#29 WARRIORS, HIGH PRIESTS AND PROPHETS: AARON, JOSHUA AND DEBORAH

Liberation, wandering, invasion, and conquest are the dramatic themes running through these early Jewish lives of St Germain and Mary. Watch them as they lead the Israelites as priests, warriors and judges.

St Germain, first as a magician, and then as a high priest, will create the political climate by forcing the Pharaoh to release the Hebrews from enslavement in Egypt.

Joshua will follow, a take-no-prisoners warrior, who will conquer Jericho and stabilise the tough Imhotep line of St Germain. When he returns as Samuel, the priest, he will be the last judge of Israel. Mary, in her aspect as the Magdalene, incarnates in one of her most remarkable lives as Deborah who is a judge, poet and warrior. In all their lives they are charismatic heroes as well as being prophets who act as the mouthpieces and intermediaries of God.

The Jews had been in Egypt since Jacob and his sons migrated there to escape a fierce drought. Held in servitude for many generations, it was time for them to be set free. Moses, the adopted son of the Pharaoh emerged as the leader but it was his true brother, Aaron, who conducted the difficult negotiations with the Pharaoh. He struck with surprise with his magic he predicted the Egyptian plagues and conducted the miracles until finally the Jews were freed.

After many years of wandering and Joshua’s brilliant victories, the ten tribes who had descended from Jacobs’s sons continued their invasion of Canaan, trying to wrest control from the indigenous people… the Canaanites.

Anarchy reigned. The book of Judges describes the chaotic situation saying: “in those days there was no King of Israel: every man did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6) While Deborah’s story describes one battle with the Canaanites while Samuel’s story describes other battles with the Amelkites, a nomadic tribe, and with the Philistines, a recently arrived invader from the sea. Success in battle comes to the Israelites through God’s intercession in their human affairs.

AARON: FIRST HIGH PRIEST OF ISRAEL

Moses, Aaron and Miriam, two remarkable brothers with their remarkable sister, who led the Israelites out of Egypt and into forty years of wandering until they could enter Canaan, the Promised Land. There are four books of the Bible, that describe their lives and exploits: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Moses, was Aaron’s older brother, who was born, we are told at the time when the Pharaohhad, as part of a regular cull of slaves, ordered his soldiers to drown all Hebrew male babies. Their mother who carried a remarkable lineage as the daughter of Levi and the grandchild of Leah and Jacob, placed her new born son, Moses in a basket and pushed him into a tributary of the Nile where she was sure he would be rescued. Moses was retrieved by a member of the Pharaoh’s household and raised and educated as a royal son.

Later the brothers were to be re-united and the smooth-tongued Aaron became the spokesperson for the stuttering Moses and a mediator between the prophet, God and the Jewish people. Moses, with his speech impediment, lacked Aaron’s eloquence. God had said to Moses that Aaron “shall be for you a mouth, and you, you shall be for him a god.” (Exodus 4:16)

Yet, Aaron gets very bad press. Any assessment of Aaron by Christian writers seems to start and finish with one incident in his life: that of his terrible and treacherous mistake in which he aided the creation of a false god, the Golden Calf, an aspect of the god Baal. (Exodus 3:21-32). As a result he is known as Aaron the idolater. For his sin, we are told that Aaron will die like Moses without entering the Promised Land and will be buried with his sister Miriam at Kadesh-Barnea, at the edge of Sinai where the Negev desert begins.

Aaron was the confidant of Moses, his advisor and he plays a similar role to the one he will play as Merlin to King Arthur. This is the Comte de Saint-Germain’s line of St Germain whom we have only seen once before as Krishna.

Conversation with the Gatekeeper

“Gatekeeper, can you make Aaron come alive for me because he’s hidden behind his terrible sin of the creation of the false god …the golden calf… and we Christians can’t see him properly?”

The Gatekeeper was waiting for the opportunity to set the record straight about Aaron, he needed no encouragement to launch into the exploits of Aaron who was one oh his favourite lives of the Count.

“Aaron is downplayed in Christian accounts as the ‘eminence gris’ but he was, in fact, the brains, the administrator and the salesman of ‘Operation: Exodus’. Aaron, like Moses, was born in Egypt. They were full brothers who didn’t look at all alike. Despite what it says in Exodus, Moses was the older brother. But Aaron who didn’t want to be a leader because he didn’t have Moses’ sense of destiny. Aaron was born to be a second in command, which is exactly where he wanted to be. He was of medium height and very handsome with regular even teeth, a full mouth, sensual lips, heavy eyebrows, blue-black hair, and rather fair skin and darkish grey eyes. He was an intelligent man, quite authoritarian and given to polarity of thinking. Life for him was either black or white. He loved music and was flamboyant in his personal dress and jewellery. And nothing was more showy than his very flash staff; it was of African ebony inlaid with ivory and set off with a gold tip in the form of a cobra. ‘Get a plain staff!’ Moses commanded him, and Aaron ignored.

Aaron and Moses were closer than most brothers, especially ones who had been raised apart, because these very same aspects of Germain and Hilarion had previously blended to form that great being… Krishna. Throughout their previous life they had established a spiritual brotherhood. But Aaron was Aaron! And that made their relationship complex. Moses had been taken away to be abandoned on the river and later was miraculously restored to him.

Aaron had been born after the law was relaxed that ordered the slaughter of eldest born males. Aaron picked up on his mother’s guilt over her abandonment of her son. As she lay dying she told him how to find his older brother Moses. Aaron, then in his twenties, didn’t even know he had an elder brother! When he found him they were culturally different. Aaron was a Jew and Moses was an Egyptian in his forties, married to a Midian, the daughter of Jethro, the Chief Judge of the Midians. They wouldn’t have worked together so well if they’d grown up as brothers. Because there was no rivalry from adolescence there was this strong cohesiveness in their relationship. Moses was a strong, running, leaping man. Aaron was studious, not good at sports, who used his guile, not strength, for his authority. What is surprising was that Moses and Aaron loved one another deeply although they didn’t have much in common ground and could hardly maintain a conversation.”

“Did Aaron train as a priest?”

“Aaron completed his training from the priests of the White Brotherhood and advanced in that Order. Aaron was the scribe fluent in hieroglyphics, and he was a workaholic. He made a suitable marriage but he didn’t pay much attention to it as he was wedded to his work. He was an accountant and lawyer before he became High Priest and wrote two books of the Torah: Numbers and Leviticus and the first draft of Exodus.”

“Those are attributed to Moses!”

“Maybe, but it was Aaron himself who dictated them to an Egyptian...whose identity I will reveal later... Aaron also dictated to a few Hebrews who were trained in hieroglyphics and early Hebrew.

“And Aaron was also a magician?”

“Aaron was a conjurer and much more. Aaron learned simple illusion in Egypt from the uncle of his wet nurse. She was a Nubian and Aaron was a wanderer as a child who would visit the Nubian quarters where the families of the Pharaoh’s elite bodyguards of lived. And there he met with a ‘witch doctor’ who taught him illusions that were both sleight of hand and actual magic. From them he learned elementary hypnotism, and then, advanced hypnotism.”

“So he was well trained before he met the Pharaoh. How did Aaron deal with him? Can you describe his contest with his magicians and his prediction of the plagues?”

“The time had arrived for the Hebrews to leave Egypt. They were bonded servants who had sold themselves to Egypt when they were struck with drought and invasion in Canaan at the time of Jacob. It was the first Diaspora of Jewish people. They had bonded their labour so they could eat a square meal and feed their herds. They were manual labourers in the brick works, artisans, builders and artists of all kinds; many of them were musicians, the best musicians in Egypt. And they were critical to the Egyptian economy because they provided labour at cheap non-inflationary prices being tied to contracts without rise and fall clauses. But the Egyptians grew afraid of this skilled class whose numbers kept increasing and therefore they periodically culled them. They culled them in case they became too numerous, staged a revolt and took the country over. (They had already experienced the Shepherd Kings and didn’t want that to happen again.) Moses had avoided being victim of one of their culls.

So, this was the environment, the background, when Moses and Aaron approached the Pharaoh through his chamberlain for an audience. Aaron was the official credited to represent the Hebrews somewhat like a trade union boss… he was to be their advocate.”

“Today’s scholars believe the Pharaoh was Ramses II. Was he the Pharaoh at the time of the exodus?”

“No, he definitely was not. Ramses was the Pharaoh of Homer and Odysseus. The Pharaoh of Moses was two hundred years before that, and he was the father of Moses’ foster mother, Thutmosis II, and he reigned 1492-1479 BC.”

“I think that was the Pharaoh who had Hatshepsut, the only female Pharaoh, as his Queen. Was she present?”

“Let me look. There is Hatshepsut and her two daughters Neferure and Neferabiti. Neferure was Moses’ foster mother who allowed his real mother to stay with him until he was about five. She called him Messes not Moses after her father.”

“Was it unusual for the Pharaoh to be surrounded by magicians?”

“Yes it was, but special arrangements were made for this audience. Before their meeting, the Pharaoh was briefed by his Chamberlain about why Aaron and Moses wanted to see him and why they wanted to leave Egypt. The Chamberlain told him that Moses “was the adopted son of your daughter and his real brother is with him, who is a secret priest and a magician.” “Good”, the Pharaoh says, smiling and moistening his lips, “Get the best magicians you can find, bring them here and we will out-magic them.”

Aaron heard of the Pharaoh’s plan from his network of contacts among the Nubian bodyguards and he went prepared to be a conjurer. He filled his cloak and his sleeves with many hidden objects and animals as he had been trained to do because he knew the Egyptian way of thinking. Before the Pharaoh, Aaron performed brilliantly; he turned water into blood, he drew jewels from the noses and mouths of court officials: all the usual conjuring tricks that St Germain will become famous for including his spectacular trick of his disappearing staff and his trick of the snake slithering from his sleeve. Even though Aaron out-magicked even the best of his magicians, the Pharaoh refused all the Hebrew demands.

After the Hebrews had exhausted their repertoire of conjuring tricks and failed to gain their freedom; they resorted to threats. They threatened plague and disaster on Egypt and the Pharaoh just smiled’ nonchalantly. And many times they would threaten him. For an intelligent, well-connected man like Aaron, it would be easy to forecast the upcoming disasters. All natural phenomena were predictable from the information he had from the Abyssinians, Nubians and Sudanese. He had been warned about a plague of locusts approaching. He could forecast the plague of raining frogs because in the previous years of wet weather, they had laid a huge number of eggs, which were carried away into the sky by tornado-like winds. They were supported by the moisture in the clouds until they became too heavy and fell to earth. This had happened before. These events Aaron forecast to the Pharaoh attributing them to the hand of God, and his (Aaron’s God), in particular. He also predicted the phenomenon of the Nile turning into blood. A combination of algae and plant life introduced into the Upper Nile was carried downstream where it bred in the hot, humid weather into an algae bloom and with weed it turned the Nile to the colour of slightly oxidised blood; a reddish, dark brown.

Aaron kept prophesying one disaster after another and the Pharaoh kept refusing until the very last plague. The last plague was so horrific that up to one hundred thousand children would die from a virulent fever like Ebola.

“Where did this plague come from?” I asked

“It will not serve your purpose to go into the details of this plague. Suffice to say the plague was introduced and the Hebrews were protected from it by dosing their children with hyssop and marking their doorposts with lamb’s blood. We get some clue about what the illness was from the hyssop, a sacred herb associated with cleansing and used in healing for tuberculosis and lung haemorrhage. Aaron had warned the Pharaoh when he said to him: “The Lord, our God, will take from you the first born of every family.” “Then”, said the Pharaoh confidently, “it will strike yours also.” But none of the Hebrew children died.

In forty-eight hours, almost overnight, the children died in vast waves. It was as horrific an act of God as ever was to occur. It produced a grief so enormous, an absolute explosion of grief; it was a shock as if an atomic bomb had exploded. Hatshepsut was overcome by distress and anger and it hardened her for what was ahead. She had loved Moses as her grandson and coached him herself in singing and poetry. How could he slaughter her grandchildren? The Egyptians would do anything to avert it ever happening again. She pleaded with her husband to release the Israelites.”

“Is there any record of such an horrific event?”

“Records are usually attached to a corpse’s mummification, but because it was a result of a plague the Egyptian burials did not occur in the usual way. All the bodies were burnt, sacrificed and buried. In a couple of cases they were mummified and buried with the usual grave diaries. In a couple of other cases, the families had the scribes’ record the disaster and this may come to light in the future, if you know what you’re looking for and the date of its likely occurrence.

During this terrible time, Aaron played a central role in all the negotiations with the Pharaoh. “Now our children are more numerous than yours” he would say, “will you try to cull them as before and suffer the vengeance of our God?” Aaron was the brains and he was courageous and he taunted the Pharaoh.”

But the Egyptians couldn’t get rid of the Hebrews quickly enough. In some weeks – let’s say three to four – all of them had left. They were gone!. Some Hebrews took advantage of their employers and demanded from the grief-stricken and shocked parents – all their gold jewellery. To get rid of them the Egyptian parents gave them what they asked for. Watch where that ill-gotten gold jewellery will end up!

“After they were released and wandering in the Sinai desert, Moses went away for forty days to receive the Ten Commandments, why did Aaron commission the casting of the Golden Calf?”

“It was the weakness in Aaron and we will see it again in his later life as Comte de Saint-Germain. He can never resist a glittering opportunity to be a showman. Some of the Hebrews came to him and said: “Aaron, the people want a Golden Calf, why not give it to them? Unlike your brother, you understand what it is to be a real man.’ And with a twirl of his moustache Aaron is into it. Sheer vanity. Vanity. Vanity.”

“The Bible records Aaron making three serious mistakes. The golden calf was the first. The second was when he and Miriam spoke out against Moses marrying the Cushite woman. Was she an Ethiopian? What was the problem and why was Miriam struck with leprosy as a result?”

“The Cushite woman was a black Somali woman and Moses already had three other wives. Aaron and Miriam thought it was a bad example to marry someone of a different culture and religion. And she was black! There was such great family stress that Miriam’s eczema became exacerbated into a terrible outbreak. Aaron argued the marriage was unsuitable and it was just lust to marry her but Moses married her anyway.”

“Then there was the third mistake of Aaron’s anger, somewhere in the Sinai Aaron struck a rock to get water rather than speaking to it as God commanded because he had become annoyed by the Hebrews’ murmuring.”

“How different is the truth! Remember this man is a magician and a showman who always has tricks up his sleeve and he had devised a bit of theatre. He divines a new spring, he secretly cracks open the rock above the spring with a hammer and wedges it back into place. Here is a man who is being driven insane by the Israelite’s complaints: - ‘We’re starving to death! Where are we going? When are we going to settle down? Why are we dying of thirst!’ Moses is unapproachable and Aaron has to deal with all the problems. With a sharp blow from his staff the spring bursts out and instantly they shut up, shocked and filled with awe. And so he gained more control of the rough necks! Yes, he was angry - at their incessant whinging!”

“What do you think, Gatekeeper, was his greatest accomplishment?”

“Aaron found ways through the manipulation of rules to help Moses govern an ungovernable people. It was Aaron who laid the foundations of Judaism as their Chief Priest and he managed an unruly rabble of three hundred thousand Jews with six hundred thousand opinions and got them to do as they were told.”

“Was that Aaron’s gift to the Jewish people?”

“By his codification of the law, Aaron told them precisely what to do. This is the box, he said, move outside the box and God will strike you dead. Do this and you will be happy; do that and you will be unhappy. He created the People of the Law. For the books of the Torah that Aaron dictated the provenance is still there and at some stage it will surface.”

“What was his life purpose?”

“To be Moses’ mouthpiece, to act as his spokesman and he achieved his purpose.”

“And his spiritual challenge?”

“It would have to be his vanity. This was his vulnerable weak spot that was amplified in someone who played second fiddle to the dreaming king.”

“In the Bible, Aaron dies at one hundred and twenty-three years old. Where and when did he die?”

“Aaron died at Mt Horeb, in Sinai, of heart failure. Both Moses and Miriam were dead and he was worn out with old age.”

“Before you go on, I can’t believe that the Israelites had been lost in that Sinai Desert for forty years. As an Australian, deserts are in our backyard, Sinai is small by comparison (I was shocked when I actually saw how small it was) and only unprepared fools would get lost in it. Abraham, Jacob and his sons had no trouble going back and forth across Sinai, nor did the Egyptian army when they needed to. Rudimentary star navigation would have allowed them to follow a true path out of the place and, I don’t believe you could get lost in Sinai for even one year, let alone forty! I suspect behind their claim there is another story.”

“There is. The Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for twenty-three years not forty years and their journey wasn’t the accident of poor navigation; it was at the command of Moses. He knew he couldn’t stop the Israelites from being slaves by his edict, their conditioning of two hundred years of captivity was too strong; their mentality was fixed; he needed a tougher, stronger Hebrew and they had to be bred from marrying into various tribes and from the freedom of living off the land. Moses simply did not reveal to them that the Promised Land was Canaan. He knew; they didn’t. He only told them after his spies returned.

Here, the journey was more important than the destination. They needed to wander around the Middle East to reacquaint themselves with their heritage. It took about twenty-three years, not to conquer and dispossess the people of Canaan but to marry into them. They had a succession of battles and hardships and as a result the women outnumbered men three to one and Aaron solved the problem when he declared, ‘You are Jewish through virtue of your mother’. In the story of Exodus you have maybe an inexact book from an oral tradition, but nevertheless it is essentially accurate. It was written down at the time of the Babylonian captivity. Remember herders don’t keep good records!”

“Gatekeeper, I am puzzled also about the Egyptian bondage of the Hebrews. Why was it allowed? There must have been a divine purpose for it. If God had decided that they should be His chosen people, why did He decide to enslave them?”

“They went to Egypt as shepherds and cattle traders and left Egypt literate and numerate. They went to ‘university’ there and learned from the Egyptians medicine, law, use of memory and they especially learned about Egyptian religion.”

“What did they bring from Egypt into Judaism?”

The Gatekeeper held up his hand, and pointed one finger, he would often count saying “one finger, two fingers…”

“One finger, they took God originally called Amun, the sun god, and eventually renamed him Yahweh. Then, they took the concept of priests, with an ecclesiastical hierarchy. They borrowed the idea of one tribe, a separate caste, to care for their liturgy and for all their religious places and for that tribe to become responsible for the complete governance of their religion. They took the influence and membership of the White Order or Brotherhood and they took from them male circumcision.

Two fingers, they took an enormous knowledge of herbal medicine and surgery, which would make them well in advance of the rest of the Middle East.

Three fingers, there are many traces apparent in the Cabalism and in their numerology, which are also Egyptian. Egyptians believed it took forty days and forty nights to break the bonds of the Earth after death and go to the Halls of Judgement. In this, you know, they were largely correct. But the number forty reverberated through their religion; Moses spent forty nights in the desert, Jesus spent forty nights in the desert; giving Christians a forty day Lent and for forty years the Hebrews wandered in the desert.

Four fingers, there is the architectural concept of the Temple with its various courts echoed in Solomon’s Temple which too,was Egyptian inspired as was the concept of a Tabernacle, the portable temple, which the Egyptians took to war. It was carried by Egyptian priests and it contained their holy scrolls.

Five fingers, there is the concept of Satan. This idea originated with Set, the wicked brother of Osiris. It is not in the Bible, it was in their oral tradition not in the doctrinal writings. But they did not take everything. What the Jews did not take was hieroglyphics, a difficult form of writing. Although they did retain the concept of writing and the tradition of recording important laws and they were one of the first to embrace the Phoenician alphabet when it became available.” [Litchfield, 2007]

“What was Aaron’s next life?”

“He needed to balance his idolatry and eliminate his vanity and he would incarnate to do that specifically as Samuel, the last Judge. But first there is the man of iron, Joshua, the clever commando who would lead the Hebrews into Israel.”