The Evil Eye

The curious verb βασκαινω (baskoino) means to bewitch or "evil-eye" someone, and occurs in the New Testament in Galatians 3:1 only, in Paul's famously provocative question: "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?"

Paul is widely considered the original evangelist to the gentiles, but his question to the Galatians comes with a gravity that seems inappropriate to the skewed intuitions of theological amateurs. If the Galatians were only recently introduced to the Gospel, then thinking that "following Christ" has to do with submitting to some overlord or superior master isn't too much of a stretch. It's precisely what many Christians today think. People who actually know Christ, and hence understand the Gospel, also know that instead, "following Christ" means doing what Jesus did and going where Jesus went, which is (a) the will of the Father, and (b) to the Right Hand of the Father, from which he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Here's how we can tell that we have and indeed are following Jesus: (a) we routinely walk on water and make the blind see, the lame walk and the dead rise from their grave (Matthew 11:4-5, John 14:12), and (b) we are currently seated at the Right Hand of the Father, from where we and many like us are getting ready to tell the living apart from the dead — evidently by using a balance or scale, a libra, to see who has the critical mass and who is too light to pass (see Daniel 5:27, Job 31:6, Proverbs 21:2, Psalm 62:9).

You cannot simultaneously be like someone and less than them, because you are either like them or less than them (see Psalm 8:5, Genesis 3:22, Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34). This is why Jesus calls his people his friends rather than servants (John 15:15). And it is not for obedience but for freedom — autonomy and sovereignty as the result of one's mastery of God's law: see ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law — that Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1).

First Love

If the Galatians were really new to all these complicated and anti-intuitive things, one may have expected a kinder correction from someone like Paul. Instead, Paul seems to refer to a kind of revelation that had existed among several peoples in the past, most notably the Canaanites (Genesis 14:18), Midianites (Exodus 2:16), and Phoenicians (Ezekiel 28:12), and had been forgotten. Forgotten!

Contrary to what is commonly believed, House Israel is not unique in having received the revelation for which Abraham is still so very famous (Genesis 15:1), but rather that they remembered it. From the whole of House Abraham, only House Isaac remembered. From House Isaac only House Jacob went ahead. From House Jacob (i.e. House Israel), only House Judah kept going. And from House Judah, only House David remained faithful. The story of Jesus is not something new but simply a continuation of this pattern, and "House Jesus" is a subsection of House David (or two subsections, actually), that remained true to the Abrahamic covenant (Galatians 3:7).

Beginners may think that Paul and Jesus started something new, but no. It's still the same story, and the "Son of God" is still the same person, just a bit leaner (Luke 3:38, Exodus 4:22, Psalm 2:7, Matthew 5:9, and see Romans 8:14 in one breath with 2 Corinthians 3:17). The prophet Zechariah says it like this: "In that day YHWH will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the one who is feeble among them in that day will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of YHWH before them" (Zechariah 12:8).

So no, Jesus is not a new kid on the block but a very old one. There's no "New Testament" or "New House"; it's still the same one, and it's filled to the rafters with all sorts of folks who have always remained as faithful as they could possibly be, even when the peoples they emerged from abandoned God collectively and their cultures became putrid and ultimately died and turned to dust.

House Jesus is mostly mixed multitude, but they are as One as God himself (John 17:20-26, Ephesians 4:1-6). They have no corporate HQ, no slogans, no symbols, no uniforms, no mailing lists, no twitter handles, none of any of that. They are not doctrinal or credal (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11, Song of Solomon 2:4) but partake in the vast multivocal discourse from which all perfect policies emerge (James 1:25) and that sits alive and well at the heart of mankind, waiting for the bullies to die off and the dust to settle. Because the council in all its omnipotence will by general principle not ever enforce law (Zechariah 4:6, 1 Corinthians 15:24).

And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations

It's long been noted that the Celtic language branch has many features in common with Hebrew, and some commentators have even speculated that the lost tribes of Israel aren't lost at all but drifted into Europe, where they triggered islands of otherwise inexplicable cultural and theological sophistication: that of the "native" tribes of Scotland and Scandinavia for instance. The ancestors of the Galatians to whom Paul wrote had moved to Anatolia from Gaul, and by the time Paul wrote, the Celtic culture of their homeland had been destroyed by Rome, and the Celtic languages had begun to be forgotten.

In Celtic and Nordic cultures, the tree is most central. Even the word "druid" means "tree knower". When Paul insisted that the Galatians had known that Christ had been publicly crucified, he quoted: "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" from Deuteronomy 21:23 (see Galatians 3:13). Our English word "library" comes from the Latin word liber, which referred to bark, which was what the Latins wrote on. As we explain in our article on λιτρα (litra), liter, which comes from libra, scale or balance, and corresponds to libertas, freedom: theologies relate closely to cultures, which relate to language, and every language has unique properties that in the Bible are referenced by the material on which texts in these languages were commonly written. For Hebrew, rather unspectacularly, this was cloth or material woven from threads (Luke 2:7; hence Genesis 3:21, Exodus 20:26, Revelation 6:11).

God revealed himself in Hebrew. Or perhaps more accurately: God revealed himself to the world in all of the world's languages, at a time when Hebrew was still alive and on a general par with all of mankind's other languages. It's written that wisdom begins with the reverence of YHWH (who is One), which means that foolishness begins where the reverence of unity ends (Psalm 111:10, Proverbs 1:7). In the very deep past, not all proto-humans learned to speak because in order for speech to emerge, proto-humans first had to have a reverence for social equity and a desire to welcome and imitate the other guy rather that run him off (1 Corinthians 11:1, Matthew 18:20). That means that all ancient languages had the unity of God baked into them, which in turn means that the language we now call Hebrew is the sole surviving member of a much greater family of "Eberite" languages that emerged when the "earth was divided" (Genesis 10:25), namely into proto-humans that had complex speech and proto-humans that didn't.

All modern languages have forgotten the unity that once brought them forth and have essentially died off and turned to dust. That is: except Hebrew, which is why people who are actually seriously drawn to God, study Hebrew. This is also why YHWH said through the prophet Zephaniah: "For then I will give to the peoples purified lips, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him shoulder to shoulder" (Zephaniah 3:9, see Isaiah 6:6). That's because God (or more precise: the Unity of God), is not in any modern language

The stories of Moses among the reeds of the Nile, and Israel crossing the Sea of Reeds, are purposed to discuss the relation between the Egyptian literary tradition and the Semitic alphabet that emerged within it (see our article on YHWH). Likewise, the word parchment comes from Pergamum, which comes from Priam, the king of Troy, and refers to Hittite script and thus theology (and the first husband of Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon son of David, was a Hittite). Likewise Latin, and the horrors it would dream up, are referred to anything that hangs loose from a tree. All these stories illustrate that the Word of God came to mankind in Hebrew, and that Word cannot be translated into some other language (not even Greek or Aramaic: see our article on εβδομηκοντα, hebdomekonta, seventy).

When your eye causes you to sin ...

Our verb βασκαινω (baskoino) is quite common in the classics and was either used to mean to slander and malign or to bewitch and particularly with the "evil eye". This evil eye motif is a widespread phenomenon that appears to have originated in Mesopotamia but quickly spread all over Celtic and Greek Europe (hence, it seems, the emphatic reference to eyes in Paul's rhetorical question). The key here is that God's law is not enforced, but learned and mastered. It's like freedom of speech, that can only come if one first learns the rules and submits to them. Only then one obtains the freedom to say anything at all. God's law is not enforced, and any kind of violent law enforcement very strongly testifies of something being very wrong, and that is probably the very law that the enforcer is trying to enforce: that's not going to be God's law but someone else's law.

All sorts of law enforcement are forms of tyranny, which is satanic, because it yields bondage and not freedom (see our article on Tyrannus). The lust for violent law enforcement is so rampant in our world that we rarely realize that it's the very road to destruction that so many take. The narrow gate to life, contrarily, is the one of peaceful congregation and learned conversation (see our article on πλατυς, platus, broad or wide).

We have to be careful, of course, that we don't confuse the rigorous training of children and amateurs with tyranny, but in general and on average, God's love is taught by love and patience and by demonstration (1 Corinthians 2:4, Luke 7:22), not by violence or the threat of violence. The law of God is something that people line up to join (if they could only find it), so any need for enforcement is a clear sign that something is wrong with the law one is trying to enforce. Our word βασκαινω (baskoino) has to do with forcing a situation upon someone who isn't happy with that and never will be: something that is perceived to be beneficial to the doer but not to the recipient. The full term οφθαλμος (ophthalmos), eye, βασκανος (baskanos), malignant, occurs all over the classics.

Where our word βασκανος (baskanos) comes from, and thus what it originally denoted, is unknown. Some have suggested links with βασκευται (baskeutai), which refers to a bundle of wooden sticks and appears to be related to the Latin fasces, hence the term fascism (see our article on Three Taverns). Others think of the verb βαινω (baino), to step, but that doesn't seem ominous enough or otherwise appropriate. And others propose links to the verb βαζω (bazo), meaning to talk or chat or utter nonsense.

Where the latter verb βαζω (bazo) comes from isn't altogether obvious, but here at Abarim Publications we are rather struck by the similarity with the Hebrew verb בוז (buz), to despise or show contempt. The related verb בזה (baza), to show contempt, occurs in Esther 1:17 in combination with the noun עין ('ayin), meaning eye (or fountain or source of a river; hence Isaiah 2:3, Ezekiel 47:1, Revelation 22:1). The familiar idea of "haughty eyes" uses עין ('ayin), eye, and רומ (rum), high or haughty (Psalm 18:27, Proverbs 6:17, 21:4) or גבה (gaba), high or haughty (Psalm 101:5, Isaiah 2:11). A haughty or elevated eye is of course not the same thing as a contemptuous eye or even a bewitching eye, but these ideas are not far apart and may have helped each other's formation.

The name Europe is often explained to mean what it would have meant to a Greek speaker, and that is Land Of The Good Eye (ευ, eu, as in Euphrates, and ωψ, ops, as in Ethiopia). This in turn does not refer to just one eye, just like an invasion by the Midianite does not refer to just one Midianite, or Lord of the Fly refers to just one fly — which is the same reason why the Cyclops didn't only have one eye: to any Greek speaker, the word "cyclops" means Round Eye (from κυκλος, kuklos, circle) and refers to the same kind of national council as that of King Arthur and his Round Table. All these things have to do with federations of local governments that are forcible held together by some kind of unnatural federal constitution: an empire. This is also the bottom line meaning of the great living beings covered with eyes: Ezekiel 10:12, Revelation 4:6. These are federations or trade agreements or pacts of some sort.