Sacrifice of the firstborn son

So it is Christmas. I thought of writing a short post of the sacrifice and of the Messiah.

The first information that Levantine peoples sacrificed their children is from Sumerians. A

Sumerian myth tells that the practice was started after the Flood. Some modern researchers have understood this as an indication that the Middle East and Sumer faced a Malthustian catastrophe: the population exceeded the food sources. I cannot see how such a situation could be solved by the sacrifice of the firstborn son. It is much better dealt with by limiting the number of children, and if this was impossible for those people, then they would have killed girls, as is a common practice with hunter-gatherers. Much points out to another type of catastrophe: mutational overload in the Y-cromosome. There are studies showing that in Europe around the time of the beginning of agriculture the variability of the Y-chromosome decreased radically. Such a drastic reduction would easily lead to mutational overload and infertility of men. Why this should be associated with agriculture is simple to see: the eldest son inherits the father in most human cultures. In a hunter-gatherer society this has no ill effects as the father does not own practically anything: he has his weapons, his tent, his hunting rights and his position in the tribe, but in a sedentary culture a rich father owns land, usually many wives, livestock and slaves. Basically everything can be owned by a small group of men. If these men pass their property to their eldest sons, the result very easily is that a small group of men has a monopole on women and as a result mutations in the Y-chromosome lead to a mutational overload and the death of the community. One way to avoid such a situation is to let the younger brothers compete. They all have inherited the Y-chromosome from their father, but not all of them have acquired harmful mutations. This competition decreases the speed harmful mutations accumulate to the Y-chromosomes of the leading paternal lineages. This, I think, is the basic reason for the sacrifice of the firstborn son. Naturally, people of that time did not understand anything of genes, but the rule could be deduced by observation. It is not the neatest solution to the mutational overload problem. In a very concrete sense the sacrifice of the firstborn redeemed the sins of the tribe, as the payment of sin is death and this practice avoided, or at least postponed, the death of the tribe.  

At some point Israelites started to violate this rule and adopted the practice that the firstborn sons must be redeemed. Originally they were redeemed by other children, for instance daughters, but prophets forbade this solution. Then they were redeemed by animal sacrifices, like in the story of Abraham and Isaac, but prophets told that God does not approve animals as sacrifices. There remained the possibility of sacrificing children or grownups from other peoples, which was what e.g. Carthageans usually did: they grew up slave children for the purpose of sacrificing them, but such sacrifices were not enough for redeeming serious sins. Carthagean elite had to sacrifice their own children in difficult times. This is because a sacrifice redeemed the sins of the people and a less worthy sacrifice could not do it.

So we come to Jesus. Only blood had the power to redeem and the command of sacrificing the firstborn son had not been cancelled, only modified: the firstborn son was not to die, he had to be redeemed. This creates a puzzle which has only one solution: the sacrificed son must rise from the death after having redeemed the sins of the people. The law commands that a sacrificed animal must be perfect, so Jesus told his disciplines to be perfect, as he himself was perfect. Only the innocent can redeem the sins. At the time of Jesus Jews had lost their independence and were under the Roman rule: that means that the people must have sinned since otherwise no such thing could have happened. All people in Judea had sinned, a bit later the best of them was Judas Iscariot. And besides, they just needed one good Israelite in order to torture and kill him, it was not that they wanted to become better, only to get the sins redeemed, drive out the Romans and get the world rule. There is nothing of Christian kindness in the sectian writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, Essenes looked for a child from Samaria. You say, Galilea, but I say Samaria. This is because Jesus was not born in Galilea, he was allegorically born in Betlehem. But Betlehem is where King David from the tribe of Judah was born and to Essenes the House of David meant Maccabeans, the Hasmonean dynasty. Sebaste (=Samaria), the capital of Samaria, was the center of the rebel of Aristobulus II, of his sons Alexander and Antigonus Mattathias. (This Mattathias may be Mattas, son of Levi in Luke 3:24). Herod the Great did not kill the children of Betlehem, he killed the Hasmonean princes, so Betlehem is in Samaria, the stronghold of Aristobulus II. John the Baptist baptized in Jordan, died in Sebaste and was from the tribe of Levi, like the Maccabeans. It is here where the center of the rebel was. Later Jesus lived in Galilea. As a Taheb from Samaria he asked water from a Samaritan woman and praised the Good Samaritan.

Simon Magus was a Samaritan witch who according to Acts converted to Christianity. Christian tradition tells of a contest between Simon Peter. As in Bible research it is customary to make weak theories, let me make a theory that Simon Magus was Simon Peter and the original form of Christianity was closer to Gnosticism that you may think. Simon Magus traveled with Helena, let she be Queen Helena of Adiabene, but the brother of Jesus, James, was an Essene from the Dead Sea Sect. How about that? As good as suggesting that Jesus was the grandson of Antigonus Mattathias, which someone has proposed.

The risen Jesus promised to appear on a mountain in Galilea. This mountain is said to be the Mount of Beatitudes on the Korazim Plateau. I do not agree with this. According to Zohar the Jewish Messiah will appear on Mount Meron close to Safed. I have not studied this issue deeply as my version of Zohar is in Italian and, not knowing Italian, can read it only slowly. Safed was the center of kabbalism in the Middle Ages, but many traditions in Zohar are older than Zohar. The tradition that the Messiah comes from a mountain in the North is already in the words of Jesus telling the disciplines to go to the mountain in Galilea. The place Jesus meant had to be (in my opinion) a mountain of significance in the Old Testament, so I think it is Mount Gerizim, the holy mountain of Samaritans. Shechem was close to Mount Gerizim.  I found this blogger interesting

Kabbalistic knowledge about Meron and Safed

He claims that Meron is Shechem (about where today is Nablus), so I agree.

            According to Gershom Scholem Kabbalah has the roots in Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism. Long before him Isaac Myer in 1888 stated that the Sephirot comes from Orphite Diagrams. Please, look at the diagrams in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophite_Diagrams

You see there the circles Father and Son, which in Kabbalah correspond to Macroprosopus and Microprosopus. Microprosopus is the sacrificed son, often drawn to the Sephirot in a position of the crucified Jesus and the rite associated with it is the Tiphereth, the sacrifice rite, the holy blood rite. But this is the Holy Grail rite, a Passover rite, not a Christmas tradition.

The star of Betlehem is a Christmas tradition, what was that one? As it seems to be so that Jesus was Taheb, the new Moses, miracle maker and lawgiver and sacrifice, and Herod Agrippa was meant to be the the King Messiah, maybe you should check when Herod Agrippa was born and when the Halley comet was seen. Was it maybe 11 BC. The issue is that earlier comets had been seen as bad omens, but after Caesar’s comet, comets were considered good omens in Rome.

            Well, maybe I stop here. After all, it is Christmas and not all secrets should be revealed.