LECTURE X
Hebrew - English Bible
ROM
all that has been said in the last few days,
and especially from what was said yesterday, you will have gathered
at about what time we have placed the Genesis story. In fact we have
pointed out that the first momentous words of the Bible mark the
moment when we should say in terms of Spiritual Science that the
substance constituting the earth and sun, hitherto one body, makes
ready to separate. Then follows the separation, and during its course
what is described in the opening verses takes place. The biblical
description of the creation then goes on to cover all that happens
until far on into the Lemurian age, right up to the separation of the
moon. What has been described by Spiritual Science as coming after
the withdrawal of the moon, that is, at the end of Lemuria and in the
beginning of Atlantis, took place after the
“days” of creation. We pointed that out yesterday. We
also pointed out the deep significance of the statement that man
received in his body the imprint of the earth-moon-dust. This
coincided with the cosmic event which we have called the advancement
of the Elohim to become JahveElohim. We had to think of this advance
as more or less coinciding with the beginning of the moon's activity
from outside. Thus we must think of the process of the moon's
separation, and its activity from without, as associated with that
Being who represents the Elohim as one undivided entity, with Him
whom we call Jahve-Elohim. The first phase of the action of the moon
upon the earth coincides with the imprinting of the earth-moon
material into the human body. The human body, which hitherto had
consisted solely of warmth, was now endowed with something expressed
as follows: And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living soul — or, let us
say, a living being.
We must not fail once
again to notice the aptness, the grandeur, the power of the biblical
words! I have impressed upon you that the proper earthly incarnation
of man depended upon his being able to wait in his spiritual nature
in spiritual surroundings until suitable conditions were present in
the earth itself; so that it was his late assumption of his bodily
nature which enabled him to become a mature being. Had he come down
into his body earlier, let us say, during the events of the fifth
“day,” he could only have become a being resembling
physically the beings of the air and of the water. How does Genesis
describe the being of man? Wonderfully! The passage is a model of
accurate and appropriate wording. We are told that the group-souls
who descended into earthly matter on the fifth “day”
became living creatures — became what we today call living
creatures. Man did not descend at that time. The group-souls who
still remained above in the great reservoir of the spirit did not
descend until later. And even on the sixth “day” it was
the animals nearest to man, the earth-animals proper, which came down
first. Thus man was not able to descend into solid matter even during
the first part of the sixth “day,” for if he had
imprinted the earth-forces into himself at that time he would have
become a creature physically resembling the animals. The group-souls
of the higher animals descended first and populated the earth, as
distinct from the air and the sea. Only after that, little by little,
came about conditions favourable to the formation of the prototype of
humanity.
How was it achieved?
It is conveyed to us in memorable words when we are told that the
Elohim set about combining their activities in order to make man
after the image I have described to you. This earth-man arose because
the Elohim, each with his different capacity, worked together as a
group to achieve a common purpose. Man began by being the common
purpose of the Elohim as a group.
We must try to get a
closer idea of what man was like on the sixth “day.” He
was not yet as he is today. The physical body which we find in man
today only came later with the inbreathing by Jahve of the breath
of life. The event which is described as the creation of man by
the Elohim took place before the earth-dust had been imprinted into
his bodily nature. What was he like — this man brought into
existence by the Elohim, still in the Lemurian age?
Remember what I have
often said about the character and nature of the man of today. It is
only as regards his higher members that their physical humanity is
the same in all men. As regards their sex we must distinguish. The
male has a feminine etheric body, and the female a masculine etheric
body. How did it come about? This differentiation, this separation into
male and female, came about relatively late, after the “days”
of creation. There was no such differentiation in the human being who
arose on the sixth “day” as the common purpose of the Elohim.
At that time all human beings had a bodily nature in common. We can best
describe it (so far as representation is possible at all) by saying
that the physical body was more etheric and the etheric body somewhat
denser than is the case today. A differentiation between physical and
etheric, a densification on the side of the physical, only occurred
later under the influence of Jahve-Elohim. You will appreciate that
we cannot speak of the human creation of the Elohim as separately
male and female in the sense of today; the Elohim-man was at the same
time both male and female, undifferentiated. Thus man, in the sense
expressed by the Elohim in the words Let us make man, was
still undifferentiated, still male and female at the same time.
Through this deed of the Elohim the bisexual man was created. That is
the meaning of the words translated male and female created he
them. The words do not refer to man and woman in the sense of
today, but to the undifferentiated man, the male-female man.
I am well aware that
countless biblical commentators have objected to this interpretation
and have sought to throw ridicule on what earlier distinguished
commentators have maintained — which is nevertheless the truth.
They take exception to the view that the Elohim-man was male-female,
and that therefore the male-female is what was made in the image of
the Elohim. I should like to ask such commentators on what they base
their view. It cannot be upon clairvoyant investigation, for that
will never give anything other than what I am saying. If it is upon
external investigation, I should like to ask them how, in face of
tradition, they justify any other interpretation. At least people
ought to be told what the biblical tradition is. When through
clairvoyant investigation one first discovers the true facts, then
life and light breaks into the text, and minor discrepancies in the
tradition no longer matter, because knowledge of the truth enables
one to read the text correctly. But it is very different if one
approaches the matter from the point of view of philology. One must
nevertheless understand clearly that, even as late as the early
centuries of the Christian era, there was nothing in the first
chapters of the Bible to mislead anyone into reading the text as it
is read today. There were no vowels at all, and the text was in such
a condition that even the division into separate words had yet to be
made. The dots which in Hebrew signify the vowels were only inserted
later. Without the preparation which Spiritual Science gives, what
claim has anyone to offer an interpretation of the original text, of
which he can say conscientiously, and with scholarship, that it is
reliable?
Thus in the
Elohim-creation we have man at a preparatory stage. All the processes
which are included in a term such as “human propagation”
were at that time more etheric, more spiritual. They remained at a
higher level. It was the deed of Jahve-Elohim which first made man
into what he has become today. That had to be preceded by the
creation in due order of other, lower beings. Thus the animals became
living creatures by what one might almost call a premature act of
creation. The same expression nephesch,
[ 1 ]
living creature, is applied to these animals as is ultimately applied
to man. But how is it applied to man? At the moment when Jahve-Elohim
intervenes and makes man into the man of today, it is said that
Jahve-Elohim imprints n'schamah.
[ 2 ]
It is through having a higher member implanted into him that man
himself becomes a living being.
Note what a very
fruitful concept the Bible, of all books, introduces into the theory
of evolution! Of course it would be foolish not to recognise that, as
regards his external form, man belongs to the highest stage of the
animal kingdom. This small concession may be made to Darwinism. But
the essential thing is that man did not become a living being in the
same way as the other, lower beings, whose nature is described as
nephesch; man was first endowed with a higher member of his being, a
previously prepared soul-spiritual element.
Here we come to
another parallel between the ancient Hebrew doctrine and our own
Spiritual Science. When we speak of the human soul, we distinguish
between sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. We
know that these first arose in their soul-spiritual form during the
first three “days” of creation. It was then that their
characteristic tendencies were formed. But this inner soul-nature was
not clothed in physical form, was not, so to say, impressed into a
physical body until much later. Thus we have to understand that first
there arises the spiritual, that this spiritual is then invested with
the astral and then gradually condenses into the etheric-physical; it
is only then that what was previously spiritual is imprinted into the
body as the breath of life. Thus what was implanted as a seed into
the human being by Jahve-Elohim had already been prepared earlier. It
was there in the womb of the Elohim. Now it is imprinted into man,
whose bodily nature had been built up from another direction. Thus it
is something which enters into man from without. This impress of
n'schamah first made it possible to implant in man the
predisposition to, the rudiments of, the ego nature. For these old
Hebrew expressions nephesch, ruach, n'schamah
correspond to our spiritual scientific terms sentient soul, intellectual
soul and consciousness soul respectively.
Thus this further
evolution is very complicated. We must think of all that happened on
the six “days” of creation, that is to say, we must think
of the work of the Elohim before they advanced to Jahve-Elohim, as
having taken place in higher, spiritual realms; and what we can see
today in the world as physical man first came about through the deed
of Jahve-Elohim.
Of all this which we
find in the Bible — and again now in clairvoyant perception
— and which first enables us to understand the inner nature of
man, the Greek philosophers still had a consciousness derived from
their various initiation centres — Plato especially, but even
Aristotle still knew something of it. Anyone familiar with the works
of Plato and Aristotle knows that in Aristotle there was still an
awareness that man first became a living being through the
introduction of a higher soul-spiritual member, whereas the lower
animals went through different evolutionary processes. Aristotle
expressed it somewhat as follows. He says that the lower animals
became what they were through other processes of evolution; but that
at the time when the forces which are active in the animal were able
to become effective, the human soul-spiritual being, which still
hovered in higher regions, was not yet allowed to acquire an earthly
body, otherwise it would have remained at the animal stage. The human
being had to wait; in him the lower, the animal stages, had to be
ousted from their sovereignty through the implanting of the human
member. To express this Aristotle made use of the word
φθειρεσθαι
(phtheiresthai). By this he meant to say, “Of course,
superficially speaking, man has the same bodily functions as the
animal, but in the animal these functions are supreme, whereas in man
the bodily functions have been dethroned and have to follow a higher
principle.” That is the meaning of the word
φθειρεσθαι.
The same truth lies
behind the biblical story of the creation. Through the implanting of
n'schamah the lower members were dethroned. In the bearer of his
ego man has acquired a higher member. But his earlier, more etheric
nature was thereby brought down a stage and became differentiated.
Man acquired an external, bodily member, and an inner, more etheric
member; the one became denser and the other more rarefied. The
principle was repeated in man which we have come to recognise as
running through the whole of evolution. We saw how warmth condensed
to air and rarefied to light, how air condensed to water and rarefied
into sound-ether and so on. The same process takes place in man at
higher levels. The male-female becomes differentiated into man and
woman, and moreover in such a way that the denser physical body
appears on the outside, the more rarefied, etheric, invisible body
goes inwards. We could also call this the progress from Elohim-man to
man the creation of Jahve-Elohim. The man we know today is the
creation of JahveElohim, and the sixth “day” of creation
corresponds with the Lemurian age, in which we speak of the
male-female human being.
Now the Bible speaks
of yet a seventh “day” of creation, and we are told that
on this seventh “day” the Elohim rested. What does that
actually mean? We only understand it aright if we realise that this
is the very time when the Elohim rise, when they experience their
promotion to become Jahve-Elohim. But we must not conceive
Jahve-Elohim as the entire hierarchy of the Elohim united; we must
understand that the Elohim give up, so to speak, only a part of their
Being to the moon-Being, and hold the rest in reserve; and that in
this older part of their Being they continue their own further
evolution. So far as this part of them is concerned, their work is no
longer devoted to the creation of man. That part of the Elohim which
has become Jahve-Elohim continues to work on man. The other part does
not work directly upon the earth, it devotes itself to its own
evolution. That is what is meant by rest from earthly work, by the
Sabbath day, by the seventh “day” of creation.
And now we must call
attention to something else of importance. If everything that I have
just been saying is correct, then we must regard the Jahve-man, the
man into whom Jahve impressed his own Being, as the direct successor
of the more etheric, more delicate man who was formed on the sixth
“day.” Thus there is a direct line from the more etheric
man, who is still male-female — from the bi-sexual man —
to the physical man. Physical man is the descendant, in a densified
form, of the etheric man. If one wanted to describe the Jahve-man who
passes over into Atlantis, one would have to say: “And the man
who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth ‘day' of creation
developed further into the unisexual man, the Jahve-man.” Those
who followed after the seven “days” of creation are the
descendants of the Elohim-men, and thus of what came into being
during the first six “days.”
Again the Bible is
sublime when, in the second chapter, it tells us that the Jahve-man
is in fact a descendant of the heavenly man, the man who was formed
by the Elohim on the sixth “day.” The Jahve-man is the
descendant of the Elohim-man in precisely the same way as the son is
the descendant of the father. The Bible tells us this in the fourth
verse of the second chapter, which says “Those who are to
follow are the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the
heavenly man.” That is what it really says. But if you take a
modern translation, you find the remarkable sentence: These are
the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were
created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the
heavens. Usually we find the whole hierarchy of the Elohim
called “God,” and Jahve-Elohim called “the Lord
God” — the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
I ask you to look at this sentence carefully and try honestly to find
a reasonable meaning for it. Anyone who claims to do so had better not
look on ahead in his Bible, for the word used here is
tol'doth,
[ 3 ]
which means “subsequent generations”;
and the same word is used in the later chapter
which tells of the subsequent generations of Noah. Thus here it is
speaking of the Jahve-men as the descendants, the subsequent
generations, of the heavenly Beings, in the same way as there it
speaks of the descendants of Noah. Thus this passage must be
translated something like this: “In what follows we are
speaking of the descendants of the heaven-and-earth beings who were
created by the Elohim and further developed by Jahve-Elohim.”
Thus the Bible too looks upon the Jahve-men as the descendants of the
Elohim-men. Anyone who wants to presuppose a fresh account of the
creation, because it says that God created man, should also look at
the fifth chapter, which begins This is the book of the
generations (the word used there is the very same as in the
other passages — tol'doth), and should assume a third
account there — thus making his Rainbow Bible really complete!
That way you will get a whole knocked up out of Bible fragments, but
will no longer have the Bible. If we could go on longer, we should be
able to elucidate what is said in chapter five too.
Thus, when we go
deeply into these things, we see that there is full agreement between
the biblical account of the creation and what we can establish
through Spiritual or Occult Science. This leads us to ask why the
Bible account is in a more or less pictorial form. What do these
pictures represent? And then we realise that they too are the result
of clairvoyant experience. Just as today the eye of the seer gazes in
the super-sensible upon the origin of our earth existence, so too did
those who originally composed the Bible story gaze upon the
super-sensible. It was by clairvoyant experience that the facts
originally given to us were acquired. When we set to work to
construct prehistory from the point of view of purely physical
observation, we start from the traces of it which are extant and
discoverable by external means, and the farther back we go in
physical life and physical origins the more hazy the physical forms
become. But in this misty element spiritual Beings hold sway. And man
himself in his spiritual part was originally within them. And if we
pursue our study of its origin as far back as the times described in
Genesis, we come to the original spiritual condition of our earth
itself. The “days” of creation refer to spiritual stages
of development, only to be grasped by spiritual investigation. What
the Bible is telling us is that the physical is little by little
formed out of the spiritual.
When the seer gazes
upon the facts which are described for us in Genesis, he fords to
begin with only spiritual processes. The physical eye would see
absolutely nothing; it would gaze into a void. But, as we have seen,
time goes on. Little by little for the seer the solid crystallises
out of the spiritual, just as ice is formed out of water and
solidifies. Out of the flowing sea of the astral, of the Devachanic,
emerges what can now be seen by the physical eye. Thus, as
clairvoyant observation proceeds, within the picture which to begin
with has to be understood as purely spiritual, the physical emerges
like a crystallisation. It follows that at an earlier time physical
eyes would not have been able to discover the human being. Right up
to the sixth and seventh “days” of creation, that is,
right up to our Lemurian age, man could not have been seen by the
physical eye; at that time he only existed spiritually. That is the
great difference between a true theory of evolution and a fancy one.
The fancy one assumes only a physical process of development. But man
did not originate by lower beings evolving to human stature. It is
utterly absurd to imagine that an animal form can be transformed into
the higher, human form. During the time when the animal forms came
into being, forming their physical bodies below, man had already long
been in existence, but it is only later that he descends and takes
his place beside the animal natures which had descended much earlier.
Anyone who cannot look upon evolution in this way is beyond help; he
is hypnotised as it were by modern concepts, he is influenced, not by
natural scientific facts, but by contemporary opinion.
If we want to connect
the coming into being of man with that of all other creatures, we
must say that first there appear two branches, the birds and the
marine animals;
[ 4 ]
then, as a special offshoot,
come the land animals; the birds and marine animals came into
existence on the fifth “day” of creation, the land animals
on the sixth. And then came man, only not by producing the same line
further, not as a continuation of the series, but by a descent upon
the earth. That is the true theory of evolution, and it is contained
more exactly in the Bible than in any modern textbook which
surrenders to materialistic fantasy.
These are a few
fragmentary remarks such as always seem to be required in the last
lecture of a Cycle. To follow up adequately every aspect of such a
theme as this would take months; there is so very much in this
Genesis story of creation. In our Cycles we can never do more than
touch upon things, and that is all I have attempted to do this time.
I should like to emphasise once more that it has not been so very
easy for me to give this particular course; nor will any of my
hearers readily realise how difficult it is to reach the depths upon
which the Bible story is based, how hard it is to find the true
parallel between already ascertained spiritual scientific facts and
the corresponding passages in the Bible. If one works
conscientiously, the task is an extraordinarily exacting one. It is
so often assumed that the eye of the seer reaches with ease
everywhere — that one has only to look, and everything follows
of itself. An inexperienced person often thinks, when confronted with
a problem, that he will easily be able to solve it, whereas the
further he probes the more numerous are the difficulties which
present themselves. This is so even in ordinary, external research,
and when one leaves the physical and plunges into clairvoyant
investigation, then the real difficulties begin to show themselves,
and with them the feeling of the great responsibility incurred in
speaking of these things at all. Nevertheless I think I may say that
I have not made use of a single word in the whole of this Cycle which
cannot stand, which is not as far as it goes an adequate expression
in our own language of the right way to conceive these things. But it
was certainly not easy.
There is much that I
could still say. Especially something which has been borne in upon us
at every stage during these lectures — and that is the need for
anthroposophical teaching so to permeate our hearts as to lift us
with all the strength of our inner life to ever higher forms of
perception, to an ever larger-hearted comprehension of the world.
Whether we become better men in the intellectual, feeling and moral
spheres — that is the touchstone for the fruitfulness of what we
gather in the spiritual-scientific field. To study the parallel
between spiritual-scientific investigation and the Bible can be
particularly fruitful; for it enables us to experience how we
ourselves are the “primal cause,” the “primal
state,” as Jacob Boehme would have said, in that super-sensible
spiritual womb whence also came those very Elohim who developed into
Jahve-Elohim, into that higher form of evolution, in order to bring
about the great goal of their activity, which we call man. Let us
comprehend our origin with due reverence, but also with a due sense
of our responsibility. The Elohim and Jahve-Elohim gave their highest
forces to the beginning of our evolution. Let us look upon this our
origin as laying upon us an obligation to absorb into our human
nature more and more of the spiritual forces which in the course of
subsequent evolution have entered into the development of the
earth.
We have spoken of the
influence of Lucifer. Because of this influence something which lay
in the womb of that spirituality in which man too originated remained
there for the time being; it came forth later in the incarnation of
the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Since that time the
Christ has worked in the earth as another divine principle. And
contemplation of the great truths of Genesis ought to point us to the
duty of taking more and more into our own being the spiritual Being
of the Christ; for only by permeating ourselves with the Christ
principle shall we be able to fulfil our human task; only so shall we
become on the earth more and more what we were predisposed to be in
those times with which the biblical story of creation is
concerned.
Thus such a series of
lectures as this can not only give us knowledge, but can stir forces
in our souls. Even if we forget much of its detail, may what we have
learnt through a closer examination of the biblical story of creation
go on working as power in our souls. I may perhaps be allowed to say
this at the close of these lectures, during which we have tried to
immerse ourselves in our anthroposophical life. Let us try to take
with us the strength which should flow from this teaching. Let us
carry it away with us, let us fructify our outside life with this
strength. Whatever we may be doing, in whatever worldly profession we
may be engaged, this strength can warm and ripen our creative
activity as well as intensify our joy, our happiness. No one who has
rightly grasped the sublime origin of human existence can go on
living without taking this knowledge as a germinal force of blessing
and joy for the rest of his life. When you try to carry out deeds of
love, let the truth about the mighty origin of men shine forth from
your eyes, and thus you will best reveal what anthroposophical
teaching is. Our deeds will proclaim its truth, rejoicing those
around us, conferring blessing, refreshment and health upon our own
spirit, soul and body. We ought to be better, stronger, healthier
human beings through having absorbed anthroposophical teaching. May
this above all be the effect of this Cycle! It should be a seed
which sinks into the soul of the hearer only to spring up again and
bear fruit for those around us. Thus we go our separate ways, while
our spirits remain united, and we try to work together to translate
this teaching into life. Let us permeate ourselves with this spirit,
without weakening, until the moment when we are able to meet again
not only in the spirit but in the flesh.
Notes:
1.
| Diagram 12 Click image for large view | |
2.
| Diagram 13 Click image for large view | |
3.
| Diagram 14 Click image for large view | |
4.
Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard.
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