When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone

Author:Merlin Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307816856
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-09T03:00:00+00:00

THE LEVITES AND THE SONS OF LIGHT

The association of the Hebrew people and the Indo-Europeans, both worshiping a god of light, is even further suggested by the recent discoveries of old Hebrew texts, popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls, discovered at Qumran in Palestine, are the oldest extant Hebrew texts of the books of the Old Testament, dating from about the third century BC. Generally they are quite in keeping with the Greek version and even the later Hebrew one, with some variations. But there was an additional text which was completely new to Bible scholars. It is an account known as “The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.” The scroll consists of the plans for a battle that was about to be fought. The enemy was collectively known as the Sons of Darkness; the Hebrews, still led by the Levite priests, were the Sons of Light. It begins by stating that “The first engagement of the Sons of Light shall be to attack the lot of the Sons of Darkness … The Sons of Light are the lot of God.”

Many authorities have once again attributed this surprising find to influence from Iran, where the worship of Ahura still prevailed. But when we consider that so many of the other texts discovered at Qumran were from the Old Testament, we may question why this particular account should have been included among them. Also, there is no specific mention of Ahura. As we have seen, the concept of the god of light was not a new one to the Hebrews. The Indo-European duality of light and dark may be seen underlying the earliest description of Yahweh’s creation of the world. For in Gen. 1:3 we read, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light; and God saw that the light was good and he separated light from darkness.”

Another significant factor in the scroll is that it reveals that the priestly Levites were still in control. The people at Qumran were from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the southern survivors after the other tribes of Israel in the north had been conquered and dispersed in 722 BC. Though the southern state of Judah had been conquered in 586 BC, many of the people had returned to the area to live under foreign rule. It is from these two tribes that the Hebrew people of today descend; the others probably dispersed into the populations of Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, despite the aperiodic attempts to exhibit traces of them in Ireland or in the various Indian cultures of North America.

In the Qumran scroll, just as in the books of the Old Testament, the dress, the banners, the duties and the position of the Levites were separately and carefully described. The banners were to be decorated with the names of Aaron and his sons. Even more interesting is the fact that the Levites were once again, or still, in charge of the battle trumpets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.