Fear of Isaac

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Ethan
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Fear of Isaac

Post by Ethan »

Genesis 31:42
Except the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had been with me.

The word fear in this verse is translated from a proper noun, a name of a particular God called פחד.

The LXX translates φόβος meaning fear, but can also be a proper noun, Phobos (Φόβος) the personification of fear and panic in Greek mythology,
and the son of Ares. He is called Pavor in Roman mythology, a companion of Mars. Or Φοῖβος bright-one, epithet of Apollo.

Genesis 31:53 Jacob sware by the fear of his father Isaac.

fear here is a proper noun and is capitalized in the vulgar.
~ Iacob per Timorem patris sui

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Last edited by Ethan on Sat Oct 02, 2021 7:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ConfusedEnoch
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Re: Fear of Isaac

Post by ConfusedEnoch »

I find it interesting that this name is only found once in the entirety of the Bible, and is mysteriously treated like a proper noun as if it's some sort of popular allegory like Lamb of God or Son of Man.
It also doesn't really make sense when looking at the context of this chapter. Isaac was never described as fearful of God, his name literally means "He who laughs".

Now, what you said about Apollo is indeed very promising, because it connects rather beautifully to the other names given in this verse.
First, the "God of Abraham" is likely El Shaddai from Exodus:
“I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name YHWH I did not make myself fully known to them.
El Shaddai is of course the same as the almighty El, but has an obscure epithet which has been variously theorized to be connected to mountains, destruction, and agriculture. Funnily enough, Hermon is also the holiest mountain as well as the "destroyer" (from root H-R-M, "to divide, to cut").

Before I move on to the other names, I have to mention two verses which confuse me immensely. Acts 7:43 and Amos 5:26:
43 Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.
26 But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.27 Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts.
First off, if these two verses are supposed to be equivalent, why is it that Damascus and Babylon are equated here? Perhaps Paul knew that the word "Babylon" was thrown around willy nilly by the Israelites post-Exile so that they can blame a single party for their demise and not the entire Levantine region.

I digress, though, because the real mystery here is who Moloch is. As the verses show, the Israelites were seen to be worshipping Moloch/Remphan, so they considered him the most powerful god for a reason. Well, judging by the fact that EL HIMSELF is Moloch, then it would make sense for the pre-exilic jews to worship him. Let me explain.

Remphan is a Greek transliteration of Kaiwan (Chiun), the Persian name of the planet Saturn. Indeed, Saturn is connected to the Bull in almost all religions: In Egyptian mythology he is Horus-Bull-in-the-Sky, in Babylonian he is Shemesh the Heavenly Bull, in Greek mythology he is Cronus the baby eater who has been related to Minotaur in various ways. But most importantly, both Baʿal and El were associated with the bull in Ugaritic Baal Cycle.
El is Cronus in Phoenician cosmogony of Sanchuniathon as well. Saturn is the original harvest god and the undisputed God of Gods. Being a Harvest God he is responsible for both the weather and the passage of time. That's why Mt. Hermon was originally El's abode, because it's practically the only place where God's grace (Rain) can be seen in its full glory year-round.

"Moloch" is just another distortion from the Jews in order to demonize neighbouring civilizations and justify their military conquests. Just like Beelzebub, who was originally Baal-Zebul, an epithet of the storm God Ba'al Hadad (or just El), Moloch is another epithet of El, "the King".
In Semitic, the word Moloch comes from the morpheme M-L-K meaning "ownership", same as Baal. God owns living beings as explained in Exodus 13:2:
“Consecrate every firstborn male to me, the firstborn from every womb among the Israelites, both man and domestic animal; it is mine.”
What was Abraham prepared to do for the Jewish God? Sacrifice his firstborn son Isaac. Theologians like to see the Israelites as some enlightened gurus amidst a sea of cannibalistic monsters but the truth is they were exactly the same as their neighbors.

I haven't commented on the connection to Phoibos yet because to me it is the most worthy of investigation. If what you say is right, then Jacob seems to be worshipping Apollo who is the same as El Shaddai. But how could it be that El and Apollo are the same since Apollo is a Sun God and El is Saturn? Well, I will let Franz Boll, prominent philologist and scholar of Classical Greece, respond: "Kronos and Helios were originally one and the same".

This means that if Apollo is Helios/Kronos' son, then we would have to find a counterpart in Canaanite mythology, should we not? As it turns out, there is one son of El which fits this description. His name? Yaw.
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ConfusedEnoch
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Re: Fear of Isaac

Post by ConfusedEnoch »

Apollo, Abelios, Baal. Why did most civilizations have to add this story of a quasi-human character defeating the All-Father and taking his power (And even his title) ?

Was Cronus a bad god? Was El? No. But they represented something that we humans no longer have need of. The God of Time is the Creator and the Destroyer, he is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the beginning and the end. He is the god of Destiny, Fate, Birth, Death. He is the one who kills people when a volcano erupts or a meteor hits. He is the Grim Reaper, he decides everything about your life. We don't need civilizations or medicine or science or engineering or astronomy if everything is dictated by this one entity. So in a way, even though he is the Demiurge, the Designer, the Creator, he is the ultimate enemy of Mankind.

If someone can defeat Death, then they have defeated Time. If someone changes their Destiny, then they have defeated Time. If someone understands what morality is, or in other words what Good and Evil are, then they have taken that ability from God and given it to themselves.

There is a reason why Mithraism was such a successful cult. Mithras is a trickster deity-turned-God. He kills the Heavenly Bull in the Tauroctony and cuts off its genitals (Like Zeus castrates Cronus). He is associated with the Sun and basically steals the Sun Chariot from the corresponding sun-god. (Like Apollo and Helios). He is associated with the Serpent of Knowledge (Like Hermes and Satan) who grants immortality to he who seeks Gnosis. The mystery surrounding this cult is the simple result of the rich thinking the poor don't deserve their "secrets", most of which were either psychedelic or astrological in nature.

It is a fact that at one point, almost the entire Near East and Mediterranean coast was initiated into the Mithraic "secrets", especially when it comes to nobility. Interestingly, Mithraism almost completely disappeared with the advent of Christianity, even though the Roman Empire was obsessed with Mithras. Many scholars have found similarities between Mithraism and Christianity, enough to try to draw conclusions as to why this powerful cult would dissolve so quickly, but the truth is that Christianity is simply a dumbed-down version of Mithraism that was used to brainwash and manipulate civilizations for centuries into giving their riches and lives to the "Church". The New Testament contains almost no insight into the past and the Old Testament (especially the MT and KJV) are revised pseudepigraphal books of misinterpretations and mistranslations. The true history of religious thought lies in the lost authentic texts of the Phoenicians, the pre-Homeric Euhemeristic accounts of Ancient Greeks and the eradicated polytheistic cults of Egypt.
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ConfusedEnoch
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Re: Fear of Isaac

Post by ConfusedEnoch »

Oh and another fun parallel is one that explains Isaac's name. Ugaritic texts dating from the 13th century BCE refer to the benevolent smile of the Canaanite deity El with epithets like D-H-K or TS-H-KH referencing his laugh.
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