Shabbat shalom. A lot of Biblical exegesis is spent on trying to understand the meaning of certain liminal figures in the Bible such as angels (lit. “messenges” in Hebrew), cherubim, nephalim (lit. “fallen”), dragons, and other such things.
It seems as though most such imagery comes from the Elohist framents of the Torah, those pieces that identify “God” as “Elohim”, which is the pluralized form of the Canaanite/pagan “El” god. Those who are trying to find some kind of ancient aliens in the Torah negate the possibility that the Torah is a quiltwork of Elohist, Yahwist (books where Yahweh is the deity), and other authors’ documents. They must, like any fundamentalist sect, assume that the Torah is a literary whole.
Naturally this brings up many issues, not least of which is the genealogy linking Abraham with Israel. The angels and aliens researchers out there believe Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and later Moses, Gideon, David, Ezekiel, Daniel and others were visited by various flesh-and-blood alien types who gave them the necessary wisdom and information to carry Yahweh’s Name to victory.
Let’s look at their interpretation of Abraham’s marriage to his (half) sister Sarah. Under patrilineal law, this would have been illegal and subjected them both to capital punishment, but the angels and aliens people use the same exegetical arguments to claim that the anti-incest laws of Leviticus hadn’t been given yet, granting free reign for the prince Abraham to marry whomever he wanted, engaging in a pseudo-Egyptian-style incestuous royal marriage. Or, more nefariously, they project their antisemitic rhetoric into Abraham who was tasked by Yahweh to “keep the race pure, by whatever means necessary.” The same logic might be applied to Moses’ father Amram who married his own aunt, or any other seeming violations of holy laws. Angels and aliens types don’t worry too much about the logic of this; if the ancient Hebrews violated their own laws to maintain a “pure Jewish race,” then all the better they can stick it to the Joos.
Without even commenting on the vapid antisemitism of many angel and alien types, we can simply dispatch with these interprations by citing basic anthropology. It’s most likely that Abraham married his half-sister completely legally; assuming that, like the rest of ancient Canaan (and even ancient Arabia until Islam) the ancient Hebrews operated under a matrilineal system, kinship and inheritance passed through the mother. Abraham and Sarah shared a father, but they had different mothers. This makes them perfectly marriageable in matrilineal society. Such a system might have been common among elites; kings married multiple women, all of whom came from different clans, and all of whose children could therefore intermarry, keeping the throne within the geographical family, without breaking incest laws.
We can see such a situation in the transfer of power from King Saul to David; Saul’s own son Jonathan, if he was his biological son, would not have been eligible for the throne since the scepter (likely) passed through the mother’s line in Benjamin. Saul’s nephew (through his sister(s)) would have inherited the throne instead, or else his maternal uncle, as we saw with Montezuma’s succession by his uncle and later his nephew. I’ve hypothesized that there are 2 David stories in 2 Samuel; 1. the Judean, shepherd, stone-and-sling David whom Saul never meets before fighting Goliath, and 2. the Benjamite, lyre-playing, archer David who is part of Saul’s court before fighting Goliath. The two stories are practically irreconcileable; only a short time after David plays the lyre for Saul, Saul is introduced to David for the first time at the battle scene. If David was actually Benjamite, it would make sense why Goliath would make fun of his “sticks,” as the Benjamites were renown archers. Regardless, whatever David’s original tribal affiliation, he acquires the throne legitimately by marrying Saul’s daughter, and the author takes pains to remind us that David didn’t use a sword, that he was very kind to Jonathan, and he definitely came from the tribe of Judah.
David is the first time the Judean monarchy turns completely patrilineal. His biological son Solomon, born of an Egyptian heiress, inherits the throne and, somehow, acquires a vast amount of wealth necessary to build the First Temple. The author again takes pains to remind us that Solomon definitely taxed Israel heavily to fund the temple. But it also seems possible that Solomon acquired his inheritance through his Egyptian mother. It comes in the form of movable capital like precious metals, grain, timber, and slaves, all of which are put to good use to make the First Temple.
Angels and aliens types will be on the fence about this. On the one hand, recasting the Davidic monarchy in a matrilineal lens confirms their suspicions that the First Temple was an Egyptian project; on the other, there are no demons or aliens needed to explain how Solomon acquired the resources to build the Temple. No Solomon’s Ring or any of that garbage. Just a very standard mode of kinship that was capable of doing very considerable public works projects, which had been tried and tested for millennia in Egypt and elsewhere.
Where Egypt seemed to fail, and Israel succeeded, was crafting a code whereby the wealth of the nation could be retained in the capital and not siphoned out due to another royal intermarriage. Egypt appeared to retain matrilineal descent, but Israel switched to patrilineal descent (and patrilocal marriage) to ensure that kings’ heirs and their property would stay put and be built upon generation after generation. This is how you build fortified cities.
Before Babylonian captivity, Judean royalty was probably still matrilineal. Read the books of 1 and 2 Kings; they always acknowledge that legitimate Judean kings’ mothers were also Judean. Once Nebuchadnezzar exiles the royal family, a new plan had to be concocted. This would have to wait for Persia apparently, which seemed more amenable to Judean independence. The lineage had to be rewritten along patrilineal lines to ensure there would be no power struggles that would threaten Persian hegemony. It’s possible that Ezra the scribal prophet was responsible for stitching together the necessary Elohist, Yahwist, Priestly, and Deuteronomist accounts, redacting some of the lineages, and superimposing a patrilineal narrative.
Ezra needs to be studied. No, he needs his own movie, right away. If he was responsible for compiling the Torah and making the redactions necessary to show the legitimacy of both Judean (political) and Levitical (priestly) claims to Jerusalem, then his work was easily the greatest retcon in human history. He makes the Levites look far cooler than Judeans. Whereas the Levites descend from a court noble in Egypt who becomes a leader of the people, Judah hs headed by a patriarch whose sons wouldn’t continue the line through Levirate marriage (see Genesis 38), forcing Judah to sleep with someone he thought was a whore on the road. Even David has to murder a guy just to produce an heir, and Solomon’s heir (and almost all Judean elites from then on) are painted as woefully inept. I often wonder if Ezra did this just to poke fun at the Judean political leadership. I’m not sure who merged the 2 David accounts, but he was also a genius, since the stories show clear fault lines between Judah and Benjamin, who shared a border. All this is done without actually disrupting the political legitimacy of Judah.
I also wonder if the Judean leadership begrudgingly let Ezra manhandle Israel’s history and recast the Judah tribe however he saw fit. The scribes were Levites, and a constitution had to be written, in the form of the Torah. What else could be done?
For sure, Ezra is my favorite author of all time. His Torah (if it’s his) convinced the Persian government to fund the construction of the Second Temple. Upon completion, the Judean government knew exactly what to do: enact a national and foreign policy that would ensure another Babylonian Exile never happened again.
When one reads Maccabees, it’s clear that this formula was rock solid. Despite being at the crossroads of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Rome, under the Hasmoneans Israel retained this same policy which, net net, survived and bested all of these empires. Much of antisemitism is a reaction against such ridiculously solid generational fortification. It’s really an angry bashing against one’s inner, crying child, who can’t find his generational (or genetic) identity in technological society. But it’s also the cry of someone who fails to understand simple kinship. Antisemites (and angel and alien types) believe the veracity of the Bible (and its patrilineal retcon) just as much as any Bible-thumper.
The ROBA Hypothesis states that, since violence is co-generative with kinship, along with language, religion, and all of human culture, then there are always mechanisms at work to try and ensure a person, family, and group are protected against the violence of other people, families, and groups. Inheritance transfers and marriage are integral to this process; but scribes are also always using the power of the pen to recast history according to the paradigm that ensures the survival of the fittest. This also takes the form of aberrant Chinese family trees which begin to mysteriously exclude matriarchs and intertribal marriages; understanding these things would be a clear cipher into understanding Chinese totem clans and esoteric martial art systems; but if we remain “true believers” and trust the retcons, we can’t discern the real past. The same goes for the Bible. We need to get over our fear of the Word; it still points to the Almighty, but we must be able to read beyond the pen of geniuses like Ezra.
So if we apply this kinship lens throughout the Bible, and even expand it broadly over historical time, we can understand how major cities suddenly arise, invent seemingly miraculous technologies, and how they can rapidly fall. Kinship is a useful cipher for seeing through the incessant stream of angels and aliens gibberish; all we need to do is recast royal family dynamics in a new light, and suddenly the entire history of cities, and Jerusalem in particular, makes complete sense. Cities do not arise due to ancient aliens or demonic spells and rings; they are recepticles for multiple streams of royal intermarriage, where resources can be siphoned from foreign treasuries into massive public works projects that defy human understanding.
My book If These Fists Could Talk discusses such kinship matters briefly and is available on Amazon January of 2025, but I plan on writing a more complete book on the kinship of violence in the future, a book which I hope finally cuts the Gordian knot of the mysterious South Shaolin Temple, the conspiratorial nature of Buddhist temple cities in China and Japan, and of course the true origins of animal martial art systems.