John saw
the waters of life flowing again from the holy of holies, around or from the
Tree of life, perhaps from the throne beneath the Tree. On the throne was the
One who was both divine and human—‘God-and-the-Lamb—the temple idiom found also
in the account of Solomon’s coronation: he sat on the throne of the LORD as
king, and the people worshipped the LORD-and-the-king (1 Chron. 29.20-23). In Revelation,
the servants worship him, singular, and see his face, singular,
and wear his Name, singular. The time of wrath described in the Damascus
Document, when the LORD his face, was over. (CD 1.5) This began in the time
of Isaiah, when the people rejected the gentle waters of Shiloh and all they represented,
when Isaiah sealed up his teaching among his disciples, and the LORD hid his
face (Isa. 8.1-17). ‘Wearing the Name’ meant that the servants were high
priests, and according to John, this was the vision. Jesus had prayed for his
disciples: ‘Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be
with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for
me before the foundation of the world’ (Jn 17.24). (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring
Her Story [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 281-82)
In Proverbs
8.30-31 Wisdom describes her place and role in creation. She is beside him,
suggesting a shared role as Creators. She is also ‘mwn, a word with many
meanings.
First we
note that this was a self-description of the LORD in the letter to Laodicea: ‘I
am the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation’
(Rev. 3.14). ‘Amen’ here semes to be the ‘āmôn of Proverbs 8.30, the witness of creation and its
beginning. The other imagery in the letter is from Wisdom: true wealth, white
garments and oil to restore sight. The problem is that here the Amen figure is
male, and the form ‘āmôn
is also masculine. Justin equated Wisdom with both the Son and the Spirit, (Trypho
61) but Philo explained:
Let us pay
no heed to the discrepancy I the gender of the words, and say that the daughter
of God, Wisdom, is not only masculine, but father, sowing and begetting in
souls aptness to learn, discipline, knowledge, sound sense, good and laudable
actions.
He adds to
the confusion by stating in the same treatise that the Father of the high
priest is God and his Mother is Wisdom ‘through whom the universe came into
existence’. His head was anointed with oil and what guides and leads him was
illuminated with a brilliant light. (On Flight 52, 110.)
Wisdom at
the side of the LORD was ‘mwn.
·
Read
as ‘āmôn the word means the one who joins together in harmony,
which is how the LXX understood it, harmozousa. This ‘joining’ derives from
the word ‘firm’, and was used, for example, of establishing the covenant: ‘My
steadfast love I will keep for him for ever, and my covenant will stand firm
for him’ (Ps. 89.28).
·
Read
as ‘āmûn the word means a foster child, a suckling. In the overall
picture of the Great Lady as the Mother, this would mean that the ‘āmûn
was the LORD beside his Mother; or read as ‘ōmēn the word means wet nurse (Num. 11.12; 2 Sam. 4.4),
and so Wisdom is feeding her ‘sucking’, yōnēq. The sun goddess of Ugaritic was the heavenly
wet-nurse of the crown prince. (KTU 1.15.ii.27-28) The ‘suckling’ was a
title for the son of the Great Lady: the sucking ‘delighted’, š”, over a whole of the asp after receiving the Spirit of the
LORD (Isa. 11.8), and the Servant grew up ‘like a suckling’ (Isa. 53.2). The
word also means young plant, a sapling of the Great Lady’s tree.
·
Read
as ‘ēmēn the word means ‘I was at the right hand’,
from the related verb ymn. The Great Lady appeared at the right hand of
the LORD (Deut. 33.2), and the Queen was at the right hand of the king (Ps.
45.9).
The enigmatic
‘mwn probably meant all these things: the one who holds all things
together, the nursing mother set at the right hand. We must bear in mind the
warning of Ben Sira’s grandson, who translated his book of Wisdom teachings
into Greek: ‘What was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the
same sense when translated into another language’ (Preface to Ben Sira). A
great deal has been lost in translating ‘mwn. (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring
Her Story [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 411-12)
The Hebrew
word for tree, ‘ēṣ, a masculine noun, also meant wood, and the
feminine form of the word, ‘ēṣâ, meant wise counsel, plan, or design.
This gave rise to wordplay. Job, who debated with the wise men of Edom, lived
in the land of Uz, ‘ūṣ, another related word. When the LXX translated
Isaiah’s oracle of the throne names (Isa. 9.6), it gave a single title rather
than the four that are familiar with the English versions based on the MT.
Instead of ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of
Peace’, the LXX has megalēs boulēs aggelos, ‘Angel of great counsel’.
Sometimes it is possible to see how a different word in the LXX came from
another way of reading the Hebrew text, but this ‘angel of great counsel’
cannot have come from the Mt. There must have been another version of the
Hebrew text at this point, ml’k ‘ṣh gdlh. Since the text was written without
spaces between the words, the translator of the LXX would have had ml’k ‘ṣhgdhl,
‘angel of great counsel’, which could also be divided as ml’k ‘ṣ hgdlh,
and read as ‘the angel/messenger of the tree of the Great Lady’. This is how
the risen LORDS appears at the beginning of Revelation: the shining heavenly
Man in the midst of the sevenfold menorah which was the golden Tree (Rev.
1.12-16). (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story [Sheffield:
Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 240)