The nearest text to this prophecy in Matthew is, “He shall be called a Nazarite unto God” (Judges 13:2–5), uttered by an angel of the Lord prophesying the birth of Samson in a story curiously similar to the annunciation of Mary the mother of Jesus. Samson would “deliver Israel”—from the Philistines. When we think of Samson’s long hair, we may find a “hairy Elijah” connection, and thus link him to John. And of course Samson was one of the great judges who brought down the foreigners’ heathen temple with the power of God. Matthew would appear to have found the similarity of “Nazarene” to “Nazarite” satisfying enough; the subtleties are lost in the Greek. Anyhow, if the book of Judges is the source for Matthew’s fulfillment text, then it is a clear reference not to a place, but to the Nazarite vow. The vow, detailed in Numbers 6:1–21, required fasting and visits to the Temple for prayer. Its performance would necessitate leaving Galilee for Jerusalem; the Nazarite must go to the “door of the tabernacle of the congregation.”
Nazarite, from the Hebrew nezer, spelled with a Hebrew letter zayin or “z,” means “consecrated,” “separated,” “dedicated,” as well as “crown” and even “hair.” It applies to someone dedicated to holiness to God. The high priest’s miter was called a nezer, and on it were inscribed the words “Holy to God.” Taking the Nazarite vow made an individual “Holy to God” for the vow’s duration.
More intriguingly, and more pertinent to the case, in my judgment, the word Nazorean may stem from the Hebrew verb “to keep” (as in keeping the Law) and, above all, “to watch,” suggesting, prosaically, a hill lookout, or watchtower: prosaic in the first instance, but which upon closer inspection opens the required missing link to the Nazarene. The Hebrew NATZARIM from natzar (or natsar) means “watchers.” It occurs, significantly, in Jeremiah 4:16–17:
Make ye mention to the nations; behold, publish against Jerusalem, that watchers come from a far country, and give out their voice against the cities of Judah. As keepers of a field are they against her round about; because she has been rebellious against me, saith the LORD.
The Watchers (natzarim) come from beyond the cities of Judea to publish or proclaim the judgment. They “give out their voice” against those who have fled from the path of God. They are “keepers,” “keepers of a field.” Now recall Jesus’s parable delivered in the Temple about how God’s vineyard will be let to new keepers or “husbandmen,” because the old, corrupt field hands killed God’s prophets. Soon we shall discover what is meant by the “far country” from which the Watchers come.
The imperative “Watch!” is powerfully expressed in Mark’s apocalyptic thirteenth chapter. It opens with a judgment concerning the corrupt Temple:
And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! And Jesus answering said unto him, “Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”
This Samson-like declaration (“thrown down”) launches a chapter full of classic eschatological imagery, much of which is taken from the book of Daniel, including the “Son of man” coming on the “clouds of power.” Mark 13 concludes with an extraordinary command-parable in which the imperative “Watch!” is repeated no less than four times:
Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.
He is coming, and who will stand when he comes? If you wanted a name for this movement, look no further: welcome to the harvest of the Watchers! The Greek “Nazōraiōn” (Acts 24:5), Nazarenes, is thus revealed as a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Natzarim. The “Natzarim” publish the judgment; they keep God’s commandments, and they watch, watch, watch!
When we join the respective meanings of the words keeper and watcher, we produce, in English, the word guardian, and that may be the best sense for us to understand the nature of the original, authentic movement of John and Jesus. They were the Guardians, the Watchers. They loved their country and wished to restore it to true, spiritual Godliness.
The Greek imperative “Watch!” comes from the verb grēgoreō (the origin of the name “Gregory”), which means, as well as “I am watchful” or “alert,” “I am awake” (as in the night). The true guardian, like the true prophet, stands, endures, remains to the end, is awake, watches: a perceiver, a man of light in the darkness, someone you can trust, someone who stands, like a reed in the breath of God.
The disciples, the guardians, fell asleep in Gethsemane; that was Jesus’s agony. They failed to see they were in Paradise. Paradise means a garden, where the story of Man’s fall began, and where it could end.
In modern Hebrew, the Galilean city of “Nazareth” is called Natseret (with a tzaddi). The Hebrew word for land or earth, especially dry land, even desert or scrub, is aretz or arets. Coupled with the idea of the Natsarim we might, in “Nazareth,” be looking at the remains of a compound word for “keeper-land” or “watcher-land.” If Jesus’s father Joseph built an enclosure for Natzarim, it would be an apposite name for a place for those who watched and waited for the fulfillment of God’s secret plan, keeping faith with God’s commandments, removed from the wickedness of the state. There is even an archaeological link between a later settlement on the site and the old Jerusalem priesthood.
A third- or fourth-century CE Hebrew inscription of Galilean towns and villages, discovered in Caesarea in 1962, revealed where a priestly (kohanim) family of the Hapizzez, the eighteenth of the twenty-four priestly courses, settled. This was presumably after the priests, and indeed all Jews, were expelled from Jerusalem by the Emperor Hadrian after 135 CE. The inscription reveals a priestly residence, spelled with the Hebrew tzaddi. The priestly house was at Natzareth, a name possibly derived from a distant time when the sons of Joseph and their friends, the Nazarenes/Natzarim could have looked down from those heights to the Plain of Megiddo (Armageddon) and further south, where the sun was most cruel, beyond Samaria to Ephraim and Judah.
THE FOUNT OF LIVING WATERS AND THE HIDDEN CORRUPTERS OF EARTH
One of those Natzarim was, I believe, Jesus’s brother Judas. Judas is the best candidate for the authorship of what Christian Bibles call “The General Epistle of Jude.” Jude, the deliberately shortened form of Judas provided an English translation for reasons fairly obvious. Judas was too well known as the “traitor,” so, seeing the name “Jude,” most people never guess that the Greek original is absolutely stark in attributing the letter to JUDAS, “the slave of Jesus Christ, and brother of James” (1:1).
Jesus’s brothers names, according to Mark, were Judas, James (Jacob), Joseph, and Simon (Mark 6:3). James and Cephas (“son of John”), the “pillars,” led the Nazarenes after Jesus was crucified. We know little of brother Judas, except, intriguingly, that his grandsons were interrogated by the Emperor Domitian (81–96 CE) at the end of the first century. Judas’s grandsons were interrogated as members of the politically suspect House of David (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, 19–20). This “Judas the Obscure” was the probable author of the last little letter of the New Testament.
The letter shows Judas’s indebtedness to the prophecies of Enoch and that work’s author’s evident familiarity with the esoteric tradition of the evil Watchers: archenemies of Jeremiah’s keeper-Natzarim. Following the Book of Enoch, Judas defined these hidden sowers of wicked seed as “angels, which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Judas, v. 6).
Here we come to what is probably the secret and hidden aspect of the judgment that John and Jesus proclaimed. Whil
e all men and women must turn to God for their salvation, the primal culprits behind the corruption of the creation (the creation, note, not just the Temple) were the wicked, rebellious angels who quit heaven out of lust for the daughters of men and brought forbidden knowledge to the spiritually immature. This theory involved an esoteric interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4. Genesis describes the birth of the Nephilim, usually translated as “giants,” but with a Hebrew root word suggesting “fallen.” Judas holds fast to the Enochian prophecy that the Lord will come to execute judgment on all those who have permitted themselves, through ill will and self-will, to become infected by the primal wickedness:
And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches, which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. (Judas, vv. 14–15)
So we see that in the early first century, the term “the watchers” (natzarim) had a specific esoteric meaning as well as an exoteric, prophetic meaning. The Book of Enoch brings the exoteric and the esoteric together. Familiar to the Essenes, to the New Covenanters or “Qumran sect,” the Book of Enoch provides essential rationale and mythology for the Nazarene message. Dated (in parts) ca. 100 BCE–70 CE, Enoch, like the letter of Judas, is seldom read today, possibly because it has practically nothing to say to the Pauline Christian. That is a pity, for both works have much to say about the authentic worldview of Jesus and his close comrades.
Enoch’s “Watchers” are the angels of God, imagined or manifest as stars, lights in the darkness, looking down on us, guarding, guiding, and keeping us. Enoch is called to proclaim judgment on the evil and rebellious Watchers, who have too long been tolerated by the “Father of Lights.” They are to be bound to Earth as punishment, joined forever to unrepentant humankind. The Father of Lights declares to Enoch, “And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them [the evil Watchers] to the end of all generations.” Judgment is coming:
And destroy all the spirits of the reprobate, and the children of the Watchers, because they have wronged mankind. Destroy all wrong from the face of the earth, and let every evil work come to an end: and let the plant of righteousness and truth appear: and it shall prove a blessing: the works of righteousness and truth appear: and it shall prove a blessing: the works of righteousness and truth shall be planted in truth and joy for evermore. And then shall all the righteous escape, and shall live until they beget thousands of children, And all the days of their youth and their old age shall they complete in peace. (Enoch 11:15ff., my italics)
We are told in chapter 12 of the book that before the end, “Enoch was hidden. . . . And his activities had to do with the Watchers, and his days were with the holy ones.” Enoch was about his Father’s business, as his descendant Jesus was (Luke 3:37):
And I, Enoch, was blessing the Lord of majesty and the King of the ages, and lo! the Watchers called me—Enoch the scribe—and said to me: “Enoch, the scribe of righteousness, go, declare, to the Watchers of the heaven who have left the high heaven, the holy eternal place, and have defiled themselves with women, and have done as the children of earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives: “Ye have wrought great destruction on the earth . . .” (Enoch 12:3ff.)
Apart from drawing on the Nephilim (giant) myth in Genesis 6, key parts of the Book of Enoch appear as a kind of midrash or expansion on Jeremiah 4:15–17, where the word natzarim appears in the Hebrew original:
For a voice declareth from Dan, and publish affliction from Mount Ephraim. Make ye mention to the nations; behold, publish against Jerusalem, that watchers [natzarim] come from a far country, and give out their voice against the cities of Judah. As keepers of a field, are they against her round about, because she hath been rebellious against me, saith the Lord.
Enoch takes up Jeremiah’s declaration from Dan. In doing so, Enoch gives Dan great significance in the apocalyptic itinerary, significance not lost, I believe, on the Nazarenes/Natzarim. It is from Dan, in the far north, that Enoch will publish the judgment on those “rebellious” against the Lord: “And I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon: I read their [the Watchers’] petition till I fell asleep.” (Enoch 13:7ff.) The petition came from Azazel, prince of the fallen Watchers. It begged Enoch to intercede with the Lord of Spirits against the Watchers’ coming judgment. Azazel may be identified with the “prince of this world” or “Satan,” whose dramatic fall Jesus famously envisioned (Luke 10:18; John 12:31). Interestingly, the name Azazel probably derives originally from the Hebrew “scapegoat” (from the Hebrew stem “azel” = “remove”; see Leviticus 16:8–10), loaded with the people’s sin at Yom Kippur and sent out of the city into the wilderness to be cast from a mountain. Readers of deep cross-symbolism may grasp the significance of this.
It is a pity that Dan’s significance to Jeremiah and Enoch has been lost to the Christian tradition. However, when we restore that significance, we see at once how closely the Nazarenes/Natzarim followed the esoteric itinerary of judgment, even though long obscured to second-generation Christian commentators and their descendants.
This is the Dan that Jesus will visit, the Dan renamed and Romanized by Herod Antipas’s half-brother Philip as Caesarea Philippi. This is the place chosen by Jesus to ask the question, “Whom do men say that I am?” to which question he would receive the telling answers: “John the Baptist: but some say, Elias [Elijah]; and others, One of the prophets.” And this is the place where Cephas declares Jesus to be the Messiah (Mark 8:27ff.), where Jesus speaks of the “Son of man” only to be rebuked physically, that is attacked, by an enraged Cephas for saying the Son of man must be rejected and killed—the unbearable opposite of everything Cephas has hoped for. He, Cephas, after all, was Jesus’s protector. Jesus sees evil spirit working through Cephas and casts this “Satan” (or evil Watcher) aside: “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.” The defeat of the fallen Watchers, bound to them that do evil, requires a reversal of the world’s expectation: the Messiah must die; he must be the scapegoat! But Jesus insists his disciples keep what they might grasp of this disturbing mystery secret:
And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:30–31)
Jesus could hardly have chosen a more potent or significant place than Dan to speak openly, if discreetly, to his fellow “natzarim” of the mysterious means by which the prince of this world and his evil Watchers would confront their judgment and lasting incarceration.
Today, Caesarea Philippi is a ruin among ruins. Raised by Philip the Tetrarch in 3 BCE, the grand construction was adjacent to the springs of Paneas (Josephus called Philip’s city “Caesarea Paneas”) where Philip’s father Herod the Great had built a marble temple in honor of his patron Caesar Augustus. The Natzarim would have seen it: the crumbs of the dog served back to its master. They would also have seen an elaborate temenos, or sanctuary, to the god Pan, the god of shepherds, of victory (for he puts “pan-ic” in his enemies), whose name means “the All.” Paneas came from Pan.
Sacred since time immemorial, the springs of Paneas attracted pagan devotions that would have been observed by the Natzarim, and we must presume that John the Baptist would have come to Paneas also. How could he not? For in his day, a giant spring used to gush from a limestone cave whence the waters wove their way down to the Huela marshes, thence southward. According to Josephus, this mighty spring was held to be the source of nothing less than the living waters of the holy River Jordan: “Now the fountains of Jordan rise at the roots of this cavity outwardly; and, as some think, this is the ut
most origin of Jordan” (Wars 1:21:3). How could a prophet not be deeply moved at the poetry and spiritual atmosphere of such a place, close to the source of the purest water that rose within the body of the holy Mount Hermon?
Today, visitors to what is now called Baneas can still see a Roman bridge that passes by the springs. It supports the old road to Damascus. Perhaps Saul stopped at Paneas during his pursuit of the Nazarenes. Perhaps coming to the source proved too much for him. The sun, reflected on all of that meaningful water, would have been pretty blinding. And perhaps Paneas impacted on the New Covenanters also. The Qumran Damascus Document (ca. 70 BCE) announces a new covenant between the “remnant” of Israel and the God of righteousness “in the land of Damascus.” Damascus is about twenty miles northeast of Paneas by direct road:
None of the men who enter the New Covenant in the land of Damascus, and who again betray it and depart from the fountain of living waters, shall be reckoned with the Council of the people or inscribed in its Book from the day of the gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the coming of the Messiah out of Aaron and Israel. [my italics]
While the document’s reference to the “fountain of living waters” seems largely symbolic of the purity of the Law, it would make sense to see its visual analogue as the Jordan’s gushing spring at Paneas, where Enoch slept before declaring the judgment against the wicked Watchers.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 22