God revealed Himself to humanity through a long path of ancient lore.
Abraham came out of Mesopotamia, a land renowned in its day for hosting a vast lore of archives representing ancient religions and mythology. Some of that traveled far and wide through various contacts with other civilizations, always gathering and always spreading.
In this mixture was the actual revelation of God. We see hints of accurate knowledge here and there because the Mesopotamians kept track of Jehovah as one among many gods. We see that accurate understanding in the religion of Job and Jethro, men who lived on the borders of the vast expanse of desert that separates high grasslands east of the Jordan Rift Valley and western edges of Mesopotamia. It was much the same religion as Abraham came to espouse after decades of living as God’s man for his time.
Moses went out and spent several decades living with Jethro relearning a lot of things lost during the Egyptian sojourn. That period of forty days and nights on Mount Sinai was not wasted time; God worked with Moses to sift through that vast ancient lore to extract with greater clarity what God wanted to reveal. The Books of Moses are the definitive account drawn from primordial religious beliefs in the Ancient Near East. The nation of Israel was the chosen vessel for the true revelation of God.
The revelation includes the intellectual frame of reference for understanding. If you move away from that intellectual frame of reference, you move away from the revelation. I have warned my readers in the past and wrote several books to get that point across. If you cannot quite grasp how very different our intellectual culture is today from what brought us the Scripture, then you haven’t studied it enough. To bring a Western mind to Scripture and fail to adopt the Hebrew mindset is to reject revelation.
It’s not as if the Hebrew traditions have no room for our brand of rational objectivity. They considered it inadequate. Such is a critical part of the narrative in Job; Job’s three friends were clinging to rational objectivity and literalism in their analysis. Job shot them down, but failed to do so with sufficient finality. Elihu finished the task, pointing out that the trio weren’t at all on the same level as Job, and then going on to berate Job for not making that more obvious.
Another critical lesson from Job is the futility of debate when there is no shared epistemology. Debate isn’t inherently wrong, but debate on that lower rational level is meaningless. Did the Pharisees ever hear much of what Jesus said? No, because they were Hellenized and fully embraced objectivism and literalism, whereas Jesus was completely Hebraic in the use of parabolic and symbolic language.
Language was never meant to be truth, nor even to convey truth. Language was meant to provide road signs indicating the way of truth.
This is why I distance myself from so-called “red pill” sites and their approach to Game and socio-sexual theory. Their entire approach remains buried in the mud of Western rationalism. You either get feminism or objectivity. It shows up in politics in the bogus left-right paradigm. Both represent a false dichotomy, because you cannot find the truth of God anywhere in the landscape.
The biblical image of the shepherd is someone who finds his place in God’s creation as one who protects the sheep God gave him. In many ways, it’s the same for godly women as the shepherdess. She doesn’t have to choose between feminism or Western patriarchy. ANE feudalism is God’s explanation of how things work in this world. We are each granted a domain. The logic is symbolic, not analytical and objective. Nor is it subjective; the argument between objective versus subjective is a red herring, another false dichotomy.
It’s one thing to understand Western Civilization; do study it. Make sure you know it root and branch, because you have to understand how it is a total failure. It remains a stumbling stone of falsehood and we are obliged to reject it.
If you remain Western, you are not following Jesus.
