Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 2)
Presented on: Tuesday, April 23, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch Presentation 19 of 54 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 2) Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, April 23, 1985 Transcript: We're coming closer and closer again to what we would recognize as Alexandria. And we're having to take all this time on what seemingly are detours because all of this tradition that we're developing implodes upon Alexandria. It's difficult to conceive of the tremendous synthesis that happened there. And so, we're needing to develop background for ourselves. Frankly, almost nobody knows about these materials, even though some of them have been around. Now, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs has been around since 1908, in this edition, but very few people have read it. And of those few, even fewer have had the kind of consciousness which we can bring to bear upon it. I don't say I,' I say we'. We bring a very high-powered multidimensional consciousness to bear. And so, for us, the material scintillates it comes alive. Almost all of the people surrounding [R. H.] Charles were English Anglican Oxford professors which was a style of life and a style of thought, a very good one, but nevertheless limited. We also are limited, but we are not limited in their way. What limits us is a blind spot, whereas what limited them was the thesis, the ascent, the entrance into the material. For them, they were still believers. As Bertrand Russell said, very few people of my enlightened generation would commit adultery in a thunderstorm. They held wonderful views, Voltairean at cocktail parties, but underneath it all they were scared to death. Our difficulty is a blind spot, which is natural. It isn't anything that's a flaw or a fault - it's part of the nature. It's part of the development which we have had to pay for our consciousness. Our expanded consciousness. And I don't mean this in a psychedelic sense. I mean this architecturally. Now we have a worldwide sense, and the price that we pay for that expansion is that the center disappears. It's not so much that the center doesn't hold anymore, it's that it doesn't occur to us that it's valuable, that it's there. And this blindness for us is interesting because our material tonight is exactly in that blind spot. That is to say, this material usually is discounted and set aside. And it's ironical because this is exactly the material that we need to bring forth. Now we all do very well on the esoteric aspects. We can understand subtlety and multidimensionality. We would put to shame theologians of a generation or two before us. But we do not see, we do not appreciate the importance of ethical form, and it is the visibility of ethical form that permits the viability of a cosmology. And before there could be a messiah, there had to be an ability to see in terms of ethical form. It was this one requirement that was lacking in the Egyptians, lacking in the Greeks. Oddly enough, they saw ideational form as an ideological achievement, a conception. The Egyptians saw it as just more proliferation. But the Jews had a rather gut reaction that needed to have some definiteness brought forth. And the ethical form that they struggled with was to conceive of the people as a whole. And we call that Israel. Israel as the people as a whole. And the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the document that matures this need, that sharpens the focus so that Israel could be seen as an ethical form. And in the sharpening of that focus there was an implicit amplitude building that universalized Israel. Instead of members of twelve tribes, it was every conceivable human being, and it took about three generations for this amplitude to mature itself. But before that could happen, before any of that universalizing motion or dynamic could manifest itself, the ethical form of the Jewish people of Israel, of the twelve tribes brought together as a form, had to be accomplished. And so, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written around 108 BC, with emendations about a generation or two later - there were emendations as late as around 60 BC - sets the stage for the documents that have been unearthed for us, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we can move directly, if we wish, from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs to the Dead Sea Scrolls. This document also introduces a very powerful timeline. There had been a Book of Noah. And that had been a dismembered or transformed or dissolved and recast as the Book of Enoch. Noah and Enoch belonging to the flood days, the deluge days, early Genesis and now the book of the twelve patriarchs takes the sons, the twelve sons of Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve sons. The next development from this in the timeline was Moses, a recasting of the Torah. And this is where the Messiah will come in. And the New Testament is recutting a recrystallization of the Pentateuch of Moses in a massive cultural, theological way. Jesus will be a new Moses. And this is to say something. The only example that I can give off the cuff that has any kind of bearing on it. Thursday, I will say that Abraham Lincoln is an American Saint Francis of Assisi. And of course, he's going to be different from Saint Francis. So, Jesus is a different Moses. He's not going to be raised in Pharaonic Egypt, but he's going to be raised in Alexandrian society. He will not be a product of Israel exclusively. He will not be someone who is raised exclusively in the Jewish tradition, in the Hebrew language, he will have an Alexandrian cast to his capacity, to his mind, to his expressive form, so that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a Jewish ethical form. And it will be recast into a Christian ethical form around 80 AD, and we have the document here called the Didache, which is the teachings of the twelve apostles. It was a book which was the basis, the early manual of the Christian religion and its power, its insightfulness, is elusive for us because we don't sense its poignancy. For us to discover secret codes of esoteric knowledge is a great joy and a triumph, but for us to see ethical form as poignancy escapes us, it seems so every day. Why would anybody be excited by this? This is because this content is structural for us to such an extent that it is personally unconscious. It is within ourselves as beings, as an almost unconscious structure, and we assume that it's always been there for the turn of the millennium. Two thousand years ago it was not there in anyone. It had to be worked for. It had to be sweated for. And the large, everyday personal calmness which we can have access to, though we may not always live our lives in this way, was a great achievement of the human spirit, and it was made painstakingly at this time. And the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is one of the major steps in making this persona, this new persona for man, this new capacity. The first of the twelve is Reuben. The first six sons will be from Leah, then there will be two sons from Bilhah, two sons from Zilpah, and two sons from Rachel. Reuben, the firstborn of Jacob, has a curious kind of a tone to it. It begins here, the copy of the Testament of Reuben. Even the commands which he gave his sons before he died in the 125th year of his life. So, we're going to go through this little format in each of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. These are testaments, death testaments. They're on their death bed. Each one and all of their sons and grandsons are gathered around. And so, this is a time for speaking the truth. But because we don't have much time, the Testaments will concern that particular truth that that particular son was the guardian of, and he will contribute it towards the whole and each of the twelve will make his contribution, until finally we will have a whole campfire circle and all of the expressions that were bound up in the covenant given to Abraham, which he passed on to Isaac, and which Isaac passed on to Jacob, now will open its hand and disclose what is there. The reason why Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are always talked of together is that they form a timeline. The three of them together form a timeline where the word of God was wholesome in its powerfulness, in its numinousness, and one just accepted it. There was no explication of it. There was no amplifying of it, no development. It is with Jacob that the hand must open and deliver its message. This happened before. The first, going into Egypt before the Great Famine, and they were driven into Egypt and where they became slaves, ostensibly for 400 years, and then were released by Moses and taken into the wilderness. All of this is a prototype for what is happening again, only everything is condensed now. Time, which had to be lived in its natural serial form, is now being relived in a much condensed, much faster pace. And it's this condensation that shows that it is not happening in a natural tone, but in a supernatural tone. The jamming together of temporality shows a supernatural or we would say, I guess an archetypal matrix. A soup is now cooking and has been cooking obviously now for better than 100 years, so that the march of events, if we can use that term now, is no longer natural, but is attenuated to produce a furthering of consciousness. We live in such a time ourselves. It's just that the speeding up of events that happens in our time is so comprehensive and so fast that we do not see it. We experience it, but we do not see it. We can in retrospect, though, see this condensation of events. Reuben is talking then as the first contributor to the circle of twelve. And he is going to talk about the necessity of controlling oneself in a temperate way. And he says that his whole life was ruined because of a sin against one of his father's wives, Bilhah. He saw Bilhah taking a bath, and he was incited by her naked form, and he couldn't get her out of his mind. And one day she was asleep, inebriated from too much wine, and slightly uncovered, and he went into her, and she woke and shouted out loud. And the whole situation was brought before Jacob, and he never again went into Bilhah. And instead worked on his firstborn, Reuben, to understand that one must control oneself, that these images are powerful in their natural form, but that man must exercise a personal discipline over and above his natural response. That this was wrong, this was ethically wrong, though it could be understood as a natural happening. And so, Jacob is saying to Reuben, the blame with you is not that the event happened, but that you are unable to control the event. And so, it's not a blame so much as a need for discipline. And so Reuben is telling on his deathbed that this was the major happening in his life that he learned. And this is the beginning of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. He learned that man must make an effort, and that he cannot just count on nature and natural processes and natural patterns. Now, there may be theological reasons why he cannot. There may be historical reasons why he cannot. We have seen with the Enochian literature, of course, which tremendously influences the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The Enochian literature lays the blame not on some original sin in the Garden of Eden, but because angelic powers have interbred with men. And so, there are beings who are not human and are not angelic but are in between who are giants when they are alive and when they die, they're evil spirits stay hovering around the earth in a sublunar way and influence. And so, nature has become perverted that natural patterns no longer can be trusted. Thus, Reuben opens up the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs with the declaration that in order to even live his life, man must make an ethical struggle within himself, and that the struggle must focus upon his learning. Not to respond to nature as such, but over and above nature to have ethical concerns. And the main ethical concern is that he shall take into consideration others. This is such a simple thing to us. This is a major step at this time for these people. It's not the eye for an eye and the tooth for a tooth. Others, but it's others in a structural way that one cannot live without the relationality, without the web of relations. And this is why the tribal elements now are going to be more important than the personal, and why the elements of Israel as a whole are going to be more important than the tribal, so that the perception of ethical form now changes its focus from the person to the tribe, to the nation as a whole, to the people. This makes the chosen people. It is this ethical concern; it is this making visible of an ethical form of the people as a whole that makes them a chosen people. It's not on the basis of any covenant. It's not on the basis of any tradition handed down by Abraham or Isaac or Jacob. It is now the opening up, articulated realization that the ethical form of the people as a whole is necessary. And so, Reuben says, beware, therefore, of fornication, for if you wish to be pure in mind, guard your senses from every woman, and command the women likewise not to associate with men, that they also may be pure in mind. And then he goes on in this way and says that this was a necessary lesson which he learned, and he passes this on to the people. The next testament is from Simeon, the second son of Jacob and Leah. And Simeon is rather a forceful individual, and his contribution is to watch out for envy. So, we have had what we would call lust in Reuben and envy now in Simeon, he says, and now, "my children, hearken unto me, and beware of the spirit of deceit and of envy. For envy ruleth over the whole mind of a man, and suffereth him neither to eat, nor to drink, nor to do any good thing." Now Simeon is one of the twelve brothers who wanted to kill Joseph. I don't know if you remember that story at all, but Joseph had a dream that he was going to be king over his brothers, and the brothers were upset by this, and Simeon, one of the more aggressive of the brothers, decided that they would put a sword to Joseph. And we'll see later on it's only because of the tremendous, merciful compassion of Zebulon, who found himself weeping in sympathy with the weeping Joseph who hid behind him, that Simeon was kept from killing him. But now Simeon is on his death bed, and all things have worked out, and he is saying, I had to learn about envy, just as Reuben had had to learn about lust. Simeon has to learn about envy. So now we have a sequence that's set up: lust, envy. If we were going in an archetypal structure, the next testament would be about anger because those form the basic triad. Lust, envy, and anger. But the third jumps us to a new quality. The third is Levi, and Levi is a very special son. The Levites were the tribe of the priests. All the priests were chosen from the Levites, so the high priesthood belonged. And so, the Levites had to do with things of heaven. So, we're going to leave Reuben and Simeon. We're going to leave, lust and envy. And now we're going to go to another dimension. And in fact, in Levi, he incorporates what Reuben and what Simeon said and enlarges it so that we have now the seven deadly sins that come out in Levi, all of them together. Levi, in fact, talks about the seven heavens. And he says, I prayed to the Lord that I might be saved. And there fell upon me asleep. And I beheld a high mountain. I was upon it, and behold, the heavens were opened. And an angel of God said to me, Levi, enter. And I entered from the first heaven into the second. And I saw there a sea hanging between the one and the other. And further I saw a third heaven, far brighter and more brilliant than these two. For there was also a boundless height therein. And I said unto the angel, wherefore is it so? And the angel said to me, marvel not at these, for thou shalt see for other heavens more brilliant and incomparable, when thou hast ascended thither, because thou shalt stand near the Lord, and shall be his minister, and his mystery shalt thou declare to men, and shall proclaim concerning the redemption of Israel. So, in Levi we get the first development after the opening two shots. It's like Reuben and Simeon give us the beginnings of the theme, but now Levi comes in with another theme larger, more insistent, almost like a Beethoven second theme. Now this is the major theme the redemption of Israel as a whole. Up to now, it's been every man for himself, or every man for his tribe, or waiting for the right leader. And now the community as a whole must be taken as an entity. This is an ethical perception. This is what we call ethical form. Those of you who are, and most of you are, coming on Saturday, realize that this is a tremendous jump in consciousness to be able to perceive ethical form, not to act by rules, not by a Decalogue that is now shelved and put away when it's not reminding oneself of rules. That would be a regression, as we would say at this point. Now we have to carry dynamically into a total involvement, an existential commitment, the actuality of the whole unfragmented by a Decalogue. Now Levi talks on his deathbed, and he says, thereupon the angel opened to me the gates of heaven. And I saw the holy temple, and upon the throne the glory of the Most High. And he said to me, Levi, I have given thee the blessings of the priesthood until I come and sojourn in the midst of Israel. Now this is a tremendous development. The first time that there was an individual who was able to go to heaven to speak to God was in the Book of Enoch and all the Old Testament. There was never anyone who went to heaven and spoke to God. Not Job, not Daniel, not Noah. And now, since the Book of Enoch, 100 years before this, had done it. Now in the Testament of Levi, the priesthood, the high priest is able, almost expected, to be able to do this, to go to heaven and speak directly to God, to hear it directly from him in a vocabulary that he can understand and can report back to the people, not just to the tribe of Levi now, but to the whole of Israel. And this is the key to the testament of Levi. This is why it is different, why it jumps above what Reuben and Simeon had started. Because Levi is speaking to the entirety of Israel, but he's speaking as a priest. And we'll see that the next son, Judah, will speak as a king, because the kingship will follow through him. Then the angel brought me down to the earth and gave me a shield and a sword, and said to me, execute vengeance on such him because of Dinah, thy sister and I will be with thee, because the Lord has sent me. And we have seen last week that Shechem was extremely important, and that Shechem was completely destroyed by John Hyrcanus, and that this destruction was very Roman, almost like the Roman destruction of Carthage. And in fact, the descriptions increasingly in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs have in their military metaphors descriptions that approximate more and more the Greco-Roman military way. Until we get to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the War Scroll [aka, War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness], and the descriptions of the Armageddon in there are descriptions of Roman Legion tactics, late Roman, Julius Caesar. Levi then says, And there again I saw a vision even as the former, after we had spent their seventy days and I saw seven men in white raiment saying to me, arise, put on the robe of the priesthood, and the crown of righteousness, and the breastplate of understanding, and the garment of truth, and the plate of faith, and the turban of the head, and the ephod of prophecy. And they severely carried these things, and put them on me, and said unto me, from henceforth become a priest of the Lord, thou and thy seed forever. And the first anointed me with holy oil and gave to me the staff of judgment. The second washed me with pure water, and fed me with bread and wine, the most holy things, and clad me with a holy and glorious robe. The third clothed me with a linen vestment like an ephod. The fourth put round me a girdle like unto purple. The fifth gave me a branch of rich olive. The sixth placed a crown on my head. The seventh placed on my head a diadem of priesthood, and filled my hands with incense, that I might serve as priest to the Lord God. And they said to me, Levi, thy seed shall be divided into three offices, for a sign of the glory of the Lord who was to come. And the first portion shall be great. The second shall be in the priesthood, and the third shall be called by a new name, because a king shall rise in Judah, and shall establish a new priesthood after the fashion of the Gentiles. And his presence is beloved as a prophet of the Most High and the seed of Abraham our father. So, in Levi's vision, now at the core, at the very beginning of his consecration as a high priest, with all the effects of office. And you have to see now that in the passion and resurrection of Jesus, all of these offices, all of these emblems will be conferred upon him the bread and wine of the Last Supper, the linen of the wrapping after the crucifixion, etc., etc., showing that his priesthood, his new priesthood, spans life and death. Or rather, it spans life as we knew it or know it over death and over life as it will be again in a completely new way. Imagine to yourself the Greek Omega sign. The first base of the Omega is on life in its natural way. Then there's a great arch over a mysterious, death-like interlude. And then the other foot of that Omega is on a new life, completely new, supernatural in terms of the old but now of a new nature, so that the previous life is now like a dream. And this will be the mystery. That the Passion of Jesus will be a transformational mass, the first one ever held on the planet. It will be a transubstantiation of the physical life into a supernatural life. And so, the symbols of office of this priesthood, of this ritual consecration, will be taken directly from Levi, the Levites, as it must be incidentally. Then Levi, towards the middle of his testament, says. And behold, I am clear from your ungodliness and transgression, which ye shall commit in the end of ages against the Savior of the world, deceiving Israel, and stirring up against it great evils from the Lord, and ye shall deal lawlessly together with Israel. So, he shall not bear with Jerusalem because of your wickedness. But the veil of the temple shall be rent, so as not to cover your shame. And ye shall be scattered as captives among the Gentiles and shall be a reproach and a curse there. For the house with which the Lord shall choose shall be called Jerusalem, as is contained in the Book of Enoch, the righteous. So now, Levi, in the Testament of Levi, we had the origins in consonance with the old mosaic origins. But now there's a sudden shift about the middle of the Testament of Levi, and now he is talking about future days - days to come - and in these days to come, everything is going to come apart. That this temple that was made will need to be torn asunder. The veil of that temple will have to be torn so that your shame will be aired out to the sun of realization because something has changed. And all of this is contained in the Book of Enoch the righteous. And he says, Work, righteousness, therefore, my children, upon the earth, that ye may have it as a treasure in heaven, and so good things in your souls, that ye may find them in your life. But if you sow evil things, ye shall reap every trouble and affliction. Get wisdom and the fear of God with diligence. And for though there be a leading into captivity in cities and lands be destroyed, and gold and silver in every possession, perish the wisdom of the wise not can take away, save the blindness of ungodliness and the callousness of sin. So, we have a change of emphasis. What had been paramount in the old law, in the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, what had been paramount was the good life - to have plenty of sons, to have a prosperous life. This was the paradigm of excellence. And now, in the Testament of Levi, this is being said that this is not to be emphasized, that instead the wisdom of the soul is to be emphasized, that this is what is important. So that Levi is showing in the Testament of Levi, what is being shown here is that the old ethical form has now undergone a transformation, and that what was ethically good before is no longer of any consequence, or no longer of any real consequence. It still may count, but if it continues to count for you in the old way, you will lose everything because there's a shift in valuation going on. And so, we now have to have a re-envisioning of ethical form, because none of us any longer understand what good is. And we must understand what good is. And in order to see that, we have to be able to renew our capacity to see ethical form. So, the Testament of Levi now is getting very specific here. So good things in your souls that ye may find them in your life, find them in your life. And he says, I have learnt from the writings of Enoch that in the end you will transgress against the Lord, stretching out hands to all wickedness, and your brethren shall be put to shame because of you, and to all the Gentiles shall ye become a scorn. Now the Enochian literature is having a very powerful influence because it was taken to be true that Enoch had gone to heaven, had been shown by angelic powers the future, and that events were showing this progressively, that the world was coming apart as they knew it, that in fact, there had been the revival in the Second Temple period under the Maccabean priest princes. And now all that was beginning to sour, and everything was looking worse and worse. So, Levi says, and after their punishment shall come from the Lord. The priesthood shall fail. And then the Lord raise up a new priest. And for that we should read new kind of priest, a radically different kind of priest. You can be a radically different kind of priesthood. And concomitant with that, a radically different Israel. You can think of it on a beginning level that Israel is going to be metaphorical, but actually it's going to be mystical. And to him, all the words of the Lord shall be revealed, and he shall execute a righteous judgment upon the earth for a multitude of days, and his star shall rise in heaven as a king, lighting up the light of knowledge as the sun the day. So that what is coming is a star of understanding - a priest who now knows all. The words, all the sacred vocabulary to invoke not a fullness of natural life, but a fullness of supernatural afterlife. This is what it's going to be coming. And Levi says that he shall give the majesty of the Lord to his sons in truth for evermore, that he's going to have then a tribe. He's going to have sons, but that they're going to be sons in truth, so that the tribe of this new priest is going to be the tribe of those who understand the truth. And admission into the tribe is no longer going to be on the basis of circumcision or on the basis of blood. It's not going to be a blood relationship. It's going to be a spirit relationship. You're going to be on the basis of spirit. So that spirit is going to displace blood. And so, the family of man is going to change its nature. That man is not going to run on blood anymore. That is to say, his ethical form will not be apparent to people who are still in a blood world. It's only those who are in a spirit world that they'll be able to see again and understand what's going to happen to the rest of them. They are going to become haunted by the evil spirits that are going to inundate the world. In one of the Dead Sea Scrolls there are hymns. It will be a stumbling block to those who swallow me up in a snare. To all those who battle against me I will be for my enemies cause of shame and a cause of disgrace. To those who murmur against me. For thou, O my God, thou will plead my cause. For it is according to the mystery of thy wisdom that thou hast rebuked me. Thou will conceal the truth until it's time and righteousness until its appointed moment. Thy rebuke shall become my joy and gladness, and my scourges shall turn to eternal healing and everlasting peace. The scorn of my enemies shall become a crown of glory, and my stumbling shall change to everlasting might. These are the kinds of plaintive notes that were found in Qumran, and they're multiplied many times over. And when we get the scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, you'll see an even more torrential, militaristic, compulsive description of the final battle between good and evil. And also found there was a manual of discipline. All of these documents point up to a highly energized, numerously charged situation where people were hemmed in on all sides by uncertainty and by anxiety, and there was only the possibility left alive that there was one way of truth that one could find through all of this morass, that the world was becoming an ocean of evil, and that what they had to understand, that there was no longer any land to stand upon, there was no longer any sacred place on the earth that they had to fly free of the earth in the spirit in order to find solace. Thus, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, or as they called it at that time, the Holy Ghost in a haunted world, the Holy Ghost, alone as a white dove flies free. And that white dove of the Holy Spirit, flying free, carries in its beak an olive sprig, an olive branch, a little olive sprig, which is what the bird brought back to Noah. Only the bird brought it to Noah, saying that dry land was reappearing. But the Holy Spirit says, is that there is no longer any land on earth naturally available to man, that he must become spiritual, transform the blood to spirit, because the forms upon which life can be built no longer exist in nature. That all of that has dissolved or is dissolving rapidly, and there is no security there at all. We'll see when we get to the development of Alexandrian thought around the time of Clement of Alexandria, that this becomes, in Clement's terms, what the gnosis is, that the gnosis is understanding that you cannot find security in those natural forms anymore, but only in those spiritual, supranatural forms. That that's where the new life is. That's where the new possibility of life is. And what ethical form does is it makes available life for man the possibility, at least of life for man. There will be, in fact a tremendous split, and all of the documents around the turn of the millennium will stress that there are, in fact, only two ways available. There was a way of life and there is the way of death. And that if you go the way of death, you go back into this demonically dissolving natural morass, and the way of life leads out above and away from that. And that that is the way that should be followed. So, Levi comes to an end, and then the Testament of Judah and Judah is the king. You see, the kingship comes from Judah. And Judah was a tremendously strong individual. He was fast enough to run down deer, and he was very prideful in this. And he says, and now I command you, my children, hearken to Judah, your father, and keep my sayings to perform all the ordinances of the Lord, and to obey the commands of God, and walk not after your lust, nor in the imaginations of your thoughts and haughtiness, of heart and glory, not in the deeds and strength of your youth. For this also is evil in the eyes of the Lord. Since I also gloried that in wars no comely woman's face ever enticed me, and reproved Reuben, my brother, concerning Bilhah the wife of my father, the spirits of jealousy and of fornication arrayed themselves against me, until I lay with Bathsheba, the Canaanite, and Tamar, who was espoused to my sons. And he goes on to talk about his relations with Tamar being taken in by her disguises and so forth. And he says they rob his soul of all goodness and oppress him with toils and troubles and drive away sleep from him. He is a slave to two contrary passions, and cannot obey God, because they have blinded his soul. And he walketh in the day as in the night. And so, Judah is saying that the problem here for us in Judah comes right after Levi, and Levi is giving us the vision as a priest should. He gives us the vision, the religious vision. This is what it looks like. This is the new landscape of man. Man's life has to be in this new transcendental landscape. And Judah is saying, we cannot go there until we resolve ourselves that we are blinded, particularly because we are caught between conflicting passions. We're caught, as we have been emphasizing between polarities, and these polarities generate tension, and the lines of tension all convolute themselves into shapes, phantasmal shapes, of desire or repulsion, one or the other. And we are bounced back and forth. And so, we cannot obey God because we are blinded in our soul. And Judah says, this is what a king must do then is unite this together. And of course, the uniting of the soul will be the quality of the next son, Issachar, the fifth son of Jacob and Leah. I guess we're just going to get to six sons tonight, and we'll do six more next week. Issachar is a very special child, and his virtue is what was called engendering the single eye of the spirit or the singleness of heart through simplicity. That the first way of integration is through simplicity. Complete, utter simplicity. We recognize it in later ages, and persons like Saint Francis of Assisi or in Gandhi, that utter simplicity is a resolver, that the polarities are resolved into unity, into singleness. And Issachar says, the spirits of deceit have no power against him. There is no envy in his thoughts, nor worry with insatiable desire in his mind. For he walketh in singleness of soul, and beholdeth all things, in uprightness of heart, shunning eyes made evil through the error of the world, lest he see the perversion of any of the commandments of the Lord. Keep therefore, my children the law of God, and get singleness and walk in godlessness, not playing the busy body with the business of your neighbor but love the Lord and your neighbor. Have compassion on the poor and the weak. So, this insight of Issachar coming after Levi and after Judah is extremely important and very poignant. That there is no longer any possibility of balancing out in terms of the old vengeance. That there is so much evil in the world that if you were to try and balance it out, you would become infinitely evil yourself. To try and balance it out, and that this is true all the way down to the person, any particular thing that happens to any particular person. And so, Issachar says, the only resolution in this is to have the singleness of heart with the simpleness of devotion, so that if you engender in yourself devotion for the Lord continuously, there is no room for anything else. And that whatever has come upon you will receive that impress of your singleness of heart, of your devotion. And so, he says, if you do these things, my children, every spirit of Belial shall flee from you. Belial becomes by the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs by about 100 BC - between 100 BC and 60 BC, certainly by 60 BC - Belial becomes the archetypal name of the Prince of Darkness of Satan in Job, the Book of Job. And the wisdom literature is always given in the Hebrew as a neuter, never as a male or a female, always as a neuter. But in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Satan is always given a name, and the name is Belial. And Belial are taken from the Enochian literature what has become an evil spirit of the chief of those angels that had come down. Now his name in Hebrew, the original name given in Hebrew was Semjaza - Semjaza - but Semjaza is not able to be given conscious form very easily early on in the literature. That is to say, you know, when these forms become available for consciousness for the first time, they are too numinous to be seen clearly. And so, another angel, a fallen angel, Semjaza. Semjaza becomes more visible but by the time of the writing of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, there had been enough development, enough practice, that the person of the evil could be seen, and they gave the name Belial to that person. And so, if you do these things, my children, every spirit of Belial shall flee from you. And no deed of wicked men shall rule over you, and every wild beast shall ye subdue. Since you have with you the God of heaven and earth and walk with men in singleness of heart. What Belial and his demonic hordes love is the indecisiveness, and it's the indecisiveness that keeps the dynamic going. It's the inability to settle down, which is what they want. And if you have this kind of a jittery mind, one cannot see one's way to ethical form. One cannot be at one moment with the community. There is no community, there are only fractionated individuals. And a sign of great spiritual distress is when individuals cannot come together and form a community. When the struggling person has to struggle by themselves, it's a sign of numinous, archetypal - it used to be called evil, we would say now that it's just unresolved. Now, after Issachar comes Zebulon. And Zebulon is compassion and mercy. Zebulon is the son who saved Joseph by his sympathy. Not by any act that he did. He began weeping, and Joseph, weeping, beseeching his brothers not to kill him, hid behind Zebulon, and that gave them enough time, the split second, so that the swords couldn't reach him right away. And then the vision of the brothers weeping together, pulled out a little bit of sympathy, a little bit of mercy from the others, and they decided to throw Joseph down one of these dry wells, and they held them there for three days and three nights, until some Ishmaelites came along, and they beat Joseph up and put slave's clothes on him. And so, they sold him to the Ishmaelites as a slave, and then took his robe and bloodied it with the blood of a lamb, and took it into Jacob, and said that he'd been gored and eaten by a wild animal. Well, Zebulon brings compassion, and you must see that we've been being given pairs that Reuben and Simeon go together, that lust and envy go together. They're a polarity. And the unresolved world, the priesthood and the kingship are a polarity. They're at odds in the unresolved world, the Levites and the Judahites. And so, the third polarity that we're being given is that between Issachar and Zebulon, between singleness of heart and compassion and mercy. Now these aspects have to be brought together. They have to be resolved as it is. They have to be reconciled. And so, we're going to get six pairs of them in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, six pairs, there will be an archetypal structure and the twelve apostles. Will come from the structure. Now, just a few observations to make this a little more perceivable. First a paragraph, short paragraph, from E. R. Goodenough. This is from Religious Tradition and Myth, published by Yale University Press, 1937. Goodenough is the one who did the 13-volume series on Jewish symbols in the Greco-Roman era for the Bollingen Series, published by Princeton University Press. I gave a set of it to the PRS [Philosophical Research Society] library, and I got volume 13 again, which has summary and conclusions up on top of the bookshelf over there. This is what Goodenough, who spent a long, excellent life trying to find out what was Hellenistic Judaism because no one knew before the 20th century, no one knew what Hellenistic Judaism was. And that is everything that we're looking at now is what it was. There is no tradition of it. Since the third century AD, no one has known. All right, Goodenough writes this in 1937, "The Judaism out of which Christianity grew was a religion of action and trust, not one of formulated beliefs. No theological definitions appear in the Old Testament. There it is taken for granted that Jehovah is God, and that he alone is God - The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God' [was the quotation] - but God is never defined in a way which at all suggests a creed or theology. Jews had abandoned their primitive notion that Jehovah was the tribal god of the Israelites and had come to conceive of him as the God of all men in the universe. But still there was no philosophic account of what they meant by God: indeed, he could be described in the simplest language of anthropomorphism, made to talk with men, love, hate, be jealous, avenge, repent of a rash decision, in a way that made him [seem] only a greatly glorified human being." Now, this is what we talked about before is that the mystery had been handed to Abraham, and Abraham had not opened it up. They had passed it on. And now, in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, this is being opened up. Here is R. H. Charles in his great Lecture series done on a concise critical history of the doctrine of a future life on eschatology - final things. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs it seems indubitable that some apocalyptic fragments of this book belong to this century. Though the body of the book originated over a century later, some of the oldest sections appear to have constituted originally a defense of the warlike Maccabean high Priests in the latter half of the second century BC, while others seem to attack the later chiefs of that family in the first century BC. It is hardly possible to interpret otherwise such a statement regarding Levi, as in Reuben he shall die for us in wars visible and invisible. One or more of these sections may possibly be from an earlier date, whereas many of them belong to the first century BC. Since, however, their eschatological thought in some respects belongs to the second century, we will give a brief outline of it, though we will not build any conclusions upon it. This is all that can be done until a critical edition of this book appears, and the critical edition was his own, some eight years later. Levi has been chosen by God to rule all the Gentiles with supreme sovereignty, the Messiah of the Tribe of Levi, who will appear at the close of the seventh Jubilee, will possess an eternal priesthood. This will endure until God comes and restores Jerusalem and dwells in Israel. This Messiah will judge as a king. He will bind Belial to open the gates of Paradise and give his saints to eat of the tree of life to the messianic kingdom on earth. All the righteous patriarchs will rise then the spirits of deceit will be trodden under foot and Belial are destroyed, and there will be only one people and one tongue. The surviving Gentiles are in all cases to be converted, save in Simeon, where they are to be doomed to annihilation. Therefore, what is in large being developed in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the vision of a new people, and the one language which they will speak will be the language of spiritual form, that they will speak to a world which they see in the purity of their spirit, but which is invisible to people who are not of that kingdom. So that we're going to have two worlds happening simultaneously. We're going to have the old profane world still going on, but increasingly becoming mad, insane. And we'll have the new world, which is invisible and cannot be seen in the old ways, requires a transformation, a metanoia. And the key to this transformation is the ability for people to come together and make a community that as long as they remain individuals, they will remain in the old world. Because it is an intrapersonal aspect that keeps us in the old world. It is an interpersonal aspect which allows us to transform into the new world, that the world of spiritual form is now leaving the individual and going into the transformational community. A document from the same time, written in Alexandria, the Wisdom of Solomon. Two little excerpts from it just to emphasize this point. "Love uprightness, you who judge the land; think of the Lord with goodness, seek him with sincerity of heart. For he is found by those who do not try him and is manifested to those who do not disbelieve him. For crooked reasoning separate from God and when his power is tested, it exposes fools. For Wisdom cannot enter into a deceitful soul or live in a body in debt to sin. For the Holy Spirit of instruction will flee from deceit and will rise and leave at unwise reasoning and be put to confusion at the approach of wrong. For wisdom is a kindly spirit and will not acquit a blasphemer of what he says, for God is a witness of his heart, and a truthful observer of his mind, and a hearer of his tongue. For the spirit of the Lord fills the world, and that which embraces all things knows all that is said. Therefore, no one who utters what is wrong will go unobserved, nor will justice in its investigation pass him by. For there will be an inquiry into the designs of the ungodly, and the sound of his words will reach the Lord to convict him of his transgressions. For a jealous ear hears everything, and the sound of grumbling is not hidden. So, beware of useless grumbling, and spare your tongue from slander. For no secret word goes for naught, and a lying mouth destroys the soul. And then later on, therefore Uninstructed souls went astray. And when lawless men thought they were opposing a holy nation, they lay shut up under their roofs, exiled from the eternal providence. Prisoners of darkness and captives of the long night. For when they thought they were hidden in their secret sins by a dark veil of forgetfulness, they were scattered, terribly frightened, and appalled by specters. For even the inner chamber that held them did not protect them from fear, but appalling sounds rung around them, and somber ghosts appeared with gloomy faces, and no fire was strong enough to succeed in giving them light nor could the bright flames of the stars undertake to illumine that hateful night. Only there shone on them a fearful flame of itself, and throw dreadfully frightened at that sight, when it could not be seen. They thought the things they beheld still worse. And the delusions of magic art were prostrate, and their boasted wisdom suffered a contemptuous rebuke. For those who claim to drive away fears and troubles from six souls were sick themselves with ridiculous fear." This is the Wisdom of Solomon, written about 50 BC in Alexandria, just after the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was finished. The emphasis increasingly is upon wisdom as a spirit that has a feminine tone to it. It's almost as if the veils of Isis, conferring a graceful grandeur, are beginning to spread over the conception of the new priest and the new priesthood. And this is all coming together about 50 years BC. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is originally written in Hebrew - it was no doubt about it - but it's translated almost instantly into Greek and Aramaic. Which means that the spread of this document was news, and the communities to which it was spread were individuals who could understand its message, but who could not read the Hebrew. That's why it had to be translated into Greek; that's why it had to be translated into Aramaic. Now the Greek is for the Alexandrian area, and the Aramaic is for the areas north of Israel centered around Antioch in Syria. So that the translation made this available in a spread that went from today, modern Turkey down to modern Egypt, so that the Jewish community was in this broad crescent, as it were, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, evoking this new responsibility upon the people. We have another half of it to go through, and I'll try and bring in more of the Dead Sea Scrolls material next time. Because while this is happening in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, and while it has its reverberations in Alexandria and somewhat in Antioch, there is a growing awareness out in the desert communities, the Essene communities, that in fact, the time is ripe that the very bringing together of documents like this and their popularization means that the numinous quality of the spirit is very close to the surface of breaking open onto the surface. And as far as we know, the most powerful community at the time was at Qumran. And remember, now Qumran is just down from Jerusalem. You could see Qumran from the Mount of Olives. This is why Jesus went there very often to meditate, because from the top of the Mount of Olives, one can look over what was called the Wilderness of Zin, this weird-shaped rocks cut by wind and sandstorm. And there were no plants. And from about 2200 feet, 2300 feet, Jerusalem is all the way down to the Dead Sea, which is a couple of hundred feet below sea level, is this wilderness of weird, shaped wind whistling rocks. And then down at the bottom is the Dead Sea, which is dead, there is no life in it. It's just an opalescent, dull gray, sometimes getting pearly greenish in stormy weather and there, flowing into it, is the Jordan River, and up the Jordan Valley is the only greenery that you can see. It's the water of life. It's the river of life. And Qumran was located right where the Jordan ran into the Dead Sea, right where the wilderness met the reeds of the Wilderness of Zin. So, the green and the rock, the dead water and the live waters, the view from Jerusalem down to this community. It's almost like a sight line of a new geometry of meaning. And so, we'll bring some of that material in next week. Thanks for bearing with us. I realize this is a little difficult to get into. I realize that it's a little close to Sunday school type material, but I think you're all able to appreciate what a tremendous electrical resonance at that time had with our own, that the images that they talk about are still of interest because we're coming out, as they would say, on the high side of that transformation, because the transformation that happened then went underground - it went into invisibility. The world of the spirit went invisible. It went from the visible to the invisible. In our time, it's coming from the invisible back into the visible. It's coming above ground again. So, the transformation that happens in our time is very much the contrapositive of what happened then. We have to learn to see nature again in a life-giving way. Whereas the press on them was to learn to say that the inner life was what was real. The inner nature was what to pay attention to. It was the forms of the ethics of the inner nature that were the salvation from the growing madness that was enveloping the world. It's difficult for people in other times to have conceived of a world gone mad. But in our time, unfortunately, we can at last understand what that might be. A whole world gone mad. So that the sane man stuck out like a sore thumb. The man with a little bit of equanimity about himself was unusual. We'll see what an incredible character Jesus was because he stuck out in a very peculiar way, and I think we'll be able to view that. Well, let's take this chance to get some food. We have some food. Wake up Helen there and get some. END OF RECORDING