Book of Job a Puzzle to Scholars

by Damien F. Mackey “The language in Job is unlike any other found in the Bible, or outside it. True, the book is written in Hebrew, but it is very strange Hebrew indeed. It has more unique words than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The language is archaic, which would indicate that it was very ancient: but it is also heavily influenced by Aramaic, which would make it relatively late”. Elon Gilad So devoid of (auto-)biographical details is the Book of Job that it is a complete nightmare for commentators to try to pin it to a particular era. Guesses about it range from before the time of Abram all the way down to the late C6th BC return from Babylonian captivity. That is an incredible range of something like one and half millennia! Elon Gilad, writing for Haaretz, tells of the puzzlement scholars face with the Book of Job: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/1.741973 The Book of Job is quite possibly the strangest book in the Hebrew Bible, and is notoriously difficult to date. In essence, Job is an essay on the problem of evil. The book starts with God and Satan discussing Job, a “perfect and upright” man who “feared God and eschewed evil” (1:1). Satan tells God that Job is only virtuous because he is well off; were he to suffer, he would surely “curse thee to thy face” (1:11). God accepts the challenge and gives Satan permission to destroy Job’s life. Satan kills his children, destroys his house, bankrupts him and gives him a terrible skin disease. Job’s unnamed wife says to him, “Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die” (2:9), but Job stands firm. The story then stops being a narrative and takes a philosophical bent, with Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, each in turn, saying that all reward and punishment comes from God. God is just. Job was punished. Therefore Job must have sinned grievously. A fourth character then enters the story – Elihu, who accuses Job as well (chapters 32-37). Biblical scholars suspect him to be a later addition to the book, mostly because while the first three friends are mentioned in the introduction, Elihu appears from nowhere. Either way, Job denies sinning, and calls on the heavens to testify on his behalf. At this point (38:1) God appears from the whirlwind and answers Job’s explicit implication that he is unjust. …. Strange Hebrew Since the story lacks any historical context and no historic individuals are mentioned, it is very hard to date. The Talmud (redacted at about 500 CE) has several versions. The Talmud (Bava Barta 14b) says it was written by Moses, but then on the next page (15a), rabbis Jonathan and Eliezer say Job was among those who returned from the Babylonian Exile in 538 BCE, which was about seven centuries after Moses’ supposed death. The very same page of Talmud suggests that Job is not a real person and that the whole book is just an allegory; also, that Job was the contemporary of Jacob or Abraham. Modern biblical scholars on the other hand think they do have a clue. There are no historic reference points but they can analyze the language and theology, and compare them with other Hebraic writings of known provenance. There's a snag, though. The language in Job is unlike any other found in the Bible, or outside it. True, the book is written in Hebrew, but it is very strange Hebrew indeed. It has more unique words than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The language is archaic, which would indicate that it was very ancient: but it is also heavily influenced by Aramaic, which would make it relatively late. Theories for the peculiar language range from it being written by Arabian Jews, to it being a poor translation from Aramaic, to the text being written in Idumean, the language of Biblical Edom, of which we have no record - but would have likely been very similar to Hebrew (note that Job is described not as Judean but Idumean). The most popular theory now is that Job was written by someone whose first language was Aramaic but whose literary language was Hebrew, and that the use of archaic language was deliberate. This would indicate that we are talking about an author or more likely authors living in the early Second Temple period. [End of quote] Allow me to offer a few possible guidelines. • Key to the dating of the Book of Job is mention of the “Chaldeans” in 1:17: “… another messenger came and said, ‘The Chaldeans formed three raiding parties and swept down on your camels and made off with them. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!’” • Commentators are of course aware that Job, who lived “In the land of Uz”, and “among all the people of the East” (1:1, 3), was not geographically a part of mainstream Israel. And that would allow for some degree of foreigness in the language. • Job is Tobias, son of Tobit. See my: Job's Life and Times https://www.academia.edu/3787850/Jobs_Life_and_Times And this fixes the major part of his early life to the later neo-Assyrian empire, whose fall he lived to witness (Tobit 14:14-15): “Tobias died, having lived long enough to hear about the destruction of Nineveh …. As long as he lived he gave thanks for what God had done to Nineveh”. With these points in mind, we can at least broadly date the irruption of the “Chaldeans” in Job 1:17 to the time when the Chaldean empire had begun to overtake the Assyrian one. This revised view of Job now enables for him to be firmly fixed to an historical period, and removes so much of the ‘strangeness’ that the Book of Job can present to biblical scholars. No longer can we entertain the Talmud’s view “that Job is not a real person and that the whole book is just an allegory; also, that Job was the contemporary of Jacob or Abraham”. Job (Tobias) and his relatives had served some of the greatest kings of antiquity (Shalmaneser; Sennacherib; Esarhaddon). The book itself may have been written, at least in part, by the brilliant Elihu, who was an eyewitness to the dialogues that occurred during Job’s major trial. Some suggest that Elihu may have been a Syrian, and hence a speaker of Aramaïc. Job 32:2: “Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram”. For, according to Francis N. Peloubet (Studies in the Book of Job, p. 66): “[Elihu] was an Aramean (Syrian) of the family or tribe of Ram = Aram = Syria”. That could explain why: “The language in Job is unlike any other found in the Bible, or outside it. True, the book is written in Hebrew, but it is very strange Hebrew indeed. It has more unique words than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The language is archaic, which would indicate that it was very ancient: but it is also heavily influenced by Aramaic, which would make it relatively late”. As far as goes that other view of “… the text being written in Idumean, the language of Biblical Edom, of which we have no record - but would have likely been very similar to Hebrew (note that Job is described not as Judean but Idumean)”, I would dismiss this because I consider that Job was, not an Idumean, but a Naphtalian Israelite who had grown up in Assyrian captivity. Problematical, too, is Elon Gilad’s final assessment of the Book of Job: Archaeological signs from deep antiquity Even if the story of Job was written down during the early Second Temple era (late 6th century BCE to the early 4th century BCE), that doesn’t mean the story was a new one. In fact, we know that it was extremely ancient. Ezekiel (about 622 to 570 BCE) mentions Job together with Noah and Daniel as men of ancient renown (Ezekiel 14:14). This means that for Ezekiel, Job was one of those mythological characters that people told stories about throughout the Near East, and not particularly Jewish, just as a story of a Noah-like character appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a mythical Daniel is known from the ancient Semitic city of Ugarit. …. [End of quote] The story was by no means “extremely ancient” in Gilad’s context of “mythological”. Its origin was comparatively late, approximately during the C7th-C6th BC rise of the Chaldean (or Neo-Babylonian) empire, meaning that Job was (quite unlike the ancient Noah) an older contemporary of the prophet Ezekiel who mentions him. Likewise, Ezekiel refers to his wise contemporary, “Daniel”, who is not the same as the pagan Dan’el of Ugaritic literature. On this, see my: Identity of the ‘Daniel’ in Ezekiel 14 and 28 https://www.academia.edu/29786004/Identity_of_the_Daniel_in_Ezekiel_14_and_28

Complete confusion as to true era of prophet Job

by Damien F. Mackey “All the Tannaim and Amoraim, with the exception of the one who placed Job in the time of Jacob, were of opinion that Job was an Israelite …”. R. Hananeel Thankfully I, now, due to my double biblical identification of the prophet Job, as (i) Habakkuk: “Where shall I place Habakkuk?” (1) (DOC) "Where shall I place Habakkuk?" | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu and, as (ii) Tobias, son of Tobit: Job’s Life and Times (1) (DOC) Job's Life and Times | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu am in a position to exclude whichever other suggested candidates could not have been Job - such as the Jobab of the Patriarchal era, or Jobabs of the Mosaïc or Judges era: Prophet Job did not belong to the Patriarchal or Judges era (2) (DOC) Prophet Job did not belong to the Patriarchal or Judges era | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu The utter confusion over the true era of the prophet Job is clearly apparent in this piece from the Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on “Job”: JOB - JewishEncyclopedia.com Opinions as to Date.—In Rabbinical Literature: Owing to the importance of the Book of Job, the Talmudists occupied themselves frequently with its chief character. One of the amoraim expressed his opinion in the presence of Samuel b. Naḥmani that Job never existed and that the whole story was a fable (B. B. 15a). An opinion couched in similar words and pronounced by Simeon ben Laḳish was interpreted to mean that such a person as Job existed, but that the narratives in the drama are inventions (Gen. R. lvii.). Apart from these utterances all of the rabbis took it for granted that Job existed, but they differed widely as to the epoch in which he lived and as to his nationality, two points of discussion closely connected. Every one of the Talmudists inferred Job's epoch and nationality from an analogy between two Biblical words or sentences. According to Bar Ḳappara, Job lived in the time of Abraham; according to Abba b. Kahana, in the time of Jacob, he having married Dinah, Jacob's daughter (ib.; B. B. 15b; comp. additions in Targ. Yer. to Job ii. 9). R. Levi said that Job lived in the time of Jacob's sons; and he also said, in the name of Jose b. Ḥalafta, that Job was born when Jacob and his children entered Egypt and that he died when the Israelites left that country. Job consequently lived 210 years (comp. Rashi on Ex. xii. 40). When Satan came to accuse the Israelites of being idolaters, God set him against Job, whence Job's misfortunes (Gen. R. l.c.). This opinion is supported by the statement that Job with Jethro and Balaam was consulted by Pharaoh as to the means of reducing the number of the children of Israel and that Job was stricken with calamity because he had remained silent (Sanh. 106a; Soṭah 11a). It may be mentioned that this legend is narrated differently in the "Sefer ha-Yashar" (section "Shemot," p. 110a, ed. Leghorn, 1870) as follows: At first Job, who was one of Pharaoh's eunuchs and counselors, advised Pharaoh to have every male child murdered (Ex. i. 16). Afterward Pharaoh, having had a dream which prognosticated the birth of a helper, again consulted Job. The latter answered evasively: "Let the king do as he pleases" ("Sefer ha-Yashar," l.c. p. 111a). Levi b. Laḥma also held that Job lived in the time of Moses, by whom the Book of Job was written. Some of the rabbis even declare that the one servant of Pharaoh who feared the word of God (Ex. ix. 20) was Job (Ex. R. xii. 3). Raba, specifying the time more accurately, said Job lived in the time of the spies who were sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan (B. B. 15a). According to these rabbis, Job was a Gentile—an opinion which is elsewhere expressed more fully, in that Job is said to have been a pious Gentile or one of the prophets of the Gentiles (ib. 15b; Seder 'Olam R. xxi.). Other tannaim place Job variously in the reign of Saba, in that of the Chaldees, and in that of Ahasuerus. R. Johanan and R. Eleazar both declared that Job was one of those who returned from the Captivity and that his bet ha-midrash was at Tiberias (Yer. Soṭah v. 8; B. B. l.c.; Gen. R. l.c.). It is said in B. B. (ib.) that these tannaim necessarily considered Job an Israelite; but R. Hananeel (ad loc.) has in his text, "All the Tannaim and Amoraim, with the exception of the one who placed Job in the time of Jacob, were of opinion that Job was an Israelite" (comp. also Gen. R. l.c.). ….

Archaeology on side with the Gospels

“The University of Haifa announced a new discovery of an ancient synagogue in Migdal. In biblical times this area was Magdala, home of Mary Magdalene”. Greg Sheridan Christianity’s purpose: the re-enchantment of life GREG SHERIDAN https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/a-time-of-enchantment/news-story/8de29bce7208dd3e86cc1632a90a4008 This week our blighted age, challenged world and disenchanted civilisation received an enchanting Christmas present from the Holy Land. The University of Haifa announced a new discovery of an ancient synagogue in Migdal. In biblical times this area was Magdala, home of Mary Magdalene. Migdal is on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. The newly discovered synagogue dates from the first century, the time of Jesus. It is yet another archaeological discovery that bears out the historical accuracy of the Gospels and the New Testament generally. The New Testament is primarily a religious testimony to the universal faith of Christianity, which is not limited to any one civilisation or culture. But the Bible is also the central book of Western civilisation. Establishing that the New Testament is true in everything about it which can be tested is a wonderful boon for our culture. And our culture is in need of all the help it can get. Modern liberalism, cut off from the sustenance of its Christian roots, is running mad down every dead end, diving into every poison creek, of extreme identity politics, racial politics, gender politics and, if not the war of all against all, an increasing intolerance of almost all for anybody they disagree with. The roots of our crisis are deep. After the Enlightenment, the righteous exuberance that celebrated reason and rationality as the heart of civic life, our culture took a bad wrong turn, based on two dreadfully mistaken propositions. The first is that God is dead, that science has pronounced against God, that God never existed. The second is that the Bible is full of lies, and the New Testament is folklore and oral tradition at best, and does not describe historical reality. Neither of these propositions is true, or necessary to the Enlightenment. Max Weber called this disenchantment. It has been the project of modernist ideology for the past 200 years, to rob the culture, and human beings, of the enchantment of life. The intellectual object is to erase from life the element of mystery. The consequence emotionally is that it also strips life of its poetry. It strips the normal quotidian rank-and-file human being of the sense of magnificence and renders life tawdry and tedious. To escape that tedium, people seek intensity for its own sake, often courting oblivion and creating false transcendence through ever more neurotic politics. During the past five years I’ve written two books attempting, feebly enough, to offer a thimble full of rebuttal to the two obnoxious propositions of disenchantment. The first, God is Good for You, asserts that God is alive. Belief in God is intellectually compelling (though not finally provable) and science has certainly taken no stand against God at all. It’s not qualified to do so, even if it wanted to. In reality good science has no such ambition. Writing this book involved systematically reading the New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens etc. I was astonished at how lame and antique, how frowsty and loose and simultaneously logic-chopping and ramshackle, their arguments were. The Christianity they mock was a farcical caricature. The success of their books relied in part on the reading audience having no real knowledge in substance of Christianity. Much of their effort sought a false glamour by association with real science. So an unprovable or even ridiculous argument would be sat next to a lot of irrelevant science. Dawkins argued, for example, that because the universe is 14 billion years old there can be no God, because God wouldn’t waste 14 billion years constructing a whole universe just for humanity to enjoy one planet in one tiny corner. To which one thinks: how would Dawkins know what God might do? God’s generosity and grandeur might be beyond Dawkins. To the Christian, it seems characteristic of God that he would spend 14 billion years preparing a beautiful garden just for us. My second book, Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World, seeks to find Jesus in the New Testament and among his first friends, and again among his friends today. It asserts that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are the same person, whereas divorcing those two has been central to the brutalist machinery of the disenchantment project. Re-establishing the credibility of the New Testament – not as the founding myth of Christianity but as the historical truth of Christianity, and indeed of human history, would help the human situation profoundly. It would also, incidentally, rescue Western civilisation. Many of the objections to the idea that the New Testament involves witness testimony to real events comes from good-hearted folks whose knowledge of biblical scholarship doesn’t only incline them to an ultraliberal version of Christianity, with Jesus stripped of divinity, but whose sense of biblical scholarship is out of date. Up until the 1960s or ’70s, it was fairly common to hear a popularised version of an ultraliberal interpretation of the New Testament that held it was the end point of a long process of oral tradition that changed radically over the years with the telling, and that much of the miraculous and divine stuff had been inserted, perhaps centuries later, by church authorities to suit their own agendas, sometimes moral agendas, more often power agendas. This interpretation was always wrong, but it was once semi-respectable in scholarly circles and widely and mistakenly held in popular culture. In so far as it had a flickering half-life within Christianity, it often came to people through American celebrity Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong. Within Christianity it lingers in this way. The real division within Christian churches now is not so much between denominations but within denominations, between those who believe Jesus rose from the dead and is the second person of the Holy Trinity of the Godhead, and those who take a view with less divine claims. In other words, between those who believe, say, in the Apostles Creed, and those who, for whatever reason, don’t. At the wider social level, books and films such as The Da Vinci Code have popularised all manner of crazy conspiracy theories, based on the bedrock of the old modernist contention that the New Testament is all fiction, folklore or falsehood. But high-quality modern scholarship is moving strongly to the view that the New Testament involves authentic testimony. This is a complex process and any generalisation about biblical scholarship has a thousand contrary examples. But a series of interlocking dynamics has led to the validation of the New Testament as a historic source in the new scholarship. One is the ongoing process of archaeology. This process yields real, hard, new facts. It is less a process of inference. If archaeology discovers an object from the ancient world, all subsequent scholarship has to take it into account. The second big factor is a vastly increased attention to the Jewishness of Jesus, of his first followers and of the context in which he lived. There are a thousand reasons Christian scholars neglected this in the past, even as they regarded the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, as an essential part of Christianity. Historical work beyond biblical studies has now given us more knowledge of the Jewish context of Jesus than ever. And this, as much as anything, has tended to validate the New Testament. Finally, Christian scholars themselves have become much more rigorous in their approach to historical research and this has been rewarding. Christian schol¬ars and leaders work more co-operatively across denominations than before. The previous pope, Benedict, himself a formidable scholar, was very scriptural in his intellectual approach and this endeared him to Bible-centred Protestants. Two important caveats. Many biblical scholars who accept now that the New Testament involves important testimony, including witness testimony, do not embrace belief in Christianity. They still might hold that the resurrection did not happen, could not happen, was a mistaken account or a dishonest account. No one any longer seriously holds it was inserted a hundred years later by scheming church authorities. Second, Christians themselves should not have their beliefs determined by biblical scholarship. Most biblical scholarship is inferential and a little speculative. It ought to have a certain becoming modesty about the certitude of its speculations. It is not because of a trend in scholarship that I believe in Christianity. But modern people, indoctrinated from birth with the hard disenchantment doctrine that the New Testament is all lies, should be aware of just how profound a revolution has taken place in biblical scholarship. So back to the synagogue in Migdal. This is another important piece of evidence that has come out even since the publication of my modest effort, Christians. The background is this. Before 2008, some scholars held that there had been no synagogues in the Galilee area during Jesus’ time. Until then, there had been no conclusive archaeological evidence of a Galilee synagogue in Jesus’ time. One theory was that Jews in the Galilee were so close to Jerusalem that they could travel there to the Jewish temple, the Second Temple, for important festivals. Around AD70, decades after Jesus’ death, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. So the local Jewish community started to build local synagogues, some of which are well known archaeologically. As so often, scholars were mistaking the absence of evidence for the evidence of absence. Thus some scholars argued that when the Gospels spoke of Jesus teaching at Galilee synagogues, this was an indication that the Gospels had been written long after AD70. Because there were synagogues by then, the Gospel authors were mistakenly assuming that the situation had been the same in the time of Jesus. If true this would indicate a late dating for the Gospels and that they were not written either by witnesses or by people who knew witnesses. Then in 2008, in a routine excavation before the building of a new resort, the Israel Antiquities Authority discovered the ruins of a synagogue from the time of Jesus, also in Migdal. This was a revolutionary discovery and the site was riddled with historical treasures. In the next few years two other synagogues from Jesus’ time were discovered. And now this week a second synagogue in Migdal. Many visitors to Israel have been to the ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum, where Jesus also taught. This is a later synagogue, perhaps 4th century. but intriguingly it was built on the foundations of an earlier building. It was the custom to build sacred buildings where old ones had stood, so that may well be a fifth Galilee synagogue from Jesus’ time. Doubtless more will be discovered. So in this matter, the scholars were wrong, the New Testament was right. Let me offer a second example. The most important book of biblical scholarship in the past 20 years was Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, especially the second edition in 2017. He takes advantage of a magnificent database that Jewish scholars have assembled of the distribution and popularity of Jewish names through the centuries. It turns out that the spread of the Jewish names across the whole New Testament – not in any one book but across the whole – matches more or less exactly with the preponderance of Jewish names of New Testament times. This would have been impossible to fake. Imagine writing a historical novel now about Australia 200 years ago without access to such a database. Would you get the names right? Many archaeological discoveries have validated the New Testament. A stone inscription showed the Gospels had Pontius Pilate’s official title right, Roman historian Tacitus got it wrong. A physical fragment of John’s Gospel found in Egypt put an absolute limit on the date of its composition. There are countless others. So here is the good news. The New Testament is true. God is alive after all. Meaning and transcendence reign. Enchantment is back. Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication. It makes the case for the historical rel... Read more Related stories • The West may not survive its own woke madness • Time to reassess Mary, the first Christian • ‘I couldn’t function without my faith’

Whale-hunting Nebuchednezzar visited by man-in-a-whale, Jonah

by Damien F. Mackey “King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has devoured me; he has crushed me. He has set me aside like an empty dish; he has swallowed me like a sea monster; he filled his belly with my delicacies; he has vomited me out”. Jeremiah 51:34 Why did the prophet Jeremiah choose to describe King Nebuchednezzar by using a metaphor so obviously inspired by the true story recorded in the Book of Jonah? According to what will emerge in this article, there may be several major reasons for this: - Nebuchednezzar was such a Babylonian (Chaldean) total devourer of Judah; - Nebuchednezzar was also a hunter of whales; - Nebuchednezzar was Jonah 3:6’s “king of Nineveh”. Although I was aware that Assyrian whale-hunting in the Mediterranean Sea had occurred during the reign of Tiglath-pileser so-called I – {who, in my revision of ‘Middle’ Assyrian history, belongs as late as the siege of Samaria, this Tiglath-pileser being the same as Shalmaneser so-called V} - I had no idea whatsoever, until very recently, that Nebuchednezzar ‘the Great’, a later king, had indulged in this form of marine hunting activity. Paul Haupt tells, in his article “Jonah’s Whale” (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 46, No. 185, Jan. - Apr., 1907), about the involvement of Tiglath-pileser in a whale hunt, and of the reception by Ashurnasirpal of a tribute gift of ivory whale teeth. He also tells us what sort of whale it must have been (pp. 155-156): Sperm-whales are found in the Mediterranean, although they are not frequent. In a cuneiform inscription of the Assyrian king Assur-nâçir-pal [Ashurnasirpal] … we find the statement that his predecessor Tiglath-pileser I … boarded Phoenician ships at Arvad (near the N. E. end of the Mediterranean) and slew a blower …. The Greek name of the sperm-whale, physeter, means blower, i.e., spouting up water. …. In a paper on the cuneiform name of the cachalot … I showed that the blower (Assyr. Nâkhiru) slain by the ancient Assyrian king … must have been a sperm-whale … because in a passage of the cuneiform annals of Assur-nâçir-pal we read that this king received, as tribute from Tyre, Sidon, Arvad … ivory teeth of the blower, the creature of the sea. This blower with ivory teeth cannot have been a narwhal … or walrus … these animals are not found in the Mediterranean. The sperm-whale has, on each side of the lower jaw … from 20 to 25 conical (slightly recurved) teeth which consist of the finest ivory. [End of quote] If Paul Haupt was correct in all of this back in 1907, then we learn some most interesting things that may have a strong bearing upon that fascinating, but little agreed upon, Book of Jonah. We learn that the kings of Assyria not only knew about whales, Sperm Whales, but that at least one of the kings had hunted the great sea creature. We learn in what Sea they moved, and that they were not only hunted, but captured, and commercially (or politically) exploited. I also deduce from Paul Haupt’s article that, if Ashurnasirpal (I/II) referred back to Tiglath-pileser as a predecessor king, then Ashurnasirpal must (contrary to any text books) post-date Assyria’s siege of Samaria (c. 722 BC, conventional dating). That makes Ashurnasirpal very late, indeed. We know of at least one other Assyrian king who engaged in – or claimed to – the hunting of blower whales. For in my recent article: Ashur-bel-kala as Ashurbanipal (DOC) Ashur-bel-kala as Ashurbanipal | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu it became apparent that Ashur-bel-kala, already known to have been a keen hunter, had boasted of capturing blower whales. Thus I quoted from the Wikipedia article, “Ashur-bel-kala”: Aššūr-bēl-kala’s interests were not solely zoological as he enjoyed hunting and boasts killing wild bulls and cows “at the city of Araziqu which is before the land of Ḫatti and at the foot of Mount Lebanon.” …. He “rebuilt from top to bottom the storehouses of my lordly palace, which are at the fore part of the enclosure” … and Aššur-nādin-aḫḫē's terrace of the New Palace at Nineveh, placed gate guardians inspired by the nāḫiru he had supposedly hunted. …. Now Ashur-bel-kala who was Ashurbanipal, as I went to some trouble to show in that article, was the same, again, as the great king Nebuchednezzar, according to my identification of the latter as Ashurbanipal (compare with Nebuchednezzar: grandiloquent; 43-year reign; conquest of Egypt): Ashurbanipal the Mighty King (3) Ashurbanipal the Mighty King | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu The great fish (דָּג גָּדוֹל), dag gadol, of Jonah 1:17, a real creature, is clearly also a symbol of the mighty Chaldean king, Nebuchednezzar, devouring Judah. Jeremiah obligingly makes that connection for us: “King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon … like a sea monster …”. Jeremiah uses a word for the creature, tannin (תַּנִּ֔ין), different from that used in the Book of Jonah, dag. {We know, of course, that a whale is not actually classified as a fish}. Jonah’s father, Amos, will earlier use another Hebrew word, again, when predicting what could happen if one tries to flee from the Lord (Amos 9:3): “Even if they hide at the bottom of the ocean, I will send the sea serpent after them to bite them”. The Hebrew word used here for “sea serpent” is nahash (נָּחָ֖שׁ). - Nebuchednezzar was such a Babylonian (Chaldean) total devourer of Judah; We know from the Scriptures about King Nebuchednezzar’s all-encompassing, God-given power (e.g. Daniel 2:37-38): ‘Your Majesty, you are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; in your hands he has placed all mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds in the sky. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold’. - Nebuchednezzar was also a hunter of whales; And we have just determined that Nebuchednezzar, as Ashur-bel-kala, had boasted of having hunted blower whales. But what about our third ‘major reason’?: - Nebuchednezzar was Jonah 3:6’s “king of Nineveh”. Well, I have already shown at some length that King Nebuchednezzar, particularly in his guise as Esarhaddon, was Jonah 3:6’s “king of Nineveh”: De-coding Jonah (7) De-coding Jonah | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu even right down to: The ‘Jonah incident’ historically identified (7) The 'Jonah incident' historically identified | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu The Ninevites and their king had heard all about the Jonah miracle, not least from those exemplary sailors and captain on board the ship, who had watched the sea grow calm after they had tossed Jonah overboard at his request, and had converted before the Ninevites had had a chance to (Jonah 1:12-16). ‘For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also will the Son of Man be to this generation’. Luke 11:30 When the man-in-a-whale, Jonah, visited the city, Nineveh, of the whale-hunting King Nebuchednezzar, causing that king’s decree of repentance (Jonah 3:7-9), it is almost certain that the two celebrities did not meet. The out-of-sorts prophet Jonah, having briefly spoken his words, had then skulked off to the east of Nineveh to see what the Lord was going to do (4:1-5).

Were the Philistines barbaric?

by Damien F. Mackey ‘I brought the Philistines from Crete, and the Syrians from Kir, just as I brought you from Egypt’. Amos 9:7 For the approximately century-long period known as the United Monarchy of Israel (kings Saul, David and Solomon), Israel will encounter basically the same hostile forces as were prevalent during the much longer period of the Judges. Chief among these were the Philistines and Amalek, also Ammon and Moab, Edom, the Canaanites and, sometimes, the Midianites (Ishmaelites). According to I Samuel 14:47-48, Saul fought against Moab, Ammon, Edom and the (Syrian) kings of Zobah. In addition, he fought against the Philistines and the Amalekites. Not much is said about the wars against Moab, Ammon, Edom and the kings of Zobah. The chief difference between the two eras (Judges and United Monarchy) will be the enmity also experienced by kings Saul, David and Solomon from the Syrians (Zobah), these not figuring notably in the Judges phase. With king David’s powerful Syrian foe, Hadadezer, to be identified as Shamsi-Adad I, who also ruled Assyria (or part thereof), we finally find our way back geographically to those more distant eastern regions that had fallen into a big gap in our history after the demise of the Akkadians, with Egypt then taking over as the main world power. Then, during the phases of the MBI Wanderings and the Conquest, and on through the centuries of more settled rule by the Judges, we had very little to say about Egypt, which, subdued, had fallen under foreign Hyksos rule. However, given the possibility that the supposedly Hyksos king, Khayan, may have been an ancestor of Shamsi-Adad, a Syrian, then could there actually have been some Syrian-Amorite connection with the Hyksos? Philistines Although today we use the word, “Philistine”, disparagingly, to mean “a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts” (Oxford languages), the Philistines or Cretans, wrongly called “Minoans”, led the way as one of the most advanced cultures of the early ancient world. Gavin Menzies had really managed to bring to life this people and their civilisation and technology (especially maritime) in his very readable book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis: History’s Greatest Mystery Revealed. He may even have gone very close to solving the long-standing mystery of Atlantis, with the eruption of Thera (Santorini). Despite their technological expertise, though, their magnificent palaces and art, their fleets, and incredible mining skills and metallurgy, the Philistines were barbaric in their religious beliefs and practices. Worshipping a cruel Mother Goddess, while child sacrifice/infanticide is evidenced, a slimy fish god (Dagon), and many other idols. In some ways they are a perfect mirror reflection of our woke world today, a marvellous technology accompanied by a superstitious worship of Mother (Earth) Gaia, universal child sacrifice, all manner of idolatry – especially the worship of money and self. In short, a society teetering precariously on the edge (eve) of destruction, facing, what was predicted, but conditionally, by Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima, Portugal (1917): ‘Several entire nations will be annihilated’. The DNA of the Cretans reveals Anatolian origins, which is entirely consistent with the location of the Ark landing and traces of the earliest civilisations in NE Turkey. They would have been one of the early (Pre-Pottery) Neolithic cultures, as PPNA spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and beyond to the west. Certainly the Cretans were amongst the most successful of the Neolithic cultures - and wasn’t the rich island of Crete custom made for crops and farming, and animal husbandry! At least five palaces are known in Crete (viz. Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros and Kidonia), which just may, perhaps, suggest that the unusual confederacy of five kings (Pentarchy?) for which the Philistines became known in the land of Canaan (ruling Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza, Ekron, and Gath), had its origin type in Cretan rule. Gavin Menzies has badly mis-dated Cretan Neolithic I to about 100,000 BC, an unreasonably large figure for anyone to have to cope with. It needs to be divided by 50 to get close to what is should be, that is, about 2000 BC. Chronology is not a strong point in Menzies’ book, he being an experienced navigator (submariner), rather than a qualified historian or palaeontologist. Far more helpful, and scientific, I find, is Dr. Donovan Courville’s tracing of the distinctive Cretan pottery backwards from its appearances in Palestine at the time of King Saul, a major opponent of the Philistines, to Neolithic Crete 1 (in The Exodus Problem and its Ramifications, 1971). This needed to be done, Courville has done it, and no one else of whom I am aware so far appears to have become involved with it. And so continues the gross ignorance about the Philistines in relation to the Bible. Ancient historians, with their overblown chronology and an archaeology that does not properly co-ordinate across the board, have shown themselves to be totally ignorant about the biblical Philistines, for whom, they believe – confusing them with the badly mis-dated “Sea Peoples” (500 years too early) – they cannot find an archaeological locus in Palestine in the days of Abraham and Isaac (as according to Genesis). Whilst the pottery of the “Sea Peoples”, who do include Philistines (Palashtu) amongst their mobile thalassocracy, is of Aegean origin, as Courville has painstakingly shown, the pottery of the biblical Philistines (in the main) can be traced back to its most ancient Cretan origins, as non-Aegean ware. Courville will trace back this type of pottery from the time of King Saul, and Alalakh (needing to be re-dated), through the era of the Judges, to Neolithic Crete. Thanks to Dr. Peter Revesz, who has finally cracked the Cretan Linear A script, we can now know much more about the Cretans, their ancient interconnections, their language, culture and ethnicity. Watch, for example: Breakthrough Decipherment of Minoan Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphs | Minoans Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiLyN9T2stY

Amos and Hosea, a father and son

by Damien F. Mackey “Amos, like Hosea, accuses Israel of idolatry, but the main burden of [Amos’s] accusation is about the results of social injustice connected to their idolatry”. Whitney Woollard Little wonder that biblical commentators find striking similarities between the prophets, Amos and Hosea, both of whom preached to the northern kingdom of Israel. For this pair Amos and Hosea, who were also, respectively, Micah and Isaiah (and Micah and Uzziah of the Book of Judith) - and who were actually Simeonites from Judah in the south - were a father and son prophetic combination: God can raise up prophets at will - even from a shepherd of Simeon (2) God can raise up prophets at will - even from a shepherd of Simeon | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu Whitney Woollard has provided the following useful comparisons between the pair: https://bibleproject.com/blog/hosea-amos-two-sides-covenant-failure/ Hosea and Amos: Two Sides of Covenant Failure Unfaithful Whores and Unjust Hypocrites …. Reading the Book of the Twelve, commonly referred to as the Minor Prophets, can be really disorienting. These books are full of poetic language, metaphors, and imagery unfamiliar to modern readers. They also speak a lot about God’s judgment, which can be difficult to sit with. However, all the weird imagery and talk of a future doomsday serves a purpose—the prophets are retelling the story of Israel’s covenant failure and God’s impending judgment, while providing future hope for Israel beyond exile. Because these books are focusing on the same basic period of Israel’s story, reading one right after another can feel a bit redundant. But each of these prophets have a unique emphasis and a specific way they call Israel back to covenantal faithfulness. Let’s compare and contrast how the prophets are similar yet different, beginning with Hosea and Amos. The Same ... Hosea and Amos were contemporaries who overlapped both in terms of historical context and theological content. Amos is the earliest prophet named in the Old Testament books. He lived in southern Judea but spent his life prophesying about the apostasy of the northern kingdom during the reigns of Jeroboam II and Uzziah. Hosea lived in northern Israel and prophesied to his own people during the reigns of Jeroboam II and the flurry of bad kings that followed him until Assyria finally swept away the northern kingdom in 722 B.C. The driving theme of these books is the description and indictment of Israel’s idolatry. Both authors frequently use “Yahweh,” the name representing God’s special relationship between him and Israel. This is intentional—Israel hasn’t just rebelled, they’ve broken covenant with their covenantal God. The God whose love they’ve rejected is the God who chose them for himself and brought them out of the land of Egypt into the promised land. Hosea 11 and Amos 3 talk about this, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” Hosea 11:1 and “Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, o people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt.” Amos 3:1 Because Israel rejected the God who rescued them and gave them all they had, the prophetic message is that of imminent disaster for God’s faithless people. Unless they repent, return to Yahweh, and obey him, judgment will come. This is why you get accusation after accusation of the ways in which the northern kingdom has broken covenant with God through idolatry in both Hosea and Amos. In Hosea 4, the Lord is outraged that in the place of faithfulness and covenantal love there is “swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery” (4:1-2). That’s five out of the ten commandments right there! If that weren’t enough, chapter 4 also exposes how they sacrificed to pagan gods on the high places, engaged with cult prostitutes, and joined themselves to idols. Flip forward to Amos 4 and you see similar accusations. Israel has forsaken Yahweh to worship Canaanite gods at the idolatrous shrines erected at Bethel and Gilgal. At one time in Israel’s history, these places represented God’s special relationship with his people, but now they have become thoroughly corrupt. The same point is being made in Hosea and Amos: despite acting like every sinful action is well and good, the religious life of the northern tribes is certainly not acceptable to the Lord—and judgment is coming. ... But Different The historical context and theological content of Hosea and Amos may be similar, but the language and imagery each prophet uses to mount his accusations are unique. That’s what makes comparing Hosea and Amos so fascinating. Hosea: Israel as an Unfaithful Whore The most common image connected with idolatry in Hosea is adultery. His fundamental metaphor is idolatry as adultery. This is symbolically portrayed in Hosea’s marriage to Gomer in chapters 1-3. The book begins with the Lord telling Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” Hosea 1:3 And that’s just the start. The idea of prostitution is laced throughout. The Hebrew root zanah actually occurs fourteen times in this book! Israel, by turning to pagan gods, has broken its covenantal bond with Yahweh, the God who led them out of Egypt and made them his own people. The strong sexual language used serves a double purpose. It’s both a metaphor for Israel abandoning the Lord in favor of Baal, and a description of the kinds of behavior the Israelites were engaging in as part of the Canaanite cult religion. This is what life looks like when you abandon God for the demonic, pagan gods of the Canaanites. Idolatry, for Hosea, is about covenant betrayal. The Israelites have renounced their loyalty to the God who gave them everything. This disloyalty results in doing things mentioned above like swearing, deception, murder, stealing, sexual perversion, etc. This is especially inexcusable given this is the God to whom the Israelites owe everything. Israel’s covenant betrayal is the reason why you get this really emotive language on God’s part. No other biblical book includes such detailed description of God’s inner feelings. He’s portrayed as a spurned spouse whose feelings are hurt and a loving parent who grieves the fate of his rebellious child. You’re meant to imagine a husband whose stomach is in knots because his wife hasn’t come home yet. And he knows what she’s out doing. Or, a dad slumped over in his study looking at an old picture of his son remembering what it was like before his son cut himself off from the family. God is in anguish over Israel’s unfaithfulness. In Hosea 11:8 he cries, “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?” He was sick over the idea of sending them into exile, but this was the result of Israel’s idolatry. They broke the covenant and now they would experience the consequences. Amos: Israel as an Unjust Hypocrite While Hosea examines Israel’s failure to uphold the worship and ritual reverence for God, Amos focuses on the moral decay and social injustice that represents the other half of the covenant-failure coin. Amos, like Hosea, accuses Israel of idolatry, but the main burden of his accusation is about the results of social injustice connected to their idolatry. The book begins with a lion’s roar that withers fertile pastures (Amos 1:2). Yahweh was coming from Zion to judge the nations for their rebellion against the Creator of the earth. No one could escape the fire of judgment, including the northern kingdom. Much to Israel’s horror, they were going to be the primary object of destruction on the Day of the Lord because they had offended him more than all the other nations. Why, you might ask? Well, in chapter 3, he recounts how he had chosen them as his own people and given them more revelatory light in order to keep his commands and represent him to the surrounding nations. Their great calling led to greater responsibility. But in chapter 4, you see that they were oppressing the poor and crushing the needy. They were living self-indulgent lives built on the oppression of the poor and weak, while they hypocritically maintained the appearance of religion through hollow rituals. Their idolatry manifested itself in economic injustice, materialism, and religious hypocrisy, all things God finds especially disgusting. God’s disdain of Israel’s injustice and hypocrisy is seen in chapter 5. Amos 5:4-5 says, “Seek me and live; but do not seek me at Bethel, and do not enter into Gilgal.” He’s telling them to renounce their idolatry. Don’t go to Bethel, don’t go to those idolatrous temples. Then in verses 10-13, he explains the sorts of things that happen in society when you do worship false gods: people who stick up for the poor are ignored or hated. The poor have heavy rent imposed on them. The wealthy keep getting wealthier, but they’re annexing the land of the poor. The poor are turned aside at the city gate. Society gets really bad when you don’t live faithfully for the one true God. In Amos 5:14, God gives the better way, “Seek good, and not evil, that you may live.” This is a cool pairing with the beginning command in 5:4. Initially, God said “seek me” as a means of rejecting idolatry. However, in 5:14 it’s “seek good and not evil” as a means of rejecting idolatry. The play on words is meant to show you that right worship of the God of the covenant will result in justice being done in the city gate, while idolatry will result in neglect of the poor. For Amos, to seek God is to seek the good of others. To turn your back on God (in idolatry) is to live at the expense of others. Your worship of God, or lack thereof, will certainly reflect itself in how you treat the poor, the oppressed, and the needy. True Worship Results in Justice When you compare and contrast Hosea and Amos you get this profound point— worship and justice are inherently combined. They help us see that the purpose of elevating God, manifested through temple worship, praise, and reverent prayer, is to ultimately elevate the commandments of God which will shape every area of Hebrew life. In the prophets’ worldview, to worship the God of Israel is to worship the God who rescued poor slaves out of Egypt, brought them to the Promised Land, and gave them abundance. If you worship a God whose fundamental nature is to pay attention and give gifts to the poor and oppressed, then that’s the kind of society that will result, a society that reflects a God who takes care of the poor. On the flip side, if you turn your back on that kind of God and worship various Canaanite gods of fertility or war or sex, then those things will draw your allegiance. In those societies, the poor will be abused and neglected. Both Hosea and Amos help us see how Israel is an example of this; they offer two different sides of the same covenant-failure. Don’t worry, there is hope. There’s always hope because of Jesus! In the New Testament, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, “out of Egypt I called my son,” in one of his fulfillment formulas. It’s applied to Jesus’ return to Israel from his “sojourn” in Egypt after Herod’s death. It’s meant to evoke strong images of Jesus as God’s Son. But thankfully, this Son isn’t like Israel. This Son faithfully worships Yahweh and keeps the Torah. This Son perfectly loves his neighbor as himself. He shows particular concern for the needy, oppressed, and poor of society. His worship of the Father always results in compassion and acts of justice. In fact, the greatest act of mercy displayed in God’s Son is the sacrifice of his own life on behalf of needy, poor sinners like you and me. This is the hope that Hosea and Amos anticipate. Jesus, the true Israel and faithful Son, gave his life for idolatrous covenant-breakers so we could be reconciled to God. That’s really, really good news, so you’ll want to keep reading the Minor Prophets to see how this plan of redemption unfolds!

Zodiac, Twelve Tribes - and a Divine pattern

by Damien F. Mackey There is a false astrology, condemned by the Bible (e.g. Deuteronomy 18:10-12; cf. Leviticus 19:26; Isaiah 47:13-14; Jeremiah 10:2), and a true astrology based on God’s structural design - from the beginning - of the heavenly bodies for “signs and seasons” (Genesis 1:14). Since everything that God has created through his Wisdom has been effected with marvellous precision and meaning, there must be a profound significance to the structure of the universe. Wise souls down through the ages have sought to make sense of it all, with the wisest - those prepared to be instructed by the Designer - such as King Solomon, being able to claim, as Solomon did, a ‘sure knowledge’ and an ‘understanding of the structure of the universe’, and of much more besides (Wisdom 7:17-21): He it was who gave me sure knowledge of what exists, to understand the structure of the universe and the action of the elements, the beginning, end and middle of the times, the alternation of the solstices and the succession of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the position of the stars, the natures of animals and the instincts of wild beasts, the powers of spirits and human mental processes, the varieties of plants and the medical properties of roots. And now I understand everything, hidden or visible, for Wisdom, the designer of all things, has instructed me. Dr. Ernest L. Martin (RIP) has concluded, from scrutinising the biblical data, that there was a common Divine pattern regarding the structure of the universe; the ancient Garden of Eden; the Hebrew camp in the wilderness; and the Temple of Yahweh built by King Solomon. Others have attempted to do the same. What I like about this sort of approach regarding the universe - whether any given effort be actually correct, or not - is that it is at least a search for a meaning that must surely be there, rather than one’s simply considering the universe as a vast and unintelligible mass. We read of Dr. Martin’s particular view in Roger Waite’s “The Lost History of Jerusalem” (pp. 37-38): http://www.rogerswebsite.com/articles/TheLostHistoryofJerusalem.pdf Another way we see this pattern between what is on earth and what is in the heavens is in the comparison between the three general compartments within the Temple and the three heavens noted in scripture. …. This is what Ernest Martin writes about the similarities between the three compartments of the Temple and the three heavens: The Temple and its environs were further patterned after God's heavenly palace and its celestial surroundings that existed in the north part of the heavens …. The Bible shows these "three heavens." Numerous texts show that the "first heaven" is the atmosphere where the birds fly and where all weather phenomena take place. The "second heaven," however, was beyond the earth's atmosphere and embraced all the visible planets and stars, including the sun and the moon. The "third heaven," that the apostle Paul referred to in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4 that he called Paradise, was that of God's official residence in his heavenly region which was separate from the other two heavens. These "three heavens" were symbolically pictured in the Temple at Jerusalem. In fact, the three main sections of the Temple were designed to show these three heavens. When an Israelite entered the main Temple from the east, he or she would first be within the Court of the Israelites. This first section of the Temple (which continued westward up to the eastern portion of the priests' court in which was the Altar of Burnt Offering) was not covered with a roof. The first section was open to the sky and to all weather phenomena. Birds could also fly within it. This area of the Temple answered in a typical manner with the "first heaven," which was like our atmosphere surrounding the earth. The "second heaven" in the Temple in a symbolic sense began at the eastern curtain in front of the Holy Place. Josephus tells us this curtain had the principal stars of the heavens displayed on it in tapestry form. It represented the entrance into the starry heavens beyond our atmosphere. Josephus tells us that west of this curtain, one could witness the center of the zodiacal circle with the seven [visible] planets displayed on the south side in the form of the Menorah (the seven lamps) with the twelve signs of the Zodiac denoting the twelve months displayed on the north side by the twelve loaves of the Table of Shewbread. This second court of the priests represented all the starry heavens above the earth's atmosphere. But beyond this "second heaven," there was yet a "third heaven." This "third heaven" was the Heaven of Heavens, or in Temple terminology, the Holy of Holies, which equaled God's celestial abode where his palace and divine precincts were located which the apostle Paul called Paradise (Temples, p.253). Signs of the Tribes Each one of the twelve tribes of Israel had a zodiacal sign associated with it. “Moses positioned each of the twelve tribes of Israel as representing a particular zodiacal sign in its regular astronomical order”. We read the following in Roger Waite’s “The Lost History of Jerusalem” (p. 28): http://www.rogerswebsite.com/articles/TheLostHistoryofJerusalem.pdf In addition to the symbolism of the three compartments of the tabernacle and Temples, according to Ernest Martin, there was also an astronomical pattern in the design of the camp in the wilderness and where each of the tribes of Israel were placed in relation to the tabernacle. This pattern was also established around the environs of Jerusalem itself. Ernest Martin writes the following about the position of the tribes around the tabernacle: Though the Holy Scriptures in other areas utterly condemn the use of Astrology as conceived by the Gentiles and when the celestial motions are used for wrong purposes (Isaiah 47:11-13), the placement of the twelve tribes of Israel around the Tabernacle was intended by Moses to provide the authorities in Israel with a knowledge of God's plan for the nation of Israel .… The Gentiles actually corrupted the prophetic teaching found in the design of the "Camp of Israel" and placed on it a hodgepodge of heathen interpretations that completely obliterated the true prophetic meaning that God gave to Moses… So, what about this astronomical design of the "Camp"? The outer boundary of this zodiacal design was an imaginary circle positioned by the Jewish authorities to be 2000 cubits (a radius of about 3000 feet) from that central point in the Holy Place of the Temple. It is important to realize that the outer boundary of this circle denoted the limits of the "Camp." Moses positioned each of the twelve tribes of Israel as representing a particular zodiacal sign in its regular astronomical order. The tribe of Judah was given the prime position in this zodiacal design by being located directly east of the entrances to the Tabernacle and the later Temples. Let me explain. Four principal tribes were selected to denote each of the four seasons of the year. Judah was first, Dan was second, Reuben was third and Ephraim was fourth. The positions of these four prime tribes were arranged 90 degrees from each other (within a 360 degrees circle) to accord with those four seasons of the year. Judah was selected to be the tribe directly east of the Tabernacle and it was given first place... The zodiacal story is a prophetic account that actually centers on the Messiah of Israel who was destined to come from the tribe of Judah. For this reason, Judah was reckoned as the chief tribe and it was located in Moses' arrangement of the "Camp" directly east of the Temple. The tribe of Judah had for its tribal symbol the Lion (called Leo today). Judah had a subsidiary tribe of Israel located on each of its sides. As the chief tribe, Judah (Leo) and its sign was positioned to dominate the summer season in prophetic and calendar matters…The twelve tribes in their arrangement in the encampment also represented the twelve months of the year. The next pivotal tribe proceeding counterclockwise around this zodiacal design of this "Camp of Israel"… was Dan with a subsidiary tribe of Israel located on each of its sides. It was positioned on the north side of the Temple and Jerusalem as a venomous creature, sometimes displayed as an eagle with a snake in its talons (called Scorpio, the venomous scorpion today). It dominated the autumn season in the prophetic calendar of Israel. Reuben…with a subsidiary tribe of Israel located on each of its sides was placed on the west side of the Temple and Jerusalem in the original arrangement. Reuben was connected with water, as a Man bearing water (called Aquarius today), and it dominated the winter season in the original prophetic calendar…. And finally there is Ephraim…with a subsidiary tribe of Israel located on each of its sides. He was on the south side of the Temple and Jerusalem as a bullock (called Taurus today). It was positioned to dominate the spring season in a prophetic and calendar sense. And, of course, if one continued…another 90 degrees, one would then return to Judah (Leo) for the start of another calendar or prophetic year… Another form of this astronomical arrangement surrounding the Temple and Jerusalem (and patterned after God's abode in heaven) was the four sides of the cherubim mentioned by Ezekiel (1:4-14) and the Book of Revelation (4:6-7). The cherubim were reckoned by the biblical writers as encompassing the throne of God in heaven. These angelic cherubim also had the four zodiacal signs representing the seasons of the year associated with them (Lion, Eagle, Man, Bullock which are today called Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius, Taurus and they were analogous to the four principal tribes of Israel: Judah, Dan, Reuben and Ephraim) …. The above view is supported by what we read in the following intriguing article: http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds/meridian/2005/12sons.html Twelve Sons, Twelve Constellations by John P. Pratt There is a strong Hebrew tradition that each of the twelve tribes of Israel was associated with one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The precise identification of which constellation goes with which of Jacob's sons has only been known with certainty for four of the tribes. Each of the twelve carried a banner or flag, and the many of those flags are believed to have displayed one of the zodiac symbols. Thus, those figures came to symbolize the entire tribe to a large degree, much as the eagle represents the United States. This article proposes a correspondence of each of those tribes to one of the zodiac emblems, based on proposed dates for the birth of each. Knowing those dates then leads to greater understanding of the holy days on the Hebrew Calendar, and testifies of the Lord's foreknowledge of all things and of his great plan of salvation. What does the zodiac have to do with the twelve tribes of Israel? Aren't the zodiac signs the basis of astrology, and isn't that a false belief system? Wasn't Israel admonished over and over not to worship the hosts of heaven? Why would Israel put zodiac figures on their flags? It is not surprising if these are your first questions as you read this article, especially if this is the first you've read on the subject. As has been pointed out in numerous earlier articles … the Book of Enoch records that an angel revealed the constellation figures to the prophet Enoch some 5,000 years ago, and many scholars claim they symbolize the key features of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Last month's article proposed that each of the twelve constellations of the zodiac, through which the sun appears to travel during the year, represents one of the twelve principal roles of the Savior. …. Satan twists truth and perverts it for his own purposes, which he has clearly done with the zodiac signs. That causes many to avoid the entire subject, but the symbolism of these figures is so rich that it would be a tragedy not to learn of the beauty of their meaning, and the clarity of their symbolism. So my articles on the subject attempt to ignore the perversions and focus on the good. My position is that the sun, moon, and planets are like the hands on a huge clock, with the twelve zodiac constellations through which they move being the 12 numbers on the clock face. The Lord uses his clock to time key events in world history. But when Israel began to worship the hands on the clock, as did the pagan nations, then they were told they had missed the whole point, and to desist. Similarly today, if someone believes the planets are controlling his life, rather than merely keeping time, then Satan could falsely convince him that he is not responsible for his actions. Having that disclaimer in mind, let us look at the evidence, even from the Bible itself, that the twelve sons of the prophet Jacob were each identified with a different sign of the zodiac. First, consider the dream of Jacob's son Joseph, of the sun, moon and 11 stars (11 constellations?). He dreamed that they all bowed down to him (Gen. 37:9). When he told the dream to his family, they immediately knew that the 11 stars referred to his 11 brothers. Was that just because of the number eleven, or what it also because they already knew that each was associated with a different zodiac constellation? Evidence for answering this question affirmatively comes from noting that most of their names have close ties to the zodiac constellations, as discussed below. Secondly, when the tribes received blessings under the hands of their father Jacob and many years later by Moses, many unmistakable references were made to zodiac constellations. Moreover, visions such as those of Ezekiel and John, describe figures with the heads of a man, lion, ox, and eagle, which just happen to match the four "cornerstone" constellations (Ezek. 1:10, Rev. 4:7). …. It is precisely these four key figures which are the most easily matched with the four principal sons of Israel because each is mentioned in the blessings. Reuben is compared to a man and to water, Judah is compared to a lion, Dan to a serpent (counterpart of the eagle), and Joseph's two sons to the horns of the wild ox. Those link to the constellations of the Water Bearer, the Lion, the Scorpion, and the Bull, respectively (Gen. 49: 4, 9, 17; Deut. 33:17). Those four sons are each also assigned to four directions (Num. 2:3, 10, 18, 25), and those four constellations are evenly spaced around the circle, as are the four points of a compass. And even non-Israelite prophets, such as Balaam, have used the same figures to represent the tribes (Num. 24:7-9). All of this has been discussed in detail in earlier articles, and is summarized here only as review and to make it clear that the Lord himself uses the symbolism. There is something very profound going on here, and it is certainly seems worth investigating. Until now, the identification of the constellations associated with the other eight tribes has not been known with any degree of confidence. The other references to the zodiac are sketchy, and different scholars have proposed a variety of associations based on scriptural clues. But historical evidence of exactly what emblems were shown on which flags has been weak, and is based mostly on tradition. Thus, the information about the zodiac associations has been lost. This article proposes a correlation based on the "brute force" method of actually determining the birth dates of the twelve sons, and then looking at which constellation the sun was in at their birth. …. Zodiac and the Messiah “Jesus was born of Judah … Leo the Lion … and the first sign in a counterclockwise direction that anyone within the camp would encounter would be Virgo, the Virgin …. And certainly, Jesus was accepted by Christians as being born of a virgin”. We read the following in Roger Waite’s “The Lost History of Jerusalem” (p. 28): http://www.rogerswebsite.com/articles/TheLostHistoryofJerusalem.pdf In fact, the design of the biblical Zodiac that the tribes of Israel displayed in their encampment prefigured the history of the Messiah of Israel as certainly interpreted by the early Christians… Jesus was born of Judah (Leo the Lion, the month of Ab) and the first sign in a counterclockwise direction that anyone within the camp would encounter would be Virgo, the Virgin (Elul, the 6th Hebrew month). And certainly, Jesus was accepted by Christians as being born of a virgin. Then, in the New Testament narrative, Jesus at the start of his ministry then met Satan for his temptation as shown by Dan (the sign of the venomous serpent or scorpion). He later came into deep waters (e.g. Psalm 124:4) through his apprehension, trial and crucifixion at Jerusalem (which is symbolized by Reuben, the sign of the Water Bearer a man carrying water). But then comes the Springtime (as indicated by the Joseph tribes, particularly Ephraim, Taurus the Bull) and this represented the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Finally, one returns in this circular (or celestial) journey within the camp to the first part of the tribe of Judah (Leo the Lion, back to the first fifteen degrees of the month of Ab) where the chief star called Regulus the King Star is located (which happens to be the closest star in the heavens to the ecliptic, the path of the Sun), and this represents the Christ being crowned King of Kings and sitting on the right hand of the Father, whom the Sun represents (Malachi 4:2). The four cherubim which represent the four seasons (and the four principal tribes) are the primary actors in this zodiacal or celestial design of the fortunes of the Messiah within the Camp of Israel. It is reflected in the story found in Psalm 19 where the Sun comes forth as a bridegroom and begins to tell a prophetic history that Israel can understand. Indeed, the apostle Paul quoted Psalm 19 (Romans 10:18) and referred it to Jesus and his message as going forth like the messages in the sun, moon and stars into all the world. The early Christians saw the astronomical message found in the zodiacal arrangement of the tribes of Israel within their encampment as giving highlights of the career of Jesus in his role as the Christ of God (Secrets of Golgotha … p.53-60). E.W. Bullinger in his book “Witness of the Stars” has gone into much detail about how the plan of God can be seen in the various constellations in the heavens. One can't help but wonder about that and the evidence of design in the heavens when one sees the Southern Cross. Two of the brightest stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri, point to it and seem to highlight how Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins. ….