When Time and Eternity Kiss: A Bold New Vision of Human Destiny, God, and the Bible

By Sean Maddox

A LIFE-CHANGING SPIRITUAL MASTERWORK
ON GOD, HUMAN DESTINY, AND THE BIBLE
A UNIQUE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY GUIDE

When Time and Eternity Kiss is a boldly provocative and highly original new interpretation of the Bible--a page-turner for believers, seekers, skeptics, and secularists alike. By harmonizing the Bible with 21st c. quantum physics and the "Big Bang" theory, Maddox leads us into the labyrinth of God's mind.

What are we? Where do we come from? Do we have a destiny? The Bible proclaims: "You are gods." What does that mean? Is there an objective reality or just the illusion of one, as Eastern spiritual traditions assert, quantum physics theorizes, and Einstein suggested?

In When Time and Eternity Kiss, author Sean Maddox argues passionately that the Bible answers life's most perplexing questions. He supports his propositions by integrating wisdom and insight from mythologies, biblical Hebrew, Kabbalah, Hindu Chakras, Buddhism, psychology, archetypal symbolism, dream work, and quantum physics. His multidisciplinary perspective allows readers to see with new eyes how the Bible is the spiritual guide par excellence to the psycho-spiritual evolution of divine and human consciousness.

INSPIRED, GROUNDBREAKING SCHOLARSHIP
This revolutionary work is the culmination of the author's twenty-five-year journey of psycho-spiritual inquiry, study, and singular personal sacrifices. Maddox emerges as a daringly independent scholar and visionary who peers into the Bible's riveting mysteries and reveals God's Feminine Side in the texts. Aptly titled, When Time and Eternity Kiss is a passionate cosmic love story from start to finish.

At the climax of the book, Maddox upends traditional interpretations as he illuminates the two Genesis Creation stories and shares his vision of why God shattered the silence of Eternity to create life in time and space. In radiant lucid prose, Maddox restores the Bible to 21st c. relevancy as the cornerstone of Western civilization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504362191

Sean Maddox

Author Sean Maddox enjoyed a spiritually abundant but financially impoverished childhood on an Oklahoma farm. At age fourteen his family moved to Colorado. After majoring in theatre at the University of Colorado, he joined the U.S. Air Force. Following discharge, Maddox married and relocated to Toronto with his Canadian wife. In less than two years he became the managing director of Toronto’s highly acclaimed International Caravan Festival, produced multicultural presentations for Queen Elizabeth II and former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Maddox later served as executive director of Theatre Ontario, publishing a monthly theatre magazine, producing theatre festivals, and managing professional theatre training programs. A decade later he returned to Colorado with his wife and son. Unable to find work in his field, Maddox transitioned successfully to business, working twenty years for two major American corporations. As he approached the apex of his career, he suffered a near-fatal fall from a ladder and a midlife crisis, which launched his spiritual journey and extensive studies in mythology, depth psychology, Kabbalism, and world religions. He was ultimately inspired to write When Time and Eternity Kiss, which is the first in a unique trilogy of books on the Bible that proves the Bible is the spiritual journey guide book par excellence. Sean lives with his wife, Susanne, in the San Francisco Bay area.

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Copyright © 2016 Sean Michael Maddox.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The cover image by Gustav Klimt is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923. The author died in 1920, so this work is also in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 95 years or less. File:The Kiss - Gustav Klimt, Google Cultural Institute.jpg; from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. Location of work: The Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-6188-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6189-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-6219-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911321

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/03/2016

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

2 The Journey Begins

3 Language And The Bible

4 Biblical Hebrew

5 The Names Of God: The Genesis Of Concealment

6 Does God Have A Wife?

7 Mythology

8 The Secret Language Of The Bible

9 Archetypes In The Bible

10 The Archetypal Serpent And The Chakras

11 The Inner Serpent

12 Kabbalah’s Tree Of Life

13 The Bible’s Principal Code Words, Archetypes, And Symbols

14 The Tower Of Babel And The World Mountain

15 Archetypes Of The Family

16 Archetypal Numbers And Colors

17 Hero’s Journey

18 The Philistines

19 Samson And Delilah

20 Sodom And Gomorrah

21 Science, Quantum Physics, And God

22 Celestial Dreaming

23 The Mind: Projection And Reflection

24 The Dreaming Mind

25 Genesis One: God Speaks

26 The Bible’s Big Bang—Bereshith

27 Bereshith: Part 2

28 Before Sunrise My Vision

Bibliography

Endnotes

About The Author

A Note on Bible Translations Used in This Book

Unless otherwise specified, I have used the Tanakh (Jewish Publication Society) for all Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) quotes and the New International Version (Zondervan) for New Testament quotes. The bibliography contains detailed information on these editions and other Bibles to which I refer or used for research.

For Susanne, beloved wife,

editor, mentor, and muse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am profoundly grateful and indebted to my wife, Susanne, and son, David, for their patient encouragement and loving support during the research and writing of When Time and Eternity Kiss. They never wavered in their belief in me and my project, even when it meant they had to endure privations so I could study, do research, and write.

I am especially grateful to Susanne for being my muse and personal librarian for more than forty-seven years. She has always known intuitively what books I needed to read at each phase of my spiritual journey. Most recently she stopped work on her own writing project to edit my manuscript.

Tina Sagmoe Samaniego and Erik Magnuson deserve a special thanks for reading and commenting on early drafts. Their input was invaluable.

I also want to thank Frank Pinter, Jerry Rosenberg, Carol Bower Foote, Marc Swartz, and Eileen Andrade for the various ways they helped me make When Time and Eternity Kiss a reality.

Above all, I want to offer my greatest thanks to God for the life, love, gifts, opportunities, and life-lessons I have been given. Regardless of how painful and frustrating some of the lessons were, they have enabled me to grow spiritually and love more deeply.

Sean Maddox

Rio Vista, California

2016

1

INTRODUCTION

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

—C. G. Jung

The Bible opens with two great but conflicting creation stories. In the first, Genesis One, a dispassionate God creates the Earth, the cosmos, and for His crowning achievement, human beings in His own image and likeness. By reserving the ultimate place in the order of creation for humanity, Genesis One relates a profound message: that we humans are nothing less than miniature gods endowed with divinity’s vast, unlimited creative potential and intellectual gifts. In Genesis Two God forms the first human being at the very outset of the story. Only after that accomplishment does God continue to create the world and a paradisiacal home for the first human.

Whether readers regard these stories literally as history or as mythological tales about the origins of humanity, the creation chronicles raise immense questions about God’s various levels of consciousness and His reasons for leaving the timelessness of eternity to create a bountiful but tumultuous temporal world that is all too frequently overshadowed by endless human strife, unbridled greed, suffering, and death. In this book we probe humanity’s role in creation and seek the divine reasons for sharing god-like potential with us as co-creators. After much deliberation, one vital question continues to loom. If we are indeed encoded with divine potential, why do the masses of humanity struggle simply to subsist day-by-day, while those inspired with genius–Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein–reflect a magical but miniscule number of people throughout history, including its golden ages and various renaissances? Finally, is divine destiny scripted and sealed at birth or have we a measure of free will in determining our life destiny and thereby the course of human history? Discussing these issues shatters many standard interpretations of the Bible that no longer make sense in the space age and blazes new trails of insight into the West’s most famous stories.

Genesis Two states clearly that Adam and Eve disobeyed God when they ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree symbolizes the dualities or opposites in the world of time and space–male and female, day and night, good and evil, life and death. The dualities are essential for the tension between the opposites. Without this tension, all is static and nothing could transpire in the world of time and space.

In Genesis Two God’s summary expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is an act of unmitigated cruelty. He punishes the guileless couple by casting them out brutally from the only world they have ever known. Except for the knowledge that they are of different genders, Adam and Eve are totally unprepared for the world outside the garden’s gate. We are given no true idea as to their level of consciousness of good and evil. God’s expulsion of the childlike, inexperienced couple from the garden where all their needs have been met into a world where they must make their own way, grow their food, and survive the elements of temporal life is as cold-blooded as it would be for human parents to force young adolescent children from their family home to fend for themselves in an alien and hostile world without preparation, education, and survival skills. Unlike Genesis One, the second garden story does not address the issue of whether or not the young couple carry within themselves all of God’s potential. Neither does it suggest whether or not God has encoded the first couple with destiny. If God has provided Adam and Eve with the ability to survive outside the garden and endowed them with a destiny to fulfill, are we to assume that each one of us is also encoded with a personal destiny? And even if we are born with a destiny, we are still left questioning whether or not we have free will, and if so, to what extent. We are very much in a quagmire over the issue of destiny and free will in Genesis. Indeed, Genesis and many biblical texts are treasure troves of metaphysical ideas and spiritual secrets that much of the Judeo-Christian world has chosen to ignore, but this book does not.

Genesis One and Two raise other exciting questions that are woven into the body of this book. Do we have an immortal soul? Is a personal God intimately involved with the script of our lives or are we alone and alienated during our brief journey through time and space? What happens at the moment of death? Do we enter a state of eternal peace in a dimension some call heaven? Are we participants in a process many call reincarnation? In harmony with the theories of quantum mechanics, should we anticipate survival of some form of consciousness and the continuation of our existence through the indestructible God Force of the Universe itself, recognized today by a growing number of scientists as unlimited consciousness and creative energy? Or does nothing but oblivion await us?

What is the measure of a life well-lived? Could it be the endless pursuit of pleasure and acquisitions or its opposite–the cultivation of compassionate altruism? Perhaps there is a middle path between these extremes that reveals itself only when we stop searching for it, as the Buddha has observed.

Until my early forties, I had been preoccupied pursuing an education, career, and ultimately, financial security to truly ponder these profound existential questions. As with many life travelers, middle-age became the crucible of my life. From crisis came enlightenment, spiritual transformation, and purposive existence moved by an emerging sense of destiny and a vision of scattered seeds that would take root and grow into spiritual insights into humanity’s role in the divine plan, the complexity of God’s nature, and the perplexing meaning of the Bible itself. I soon realized I held the blueprint for this book in my mind, and that my destiny was to write a trilogy of books centered on the Bible to fulfill my destiny as an author.

Entering the world with a passport to a singular destiny and the promised participation of Providence in our lives is an immense prospect. Once my spiritual journey commenced, I slowly began to recognize, with reflection, that I had been following destiny’s path my entire lifetime. Through reflection on my life and its landmark events the road I had been travelling became clear. Sometimes the way had been smooth and peaceful; sometimes it had been joyous or filled with awe; sometimes it had been burdened with travails and tests; and sometimes, the path seemed to have vanished before my eyes like shifting sand. But always I seemed to know that I was following the road I needed to walk–had to walk–if I was to apprehend and fulfill my destiny, elevate my consciousness, and evolve spiritually into the divine creature I am, that all of us are. Everyone has a unique path to follow, whether or not they are conscious of it or not.

I was raised by a fundamentalist Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother and enjoyed a vital religious life in my youth and young adulthood. Until age fourteen I lived in rural Oklahoma, where my family’s strict Protestant church was the very center of my life. We were very poor. Our three-room farmhouse lacked electricity and plumbing. Oil lamps lit our nights. Our bathroom was an outhouse near a pasture housing a terrifying bull. My brothers and I bathed in a galvanized tub on the kitchen floor. Our entertainment was a battery-powered radio that broadcast the great programs of the era. Television was still many years away for my family.

Riding to church Sunday mornings on the back of a wagon pulled by Grandpa’s John Deere tractor was the highlight of my week. On the way, Grandma carried Jesus on her lap, the unleavened communion bread she had baked in her wood-burning oven in the dark hours. The unsalted flat bread was the centerpiece of the worship service.

After church we went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for dinner. I eagerly watched Grandma corral two or three chickens in her apron, outstretched like a net. She rang their necks, dunked them in an outdoor cauldron of boiling water, plucked their feathers, and fried them in piping-hot grease. After dinner there might be a revival meeting or a baptism.

I loved the baptisms. The ritual was magical for me and became my first experience of theatre, which I grew up to love. As the congregation waited, the curtain at the front of the church suddenly opened, revealing the preacher standing in a tank of water with his hand under the penitent’s head. I knew the sinner had privately confessed his evil ways to the minister and was now about to take another step closer to Heaven. Three times a week we gathered at church, where I learned to love Bible stories and hymn singing.

Just after I turned fourteen we moved to Colorado, where my father found work. I began to develop an interest in Catholicism and, at age eighteen, I converted to my Mother’s religion. I found my new faith filled with mystery and excitement. My later religious experiences brought great joy to my life, and I briefly considered the priesthood.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They are in each other all along.

—Yurak Indian saying

The most momentous experience of destiny occurred the day I met my future wife, Susanne. After discovering the woman of my dreams in a romantic adventure and pursuing her on two continents and in three countries, I had found my life partner. She would forever change the very fiber of my being. We both believed at the outset that our implausible chance meeting at a ferry boat landing in Italy had been orchestrated by destiny. This book is assuredly the most visible result of our fateful meeting.

Susanne was a Canadian university student touring Europe alone, midway through an honors program in English literature. I was an American who had majored in theatre arts at UC, Boulder, and was now an airman at an American NATO base in Brindisi, Italy. It was 1968 and the Viet Nam War was raging halfway round the world from my base. I was spending the June weekend camping with three pals on the Ionian Sea, an hour’s drive from our base. On our afternoon at the beach I was suddenly overcome by an irresistible desire to leave camp, rush back to town and meet the car ferry arriving from Greece.

We occasionally greeted the ship, which arrived daily. It was the only chance we servicemen had to mingle with English-speaking girls. The young women routinely had a three-hour layover before they caught the night train to Rome. During that window, we had an opportunity to meet them after they cleared customs, give them a tour of the ancient town that marked the end of the Roman Appian Way, and share ice cream or pizza and local wine before they left Brindisi.

My buddies were intrigued by my sense of urgency and decided to join me. We arrived at the port very late. The ferry should have docked an hour earlier. But the beautiful white ship, the Appia Venezia, was magically arriving just as we drove up. When I spotted a group of three attractive young women, I offered them baggage service and a ride to the train station in my Fiat 500. They could check their bags and visit the town with us.

Susanne stepped off that ship and into my life. We were attracted to each other at first sight. After falling into deep conversation at a pizzeria, and exchanging mail addresses, Susanne and I were in a world of our own. Afterwards we strolled arm-in-arm around the port, losing the others. She laughed that destiny had played an impressive role in our meeting. The ferry had been late departing from Piraeus, Greece the previous night. During the crossing she had ended a week-long touring partnership with an Aussie fellow, deciding to be on her own again. She had chosen to share a cab with two American women just moments before disembarking.

Finally, national student strikes in France persisted, and the border between Italy and France had been closed for almost a month. Susanne could catch the night train to Rome, but would be stranded in Rome or the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, as she was heading to France. She had toured Italy extensively in May, and time was running out on her trip. She intended to be on the first train into France, eager to see as much of Paris as possible before taking the boat-train to London for her flight home to Toronto June 27th.

I suggested she and her two companions reconsider their travel plans and spend the night in a hotel. We could go dancing at an open-air night club across the harbor. The three women agreed to stay. At the club Susanne and I drifted to an isolated table next to the railing and the Adriatic Sea. Continuing our life histories, we toasted one another and danced, gazing all the while at the Appia Venezia as she sailed out of port between two flashing signal lights on her return voyage to Greece. The ship’s lights were blazing from every deck and a full pink Moon was rising overhead. It was the perfect backdrop for two people who seemed fated to fall in love. And we did. The other two women were anxious to head home to North Dakota and left the next day.

Susanne spent the next nine spellbinding days stranded with me at the Ionian camp site, which we had to ourselves. Sitting on the beach under the stars, we began to think of a life together. Despite a world of differences between us, from political views to cultures and even religions, we had dissimilar expectations of the near future. I had two years left on my tour of duty; she was dashing off to Harvard to take a summer course, and then would finish her last two years at the University of Toronto. As destiny would have it, my extended tour of duty in Italy was cut short and I was assigned to a base in the United States. Susanne and I were married six months later in Toronto, where we settled for the first decade of our long marriage.

Susanne became my muse, mentor and librarian. She taught me to love opera, foreign films, and fine art. She even trained my photographer’s eye. She was a perfect traveler who found incredible hideaways off the tourist map. Highly spiritual, a fervent humanitarian and tireless champion of the underdog and civil rights, Susanne helped me overcome the last vestiges of racism carried over from my childhood and early adolescent years in once-segregated Oklahoma.

Early in our marriage Susanne suffered with misdiagnosed bipolar depression. Her mood disorder placed tremendous stress and strain on our marriage. Finally, I thought a new start was in order. After a decade of life as a rising star in the performing arts in Toronto, I decided we would move to Colorado, where my family still lived. Denver was not a thriving cosmopolitan arts center like Toronto. Unable to repeat my performing arts success in Denver, Susanne and I opened a plant and floral business. It was the best thing that could have happened for us. We worked together every day. It became our salvation. Our marriage healed. A few years later we sold the business and I found work in a major corporation, which transferred us to the West Coast with our eight-year-old son, David.

Life began to unravel just months after we resettled in California. I was forty-one when our marriage began to come apart again, and this time, there was no fix for it. After moving to affluent Marin County north of San Francisco, buying our dream house and losing my job the week we moved in, it should have come as no surprise when I found myself alone and adrift on a vast sea of materialism. The religious foundation that had supported me was nearing total collapse after two decades of neglect. Without a spiritual compass to guide me, I lost my bearings and bravura and sunk into depression.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work; and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

—Wendell Berry

My Mid-Life Fall: The Beginning of My Search for Meaning in My Life

I lost my job without notice or severance pay. In the weeks that followed, our marriage of almost eighteen years suddenly came to an end, after a year of conflict and bitterness with Susanne had escalated sharply into a virulent civil war. Our eleven-year-old son seemed as baffled and shocked as we were when my wife discussed a two or three-year separation and a move to San Francisco. She had lived in the house she adored for just four tumultuous months, having visualized it for almost twenty years.

Overall, our long partnership had been vibrant, centered on love and mutual respect, divergent politics and her passion for intellectualism and culture. One night Susanne told me and our son she had to leave so that we could heal our lives. Susanne found a low-rent dark old studio apartment near a cable car line in a gritty part of San Francisco.

Of all my losses, it was my loss of Susanne, the woman I was destined to marry and with whom I had intended to spend a lifetime, that caused me the greatest shock. I had no interest in replacing her. Clearly she was one of a kind. I was devastated and utterly bewildered as to why these catastrophic events had happened to me in rapid succession.

For the next two years I foundered, aimlessly floating from one day to the next. Although I found another job, it was as unfulfilling as the previous one. One weekend when my son was staying with a friend and I was up on a ladder painting the tallest outdoor peak of wooden molding on the house, I fell ten feet down, landing on the cement sidewalk. I came close to breaking my neck, but in the end suffered compressed vertebrae. After several days of rest I returned to work. In rapid succession to the fall, I was the innocent victim of two highway car accidents. It would be many months before the meaning of my bad adventures became clear to me. I have lived with chronic back pain for many decades now, a constant reminder of the low spiritual place to which I had descended: a place where I hope never to return.

As I was eventually to realize, each unique life event was part of a series of powerful wake-up calls demanding that I reassess my core values, correct my life’s course, and renew my badly neglected spiritual self. Only by heeding the call to change my life could I begin the work of rebuilding and discovering my true destiny. Ironically, it was my estranged wife, Susanne, who gave me the resources and encouragement I needed to radically alter my life course and eventually renew our marriage three years later with a full reconciliation.

My fall marked the beginning of a spiritual journey I had not consciously sought, and a slow, gradual renewal of my spiritual nature. Ultimately, the journey would lead me back to the Bible of my youth, initiate a fifteen-year quest to fathom the depths of the book’s ancient stories, uncover the secrets they harbored, and work to understand how those tales were relevant for me. My odyssey would eventually lead to the pages of this book.

Sooner or later you have to return to the Bible to struggle with the God of your youth.

—Stephen Mitchell

When crisis erupted in midlife and I became desperate for inspiration and insight into my perilous situation, a return to the Bible seemed a logical first step in resetting my moral compass. I had not read the Bible since adolescence, and with considerable shock, I realized I no longer even owned a copy.

With a new Bible I determined to reread it from the beginning. Ruminating over the stories that had mesmerized me as a child, I soon discovered that they had lost their once powerful grip on my imagination. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to read on, to attempt to penetrate the Bible’s cryptic language, and ultimately to discover the truths it concealed in the rich strata of its stories. I patiently persevered in my search for inspiration and meaning in my life.

Frustrations and Breakthroughs

Early in my journey, however, I discovered that my independent study of the Bible demanded that I exceed the bounds of traditional Christian thought and interpretations if I was to fathom the deepest layer of possible meanings of the difficult cryptic texts. Where does one turn to find new ways of looking at stories whose meanings have been set in stone by one’s religious tradition? My first breakthrough was serendipitous, along with an answer to breaking free from narrow religious doctrines of any kind.

During my separation from Susanne, she taped a television series on mythology featuring the late Joseph Campbell, America’s most insightful and erudite mythologist, in interviews with journalist Bill Moyers. She was confident she would share Campbell’s wealth of spiritual ideas with me. In time she did. So impressed was she with Campbell’s engaging discussions on world mythologies and religions that she eagerly read his entire body of work. I could not have hoped for a more passionate teacher than my own wife. Her lifelong intellectual pursuits were exceeded only by her great joy in sharing all she had learned with me.

The Campbell interviews offered me radical new ways of thinking about spirituality, my faith, and the Bible itself. The programs further stimulated in me a keen new interest in Eastern philosophies and religions. The more I studied the mythologies, Scriptures, and books of wisdom of other traditions, the more I realized that all of them were based on one universal truth: despite our persistence in seeing divisions and differences between us, which we reinforce with myriad cultures, languages, religious, and political differences, each of us is a member of one and the same human family with a common source, beginning, and end.

Our species emerged in Africa as a small population of Homo sapiens sapiens less than 200,000 years ago. That is but a speck of time in the planet’s 4.5 billion-year history. Our migration from Africa and subsequent divisions into different peoples, races, and nationalities began a mere 60,000 years ago. Our supposed differences have become so ingrained in our minds that we find it difficult to see that we are all the same and thus one family.

Who sees all beings in his own self,

And his own self in all beings, loses all fear.

Isa Upanishad

Campbell’s numerous references to Carl Jung, who pioneered the science of depth psychology, so intrigued Susanne that she embarked upon an intensive study of Jung’s theories, reading his complete works and those of his legendary followers. Again she shared her readings and ideas on his groundbreaking work with me. Jung’s ideas dovetailed so perfectly with the world mythologies and religious ideas I was reading that I added them to my daily regimen. For the next fifteen years I studied the Bible, mythology, depth psychology, and Eastern religious thought. The knowledge and insights I gained were instrumental in helping me crack the nut of the Bible’s cryptic stories and pierce its profound metaphysical mysteries.

Who Am I?

Mine ears you have opened. Psalm 40:6 (NKJV)

I would describe myself as a free-thinking, open-minded Christian, independent biblical scholar, interpreter, author, and spiritual teacher. I embarked upon my journey when I heard the call of my own inner voice to change my life or lose it. Making a career of my spiritual odyssey was not my goal. Rather, responding to the call gave me the freedom I needed to approach the Bible’s texts both objectively and subjectively. The dual perspective is my edge. I have never been limited by the constraints of any religious educational institution.

Although I have done my utmost to support this book’s interpretations and ideas with reason and logic, I have also written in the venerable tradition of the mystic-seeker, whose insights into sacred texts are born not only from continuous study but from intuition, inner knowing, inspiration, and the personal experiences of the great Mystery of Being that no amount of scholarship or formal religious education could ever provide. Once I opened the portals to the hidden meaning of the Bible’s stories, I was able to enter the labyrinth of the Bible’s mind and hear the voices of its stories directly, unfiltered by centuries of orthodoxy, dogma, or doctrines. I decided to write this book in order to share my new understanding of the Bible and my exciting enlightenment with millions of others who may have reached spiritual dead ends or a crisis of faith.

To penetrate the Bible’s multiple levels of meaning, I immersed myself in mystical traditions, such as the Jewish Kabbalah and Hinduism’s chakra system, personal dreamwork, cosmology, and quantum physics. All these modalities refreshed my penetration of the Bible’s enigmatic texts and enabled me to traverse the deepest regions of my own unconscious mind.

I discovered that the Bible’s historical façade is merely the first layer of meaning in texts with subtexts layered upon even more mysterious subtexts. I compare my experiences to those of an archeologist who seeks evidence for ancient civilizations in the soil of the Middle East. In each strata of soil the archeologist examines, he hopes to find important clues about the ancient civilizations that were constructed one on top of another.

With his findings he may be able to paint a reasonably reliable picture of the various evolutionary, climatic, and cultural forces that created and destroyed societies throughout the ages. In shedding light on those lost civilizations and their fate, the archaeologist makes ancient cultures relevant today. A main goal of When Time and Eternity Kiss is just that: making the Bible meaningful and relevant for millions of people who either do not read it because they do not believe it is relevant for them, or cannot understand its stories esoterically.

One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the errors and falsehoods abide forever. And no one sees and no one hears and no one awakens, for they are all asleep…they do not question and do not read and do not search out.²

—Rabbi Moses de Leon

Breaking the Bible’s Code

Eternity’s disclosure

To favorites–a few–

Of the Colossal substance

Of Immortality.

—Emily Dickinson

A journey that began as a renewed interest in my own spiritual tradition and a quest for my life’s meaning when I had lost my way became a passionate mission to crack the Bible’s hidden code and lift the veils of concealment that obscure its secrets, mysteries, and the feminine face of God.

This book’s bold biblical interpretations were born of many years of personal sacrifices and, on occasion, agonizing doubt and despair. Fortunately, these negative but necessary human emotions ultimately gave way to countless moments of sheer jubilation and ecstatic discoveries, when light emerged from darkness and tears of joy illuminated the divine countenance for a moment in Eternity.

Who Will Enjoy This Book

I wrote for believers and unbelievers alike, for people who love the Bible’s stories and for those who think the Bible is irrelevant in today’s sophisticated, science-based societies. I also wrote this book to offer Christians of all denominations and Jews of every persuasion exciting new ways of reading the Bible. I respect diverse views and the unassailable faith of religious Christians and Jews alike whose lives are centered on various biblical interpretations. I did not write this work to challenge anyone’s beliefs, but rather to enhance the faith people hold in their hearts and minds.

For readers who approach this book with an open mind, regardless of their feelings about the Bible and the religions it spawned, When Time and Eternity Kiss will reveal how and why the Bible is the masterwork of Western spirituality, mythology and literature and entirely deserving of its revered place as the cornerstone of Western civilization.

After more than twenty-five years into my journey of spiritual renewal, I know it has not been in vain. I have accomplished my greatest goals: the revitalization of my spiritual nature, the restoration of my marriage and family, and the completion of When Time and Eternity Kiss. I have also renewed my wonder and joy in the world, which I had in my youth, and in its people, who are without exception made in God’s image and likeness.

≈

Everything Yet Can Happen

A great leaf that God and you and I have covered with writing turns now, overhead, in strange hands. We feel the sweep of it like a wind. We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

A bright new page in history opens every day, when everything yet can happen, and each of us has the chance to write a few lines in the history of God and humanity. This book explores some of the oldest, most inspiring, mysterious, violent, and controversial chapters in the chronicles of divine and human relationships–those in the Bible. Its ancient chapters have given birth to three major religions, engendered faith in half the people on the planet, and inspired much of the world’s greatest literature, art, and music. Tragically, its teachings have also produced millennia of racism, war, and genocide; misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse; and the unbridled exploitation of our planet by people who have perverted the profound spiritual meaning of the Bible’s stories for political and economic gain, as well as for narrow parochial purposes.

Many biblical stories–and the inflexible, implacable, and irascible God they depict–have caused millions of contemporary people, legions of feminists, and gay men and women to condemn the Bible as a prejudicial and sexist patriarchal collection of terrible texts, as some have referred to them. Here are a few examples of such stories, which, as I will prove, have been grossly misinterpreted and misunderstood:

• A devilish serpent that deceived Adam and Eve: patriarchal religions have used the tale for centuries to blame women for humanity’s loss of paradise and to place Eve under Adam’s authority.

• The lascivious tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, when misinterpreted, as it has been for the last 2,000 years, has caused centuries of homophobia and deadly persecutions of homosexual men and women.

• God made the seemingly hardhearted decision to destroy the entire world in a flood that killed every human being, young and old alike, the innocent along with the guilty.

• God unleashed deadly attacks on the people of Egypt.

• God showed favoritism for one group of people over all others, and his command to Joshua and the Israelites was to wage genocidal warfare on the indigenous peoples of Canaan–some of whom archeologists are now discovering in the 21st century were the Jewish people themselves.

• Many of the prohibitions and lethal penalties prescribed by the Book of Leviticus are outrageous and bereft of mercy and compassion.

• The portrayal of God as a solitary male deity is a proposition that conflicts with reason and the reality of the natural world.

When read literally or superficially, many of the Bible’s stories are shamelessly brutal. God appears as a merciless, bloodthirsty, tribal deity. Are these episodes truly terrible texts? Is the picture of God they present accurate? Might the stories be telling us something quite different from what centuries of literal readings have rendered? What if, on more profound esoteric and metaphorical levels, these stories have absolutely nothing to do with the physical and historical world? Is it possible that religions, theologians, and traditional Bible scholars have deliberately and systematically misinterpreted the texts for centuries? Might they have manipulated and misconstrued the enigmatic stories to support and uphold particular brands of religion and points of view?

What if the Bible’s narratives are, in essence, complex literary fictions purporting to be the history of an ancient people? What if the stories conceal great spiritual secrets that are as timeless and universally meaningful for people today as they were for the ancient Israelites who first read them 2,500 years ago? And what if the stories encompass the great and universal struggle of the soul–every soul–to transcend the suffering world of time and space and return to the Promised Land of the eternal One, from whom all souls have descended and to whom all souls long to return?

Carl Jung believed that all interpretations of the Bible required an open system to allow for new discoveries and new interpretations. What I discovered during my research for this book was quite the opposite of Jung’s open system. Early in my studies I found that traditional biblical commentaries and interpretations appeared to have been created within a closed, interlocking system dominated by organized religions and the institutions of higher learning with which they have symbiotic relationships. Even universities with secular funding and status seemed often to be partnered with organized religious denominations.

Indeed, most religious and academic factions espouse the belief that the Bible is a reasonably accurate historical record of the ancient Jewish people and their Middle Eastern neighbors. Although some commentators are willing to concede that the earliest chapters of Genesis might be mythological, few are willing to include the stories of the Jewish patriarchs–Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob–and their successors in this hypothesis. Nor are they disposed to concede that the first eleven books of the Old Testament–the Hebrew Bible–(Genesis through 2 Kings) are probably narrative fiction, as proposed so convincingly by America’s renowned Yale University literary scholar Harold Bloom in the 1990s. The unyielding historical viewpoint of organized religions has had the effect of discouraging scholars, theologians, and lay-people from penetrating deeper into the biblical stories for the mysteries and perplexities they hide. Or from asking questions whose answers would challenge entrenched beliefs. It struck me that the whole closed system was designed to perpetuate identical agendas and petrified religious positions.

Canadian historian and author Donald Akenson expressed the problem of traditional biblical scholarship in a nutshell.

[Biblical scholars persist in] asking the same old questions in slightly new ways so that the answers turn out to be the good old conclusions. This scholarship, if such it is, has the virtue of keeping its engagés from thinking about big issues.³

Akenson believes that in the Bible, and its associated documents, are questions that make the nature of wee things like the Big Bang relatively inconsequential.

The Big Questions

In this book I have not hesitated to ask the big questions or confront the important issues that the Bible’s stories raise. Neither have I failed to offer answers. I also discuss the Big Bang in depth with great exuberance and awe, relating it to the Bible’s first creation story. Genesis chapter onei states clearly that we are made in the image and likeness of divinity. Does that mean that we are gods brimming with divine potential?

The opening story of the Old Testament makes it crystal clear that we are made in the image and likeness of God and are thus imbued with the creative potential of divinity.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness… So God created Man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27 (NIV)

The Psalmist boldly proclaims this truth.

I said, you are gods"; you are all sons of the Most High. Psalm 82:6 (NIV)

We find the same idea woven into the fabric of Hinduism, as the Chandogya Upanishad tersely declares.

Tat tvam Asi–Thou art That.

Yes, we are That, but have forgotten. Encouraging us to remember our divine origin is one of the Bible’s main goals. Its stories remind us precisely why we were created in the first place and what we must do to understand our destiny. They further show us how to transform faith into knowing and knowledge into wisdom.

Throughout this book I turn directly to Scripture to support my answers to the greatest questions I pose and my propositions, theories, and interpretations. In examining the sacred writings of the Bible, it is my intent to reveal that the texts are not the work of historians, parochial tribal scribes or ancient computer scientists, as one late twentieth century book suggested. Neither are the biblical tales a reworking of Near Eastern mythologies or reversals of the older Goddess culture’s stories that predated them.

On the contrary, the Bible’s five foundational texts (Genesis to Deuteronomy, which are known as the Torah for Jews and the Pentateuch for Christians), quasi-historical books (Joshua to 2 Kings) and writings (such as Esther and Ruth) were created not by historians, but Jewish storytellers, seers, mystics, sages, and enlightened scribes. I believe that these brilliant visionary authors heard the Voice of the Eternal resounding within themselves, as did Abraham, Moses, the Old Testament’s prophets, and the authors of the New Testament’s Gospels.

The Voice is always sounding but we are not listening.

The command is, first of all, to hear.

—Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

Healing and Transformation

Most of us live lives consumed by unquenchable flames–the fire of time. In the often-frenzied complexities of day-to-day life, we become stressed, angry, and emotionally drained. For relief we anesthetize ourselves with a diet of junk-food entertainment and mindless Internet surfing. We delude ourselves, rationalize our lifestyles, indulge our egos, numb our feelings, suppress our senses, and repress our spiritual hunger. When our quick fixes fail to assuage our fears and anxieties, we go shopping. It is the narcotic sanctioned by our society to give us temporary relief from our existential angst.

Once churches and synagogues were mainstays of our culture. Their religious symbols, ceremonies, sermons, teachings, and rituals offered respite from the traps of the secular world. But can they sustain our moral and spiritual lives in the twenty-first century and beyond? Can they still grant us the experience of mystery we seek and so desperately desire to imbue a spiritual dimension to our lives?

In our quest for change, growth, and self-knowledge, we devour libraries of self-help books, spend a fortune on personal-growth workshops, and seek the promised salvation of weekend retreats. And yet our insatiable spiritual hunger lingers, our nagging questions remain unanswered, and our desperation intensifies, as we watch our lives suddenly burning away, our gifts fading, and our destiny decaying in a dusty box we have labeled my unfulfilled life.

How long will we deny our true nature and fail to tap our divine potential, or continue to project our singular gifts onto ego-centric business moguls and sports and entertainment celebrities? When shall we reclaim our authentic selves and begin living our destiny? When shall we once again meet the One cloaked in stillness who waits patiently within us to be heard? Hear the Voice that talked to us in our night? Called us to live our destiny in the light of day? When shall we heed the Voice that compelled us to hear It? Finding answers to these relentless spiritual demands are at the core of every biblical tale. Awakening you to the Bible’s true call is the purpose of this book.

Healing and transforming the world is the most essential work facing humanity today. Judaism calls it tikkun olam in Hebrew, which means to heal, repair, and transform the world. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that the starting place for any such radical transformation is one’s self. The New Testament is unambiguous about where that world exists: "the kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21) Within us is where God patiently waits to guide us on our path to higher consciousness, the development of our innate potential, and to remembering our vast and vital divine heritage. This is a truth I discovered early in my spiritual journey. Although it was quite unnerving at first, in time I learned to trust the inner voice. In so doing I found a new level of confidence and consolation.

If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth: Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.⁴

—Kabir

We find the idea of the indwelling, immanent God in the East as in the West. Hinduism’s most sacred work, the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), tells us that God dwells in the heart of all beings…And his power of wonder moves all things…whirling them onwards in the stream of time.

If we could embrace the concept that the world the Bible describes exists within every one of us, we might realize that we are truly One with the world in which we live. With that insight we could tear down the walls that have always separated human beings, whether by social class, wealth, race, nationality, or religion.

The Bible’s famous characters are a mirror in which we may see our own needs, fears, and hopes reflected, if only we have the courage to look into the glass. The fate of many of the Bible’s characters recounts the disastrous consequences of failing to transform, elevate their spiritual consciousness, integrate mind, body and spirit, and realize their inherent wholeness. Above all, the stories help us understand that God dwells within every one of us and not in some heavenly abode somewhere in outer space. With this realization we learn that paradise is not so remote as we may have believed. Fear blinds us to this truth. This book asks you to let go fear and open to a faith born of self-discovery.

Life Is A Crucible

Life is not a spectator sport. It must be lived, enjoyed to the fullest, and sometimes suffered. Life, with all its uncertainties and vicissitudes, is a crucible in which we are tried, tested, and purified. As much as I yearned at times to escape to a desert retreat or mountain-top cabin, family life, careers, community, and the mundane grind of daily life actually worked to my advantage and to the transformation of my lower nature and consciousness.

The Bible’s Central Theme: God’s Quest for Consciousness

Apart from consciousness, no absolute truths exist.

—Buddha

The creation, development, and transformation of consciousness are of primary thematic concern in the Bible. Even a casual romp through the Bible’s myriad tales of legendary Jewish history and its heroes reveals a compelling fascination with consciousness–both human and divine. For this reason I address the concept of transformative consciousness repeatedly throughout this book.

The Bible focuses on consciousness for a fundamental reason: God’s own Self-consciousness and His vast creative potential are inextricably linked to the emergent and ever-expanding consciousness of human beings, the vessels of divinity’s incarnations in the material world of planet Earth. The creation and evolution of both divine and human consciousness are foremost thematic concerns in biblical stories. This stellar group of stories includes: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; the flood story; the Tower of Babel; Abraham’s call to leave his home in Haran; Sodom and Gomorrah; the binding of Isaac; Jacob’s wrestling match with God; the Exodus; Moses’ theophany on Mt. Sinai; Joshua and the invasion and conquest of Canaan; Samson and Delilah; Israel’s first three kings, Saul, Solomon, and David; the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon; and Jesus’ surrender to the will of God, both in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross.

In the great biblical span from Abraham to Jesus, all the celebrated characters of both the Old and New Testaments undergo dramatic transformations of consciousness, although readers may not be aware of the deep underlying meaning of the Bible’s stories, even after numerous attentive readings. The great metamorphoses of the Bible’s major figures are not unlike the searing transmutations experienced by Shakespearean characters. Ponder Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear.

Digging below the superficial and literal layers of the Bible’s multifaceted stories to uncover profoundly symbolic, mythological, and transcendent dimensions, thoughtful readers need only curiosity, an open mind, and the insights of this book to guide their scriptural adventures. The deeper readers venture into the texts, the more apparent it will become that consciousness is the overarching theme of the Bible. Throughout history readers have approached all great literature in just this manner, from Hinduism’s Upanishads to Homer’s Odyssey. For its part, the Bible, which plays a formidable role in the Western literary canon, has remained largely trapped in religious ideologies and centuries of narrowly-focused interpretations. Despite every hindrance, the Bible’s rich mysteries have remained intact. It is the intention of this book to lift the remaining parochial veils concealing the deepest levels of meaning of the biblical narratives. Once these veils are lifted, the masterpiece that is the Bible opens beautifully for enlightened study, without sacrificing to any degree the work’s sacred component or divine inspiration.

The theme of consciousness first appears in Genesis One, the Bible’s great cosmic creation story. At the tale’s climax, God makes human beings in His image and likeness. Could this famous line possibly mean that we resemble God physically? Such a proposed reading sadly lacks scope, depth, and basic reason. We must eventually conclude that God has endowed human beings with divinity’s formidable intellectual potential and creative energy, which exceed the sphere of human thought and imagination. From the first two creation stories in Genesis and continuing throughout the Bible, the narratives instruct us to develop both our consciousness and creative potential in hopes that humans may become God’s co-creators on Earth. Yet few readers ever grasp this profound truth. God’s imperatives, whether stated directly or implied obliquely, are the Bible’s ultimate story.

Why did God awaken from His deep eternal sleep to create a world of temporality? In the realm of the eternal, we believe God to be omniscient, omnipotent, and imperishable. We further conjecture that everything exists simultaneously as potential within the divine mind without past, present, or future. In such a state of immovability, all is stillness. All contributing conditions essential for both dynamic life and the creation of consciousness exist solely in a static state of latency. No opportunities exist for interactions between the as-yet-unrevealed dualities. In this eternal realm there are no distinctions between male and female, love and hate, birth and death, joy and despair, good and evil, or happiness and sorrow. For God to Self-actualize, experience His infinite creative potential and also observe the consequences of His actions, it is existentially necessary for Him to make flesh-and-blood surrogates who will live, create, and interact on a finite material plain governed by the appearance of linear time, as told by the Genesis One and Two creation stories. (We shall pursue the matter of the appearance of linear time in later chapters.)

As humans, we act on God’s behalf with abundant opportunities for innovative endeavors, relationships, and interpersonal interactions that nourish the creation of consciousness on the field of time. Genesis One describes the creation of the material world where human beings fulfill the divine desire to experience the Godhead Itself. God’s instructions to His mortal vessels make clear that above all else, He seeks boundless consciousness: Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth. (Gen. 1:28) Notice how a flat literal translation of this famous verse renders it utterly devoid of God’s manifest search for unlimited consciousness in both Himself and all humanity.

In sharing the dualities and divine creative potential with us, our species becomes God’s crowning eternal achievement: the wondrous creators of consciousness. Someday we may realize we are indeed miniature gods with vast intellectual, artistic, scientific, visionary, and spiritual potential that still remains mostly untouched, especially by the masses of humanity.

All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his ‘oppositeness’ has taken possession of him, incarnated Himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict.⁵

—Carl Jung

Participation Mystique

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. Mankind learned to talk and we learned to listen.⁶

—Stephen Hawking

Before early human beings experienced the twilight of consciousness, they would not have distinguished themselves as existing separately from nature and the world around them. Neither would they have been able to look objectively at their own dual spiritual-animal nature. Jungian author Erich Neumann describes the primal condition in which our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve, perceived the world:

If [primal man’s] existence in the uroboros* was existence in participation mystique, this also means that no ego center had as yet developed to relate the world to itself and itself to the world. Instead, man was all things at once…Not only is the psyche open to the world, it is still identified with and undifferentiated from the world; it knows itself as world.⁷

*The uroboros represents a primal, undifferentiated state of existence in which man is totally preoccupied with himself and his basic needs for food and shelter. At this stage of undeveloped consciousness, human beings are focused almost exclusively on fundamental being. Such is the consciousness of Adam and Eve before they eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A newborn infant epitomizes the uroboric stage of human development. In dream and art motifs the uroboric stage is represented by a serpent biting its own tail. (The mythological serpent and its significance in the Bible and other sacred works will be discussed at length in the chapter titled: The Archetypal Serpent and the Chakras.)

The term participation mystique refers to a primitive state of existence in which early human beings believe in simultaneous multiple identities and locations, as well as an entire folklore about the transmission and reception of mystical and magical powers. People cannot recognize that individuals have one unwavering self-identity and personality. This unique psychological condition enables early human beings to participate in the mysteries of nature and perceive that they and the world are indistinguishable as one entity. As Neumann describes the condition: Early men and women, who, without being aware of it, occupied a position in the center of the world, whence they related everything to themselves and themselves to everything.⁸

Participation mystique is the psycho-spiritual state in which Adam and Eve live one with each other, God, and the world in the Garden of Eden. They have no sense of self or separateness. In the imagery of the story, they are naked. This magically primitive state bursts into differentiation the moment they eat the forbidden fruit. After its consumption, the couple are catapulted to a new level of consciousness, one in which they see themselves as independent entities separate from each other, their environment, and of greatest consequence, from God. They have fallen from the paradisiacal state of divine unity into the world of dualities–all the opposites that manifest in the world of time. They have suddenly become as gods, knowing good and evil. Experiences of conflict, suffering, and death are now to become the inevitable consequences of their first leap into the consciousness of experiential human life.

So must we all discover the dualities of existence in life, though perhaps less dramatically than the first couple. Paradoxically it is precisely pain, loss, and suffering that challenge us to expand our very existence and develop far greater consciousness, often as a response to overcoming tragedy. Many people choose paths of creative self-expression to rediscover themselves. Others become inventors or entrepreneurs. Some become volunteers serving communities failed by life itself. As Genesis Two reveals, movement to a primary new stage of consciousness in the Garden of Eden, followed by a traumatic expulsion from paradise, positions the human prototypes to fulfill their grand purpose as vessels for God’s experiences of Himself in the sphere of time and space.

Only here, in life on Earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised.⁹

—Carl Jung

By Genesis Six, three chapters after the famed banishment of the first human beings from the Garden of Eden, God’s frustration with humanity turns to unbridled rage with the discovery that humans have become totally preoccupied with evil.

The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on Earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on Earth, and His heart was saddened. The LORD said, I will blot out from the Earth the men whom I created–men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them. Genesis 6:5-7

God’s sudden decision to annihilate every living being created on the planet resonates with more dread and fury than perhaps any other great scene in the Hebrew Bible. The brief five-paragraph story is highly revelatory of the immature level of consciousness shared by God and His human progeny during the earliest period of their cohabitation in the material world as it is measured in Genesis Six.

At this critical turning point, are we not compelled to pose the question: Does God possess a conscience, that inner measure guiding moral rightness or wrongness of behaviors, principles, and ethics? In His hastily-planned calamitous destruction of creation, has He given any thought to the predictable consequences of His forthcoming action? Has He once considered the unspeakable chaos, pain, and agony about to be inflicted on all living creatures?

We must consider God’s empathy. He appears not to have developed empathy, the pinnacle of emotions, any more than he has developed a sense of conscience. Indeed, we must wait to measure God’s empathy in the watershed story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the Bible’s very first human study in evolving consciousness, it is the patriarch Abraham’s imperative to interfere with yet another of God’s rash and destructive unempathic plans. This time, Abraham is demanding God spare the innocent in His thoughtlessly designed plot to bring suffering and death on a multitude of people, the innocent as well as the guilty. Since we study Sodom and Gomorrah in what this author regards as a profoundly decisive and controversial chapter in the Bible, let it suffice for the moment to remark that it is an aged Abraham, for reasons of his own human empathy, who challenges God to rethink a plan of imminent destruction of the two famed cities. As late in the book of Genesis as chapter 18, God has still failed to consider the role empathy must play in a just and merciful deity of time, especially one whose idea of love inspired him in the very beginning to create surrogates in His own likeness and image.

Genesis Six highlights a problem