From the Narrow Desert: Daniel

Showing posts with label Daniel. Show all posts

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Concerning shoon

The Man in the Moon

Wears silver shoon,

But gold costs twice

As much. That price

Is far too high,

And that is why

The Girl in the Sun

Wears only one.

On Venus, copper

Shoon they wore,

But copper’s dearer

Than before.

Until they’ve saved

Enough, that price

Means penny-loafers

Must suffice.

But iron’s cheap.

The shoon on Mars

Cost less than those

On other stars.

The Man that’s there

Is shod, of course,

With shoon to spare

To shoe his horse.

And what of Earth?

Men there, they say,

Make do with shoon

Of miry clay

Until, the Ancient’s

Reign restored,

They may go barefoot

Like their Lord.

Sons of Michael,

He approaches.

Rise! The Ancient

Father greet.

Bow, ye thousands,

Low before him.

Minister

Before his feet.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" -- the prototype for William Wright style "words"?

I've been reading the Book of Daniel, and the story in Chapter 5, where Daniel interprets the writing on the wall, reminded me of William Wright's "words" and the methods he uses for interpreting them, as well as my own recent stab at such an interpretation in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose." Here is Daniel's analysis (vv. 25-28):

And this is the writing that was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing:

Mene: God hath numbered [menah] thy kingdom, and finished it.

Tekel: Thou art weighed [tekiletah] in the balances, and art found wanting.

Peres: Thy kingdom is divided [perisath], and given to the Medes and Persians [upharas].

My understanding is that the writing on the wall, unlike William Wright's multilingual hodgepodges, consists entirely of normal Aramaic words, which can be translated literally as "mina, mina, shekel, and half-pieces." A mina is either 50 or 60 shekels, and commentators are divided on whether the "half-pieces" are half-minas or half-shekels, but basically these are all units of weight which, like our English pound, were also used as units of currency. Note that pharsin is the plural of peres, and that u- is a prefix meaning "and."

It doesn't make any sense literally, though. The first three words might mean two minas and a shekel (i.e., either 101 or 121 shekels), but the final word is perplexing. "A shekel and a half" makes sense, but "a shekel and halves"? I don't know anything about Aramaic, but I would be willing to bet that the word upharsin -- "and halves" -- is attested nowhere but in this story. "One and a half" is an understandable quantity; "one and halves" is not.

Daniel therefore turned, as William so often does, to etymology. Mene, tekel, and peres derive from verbs meaning respectively "to count," "to weigh," and "to divide," and it is on these underlying roots that he bases his interpretation. He also uses a non-etymological association -- something like a pun -- to give the final word a double meaning. In addition to its etymological meaning of "to divide," upharsin -- specifically that form of the word, the one with the bizarre meaning "and halves" -- happens to sound an awful lot like "and Persians." These two unrelated readings of upharas are synthesized to produce the final meaning: that the kingdom will be divided between the Medes and Persians.

Isn't that rather similar to the sorts of analyses to which William subjects his "words"? The only thing Daniel failed to do was to try reading the inscription as Elvish rather than Aramaic. Well, better late than never.

The closest Elvish word to mene is menel, "the heavens." Tekel suggests the root tek-, "to write," and tecil, "pen." U- is a prefix in Elvish as well as in Aramaic, and u-par-sin can be read as "bad/difficult to learn in this way." Doesn't that read pretty well as meta-commentary on the whole writing-on-the-wall incident? Daniel specifically said that the hand that wrote the words had been "sent from" the "Lord of heaven" (vv. 23-24). So our Elvish reading goes like this: When God sends a hand from heaven to write your doom on your palace wall, that's learning things the hard way!

As for peres, the other word that appears in Daniel's analysis, it's an Elvish root meaning "affect, trouble, disturb" -- a pretty apt description or Belshazzar's reaction when he saw the hand:

Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another (v. 6).

Friday, March 8, 2024

You must remember, or I'll have you executed

Yesterday, William Wright posted "Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit: What did the Dormouse say?" and quoted the following exchange from Alice in Wonderland:

"Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said --" the Hatter went on, looking anxiously round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being fast asleep.
"After that," continued the Hatter, "I cut some more bread-and-butter --"
"But what did the Dormouse say?" one of the jury asked.
"That I can't remember," said the Hatter.
"You must remember," remarked the King, "or I'll have you executed."

The word dormouse does not actually derive from mouse but from the French dormeuse, "sleeper," a reference to the fact that it hibernates, which is presumably why the Dormouse in Alice is forever falling asleep. The King is demanding that the Hatter remember what the Sleeper said or face execution.

Yesterday I finished reading the Book of Ezekiel, and today I read the first four chapters of the next book, that of Daniel. In Chapter 2, King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, forgets it, and then demands that his magicians both remember the dream for him and interpret it:

Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king.

And the king said unto them, "I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled to know the dream."

Then spake the Chaldeans to the king in Syriack, "O king, live for ever: tell thy servants the dream, and we will shew the interpretation."

The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, "The thing is gone from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill."

The dream, like whatever the Dormouse said, was produced by a Sleeper and has been forgotten. The King demands that someone produce this forgotten content or be executed.

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Mr. Owl ate my metal worm

Some months before all this owl business started, one of my students noticed that racecar spelled in reverse is racecar. I told her that this was called a palindrome and gave another example: the sentence "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."

This morning, while I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, that palindrome came back into my mind, and it occurred to me to wonder if it might mean anything.

For starters, what's a "metal worm"? Well, worm can mean "dragon." In D&D, "chromatic" dragons (black, blue, green, red, etc.) are evil, and "metallic" dragons (gold, silver, bronze, etc.) are good. The king of the metallic dragons -- the Metal Worm par excellence -- is the Wyrmking Bahamut. The name Bahamut is taken from Arabic mythology and is cognate to the Hebrew Behemoth. In the Arabic version, though, Bahamut is a giant fish, and Kuyutha (generally assumed to be a corruption of Leviathan) is a giant bull, reversing the Hebrew identities.

So the Metal Worm corresponds to Behemoth, but Behemoth-as-Leviathan, Behemoth as a whale. The name Bahamut evokes both of these mythical monsters as one.

Regular readers will get where I'm going with this. In my April 1 post "Call me Ishmael," I discussed a D&D monster called a behemoth, described as "a killer whale with four stubby legs," and connected it to the then-ongoing sync-stream relating to the many-eyed whale of John Dee.

This little train of thought, taking me from "Mr. Owl" to a killer whale, had taken place while I was reading The Messengers. At this point I returned my attention to the book, turned the "page" (virtually; I was using the Kindle app), and saw that -- completely unexpectedly in a book about owls and UFOs -- the next section bore the heading "Orcas in Puget Sound." It related a story about how "approximately three dozen orcas surrounded a commuter ferry as it crossed Puget Sound . . . carrying sacred tribal artifacts" from a Seattle museum back to the homeland of the Suquamish tribe. What was this story even doing in this particular book? The owl connection was tenuous indeed:

The orcas, like the owls, are animals considered devoid of any higher consciousness by the watchdogs of our consensus reality. But nonetheless they are showing up as totems at an important moment, they are presenting themselves as a beautiful example of this attuned symbolic power. This wasn't a dream vision of orcas, they were physically there, playing the role of escort for something sacred on its journey home.

In other words, this story is inserted more or less randomly in a book about owls. Whales are never mentioned again, although their similarity to owls may be deeper than Clelland himself notes. The book is called Messengers because that is one of the traditional roles of the owl in mythology: The owl flies into the dark, representing the unseen realm, and returns with a message. Likewise, the whale dives deep into the sea and, unlike most marine animals, returns regularly to the surface. It, too, would make a good mythological "messenger."

If the Metal Worm is Bahamut, alias Leviathan, the statement that "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" takes on an added significance -- because one of the things the Bible says about the Leviathan is that God will give it to his people to eat. "Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness" (Ps. 74:14). "Rabbi Johanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed by He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan" (Bava Batra 75a).

Those who eat the Metal Worm are (a) the people inhabiting the wilderness and (b) the righteous in the Messianic Age. The owl is a proverbial creature of the wilderness in the Bible. The Psalmist laments, "I am like an owl of the desert" (Ps. 102:6). Jeremiah says, "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein" (Jer. 50:39). And who shall inherit the Messianic Age? According to Daniel, "they that be wise" (Dan. 12:3).

Sunday, August 15, 2021

One beast becomes four, and four become one

In Ezekiel 1, the prophet sees strange hybrid "living creatures" that are part man, part lion, part ox, and part eagle.

And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot . . . And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; . . . As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle (Ezek. 1:5-10).

John of Patmos separates these chimaeras into four separate creatures.

And round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle (Rev. 4:6-7).

In Daniel 7, the prophet has a dream of four separate beasts.

I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.

The first was like a lion . . . . And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear . . . . After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which . . . had also four heads . . . . After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; . . . and it had ten horns (Dan 7:2-7).

Daniel's four beasts have among them a total of seven heads and ten horns. John of Patmos combines them into one.

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion (Rev. 13:1-2).

In the Old Testament, the cherubim are monstrous hybrids, while the pagan kingdoms are individual creatures, "diverse one from another." In the Apocalypse, this is reversed: Each cherub has its own distinct character, while the pagan kingdoms have been amalgamated into a single grotesque Beast.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

The Messiah and Son of Man in Daniel

The vision of Daniel 7,
from Beatus of Santo Domingo de Silos

Daniel is the only book of the Old Testament to use "Messiah" as a personal name, without the definite article (much as we use "Christ" today), and is thus the only place where the word "Messiah" occurs in most English translations of the Old Testament. (Elsewhere, the word is rendered "anointed," which is what it means, and does not always refer to the prophesied figure who would later come to be known as the Messiah.)

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Daniel 9:24-27

If Daniel is unusually clear in calling the Messiah the Messiah, that is unfortunately just about the only thing that is clear about his Messianic prophecy (which he presents as something that Gabriel told him). Here it is.

[24] Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. [25] Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

[26] And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. [27] And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

Prophecies such as these are a happy hunting ground for chronology cranks, the most illustrious of whom was Sir Isaac Newton. By Newton's reckoning, it was in 458 BC that Artaxerxes I gave the decree to rebuild Jerusalem, and it was exactly 70 "weeks of years" (i.e., 490 years) later, in AD 33, that Jesus was crucified and resurrected. (Of course Daniel also says the Messiah shall be "cut off" in what would in Newton's system be 24 BC, before Jesus was born.) The Internet is full of would-be Newtons with their own refinements of or alternatives to his chronology, but I shall resist the temptation to wade into that fray myself. I simply don't believe that precisely dated prophecies of the distant future are possible, and at any rate chronology is secondary. The questions at hand are: (1) what did Daniel say the Messiah would do? and (2) did Jesus do that?

At first glance, "to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness" sounds like an acceptable description of Jesus' mission -- but Daniel (or Gabriel) actually presents this as a list of things that the people of Israel must do, and the last item on the list is "to anoint the most Holy" -- that is, to acknowledge and "crown" the Messiah, anointing being the cultural equivalent of coronation. These are not things the Messiah is going to do, but things the people must do in order to be worthy of the Messiah. Except for this passage, the rest of the prophecy deals with the destruction of Jerusalem and desecration of the temple (presumably with allusion to the outrages of Antiochus Epiphanes) and the subsequent restoration and rebuilding. Some may see in "he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease" a reference to how Jesus' final sacrifice would put an end to the cult of animal sacrifice, but in context the cessation of sacrifice is temporary, and is a result of "the overspreading of abominations."

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Daniel 7

While Daniel 7 is not an explicitly Messianic prophecy per se, it is relevant because it provides the prophetic context in which Jesus' contemporaries would have understood his references to himself as the "son of man."

[2] Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, . . . [3] And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. [4] The first was like a lion, . . . [5] . . . a second, like to a bear, . . . [6] . . . another, like a leopard, . . . [7] . . . and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: . . .

[9] I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. [10] A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened. [11] . . . I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. [12] As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time.

[13] I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. [14] And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

Rashi's interpretation of this is that the four beasts are respectively Babylon, the Medes and Persians, Alexander's Hellenistic empire, and Rome -- four subsequent conquerors of the Jews -- that the Ancient of Days is God, and that the Son of Man is Messiah. Most Christians read it the same way, understanding the Messiah to be Jesus at his Second Coming. (Mormons differ slightly from others in understanding the Ancient of Days to be Adam rather than God.)

(Incidentally, the great beast of Revelation, with its seven heads and ten horns, is an amalgamation of Daniel's four beasts, which have among them a total of seven heads and ten horns.)

"Son of man" simply means "man" -- cf. the plural "children of men," or the way "son of Adam" is used in the Narnia stories. In contrast to the four great beasts that have preceded it, this latest apparition is of a human being. Elsewhere in the Bible, particularly in the Book of Ezekiel, "son of man" is used in the sense of "mortal man," as contrasted with God. Jesus' use of the title "son of man" would have been understood as alluding to Daniel (Mark and Matthew even have him refer to the son of man coming "with the clouds of heaven," making the allusion unmistakable) while at the same time maintaining plausible deniability; no one could accuse him of blasphemy for calling himself a son of Adam, a mere mortal.

What did Daniel himself understand his vision to mean? Well, it so happens that he asked for, and received, an interpretation from "one of them that stood by" (presumably an angel).

[15] I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me. [16] I came near unto one of them that stood by, and asked him the truth of all this. So he told me, and made me know the interpretation of the things.

[17] These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth. [18] But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever. . . .

[21] I beheld, and [one of the horns of the fourth beast] made war with the saints, and prevailed against them; [22] Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom. . . . [27] And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

This certainly sounds as if the Son of Man represents "the saints of the Most High" collectively, rather than a single individual, the Messiah. After the successive dominance of the four heathen kingdoms represented by the beasts, God will intervene and give dominion over the world to Israel, a holy and therefore fully human kingdom. This kingdom will presumably have a king, who is the Messiah, but that is not emphasized in this prophecy.