The Second Coming of Saturn: The Great Conjunction, America’s Temple, and the Return of the Watchers by Derek P. Gilbert

Author:Derek P. Gilbert [Gilbert, Derek P.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There are several important points to note in this passage. First, the word rendered “inquire” (Hebrew dirshu) is translated “seek” or “search” about twice as often as “inquire.” Compare Isaiah’s words to the question asked by the angels of the women who’d come to prepare the body of Jesus after dawn of the third day: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”[332] In other words, Isaiah condemned the people of Judah for seeking the dead among the living, where the true “signs and portents” from God were to be found.

The prophet described those who looked to the spirit realm for oracles as people who were already dead: They live in darkness, and they’re “greatly distressed and hungry,” like the pagan dead of Mesopotamia who are not properly cared for by their descendants. In verse 21, Isaiah makes the connection to the dead explicit, writing that these unhappy souls will “pass through” the land. The Hebrew verb ‘ābar is based on the same root, ʿbr, from which we get ʿōberim—“Travelers,” as in the spirits of the dead who “travel” or “cross over” from the land of the dead to the world of the living; it’s the same word used by the pagan Canaanites to describe the Rephaim summoned from the underworld through rituals to the threshing-floor of El on Mount Hermon.

What Isaiah described is the punishment for those who defied God by using ritual pits to summon the spirits of the dead—they become like the unhappy dead themselves. When they realize their fate, “they will be enraged.” But in the context of the passage, with an understanding of the cult of the dead and the role of the “king” god in it, a better translation of the following sentence is this: “And they shall curse by Molek and by their ghosts.”[333] (Elohim, the word translated “ghosts,” isn’t always a reference to God. The basic meaning is “one who lives in the spirit realm.” Context is king, and here “ghosts” or “spirits” is a more accurate reading than “God.”)

It’s difficult for us in the twenty-first century to understand how an underworld god whose cult involved necromancy and child sacrifice survived in Israel and Judah for eight hundred years, but it did. The Israelites fell into the worship of Baal-Peor, another title or identity worn by this god, in the time of Moses and Joshua in the late fifteenth century BC, and it continued at least until the reforms of Josiah in the late seventh century BC.

But perhaps the most audacious example of this god’s hubris is found on top of a hill just outside the walls of Jerusalem. And it was put there by the son of Israel’s best and most beloved king.

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