The Early Jewish Nation
The Jews searched for a racial identity and craved for a theology and social framework that was their own. They had the distant legend of a founding father in Abraham and a law-giver in Moses. The early Jewish kings provided a hollow sense of heritage. David, erroneously portrayed as a giant killer, gave them a role model. Solomon, humble and ill-starred though his exploits had been became the focus of national pride. It was not a man, however, who eventually came to epitomize the search for purpose and self esteem, it was a small and unimportant building that Solomon had erected for the god of war, Yahweh.
After the death of Solomon, in the northern kingdom, assassination of the king became a national sport and in the centuries that followed, war, murder and treachery became the norm. Jehu, a general came to power by personally murdering Jehoram, King of Israel. He then murdered Ahaziah of Judah, who was visiting the north, and had the unfortunate Jezebel trampled to pieces beneath the hooved of horses so that only her skull, feet and the palms of her hands were found for burial. A further one hundred and twelve possible opponents were killed and all the Baal worshippers in the land were rounded up and slaughtered. We are told that God was well pleased with these ‘noble’ actions. 2 Kings 10:30
’And the LORD said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in mine heart, thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.’
Judah managed to maintain genuine stability for almost three and a half centuries after the split. The Davidic line continued uninterrupted for over four hundred years in total.
The main reason for the continuance of the Davidic royal line over such a considerable period was due to the cohesion provided by a ‘divine right to rule’ conferred by a mystic and secret ceremony. The descendants of David were considered to be Yahweh’s choice. The ruling family and its entourage united by their membership of the secret holding group, and when they ‘raised’ their chosen candidate to the status of king, insurrection was very unlikely because of the power of this controlling group.
The importance of the king of Judah was demonstrated in their New Year rituals, which followed Egyptian and Babylonian models.
The Exile in Babylon
The northern kingdom of Israel had struggled from start to finish and it finally collapsed in 721 BC when it was overrun by the Assyrians. Judah lasted over a century and a half longer. On 15 and 16 March 597 BC the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar seized Jerusalem, captured the king and appointed a new puppet king called Zedekiah. The true king, Jehoiachin, was carried into exile with all his court and the intellectuals of the land, the idea being that those that remained would not have the wit to raise a rebellion against their new masters.
Over three thousand people were taken to Babylon; cuneiform tablets found at Babylon list payments of rations of oil and grain to the captives, naming specifically King Jehoiachin and his five sons as recipients.
The new puppet king was tempted to side with Babylon’s enemy, the Egyptians, in order to liberate Judah. Nebuchadnezzar attacked Judah; in the following January the siege of Jerusalem began. Despite an attempt by Egyptian forces to drive off the Babylonians, the city fell in July 586 BC. Jerusalem and its temple were utterly destroyed.
Zedekiah was brought before Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah in Babylonia where he was forced to watch the killing of his sons, and as he stared in horror his eyes were plucked out. With this last terrible sight burned into his memory, the puppet king was carried off to Babylon in chains. According to Jeremiah 52:29 a further eight hundred and thirty-two people were taken in exile at the same time.
The Greek historian Herodotus visited Babylon and described the lofty Ziggurat of Bel, the stepped pyramid with seven tower-like storeys, faced with the colors of the sun, moon and five planets, and upon its summit a temple. This structure was the source of the story of the Tower of Babel. Ba-bel was a Sumerian term meaning ‘god gate’. The Tower of Babel still exists, although it is now just a shapeless ruin.
The Processional Way led to the great Ishtar Gate. It was massive and covered with blue glazed tiles on which were depicted lions, bulls and dragons in raised relief. Marduk the dragon deity, Adad the god of the sky in the form of a bull, and Ishtar the goddess of love and war, symbolized by a lion.
The deported must have felt gratitude. The metropolis made Jerusalem and its Temple look extremely humble.
Their own Egyptian/Caananite-based legends and those of the Babylonians derived from a common ancient Sumerian source. The Jews found that the gaps in their own tribal stories of the creation and the Flood could now be filled in.
The majority of Jewish families stayed on when the captivity ended.
Contrary to popular belief, the Jews of this period were not monotheistic. Yahweh’s zone of influence lay in Jerusalem and from all of the evidence available, even his strongest supporters never created a shrine to him in the entire period of their captivity.
During the Babylonian captivity most of the first five books of the Bible were written.
In Genesis 28:18 we are told that Jacob erected a pillar to link Earth with Heaven at Bethel, some ten miles north of Jerusalem, and later in Genesis 31:45 he created a second at Mizpah in the mountains of Galeed, east of the River Jordan. Neither towns identified in the Bible existed in Jacob’s time.
The late Semitic philologist John Allegro discovered that the name Jacob stems directly from the Sumerian IA-A-GUB, meaning ‘pillar’ or more literally, ‘standing stone’.
The Hebrews gave the key characters titles to communicate specific meanings, which modern readers see simply as personal names.
The Prophet of the New Jerusalem
One of the strangest figures of the Babylonian exile was the prophet Ezekiel. The writings attributed to him provided the theology of Quram, the people who were the Jerusalem Church. (2) Ezekiel was the architect of the imaginary or idealized Temple of Yahweh.
The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple were of massive significance to Ezekiel, who was a priest at the Temple and, one of the elite taken into exile in 597 BC. His wife died on the eve of the destruction of the Temple which in no way surprised Ezekiel, who saw it as Yahweh’s punishment.
Ezekiel saw himself as the architect of the new Temple. It would be ‘the kingdom of Heaven’ upon Earth. In his visions obscure allegory and symbolism abound with images of multi-faced men, lions, eagles and such odd items as iron baking plates.
A particularly interesting and important vision occurred in November 591 BC when Ezekiel was sitting in his house near the grand canal in the city of Nippur in Mesopotamia (Sumer) with the visiting elders of Judah sitting in front of him. The elders had come to hear messages from Yahweh. The prophet fell into a trance. Ezekiel saw images of pagan worship to the gods Tammuz, Baal and Adonis before being taken to a door of the court and commanded to dig a hole in the wall through which he saw a remarkable sight.
’Through it he sees mural paintings containing pictures of ‘creeping things’ and other mythological scenes, motifs which seem to pint to syncretistic practices of Egyptian provenance. Seventy elders are engaged in secret mysteries with sensors in their hands.’(3)
The elders of Jerusalem possessing ‘secret mysteries’ of Egyptian origin and conducting private ceremonies in the Temple of Solomon? Ezekiel 8:12 tells that the ceremony was conducted in the dark.
The Egyptian element has never been explained.
Ezekiel is outraged by the Egyptainesque images on the walls.
The message that the prophet was putting to the exiled elders concerned their own secret ceremony that had come down to them through the line of David from Moses. The essence was something like this:
’We have lost our kingdom through people being unfaithful to Yahweh. You were the greatest transgressors because you have conducted your ‘secret mysteries’ which are from pagan Egypt, based on sun worship and without a role for the God of our fathers. Yahweh has punished you.’
The imagined response:
’But those are the secrets given to the Royal House of David by Moses himself!’
It was at this point in the history of the Jewish people that the story of Seqenenre became the story of Hiram, the builder of the first Temple that was lost because of the reforming urge of Ezekiel to remove as many traces of Egyptian ritual as he could.
The most famous of Ezekiel’s visions was one that occurred early in 573 BC after the prophet had spent nearly a quarter of a century in captivity. First he finds himself at the east gate where he meets a man like a figure of bronze with a ten-feet-four-inch measuring-reed in his hand; this is his architectural guide.
He sees the east gate, also known as the gate of righteousness, in direct line with the main approach to the temple. The main temple area is elevated so as to separate the holy from the profane, and by ascending seven steps they arrive at the threshold and then the passageway of the gate, where there are three guard-rooms racing each other; all of them being a perfect square and of the same dimensions.
In Freemasonry the candidate in the third Degree ceremony is required to take seven steps to the Master’s pedestal in the east of the Masonic Temple.
Beyond the passageway is a second threshold and the vestibule of the gate that leads to the court. Along the wall of the outer court, to a depth of the length of the gates, runs a large pavement with symmetrically arranged chambers totaling thirty in all. The degrees of holiness are represented by the increasing elevation of the various parts of the Temple. Ezekiel is led to the inner court where he sees two rooms at the side of the north and south gates, the former for the priests who control the Temple precincts and the latter for those who have charge of the altar. The court is a perfect square. The vestibule of the Temple is ten steps higher than the inner court, the pillars of which correspond with Boaz and Jachin, the pillars of Solomon’s Temple. The vision culminates with Yahweh rising like a star in the east and entering his new house through the ‘gate of righteousness’.
Finally the imagination of Ezekiel establishes the rules for the priesthood that would become the landmarks of the Essenes of Qumran. (4) The legitimate priests of the sanctuary are to be the sons of Zadok, the erstwhile chief priest. Known as Zadokites, these sons would wear white linen garments. They could not shave their heads nor allow their hair to grow very long, they could not drink wine before entering the inner court, they had to marry a virgin of Israelite birth and they must teach people the difference between clean and unclean. The list included that they should not have personal possessions nor come into contact with the dead. (5)
Zerubbabel’s Temple
On 12 October 539 BC a general of the Persian King Cyrus by the name of Ugbaru took the city of Babylon without bloodshed. The king not only allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, he returned to them the treasures that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Temple.
People who had left Jerusalem as children returned as old men and women.
The Temple was rebuilt before the end of the sixth century BC by Zerubbabel, the grandson of the last king and the heir to the throne of David. Zerubbabel means ‘seed of Babylon’. New stricter requirements for ‘holiness’ were formulated. The book of the law that was enforced by the returning exiles was very precise about what was required of Yahweh’s people. Dietary laws were extremely demanding, with long lists of foods that could not be eaten.
Prior to the return of the exiles, the people of Israel and Judah were not monotheists nor fervent followers of Yahweh, the god of Moses. In fact the term ‘Jew’ (meaning member of the tribe of Judah) was coined in the Babylonian captivity. The builders of the new Jerusalem saw themselves as a people with something special in their relationship with Yahweh. They took such steps as banning marriage outside of their own people. In this way the once disparate tribes of the Levant became a race.
The New Threat to Yahweh
In the mid-fourth century BC a radically new culture arose that was to have a profound effect on the future of Judaism. These radical thinkers were the Greeks.
The Jews wanted only consolidation and a focus on their special god – Yahweh. The Greeks were open to new ideas.
Greek thinkers produced a new class of philosophers, scientists and poets. The world found out about this new great power through the military exploits of the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great.
Alexander led an army that conquered Egypt, the entire Persian empire and crossed Afghanistan into the Indian sub-continent. He died of fever in Babylon in 232 BC, thirty-three years old. Greek language became the standard. The Hellenistic life and thinking became the only way for intellectuals; if a person could not read and write in Greek, they were outside the new international elite.
The crumbling Egyptian society declared twenty-four-year-old Alexander the son of god. The young warrior took the name Haa-ib-re Setep-en-amen, ‘Jubilant is the heart of Re, Chosen of Amen’. Alexander restored temples and built the city that still bears his name. The Hellenistic influence in Egypt remained with the line of pharaohs known as Ptolemies who were Greeks. The most famous of them was Cleopatra. She was one of the very few leaders who could speak Egyptian.
Old Egyptian gods merged with Greek gods. The twin pillars became the Pillars of Hermes. Thoth became Hermes. Thoth, the brother of Ma’at possessed all secret knowledge on 36,535 scrolls that were hidden under the heavenly vault (the sky).
Both Thoth and Hermes are important in the legends of Freemasonry and the two are treated in Masonic myth as representing the same person. (6)
The Ancient Charges of Freemasonry:
’YOU ask me how this Science was Invented, My Answer is this: That before the General Deluge, which is commonly Called NOAH”S Flood, there was a Man called LAMECH, as you may read in IV. Chapter of Genesis; who had two Wives, the One called ADA, the other ZILLA; BY ADA, he begat two SONS, JABAL and JUBAL, by ZILLA, he had One SON called TUBALL and a Daughter called Naamb: These four Children found the beginning of all crafts in the World: JABAL found out GEOMETRY, and he Divided Flocks of Sheep, He first built a House of Stone and Timber.
HIS Brother JUBAL found the ART of MUSIC He was the Father of all such as Handle the Harp and Organ.
TUBAL-CAIN was the Instructor of Every Artificer in Brass and Iron, And the Daughter found out the ART of Weaving.
THESE Children knew well that GOD would take Vengeance for SIN either by Fire or Water; Wherefore they Wrote their SCIENCES that they had found in Two Pillars, that they might be found after in Two Pillars, that they might be found after NOAH’S Flood.
ONE of the Pillars was Marble, for that will not Burn with any Fire, And the other stone was Laternes for that will not drawn with any Water.
OUR Intent next is to Tell you Truly, how and in What manner these STONES were found whereon these SCIENCES were Written.
THE Great HERMES (Surnamed TRISMAGISTUS, or three times Great) Being both King, Priest and Philosopher, (in EGYPT)he found One of them, and Lived in the Year of the World Two Thousand and Seventy Six, in the Reign of NINUS, and some think him to be Grandson to CUSH, which was Grandson to NOAH, he was the first that began to Learn of Astronomy, To Admire the other Wonders of Nature; He proved, there was but One GOD, Creator of all Things, He Divided the Day into Twelve Hours, He is also thought to be the first who Divided the ZODIAC into Twelve Signs, He was minister to OSYRIS King of EGYPT; And is said to have invented Ordinary Writing, and Hieroglyphics, the first Laws of the Egyptians; And Divers Sciences, and Taught them unto other Men. (Anno Mundo. MDCCCX.)’ (7)
Here Freemasonry recalls how the Greeks built up their beliefs first from Egyptian legends. “Anno Mundi’ means from the beginning of the world, which is taken by Freemasonry to be the year 4000 BC, the time when the Sumerian civilization apparently materialized. Thoth/Hermes taught the sciences in 3390 BC. This was little more than two hundred years before the consolidation of the first united kingdom of ancient Egypt took place and the earliest known hieroglyphics were produced.
In the fourth century BC Jewish theology had become mature with detailed legends of its own, and the priesthood did not want any intrusions from the Greeks. The new 4race which called themselves Jews spread,. The Jews had few skills but learned to live on their wits and extract the best out of any situation. A natural resourcefulness and willingness to keep going in the face of adversity made them part5icularly suited to becoming traders, buyers and sellers, wheelers and dealers who could make a good honest living by spotting an opportunity for profit that others might miss.
The Jew’s books were translated into Koine, the contemporary, city-based version of classical Greek. These writings became known as the Septuagint – ‘the Book of the Seventy’. Early scriptures now existed in Hebrew, Aramaic of the Persian Empire and Koine.
Translation is an imprecise art and not the scientific replacement of one word with its exact counterpart that many people imagine. The Greek language was developed by a rational, free-thinking, cosmopolitan people who use oratory and philosophy to great effect. Hebrew developed by an inspired, irrational people. The Koine-speaking Jews translated with good intent but could not fail but to affect the flavor and import.
The faithful minority back in Jerusalem were alarmed at what was happening in the new places. The called these Diaspora Jews ‘seekers-after-smooth-things’ or today, ‘the easy life.’
‘Synagogue’ is not Hebrew at all; it is Greek meaning ‘bringing together.’ The synagogue turned from a meeting house into t temple. This was an outrageous idea to those who believed their God could only be worshipped in His house in Jerusalem. The devoted expected Yahweh would punish them horrible unless they got a lot holier.
The religion of Yahweh was by now coming to the attention of occultists who were fascinated by the magical properties they saw in it and who took a very different view of its meaning. The numerological elements seized their attention and even the Hebrew name of God, pronounced Yahweh but written as JHVH, took on special meaning. The Greeks called this name of God the ‘Tetragrammation’ and treated the Jewish texts as a source of supposedly ancient, esoteric wisdom. New cults arose in the Hellenistic empire, basing themselves on the scriptures of Yahweh yet not being themselves Jews. These gentiles took what they wanted from Judaism and it was these groups who were the breeding ground for a later Greek mystery cult called Christianity.
CONCLUSION
The ritual of Seqenenre had been handed down to the Israelites by Moses. After the death of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel was racked by changes in its ruling line, in the southern kingdom of Judah the line of David was uninterrupted for over four hundred years. Evidence to support this position is described in the ‘Enuma elish’.
The Babylonian exile period of Jewish history disclosed the explanation of how Seqenenre’s name was dropped. Ezekiel told the exiled elders of Jerusalem to remove the Egyptian practices of their secret mysteries conducted in the darkness beneath the Temple of Solomon.
The verse in Genesis 49:6 is the only reference in the Bible to the killing of the Theban king. The Book of Ezekiel tells how the prophet purged Israel of their Egyptian practices and brought them back to the way of Yahweh. Seqenenre Tao became Hiram Abif, the king who was lost. It was the work of the brooding figure of Ezekiel.
(2) R. Eisenman and M. Wise: The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered
(3) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(4) R. Eisenman, M. Wise: The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered
(5) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(6) J. Fellows A.M.:The Mysteries of Freemasonry
(7) The Inigo Jones Document, dated 1607
