Old Testament

What this work carries

The Old Testament transmits the Hebrew counter-current within the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, preserving in written form the prophetic preparation of the bodily and soul vessel for the Christ Event. Through the line Abraham → Moses → David → Solomon → the prophets, it carries forward the Yahweh-impulse that worked from the moon-sphere to ready human blood-inheritance for the Incarnation.

Language frame

Hebrew scripture in narrative, legal, sapiential, and prophetic forms, whose imaginative-pictorial mode of telling history reflects an older atavistic clairvoyance translated into priestly-written record. Its grammar of the divine name and its genealogical emphasis bind cosmic event to physical lineage.

Steiner’s engagement

• GA 155, 1914-07-12Steiner states that the Christ was already working in the Old Testament, though unrecognized by those through whom he worked.
• GA 139, 1912-09-20Steiner emphasizes that the Old Testament repeatedly underscores how its people belong to a particular bloodstream, making the line of inheritance the carrier of the preparatory revelation.
• GA 175, 1917-03-27Steiner holds that the Old Testament can only be understood through familiarity with imaginative conceptions, which nineteenth-century intellectualism had lost.
• GA 210, 1922-02-17Steiner contrasts the Old Testament creed as the polar opposite of modern nature-knowledge, since it knew neither nature as we know it nor the human being as the Greeks did.
• GA 210, 1922-02-18Steiner notes that Philo of Alexandria already allegorized the whole Old Testament, marking the moment when its direct imaginative narration began to be intellectually decoded.
• GA 209, 1921-12-26Steiner distinguishes the age described in the Old Testament from that of the New Testament, locating Christianity's deepest experience in the transition between them.
• GA 186, 1918-11-29Steiner identifies dominant Old Testament conceptions as those of Old Testament Judaism which later took worldly form in Romanism.
• GA 187, 1918-12-24Steiner sees in the Pharisees and Sadducees the externalization of what had been given to humanity through the Old Testament, against which the Christ-impulse appears.
• GA 347, 1922-09-13Steiner observes that the ancient Hebrews — from whom the Old Testament comes — still spoke of bodily organs such as the kidney with a directness foreign to later abstraction.

Cross-tradition congruence

• Egyptian mystery-wisdomBoth frame cosmic order through priestly transmission and ritual law, but the Hebrew current narrows the cosmic to the genealogical to prepare a single bodily vessel.
• Zoroastrian AvestaBoth inscribe a moral-cosmic polarity into history and await a coming redeemer, though the Hebrew line works through bloodline rather than through Sun-being recognition.