The Book of Job is a complete representation of ancient initiation, and the trials which generally precede this grandest of all ceremonies.
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The neophyte perceives himself deprived of everything he valued, and afflicted with foul disease. His wife appeals to him to adore God and die; there was no more hope for him. Three friends appear on the scene by mutual appointment: Eliphaz, the learned Temanite, full of the knowledge “which wise men have told from their fathers — to whom alone the earth was given”; Bildad, the conservative, taking matters as they come, and judging Job to have done wickedly, because he was afflicted; and Zophar, intelligent and skilful with “generalities” but not interiorly wise. Job boldly responds: “If I have erred, it is a matter with myself. You magnify yourselves and plead against me in my reproach; but it is God who has overthrown me. Why do you persecute me and are not satisfied with my flesh thus wasted away? But I know that my Champion lives, and that at a coming day he will stand for me in the earth; and though, together with my skin, all this beneath it shall be destroyed, yet without my flesh I shall see God. . . . Ye shall say: ‘Why do we molest him?’ for the root of the matter is found in me!”
This passage, like all others in which the faintest allusions could be found to a “Champion,” “Deliverer,” or “Vindicator,” was interpreted into a direct reference to the Messiah; but apart from the fact that in the Septuagint this verse is translated:
“For I know that He is eternal
Who is about to deliver me on earth,
To restore this skin of mine which endures these things,” etc.
In King James’s version, as it stands translated, it has no resemblance whatever to the original.The crafty translators have rendered it, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” etc. And yet Septuagint, Vulgate, and Hebrew original, have all to be considered as an inspired Word of God. Job refers to his own immortal spirit which is eternal, and which, when death comes, will deliver him from his putrid earthly body and clothe him with a new spiritual envelope. In the Mysteries of Eleusinia, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and all other works treating on matters of initiation, this “eternal being” has a name. With the Neo-platonists it was the Nous, the Augoeides; with the Buddhists it is Aggra; and with the Persians, Ferwer. All of these are called the “Deliverers,” the “Champions,” the “Metatrons,” etc. In the Mithraic sculptures of Persia, the ferwer is represented by a winged figure hovering in the air above its “object” or body.It is the luminous Self — the Atman of
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the Hindus, our immortal spirit, who alone can redeem our soul; and will, if we follow him instead of being dragged down by our body. Therefore, in the Chaldean texts, the above reads, “My deliverer, my restorer,” i.e., the Spirit who will restore the decayed body of man, and transform it into a clothing of ether. And it is this Nous, Augoeides, Ferwer, Aggra, Spirit of himself, that the triumphant Job shall see without his flesh — i.e., when he has escaped from his bodily prison, and that the translators call “God.”
Not only is there not the slightest allusion in the poem of Job to Christ, but it is now well proved that all those versions by different translators, which agree with that of King James, were written on the authority of Jerome, who has taken strange liberties in his Vulgate. He was the first to cram into the text this verse of his own fabrication:
“I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last day I shall arise from the earth,
And again shall be surrounded with my skin,
And in my flesh I shall see my God.”
All of which might have been a good reason for himself to believe in it since he knew it, but for others who did not, and who moreover found in the text a quite different idea, it only proves that Jerome had decided, by one more interpolation, to enforce the dogma of a resurrection “at the last day,” and in the identical skin and bones which we had used on earth. This is an agreeable prospect of “restoration” indeed. Why not the linen also, in which the body happens to die?
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
