Ezra 7:21 · World English Bible
I, even I Artaxerxes the king, make a decree to all the treasurers who are beyond the River, that whatever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, requires of you, it shall be done with all diligence,
The law that religion hands down as the word of Moses was in fact written far from any promised land, in bondage in Babylon, by a scribe named Ezra, under the seal of a Persian king. There are no 10 Commandments without Iraq.
From the Esoteric reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
ESOTERIC
The law that religion hands down as the word of Moses was in fact written far from any promised land, in bondage in Babylon, by a scribe named Ezra, under the seal of a Persian king. There are no 10 Commandments without Iraq. What comes to the people as sacred inheritance was drawn up under a foreign crown, its supplies decreed by treasurers beyond the river, its author a real man and not the mythical lawgiver whose name the books carry.
Strip the legend away and the temple and its law arrive out of Persia and Babylon, and the honest thing is to see who actually wrote it and where, rather than repeat the story that a single prophet carried it down a mountain.
River: the one universal truth that runs under many names and nations, here the boundary the Persian decree reaches across.
Esoteric lens
Which story have you repeated for years without ever checking where it started?
Do not accept something because it is tradition, or because a respected voice said it, or because it is written in your books. Test it against your own experience and see whether it holds.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Any authority you set above yourself becomes the thing blocking the view.
In the dispute over the oven, a voice from heaven backs one rabbi and the others answer that the law is not in heaven. The ruling is settled by human argument, not by the voice.
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Esoteric