THE BENE ELOHIM

"Did you ever notice in the Bible, that whenever God needed to
punish someone, or make an example - or whenever God needed
a killing, He always sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a
creature like that must be like? The entire existence spent praising
your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you
ever really want to see an angel?

~Thomas Dagget, "The Propechy" , A DIMENSION Films Release
Written and directed by Gregory Widen

 

Earlier on in Chapter III -- The Structure and Practices of the Yahad, I briefly mention the bene elohim and discuss the general interpretations of these words. At this point, I'd like to go into a lot more detail about the true symbology of this phrase.

It seems strange, doesn't it, for these angels to be called "sons of the goddess" in a religion that is to all outward appearances dominated by the patriarchal Father god, YHWH. Part of the mysteries of the Jewish religion include a female half of the god. She is called the Shekinah. She is the Mother of the material universe. The Gnostics refer to the female principle as Sophia. This is identical to the concept of Shakti in Tantra. Kaballistically speaking, this is the equivalent of the sephira Binah, who is the Mother in relation to the Father, Hokmah. If you are not familiar with the Tree of Life, below is a diagram.

 

 

Binah (black sphere) controls the left side of the Tree of Life, or the Pillar of Severity, while Hokmah (grey sphere) controls the right side of the Tree, the Pillar of Mercy. These names come from the middle sephirot on the respective left and right sides, Geburah (red sphere) and Hesed (blue sphere). Geburah is the sephira of Judgement, while Hesed rules the sphere of Mercy. Geburah emanates directly from the Mother as the FIFTH sephira of the divine emanation. The pentagram or pentagon is the sigil of this sephira. It is no odd coincidence that the headquarters of the United States military forces is called The Pentagon. The color of Geburah is red. The sephira of Judgement is known also as "strength." A familiar word? Azazel -- "the strength of the Lord" and Shemjaza -- "the name of the Strong." The seraphim or the "fiery serpents" are the angelic chora assigned to Geburah. Last but not least, the planet of Geburah is Mars, the God of War and the the planetary metal, iron. Geburah and Hesed are known as the left and right hands of God. The sephirot directly beneath them are the "thighs" of God, Hod (orange) and Netzach (green).

There should be enough light bulbs going off in your head about now to rival a presidential press conference.

Some of the mystery of the story of the Watchers in Enoch should be beginning to unravel. Particularly in the figure of Azazel. In reading the Bible, it becomes obvious that war was not invented by anyone in particular. War as a concept in Jewish philosophy is the judgement of the Lord against the people for their backsliding and sins. This becomes very clear in reading both books of Samuel and Kings, and the book of Judges. War came upon the Hebrews repeatedly, because of their failure to comply with the covenants made repeatedly with YHWH. In the lapses between judges, the younger generation would forget and walk away to worship other gods.

The prophets, who seem to be unaffiliated with anyone but the Lord, move through the stories of the Old Testament performing as many or more miracles than Jesus. Elijah's 'hairiness' would seem to indicate that he had long hair and a beard. Both might mark him as a Nazirite.

The Nazirites were persons who took vows to separate themselves from certain worldly things and consecrate themselves to God. They did not cut their hair, unless they broke their vows, at which time they shaved their heads. Nazirites did not drink wine and could not eat even grapes or raisins. Neither did they shave their beards. The girdle of leather about his loins is reminiscent of the later practice of the Knights Templar of wearing similar leather girdles or breeches under their robes, as well as the leather apron of the Masons.

The name Nazirite is very similar to the name of the Nasoreans or the Mandeans, who were "knowers of great secrets" and practiced baptism, as did Elijah, John the Baptist and others. Some think that Jesus was in truth not from Nazareth, but that he was also a member of the Nasoreans and the name "the Nazarene" should in reality be "the Nasorean." The two words sound very similar. The Ismaili Nizari sect of Islam has similar attributes and we shall investigate some of this in a few moments. But all in all, both Elijah and Elisha would seem to be precursors of the traditions of the Yahad.

Perhaps the Yahad was something more than a "third group of the Jews" as Josephus describes the Gnostics, and they had been in existence far longer than from second or third century BCE.

Aside from the figure of Elijah the Prophet, there are a couple of stories in the book of Judges that are of great interest to us at this juncture. The first one comes from the third chapter. It describes a time when the Israelites are sorely oppressed by the Moabite king, Eglon for eighteen years. It begins at verse 15. I will paraphrase here somewhat:

But when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man lefthanded: and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab. But Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length; and he did gird it under his rainment upon his right thigh. And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man. And when Ehud had made a end to the offering of the present, he sent away the bearers of the present. But Ehud himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, "I have a secret errand unto thee, O king". The king replied to him to hold his silence, until he sent away all his officials and the others in the room.

Eglon and Ehud were sitting in a summer parlor that the king had made for his own pleasure. Ehud spoke to the king saying, "I have a message from God unto thee." And he arose from out of his seat. Then Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into Eglon's belly. The haft went in after the blade and the fat closed over it so Ehud could not draw the dagger from the king's belly, and all his entrails and filth fell out. Then Ehud went out of the garden and locked the doors behind him. When the servants came after Ehud left, they saw that the doors were locked and presumed that the king wanted to be alone in his chamber. They waited and waited until they began to have doubts. When they opened the doors finally, they found their king dead on the ground. In the mean time, Ehud has made good his escape and gone to Seirath. There, he ascends the mountain and blows a ram's horn to summon the people to tell them that they have been delivered from the oppression of the Moabite king.

I love this story. To me, it is an absolute gem, because it ties so many things together.

The author of this story emphasizes that Ehud was "left handed." Not once, but twice. This is significant, pointing directly to the role of Severity and Judgement in this act. Added to this is the name of the "deliverer" sent by the Lord -- Ehud. This is simply an alternate spelling of Yahad. The fact that he girds the dagger on his "right thigh" is symbolic of both Chesed, the Father's Mercy on his children, and Victory or the sephira of Netzach. The name Eglon means "young bull" and he was a very fat one, we are told. He was the sacrifice that was made to release the Hebrews from their servitude. Ehud's paternity is given as the son of Gera, which is an alternate spelling of Girra, the Sumerian god of Fire. The name Benjamin, which is given as his tribe (Benjamite), means "the right hand of God."

What is Ehud, but a hint of things to come? The "political assassin" with his double-edged knife or dagger that cuts both ways. This, combined with both Elijah and Elisha later working behind the scenes to manipulate, make and break kings can only lead to one conclusion. The Yahad was more than a group of learned men who wrote scrolls and lived out in the desert. And if the stories of the Bible do have any sort of cohesive order in time, the Yahad had been around a lot longer than second century BCE. They had been around since at least the time of Joshua's death -- only one generation out of Egypt, when this story takes place. But, I'm going to go one further and say that they had been around even longer than that. I will elaborate on this later.

Looking into the future from the point of this story, one cannot help but notice the parallels between the ideas presented here and the famous Nizari sect of assassins formed by Hassan-i-Sabbah in the twelfth century CE as a splinter group of the Moslem faith. The fadai or assassins of Hassan also used daggers as their instruments of choice, because they were easily concealed. They often worked alone, or in pairs, when the success of the mission was critical. If one did not succeed, the other did. One of the most important concepts to the Nizari is something called Tawid. This word means "the unity of God" -- that there is one and only one God. This is exactly the meaning of Yahad - "unity."

Hassan-i-Sabbah and his assassins brought the idea of individual assassination into the realm of jihad. Although they were villified and accused of every conceivable hideous evil imaginable, like the Templars after them, the record shows that the Nizari under Hassan and his two successors only killed 75 people in a span of about 100 years - far fewer than most of their critics and enemies. It was their point of view that it was better to take out individuals who might cause or were causing problems, than to embroil entire countries in war. It is always the little people, the peasant soldiers and the families that they leave behind who suffer most. Not the political and religious leaders who declare the wars. For this reason, Hassan had a certain popularity amongst the peasant class -- even though they might have been from opposing sects of Islam. Rather like Robin Hood of British legend.

The idea of the Nizari being a reincarnation of the Gnostic Nasoreans and the earlier Nazirites also parallels something said in the introduction to one book of the scroll translations as regards similar finds of scrolls at the fortress of Masada.

The salient difference is that in the case of Masada, we possess ancient, eyewitness testimony as to who had collected these scrolls. Josephus was involved with the freedom fighters in the first stages of the war, and he gives us a name: the sicarri. This group, named for their penchant for using a sica, or short dagger, to assassinate collaborators with Rome, seized control of Masada at the time the war broke out. They made numerous forays against the Romans and collaborating Jews in the years that followed, and at the last, about to be overcome by Roman forces, they committed mass suicide. [2]

After the Romans, the Yahad seems to have changed it's tactics with the advent of the coming of the "Son of Man." A "new world order" was instituted that was aimed at combining the severity of Geburah with the pagan agape of it's opposite sephira, Netzach. Netzach is the sphere of Venus and it's color is the green of abundance and harvest. It is also the color of Love. This is the root of the twinning between Azazel and Shemyaza, for one can be seen as very severe and martial (Mars, Ares, Nergal, etc.), while the other is associated with the Dionysian aspects of Dumuzi/Tammuz. This also clues us in to the link between the Sumerian "gatekeepers" of An or Heaven, Dumuzi (Venus) and Ningizhida (Mars). This is not to throw away the twin aspects of Venus, itself as both the morning and evening stars. I speak more on this in a later chapter.

The central point between them falls in Tiphareth (yellow sphere) -- the ideal spiritual Man, represented by Christ or the Logos (Word). As I've noted previously, even the tone of the Gnostic writings changes significantly under the influence of the "anointed One" and the later teachings of the Apostles, who have taken the place of the Prophets.

To summarize all this, it is my belief that the Prophets and those of their order were both the Watchers and the Judges, and the "avenging angels." More often than not in the Bible, we are told that what is later interpreted as visitations by spiritual angels are "men." They considered themselves to be of the order of seraphim, the Fiery Serpents, who were the messengers of the true God's wrath...the Left Hand of God.

Were the "new Gnostics" a splinter group of the "old Gnostics" or the Yahad ? Did the old faction die out or commit mass suicide like the sicarii at Masada? Did the Romans kill them all? Did they simply go underground? We are left with a lot of questions and seemingly no real answers. If my correspondences still seem a little shakey, then I invite you to read the second meaningful story from the book of Judges...the story of Samson.

 

NOTES:

[2] "The Dead Sea Scrolls ~ A New Translation" by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr. & Edward Cook. Introduction Pg. 33. Harper San Fransisco, 1996.