Universal History: the Mystery of Ethiopia | with Richard Rohlin (Ethiopia #1)

so hello everybody i'm really excited to be back with richard roland for our third discussion on mythical history on this universal history for this episode we're going to dive into ethiopia and i'm really excited about this because i have been a a big fan of just this mystery of ethiopia i traveled to ethiopia and i've just been fascinated with how its role is not just in the bible but in other ancient cultures as well and so i'm really looking forward to exploring this with him yeah i'm i'm very excited about this conversation i have been actually since i was a little kid we had this this textbook i think it might have been like a middle school textbook or something like this but um there was a single paragraph in this world history textbook a single paragraph you know probably three to four sentences that mentioned the once great christian kingdom of aksum in northern africa and then basically said but it was wiped out by islam and there are no more christians there anymore and this isn't a this isn't a textbook um it's actually a fairly well known history textbook i won't say which one but um and so i i i sort of as a kid like i had this romantic idea in my head and then of course many years later discovered actually you know there are still christians in that part of the world and you know now i've actually been able to meet a few um archbishop uh dimitri who's the the sainted founder of the the diocese that i'm in uh he was very uh he had a very loving relationship with the ethiopian and eritrean communities here in the dallas fort worth metroplex and so we actually have some you know eritrean folks who are are actually you know we're received into our parish and are members of our parish um and they they you know once a year we do uh right right before lent we do this big eritrean meal um and uh but there's also uh there's also you know i've just had random encounters with ethiopian and eritrean christians like like very strange very wonderful encounters like i don't want to use up all of our time to talk about them but both both here in the dallas fort fort worth metroplex but actually most often when i travel i always seem to run into these ethiopian orthodox christians um and you know so it's i i've just got a really deep love for the culture and obviously there's some really cool things that ethiopian christianity seems to preserve for us uh stuff like the book of enoch for instance the only full copies that we have of those of those enoki and manuscripts are all from ethiopia uh so i think that if if somebody wanted to know why would we want to talk about ethiopia i'd say first of all it's because ethiopia is a very interesting proof case right when we're talking about universal history and why it's still important to us if you can understand the place of ethiopia in the scriptures and in the medieval universal history then that will actually tell you something about the importance of ethiopia today and then so it's a good way to show how the the legends of a people their sort of symbolic identity uh participates in the larger universal narrative and then ultimately i think maybe that helps us understand the ways that uh ethiopia might be i'm going to be careful here because i don't sound like i'm trying to make prophecies or something like that but the role that ethiopia still seems to have to play in in the christian story the big story yeah which is of course ongoing right yeah um so i thought what we could do is start out by talking about ethiopia in scripture and that would probably bring us up all the way to the queen of sheba and the ethiopian eunuch which are two things that actually you have to understand together to understand them at all and that's probably as far as we're going to be able to get in a single video but maybe we can just sort of tease ethiopia in medieval universal history and how that relates to alexander yeah definitely i think that we might be doing a few episodes on ethiopia at some point because it i think in terms of a role like you said going to ethiopia i was in ethiopia for a few weeks and it's you can see that it's a place that still is full of magic that there really are possibilities that exist there right that seemed to be completely evacuated from the rest of the world i was on lake tana where all these monasteries are these like round monasteries which are amazing and i'm on the lake and i'm going towards the the monasteries and i'm looking at this lake and it's something it's like out of a fairy tale and the guide was like this rasta guy obviously not like a very if he was a christian he's obviously not extremely uh you know he was just a guide right and i looked at him and i looked at the lake and i said are they is there a monster in this lake and he like he hesitated he didn't want to really answer because he didn't like the question i guess and he kind of looked at me and he goes yeah and he says it's a monster that will will take its victims we'll pull it down into the water for six days and release them on the sabbath and i was like [Laughter] i just couldn't believe it i was like it's amazing of course it was non-stop like all my time you need to have it non-stop these like ins like just amazing stories that i was that i was getting from what else what else would there be in that way exactly it's like how how could there be anything else in this yeah all right well okay so let's let's begin with with ethiopian scripture here because i we might come back to that late thing here in a little bit um so the first reference that we have to the land of and i'll say in the old testament in the hebrew old testament the word is usually kush um ethiopia is a greek word uh it first appears in homer um so some some translations of the of the bible like the king james use ethiopia and then maybe more recent translations will say the land of cush but it's talking about that same area the area that's kind of on the horn of africa there so the first reference that we get to this is in the four rivers that flow out of eden and of course you've done some great videos on what are the rivers and what do they what are they doing symbolically and all the stuff uh edie and eden's not a terrestrial location uh in the sen you know in this way but uh so we're told that this name of the second river is the gihon it is the one that flowed around the whole land of kush or the whole land of ethiopia now nobody totally agrees on uh exactly which river the gihon is the ethiopians themselves associate it with the abe river which is the blue nile so it's one of the two major tributary rivers that flows into the nile what's really interesting is that a lot of arab authors actually try to identify it as of being a river that's in or around the hindu kush now this might seem very contradictory obviously these are two very divergent locations separated by thousands of miles which you have to understand though is that india and ethiopia are very closely related in ancient let's say ancient geography or ancient cosmology so homer who is the first person to mention the ethiopians as a people writes that they are be that they are to be found at the extreme east which is in india and the extreme west which is northern africa of the greek world so uh they're divided by the sea into the eastern so so the idea is it's the land that the sun touches right so that the land of the extreme east which is india right the sun rises in the east and the extreme west where it goes down yeah so it's understanding them as the place of extreme like they are they are the people that live on the extremes exactly uh so later writers of of late antiquity and even the early middle ages for instance there's a latin account i want to say it's maybe 7th or 8th century there's a latin account of the conversion of the ethiopians that actually calls them indians it conflates india and ethiopia this is a very natural thing to do one useful way to kind of understand the relationship in economic terms which is the most boring way to understand anything but maybe it'll help some people is that there is the major trade route in the ancient world for goods especially spices coming from uh india was that they was the that trade route passed through the horn of africa so anything for anything to enter the roman world from india it almost always came through the horn of africa through ethiopia so you can see you can see kind of the relationship there so uh so ethiopia or kush it's it's a it's a it's a complex geographical term in ancient literature because it can refer to like the ancient regions of aksum of nubia it can be more generally used for anything in sub-saharan africa right yeah um so this phrase um and there's a phrase that appears over and over again in biblical literature and also elsewhere in the ancient world beyond the rivers of ethiopia or beyond the rivers of cush right so basically it's it and this shows up in prophetic literature it also shows up in like you know talking about in the book of esther when it talks about the the empire of artaxerxes right that he ruled from such and such a location to beyond the rivers of ethiopia in other words to the end of the world so it refers to this the extreme end of something originally both east and west the extreme end of the known world yeah that's exactly the and if we're talking about mythical history and we're talking about right the role that a people or or a nation or an identity plays in the not only like in the spatial understanding of how the world lays itself out but also in the story then we we have to we don't have to get hung up too much on where exactly the ancients thought it was right you know on the map but rather understand what role it played for them in the way that the way that they talked about it so the ethiopians if we look at the table of nations for instance in genesis chapter 10 the ethiopians are or the cushites are descendants this are you know come from the sons of noah and they come come from ham in this case um and it it's it's interesting to point out here that there was definitely a let's say a species of american christianity here in the south um even until quite recently that basically you know identified you know black people as because they're the son of you know the the descendants of of ham that they they they have this curse on them you know and it was it was actually one of the uh one of the arguments used to justify slavery yeah and the the thing to kind of understand about that is that these people you know as as jesus would say you do not know either the scriptures or the power of god like if you if if you if you're reading genesis and you come away with that take on this then then like you haven't read to the end of the story right exactly you don't you're just like not getting it yeah how it plays out yeah you don't understand the pattern so um so according to the book of aksum which is uh it's a late collection of texts that's based on basically a collection of a bunch of much much earlier oral traditions the etymology of the name ethiopia ethiopia has three potential etymologies and i think you can understand these as all revealing something different about the the pattern of what ethiopia represents symbolically obviously the most common one the one that the greeks assigned was that it just meant like burnt face or red brown um but scholars today think that ethiopia might have come from um an egyptian word which means the stealer of the heart the steeler of hearts so yeah and bracket that we're going to come back to that in a minute uh cause that's really interesting um but in the book of aksum they derive ethiopia from the name of ethiopies uh who is a he's he's an extra biblical son of the biblical kush so he comes from the city founding line remember it's cain you know that built who builds the first city so this is the book of aksum is it a this is an ethiopian source yeah yeah it's a it's a it's their it's their sort of collection actually there's a bunch of legal texts there's a bunch of animals it's just like a collection of like their older tradition that sort of codified at a certain point in the middle ages but it's much older stuff um so they had they actually had a an extra biblical son of kush who they believed came to this part of africa and built a city he's believed to have built the city of uh i think it's said mazeeber or i'm probably saying that wrong but anyway that's the original capital of the kingdom of aksum so note that he comes from the city founding line of cain but then he goes beyond the place where cain and his descendants founded their civilization in the fertile crescent uh so he goes on to found his own city it's kind of a city on the edge of the world yeah and it's important to understand like this is where it becomes important to understand the manner in which the a people self-identify right so the ethiopians themselves see them they see themselves as descendants of kush and and it's and it's important to it's important to see that like they see themselves in a certain line and so when we talk about how other nations understood them we look at how they understood themselves and it's interesting sometimes to see how these these things actually come together so there's a there's a negative and positive aspect to whatever dissent whatever descendants you take like any symbolic pattern the northern people like the northern people understood their own their own challenges and so they saw themselves some of them saw themselves a bastard son like oh not a bastard zone but this like weird son that was born on the ark and was not completely accounted for let's say and so in the same with ethiopians that that we need to understand all these stories to see the positive and negative side of the role that they played or that they can play in this giant cosmic story right and of course as you know even today ethiopia is famous for having churches monasteries and settlements in these really extreme locations i mean you can just go like look online look at at documentaries or pictures on google of of these monasteries that are in these totally inaccessible you know craggy mountaintops um there's actually a place called the finca hebera site i think it's finca or fincha herberasite this is in the bail mountains of ethiopia and they found remains of a really ancient human settlement like a really long-lived human settlement it's 3469 meters above sea level it's the highest continuous human settlement ever discovered we don't even know how they lived up there because if humans spend any time at that altitude without you know oxygen and and you know specialized clothing they you start to suffer from hypoxia and extreme weather conditions so we don't even know how they did it we don't even know how they survived up there so the idea then is you know this idea of a city being founded on the edge of the world right that you're sort of like going to the extreme edge of being but then you're building a city there right um and that's what everything as we notice like as we look at the tradition of ethiopia even how even the the ones that are still alive today in ethiopia this is what we will see is that it is a manifestation of the extremes in almost every case like everything about this their saints their stories the things that they celebrate it's so it's like this amazing uh this amazing capacity to kind of to move into these extremes and and and and so it's it you'll see we'll see it as we talk about it people will see how it manifests it's pretty amazing so if once you start to understand that there's this overlap and this polyvalence between india and ethiopia you know the extreme east and the extreme west uh we can understand the way what you just said like the way that ethiopia participates in the symbolism of being the extreme edge of something right that it's both the source of great wealth this is where all the really great gold comes from right solomon gets it you know when the queen of sheba comes uh you know she brings spices spices that nobody's ever you know beaten like these are the best spices that anyone has ever seen right so it's a source of great wealth of great potential it's also a source of great danger yeah um and so this danger is often expressed in the scriptures as being um and i'm gonna tease the queen of sheba but we can't get there yet but so just just uh but but it's it's often expressed in the scriptures as being sort of like the mysterious feminine or even the idea of what what you know the book of proverbs would call the strange woman and the idea is that a stranger who comes as a captive but then who captivates in her turn so uh there's this reference in ezekiel when it talks about ethiopia it speaks of it as being the land of all of the mingled people um uh and uh it says ethiopia and libya and lydia and all the megal people in chubb and the men of the land that is in league shall fall fall by the sword so it's this is a prophecy but the reference here to ethiopia is as ethiopia is a land of mingled people and um and of course you've talked a lot about hybridity being on the edge so when we come to the edge of something this is what we would expect to find yeah and you can see like that's why uh that's why for example in the greek culture the sphinx was said to come from ethiopia right but the sphinx is uh is this hybrid it's dangerous but it also hides a secret it keeps this secret and if you can unlock the secret of the sphinx then you have access to this almost like secret knowledge or this secret all these these these possibilities that you didn't have before but it's also dangerous if you play with it then it can eat right so um and on any level you want to look at this is true like ancient ethiopia itself was made up of multiple nations like it would be way too complicated and time-consuming to talk about like all the different dynasties and migrations and things like this um and although they're sort of originally what is considered an afro-asiatic or uh or afro-asian or an or a kushite language that's actually kush like gave his name to that particular family of languages even today um they're made up of multiple nations and so uh they came to speak a semitic language um so this this it's this kushite people who then come to speak a semitic language through the through an influx of a group a people group called the sabians who are uh descendants of of shem in the biblical and the biblical narrative so they represent this very interesting kind of a hybrid between the gentile and the jew yeah between the the descendants of ham and the sentence of shem and this is a hybrid that results let's say in certain elements of the original becoming more extroverted and therefore more strongly preserved um and by the way this is you you see the same kind of hybrid repeated for instance on a smaller scale in somewhere like samaria so the samaritans were originally this this uh you know in the biblical story they're this hybrid between you know the nations that the assyrians brought in who intermarry with the israelites who are left in the land right and so they develop their own particular culture their own particular religion um and even though they're excluded from the jewish people through you know through whom salvation comes as christ says they do preserve certain things that we you know for instance their version of the torah agrees more closely with like the dead sea scrolls and the and the the septuagint than the masoretic text yeah the modern like the medieval hebrew attacks that everyone uses for the hebrew bible now so it's like it's like they're more they're they're they're a hybrid but somehow that hybridity has resulted in preserving a more extreme or more extroverted element of the original yeah and the way to understand that in terms of pattern is to understand that the edge of the world is also a container and so if you can understand the world as a as the mountain as the pyramid the way i show it the bottom of the world's like a cup and so things get preserved in the cup right no that it it the edge of the world is a place where things get get preserved in a way that how can i say that like you said preserved outside of almost kind of outside of the narrative in a way they're just kind of held there almost like uh in as a secret that's hidden in the waters or this pearl that's hidden in the field and so you can imagine something like ethiopia the edge of the world as the field in which the pearl gets hidden and the fish in the bottom of you know the fish shining in the ocean it's all of that type of imagery that that the edge also can represent we were we were talking a little bit earlier before we hit the record button about the symbolism of the nest right so the nest is something that's made up of remainders it's like little bits of twig and fur and lint and whatever else but then the it forms a protective you know shelter around around the egg the seed of life right at the center right when i i think there's something something similar going on here right yeah and you can understand why then something like the ark of the covenant has cherubs on it yes but it has these hybrid creatures on it as a kind of seat you know talk about the mercy seat or whatever it might be a bad inter a bad translation but there's a reason why we say that that it's like this container this resting place right for the glory uh and it's and and so this is all of these things are kind of coming together as we understand the role that ethiopia plays in these stories so before we can get to the queen of sheba there's actually an like uh let's say a prototype of the queen of sheba in the scriptures and this is something that maybe a lot of people don't know about um but this is the this is moses either first or second wife uh there's no there's no clear chronology for this in the scriptures um but according to legend according to legend it's it's it's moses first wife so i so let me just ask you a question have you ever seen the charlton heston ten commandments film where charlton heston is moses right yeah so remember at the beginning of that movie when moses is just coming back from like his successful war uh in ethiopia and like they bring he brings in like the king and the princes of the ethiopians and there's this very strong subtext that at some point that princess and moses got it on like it's it's their their you know everyone's picking up on it nefertieri is definitely picking up on it okay if you haven't seen this movie everyone i mean it's a great movie and it's very symbolically uh rich i think it's an interesting film but anyway uh it's it's a it's a it's kind of a classic uh so it i watched that movie like a million times as a kid um so many times um what i didn't realize until much later on is that that particular princess of the ethiopians is an actual like she's a person she's a historical you could say like a legendary person okay so and there's this there's this very cryptic mention of this and as far as the only mention of this in scripture it's in numbers chapter 12 verse one it says and miriam and aaron spake against moses because of the ethiopian woman whom he had married for he had married an ethiopian woman and it's just mentioned there and it never comes up again okay but in ancient legend like ancient jewish legend uh uh and this is actually it's referenced by saint irenaeus right so one of the apostolic fathers actually refers to this legend as something that the jewish community of his time and he considered to be credible yeah that moses that moses reigned in ethiopia was the king of ethiopia and so what so the legends like people are going to freak out and they've been never heard of i know saying it i don't know it's totally normal so the legend here is that uh is that this princess her name is starbus okay um and she was actually moses first wife whom he married while he was still a prince of egypt so the legend concerning her this is very important is that he was besieging the city where she lived and she saw him from the city walls fell in love with him from a distance and then met him secretly and offered to turn the city over to him if he would marry her in return so this is the legend that saint irenaeus refers to so in in later medieval legend there's like an expansion upon this uh which is that after they get married moses is like well now that i've conquered ethiopia uh it's time for me to head back home to egypt and tharbis is refuses to let him do this and so moses makes uh moses as we're told is is the most skilled man in astronomy which means magic uh in the world and so he makes two magical rings one which makes the wearer forgetful and the other one which makes the the the where remember everything so it's the right hand left hand right so he keeps the s the for the second ring the one that makes you remember everything and then he gives the forgetfulness ring to tharbus and once she forgets about him he escapes away into egypt this is a very interesting legend i think um and though this this doesn't seem totally compatible with let's say the biblical chronology and like you just gotta not worry about that uh because it is it is a it is a legend like even in the middle ages they would have been like you know this is a fun story yeah but uh but numbers chapter 12 does seem to indicate that moses ethiopian wife is either with him at this time or that uh you know even though we don't get a timeline from when he might have married her so is this moses first wife is it his second wife uh it doesn't it doesn't totally matter for our purposes what what does kind of matter is why is this something that miriam and aaron are objecting to and of course i've heard people say well this is like an early example of racism or something like that but you have to understand we know from linguistic evidence that a whole lot of the people uh from the tribe of aaron are black um and if you if you're curious about this um father stephen the young talks about it quite a bit in his uh in his uh his podcast the whole council of god which is like a bible study podcast you can just go listen to him talk about the evidence for this yeah um so it's not the fact that she's black it's the fact that she's an ethiopian right yeah but i think i think look i when i read it i think that it's not in it's not the same in terms of racial in terms of racial rights but there seems to be something about her being dark in the story and i'll tell you why because miriam miriam is basically criticizing moses because he has a foreign wife it's mostly the most foreign wife you could say so but it there is something about her being dark right also being foreign is already being dark like yeah i'm i'm yeah i'm not trying to say and of course miriam her her punishment is leprosy right but it all but in this it's not just leprosy like the way it's described is that her her her punishment is that her her skin becomes white yeah and so right it's like she she criticizes she's acting like what i call an excess of purity she's criticizing moses for not being pure enough and then as her punishment is to become so pure that she can't function in society anymore yes and she has to be excluded because she's too pure in a bad in a bad sense like she doesn't she doesn't have access to to others anymore yeah and i'm i'm not yeah let me clarify and say i'm not trying to separate the darkness of her skin from her being an ethiopian i'm trying to separate like our our current moment yeah and are some of our current hang-ups uh around race uh from what's going on here right because because they're not i mean they're they're close and they seem close enough that we could just like read in what we're dealing with as a culture right now and that would actually cause us to miss something really important in the story uh which is that which is that you know this manifestation like the the manifestation of the extreme version of the strange woman yeah right uh this is the this is the one who is captured and in her turn conquers her conqueror and by the way there's another african queen she's not ethiopian but there's another african queen lady named cleopatra who manifests this unlike not it's not even a legendary level like it's it's it's totally it's completely historical right that's the trope the trope of caesar is exactly that trope yeah of being captured by this stranger that this like strange woman who fascinates right and so remember that one of the possible etymologies of ethiopia of ethiopian is the steeler of the heart yeah right one who you know that can play out on kind of multiple levels we talked about the arc in a minute i think that's really it's a nice it's really on the nose i don't know happens moment but but but you can see this happening with with tharbus right that that she uh she's conquered by moses but then she steals moses heart um and so and it's again i i think that there's probably like a lot more to that story into that legend uh than just what i'm bringing out here maybe this will just like introduce people to something they probably didn't know about moses yeah um um uh yeah so so this brings us then to the queen of sheba right so the the the details that were given in about the queen of sheba these come primarily in first kings chapter 10 our first uh or which is also like if you've got an orthodox study bible third kingdoms chapter 10 it's the same book so uh and we're basically told that when she hears the fame of solomon concerning the name of yahweh she came to him to prove him with hard questions so she comes posing a riddle and you mentioned the sphinx earlier right yeah um so she comes to him and she brings tremendous wealth with her uh we're told that she comes to jerusalem with a very great train camels that bear spices much gold precious stones right so basically the whole figurative wealth of the east right she brings with her and she comes and she comes to him and it first says that she tried him with hard questions and then it says that she communed with him of all that was in her heart so yes that solomon told her all of the questions there was nothing hid from the king which he told her not and when she saw his wisdom uh then she speaks of speaks of his fame she blesses his god etc and she gives him a bunch of gold spice is a very very great store precious stones um and you have to understand this there's so much going on in this story like there's so many layers because it also has to do with the feminine itself right but the feminine which which is a question which which which asks to be answered just like the mother of god asking christ posing a problem like saying they have here's a problem solve it you know and everybody under anybody who's married who has relationship with women understands this relationship like the woman frames the the situation ask the question the neck right that tells you where to look and then and then the masculine kind of answers or attempts to answer let's say and so it's like this idea of like the the woman as bringing a question a mystery that needs to be solved a puzzle that needs to be answered and then that is how the seduction happens right right it's like in answering her question in resolving her puzzle then that is how they commune that's how they commune into her heart like let's say it becomes a very sexual imagery so to sort of speak to of things too high for me for a moment okay this is the relationship that the church has with christ you know that that and and and that's uh that's a really that's a really strange thing to me you know you don't think of yourself as like posing a question to christ right but but and and this is where this is where attempts to like define the church that are you know let's say i i don't want to just like pick on on like western christianity but this is where where attempts to define the church that are aren't able to see it as the bride right they're not able to see as the feminine right and so and so they you you attempt to nail down what the churches and let's say just a really masculine way and hopefully people will know what i mean by that yeah uh they they they it's not just that they're wrong it's more like they're unconvincing like they're they're there's nothing beautiful about them like it might be the sort of thing that offers a like a high degree of certainty okay i know who is in and i know who's out right and that's really attractive for a little while but but it's got no power to seduce it's got no power to really like charm you and draw you in and and i mean similarly um you can take different approaches to talking about the mother of god but ultimately the best the best approach is really not to talk about her um you know it's you know it's the case an icon and and it just sort of sort of i don't know it's it's uh it's a really mysterious thing and what's here so here's what's interesting is that in medieval iconography the queen of sheba is used to represent both the church and in particular the gentile church the gentile nations coming to christ but also the image of the queen of sheba enthroned was seen as a prototype in medieval arts especially medieval western art of the coronation of the virgin yeah so this is interesting because you have this this figure who she's a gentile she either is either seduced by or seduces solomon you know and a lot of a lot of medieval commentators saw her as being being the the historical context for the song of songs yeah that she's the schulemai yeah yeah that solomon talks and she says i am i am i am dark but fair right you know so but you can understand then why this would come into the church as being an image right and and why for example like you would have a tradition of black madonna's that would appear in western christianity which happened almost accidentally like the black madonna's in terms of material causes it's just because the wood gets darker with time and the smoke and everything but that people would celebrate this image of the dark madonna as the idea of pure possibility or this pure potential which is offered up and which is kind of asking for enlightenment which is which is becoming pure in in this is becoming dark right and becoming just pure space and so that's our role as the church right that's what we do we we try to eliminate our own thoughts and eliminate our own passions to then be open up to the illumination that christ offers us and so it does end up being this masculine feminine relationship so and you'll also enjoy this because we've talked a lot about the sibling oracles most medieval authors who were reading the sibling oracles believed that one of the sybils identified in there was the queen of sheba so she's she's also she's also connected to this late antiquity early medieval oracular tradition um so the reveal it's like the revealing of of the mystery you know but even then the mystery is like veiled in a mystery you know it's like it's like revealing but also you know concealing yeah uh one might say so this story here uh the story of solomon it's the beginning of a long history of interaction between let's say ethiopian culture and judaism now to speak from a modern historical perspective for just a quick just a quick second just a quick second uh historians don't agree on exactly when the current consensus seems to be that sometime around the eighth century uh which is about three centuries after probably when solomon lived um but there was we know that from the historical record sometime at or before the eighth century there was a huge influx of jewish settlers who came to live in ethiopia uh they brought with them not just jewish customs but also jewish religious practices there are actual jewish temples that were built in ethiopia for this one at yaha in the in the tigre province yeah uh which which is very old um and it's believed to basically be an architectural copy of the jerusalem temple yeah um and uh there are other examples for instance on some of the monastery islands of lake tana which you were just talking about um there's there are some ancient stone altars dating back to 800 years before christ wow um which seemed to have been built in the manner of jewish sacrificial altars they've and they've been profound found not only preserved in good condition but still containing blood residue in the way that the altar is purified with the sprinkling of blood in the jewish ritual you know of you know of atonement so uh all of this seems to have indicated that 800 years before christ there is a culture in ethiopia that is already strongly adhering to some version of mosaic law and it's not exactly because obviously they're not going to the jerusalem temple to worship so this i mean we could say from a perspective of you know old testament you know religion this is problematic um but the point here um is that but it is also it was problematic when the the temple was destroyed and it was problematic when when the jews right scattered in different so it was like it wasn't like the ideal situation right imagine these well but but even even in the even in the old testament you know one of the things you're not supposed to do is like build a high place you know you're supposed to go worship at the tabernacle this isn't like the era of the judges and the early kings before the the temple is built you're not supposed to build a high place you're supposed to go worship at the temple or the tabernacle but then we find people like the prophet samuel going and offering sacrifices at the high places all the time so it's like well i don't know it's complicated i don't know what's going on here uh god apparently knows but uh and what's fascinating about the ethiopians in terms of this these proofs that people find is that the ethiopians have no desire to like prove to the modern world that they are what they say they are right this altar that they found and that they have they have proof that they were able to get blood samples or whatever there's other stuff there that they don't oh yeah i show you oh yeah i care to show you they don't want they don't need to prove to all you scholars that they are what they say they are they know what they are so so i think that uh the stories of this connection we have and there are legends about this that get written down in the middle ages but i think they really represent some much older oral history um and i'm not the sort of person who by the way when i say oral history thinks that's unreliable right remember that socrates basically said well oral history is reliable it's when people start writing things down that we're going to be in trouble you know so it's so i'm i'm definitely not of the opinion that oral history is in any way like less reliable than what's written but uh uh so so the the story about solomon and sheba and i'll just go off of the uh off of the ethiopian version of it here since you know there's actually there's actually so much material written in jewish christian and islamic sources in the middle ages about the queen of sheba that you could fill an entire library with it like there's just so much written there's all kinds of stuff but to just go off of the to go off of the the the ethiopian version of the story um we're told that the queen of sheba whose name in the ethiopian is uh makita or makata um again if i'm sure there are people out there uh like my buddy john wayne coatney who actually knows how to say all these ethiopian words and i'm just super sorry for getting it all wrong i'm just a dumb anglo uh but but uh uh queen queen makita uh makes it a pilgrimage to jerusalem and by the way some scholars think that makita is is the like that candace is like a is like a uh the candace the ethiopian in queen in in the book of acts that that that's actually some rendering of makita in greek okay and that that's actually a title as like like caesar would be and yeah yeah yeah in in roman culture so she makes this pilgrimage to jerusalem she wants to hear solomon she test him during her stay so going back to this idea of the strange woman the one who was captured but then also captures uh she she becomes so enraptured solomon becomes so enraptured with her beauty that he just decides he's gotta have her of course this is a thing that solomon you know is it was a thing um and so so that the story and i'm going to just tell you this story and then i want you to just like help me understand it symbolically because it's very strange um so no pressure you're on the air uh so so one evening he orders his royal cooks to uh increase the amount of pepper in the meal that they're being served for dinner but he also orders the water bearers not to bring water to anyone unless they're specifically authorized to do it and then to place a really big jug of water in his bed chamber and so queen makita she realizes his trickery she plays along thinking that she can just go without water for the evening but eventually she becomes dehydrated the pepper is too much and so she finally gives up and goes to his bed chamber and ends up sleeping with him right and this affair leads to the birth of their son uh menelik the first who is like the first solomonic what's called the solomonic dynasty the first solomonic king of ethiopia now what the heck is going on with the water in the pepper jonathan pageot okay well i mean for sure it has to do with trickery that is the first thing and i think the all the different versions of how they end up together uh is always has to do with some kind of trickery right uh but it's like a trickery that she is also conceding to it's not it's not obviously it wouldn't it's problematic for our like standard sure sure and today whatever but like in terms of of the story it's the idea that that he's trying to trick her into giving in to him and so that's the first thing um and so then the second thing has to do with the difference between water and spice uh and so spice is the extreme right it's it's the extreme in the sense of it's like it's the flavor without the the the meal it's the flavor without the the it doesn't sustain you right it's flavor without sustainment and so that's what spices and so you it has to do with the foreigner themselves right foreigners are like spice in in in a in a system strangeness is like spice so you want a little bit in order to kind of saying that saying variety is the spice of life right it's it's exactly variety is the spice of life that's good that you went there yeah um and so so that so there's a relationship between spice and strangeness because it's like these things like you're eating what you're eating potatoes and so it's like you don't want to you add something to it to make it different from potatoes it's still basically potato but it has a it has an extra an extra kind of a next extra aspect to it to to titillate you let's say and so that's what so that's what's going on and so he's he's trading he's giving water for spice so he's he's giving he's spicing her up like making her what she is nice and then he's offering water and so it's there's a relationship between it's not the same people are going to get right but how christ offers the source to the samaritan woman right it's like source of life so this is what's this is what's going on now the water becomes like active water you could say not passive water like the ocean but like fresh water is a way to understand it so he's offering her fresh water which comes down and then she's full of spice and she's full of this strangeness so it's it makes sense in terms of the basic symbolic pattern i think i think that it's uh there's two biblical associations that come readily to minor one that and of course this is part of what's going on in the story of the samaritan woman is that the patriarchs always meet their wife by a well right it's always it's they always meet their wife by the well uh but then but then also even even in proverbs when solomon right is talking about the strange woman that's how he presents it he and what he'll say is drink waters from your own well drink waters from your own cistern he says don't let your fountain run into the streets right so but solomon does that like solomon does exactly that and christ does that too it's just that christ succeeds like christ his water flowing into the streets doesn't disperse him whereas uh like in in the sense of the way solomon talks about the strange woman it's like it leads to death right so but there's a mystery there's this mystery there because death or the edge or the limit is also potential and so that's why the queen of sheba brings riches because she's offering more body you could say she's she has more body she's further out she has she's out on the limit and shows the offering more potential for solomon to to let's say to just to pour his water over let's say and like kind of fill but but it's a dangerous game like it's a dangerous game and that's what happens in the legend of solomon right at least in the camera and the gas right it's a dangerous game because it leads to the ark being stolen right so so the the the the so that's that's where this legend goes right and and that's that metallic is raised by his mother as a jew in ethiopia until he's in his 20s and he goes to jerusalem to meet his father for the first time right and there are different varieties of the story but in the one that you just referenced which is kind of the most common version uh he is he either either refuses or is refused the throne after solomon's death like solomon wants him to become king but he's either not will uh willing to succeed him because he wants to live in ethiopia or the elders of israel are not having it you know like one of those are two different versions of the same thing but essentially he can't become king or he's refused the throne after solomon's death and so he sends his servants to break into the temple and to steal the ark of the covenant and take it back with them to ethiopia and when solomon discovers what they've done he allows it and he the reason that he allows it is that he believes that god has allowed the theft he believes that you know if god had i mean this is the ark we all know what happens when you touch the ark without permission right and so the fact that that nobody has died solomon takes as being a sign that that this is something that god has allowed yeah and this is the legend of how the ark gets to ethiopia and then there's so much like i wish i could unpack i could unpack this for hours because there's so much mystery in this event and there's so much going on and it helps you understand how symbolism is neither just positive or just negative right because the imagery that is used to tell that story is the very imagery in proverbs when when king solomon says like don't go to the to the strange woman because you'll lose the strength of your work right like you'll actually this your strengths will be dispersed into the edge and you'll you'll lose the the fruits of your labor and it's like that's exactly what happens to him right but then it ends up in the end working towards this kind of universal salvation which is the surprise like this kind of weird surprise at how things flip you know god uses things and turns them on their head and bring them back to to participate in salvation let's say so you have so you remember then that the again one of the possible meanings of ethiopian is the steeler of the heart yeah right that the the queen of sheba comes and we could say in like you know in our modern romantic parlance you know we say oh she's she stole solomon's heart but then like she literally stole the heart comes and steals the heart of israel star steals the heart of you know the the the visible presence of yahweh among his people and i understand that this is a story that the ethiopians tell like this is right yeah like their sacred history yes so they understand their origin as a theft a relationship so i've talked about this before where the relationship with the stranger is often a relationship of trickery because we're not in the same identity and so what happens in the end are these ironies and flips and and switches that are what trickery is about like how jacob acts in the in in in the lab in laban's uh laban's court and how laban acts with him are these relationships of trickery like of trying to to trick the other and so you see this as the very origin the way that the ethiopians understand themselves as their origin um and anyways but it plays out it plays out in the whole story as as as something amazing but it's it's just important to understand that that even in the story of king solomon how he tricks uh the queen of sheba to sleep with them and then he ends up being tricked where as the ark is stolen out and so see the story of of jacob how he tricks he tricks uh uh layman tricks jacob and jacob tricks laban and then he steals the idols from right house and brings them out it's like this is the same story that's going on and even the the uh even the the two the two uh the the jacob's two wives right you know which which have all this varied symbolic resonance you know the the act of life and contemplative life and things like this but they're also the the wife of your youth and the strange woman right because one of the things one of the paradoxes about the strange woman is this strange woman is like uh um she's usually not fertile right you know she because she can't give you she can't give you a legitimate heir yeah right and so so then like jacob has these two wives and like his heart is drawn after one of them but it's the other one that keeps giving him heirs you know and uh but the same thing with moses right moses has two wives right he's got zipporah who's not an ethiopian she's a you know she's a ishmaelite midianite right um and then you and then you have uh so she's she's semitic she's oh she's she's of an abrahamic people you could say um and she gives him his legitimate son but even there there's something about moses where he's like unable to i mean talk about circumcision right he's unable to cut off the remainder right and so he still has this ethiopian wife he doesn't circumcise his son you know there's something about that that i think is is really interesting and i think part of part of what's really interesting here is that the legend is that solomon had many many wives obviously but the only ones who ever produced him a son were the queen of sheba and then the mother of rehoboam whose name i can't remember right now um so rehoboam is the king whose arrogance and foolishness is eventually results in the splitting of the kingdoms yeah and so the idea seems to be here in the legend that if solomon's son menelik could have been the good son who kept the king like he could have been the good son the good heir who actually kept the kingdom from falling apart if he could have stayed but of course he can't stay for various reasons ultimately because it's not part of his the pattern that he's in yeah and it's convenient in the legend because metallic steals the ark and then israel gets set then israel falls apart it's like that's the actual hidden cause of the separate the breakdown of yeah yeah and so so you know he returns to his native land he takes the heart with him right um and what this ironically does then if you follow the legend is that it allows the ark to be preserved after the babylonian conquest yeah right that's the mystery of the edge like this it's like a scandal right then then it turns into a mysterious keeping so the symbol of the symbolism of ethiopia seems to be on an intuitive level is really again talking about the nest right the idea that's it's it's this collection of the remainder but the remainder becomes a safe space in which the egg the seed of new life the heart of something can be hidden and protected and of course there's a historical site the the rulers of ethiopia and we probably shouldn't talk too much about this in this video but the rulers of ethiopia still take the title the line of judah you know um you know uh quite recently because they they contin they they trace their lineage all the way back to solomon yeah um so amazing i don't know how we're doing on time i don't know i think we could if you're okay i think we should keep going okay yeah we've got good stuff and we just let's keep going because i want to get into i want to get into uh ethiopia at least start teasing the role of ethiopia in the christian story yeah that we've kind of laid this this we've laid this groundwork and we've established the basic pattern right so that's the symbolic identity of ethiopia as the extreme edge the outsider the hybrid the strange woman right but then this idea you know if you think all of the stuff is totally negative that's going to be really complicated by the old testament by by the prophecies of the old testament itself yeah and some stories in the old testament yeah yeah so there's there's an idea that the that this is also part of resurrection right there's an aspect of resurrection which is related to this change this weird flip that happens in death and the best image of it is jeremiah who is in the cistern and it's a really fascinating image because jeremiah is in the cistern and he's kind of stuck there and he's in he's in this like mire you know how the psalmist talks about sinking into the mire and all that stuff right so there he is in the mire and the person who pulls jeremiah out is an ethiopian he pulls him out with rotten rags and so he he he put these rotten rags around him and he pulled him out of the system it's like if you want to understand the mystery of resurrection there's something about about that about about the relationship with uh the relationship you have to you have to for resurrection to happen there has to be reconciliation with the stranger because it's a you the universal story has to not you have to find a way to bring this all together like all of it has to fit and so the idea that in the end so it i mean and you have it there's a like the scandal of of of resurrection has to do with that and and it you see that in christianity one of the reasons why romans become christians has to do with this scandal of the the stranger becoming the stranger participating in the the return of the seed right uh so there are these there these prophecies let's for instance in the psalms psalm 68 in the like the numbering most people use uh talks about princes coming out of egypt and ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto god and now this particular line that ethiopia will stretch out her hands of the god this becomes really important in the way that ethiopia is viewed in the byzantine and byzantine apocalyptic tradition so maybe just bracket that because that's that's gonna have to be another video um it's like the ultimate tease i know i know like how the relationship between ethiopia and like the end of the end of everything and the right the final resolution yes yes literally the end of everything right ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands under god psalm 87 speaks this is one of my favorite psalms i think that we read it uh every every monday or not every monday every wednesday night uh in the orthodox church at wednesday vespers so so we hear i always hear this i hear the psalm read every week and uh it goes a little bit differently in the septuagint translation we use in my parish but in the king james it says i will make mention of rahab and babylon to them that know me behold philistia entire with ethiopia this man was born there the idea is that people from the edges of the world right from all of these these places and and these these places function differently babylon is not the same as ethiopia symbolically it's a totally different you know kind of a thing philistia is more closely related to ethiopia um tyre you know so but the idea is that all these different gentile nations with all of their symbolic resonance that the people from these nations are going to say of jerusalem that's my city i was born in her and of course the of course the uh the the most important ethiopian church uh which is in the in the town of oxum today uh which is sort of the spiritual heart of of ethiopia is saint mary of zion um that's the church yeah and um and of course the the church fathers read this particular psalm as resonant speaking both of the church and the mother of god right as as mary mary is sort of the the new jerusalem somehow and that's why he man if you go to ethiopia it it just becomes so intense in terms of seeing that because ethiopians seem to identify themselves as mary like in a very mysterious analogical way there's an image in uh in one of the churches i forget the name of the the place where all the little angels are at on the on the ceiling um where they they they where they have the the great theophany uh festival i forget the name of the church i'm sorry um but in that church there's an image of mary who's who's in the shape of ethiopia like oh man so i got a little like ever ahead and she's holding and then the the her veil like ah her veil kind of falls at the bottom of how she's presented she's actually taking up the shape of ethiopia oh my goodness it's pretty amazing yeah i'm gonna have to look for that um oh maybe i can add it and when we edit this yeah that would be good that would be good and then i'll watch the video so i can see you can see it so i can see it um yeah so so there's this so the idea is that that this the ultimate stranger right would then identify with the ultimate center of things and and i personally have to say that i love this verse i love the song because for me as a as a you know i'm a gentile i'm a you know a wasp i'm a like i live in north texas of all places right for me to be able to say zion is my city and i was born in her right uh that's you know with with all of the sort of the mystical layers that that entails to me that's a deeply there's actually a deeply comforting thing comforting thing and it's deeply reaffirming of of my identity in christ you know as as part of as part of the church so uh so there's there's this idea that that the ethiopians are going to be drawn to jerusalem they'll identify it they'll claim their lineage from it and they'll worship the god of israel and because of the symbolism the queen of sheba is often as i mentioned earlier she's used the medieval iconography as a type of sort of a shorthand of the entire gentile church yeah that the hybrid the multiplicity of all the nations of the gentiles is united in the with the center in such a way that it actually preserves the unity and the unique identity of the people of god yeah that's the image like just the image of pentecost the ancient image of pentecost is having all the nations gathered into the door to receive the spirit of god like that is this the queen of sheba is a condensation of that type of imagery and this is also what i mean would say paul talks about the gentiles becoming sort of the ultimate means of salvation for the jews you can even see that playing out in a symbolic level in that only in ethiopia is a certain form of judaism preserved that was actually kind of like the dominance one of the dominant strains of judaism at the time of christ you know but but it hasn't it hasn't been preserved anywhere else and even even things like uh even things like some of the some of the let's see the crazier you know scriptural books things like enoch and jubilees which which aren't in our canon you know and they're not in any certainly they're way outside any western canon you know but in ethiopia they were preserved and the reason that they're preserved in ethiopia is because they'd already been preserved by the jewish community of ethiopia so these are like these are really important texts to what a lot of people call second temple judaism or second temple judaisms these are really important texts but it's only in ethiopia that they really survive and so but it's so fascinating to see how the layers come together which is the idea that ethiopia has the arc the idea that ethiopia has all these texts it's like ethiopia is the ark it has it is the place where things end up kind of being preserved this this box this home this this this hidden place where where you know where you put you know it's like the in the ark what did they put they put they put the the the ten commandments they put the staff they had these they had the mana they had these these uh tokens of the tradition which were held in the box so you can understand that that's what ethiopia the role that ethiopia kind of played even in terms of modern bible scholarship like without ethiopia the narrative of the book of enoch would not be full we wouldn't have this full and it's playing a role like just like the lord of spirits it's playing a role in in what's going on like this restoration of christianity it's going to vote through that type of story that's the thing like i don't know if this is too crazy to say you know on a recording or not i guess you can edit it out if it is but like you wouldn't be doing the thing you're doing right now without ethiopia exactly you're like lord of spirits wouldn't be a podcast right now without ethiopia no you're totally right there is there is something happening like in terms of the the the capacity to recapture the ancient story to recapture let's say that more mythical aspects of christianity are coming through what the ethiopians have have preserved and have kept uh but but it's it's more than that like it's hard to explain to people it's more than that because the magical world is still alive in ethiopia like th this kind of enchanted reality is still there if you go there you'll you'll you can't get around it like this i was in i was in on a mountaintop and this this insane mountain top is super high up it took us like half a day to go up there and then you wake up on a sunday morning and you look out in the valley and you see all these little white dots that are that are climbing up the mountain just to go to church and they're going into this cave where this church is and you know that there's they're like walking for two hours just to two three hours just to come to church on a sunday and to ascend this mountain to be in this cave and you're thinking like where else like where else is this even possible it's just astounding man i don't man like i don't know what to say because i complain because i've got to drive and drive i was just thinking in five minutes yeah i was just thinking about my 30-minute drive to my parish and like lord of mercy yeah let's all be shamed but we yeah getting said to be shamed okay so so so uh so the so the the queen of shiva right like she represents both the church right the gentile church but also we see this this movement from the strange woman to the to the new jerusalem of course we have this wonderful hymn that we sing instead of it is truly meet during the possible season which is now past you know uh sp singing seeing you know the angel cry to the lady full of grace it's this announcement of the enunciation if you will of the resurrection to the virgin but then she's but then we sing shine shine oh new jerusalem so that hinography closely identifies it's not the only place obviously it's very frequently found in our tradition but the hymnography closely identifies the virgin with the new jerusalem and so we see uh the enthroned queen of sheba being used in medieval art to represent the coronation of the virgin mary um and so uh so there's there's uh uh all of this kind of culminates in the ethiopian eunuch which is maybe i think we'll get to the ethiopian eunuch and then maybe we could just tease the business the next stuff for the next time yeah yeah all right yeah um and i've got a great teaser for that so okay so so with the ethiopian eunuch you have to remember what's the ethiopian eunuch reading when philip meets him on the road he's reading the scroll of the book of isaiah and of course he's very famously reading that you know chapter 53 which is about the suffering servant right but if you go to the book of isaiah and you look at the stuff that comes before that and after that of course he's reading on a scroll so you don't flip around on a scroll you sort of start at one end and you kind of work your way across a few chapters before um talking uh this is in chapter 43 and chapter 45 we say we see yahweh the god of israel saying i am the lord thy god the holy one of israel thy savior i give egypt for thy ransom and ethiopia and sheba for thee and then he says uh then he says you know talks about thus says the lord the labor of egypt and merchandise of ethiopia and of the sabians right the sabians or this group that came into ethiopia men of stature they shall come over unto thee and they shall be thine they shall come after thee they shall fall down unto thee they shall make supplication unto thee saying surely god is in me and there is none else there is no god so here's the here's the ethiopian eunuch and he's on the road between ethiopia and jerusalem and he reads in the scroll and it says ethiopians are going to come to jerusalem and say god is in you and there is no other god than you you know like than your god so then he reads isaiah chapter 53 and that's when philip shows up and that's when he gets baptized yeah okay but then you go three more chapters down and we get this crazy verse in chapter 56 it says neither let the son of the stranger that hath joined himself to the lord speak saying the lord hath utterly separated me from his people neither let the eunuch say behold i am a dry tree thus says the lord unto the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths and choose the things that please me take hold of my covenant even unto them i will give my house and my walls and a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters i will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off that's amazing i never knew that that was there like i never knew that that was in the in isaiah this is like i mean this is incredible yeah it's incredible because it's also there's something about the the the eunuch it's it's it's everything about christianity is in that story in terms of the right the ethiopian because he is from the edge of the world he's the he's the ultimate stranger but he's also in terms of jewish law he would not have been allowed to go into the temple because he was castrated and so he is he is the reject like he is really is he represents the edge in every way you couldn't be you couldn't be more on the edge of the ancient jewish world than him like because he's both a gentile he's an ethiopian and he's a eunuch like it's he's the mystery that's being shown and it's being shown in the story is that the eunuch is like is the garment of skin in this story it's because the in the story it's trying to show you that there's a relationship between elijah and the story of the ethiopian eunuch because when philip baptizes the eunuch it says that philip ascended into heaven and there was no more and the the text the the phrase it's used in greek is the exact same phrase in the septuagint which it says that elijah went up when he tried to cross the river and so this is like the story of christianity like condensed into an amazing moment because he crosses over the river he goes into death with the garments of skin philip goes up like elijah and then the blessing falls down on the ethiopian and so now the stranger becomes the body of christ basically it's like a little repetition of you know of even the ascension of christ in a way like christ goes up and then down below from the body and so this is what is happening in the story where this garment of skin is transformed into a garment of glory before your very eyes in in in this story the edge becomes the body of christ and that's that's and that's exactly what isaiah says he says the eunuch will be the house of god yeah and the eunuch will be the place where god puts his name right and that he is going to bring the eunuch to his holy mountain in verse 7 of chapter um and what's really interesting to me is that this is the context when christ is in the temple he's purging the temple and he says it has written my house shall be a house of prayer he's quoting this passage that this passage of and like this is some symbolism that i'm still trying to wrap my head around because because what christ is doing is an act of purity right it's an act of purgation he's pure he's purifying the temple because the temple has been defiled with commerce but commerce is related to ethiopia you know and he's he's he's he's you know it's the it's the influx of you know from the stranger coming in and so he's he's pure that's what money changing is too it's about it's about strange currencies but but and this is my obligatory ethics of beauty reference for this video um because i just have to talk about this book all the time one of the beautiful things and i think this is what dr petitta actually did his whole dissertation about for his phd but um is the idea of the liturgy of holy week as a city founding ritual and so in the ancient world all these cities have the various cities had these city founding rituals that they would enact every year and what's what's uh i mean they're different a little bit different from city to city but basically the pattern would be that the king comes into the city and he ascends to the the center of the city where the holy place is and he enters into the holy place and he spends a ritual night with the city you know of course in a pagan context this is with like a temple prostitute but in uh in but what what dr patiza argues is that is that you can read especially in the gospel of john uh and you know that you can actually read christ's movement into uh one of the interesting things that we're we are never told in the gospels that christ spends the night in jerusalem never happens he always goes out of town to bethany which is like the the the ghetto right the that's where the poor are so he always goes outside of jerusalem to bethany to spend the night we're never told that he spends the night in jerusalem so this is what's really interesting is that in the the holy week narrative you have christ ascending and he gets to the high place he gets the holy place of the city but then when he finds this it's totally defiled yeah so he purges it he cast out the money changers and then he leaves the city and goes outside and the bridal night for the story of holy week becomes the bridal chamber of the tomb yeah and so we see christ sort of like consummating his relationship with the new jerusalem right and constituting a new people so that's dr uh petita's argument in his book and in his phd thesis and i think it's brilliant but here's the thing christ is saying is quoting this passage what is this passage about this passage is about god constituting bringing in the stranger bringing in the eunuch and constituting a new people of yahweh the god of israel bringing in the ethiopian and the eunuch and saying these this is my people uh and and what what constitutes it he refers to it over and over again as these are the ones who keep my sabbath in other words they're the one who preserved the remainder right and that this is where he's gonna put his this is where he's gonna make his new people so and and he's referring to that as he's purging the temple which is somehow participating in this idea of a city-founding liturgy and this idea of so this is a this is an idea that's not like fully formed in my mind yet but i've been i've just been noodling on this a lot the last few weeks yeah there's something really mysterious happening here and always you know uh father stephen deyoung talked about this whenever the new old testament is quoted in the new testament you have to go back and look at the rest of the passage because it's like a hyperlink yeah so you got to click that and go to the rest of the passage to see what is christ talking about so he's not just saying oh you're supposed to pray in church and instead you're selling stuff in church that's not what he's really saying at all i mean he is saying that but what he's really saying is is i'm going to make a new people for myself right he's saying he's saying i'm going to make a new people for myself i'm going to make a new temple right that the temple of my body is going to be destroyed and it's going to i'm going to rebuild it and it's going to be the church and it's going to bring in these people from the edge of things yeah and that's going to be where i put my name so you can understand it like you can maybe understand if you can compare the money changes to pentecost when maybe an interesting way to understand where money changing is like it's like this equivalency of identities that just gets kind of traded back and forth and and there's like you know it's almost like it really is like this kind of weird mixture and and mitigation you could say whereas pentecost there's a sense in which the one truth gets embodied in all these particulars so the particulars commune together by by by preserving their particularity but are able to see each other as brothers you're not and they're able to see each other as in a way to transcend that right it's like it's a way to transcend their particular but it doesn't mean it doesn't it also affirms the reality because people were hearing their the they were hearing the the speech of the apostles in their own language and so it's like this filling up of multiplicity but you're right it's difficult because there's like a there's a thing happening here like in terms of the place of multiplicity and unity together how it kind of how it plays together in christ when it comes together and it's sometimes not easy to see through it because it seems to be so found such foundation that sometimes it's hard to see the foundation of something yeah so maybe at this point i'll just tease all right let's go okay so here's the thing we all know and i'm sure somebody out there some some very zealous person out there is like well why are richard and jonathan talking so much about ethiopia ethiopia don't you know we're in chisholm with them you know so i'm just going to say this in the byzantine apocalyptic tradition there's this idea that the seed of rome and i really literally mean the seed of rome because it's the son of romulus that the seed of rome is preserved in ethiopia kind of like the the you know the seed of solomon being preserved in ethiopia it's the same pattern the seed of rome being preserved in ethiopia but the place where that happens in the byzantine apocalypse tradition is at calcidon which is where the fourth ecumenical council right where where where you know the calcidonian churches you know and that and the non-calcedonian churches wanted decision was at that council so and the thing is like when that when this is being written when this prophecy is being written this was a few hundred years after that had happened it's totally deliberate wow so there's a sense in which there's a mystery in the separation right there's the mystery and the fragmentation of the church which is going to play out in in in the apocalypse yeah that's amazing so it's amazing it's a little teaser people need to need to tune in for that next one we'll talk about ethiopia and the byzantine apocalyptic tradition and maybe we can talk and you know more about this than i do so maybe maybe we can talk and you can kind of talk and i'll listen and ask questions about about uh ethiopia today and about you know recent history you know there's there's this recent emperor of ethiopia who like some people worship and um i've actually met a couple of those people now and of course they eventually became ethiopian you know today christians so so yeah i i have a lot of i just have a lot of questions about all that and then uh and then but also the this this uh in the byzantine apocalyptic tradition ethiopia is very closely tied to the myth of alexander so i think that's going to be a really natural segue into talking about alexander and about all of these great imitators of alexander uh in the in the medieval universal history so awesome and i think i also want to talk about in our next discussion on ethiopia i want to talk about the traditions of ethiopia the the way that we talk about the extreme and to what extent their traditions preserve extremes that to us sometimes look so fringe that it's hard to it's hard to talk about them but it's interesting to understand that this accumulation of extremes does seem to be the reason also why they were able to preserve texts that we have forgotten and that we have kind of set aside so we can look at all that so one more teaser then yeah the preservation and and i would say that most like textual scholars don't think this is true from like a historical critical perspective okay but the tradition is that the reason that enoch and jubilees are preserved is because of a group called the nine saints yeah and the nine saints were this these people who uh at the calcidonian schism they came out of the byzantine empire they went into exile they went to ethiopia and they brought with them all of this learning that was not preserved yeah anywhere else so those nine saints man they are wild bunch yeah if there's actually i i i won't go too too much but there's one who like committed suicide to imitate christ like crazy stuff that we don't have in our traditions yeah yeah and and and don't necessarily want in our tradition in some cases but but it's there and it's yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's it's like i said it's good to understand this as this kind of extreme and so we'll talk about it next time okay because we can just keep going now next video is gonna be awesome all right all right everybody so thank you for your time i hope you're as excited about ethiopia as we are um and so you know and so so stay tuned we're gonna we're gonna keep going you know as long as everybody's interested we're definitely gonna keep going and talking about this universal history so thank you everybody for your attention and we'll see very soon bye as you know everything i'm doing here is thanks to your help and your support there are many ways you can get involved by commenting and sharing these ideas to your friends by getting involved in the symbolic world facebook group or reddit if you want to support this work financially you can do it by purchasing products with my designs on teespring for example for this podcast i created an exclusive illustration based on ethiopian crosses and ornamentation but if you want to support it directly you can also do it through my website or patreon supporters get an extra video a month plus opportunities to ask questions and participate in exclusive discussion groups so thank you everybody for your support and i'll talk to you very soon

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 110,543

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: czy7MnDXOO0

Length: 79min 12sec (4752 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021