From the Narrow Desert: Nebuchadnezzar

Showing posts with label Nebuchadnezzar. Show all posts

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.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Sixes

This morning, despite my general aversion to talking video, I somehow found myself watching Jonathan Pageau expound on the meaning of 666.

Instead of the usual gematria/isopsephy approach of finding words and names that add up to 666, Pageau (following the lead of St. Irenaeus and others) focuses on the meaning of 6 itself and other occurrences of it in the Bible. He mentions the six days of creation, the supposed 6,000-year history of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar's golden image that was 60 cubits high and six cubits wide, and the fact that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood occurred.

Pageau doesn't use the term "triangular number," but he does mention that 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, and that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 6² is 666. I would add that 6 is the most triangular number there is: 6 is triangular, 6² is triangular, 66 is triangular, and 666 is triangular.

(Pageau also discusses how and why 666 symbolizes the all-encompassing System from which no one is allowed to opt out, and is well worth watching for those insights, but they are not directly relevant to the synchronicities noted in this post.)

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Just after watching that, I checked some blogs and read a recent post by Vox Day saying that "Thomas Wictor is a goofball" for accepting the official belief that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Vox writes:

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

A commenter asks:

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

Another commenter suggests:

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

Looking this up, I find that there are really only 304,805 letters in the Torah, but that there are assumed to be additional "invisible letters" which bring the total up to the requisite 600,000. The article also says:

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

So obviously, the significance of 6 (times various powers of 10) comes first, and actual figures -- like the numbers of Jewish souls, Torah letters, and Holocaust victims -- are arbitrarily enlarged or reduced to fit that Procrustean bed.

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After writing most of the above, but before publishing it, I met with one of my students, a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for student of English which has articles on a variety of subjects, with accompanying notes on potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar. We went through two of the articles he had read recently -- one about stop-motion animation and one about Oedipus -- so I could explain anything he still didn't understand.

For each article, a handful of vocabulary words are chosen for emphasis, and at the end of the article these are listed, each with a definition and an example sentence.

At the end of the first article, this sentence was used to exemplify the use of the word represent:

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Recall that Pageau had discussed the measurements of the golden statue made by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3:1): six cubits wide and 60 cubits high. The sentence in the magazine didn't use the number six, but the strange focus on the height of the statue still seemed a significant synchronicity. I mean, if you were asked to use the word represent in a sentence, would you naturally come up with a sentence about how tall a specific statue is?

The second article mentioned how the Sphinx drowned herself after her riddle had been solved, so at the end there was an example sentence for drown.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

Now that's a more impressive sync! Six is given as the "official" number of people who died, as in the Holocaust. And they died in "the flood"; recall that Pageau had mentioned that the Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old.

Monday, June 15, 2020

Living in the reign of Zedekiah

I've been thinking lately about the opening of the Book of Mormon.

"For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, . . . there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed" (1 Nephi 1:4). Nephi's father, Lehi, became one of these prophets, and he, too, began proclaiming that Jerusalem would be destroyed for its iniquities. "And it came to pass that the Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them" (1 Nephi 1:19). "Neither did they believe that Jerusalem, that great city, could be destroyed according to the words of the prophets" (1 Nephi 2:13).

I always used to wonder why, in the reign of Zedekiah, people would find it hard to believe that Jerusalem could be destroyed. Here, according to 2 Kings 24 (and backed up by the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle), are the circumstances under which that reign began:

[10] At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged.

[11] And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city, and his servants did besiege it.

[12] And Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers: and the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign.

[13] And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the Lord, as the Lord had said.

[14] And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.

[15] And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, and the king's mother, and the king's wives, and his officers, and the mighty of the land, those carried he into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon.

[16] And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.

[17] And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah his [Jehoiachin's] father's brother king in his stead, and changed his name to Zedekiah.

In other words, in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, Jerusalem has already been conquered. The royal palace and the Temple of Solomon had been pillaged; the entire population of Jerusalem, excepting only "the poorest sort," had been deported; and Zedekiah himself was a mere puppet, chosen and quite literally named by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. When, after all that, prophets began prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, it is only to be expected that they would be ridiculed -- not for their far-fetched claims, but rather for the absurd pretension of prophetically "predicting" what was already virtually a fait accompli.

Nevertheless, at least as the Book of Mormon tells it, the people still thought of Jerusalem as "that great city" and believed it to be invincible!

How could they have been so clueless? How could they not have noticed that -- even though, at the superficial level, the Temple and the city walls were still standing, and a scion of David on the throne -- "that great city" was already kaput?

Or perhaps it was because Jerusalem was already subject to Nebuchadnezzar that the people thought they were safe. Surely there could be no reason for the king of Babylon to destroy one of his own possessions. Surely, rather than coming back to stomp on its corpse, he would want to develop the city -- to make Jerusalem great again -- if only to ensure that the tributes kept coming in. And perhaps that was Nebuchadnezzar's original plan. However, the people had overlooked the fact that he fundamentally did not care about Jerusalem, and at the first sign of trouble (Zedekiah had sought an alliance with Egypt), he did not hesitate to come back and squash the city like a bug.

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The reader will have guessed why this story has been on my mind. Remember when there was a worldwide totalitarian coup, and no one noticed? And even those few who did notice were generally taken by surprise when control gave way to destruction, and the nascent birdemic police state suddenly morphed into an Eff-tha-Police state. The reign of Zedekiah isn't really a precedent for this extraordinary state of affairs -- there are no precedents -- but it does provide some food for thought.