Last Word of Kohath

May 10, 2009, 9:52 am by dc-agape.

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The next “Last Words of…” will be from Kohath.  You might be wondering who this person is, and only if you are a true Biblical Scholar would you even have a chance of remembering him.  He was the eldest son of Levi and only mentioned in the Word of God as that.  He took no actions within the history of the Jewish people, yet his clan, the Kohathites, are mentioned many times.  Oddly, the Kohathites did inherit land and cities.  And I had always been taught that the Levites were scattered amongst all the tribes of Israel. 

Even though this Tractate in principle follows the Last Words of Levi and is itself followed by the Vision of Amram (the son of Kohath and the father of Moses), I would rather leave the Last Words of Levi to the end of this series.  All three Tractates are fragmentary, but the Last Words of Levi is the longest and most complex.  Of the Last Words of Kohath, three sections survive: a blessing and two commandments.

In the blessing freewill is again destroyed.  This has been a topic that I have covered (as a Biblical Topic) and will continue to bring up whenever the religious texts make it clear that YHWH does not give us freewill.  The authors of the Last Words of Kohath are quite clear:

4Q542 col 1:2-4 For he is the God of the ages, and Lord of everything that is done, and ruler of all people, doing with them whatever he pleases.  May he give you happiness, and to your descendants joy, in the generations of truth forever.

“Doing with them whatever he pleases” makes us out to be YHWH’s puppets.  There is no way around the meaning of this passage.  “Lord of everything that is done” makes it quite clear that YHWH is the instigator of both good and evil.  Both phrases do not have qualifiers; they say exactly what the Levites believed about YHWH.  I am sure that the authors of this Tractate were “heretics” in their time for this concept, just as they would be today: humans do not like to think that a loving all-powerful god is just playing with us.  But it is clear, from so many verses and books, that this is exactly what YHWH does.

The Tractate continues with a commandment to keep their inheritance to themselves.  The meaning of this was to ensure that other cultures did not “water down” the teachings of YHWH.  I do find one section of this quite humorous, for it changes the history of Levi greatly.

4Q542 col 1:7-8 So hold firm to the command of Jacob your ancestor, grasp tightly the judgments of Abraham and the good deeds of Levi and myself, and be holy and pure,

Levi did good deeds?  Truly, what good deeds of Levi?  The only acts we know Levi carried out is the massacre of the town of Shechem (Gen 34:25-31).  Jacob admonishes them for the heinous crime at that time and on his death bed (Gen 49:5-7).  No other deed of Levi are recorded in the Word of God, so what good deeds did Levi do?  Oh yeah, he conspired to kill his brother Joseph (Gen 37:19-35) and lied to Jacob, his father, about the death of Joseph!  Wow, if those are good deeds I never want to see a bad deed.

The Tractate ends with the commandment to guard the sacred writings that Levi gave to Kohath.  Notice, that it is not the sacred writings that YHWH gave to Levi.  This nearly proves that the entire Jewish religion was created by a single person: Levi. 

Of course there are some oddities about this Tractate.  First off, is that the date of its creation is much later than the Torah.  This would imply that Kohath did not write it.  And yet at the same time, it continues the commandment to not intermingle with foreigners.  So what this tells us is that the Israelites were xenophobic for more than 1,000 years.  This is the second oddity.  These were the chosen people of YHWH; their fear of YHWH was greater than their trust in YHWH.  Shouldn’t that tell us something about YHWH?  For centuries he controlled the people of Israel with fear and punishment, love was a missing element in the relationship between Israel and YHWH.  How can the Christians of today claim that YHWH is love: he was an abusive, domineering, overlord for millennia?  He required blood sacrifices to quench his desire for the pleasant aroma of burning flesh?  There can be no doubt that YHWH has evolved just like humans have evolved.

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