Saturday, January 25, 2020

The Words of the Prophets

It's interesting to watch something like this:



and see a lot of folks on Twitter wonder "Is this a pro-life attitude?" I can't say it's necessarily pro-life, but it is Biblical. It mirrors Hosea, who prophesized about the times ahead for those who went against the chosen of god:


14 Give them, LORD— what will you give them? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that are dry.

In context it can be taken a couple of ways, literally, that the entire people be cut off root and branch and flourish no more, ceasing to exist, or figuratively, that no thing they attempt will come to any good and history will forget them. (In Jeremiah, God is not so harsh:

Is Ephraim my dear son?
Is he my darling child?
For as often as I speak against him,
I do remember him still.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him,
declares the Lord. )

Anyway. this kind of language fits in with some of the cultish trappings that surround Trump's presidency. In the recent drop of an audio recording of Trump at a 2018 dinner in which he apparently speaks with Parnas about Ukraine, natural gas, and firing the ambassador. But a really interesting thing stands out:

In a bizarre moment near the end of the dinner, Parnas and Fruman compare Trump to the messiah. Parnas tells him: “It’s like messiah is the person that’s come to save the whole world. So it’s like you’re the savior of (inaudible).”

The two present to him a gift that they say shows how Trump’s name adds up to the same numbers as the Jewish messiah, a reference to the Jewish mystical practice of Gematria. In Gematria, every Hebrew letter is assigned a numerical value, and the sums of those values are then compared to numerical values of other words or phrases to identify hidden meanings or connections.

“The messiah comes out to 424. Your name, your name, it adds up to his name. So it’s 424, 424,” Parnas says.

Fruman adds: “So all Jew people of Ukraine, they are praying for you.” Another unidentified voice tells Trump to “talk to Jared, he’ll explain it to you” — a reference to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is an observant Jew.

This is something I don't know a great deal about, but it is not something Fruman and Parnas are making up--gematria has been used to suggest Trump will bring about the Messiah. (I worry myself that he is likely to immanentize the eschaton.) It had been noted that he has called himself the Chosen one and some around him also speak that way.

Personally, I think this religious-based flattery of Trump is mostly just that--flattery. But in the mind of someone who is a bit of an egomaniac already? Or spread out among people who think Q is a real thing? It's not quaint or ironic, but a bit disturbing.

No comments:

Oh Look, We Found GA Voter Fraud

 It turns out, it was the GOP all along--or anyway, there was an election-denier who weirdly enough submitted multiple ineligible GOP ballot...