Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 3)
Presented on: Tuesday, April 30, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 20 of 54
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Part 3)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 30, 1985
Transcript:
The date is April 30th, 1985. This is part two of the Twelve Patriarchs lecture by Roger Weir.
We are focusing on the most difficult of all aspects. It is difficult to appreciate that this might be significant. Or conversely, it's immediately seen as significant and then forgotten. It isn't developed. The point is that community is essential. Community is at least as essential as truth. For instance, in Buddhism, the three jewels are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. They're all on an equal par - the community. The Holy Ghost in Christianity is the community. Reducing it to a third person is a doctrinaire bureaucratic misunderstanding of monumental proportions.
The difference between Judaism and Christianity was exactly on this point. Judaism transformed itself several times over and by the time of the Essenes - the community of the elect, the purified ones - were the temple. But they looked forward to a time when there would be a New Jerusalem and they could build another temple. The Christians initially stayed Christians and were not Jews because they realized that the community was the temple. It is the body of the worshippers who are the vehicle. And this is the most essential point, and it is difficult to appreciate the significance of this in our time, because we have devalued this to an extraordinary extent. We think of community as something like committee or neighborhood or party or faction. Almost anything except the spiritual.
And the theme that we've been developing consistently in Alexandrian Judaism is the increasing recognition that the face of God manifests only in a gestalt of a purified community. Otherwise, it cannot be seen that unless all the members of the community work together, the dots don't connect. The face of the personality of the divine does not manifest. This is the central issue. Now what we're going to find that happened and actually did happen. It happened with a vengeance in history, is that the Roman community took over the Christian church and eclipsed the Hellenistic Jewish sense of community. And built a church instead of a community, and he elected a pope as emperor. And this plagues the situation until the common problems become prolific in our time because all of the individuating archetypal energy of the Hellenistic world that was focused and integrated and channeled into Messianic Judaism, which became the early church, was co-opted, and put into a vessel that cannot express it. And time and time again, it has come to the attention of people in the Western world that what's wrong with Christianity is that the esoteric interior, transformative understanding is superior, and the presentational structures, the bureaucracy, the forms are absolutely the devil's own.
So, we're tonight trying to focus ever closer towards understanding how the Roman state took over the Hellenistic Jewish sense of spiritual community and produced the world conquering church. This is a very big problem. It is one that is difficult to see. And although there have been pointed references to this over and over again - even in the third and fourth century there were already poignant critiques just on this point, and there have been reoccurring off and on ever since. It is difficult for us to understand because we cannot delegate a sense of belief that this is a significant issue. It doesn't have the charisma of something kabbalistic. It doesn't have the pizzazz of something that is metaphysical. It's too damn ordinary. But the fact is, is that its ordinariness is our misunderstanding. The spiritual community is the most extraordinary transformation there is, because it took the spirit out of the individual into the inter-individual, the inter-relational, and made possible an esoteric understanding of the exchange of selves on a community-wide basis. And because this exchange of selves, this kind of a spiritual total communion was so close to the ecstasy experienced in sexuality, all of the strictures, that the documents of late Hellenistic Judaism have on sexuality are not from the standpoint of prudery, but from the necessary standpoint that you have to be able to make a differentiation, and you cannot do it if you're not in tune.
And the book that we're looking at now, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, again and again, lust comes up as a real bugbear. And we'll see when we get to Joseph tonight, that the Testament of Joseph is all about this. And it is not a statement of prudery. It's not a statement of morality. It is a statement of structural necessity because you cannot differentiate on these high transcendental levels without a kind of a purity, because the whole effectiveness of the spiritual manifestation is in the giving up of oneself to others. And we'll see that Christianity comes into focus with Jesus because he offers himself as that other. If you can't find anyone to have communion with on this great level, here at least is one other besides yourself, and that the church exists literally wherever one or two are gathered together in my name. There is the community. There is the face of the Holy Spirit. There is the New Jerusalem.
Now all of this becomes more and more poignant as the 20th century goes on, because we have evidently gotten ourselves into a situation where we are going to be swamped with data. We're going to be cudgeled with information that are relevant, that is relevant to exactly this point. This book is published just this last week. It's called the Temple Scroll the Hidden Law of the Dead Sea Sect by Yigael Yadin, who was very high up in the Israeli government and died of a heart attack last year just as he finished this book. He was also Israel's greatest archaeologist, and he devoted his entire life to the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially to the scroll called the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, which Oxford University Press published in 1962. But the Temple Scroll is about an even more powerful scroll because in examining the Temple Scroll, it is evident that the Essene community expected a physical New Jerusalem, and they thought that the community holding the temple in themselves was a short-term responsibility, that they only had to do this through some crucial series of a generation, or two or three at the most.
So, they kept computing to try and find out when they could deliver the temple back out of the community, of the people, into the architectural exteriorization of it that had always been there since the building of Solomon's First Temple. As time wore on and the situation matured, it began to occur to a few people that this may not be the pattern, that the transformation that has happened - the community carrying the temple instead of it being an architectural expression - might be a permanent change. This might have been the transformation. If so, the last documents that the Jewish tradition had before there was a temple were the Psalms of David. And this is why the Psalms of David assumed an overwhelming importance. And because of the Babylonian captivity, that time period also assumed a tremendous importance. And the figure of Daniel becomes prototypical, archetypal because he is the first to be able to hold Judaism together in exile because of a visionary capacity so that Daniel becomes the first of the new Jewish Transcendentalists.
But the Book of Daniel, as we have discovered, was not written until about 146 BC, 500 years after the events occurred, because 500 years after those events occurred. For a single individual, it was now a poignant restatement, enlarged for the community as a whole. And we have seen that the Book of Daniel actually occurs right in the dead center of the development of the Enochian literature, the Enochian literature, starting about 180 BC and running to about 100. And the Book of Daniel is right in the center of it - it is the fulcrum. The vision of the Book of Daniel is the fulcrum upon which the Enochian literature is laid out. The prototype in visionary terms and feeling toned modes set the complex of the feeling toned complex up so that it was sketched in, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs collected that sketch into its first full shape.
And it was with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs document that the Essene communities were initiated. And all of the Essene writings come in the next 100 and some years. They start about 100 BC and intensify down to 0 BC. It is apparent that this was such a devastatingly complex issue that no single individual dared speak out, because it was not incumbent upon an individual to understand. It was incumbent upon the community to understand, so that instead of there being a leader like David or a visionary like Daniel, the leader had to be a teacher, the teacher of righteousness who taught the community, who brought the community, matured them together as a community. The righteousness that the teacher of righteousness taught was the integrity of the spiritual community. You must all do it together. No one can, by themselves, by any individual brilliance, by any wild talent any longer, go ahead of the group, the community. Therefore, there was no question of withdrawing into solitary monastic conditions, but of reestablishing the primordial design and sense of human community in its pristine purity. And that's what they tried to do.
While this was happening in Israel - happening, in fact, in southern Israel, Judea - the Roman Empire was going through a catastrophic change. And the change that the Roman Empire was going through was the transformation from the community to the super individual, the dictator. And contemporaneous with the Essene experiments is the development of the first lasting, horrific dictatorship in Roman history.
So, before we go to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, we need to review the Roman situation for about 15 minutes. And in order to do this in this condensed time scape, I'm going to choose a single individual who was the focus of this transformation. He was a general, a Roman general named Sulla, who lived from about 138 BC to, I think about 78 BC. So, he comes roughly at... he is born around the time of the Maccabean Revolt, when it was at its apex, and dies about just before the time that King Herod comes in. So, his lifetime, that 60 years spans a tremendously significant transformation, not only in Israel but in Rome. And now we have to keep our antenna out here, because we can see that somehow Rome and Jerusalem are getting into a polarity. And the only place from which that polarity can be seen in all of its wholeness will be Alexandria.
So, we're obliquely still talking about Alexandria, but we're trying to disclose to ourselves why the spiritual transformation happened in Alexandria, even though a lot of the story takes place in Jerusalem and Rome. Neither Jerusalem nor Rome could see it because they were a polarized part of it, and it might have been seen in the old cultural center, spiritual cultural center of Greece - Athens - except for the fact that Sulla leveled Athens. Well, he left the Acropolis all right, but you'll see how he completely decimated the city. He also decimated Rome.
Sulla was a very peculiar individual, physically he was very peculiar. He had very light, white, milky skin with red splotches all over it. He had a kind of a personality where he loved to chat with actors and prostitutes and street characters, and at the same time he was intellectually very astute. He was from a patrician family, but they were very poor. Apocryphal story about him is he was putting a wealthy slave, ex-slave, to death. And the ex-slave said, but you used to live in the same apartment with me. So, Sulla had very peculiar origins. He was always attractive to the ladies for some odd reason because he was an oddball. He was extremely generous, and yet he was uncannily ruthless. Just that sort of individual.
Our best source for the life of Sulla is from Plutarch. This is the Penguin Classics translation Fall of the Roman Republic and Sulla's right at the beginning of the Fall of the Roman Republic. He found himself in several military campaigns in Numidia, province of northern Africa, and he arranged for the surrender of the grandson of Massinissa, who had been the great confrere of Scipio Africanus, and his grandson had promoted revolution quite effectively, and Sulla was the one who arranged for the surrender and had a statue and a medallion struck showing Sulla receiving the surrender and the tribute. And this immediately made him very popular in Rome, even more popular than the consul named Marius, who is forever associated with Sulla. And Marius was quite jealous of his young aide de camp who was stealing all the thunder. And so, Marius took a great disliking to Sulla. And as we'll see, it's the personal dislike between these two men that is the petty origin, the kicker, as it is on the first wave of the great civil wars of Rome.
Sulla, eventually, consulted Etruscan soothsayers and mystics about himself, and Plutarch has this to say, "He found himself opposed by Marius who, under the influence of those never aging passions, love of distinction and mania for fame, had set his heart on foreign war across the sea, in spite of the fact that he had now grown unwieldy in body and had only recently retired from military service on account of his age. While Sulla set out for his camp to attend various matters which still required his attention, Marius stayed at home and busied himself with contriving that terrible outbreak of civil violence which did more damage to Rome than all her other wars put together. There were many supernatural warnings of what was to come. Fire broke out of its own accord from under the staves of the ensigns and was only got under control with great difficulty; three ravens brought their young out into the road and after eating most of them carried back the remains to their nest; mice gnawed at some consecrated gold in a temple and when a keeper had caught one of them, a female, in a trap, she gave birth in the trap itself to five young and ate up three of them. But the most striking phenomenon of all was when the sound of a trumpet rung out from a perfectly clear and cloudless sky with a shrill, prolonged, and dismal note so loud that people were driven half crazy with terror."
This is in Rome. "The Etruscan wise men declared that this portent foretold a change over into a new age and a total revolution in the world. According to them there are eight ages in all. In each age the lives and manners of men are different and God has established for each age a definite span of time which is determined by the circuit of the Great Year."
We've talked about the Platonic Great Year - about 2160 years. That's a great cycle revolution. So, the change of the Great Year, according to the Etruscan soothsayers who are at the mystic core of the Roman communitas, is beginning to sound itself now around 90 BC.
"Whenever this circuit comes to an end," writes Plutarch. "Whenever this circuit comes to an end and another begins some marvelous sign appears either on earth or in the heavens so that it becomes at once clear to those who have made a thorough study of the subject that men of a different character and way of life have now come into the world and the gods will be either more or less concerned with this new race than they were with their predecessors."
So, the emphasis here, Plutarch is saying - and he's writing this about 120 AD - that when the new age changes, there are contending types of people, different types of character. And the divine concern, the divine energy goes to the new type of character. It's not that the old people were bad, it's that that age has ended, that flower has bloomed and is now wilting. They do the best they can, but they don't have the vision. They don't have the insight working. They're not energized. Notice that the emphasis in Plutarch who understood these things - he was an initiated high priest of the mysteries besides being the most educated man of his day. The key to this is the character, not the consciousness, but the character of men. And character is formed in the community. Character is a sociological expression, is not raising consciousness. That's the key. It's acquiring the character of the new age. That's the key.
Sulla will be the last of the old age misunderstanding the new age. In Roman terms, he's a direct prototype for all the Roman strongmen who will come after him. He has... two of his generals were Crassus and Pompey, who learned from the hands of the master who formed with Julius Caesar the First Triumvirate, who set in motion the whole pattern. And all of this will come to a head in Alexandria in 30 BC. Sulla then became a military commander, very famous, and he responded to the fact that in the East a king named Mithridates, who was of Parthian origin, began taking over most of the Middle East and most of Asia Minor, and began making incursions into Macedonia and into Greece. And so, Sulla took his legions, Roman legions, and went to Greece, and immediately set out to focus his initial development of the battle around Athens. And the people of Athens sided with Mithridates. And so, Sulla laid siege to the city of Athens, and finally, when by stealth, they were able to enter into the city of Athens, Sulla went crazy with revenge and had put to death, murdered, mass murdered almost all of the controlling individuals, almost all of the controlling families, and had torn down all of the defensive walls of Athens, all of the buildings stretching down from Athens to the Piraeus, demolished most of the temples outside of the Acropolis and reduced Athens to a village, and then moved his army north to Boeotia because there wasn't enough food to support even this decimated population.
So, Athens goes out of world history at this time. I mean, you have to imagine now, this is a real debacle. Sulla is the one who orders all the trees in Plato's Academy to be cut down. All of the vast forest gardens that had been the pride of Athens, all of the trees surrounding the Lyceum, so that Athens was leveled and denuded out of anger, out of vengeance by Sulla then. I won't go into all these descriptions of this that Plutarch gives us.
And of course, they were extremely terrifying to the known world. At that time, Athens had been the university of the classical world. It literally put out the eye of Greek wisdom so that there was no longer any balanced vision possible from Greece. This is why Alexandria assumes even more importance because it becomes the only major Greek metropolis left thriving, because Sulla will destroy many, many other cities in Greece. I won't go through all of the terrible battles and scenes. Sulla was a great commander to large armies of Mithridates. Over 100,000 men each were completely beaten by Roman legions, not numbering over 15,000. And the reason for this was that the Roman legions by Sulla's time were absolutely professional killers. They worked together as a team with their lances and shields and swords, and the discipline was incredible. All of the developments for centuries of the Greco-Roman military system had come to a focus, and the Roman military machine was literally unbeatable. They simply chewed their way through, whether it was a flanking attack, a center attack, no matter what it was.
So, eventually Mithridates made his peace with Sulla and retreated. And Sulla then took his legions back to Italy. They landed at Brundisium and marched across Italy towards Rome, towards the city of Rome, and the city of Rome barricaded itself. And eventually Sulla laid siege and entered into the city of Rome.
I don't have time to read you all the sections that I had out here in Plutarch, so I'll just tell you the story. When he broke into Rome, his first act was to convene the Senate and while he was speaking in the Senate, he had about 6000 patricians from the Roman families killed in the courtyard outside of the Roman Senate, so that the shrieks and howls and these echoes, punctuated with the background music, as it were, macabre music of his speech, which was absolutely passionless, absolutely a classical rhetoricians declaiming to them that he was going to completely rewrite the Roman constitution, that he was going to reform the Roman people, and that he was going to assume these dictatorial powers until it was done. And then he retired. But before he retired, he put to death, as he had in Athens, almost all of the traditional families, almost all of the men who came from traditional republican Roman families, so that the population of Rome, as well as the population of Athens around 83 AD, in the 80s, from 88 AD to 83 AD were decimated. They were taken out of the old traditional mode, and there were no longer enough people left of that old mode to work.
Sulla believed that it was a new age, and it was time to completely get rid of people. Sulla was like a Hitler of his time, very much that kind of a maniac, kind of a genius. There is no counting the number of dead in the city of Rome from that debacle that went on week after week after week until even the supporters of Sulla became tired of the killing and asked him when he was going to stop. And his reply was as soon as he quit thinking of people that should be done away with. And when it was finished, he gave huge, beautiful banquets for the actors and the prostitutes and the people. And then he died the most horrible death. His body began to putrefy, and little worms began to occur in the flesh, and they were picked off, and he was bathed, and herbal solutions put on him until he was taking baths almost every hour during the day. But he literally putrefied. He died of massive maggots just coming out of his flesh. He died in 78 AD.
These events were catastrophic. The imagery of these events, happening as they did in quick sequence, destroyed the viability of the old republican character of Rome. It had been shook by the terrible savagery of the Third Punic War when they had completely decimated Carthage and leveled it. But now Athens, which was the cultural origin of the intellectual underpinnings of the Roman Republic, and the city of Rome itself, which was the expression of the Roman Republic, were also decimated.
Do you notice that the pattern is that once an evil has been perpetrated out there, it almost glacially like comes home? This is a very peculiar pattern. It's one of the patterns of history. And it's one thing this country has to pay attention to. Whatever is perpetrated outside comes home to roost. It comes home to roost in the character of the individuals who inherit that situation, that tradition, so that the problem area is in the human character. It's the development of human character, which is where the physician of the soul needs to look, not in consciousness. We purposely misunderstand that in our time. Purposely misunderstand it. We think expanding consciousness is the way to realization. But consciousness is never other than what it is. It is more or less covered, more, or less open, but it does not change. It's like the sun shining. It always is what it is, but character vacillates. Character is capable of clouding over like a cataract.
While this is happening, the Essene communities are excerpting themselves from the Jewish tradition more and more because the Jewish tradition more and more is becoming a province of the Roman Empire, which has just undergone this whole transformation. So, the Essene communities are interested in purifying themselves not just from the Jewish tradition, but from the Roman-swallowed Jewish tradition, which has now become a horrific nightmare for them. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, then comes right at the watershed, where the Essene communities are just beginning to have their viability, because the old traditional wisdom literature of Judaism is coming together and expressing itself in the best mandala you could have.
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, as we have seen last week, the first of the six patriarchs, there are twelve altogether, deal with various virtues and vices. And when we start tonight, we start with Dan, who's the seventh son. And Dan, the Testament of Dan, concerns anger and lying and it begins something like this. The copy of the words of Dan, which he spake to his sons in his last days in the 125th year of his life. Now Dan is the son of Jacob. When did Jacob live? He lived long - hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before Moses, who lived more than a thousand years before these events. So, these testaments follow the pattern, they follow the pattern that the Book of Enoch took, because Enoch had lived before the great flood days. And they followed the pattern of the Book of Daniel hearkening back. So, it's a tradition of Jewish literature not to put words into the mouths so much, but to say that the context is important. We have to understand the context. And the content in that context is where the significance is because we have to keep our tradition alive. We cannot forget the tradition. We can't do something new that doesn't take in the tradition.
So that Jewish complexity, the Jewish character, is rather like circles within circles within circles becoming like a target. And the bull's eye in that target will be the Messiah, who will in himself represent the fulcrum of the universal spiritual community, and also the implosion of all the circles, all the concentric circles of history. He will sum up history in its eternal fulcrum. And this is what we're leaning towards more and more. He writes about how wonderful it is to be a son of Jacob. He writes about how terrible it was for the sons of Jacob to gang up on Joseph. And then he writes about how he used to live very well according to the Law. But I know that in the last days ye shall depart from the Lord, and ye shall provoke Levi unto anger, and fight against Judah, but ye shall not prevail against them. For an angel of the Lord shall guide them both. For by them shall Israel stand and whensoever ye depart from the Lord, ye shall walk in all evil, and work all the abominations of the Gentiles.
You're going to live like Romans. You're going to think like Greeks. You're going to start living like Egyptians. But all this time you're really Jewish. This is what the message, again and again in different ways, and remembering what that is, is remembering that the context and the content are always interwoven together and always point towards a conclusion, always come to a focus somehow. And the focus is always the Lord. So whatever manifestation of the center of that target, it's going to be a manifestation of the Lord in person. And as one gets closer and closer to that quality, as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs would say, the angels of the presence become more and more perceptible. They become less and less arcane experiences of a few and more and more the everyday experience of the spiritual community. This is how they know that the time is ripening, because the community in its everydayness begins to sense it.
Now, without the community, there would be no way to know, for there is no longer any particular individual who is gifted to see this. It is only the perception of spiritual form by the spiritual community that is viable as a visionary agency. So, he goes on and he says, for I have read in the Book of Enoch the righteous, that the prince of these wicked is Satan, and that all the spirits of wickedness and pride will conspire to attend constantly on the sons of Levi, to cause them to send before the Lord.
So, there is the emphasis that in all of the Testaments that one has brought together all the sons of Jacob again in this transcendental way, this historical displacement way. And the cue for all this has been the Enochian literature, which has tuned our visionary capacity, and that we have to pay attention to these virtues, and we have to be on guard against these vices, because there are two orders. There's an angelic order, which the good is trying to focus on and manifest in terms of the community. And there is the evil, that the Prince of Evil, Satan, or Belial as he is usually named in here, which means worthless' in Hebrew. Belial is junk. One has to guard because the temptation comes to the individual. It is the individual character that is the weakest point, is the susceptible point. Why is this so? Because individuals used to be fortified. They used to be prime in their individuality. Now, in the new age, they have to open up to each other. And it's that need to be open that gives Belial the best opportunity because he specializes in deceit. So, we can no longer remained as individuals. We have to get together. It's in our getting together that we're most vulnerable because we don't have the individual virtues of judgment and excellence and balance. We're going to make more and more mistakes as we, more and more give ourselves up to the community so that the possibilities of going astray are climbing all the time, that the new transformation is coming in.
And so, Belial's loving this. He's having a heyday. Okay. It ends then with Dan saying that we have to not depart from righteousness, that this is the cue. We have to stay within this righteous matrix. We are safe as long as we're there. And so that the righteousness of the community is amplified and somewhat transformed version of the righteousness of the individual, we can no longer stay in the righteousness of the individual. We have to leap, as it were, bridge ourselves over to the righteousness of the community. All this is happening just at the time when the sense of community and the larger sense the Roman Empire is coming into being. So that Caesar will be the perfect foil to the Christ. Be the perfect foil.
The next testament is the Testament of Naphtali. Naphtali was concerning natural goodness, and I won't go too much into it, except that here we find in Naphtali for as a man's strength, so also is his work as his eye. So also, is his sleep as his soul. So also, is his word, either in the law of the Lord or in the law of Belial. And there is a division between light and darkness, as there's a division between seeing and hearing. So also, there is a division between man and man, and between woman and woman. And it is not to be said that the one is like the other, either in face or in mind. For God made all things good in their order. He joined everything together for a specific purpose in its order. But the order is to work together, to come together. The emphasis is on the articulation of individuality so that the community has fullness, and it has to have all this articulation so that the fullness is wholesome. The community represents then a perfected being. If thou bid the eye to hear it, it cannot. So, neither while ye are in darkness can you do the works of light. Naphtali is like this.
And so, he says, be ye therefore not eager to corrupt your doings through covetousness, or with vain words to beguile your souls, because if ye keep silence and purity of heart, ye shall understand how to hold fast the will of God, and to cast away the will of Belial. Suns and moon and stars change not their order. So do ye also change not the law of God in the disorderliness of your doings. The Gentiles went astray and forsook the Lord, and changed their order, and obeyed stocks and stones, spirits of deceit. But ye shall not be so, my children, recognizing in the firmament, and in the earth, and in the sea, and in all created things, the Lord who made all things that ye become not as Sodom, which changed the order of nature. In like manner the watchers also changed the order of their nature, whom the Lord cursed at the flood, on whose account he made the earth without habitation and fruitless.
So now the problem becomes exacerbated more and more in the Jewish understanding. We have to no longer remain strong within ourselves. We have to now be strong as a community. So, this exposes us to a lot of travail and deceit. We need a basis upon which community can be formed. Nature does not lie, but nature has become increasingly perverted. The order of history would be one source of naturality, but the watchers have changed all that. The mind has its order, and it would be a source of prototype to teach us how to have community. But the mind has been perverted. So they're saying again and again in this literature, in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, that we have a very difficult time becoming a spiritual community, because the only trustworthy guide that we have left when you take all of this away is the will of the Lord, which is inscrutable, which cannot be perverted, so that we have to come together as a community before we can understand the basis upon which this community will last. This is what is being said. We have to come together in trust that it is going to work out before we know that it is going to work out.
Hence the emphasis increasingly on faith that you don't know, you don't understand until in retrospect. It's not that man can't understand, but he has to have faith first before he can understand, because faith is the only possibility for the community. But because it's so difficult to affect this, we'll see that the Essenes increasingly take the most difficult path available to them. They will choose the most ascetic, disciplined, yoga-like existence. And this will become quite a prototype in the classical world.
The next testament, the ninth, is of Gad, and it's a testament concerning hatred. I won't go into that again. The typical order, hearkening back to Jacob and his sons and then saying, but we know from the Book of Enoch that you're going to go astray. And we know that these hard times are coming, and therefore you have to pay attention to this particular aspect. So, obey your fathers. Bury me near my fathers. He drew up his feet and fell asleep in peace, and after five years they carried him up to Hebron and laid him with his father's there all being laid together at Mount Hebron. Mount Hebron is the place where Jesus has his first transfiguration. Mount Hebron is the place where the watchers came down. The angelic angels who fell in love with the daughters of men and coveted them. That's where they came down.
So, the top of Hebron becomes the focal place, the point. It's far in the north. It's even beyond Galilee. The tenth testament is of Asher, and Asher concerns the two faces of vice and virtue. And the Testament of Asher goes constantly into this doubling aspect. One has to watch out for this doubling aspect. We would say psychologically that the polarity is a sign that the complex is working on you. When you notice the polarities more and more, it's a sign that the complex is fermenting in you. And one, then, increasingly is tempted to find false wisdom in limbo in doing nothing because one can see equally that each issue divides itself. Each situation has a pro and a con, and one tends to want to back into non-doing. And what Judaism says again and again, that only by good works does this new community actually get affected, actually happen. That non-doing is the very source then, of deceit and evil.
The eleventh son is Joseph, and Joseph is ostensibly about sobriety, as they say, but what he is about is not so much sobriety, but what the Greeks called sophrosyne, which was an evenness of mind. Tt was said that Sophocles displayed the most of sophrosyne, the evenness of mind, and yet able to act and to act on the basis of the evenness of mind. So, to call it sobriety, as they do here, is somewhat misleading. It's a Victorian usage by even talking about emotional power. Or it would be, it would be an evenness between mental and emotional tones, the emotional tone and mental structure. A large part of Joseph recounts the temptations by wealthy Egyptian women to get him to lie with them. It is not a story that is paltry. It's a story that's poignant because Joseph has a visionary capacity, a visionary quality. So, he is related to Daniel. He's like Daniel, but unlike Daniel, he has eleven brothers who have to come together with him. In fact, he has ten brothers because the eleventh brother is younger than Joseph. He comes after Joseph, and it's the younger brother that is able finally to bring in this family community of all the twelve tribes coming together - Joseph.
And I'm going to skip over some of it. Towards the end of Joseph, notice the visionary tone in Joseph, he says, and I saw that from Judah was born a virgin wearing a linen garment, and from her was born a lamb without spot. And on his left hand there was, as it were, a lion. And all the beasts rushed against him, and the lamb overcame them, and destroyed them, and trod them underfoot. And because of him the angels and men rejoiced in all the land. And these things shall come to pass in their season, and in the last days. Do ye therefore, my children, observe the commandments of the Lord, and honor Levi and Judah. For from them shall arise unto you the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world, one who saveth all the Gentiles and Israel. For his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, which shall not pass away. But my kingdom among you shall come to an end as a watcher's hammock, which after the summer disappears.
So, Joseph has this vision, and he's the one that has to share it. And he is a set upon by his brothers because he is the one who has brought the message. The twelfth son is Benjamin. And the Testament of Benjamin concerns pure mind. Not so much purity of mind as pure mind. And it runs like this. The copy of the words of Benjamin, which he commanded his sons to observe after he lived 125 years. And he kissed them and said, as Isaac was born to Abraham in his old age, so also was I to Jacob. And since Rachel, my mother died in giving me birth, I had no milk. Therefore, I was suckled by Bilhah, her handmaid. For Rachel remained barren for twelve years after she had born Joseph. And she prayed the Lord with fasting twelve days. And she conceived and bare me. For my father loved Rachel dearly and prayed that he might see two sons born from her. Therefore, I was called Benjamin, that is, a son of days, of old days of old age. And I went into Egypt to Joseph, and my brother recognized me. He said unto me, what did they tell my father when they sold me? And I said unto him, they dab, dab thy coat with blood, and sent it, and said, no, whether this be thy son's coat, remember it was goat blood. And he said unto me, even so, brother, when they had stripped me of my coat, they gave me to the Ishmaelites, and they gave me a loin cloth, and scourged me, and bade me run. And for one of them that had beaten me with a rod, a lion met him and slew him. And so, his associates were frightened. Do ye therefore, my children, says Benjamin, love the Lord, God of heaven and earth, and keep his commandments, following the example of the good and holy man Joseph.
Why is Joseph the example? Two reasons that are now braided one, he has kept his visionary tie to the divine, and two, he has kept himself open to the family community as a whole. It is only because of Joseph's integrity in Judaism that the people could be saved 400 years later, brought out of Egypt by Moses 400 years later. It was only because of the integrity of Joseph that left that impress of the community. The mystery of the community that even after all that time of slavery and degradation, they still had the spiritual capacity to be recognized as a people. There was something there to, to grab on to, to lead out and to refurbish, to save. The living seed was in the vision of the community, and this is the very essence of Judaism. The call is "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one," and it is a declaration to the community that they are united in a way that can never be disbound. This is the very essence of Judaism.
So, Benjamin says, then let your mind be unto good, even as ye know me. For he that hath his mind right sayeth all things rightly fear ye the Lord and love your neighbor. And even though the spirits of Belial claim you to afflict you with every evil, they shall not have dominion over you, even as they had not over Joseph, my brother. How many men wish to slay him? And God shielded him, for he that feareth God, and loveth his neighbor cannot be smitten by the spirits of Belial. Being shielded by the fear of God. Notice that the emphasis here is on the interplay. For he that feareth God and loveth his neighbor.
Do you see the interplay? The individual fears God and loves his neighbor. It's the same motion. The exteriorization of the fear of God is the love of neighbor. This is a very powerful current. Only when that evenness of mind, which is a pure mind, is present does the channel move along this feeling toned corridor of fear and love. As one does, God and the community become connected, a clear channel. If love and fear are polarized, then the divine doesn't have a clear channel through to the community, and man is the only being who can balance out that love and fear so that they are the same feeling. And that feeling is the structure of the pure mind. That character. Thus, the community receives that character from its population and there manifest the face of the divine.
This is roughly the way that they would have said it about, I imagine, about 50 BC. If you wish to read the document that we started off with about four months back. The Wisdom of Solomon, the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, you'll find there this a description of Sophia, of Wisdom. And it's the perfect expression of the manifestation of the loved one. Sophia is the loved one. She is the mother of the community. She is the divine in its incarnated capacity. What she would give birth to that is the new man.
Well, I think we have to stop there tonight. We finished with Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Next week we're going to go to the Essenes. We're going to go to the Essene communities, and we're going to go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And you have to be aware now that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the Jewish side of a parallel happening, that in the AD's will manifest itself in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic material. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the BC, and the Nag Hammadi are the AD. The one is the Jewish, the other is the Christian Gnostic. They're both essentially Jewish except that in the AD there will be the primary difference, that the sense, the shape of reality, is now a transcendental, invisible shape and has no longer a necessary need to be put into stone and brick and mortar. This would be the primary difference.
Well, let's stop there. Thanks for bearing with this most difficult thing.
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