Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Sitchin Zecharia
Title : Divine Encounters A Guide to Visions, Angels, and other Emissaries
Year : 1995

Link download : Sitchin_Zecharia_-_Divine_Encounters.zip

THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS. Divine Encounters are the ultimate human experience—the maximal, the utmost possible when alive, as when Moses encountered the Lord upon Mount Sinai; and the final, termi- nal, and conclusive, as that of Egyptian Pharaohs who at death assumed an eternal Afterlife by joining the gods in their Divine Abode. The human experience of Divine Encounters as recorded in scriptures and texts from the ancient Near East is a most amazing and fascinating saga. It is a powerful drama that spans Heaven and Earth, involving worship and devotion, eternity and morality on the one hand, and love and sex, jealousy and murder on the other; ascents unto space and journeys to the Netherworld. A stage on which the actors are gods and goddesses, angels and demigods, Earthlings and androids; a drama expressed in prophecies and visions, in dreams and omens and oracles and revelations. It is a story of Man, separated from his Creator, seeking to restore a pri- meval umbilical cord and, by so doing, reach for the stars. Divine Encounters are the ultimate human experience per- haps because they were also the very first human experience; for when God created Man, Man met God at the very moment of being created. We read in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, how the first human, "The Adam," was brought into being: And God said: Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness ... And God created the Adam in His image, in the image of Elohim created He him. We can only surmise that the newborn, at the moment of being brought forth, was hardly aware of the nature and significance of that first Divine Encounter. Nor, it appears, was The Adam fully aware of an ensuing crucial encounter, when the Lord God (in the creation version attributed to Yahweh) decided to create a female mate for The Adam: And Yahweh Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon the Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead of it. And Yahweh Elohim formed the rib which He had taken from the Adam into a woman. The first man was thus deeply anesthetized during the pro- ceedings, and therefore oblivious to this crucial Divine En- counter in which the Lord Yahweh displayed his surgical talents. But The Adam was soon informed of what had hap- pened, for the Lord God "brought the woman unto the man" and introduced her to him. The Bible then offers a few words of commentary on why men and women become "one flesh'' as they marry and ends the tale with the observation that both the man and his wife "were naked, but were not ashamed." While the situation seemed not to bother the First Matchmaker, why does the Bible imply otherwise? If the other creatures roaming in the Garden of Eden, "the beasts of the field and the fowl of the skies," were unclothed, what on Earth should have caused (but did not) Adam and Eve to be ashamed of being naked? Was it because the ones in whose image the Adam was created were wearing clothing? It is a point to be kept in mind—a clue, an inadvertent clue provided by the Bible, regarding the identity of the Elohim. ...