Libertine meaning

Meaning

Freed At The Cost Of Bondage

Etymology

From liberty, perhaps from לברית (librit), unto a covenant.

The name Libertine belongs to a Roman social class, namely that of freed slaves, who evidently and for rather obscure reasons had their own synagogue(s). In the first century, the number of synagogues in Jerusalem had been between half a dozen (according to modern academic minimalist estimates, based on population size and the farthest one was allowed to travel on a Sabbath) and four-hundred eighty, according to the Talmud, although the latter estimate (4 x 10 x 12) appears to rather say something about the remnants of Israel in all four corners of the world, of which Jerusalem will always be the capital (see Acts 2:5, which ties into 1 Kings 4:34 and Revelation 21:24; also see Iliad 2.803-804).

The curious "Synagogue of Libertines" is mentioned in the Bible only once, namely in Acts 6:9, and although we know what synagogues were and also what Libertines were, it's rather puzzling why there would have been a Synagogue of Roman Libertines in Jerusalem in the first century. Rome had conquered Palestine in 63 BCE, and made a lot of slaves in the process, and exported these all over the region. It's likely that in time, some of those had been freed, and some of those surely made it back. But why these freed slaves didn't simply reintegrate into their society, and instead appear to have formed their own synagogue is not easily explained.

But then, perhaps the Synagogue of Libertines wasn't actually a proper synagogue but rather something akin the "Synagogue of Satan", which John the Revelator mentions in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, which were organizations peopled by folks who "say they are Jews and are not" — not satanists who worship satan (whatever that means), but rather folks whose pious creeds are conveniently subsumed to something decidedly more authoritative. The term שטן (satan) simply means Opposer, regardless of who is doing the opposing and to what. The first time this word is used, it describes the angel of the Lord as he opposes Balaam (Numbers 22:22). Most modern commentators on Revelation pretty much agree that in this particular context, Satan is the same as the Roman State, as it opposes the Kingdom of God. This would make the Synagogue of Satan a sort of hotspot for collaborators: people who looked and behaved as Jewish as the next guy but who accepted Caesar rather than God as their king (John 19:15).

It needs to be remembered that the other sort of Judaism (the God-only sort), including the spinoff that would help yield Christianity, had rightly begun to be recognized as a consorted act of high treason against the Roman State. In most modern jurisdictions, acts of high treason are punishable by imprisonment for life, but more barbaric countries have upheld the death penalty until today or else very recently. In Roman times, high treason was met with death in a wide range of creative ways.

Insofar as the word applies to these outrageous conditions, the term Synagogue of Satan is a jocular term, designed to mean very little to any snooping Roman censor but a great deal to people in the know, who, then and now, run a fully functioning network of information dissemination that is entirely invisibly to the overlords. In our modern world, puns like John's "Synagogue of Satan" are still very much in vogue and for much the same reason. There are many examples but one is Apple TV+'s The Morning Show, which is an obvious but tongue-in-cheek commentary on mediacracy, or government by mass media (Morning Show → Morning Star → Lucifer — the Hebrew word for morning is בקר, boqer, cattle is בקר, baqar, and both words come from the verb בקר, baqar, to split and thus to investigate or be a journalist). And, as we will see below, synagogues were not centers of worship but centers of statecraft. And yes, they were an interlocked network that continuously worked to maintain and extrapolate the same foundational text. That's where the postal system, and hence the Internet come from.

The titles Christ (that's Greek) and Messiah (that's Hebrew) both mean "anointed" and described Israel's king, as Israel's king was not "crowned" but "anointed" into office. And although Christ's Kingdom is ostensibly "not of this world" (John 18:36), it certainly competes with earthly kingdoms: not as any competing just-as-bad kingdom next door, but as a competing kingdom from above, different but nevertheless designed to overthrow the old ones (1 Corinthians 15:24). Hence when Isaiah proclaimed that the government would be upon his shoulder (Isaiah 9:6), he wasn't talking about feelings, creed or personal discipline but actual physical and earthly government and the age old question of how to run a complex state that is much larger than a simple tribe of people who all know each other and accept the authority of the tribe's immediate elders.

In our present scene, the Greek wording leaves any specific interpretation open to the good humor of the reader, and lists the Synagogue of Libertines either along, or else inclusive of, various folks of distinct and signature intellectual leanings: the cities of Cyrene and Alexandria were host to important wisdom schools and likewise, Cilicia's library and academia rivalled that of Athens (the apostle Paul was from Tarsus in Cicilia). The Asia mentioned in our scene refers primarily to the Roman province of Asia Minor (home of the ancient Hittites, of Homer's Troy and of John's seven churches), but also provides a tongue-in-cheek reference to the original Asia Major, the proverbial ancient land of the east (קדם, qedem, means both east and antiquity), which is synonymous to Persia, the arch-rival of both Greece and Rome (Acts 17:21), where Pharisaic Judaism had originated and from where the Christ-finding magi had hailed (Matthew 2:1). Rather pertinent to our present story, the Nazis called their research branch Ahnenerbe (from Ahn, forebear, and erben, to inherit), and charged it not with pursuing global truth but rather with providing proof that the Führer had been right all along.

As we discuss in greater detail elsewhere (see our articles on Pyrrhus, Malta or Onesimus), the Book of Acts is not a piece of journalistic realism but rather demonstrates the fractal patterns that pervade all of God's creation simultaneously at all levels of complexity: Acts, like the rest of the Bible, is not anecdotal or even historical, or else it would play within the constraints of time, and be subject to the timeline, and time would be greater than the story. Instead, the Bible is Law, and time is a consequence of that Law and is subject to that Law, so that time unfolds in it rather than the other way around (John 1:1, Psalm 78:2).

In Hellenistic times, the very common and not specifically Jewish word synagogue — from συν (sun), together or jointly, and αγω (ago), to lead, guide, govern — referred not to a center of worship but to a center of statecraft: a place where a community's male elders would convene and discuss the goings on in order to decide on policies that were generally agreed upon by all. Synagogues were the nodes of the sort of state that European academics since the 16th century CE have called the Hebrew Republic: the sort of state that will one day cover the entire earth (Isaiah 2:3, 40:5, Habakkuk 2:14, Zechariah 8:23, Revelation 21:24).

It should be obvious that the "Synagogue of Satan" would not have been pursuant of the Hebrew Republic, but rather utilized the power of council for tyrannical purposes: a federation of equal tribal lords or Ringwraiths or stock holders or Death Eaters or what-have-you is stronger than any single ruling visionary, and is additionally able to pool resources and intelligence and focus more energy upon a single target anywhere in the broader market. The whole idea here is that a tightly bundled group of sticks is harder to break than many loose ones (and see this further discussed in our articles on Memphis and Three Taverns). Such synagogues are wolf packs, and wolf packs can be recognized by their persecution of anything that doesn't jive with their policies and views.

Synagogues that strive for the Hebrew Republic, contrarily, see the entire world as a single interconnected dynamic system, so that anything that emerges anywhere in the world does so in response to the harmonic whole of all the global forces in it (Acts 5:38-39). Synagogues of the Hebrew Republic strive to accommodate anything that God called into existence, which certainly may involve putting fences around certain wildlings, but certainly not a program of extermination of perceived "bad guys". The Hebrew Republic strives for peace of the entire world (Genesis 22:18), by promoting understanding and wisdom and freedom across the board and within any topic imaginable. Such synagogues understand that whatever people want, they will inevitably go for, so whatever people ask for, must be formally provided for, so as to guarantee compliance with legal provisions and an uninterrupted protection of the innocent and defenseless.

And there's our key word, "freedom", which is the very purpose of the gospel of Christ. Or as Paul puts it: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1). Freedom is always attained by regularities because regularities can be learned (this is where rules and laws and ultimately science come from) and used to predict what will happen next so as to avoid collisions and gridlocks and such. Freedom of speech starts with learning the rules of the language. Freedom to travel starts with learning the rules of traffic. Likewise freedom of life starts with learning the rules of life. And that is why Synagogues of the Hebrew Republic are obsessed with law: they are pursuing the perfect law, the Law of Liberty (James 1:25).

For more on the Hebrew Republic, see our article on Gog and Magog, but in summary: the two main characteristics of the Hebrew Republic are (1) that it is based on the free and perfectly liquid exchange of information (which requires the Hebrew language: see our article on YHWH), and (2) that it has no need for violent law enforcement because it functions entirely on intelligent consensus. The obvious opposite of the Hebrew Republic is any other form of government, from Plato's idiotic Republic down to the Roman Empire and Hitler's Third Reich: any government based on the say-so of some elite group, who must always enforce their laws because their blinkered visions inevitably generate the objections of those who don't fit into their designs. In other words: the Hebrew Republic is internally unopposed (hence Romans 16:20), and since in our present context, the Libertines are marked most notably by their (violent) opposition of Stephen (means crown), their synagogue aligns rather uncannily with the aforementioned one of Satan.

The point here is that the Libertines were Libertines if-and-only-if the world complied with Roman legislation, only within a virtual environment that ran on Roman software. Libertines were a class of Roman Citizens, and the title of Roman Citizen was a very expensive and much desired one because it yielded many perks, protections and rights. Paul's life was saved because he was one, whereas Jesus was crucified because he wasn't. Some bought it with their family fortunes, others with twenty-five grueling years of their lives in the very front lines of the Roman army (which only few survived). As the commander said to Paul: "I acquired this citizenship with a large sum of money" (Acts 22:28).

As a simple matter of protecting one's investment, Libertines preached compliance with Roman law, and would oppose anyone who opposed it. The long recognized and often exploited human quality now known as Stockholm syndrome has victims fall in love with their abusers. In Nazi concentration camps and Russian Gulags, the overlords would select "trustees" from among the inmates and lavish them with titles, perks and freedoms, only to see them use these freedoms to brutalize their fellow inmates to a degree that baffled even the overlords.

In our modern world, there are people with PhD's who paid fortunes for their degrees, but whose degrees are not purposed with proving their holder's insights and wisdom (or even broader knowledge, or even the values of their expertise relative to the whole of all science, or even their practical usefulness to the world at large), but rather their compliance with academic procedures and hierarchy. A company that needs a wise innovator will look for someone who has invented clever things. But a company that needs someone who knows how to comply with the going academic and governmental fashions will look for someone with a PhD.

Contrary to what's commonly believed, our earthly world is technically certainly not in the kind of trouble that cannot be fixed by a few clever engineers. Instead, our world is in trouble because humanity's best and brightest trade their divine right to create for a piece of paper that declares their allegiance to the system. Our God-given shepherds don't shepherd but work for Big Finance, in marketing, in the manipulation and bedazzling of the common folks who should be out in the fields having their fill of green grass and fresh water. And all for their huge salaries, with which they buy their Lamborghinis, which are the glimmering sores of a deadly ill body.

In the words of Tacitus: "In small steps they declined onto the soothing vices: the public lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. And in their ignorance they called it culture, while in fact it was part of their enslavement" (Agricola 21.3). In the same vein, Rabbi Eliezer haGadol said: "In the footsteps of the Messiah, grapes will be abundant but wine expensive" (Talmud, Sotah 9.15; see Matthew 9:37).

In their trauma and darkness, the Libertines imagined they were free because a lot of money had changed hands, while all this money had ever bought was a declaration of freedom within an overbearing system of wholesale enslavement.

The term Libertine, or libertus in Latin, was a common term for freed members of the servant class, and freeing slaves had nothing to do with removing bars from windows or snapping off physical chains. There were no human rights back then, and merely paying someone's purchasing price didn't set that person free, but simply transferred the ownership of that person into the portfolio of the buyer. The Libertines hadn't been freed, they'd merely been promoted to a higher degree of bondage.

Actual freedom, instead, has everything to do with having the wisdom to function independently within society, as an appreciated member of said society, having the means and wherewithal to sustain oneself mentally, physically, behaviorally and financially. Slaves were called juniors — the word is παις (pais), child — because they were considered to be children who could not live on their own and when set loose would either not survive, turn criminal or get captured again and returned to slavery. As the Jew understood many millennia before the gentile, freedom is a result of wisdom, and without the latter, there is no former.

The Greco-Roman world was strongly stratified, and although vertical movement was always possible, it was in all practicality impossible to separate oneself from one's origin. Greek society roughly comprised three main classes. The economic, political and military leaders were called ελευθεροι (eleutheroi), the Eleutheroi or Free Men, those people who owned all land and realty and all the people and animals and properties that existed and functioned on those lands. The necessary Yin to the Free Men's Yang came with the servant class, the δουλοι (douloi), which were people who had no or little property and worked for a protected living on the Free Men's properties: anybody from respected administrators, estate managers and skillful artisans to lowly field slaves and the merchants who brought produce to market.

The third major stratus in Greek society were the πτωχοι (ptochoi), the spit-out ones, who were people who were so worthless — that is worthless in regards to the demands of one's immediate societal environment: someone with a rare talent for orchestral symphonies or advanced mathematics will end up destitute if society has not yet brought forth enough complexity to require such talents — that they couldn't even be δουλοι (douloi), and were subsequently forced out of the cities and lived in the wild like animals (Matthew 20:30, Luke 14:23). It's a bit of a Hollywood trope, but society's princes, top managers, bankers and movie stars are so hopelessly inept in unaided living that whenever their bubbles burst, they end up on the streets in a state of permanent psychosis. This in turn suggests that the other popular Hollywood trope, namely the idea that fallen satanic angels became earthly royals and billionaires, may be entirely misguided, and that satanic angels rather first had a go at governing animals like pigs and when pig-society suicided itself, descended ever further into the realm of mindless bugs and such (see the name Beelzebub, meaning Lord Of The Fly). Also note that the Greek word for evil, namely πονηρος (poneros), stems from the verb πενομαι (penomai), meaning to toil or labor, and points to the working and not the ruling class.

It's tempting to assume that humanity is shepherded onto its destiny by the very rich and powerful, but that's an illusion. Anyone who has ever been poor will readily confirm that the minds of the poor are entirely hijacked by fear about where the next meal will come from, or how to pay for shelter, or how to defend one's children and keep one's elderly parents alive. But likewise the minds of the very rich are continuously occupied by the great many loose ends, weak spots and lurking enviers their world is heir to. Freedom of mind — without which there can be no Sabbath, no quiet enjoyment of a sunset, no whispered recital of one's favorite poem: no cool-of-the-day for God to take a stroll in — can only exist when one is free from worry and fear, when one leads an ordinary life that nobody wants to kill you for, with an average salary for a pleasantly interesting occupation that other ordinary people thank you and reward you for. Anyone who has ever been a billionaire will readily confirm that the best life a person can have is that of an autonomous craftsperson in some average village. As attested to by the gospel authors, all progress that humanity has ever made has always come from the upper middle class. The extremely poor and extremely rich are simply two sorts of slaves to that upper middle class.

Whether via bad decisions or bad luck, wealthy property owners could forfeit their wealth and so demonstrate that they should never have been part of the nation's ruling class in the first place (Luke 16:10, 1 Timothy 3:4-5), and end up having to sell even their bodily selves into servitude. And contrarily, there were several avenues via which servants could legally attain their freedom. But both the nouveau riche and the recently disenfranchised were shunned by their respective receiving establishments, the idea being that both the truly free and the truly bound were born that way, and brought up from birth that way, and integration into a new social stratus would require adoption in all legal and emotional sense, plus a long period of rigorous training — because who would want to buy a maid servant who was a noble lady until yesterday and has no idea how to be a maid? Like switching languages, adult switchers would only very rarely lose their native accent, and so would go through their new life betraying their origin at every turn.

When in 73 BCE, Spartacus broke free and inspired thousands of slaves to do the same, they had no choice but to become bandits and flow in perpetually liquid state about the countryside, stealing food wherever they went, in a constant state of war with whoever legally owned that food. Two years later, their number had swelled to an unsustainable swarm of 70,000 individuals, which forced the Roman government to intervene and defeat them. Most of them were resold into slavery and 6,000 of the most uppity ones were crucified along the Appian Way.

Quite to the contrary — and we tell this story in greater detail in our article on the Phoenicians — a group called the Bruttians also appears to have originated in a band of escaped slaves, but had been able to secure a bit of land for themselves. The land now called Italy was then far less densely populated, so they simply homesteaded a plot somewhere in the wild, and formed their own local government, production and merchant economy. Not long after that, they became widely recognized as a proper legal mini-state, whose neighbors were happy to engage in trade and military alliances. Here at Abarim Publications we further suspect that the name Britain may have originated in people's general respect for the Bruttians' wonderful ways of morphing from Societal Dust to Solid Sate (in a Genesis 2:7 sort of sense), and would even propose that the name Bruttian in turn may have stemmed from the noun ברית (berit), meaning covenant or legally binding agreement.

The Bruttians appear to have understood what separates man from beast, and that is not intelligence but rather covenant: a measurable bond between parties that is not explained by either natural forces or private feelings, but rather by formal agreement and ultimately trust, respect and brotherly love between parties that are not otherwise bound by biological or tribal relations. The first such covenant was that of marriage, and this explains why Pharaoh became so upset when it appeared that Sarai was not merely Abram's sister, but rather more so his covenanted wife. Pharoah understood that the violation of any covenant affects all covenant and ultimately one's entire kingdom, if that kingdom is sustained by trust and agreement rather than violence and threats.

In the mid-1990's a cluster of big budget films offered a rather unified commentary on the shared observation that when the grown-ups allow their personal feelings to overrule their legal covenants, noble empires plunge like Icarus (The English Patient, 1996, whose author Michael Ondaatje was basically retelling Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago), immigrants risk their passionless but protective traditions (The Bridges of Madison County, 1995), and young daughters lose their footing, their best friend and the use of their horses. In The Horse Whisperer, 1998, the girls Judith and Grace rather blatantly personify Synagoga and Ecclesia, with the former's death-by-truck a metaphor for the fate of Europe's Jewry in the 1940's. Their last stand, as illustrated by the paradoxical Little Bighorn battlefield scene, amounted to a victory of the only sort that counts. The story that we the audience gawp at (whether while watching the rest of The Horse Whisperer or the evening news) is the story of the dying of the doomed (John 4:22, Genesis 18:32).

The Libertines claimed a freedom that they had solely by merit of the decrees of Rome, and were Rome to fall, their liberty would fall with it. That means that their liberty was a conditional liberty, which is no liberty at all. And like their more famous near-namesakes, the Liberators — who had aimed to liberate the world of tyranny, and hence assassinated Julius Ceasar — the Libertines had managed to convince themselves that liberty comes when tyranny is defeated. This, of course, is correct in principle (see our article on Tyrannus), but both the Liberators and the Libertines had made the mistake of thinking that such a thing is achieved by killing the opposition.

Killing the opposition is precisely what defines a tyrant. This fairly basic insight doesn't occur to a lot of wannabe Liberators, and unfortunately, most Liberators in past and present are simply as tyrannical as the tyrants they aim to slay. When two dogs fight, neither of them is trying to eradicate dogness, and both are instead invested in being the dominant dog. But tyranny is not defeated by more tyranny, just like evil is not overcome by more evil. And where two tyrants fight, the losing party can be recognized by their banners and protests and loud whining and wailing about the injustices of the world.

The word liberty describes a marvelous and precious and rather mythical state, because very few people have actually experienced it. And that explains why so many people are so manifestly wrong about it. The Greeks are celebrated for having venerated Liberty as their societal ideal, but their society destabilized and had begun to go up in smoke long before the Romans came along to finish them off. The Romans likewise, venerated Liberty, but their Republic destabilized too and hardened into the Empire that covered the world in a blanket of slavery and oppression. Their ideas of liberty were wrong, and they never had it.

False or dependent or conditional freedom comes from existing in an environment that is not in harmonic sync with the universe: a virtual reality, a simulated reality, whose rules don't add up to a consistent whole and certainly don't add up to a unified whole. Freedom can only exist in an environment that is indistinguishable from the rest of the universe, and which works on precisely the same laws. Since Hebrew is the only language that has been shown to do that, freedom can only be experienced by a mind that runs on the software that is the Hebrew language. All other languages are at odds with the universe and will be erased by the universe. All pseudo-freedoms enjoyed in those languages will be rescinded and will be as if they had never existed.

The Latin-derived noun liberty comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root "hlewd-" as the aforementioned Greek equivalent ελευθερια (eleutheria) — the Greek "u" is pronounced as a "v", so that eleutheria → elevtheria → elebtheria → lebtheria → lebteria → liberty — but, perhaps surprisingly, that root most crucially expresses community and society. It is also the source of familiar words like the German Leute, the Dutch lieden, the Slavic ljudi; all meaning "people", which implies that our word liberty originated in considerations of government: how to organize a large group of individuals so that not bondage but freedom might ensue. The obvious answer is law, but a law that emerges out of the observation of everybody's behavior: a natural law that describes human behavior when no individual is hindered, and every individual is prevented from hindering someone else's behavior.

Our PIE root "hlewd-" is also suspiciously similar to the PIE root "lewb-", from which English gets its word "love". Where these two roots in turn come from is rarely discussed, but if humanity came out of Africa, chances are excellent that the entire Indo-European language basin more or less derived from the Semitic one. Here at Abarim Publications we have compiled a list of Greek words that may actually be Semitic in origin, which we suppose may have been imported into the European language basin along with the alphabet. Our PIE roots, likewise, are strikingly similar to the Semitic term לברית (librit), meaning "unto a covenant", which occurs from Genesis 17:7-19 to Psalm 74:20, Isaiah 42:6 and 49:8, consistently in descriptions of the relationship of Abraham's covenantal seed to the rest of the human world.

Rather strikingly, the Bible often refers to various cultures via their languages, or more specifically, the writing systems and particularly the material on which texts were written: for Egypt that was papyrus (hence Israel's crossing the Sea of Reeds), for the Trojans that was parchment (hence the name Pergamum), and for the Latin world, it was strips of bark that hung loose from trees. This loose hanging bark was named liber, and that not only explains the English word "library", it also adds meaning to the observation that "cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Deuteronomy 21:23).

Freedom does not come from glorifying an elite selection, and it also does not come from destroying a rejected selection. Instead, freedom comes only from all words that come from the mouth of the Lord (Matthew 4:4), which vastly exceeds all the books from all the materials of all the cultures in the world (John 21:25). Not only Holy Books, but all texts are God-breathed (Genesis 2:7), and are useful for instruction (2 Timothy 3:16). God called to Noah's ark all animals, both clean and unclean, and Noah's job was to curate whatever the Creator had deemed fit to bring about. This is why the Sons of God don't burn other people's books, but rather cherish and respect them, and even study them, until God himself erases those that must not live.

The name Libertine literally means Freed, but only does so in a language that is based on bondage and incompleteness. In that sense, it means Conditional Freedom or even False Freedom or even Freedom For The Price Of Bondage.