Amedeo

From literary information of Classical Greece we learn about certain Greek people called Essenes:

Singular: Essen [epsilon sigma sigma, eta, nu]
Plural: Essenoi [Esseni, in Latin].

An Essene was a priest of the virgin Diana (Artemis), a moon goddess (the crescent moon of the triple goddess) and queen of the wilderness, often depicted as the huntress. The Artemis of the Essenes was the Artemis of Ephesus, whose rich meaning and history is beyond the scope of the present essay. [Se the Wikipedia article, etc. etc.]

Whereas the word "essene" denotes and priest of Artemis, its meanins is not obvious (for us who not speak ancient Greek); however, affine words -- words with the same etym -- reveal the meaning:

The Ionic verb Essoomai [epsilon, etc.] = the Attic verb Essaomai [eta, etc.], which means: to succumb, to yield, to stay low. Wherefore,
Ionic Esson = Attic Esson, means: Weaker, more withdrawing, and the like.

Thus an Essene is a yielding or humble person or what in Christian monasticism is called a Minor Friar ("frate minore"), a member of the humbler sector of a religious Order.

The members of a certain sect of ancient Israel (the People whose religion is Judaism), in the Palestine territory, were called by the Greeks (of the 1st century B.C.) Essenes; that is, Essenoi, with the same letters of the name of the Greek Essenes. A slightly different name was also employed:

Essaioi, plural of Essaios (epsilon sigma sigma alpha omicron iota sigma), which is the plain addjective, used as a noun: weak, withdrawing, etc.

From the presence of these two names, there is no doubt that the name for that sect of Judaic people is from the cited Greek words. It is unknown what the Judaic Essenes called themselves, and no name of theirs was ever mentioned in the Christian Scriptures. This has been noted by some scholars who saw that, on the contrary, the Gospels mention Pharisees and Sedducees. But I doubt that the Greek-called Essenes had a special name for themselves, since they considered themselves to be the true Israelites (in contradistinction to the Judeans).

The earliest Essenes, of whom there is no historical record, must have been the people who insisted on a political division which became the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel [which consisted largely of Galilee]. As Israelites, the Galileans worshipped El, the God of Genesis-1, whereas the Judeans were the worshippers of Yahweh, whose House they erected in Jerusalem, or Yahweh Sabbaoth whose Ark they held and lost (long before God's House was destroyed).

In a sense, the Essenes were the followers of Abraham rather the Moses. As members of their own political society, they were "spiritualists," whereas the Judeans were "secularists (with a clear distinction between "church" and "state"). Thus the Pharisees were the "legalists" in the eyes of the Galilean and probably Essenic Jesus of Nazareth, whereas the Essenes live by the spirit of the Law.

The Essenes were Judaic "puritans" and monastically oriented. They withdraw, instead of protruding or forcing. They would see brothers in the Taoists and in the Greek Orphics. The Orphic "withdrawal" or receding from public view is clearly found of the Eleusinian rites, which are not religious rites but rites of immortality.

The Orphics are so called after the prophet and poet Orpheus (singer of the gods), otherwise they have no specific name for their whole ideology (conception of reality, policy as to how to live and behave, etc.). We know, however, that theirs was not a religion of the celestial gods, that they believed that man is a body and a soul, and that they believed in the immortality of the soul. The Essence have a similar ideological perspective, which is different from the Judaic belief in the resurrection of the whole man in some future epoch. (The belief in a soul and in the immortality of the soul is not a universal belief of Caucasoid people; it is specifically Thracian-Greek in origin and must have been in the population of the Levant before the Arab incursions and the mixing of languages and religions, around 3000 B.C.)

It seems to me that the Judeans preserved (and then developed) an ancestral celestial religion and some of the language in the Levant, that the Philistines were an unmixed Graeco-Levantine population until they were overwhelmed by the Judeans led by the followers of Moses, and that the Essenes preserved, after the conquest by the Arabs [the Araboid peoples who formed Canaan, the Hebrews included, and Akkaad] Orphic-like anthropological beliefs and living perspectives which were alien to the Judaeans (that is, those Israelites that instituted themselves in Judaea). In a word, the Essenes and the Judaeans, so named after the historical split, preserved different cultural elements from the pre-occupied Caucasoid and Greek speaking Levant. [Of course, I am not going by the Bible account, which has human history beginning in the real agricultural-metallurgical Era of mankind. It speaks of the Middle East AFTER the historical events I am citing clues for. It is an irrelevant Book for the history of the Jews and others.]

In view of these cultural distinctions, we must infer that Jesus the Galilean was not an Essene (though similar in various ways), because Jesus preached salvation [from hell] which would occur after the end of the world. The doctine of the soul and its immortality is alien to Jesus. The Christians hold both beliefs: immortality of the soul and the eventual resurrection of the whole man (in an everlasting world of rewards and punishments), but this is another story.

Styrofoamdeity

(Moving this thread to Biblical History for a kick-around by the biblical galacticos).

mountainman

IMO an analysis of the surviving remnants of the neopythagorean
academic author Porphyry substantiates this inference, on the basis
that Porphyry (purportedly) writes about the Essenes, and that
Porphyry (purportedly) also writes about "the christians", and his
terminological distinctions preclude any sane person to hold the
view that Porphyry could have considered the two tribes to be
related.

Amedeo

Following # 1:
Points about the "other story," namely the story of the Gentiles who converted to Judaism through the preachings and recruitings of apostles of Jesus the King-Messiah --

In various posts of mine I expounded the thesis about the Gospels (the synoptic biographies of Jesus)
to the effect that each consists of the fusion of two biographies, that of Jesus the legitimate king of the Judeans (in the bloodline of King David) and that of Jesus the Scripture foretold Messiah. And the thesis that the Messiah's mission was to unite (bring back the strayed sheep) and save Israel from the fires of hell, after the IMMINENT [one-generation distant] catastrophe of the world.

Well, AFTER Jesus died (whether he was resurrected or not, and whether he ascended into heaven or not, the reins of the organization or mission were left in the hands of the Apostles, joined in by Saul of Tarsus.

What exactly were the Apostles to do now that Jesus was no longer here, that Jesus of Nazareth king of the Judeans was crufied and removed from the competition [in the contemporary social movements against the Herods and the Romans], and that the end of the world did not come???

Without the imminent collapse of the world, the messianic mission to the Israelites lost its momentum (which apparently never had to any large degree). So, one may say, the mission was made unto the Gentiles: Paul created a new idea of salvation, namely th salvation of mankind by the atonment of the divine Jesus on the cross. This pagan idea of atonment or, for that matter, of sacrificial offering for prosperity and success, is foreign to the Jesus and "culture" of the Gospels and, most importantly, the recruiting of the Gentiles [without requiring circumcision] was to be a period of time only. There was never any project of converting mankind to Judaism so that, through the death of Jesus, the Gentiles would share in the salvation of the old Israelites.

The recruting, I suggested, was in relation to the mission of Jesus the king. The Greek-edited story about Jesus eliminated almost everything that has to do with the royal Jesus.

What were the Gentiles taught? We assume there were told what we read in the Gospels, but presenting such biographies to people would be a story-teller's job, not a recruiter's. The Gospels -- the tales of what happened in the past -- don't induce Gentiles or anybody else to convert.

So, what did they teach? What was the "christian docrine" thay the Gentiles acquired? For one thing, they learned about the end of the world [though, as Peter said, at some unknown future time, not imminently] and the promise of resurrection. (The promise of immortality is the selling point of any religion.) Thus Paul made a great deal of the fact that Christ had conquered death and we, through him, would arise from death. So, one has to somehow become an ALTER CHRISTUS and be likewise immortal, such as the Dionysians did by ingesting and assimilating the blood and body of Dionysus; and such as the Eleusinian Greece-wide mystae became an ALTER KORA, by re-enacting her life. Paul -- who knew Greece, the Stoics, and spoke Greek -- employed pagan Gentile ritual-ideologies to win the Gentiles. And eventually, the Greek Gospel writers make Jesus speak at the last supper as Dionysus would: This is my body, etc. The homophagia of the ancient Dionysians was re-instituted in Jerusalem! (At the same time, the Greek theologians were Orphics, and their theology unites the doctrine of the resurrection, the doctrine of the immortal soul, and the doctrine of becoming immortal by assimilation -- by becoming like an immortal.) [For those who don't know, there is a branch of Greek Christian theology called "mystical theology." Do you get it? For example, it speaks of the priest as being or having become an "other Christ", just as the initiated Eleusinians, the Mystae, became a version of Kore and immortal or ever-returning, like Kore [the spring vegetation, the daughter of Demeter).]

In relation to the issue of immortality, then, all Christians were apocalyptics, and the written Apocalypse is the culmination of the creative imagination about the catastrophe and the kingdom to come, with Lord/King/Judge Jesus at its center. The Christian morals and renunciations of the world are all related to the preparation of oneself for the next life.

But if the apostolic teachings were to be simply an extension of Jesus's mission to the Jsraelites, why think of limiting the recruitment? And why, after the destruction of the temple, did the Gentile Christians institute themselves as the new People of God, a new church?... which finds itself written in the Gospels, as if Jesus has abandoned Israel and founded a new people, with himself at the head? There was no new Covenant, there was no new Abraham that repudiated the old one.

My new thesis is that the Apostotles [after 33 or so and before 70 A.D] still had reasons to believe that a person in the bloodline of David could get rid of the Herodian dynasty, and that the temporary recruitments of Gentile soldiers and civilians would lead to victory. This was not a spiritual recruitment, but a military one -- which seems strange, since all the Christian Scriptures are not really concerned with the royal Jesus, and his very death was transmuted into an event with a spiritual reason. (Any reader of the Gospels that misses the genealogy of Yeshua ben Josef and Herod's massacre of the innocents is bound to be startled by the fact that, for no logical reason, Jesus was crucified as the KING of the Judeans, and so stated in three languages.)

The history of the early Christians outside Palestine was written by pious Christian, who keep, on telling us of the persecution of the "Chrestians" , often called Judeans in early time, and holocausts of account of their being Christians... While the Romans were the most liberal people in the world, respecting all religions, and welcoming them within Rome itself. What persecutions? Maybe seditions. Maybe plots to undermine the Roman government, thus continuing the struggle against the Romans that was initiated in Palestine by various rebellious groups, including the followers of King Jesus.

What if, what if, as I wrote in my two-year-old post, "Here Lies the Ark," Jesus was really married to Mary Magdalene? If She had a child and/or expected one, it would make sense for the royalists to prepare the conditions to perpetuate the Davidic bloodline and to even send the Magdalene to a refuge. (According to a golden legend discovered by 12th century French monks, she joined a Jewish community near Marseilles, at Rennes-les-Chateau. Descendants were married by the Merovingians, and eventually, as I explained, crudases were organized to restore the throne of Jerusalem to Godfrey of Bouillon, of the bloodline of David, and nine Templars were appointed to search for and secure the lost Ark of the Covenant. / The location of the Ark I have pin-pointed by "detective work" remains to be excavated and, thus verified.)

Amedeo

With reference to # 1:

The point was made that the Greek denomination of a sect or faction of the Galilean Israelites, namely "essenes," was an original Greek name, that is, not a transcription of an Aramaic or Hebrew name. However, it may well be that that they had an Aramaic name that was practically synonymous with "essene."

It may well be that they were called Hasidim, even though the Judean Hasidim would be doctrinally different (that is, devoted to Yahweh and believeing in the future resurrection or in no future at all). It is in relation to the matter of certain Essenic doctrines that I said they preserved an archaic Greek tradition -- that was in the Levant before the advent of the Arabs there. [The prehistory of the Levant is obvious NOT in the Biblical accounts of the Middle East./ So, for example, the Chadeans/ Akkadians, of whom WE have history, appear in the Bible as a people or nation founded by some descendants of Noah, rather than as a people formed out of the interactions of "Arabs" and Sumerians. The nations that the Bible narrators spoke of were all founded monogenetically and complete, framed in their mythic genealogy that goes back to Noah, that blessed of God drunkard. Other ethnic cultures invented their own genealogies, as it was customary of the Agrarian/Heroic Age of mankind. The Greeks that also invented genealogies did not remain frozen in time, in their Agrarian/Heroic Age; they became historians!)

Amedeo

...
The Judeans preserved many words from their pre-commingling Levantine language (an archaic Greek, which was also shared by the Phoenicians and the pre-Latins). [I have barely begun to explore Phoenician; elsewhere, I have demonstrated the Greek origins of Latin in no uncertain terms. I am not going to prove anything here.] The most important words are theonyms, toponyms, ethnonyms -- which are preserved by people who move to new pastures as well as by people who are overwhelmed by some other culture. "Yahweh" and "Yehudah" are two cases in point.

"Hebrew" has been one of those Hebrew words which are hopelessly controversial for Semiticists, namely those who believe that that there is a pure language, called Semitic (after the language of the diecendants of the mythical Shem), and that this is the original language of mankind [the fully formed language with which Adam and Eve were created, and the Serpent was endowed with in his intelligent reality].

Hebrew =

-- (Hebrew) IBRI or IVRI [masculine], referring to people;
-- (Hebrew) IVRIT ['IVRITH] (feminine), referring to people.

My earliest information about the word was this: The Egyptians called the Israelites Habiri [an extended form of Habri or Ibri], which allegedly meant something like "bandit." (This would be naming them with a derogatory word.) But then there was no information as to whether the Egyptians learned the name from the Israelites [who were no bandits when they gained access to Egypt by Abraham's telling his wife to be his sister unto the Pharaoh], or they employed their own name for them after the God-sanctioned plunderers left.

"Ivri/Ivri" has been linked to other Hebrew words and supposedly it means, "traverse, cross over," such as one who crosses over the borders (or wanders about). How fitting a term for the so-called "wandering Jews"! Somebody must had had a premonition of a history to come. In truth, the Judeans have simply forgotten the meaning of such words as "yahweh" and "hebrew."

Hebrew/Ivri = (in New Testament Greek) EBRAIOS (noun and adjective).

-- Ebraios = EBRA + ios (which is an adjective forming ending).

A river in Thracia used to be called Ebr(os), but this is the name of the river whose meaning remains obscure. So, thus far, we do not know if "EBR-" is an etym shared by the two words, Ebros and Ebraios.

There is a bunch of Greek verbs which are affine to EBRAios, which are called defective; that is, defective in view of the fully formed conjugations of verbs at the second level of verb-forming. The earliest verbs were by nature "unique:" the grammatical forms were unique to individual verbs (as in the case of the English "to be:" am, art, is, are, was were, be, etc.) On the contrary, very early words, which are exant only in poems, are called poetic [in use].

-- Ebrakhon [epsilon, beta, rho, alpha, chi, omicron nu] (noted as having an aorist-looking prefix) = I resound, I make noise.// I see its etym as being Brakh-.

-- Ebrakhe and Brakhe = to make a din, to roar.

-- Brastes = that agitates, that shakes: participial adjective from Brasso and Bratto = I agitate, I make boil, etc.

The presence and the absence of the initial E- is attested in all of the above words.

Whereas EBRKH- coincides with the classical Greek word EBRAios,
BRATT- [or *Ebrat-] coincides with the Hebrew word IBRI/'IVRI/IVRIT.

So, an Ebrat or Ivri(t) or Hebrew is one who is noisy, makes a din, is agitated, or shakes -- perhaps, in one word, "a frenzied (or frenzical) person."

This meaning does not look like an epithet of a mainly shepherding people; at any rate, it is not a nationality or tribe name which they would give to themselves. We don't know the name of those people who lived near Paradise [N-W Mesopotamia] before the Arab incursions, any more than we know the name of those people who, upon settling in central Italy, were topologically called Latins, except for the clan called Quirites [which I have elucidated elsewhere]. It appears that "Quirites" and "Hebrews" were later surnames of Archaic Greek, Caucasoid, populations in different parts of the Middle East before 3000 B.C.

Amedeo

Is there such a thing as a Semitic language at all, apart from the historical connotations of the word "semitic [: of Shem]"? Of course there is. It is the language that, to begin with was spoken by the Arabs and the Ethiopians. Then, with reference to the Middle East, we could speak of "Semitic = Arabic." This would be correct to an extent, not but simply so.

To clarify the situation, I found that the Wikipedia article is excellent. A gree with an ancient Arab linguist that "kalam al-'Arab" (= the language of the Arabs" came to denote the uncontaminated [unmixed] language of the Bedouins. This "pure Arabic" is what elsewhere I called "Arabesque" in order to avoid all sorts of confusions. So, the language of the Bedouins, or the language of the Arabs, or the [pure] Semitic language (possibly spoken also by the ancient Ethiopians) is what I call Arabesque or the Arabesque Language.

The article is an excellent account about the word "arab" . It it an Arabesque word, but as designating an Arab person or Arab thing, it does no appear in the Qur'an. There, the word "arabiyyun" is used together with "mubinum" to describe the Koran itself, namely "intellegible (understandable)" and "clear." The Bibblical (Hebrew) word "`arav" can mean "the desert people," which would be the nomadic Bedouins; the word "arab" was used later on by Arabs to designate the sedentary Arabs (as of Mecca and Medina).

The Arabesque word "arab" (and "arabic" and "arabian" is stated in classical greek as ARABIOS [ar`abios], which has nothing to do with Greek words which may seem to contain the etym "arab-" or "arabi-". The resemblance is purely coincidental, since the meaning of the look-alike Greek words are totally different from what "arab" may designate or mean [as per the cited article]. Homonyns are not cognates.

In Greek, there are many verbs that refer to either some actions (or happenings), or to the sound that those actions or happenings produce. Occasionally, they have two affine verbs, one referring to certain actions or happenings, and the other referring to the production of related sounds. (I call the latter "twin verbs" (as they are not synonymous.)

I have before me a set of twin verbs (and affine words, such as nouns or adjectives), and I see that the sound-expressing verb is synonymous with a "defective" verb I mentioned above, while I was tracing the meaning of "hebrew."

-- Arasso; Attic Aratto = I beat, strike, hit.

-- Arabeo (and Arabizo) = I make noise, I resound, I clang -- used also with the specific meaning of : clangor of weapons and armors. [To be reminded that in Latin, Sonus = sound; Sonor = resounding, clangor (as in the clash of metallic shields).]

Affine words:

-- Arabeo < or > arabos [`arabos] = sound, din, clang.

-- Arasso/Aratto >
..... to aragma [`aragma], -atos = din, rattle, racket;
..... o aragmos, -ou = din, rattle, racket.

With the loss of the gamma [g], we have the words:

-- arama; aramatikos
-- aramos; aramou.

these are the bases of Aramaeus, Aramaean, and Aramaic. The name is applied to a population orginally in northern Mesopotamia [which would include the so-called Hebrews] and the language they spoke. Aramaic is, for instance the language of the Galileans (Jesus and the Essenes included).
(Aramaic and Hebrew -- as current names of languages -- designate impure Arab languages; that is, they are a mixture of Arabesque and Proto-Greek.) Did Hebrew differentiate itself , albeit slightly, from Aramaic after the formation of the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel? There are various clues to the effect that Aramic is the older language and is preserved in some of the Bible's accounts [in the Bible redacted by Judeans]; that Aramaic was the mixed language of all the Hebrews that organized as Israel and were led by Abraham from the environs of Paradise into Egypt. As the leader said, who knows what these tower builders are going to do next; let's move on. The tower builders were agrarian locals whose fortress or fortresses would secure them from the raids of non-agrarian people, such as the Hebrews.

There is a verb in my native dialect that is based on the din and screamings that raiders of fortresses used to make: "arruocculu." It = a(d)+rocca(m)+ulo [or ulizo, if it were Greek]. The verb is formed from the words, "To the Rock, to the Rock," yelled in chorus by the charging raiders. In effect, the word "hebrew" which means "frenzied," can refer to "screaming raiders." (Where did somebody find that "habiru" meant something like "brigand"? I don't know.)

It seems now that the two Levantine-Greek names, "hebrew" and "aramaic," are really synonymous. These two words are not of Arabesque ["Semitic"]
origin.

Amedeo

Correction in # 4

Alter Kora ====>> Altera Kora [or Cora; the Greek Kore].

Roger Pearse

These sorts of comments should always be referenced, surely? After all, "literary information" tells us nothing. Which authors, which works?

If this is all hearsay, what is the source of it?

I do not find this word ESSHN (or ESSEN) in Perseus, tho.

Evidence?

(ESSWMAI or (ESSAWMAI means "to be less than another, inferior to" according to Perseus, LSJ.

?

The Franciscans come into existence in the 13th century AD. But aren't we discussing things from the 4th century BC here?

Nothing found for these in Perseus.

Is it? Two similar-looking words four centuries apart prove connection and derivation, regardless of every other consideration of politics and culture?

The details of these rites are not preserved, tho, so are we saying anyone who wants privacy "would see brothers in the Taoists and the Greek Orphics"?

Lots of facts to be produced here, I think. On the face of it this is drivel, but perhaps there is more evidence for this than I can see.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Amedeo

Reply to # 9
Obviously you do not allow for ideological comparisons that one may make in passing. I do and I make them. However, the danger with comparisons lies in attributing too much to the primitive Levantine Essenes.
So, out of respect for the Taoists and the Franciscans, I would do well to retract my comparisons.

As the the rest, I rely on scholarly European dictionaries of Greek. For instance, the Bonazzi one includes historical notes as to who the Ephesian Essenes were and the goddess they served.

Your accusation or suspicion of DRIVEL is based on plain ignorance. You revealed NOTHING about any Essene or anything else.