I have never created a thread here before, but this introductory Postflaviana topic has none, and I wish to ask questions about it. So, here goes! Richard states that because Yahweh at the last minute allowed Abram to sacrifice an animal rather than his son Isaac to him, "then we can infer that Yahweh, or whomever was actually in charge, previously approved and also allowed this practice to occur for generations". If this supposition is true, could this human sacrifice to Yahweh have started all the way back with farmer Cain "sacrificing" shepherd Abel to him as a human blood sacrifice, as "the Lord" had rejected his first sacrifice of the fruits of his land. Tupper Saussy, in "Rulers of Evil", seems to imply this very idea. Also notice that the Lord does not kill nor order Cain to be killed for what he did, but instead gives him a special "mark", which Saussy seems to think was the "powers and insignia of kingship", which made him more powerful than the common people. So is this where it (perhaps symbolically) all starts, with Cain being the first "Ruler of Evil", Emperor, Pope, etc., again, in Saussy's words, "the prototypical CAESAR"? Human sacrifice is stopped by Yahweh, however, in the special case of Abram not having to sacrifice his son Isaac, as "this is just a test", and the Chosen Dynasty must continue.
Peoples of the Flavian Book discussion
- Thread starter Seeker
- Start date
And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite. Ezekiel 16:3 KJV
What exactly is being said here? Is this proof of Abraham's ancestry (paternal Amorite, maternal Hittite), or is Abraham an Amorite and Sarah a Hittite as they are the "parents" of the Chosen People, or is this a broad reference to the Chosen ancestors previously dwelling in lands belonging to the Amorites and Hittites, before winding up in "the land of Canaan"? If so, assuming that Abraham was also a Brahmin and/or a Pharaoh (?), how does India and Egypt fit into this chronology?
What exactly is being said here? Is this proof of Abraham's ancestry (paternal Amorite, maternal Hittite), or is Abraham an Amorite and Sarah a Hittite as they are the "parents" of the Chosen People, or is this a broad reference to the Chosen ancestors previously dwelling in lands belonging to the Amorites and Hittites, before winding up in "the land of Canaan"? If so, assuming that Abraham was also a Brahmin and/or a Pharaoh (?), how does India and Egypt fit into this chronology?
That highlighted section is a very insightful thought, Seeker.
For example, I suspect that the Cainite sect abhorred killing animals, hence Cain's killing of Abel was a revenge killing by the True Father Gnostic God against the commands of Jehovah who commanded animals be sacrified to him. Be that as it may, your suggestion goes deeper in that it implies the creation of the original document by a Moloch-like sect, in that the God is commanding human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice. If that is the case it is easy to see why people would come to prefer the latter! Perhaps Richard can develop this line further or come up with something very new!
Yours faithfully
Claude
It is different to my own more conventional thoughts here, but that does NOT negate your thought but rather reveals that the original document may have been interpretable on many levels and been extended in various ways, perhaps recombined later.
For example, I suspect that the Cainite sect abhorred killing animals, hence Cain's killing of Abel was a revenge killing by the True Father Gnostic God against the commands of Jehovah who commanded animals be sacrified to him. Be that as it may, your suggestion goes deeper in that it implies the creation of the original document by a Moloch-like sect, in that the God is commanding human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice. If that is the case it is easy to see why people would come to prefer the latter! Perhaps Richard can develop this line further or come up with something very new!
Yours faithfully
Claude
https://archive.org/details/F.TupperSaussyRulersOfEvilUsefulKnowledgeAboutGoverningBodies/page/n293 On page 271 of "Rulers of Evil", Saussy points out that in 1887 Oxford Professor Archibald Sayce equated Cain with Marduk, and Saussy states that Cain was also known as Sargon, by translating variations of the name "Sargon" to mean "King Cain", though this seems like a very big stretch to me. However, as you say, perhaps Richard can provide some clarification on this topic, or give us an entirely different thought on this touchy subject of human sacrifice demanded by the ancient elite, until an important exception was made for Abram/Abraham.
It appears as though the "Table of Nations", at Genesis 10:15-16, may endorse the "Out of Africa" theory as the ancestors of "Jerusalem", as Heth (ancestor of the Hittites) and the Amorite are stated to be the descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham, who was allotted Africa by his father Noah.
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
Good questions. We always have to keep in mind the issues of literalism versus figurativism .. and possible admixtures of the two. We have peoples like the Hindus that will not eat meat, and there is also a natural tension between ranchers and farmers, as witnessed by the range wars of the American West in the 1800's.
And, we must keep in mind that I am not an oracle, though it is hard to believe.
The crook and flail implies two different flocks, sheep and cattle. Women (and explicit slaves) until very recently were accorded as cattle -- i.e. chattel. As I posted about a video recently, as late as the early 19th century common people of England resorted to an (il)legal ruse of actioning off of their wives in lieu of obtaining a very expensive legal divorce (that had to be approved by Parliament). If you can sell your cow, then you can sell your wife, right?
Dialectics and victimology is also related to narrative inversion and contextual 'spin'.
Imagine the migrational dislocations that necessarily occurred with natural cataclysm (earthquakes, floods, fires) surrounding the collapse of the IVC, yet is also accounted with the incursion of northern peoples associated with Indra. This is yet thousands of years later that the massive cosmic event that triggered the anomalous Holocene interglacial we're still in. The embedded cultural practices stemming from massive trauma, like an induced mass PTSD, continue to haunt us. With Religion facilitating the cultural longevity via dealing with issues of sacrifice to the gods, to appease them from assaulting us yet again. This is why people were thrown into volcanoes.
At some point, such sacrifice becomes to ensure the fertility of humans and crops. But as well, such as Yahweh must be appeased to ensure that he doesn't wield his iron rod of punishment, either upon the heathens or upon backsliding Hebrews. But when does appeasement become a cover story for underlying geopolitics of the day? For instance, if pharaoh (or Cyrus) is what is implied by 'Yahweh'? Especially if Yahweh employs such as the Egyptians or the Assyrians as his iron rod.
There is evidence that the peoples of Canaan / Phoenicia / Carthage did employ child sacrifice to Ba'al and Molech, but exactly to what extent is not certain. It was supposed to the firstborn of the king (and/or other elites), but it may have involved substitutes as well (as was said for Jesus in the Quran).
There are some who believe that Canaan is a remembrance of Cain, but one must resolve the issue of Canaan and his descendants being accorded as perpetual slaves for father Ham's misdeed. Is such caught up within one of the prior inversions, or both of them (Mosaic and the prior Indian-Persian)? As slaves, the Phoenicians and their massive seafaring trading empire seem od slaves, as do the occupants of the IVC, with their advanced rectilinear cities and rock hewn quays at their seafaring ports.
The land of Sanliurfa (aka Edessa, aka Ur of the Chaldees (not Ur to the south, but a trading colony of Ur, like New Ur) is the land of the Amorites (later the Aramaians) and Harran is at the bounds of the lands of the Hittites. Abraham leaves Harran with an armed retinue of 318 and arrives in Hebron, accorded as a trading outpost of the Hittites. The Hittites greet him according to his high status, and Abram buys a burial plot there.
Then he goes to Egypt and deceives pharaoh regarding Sarah (meaning princess), as well as play such similar games with Canaanite king Abilimech(?). Abram also helps orchestrate a war against 5 kingdoms. A mere nomadic shepherd?
And, we must keep in mind that I am not an oracle, though it is hard to believe.
This may be a sly Biblical introduction into the field of dialectics, and perhaps even victimology. The OT and NT like to employ the paradigm of the Good Shepherd, but it is clear in this sense that the shepherding is that of human sheep. This was not new as the symbology is explicitly employed with the pharaonic crook and flail, later the crook/crozier adopted by the papacy.
The crook and flail implies two different flocks, sheep and cattle. Women (and explicit slaves) until very recently were accorded as cattle -- i.e. chattel. As I posted about a video recently, as late as the early 19th century common people of England resorted to an (il)legal ruse of actioning off of their wives in lieu of obtaining a very expensive legal divorce (that had to be approved by Parliament). If you can sell your cow, then you can sell your wife, right?
Dialectics and victimology is also related to narrative inversion and contextual 'spin'.
Imagine the migrational dislocations that necessarily occurred with natural cataclysm (earthquakes, floods, fires) surrounding the collapse of the IVC, yet is also accounted with the incursion of northern peoples associated with Indra. This is yet thousands of years later that the massive cosmic event that triggered the anomalous Holocene interglacial we're still in. The embedded cultural practices stemming from massive trauma, like an induced mass PTSD, continue to haunt us. With Religion facilitating the cultural longevity via dealing with issues of sacrifice to the gods, to appease them from assaulting us yet again. This is why people were thrown into volcanoes.
At some point, such sacrifice becomes to ensure the fertility of humans and crops. But as well, such as Yahweh must be appeased to ensure that he doesn't wield his iron rod of punishment, either upon the heathens or upon backsliding Hebrews. But when does appeasement become a cover story for underlying geopolitics of the day? For instance, if pharaoh (or Cyrus) is what is implied by 'Yahweh'? Especially if Yahweh employs such as the Egyptians or the Assyrians as his iron rod.
There is evidence that the peoples of Canaan / Phoenicia / Carthage did employ child sacrifice to Ba'al and Molech, but exactly to what extent is not certain. It was supposed to the firstborn of the king (and/or other elites), but it may have involved substitutes as well (as was said for Jesus in the Quran).
Such selective morality regarding the punishment for the murder of Abel is what should give people pause in what the Bible is really all about, that it is much more than making one feel good spiritually. Instead it should give everyone the creeps. And here there is plenty of evidence that such is indeed interpreted on multiple levels, even within the various churches. Hence, exoteric versus esoteric interpretations.
There are some who believe that Canaan is a remembrance of Cain, but one must resolve the issue of Canaan and his descendants being accorded as perpetual slaves for father Ham's misdeed. Is such caught up within one of the prior inversions, or both of them (Mosaic and the prior Indian-Persian)? As slaves, the Phoenicians and their massive seafaring trading empire seem od slaves, as do the occupants of the IVC, with their advanced rectilinear cities and rock hewn quays at their seafaring ports.
Such begs the question of exactly what is an OG Hebrew and Jew, in the context of Semite ethicity versus Aryan (Indo-European). There are many more verses that demonstrate the Hittite vector into the Biblical narrative, and which also otherwise belies the Jewish mythos of pure blood origins, like the heritage of David via Ruth.
The land of Sanliurfa (aka Edessa, aka Ur of the Chaldees (not Ur to the south, but a trading colony of Ur, like New Ur) is the land of the Amorites (later the Aramaians) and Harran is at the bounds of the lands of the Hittites. Abraham leaves Harran with an armed retinue of 318 and arrives in Hebron, accorded as a trading outpost of the Hittites. The Hittites greet him according to his high status, and Abram buys a burial plot there.
Then he goes to Egypt and deceives pharaoh regarding Sarah (meaning princess), as well as play such similar games with Canaanite king Abilimech(?). Abram also helps orchestrate a war against 5 kingdoms. A mere nomadic shepherd?
I can't really give much insight here beyond what others have, because I haven't focused much on that era. Just that these changes in ritual customs, and the changes in names, indicate changes in the new social orders. It is stories of elite outsiders taking over and inserting themselves into various cultural narratives as if they were of native stock. They usually come to adopt the indigenous language (e.g. the Normans), but not always (e.g. the Americas and Australia).
One has to ask what is meant by 'Africa' and what the actual time period being referred to is. The ancient Egyptians are not today the same as the Arabs that occupy Egypt. Who were the peoples that lived under the sand dunes of today's Sahara Desert? Why were so many ancient global people besides the builders of the great pyamids of Giza focused on Orion and its belt stars?
Before I comment, let me say that perhaps subconsciously I was regarding you as an oracle, because the very first post that I ever read on this site was yours, and I was struck by how hard you worked to inject some common sense into "crazy conspiracy theories".
That being said, I noticed that in your "manifesto", the first "human" character from the Bible that you mentioned was Abraham. Do you have an opinion on whether he should be taken literally, as someone by that name who actually lived, and whether all of of his named Biblical ancestors (including Adam, Enoch, Noah, Shem, etc.) should be taken figuratively?
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
I suspected that Abraham was an avatar, but then somebody had to have led the Hyksos to take over Lower Egypt, akin to say William the Conqueror. If this was the case, then the Biblical account is distorted in exactly what took place and the name may have been changed to protect the guilty. Ellis, in his earlier books on the Exodus and David and Solomon gives a convincing case that the patriarchs are pharaohs, and before the Flood they were kings of Mesopotamia. Maybe Sargon?
Regarding the Hittites, I forgot to add that Beth-el, the Hebrew capital before Jerusalem, was the Hittite fortress of Luz. It was here that Jacob had an all night naked mud-wrestling contest with El, where El could not defeat Jacob and thus renamed him to Isra-el. Beth-el / Shiloh is in the territory of Ephraim, who has the noble blood of an Egyptian high priest, at least, whose daughter was assigned to Joseph by 'pharaoh'.
Judah establishs the tribe of the Jews, by being tricked by his daughter-in-law, Tamar, into him thinking that she was a prostitute. The name Tamar is a common female name in Egyptian royalty. Tamar did this to enforce her rights under the Levirate marriage contract, whose practice is known only amongst Indo-Europeans, even today in small pockets. Onan, one of Judah's sons before the Tamar line, was killed by God himself, for spilling his seed, which I take to really mean that he didn't want to become Tamar's new Levirate husband.
Regarding the Hittites, I forgot to add that Beth-el, the Hebrew capital before Jerusalem, was the Hittite fortress of Luz. It was here that Jacob had an all night naked mud-wrestling contest with El, where El could not defeat Jacob and thus renamed him to Isra-el. Beth-el / Shiloh is in the territory of Ephraim, who has the noble blood of an Egyptian high priest, at least, whose daughter was assigned to Joseph by 'pharaoh'.
Judah establishs the tribe of the Jews, by being tricked by his daughter-in-law, Tamar, into him thinking that she was a prostitute. The name Tamar is a common female name in Egyptian royalty. Tamar did this to enforce her rights under the Levirate marriage contract, whose practice is known only amongst Indo-Europeans, even today in small pockets. Onan, one of Judah's sons before the Tamar line, was killed by God himself, for spilling his seed, which I take to really mean that he didn't want to become Tamar's new Levirate husband.
NIcholas de Vere describes Ham as "(Chem Zarathustra), 10th Archon of the Age of Capricorn", what on earth does that mean, and would that have anything to do with a prior Indian-Persian inversion?
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
I do not remember that. If true, that might just be the case about the inversion. Certainly considerable motivation to treat Ham and his descendants that way. There is a lot of debate about the true age of Zarathustra or whether there was more than one.
http://www.dagobertsrevenge.com/devere/Genealogies/DragonDescentFiles/DragonDescentOne.JPG It's from his "Dragon Descent" line, and apparently de Vere thinks that Ham and Japheth were the sons of Tubal-cain. and not Noah!!! I have noticed how you appear to prioritize the de Vere lineage in some of your posts, and he appears to consider the Cain line the dominant one (as Saussy also emphasizes it?), not the Seth line, because he shows the particulars of the descent of Ham's grandson Nimrod to the Egyptian royal lines of Pharaohs, until he has Sarah, an Egyptian Princess, as the wife of Abraham, with their grandson Esau the ancestor of the Hyksos Pharaohs, and female descendants of that line marrying into the 18th Dynasty. In this particular lineage, de Vere does not appear to attach the same importance to the Jacob/Israel lines that he does to Esau's, perhaps he regards them as appendages to the Egyptian Dynasties.
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"And this leads us to the reason we have chosen the name Postflaviana for this website. We consider ourselves to be Postflavians, as a rejection of the means and methods of these scions, or the Scionists [sic], and that a globalization, or new world order, can only be positive for humanity if such a deceitful and selfish oligarchy is not allowed to continue to sit upon the inherited extreme apex of power, maintain and increase its absurd imbalance of wealth at everyone else’s and the environment’s expense. "
Silly me, believe it or not, up until the time of my reading Richard's "Manifesto", I had believed that the name "Postflaviana" was chosen because we were all living in a "Postflaviana" world now (sort of like "The Matrix"), i.e., the one created with the help of the original Flavians. If I understand the concept correctly now, you are projecting this name for a future world, much as Sir Francis Bacon did in his "New Atlantis", only without the expert elite running it, of course. Perhaps you may even have a Postflavian Party someday, or maybe not, as the initials "PP" could be a misleading trajectory!
Silly me, believe it or not, up until the time of my reading Richard's "Manifesto", I had believed that the name "Postflaviana" was chosen because we were all living in a "Postflaviana" world now (sort of like "The Matrix"), i.e., the one created with the help of the original Flavians. If I understand the concept correctly now, you are projecting this name for a future world, much as Sir Francis Bacon did in his "New Atlantis", only without the expert elite running it, of course. Perhaps you may even have a Postflavian Party someday, or maybe not, as the initials "PP" could be a misleading trajectory!
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
Yes, we will indeed PP on such as Donald Trump.
And yes, we consider all of us to still be in a Flavian, or neoCeasarian world, and the name is a desire for a new paradigm. And now we have a radically new interpretation of Plato and his Philosopher-King, thanks to Pierre Grimes et al. to support our thesis.
And yes, we consider all of us to still be in a Flavian, or neoCeasarian world, and the name is a desire for a new paradigm. And now we have a radically new interpretation of Plato and his Philosopher-King, thanks to Pierre Grimes et al. to support our thesis.
So Sorry, please pardon my ignorance, but I do not know who Pierre Grimes is, and would like to know what his "radically new interpretation of Plato and his Philosopher-King" is that supports the Postflaviana thesis.
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
Pierre Grimes: https://postflaviana.org/community/index.php?threads/from-chrest-to-christ.2462/post-13681
I have recently recognized the inherent dualism of nationalism vs. globalism within the Western construct, as perhaps epitomized within the Book of Revelation, where thethe nation nations of ethnons all answer to one authority, symbolized by the saved standing around the seat of the 'solar' God.
Were such as the authoritarian Fascist go fantastically wrong is continuing along the path of the traditional interpretation demanding some form of a monarchy or strongman, that always, always leads to a tyrant sooner or later. Thus humanity is forced to rebel, and then the authoritarians 'react' seeking to restore their false sense of Order. They justify this view based upon Plato seeming to recommend an inherited class / caste system that the Catholic Church indeed delivered. Instead, Plato is really pointing to the One Self, which implies that all humans must strive to become their own philosopher-king, which includes learning to properly accommodate the community and society in which they are immersed.
All children show a hunger to learn, but the corrupt Flavian structure we live in kicks this natural hunger out of them in various manners, allowing the rigged upper caste to preferentially benefit. Then we are absurdly and paradoxically told by the contemporary Libertarians and Fascists (mostly Useful Idiots) that there is no such thing as Class, and hence class struggle is wrong. As long as the 'retrograde' (since the corruption of Plato, at least) corrupt structure is maintained there will naturally be class warfare, e.g. Spartacus.
Consistent with this, we must return back to the proper regulated 'liberty' of Embedded Liberalism, where markets are returned back to the traditional role in society, from that of being made master over society that Lassez-Faire Liberalism and Neoliberalism accomplished. Even the Catholic Church, in the late 19th century was aware of the general problem, as witnessed by Rerum Novarum, but this was cynically used to implement the bait and switch Third Way of Fascism, which later became the bait and switch Third Way of Neoliberalism.
https://postflaviana.org/community/...ernment-capitalist-enterprise.2575/post-13656
Hence:
Double hence, we see such as Claude Badley make the same errors as otherwise good Christians of Nazi Germany making the same analysis errors because they can't fathom the correct course out of the market problem. This is much akin to Jews and others who falsely perceive the Maccabees as being their heroes, or the Neoliberal Clintons as being friends of the 'people'. Hitler betrayed the Germans from day one, as is Trump doing today.
We have definitely demonstrated on other threads and blog posts that the Abrahamic underpinnings of Western Civilization, at least, are indeed Globalist, utilizing such as Conquest and Colonization, 'scripted' and Justified from Scripture. I have a thread that lists 120 globalist verses from the OT and 80 from the NT. And as well, such Globalism is complementary to the pagan Roman corpus (e.g. Victory stands one foot atop a conquered globe), which I consider to accurately be within the Abrahamic construct -- as 'red' Edom / Esau. The 'Jewish' OT says that Esau will regain his rightful inheritance, and he did (thanks to Christ Titus); and that Ephraim and Judah will become as one, and it seems they may have, thanks to the Holocaust.
I have recently recognized the inherent dualism of nationalism vs. globalism within the Western construct, as perhaps epitomized within the Book of Revelation, where the
Were such as the authoritarian Fascist go fantastically wrong is continuing along the path of the traditional interpretation demanding some form of a monarchy or strongman, that always, always leads to a tyrant sooner or later. Thus humanity is forced to rebel, and then the authoritarians 'react' seeking to restore their false sense of Order. They justify this view based upon Plato seeming to recommend an inherited class / caste system that the Catholic Church indeed delivered. Instead, Plato is really pointing to the One Self, which implies that all humans must strive to become their own philosopher-king, which includes learning to properly accommodate the community and society in which they are immersed.
All children show a hunger to learn, but the corrupt Flavian structure we live in kicks this natural hunger out of them in various manners, allowing the rigged upper caste to preferentially benefit. Then we are absurdly and paradoxically told by the contemporary Libertarians and Fascists (mostly Useful Idiots) that there is no such thing as Class, and hence class struggle is wrong. As long as the 'retrograde' (since the corruption of Plato, at least) corrupt structure is maintained there will naturally be class warfare, e.g. Spartacus.
Consistent with this, we must return back to the proper regulated 'liberty' of Embedded Liberalism, where markets are returned back to the traditional role in society, from that of being made master over society that Lassez-Faire Liberalism and Neoliberalism accomplished. Even the Catholic Church, in the late 19th century was aware of the general problem, as witnessed by Rerum Novarum, but this was cynically used to implement the bait and switch Third Way of Fascism, which later became the bait and switch Third Way of Neoliberalism.
https://postflaviana.org/community/...ernment-capitalist-enterprise.2575/post-13656
Hence:
Double hence, we see such as Claude Badley make the same errors as otherwise good Christians of Nazi Germany making the same analysis errors because they can't fathom the correct course out of the market problem. This is much akin to Jews and others who falsely perceive the Maccabees as being their heroes, or the Neoliberal Clintons as being friends of the 'people'. Hitler betrayed the Germans from day one, as is Trump doing today.
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Thank You, you have so many interesting topics on this site, that I had recently decided to stop wandering around here, and concentrate on your "Manifesto" in a new thread, as a new beginning for me. Obviously that "strategy" didn't work either, as I missed what you had just posted recently! I certainly am familiar with the commonplace interpretation of Plato's supposedly elitist Philosopher-Kings, and did not realize that there was "a radically new interpretation" of this concept that involves all of us, and not just some of us. I am realizing just how naive I was when I first came here, for what you all are doing is much more profound that I had imagined, than simply being a common sense interpretation of "crazy conspiracy theories". I mean no offense by the comparison, but some of this reminds me of what I read that the Rosicrucians were trying to expound and accomplish in the 17th century, if they were not just another elite tool veiled in secrecy, of course.
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Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
Don't feel bad, I just discovered those interviews and thus Grimes, as a consequence of watching the great interviews with Jason Reza Jorjani. Plato was always a problem for me, and Grime's position makes so much sense now. He discusses the deeper meaning of various Dialogues, how Plato meant something completely abstract by the need to know the Pythagorean disciplines, and why Socrates engaged so with the common man, not just the elites -- the latter who killed him.
Also, notice that I have made several edits to the prior post, links to the globalist verses and the bottom paragraphs.
Also, notice that I have made several edits to the prior post, links to the globalist verses and the bottom paragraphs.
Richard Stanley
Well-Known Member
Crooked Shepherds? Who is this guy pre-plagiarising our thesis? Seems to have been a flash in the pan.
Pre-plagiarizing?
https://crookedshepherds.wordpress.com/
Well, just in case anyone runs out of material here.
Pre-plagiarizing?
https://crookedshepherds.wordpress.com/
Well, just in case anyone runs out of material here.
Don't mess with him, he must be one of those Illuminatus/Duke of Bedford/Skull and Bones/Jehovah Witness Russells, I have one of them in my family too, her cover story is that she is "Irish". Seriously (or not), I love how some of them were the Marquesses of TAVISTOCK!
Emma Robertson
Active Member
Do you know this study about the origins of the Old Testament?
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/how-persia-created-judaism-persian-and-jewish-religion
It has been my reference when I wanted to discover the truth about the Old Testament, just before I found Ceasar's Messiah about the New Testament.
From it my idea is that the Abraham story is a fully invented one, as you will read.
I copy the most relevant parts, at least to me. It's quite long as the document is extremely long, and would be rather difficult for somebody to read it from the beginning without first having an idea of what it talks about.
HOW PERSIA CREATED JUDAISM
"Pacification by Transportation
Transportation of populations has long been used for pacification. In Egypt, at the time of Amenhotep II (1453-1419 BC) and Thutmose IV (1419-1386 BC), these pharaohs deported about 80,000 Canaanites, many from Gezer. Amenhotep III (1386-1349 BC) fortified Gezer and other cities in Palestine to hold the royal garrisons. He provided these cities with fine temples and palaces. The Canaanites will have been moved to outposts in Nubia or Libya, and Nubians or Libyans were probably moved into Canaan. So, the leaders of the native populations were removed and others were transported in to replace them.
In the eighth century, the Assyrians had a warrior leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who proved to be a great pacifier of troublesome populations. His policy was to set up colonies, claiming to be saving the colonized people, then to deport the leading elements of a colony to another colony elsewhere. Thus the bulk of the population left behind were leaderless and lacked necessary skilled people and the clever and perhaps dangerous people who were uprooted were planted hundreds of miles away in the midst of a hostile population. Thus 65,000 Medes were deported to Diyala near modern Baghdad and were replaced by Aramaeans.
In Israel, Tiglath-Pileser deposed the native king and replaced him with a vassal called Saviour or Salvation (Hosea), proof that the action of the invader was presented as a deliverance (2 Kg 15:29-30). 2 Kings 17:3 tells us that later Hosea was paying tribute to Shalmaneser but eventually sought an alliance with Egypt and was deposed by the Assyrian king. When Sargon (Sharru-Kin) II captured Samaria (biblical Israel) he implemented the policy of transportation, moving 30,000 Israelites to other parts of the empire, some of them to Halah near Haran and Habor on the upper Euphrates, others to Rhages near Teheran, the “cities of the Medes” of 2 Kings.
He replaced them with people transported in from Cuthah in Babylonia and Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim in Syria. These people incur the anger of the writer of 2 Kings for worshipping their own gods, despite them also taking up the worship of the native god, Yehouah. It seems a safe guess that the displaced ruling class of Israel did the same in the lands in which they settled in the Assyrian plains and Syria. They will therefore have taken up the worship of Ashur, who was the god of the earlier race of Indo-Europeans that ruled in Assyria. This might be why an apparently Semitic people, the Assyrians, seemed to worship a god of the Aryans, similar to Ahuramazda."
[....]
"Cyrus the Great (559-530 BC)
Cyrus the Great in Elamite robe
Dom Gregory Dix says that Herodotus recognized the sudden rise to empire of the Persians under Cyrus in 550 BC as the turning point of Greek history. Second Isaiah saw him as God’s saviour of the world! If God’s chief prophet and the world’s first historian tell us that Cyrus was so important, why do modern theologians and modern historians ignore the man?"
[......]
"Historically, Cyrus the Great became a Zoroastrian at some time in his career, for at his death Zoroastrianism was the official religion of his empire, and the Magi had attained the monopoly of religion. It was the proper religion of the Medes and Persians, so that being a Zoroastrian meant being a Persian. The two became equivalent, religion and ethnicity being identified, as they later did in Judaism.
As a devoted Zoroastrian, Cyrus believed that his religious duty was to bring about the eschatological promises of Zoroastrianism through active warfare. If the universe was an epic struggle between the forces of Ahuramazda and the forces of evil, Cyrus saw his job as personally bringing about the victory of his god. As an extension of this, Cyrus would bring Zoroastrianism to all the peoples he conquered, but not by forcing them. Zoroastrianism recognized all the gods of other people—some were of Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, and some were of Ahriman’s Evil Creation. Cyrus distinguished between them on the basis of the resistance the worshippers of the god offered him.
A scholarly Parsi, Ruhi Muhsen Afnan (Zoroaster’s Influence on Anaxagoras, the Greek Tragedians, and Socrates, New York, 1969), shows that expansion of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenids was motivated by a “divine mission to offer mankind” a true belief, like the wars of Islam. These wars “were dominated by a religious fervor that must be taken into account” in the sudden emergence of Persia, just as the Arabs suddenly emerged with a divine militancy and conquered most of the world."
[...]
Cyrus was always astute enough to realize that most people he was conquering were far more cultured than his own, and made no attempt to impose a Persian “culture” nor was he interested in directly forcing the Persian religion on to others. He thought, though, that the universal god, Ahuramazda, was favouring him, his house and the Persian nation, and he was keen that people ahould see some god as universal so that the idea of a universal god would confer legitimacy on the idea of a universal king of kings on earth.
Cyrus still had a strong and rich country independent at the centre of his empire and decided it had to be made to submit. Chaldeans [†] were a Semitic people who invaded Southern Babylonia in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, while the Aramaeans occupied Syria. Chaldaea is first mentioned in the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC). When they ruled Babylonia, after the Assyrians, they followed the practice of their predecessors, pacifying people by deportation including part of the Judahite [†] population, supposedly 10,000 nobles and craftsmen. It is doubtful that many, if any, of these people or their descendents willingly returned to Palestine, but the people who themselves were deported into Palestine by the Persians, a hundred or so years later, were nevertheless called the “Returners from Exile”.
Cyrus returned from the east in 539 BC determined to settle the Chaldaean question. Nabonidus (Nabunaid) (555-539 BC), was apparently a cultured but loopy king, interested in the worship of the god, Sin—neglecting Babylon’s principal god, Marduk, who symbolized the city as well as the faith of its people—and in archaeological research, and quite uninterested in warfare, which he left to his son, Belshazzar. Cyrus had a large army with Medes and Persians at the core but lots of soldiers of conquered nations in support. He needed no army. Babylon submitted and only a few days of token resistance came from the guard of the royal compound. As ever, Cyrus was generous to the defeated king and his family, but Nabonidus died a year later anyway. Cyrus joined in the public mourning.
The victory over Babylonia expressed all the facets of the policy of conciliation which Cyrus had followed until then. He presented himself not as a conqueror, but a liberator and the legitimate successor to the crown. He took the title of “King of Babylon, King of the Land”.
Cyrus made cylinder seals and inscribed tablets with declarations of his treament of and welcome by the Babylonians. He entered Babylon “amidst exulting shouts”. His victory was “desired to the joy of their hearts” and “him did they bless with joy”. Then, “Marduk the great Lord made the honourable hearts of the people of Babylon inclined towards me because I was daily mindful of his worship” “the inhabitants realized the satisfaction of their hearts desires” and “their sighs I hushed, their anger I appeased”.
If Cyrus said all of this regarding Marduk and the Babylonians, it is credible that a similar tactic should have been employed in respect of the Jews, and indeed many other people, the evidence of which is now lost. Cyrus claimed to have been visited in a dream by Yehouah, a god of the Hebrews, the people who lived in “Beyond the River”, the Assyrian province of “Eber-niri” (Persian “Abarnahara”). Yehouah declared he was of the Good Creation and asked to be worshipped in the land of Yehud. The Jewish scriptures, not an unbiased source, tells us that Cyrus sent the “Returners from Exile” there to introduce the proper worship of Yehouah in the Temple at Jerusalem.
Thus saith Yehouah to his messiah, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut.
Isaiah 45:1
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, Yehouah Elohim of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Ezra 1:2
“Yehouah Elohim of heaven” means “Yehouah of the gods of heaven” not “The Lord God of heaven” as the dishonest translators will put it. For Indo-Europeans, the gods of heaven are the Daevas, the wicked gods derogated by Zoroaster. It seems the Persians saw all national gods as Daevas, but were ready to allow their worshippers to show by their deeds that they were really Yazatas, good spirits.
In fact no one, or very few volunteers went there and later kings were obliged to send deportees to shore up Jerusalem as a citadel against the Egyptians. It was set up as a temple City in which the people, a Nation of Priests, were privileged in return for their loyalty.
The Reverend Mills recognized that ancient politicians were sensible of propaganda. He comments on the propaganda of Cyrus: “All this piety was of course political” but still showed the Persian king as a man of faith. When Cyrus flooded the empire with these cylinder seals and inscriptions, he knew that they would be read by the literate and repeated by story tellers for a long time. He knew they would become the stuff of legends. Mills observes:
The empire was as complex in its religious types as it was vast in extent, and the amount of business entailed in administering it must have been phenomenal.
Beyond a question there existed a “Ministry of Public Worship”.
The objective of this ministry was to make a show of restoring gods and temples to please the peoples of the nations, but it is utterly naïve to imagine that the “restoration” had no strings attached or was simply restoration of an ancient worship rather than its “improvement” in the sense of arranging it in a form more conducive to civil obedience. No subtle king could miss the chance to cast the restoration in a direction favourable to himself. As Mills says:
These Achaemenids were men of business and practical to the finest point.
Darius took the same line but was more keen on monumental inscriptions than Cyrus. His main legacy is the immense carved cliff face at Behistun but other inscriptions are at Persepolis, Naksh-i-Rustem, Elvend, Kerman, Susa, Suez, Van and Egbatana, as well as on seals, tablets, pillars, weights and vases. Mills points out that “what the great Iranian inscriptions said, all officers of the kings government must have known”.
Cyrus the Deliverer of Oppressed Peoples
The interesting thing was that Cyrus offered himself to the Babylonians as a deliverer or Saviour (in Greek, Soter), just as he did to the Judahites. He said Babylon’s god, Marduk-Bel, had chosen him, Cyrus, as a righteous king who would rule the world. To prove it he ritually took the god’s hand at the new year festivities, thus legitimising him in the official title of the Babylonian king—“king of the land” of Babylon. Marduk-Bel was offered to his own worshippers in a new light—as a god with a world outlook not merely a local one.
Cyrus told the Babylonians that earlier kings, like Nabonidus, had taken their gods from their rightful homes and he promised to “restore” them. Nabonidus had used exactly the same approach in Harran when he persuaded the people he deported to the town that the proper god of the city was Sin. Even then the policy was not new. An inscription of Hammurabi who rules in Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC speaks of him restoring to its rightful place the god who favoured the city of Assur.
Persians called Cyrus “Father”, Greeks “Lord” or “Master”, and “Law-Giver”, and Jews called him “Messiah”. Greek writers like Aeschylus depict the Persian king as a god, and Curtius Rufus has a sycophant encouraging Alexander the Great to accept divine honours by assuring him the Persians had worshipped their kings among the gods. It was not true. They did not and no Persian king claimed to be a god, but they did like to depict themselves as god-like. They had a doctrine equivalent to the divine right of kings. The shah had divine authority. He was king by virtue of God's will. He was God's chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent on earth, and if that meant some people thought they were an angel of God, doubtless they would be hardly likely to send an envoy to correct their misconception. They showed themselves larger than men and, as it were, conversing with God. To justify it, they propagagted monotheism in the lands they conquered. The shah ruled with divine authority, and that authority was that of God—one single monotheistic God. For Persians, Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have an equivalent of Ahuramazda to be able to confirm the shah as the King of Kings—the Shahanshah.
Historians like to say Cyrus had “no thought of” moulding conquered countries in a Persian mould. That was perhaps true and realistic, but Ahuramazda was always depicted as a god rising above the solar or equinoctial disc, implying that the Persians saw him as transcendental, and certainly Cyrus was interested in persuading people that the true god was universal in outlook. His purpose seems to have been practical and political rather than religious, but it was a policy that led to all the main patriarchal religions of today. Cyrus was the founder of the modern great religions!
His novel and clever policy of conquest was to be generous to defeated people. In his propaganda he painted himself as the saviour and legitimate ruler of a conquered country. This must have been such a shock to people who expected to be massacred by conquerors that they could only conclude it was true.
Cyrus’s religious policy was an extension of this practical policy—to make it seem to be God’s will, whoever the local god was. He reshaped the Marduks and Yehouahs as Ahuramazdas—transcendental gods, suns beyond suns. To do so, he “restored” the local gods, but the restoration was in a mould that suited a universal king. The “restored” god was willing to look beyond his traditional worshippers to a world scale to recognize a righteous king when it saw one and approve of him in the appropriate way.
He got people to believe his propaganda by transporting them to a country that he declared was their proper homeland, where they had to start anew from the facts the Persians provided. Cyrus was their saviour, so-and-so was their rightful god, the god recognized Cyrus as the saviour—“Go thee and do likewise” and we Persians will help you.
Cyrus “restored” Yehouah to Jerusalem and supposedly 40,000 worshippers of Yehouah—Jews, for that is the name of people who worship Yehouah wherever they come from—“returned” to Jerusalem. The truth seems to be that very few did. Into the third generation of captivity and having the privileges of a deported class, the Judeans are unlikely to have wanted to return.
In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus is presented as a saviour and an agent of God—the Jewish god, Yehouah—and is even described as the messiah (the anointed). Yehouah had used the righteous but foreign king, Cyrus, to avenge the Jews against Babylon. We even find Yehouah shaking Cyrus by the hand (Isa 45:1) just as Bel had done:
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him.
Two separate gods, Marduk and Yehouah, of people who were enemies, Babylonians and Jews, saying kind things about a foreign prince, choosing him as a deliverer and taking him by the hand in proof. It all begins to look suspicious—like pro-Cyrus propaganda. Cyrus depicted himself as the benefactor of conquered peoples and the “restorer” of gods to their rightful place.
The leaders of the “returners” were Zerubabel, supposedly a member of the Jewish royal family, and Joshua, supposedly the descendant of a dynasty of High Priests. The name Joshua means “saviour!” They were accompanied by an assortment of Persian officials.
Is it not curious that Zerubabel, a Jewish leader, should have a distinctly Babylonian sounding name, and one that in “Zeru” suggests “Zara” (Zoro), the beginning of Zoroaster’s name, the latter part simply meaning Babylon? Zara pertains to the sun and seems to have connotations of “power” or “strength” and so “protecting” or “saving”. Zerubabel is the “saviour from Babylon”. The same is true of a later and more famous Jewish leader to “return”, Ezra, where again we have the characteristic consonants “ZR” appearing in a language which did not write vowels, so that it could equally be rendered as Zara—another saviour!
In fact, Zerubabel was the Tirshatha, the Persian governor, whose duty was to act on behalf of the king, Cyrus, and whose bogus Jewish royalty was to give him authority over the skeptical natives of Judah. He is also called Sheshbazzar which seems to mean “mighty power of the king” or “citadel of the king”.
[...]
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/how-persia-created-judaism-persian-and-jewish-religion
It has been my reference when I wanted to discover the truth about the Old Testament, just before I found Ceasar's Messiah about the New Testament.
From it my idea is that the Abraham story is a fully invented one, as you will read.
I copy the most relevant parts, at least to me. It's quite long as the document is extremely long, and would be rather difficult for somebody to read it from the beginning without first having an idea of what it talks about.
HOW PERSIA CREATED JUDAISM
"Pacification by Transportation
Transportation of populations has long been used for pacification. In Egypt, at the time of Amenhotep II (1453-1419 BC) and Thutmose IV (1419-1386 BC), these pharaohs deported about 80,000 Canaanites, many from Gezer. Amenhotep III (1386-1349 BC) fortified Gezer and other cities in Palestine to hold the royal garrisons. He provided these cities with fine temples and palaces. The Canaanites will have been moved to outposts in Nubia or Libya, and Nubians or Libyans were probably moved into Canaan. So, the leaders of the native populations were removed and others were transported in to replace them.
In the eighth century, the Assyrians had a warrior leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who proved to be a great pacifier of troublesome populations. His policy was to set up colonies, claiming to be saving the colonized people, then to deport the leading elements of a colony to another colony elsewhere. Thus the bulk of the population left behind were leaderless and lacked necessary skilled people and the clever and perhaps dangerous people who were uprooted were planted hundreds of miles away in the midst of a hostile population. Thus 65,000 Medes were deported to Diyala near modern Baghdad and were replaced by Aramaeans.
In Israel, Tiglath-Pileser deposed the native king and replaced him with a vassal called Saviour or Salvation (Hosea), proof that the action of the invader was presented as a deliverance (2 Kg 15:29-30). 2 Kings 17:3 tells us that later Hosea was paying tribute to Shalmaneser but eventually sought an alliance with Egypt and was deposed by the Assyrian king. When Sargon (Sharru-Kin) II captured Samaria (biblical Israel) he implemented the policy of transportation, moving 30,000 Israelites to other parts of the empire, some of them to Halah near Haran and Habor on the upper Euphrates, others to Rhages near Teheran, the “cities of the Medes” of 2 Kings.
He replaced them with people transported in from Cuthah in Babylonia and Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim in Syria. These people incur the anger of the writer of 2 Kings for worshipping their own gods, despite them also taking up the worship of the native god, Yehouah. It seems a safe guess that the displaced ruling class of Israel did the same in the lands in which they settled in the Assyrian plains and Syria. They will therefore have taken up the worship of Ashur, who was the god of the earlier race of Indo-Europeans that ruled in Assyria. This might be why an apparently Semitic people, the Assyrians, seemed to worship a god of the Aryans, similar to Ahuramazda."
[....]
"Cyrus the Great (559-530 BC)
Cyrus the Great in Elamite robe
Dom Gregory Dix says that Herodotus recognized the sudden rise to empire of the Persians under Cyrus in 550 BC as the turning point of Greek history. Second Isaiah saw him as God’s saviour of the world! If God’s chief prophet and the world’s first historian tell us that Cyrus was so important, why do modern theologians and modern historians ignore the man?"
[......]
"Historically, Cyrus the Great became a Zoroastrian at some time in his career, for at his death Zoroastrianism was the official religion of his empire, and the Magi had attained the monopoly of religion. It was the proper religion of the Medes and Persians, so that being a Zoroastrian meant being a Persian. The two became equivalent, religion and ethnicity being identified, as they later did in Judaism.
As a devoted Zoroastrian, Cyrus believed that his religious duty was to bring about the eschatological promises of Zoroastrianism through active warfare. If the universe was an epic struggle between the forces of Ahuramazda and the forces of evil, Cyrus saw his job as personally bringing about the victory of his god. As an extension of this, Cyrus would bring Zoroastrianism to all the peoples he conquered, but not by forcing them. Zoroastrianism recognized all the gods of other people—some were of Ahuramazda’s Good Creation, and some were of Ahriman’s Evil Creation. Cyrus distinguished between them on the basis of the resistance the worshippers of the god offered him.
A scholarly Parsi, Ruhi Muhsen Afnan (Zoroaster’s Influence on Anaxagoras, the Greek Tragedians, and Socrates, New York, 1969), shows that expansion of the Persian Empire under the Achaemenids was motivated by a “divine mission to offer mankind” a true belief, like the wars of Islam. These wars “were dominated by a religious fervor that must be taken into account” in the sudden emergence of Persia, just as the Arabs suddenly emerged with a divine militancy and conquered most of the world."
[...]
Cyrus was always astute enough to realize that most people he was conquering were far more cultured than his own, and made no attempt to impose a Persian “culture” nor was he interested in directly forcing the Persian religion on to others. He thought, though, that the universal god, Ahuramazda, was favouring him, his house and the Persian nation, and he was keen that people ahould see some god as universal so that the idea of a universal god would confer legitimacy on the idea of a universal king of kings on earth.
Cyrus still had a strong and rich country independent at the centre of his empire and decided it had to be made to submit. Chaldeans [†] were a Semitic people who invaded Southern Babylonia in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, while the Aramaeans occupied Syria. Chaldaea is first mentioned in the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC). When they ruled Babylonia, after the Assyrians, they followed the practice of their predecessors, pacifying people by deportation including part of the Judahite [†] population, supposedly 10,000 nobles and craftsmen. It is doubtful that many, if any, of these people or their descendents willingly returned to Palestine, but the people who themselves were deported into Palestine by the Persians, a hundred or so years later, were nevertheless called the “Returners from Exile”.
Cyrus returned from the east in 539 BC determined to settle the Chaldaean question. Nabonidus (Nabunaid) (555-539 BC), was apparently a cultured but loopy king, interested in the worship of the god, Sin—neglecting Babylon’s principal god, Marduk, who symbolized the city as well as the faith of its people—and in archaeological research, and quite uninterested in warfare, which he left to his son, Belshazzar. Cyrus had a large army with Medes and Persians at the core but lots of soldiers of conquered nations in support. He needed no army. Babylon submitted and only a few days of token resistance came from the guard of the royal compound. As ever, Cyrus was generous to the defeated king and his family, but Nabonidus died a year later anyway. Cyrus joined in the public mourning.
The victory over Babylonia expressed all the facets of the policy of conciliation which Cyrus had followed until then. He presented himself not as a conqueror, but a liberator and the legitimate successor to the crown. He took the title of “King of Babylon, King of the Land”.
Cyrus made cylinder seals and inscribed tablets with declarations of his treament of and welcome by the Babylonians. He entered Babylon “amidst exulting shouts”. His victory was “desired to the joy of their hearts” and “him did they bless with joy”. Then, “Marduk the great Lord made the honourable hearts of the people of Babylon inclined towards me because I was daily mindful of his worship” “the inhabitants realized the satisfaction of their hearts desires” and “their sighs I hushed, their anger I appeased”.
If Cyrus said all of this regarding Marduk and the Babylonians, it is credible that a similar tactic should have been employed in respect of the Jews, and indeed many other people, the evidence of which is now lost. Cyrus claimed to have been visited in a dream by Yehouah, a god of the Hebrews, the people who lived in “Beyond the River”, the Assyrian province of “Eber-niri” (Persian “Abarnahara”). Yehouah declared he was of the Good Creation and asked to be worshipped in the land of Yehud. The Jewish scriptures, not an unbiased source, tells us that Cyrus sent the “Returners from Exile” there to introduce the proper worship of Yehouah in the Temple at Jerusalem.
Thus saith Yehouah to his messiah, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates, and the gates shall not be shut.
Isaiah 45:1
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, Yehouah Elohim of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Ezra 1:2
“Yehouah Elohim of heaven” means “Yehouah of the gods of heaven” not “The Lord God of heaven” as the dishonest translators will put it. For Indo-Europeans, the gods of heaven are the Daevas, the wicked gods derogated by Zoroaster. It seems the Persians saw all national gods as Daevas, but were ready to allow their worshippers to show by their deeds that they were really Yazatas, good spirits.
In fact no one, or very few volunteers went there and later kings were obliged to send deportees to shore up Jerusalem as a citadel against the Egyptians. It was set up as a temple City in which the people, a Nation of Priests, were privileged in return for their loyalty.
The Reverend Mills recognized that ancient politicians were sensible of propaganda. He comments on the propaganda of Cyrus: “All this piety was of course political” but still showed the Persian king as a man of faith. When Cyrus flooded the empire with these cylinder seals and inscriptions, he knew that they would be read by the literate and repeated by story tellers for a long time. He knew they would become the stuff of legends. Mills observes:
The empire was as complex in its religious types as it was vast in extent, and the amount of business entailed in administering it must have been phenomenal.
Beyond a question there existed a “Ministry of Public Worship”.
The objective of this ministry was to make a show of restoring gods and temples to please the peoples of the nations, but it is utterly naïve to imagine that the “restoration” had no strings attached or was simply restoration of an ancient worship rather than its “improvement” in the sense of arranging it in a form more conducive to civil obedience. No subtle king could miss the chance to cast the restoration in a direction favourable to himself. As Mills says:
These Achaemenids were men of business and practical to the finest point.
Darius took the same line but was more keen on monumental inscriptions than Cyrus. His main legacy is the immense carved cliff face at Behistun but other inscriptions are at Persepolis, Naksh-i-Rustem, Elvend, Kerman, Susa, Suez, Van and Egbatana, as well as on seals, tablets, pillars, weights and vases. Mills points out that “what the great Iranian inscriptions said, all officers of the kings government must have known”.
Cyrus the Deliverer of Oppressed Peoples
The interesting thing was that Cyrus offered himself to the Babylonians as a deliverer or Saviour (in Greek, Soter), just as he did to the Judahites. He said Babylon’s god, Marduk-Bel, had chosen him, Cyrus, as a righteous king who would rule the world. To prove it he ritually took the god’s hand at the new year festivities, thus legitimising him in the official title of the Babylonian king—“king of the land” of Babylon. Marduk-Bel was offered to his own worshippers in a new light—as a god with a world outlook not merely a local one.
Cyrus told the Babylonians that earlier kings, like Nabonidus, had taken their gods from their rightful homes and he promised to “restore” them. Nabonidus had used exactly the same approach in Harran when he persuaded the people he deported to the town that the proper god of the city was Sin. Even then the policy was not new. An inscription of Hammurabi who rules in Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC speaks of him restoring to its rightful place the god who favoured the city of Assur.
Persians called Cyrus “Father”, Greeks “Lord” or “Master”, and “Law-Giver”, and Jews called him “Messiah”. Greek writers like Aeschylus depict the Persian king as a god, and Curtius Rufus has a sycophant encouraging Alexander the Great to accept divine honours by assuring him the Persians had worshipped their kings among the gods. It was not true. They did not and no Persian king claimed to be a god, but they did like to depict themselves as god-like. They had a doctrine equivalent to the divine right of kings. The shah had divine authority. He was king by virtue of God's will. He was God's chosen one, and held his hand. Shahs were God’s regent on earth, and if that meant some people thought they were an angel of God, doubtless they would be hardly likely to send an envoy to correct their misconception. They showed themselves larger than men and, as it were, conversing with God. To justify it, they propagagted monotheism in the lands they conquered. The shah ruled with divine authority, and that authority was that of God—one single monotheistic God. For Persians, Ahuramazda was the only true god, and each subject nation had to have an equivalent of Ahuramazda to be able to confirm the shah as the King of Kings—the Shahanshah.
Historians like to say Cyrus had “no thought of” moulding conquered countries in a Persian mould. That was perhaps true and realistic, but Ahuramazda was always depicted as a god rising above the solar or equinoctial disc, implying that the Persians saw him as transcendental, and certainly Cyrus was interested in persuading people that the true god was universal in outlook. His purpose seems to have been practical and political rather than religious, but it was a policy that led to all the main patriarchal religions of today. Cyrus was the founder of the modern great religions!
His novel and clever policy of conquest was to be generous to defeated people. In his propaganda he painted himself as the saviour and legitimate ruler of a conquered country. This must have been such a shock to people who expected to be massacred by conquerors that they could only conclude it was true.
Cyrus’s religious policy was an extension of this practical policy—to make it seem to be God’s will, whoever the local god was. He reshaped the Marduks and Yehouahs as Ahuramazdas—transcendental gods, suns beyond suns. To do so, he “restored” the local gods, but the restoration was in a mould that suited a universal king. The “restored” god was willing to look beyond his traditional worshippers to a world scale to recognize a righteous king when it saw one and approve of him in the appropriate way.
He got people to believe his propaganda by transporting them to a country that he declared was their proper homeland, where they had to start anew from the facts the Persians provided. Cyrus was their saviour, so-and-so was their rightful god, the god recognized Cyrus as the saviour—“Go thee and do likewise” and we Persians will help you.
Cyrus “restored” Yehouah to Jerusalem and supposedly 40,000 worshippers of Yehouah—Jews, for that is the name of people who worship Yehouah wherever they come from—“returned” to Jerusalem. The truth seems to be that very few did. Into the third generation of captivity and having the privileges of a deported class, the Judeans are unlikely to have wanted to return.
In the Jewish scriptures, Cyrus is presented as a saviour and an agent of God—the Jewish god, Yehouah—and is even described as the messiah (the anointed). Yehouah had used the righteous but foreign king, Cyrus, to avenge the Jews against Babylon. We even find Yehouah shaking Cyrus by the hand (Isa 45:1) just as Bel had done:
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him.
Two separate gods, Marduk and Yehouah, of people who were enemies, Babylonians and Jews, saying kind things about a foreign prince, choosing him as a deliverer and taking him by the hand in proof. It all begins to look suspicious—like pro-Cyrus propaganda. Cyrus depicted himself as the benefactor of conquered peoples and the “restorer” of gods to their rightful place.
The leaders of the “returners” were Zerubabel, supposedly a member of the Jewish royal family, and Joshua, supposedly the descendant of a dynasty of High Priests. The name Joshua means “saviour!” They were accompanied by an assortment of Persian officials.
Is it not curious that Zerubabel, a Jewish leader, should have a distinctly Babylonian sounding name, and one that in “Zeru” suggests “Zara” (Zoro), the beginning of Zoroaster’s name, the latter part simply meaning Babylon? Zara pertains to the sun and seems to have connotations of “power” or “strength” and so “protecting” or “saving”. Zerubabel is the “saviour from Babylon”. The same is true of a later and more famous Jewish leader to “return”, Ezra, where again we have the characteristic consonants “ZR” appearing in a language which did not write vowels, so that it could equally be rendered as Zara—another saviour!
In fact, Zerubabel was the Tirshatha, the Persian governor, whose duty was to act on behalf of the king, Cyrus, and whose bogus Jewish royalty was to give him authority over the skeptical natives of Judah. He is also called Sheshbazzar which seems to mean “mighty power of the king” or “citadel of the king”.
[...]