“Yehouah of Hosts” and the “Hosts of Heaven” occur often in the Jewish scriptures. This Yehouah of Hosts is often described as sitting enthroned on the cherubim. The conspicuous object sitting among the host of heaven is the sun, and a reference in the El Amarna tablets is to a “sun of thousands”, a Canaanite expression closely similar to Yehouah of Hosts. Psalms 80 has a refrain repeated three times:
Turn us again, O Yehouah, God of hosts, and cause thy face to shine and we shall be saved.
Psalms 80:3,7,19
And:
O Yehouah of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold.
The clergy for whom these books are the word of an invisible and transcendental god, do not read them themselves, or when they do they invite us to believe that all of this imagery is metaphorical! K Vollers in 1900 told us that Yehouah was a sun god, but those with a vested interested in religion, the pious liars, closed ranks against him, and over a century later, few believers have been made any the wiser. No reasonable person can avoid concluding that Yehouah was once the sun, whatever the clergy say He is today. As H-P Stahli has shown, Jewish prayers, as late as the Greek period sometimes explicitly identified Yehouah with Helios, the Greek sun god:
Hail, Helios, thou God in the heavens, your name is Almighty.
Helios on the cherubim.
Yet, in Deuteronomy, worship of the sun is twice specifically forbidden. In Deuteronomy 4:19, the worship of heavenly bodies is expressly forbidden. That it should have to be forbidden so emphatically, however, shows that it was a practice that had been happening. Moreover, the law stated that the host of heaven should not be worshipped by the people addressed, the Jews—they had been provided by God for other nations to worship.
The next passage, Deuteronomy 17:3, is even more emphatic, saying that worshippers of the heavenly bodies must be stoned to death. J Glen Taylor (Yahweh and the Sun, Sheffield, 1993), for whom we are indebted for much of this material, suggests that the real issue in these commandments that seem to have been so flagrantly ignored is iconism—not that Yehouah was not conceived as the sun or the heavenly host but that He could not be depicted as them.
Perhaps so, but more likely might be that these verses have been added to the law at a later date when the evolution of the religion had led it into a belief in an invisible and transcendental god. The fact that Yehouah is now seen as an invisible god, both immanent and transcendental at the same time, does not mean He was always thus, and the bible shows it. Religions are conservative institutions, it is true, but even they evolve, and occasionally undergo revolutions. Sadly, believers cannot accept evolution in religion any more than many of them can accept it in life. They cannot conceive that human beings can add to and delete from, and alter texts, even holy ones, and so they finish believing what is impossible, contrary to the brain that they have in their heads, presumably courtesy of their own god.
If Yehouah was not represented by the Host of Heaven and had no idolatrous or astrological connexions, it is hard to see why much of the paraphernalia of the tabernacle, temple and the priesthood was manifestly astrological, according to reputable commentators such as Josephus and Clement of Alexandria. How is it possible for a Yehouah of the Hosts of Heaven to live in a wooden box in a tent, or even in a temple?
The explanation is that Yehouah was originally worshipped outdoors, beneath the celestial hemisphere, in al fresco churches on hills called “high places”. Even after the temple had been introduced, a controversial act, altars were set up on its roofs, to imitate a “high place”, where hymns and prayers would be sung to the heavens at night and the sun from before dawn to dusk at the several stations it passed through on its journey across the sky.
Yehouah was originally a Canaanite Baal, a storm god, but the Yehouah as we know Him began as Ahuramazda, the Persian High God, who wore the heavens as His “massy cloke” showing that He was mightier than the host of heaven because they were merely His outer appearance. Thus it was that the Persian colonists introduced Him to the Jews as Yehouah of Hosts (Yehouah Sebaoth).
The Persians originally had no idea of worshipping a god of the universe in a confined space, and did it in the open on natural or artificial mounds, but, after about 100 years of empire, the Persian royal family had been civilized by the Babylonians and their habits were asserting themselves. Babylonians worshipped in temples, albeit pyramid shaped ones. These temples also acted as banks and treasuries. The Persians set one up in Jerusalem.
The Persians seemed to rationalize the worship of a cosmic god in a “house” by regarding the house as a stairway or bridge to heaven, as apparently the Babylonians did. Like the Babylonian models, it was built on a series of ascending platforms, with the highest one reserved for God—the Holy of Holies—a sort of gateway to the cosmos. This room had its entrance oriented to the east, so that for a few days twice a year the rising sun would directly illuminate the otherwise dark and windowless room, filling it with the glory of God.
Afterward he brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh toward the east: And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noise of many waters: and the earth shined with his glory.
Ezekiel 43:1
The glory of God can only be solar. These occasions were the two equinoxes, when the religious and the civic years began.
In the Holy of Holies, God is conceived of as sitting on the Ark of the Covenant between the cherubim. Cherubim are winged sphinx-like creatures that guarded entrances and thrones. Particularly large examples were found in the ruins of Assyria. In the bible they are identified as having four faces, and these equate with the four constellations at the four zodiacal points—Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, Eagle (Scorpio). Christians will note that these are the four images of the evangelists! Thus, cherubs are celestial objects which, in the scriptural metaphor, God, being the sun, could ride on with the clouds.
The long-ass movie I posted in conjunction with a thread one time had a bunch of connections of this sort.
It's just another layer to add onto the number of pagan and/or esoteric traditions that were assimilated into Christianity, because the evidence (especially in the Old Testament) is startling.
I can post the link again, but it's almost 2 hours long, so it's kind of a drag to watch.
KMC Community Forums
Oct 19th, 2006 09:34 PM
