This is Jonathan Peshel. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everyone,
we are back with another episode of Universal History. Today we are going to
talk about the Tower Babbel, something that I find very interesting that I've been
thinking about for years. I can't wait to get Richard's take on it.
But before we start, I want to make a big announcement, which is
that, as you know, Symbolic World Press has had some problems in the
past month or so and myself, just for the couple, just myself discovering
that things were not what they seemed in the way was represented to me,
and that things were a lot worse than what we thought. And I went
to Dallas and Richard saved my life, like literally, but he helped me.
He was We drove around town for days trying to figure things out,
connect with lawyers and accountants and you know, get stock. His house was
full of books first for weeks, you know, trying to get organized so
that we could send your books to you. But it's weird in that moment,
and even a little bit before that, I discovered I had an insight
which I can't believe I had had before, with just how close Richard and
I thinking is in terms of storytelling, in terms of the way we see
universal history and the way we see the cosmos. But also Richard has a
lot of skills that I do not have. He is a he know,
he has a computers thinking like, he's a he's a manager. He's able
to deliver projects. And so we've decided to partner up in the Symbolical Press,
and so we will be working together very closely in the next few months.
So so Richard, welcome to Symbolic World. Thank you. It's you
know, I when we were talking about all of this, I said,
you know, it feels like everything that I'd done in my life up till
this point was was maybe for this, like you know, the weird mixture
of I'm into all these ancient stories but also like project software, project management,
and you know, I don't know anyway, it's it's it's been a
whirlwind so far, though, Jonathan, I have to say, like,
you know, it's already been, you know, one of the more interesting
things that I've under ever undertaken. It's only been you know, basically a
month. But yeah, there was so much crazy stuff that happened, and
it all happened right on Candle Miss, you know, and we spent all
of Candle Miss, like you know, driving around in the pouring rain trying
to you know. Yeah, it was just I don't know, it was
just it was a whirlwind time. And I said this on on Derek's channel
recently. But like I remember, we were having this this conversation, you
and I we were talking about some various things, and you were like,
yeah, mystical things don't really happen to me. I mean, I believe
that they happen and whatnot. And then like there's just all of these insane
things happening the entire week that you're down here, and I was like,
oh, yeah, mystical things don't happen, sure, uh huh, yeah,
but no, it was. It's it's been a crazy time. My
house has essentially been a warehouse for the last two weeks now, and so
I know a lot of people have been posting on Twitter saying they're getting their
snow white stuff. I know that a lot other a lot of other people
still haven't gotten it. But we're on it now. We're on the case,
so we're gonna we're gonna make sure it gets done. So I've I
think I've only got like six big boxes left in my office here and then
uh and you know, then the rest will be coming out from the warehouse
relatively soon. But yeah, so I'm excited about this. I'm excited about
the potential of getting to tell some stories that have been living rent free in
my head for a long time and and now maybe we'll get to share them
with the world. So yeah, and so, and also before we start,
don't forget next week, I mean, Rich and I are going to
be together in Florida, Tarpin Springs the Symbolic World Summit. Jordan Peterson's gonna
be there, Father Stephen de Young, Neil de grad If, Deacon Nicholas
Vesper Stamper, and a bunch of people that are not on the roster like
Andrew Gold going to be there, Father Siloe and Justiniano. Just it's going
to be absolutely crazy. Jordan Hall is coming. I don't even remember all
the people that are going to come. And so there are still a few
tickets left for the actual event, so you can get those on the Symbolic
World But if you cannot come, which I understand, then we've decided to
offer virtual tickets that are deeply discounted until the very day of the conference,
because we're going to release the videos during the days that the conference is on,
and so go to the Symbolic world dot com. And because this might
be a once in a lifetime opportunity to be honest, because it's crazy.
But I'm not sure. I'm not sure we're ever going to do this again,
all right, And so Richard, take us, take us, Take
us to the Tower Babbel. Okay, So I thought that it would be
fun. We were talking about what video we should do for Universal History this
month. Obviously, the Dragons one came out. What people don't know is
that we recorded that back in like November or something. And because life has
been crazy, we haven't recorded one of these in a little while, and
I thought it would be fun to do something. It would kind of tease
the stuff I'm going to be talking about at the conference. So the title
of my talk is, or one of the talks I'm giving is called the
Shadow of that Hideous Strength, which sounds like it's a C. S.
Lewis reference, But the title of the C. S. Lewis book,
which is one of my favorite books, is actually a reference to the Tower
of Babel, and so we're going to talk about the Tower of Babel today.
I'll talk a little more about the connection to that hideous Strength and the
poem and that that's a reference to and all this stuf. I'm going to
talk about that at the conference. It's not going to talk about that today.
But basically what I'm going to do at the conference is really focus on
Genesis and really focus on all of the things about Genesis which in the ancient
world and in the Middle Ages, people took for granted when they were reading
Genesis. And it's not to say that some of these things are completely universal,
but there's definitely, like you could say, a constellation of ways to
read and ways to understand Genesis. What pretty much everybody in the ancient world
agreed on is that Genesis is the most important book of the Old Testament when
it comes to just understanding why everything is the way that it is. And
this is one of the beautiful insights that your brother Matthew brings out in his
book. And this is one of the actually, to me, one of
the really cool things about God's Dog. That God's Dog, too, by
the way, is on Kickstarter. Now I know we have a lot of
things going on, people, But there's going to be I've already gotten to
see some of the stuff from God's Dog too. It's going to be actually
some of the stuff we're talking about today and which I'm not going to like,
and then other things which you might here explained if you come to the
conference. So anyway, but there used to be this way of reading Genesis,
and that way of reading Genesis was lost, particularly in the West,
because a lot of the books which contained it were rejected ultimately rejected as apocryphal,
and at some point in the West. We don't need to go into
why right now, but the idea apocrypha became associated with this is bad and
evil and wrong and potentially dangerous to read, right, And this is not
the That's not what that word actually means in the church, right historically,
that's not always how we've used it. So these ways of reading Genesis got
lost. And then the twentieth century comes along, especially to say the last
twenty thirty years that the twentieth century comes along, and with the emergence of
you have an emergence of maials materialist readings of Genesis. In response to let's
say you know, atheists basically trying pick it apart, right, and so
then Christians come back, but they come back on the same terms the atheists
are using and try to defend Genesis in a materialist way. And so one
of the things that ends up happening is when somebody like you or your brother
tries to talk about Genesis in a let's say, like a more of a
mythical register, people are like, are you saying you don't believe God created
the world in six days? Or something like this? So what I want
to kind of do. What I want to do is to kind of introduce
people to a selection of these readings and or these traditions is really the right
the correct word about Genesis and explain how this actually still affects the way that
you live today. For instance, if you're an Orthodox Christian, there's certain
things that you believe, for instance, about the liturgy. I'm not going
to explain this today, you have to come the conference, but there are
certain things that you believe about the liturgy and about the feasts of the Church
that are true because of the way that we've inherited, because of this tradition
about Genesis that we've inherited. So if you find yourself in the Orthodox Church
or in a more traditional branch of Christianity, there's a lot of the stuff
that you'll still assume to be true. Actually, even if you don't,
there's still a lot of the stuff that you assume to be true. Most
evangelicals, for instance, take it as more or less fact that evil spirits
are fallen angels. There's actually nothing in the Bible to say that directly.
There are things that you can infer, but you only infer them kind of
in the light of these older traditions about how to read those scriptural passages.
So that's kind of one example. But so today I thought we had talked
about the Tower of Babel. Obviously, this is one that's very interesting to
me as a linguist, and it is to me, like most of the
stories in Genesis, it is one that is impossible to say everything about,
like it's impossible to exhaust. So we're going to say some things about the
Tower of Babbel today. But if you're out there watching and you're one of
the people who knows all these traditions, I didn't mention XYZ, You're right,
I did not, But maybe we will on a future video. Maybe
there's actually more stuff about the Tower of Bubble I'm going to talk about at
the conference, so come to that. But so I thought we would talk
about, first of all, just what a tower is. Uh, if
you look at traditional images of the Tower of Babble, the one that's most
well known is one it was I think it's like a sixteenth century image.
Yeah, that's right, it's from the it's from the Renaissance, and it
basically shows kind of a spiraling tower going upwards. And that's essentially correct.
Now you can say, you know, it is a zig rot, which
is kind of like a stepped pyramid or something. It's the same thing,
though, like it's the it's the same thing. It's doing the same kind
of the same kind of thing. So a tower is, I mean,
and you can probably explain this better, but a tower is you could say,
it's a fixed point in space, right, and and it's a way
of literally nailing something down right, whereas the spiral is. And I love
that you just did that video on the Leviathan and the Ouroboros and all that
stuff, because it's because that idea of the spiral as kind of like time
and change, right, and then but then also kind of this cyclical or
say like undulation in time. So when you have the combination of those two
things, and there's this wonderful the opening sequence of the first volume of God's
Dog. Maybe we can put that up here for people to see. But
the opening sequence of God's Dog is actually the Tower of Babel, but in
a in a good context. Yeah, right, And this is the thing
to say about symbolism, And you mentioned this in your Leviathan video that just
dropped that symbolism is uh, it's I don't want to say neutral, but
it's not like it can be positive or negative, right, It can have
positive or negative aspects depending on the consequence, depending on the context. Right,
Yeah, And so there's this moment in those I was trying to find
my copy of God's Dog, so I could just show it here to the
screen, but we will put it up where you see the overlap of that
image of the tower with the spiral going up, which is like the stylight's
pillar. And then oh, you got it right there. Yeah, I
always have a copy of God Doug's Yeah you're by so yeah right here,
Yes, it's right. Yeah, So there's the there's the tower with the
spiral going up and then the stylight's pillar at the top. But then if
you flip a couple more pages, you see the overlap of that with the
candle, right, and it's it's funny because one of the the yep,
there it is right there. Yeah, yeah, So it's funny because one
of the questions that I get asked the most often in my capacity as a
catechist is why do you light a candle when you pray? What's going on
there? And that is the easiest thing to into it and the hardest question
to answer, Like, there is something that's just very intuitively right about Obviously
you would light a candle when you prayed, but it's really hard to explain
to somebody why right. But it's actually connected with the symbolism of the tower,
including the Tower of Babel. So the idea of the ziggurat or the
tower is that it's a It's an artificial mountain, right, is another way
to think about it. It's an artificial mountain, and you know there's there's
overlap between like a mountain and a pillar. So it's an artificial mountain because
God lives at the top of a mountain is everybody in the ancient world knows
it's a hierarchy. I mean people because people take a wise appillar like a
mountain. It's a it's a connection between heaven and Earth. It's what's right
the vertical. It's a hierarchy, and you could see it like a right,
you can see it this way as Earth coming closer to Heaven. But
you can also have it added a ladder, as a pillar, as a
rod yet, etcetera, etcetera. It's something that you can ascend and it's
got its base on the earth, but its top in the heavens, right,
yeah, and there's this uh and then at the very top there is
an altar or a flame. Right. And one of the things we were
talking about for video started the Latin word focus. Right, when we say
the focus of something means like a hearth or an altar. Now, you
can commit the etymological fallacy and say every time that the word focus is ever
used, then it actually means this other thing. But also that's not an
arbitrary connection between those two things. Like if you can think about I mean,
especially if you've worshiped in any kind of a traditional space where the focus
is the altar, right, and those two things become the same thing.
And it's why even in like a like an Orthodox home, you have a
hearth or you know, and you usually people put their icons over the top
of a hearth, right, It's just it's a natural thing to do because
the layout of the house is centered around the fireplace. Actually, the layout
of modern houses is now centered around where the TV is supposed to go.
Right. This is why I tell whenever catechumens ask you know, where should
I put my icons? Do they have to go on in east wall or
anything like that? What I usually tell people is figure out where in your
house the TV was intended to go, and then I put your icons there
and put the TV somewhere else, like if you like, I'm serious,
it'll change the way that you pray and like the way that you live your
family life. So anyway, so, the the altar is a point of
focus, it's a point of intention. It is a place where you could
say the meaning of time and space is brought together. Right. So if
you've got space is this fixed point uniting Earth and heaven, and then time
is this movement and change. The alter is the is the is the focal
point that brings those two things together and kind of reconciles the meaning. And
again you can we could talk about how the liturgy does this. The way
that liturgy transforms you know, chronos into cairos, and the way that it
transforms space into place and all those different things. Those things actually happen in
the liturgy. And even in the like the Eastern Liturgy, there's even the
circular or movement that's constantly happening. We go around the altar in a process
of ascent as we move upwards towards the kind of the culmination of the sacrifice
that's on the altar. So anyway, all of this to say, this
is what the Tower of Babel is. I mean, if you want to
get some more on the religious connotations of what the Tower of Babel is,
you can go and listen to the episode The Lord of Speirs Guys did on
it, which is really great. What I want to kind of point out
is before we talk about why the Tower of Babel was wrong, you need
to understand that the essential idea, the essential shape of it, is not
wrong. That's just an unavoidable shape. This is what essentially what worship,
what meaning looks like if you want to have meaning, if you want to
not be scattered, yeah, then this is what you have to do.
And it's important to know that because what happens is people have readings in scripture
and they'll see, for example, God's telling the Israelites to take down the
high places, to remove the sacred poles and like. So there's this language
that's really there in scripture. But then they take it as a general rule
that high places are wrong in themselves and that you know, these these pillars
are wrong in themselves. And then you have the cross, and then you
realize that the temple itself is actually on a mountain, and that you know
it's like and then Moses goes up the mountain, and so you you have
to be able to understand the fullness of the symbolism to see when it's when
it's off, and when it's wrong, that's right, that's right. So
I want to so with that kind of said, and with kind of putting
in people's mind the polyvalance between the Tower of Babbel and the idea of like
a mountain, the mountain of God, the ziggurat, the stylight's pillar,
the candle offered in prayer. These are all kind of overlapping images. We
can talk about the Tower of Babel in specific and I've got here uh the
uh a copy This is from Charles Worth's oldestimates to do Pigrifa, a copy
of the Book of Jubilees. And the traditions that i want to talk about
today in reference to the Taro Babbel specifically come from the Book of Jubilee.
So Jubilees is a text which is not in your Bible unless you're Ethiopian,
and then it is. But this is not lucky Ethiopians. They get all
the good stuff. But but I mean, this is not a problem for
us because of course, and actually Father Stephen Young has a book called Apocrypha,
which you can just go and read if you want to know about the
reception of Jubilees in the Eastern Church. So go and read that. I'm
not going to repeat all the things that he says there. But but the
thing to note is that it is quoted in the New Testament multiple times.
There's one really cool example which I'm going to save for the conference. People
have to come because it's really awesome. But but for instance, Jesus you
know, famously, Jesus quotes himself in Jubileese. Right, So in Jubilees,
the Angel of the Lord what he's given the law to Moses, but
Jesus quotes that and says basically that was me right, And so yeah,
so Jesus quotes himself in Jubileese. Saint Peter quotes Jubilees. H Saint Stephen
when he is giving his kind of summary of the Old Testament in his sermon
before he's stone to death, he refers to traditions that are if they didn't
come from Jubilees, they came from the same place that the guy who wrote
Jubilees got them. So anyway, all that to say, all that to
say it is it is, it does have a place in our tradition and
the account that's given in Jubilees of the building of the tower Babbel. I'm
not going to read the whole thing here, but I'll just kind of summarize
it. So first of all, we get we get the clarification. And
that's how to think about Jubilees is it's a sort of it has a frame
narrative, but it's it's almost like a commentary on Genesis, or it expands
the parts of Genesis that you might like have wondered about, like okay,
Moses, you did not give me enough, and from here, what's going
So one of my favorite examples of this is like Juda's repentance after the Judah
and Tamar incident, which is like this crazy thing that happens in Genesis and
then you're like, so, how were family dynamics? What was that like?
After this? You know exactly awkward, awkward, grow awkward Christmases and
stuff together. So so but if you know, so there's some details like
that, and some more details about how did Joseph resist temptation in Potiphar's house
and so on and so forth. So that's kind of what Jubileese is doing.
And so we get an expansion here or just like kind of an explanation
of what's going on with the Tower of Babel, which is that it's not
just a tower. It's a city surrounding a tower. Right, So it's
a tower in the center and there's a city around it, and then there's
a wall around the city. And this is something that you have to think
about when you start to think about the descent of the city in the apocalypse
right in the Book of Revelation. Right that that and I know that this
is one of the key ideas that you've talked about in your videos over the
years, and probably worth revisiting because it might have been a while since people
have really heard it or thought about it. But the idea of the city,
right, and all these people in Genesis who go and build cities and
what's going on there. But they take they build it with the the the
bitumen, right, the mortar that they use, they take it from the
nearby sea. So this is another kind of important, uh element of the
symbolism here because it's really the rising up of the dry land out of the
sea, right, And so in that way it is it's an attempt to
recreate the world. And of course this is in the context of it's just
after the flood. Humanity has been scattered. They don't want to be scattered
again if the flood waters come. They need a you know, like a
safe place to go. And so they build the city. And you know,
we get the dimensions of the Tower of Babbel here are given in ju
Belieze. The numbers are in interesting I don't know if they're significant. I've
never I've never been able to. What I really want to find is a
really old tradition that like attributes significance to the numbers, like so many cubits
in so many stadia and so on and so forth. But I've never found
it, so we'll pass over that for now. But it's surrounded by this
wall. So a city with a tower in the center, or like a
zigguratt in the center, surrounded by a wall. And in the account that's
given in Jubilees, right, Obviously, the way that it's translated in most
modern accounts of Genesis is weird, and it's because the Hebrew is super old
and very difficult, right, And so the way it's usually translated in English
is something like and now nothing will be impossible for them, right, And
so the story gets turned into this kind of like this retelling of a narrative
in which God is like trying to keep us from achieving our potential essentially,
right, he's threatened by us. Right. The way that it's framed in
Jubilee, I think is maybe a little more helpful, because what it says
is the Lord looks down on what mankind is doing actually looks on us as
we finish, like as as the tower is finished, and says, now
nothing will escape them, right. And I think that's probably a much more
helpful way of understanding what's going on with the Tower of Babbel, because it's
about this, this, uh, the creation of a totalizing system, right,
the creation of something. Again, you think about the idea of like
the pillar or the mountain fixing space in place, right, and this is
one that's so big it's going to dominate over any other system. Yeah,
And that's why the idea that they only have one language is part of the
question. Like it's it's a it is a it's a tyranny in the in
the way that we ultimately get, you know, the final image of the
totalizing system in Revelation, Right, it's like it tries to be one thing,
and that's what God told them not to do. Yes. So one
of the things that we then get in the account in Jubilee is that after
the confusion of the tongues and we'll come back to the confusion of the tongues
thing, because this relates in an important way to something that happens with Abraham
later on. In Jubilees, but after the confusion of the tongues, the
Lord sends a wind and the wind knocks over the tower and destroys it,
which is not something you'll find in the Genesis account, but is very very
important for understanding the story in the way that the apostles understood it, which
is the argument I'm going to make in a sense. Yeah, but it's
interesting because if you ask most people like if the Tower of Babbile fell,
they'll probably say yes, But it doesn't say that in scripture, right.
I think that I always say the way that I absorbed the story, and
people talking about the story growing up, I always sort of thought, well,
they were like halfway building it and then just abandoned and it fell apart,
right, But this is the tradition in Jubilees, is that the tower
is actually completed and then a wind comes and blows it over. I would
love some day just to talk about the symbolism of wind, because it's a
weird thing like wind is is. Obviously it's like related to the idea of
chaos, right and storms and all so on and so forth, but it's
it's unique because it comes from above and one of the interesting things about in
the Old Testament, especially when you're going through Leviticus and so on, and
you're getting like that, don't do this awful thing, don't do this awful
thing, all of these things which we're essentially doing now in our society.
And but but certain kinds of sins. It says, if you do this,
the land will spitch you out. And then other sins, importantly idolatry
says if you do this, then God will scatter you. H And so
it's like some sins are going to cause the potential that's beneath you to actually
reject you, right because it because that and there are always things that have
to do with let's say, like the fertility of the land, right like,
there are always sms that render what's below us infertile. And then there
are other sins that are let's say, like this is like a this is
this is something I was thinking about literally just last night, and I'm so
I haven't tried to express it before, but it's something like there are other
sins and again, in particular idolatry. That's that's about looking upwards and the
way that you should be, you know, the way your focus should be
right, that focus that alter that flame at the top of the structure.
When that's directed wrongly, then then you get the wind right. So there's
like the floodwaters or the land spitting you out or something like that, and
then there's the wind the scattering that comes from above. Yeah, so it's
it's really the same thing that you see in Genesis in the Fall, because
it's pride. Really, idolatry is a form of pride because it's it's trying
to capture everything in an object or an idea. It's like trying to capture
everything into one and not understanding that all things have to be transparent and have
to be vehicles for something that is higher. And so when human take the
fluid for themselves, they try they kind of they think about it like something
that tries to crystallize too much and it becomes it becomes brittle because it tries
to hold it all together, and so then you blow on it and it
shatters because it's too it's brittle. And so in the Book of Jubileese,
the Tower of Babble is specifically associated with idolatry. And this is really easy
to see. For instance, if you look at the passage immediately before it
and the passage immediately after it, which are both about idolatry and the evil
spirits, right, And so in Jubileese, I mean, Jubilees follows the
same tradition that Enoch does concerning the sons of God and the daughters of men
and so forth. So after the flood, you've got all these evil spirits
running around, and essentially they're tormenting Noah's children and grandchildren, and so no
praise to God, and God binds nine tenths of them and puts them in
Tartarus, and then he allows one tenth of the evil spirits to continue to
roam the world and basically test mankind, right, And so Mastma is the
you know, or sometimes also the word Satan is also used in Jubilees,
but is kind of like the leader of the evil spirits, and the writer
of Jubilees makes it very clear that he's the one that's kind of instigating all
of this with mankind. And so there's a lot of stuff in Jubilees in
the passage immediately following this about Abraham and about how Abraham is the first person
since the fall of the Tower of be able to really worship God. And
one of the great acts which he does is he goes and he destroys his
father's idols. And in a way that's kind of reminiscent of what Gideon does
in the Book of Judges. And this is a tradition that actually gets expanded
upon later in Judaism. But it's very clear for the writer of Jubilees idolatry
is at the heart. It's at the center of what's going on with the
Tower of Babel, and so that's why there's this wind that comes overthrows the
tower and scatters it. And essentially what happens in Jubilee is that after the
fall of the Tower of Babel, of course you get the confusion of the
tongues and the world descends into chaos and idolatry. And what it says is
everybody leaves and start building their own cities and towers. This is what Jubilee
says. So it's like with the collapse of the one sort of megastructure,
everybody goes and starts trying to build their own and then they go to war
with each other, right because it becomes this, it becomes everyone's trying to
do babbel again themselves. But now because there's no unity of tongues, because
there's no unity of like opinion or approach or whatever, that you get all
of these competing towers, all these competing attempts that idolatory and worship. And
one of the things that Jubilee says is that at this time people that the
building of these competing cities and towers are accompanied with the the increase of what
you could call like bespoke religions. Right, so everybody starts making their own
idol, they start making their own altar, they start making their own ziggurat,
they start making their own city. Like all that stuff goes together,
and that's basically you know that that causes the loss of the knowledge, the
true knowledge of God. And then also for the right of Jubilees, the
loss of the Hebrew language. Hmmm. And so the loss of the he
So the Hebrew language was the one language. This is, this is,
this is what Jubilees has. And it's a little tricky depending on how you
word bit or basically how you translate a couple of words, that either Hebrew
was lost immediately after Adam fell or it was lost after the Tower of Babel,
but I think it's the I think it's the latter. Basically, Sometimes
people will say there's a reference to the fall, and it says, nobody
has spoken Hebrew since the fall, right, and the question is the fall
of what? Right? Well, there's a modern approach that says that the
only basically Adamson is the only fall. Right, but that's not how people
saw things in the time of Jubilees. And I think that basically they're talking
about the tower falling, right, that the tower falling, but also that
the Tower Babeyl was seen as one of the falls of man, right,
and that and that it is the it is the specifically linguistic fall. And
there are a couple of other things in the text that I would argue,
really really argue for it's talking about Babel. And but this is a common
belief in the ancient world, though in obviously in Judaism and in Christianity.
Uh. This, this idea that that Hebrew is was sort of like the
Adamic tongue. Unless you ask Albanians, they'll say it's Albanian. But anyway,
actually this this was an argument that some Albanian philologists try to make in
the the nineteenth century. Really that Albanian, the Albanian is the original language,
and anyway, that's some old stuff. Well, if you know anything
about Albanian national pride, it's not even a little bit surprising. My joke
is that even the King James Bible was originally written in Albania anyway. Anyway,
No no hate by the way for any Albanians listening to this, I
love you guys, but anyway, it's just just a joke. But anyway,
actually, if there are Albanians watching this properly, like yeah, gosh,
darn it, it was originally written in anyway, So you have the
the loss of the true knowledge of God. And for the writer of Jubilee,
that's the same as the loss of the Hebrew language, right, so
he really equates those two things together. And one of the other things that
happens at this time is of course that Ham's son Canaan seizes the land that
was originally fell to the sons of shem by lots. So there's this earlier,
a little earlier on in the story, after the flood, there's this
this place where basically they're they're drawing lots for which son of Noah is where
right, and the land of basically the holy land of the Levant falls to
the descendants of Shem and then Canaan seizes it for himself. Yeah, and
he when he seizes it for himself. Uh. This this basically everybody says,
don't do that, You're gonna be punished by God. Right, And
so this is setting up like the conquest right in the Book of Joshua,
and also the curse of ham in Jenice in Genesis in Jubilee that's associated with
with this. Soa. So then the kind of like to close out the
Jubileese kind of Babel narrative, I mentioned Abraham. So Abraham in Jubileese comes
just a little bit after the Tower of Babel. There are actually other,
uh traditions that are a little bit later. And when I say a little
bit later, I still mean, you know for a second century that Will
Will will have Abraham actually present at the time of the building of the Tower
of Babel. Oh really yeah, yeah, and uh and like have him
interacting with Nimrod and so like when he destroys his father's idols, he gets
held before Nimrod and he's going to be executed. But then God delivers him
and all this other stuff. Is it in Jubilee, No, that's in
that's in uh Jashure the yeah, we were talking about earlier. But anyway,
yeah, so that's so there are other uh, there are other traditions
that will place him like basically present at the fall of the Tower of Babel,
but that's not in Jubilee. Jubilees has him coming on like just maybe
a little bit after, uh, but certainly as a as a kind of
like a contemporary of Nimrod and of all these other people. Yeah. Yeah,
So because of his piety, we are told that Abraham that God sends
an angel to open Abraham's mouth and ears so that he can understand Hebrew,
which is the language of the heavenly Law. So one of the main ideas
of Jubilees is that when the law is given to Moses, God's not just
like making it up like that that the law, like when the Torah is
given to Moses and all the the worship and all the things that that he
he's giving, He's giving, Christ is giving to Moses what's already in heaven.
Right, that's it like it's a it's so the law is written on
heavenly tablets first, and then he gives those to Moses. The law that
that even the this is a little bit of a spoiler for my talk,
but even the feasts, even the feasts of the of the Old Tabernacle,
and we would actually say of the church, we're already things being celebrated in
heaven for the right of jubilees that are then given to humans because it's a
way to participate in the heavenly order. And this is why Jubileese is like
really obsessed with the idea of the calendar and all this other stuff, so
so so basically, there's already this idea that in some ways the feasts are
heavenly feasts. Yes, but this is my talk. Oh sorry, No,
it's okay, Okay, it's okay. Well, it's a really great
it's it's really cool. It's really cool stuff. Please talk to the Symbolic
World Conference or by the virtual ticket or something, because I'm gonna I'm gonna
tell you some things that are going to be really really so yeah, people
got to come. But I want to say one thing about about the idea
just just before we continue, Because the idea of the wind blowing down the
tower and the wind scattering. I think it's important to understand it. It's
related to the idea of symbolism the way we talked about it, which is
the position of things that they're ontologically there's there's a place where they are in
a kind of map. Yeah, think about it that way. And sometimes
the effect or the relationship can even be opposite. It can even be the
contrary to one to the other. But if you understand their place and you
can see what's happening. So, right, the idea that the spirit is
blown into the inn gathering of the dust in order to create atom, right,
that's the origin of the of man. And then you can imagine that
you could think about it like either God takes the breath out right, and
then the dust goes back to dust. But it still works if you think
God also blows on it and then scatters the dust and so. But it's
really is about the idea that God's breath and God's spirit is what is holding
or scattering the the the phenomena and anything that has identity. It's like basically
it's it's it's in God's will that all things are held together, you know,
So I have to go off script here because you're talking about this and
I feel like, I feel like we should talk about the crows. Okay,
So in the Book of Jubilees in between actually in the transition transitory passage
like coming the transition from talking about the Tower of ba Able to talking about
Abraham, we get crows. And uh, let's see here. So when
when when Tara uh Tara, Abraham's father, when he's born, it is
marked by a devastation of crows, it says, and Prince Mastema, this
is the devil essentially right scent birds, so that they might eat the seed
which was being sown in the earth, in order to spoil the earth,
so that they might rob mankind of their labors. Before they plowed the seed,
the crows picked it off the surface of the earth. And therefore he
called them. It called him Tehra, because the crows and birds were impoverishing
them, and they ate their seed, and the years began being barren because
of the birds, and they ate all of the fruit of the trees from
the groves. If they were ever able to save a little from all the
fruit of the earth in their days, it was with great effort. So
then Abraham is born, and Abraham is born, and he is born with
he's pious to the point that even when he was two weeks old, you
know that he refuses to worship the idols, right, And it says that
he began to pray to the Creator also that he might save him from the
strain of the sons of men and so that his portion might not fall into
strain after pollution and scorn. And then the next part is Abraham versus the
crows, which I think is maybe, you know, not something most of
us woke up this morning thinking about. I mean I did, because I
was getting ready for this video, and I was like, we're probably not
going to talk about the crows because it's a little off topic. But then
you started talking about the scattering, and this is clearly what's going on here,
right, And so so basically what happens is that Abram when he goes
out he when he's fourteen years old, he is trying to plant, and
the crows are coming after him and they're trying to get the seed and he's
he's scaring them away. And eventually what he does is he comes up with
a way to plant the seed, and he does this through a use of
techne right, and so I mean this is the other kind of thing that's
going on, is the in jew believe as an eenoch, right, the
technology comes from like the demons. But then there are these uses of technology
that are like counter to the activity of the demons. I'll give you another
example is that earlier on, when Noah is like dealing with all the demons
that are plaguing his family, He's basically given the knowledge of how to use
herbs from the earth to counteract the basically the diseases that the demons are.
So he's given like metal pharmacaea, right, you know, which is like
medicine, but also sorcery, right, and and so this is one of
the things that Noah is given this knowledge to essentially cataract what the demons are
doing. I assume it was essential oils, but anyway, anyway, homeopathy.
So now Abraham, the way that Abraham solves this is that in the
first year of the fifth week, Abram taught those who are making the implements
were Oxen, the skilled carpenters, and they made implements above the ground facing
the handle of the plow, so that they might place seed upon it,
and the seed would go down from within it onto the point of the plow,
and it would be hidden in the earth. And therefore they were not
afraid of the crows. And they did likewise upon all the plow handles above
the ground, and they sowed untilled all of the earth, just as Abram
commanded them. And therefore they were not afraid of the birds. And so
this basically solves the crow problem. That's a really I mean, it's a
really interesting image because again we can see how this structure. Right, and
I mentioned this before, but the idea that heaven is only good, right,
Yeah, sometimes heaven is dangerous because it takes meaning away, right,
It takes the seed, It takes the seed away from the from the earth.
That's a good example. But sometimes that's a good thing. God does
that destroy a world. For example, when he takes Elijah and he takes
Enoch. When he takes Enoch away from the earth, he's basically saying,
all right, I'm gonna take the best away from you guys. Sorry,
I'm taking the seed out, and now the thing is gonna crumble. It's
like I'm taking the breath out of a person. I'm taking the saint out
of the world, so that now the world will will crumble. That's what
happened with Elijah too. There's there's a people forget that one of the names
for the enemy is the Prince and power of the Air. Yeah, right,
and and that's clearly I mean, that's what's going on with with mastermy
here. Which is the name of the enemy in this passage, right,
is that he's he sends the crows right, which are which are of the
air? Right, and so they're they're heavenly in that way. But then
also crows are you know, they eat dead things, you know, which
also has an interesting connection in the story of Elijah. But anyway, it's
it's it's like we could go I know, I know, let's go back
to Babel, Okay, all right, so we go back to Babel,
all right. So the last thing that I wanted to mention in here is
basically right after this incident, because of Abraham's piety, so he's fighting against
the work of the works of the evil one, right, and he's refusing
to worship the idols and so on and so forth, that God opens his
ears and his mouth so that he can understand Hebrew and when he does this,
he's able to read the books of his father. So his father Tera
has the books which are its basically the Law of God and in Hebrew,
and of course these have basically been passed down from Enoch, but Tera can't
read them because he can't read Hebrew, and he's worshiping idols, right And
so basically this gives Abraham the secret knowledge, which is actually the knowledge of
the calendar, it's the knowledge of the feasts which he's supposed to celebrate,
it's the knowledge of circumcision and all these other things that this is going to
give him that knowledge so that he can essentially rightly order the world. And
one of the things that I want to mention here when we talk about Abraham's
mouth and ears being opened so that he can understand Hebrew. Right that and
again the Lord of Spirits guys have done a whole bunch of stuff on this.
But sort of the last thing you do in the ancient world when you
build a temple is to there's a basically a perform a ritual to open the
nostrils of the idol, and basically so that the spirit of the God that
you're worshiping can inhabit it, and there are examples. We have a like
basically a liturgy for this from ancient Egypt, for instance. But and of
course you can draw a lot of parallels to like the creation of the world
in Genesis, with man being the final thing that happens that God breathes into
him and opens his nostrils. Right, So here's Abraham's mouth and ears being
opened so that he can essentially become the focal point for the worship of the
One True God. Right. And then when he does this, when this
happens, he is able to and it's the same it's exactly the same thing
as him being able to save the seed, right, because what he ends
up doing is is now there's this hidden seed, which is the law of
God which has been hidden and lost and forgotten, but he's able to actually
use that to begin to rightly order the world. And then that basically is
the introduction to Abram. And from there it goes into the story of Abram
as you basically know it from Genesis, although with a lot more sort of
calendar stuff thrown in. So with all of this set, with everybody kind
of thinking about along these terms, what I want to do is talk really
briefly about Pentecost. Now, Pentecost is chevaute. It's the the feasts of
the First Fruits. It's one of the Old Testament feasts that we continue to
celebrate in the Church today. And again a little bit of a spoiler,
but if you read in Jubilees, you'll see that they were celebrating this in
heaven first, which is going to be you know, there's a lot of
interesting things there that we'll talk about. But the feast of the First Fruits,
right, is one of the most important feasts in Jubilees. It's commanded
and celebrated first in heaven, and essentially it celebrates the renewal of a covenant.
So the first time that it's commanded for humans is after Noah offers the
sacrifice following the following the flood, right, So he gets out off the
art and offers a bunch of animals to sacrifice, and God smells the sacrifice
and is pleasing to him, and he institutes the feasts of the First Fruits
for those on earth. But it's the idea is the angels are already celebrating
it in heaven, right, And there's no hint of that in scripture,
though this is really from Jubilee, the idea that that, yes, the
Pentecost is when Noah offered the sacrifice. Well, Pentecost, you could say
historically used in the worst sense possible, but you could say, like historically
it celebrates the giving of the law, because this is what I mean,
this is what Pentecost celebrates, is the giving of the law to the people
of Israel. But remember that the there's a nodic laws. Yeah, yeah,
there's there's there's already a covenant, right, there's already a law and
a covenant that's given a Noah. And basically the whole premise of Jubileese is
that when Moses is given the law, it's not like some new thing.
Yeah, but that is actually a revelation of who God has always been.
And by the way, this is still as Christians, this is how we
understand the law, not as something that is prescriptive, but it's something that
is descriptive, right, something that describes this is what God is like.
And if you sort of align yourself on this pattern, then and your world
will cohere, right, And if you don't, then you'll be scattered or
the land will vomit you out, et cetera, et cetera. Right,
and so and so it's celebrated again in Jubilees with the giving of the Law,
which which you have to remember, that is the frame narrative for all
of Jubilees, is the Word giving the Law, which includes Genesis. Genesis
is part of the law. It's one of the five books of the law.
Right, the Word giving the law to Moses on Sinai, and so
everything is told in the first person, or but it's the Angel speaking,
right, the Angel of the Lord. He's he's telling. And then I
did this, and then I told Noah this, and then I told Enoch
this, and then I told Moses, you know, so on and so
so. So that's the frame of Jubilees. Is is the actual giving of
the law. So the thing that Pentecost celebrates is the giving of the law,
which is what Jubileese is all about. And so it's this really significant
feast all throughout the book of Jubilees. And it's a at some point it's
sometimes referred to as like a the twofold celebration or the celebration that has two
aspects, and it's this is as far as I've been able to find,
this is never explained in Jubilees, but I think it's something like that the
giving of that the Covenant is given twice, the Law is given twice,
first to Know and then to Moses. Something like that. But all this
to say, it's the most important feast in Jubilees, and we get some
in a way. There are some really fun connections that again I'm going to
save for my talk. But essentially, what I think everybody knows, or
maybe not everybody knows, but everybody could know. You know, if you
go to church on the night, you know, Saturday night before Pentecost,
right, is that Pentecost is an inversion of Babel. So Pentecost is the
first feast of first roots. But the Church sees it and has really always
treated it and seen it. I'm going to argue, all the way back
to the Book of Acts, has seen it as a reverse of the curse
of Babel. So the apostles are all gathered together. Where are they gathered.
They're gathered in a city on a mountain in an upper room, right,
and at the top of that room they are creating an altar, a
focus point. Right, and that is that they are gathered together I'm gonna
say, to serve the liturgy. There's a very ancient tradition that is still
you can still find in like the Malankara churches, like the Syrian churches,
the Coptic Church, and so on and so forth. There's a very ancient
tradition that when the church is gathered together in the upper room, you know
it's and it's an upper room, it's not a basement. They're gathered together
in the upper room to serve the liturgy. That when they're gathered together,
that they are serving the divine Liturgy for the first time. Now, somebody
out there wants to say, well, we don't know, we don't have
a single liturgy written down from the first entry, blah blah blah. This
is the tradition. Though, this is the tradition, and certainly you know,
the liturgy of Saint James, who was the first Bishop of Jerusalem,
is most people agree is the oldest Christian liturgy that we have. And so
the tradition is that they're serving the liturgy together for the very first time since
the resurrection m HM. And that the Lord appeared after his resurrection to James
and some of the other apostles and essentially gave them the liturgy. So Saint
James is serving the liturgy there as the first Bishop in Jerusalem in the upper
room. And during the Anaphora, which is the moment in the liturgy when
we call the Holy Spirit down upon the gifts on the altar. That that's
when the Holy Spirit comes down at Pentecost. And this is still still in
our liturgy. By the way, like the right before the Enophara, the
priest praise and you can't hear it if you're out in the nave because it's
said quietly, but the priest praise, you know, O Lord, as
you sent down your Holy Spirit on the apostles, right, take them not
away from us, and so on and so forth right, and so there's
this, So there's this calling down of the Holy Spirit with a reference to
Pentecost that happens right before that part of the liturgy. So anyway, if
even if you're you know, you want to argue, it's impossible to prove
any of this like textually or whatever. I'm just saying, this is the
tradition, and it's a tradition that is still implicit in the the liturgy of
all of the Eastern churches. Okay. And and so as he calls down
the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit descends, and he descends not just on
the gifts, but upon the whole church, which is, by the way,
it's what we always ask for. Send down your Holy Spirit upon us
and upon these gifts set forth right. And so the Holy Spirit comes down.
And how does he come down? He comes down as a wind,
right, which is this really important aspect of the Babbel story as it's told
in Jubilee. The Holy Spirit comes down as a wind, and tongues of
fire, right, which is that? Which is I mean, they become
candles. I don't know how it's to say it, right, The tongues
of fire come and they hover over the heads of each of the apostles,
and over the head of the Mother of God, who is also present there
in the Book of Acts, and they make each of the apostles in to
a tower or a candle or a pillar, like however you want to think
about it, right, that's exactly what is happening there. And then what
happens is that the tongues, the confusion of tongues is resolved and It's very
tricky in the text actually how it is resolved, because it sounds at one
point like the apostles are just speaking and you know, probably aramic, but
then everybody's hearing it in their own tongue. But then some people can't understand
what's going on. And those people who can't understand what's going on, they
just hear what the babel, right, they hear babel and they accuse the
Apostles of being drunk. And I will just say this is another video,
but there is some weird stuff going on with Pentecost and the symbolism of like
Pentecost and its relation to drunkenness. I mean, I'll just give an example.
So the Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of the Law and the
giving of the Covenant. Right, So the first time in Jubilieze that this
happens is after the Noah plants a vine and gets drunk, and he gets
drunk. And then the second time that this happens is on Sini Moses receives
the law and he comes down the mountain. Then everybody's drunk, yeah,
right, And then the third time is when the Holy Spirit comes and he
gives it the law of flesh in our own hearts, and the apostles begin
to prophesy, and the people who can't understand them, and this is a
weird thing about the miracle, like it's not just that some that it's not
that everybody can understand them. The people whose hearts are ready, they understand
in their own tongue, but for everybody else that sounds like babbel and those
people again accuse them of drunkenness. There's something about this descent like drunkenness at
the bottom. I don't know, yah no. But the way to understand
it is to understand what Pentecost is doing is something similar to what the Crucifixion
is doing. Is that it is collapsing all the symbolism into one place,
and it's basically gathering it together in a way that both resolves the whole question
but also does it in a way that if you try to capture it in
your mind, you really struggle to hold all the pieces together, because,
like you said, it's like, is the Holy Spirit scattering them? The
answer is yes, yeah, because it's going to scatter them to the four
corners of the world. Yeah. And is the Holy spirit gathering them.
The answer is yes, of course they are, because they're all speaking in
one mind and in one voice, but everybody's hearing them in their particular voice,
and so what it's doing, and also there's confusion on the edges,
and so it's actually a cosmic image of the whole thing simultaneously, both the
uniting of Babel and the splintering of Babel and the confusion of it, but
all done in a manner that transforms it into a proper hierarchy, like an
actual, true hierarchy of unity, in the togetherness of multiplicity, in the
way in which it can contact it relates to the particular, but then even
room or a kind of chaos and fluidity on the edge. So it's like
it's recasting the entire world in that moment. And in this way we see
the way that the saints become the pillars that are now upholding the world and
uniting, having to earth together, and like each one of them becomes that
little image of the candle or the tower or the mountain or whatever it is.
Right and even like in our hymnography in the Orthodox Church, we often
refer to the Mother of God as being like the the the you know,
the uncut mountain, right like like like as being the mountain of God,
you know, and then you know the basically the place where God makes himself
known, the place where he's manifest. But every single member of the church
is supposed to be that, right, and so you have that happening at
Pentecost. I'll just kind of close this out by saying two things. One
is that thinking back to Abraham's mouth and ears being opened so that he can
understand the law of God, right, that this is really this is what's
going on. But now it's not just Hebrew, right, it's the idea
of that there's there's a it's not about the language, right, it's but
it's about the content, right. But our mouths and ears are open so
that we then become the sons of Abraham. Right, That's the that's the
kind of the key image there. And then the other thing that I want
to do is just to show that the I mean, I just I don't
see how you could like see see the connection the very careful order of the
story in the Book of Acts and say that this is that the connection to
babylist arbitrary. But in case anybody was wondering did the ancient church make these
connections as well? I have. This is this is my big, big
Pentecostarian which is like all of our our hymns, the ancient hymns and and
and the stuff around Pasca and Pentecost is our essentially our most ancient hymnography in
the Orthodox Church. We're talking about, uh, most of the stuff going
back to third and fourth century. Okay, I'll just read a couple of
hymns, uh this, These are from These are from Vespers. I'll read
one from Vespers and one one from Mattens. For the feasts of Pentecost,
says of old the tongues were confounded because of the audacity in the building of
the tower. But now the tongues are made wise for the sake of the
glory of divine knowledge. So there's a connection there with the divine knowledge.
And that goes back to this. I'm going to argue that goes back to
this tradition with Abraham. There God condemned the impious because of their offense,
and here Christ hath enlightened the fishermen by the spirit. At the time,
the confusion at that time, the confusion of tongues was wrought for punishment,
but now the concord of tongues hath been inaugurated for the salvation of souls.
And then also the hymns, even in Greek, they do make a lot
of puns between the confusion of tongues and then the tongues of fire. Yeah,
right, that's like people really like that pun In the ancient world,
it says once when he descended and confounded the tongues, the most High divided
the nations, and when he divided the tongues of fire, he called all
men into unity. So like there was like one tongue and then division,
and now there's a division of tongues because it's the tongues of fire, but
that actually brings us into unity. He called all men into unity with one
accord, we glorify the all Holy Spirit. So there's actually a lot more
in the Hindography of Pentecost, but I thought I would just read a couple
of examples to show how it's really what I'm arguing for is how we have
always like in our tradition, this is how we've always read the scriptures,
right, and this is going to be basically what we're going to be talking
about at the conference, at least in my track is we're going to be
looking at some other ways that the church has always read and understood Genesis and
the way that it actually affects the way that we still think about God,
who he is, how we worship him, what it means to serve him
today. So any that's my pitch for the summit, or at least get
the ticket as virginal ticket. So thanks Richard. This is awesome. I
mean, I see a lot of amazing things in the future everybody, you
know, Richard and I already as we try to get through this logistical chaos,
we're all already planning out all these wonderful stories of how to connect the
ancient stories with modern storytelling tropes with you know, we won't we won't spoil
what we're gonna do, but it's gonna be it's gonna be wonderful. So
so everybody, thanks for your attention, thanks for supporting everything we do.
Hopefully we'll see some of you at the summit, and if not, there
will also be online places to discuss the summit if you get the virtual ticket,
like we'll have spaces where people can and I think that we're gonna do
like some kind of like a big live Yeah, we'll do a live thing
after at the end. Yeah, So all right, everybody, thanks for
your attention. Thanks everyone. If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please
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