The Bible: The Biography by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Retail, 21st Century, Religion, v.5, Religious Studies, Amazon.com, Mythology, Religious History, Social Sciences, Cultural Anthropology
ISBN: 9781848872547
Google: JtMaTD-dA30C
Amazon: 1594152632
Goodreads: 17048699
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2006-12-31T15:00:00+00:00

Anybody who simply read the Bible literally ‘as a book presenting narratives and everyday matters’, had missed the point. There was nothing special about the literal Torah: anybody could write a better book – even the gentiles had produced greater works. 47

Kabbalists combined their mystical meditations on scripture with vigils, fasts and constant self-examination. They had to live together in fellowship, repressing selfishness and egotism because anger entered into the psyche like an evil spirit and shattered the divine harmony of his soul. It was impossible to experience the unity of the sefiroth in such a divided state. 48 The love of friends was fundamental to the ekstasis of Kabbalah. In the Zohar, one of the signs of a successful piece of exegesis is the cry of joy uttered by the interpreter’s colleagues when they have heard what they experience as divine truth or when the exegetes kiss one another before they resume their mystical journey.

Kabbalists believed that the Torah was flawed, incomplete and presented relative rather than absolute truth. Some thought that two whole books were missing from our Torah or that our alphabet lacked one of its letters, so that language itself had been dislocated. Others developed a version of the myth of the Seven Ages of Man, each of which lasted seven thousand years and was ruled by one of the seven ‘lower’ sefiroth. The First Age had been governed by Rekhamim/ Tifereth (Grace and Compassion). All creatures had lived together in harmony and their Torah never spoke of the serpent, the Tree of Knowledge or death because these realities did not exist. But we were living in the Second Age of Din, the Stern Judgement that reflects the darker side of God, so our Torah spoke of constant conflict between good and evil, was full of laws, judgements and prohibitions, and its stories were often violent and cruel. But in the Third Cycle, under Hesed (Mercy), the Torah would be good and holy once more.

Kabbalah began as a tiny, esoteric movement, but it would become a mass movement in Judaism and its mythology would influence even those who had no mystical talent. As their history became more tragic, Jews found the dynamic God of the mystics more sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers, and felt increasingly that the plain sense of scripture was unsatisfactory and could shed no light without the interpretation of an inherited tradition (kaballah).

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.