The original Israelite civilization offered no evidence of having had a mystical initiatory tradition of any sort. Indeed, prominent Kabbalah scholars such as Gershom Scholem have famously insisted that there was no mysticism at all in biblical Israel. It is this unaccounted-for peculiarity that launched a painstaking investigation, the results of which are recounted in this book. The research sought to foreground what has been dubbed the “second channel” within the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua, a narrative stratum hypothesized to contain ideational and some concrete information regarding the conjectured missing initiatory system of the priests of the First Temple. The Sôd Hypothesis substantiates that the authors of the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua intended to communicate to future generations the fact of the existence of their otherwise concealed esoteric system. The temple priests in Jerusalem (Kingdom of Judea, or Judah, the “Southern Kingdom”) who created this communication wanted it to survive any unforeseen calamity, perhaps after they had witnessed the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel (the “Northern Kingdom”) by the Assyrians in 720 BCE. With that in mind, they encrypted their communication in and through the specific form that the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua took. Their thinking likely was that the otherwise confusing, obscure esoteric material captivatingly presented in semihistorical settings and in magnificent, spellbinding literary-narrative forms would ensure the work’s long-term survival. The priestly communication was not coded in a way that would have required a special key or “code” (since then the task of recovery by future readers could prove to be unfeasible and thus not serve the ultimate aims of the authors). Rather, it was embedded by way of literary-allegorical and symbolic-esoteric means. To assure a concise and specific information transfer, an elaborate system of linguistic-semiotic-esoteric correspondences was developed; thus, if the intended recipient(s) managed to grasp at least one vital element of the system, the rest would unfold, constructed out of logical inferences involved in the emerging system of deliberately fashioned correspondences. As to who might have been the intended specific recipients (here, paraphrasing Derrida): “the secret” was made public yet without revealing it. The Hexateuch endeavors to create both coded esoteric instructions to individual initiates, partially via parabolic projection onto Exodus and other narratives, and also, simultaneously, a national exoteric program of transformation of an entire people into what would be called “a nation of priests and a holy people,” in effect, a nation of initiates and spiritual aspirants—a feat quite unparalleled in history. The concealed inner-core esoteric knowledge concerns a mystical transformation of consciousness of a would-be Israelite priestly initiate who thereby gains access to the national deity, with the latter’s awesome powers. Even the fact of the existence of the priestly mystical-initiatory system, let alone its contents, was a secret. KEYWORDS: Pentateuch; Torah; Hexateuch; Judaism; Hebrew Bible; Old Testament; ancient Israel; early antiquity; First Temple; Israelite; priesthood; religion; communication; secrecy; initiation; sod; religious experience; cognitive; consciousness; Jewish mysticism; kabbalah; altered states; esoteric; noetic; literary; figuration; nonliteral; phenomenology; intention; intension; hyle; noema; doxa; episteme; poiesis; deixis; semiotic; transitivity; hyponoia; metaphor; allegory; allegoresis; metalepsis; emergence; God; YHWH; Elohim; sublime; categorization; de dicto; de re; tree of knowledge; tree of life; Eden; mysterium tremendum; identity; complex systems

The Sôd Hypothesis: Phenomenological, Semiotic, Cognitive, and Noetic-Literary Recovery of the Pentateuch’s Embedded Inner-Core Mystical Initiation Tradition of Ancient Israelite Cultic Religion

Religion & Spirituality

Alex Shalom Kohav

Christian Books & Bibles

MaKoM Publications

Joseph ben Matthias, Judæan aristocrat and Jerusalem Temple priest of the first rank, steps out into the boundless, magnificent city of Rome. He's clever, handsome, fêted by his Jewish hosts, and on a righteous mission to free three venerable old Jews wrongfully imprisoned as rebels. Joseph secures an audience with Nero's beautiful young Empress, Poppæa. Charmed by Joseph's zeal, she asks the Minister of Oriental Affairs to release the prisoners. The Minister seizes the opportunity to trade his assent for an edict guaranteed to outrage and mobilize the Jews of Judæa; Rome needs an excuse to comprehensively crush ongoing Jewish resistance. His scheme bears fruit. In the year 66 Judæa revolts.         Led by canny old commander Vespasian, Roman forces prevail until only the fortified city of Jerusalem remains in the hands of Jewish rebels. Vespasian is acclaimed Emperor and returns to Rome, leaving the siege to his son Titus. Weeks drag by. Jerusalem, with its lofty, magnificent Temple, becomes to the besieging Romans a symbol of obdurate Jewish arrogance to be overthrown.         Rebel commander, Roman captive and Flavian protégé, Josephus, long reviled as a traitor and Roman toady, is portrayed by Feuchtwanger with clear-eyed empathy as a complex, brilliant man whose desire to become a "citizen of the world" conflicts with his Jewish identity. It was Joseph’s destiny, however, to become a fierce defender in Rome of the unique importance of Jewish contribution to humanity, and to become known as the first-century historian Flavius Josephus and the author of "The Jewish War." [adapted from a review by Annis, HistoricalNovels.info]

The Judean War: A Historical Novel of Josephus, Imperial Rome, and the Fall of Judea and the Second Temple

Lion Feuchtwanger

History

"There are seventy-seven who have the ear of the world, and I am one of them." This was no idle boast on the part of Flavius Josephus, and, in the days the Roman Empire's greatness, it was no small achievement. It had not, however, been an easy task for the Jewish historian to make his way as a Roman and a Jew, and in the years to come it was to be yet more difficult. Christianity was emerging for the first time as a world idea. The conflict between the forces of nationalism and world citizenship was of growing importance then as today. Josephus' heartbreaking role in this struggle has a poignant modernity. With all the ambiguity of his character, his work, his destiny, a participant fighting and suffering in the great events of the period, he is more than a man of importance---he becomes a symbol of his age.  Lion Feuchtwanger's second volume of the "Josephus" trilogy takes up the story of Josephus at the time when he had become a power in Rome, and Rome was determined to be the only power in the world. Through the novelist's eyes the reader relives the dramatic events of Titus's reign---the Fire, the Plague, the visit from Judea of the exotic and exquisite princess Berenice. He travels with Joseph to Judea, sits in the councils of the Jewish fathers in the days of their great sorrow, searches for information about a certain prophet said to have been crucified at Jerusalem. Thus he is sharing in the strange spectacle of a new faith coming to birth.  Feuchtwanger paints his hero against the background of great historical events, against the background of an era that more than almost any other was adventurous and colorful and profoundly stirred by the eternally crucial questions of the destiny of human civilization. "The Jew of Rome" is a magnificent panorama of a brilliant age, and a moving portrait of a man whose essential honesty and clear reason made of him a wanderer through the world and a singular historian in the annals of humanity.

The Jew of Rome: Vol. 2 of the Trilogy of Historical Novels on Josephus, Rome, and Judea

Feuchtwanger, Lion

World

Feuchtwanger has been called, largely because of his story of Flavius Josephus, one of the greatest historical novelists of all time. The book begins with Josephus, aged 50, living in retirement in Rome and ends with his death in Galilee during the bloody uprising of the Jews against their Roman conquerors.  In the present volume, "The Emperor and His Jew," the earlier young and ambitious emissary of Judea to the court of Nero (in "The Judean War") and the militant writer who held the ear of Titus (in "The Jew of Rome") has reached the fullness of years and wisdom. Now he engages in the subtlest and in many ways the most dangerous period of his career. In the East the Jewish fanatics were challenging the might of Rome; and everywhere, even in the family of the Emperor, the Christians were exerting a passive but disturbing force. The time had come for all men to take their stand, and Josephus, who had thought to live and die both a Roman and a defender of the Jewish perspective and cause, was forced to make a choice. This situation intensifies the deep personal conflict in the mind of Josephus, and in this book Feuchtwanger attempts to analyze Josephus' mind and to find motives for his apparently paradoxical actions and views.   In its detail, the "Josephus" trilogy's final work leads the reader through the utterly fascinating daily life of Roman society. At the court of Domitian, in the apartments of the beautiful Empress, Lucia, in the Senate, and in the homes of the financial and intellectual leaders of Rome, Feuchtwanger walks with the ease and confidence of a man born to the toga.  It was Josephus's fate to be feared and hated by three of the most powerful men in the world and to survive them all. His life was beset by the ambiguity of his intellect; his death was glorified by the clear simplicity of his faith.

The Emperor and His Jew: Vol. 3 of the Trilogy of Historical Novels on Josephus, Imperial Rome, and Judea

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

"The King became passionately enamored with a Jewess who was called by the name of Fermosa, meaning The Beautiful, and he forgot his wife. And he shut himself up with the Jewess for almost seven full years, forgetful of himself, and of his realm also, and paying no heed to any other thing." - Alfonso el Sabio, “Crónica General,” c. 1270. This is a haunting love story of Alfonso VIII, the Christian King of Castile, and Raquel, the beautiful Jewess of Toledo, two lovers trapped by the bitterness and conflict of their times in a tragic alliance. Raquel was the daughter of Yehuda, a wealthy, proud aristocrat, who had come from Seville with his family to serve as Alfonso’s Minister of Finance. His mission was to replenish the country’s depleted treasury, but he saw in this assignment an opportunity to prevent war between the Christian North and the Moslem South and in the process to save his own people, the Jews, from being crushed between these two ruthless forces. But when the impetuous Alfonso fell in love with Raquel and demanded her as his mistress, Yehuda had to choose between his daughter’s future and the fate of his people. In this epic romance of the lovers and their bitter destinies, Lion Feuchtwanger, one of the world’s great historical novelists, has brilliantly recreated the drama and pageantry of the Middle Ages, rent with love and hate, cruelty and compassion, profanity and piety, bloodshed and ritual.

Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo: A Spanish Ballad

Product Description "The Book; yes, their Book. They had no state, holding them together, no country, no soil, no king, no form of life in common. If, in spite of this, they were one, more one than all the other peoples of the world, it was the Book that sweated them into unity. Brown, white, black, yellow Jews, large and small, splendid and in rags, godless and pious, they might crouch and dream all their lives in a quiet room, or fare splendidly in a radiant, golden whirlwind over the earth, but sunk deep in all of them was the lesson of the Book. Manifold is the world, but it is vain and fleeting as wind; but one and only is the God of Israel, the everlasting, the infinite, the Jehovah."-Jud Süss, 1925. When Feuchtwanger’s two best known novels “Jew Süss” (“Power”) and “Ugly Duchess” were first translated into English in the 1920s, they caused a tremendous sensation in England and then in America. The critics all hailed Feuchtwanger as the master of the historical novel—the peer of Dumas and Scott but written with the psychology of our own day. “Jew Süss,” set in the 18th century Germany (at the time consisting of numerous fragmented independent states), deals with an identity crisis: in order to gain social power, the novel's protagonist attempts to forsake his Jewish heritage and becomes assimilated into the mainstream of German culture. More than that, Süss finds himself being in the position of potential kingmaker. Brilliant, attractive and with an insatiable lust for power, he practically ruled the Duke and his court, pandering to the vices of dissolute nobility, mounting through his intrigues to dizzying heights of power. Süss’s only vulnerable spot, however, is his precious, exquisite, gentle daughter, Naomi. When her beauty became exposed to the beastliness of the Duke, tragedy came swiftly after. About the Author The celebrated German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) was an incomparable master of the historical novel, applying his distinctive technique of projecting critical contemporary themes onto exceptional individuals and complex historical scenery from times long gone. Using a thorough knowledge of historical detail and playing the role of an enlightened philosopher with a highly idiosyncratic literary style, he engaged both ancient Jewish history and the dilemmas of Jewish existence in his key writings. Throughout his career, Feuchtwanger was drawn to a central theme of Jewishness, and his best work presents the enigma of the Jew and treats the quandary of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world. He depicts the predicament of the "modern" Jew, of whatever historical period, in achieving a synthesis of his or her particular relationship to the Jewish people and a universal relationship to all humanity. Beginning in 1925 with his instantly famous novel "Jew Süss" and followed by his "Josephus" trilogy-"Josephus" ("The Judean War"), 1932; "The Jew of Rome," 1935; and "Josephus and the Emperor" ("The Emperor and His Jew"), 1942-Feuchtwanger deals with the theme of nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, in the trilogy specifically via the life of Josephus Flavius, the renowned yet controversial Jewish historian of the first century. In these inimitable and haunting works, as also in his life, Josephus witnesses firsthand the tragic fall of Judea and the Jerusalem Temple, and then spends his life defending the Jewish cause on the world's greatest stage at the time, Rome. Feuchtwanger also wrote fascinating historical novels on Goya the artist, Benjamin Franklin in France ("Arms for America"), and Rousseau the philosopher. Toward his life's end in California, Feuchtwanger took up the theme of Jewishness again in his novel "Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo" (all available from MaKoM---see MaKoM Publications titles).

Jew Süss

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