The Birth of God as a Luminous Anthropos

By Wesley Muhammad

How could God be a human being? The ancient Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible explain this clearly. In this heavily documented twenty page EPUB digital book, Dr. Wesley Muhammad demonstrates how such a concept was not so strange to Moses and John the Baptist—the men through whom Jews, Christians and Muslims believe are messengers of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365609718

Book preview

The Birth of God as a Luminous Anthropos

The Birth of God

as a Luminous Anthropos

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD

The Birth of God as a Luminous Anthropos:

Understanding the Hebrew Text of Genesis 1:1-4

EPUB Digital Book By Wesley Muhammad, PhD

978-1-365-60971-8

Second Edition

December 2016

COPYRIGHT © 2016

By

A-Team Publishing

PO Box 551036

Atlanta GA, 30355

To order additional copies or to reach Dr. Muhammad for speaking engagements, please contact him through http://www.drwesleymuhammad.info.

All Rights Reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, photocopying, mechanical, recording, information storage or retrieval system without permission from the publisher, A-Team Publishing. Brief quotations may be used in reviews or commentary.

Table of Contents

The Birth of God as a Luminous Anthropos

The Esoteric Tradition Behind The Text

Genesis and its African and Ancient Near Eastern Background

Triple-Darkness in the Hebrew Bible

The Primordial Atom

‘Let There Be Light’

Primordial Light and the Luminous Body of God

The Esoteric Tradition Behind The Text

Gerhard von Rad in his Genesis commentary appropriately put any would-be interpreter of the first chapter on notice:

Whoever expounds Gen., ch. I, must understand one thing: this is Priestly doctrine-indeed, it contains the essence of Priestly knowledge in a most concentrated form…Nothing is here by chance; everything must be considered carefully, deliberately, and precisely…Nowhere at all is the text only allusive, symbolic, or figuratively poetic. Actually, the exposition must painstakingly free this bundled and rather esoteric doctrine sentence by sentence, indeed, word by word. These sentences cannot be easily over interpreted theologically! Indeed, to us the danger appears greater that the expositor will fall short of discovering the concentrated doctrinal content.

[1]

Because Genesis I contains the essence of Priestly knowledge in a most concentrated form, and this knowledge was esoteric, the Temple traditions represented by P (the Priestly author of Genesis) are never explicitly communicated in these materials.[2] Stephen A. Geller has observed that P more than any other biblical author, reveals what he has to say by how he says it.[3] Instead of openly verbalizing his theological concepts, P employs a method of ‘literary indirection’ through placement, juxtaposition, and subtle allusion to impress these unarticulated concepts on the structure of the Pentateuch.  Employing the tools of literary analysis has allowed scholars to shed light on a number of these ‘esoteric’ themes.

[4]

That the creation of account of Genesis I was part of Jewish esoterica was affirmed my no less an authority than Maimonide (1138-1204) who cautioned:

Whoever shall find out the true sense of the book of Genesis ought to take care not to divulge it. This is a maxim which all our sages repeat to us, and above all, respecting the work of the six days. If a person should discover the true meaning of it by himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent; or, if he speaks of it, he ought to speak of it but obscurely and in an enigmatical manner’. (Guide of the Perplexed, Pt. II, Chapter 29)

What is the true sense of the Genesus creation account that ought not be mentioned? According to the esoteric tradition of Judaism, called Kabbalah, the biblical story of creation in six days is both a cosmogony and a theogony, that is an account of God’s own corporeal birth and self-evolution, as Gershom Sholem informs us:

the work of creation as described in the first chapter of Genesis has a twofold character: Insofar as it represents, in a mystical sense, the history of God’s self-revelation and His unfolding…the description is a theogony…and only in so far as it brings the nether world into being, i.e. creation in the strict sense…can it be described as cosmogony…Theogony and cosmogony represent not two different acts of creation, but two aspects of the same.

[5]

On this reading, the six days of Genesis chronicle not only the birth of different aspects of the physical cosmos,

Reviews for The Birth of God as a Luminous Anthropos

[courtney sullivan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An extraordinary work of scholarship that brings the oft heard, but rarely studied, scriptural references many are familiar with on a surface level, into the light of truth for a more robust discussion. I find myself returning to this slim volume of great depth often, both in thought and as a reference.