The Origin of False Doctrine

by MBPSTB

11 December, 2014

22nd day, 9th month

Bible Study - Christians and Torah

When students of the Bible attempt to understand what happened and why, many are led to Constantine and his declarations regarding Sunday law and worship. Some argue he was trying to be "politically correct" in his day. Others will argue he knew exactly what he was doing. It brings to mind a couple of cliché's:

1. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

2. No good deed goes unpunished.

But the truth of how Christianity split from its original roots is much older and has been an ongoing tactic used by the adversary to draw people away from YHWH and lead them down the wrong path. It makes the Trojan Horse look like child's play.

When the Nation of Israel was one, they were undefeatable against their enemies. That is providing they OBEYED and when they didn't, YHWH was not with them. He would turn His back on them because in their disobedience, they sinned and YHWH is Holy and Set Apart and cannot abide sin.

There are 95 verses in which we find mention of the sins of Jeroboam. Some are excluded only for the sake of brevity.

(1Ki 11:26) And Jeroboam the son of Nebat, an Ephrathite of Zereda, Solomon's servant, whose mother's name was Zeruah, a widow woman, even he lifted up his hand against the king.

Jeroboam, of the tribe of Ephraim, went against Solomon, King of Israel of the tribe of Judah.

(1Ki 11:28) And the man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valour: and Solomon seeing the young man that he was industrious, he made him ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph.

Jeroboam, of Ephraim became LEADER of the House of Joseph.

(1Ki 11:29) And it came to pass at that time when Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem, that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the way; and he had clad himself with a new garment; and they two were alone in the field:

(1Ki 11:31) And he said to Jeroboam, Take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee:

Jeroboam of Ephraim now became LEADER of the Ten Tribes, that is, the House of Israel.

(1Ki 12:3) That they sent and called him. And Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came, and spake unto Rehoboam, saying,

(1Ki 12:20) And it came to pass, when all Israel heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they sent and called him unto the congregation, and made him king over all Israel: there was none that followed the house of David, but the tribe of Judah only.

(1Ki 12:25) Then Jeroboam built Shechem in mount Ephraim, and dwelt therein; and went out from thence, and built Penuel.

(1Ki 12:32) And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made.

Now Jeroboam declared feast days other than those of YHWH, making false sacrifices -and- appointing priests that were not of the tribe of Levi.

(1Ki 13:33) After this thing Jeroboam returned not from his evil way, but made again of the lowest of the people priests of the high places: whosoever would, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places.

(1Ki 14:7) Go, tell Jeroboam, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Forasmuch as I exalted thee from among the people, and made thee prince over my people Israel,

1Ki 14:8 And rent the kingdom away from the house of David, and gave it thee: and yet thou hast not been as my servant David, who kept my commandments, and who followed me with all his heart, to do that only which was right in mine eyes;

1Ki 14:9 But hast done evil above all that were before thee: for thou hast gone and made thee other gods, and molten images, to provoke me to anger, and hast cast me behind thy back:

(1Ki 14:16) And he shall give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin.

(1Ki 15:30) Because of the sins of Jeroboam which he sinned, and which he made Israel sin, by his provocation wherewith he provoked the LORD God of Israel to anger.

(1Ki 15:34) And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin.

(1Ki 16:2) Forasmuch as I exalted thee out of the dust, and made thee prince over my people Israel; and thou hast walked in the way of Jeroboam, and hast made my people Israel to sin, to provoke me to anger with their sins;

(1Ki 16:26) For he walked in all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin, to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger with their vanities.

(1Ki 16:31) And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him.

(1Ki 21:22) And will make thine house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah, for the provocation wherewith thou hast provoked me to anger, and made Israel to sin.

(1Ki 22:52) And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of his father, and in the way of his mother, and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin:

(2Ki 10:29) Howbeit from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them, to wit, the golden calves that were in Bethel, and that were in Dan.

(2Ki 10:31) But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law (Torah) of the LORD God of Israel with all his heart: for he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 13:2) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made Israel to sin; he departed not therefrom.

(2Ki 13:6) Nevertheless they departed not from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, who made Israel sin, but walked therein: and there remained the grove also in Samaria.)

(2Ki 13:11) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD; he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin: but he walked therein.

(2Ki 14:23) In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel began to reign in Samaria, and reigned forty and one years.

(2Ki 14:24) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 15:9) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, as his fathers had done: he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 15:18) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he departed not all his days from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 15:24) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 15:28) And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

(2Ki 17:21) For he rent Israel from the house of David; and they made Jeroboam the son of Nebat king: and Jeroboam drave Israel from following the LORD, and made them sin a great sin.

(2Ki 17:22) For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them;

(2Ki 23:15) Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.

(2Ch 11:14) For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing the priest's office unto the LORD:

(2Ch 13:4) And Abijah stood up upon mount Zemaraim, which is in mount Ephraim, and said, Hear me, thou Jeroboam, and all Israel;

2Ch 13:5 Ought ye not to know that the LORD God of Israel gave the kingdom over Israel to David for ever, even to him and to his sons by a covenant of salt?

2Ch 13:6 Yet Jeroboam the son of Nebat, the servant of Solomon the son of David, is risen up, and hath rebelled against his lord.

2Ch 13:7 And there are gathered unto him vain men, the children of Belial, and have strengthened themselves against Rehoboam the son of Solomon, when Rehoboam was young and tenderhearted, and could not withstand them.

2Ch 13:8 And now ye think to withstand the kingdom of the LORD in the hand of the sons of David; and ye be a great multitude, and there are with you golden calves, which Jeroboam made you for gods.

2Ch 13:9 Have ye not cast out the priests of the LORD, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites, and have made you priests after the manner of the nations of other lands? so that whosoever cometh to consecrate himself with a young bullock and seven rams, the same may be a priest of them that are no gods.

(2Ch 13:8) And now ye think to withstand the kingdom of the LORD in the hand of the sons of David; and ye be a great multitude, and there are with you golden calves, which Jeroboam made you for gods.

(Amo 7:9) And the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.

Sanctuaries of Israel. Look at the churches and branches of Christianity to day and how far they have strayed from God's Truth.

(Amo 7:11) For thus Amos saith, Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel shall surely be led away captive out of their own land.

Israel, the Lost Ten Tribes, scattered to all four corners of the earth.

2Ch 11:14 For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing the priest's office unto the LORD:

2Ch 11:15 And he ordained him priests for the high places, and for the devils, and for the calves which he had made.

Looking at Christianity, we see varying sects of the faith, appointing whomever to positions of Shepherds of these flocks. Instead of deep study of the Scriptures, they go to Theological Universities earning degrees taught by men who have not the Spirit in them but carry forward teaching the false doctrines begun by Jeroboam.

Instead, believers who seek out God's WORD for themselves, finding truths that are not taught in their church, instead of being embraced are cast out and considered anathema. So, in fear of being cast out, they keep quiet and surrender to man instead of to God.

Prophecy Watch: Friday 24th May 2013

From The Sun To The Moon

The scene could be out of the Haggada - a group of rabbis sitting on the floor in a circle through the night, probably reclining on pillows, scrolls scattered about them, engaging in heated disputation until the pale light outside signals that a new day is upon them.

The fact that this particular gathering, mentioned in the Talmud, is held in an attic (aliyat gag) might suggest to a modern reader that there is something clandestine about it, perhaps a desire to take distance from Roman ears or even from the surrounding Jewish population.

Clandestine or not, this meeting, and all the similar gatherings that preceded and followed, contained the seeds of revolution - the radical restructuring of Jewish religious thought and practice that followed the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

According to Prof. Rachel Elior of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis were involved in nothing less than "a reinvention of Judaism... They were closing an old world based on prophecy and angelic revelation and opening the sacred canon to human reinterpretation."

A glimpse into that intellectual ferment is provided in the brief depiction in the talmudic tractate Shabbat (13b) of the rabbinic gathering, perhaps in Yavne - which had become the major center of Jewish learning after the destruction of Jerusalem.

"That man should be remembered with favor," the passage says in reference to one of the participants in the meeting, "his name being Hanania son of Hezekiah, for if it were not for him the Book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed and withdrawn as its teachings contradict those of the Torah. What did he do? They brought him jugs of oil [for lamps] and he sat in the attic and expounded upon the texts [through the night]."

What Hanania and his colleagues were engaged in was a culling of all the Hebrew religious texts composed until that time. The works they would choose from this library would constitute the Jewish canon which henceforth would be the only texts deemed to have divine authority.

In the end, a consensus formed around 24 works, including the five books of the Pentateuch, which together would make up the Bible. But what of the works excluded from the canon? Many were of comparable literary and religious quality to those chosen, says Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mystical thought. "To many of the Jews of the first millennium BCE, all the texts had been equally holy," she says.

"The [excluded] Book of Enoch or Book of Jubilees were certainly not considered less sacred than the [canonical] Book of Judges or Esther or Daniel." Yet the excluded texts - close to a dozen major works - were not just abandoned but excised as if they were a malignant growth.

"Whoever reads them," declared Rabbi Akiva, one of the foremost sages involved in the process, "will have no place in the world to come." Left to die, some of the expelled texts were rescued and adopted by another religion.

Newborn Christianity, which regarded itself as the successor of Judaism, incorporated these texts into its own corpus of holy works along with the Old Testament, as the Hebrew Bible came to be called. In time, Jewish scholars would rediscover the repudiated texts of their ancestors in Greek, Ethiopian (Geez), Syriac, Armenian and Slavic church translations.

These writings, known as Apocrypha ("hidden scriptures" in Latin) would never be reincorporated into the Jewish library but would remain for scholars to puzzle over as they tried to understand by what criteria the texts had been rejected.

HALF A century ago another lost library with a mystery attached surfaced on the shores of the Dead Sea, this one having been literally lost for 1,900 years after being hidden in the caves of Qumran. Many of these Dead Sea Scrolls would have been suppressed, says Elior, for the same reasons that the previously known apocryphal books were suppressed.

In her recently published (Hebrew) book, Memory and Oblivion - The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she offers a bold and coherent narrative to explain events about which scholars have long held contrary views.

The short reason for the canon/Apocrypha divide, she suggests, was a dispute over the calendar. The more profound explanation involves a power struggle between the old priestly order that believed its rulings to be divinely inspired and an emerging class of rabbis espousing a different narrative, one which gave human reason and laws a role in shaping the religion.

Elior demonstrates how mystic notions like cosmic calendars and heavenly chariots were part of a power struggle whose outcome would affect how Judaism is practiced to the present day. For centuries the Israelites had marked time according to a solar calendar drawn up by the priestly caste but regarded as divinely inspired. The calendar emulated the pattern set by God when He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The number seven would become a mystic measure of Jewish time. The Israelites adopted a seven-day week, apparently the first people in the world to do so, and they too rested on the seventh day.

Every seventh year was designated a shmita year when the earth itself rested and lay fallow. Each cycle of seven times seven years, 49 years in all, would be followed by a jubilee year, a new beginning when indentured servants were freed and leased land reverted to its original owners.

The time between the exodus from Egypt to Moses's meeting with God on Mount Sinai would be remembered as seven weeks. Joshua would lead the Israelites across the Jordan in a jubilee year. There would be, until this day, seven days of mourning, seven days between birth and male circumcision, seven days of female menstrual impurity.

Elior terms the priestly calendar an exceptional mathematical construct that reflected a presumed cosmic order revealed to Enoch (Hanoch, in Hebrew), an intriguing biblical figure central to the priestly narrative but shunted aside by the rabbis. In Genesis (5:18), he is mentioned briefly in the long list of descendents of Adam - the seventh generation of the patriarchs of mankind, and thus safely distanced from the incest that necessarily marked the earliest generations - but his listing is unique. As with all the others, it gives the number of years he lived - 365 in his case, not coincidentally the number of days of the year - and tells whom he begot - Methuselah, who lived 969 years and who in turn begat Noah.

However, the thumbnail biography of Enoch does not end like all the others with the words "and he died." Instead, it says "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him." The Bible does not elaborate on this, but the Apocrypha does. Several versions of the Book of Enoch preserved by the church have been found in different languages. (Several scrolls of Enoch turned up in Qumran as well, in Aramaic.) They describe Enoch being brought up to heaven and granted immortality along with a two-way ticket. At God's direction, he is taught by angels to read, write and calculate numbers - the first human given this knowledge. He then returns to earth to share with humankind what he has learned, including the solar calendar.

The priests, wrote Elior in an earlier book, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, viewed this calendar as "a cyclic reflection of an eternal divine order." The priests were the calendar's guardians, privy to secrets imparted by angels and, like Enoch, would serve as conduits between the heavenly and the terrestrial. It was members of the priestly caste and prophets, many of whom were priests, who wrote the books that would form the Bible, and they wrote the books that would become the Apocrypha as well.

Everything the priests wrote was considered sacred because they were, in effect, taking dictation from the angels. They regarded the angels as their heavenly counterparts and saw themselves as working with them to ensure a synchronization of the cosmic order in heaven and on earth.

THE MOST tangible earthly manifestation of the solar calendar was the priestly work roster on the Temple Mount. Twenty-four priestly families, the same number as the number of hours in a day, took weekly turns attending to animal sacrifices and other Temple rituals. Like army reservists today, members of one of these families would go up to the Mount on Sunday morning and officiate until relieved by the next family a week later.

These priestly "watches" gave a time frame to the life of the entire community, says Elior. From the time the Temple was built by Solomon in the 10th century BCE, the High Priest was chosen from a family line descended from the priest Zadok, who had carried the Ark of God in David's time and anointed David's son, Solomon, as king.

The last Zadokite (Sadducee) high priest was ousted during the political chaos that preceded the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE. The Hasmoneans, a priestly family but not of the Zadokite line, cast out the Hellenizers from Jerusalem but instead of restoring the Zadokite line installed their own members in the high priesthood. Some of the Zadokites and their followers challenged the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priestly leadership and seceded from Temple service.

This conflict between the Zadokite "secessionists," as Elior calls them, and the Hasmonean usurpers is the theme of many of the most interesting scrolls found at Qumran. Elior views the Qumran scrolls as a Zadokite library, not an Essene library as has been the consensus view. Amid the chaos and intense religious ferment of the Hasmonean period (152-37 BCE), new voices began to be heard - those of scholars known as Pharisees who disputed the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priests and kings and who argued with the Zadokite priests about the solar calendar and their claims to possess an open line to the divine.

These scholars, who would become known as rabbis or sages, were unhappy about the exclusiveness of the priests and the power they had accrued through their claims to esoteric knowledge as confidants of angels. In a game-changing move, the rabbis declared that the age of prophecy had long since ended and that the priesthood had been severed from ongoing access to higher authority. According to one rabbinic tradition, prophecy had ended with the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

According to another, it ended when Alexander the Great and the Hellenizers arrived two centuries later. The priests vigorously rejected this downsizing. The rabbis favored a lunar calendar, says Elior, because they saw it symbolically freeing the nation from dependence on a closed priestly caste locked into the solar calendar and claiming divine authority.

They wanted to symbolize instead man's share in the determination of time and of his own fate. "They declared that human understanding of sacred writings was a legitimate source of authority." The month would now not commence according to a solar calendar precalculated for eternity but by mortals scanning the sky for the new moon, perhaps disagreeing about the sighting among themselves, perhaps even erring.

A MODERN-DAY reminder of the rabbinic victory in their epic struggle with the priests can be witnessed outside Orthodox synagogues one night a month, when the congregation emerges to pronounce the prayer for the new moon. In choosing the works that would comprise the biblical canon, says Elior, the principle criteria of the rabbis was to exclude those which invoked the solar calendar and endowed the priests with ongoing divine authority. "They were saying by this, 'The old age has ended and a new age has begun.'" Similar symbolic moves would follow the French Revolution when a radically new calendar, including a 10-day week, was adopted, and following the Russian Revolution when the Gregorian calendar used in the West was substituted for the Julian calendar followed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The issue was less the measure of time, notes Elior, than the measure of man's sovereignty. Alongside the texts that the rabbis accepted into the canon, they created a parallel framework of oral law which they themselves - not the priests - would develop and which would become ever more relevant over the centuries to the evolving circumstances of Jewish life. The first major compilation, the Mishna, would be completed by 200 CE. In the following centuries, sages in Palestine and Babylonia would complete the Talmud. These compilations would remain oral - the ancients having a capacity for memorizing enormous texts - until the eighth or ninth centuries when they were finally put into writing. The sages represented a strongly democratic strain. Study was open to all Jewish men and was not a matter of dynasty and inherited privilege. Rabbi Akiva had been a shepherd. Other sages had been farmers and craftsmen. Resh Lakish was a reformed bandit.

The Oral Law, says Elior, was "open to study and interpretation by the entire male Jewish population." The meritocracy that emerged displaced the hereditary leadership of the priestly clans which had traced their dynasty, link by link, back to Moses's brother, Aaron. "The rabbis transferred the center of gravity," says Elior, "from a regular, priestly ritual, anchored in holy time and holy place, to an ever-changing order entrusted to sages from all classes of the population, who took charge of humanly declared time and taught a new perception of holiness."

The debate between the sages and the priests ended abruptly with the Roman conquest. Following the destruction of the Temple, the priestly order was shattered and the rabbis were free to reconfigure the playing field. They not only discarded the apocryphal texts but, according to Elior, probably amended some passages in the books they would include in the Bible to minimize references to the solar calendar, to angels and to the story of Enoch. By doing so, the sages prepared the Jewish people for the long haul through the ages. The conduit to the divine was no longer a monumental building in Jerusalem served by a priestly caste. As they went into exile, the Jews took with them the Sabbath and the Bible but were no longer dependent on a specific holy place or on priestly intermediaries. From now on a quorum of 10 ordinary Jews assembling in the humblest of rooms, or in no room at all, could, anywhere in the world talk directly to God.

Replies

Meshelemiah July 17, 2016 at 2:01pm

Prophecy Watch: Friday 24th May 2013

From The Sun To The Moon

The scene could be out of the Haggada - a group of rabbis sitting on the floor in a circle through the night, probably reclining on pillows, scrolls scattered about them, engaging in heated disputation until the pale light outside signals that a new day is upon them.

The fact that this particular gathering, mentioned in the Talmud, is held in an attic (aliyat gag) might suggest to a modern reader that there is something clandestine about it, perhaps a desire to take distance from Roman ears or even from the surrounding Jewish population.

Clandestine or not, this meeting, and all the similar gatherings that preceded and followed, contained the seeds of revolution - the radical restructuring of Jewish religious thought and practice that followed the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

According to Prof. Rachel Elior of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis were involved in nothing less than "a reinvention of Judaism... They were closing an old world based on prophecy and angelic revelation and opening the sacred canon to human reinterpretation."

A glimpse into that intellectual ferment is provided in the brief depiction in the talmudic tractate Shabbat (13b) of the rabbinic gathering, perhaps in Yavne - which had become the major center of Jewish learning after the destruction of Jerusalem.

"That man should be remembered with favor," the passage says in reference to one of the participants in the meeting, "his name being Hanania son of Hezekiah, for if it were not for him the Book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed and withdrawn as its teachings contradict those of the Torah. What did he do? They brought him jugs of oil [for lamps] and he sat in the attic and expounded upon the texts [through the night]."

What Hanania and his colleagues were engaged in was a culling of all the Hebrew religious texts composed until that time. The works they would choose from this library would constitute the Jewish canon which henceforth would be the only texts deemed to have divine authority.

In the end, a consensus formed around 24 works, including the five books of the Pentateuch, which together would make up the Bible. But what of the works excluded from the canon? Many were of comparable literary and religious quality to those chosen, says Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mystical thought. "To many of the Jews of the first millennium BCE, all the texts had been equally holy," she says.

"The [excluded] Book of Enoch or Book of Jubilees were certainly not considered less sacred than the [canonical] Book of Judges or Esther or Daniel." Yet the excluded texts - close to a dozen major works - were not just abandoned but excised as if they were a malignant growth.

"Whoever reads them," declared Rabbi Akiva, one of the foremost sages involved in the process, "will have no place in the world to come." Left to die, some of the expelled texts were rescued and adopted by another religion.

Newborn Christianity, which regarded itself as the successor of Judaism, incorporated these texts into its own corpus of holy works along with the Old Testament, as the Hebrew Bible came to be called. In time, Jewish scholars would rediscover the repudiated texts of their ancestors in Greek, Ethiopian (Geez), Syriac, Armenian and Slavic church translations.

These writings, known as Apocrypha ("hidden scriptures" in Latin) would never be reincorporated into the Jewish library but would remain for scholars to puzzle over as they tried to understand by what criteria the texts had been rejected.

HALF A century ago another lost library with a mystery attached surfaced on the shores of the Dead Sea, this one having been literally lost for 1,900 years after being hidden in the caves of Qumran. Many of these Dead Sea Scrolls would have been suppressed, says Elior, for the same reasons that the previously known apocryphal books were suppressed.

In her recently published (Hebrew) book, Memory and Oblivion - The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she offers a bold and coherent narrative to explain events about which scholars have long held contrary views.

The short reason for the canon/Apocrypha divide, she suggests, was a dispute over the calendar. The more profound explanation involves a power struggle between the old priestly order that believed its rulings to be divinely inspired and an emerging class of rabbis espousing a different narrative, one which gave human reason and laws a role in shaping the religion.

Elior demonstrates how mystic notions like cosmic calendars and heavenly chariots were part of a power struggle whose outcome would affect how Judaism is practiced to the present day. For centuries the Israelites had marked time according to a solar calendar drawn up by the priestly caste but regarded as divinely inspired. The calendar emulated the pattern set by God when He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The number seven would become a mystic measure of Jewish time. The Israelites adopted a seven-day week, apparently the first people in the world to do so, and they too rested on the seventh day.

Every seventh year was designated a shmita year when the earth itself rested and lay fallow. Each cycle of seven times seven years, 49 years in all, would be followed by a jubilee year, a new beginning when indentured servants were freed and leased land reverted to its original owners.

The time between the exodus from Egypt to Moses's meeting with God on Mount Sinai would be remembered as seven weeks. Joshua would lead the Israelites across the Jordan in a jubilee year. There would be, until this day, seven days of mourning, seven days between birth and male circumcision, seven days of female menstrual impurity.

Elior terms the priestly calendar an exceptional mathematical construct that reflected a presumed cosmic order revealed to Enoch (Hanoch, in Hebrew), an intriguing biblical figure central to the priestly narrative but shunted aside by the rabbis. In Genesis (5:18), he is mentioned briefly in the long list of descendents of Adam - the seventh generation of the patriarchs of mankind, and thus safely distanced from the incest that necessarily marked the earliest generations - but his listing is unique. As with all the others, it gives the number of years he lived - 365 in his case, not coincidentally the number of days of the year - and tells whom he begot - Methuselah, who lived 969 years and who in turn begat Noah.

However, the thumbnail biography of Enoch does not end like all the others with the words "and he died." Instead, it says "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him." The Bible does not elaborate on this, but the Apocrypha does. Several versions of the Book of Enoch preserved by the church have been found in different languages. (Several scrolls of Enoch turned up in Qumran as well, in Aramaic.) They describe Enoch being brought up to heaven and granted immortality along with a two-way ticket. At God's direction, he is taught by angels to read, write and calculate numbers - the first human given this knowledge. He then returns to earth to share with humankind what he has learned, including the solar calendar.

The priests, wrote Elior in an earlier book, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, viewed this calendar as "a cyclic reflection of an eternal divine order." The priests were the calendar's guardians, privy to secrets imparted by angels and, like Enoch, would serve as conduits between the heavenly and the terrestrial. It was members of the priestly caste and prophets, many of whom were priests, who wrote the books that would form the Bible, and they wrote the books that would become the Apocrypha as well.

Everything the priests wrote was considered sacred because they were, in effect, taking dictation from the angels. They regarded the angels as their heavenly counterparts and saw themselves as working with them to ensure a synchronization of the cosmic order in heaven and on earth.

THE MOST tangible earthly manifestation of the solar calendar was the priestly work roster on the Temple Mount. Twenty-four priestly families, the same number as the number of hours in a day, took weekly turns attending to animal sacrifices and other Temple rituals. Like army reservists today, members of one of these families would go up to the Mount on Sunday morning and officiate until relieved by the next family a week later.

These priestly "watches" gave a time frame to the life of the entire community, says Elior. From the time the Temple was built by Solomon in the 10th century BCE, the High Priest was chosen from a family line descended from the priest Zadok, who had carried the Ark of God in David's time and anointed David's son, Solomon, as king.

The last Zadokite (Sadducee) high priest was ousted during the political chaos that preceded the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE. The Hasmoneans, a priestly family but not of the Zadokite line, cast out the Hellenizers from Jerusalem but instead of restoring the Zadokite line installed their own members in the high priesthood. Some of the Zadokites and their followers challenged the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priestly leadership and seceded from Temple service.

This conflict between the Zadokite "secessionists," as Elior calls them, and the Hasmonean usurpers is the theme of many of the most interesting scrolls found at Qumran. Elior views the Qumran scrolls as a Zadokite library, not an Essene library as has been the consensus view. Amid the chaos and intense religious ferment of the Hasmonean period (152-37 BCE), new voices began to be heard - those of scholars known as Pharisees who disputed the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priests and kings and who argued with the Zadokite priests about the solar calendar and their claims to possess an open line to the divine.

These scholars, who would become known as rabbis or sages, were unhappy about the exclusiveness of the priests and the power they had accrued through their claims to esoteric knowledge as confidants of angels. In a game-changing move, the rabbis declared that the age of prophecy had long since ended and that the priesthood had been severed from ongoing access to higher authority. According to one rabbinic tradition, prophecy had ended with the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

According to another, it ended when Alexander the Great and the Hellenizers arrived two centuries later. The priests vigorously rejected this downsizing. The rabbis favored a lunar calendar, says Elior, because they saw it symbolically freeing the nation from dependence on a closed priestly caste locked into the solar calendar and claiming divine authority.

They wanted to symbolize instead man's share in the determination of time and of his own fate. "They declared that human understanding of sacred writings was a legitimate source of authority." The month would now not commence according to a solar calendar precalculated for eternity but by mortals scanning the sky for the new moon, perhaps disagreeing about the sighting among themselves, perhaps even erring.

A MODERN-DAY reminder of the rabbinic victory in their epic struggle with the priests can be witnessed outside Orthodox synagogues one night a month, when the congregation emerges to pronounce the prayer for the new moon. In choosing the works that would comprise the biblical canon, says Elior, the principle criteria of the rabbis was to exclude those which invoked the solar calendar and endowed the priests with ongoing divine authority. "They were saying by this, 'The old age has ended and a new age has begun.'" Similar symbolic moves would follow the French Revolution when a radically new calendar, including a 10-day week, was adopted, and following the Russian Revolution when the Gregorian calendar used in the West was substituted for the Julian calendar followed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The issue was less the measure of time, notes Elior, than the measure of man's sovereignty. Alongside the texts that the rabbis accepted into the canon, they created a parallel framework of oral law which they themselves - not the priests - would develop and which would become ever more relevant over the centuries to the evolving circumstances of Jewish life. The first major compilation, the Mishna, would be completed by 200 CE. In the following centuries, sages in Palestine and Babylonia would complete the Talmud. These compilations would remain oral - the ancients having a capacity for memorizing enormous texts - until the eighth or ninth centuries when they were finally put into writing. The sages represented a strongly democratic strain. Study was open to all Jewish men and was not a matter of dynasty and inherited privilege. Rabbi Akiva had been a shepherd. Other sages had been farmers and craftsmen. Resh Lakish was a reformed bandit.

The Oral Law, says Elior, was "open to study and interpretation by the entire male Jewish population." The meritocracy that emerged displaced the hereditary leadership of the priestly clans which had traced their dynasty, link by link, back to Moses's brother, Aaron. "The rabbis transferred the center of gravity," says Elior, "from a regular, priestly ritual, anchored in holy time and holy place, to an ever-changing order entrusted to sages from all classes of the population, who took charge of humanly declared time and taught a new perception of holiness."

The debate between the sages and the priests ended abruptly with the Roman conquest. Following the destruction of the Temple, the priestly order was shattered and the rabbis were free to reconfigure the playing field. They not only discarded the apocryphal texts but, according to Elior, probably amended some passages in the books they would include in the Bible to minimize references to the solar calendar, to angels and to the story of Enoch. By doing so, the sages prepared the Jewish people for the long haul through the ages. The conduit to the divine was no longer a monumental building in Jerusalem served by a priestly caste. As they went into exile, the Jews took with them the Sabbath and the Bible but were no longer dependent on a specific holy place or on priestly intermediaries. From now on a quorum of 10 ordinary Jews assembling in the humblest of rooms, or in no room at all, could, anywhere in the world talk directly to God.
Meshelemiah July 17, 2016 at 2:00pm

Jer 8:8

(ASV) How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of Jehovah is with us? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely.

(Brenton) How will ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? In vain have the scribes used a false pen.

(Geneva) Howe doe yee say, Wee are wise, and the Lawe of the Lorde is with vs? Loe, certeinly in vaine made hee it, the penne of the scribes is in vaine.

(HOT+) איכה^H349 תאמרו^H559 חכמים^H2450 אנחנו^H587 ותורת^H8451 יהוה^H3068 אתנו^H854 אכן^H403 הנה^H2009 לשׁקר^H8267 עשׂה^H6213 עט^H5842 שׁקר^H8267 ספרים׃^H5608

(JPS) How do ye say: 'We are wise, and the Law of the LORD is with us'? Lo, certainly in vain hath wrought the vain pen of the scribes.

Jer_8:8 How^H349 do ye say,^H559 We^H587 are wise,^H2450 and the law^H8451 of the LORD^H3068 is with^H854 us? Lo,^H2009 certainly^H403 in vain^H8267 made^H6213 he it; the pen^H5842 of the scribes^H5608 is in vain.^H8267

H8267

שׁקר

sheqer

sheh'-ker

From H8266; an untruth; by implication a sham (often adverbially): - without a cause, deceit (-ful), false (-hood, -ly), feignedly, liar, + lie, lying, vain (thing), wrongfully.

H8266

שׁקר

shâqar

shaw-kar'

A primitive root; to cheat, that is, be untrue (usually in words): - fail, deal falsely, lie.

(The Scriptures 1998+) “How do you say, ‘We are wise, and the Torah of יהוה is with us’? But look, the false pen of the scribe has worked falsehood.

(YLT) How do ye say, We are wise, And the law of Jehovah is with us? Surely, lo, falsely it hath wrought, The false pen of scribes.

EHYEHshua had a lot to say on the subject of scribes it seems:

(Matthew 23:13) But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

(Matthew 23:14) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

(Matthew 23:15) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

(Matthew 23:23) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law(TORAH), judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

(Matthew 23:25) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

(Matthew 23:27) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

(Matthew 23:29) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,

(Luke 11:44) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.

(Luke 11:46) And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.

(Luke 11:52) Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

Comment on Youtube:

No, well not directly but in Jeremiah we find the verse about the false pen of the scribes. Then too even Jesus railed against the Scribes. you have to ask yourself---why?? What DID they do? They were responsible for writing and copying the Scriptures!! Not that ALL of Scripture is false, but subtle changes made.

Consider this: the original Hebrew text was ALL CONSONANTS. NO VOWELS. The rabbis and sages held tightly to the truth (even Jesus accused them of that!) not letting anything flow to others. So.....why did they later add vowels to help common man understand? It was to DECEIVE not to help. By adding vowels they could take one Hebrew word and make it mean different things and so changing the actual meaning of verses in order to HIDE the truth.

Okay, you will argue the verses where we are WARNED about making those changes. These rabbis and sages are very DEVIOUS. PLEASE NOTE!!! That in the Hebrew any vowels are dots or lines placed AROUND but NEVER TOUCHING the actual Hebrew consonants.

They made changes to (and this is even more important to understand) the SOUND of letters. WHY??? Because it is in the SOUND that the true Name of YHWH can be known. Spelling it is not the same as sounding it out. Don't you just hate it when people mispronounce your own name???

Don't you think YHWH feels the same? Even more so???

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