. Then one is in the world, but not of it, so that then I'm skipping over to the end of The Wisdom of Solomon, the worst problem for man is the problem of idols, because idols degrade this primordial recognition.
It's like trying to make all the switches there are, and none of them are working because none of them have any juice in them. And what happens? That man becomes jaded because none of these switches are working - all the switches are dead. And we'll see that this haunted the Greco-Roman mind. Haunted, I use that term.
Plutarch, in his Moralia, tells in 130 AD this tremendous archetypal story. This image, he says that he heard it himself from an old Greek sailor who was at one of the oracular spots, Delphi or Dodona, and he was told there by an old woman of the place that when he was sailing back to Italy and he was rounding one of these capes, just before you get to Brindisi, the port on the Adriatic, that he was to yell out to the shore that the great god Pan was dead. And so, the old captain says in Plutarch's reckoning that they rounded this cape, and they saw nothing but virgin wilderness, forested hill. So, he says he did what he was bidden, and he yelled, "The great God Pan is dead!" And in reply there was a great sigh, a great moan, as if that millions of spirits in this forest said, ahh.
This is Plutarch's way, you see, because he was a priest of the mysteries. Plutarch's way of saying that all the esoteric switches were dead by his time. None of it worked, and this led to a chronic throwing up of interior images. All the complexes, all the schizophrenia, everything came up not just for a few mad individuals, but for every one of the time. And so, this produced an incredible cacophony of madness. And the only thing that people could think of was that there must be some way to heal this. This is what happened, but The Wisdom of Solomon is saying that the root of all this problem is in this most degraded worship, relationality of idols, because it deludes you into thinking that something's going to happen. Or in our day, I guess they use the terms probability and say, oh, well, the probability is very high, but if you have to count on it, probability doesn't help you at all. The writer says this, "the really degraded ones are those whose hopes are set on dead things who give the name of God to the work of human hands, to gold and silver fashioned by art into images of living creatures, or to a useless stone carved by a craftsman long ago." And then he, uh, gives these stories of people praying to pieces of tree and not getting anything out of it, or praying to rock. And he talks about this.
So, then he moves on to the pattern of divine justice and writes in this way, concluding The Wisdom of Solomon. It was for fear they might fall into deep forgetfulness and become unresponsive to any kindness. This is, this is why the worship of false idols was so bad that eventually it deadens the spirit, and they fall into fear, they fall into fearfulness. And it was for fear that they might fall then even further than fear, into deep forgetfulness, and become unresponsive to any kindness, so that they would lose all chance for any kind of healing. For it was neither herb nor poultice that cured them, but only the all-healing word O Lord.
To the right arm of The Wisdom of Solomon is saying. It finally gets down to that. Then he ends, "Thou hast the power of life and death. Thou bring us a man down to the gates of death, and up again. Man and his wickedness may kill, but he cannot bring back the breath of life that has gone forth. No release of soul that death has arrested." And so, The Wisdom of Solomon ends there, and it ends there with this conundrum, this challenge. Has there ever been an idol that ever brought anyone back from death? Has Zeus ever brought anyone back from death? How about Marduk? How about your favorite Egyptian god? And so, The Wisdom of Solomon ends with this challenge, as it were.
It's almost like the document that Job says he wishes that someone would draw up a document of the real negotiations that man has a right to have with the divine. He says, I will fix my name to it and submit it to him. So, The Wisdom of Solomon submits this challenge and says, can you come back from death? That's the whole challenge.
Now you go back to David momentarily and then flash forward. There was a crucial time when David was reduced down to himself. In fact, he was reduced further down than just himself. He was brought before a wicked king of that time and of that region. I think his name was Abish. Anyway, David realized that he was going to be killed any moment, and the only thing that he could do - he had no arms, he had no hope of escape at all. The only thing that he could do was feign madness. And so, he feigned madness. And Abish says, "who has brought this fool before me? I mean, he's not worth even killing or keeping and get him out of here." And so, they threw David into a cave. The Cave of Adullam, I think, is the name of it.
Well, this is an archetypal situation. The throwing of the heroic man who's reduced down only to his interior spirit - even his mind is gone. The kingdom is reduced to invisibility. The only place that David's kingdom exists is in the mysterious interior, and only he himself knows it's still intact. He's thrown into the cave and David brings himself back. He brings himself back through. He counsels himself out of his own stability, his own inner stability, and calms his mind, reconstitutes his mind, reconstitutes his personality, and within a couple of weeks there are 400 warriors there with him and their families, and he reconstitutes the whole kingdom. And this was bringing himself back from as close as a man could come to death at that time.
And so, twenty-eight generations had gone from Abraham to David. These fourteen generations, this development, then had ensured that the covenant was no longer in exterior terms. It didn't matter whether there was a rainbow set in the clouds. It didn't matter any longer whether a goat was sacrificed. It didn't matter any longer whether the temple was still standing. It didn't matter whether you had the Torah are still protected. It didn't matter even if there was no one there, if only one human being in the integrity of himself kept that relationality true, the kingdom could all reconstitute itself. And so, this became a prototype in The Wisdom of Solomon, saying, now we're going to go that last inch into infinity. We're going to come back from death. Then, Mr. Caesar, what are you going to do? You're going to get tired of taking things away from us, because you can't take that away.
We're going to see that happen. Well, that's enough for tonight.
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