Course XXVIII - Teaching 14: The Israelites

An expanded Semitic people throughout different places of Asia, which were nomadic tribes, became strong peoples, like the Phoenicians, Arameans and, on lower scale, the Moabites.
But others rejected sedentary life and preferred the desert to the city, the country tent to the comfortable house, and the unleavened bread of natural furnace to tasty dishes.
Among the rest of peoples, usually even Semites fragmented the Divinity by attributing it different aspects and forms.
But these pure sons of the sand and of unending routes have in their simple minds only one concept about God: Eloh, spirit, invisible being, unknown power, which they were unable to define. These nomadic Terakites, divided into several tribes, formed perhaps the twelve tribe of Israel. But the tribes of Ben Israel and Ben Jacob prevailed over the others.
These nomads, called “Hibrim” by the Assyrians and Chaldeans (which means “Hebrews”, that is, those who come from beyond the river) had a very high worship of preservation of their own race and purity of their own blood.
They were descendants of the Semitic Atlanteans, who for centuries and centuries, had to fight to maintain their blood intact, since it had to be handed on to subsequent generations to form the new type of man.
Their ancestral mission had been to maintain in the world the physical type of the new race, which they had begotten from their Atlanteans ascendants.
This power to keep the race intact revealed an absolute intolerance to mix their blood with anyone outside their tribe.
The religion of the early Hebrews was entirely simple and vast.
While caravans and camels slowly went through roads toward the Euphrates or through paths of Syria or the Fore-Lebanon, they offered their prayers to the Almighty with slow rhythmic songs, similar to the Iasar of the Israelites and the Kitab-el-Aghni of the Arabians.
Now and then they settled and camped close to an oasis and, before continuing slowly their journey, erected a stone memorial called “Iad” and, when they did not find a stone, then piled lots of stones that until our days the Arabians of the desert call “El Galgail”.
The wind that formed enormous dunes and whistled day and night through their tents; lightning that hurt implacably their cattle, so lovingly guided by them; the Moon that traced its paths by a strip of light projected on the sand; and the starry sky and the burning sun, all this was their “Eloh”.
Instead of dividing these elements and of assigning to them different names and attributes, they assimilated them together like a unique expression of supernatural power, “Elohim”, which at the same time is the God One and the powers of God together in One.
This simple worship, practiced by the early Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians –which they lost in the course of time and progress–, had laid the foundations of the monotheistic concept that still lasts in the world.
Jehovah is a name given to God later, when this God One becomes more material and more united to destinies of the Israelite people.
The Hebrews were devoid of mythology, since their simple worship did not accept it; even really they had not any worship itself, since they carried with them, in the Teraphim or portable ark, an oil that usually they poured on their stone memorials.
The Hebrews had worships and temples just after their captivity in Egypt and Babylon, once they settled in Palestine.
According to the Semitic concept, God is All, and the Absolute, cannot be named, and comprises everything, but man is transient.
Unlike the Aryans, who believe in life after death and in “Pitris”, invisible protectors of the race, the Semites, and particularly the Hebrews, do not believe that man survives in the hereafter. To them, a venerable and respected old age, their name uttered reverently after their death, and the memory of the patriarch perpetuated in their race, all this is enough.
Beyond is just the nothing, eternal silence, what a man must not investigate. In the most extraordinary of cases, certain enlightened beings were taken away, during their lifetime, toward the kingdoms of God, in order to live beside Him.
Nomadic tribes of the Hebrews, or rather, certain tribes, had settled in low Egypt to such an extent that got their own name, and were called Ben-Joseph’s. They prevailed over those Ben-Israel’s and those of Ben-Jacob’s tribes, and attracted and controlled them, by keeping an aristocratic predominance. But frequent nomadic invasions had weakened Egypt and the Pharaohs, and these foreigners promoted periodical intestine revolutions in Pharaohs’ provinces.
A young Levi, assigned to the Egyptian worship and called Moses, rebelled the Hebrews against the Pharaohs and, at the head of this people, led them to escape toward the desert of Canaan.
The Hebrew people did not take anything from the Egyptian worship, since in Judea always was considered blameworthy anything that remembered Egypt, namely, calf of gold, serpent of brass, and other idols. They just preserved the Egyptian priesthood, copied from Levis.
As you have seen, the Hebrew worship is based totally in worships of Chaldea and Assyria. But the pure early worship of the Elohim, which had culminated on the beautiful patriarchal figure of Abraham and that was only universal monotheism, gradually became racial monotheism –Jahveh, the Jehovah of the Jews, was not any more an Eternal God that comprises everything, but the peculiar god of the new people, a god reduced to a narrow strip of earth, to a short number of men and to a personalized relativity.
As this people settles in Canaan and establishes itself like a steady tribe, it further condenses in itself this individual god.
The spiritual concept of the Hebrews becomes more and more obscure, in spite of David’s reign and if Solomon’s Temple: the more splendid is their spiritual progress, the more materialistic they become. But pain and prophets awakened this people to preserve the heritage of the Semitic religion throughout races.
During their captivity in Babylon, far away from Jerusalem, far away from splendor of Palestine, and far away from the great solemnity of their destroyed Temple, they though again of the true immensity of God, and to hear the vital voice of their prophets.
Back again in Jerusalem, by will of Cyrus “the Great”, King of Persia, they re-established the purest worship. Ezra re-unites lost and scattered laws of the people and enlarges and establishes definitively the Torah.
The spiritual life flourishes, and philosophies and men proclaim the existence of the spirit after death.
The subsequent Sadducees are materialistic, while the Pharisees are spiritual in Israel.
They not only consider the dead letter of law, but also study its esoteric and hidden part. And when the emerging Christians wanted to possess the holy books of the Hebrews, gladly the latter delivered them; so they gave the dead letter to the Christians, and hid the esoteric part that is beautifully reflected on the Talmud.