The Old Testament conception of God may seem strange to us now, since Jesus had introduced a new conception of God as a fully transcendent being whose presence was manifest in goodness and love and who had no need of rituals or a tent to live in, nor of vociferous liturgical prayers, nor animal sacrifice. We may assume that despite appearances to the contrary, humanity is gaining in awareness of the metaphysical and transcendent and so the modern mind has no need of a God which demands of Moses that the sons of Aaron barbecue meat for him because the burnt offering is ‘an aroma pleasing to the LORD’; though it seems that the best part of the offering always ended up in the hands of the priests while God had to make do with a barbecued head and the rest of the bits nobody else wanted.
But reading those passages in Leviticus may make us wonder who or what it was that Moses was communicating with. It seemed God was manifested to Moses as a voice in the Temple of Meeting which gave Moses clear instructions regarding the sacrifice of animals and specific cooking instructions. In fact apparently anyone who wished to speak to God could go to the Tent of Meeting which was just outside the main camp and God would speak and appear in a pillar of cloud. On Mount Sinai God was even able to manifest to Moses physically, and had a face, a hand and a back, and could ‘pass by’ as if it were something which was localised and not, as we might assume of God, omnipresent. We can only guess what any of that really means or whether it even happened at all.
We cannot say whether this was a real historical occurrence or not. We just have to trust the narrative, but if we do that, then it suggests at least some kind of spiritual being which is able to manifest in limited but significant way and communicate with people. But how do we know this is God? This could be one of the beings which communicates directly with the manipulators, some kind of astral intelligence which when animals have their life sacrificed to it, gains some kind of energy or strength. This is something of the belief that has come through with the Gnostic movement which seemed to emerge almost step by step with early Christianity.
The strange thing is that this is precisely the kind of activity which is reputed in witchcraft and Satanism, where animals are routinely sacrificed, and if the rumours and insider accounts are to be believed, fellow humans as well. In fact history is replete with examples of ritual human sacrifice. The mercy of the Old Testament and Israelite conception of God is that human sacrifice was not required and this was one of the specific crimes of the Canaanites which were said to include child sacrifice, bestiality and homosexual religious rites which kindled God’s wrath although those that had so far escaped Joshua’s God driven genocide of the Canaanites were apparently allowed to remain:
“I also will no longer drive out before them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died, so that through them I may test Israel, whether they will keep the ways of the Lord, to walk in them as their fathers kept them, or not.” Judges 2:21.
Could this be the ongoing project for humanity to this day? Are we all being tested on a daily basis by some kind of elite secret priesthood using a three-thousand-year-old blueprint? In order to corrupt a population the population has to willingly choose to be corrupted. It might seem hugely counter-productive to corrupt countries and societies and drive them into confusion and degeneracy, but one country and one people in particular benefit from the disarray of their perceived ancient enemies, these people have long memories and they have been operating as a people with a particular continuous cultural identity for at least 3,000 years. No other people can compete with that kind of level of cultural organisation which will always be one-step ahead of any attempts to thwart their plans. Unfortunately, any people which are not of their tribe is an enemy and their specific God given scriptures specifically instruct them to show no mercy to their enemies.
I contend then that the Kabbalah and by extension the so called ‘oral tradition’ of the Rabbis passed on generation from generation from the time of Moses is nothing more than the same ancient evil of Asherah and Baal worship, albeit cleverly camouflaged to hide within Judaism and claim a kind of inner-logic to make it seem to fit within Torah Judaism when it is the very force which the Torah was written specifically to oppose all those thousands of years ago. This is why the Kabbalah is so keen to introduce feminine aspects of God, even though as we have discussed, it makes no logical sense to bring gender into spiritual concerns but IF what you are secretly worshiping is an ancient Goddess cult, in fact THE ancient Goddess cult, then this is how you slowly rehabilitate the Goddess.
The Kabbalah, although it talks of the Ain Soph as being the ultimate image of God this is cleverly dismissed as ‘nothing’. It cannot be worshipped because it has no attributes, it is everything and nothing. It is only at the point at which this force can become personalised as the Shekinah, a feminine force, a Goddess, that God becomes something which can be acknowledged, worshipped and which will respond and interact with humanity. Shekinah is the Hebrew word for the ‘dwelling’ or ‘settling’ and describes the manifest divine presence of the Lord. Neither this term, nor anything which can be associated with it, appears in the Bible. Nor was it found in any of the texts of the Dead Sea scrolls associated with the Essenes. It is solely a product of Pharisaic Rabbinical literature and appears as a feminine form in the Talmud and the Zohar. The Shekinah is also described as the Sabbath Bride:
“One must prepare a comfortable seat with several cushions and embroidered covers, from all that is found in the house, like one who prepares a canopy for a bride. For the Shabbat is a queen and a bride. This is why the masters of the Mishna used to go out on the eve of Shabbat to receive her on the road, and used to say: ‘Come, O bride, come, O bride!’ And one must sing and rejoice at the table in her honor … one must receive the Lady with many lighted candles, many enjoyments, beautiful clothes, and a house embellished with many fine appointments …”
The bridegroom of the Shekinah is sometimes the name for the sefirah of Tiferet but there is so little consistency of terms or even of their meanings with the Kabbalah that none of these concepts or definitions can be said to have any fixed meaning. Tiferet is in the middle of the Tree of Life and is connected to all the other sephirot except Malkuth which, within the logic of the Zohar, it interacts through the phallic Yesod. Within the abstract realm of the Kabbalah the Shekinah is considered to be spirit where ‘God’ interacts with the physical world and is represented by Malkuth. ‘She’ is often referred to as ‘the daughter of God’ and reflects the divine light the way the Moon reflects light upon Earth. The idea of Shekinah was a relatively recent addition in Rabbinical literature particularly in the work of Isaac Luria and his Aader Bishvachin song which is sung at the Sabbath evening meal:
“Let us invite the Shechinah with a newly-laid table
and with a well-lit menorah that casts light on all heads.
Three preceding days to the right, three succeeding days to the left, and amid them the Sabbath bride with adornments she goes, vessels and robes.
May the Shechinah become a crown through the six loaves on each side through the doubled-six may our table be bound with the profound Temple services.”
Shekinah also appears in the gnostic texts of the Mandaeans and Manichaeans; ‘Manda’ is the Aramaic word for ‘knowledge’ and hence ‘gnosis’ but those among them who have attained the true secrets of their religion they call Nasoraeans, and this word has been used to describe 1st Century Christians including Jesus himself and to this day the Arabic the word ‘Nasrani’ is a word for Christian.
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