posted on Apr, 2 2010 @ 02:35 PM
The so-called 4 Horsemen section (or 'Peri-cope') of the Apocalypse of Yohanon the Levite (aka Book of Revelation) of course is actually not made up
from whole cloth, but is a Rabinnic 'Midrashic expansion' of an earlier Apocalyptic text (as with every single line of the book) in the case the
Aramaic Targum of the Scroll of the Book of the Prophet Zechariah chapter 6 verses 1-11
If you read the Scroll of the Book o the Prophet Zechariah chapters 1-8 (protoZechariah) VERY carefully and also the material contained in the later
writer of Zechariah chapters 9-14 (sometimes called Deutero-Zechariah i.e. 2nd Zechariah) you will see many passages that are the basis for the
expansions in the Apocalypse of Yohanon the Levite (aka Book of Reveleation), as well as other OT and pseudipigarphical Hebrew texts, most of the
material taken from the Aramaic Targum material of the paleoHebrew versions and brought into very clumsy (and impossibly grammatical) mid-1st century
Koine Greek :
Aramaic Targum of Zechariah 6:1-11
And I turned, and lifted up my eyes & behold, I saw:
Lo, Coming out from between two Mountains,
And behold: the Mountains were as Mountains of Brass !
I saw: there were coming towards me, Four Chariots !
And lo, in the 1st Chariot there was a Red Horse;
and in the 2nd Chariot there was a Black horse
And lo, in the 3rd Chariot, behold, there came a White Horse;
And I turned and saw a 4th Chariot which lagged behind the rest,
and I looked, and behold, it was being led by a Grisled Horse !
Then I turned to the Angel near me and said to him:
What do these 4 Horses signiffy, my lord?
And the Angel spoke to me, saying:
Son of Man, these are the 4 Winds of Heaven
even they which go forth from standing before the face(s) of YHWH
and from there they proceed to the 4 Corners of the Earth.
For behold, see how the Black Horse proceeds to the North Countries
and lo, how the White Horse follows him !
And behold, the Red Horse likewise follows behind the White Horse !
And I looked, and behold I saw: the Grisled Horse sped to the South
Then lo, they all ere set to depart from their former places,
in order that they all leave to walk to and fro upon the earth !
And he commanded them, saying,
"Go, Get you up, so that you might march to & fro on the the earth !"
And lo, they all began to traverse to & fro through upon the earth.
Then the angel cried to me in a loud voice, saying,
Behold, these that go toward the north country
even these have quieted my spirit in the north !
And the word YHWH came unto me...saying,
Take silver and gold,
that you might make crowns from them
And set them upon the head of Joshua
Even the son of Yosedech,
who is the High Priest of YHWH !
And say to him: "Thus says YHWH the clan god of Armies:
Behold the Man !
Even he whose name is haNAZIR (=the BRANCH)
Lo, he shall grow up away from his place of birth
in order to re-build the temple of YHWH
Yea, even he shall be the one who shall rebuild YHWH's Temple !"
And he shall bear the Glory & sit to rule upon his throne;
And there also shall be a priest next to him sitting,
For lo, the Counsel of Peace will exist between them both.
Notice the echo in Zech 6:9 with the 4th canonical Greek Gospel ('accoding to John' whoever he was) BEHOLD THE MAN ! WHO SHALL BE CALLED THE NAZIR
('the branch of David'), which explains the origin of the term NAZIRITE, which has nothing to do at all with the later fictitioius placement of
Nazareth in Galilee which did not even exist at that time (only a Lake Genesseret can be found on maps from the 1st century) - this suggests the
gospel writers inherited a CODE they did not understand - NAZIR means 'branch of David' i.e. King, and it was considered seditionist to use such
terms apart from 'the divine' Caesars, so it was turned into a place name and buried in the canonical Gospels to hide the political overtones to the
earliest strands of the oral galilean Aramaic material surrounding the Daviddic pretender R. Yehoshua bar Yosef, one of whose original titles was
haNazir - a title which eventually found its way on the TITULUS (placard of crimes) above his head when he was executed by crucifixion for armed
sedition against the state in 36 CE during the 100th anniversary of the invasion of the Roman Army by Pompey in 63 BCE.
But a modern reader of the text today CANNOT UNDERSTAND a single line of the 12-line poetry underneath all the Greek of the Apocalypse of Yohananon
the Levite (Aka Book of Revelation) without DIRECT access to the Aramaic Targum paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures from which the text of the Book
of Revelation was ultimately derived, and carefgully midrashically expanded, in Rabinnic fashion, by the compilers of all the impossibly bad Greek we
read in the mangled text copies that survive today ('full of Grammatical Howlers in the Greek' to quote C.K. Barrett) whose compilers were in the
middle of trying to survive the un-winnable Jewish War against Rome --and who were originally were trying to make some kind of 'Apocalyptic sense'
out of the impending destruction of Judaea by the Roman Army during the 1st Failed Jewish War against Rome (AD 66-72) when the book was re-edited and
cobbled together from a hotch potch of earlier Hebrew & Aramaic Apocalyptic scraps (e.g. Daniel, or the Tamid Psalms of the Temple, or Proto & Trito
Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Hezekiel & other earlier 'apocalyptic' related material from the Macabbean period and even earlier (e.g. from the times of
the first invasion of Assyria, then Babylon, then Persia, then Egypt, then Greece and finally Rome who eventually ground Israel to powder in AD 70,
killing over 900,000 Palestinian Jews, Sammaratins and Galileans.