While Working on Neville Goddard and the Wisdom of Solomon
Erico,
Sorry, but I am working on something else. I wanted to remember what Maimonides said about angels being forces, and this article, below, came up. It addresses (in a way) the idea you are asking about (how much, if any, of the Bible is literal history). I do not know if any of the Bible is record of what we call literal history. And yet it is true -- the world is as the Bible says it is -- just not like that. You will note the 'imagic' part of my handle: imagicworldview. The world we experience is an image of the Ineffable Most High (...?) we cannot experience. The world we experience, "history" as we have it, our personal situations and all are the vocabulary of that Ineffable Being explaining Itself to us--to form us into Its Self (which we are, but we are not acting like It--which is why we are here getting fixed).
I obviously cannot explain it all, but please allow me to point you in what I think is the right direction for the moment. I am deep in thought about Proverbs chapter 8's Child - the wisdom of God constituted as a young "son" (around verse 22 and following). Through this Child God created all states of existence there would ever be, i.e., eternity, BEFORE BEGINNING TIME. The Hebrew word for this child, a stripling, is 'olam. In Ecclesiastes 3: 11, Solomon notes that God put eternity, this Child, 'olam, in our hearts. This is what Neville Goddard was teaching. The Child is becoming through the manifestation of all the states throughout history. My thought right now is that the final, complete, and fully mature Child is the Milta (Aramaic), the Manifestation of the Ineffable (as much as It can become manifest). THAT state of the Ineffable, the Milta, Its wisdom so constituted BEFORE THE BEGINNING, is Eternal Self-knowing Deity, God Incarnate, Lord and Master over EVERYTHING. Or what we call It: "Jesus Christ"-- the Kingdom of God IN US.
It is real, but "history" may just be communication of this reality to us. So, a real guy, and not a real guy. The Bible is true; its "history" is true...just not like that.
Maimonides on Angels
Maimonides uses the words “angel”, “miracle”, “God” and “providence” … but he utterly disagrees with the traditional, perhaps Orthodox, definition of those terms.
Rabbi Simchah Roth, זצ״ל, of blessed memory, discussed this issue in his famed Mishnah Rabin Study Group. Here he gives and an introduction – and then quotes Maimonides at length. Quite stunning.
http://www.bmv.org.il/html/rmsg.asp
____________________
I do not think anyone will find it difficult to understand why Rambam (Maimonides) sees every physical reference to the Deity, even the remotest, as being pure metaphor and not to be understood literally. God does not sit, God does not speak, God does not really have “a strong hand and an outstretched arm” – the list of examples could be endless.
As far as Rambam is concerned all such expressions are no less obviously metaphoric than for us, say, lines such as John Donne’s “Death, be not proud … Death, thou shalt die” or Homer’s “Gossomer-clad dawn”.
Death is not really a personal entity, and neither, of course, is the dawn, so the dawn cannot wear any clothes at all! And even the most patriotic American knows, when singing “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing”, that the home of liberty is not listening, cannot listen.
“It is all pure metaphor, simile and anthropomorphism” as Rambam so lucidly put it.
Now let us ask how this Deity, whose verity is so incomprehensible to us that we can only speak of God in metaphoric terms – how can this Deity be associated with angels? Maimonides writes:
Now you already know that it is very difficult for people to apprehend, except after strenuous training, that which is absolutely devoid of physicality… Because of the difficulty of this matter, the books of the prophets contain statements whose external sense can be understood as signifying that angels are corporeal, that they move, that they have human form, that they are given orders by God and that they carry out God’s orders…
[Rambam, Guide for the Perplexed, 1:49]
All forces are angels. How great is the blindness of ignorance and how harmful! If you told a person who is one of those who deem themselves one of Israel’s sages that the Deity sends an angel, who enters the womb of a woman and forms the fetus there, he would be pleased with this assertion and would accept it and would regard it as a manifestation of greatness and power on the part of the Deity… But if you tell him that God has placed in the sperm a formative force shaping the limbs … and that this force is a “Mal’akh” … the man would shrink from this opinion…
[Ibid. 2:6]
Rick Dinitz sent me (the author of the article) the following:
Rambam’s distinction is too subtle for me. Please explain what difference it makes to Rambam’s hypothetical sage whether God sends the angel directly into the womb, or God places the angel in the sperm and the angel arranges transportation to the womb where it does its work.
I responded to Rick privately as follows:
Moreh Nevukhim [“Guide for the Perplexed”] was originally written in Arabic with Hebrew quotations and phrases interspersed. When the phrase “Chakhmei Yisrael” occurs in the middle of an Arabic sentence in the Guide, experience – gradually built up throughout the work – teaches us that the term here is being used in a derogatory fashion. What Rambam was saying was that most “religious” people are prepared to believe in angels but are not prepared to believe that the forces of nature are the angels – the messengers of God through which the purposes of the Deity are effected. He explains that this is why the Bible, intended for a “mass readership”, accords angels the humanoid physicality that it does. He thinks that the perceptive intellectual will perceive beyond that.
Damn. Almost lends credence to the Law of Attraction.
Erico,
One more thing: I almost started a course on meditation recently. But because the director or CEO of the company offering the course curses in his advertisements, I decided to not associate myself with them. It struck me then, God can certainly teach me how to meditate. His course is almost scary: revelation and insights; comprehension and understanding. May I encourage you, if you have not already, ask God to teach you how to meditate and pray.
Thanks for reading my blog and for the questions.
Dan Steele
Sorry, but I am working on something else. I wanted to remember what Maimonides said about angels being forces, and this article, below, came up. It addresses (in a way) the idea you are asking about (how much, if any, of the Bible is literal history). I do not know if any of the Bible is record of what we call literal history. And yet it is true -- the world is as the Bible says it is -- just not like that. You will note the 'imagic' part of my handle: imagicworldview. The world we experience is an image of the Ineffable Most High (...?) we cannot experience. The world we experience, "history" as we have it, our personal situations and all are the vocabulary of that Ineffable Being explaining Itself to us--to form us into Its Self (which we are, but we are not acting like It--which is why we are here getting fixed).
I obviously cannot explain it all, but please allow me to point you in what I think is the right direction for the moment. I am deep in thought about Proverbs chapter 8's Child - the wisdom of God constituted as a young "son" (around verse 22 and following). Through this Child God created all states of existence there would ever be, i.e., eternity, BEFORE BEGINNING TIME. The Hebrew word for this child, a stripling, is 'olam. In Ecclesiastes 3: 11, Solomon notes that God put eternity, this Child, 'olam, in our hearts. This is what Neville Goddard was teaching. The Child is becoming through the manifestation of all the states throughout history. My thought right now is that the final, complete, and fully mature Child is the Milta (Aramaic), the Manifestation of the Ineffable (as much as It can become manifest). THAT state of the Ineffable, the Milta, Its wisdom so constituted BEFORE THE BEGINNING, is Eternal Self-knowing Deity, God Incarnate, Lord and Master over EVERYTHING. Or what we call It: "Jesus Christ"-- the Kingdom of God IN US.
It is real, but "history" may just be communication of this reality to us. So, a real guy, and not a real guy. The Bible is true; its "history" is true...just not like that.
Maimonides on Angels
Maimonides uses the words “angel”, “miracle”, “God” and “providence” … but he utterly disagrees with the traditional, perhaps Orthodox, definition of those terms.
Rabbi Simchah Roth, זצ״ל, of blessed memory, discussed this issue in his famed Mishnah Rabin Study Group. Here he gives and an introduction – and then quotes Maimonides at length. Quite stunning.
http://www.bmv.org.il/html/rmsg.asp
____________________
I do not think anyone will find it difficult to understand why Rambam (Maimonides) sees every physical reference to the Deity, even the remotest, as being pure metaphor and not to be understood literally. God does not sit, God does not speak, God does not really have “a strong hand and an outstretched arm” – the list of examples could be endless.
As far as Rambam is concerned all such expressions are no less obviously metaphoric than for us, say, lines such as John Donne’s “Death, be not proud … Death, thou shalt die” or Homer’s “Gossomer-clad dawn”.
Death is not really a personal entity, and neither, of course, is the dawn, so the dawn cannot wear any clothes at all! And even the most patriotic American knows, when singing “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing”, that the home of liberty is not listening, cannot listen.
“It is all pure metaphor, simile and anthropomorphism” as Rambam so lucidly put it.
Now let us ask how this Deity, whose verity is so incomprehensible to us that we can only speak of God in metaphoric terms – how can this Deity be associated with angels? Maimonides writes:
Now you already know that it is very difficult for people to apprehend, except after strenuous training, that which is absolutely devoid of physicality… Because of the difficulty of this matter, the books of the prophets contain statements whose external sense can be understood as signifying that angels are corporeal, that they move, that they have human form, that they are given orders by God and that they carry out God’s orders…
[Rambam, Guide for the Perplexed, 1:49]
All forces are angels. How great is the blindness of ignorance and how harmful! If you told a person who is one of those who deem themselves one of Israel’s sages that the Deity sends an angel, who enters the womb of a woman and forms the fetus there, he would be pleased with this assertion and would accept it and would regard it as a manifestation of greatness and power on the part of the Deity… But if you tell him that God has placed in the sperm a formative force shaping the limbs … and that this force is a “Mal’akh” … the man would shrink from this opinion…
[Ibid. 2:6]
Rick Dinitz sent me (the author of the article) the following:
Rambam’s distinction is too subtle for me. Please explain what difference it makes to Rambam’s hypothetical sage whether God sends the angel directly into the womb, or God places the angel in the sperm and the angel arranges transportation to the womb where it does its work.
I responded to Rick privately as follows:
Moreh Nevukhim [“Guide for the Perplexed”] was originally written in Arabic with Hebrew quotations and phrases interspersed. When the phrase “Chakhmei Yisrael” occurs in the middle of an Arabic sentence in the Guide, experience – gradually built up throughout the work – teaches us that the term here is being used in a derogatory fashion. What Rambam was saying was that most “religious” people are prepared to believe in angels but are not prepared to believe that the forces of nature are the angels – the messengers of God through which the purposes of the Deity are effected. He explains that this is why the Bible, intended for a “mass readership”, accords angels the humanoid physicality that it does. He thinks that the perceptive intellectual will perceive beyond that.
Damn. Almost lends credence to the Law of Attraction.
Erico,
One more thing: I almost started a course on meditation recently. But because the director or CEO of the company offering the course curses in his advertisements, I decided to not associate myself with them. It struck me then, God can certainly teach me how to meditate. His course is almost scary: revelation and insights; comprehension and understanding. May I encourage you, if you have not already, ask God to teach you how to meditate and pray.
Thanks for reading my blog and for the questions.
Dan Steele
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