Luz

לוז


Genesis 28:19 opens a debate that will continue throughout the Tanach, as to whether Luz is the town and 
Beit-El (Bethel) the shrine, or they are different places. Here the name is changed to Beit-El (Bethel) by Ya'akov (Jacob).

Genesis 35:6: ibid.

Genesis 48:3 ff: ibid; and in the words of Borges, twice is a coincidence, but three times a certainty: the trouble is, we don't know which of the two options is that certainty!

Joshua 18:13 and Judges 1:23 mention it, but there is also another Luz in Judges 1:26, in Beney Chet (Hittite) country, founded by a Luzite who helped Yisra-El.

The Luz (לוז) is the almond tree, which was sacred to Artemis, as were the bow and arrow which she received as a present from Zeus; and everything connected with hunting, such as deer, bears and hunting dogs; guinea fowl and buzzards; the cypress, fir, walnut, laurel and willow; the daisy also. In Rome, Artemis was identified with Diana, which ought to connect her with Dinah, except that the Romans absorbed, assimilated and adapted gods and goddesses to their own purposes in a very different manner than in the Greek and 
Phoenician world, or later in Christianity. She was the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo.

An etymological root, Luz (לוז), can be found in the later writings, with the meaning of "perversion" or "wickedness" - a result, clearly, of the Redactor's attempts to anathematise the old idolatrous ways. Thus Proverbs 2:15, 3:32 and 14:2; Isaiah 30:12.

All three Proverbs' references seem to be parts of texts which - hardly a coincidence in the circumstances - have as their basis Psalms to the wisdom-goddess Chochmah (ככמה), whose symbol was also the almond-tree; further confirmation of the intent of the Redactor. The Yisra-Eli equivalent to Greek Sophia (Roman Sapienta, Celtic Sheila), she was very much a middle-period Yisra-Eli deity (the cult seems to have started at around the time of the Solomonic Temple, crca 1000 BCE) and was one of the first cults which the post-exilic (70 CE) Rabbis sought to destroy, presumably because of its strong Hellenistic bias, tending towards such anti-Rabbinical heresies as democracy, the cult of the intellect and, most heinous of all, non-theistic Humanism.

Yeru-Shala'im's Har ha Tsophim (הר הצופים - "the hill of the lookout", or possibly "the hill of the spectacular views", or even, at a pinch, "the hill of the honeycombs") was known as Mount Scopus by the Romans (General Titus commanded the siege of the city from its heights), and the name is still used today, especially in connection with the Hebrew University, which is located there. Its root however is not the Greek scops = "owl", Athene's symbol as the bird of Wisdom), and the central hill-shrine in Athens, under the name Athene; though in fact it was the Little Owl and not the Scops which was identified with Athene by the Greeks. Scops, or really it should be Skops, in the Yehudit, is a different Greek word, the one that yields microscope and periscope and telescope, and thence "the hill of the lookout".

See notes to BEIT-EL for further elucidation; the probability is that Luz and Beit-El were separate shrines, but in the same locality; and that Beit-El did not replace Luz at all.

Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press


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