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Traditional history of the Bnei Noah
movement
This history was written by
Rabbi Bindman, unrelated to the nascent Sanhedrin, is has not been
reviewed by the Sanhedrin and may or may not reflect the official
position of the Sanhedrin.
Mesopotamia, origin of seventy nations
Following the flood, humanity
was still one united body, living in one place, the area now known as
Mesopotamia or Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through
a fertile plain. Here the people had settled and given birth to
children. Their state of security was so great that they began to
consider themselves the masters of all creation, ready to challenge G-d
Himself for supremacy. They saw their own unity as the key to this, and
they did not commit the sins of banditry and sexual infidelity
(bestiality) for which the previous generation had been condemned. They
were kind and loving to one another, but they grew arrogant as a group
and decided to build a high tower, the Tower of Babel, from which to
gain an access to heaven.
This was a form of idolatry (violation of the Covenant of Noah), and
their punishment from the heavenly court was that their languages
should be confused. They would no longer understand each other as
before. This was the origin of separate languages as we now have them;
seventy basic tongues were established, from which all of today's
languages descended. This was also the number of the actual nations of
the non-Jewish world before they were subdivided and intermingled.
Because of their newly acquired linguistic differences, the people
began to quarrel over the building of the tower and they were forced to
abandon the project. They decided to move away from this central place,
and they re-assembled in different locations depending on which
language they spoke. Thus, the families of the earth became settled in
their separate locations. While this was going on, the Seven Laws in
all their detail were being taught from an academy in Jerusalem
established by Shem, the son of Noah, and his grandson Eber. Anyone who
wanted was free to come and learn. However, various temptations and the
distances between the peoples were increasing. Soon the nations
developed idolatrous cults of their own, based on the mistake of early
stargazers who thought that since the stars and planets were serving
their Creator, it was proper to worship them instead of Him. It is from
these stargazers that would later come all various forms of
astral/solar worship which would become the very foundation for almost
all Gentile idolatrous religions.
Shem and Eber were scholars of the whole Torah, as it is known to the
Jews today, but in their time only the Seven Laws had actually been
manifested as commandments for the people to observe and keep; the rest
remained, as it were, "in heaven."
In these circumstances there arose the first wicked king, Nimrod of Ur,
who forced all others to submit to him by making himself an actual
object of worship. This was the first instance of a form of tyranny
that has never since disappeared, a tyranny over the human spirit as it
strives for truth and for the freedom to express it. The solution came
through the efforts of one man, whose descendants developed into the
Jewish people themselves, still today the prime target for all such
wicked rulers. This man was Abraham, born in Ur into a family of
idolaters, who arrived by his own reasoning at the conclusion that only
the Creator Himself should be worshiped and served, and that His name
must be made known to all humankind.
Nimrod tried to kill Abraham for speaking out against his ruling cult,
but Abraham was miraculously saved. Then G-d told him to leave the land
of his birth and to travel to "a land which I shall show you." This was
the land of Israel, the Holy Land, which G-d gave to Abraham and his
descendants as an inheritance, as a place in which to keep all of His
commandments in the Torah and thus to be close to Him.
Abraham studied at the
academy of Shem and Eber
There Abraham studied at the
academy of Shem and Eber, and he acquired
great wisdom. He traveled with his wife and his flocks and herds,
offering hospitality to people and discussing the concepts of divinity
with them, each according to his level. Sarah, meanwhile, instructed
the women. Abraham wrote books and devoted all his wealth to doing
kindness to everyone who needed it. He brought others to the
understanding of the the Seven Laws, by which he himself was bound, but
his efforts for the spreading of this awareness earned him a much
higher reward; his descendants were to be given the privilege of
keeping the whole Torah in the Jewish manner.
After they had passed many years without children, Abraham's first
wife, Sarah, gave birth to Isaac, in whom Abraham's wisdom and his
blessings were to be continued. Sarah had previously allowed Abraham to
take a second wife, Hagar, in order that he might have a son. Hagar
gave birth to Ishmael, in whom Arab and Moslem leadership originated.
Ishmael challenged Isaac for the entire succession; though he was not
found worthy for this, his greatness continued, and he died righteous
and esteemed.
Isaac continued Abraham's work in his turn, never leaving the Holy Land
all his life. His son, Jacob, completed the original task by fathering
twelve sons and taking them to live in Egypt at G-d's command. These
twelve men became the fathers of the Jewish people. Jacob was also
challenged for the succession by his twin brother, Esau. Western power
and success, as dramatically revealed in the rise of the Roman Empire,
originated in Esau. Jacob knew the unworthiness of Esau and captured
his truth by impersonating him before their father, later also escaping
his brother's revenge.
Children of Israel in Egypt
Contrary to what some might
say it can be shown that when Jacob brought
his family to Egypt, the observance of the Seven Laws was well known as
seen in the Egyptian's Negative confession (remember most of the Laws
of Noah were negative). After Jacob's twelve sons died, an evil king of
Egypt, the pharaoh, set out to enslave the Jewish people, to destroy
their spiritual and ethical concepts, and to restrict their
independence of thought. Thus the situation remained for hundreds of
years. But G-d saw their sufferings, and He remembered the relationship
of divine love that He had made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. At an
appointed time, He brought them out of Egypt among great plagues and
wonders, through the hand of the chosen prophet, Moses, whom He had
found worthy to teach and to lead them.
Moses led the Jews out into the Sinai Desert, and they gathered at a
small mountain where Moses ascended to G-d before the eyes of them all.
He remained there receiving the whole Torah from G-d through his
prophetic faculties, and then he came down to teach it to them. Thus,
the Jewish people were established as they exist today, charged with
keeping the entire body of the divine commandments (the reiterated Laws
of Noah plus those added over and above them which makes up the
Covenant of Moses [613]).
This event took place in the year 1312 B.C.E. (Before Common Era). At
this time, during which the whole world was aware of what was
happening, the state of the Garden of Eden was restored to humanity.
(This state was to be lost again through other sins and errors of
judgment.) The other nations were again given the Seven Laws that had
been told to Noah, and the Jews were given the duty of teaching them.
From then onward, all non-Jews who kept the Seven Laws were known by
the Hebrew title of Chasidei Umot ha-Olam or "righteous of the nations."
Thus the Jews were brought out of the desert and restored to the land
of Israel, the place whose nature was fit for wisdom and for the
observance of Torah law. There they obeyed the commandments to set a
king over themselves to rule according to the Torah and to build a
Temple on the original altar site in Jerusalem for the offering of
sacrifices as the law prescribed. In these ways they performed the task
of linking all of earthly creation to its origin in heaven.
While the Jews lived on their land, with the Temple in their midst,
they had a high level of spiritual awareness. Prophecy was a constant
factor in their lives. These centuries also saw the rise of other
empires: Greece, with its scientific and artistic excellence, and
Persia and Babylon, with highly developed sorcery cults of a kind that
has now disappeared. The Greek world produced many truly great
thinkers, such as the philosopher Aristotle, but its cult of beauty
also led many people to a self-indulgent way of life, immoral and
idolatrous.
Greek influence in conflict with Torah
Thus, inevitably, through this
Gentile Greek influence as well as
others, there were elements that came into conflict with Torah and the
world of Jewish learning. During the early years of the Second Temple,
these forces mounted an all-out campaign to conquer the land of Israel
and to force the Jews away from the Torah. These Greeks opposed the
Torah as much because of the Seven Laws as from any concern over the
life led by the Jews themselves. They wanted to pollute Jewish wisdom
with impure concepts to the point where it would lose the capacity to
influence non-Jews in favor of Noachide practice. They sent troops into
the Holy Temple itself in an attempt to destroy its altars and to
contaminate the sacred olive oil used for lighting the lamps. This was
no act of random destruction: this oil and its light correspond in the
Temple service to the maintaining of pure Torah wisdom.
However, the Cohanim, the priestly branch of the Jewish nation who were
devoted to the Temple service, rose in armed revolt against the
invader. With divine help, they gained a military victory. On
re-entering the Temple, they discovered one single flask of oil that
had remained sealed against contamination. It contained only enough oil
for one day, but they trusted in G-d. In a further miracle, the light
lasted eight whole days until more pure oil could be prepared. This was
the origin of the present-day Jewish festival of Chanukah, where lights
are lit for eight days in perpetuation of the miracle.
The victory over the Greeks did not merely secure the Jewish nation
against an invader but also restored Torah to its place and maintained
the entire moral order of the world. The Jews had also won the ability
to teach the Seven Laws without interference, and through the
succeeding years their influence grew. A movement arose among Greeks
and other nations to abandon Greek culture and seek Torah enlightenment
instead.
In Temple times
In Temple times,
the non-Jews who formally took on the duty of observance of the Seven
Laws were given the right to live in the land of Israel alongside the
Jews, sharing in its divine insights and joys together with them. Both
within the land and outside it they formed large communities in
association with the synagogues. By the time of the rise of Imperial
Rome they had become so prominent that the Roman government gave them
special status in law, with the influence of their beliefs felt all
across the empire. These were later called "G-dfearers."
They were known as "G-dfearers," yirei shamayim in Hebrew. In Italy and
other western regions of the empire they were called by the Latin
equivalent metuentes. In the Greek-speaking lands to the east, where
they were much more numerous, they were known as phoboumenoi (fearers
of the One) or theosebei (worshipers of G-d). A memorial tablet found
in the synagogue of Aphrodisias in Turkey in 1976, commemorating donors
to charity, has two separate groups of names: one is of Jews, but the
other is of Greeks, such as "Polychronios," "Apianos," and
"Athenagoras," and it is headed with the words, "and also these Fearers
of the One...."
A similar inscription has also been found in the synagogue of Sardis,
this time with three groups of names: born Jews, full converts to
Judaism, and observers of the Seven Laws. The "Fearers" are mentioned
many times by the Roman commentators and historians, often with sarcasm
and mockery of their closeness to the Jewish world and its ideas.
Under the Roman Empire
Josephus records how each city
in Syria from which the emperor had
expelled the Jews still had its population of Greek "sympathizers." He
also describes the large non-Jewish community associated with the
synagogue of Antioch, which was then one of the largest cities in the
world. The biographer Plutarch, in his Life of Cicero, describes how
the great lawyer-politician defended a free Roman accused of abandoning
the pagan religion of the state in favor of "Jewish practices," making
clear that the accused had not in fact become a Jew (but a G-dfearer).
The satirists Petronius and Juvenal derided non-Jews who "act the part
of the Jew," mocking at their reluctance to be circumcised even after
accepting Jewish truth upon themselves. Talmudic sources speak of a
non-Jewish king named Lemuel who was reproached by Rabbi Hanina for
unseemly behavior with the reminder, "Your father was a Fearer of
Heaven." The Noachide observers were often well-educated people,
sometimes members of the Roman aristocracy, and they endured and
answered the pagan wits with great patience and intellectual
distinction. The Roman Emperor Antoninus, who enjoyed a close
friendship with the Jewish sage Rabbi Judah the Prince, was thought to
have established that relationship on the basis of a personal adherence
to the Seven Laws. Josephus also mentions a King Izates, who underwent
a Jewish "conversion" without being circumcised after discussions with
a Jew named Ananias who lived within his kingdom of Adiabene in
Mesopotamia. These Gentiles lived happy and fruitful lives, filled with
the knowledge of truth, realizing their non-Jewish potential before the
eyes of everyone.
It is often claimed that "ten percent of the empire" was Jewish, but
the number of Jews who emerged from that period into more recent times
does not bear out the contention that all these millions had converted
in full. By far the majority of them were Noachide observers, non-Jews
who had rejected paganism and formed an association with the Torah that
gave them a status of their own.
These were times which saw a great moral development in the non-Jewish
world, as the absurdity of the old pagan ways became obvious to
everyone. Public and private morality became the dominant issue in
people's lives, as it is to a great extent today. While the Jews were
established in the Holy Land, with the Temple at its heart for all to
see, there was no mistaking the source from which the necessary ideas
had to come. Similar developments were taking place also in the Persian
Empire, and even in India and China, because the fame and glory of the
Temple were known in all parts of the world. At this time the Hindu
religion was led away from its early idolatry toward acknowledging the
single Creator as it does today. The Buddhist ideology also arose to
take the Far East onto a higher level than it had known before.
As these developments proceeded, the Roman state became the scene of a
considerable struggle between non-Jews who stood fast by the Seven Laws
and early church leaders who wanted the public to settle for a new
religion that was based on Jewish themes but incorporated elements of
Greek idolatry into its framework. The writing of the New Testament in
Greek, based on the deeds of a certain Jew who was believed by many to
be linked to messianic concepts, was intended to further the aim of the
latter group. When the church made its bid for official domination, it
was offering to reconcile the widespread desire for idolatrous concepts
with the equally widespread desire for pure truth.
In time, there was a clear division between these two tendencies at all
levels of life and politics. At its peak the struggle led to the brief
but eventful reign of the Emperor Julian, known to Christian history as
"the Apostate." He was a remarkable man, only twenty-four years old
when he came to the imperial throne in the year 361, determined to give
a moral basis to the crisis-ridden government in a very short span of
time.
Last Attempt under Julian
the Emperor
Julian was a cousin of the
emperor, raised far away from the Roman
court surroundings, and his early education had been mainly in Greek
philosophy. Though he was considered an outsider in Roman politics, or
perhaps because of it, the Emperor Constantius recognized his keen
intelligence and gave him an important military command in the war
against the tribes in what is now Germany. Against all the odds, he
succeeded in battle and aroused the jealousy of the emperor, who
ordered him recalled.
Julian's friends in Rome, aware of his moral and intellectual
potential, rose up in revolt when they heard of his recall and
proclaimed him emperor. Before the situation could develop into a
full-scale civil war, Constantius died, leaving Julian as his only
legitimate successor. The young man came to the throne with no ties to
any of the powerful established forces of the state, whose greed and
arrogance were tearing the fabric of society apart. His philosophical
training had brought him close to Jewish ideas and to the Seven Laws at
the exact time when their relevance was greatest.
Though the Christian bishops were pressing hard for their faith to
become the sole official doctrine, Julian refused them and proclaimed
constitutional freedom of religion. He allowed pagan temples to
function, along with synagogues and Christian churches, but his policy
in government was based on spiritual values that were intended to raise
the tone of life above the level of interfaith competition. He reduced
the taxes that burdened the working people and kept inflation down by
banning price rises and stemming the flow of gold across the empire's
borders. He completed the war with the aggressive German tribes,
realizing that the state would never become stable until its borders
were secure. The support of the "G-dfearers" maintained his prestige,
and the quality of the social fabric began to improve.
However, the senatorial class soon felt their privileges were being
threatened, and the church sought to win them over as allies for the
Christian cause. Propaganda was spread among the poor, alleging that
the Jews and their adherents were planning to exploit them even more,
and this was helped by the power which Julian's policies had given to
the bureaucrats who administered the reforms. Within two years the
emperor's position was under threat; he had gone for high moral stakes,
but the empire itself was so unstable that chaos had risen against him.
In order to win final military security, he led an army to the east
against the Persian Empire, the last strong power that posed a danger
to Rome. His legions reached the Persian capital itself, going further
than Roman armies had ever gone before. However, he retreated from the
task of mounting a siege in the heat of summer. As the army marched
away, he was hit by a stray arrow and died on the sand. Thus fell the
last official advocate of the Seven Laws until modern times, a man
whose courage was brooked only by the most elemental forces that menace
the rule of law. (Rabbi Bindman, The Seven Colors Of The Rainbow,
Resource Publications, Inc. San Jose, California, 1995, p. 8-18).
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