Review
Talking with God: The Radioactive Ark of the Testimony
Roger D. Isaacs
Sacred Closet Books
417 pages
In the world of the late Sixties, when I came of age, Reality was something hard, impenetrable, fixed. It was fronted by a System of centralized economies and transnational corporations, with their supporting network of politicians and bureaucrats that seemed impregnable. What better proof of this than that System commanded vast armies that enforced its will. With its bombers and napalm the System could, in moments, wipe out a jungle village and transform living flesh into jelly.
But there were challenges to the System—the Civil Rights Movement and the Counter-Culture. But the System’s two greatest challengers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were murdered, while the war in Southeast Asia ground on.
At first appearance, the hippies seemed a hopeful presence. But in retrospect they were not serious counters to the System, simply members of a sideshow that dropped their costumes and eventually merged back into the middle class from which they had emerged.
But along with spectacle, the Counter-Culture provided several highly popular literary works that defied the absolutism of the presumed Reality. Two best selling books stand out: a French volume translated as The Morning of the Magicians by physicist Jacques Bergier and journalist Louis Pauwel and The Teachings of Don Juan by anthropologist Carlos Castenada. While The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels, supposedly accounts of a Yaqui shaman’s instructions for gaining super-human powers, are works of imagination palmed off as anthropological research, The Morning of the Magicians is much more—a compendium of facts and speculations, ancient and modern, whose effect on me was liberating. The bulk of the writings failed to persuade me to embrace the authors’ intended message: namely, the seemingly infinite possibilities for the human intellect and personality. Rather, the collection was an explosive opening into a new world, one which conventional schooling and common sense denied. Through its numerous examples from a variety of cultures, it persuaded me that the Other, call it the hyper-Real or whatever, could break through onto our plane of existence. The seeming miraculous could occur.
Since the sixties there has been no work that I am aware of (until now) that seriously challenges our common sense account of how things work. The common sense account dismisses out of hand the possibility of any intrusion of the divine or the Other into the everyday. But now Roger Isaacs has given us Talking with God (2010) a provocative work, a precis of which would fit comfortably inside Berger’ and Pauwels’ book. Given that our culture is, philosophically, materialist, Isaac’s thesis will at first glance seem absurd to many. But Talking with God is not a book for the counter-culture; it is a work of great scholarship, and its thesis is backed with comparative linguistics so dense that it would never stand a chance of making the New York Times’ Best Seller list.
It deserves a wide hearing.
Talking with God takes its stand on two premises. The first holds that the first five books of the Bible containing accounts of the Hebrews sojourn in Egypt and subsequent wanderings are fact. This puts him at odds with most intellectuals, who are ready to dismiss ancient accounts as fiction, legend, wishful thinking, and so on. Consider, for example, that until Schliemann excavated the coast of Asia Minor, searching for the remains of Troy, that ancient city was presumed a fabrication. We forget that the ancients cultivated the memory. They had to: they did not have written records.
Let us recall that Exodus records that a cloud of dust preceded the Israelites by day, leading them across the wilderness of Shur, then of Sin and Sinai into Canaan. By night it appeared as a pillar of fire. If the cloud was said to have appeared only when God led them across this wilderness, we could explain the cloud as a literary device. But the cloud appears later, again and again, and when it appears the ancient Hebrews said the Lord’s voice spoke from it to Moses, Aaron, or the sons of Aaron. Isn’t this more than a literary device?
Isaacs’ second premise holds that the laws, prohibitions and adjurations primarily in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers were not arbitrary injunctions, as they seem to many today, but were necessary to protect the Israelites. Those who did not take protective measures before coming into contact with the cloud, or the ark of the covenant, or with the cloud that descended upon it—these had to be purified. They were “unclean.” What then was the relation between the ark, the cloud, and the need for purification?
Those who came into contact with the cloud or the ark without protection developed sores and other disfigurements that resembled the sores and lesions of people exposed to radiation. Also, remember that the cloud that accompanied the Hebrews on their forty year trek through the wilderness appeared as a cloud of dust by day and a pillar of fire by night. Isaacs writes that a radioactive cloud would appear red at night. It was from this radioactivity that the Hebrews needed protection.
Isaacs writes: “When the cloud transmitted the dangerous condition first on Mt. Sinai, then on the tent and the Ark, the Ark soaked up the radiation from the cloud. Thus, it became highly radioactive and dangerous, and it remained so.” (p. 109)
Here is but one example of the effects of the cloud: the Book of Numbers recounts that God called Moses, his sister Miriam and Aaron out of a meeting tent. The Lord was angry with Miriam and Aaron for speaking against Moses, “And the anger of the Lord glowed against them, and He went away.
“And the cloud departed from above the tent, and behold Miriam [was] leprous as snow.” (Isaacs’ translation.)
Isaacs notes that the Hebrew word tsawra-at has been translated “leprosy” but that it also means “burn,” which is consistent with his theory.
Further bolstering his theory is Leviticus 13. It begins: “And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron saying, When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy; then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of the sons of the priests; And the priest shall look on the plague in the skin of the flesh: and when the hair in the plague is turning white, and the place be deeper than the skin of the flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him and proclaim him unclean.” (King James version)
The descriptions of the various degrees of leprosy (burns) and the priests’ responses run for a total of 46 verses.
Another startling indication of the ark’s potential danger was revealed to the Philistines after they captured it. Samuel 1:4-5 tells us that the Hebrews and Philistines fought two battles. At the first battle, the Philistines defeated the Israelites, who then brought the ark with them out of Shiloh into a second battle, where the Philistines again defeated them and captured the ark. The Philistines brought the ark to Ashdod, where the inhabitants were stricken with emerods. From Ashdod they brought it to Gath, but the people of Gath, young and old, were also stricken with emerods. So the Philisitines moved it again, this time to Ekron, but the people there cried, “They have brought about the ark of the God of Israel to us to slap us and our people.” (King James) Many in Ekron called for the ark to be removed, “for there was a deadly destruction [plague] throughout all the city, . . . and the men that died not were smitten with the emeralds.” (King James) The ark was returned to the Hebrews.
The Hebrew word t’chorim translated “emerods” means “hemorrhoids,” but also means “tumors.” Here we have another account that the modern rationalist is likely to dismiss. But the account is there, and does not strike me as literary invention. Something happened. Something extraordinary.
Now we come to the ark of the covenant, also called the ark of the testimony. At Mt. Sinai, where God spoke to Moses from a cloud and gave him the two stone tablets, he also gave him directions for constructing the ark of the testimony, the mercy seat, and the cherubim.
The heart of Talking with God lies with Isaacs’ contention that the ark, the two stone tablets, and the cherubim were parts of a device by which God communicated to the Hebrews. He thinks that the stones, which Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai, were the heart of the communication device. The cherubim, which were placed across from each other on the lid of the ark, were antennae that attracted communication waves. Then, when God wanted to talk to the Israelites, the cloud descended over the tent covering the ark.
All this is described in Exodus 25, 17-21. The King James’ version of the arrangement reads: “And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold . . . and thou shalt make two cherubim of gold . . . even of the mercy seat shall ye make the cherubim on the two ends thereof . . . “ The mercy seat is the lid of the Ark, the place for annual atonement sacrifice. “ . . . and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee.”
Then, verse 22 reads: “And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony.”
Without reading Isaacs’ text (with his interpretation of ancient events backed by his linguistic research) it is difficult to appreciate the seriousness of his project. Through his exhaustive research Isaacs offers alternate, accepted meanings for key Hebrew words that put events in a different light from traditional translations. We have seen that tsawra-at means not only “leprosy” but “burn,” and that t’chorim means not only “hemorrhoids” but “ulcers.” Many of the key words alternate meanings are buttressed by their cognates in Egyptian, Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian, Middle Babylonian, Standard Babylonian, Old and Middle Assyrian, and Ugaritic—cognates which Isaacs provides.
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To the rationalist who denies transcendent being, I ask, “How did the first matter come into existence?” The rationalist’s only answer can be, “It just happened.” But, you rationalist, who believes that every effect must have a cause, how do you come to believe in this one miracle, that matter’s first appearance had no cause? You deny all others but believe in this, what would be—were it true—the most astounding of miracles?
Buy on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1412549973?m=A1UDT86KRFJEFL
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