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David in the Garden: Gilboa to Golgotha

The Bible is basically a bunch of metaphors, wrapped in a single story, that it repeats in different ways. Adam is Moses is Jesus, and the Serpent is King David and Barabbas.   In this sense, just as any one of the stories can be seen to be the recasting of all the others, so those stories can be applied to any time throughout history, and even our own.

Capitalism, for example, is basically both the serpent in the garden of Eden, and the apple. Eden, of course, is the world we live in, while the serpent is represented by priests, politicians and advertisers, and the "apple" is our comforts, toys, and technologies. And for evermore of the latter, we are destroying our Eden, and each other.  

That's why the thing you have in your hand is probably an "apple" iPhone, and the internet is a "tree of knowledge." It's also why religious people act like they've been hypnotized to believe that they are "like God, knowing good from evil." And why that "knowledge of good and evil" is exactly what the serpent in the Tree of Knowledge promised they would have, if they basically "ate of the fruit of the vine," which used to be the apple or "forbidden fruit" but now they call Jesus.

Christians naturally argue that Jesus, rather than being the poisoned apple that spoiled humanity forever, was, and is, the antidote to it, and to the lie of the serpent, as well as the sin of Adam and Eve. Perhaps a better interpretation is, if one considers the Old Testament to be a polemic by the Northern Tribes agaisnt David's attempts to usurp power by declaring a divinely desired monarchy, that Jesus had come to undo the sin of David who, like a serpent, used ideas of God to get what he wanted, and like Barabbas, was willing to kill anyone who stood in his way.

Hence, the destruction of the "Temple" at Golgotha brought down the one that began with the defeat of Israel at Gilboa.

And, since David was a Jebusite, the fact that Israel "rose again with incredible speed and within a few years had become the foremost nation of Palestine and Syria," should be interpreted as the Philistines knowing that David would Paganize the Jews, rather than that God was showing favor upon him. And the temple he wanted built is exhibit A.

 

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