TL:DR: The Genesis Question part forty-three

Hi, Everybody!

So, two things:

1, the bizness:

There's a Indiegogo live if you missed the Kickstarter for the birthday card.

The remastered Volume 1, digitally for $9.99.

Postcard Kickstarter it ends in two weeks, so I hopes you gots yours!  no Star code for the remastered Jaka's Story yet, but I'll add it to the list when I get it!

2, I ran out of pages from issue 289/290 to run in front of Dave's Genesis Question commentaries. Dave suggested I use Jewish, Christian or Muslim religious images. But then, Superman's Frenemy: David Birdsong sent in a bunch of (so far) unused Cerebus in Hell? images and now I'ma gonna run them. So:
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image by Doré, Sim & Birdsong

23 November 14

Dear Troy & Mia; David and Marie:

Ezekiel 46

Thus saith the Lord GOD, the gate of the inner court, that looketh toward the East shall be shut the six working days: but on the Sabbath it shall be opened and in the day of the New moon it shall be opened.

And the Prince shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate without, and shall stand by the post of the gate, and the Priests shall prepare his burnt offering, and his peace offerings and he shall worship at the threshold of the gate: then he shall go forth, but the gate shall not be shut until the evening.

In moving toward "the apex of the apex" of the Judaic Revelation -- which we, structurally, are when we've reached the 46th of 48 chapters of the third of the Major Prophets -- inherent contradictions present themselves (as I read it) if you're STILL attempting to maintain that Lord GOD and YHWH are the same being and 46:1-2 seems to me a good example of those contradictions, as it directly contradicts Ezekiel 44:2 ("Then said the YHWH unto me, This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the YHWH, the god of Israel hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut").

Christian scripture addresses but, to me, doesn't resolve the issue in Revelations 3:7 when the spirit which is guiding John speaks to him of what he should write about what the "The-however" -- I (as is popularly inferred) infer is God or (or, more likely, "and") some being delegated to the task by God -- is saying "to the angel of the-in-Philadelphia-eccelsia" (the angel of the Christian church at Philadelphia). It's a pretty intricate piece of writing so it requires a REALLY length digression, I'm afraid: 

The ____ (however, ____) is saying, the ____, holy, the ____ truthful, the ____ having the key of David, the ____ opening up and none will shut up, and shutting up and no one is opening:

It seems to me a natural inference that this is the Prince from Ezekiel's prophecies speaking.  It allows for the inference that it is God, while also allowing for the inference that it is YHWH, OR the Synoptic Jesus OR the Johannine Jesus OR John the Baptist OR The Father OR Angel Michael OR Angel Gabriel OR the Holy Spirit.

 It doesn't resolve the question of whether the East Gate is permanently open or permanently closed but does seem to suggest that there is only one entity who can do either or both.  As I say, I infer God or an entity delegated to the task by God (which still allows for that being YHWH, the Synoptic Jesus, the Johannine Jesus, John the Baptist, Angel Michael, Angel Gabriel, the Holy Spirit, the long-awaited Jewish Meschiach: the possibilities are not quite endless, but a profusion):

I have known of you the works -- Lo! I have given in sight of you door having been opened up, which no one is able to shut up it.  That little you are having power, and you observed of me the Word and not you denied the name of me.

As Daffy Duck observed, "Aha! Pronoun trouble!"  Who is "you" and who is "me"?  I'd suggest the spectrum of options is the same and that if you substitute each of the possible entities for "you" in this passage and read "me" as God -- or any of the other entities on the list -- you'll arrive at a different image with each of what is being said and why.  Which seems to me to be God's point:  there are lesser metaphorical constructs in all cases for the relationship between Lord GOD and YHWH in Ezekiel.  Which is why I suggest that it always comes down to innermost motivation or, as Muslims put it, submission to the will of God.  As long as your own, personal, innermost motivation is that God prevails in all circumstances -- that that's what you devote your life and faith and energies to -- then that seems (to me, anyway, to be the bottom line).

It doesn't matter how much temporal power you have or seem to have, what matters is observing the word -- or Word -- of God and not denying or doubting God's existence. 

The pronoun trouble continues throughout:

 Behold! I am giving out of the synagogue of the Satan, of the ___s saying themselves Jews to be and not they are, but they are lying --

Was Philadelphia, one of the seminal Christian churches, a "synagogue of the Satan"?  I would suggest that there's an honest answer to that based in what the net collective views of its congregants were -- but that that answer is and was only known to God, that God trafficks only in innermost motivation and how that innermost motivation expresses itself in concrete action over the course of a human lifetime.  And, in the case of churches, how that accumulation of innermost human motivations expresses itself in the church's context over the lifetime of the church. 

"I am giving out of the synagogue of the Satan".   I'd suggest that this is a reference to the contradiction between Ezekiel 44 and Ezekiel 46.  Whether God wants the door open or shut, there is a contradictory YHWHistic viewpoint that wants the opposite.  God, it seems to me, tactically and strategically, suggests a door that is closed except on the YHWH's holy days when it is opened.  Which puts the YHWH in a bit of a bind which seems to continue to the time of Revelation.  Both Ezekiel 44 and 46 are observed and believed, as are the names -- YHWH and God -- attached to them.

Behold! I shall make them in order that they will come and they will do obeisance in sight of the feet of you, and they should know that I loved you. 

Again, I think you can cast the speaker and the "spoken to" any number of ways but that, ultimately, it's God and YHWH:  God allowing for -- and in fact compelling -- obeisance to the YHWH as an expression of God's love FOR the YHWH, in spite of the YHWH's animosity towards God and that obeisance to any entity besides God is, by definition, blasphemous.

Because you observed the word  of the endurance of me, and I you shall observe out of the hour of the temptation the ___ being about to be coming upon the being inhabited whole, to tempt the inhabiting upon the earth.

As I read it, this shifts the enunciation so that it's directed to pretty much everyone EXCEPT the YHWH, again hinging on "innermost motivation".  You observe the word and the endurance of God and God, in turns, will observe you "out of the hour of the temptation".  It CAN include the YHWH but likely doesn't because you can't be observant towards God and accept people doing obeisance to you INSTEAD of God.   

I am coming quickly;

"Quickly" is a relative term in the context.  At the time of the Revelation, it would have been assumed that this meant "soon":  any day now, any month now, any year now -- which later eroded into "any decade now, any century now, any millennium now".  Which the YHWH would have logically inferred militated against the latter inferences being believed.  "If 'quickly' ends up being any longer than a decade or two, the centre can't hold and God will have shot Himself in the Foot by lying to His followers."  Logically, yes, that's what you would expect would happen, but that isn't what happened.  The Christian Faith and Endurance increases the more the meaning of the term "quickly" gets stretched to (in human terms) irrational lengths.  The expanding definition takes it out of human frames of reference and into Deistic frames of reference.  When "quickly" comes to mean, by definition, more than 2,000 years, that's about as far into Deistic frames of reference, I think, as the human mind can venture.

(I'm going to jump away here from the conclusion of the "Philadelphia passage" and come back to it where I think it mirrors the sense and spirit of Ezekiel 46. )  

But, all of that is WAY, WAY off in the future in Ezekiel's time.  As I read it, God's only interest in the Ezekiel prophecy is to stabilize everything so that nothing of great structural significance changes between that time and the advent of the Johannine and Synoptic Jesus' five centuries or so later.  The YHWH's structure needs to be maintained so the YHWH can witness the exhaustion of all its possibilities and, consequently, have no complaint that YHWHistic worship wasn't given a fair chance.

[It's worth noting, I think, (if I haven't before) that Prophet Muhammad is born roughly the same length of time AFTER the birth of Jesus (570 AD) as the Babylonian Conquest of Ezekiel's time was BEFORE the birth of Jesus.]

 It's very much a status quo series of instructions:

Likewise the people of the land shall worship at the door of this gate before the YHWH, in the Sabbaths and in the New moons.

And the burnt offering that the Prince shall offer unto the YHWH in the Sabbath day, six lambs without blemish and a ram without blemish.

The six lambs, as I read it, is God conceding -- strategically -- a joint "he/she/it" metaphor for Himself and the YHWH:  each aspect represented by a lamb. Of course, I infer that God knew that when the Ultimate Sacrifice came about of His Lamb, it would be exclusively a "he":  the Johannine Jesus.  But, knowing that was central to His "endgame", five centuries of metaphorical sacrifice could only throw the point into sharper relief (which, I infer, it did).  The ram is the YHWH, metaphorically speaking, caught by his horns when the YHWH intervened just as Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac. 

YHWH blinked, basically.

Presented with the dual enactment --  either Abraham was God and YHWH was Isaac or Abraham was YHWH and God was Isaac -- the YHWH couldn't countenance watching his/her/its self being metaphorically sacrificed and cried out to Abraham to stop him.  God was content with either eventuality and could watch Himself being sacrificed with perfect equanimity.  All it would result in would be a really strange long-term tangent in the history of the earth. 

At a very deep and profound level, the YHWH recognized this and recognized that he/she/it had lost ANY pretence to Deistic credibility by flinching.  Which meant the YHWH wouldn't flinch the next time, which God knew, which was the purpose, as I read it, behind the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus.  "We're both going to watch our 'sons' die agonizing and excruciating deaths and neither of us is going to do anything about it and then we'll see where that leads, YHWH."  

And the meat offering an Ephah for a ram, and the meat offering for the lambs as the gift of his hand and a Hin of oil to an Ephah.

And in the day of the New moon, a young bullock without blemish and six lambs and a ram: they shall be without blemish.

And he shall prepare a meat offering, an Ephah for a bullock and an Ephah for a ram, and for the lambs according as his hand shall attain unto, and an Hin of oil to an Ephah.

It's a metaphorical "out" for the YHWH (who was, as I read it, undoubtedly still gravely wounded by getting metaphorically caught in the thicket by "his" horns).  Maybe God is/was the ram and YHWH is the bullock!

Further (as I read it) to my view that God's ambition is a stabilized system that will allow the YHWH's theology to "hatch out" fully:  basically (again, as I read it) the YHWH's idea being that the ritual sacrifice of animals -- with the direct implication of man's corruption inherent in it -- is a cumulative structure and function.  Men sacrifice cattle they haven't been granted dominion over and thereby mandate their own sacrifice -- which, somewhere up ahead, will mean man's eradication from the earth.  The math is off (among other things), to say the least.  It will lead to the Holocaust and the near-eradication of European Jewry, but nearly two thousand years after the actual cessation of the Temple sacrifices. Six million dead Jews is an enormous and appalling number, but -- by 1945 -- it comes nowhere near to being the eradication of men from the face of the earth. 

And when the Prince shall enter, he shall go in by the way of the porch of that gate, and he shall go forth by the way thereof.

The balance of Ezekiel 46, I think it must be said, doesn't really favour the Christian Messianic interpretations (assuming that that's who the Prince is purported to be) but points more in the direction of a Judaic Chief Priest or a political leader usurping the function of the Chief Priest (as King Saul did, as an example) -- of the Prince being a populist figure aligned with and, generally, sharing observance with the people:

But when the people of the land shall come before the YHWH, in the solemn feasts, he that entreth by the way of the South gate, shall go forth by the way of the North gate: he shall not return by the way of the gate whereby he came in, but shall go forth over against it.

And the Prince in the midst of them when they go in, shall go in, and when they go forth, shall go forth.

You can TRY to shoehorn the Synoptic Jesus into this prophecy -- and I suspect that was how the followers of the Synoptic Jesus THOUGHT the celebratory entrance into Jerusalem was going to go -- but it's an uncomfortable fit at best.  The entrance is triumphal but then just…dissipates. 

The reason for that, I infer, is that the solidity of the structure remained solid for the duration of the five hundred years:

And in the feasts, and in the solemnities, the meat offering shall be an Ephah to a bullock, and an Ephah to a ram, and to the lambs, as he is able to give, and a Hin of oil to an Ephah. 

Now when the Prince shall prepare a voluntary burnt offering or peace offering, voluntarily unto the YHWH, one shall then open him the gate that looketh toward the East, and he shall prepare his burnt offering, and his peace offerings, as he did on the Sabbath day, then he shall go forth, and after his going forth, one shall shut the gate. 

Thou shalt daily prepare a burnt offering unto the YHWH, of a lamb of his year, without blemish thou shalt prepare it morning by morning.

And thou shalt prepare a meat offering for it every morning; the sixth part of an Ephah, and the third part of a Hin of oil, to temper with the fine flour; a meat offering continually, by a perpetual ordinance unto the YHWH.

Thus shall they prepare the lamb and the meat offering, and the oil, every morning for a continual burnt offering.

All that, I infer, was still going on at the time of the Synoptic Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem and there was no place for him in that on-going enactment.  Either the chief priest and the priests were just enacting all this in a pro forma way (which is really the sense that we get from the Gospels:  the only MAJOR corruption evident was the expansion of commerce in the Temple precincts: selling sacrificial animals and profiting from the currency conversion, apart from that everyone was just "going through the motions" from the Chief Priest on down) or there were any number of Men Who Would Be The Prince, secretly endeavouring to build their own case in the eyes of the people. 

This, it seems to me, was God's primary concern in His Revelations to Ezekiel.  Nothing fancy, just some basic "rules of thumb" for anyone who aspired to be The Prince:   

Thus saith the Lord GOD, If the prince give a gift unto any of his sons, the inheritance thereof shall be his sons' their possession by inheritance:

But if he give a gift of his inheritance to one of his servants, then it shall be his to the year of his liberty: after it shall return to the Prince, but his inheritance shall be his sons' for them.

Moreover, the Prince shall not take of the people's inheritance by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession: but he shall give his sons' inheritance out of his own possession, that my people be not scattered every man from his possession.

Note that God doesn't just pronounce an edict:  He explains His own motivation in doing so.  "These are the limits on the Prince.  His money is his money, but he's not to lay claim to anyone else's inheritance. Why?….'that my people be not scattered every man from his possession.'" 

I assume that this was particularly useful by the time of the Maccabees, with the genuine fulfillment of the prophecies in Ezekiel through the Synoptic and Johannine Jesus "just around the corner", a time when the firewall between the political and the religious leadership in Judaism/Israel was starting to melt down. Without those clearly enunciated boundaries, the whole narrative could have "gone for naught", with a Prince/supposed Messiah/supposed heir of King David just ending up with everyone's money and property a la Joseph in Egypt -- and THAT becoming the point, rather than "faith and endurance" in and through genuine monotheism.

After, he brought me through the entry, which at the side of the gate, into the holy chambers of the Priests which looked toward the North, and behold there a place on the two sides Westward. 

Okay, now, jumping back to the concluding passage in the address to "the angel of the church at Philadelphia" in Revelations, I think you can see the commonality of sense between what is said there and what is said at the end of Ezekiel 46:

be holding fast which you are having in order that no one might take the crown of you.  The ___ conquering I shall make him pillar in the divine habitation of the God of me, and outside not not he should go out yet, and I shall write upon him the name of the God of me and the name of the city of the God of me, of the new Jerusalem, the stepping down out of the heaven from the God of me, and the name of me the new.  The ___ having ear let him hear what the spirit is saying to the ecclesias.

It's expressed a little differently, but the crown, I think, is, irrefutably, the Prince's crown, just as the Prince is "the angel of the church" and a pillar in God's divine habitation.  It settles the issue of whether the door is permanently open or permanently closed and where the Prince should go in and where the Prince should go out:  "and outside, not not he should go out yet".  And, it seems to me, partakes of the same open interpretation addressed TO the Prince in Ezekiel.  "If you secretly think that you're the Prince, here's some basic guidance:  'Be holding fast which you are having in order that no one might take the crown of you.'"  Again, it seems to me to centre on innermost motivation AND innermost perception.  "What do I have?"  "How do I hold fast to it?" 

God, as I read it, leaves that up to the individual.  Figure out what you have -- or, rather, Have -- and "be holding fast which you are having" -- or, rather, Having.

With the relevant passages from Revelations interwoven and interpreted as I have (personally) interpreted them, the concluding passages in Ezekiel 46 look pretty innocuous and "beside the point" but, in Ezekiel's time, I think they were very far from being seen that way by the YHWH, having NO idea how all of this was going to unfold in five hundred years' time and what that would lead to:

Then said he unto me, This the place where the Priests shall boil the trespass offering and the sin offering, where they shall bake the meat offering: that they bear not out into the utter court, to sanctify the people.

The Priests who have formed an insulating layer around the Temple, around the Holy of Holies, around God will be boiling -- it SAYS right THERE!  (YHWH would have thought, in ALL CAPS)-- the TRESPASS offering and the SIN offering!  TRESPASS and SIN, confined and limiting and limited to the Priests themselves.  Repeated and repeated and repeated in direct proximity to God.  

Then he brought me forth into the utter court, and caused me to pass by the four corners of the court, and behold [Hebrew: a court in a corner of a court, and a court in a corner of a court/KJV: in every corner of the court (interpolated: there was) a court]

In the four corners of the court [interpolated: there were] courts [KJV I: made with chimneys; KJV II: joined of forty long and thirty broad]: these [Hebrew: cornered; KJV: four corners (interpolated: were)] of one measure.

And (interpolated: there was) a new (interpolated: building) round about in them, round about them four, and it was made with boiling places under the rows round about.

Then said he unto me, These (interpolated: are) the places of them that boil, where the ministers of the house shall boil the sacrifice of the people. 

It's the fulfillment of the macrocosm/microcosm structure whereby the Temple is represented in microcosm by the Holy of Holies which makes the Levitical precincts surrounding the Temple the Temple in macrocosm -- the additional chains and locks that God has suggested as a means of binding Him within the Temple.  Here God points out that in each of the corners of the courts where the SIN offering and the TRESPASS offering will be boiled, there will be another microcosm court, which implies another macrocosm for each "joined of forty long and thirty broad".  A nearly unimaginable profusion of priestly SIN and TRESPASS "where the ministers of the house shall boil the sacrifice of the people." 

"The sacrifice of the people" is right!  At God's own behest!

Next week, God willing Ezekiel 47

Best,

Dave 

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Next Time: Something bout the fifteenth anniversary of Cerebus ending?