Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 387
and builder of the Ark of the Covenant, the right hand man of the legendary King
Hiram of Tyre.
The Festival of Tabernacles
This matter of the Tabernacle leads us into some additional interesting
speculations. Many scholars believe that the psalms were literary creations for the
central festival of the Canaanites: The Festival of Tabernacles, or “booths”. The
Feast of Tabernacles is a weeklong autumn harvest festival. It is also known as the
Feast of the Ingathering, Feast of the Booths, Sukkoth, Succoth, or Sukkot
(variations in spellings occur because these words are transliterations of the
Hebrew word pronounced “Sue-coat”). The two days following the festival are
separate holidays, Shemini Atzeret and Simkhat Torah, but are commonly thought
of as part of the Feast of Tabernacles.
One of the more interesting references to what may have been an early
celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles occurs in Genesis 33. We discover from
our exegetes that verses 1 through 17 are from the E source of the northern
kingdom. The incident in question follows a peculiar event in the previous chapter
where Jacob sends his family away and remains alone to wrestle with a “man” all
night. This “man” is later identified as an angel of God, and the angel “wounds”
Jacob in the thigh.
What does it mean to say that Jacob was wounded in the thigh? According to
some commentators, he apparently sustained an injury common to wrestlers, the
inward displacement of the hip that is produced by forcing the legs too widely
apart. The injured person finds his leg flexed, abducted and externally rotated. He
can only walk with a lurching or swaggering gait, and on his toes. The affected leg
is lengthened and this tightens the tendons in the thigh and the muscles go into
spasm.
Since the story of Jacob comes to us from the age when women were the
transmitters of the right to rule, and since Jacob won his sacred name and
inheritance which could only be granted by a woman on this same occasion, it
seems that something is wrong with this picture. The element that stands out is that
of a transition from the hieros gamos to the ritual combat, with residual sexual
overtones.
In the myth of combat between Set and Horus, Set tries to mate sexually with
Horus. This is usually interpreted as being an insult, but there is something deeper
here.
It was a formal principle of Greek myth and literature that love and death were
two aspects of the same power. In Homer, there are as many ways to kill as to
love, if not more. The language and images are disturbingly interchangeable.
The verb damaz! (as also its equivalent damn"mi) spans a range of meanings from
subjugation to slaughter to rape to seduction, and the “mingling” conveyed by
meignymi may be that of lovers or that of warriors.
Both kinds of couples grapple and cling and know a desperate, intense intimacy
with few if any parallels anywhere else in human experience. Furthermore, both the
love-act and the death-act are accompanied by “small talk” and preceded by a form