E. Rowell: In my reading of history and in my understanding of Judaism, I have never yet come across this concept: that western culture is paradoxically comprised of both semitic and antisemitic world views. One reason this concept is important is that it helps explain many things about western culture that heretofore have been inexplicable.
By Fransisco Gil-White, MANAGEMENT OF REALITY 10 June 2024
Is the Roman pontiff wearing a Jewish kippah?
- PARADOX. The culturally Greco-Roman bosses who led the Church straight into totalitarianism (the Inquisition) declared holy 1) the story of an Israelite slave revolt (Exodus) that begat pro-worker laws; and 2) the love teachings of a Jewish hippie carpenter. How and why did oppressive Greco-Roman aristocrats adopt the subversive literature of lower-class Jewish revolutionaries?
That skullcap looks to me very much like the kippah or yarmulke traditionally worn by Jews. Is that what it is? I’ve noticed some definite resistance to this idea on the part of various authorities. I have not been impressed, however, by their arguments and sources.
In The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity, for example, the Catholic apologist Taylor Marshall writes as follows:
“… [O]ne of the most common questions that Jews have concerning the Catholic Church is: ‘Why does your Pope wear a yarmulke? To be accurate, the Pope does not actually wear a yarmulke but a zucchetto, which is Italian for ‘little gourd,’ as in the vegetable we call zucchini … [because] it somewhat resembles half of a small pumpkin …”1
Discovering that the bishop’s skullcap has accrued an Italian nickname contributes absolutely nothing to refute the hypothesis that the bishops adopted the skullcap from Jewish practice, but that seems to go right over Marshall’s head.
It likewise goes over Wikipedia’s head (consulted 6/9/2024), for Wikipedia cites Marshall’s passage in order to ‘support’ the claim that “the zucchetto is distinct from … the skullcap style of kippah and yarmulke.”
Wikipedia also advances the undocumented but apparently mainstream claim that the zucchetto is derived from the Greek pilos. I find this idea striking because the zucchetto in fact bears zero resemblance to the Greek pilos (see for yourself below); by contrast, as Wikipedia concedes, the zucchetto “is almost identical to the Jewish kippah or yarmulke.
The Greek pilos. (Image credit: Wikipedia.)
Of course, the zucchetto cannot be a kippah if it appeared first. So, if you were really hell-bent on denying a Jewish origin for the Catholic skullcap you might even be tempted to say, as Wikipedia does, that “the zucchetto … predates the skullcap style of kippah and yarmulke.” That’s a remarkable claim, so I consulted Wikipedia’s footnote, which contains this:
-
-
- Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern. New York: R. M. McBride Company.
-
No page number…
Well, modern search technology can help with that. I found an electronic version of Kilgour’s erudite book on hats and searched the terms kippah, zucchetto, yarmulke, and skullcap. The first three terms are nowhere mentioned in the book. But skullcap does appear in a brief reference to Jews and popes in the short section: ‘Italy: skullcap or cap of Enoch.’ Kilgour writes (pp.252-253):
“[The skullcap] was worn in very ancient times by the elders or teachers of the Jewish tribes … For this reason we sometimes find the headpiece referred to in ancient archives as the ‘cap of Enoch.’ Mentioned in the Bible, Enoch was one of the patriarchs of the early Jewish people, and presumably wore one of these little caps. … To the present day, the rabbi in the synagogue wears the skullcap, the same as the elders before him, marking him as a teacher. The cap has always been traditionally connected with religious figures so it is no surprise to find that the Pope, upon occasion, also wearing a skullcap.”
Just… amazing: Wikipedia’s source suggests precisely the opposite of what Wikipedia claims. (Always check footnotes, you never know when someone will try to pretend with a wet footnote that they have documentation.)
Perhaps if the Jewish kippah signified in Judaism something entirely different I could abide more tolerantly these desperate efforts to allege a separate line of cultural transmission for the Catholic skullcap. But, as Taylor Marshall concedes, “the idea is the same”: in both religions the skullcap “designates that a man is a servant of the Most High, ever standing in the presence of God.”2
Hm.
I am provoked to ask the following question. Given that the Church itself does not assert cladistic independence from Judaism but, to the contrary, claims to emerge phylogenetically from it; and given that, in the ‘parent’ religion the skullcap is physically almost identical and also means the same thing, shouldn’t the first hypothesis be—until truly impressive evidence is marshalled to the contrary—that the bishops were imitating the Jewish kippah?
Or put it this way: Is it really so crazy to suggest that the bishops wanted to look like rabbis?
Consider the context. The Catholic bishops, as everybody knows, cherish a set of teachings attributed to a very, very famous rabbi: Yeshua ha Nosri or Jesus of Nazareth. And the Church has proudly claimed to be the most Jewish religion. For according to the Church fathers and their doctrine of supersession, the only legitimate evolution of Judaism is their interpretation of Yeshua, which they claim is divinely ordained to replace the ‘parent’ branch of Judaism, now rendered obsolete. To this day, the Church calls herself—officially—‘The New Israel.’
I know what you are thinking, because the question is obvious: If the Church so proudly asserts her supreme Jewishness, indeed her unique legitimacy—to the detriment of Jews!—as the proper continuation of Judaism, then why did anyone go looking for the ancestor of the Catholic skullcap in the Greek pilos?
Well, perhaps because the Church isn’t any less Greco-Roman than she is Jewish, nor, on that score, any less proud.
St Peter’s Basilica. Perhaps no building more clearly says ‘Roman power.’
The ideas of the early Church were attractive especially to Greek-speaking gentiles in the Eastern Mediterranean; soon after, as upper-class Roman citizens began to dominate the bishop class, and as the Church borrowed Roman forms for its own organization, she developed also a Roman identity (see Part 4). Greek and Roman identities mesh well because Roman culture is in many ways an evolution of Greek culture.
The Church’s Greco-Roman identity became hypertrophied when Emperor Constantine adopted the Church as official religion in the fourth century CE, thereafter fusing Church and Empire into a single, complex, Roman religious/political creature. It became entirely traditional to celebrate Catholicism as Roman, and Latin became the Church’s sacred language.
So the Church is both Greco-Roman and Jewish.
This hybrid identity is explicitly and loudly claimed by the Church in her long official name: ‘The Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church.’ ‘I am Apostolic,’ she says, meaning ‘from the friends of Jesus, the apostles’—all Jews—and ‘I am Roman.’
And that’s the Church paradox.
For the Jewish tradition is semitic; the Greco-Roman, antisemitic.
-
-
- semitism ? A social force launched by linguistic Semites 4,300 years ago in ancient southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) with the revolution of Sargon of Akkad. This force seeks to protect everyone from oppression and trends in the direction of abolitionism, constitutionalism, and, finally, democracy. The Jews—a Mesopotamian people tracing their origin as a legal and religious community to the story of a slave revolt led by Moses (Book of Exodus)—are the surviving representatives of ancient Mesopotamian semitism.
- antisemitism ? A social force that has always opposed semitism and which seeks to oppress everyone, trending always in the direction of slavery, absolutism, and, finally, totalitarianism. In ancient Western Asia (which includes Europe) the most important antisemites were the Assyrians and later the Greeks and the Romans. In the modern world, the most important antisemites, drawing inspiration from the ancient Greco-Romans, have been the eugenicists and the German Nazis, and drawing inspiration from the Qur’an, the jihadi Muslims.
-
You can see clearly, with these definitions, that for an institution to be simultaneously semitic and antisemitic makes for a perfect paradox. Which of course leads us straight into the question: How can any such chimeric Franken-Church ever have emerged in our history?
We ought to be very interested in this question.
The dramatic shift from logic to paradox cuts all of our civilized historical experience—neatly and satisfyingly—into two gigantic eras, each roughly two millennia long.
The first great era begins with the revolution led by Sargon of Akkad 2,300 years before Jesus in southern Mesopotamia (‘Babylonia’). The second, after a transition period following the Greco-Macedonian destruction of the Persian Empire, begins with the founding of the Catholic Church in the first century CE.
This model is not so hard for Westerners to process and adopt. It is perhaps true that I am reaching further back and farther East than most of us are used to (from the point of view of our traditionally ‘Western’ identity) because I believe the Mediterranean and then Europe should be analytically integrated with Western Asia into one very large yet coherent system in which semitism struggles with antisemitism. But in another sense my model is an easy fit, as I fully concur with Western calendrical cosmology that our civilized experience should be divided into the time before Jesus and the time after Jesus.
The arrival of Jesus marks the transition from the logical to the paradoxical.
Jesus of Nazareth. (Photo by Unknown Author licensed under CC BY-SA-NC.)
In the Era of Logic, before Jesus, back in our deepest Mesopotamian antiquity, the struggle between semitism and antisemitism was crisp (see Part 1 and Part 2). A good metaphor here is a pitched or set-piece battle, anticipated and committed to by both antagonists, each occupying one side of the field, each with its own colors and banners, and each hailing from separate and distinct home territories.
Such combatants are easily distinguished.
Of course, this ain’t just a metaphor. In the period that precedes Christianity, semitism controlled its own home territory of Babylonia, extended later to cover all of Western Asia, while antisemitism had its homeland to the West. And semites and antisemites indeed met on the field of battle—in gigantic confrontations. First, Babylonians vs. Assyrians, and then Persians vs. Greeks. The Greco-Persian wars (three in all, for I include Alexander’s conquest) were veritable world wars between two entire civilizations, one semitic, the other antisemitic, each in its own continent (see Part 1 and Part 2).
But in the Era of Paradox, the one we’re still in, which begins after Jesus, semitism and antisemitism have been paradoxically intertwined in an intimate embrace that makes their struggle messy and convoluted—and much harder to think about.
This messy struggle became wholly internal to Western civilization, for in this Era of Paradox the two opposed forces occupy the same geographic and cultural space and moreover raise the same institutional banner! More specifically, this paradox pits the Church’s Greco-Roman political structure against the Jewish values promulgated in the Church’s officially cherished holy books.
Schematically, we may represent that as follows:
By definition, a paradox does violence to logic. But paradoxes are not always noisily obvious things, for ‘obviousness,’ as every anthropologist knows, is not really a property of logic but of culture. Entirely made-up and/or nonsensical and/or contradictory things will seem perfectly obvious and natural to those socialized into accepting them.
We are used to the Church paradox—which goes mostly unnoticed—because it is fully Western.
The Medieval Catholic Church towered over everyone, and everything. (Photo by Unknown Author licensed under CC BY-NC-ND)
The Medieval Church crowned and also excommunicated the Germanic Holy Roman emperors, as well as sundry other European kings and queens whose disputes she helped resolve and whose confessed sins she carefully listened to and absolved.
In every European country, the Church was the biggest landowner, with huge agricultural estates. But she was no urban slouch. Indeed, one out of every ten people might be on the Church’s payroll in some European cities.
In every Christian kingdom and principality a system of ecclesiastical courts existed entirely beyond the control of king or prince, often extending their jurisdiction to many matters ‘civil’ rather than ‘religious.’
The Church also had its own State, several international armies of holy knights (by need and opportunity loaned to various kings), and a police force.
The Medieval Papal States. (Map: Historical Mapping)
And last, but hardly least, a gigantic population of priests in every European country ministered to the faithful, high and low, taught them loyalty to the Church, and gave them what such times and places considered an ‘education.’ Everywhere you went the people with smarts—the scholars, the intellectuals, the thinkers—were all priests. The very sophisticated ones were indispensable advisors, of course, to kings.
Inevitably, then, the Catholic Church drenched and draped the paradox in her bosom over every corner of Western religious, cultural, and political life. And we are still living this paradox.
You too.
I know that many modern Westerners are walking about feeling very confident and satisfied in their presumed emancipation from the Catholic Church. But they are wrong.
Certain aspects of culture are very hard to change, because they are subtle. We can stop going to Catholic Mass, for example, but that hardly means the subtle aspects of Church cosmology that have drenched the West for centuries will quickly disappear, because they are difficult for us to notice. Identity and values, once internalized, are naturalized, and people effortlessly transmit them to their children, who will pass them on again, and so forth. They don’t even notice it, because naturalized aspects of culture are very difficult for those who own them to perceive. “Fish are the last to discover water,” goes an old saying. Just so.
Think only of modern environmentalism, a clearly Christian movement. Many environmentalists borrow from Eastern and native religions, and they hardly self-identify as Christians, but they have effortlessly recycled the concepts of ‘original sin’ and ‘redemption through sacrifice,’ merely dressing them up in new vestments.
Centuries of Catholic education and Sunday instruction led Westerners to internalize the Church paradox until it became culture, stable now without the Church’s constant micro-management and husbanding, transmitted from parent to offspring without any self-consciousness. Hence, by dint of being Westerners, whether or not we call ourselves officially ‘Catholic,’ we are living the Church paradox still.
And it makes us… schizoid.
The useful metaphor here is the intra-psychic struggle of an individual man with his own demons: two opposing forces—both claiming to be his allies—exist within him and compete for control of his prefrontal cortex.
Such combatants are not easily distinguished.
Once again this ain’t just a metaphor. Centuries of Church dominance caused the individual Western psyche to become simultaneously Jewish and Greco-Roman: semitic and antisemitic.
Schizoid.
Westerners, you may have noticed, cannot decide whether they love or hate Jews, whether they wish to promote slavery or freedom, whether they are proud or ashamed of their own civilization. And they get tremendously confused. Many believe the things they most cherish in the modern West (democracy, freedom, human rights, etc.) are a Greco-Roman inheritance, when the truth is precisely the opposite: such are blessings from the Jews.
What does our future hold? Well, that depends.
Will Westerners choose the antisemitic half of the Western paradox, as they did in the early-to-mid 20th century, when they allowed themselves to be seduced by anti-Jewish propaganda and let totalitarianism and genocide flourish once again in the West, like they did when the Catholic Church enjoyed unbridled power?
Or will Westerners finally emancipate themselves from the heavy heritage of Western oppression and choose freedom, siding decisively with their better, semitic selves?
Here’s hoping we do the latter. But to have a real chance at mastering our history, we’ll need to understand it first. Up next, therefore, I explain how the Church acquired the Greco-Roman half of her identity.
#/media/File:Man_pilos_Louvre_MNE1330.jpg){kind=link}
Hat’s off
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRPePduEhTr3nvuxXPdnUlwfo91WHtcNqoHQ8HfqVSaKm1fHtsiYvL5kMzqmYhwPp4z9CQ&usqp=CAU
@Michael ” It was actually the Chicago 13 and Abbie Hoffman was seven of them.” Great line. You come up with that just now? In any case, Bravo. My hats off to you. 😀 (Finishing as we started in classical sonata form,
A-B-A 😀
Oh, one thing, the line I was really thinking of, and truly the perfect ending, from David Steinberg’s Coast bit.
😀
Cheers
Your Honors, I rest my tuchas. No ifs, ands, or butts.
Grotjes, Bastien
It was actually the Chicago 13, and Abbie Hoffman was seven of them. I believe he claimed the judge was his illegitimate father, and demanded that he recuse himself. I never heard about any of them, before moving to The Coast. Most of the non-Jews weren’t really goyim. They were lords who had gone bad.
Historical note: https://cornishnationalmusicarchive.co.uk/content/the-pirates-of-penzance-gilbert-and-sullivan/
@Michael
Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorn, none of whom were Jewish, were three of the many pivotal non-Jewish crazies responsible. Obama’s political career began in Ayers and Dorn’s lving room and they played pivotal roles in the founding of the Tides Foundation. You may recall, they were anti-Israel Communists (ideologically) who split from SDS to found the Weather Underground only to get off on technicalities. They became influential academics. He specialized in Early Childhood Education. Obama attended an SDS affiliated school in Hawaii as a boy.
I don’t recall reading Abbie Hoffman being involved with Chicago. Oops. My bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven
If you click on the links and look at their early lives, only 3 of the Chicago 7 were Jewish. Hilariously, Lee Wiener had studied political philosophy at the University of Jerusalem. 😀
Let’s hear it for Education. Education will solve all problems 😀
@MIchael
“So what am I, chopped chicken liver,” as the saying goes? 😀
“Kramer vs. Kramer vs Godzilla trailer -French subs
https://youtu.be/i0D2_nzuGyI
https://tourosynagogue.org/history/jews-in-early-america/
Hi, Michael
Ya gotta admit, all three were pretty strange. 😀
Oh, and I thought of a better answer to your existential why questions. Ask The Coast. 😀
https://youtu.be/H9EVEM3_5Rs?si=qHQZj7ADxxcfq8pL
Hi, Sebastien
I remember those 1968 Jewish crazies (You didn’t mention Abbie Hoffman) who were largely responsible for the “progressive” craziness that now plagues my country.
In 1968, I lived 90 miles and world away from the Chicago riots. The year before, my uncle’s store in Milwaukee, along with the major shopping center it was in, was destroyed by the race riots — not far from where Golda Meir grew up, 50 years ahead of me, before moving to Palestine. Yeah, I wasn’t a total stranger to these things.
You’re right, I didn’t understand Dylan’s lyrics at the time, but his music and poetry was pretty much the bedrock of my generation. Nonetheless, I do expect a “hard rain” to fall around Convention time.
Gottarun. Food.
@Michael The insurrectionary left took over the Dems with the riots led by Tom Haydn and Jerry Rubin at the 1968 convention in 1968. If you think the party is crazy now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Unless they lose by a big enough margin*, if history is anything to go by. It’s been suggested there might be a replay there. I somehow doubt much will happen at the Republican Convention. The party is unified behind Trump, even Haley and DeSantis.
* If I turn out be right you could label it a kind of “prophet margin” 😀
Remember, “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestra_Rehearsal
@Michael
I dunno. You’ll have to ask a shrink or a sociologist, maybe. But, That would certainly apply to the domestic and foreign policies of O’Biden and the Deep State, Dems, and Rinos. And in that context, I would answer, “Why Not,” and “Hell yeah.” 😀
Hi, Michael Bob Dylan, whose link you attached, unquestionably deserved the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature because I’ve never understood his lyrics, either. 😀
Hi, Sebastien
Why make fun of something you don’t understand? Might it be, that you’re afraid of it?
Whatever your intentions, the timing of your posting was spooky — appearing immediately upon my waking from that dream. I often dream of Milwaukee — of course, that’s understandable, seeing that I grew up there. But I have hardly ever dreamed of being at the Convention Center, where the Republican convention will be: and that is where the dream began.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5al0HmR4to
@Michael I’m noticing that the biblical stuff goes down easier if I just think of it as science fiction., though surely you must realize that passage is making fun of it. 😀
I remember years ago hanging out sometimes with my dry cleaner and chatting. She was an older Korean Christian woman who was always telling me I would go to hell unless I converted to Christianity (or, I suppose, Judaism for that matter, 😀 ) thinking in her futile attempt to guilt-trip me, Christian/Jewish baggage, aside, no doubt, my being Jewish and all, that she was tapping into an upbringing I never had. This is more the upbringing I have to get past, while still enjoying the comedy, just to even stomach reading the stuff;
“Monty Python’s Meaning of Life Part II, “Growth and Learning:”Oh Lord, you are so big.” (church service.) 😀
https://youtu.be/fINh4SsOyBw?si=CKYWvgz8Fn-JIuGQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_The_Meaning_of_Life
(not entirely accurate, leaves out this skit and doesn’t do it justice.) just watch the movie. You’ll probably laugh even so. It’s a classic and Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Youtube Movies has it among other places to rent or buy cheap streaming. the standard $3.99
https://www.google.com/search?q=monty+python+meaning+of+life+watch&sca_esv=dda0afae0c3a96e4&rlz=1C9BKJA_enUS790US791&hl=en-US&sxsrf=ADLYWIIAQt5OBWO7k790ep2_YEBXpxgFYg%3A1718467200380&ei=gLptZsT4Foj9ptQPnMy1oA4&oq=monty+python+meaning+of+life+watch&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiJtb250eSBweXRob24gbWVhbmluZyBvZiBsaWZlIHdhdGNoMgUQABiABDIKEAAYgAQYQxiKBTIFECEYoAEyBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgsQABiABBiGAxiKBTILEAAYgAQYhgMYigUyCxAAGIAEGIYDGIoFSLcZUPsPWNwUcAJ4AZABAJgBgQGgAfkEqgEDMy4zuAEDyAEA-AEBmAIHoAKXBMICBxAjGLADGCfCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgINEAAYgAQYsAMYQxiKBcICExAuGIAEGLADGEMYyAMYigXYAQGYAwCIBgGQBhG6BgQIARgIkgcDMy40oAffJg&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp
My standard snappy comeback is: “That’s ok, I gotta save France.” – Mel Brooks 😀
https://www.amazon.com/2000-Year-Old-Man/dp/0965340392
Another favorite is the standard Kdrama (Korean tv miniseries with English subs, or at least the ones from a few years ago) line:
“I’m leaving first.” 😀
@Michael It’s a better to test to compare it with completely unrelated cultures to see how universal it is so I googled, “ancient hawain culture hats” (sans quotation marks) and got:
Hi, Sebastien. I see you read my brief post.
What are you trying to be? A prophet??
I just woke up from sleeping (4:30 AM here). I had a dream that my family and I were in the downtown of the city I grew up in. It began raining, and a cataclysmic flood ensued. Fortunately, I had enough knowledge of the terrain and geography, to help those with us keep ahead of the rising water. Then I woke up, and realized the dream was not entirely about my family and me: My hometown, where I grew up, was Milwaukee; and the dream began at the site of the 2024 Republican Convention.
“the Albertian Order of Leibowitz?” Is that a Messianic joke? Why is the protagonist built like me?
Sebastien, you’re spooky. You must know how to read Pre-Deluge English. I’m not kidding — I didn’t read your links until after I got up. Thank you for posting it.
BTW, concerning the silly comments about the “hat”, or “kippah”,
For all I know, wearing the kippah may have come from those times. There is a hard-to-understand passage in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:
The above is meant for lovers of rabbit trails. For my part, I will be intently praying for the Republican Convention, and whatever “fallout” comes from it.
Shalom shalon 🙂
@Michael 😀 “There you go again.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_you_go_again
excerpt from “A canticle forLeibowitz”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
https://pinchinat.wordpress.com/2024/06/12/a-canticle-for-leibowitz/
Covers bald spot? 😀 I think it’s almost universal. I was conversing with someone on Israpundit by video call, one of our most vehement and ardent Zionists, who thinks we should all call ourselves, “Israelites,” and that I should lose weight, and that I should lose weight, and that I should loseweight, zzzzz…” whose first question was, “Are you a believer” (a hostile question( I asked him why he was wearing a kippa and he said to cover his bald spot! Actually, this is a joke I came up with a long time ago, but maybe it’s true?
“Occam’s razor- The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”
Though I know how comforting people find it to get pat explanations for the unexplainable.
This is a strange article, that I admit I don’t understand. What’s the point? That the Pope shouldn’t wear a kippah? That western civilization is part anti-semitic and part not? Or that a 1st century Jewish carpenter was the first hippie? The author concludes this piece (part 3 of the series), with…
I submit that to understand history, you must first commit to looking at it without spin or bias. Few ever master that feat.
Eve,
This is a precise representation of history. It is prophesied, allegorically, in Rev. 17, quoted here in part:
[9] And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.
[10] And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.
[11] And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.
[12] And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.
[13] These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
[14] These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.
[15] And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.
[16] And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.
[17] For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled.
[18] And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.
The “whore” is the Apostate Church, headed by the Bishop of Rome. It was covenanted to God through the scriptures (“Jewish”, in the paradigm). The bishop “fornicated” with the kings of the earth (specifically, the Franks), to form the Holy Roman Empire — represented as the “seventh head”, which succeeded the “sixth” (the ancient Roman Republic & Empire). The succession of “governments” of the world, from Egypt to Assyria to Babylon to Persia to Greece to Rome, is what Gil-White refers to as “Graeco-Roman”. The “ten horns” represent the Westphalian Order, which is now centered on the G-7 and the WEF.
Note that this “New World Order” HATES the apostate church.
Jacob was a man who spent time in the tent studying, building the spiritual world. Esau, a man of the field. Esau’s job is to build the physical world. To some extinct, they are in conflict with each other. The boys are twins, and boys will be boys fighting with each other. One always tiring to best or one up the other.
Esau, (Edom, Rome, churchianity) has not yet accepted the fact, that the younger brother has the covenants and birthright. Isaiah says:
2:1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 In days to come
the mountain of the LORD’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
3 Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
4 He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
But they will. It’s best if they come easy, if not they will come the hard way. They will come.
@rmderfler, I am most grateful for the references you cited. I would not be surprised if Fransisco Gil-White has familiarity with these writings as they substantiate his hypothesis. But I was not familiar with these texts so I thank you deeply for providing them to me.
Attn: E. Rowell – the paradoxical attitude of the West toward the Jewish people is found in basic Jewish texts:
Step 2: (Step 1 below)
Esau is identified with Rome/the West by the sages of Israel:
Genesis 36:1 – Esau is Edom
Edom is Rome –
See Gittin 57b – He saw the destruction of the Second Temple, as it is written later in that same psalm: “Remember, O Lord, against the children of Edom the day of Jerusalem, when they said: Raze it, raze it, to its very foundation” (Psalms 137:7), as the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, “the children of Edom.”
https://www.sefaria.org/Gittin.57b.11
See Rashi on Numbers 24:19
See Abarbanel on Isaiah 35:10
See the following article:
http://text.rcarabbis.org/italians-romans-germans-and-edomites/
Step 1:
Genesis 27:41 – Esau says I will kill my brother Jacob.
At once he sees Jacob as his brother and wants to kill him – that is love and hate together.
See also Rashi on Genesis 33:4, which is after 32:32 – Jacob was limping. The West’s love for Israel is aroused when Israel is injured, but normally the West hates Israel.
??????. ?????? ??????; ?????? ????????? ????????? ?????? ????????????? ??????????, ???? ???????????? ???????? ??? ??????? ???????? ?????? ??????, ????? ?????? ????????? ???? ???????, ??????? ???? ?????????? ????????? ??????? ?????????, ?????? ????????????? ???????? ?????????? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ?????? (???? ?????):
?????? AND HE KISSED HIM — Dots are placed above the letters of this word, and a difference of opinion is expressed in the Baraitha of Sifré (???????) as to what these dots are intended to suggest: some explain the dotting as meaning that he did not kiss him with his whole heart, whereas R Simeon the son of Johai said: Is it not well-known that Esau hated Jacob? But at that moment his pity was really aroused and he kissed him with his whole heart. (Sifrei Bamidbar 69.2)
https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.33.4.2