Choshech

חושך


There is no actual person or place of this name; it is included in this lexicon because Choshech was once a deity, and because the concept of darkness survives in Judaism as an important deitic metaphor.


The white blobs in the adjacent illustration, some of them with seemingly purple blobs around them, are known as the Tseva'ot, "the Hosts of the Heavens" who are ruled by YHVH Tseva'ot. They are mostly stars and comets filled up with, or filled up by, those most nebulous of all theological phenomena, nebulae.

Genesis 1:2 and 1:4 name "darkness" as a god-force, which is to say an El, one of several that ruled the anarchic pre-universe before it was given substance by YHVH at the time of Creation.

Exodus 10:21 gives the same with a strong sense of Hades, or She'ol, the Underworld, though a much more precise understanding of the concept will be found in my translations of the Egyptian Am-Tuat and the Book of Gates, both of which are due for publication on this blog very shortly (planned date, January 2020, so "watch this space").

Psalm 88 (especially v12) expresses the Yisra-Eli idea of death and the after-life as "the kingdom of darkness". This too is best understood through the two Egyptian texts.

Job 10:21 likewise, ibid and ditto.

Isaiah 42:7, 47:5 and 49:9 give the poetical sense of an underground, Hadean prison, which is rather closer to the Dante than the Milton, though there are early hints of both in all these texts.


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