Merchants of Babylon
When studying the matter of the beast and the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation, we see that this curious beast with the characteristics of the four different animals was really a repetition of the series of beasts which Daniel had seen and which, like Nebuchadnezzar’s image, were prophecies of four great world empires which would rule the then known civilized world, one after the other.
The Book of Revelation looks further into the future than Daniel did, because it points out something. Daniel’s last beast, you remember, was the Roman Empire which of course was apparently finally broken up and came to its end. But the Book of Revelation carries beyond that point and shows us that the same forces which were operative in these four successive empires, the same dominant Satanic leadership which made them all of similar character, are operating even into our own day.
It shows us, by its many references through here, to what it calls Great Babylon, that the forces which made Babylon the outstanding one of these ancient civilizations about it, so far as a purely materialistic culture lacking all spiritual values is concerned, Babylon had it to higher degree than any of the others.
Nevertheless, because of this complete lack of any spiritual understanding by the Judeo-Christian clergy, it was a Satanic organization. Long after the old city of Babylon had fallen, the same forces, the old Babylonian economic system which governs us so absolutely today, the old Babylonian political ideas, the old Babylonian religion, are still operative in these days.
Before we get to the final part of our study of this, studying that mark of the beast which is going to be the final exercise of complete economic control and which we are feeling being tighten down on us today, there is a little bit of parenthesis we have to throw in here, to identify these forces. Our churches have gotten nowhere with this thing, usually because they persist in mis-identifying the peoples and races and forces involved, with the result that they get a mixed up mess.
The Bible doesn’t bother recording incidents which were of no importance after their own day. The bible goes into those things which will be of lasting effect, because it was never intended that any portion of the Bible should be something good for a matter of a few years and then obsolete and no longer useful.
As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:11: “Now all these things happened unto them for ensembles: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” Therefore the things we find in the Bible are the forces that are still operating. True, a particular king that it mentions doing this or that in the Bible long is long since dead, but his modern day successors are still carrying out the same policies and still getting the same evil results thereby.
Why all this trouble? Why these thousands of years of the complete dominance of evil? The answer is that we are undergoing that same experience of good and evil for which Adam sold his birthright. Adam was not put here in the world to participate in evil, but only in good. Yawhew warned him that of the fruit of the tree which has knowledge or experience of good or evil, “you shall not” as your Bible is translated, “eat of it” but it is more than that. You will find that the word translated “fruit” means progeny, children, descendants , in the Hebrew; and the word translated there, “eat,” means, in the Hebrew, to have intercourse with.
Eat: 398 'akal (aw‑kal'); a primitive root; to eat (literally or figuratively): KJV‑‑ X at all, burn up, consume, devour (‑er, up), dine, eat (‑er, up), feed (with), food, X freely, X in ... wise (‑deed, plenty), (LAY) meat, X quite.
Fruit: #6529 periy‑fruit
a) fruit, produce (of the ground)
b) FRUIT, OFFSPRING, CHILDREN, PROGENY (used of the womb)
c) fruit (of actions) (figurative) (Brown-Driver-Briggs’ Definition)
Adam was told, “Don’t get mixed up with these pre-Adamic races who have evil so ingrained in them that you are not going to be able to lead them out of it; they will make you like one of them. You are here to have good only, and not evil, in your character and your conduct.” (To see that the trees in garden of Eden were people see Ezekiel 31)
Then he let himself be persuaded by Satan that the way to have power in this world, and rule, you had to get down off your pedestal and mingle with these people and learn their ways and out-smart them, and you had to be more clever, more crooked than they were; until, what was the result? Satan, who had been the superintendent of this planet and probably some others, was deposed because he disobeyed Yawhew, he rebelled against Yawhew. What did Adam do? He did the same thing.
So Adam forfeited that position of rulership over the world which had been given to him. Since we are his descendants we act the same way. When you see a sign on the wall, “Fresh Paint,” you have to go up and touch it with your finger to see if it really is fresh. We have to learn everything the hard way, just as Adam did.
Therefore Yawhew is giving us a period of time for testing to see what our own character is and to let us learn by bitter experience that the evil is not to be monkeyed with. When we come back in the resurrection and Yawhew says, “Now don’t do this,” we are going to understand thoroughly what He is talking about and we are not going to think that we are smarter than He is.
Probably more damage has been done by well-meaning people with good intentions than has been done by all the scoundrels and criminals in history. The old saying, that “hell is paved with good intentions,” is very true. Remember, twice in the Book of Proverbs 14:12; 16:25 it says the same thing. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” So always some well meaning fool decides that he knows more about it than Yawhew and he is more kind.
When our ancestors, the people of Israel were on the march, and ready to go into Palestine, Yawhew gave us our instructions very plainly. He said of the people who were in the land He was telling them to take possession of in effect said, “You shall destroy them totally; you shall not leave one man, woman, or child, alive; because, if you do, if you leave them there, you are going to have integration, your will grow up with theirs; they will inter-marry with them, and you will become as polluted as they are, until finally I will have to destroy you for the very same reason that I am telling you to destroy them.” (See Deuteronomy 7)
Of course our ancestors had to show that they weren’t cruel like Yawhew; they were so kind hearted they wouldn’t cut out the cancer; they just let it grow. And of course the consequences came to pass that they had been warned about, and that is the situation that we still have, and probably will have until the very end we are not going to be smart enough to recognize the warnings that are in the Bible.
Evil cannot exist by itself; it is not a condition; no one can show a yard of it or a square foot of it or a quart of it or a pound of it; it consists solely in the evil actions of evil people. And if they aren’t around then you don’t have these evil actions. That is what we haven’t been willing to learn. The Bible is full of these warnings to us, telling us who the evil ones are, so that we can avoid them and their works.
The theme of the entire Bible is set forth in Genesis 3:15; Yawhew called Adam and Eve and Satan before Him, to give an accounting of their misdeeds, and He says to Satan, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed...” The same Hebrew word “zera” (meaning laterally “seed,” and which applied equally to “descendants”) is used in both cases. Satan was to have just as literal children as was Eve. So the theme of the Bible is stated there: that as long as Yawhew permits this dispensation to run, there would be this constant warfare between the children of Satan and the children of Eve, and the rest of the Bible is just a detailed development of that theme.
In John 8:31-44, that Jesus Christ identified these living children of Satan in His Own day, when He said to them, “Ye are the children of your father the devil.” He was not just being vulgarly abusive, He was telling them a plain biological fact, exactly the same as if you said to a Chinaman, Your ancestors were Mongolians. He told them with the strictest scientific truth that their ancestor, way, way back, was Satan - and He was right. He was always right - He was always Yawhew.
Whether you recognize Satan as an actual being, which the Bible does, or whether you try to explain him away as just a mere allegorical personification of evil tendencies, you still can’t get away from the fact that evil comes from those who are his followers, and primarily those who are his literal children, his descendants; all history teaches the same lesson.
One of the most important most important of the ancient cities was the city of Tyre: a Palestinian seaport and was a large trading centers. It lay on the Palestinian coast a little bit north of where the people of Israel were settled.
Its inhabitants were a Semitic race but not Israel, although there were some Israelites living among them, as there were some Israelites scattered in various other cities. It was always friendly to Israel; the Bible never records any hostility, any warfare between Israel and Tyre. Remember its King Hiram sent to King Solomon much of the materials and some of the skilled workmen to build the temple that Solomon built. But the Bible shows that Tyre came into this satanic system.
The Bible speaks of one of the kings of Tyre, and it doesn’t identify him, it doesn’t give his name, and so we can’t say which historical king it was, but it speaks of him in terms which show unmistakably that he was literally an incarnation of Satan himself; because this language would not be appreciable to anyone else.
Ezekiel was told: “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of Yawhew; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of Yawhew; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of Yawhew: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.” (Ezekiel 28:13-18, KJV)
This would not apply to any mere man, it doesn’t fit, he can’t live up to it; it shows that the satanic direction, there, was really carried on in person at one time. Under this satanic direction Tyre became one of the great merchant cities of the ancient world, probably the greatest. We read to you just now from Ezekiel 28:13-18.
In Rotherham’s Emphasized Bible Ezekiel 27 verses 2 and 3 are rendered as follows: “Take up over Tyre a dirge; and thou shalt say unto Tyre, O thou that dwellest by the entrance of the sea, thou merchant of the peoples, unto many shores...” It is worth noting, incidentally, that in the Hebrew the very same word “Kenaan,” meant a Canaanite and a merchant; they were interchangeable; as today they are. Go into the business district of Los Angeles, for example, and go in store after store, and see if you don’t find them all owned by people of the same race and all with the same shaped nose.
We would remind you here that the Israelites were not Jews; no Israelite was ever a jew, and no Jew was ever an Israelite. The confusion has come from using the term interchangeably, sometimes meaning a person of a particular race, no matter what his religion. For example, Ben Furion, who was one of the principal founder of this Jewish nation in Palestine today, is a Jew by race, but he is a Jew by religion. And sometimes they use it to speak of the people of Judaism, no matter what the race.
There are, for example today, pure blooded, black skinned, kinky haired Negroes who have adopted the religion of Judaism; and there are yellow skinned, slant eyed, pure blooded Mongolian Chinese who have adopted the religion of Judaism, and the average person doesn’t know which he is talking about when he uses the term “Jew.”
But to the extent that it is used in a racial significance, all the ancient monuments without exception show this: the people that we call Canaanites, the people that we call Assyrians, and a large part of the people that we call Assyrians, and a large part of the people that we call Babylonians, were, as shown by their own monuments, typical hook-nosed Jews; whereas, no ancient monument that shows any Israelites shows anything but a typical straight-nosed Anglo-Saxon type of face. So trade was in those days practically a Jewish monopoly, as it is today, and in those days it became evil, as it is today. Greed running uncontrolled always runs to that sort of extreme.
Again, going back to the twenty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel: “With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: By thy great wisdom and by thy traffic, hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches...By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned...Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.”
We are sure you have heard the saying, “the more it changes the more it is the same” then they rode on a camel, today we smoke a camel, but, after all, take our great commercial cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the outstanding great commercial cities have been taken over complete by the Jews; and they are the outstanding centers of criminal violence also, aren’t they?
You see, if these things merely happened occasionally for no particular reason, the Bible would never bother to record them. It records only those things which are matters of unchangeable principle, some of them good principles, some of them evil principles, but the things that we can rely upon to be operative according to their nature and therefore either for our good or for our harm, as the case may be. But these people who monopolized trade in those days were these Canaanites, these hook-nosed Jews.
For example, Hosea 12:7 says, “He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress.” It says he is a “Kenaan” sure, a merchant or Canaanite; the terms re interchangeable. “The balances of deceit are in his hand.” Is there any people that for centuries it has been proverbial that you have to distrust in all your commercial dealings with them, lest they take advantage of you? Here it talks about the balances of deceit.
In those days coinage was just coming into being and it was an uncertain thing; but there was a certain amount of gold coinage, but lest somebody file off some of the gold so that the coin wasn’t worth what it should be, the money was weighted out the same as the goods were weighed out. The deceitful merchant had one set of weights to use on his balance scale when he was buying, and had a different set of weights to use when he was selling.
When he bought from you, his balance scale or his bushel measure was large; you had to give him more than standard measure. When he sold to you, his measure was small and you didn’t get your full measure. When you paid for something, for him the scales on which he weighed the money you presented had false weights, so you had to present more gold or silver, to buy it, than true weights would have called for; and this was characteristic all through there.
Go to Zephaniah 1:11: “Howl, ye inhabitants of Maktesh, for all the merchant people (the Kenaan) are cut down; all they that are laden with silver are cut off.” This race was everywhere throughout western Asia. There are pictures of pre-Babylonian Sumarian statues of their own people, a typical hook-nosed Jew even rubbing his hands and undoubtedly saying, “To mine own mother I couldn’t sell it any cheaper.”
It was into this land, among these people, that our ancestors were sent to live, and they were warned, “If you allow these people among you, they are going to corrupt you.” Of course we couldn’t’ be cruel like this Old Testament Yawhew, that the Judeo-Christian ministers like to denounce today and say “I can’t believe in the Old Testament Yawhew.” They seem to thing that it would matter to Him whether they believed in Him or not. Every time you decide you are better than Yawhew, you are wrong? When He gave instructions to cut out the cancer before it became fatal, He knew what He was doing.
The Bible tells us of these things. Yawhew tells us the troubles we are going to have because we allow these people among us. And He finally tells us that when we ourselves have botched this ting up tot he point where He has to come back and take over personally, to keep us from being destroyed and exterminated by these forces we have allowed to grow up and take control, that it is going to be changed back to what He told us to make it. In Zechariah 14:21 it says, “...and in that day (speaking of the day when Yawhew comes back to restore these things) there shall be no more the Canaaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.” And we pray that He will speed the day!
These same commercial evils became dominant in Assyria too; and Assyria is spoken of, mostly, because of her great military exploits, because she was constantly conquering and pillaging her various neighbors. But that was not all of it; she had the same typical crookedness that has been constantly characteristic of those people. In Nahum 3:16 speaking of Assyria, it says, “Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven...” and he lists that as being among the evils for which the city of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, was going to be destroyed. In Bible times these people had become the completely dominant race int he city of Tyre, become the most power men in the nation. Isaiah 23:8: “Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth?”
If you think that was ancient, note the fact that a large part of the British nobility today, the peerage with titles of nobility, are Jewish merchants who became wealthy and bought and paid for their titles of nobility. The honor of the British Crown has been sold and peddled like in any house of prostitution, and that is the origin of a great many of the titles in the British House of Lords. Here, in American, when we want to appoint an ambassador to some foreign nation, who is he? Don’t you note that usually he is a Jew who has contributed liberally tot he campaign funds of the party which is in power. “The more it changes the more it stays the same.”
Yawhew wouldn’t have bothered telling us about this thing, to warn us, if this was something that was going only between 868 and 742 B.C., and not thereafter; it wouldn’t have meant anything. He warns us of these things because they are reaching a degree of intensity in our own day which means the literal destruction of civilization if they are not checked. One will find, of course, in their Bible many places where Yawhew condemned the city of Babylon for the evils which were so characteristic of the Babylonian civilization. But it is very interesting to note that when the Bible prophesies the fall of the city of Tyre, it does it in the very same words that it uses in prophesying the fall of Babylon, including the final fall of Great Babylon, the Babylonian system, which we believe is in our own day.
Fro example, speaking of the city of Tyre (this is Ezekiel 26:13): “And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be heard no more.” Now speaking of Great Babylon (and this is in Revelation 18:22): “And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee...”
Going back to Tyre (Ezekiel 26:21): “I will make thee a terror, and thou shall be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord Yawhew.” Now Great Babylon, the destruction of it is described in our day (Revelation 18:21): “And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.”
The city of Tyre again: Note this parallel all the way, it is talking about the same thing; in other words just as the Babylonian empire was the capital city Babylon which was the head of all these evils, but you had a number of other surrounding cities which were equally bad and the same things could be said of them. So you had identically the same people manifesting the same evils in Tyre on the Palestinian coast of the Mediterranean Sea and which had to meet the same judgment.
In Ezekiel 27:29-33: “And all that handle the oar, the mariners, and all the pilots of the sea, shall come down from their ships, they shall stand upon the land...and shall cry bitterly, and shall cast up dust upon their heads, they shall wallow themselves in the ashes...And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and lament over thee, saying; What city is like Tyre, the destroyed in the midst of the sea? When thy wares went forth out of thee, and thou didst fill many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise. In the time when thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths of the waters thy merchandise and all thy company in the midst of thee shall fail.”
Note the same language referring to Great Babylon in the Book of Revelation. And remember, Babylon was NOT a seaport, it was some few hundred miles inland. “And every ship master, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! For in one hour is she made desolate.” (Revelation 18:17-19)
If these people were the same throughout, we should expect to find something similar in Yawhew’s condemnation of another of their principal settlements, the land of Edom. The Bible tells us that certain of the angels left their original condition and intermarried with the daughters of men and produced a race which therefore had the satanic blood line. They were literally the children of these rebel angels, including Satan, and among the places where the Bible tells you their descendants settled was Mount Seir.
The Jordan Valley runs north and south; and it is a deep narrow trench in the ground with mountains to the west, between it and the sea, and another mountain range to the east, and it slopes down to the point of the Dead Sea where the surface of the Dead Sea is some 1,300 feet below sea level, and the bottom of the Dead Sea is another 1,200 feet below that. Therefore the ground surface down there, under the Dead Sea, is 2,500 feet below sea level, of the Mediterranean or the oceans of the world. Then a continuation of that same valley, called the Wadi Araba, extends on south to the Gulf of Aquba.
Of course, starting from way down, below sea level the bottom of it has to rise as it goes southward until it gets above sea level, and the mountains which bound this Wadi Araba, on the east are known as Mount Seir. That word “Seir” means “rugged,” and if you have never seen really rugged mountains, that is what they are; they are well named.
Most of you have heard of the ancient city of Petra. At some time in the far pre-historic past, a terrific earthquake shook this Mount Seir and just cracked it open. There is a valley running north-south; that is right down the center line of this mountain range. What the earthquake did was to open a great crack from the easterly side of these mountains, whereby, instead of climbing up and over the mountains, you could go through this great crack to get to the central valley. The walls of this great crack are sheer cliffs from 400 to 600 feet high. In places a man could stand there and put his arms out and touch both sides of it; in other places it widens out as wide as a room. There never has been any place in the world as great a natural fortress as that, because there are places where, if an army of a million men attacked it, they would have to come through one or two at a time through this natural crevice. So it has been a fortified place, a city, from time immemorial.
Where this crack goes in, like the stem of a “T” it reaches this other valley which crosses it like the cross-bar of a capital “T” and if you turn to your right, to the north, you can follow where it opens out into an oval valley perhaps a mile wise by a mile and three-quarters long. Now in this narrow passageway, from the point where the stem and the cross-bar of the “T” join, from there on in, you find the ancient city of Petra.
Practically none of its buildings were buildings such as we have today, built out in the open; they were carved into these sheer cliff walls; magnificent, beautifully carved. Of course they could be only one room deep, other than for storage closets, and because there was no rear or side light or ventilation. They were just, you might say, artificial caves in the solid stone and the outside was carved into the most magnificent structures, with one startling thing about them: they are two stories in height, and those two stories range from a minimum of 125 feet to a high of 140 feet. You may recall that the old height-limit 13-story buildings in the city of Los Angeles were 140 feet in height. So divide one of those 13-story buildings into just two stories and you will see what they were like in Petra. In other words, the first generation descendants of these fallen angels were indeed giants.
The average doorway in Petra, from the floor to the lintel across the top, is 30 feet in height, equal to three stories of our modern construction. The Bible, you remember, was always so insistent that the people of Yawhew had selected to be His people should not mongrelize, should not intermix with the other races, and you remember that Esau violated that commandment; he married two Canaanite women and later an Ishmaelite woman. He couldn’t stay there then; and his descendants mongrelized, had no right to inherit, so he moved out of the land of Canaan where his brother Jacob was to stay. Esau moved out into Mount Seir which is called the land of Edom. From then on, there was no one for his descendants to marry except these Edomite peoples who were the descendants of this satanic line of people living there.
Suppose, for example, that a White Man from the city of Ontario married two Negresses and then moved to the interior of the Congo, and for the next 1800 years his descendants lived there, and there was no one his descendants could marry except these Congolese Negroes. After the end of 1800 years, one of his descendants could say, “Once I had a White ancestor.” That would be true, but the last trace of White blood would have vanished from them; they would be in every respect plain Negroes.
In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John where Christ is speaking to the Jew (and it says “Jews”), there is no mistake about it. By the way, if any of you think He was merely being vulgarly abusive because they disagreed with Him in argument, well don’t; He never was. He denounced them as hypocrites at times because that is what they were; and He told them with biological accuracy that they were the descendants of Satan which they were.
But He never said anything about them, that they were not. So you can hear the ring of sarcasm in His voice. It mentions, now, that these were Jews who believed in Him. So He says to them, “If you can continue in my doctrines, then will you be my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free” and as I say, one can just hear the ring of sarcasm in His voice, because He knew them. With that one statement Christ had lost them.
They bristled up, “What do you mean, set us free? We are Abraham’s seed, and we have never been in bondage to any man.” Now they identified themselves, there, out of their own mouths. If they belonged to any of the 13 tribes at all, they had been in bondage the first time in Egypt, hadn’t they? And if they belonged to the 13 tribes they had been in bondage the second time in Assyria. And if they belonged to the 2-tribes of the southerly nation of Judah, they had been in bondage the second time, in Babylon. But they said, “We have ‘never’ been in bondage to any man.”
The only people who could say “Abraham was an ancestor of ours and we never were in bondage to anyone” were these Edomite Jews. There is where the satanic blood line had crept into them, because, from the days of Abraham, it continued down through Isaac, then to Esau; and there they started the pollution with mongrelization, picking up the satanic blood line. So Christ winds up that same passage in the eighth chapter of John by identifying them, telling them who their ancestor was: Satan!
These mongrelized descendants of Esau became quite a military power as they grew numerous in Edom. In the historical books of Chronicles and Kings, of considerable warfare at times, of the Edomites harassing the southerly borders of Judah and the Israelite tribes. Saul was told to do down and exterminate them, and he didn’t. He killed a few of them, he stole their sheep and cattle and came back, and for that Yawhew told the prophet Samuel to tell him, “I have deposed you as king and I am going to make a better man than yourself the king of this nation Israel.”
When the southerly kingdom of Judah was taken into captivity for 70 years by Babylon, deported into Babylon, you remember that nearly all of the people were taken, all the real tribes of Judah and Benjamin were deported before this time by the Assyrians. Those Canaanites who had been left in the land when the Israelites conquered and failed to exterminate them, the Babylonians left behind, and they were but a very few, relatively speaking.
So during the 70 years that the land was left partly vacant, the Edomites were displaced from their position in Mount Seir by a great invasion by an Arabian people, the Nabateans, and the Edomites were finally driven out westwardly. They couldn’t go southwest, much, because they would be getting into the borders of Egypt, and Egypt was much too big and powerful for them to tackle at that time. So they kept north of the borders of Egypt and they took over the southerly half, approximately, of what had been the old kingdom of Judah.
When this little handful of people came back, after the Babylonian captivity, 42,600 people (of which slightly over 8,000 were not of any of the tribes of Israel at all, as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah show you). There were 34,000 people who could trace their ancestry to Judah, Benjamin, or Levi; that’s all. They were not numerous enough to displace these Edomite invaders, so all they could do was move to the north.
Originally the tribe of Judah was to the south, the tribe of Benjamin to the north, and the capital city of Jerusalem lay right on the border line between them. Then north of Benjamin was the old 10-tribed kingdom of Israel.
The Bible records that when the kingdom of Israel was taken into captivity by Assyria, the Assyrians brought other people from near Assyria and settled them in Samaria. If you take the territory occupied by the original tribes, the southerly third made up of the kingdom of Judah, the middle third was the southerly half of the northern kingdom of Israel (and the middle half because Samaria) and the northerly third of this total territory came to be known as Galilee.
The Bible also says the Assyrians brought other people and settled them in Samaria (and left Galilee vacant). So when the people returning from Babylon tried to sort themselves out, the people of Judah took the southerly part, and all they had left, really, was a portion of the old territory of Judah plus all the territory of Benjamin, and they pushed the Benjamites northward. But Benjamin couldn’t move over a little, because that was Samaria and fully occupied by other people. So the people of Benjamin had to leap-frog over, clear into the vacant territory of Galilee, and that is where the Benjamites settled. Of course you remember that nearly all the followers of Christ came from Galilee. Of all His 12 disciples, 11 of them were Galileans; only one, the traitor Judas Iscariot, was a Jew.
There is no such word in any language known to man as “Iscariot,” it is a garbling, in trying to transliterate into Greek, of the Hebrew word “ish Kerioth,” man of Kerioth. And Kerioth is a little village in the southwesterly portion of the old territory of the kingdom of Judah, well within the area taken over by these Edomite Jews.
Then these Edomite Jews, under Herod, conquered and took over the remainder of the territory of the kingdom of Judah, and Herod was confirmed by the Romans in 37 B.C., as king of Judea. So he brought in with him his army, he brought in with him all his hanger-on, he completely took over the civil government, and he took over the temple.
The Levites and Aaronic priesthood were displaced; and he murdered the last high priest, the man rightfully entitled to it as a descendant of Aaron. He put into the high priesthood a succession of worthless scoundrels of his own followers. You see, the high priesthood was hereditary and for life, and the Bible, speaking of one of these high priests, sarcastically comments: “He was high priest that year.” In fact, one of them served something like four and one-half months, before he was removed from office and replaced by a lower type scoundrel than himself.
These Edomite Jews who were the same hook-nosed Canaanite people with the satanic blood line which Christ identified in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John. Now if this is the same thread running through all of these things, Babylon is one manifestation of it, and we should find something said about Edom, shouldn’t we? We do.
Let us not the parallel between Yawhew’s judgment on Edom and His judgment on Babylon. In the forty-ninth chapter of Jeremiah He is telling you about His judgment on Edom, in the fiftieth chapter He is tell you of His judgment on Babylon. So Jeremiah 49, verses 18 and 19, says: “As in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbor cities thereof, saith the Lord, no man shall abide there, neither shall a son of man dwell in it.
Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan against the habitation of the strong; but I will suddenly make him run away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over her? For who is like me? And who will appoint me the time? And who is that shepherd that will stand before me?” Yawhew is speaking of Edom here.
In the next chapter where He is speaking of Babylon: “As Yawhew overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbor cities thereof, saith the Lord; so shall no man abide there, neither shall any son of man dwell therein. Behold, a people shall come from the north, and a great nation, and many kings shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth...The king of Babylon hath heard the report of them, and his hands waxed feeble: anguish took hold of him, and pangs as of a woman in travail. Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan unto the habitation of the strong: but I will make them suddenly run away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over here? for who is like me? And who will appoint me the time? And who is that shepherd that will stand before me?”
Now lets go back to Edom again, this judgment: “Therefore hear the counsel of the Lord, that he hath taken against Edom; and his purposes, that he hath purposed against the inhabitants of Teman: Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out: surely he will make their habitations desolate with them. The earth is moved at the noise of their fall, at the cry the noise thereof was heard in the Red Sea.”
Going to chapter 50, speaking of Babylon, beginning with verse 45: “Therefore hear ye the counsel of the Lord, that he hath taken against Babylon; and his purposes, that he hath purposed against the land of the Chaldeans: Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out: surely he shall make their habitation desolate with them. At the noise of the taking of Babylon the earth is moved, and the cry is heard among the nations.”
So you can see that this is talking about the same thing in every instance: the final destruction of this evil system which, through the same people, manifested itself in the same way, over all of western Asia int he ancient world, and which manifests itself in the same way over all of western civilization in our own day, and which can only be destroyed by the power of Yawhew, because we have abdicated the power that Yawhew gave us. We have put this thing in positions of power over us, in the last days before the final destruction of the Babylonian system which Yawhew prophesies in the Book of Revelation. In other words, it is talking about the same thing all the way though.
Now notice again, the principal blame is placed upon these “Kenaan,” these Canaanite Jew Merchants, for the evils of Babylon. Here in the Book of Revelation, chapter 18, it says: “And after these things I saw another angel come down form heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen...” Note that repetition - not just the one fall of the ancient city.
Sure, that has been nothing but a heap of mud out there in the desert for 2,000 years, but it refers to the second fall also. “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies...”
Yawhew never condemned any man for becoming well-to-do, out of any kind of honest effort; in other words, wealth gained honestly is never condemned anywhere in the Bible. And when He is condemning these rich merchants, it is because of the way they got their wealth, the way that, through all these centuries, has been so characteristic of them, that you won’t find a race or a nation anywhere in the western world that doesn’t have the same axioms and sayings about anybody who is fool enough to deal with a Jew. As they say, “When you deal with a Jew you are just paying your fool’s tax.”
“...And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and Yawhew hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she has filled fill to her double.”
Remember your Israel law as given by Yawhew. What was the penalty for theft? Not a $25.00 find, suspended jail time. The penalty was, you gave back a minimum of at least twice the value of what you stole. If you stole $100.00, you had to give back $200.00 - and that took all the fun out of it; it wasn’t profitable any more.
So here is the law of Yawhew: For the way the Babylonian system and its people have become wealthy by cheating you, give to them double punishment. Now it goes on speaking of this last fall of great Babylon: “And the merchants (Note this now)...the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more.” Now lets see if we can identify these merchants. “The merchandise of gold and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls...” Who are your jewelers today? Do you know any Irish jewelers? “...and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet...” What about the clothing manufacturer? Yes, once in a while you find a little retail store where you can go buy a shirt, or something of that sort, that is not run by them. But who are the manufacturers from whom he has to buy his stock-in-trade? Hart Schaffner and Marx?
“...and all aromatic wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble...” The big department stores - right: alright, who owns them? You know the answer just as well as we do. “...And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense...” What about the drug business? Find me just one big drug manufacturing firm, today, that is not Jewish owned or Jewish controlled. The big drug chains, all of them. “...wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beast and sheep...”
Alright, what about the wholesale food stores? Yes, you can find a little corner grocery store some place, run by White people, but find who it is that owns the big wholesale stores that he has to buy from. Yes, they have their strangle hold on that also, and that is why the prices continue to ruse and rise. there is the so-called “Kosher” tax applied on most of the foodstuffs today by the Jewish Rabbis, either Orthodox or some other Jewish group, where the rabbi says his hocus pocus and gets thousands of dollars from the food companies; you can see this so-called “Kosher” stamp on the packaging it is either a circle with a K or a U and nowadays there are some shapes such as a triangle with a K or U inside it.
“...and slaves, and souls of men.” So these are the merchants. “...The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing.” Now notice, early in this thing He says, “...the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buys their merchandise any more.” Now we are beginning to get pretty close to that, because they are not leaving us anything to buy with.
Talk to any economist today, who has kept up with what is really going on, and he will tell you that we are being set up just exactly as we were in 1929, for just the same kind of a crash we had in 1929, only on a much larger scale. First they stole all of our gold; if you are a White man you can own only a small amount, but if you are a Jewish Banker you can have it in unlimited quantity, and especially you can get it from the U.S. Treasury if you are going to send it abroad, over to Palestine or over to Russia or one of the other bottomless holes of the world.
Now they have taken our silver from us; the slugs that “uncle” is minting with a copper-nickel alloy on the face of it to make it look like a quarter, actually it is worth less intrinsically, for the metal in it, than the five-cent piece which at least is copper-nickel alloy all the way through. So what we now have are things that are slugs of substantially no intrinsic value.
Our paper money they have also made of no intrinsic value. What kind of paper money can you get today? Look at it, any denomination you may have, it is a Federal Reserve Bank “NOTE.” When you go to the bank and borrow money, you sign a promissory note promising to pay to them, on a certain date, so much money.
But the Federal Reserve note is an I.O.U. from a purely private banking institution, in spite of the false use of that “federal” name. Yes, you can buy Federal tires but the U.S. Government has no in the manufacture of them. You can buy Federal cartridges and it is a privately owned manufacturing company. And the Federal Reserve Bank is a private banking institution. So the only money left now is their I.O.U., and they can tell you at any time, “Well, I’m sorry, we don’t have any real money to redeem this with.”
Right now, you take one of their Federal Reserve notes to any bank or to a Federal Reserve regional banking headquarters itself, and what can you get for it? You can’t get anything for it except another I.O.U., even from the Federal Reserve Bank. And any time they laugh openly in your face and say, “Well, it is a pretty piece of engraved paper, it cost us 3 cents per $1,000.00 to get the printing done on it,” what are you going to do with it? What is it worth? What is going to happen? You are dead broke. They have a mortgage on about everything you own.
How many of you own your home, free and clear, without a mortgage or trust deed on it? And how many of you have your automobile fully paid for? We can remember once seeing an old battered up jalopy on the street, but the owner had chalked on the side of it, “Laugh if you want to, but this one is paid for.” Anytime, they can say, “Well, what are you going to use for money?”
Everything you think you own, they own, and they can take it away from you. They did a pretty good job of that, back in 1929, but not quite good enough to totally destroy this nation. So they have studied it and seen where the weak spots of their plan were, and they have corrected those this time. But you know, evil has a way of outsmarting itself. One day they will laugh in your face and say, “Alright, what is that paper good for? Are you going to buy something? What are you going to pay for it with?”
“...The merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn...for no man buys their merchandise any more.” They got so clever in taking all your money away from you, that at this time you will have anything to buy with. And when it reaches that point, the American people are not going to sit down and quietly watch their wives and children starve to death.
They aren’t going to buy the merchandise, but they are going to get it no matter what it takes. And there is where this people who, through the centuries have profited by their crookedness and their scheming, are going to find they have outsmarted themselves. They have made their tricks so clever that it has backfired on them.
Do you want a little further confirmation of this? Remember the strange beast that rose up out of the sea, the beast that had the combined characteristics of all four of the strange beasts that Daniel saw, remember, all of those ancient empires were governed by this same satanic people with their same satanic principles, and they are still here doing business at the old stand and in the same way.
If you want a little more identification, let us go right on down in this same eighteenth chapter of Revelation: “And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence...” Remember we said the American people are not going to starve when they spring the trap on us. “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.”
This is not talking about the fall the ancient city Babylon on the Euphrates river, because all that has happened many centuries before John was told to write these things down. This was talking about the far distant future, many hundreds of years after John was writing this down, talking about our own day, and it is still talking about that great city Babylon; in other words, the Babylonian governmental system.
It goes on to give the reasons: “...for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorcies were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”
It is fashionable in most Judeo-Christian churches to try to blame everything upon the Catholic Church, and it is very true that the Catholic Church has a number of false doctrines, and it is very true that the Catholic Church in past centuries has murdered a great many innocent people; that is very true. But if you are going to blame Noah’s flood on the Catholic Church, just in order to show that you don’t like it, you are not using true Bible interpretation, because, remember that the Catholic Church didn’t come into existence until a good three centuries after John wrote this book.
All the innocent blood shed in the earth, and the prophets of the Old Testament, were they all murdered by the Catholic Church? Of course not. They had been dead may, many centuries before there was a Catholic Church. “...and of all that were slain upon the earth...” The Catholic Church has been corrupted by these same people and used as a part of their same scheme, exactly as in our own day they have corrupted the Judeo-Christian churches. In the same manner, and it is all merely a portion of the same plan.
Let us see if we can trace this same thing, “...in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.” Let’s take the words of Christ Himself, out of the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, verses 29 to 36: “Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites...” Who was He talking to? He was talking to the Jews, wasn’t He? “...because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, WE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN PARTAKERS WITH THEM IN THE BLOOD OF THE PROPHETS. Wherefore ye (Jews) be witnesses unto yourselves, THAT YE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THEM WHICH KILLED THE PROPHETS...” Who was guilty? Of course The Jews. “...Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers...”
Here you get into some of the miserable mistranslation of your King James version of the Bible. “...Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers...” it reads, and that is entirely a mistranslation. In the original Greek from which this was translated, it is not talking about a particular generation of people; the Greek word is “gennema” which means progeny, children, descendants. “...Ye serpents, ye children of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues...” Any question about the identification here?
“...and persecute from city to city; That upon you...” The same people that He is talking to now, this same “gennema,” children of vipers: “...That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias...whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation(Strong’s 1074)...” Again you have a mistranslation, because here the word is “genea,” derived from genos, which is the foundation of this word the Jew would like to coin, “genocide” it means a race or nation (Strong’s 1074). “...All these things shall come upon this race or nation.” So this can ONLY be the Jews who are referred to also, in Revelation 18 verse 24.
All of this thin cannot be the Catholic Church is plain; the Catholic Church is not a mercantile organization running stores, it doesn’t have a merchant navy of ships transporting goods. But the people who have had this commercial, financial power, all through the centuries, are the same ones the Bible is talking about from beginning to end. So the fall of this evil satanic conspiracy must come with violence as it says in Revelation 18:21. Now by whom are they brought down with violence?
The Bible raises no questions that it does not answer, and the correct answer to it will always be found only in the Bible. So turn to Ezekiel 25:13-14. Remember now, one of their ancient headquarters from which the entirety of their control in our Savior’s time came, was Edom. “Therefore thus saith the Lord Yawhew; I will also stretch out mine hand upon Edom, and will cut off man and beast from it; and I will make it desolate from Teman; and they of Dedan shall fall by the sword. And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury...”
This has NEVER happened in all of the past history of the world. That is not talking about something which is yet to come; and we know of course, and have proven many times over, that the so-called Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic and kindred peoples of today are the actual, literal, traceable, blood descendants of the Israel of the Bible. And Yawhew said, “By my people Israel, I will lay my vengeance upon Edom.” In the Book of Revelation, Christ told John, “This evil Babylonian system will be overthrown with violence.”
Remember what we said: The American people are not going to sit down and starve to death, quietly, when the trap is sprung on them. Turn to Psalm 149:5-9: “Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds...” Who are the saints? Is it somebody who has been canonized by the Catholic Church for some such deed of piety as St. Simeon Stylites who spent some 20 years flagpole sitting up on top of a pillar, never once coming down to take a bath? No
We find in Psalm 148:14, the statement of who all of Yawhew’s saints are, not some of them, not part of them, but all of them: “He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of ALL HIS SAINTS; even of the children of Israel, a people near unto him. Praise ye the Lord.” Amen, we say.
Psalm 149, the next one after that says, “Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds. Let the high praises of Yawhew be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; to execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; To execute upon them the judgment written: this honor have all his saints.”
Because the Book of Revelation is symbolic throughout, and the only way you can get the true meaning of it is by finding the true meaning of the symbols used. A lot of people have gotten all mixed up and they have given you some surprisingly stupid attempts to unravel the Book of Revelation, because they will not turn to the one and only place from which one can derive a correct statement of what the symbols mean, and that is the Bible.
They will theorize something which will fit the doctrines of a particular Judeo-Christian church, for example, and they will never look it up in the Bible to see whether it is correct. But they will all agree that we have gotten so far along in the events that are symbolically portrayed in the Book of Revelation that nothing remains to be done, now, except this great final judgment which is the cataclysmic end of this age, and this is exactly what this has been talking about.
It identifies the things and the peoples to be judged, it tells how the judgment is coming and who is going to do it. And if you are going to have the honor to be the servant of Yawhew in carrying out some of this judgment, you shouldn’t go around sniffling and saying, “Isn’t it awful.” YOU SHOULD THANK YAWHEW THAT HE WOULD HONOR YOU WITH THAT PRIVILEGE.