When The Message Changed

The Jews, having come to the culmination of four world empires, and believing that in accordance with the book of Daniel, were looking to a Messiah who would come to usher in the kingdom of God. However, their applications of the various interpretations, while satisfactory in developing laws of commerce and legislation to knit the nations together, could not find a way to link the Mishna to the Torah, which they considered the divine word of God. God had apparently been incomplete in his requirements of Israel to do as they were required in the Diaspora, so they had to “externalize” the “DNA” of their various experiences and make it available as a kind of standard “language’ for all the nations.

“Babylonian trade routes guided the venturesome Jews throughout the then-known world, transforming them from “parochial men ” into cosmopolitan citizens. Their commercial trading outposts became centers for thriving Jewish communities”.

If the superorganism was following a strategy of learning by placing one “code” system inside another, it had now, virus-like produced a combination of two very basic forms that was extending itself as a kind of “franchise” in the known world. As traders, the Jews were fully capable of the “cut and paste’ process that would allow, by trade and commerce, combined with their affinity for laws, to create a new cultural “DNA” model that could extend itself consciously worldwide. In fact, the Jews in trade were so successful that when Persia overran Babylon and King Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, DiMont points out:

“Though wealthy Babylonian Jews were willing to finance one-way tickets for those who wanted to return to Judah, there were few takers.”

If Bloom’s description of the superorganism is correct, it had followed a process by which there would be cultural forms of recorded “DNA” that would influence all world cultures of the day, and by the time of Rome, Jews had absorbed all the cultures and considered themselves as the equals of anyone. However, they had not yet escaped their “captivity” under Roman rule. They had been reduced to little more than record keepers, scribes of the power elite, but this pattern had supported them since their days in Babylon, and it now became irksome as they remained “second hand citizens” before Roman power.

What occurred here, from the point of view of the superorganism, was a quick process that began selecting and ordering consciously, binding the works of Greek philosophy, science, and mathematics, to Jewish monotheism, which had been the major factor leading to the dissolution of Egypt. The superorganism had spread its human “viruses” into the known world, and they were now looking ot offer the world something finer, and higher.

When I compare the Jews as “civilizational viruses”, I am not trying to insult, but to point out that as viruses spread among species and cut and pasted new DNA into different species, so did the Jews begin to cutr and paste among different cultures. They were now seeking to put a “brand name” on their combined knowledge, and use it to propel Jewish understanding to a higher level.

That “higher step” came from rabbi Hillel, a brilliant and educated man from Babylon who could combine the logic of the Greeks and the religion of the Jews in a new format. Hillel, said DiMont, taught his followers that if they wanted to be keepers of a viable Judaism, they had to keep up with science and progress. But there had to be something to prove divine assertions by logic and reason. The intellectuals had to prove divine assertions by logic and reason. Hillel did this by providing his Seven Middot or “Seven Rules” for deriving new concepts from old by the use of logic.

The superorganism had evolved a process that served better than statistical elimination. It had developed a cultural code that served generally the same purposes as the DNA of the genetic code, and they would act to unite all k nowledge, to give “meaning” by the logical process of exclusion, the excluded middle of Aristotle. Hillel, wrote DiMont:

“…designed the intellectual apparatus for an orderly evolution of divine principles…Instead of the ‘divine designer…it will be rabbinic diaspora designers who will…guide the fate of the Jews on the chessboard of world history”.

The problem, however, was that the Pharisees, who were the rabbi intellectuals, had excluded something else from their plans: the right of all the people of Israel to have self-rule. It was Jesus who would come along a generation later to challenge the control, the “leaven” of the rabbis, placing the law in the hands of the people again. This same idea would be expanded worldwide by the apostle Paul, a “renegade” Pharisee who would directly challenge the conclusions of Hillel.