Valley of the Passengers.

Trippy. The Valley of the Passengers is not a resort in Utah. It is a place in Ezekiel (39) where the armies of Gog make their final repose. Why can't we just say it plain, it takes months to bury the remains. The Valley of Passengers is just one in the catalogue of End Time events and places, maybe a little neglected, this one, so we broaden it to the public mind here. When we say broaden that includes the Valley being transported to other times and places to explain the destitute conditions there among the thousands if not a hundred thousand of these.

Dostoevsky

 

 A hindrance to understanding is that the modern imagination is so impoverished by Harry Potter and its lookalikes of fantasy that the mind cannot grasp a foothold in the epic Biblical literature of the past such as preoccupied Dostoevsky in his early family life, especially the trials of Job, the miracles. Not to argue Dostoevsky a believer, but this anchors his work in the most profound human struggles of sanity and health, prison and reprieve. So while it is said that it was Dostoevsky's genius as a writer to feel and express extremes of rejection and acceptance, the glory of passive, the non heroic non-resisting suffering of the despised and humiliated Christ so basic to the Russian religious tradition, the spirit of asceticism, renunciation, love of poverty and craving for self-sacrifice and mortification that "nourished Dostoevsky's unshakable conviction that the soul of the peasant was imbued with Christian ethos of love and self-sacrifice" (Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky the Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849, 40), and if we say Dostoevsky is the greatest of writers of the soul, we celebrate these reliquaries of devotion imbued with the scriptures of the creation of the world, Adam and Eve in Paradise, the Flood, the raising of Lazarus, the rebellion of Job the just man against God and the whole of the prophets and psalms that awaken the consciousness transfigured by the light of supernatural illumination. To be ignorant of this, or cut off from it by psychedelic, fantasy, of digital meaninglessness is to deaden the soul to its birthright and natural origin. So I'm saying this is what the Valley of Passengers can do for the modern travesties of the same in these stones carved without hands.

Tolkien

 We have to read Daniel 2. Ezekiel says a sixth part will remain.  Unmasking the cell, Galeano said in 1970 what was known in every barrio and ghetto centuries before, but only then came the bubble, a restrengthened electro-magnetic hold on media phones and the mind. And here's the Presto. Mr. Tolkien says it is spiritual evil so massive on streets, in cars.  Right off Tolkien says "I am aware it is a rash adventure." It was rash to him because a diversion from his protection, a spice, some Adrenalin. It's like he was reading Wallace Stevens:  "the adventurer in humanity has not conceived of a race completely physical in a physical world. (L’Esthetique du Mal) But it's different when it's life or death. "Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dangers for the overbold." He did not say, "spiritual evil is an overriding pervasive force that infiltrates every custom and social purpose." He writes of a thing invented to hide, its mask, "beauty that is an enchantment," which chaps in the cheap seats of the perilous and shadowy marches of the government vote (9).

You might say this conflates Dante as Fairy if you want a good argument. But open your eyes, the prophet is a fool and the spiritual man is mad. Unmask, unmask, not the Blue Fairy Book or Sir Gawain's primary and secondary belief, that despoilation is not complete. They are not coming to pick you up for some FEMA camp of mind and heart. These days it is French camp.  Neither is it about fantasy or the imagination that thousands of workshop writers are trying to find by inventing from their front brains any situation what used to be impossible to encounter. The news is their worst nightmare. Think about it every day in the subterranean, but deny it from above. The walls are broken. The boundaries stones are gone, sculptures are made of severed heads. "Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness" (Tree and Leaf, 47-8). But who needs fantasy when we have TV? Strangeness, can you even remember? The nice question is whether these imagined realities report what goes for science in secret labs around the world when DNA factories are unveiled, whether or not they call them into being. "I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear."

See Faergrygrum

 
1."where in that day the LORD will punish the powers in the heavens above and the kings on the earth below." 

2."I am about to bring punishment on Amon god of Thebes, on Pharaoh, on Egypt and her gods and her kings, and on those who rely on Pharaoh.

3. "The LORD will be awesome to them when he destroys all the gods of the land. The nations on every shore will worship him, every one in its own land."

 

4. "The LORD will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth; and men shall worship him, every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen.

He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them.

 

5. Do not rejoice, all you Philistines, that the rod that struck you is broken; from the root of that snake will spring up a viper, its fruit will be a darting, venomous serpent.Isa 24.21;
Jer 46.25; Zeph 2.11; Psalm 78.49; Isa 14.29

 The best preparation for child apocalypse is mental.  Does it take the efforts of FEMA to save? Look beneath. Twenty years ago, amid prolonged sociopaths, sons planned how they would take out attackers in their school. Truly children of another era, and inbetween, evacuated and inoculated with disaster, the spiritual preparations. There are still burgers and toys. Grief counselors are available. Evacuate public places, fire in restaurants, supper clubs. Instant, prescient movement out. Sweep the room, mark the exits, never sit publicly with a back to the door. Let's go, no questions, only reasoned action to follow. 

My version of apocalypse is awareness catalyzed by the risky neighborhoods where we lived. I am listening, not celebrating holy days like Halloween.  Relatively poor, one car, we needed to live close, in the target areas. So children feel the existential threat. But they can escape the Blood Moon. To think about the aftermath, whether personal or political, it is not over when at the finish. Then we begin. Everything is aftermath. Prove this when you are the last standing. Then you will know fathers and mothers well the personal effects raised on skin like tattoos. Firings, destructions, closings, uprootings to coal and steel and back, severance of contacts, preferments. Repudiation by surrender. What would be said in Shakespeare's Psalm 46, translated for the King, God is my refuge and my strength, a very present help in trouble, therefore will not we fear, though earth be removed and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.  

The real meaning of higher and lower spiritual welfare takes weapons with words from Messiah's hand that "the gates of hell shall not stand." "He led captivity captive," and "three nights in the belly of the earth." After resurrection a battle ensued for liberation against spiritual evil, depression, madness, lassitude, identity genome theft, manhood theft, murder, all that makes a good thriller. If this is true in the lower worlds it is worse high up. Holy madmen they retort, but madmen are victims not easy to know, fun guys of Gogol's Dead Souls and Diary of a Madman bon mot inmates of Brueghel's and Goya's asylum.

I told my teacher Philadelphia had been bombed. I was born there and spent five years, but the teacher said no, it wasn’t bombs, it was blackout curtains. My aunt was a plane spotter atop city hall downtown. Gasoline was rationed. We all had ration books. Children were schooled in case of attack. It might come at any time. Duck and Cover prepared for apocalypse, friend. Apocalypse yourself, military! It certainly saves lives, government talks. We practiced getting under tables. People in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died looking up at the flash, took glass in the face. Ballistic glass lacerations caused the majority of 1000 injuries following the Chelyabinsk meteor air burst, February 15, 2013. What they don't say is that during these preparations for thirty years in schools the government was nuking the United States itself: American Ground Zero, The secret Nuclear War (Carole Gallagher, 1993).

They didn't go far enough who count every entertainer, politician,  corporate head, all landed gents, all socialists, Marxists, tenured faculty, members of boards in the Valley. Hosea says the passengers, who seek wisdom from their cars (staff), and ask their (google) glasses what to do (1.4,5) reek of these strange wraps of outernet gauze and mesh nets in prey of false prophets, priest murder, internet hemlock furrowers who "saw your fathers first ripe in the fig, but they went down to Baal-Peor" (Hosea 9.10). What they did down in Baal-Peor used not to be spoken in public. The prophet is a fool and the spiritual men are mad. In this day you will only be protected by the unseen surrounds.

The fun begins on the mountains of Israel, an Edda enjoyed in Banquet. They hold their noses though, even if they get help with the bodies. The burials take 7 months, a time of full employment. After, they erect  a memorial to the hordes of Gog of bones. Five sixths of the armies of  the north and the south will have their tombstones carved out. Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq etc. and Egypt. And this deep  state would consummate to counterfeit made evangelicals believe a hundred years that Russia is the northern power of this assault, but Russian has become the the evangelical. Nice trick?

In the real the valley of the passengers is a great road traversed by  merchants from Syria and other mid eastern countries into Egypt and also an imaginary valley  east of the Dead Sea, a place frightful saline echoing past judgments. Passengers is a play on words - "passengers" to be buried, "passengers" to walk over their graves, "passengers" to bury them in  Ezekiel 39:11-15. "When anyone sees a man’s bone, they should set up a sign," otherwise those who lie buried are but a passing cloud. Maybe compare Jude, clouds without water, carried by winds.


But the text is already writ large for the passengers that if by the finger of Yahweh Messiah casts out demons then the Kingdom is come. Whether in the Lindisfarne, Wycliffe, Tyndale, German, Scandinavian or English versions, plunder comes to the plunderer: Reafo His Todaelde!  At the end of Gog Israel "shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them" (Ez. 39.11) those who come in the "latter days" (38.16). Gog of course and Magog are the northern powers that descend to be eaten. I had no intention to be there: 

Gog, Magog, northern powers and lands,

Decrees of pestilence and blood, hailstones,

Fire and valleys of bone and I closed the book,

This knowledge was too much for me.

  Immediately following the fall of the todaelde "he that is not with me is against me," which is to say that an authority now resides: "I am in the Father, you are in me and I am in you" (Jn 14.11). The Kingdom of Heaven is upon you. To which of the angels was it said, "sit thou here while I make thine enemies thy footstool." None, and to none of the  angels was it said, "you are in me and I am in you," or, you have been "made them the righteousness of  God in him." (2Cor 5.21). Plundering the plunderer comes to this (Hebrews 1.13, Ps 110.1). Children of apocalypse get to see Yippee science and government unleash their best. I'm getting out my clothes that morning to get a better seat. Lovely children of the air,  four eclipses of the tetrad moon intersecting Israel with its third American harbinger to help, look good when it comes.  If you don't know what these are, be blessed and go back to where you once belonged. Are we ready? Don't be absurd. We long for it. We exult!  We know he shall dash them in pieces. That's why he is Messiah. I don't want to get in trouble on youtube  flailing potters vessels as the rulers take counsel. Pots break when the rulers take counsel together. Psalm 2, you know. Angels are  powerful fast, like a super collider. Everybody around denies this. Astrologers think it's the Ukraine. Prophets think it's the fig. Hosea thinks,

the days of visitation are come

the days of recompense are here

Israel shall know it

the prophet is a fool

the spiritual man is mad (Hosea 9.7)

The first and last prophet promises dew, but in between "the prophet shall fall" (Hosea 4.5). False prophets get moths on their garment (5.12). If the apocalypse is in two weeks my son has a list. Deepen his spiritual life, put up cucumbers. Today he's doing water. I like the approach. Drink the water freely, but it isn't even one AM. The kiln is cooling, to open at dawn. Metaphors hunger. Ten days he gives up alcohol. My thirst for apocalypse  lacks inebriation. Yeshua is Lord to the glory of Yahweh. Nada mas.

You want to name the One Name buried in the One Word? Say over and over, banks, banks, banks, money-power, not madmen-holy. Madmen are not to read Bowden's Trinity and Edwardo Galeano's Opening the Vein, or Lu Xun, those compromised patriots disloyal to the world!  Spiritual evil is the fabric of commerce; Oranus-Mammon funds liberal art science.  Can you put on a uniform, get a job in some faculty corp and place in the Tempe Marketplace of Hell? Gallery owners grist with artists in the middle of the floor. Now about the earth range endless immortals like Kurzweil who deposit their checks and hundred pills into their body transplants daily. Apocalypse children seek the reason for being born. They are not going to grow old in Japan's apocalypse. Evangelions against the angels in advance, otaku childhood and old age in the last days, captive of their Babylon tongues, when all along their feet have been set in a large room (Psalm 32).

To open again the spa of the re-membered, where Gog and high rolling bodies turned women to ants, business men to mosquitoes and  the sacred scarab beetle Egyptian syllable [ai], was jokingly called "the Alien Among Us," was a very complex cultural nexus (Pelevin, Insects 9). No wonder Ezekiel claimed the passengers held their noses (39). Among fish and fowl, beasts and creeping things, men would shake and mountains fall with every wall in the rain of Gog and his bands and the many. One could ask, as if it were a question, why did they sacrifice their children to Mammon and to Baal, but the question forgets that Oranus-Mammon receives even greater sacrifice. Thus while it may be ingracious and for that matter dangerous to say, that is the purpose why you carry an iphone. To make sacrifice. This should not to suggest commerce and society are Mammon together eating itself. Cozen.

"Specifically, the toleration of the systematic brainwashing of the populace by publicity, and the tolerance toward deception in merchandising, constitute the essence of a system which fosters tolerance to perpetuate the struggle for existence. In Pelevin the market complacently absorbs art and pseudo-art alike, fostering “‘destructive tolerance’ (Baudelaire) of ‘benevolent neutrality’” toward culture” (563).

Versions of this ancient Babylonian mythology equate supreme riches and power with supreme wisdom. This same prosperity that imprisons European/American culture will ensure them a grave there. To obtain them, one has to enter congress with Ishtar’s golden

idol, winning the “great lottery.” This means answering the three riddles of Ishtar, answers which are hidden in the words of market songs (566): 

 

 "It’s a kind of biblical scene, something from Babylon, some kind of prophecy from the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes. You feel it would require a great deal of eternal spiritual resistance and repudiation not to surrender, not to succumb to the impression, not to bow down to fact and not to idolize [deify] Baal, that is, not to accept what exists as your ideal…" (Dostoevsky. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Chapter 5).

 

 Khagi cites the mythologeme in general, the consumer in particular. In the Escape from virtual reality I compare it to the iron room of Lu Xun known now as the information net cast over the mind that devices of hand and eye  attach.

 

Understand the horror of bank commerce in Revelations 18. Money and power are broadcast as good. I didn’t even want to read Revelation 18. It promises a blessing if you do, but folk can come to bad end reading ( not however from that). Babylon compounds to the woman of capital and global dominion all men of the world seek. Sea captains, gold cargoes, frankincense souls, multinational corps, blondes, Babylon City/Woman traduce the nations. Gilgamesh confronts Ishtar here. He calls her "the foul goddess" who lets in the cold and turns men to frogs, after she emasculates them in her bed. These are the bond trader merchants, global internats unmasked in the intercourse. Intercourse! Poverty is the word for it, fornication, not love. Fortune makes “an idolatrous cult of Mammon, a cult that can only merit the name ‘fornication,’” says Ricardo Foulkes (El Apocalipsis De San Juan, 189).  Extending the prophecy of St. John to contemporary global capital and multinationals, the Americas  polarized and crucified (Callahan, Ortega, Kidd on Wainwright), the same enemy Ruben Dario saddled as Alejandro-Nabucodonosor, Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar explodes mountaintops and smites rivers. At one time Keats and Coleridge fantasized succubi in Lamia and Christabel; now folk hold their succubi in their hands and wait for them to ring. Lower credit card rates! White haired, uncapped pirate samurais at a nude health club with credit cards. That's the adagio.

Make no formed concept about
the realness or unrealness of existence

George Herbert, born April 3, was on PBS. He read Collar and Artillery to refute the stars, with Maimonides:

but as I raved and grew more fierce and wild at every word,

methought I heard one calling, Child:

and I replied, My Lord.

I mean, he says,

I, who had heard of music in the spheres,

but not of speech in stars, began to muse:

but turning to my God, whose ministers

the stars and all things are.

In those lines read the apocalypse of stars. And what's below when they throw dead bodies into tombs that come out alive. Those are Elisha's bones, who only wants to be taken up  but has to wait. It is an honor to join our brothers in their death. So Donne, Good Friday, Riding Westward, says:

What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn?

Reafo is the real meaning of plunder the plunderer, which St. Jude says Archangel Michael would not do, for he could not speak inThe Name, could only say "the LORD rebuke you" (echoing Zechariah 3.2).   It's one thing to read this in safety and comfort, another to walk among evil at the Tempe Marketplace of monsters an hour before dark, where all forms of human faux array on couches or walk toward you. Tolkien would rethink the fairy intruding in real life. Spiritual warfare makes avarice visible, selfishness, lust, malignancy (Rom. 1.29-31) malevolence we walk among. If you are full in the flesh don't notice it, but be less so and the faces come out of their Grimm tales. Masks come off. Or do they go on? Which is human, which is not?

Reafo first appears in English in the Lindisfarne Gospels, the oldest translation of the gospels in English, specifically in Luke 11.22 which says, Alla woepeno his ᵹenimeð ...; reafo his todaelde (OED). This fragment of Luke was adapted to instruction in Anglo-Saxon texts in the schools by Henry Frowde: The gospel of Saint Luke in Anglo Saxon. (Oxford 1893) which renders:  Gyf Jjonne strgngra ofer hine cymS, and hine ofer- wint5, ealle his wjepnu pe he on Eruwude he him afyrS, and todjelfi his h^rereaf. Translations and comparisons likewise appear in Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in parallel columns with the versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale: The Anglo Saxon reads: "Gyf donne strengra ofer hine cymþ and hine ofer-winþ, ealle his wæpnu, de he on-truwode, he him afyrþ, and todælþ his here-reaf." Wycliffe: But when a stronger than he cometh apon hym and overcommeth hym, he taketh from him his harnes, wherein he trusted, and devideth his gooddes. The house of the strong is of course more than its possessions, it is the self, so a kind of opposite conceit frees the plunderer from captivity even as he frees, "the slave abideth not in the house forever" (Jn. 8.35), hence "if the Son shall make you free you shall be free indeed."


 A Countdown has started for passengers of every milieu. institutionalized As Chris Hedges' Tillich said, every institution is demonic, and add, banal, as Hannah Arendt said, demonic and banal.

 John Wesley's Explanatory Notes:

Passing — To go up and down over the whole land; for many of Gog's wounded, flying soldiers, died in thickets, and corners into which they crept.

The passengers — Whose assistance they would desire of courtesy.

Pulpit Commentary

  As to its designation. That in the word "passengers" lies a paronomasia is apparent; but whether threefold or only twofold is uncertain. In the present verse הָעֹבְרִים may signify either
(1) such travelers as were wont to pass through the valley (Keil), which is the obvious and natural interpretation; or
(2) the warriors of Gog (Ewald, Hitzig), who intended to pass through the land, but whose invasion had only proved a passing storm; or
(3) the commissioners who should be appointed to pass through the land in search of bones (ver. 15). The notion of Ewald, who derives עֹבִרִים from עֶבְרָה, and translates "haughty," "overbearing," meaning the Gogites, is countenanced by no ether expositor. If the first sense be taken, then the verse will read, "The valley of the passers through, and it (the valley, in consequence of having become the grave of Gog) stops (the way of) the passers through;" i.e. it becomes thereafter impassable for travelers (Rosenmüller, Keil); or, it stops the noses, or breath, of such travelers by reason of its horrible stench (Ewald, Havernick). If the second meaning be selected, the valley must be understood to have afterwards received its name from the fact that Gog's warriors lay entombed beneath its sod, and "the stopping of the passengers" to signify that whereas Gog purposed to overrun the land, his destructive career was there ignominiously arrested (Schroder). If the third rendering be preferred, then the valley will be held to have derived its designation, after the event, from the passing through it or through the land of the searchers, in which case the stepping of the passengers can only have alluded to the fact that, as the "buriers" proceeded with the work of interment, they were compelled to turn away their faces and stop their noses because of the noisome effluvium which arose from the corpses. The first interpretation is the best, though the first and second might be combined by making the first "passengers" stand for the travelers and the second for the invaders, whose career should there be stopped; and to this view a certain countenance is lent by the statements which follow, that there should Gog and all his multitude - literally, all his noisy tumult - be buried, and that the valley ever afterwards should bear the name of Hamon-gog, or, Gog s multitude.

 
Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

 
And it shall come to pass in that day,.... When this destruction of the army of Gog shall be made:
that I will give unto Gog a place there of graves in Israel; or, "a place there, a grave in Israel" (b); he that thought to have subdued the whole land, and taken possession of it, shall have no more of it than just a place for a grave, to be buried in; a place fit for a grave, as the Targum; and where that will be is next observed: "the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea"; a valley through which travellers used to pass from Syria, Babylon, and other places, to Egypt and Arabia Felix, which lay east of the sea; not the Mediterranean sea, which lies west of Judea; but either the Dead sea, the sea of Sodom, a sulphurous lake, to which there may be an allusion, Revelation 19:20 or the sea of Chinnereth, or Genesareth, as the Targum, Jarchi, and Kimchi; the same with the sea or lake of Tiberias and Galilee, mentioned in the New Testament; which sense is approved of by Gussetius (c); where was a passage from the land of Canaan to the east of the same sea. Calmet (d) thinks it stands for the great road at the foot of Mount Carmel, to go from Judea, Egypt, and the country of the Philistines, into Phoenicia, which road was to the east of the Mediterranean sea.
And it shall stop the noses of the passengers; or the passengers shall stop their noses, because of the ill smell of the carcasses (e); or their mouths, the mouths of blasphemers, who shall no more blaspheme the God of Israel, when they shall observe this monument of his power, in the destruction of his and his people's enemies. It may be rendered, "it shall stop the passengers (f); from passing that way, because of the multitude of the carcasses that shall fall there", and which is the reason of their being buried out of the way; this sense Jarchi takes notice of. The Targum is,
"and it is near to two mountains;''
as if this clause described the situation of the valley.
And there shall they bury Gog, and all his multitude; all his army, such of it as the fowls and beasts had not devoured, and the bones they had left; not his army only, but himself also, the Sultan or Grand Seignior of the Turks, the general of his mighty army: this was not true of Antiochus; he died not, nor was he buried in the land of Israel.
And they shall call it the valley of Hamon-gog: Hamon signifies a multitude; and this name will be imposed upon the place of Gog's sepulchre, because of the multitude slain and buried here, and to perpetuate the memory of it: there never was yet a place of this name in the land of Israel, which shows that this event is yet future. Calmet takes it to be the valley of Jezreel, in which he thinks the army of Cambyses was defeated, after the death of that prince; wrongly taking Cambyses and his army for Gog and Magog.
(b) "locum ibi sepulchrum", Starckius; "locum ubi sit sepulchrum", Cocceius. (c) Ebr. Comment. p. 585. (d) Dictionary in the word "Vale" (e) So R. Sol. Urbin. Ohel Moed, fol. 66. 2.((f) "et erit illa obturans transeuntes", Starckius; "et erit illa frenans transeuntes", Cocceius.

The judgments can be searched at Insight Statutes and The Palms of David.

 

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