Sepphoris

“ Huxley overlooks.
Sepphoris, the chief city of Galilee, and the strongest, exhibits those anomalies of political position which belonged to a conquered, disturbed, and variously divided country. It was one of the five great Hebrew centers, which Gabinius chose to be the seats of Sanhedrims. [17] After the death of Herod, it was taken and destroyed by the Romans, and the population reduced to slavery. Subsequently it was repeopled. When Vespasian invaded Palestine, it asked and obtained from him a Roman garrison, [18] as it had also received Cestius Gallus with acclamations not long before. ”

“ Hereon Jonathan, finding his occasion, spake to the same effect, saying that all the Scribes in the country round about Sepphoris had been turned away from Jesus because it had been noised abroad that he observed not the Sabbath. So he besought Jesus to consider his course well: "Despise not instruction from an elder, O my son, even though thou art a prophet. Art thou confident in thine heart that it is a spirit from God, and not a spirit from Satan, that tempteth thee thus to break the Sabbath? Bethink thee also how thou wilt cause the people of the land to go astray. ”

“ Therefore I cried aloud in the fervency of my passion and said, "It is written, 'On three things the world is stayed: on the Law, and on the Worship, and on the Bestowal of Kindnesses;' and lo, I know not the interpretation of the Law; and worship is naught but vanity; and as for kindness, my heart is dry and empty of love, so that there is no kindness in me."
On the third day after the sacrifice, I came to Sepphoris. My mother was so far recovered of her sickness that she was no longer despaired of by the physicians. ”

“ Write therefore, I pray thee, to his mother Mary, and to his brethren (but I grieve that his father no longer liveth to restrain him) that they may come and lay hands upon him: for they will listen to thy voice. We desire also that thou wouldst write to the young man, thy pupil and friend, Joseph the son of Simeon, that he may return to Sepphoris, lest he too fall into the pit of destruction along with this blind guide Jesus. If also thou shouldst inform Joanna, the mother of Joseph, concerning all these things, she would peradventure join her voice to thine, that thy pupil might return. ”

“ But when Vespasian was come to Ptolemais, the chief men of Decapolis of Syria made a clamor against Justus of Tiberias, because he had set their villages on fire: so Vespasian delivered him to the king, to he put to death by those under the king's jurisdiction; yet did the king only put him into bonds, and concealed what he had done from Vespasian, as I have before related. But the people of Sepphoris met Vespasian, and saluted him, and had forces sent him, with Placidus their commander: he also went up with them, as I also followed them, till Vespasian came into Galilee. ”

“ In Sepphoris also, a city of Galilee, there was one Judas (the son of that arch-robber Hezekias, who formerly overran the country, and had been subdued by king Herod) ; this man got no small multitude together, and brake open the place where the royal armor was laid up, and armed those about him, and attacked those that were so earnest to gain the dominion. In Perea also, Simon, one of the servants to the king, relying upon the handsome appearance and tallness of his body, put a diadem upon his own head also ”

“ He then tried to take Sepphoris, which was a city not far from that which was destroyed, but lost many of his men; yet did he then go to fight with Alexander; which Alexander met him at the river Jordan, near a certain place called Saphoth, [not far from the river Jordan,] and pitched his camp near to the enemy. He had however eight thousand in the first rank, which he styled Hecatontomachi, having shields of brass. Those in the first rank of Ptolemy's soldiers also had shields covered with brass. ”

“ The Baptizer : A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom ; but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice; this my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.
Act Three Galilee . 26 or 27 A. D.
Scene 1 Sepphoris, capital of Galilee, five miles from Nazareth. Herod Antipas and Herodias sit in the judgment hall. Soldiers stand in the background. ”

“ Huxley.
Many a good cause, however, suffers from the use of bad arguments in its favor. It remains for me to offer, with due submission some reasons, which appear to me serious, in support of the text as it stands.
1. Josephus says Vespasian attacked "the city of the Gadarenes." So far as I know, he uses this form of expression only when the city is the center of a district (Gadaris) , [60] named after it. Such was the case of Gadara, but not of Gabara. He does not call Sepphoris the city of the Sepphorites, or Gamala the city of the Gamalenes. ”

“ Sens, archbishop of, anti-Jewish sentiments of, 3, 171.558 rabbi of, at the first rabbinical synod, 3, 377. archbishop of, banished for harsh treatment of the Jews, 3, 401. college of, sold, 4, 48. Sephardic Jews, the, looked upon as the nobility, 4, 382–3. distinguished by Pinto, 5, 344–5. See also Marranos, the; Portugal, the Jews of; Spanish exiles, the; Spain, the Jews of. Sepharvaim, the inhabitants of, colonized in Samaria, 1, 285. Sepphoris (Diocæsarea) , a Synhedrion established at, by Aulus Gabinius, 2, 71. an arsenal for Antigonus, 2, 85. ”

“ Proof.—As the Sephiroth do not set aside the unity of the En Soph, each one of them must receive from its predecessor, and impart to its successor—i.e., be receptive and imparting. (Answer 9.)
6. Proposition.—The first Sephira is called Inscrutable Height (‏רום מעלה‎) ; the second, Wisdom (‏חכמה‎) ; the third, Intelligence (‏בינה‎) ; the fourth, Love (‏חסד‎) ; the fifth, Justice (‏פחד‎) ; the sixth, Beauty (‏תפארת‎) ; the seventh, Firmness (‏נצח‎) ; the eighth, Splendour (‏הוד‎) ; the ninth, the Righteous is the Foundation of the World (‏צדיק יסוד עולם‎) ”

“ O Sappho, why art thou ever
Singing with praises the blessed
Queen of the heaven?
Why does the heart in thy bosom
Ever revert in its yearning
Throb to the Goddess?
Why are thy senses unsated
Ever in quest of elusive
Love that is deathless?
Ah, gracious Daughter of Cyprus,
Never can I as a mortal
Tire of thy service.
Thou art the breath of my body,
The blood in my veins, and the glowing
Pulse of my bosom.
Omnipotent, burning, resistless,
Thou art the passion that shaking
Masters me ever. ”

“ The fourth and fifth Sephiroth, i.e., Mercy (‏חסד‎) and Justice (‏פחד‎) , are the two arms of the Lord, the former the right arm and the latter the left, one distributing life and the other death. And the sixth Sephira, Beauty (‏תפארת‎) , which unites these two opposites and produces the second triad, is the chest; whilst the seventh and eighth Sephiroth,—i.e., Firmness (‏נצח‎) and Splendour (‏הוד‎) , of the third triad,—are the two legs; and Foundation (‏יסוד‎) , the ninth Sephira, represents the genital organs, since it denotes the basis and source of all things. ”

“ Proof.—All created objects diminish by abstraction; the Sephiroth do not lessen, as their activity never ceases; hence they cannot be created. (Ibid.)
Scholion.—The first Sephira was in the En Soph as a power before it became a reality; then the second Sephira emanated as a potency for the intellectual world, and afterwards the other Sephiroth emanated for the sensuous and material world. This, however, does not imply a prius and posterius or a gradation in the En Soph, but just as a light whose kindled lights which shine sooner and later and variously, so it embraces all in a unity. ”

“ When thus fulfilling the commandments the pious not only enjoy a prelibation of that sublime light which shines in heaven, and which will serve them as a garment when they enter into the other world and appear before the Holy One (Sohar, ii, 299 b) , but become on earth already the habitation of the Sephiroth, and each saint has that Sephira incarnate in him which corresponds to the virtue he most cultivates, or to the feature most predominant in his character. Among the patriarchs, therefore, who were the most exalted in piety, we find that Love, the fourth Sephira, was incarnate in Abraham ”

“ Hence all powers which exist originate through the genital organs.” (Sohar, iii, 296 a.) Kingdom (‏מלכות‎) , the tenth Sephira, represents the harmony of the whole Archetypal Man. The following is the archetypal figure of the ten Sephiroth.
It is this form which the prophet Ezekiel saw in the mysterious chariot, and of which the earthly man is a faint copy. Moreover, these Sephiroth, as we have already remarked, created the world and all things therein according to their own archetype or in the likeness and similitude of the Heavenly Man or the World of Emanations. ”

“ No! we are sliding toward the abyss. Our old Egypt, which was the cradle of the world, will be its burial vault; Serapis, the god of Death, will receive the last adoration of mortals, and I shall have been the last priest of the last god.
At this moment a strange figure raised the tapestry, and the guests saw before them a little hunchback, whose bald skull rose in a point. He was clad, in the Asiatic fashion, in a blue tunic, and wore round his legs, like the barbarians, red breeches, spangled with gold stars. ”

“ See MAHOMETAN CONQUEST: A. D. 752-759. SEPTIMANIA: 10th Century. The dukes and their successors. See TOULOUSE: 10-11TH CENTURIES. SEPTUAGINT, The. "We have in the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament, the first great essay in translation into Greek, a solitary specimen of the ordinary language spoken and understood in those days [at Alexandria 3d century B. C.] . There is a famous legend of the origin of the work by order of the Egyptian king, and of the perfect agreement of all the versions produced by the learned men who had been sent at his request from Judæa. ”

“ Vopiscus in the letter of the Emperor Hadrian to his brother-inlaw Servius: “Those who worship Serapis are the Chrestians, and those who call themselves priests of Chrestus are devoted to Serapis. There is not a high-priest of the Jews, a Samaritan, or a priest of Chrestus who is not a mathematician, soothsayer, or quack. Even the patriarch, when he goes to Egypt, is compelled by some to worship Serapis, by others to worship Chrestus. They are a turbulent, inflated, lawless body of men. They have only one God, who is worshipped by the Chrestians, the Jews, and all the peoples of Egypt.” ”

“ He lived just when this religion had shed upon it the greatest strength of intellectual light which it could bear without fading; he is, perhaps, the highest type of its votary—the man for whom, more than for any other who could be named, the old national religion of Greece was a self-sufficing, thoughtful, and ennobling faith. Sophocles was, indeed, the perfect Greek ideal of a man who loved the gods and was loved by them—one, the work of whose life was their service under their direct inspiration ”

“ Have we not been oppressed? Have not our children been butchered and our gains wrung from us to fill the bottomless greed and lust of the Lagidæ? Have not the temples been forsaken?—ay, have not the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, and name the Most High by another name—by the name of Serapis—confounding the substance of the Invisible? Does not Egypt cry aloud for freedom?—and shall she cry in vain? Nay, nay, for thou, my son, art the appointed way of deliverance. ”

“ We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion. As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child Horus and its mother. ”

“ Just as Socrates almost swoons at the sight of the exquisite beauty of an Athenian youth, so Sappho trembles all over when she gazes on her lovely girls. And she weaves all the beauties of nature into the expression of the depth of her emotion. ”

“ Septimius answered with such facts and traditions as had come to his knowledge respecting his family history; a sort of history that is quite as liable to be mythical, in its early and distant stages, as that of Rome, and, indeed, seldom goes three or four generations back without getting into a mist really impenetrable, though great, gloomy, and magnificent shapes of men often seem to loom in it, who, if they could be brought close to the naked eye, would turn out as commonplace as the descendants who wonder at and admire them. ”

“ We have seen how far both Egyptians and Greeks had before then carried the practice of theocrasia, but the founders of the Alexandrian religion were not slow in pushing it to its only legitimate conclusion. Serapis, unlike the Greek Zeus, from the first declined to brook any partition of his empire over nature. “Wouldst thou know 55what god I am,” said his oracle at the Alexandrian Serapeum to Nicocreon, the Cypriote king. “I myself will tell thee. The heavenly cosmos is my head; the sea my belly. My feet are the earth ”

“ It is almost blasphemy to call the outer side of the Sephiroth bodily—for body is to us something very low. Let us, therefore, beware of attaching anything low or mean to Body, when we speak of the Sephiroth. Let us bow down and revere, for we are in the presence of the Holy, even when we in thought rise to the bodily form of the Sephiroth. ”

“ The very last letter she had received from Sypher had been full of the lust of battle. Septimus nodded gloomily.
"It was only a silly patent ointment like a hundred others, but it was Sypher's religion. Now his gods have gone, and he's lost. It's not good for a man to have no gods. ”