Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, December 07, 1998

Israel Personified as a Woman

Israel is often personified as a woman in the scriptures, a fact that has a bearing on several incidents in the gospels. Among instances are:

And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.

Isaiah 1:8

As yet shall he remain at Nob that day: he shall shake his hand against the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem.

Isaiah 10:32

For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying, Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers.

Jeremiah 4:31

Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ask ye now among the heathen, who hath heard such things: the virgin of Israel hath done a very horrible thing.

Jeremiah 18:13

The Lord hath trodden under foot all my mighty men in the midst of me: he hath called an assembly against me to crush my young men: the Lord hath trodden the virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a winepress.

Lamentations 1:15

What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?

Lamentations 2:13

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou shalt dwell in the field, and thou shalt go even to Babylon; there shalt thou be delivered; there the Lord shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.

Micah 4:10

Thus saith the Lord, The people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness; even Israel, when I went to cause him to rest. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel: thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets, and shalt go forth in the dances of them that make merry. (Israel seems to be depicted here as male then female—significant?).

Jeremiah 31:2-4

Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps: set thine heart toward the highway, even the way which thou wentest: turn again, O virgin of Israel, turn again to these thy cities. How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? For the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man. (Note that this seems to link with the previous passage quoted (Jer 31:2-4) where Israel is first a man then a woman. Whatever the meaning of the passage, it seems likely that the Essenes interpreted it as the dissolution of the female sex into the sexless, but apparently male beings, angels. In other words it was an indication that heaven and earth would join and those, the Elect, who survived into the kingdom of God would become angels—a new thing in the earth (angels visited the earth from heaven but they were not in the earth meaning of its natural inhabitants).)

Jeremiah 31:21-2

Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.

Isaiah 62:11

And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations: both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds; for he shall uncover the cedar work. This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.

Zephaniah 2:14-15

Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion: for, lo, I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee, saith the Lord.

Zechariah 2:10

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

Zechariah 9:9

Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord. (God is Israel’s husband).

Jeremiah 31:32

The Hierogamos or Sacred Wedding

All the religions of the ancient near east had a common culture of religious events (S H Hooke, Myth and Ritual, 1939). It involved the death and resurrection of the god, the creation myth, a ritual combat in which the god defeats his enemies, the sacred marriage of the god to the goddess representing the people, and a triumphal procession in which the images of the gods are revealed and carried to or from their temples for purification, and the king played the role of the god, as his regent on earth. Its purpose was to ensure order, and fertility in the coming growing season. Christians can hardly deny the similarities with Christianity, the rituals and myths of which also involve the incarnation, death and resurrection of a god, a belief in him as the creator of everything, his triumph over an enemy, his marriage with his people, the Church, and a fondness for religious processions in which images or symbols of their god are carried in public.

Von Soden (The Ancient Orient ) deduces that even early on in the ancient near east monogamy was the norm. As early as the third millennium, marriages by purchase had been abolished. Some kings had special houses for their wives, and so were not monogamous, but the legal provision for a man to take a concubine, usually a slave, under certain circumstances shows that ordinary men could legally only have one wife. Even the gods were monogamous, and the ceremony of the hierogamous or sacred marriage was widespread and popular. Dr Theodore H Robinson—cited by Claude Chevasse, The Bride of Christ, (1939)—notes the evidence that a divine marriage was celebrated in Judah. In Jewish tradition, the Bridegroom is God, the Bride is the land of Israel, and the Children of the Bridechamber are the Children of Israel. God and Israel are betrothed or married. So:

For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.

Isaiah 54:5

Turn, O backsliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion.

Jeremiah 3:14

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.

Isaiah 62:4-5

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.

Isaiah 61:10

And in that day will I make a covenant for them… and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me for ever. Yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the Lord.

Hosea 2:18-20

>As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.

Isaiah 62:5

It was part of the cycle of agricultural feasts and would have been done at one of the equinoxes, in the autumn when the rains came, or in the spring at the harvests. In Egypt, and perhaps Mesopotamia, it was timed for the flooding of the rivers which brought moisture and fertile mud to the fields. The Jews held it when the first rains were due in the autumn.

The Song of Songs

Canticles or The Song of Songs, a poem of human love, not obviously a lofty religious work, most likely is the relic of a cycle of ritual wedding songs, used in a religious sense because Jews had sung them in the ceremony of the betrothal of God. Theophile J Meek (cited in Chevasse) says it was a collection of the liturgy of the worship of the resurrection and hierogamos of Tammuz, who was the original dying and rising god of the ancient near east. His bride was Ishtar who had rescued him from Hades and then entered into the divine love match with him, the sacred signal for seasonal growth of vegetation to begin. Canticles has many unusual Hebrew words and phrases best explained as having a Babylonian source. The risen God—equal to Tammuz—had the title, “the Beloved”, and it is the goddess—equal to Ishtar—who is “the Lover”. Tammuz was the Shepherd God, symbolic of nature and the bucolic life, just as Pan was in classical mythology. Meek considers that much of the shepherd symbolism of patriarchal religions comes from their dependence on the original worship of Tammuz, perhaps at first by primitive herdsmen or shepherds and then by the early agricultural communities. In the corresponding cults of Adonis and Aphrodite in Cyprus and Biblos, the mourning was for seven days, and the resurrection and reunion was on the eighth.

Meek identifies “the Beloved” in Canticles as Dod, the god of Beersheba. Dod is David, a god mentioned at Elephantine about 400 BC, and is cognate with Dido, the “Wandering Ishtar”, the Tyrian moon goddess, identified with Elissa, the legendary founder of Carthage. Thus, in late Persian times in Yehud, Dod was perhaps “The Beloved” and Dido “The Lover”, becoming the basis of the Canticles. Dido, having founded Carthage, threw herself on a pyre rather than be obliged to marry the local king, having sworn never to marry again.

Dodo appears as the name of three men in the Jewish scriptures, and Dodai, which also appears, seems to be one Yehouistic form of the same name, and Dodavah or Dodavahu is another one. The use of Vahu for Yahu, identifies Yahu with the Persian wind God, and this man comes from Mareshah, a remarkably Persian sounding place! Dothan is a town with a related name evidently related to this same god.

“My beloved”, in Hebrew, is “yadid” whereas, in Song of Songs, it is Dodi. The distinction is apparent in this further piece of biblical nonsense:

Now I will sing to my Beloved [yadid] a song of my Beloved [dodi] concerning His vineyard. My Beloved [yadid] has a vineyard in a fruitful horn.

Isa 5:1

In the Aramaic version of the Jewish scriptures, Dodi is not translated. It was thought of as a proper name. In the Canticles, the hero is not merely a shepherd because he has every delight and is a king. He is also called Shelma or Shelan, forms of Solomon. Solomon = David! The lover is called “The Shulamite”, also suggesting Solomon and also the Canaanite mother goddess, Shala. Shala speaks of her lost bridegroom, whom she was seeking, just as Ishtar sought the dead Tammuz.

The remaining character in the cast is the chorus, just as in Greek drama. They are “The Daughters of Jerusalem”. This chorus was a feature of the Tammuz liturgy, mourning with the goddess the death of the god, then rejoicing at his resurrection and hierogamos. Psalms 45 is another example of such a liturgy, the king and queen ritually dramatizing the god and goddess. Knowing all this, what is meant by:

There followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.

Luke 23:27-28

At the least, it shows the author of Luke knew the true context of the phrase from Canticles as appropriate in the context of the death of Jesus, and so he was drawing a plain parallel between Jesus and Tammuz! Later Rabbinic Judaism, after the revolt of Bar Kosiba, tried to hide all this as best it could, and the Rabbis from Akiba declared it to have been expressions of the love of Yehouah for Israel all along!

The Wedding at Cana

The Bridgroom in these analogies was God and the Bride was Israel, the land and the people. The Christians—derived from the Essenes, who considered themselves the only pure Israel, and so called themselves Israel as if they were all of it—called themselves Israel, even though they were not ethnicly or religiously Jews. Israel, they said, meant the people of God, and, after Christ, the people of God were Christians. The Essenes also considered themselves as a living temple, having rejected the built temple in Jerusalem as polluted. They called themselves the Yahad or congregation, and sure enough, the Christians did just the same, the congregation being called a church. So it was that the sacred nuptials of God and His people were transferred by Christians from the Jews to the Church, the body of Christ!

The other change Christians made was to alter the Bridegroom from God to Christ. The Essenes, if not Jews in general, must have had a ceremonial marriage of God to Israel, the marriage supper of which was the messianic meal of bread and new wine. Jesus, as part of his investiture ceremony as Nasi of the Essenes, played the role of God in this ritual hierogamos of Yehouah and Israel. It was the wedding at Cana, the marriage recorded in John 2:1-11 as the miracle of changing water into wine.

In the older ceremonials of the New Year celebrations and the hierogamos, the king played God and the queen played goddess, but the king was God’s son or messiah. This is clear in Psalms 45. In John 3:25-29, John the Baptist is made to refer to himself as the “friend of the bridegroom”. Since John was prophesying the same event as Jesus, the coming of the kingdom, he must have meant God when he spoke of the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom in Jewish marriages was the equivalent of the best man in modern marriages. He, and the friend of the bride, the chief bridesmaid, as we would say, made the arrangements for the happy day. The female counterpart of John has been suppressed, when all this was written down around a hundred years later, with the infant church demanding its own rattles, as has the hierogamos that accompanied it.

The bride or the friend of the bride was played by Mary, as the miracle makes clear. She is in charge of the water, that miraculously becomes wine when blessed. Christians identified Jesus as the mythical messiah of the Jews, and the bridegroom, having played that role as leader. So, John’s statement was applied to Christ instead of God, as it was originally meant. It is no coincidence that this latest of the four gospels dispenses with the messianic secret of the synoptics, and declares Jesus the messiah from the outset.

In the gospel, the wine runs out and Jesus replenishes it by the miracle of making wine from water. The amount of wine which Jesus makes is 120 gallons, allowing a bottle each for 720 guests—a huge and drunken wedding by any standards. If, however, each person had a token glass of wine, the number of guests it would supply is 4320, an interesting match with the attendance at the mass feedings, where no wine is actually mentioned because they are depicted as miracles not the mass Eucharists which they were. Each of the Elect are spiritually fed with a morsal of bread and a cup of the new wine, water converted to “wine” only ritually because Essenes did not drink wine. The miracle recorded is simply the ceremony of blessing the water to make it ritual wine.

The references to marriage in Hosea imply precisely such divine nuptuals albeit allegorized as the prophet’s own. Hosea and Isaiah both mean salvation as does Jesus, and at root they all are the same as the word Essene, so the sectaries, who considered themselves the redeemers of Israel, held them in particular esteem.

All gospel references to weddings are references to the kingdom to come when God as the bridegroom unites with Israel as the bride. God, not Jesus, is the bridegroom. The change was effected to puff the Christians’ new god, making the Son into God, but might have had some basis if Jesus played the part of God or Hosea in this ritualised drama.

Mary orders the “servants” to do whatever Jesus orders, though they are both supposed to have been guests. The word translated as “servants” is actually the Greek word which has given us the church ranking of deacon, an office inherited by the church from the Essenes. Elsewhere in the New Testament, the same word is translated as “deacon” or even “deaconess”. These were not servants but ministers of the Essene church instructed by Mary to begin their duties. Plainly, Mary had an important ritual part to play in this ceremony, but Jesus was frosty to her.

No pious Jew—let alone a supposed divine Jew—would be rude to his real mother. The dialogue was simply not that of a real mother and son. Jesus calls his “mother” “woman”—being far from polite if Mary really were his mother, but acceptable if she were not. The male celibates of Qumran regarded women as temptresses. Heretics even before the time of Augustine deduced that Mary was not Jesus’s mother from this very passage.

Mary would have been the bride, as Israel, which is why she could command Jesus to provide the wine. The tradition that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, the illegitimacy of Jesus and Mary as a virgin all arise from the role of Mary as the unfaithful but Virgin Israel. In Hosea, Israel is an unfaithful wife but Yehouah affirms in the passage quoted above, “I will betroth thee unto me for ever”.

In John, Nathaniel of Cana calls Jesus king of Israel with no more ado, showing that he was a rebel—not “of Cana” but one of the Canaim. It is a lesser version of the reinterpreting of Nazarene as of “Nazareth”. Indeed, “Magdalene” is the same. The ruins of Magadan were renamed Magdala by Christians because there was no place called Magdala that Mary Magdalene could have come from. Mary will have been called Magdala really because she was a “Migdal”, a “watchtower”, the Essenes being known as “Watchers for the kingdom”)

John deliberately and boldly gives Jesus as Christ many of god’s own titles—the Sower, the Fisher, the Light of the World, the King, the Judge, and so on—and has him saying “I am” this and “I am” that, where “I am” is properly the name of God, not an assertion of Jesus about himself. John has openly made the one into the other, something that Jesus himself, as an Essene ranked on piety, humility and service, could never have done. It was a Christian blasphemy.

The Bridegroom was another of these titles, but pious Jews despaired that Judaea was ruled by Rome, a power they considered as Satan, and so the bride was adulterous and unfaithful, and unfit for marriage. God was staying away from the Bridal Chamber—the Holy of Holies of the temple. When Jesus calls the Jews, this adulterous generation, he is not saying they were committing adultery everywhere, but was using the metaphor of the hierogamos to declare Israel unfit for God. You cannot expect Christians to understand anything in context. They prefer simple explanations and for this reason have had a big thing against sexual peccadilloes ever since the beginning of the whole mix up.

The New Testamant nuptial references are many. The kingdom of heaven was likened to a king making a marriage feast for his son. Christians have added the “for his son”. The hierogamos, as has been noted above, was between God and Israel, not His son and Israel, although someone, doubtless a son of God, as all senior people, like kings and priests were, acted the role of Yehouah in the sacred drama that provided the ceremony. The king is God, and the son of God is the human elected to play the role. The outcome of the marriage was the gifts that the guests enjoyed, the benefits of the kingdom of God that followed. So, the hiwerogamos was an important political statement in the circumstances. It declared Judah/Israel as being the bride of God, not of the Romans. It was an act of defiance. The parable of the ten virgins is another expression of the hierogamos of Psalms 45.

Persian Marriage

Perhaps it is a slight digression, but justified by the closeness of many Essene customs to Persian ones, to look at the customs of a Persian—in this case a Parsi—marriage to get a possible feel of the ceremony that had occurred. Parallels with the customs of other countries at the time and of Judaism and Christian Churches are also noted.

Ahuramazda declared in Yasna 53.5 that each of the parties to the contract should clothe the other with righteousness. Righteousness is much valued in Persian religion, just as it is in the Jewish scriptures.

Persian marriage, like that of ancient Rome and Greece, had to be celebrated but in the presence of an assembly witnessing the event. Drums and fifes played at marriage gatherings to announce the occasion to the people of the village.

The assembly that gathers is the assembly of the “queenly bride”, and the bridegroom is considered the “husband king” or the “loving king”—“var-raja”—the word “var” meaning love as well as husband. In antiquity, the custom of crowning the marrying couple was common. The priests of the ancient Greeks put crowns on the heads of bridegrooms and, in Athens, the friends of the bride carried a crown for her too. In Egypt, the bride put on a crown. A Jewish couple had to walk under a canopy resembling a crown, symbolic of the tent that they entered to consumate their marriage. Early Christians kept a crown in a church for weddings.

The bridegroom is dressed in a loose white dress flowing with folds. White is the symbol of purity, innocence and faithfulness and the priests always wear white and a white turban. The marriage ribbon knots of the Romans were white. The upper garment of the bride is also a loose folded dress. In many societies a loose flowing dress is necessary for solemn and state occasions. In court, churches and universities, gowns and robes are universally worn. The folds of such dresses carry the idea of mystery, modesty, respect and rank. In western society, women still wear such a dress.

The bridegroom takes his seat on the right hand of the bride. Beside the bridegroom and the bride are two trays of rice on stands. Rice is the symbol of plenty and prosperity, and so it is sprinkled over the marrying couple while reciting the benediction. Jews threw grains of barley before the marrying couple to denote a numerous progeny and this will surely have been true here.

On the stands two candles burn. A servant holds in one hand a censer with a burning fire and in another frankincense. Fire is a symbol of purity and plenty for Persians. For the ancient Greeks, fire and water were also symbols of purification but the bridegroom held them while welcoming his bride into his house. The Roman bridegroom also held them before his bride to stand for the necessities of life. The burning candles also remind us of ancient Greek “bridal torches” kindled from her family’s hearth and carried by the bride’s mother in the marriage procession.

The bride and the bridegroom have each a marriage witness. The Jews also had two witnesses and Christians have two.

The bride and the bridegroom sit opposite each other, separated by a curtain held between them by two attendants so that they cannot see each other and they join hands with the curtain held over their hands. After the hand-fastening ceremony, it is released signifying that what separated the couple had been removed. The couple then move to sit side by side united in matrimony. The Russians of the Orthodox Church had the self-same ritual. A curtain of crimson taffeta held by two young men parted the couple to prevent them from stealing glances. Similarly, the Jewish bride put on a veil to prevent her face from being seen by the bridegroom, but it was removed when they were united in marriage. In early Christians marriage, the couple knelt with four clergymen holding over their hands a cerecloth, afterwards removed.

While the bride and bridegroom were separated by the curtain, two priests passed round the chairs of both a piece of cloth to encircle them, symbolizing unity. The ends of the cloth were tied together with the recital of a prayer signifying the tying of the marriage knot. The custom of tying marriage knots among the Persians was an ancient custom.

Then the senior priest placed the right hand of one in the right hand of the other and fastened them with the recital of the same prayer. He put a twine round their hands seven times. The Greeks had a ceremony of hand-fastening to ratifying a marriage. Roman priests similarly bound the handsof the couple with wool. In Assyria, the father of the bridegroom fastened the hands of the couple with a woollen thread.

After fastening the hands, the thread was passed round the pair seven times with several recitals of the sacred prayer. It was then passed seven times round the marriage knot of cloth described above. A single thread can be easily broken but seven threads, twisted into one, cannot easily be broken. The ceremony therefore signified a permanent binding together. Seven was a sacred number among the ancient Persians. They had seven archangels, corresponding to the seven spirits of God, seven heavens and seven Keshwars or regions. In some Jewish marriages, the bride walks seven times round the groom before the wedding and seven benedictions are recited. Seven was a sacred number to Essenes and early Christians too (cf Rev 5:6; Zech 4:10; Tobit 12:15).

At the close of the ritual of hand-fastening, of tying the marriage knot, and of encircling the couple, the servant who holds fire in a vase places some frankincense on it and the couple throw the rice over one another with their free hands. The assembly clap enthusuastically to show its approval and goodwill for the union.

The ceremony concludes with two priests giving blessings, enquiring three times of the couple if they agree to the procedings and concluding with a joint exhortation. In the Orthodox Church the priest declares the marriage three times and many Christians proclaim the marriage banns three times.

J J Modi who described this ceremony made no mention of wine or water, though one or the other was an important element in the Essene ritual.

Holy Insemination

The temple acted as an annual sun dial, with the insemination of the Land being the central calendrical date it gave. The indication of the New Year came from the orientation of the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple with respect to the Mount of Olives. The Mount of “Olives” is a mis-reading of El Elyon, God the Most High. “Elaion” is the Greek for “olives”, and in Hellenistic times, the Elyon was misunderstood to be Elaion. The recesses of the temple were meant to be the womb of the Land, Israel, personified as a woman, and the people who lived on it. Colletively, Yehouah was betrothed to them, and the marriage ceremony was enacted each year at the time when the sun rose over the Mount of Olives, representing the Most High God, and His holy rays illuminated the darkest chamber of the temple—the Holy Place. It was seen as an act of sacred penetration.

It happened around 1 Tishri, which is Rosh ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year, roughly the autumnal equinox in September. In ancient times, it might have been a few weeks earlier, because the temple was not oriented exactly eastwards, but a little north of east. The sun was in Virgo, and would have risen just as the Virgin’s sheaf of barleycorn, or her infant, the bright Star, Spica, would have been expected. The Virgin had given birth to the sun of the New Year, the rising of the god of vegetation from death, and the first rains which were due at that very time, suggesting the abundance to be expected. The happy union will have been announced with the blowing of the Shofar and the festivities began.

The New Year was brought by the Persian Shahanshahs in the late fifth century when they operated with Babylon as their capital city. So, it is based on the Babylonian ceremonies in which Tiamat, the chaos monster, was defeated by Marduk before he created the world. Jonah (Ea) was swallowed by the whale, the sea monster that stood for chaos, and remained swallowed for three days. This three days is the period a soul, in Persian theology remained with the dead body before it departed—before the dead person gave up the ghost! So, these three days symbolize death.

It is, of course, the period the sun seems to hover near to death in its struggle against permanent decline at the winter solstice from December 21 to December 24, before it is reborn. Jonah is the winter sun, the sun that brought the rains. Jonah is Ea, Iah or Yahu, the Canaanite and Babylonian water god, Capricorn, the fish tailed goat. Ea (Greek, Oannes) is the sun in Aquarius, Jonah or John the baptist. Capricorn and Aquarius are the constellations of the rains and storms, the sun that almost dies but recovers to save His people. Matthew and Luke make Jesus the type of Jonah, although Jesus was not dead long enough for his soul to have departed. In fact, Jesus and John the Baptist were titles of the Essene Nasi who acted the part of the salvific god by sprinkling salvific water on the repentent people.

Other legendary heroes, usually sun gods, had the same experience of a three day symbolic death. Hercules sprang fully armed into the jaws of Neptune’s monster—into the “jaws of Hades”—to save Hesione, the daughter of the Trojan king. After three days, he emerged from the dead creature, having butchered the monster internally, and took the hand of the maiden. Perseus similarly saves, Andromeda. These maids are the virginal earth of the new season, and the chaos monster is evidently responsible for the death of vegetation and the fertilising good sun. It is the scorching hot sun of the hot season.

Then, ten more days of chaos were celebrated. These were the equivalent of the Roman Saturnalia, and the much later twelve days of Christmas, when order was inverted, and chaos reigned before the creation ceremony, and the hierogamos itself which was the object of the Festival of Booths (Succoth ). The makeshift booths were marital tents for those who wanted to emulate the divine Bridegroom and His Bride and to encourage the land to be fertile.

Naturally, the sun would rise such as to illuminate the inner chamber again at the vernal equinox, or a little later, but the symbolism now must have been the descent of the winter sun, the fertilising sun, into Hades for the duration of the summer when the land was scorched. The sun rose then in Aries which is the Ram in the modern zodiac but was the Lamb in the Persian one, seemingly killing it just as it was about to rise, and pious Jews celebrated the Passover, the death of the lifegiving sun by sacrificing a lamb, and eating a ritual meal of bread and lamb, the Seder.

Virgo and Aries are not opposing each other in the zodiac which is why the orientation of the temple was not east-west but a little to the north. It split the year unevenly because the growing season was longer than the dry season.

The Bridegroom and Fasting

In Mark 2:18-20 are more details of the wedding ritual when disciples of John and the Pharisees accuse Jesus and the Nazarenes of not fasting when they should have been. Jesus would not have been so impious as to ignore a fast unless there were a strong reason for it or unless it never happened at all because it was a parable not an actual event. It is a distorted kingdom parable which makes use of the idea of marriage as a covenant between God and Israel. Note that the bride had to be a day over twelve years and a half for the marriage to be legal.

In Jewish tradition the bride and bridegroom fast until the solemnizing of their marital promises when the fast is lifted for the wedding feast. In other words the bride—Israel, the children—enters the house—the kingdom—of the bridegroom—God. The fast which went before is broken and the joyous wedding feast—messianic meal—begins a week of celebrations. In this case, Jesus was not recommending that Jews should not fast, but was giving an analogy between the kingdom and the feast after the wedding fast. Jesus would have used it in this sense implying that there was cause for rejoicing because God was with the Elect and they would soon be entering His kingdom. This has been distorted into Jesus feasting when others fasted.

But this and the two mini-parables which follow (Mk 2:21-2:22) might also be part of a discussion about the temple related to the promise to raise up the temple in three days. The point is that there is a minor Jewish fast ending on the 9 Ab mourning the destruction of the temple. The date is that of the end of services in Herod’s temple in 70 AD but originally there was a fast mourning the end of Solomon’s temple in 587 BC. In the preceding three weeks no marriages are celebrated. When the fast is broken, marriages can again occur and wedding festivities be celebrated.

The Christian interpretation is that Jesus, the Christ, has stopped the need for absurd duties like fasting. Yet, immediately, he says there will be a time when it is appropriate—when he is killed—even though his death is the very climax of God’s plan to redeem mankind. If Jesus died on the cross as part of God’s plan to atone for mankind’s sins, as the clergy would have us believe, then the crucifixion was no occasion for fasting!

A prediction of the death of Jesus (Mk 2:20) is plainly hindsight. Mark was writing around the time of the Jewish War about 40 years after the events of the gospel so he could put words like this into the mouth of Jesus to make him seem to predict his crucifixion, but the addition is illogical. In fact, the early church found that it was doing what the rest of this distorted passage seemed to forbid—Christians were still fasting, because Jesus had issued no such directive. The church therefore had to add this line to justify anew the continuation of the practice.

“Disciples of John and of the” has also been added to “the Pharisees” in this passage in Mark because at an early stage some Nazarenes rejected Jesus to follow John the Baptist and the gospel writer wanted to tar them with the Pharisees’ brush.

Both of the mini-parables in Mark 2:21-2:22 have to be given their proper context. They seem to be referring to the newness of the Christian religion compared with the oldness of Judaism and emphasising the need to split cleanly with the old in favour of the new. If so it is something added by Mark and not something that Jesus said. The linking of these two mini-parables with the previous verses about marriage and fasting suggests that Jesus might have been describing in a parable the nature of the kingdom in the context of the destruction of the temple. He is promising that the kingdom will be accompanied by a new temple, whence the two mini-parables, showing that the old priesthood are incompatible with the new one provided by the Essenes. Elsewhere (Mt 26:61; Mk 14:58) he is accused of threatening to destroy the temple.

Essenes wore their clothes until they were in tatters. For them there could never be a question of patching old clothes. The reason was the Essene aversion to mixing anything, which in turn reflected their view that Jews and gentiles should remain distinct. Note also that it was the Essenes who used unfermented grape juice in their ceremonies, calling it new wine. Unfermented grape juice would begin to ferment in a skin which had contained wine, thus bursting the skin with the gas pressure generated.

Divorce

If Essenes had an idea of a symbolic marriage between God and Israel, it seems reasonable to think it will be reflected in Jesus’s attitude to divorce. Sure enough, a dispute over divorce arises:

Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him.

Mk 10:2

The Nazarene band are approaching Judaea travelling apparently on the eastern side of the Jordan river—which in the north was part of Decapolis and, in the south, part of Herod Antipas’s kingdom—possibly so as not to attract premature attention from the Romans in Judaea. Pharisees are there again, but many early manuscripts make no mention of them, the question simply being put abstractly. This is one case in which it is manifest that a reference to Pharisees is not genuine. That is generally the case in the gospels.

Jesus’s answer, fleshed out in Matthew 19:1-12, is purely Essene—divorce by either party is adultery. The Damascus Rule prescribes that marriage is permanent! An Essene could not remarry even if his wife had died. Justification is that Genesis 1:27 states God’s intent in creating man and woman. Both Jesus and the Essenes considered it more fundamental than Deuteronomy 24:1-4, the Mosaic statement of the law of divorce. The Essenes also quoted the pairing of creatures in Noah’s Ark and Deuteronomy 17:17:

He shall not multiply wives unto himself.

Similarly Jesus quoted another verse—Genesis 2:24:

A man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be of one flesh.

This has been considered the only direct pronouncement on law made by Jesus in the gospels. Nonetheless it is parabolic as ever. Jesus is not merely teaching what the Essenes accepted as the law in respect of divorce. He is using it to justify his incursion against the Roman province of Judaea, the heart of the promised land. The reason why the discussion about divorce comes at this point is precisely that Jesus is intent on dispatching the Roman usurper of God’s rightful position as bridegroom of Israel. God was the bridegroom of Israel—divorce is not allowed under any circumstances, so God would not divorce his bride, Israel. As in the miracle of the raising of Jair’s daughter, the problem is that the bride has been illegally taken by another, Rome! Jesus saw it as the duty of the Nazarenes to recover the virtue of Israel by liberating Jerusalem. When it had been done, the marriage could go ahead, and the gates of the kingdom would open.

Israel is personified as an unfaithful or forsaken wife in the scriptures, and its people are therefore spoken of as whoring after foreign gods:

Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath profaned the holiness of the Lord which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god. (“The daughter of” seems to be an interpolation.)

Malachi 2:11

And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them.

Deuteronomy 31:16

And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them throughout their generations.

Leviticus 17:7

Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people. And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.

Leviticus 20:5-6

And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so.

Judges 2:17

And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.

Judges 8:27

And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made Baalberith their god.

Judges 8:33

Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast gone a whoring from thy God, thou hast loved a reward upon every cornfloor.

Hosea 9:1

In Isaiah 54:5-8, the Jews are described as a forsaken wife. The husband who forsook her? God! But he promises it was only for a moment. In Jeremiah 3:20 God speaks to the children of Israel who had become idolatrous:

Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me.

The disciples ask Jesus for an explanation of the parable but either Mark cannot see, or does not want to suggest, that this is a parable. Mark therefore writes of the same matter changing the original of the parable. Neither is Mark’s explanation genuine. Proof is that, in Judaic law, a wife could not divorce her husband and adultery could only be committed against a man not a woman. Mark’s answer is fitted to gentile not Jewish practices of the time. Mark’s false answer has been substituted for Jesus’s explanation of the foregoing passage.

Jesus argues that God and Israel are as a groom and a bride. If divorce were possible then God could notionally divorce Israel, but He has decreed that once married the twain are one flesh—divorce is not lawful and He will never divorce His bride. So far Jesus is just restating that Israel is God’s forever but he does not conclude in such a simple fashion. He asserts:

What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

His point is not simply that divorce is illegal but that, in addition, no one can forcibly separate a married couple. Yet the married couple have been separated because the bride was no longer God’s but Rome’s. Remember that the Jews were theocrats—the metaphor of God as Israel’s groom meant God was Israel’s king. Rome had usurped God’s position as ruler of Israel.

The suppressed conclusion is, of course, that God simply awaits a sign from his people that the illegal marriage is rejected. That sign is that Jerusalem, symbolic of Israel as a whole, should be freed from the Romans. God would then respond appropriately. Thus the dispute about divorce is Jesus’s parabolic explanation of his purpose in heading for Jerusalem with his band of Nazarenes.

We find confirmation in Revelation 19 where the marriage is between the lamb and his wife after the destruction of Rome. The marriage still requires the destruction of Rome who had usurped God’s position. The change that has been made in Revelation is that the lamb has been substituted for God who was the true bridegroom and the only logical one in Jewish tradition. The wife was arrayed in clean white linen, the righteousness of the saints. And we also find:

Blessed are they who are called to the marriage supper of the lamb.

A Dead Girl and a Menstrual Woman

in Mark 5:21-43, two stories are presented, one surrounding the other. A woman touches the fringe of Jesus’s robe and is cured of a haemorrhage she has had for twelve years, the inference always made being that it is a menstrual discharge when the Greek word simply means any kind of bleeding. The fringe referred to is the four tassels required by the law of Moses, showing again that Jesus followed Jewish orthodoxy. More amazingly the daughter, aged twelve, of a president of a synagogue—a Pharisee!—is raised from the dead. Peter and the Sons of Thunder as well as the parents are present. The two stories are written in different styles so must have come from different sources originally but Mark had reason to present them together. If the two stories were originally together but Mark got two versions of them he might have preferred one from each of his two versions. If the two stories occurred separately Mark has seen their connection and linked them.

The period of twelve years is the link. A woman ill for twelve years is cured and a girl at the beginning of womanhood dies but is resurrected. Two healing miracles, one of them apparently truly miraculous. The clue that the story of the older woman—if her discharge was indeed mensrual—was a parable and not a real event is that no Jewish woman with such a haemorrhage would have been in a crowd. She would have been unwelcome—menstrual discharges were unclean. If she had touched Jesus then he would also have been unclean. And this poor woman had been ritually unclean for twelve years continuously! Robert A Guelich has noted that the woman would have been “personally, socially and spiritually cut off” and a feminist writer has noted that she would have been socially and religiously dead.

There was a point about the touching for gentile readers of the time of Mark. They believed that holy men exuded their power or “dynamis” involuntarily. Believers could tap it just as the menstruating woman did. Mark has to make Jesus different however and, at the same time, get over a Pauline message. Mark makes Jesus immediately aware that his power is being drained from him and demands to know who had stolen it from him. Nevertheless he forgives her and assures her, and the Christian proselytes reading the story, that faith is the essence of salvation. All of which makes it clear that none of it is genuine Nazarene tradition and can be ignored.

In the story about the raising of the little girl, besides forgetting about the mutual antagonism between Jesus and the Pharisees, Mark forgets that the crowd must still have been outside even though he had forbidden them to see the cure itself. They must all have known about it as soon as the little girl chose to appear in public and his strait charge that no man should know is absurd. This too is a parable.

Here we have two bold speeches or declarations of Jesus in which he uses the two metaphors to show that the time to liberate Judaea is right. Naive Christians or the evangelist transmute them into innocent healing miracles.

The woman and the girl are personifications of Israel. Sickness and death, as ever, represent spiritual sickness—defeatism, lack of morale, fear. Judaea has been unclean for twelve years, suffered for twelve years, been spiritually and religiously dead for twelve years. Blood had flowed in Judaea from her occupation by the Romans in 6 AD. Now she would be cleansed or cured—the word for “healed” used in the parables really means “saved” or “delivered”. Note that the woman with the haemorrhage supports herself, so she is either not married or is divorced. If the woman had been ritually unclean for twelve years she would hardly have made a suitable bride—especially for God.

In another sense Israel has been like a little girl growing up for twelve years. She is God’s betrothed. Now, though she is on the verge of maturity and soon will be able to marry, she has been sentenced to death. For the Essenes, according to a scroll fragment, a betrothed girl who committed adultery had committed a capital crime. Israel had committed adultery because she had allowed herself to be abducted and ravished by the Romans. For that she should die but Jesus intended to save her from death so that the intended marriage could go ahead.

Jesus reassures his followers that she is not dead but only sleeping and tells her to rise using the expression, “Talitha cumi, Maiden arise”, a possible pun on words like, “lambs rise up” or “poor ones rise up”, implying an insurrection. The audience are amazed in just the sense that they were amazed in other parts of the gospel—Jesus was boldly declaring UDI. Finally he tells them to be discreet and not to tell anyone, for obvious reasons. Jesus could not have even imagined that he would be able to keep quiet the miracle of bringing a physically dead person to life. The correct interpretation makes it possible and necessary.

In both of these plainly equivalent metaphors, Israel is a polluted woman unsuitable as God’s bride, just as she is in the story of Joseph and Aseneth, which draws upon the same tradition. In that story the polluted bride also becomes cure or purified, but there her problem is apostasy—she has taken to foreign gods raher than foreign rule.

There is yet more to the raising of the young girl. The clue here is that Jesus takes with him the three priests in the leadership of the Nazarenes, Peter, James and John. They always accompany Jesus on solemn occasions, like the transfiguration and the expected miracle in Gethsemene. The raising of the girl is therefore actually a Nazarene ritual, an acted parable. Jesus, with his high priests, ritually raises Israel from her death, with the slogan or war cry, Talitha Cumi. The ruler of the synagogue would have been a mistranslation of the guardian of the congregation or assembly, an Essene camp rather than the synagogue—the Hebrew can be translated as either according to context. The name of the guardian, Jair, means God’s enlightened.

The evangelist adds that the maiden should be given something to eat, seemingly to add realism to his rewriting of the ritual as a miracle, but it is that part of the ritual when the Nazarenes were given a morsel of the holy bread of life. In other words, the Essene messianic meal concluded the ceremony, but the gospel writer cannot say so because he is reserving the institution of the Eucharist for the last supper, later in the narrative.

This explanation of the interval of twelve years would put the activity of Jesus at the time that Caiaphas was appointed High Priest (18 AD). Pilate might also have been appointed prefect at about this time and not eight years later as Josephus appears to write in Antiquities of the Jews. It is possible that the two intervals that Josephus mentions that provide our only information about the extent of Pilate’s prefecture have been altered, a simple forgery.

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