32. The Bible and Wisdom II

Thus it becomes clear that we need only understand the naming of ancient times, then it becomes bright within us in what the documents of the Bible tell us from this chapter of the history of creation. In those ancient times of dim clairvoyance, man did not attach much importance to his own personal experiences; they were only a small part of that great circle of experience to which he felt he belonged. He spoke of that which his consciousness overlooked as a unified entity. And so, just as when you talk to another person today, that person appears to you as something real, and the succession of generations as a whole appears more or less abstract, so to those people the individual person was insignificant, and what was important to him was what held his consciousness, reaching back over generations, together. Thus, in the patriarchal names, we do not have names for individual personalities, but rather a designation of a sum of beings. Thus, something in the Bible shines for us, which we recognize in its true sense when we face it equipped with higher spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is the way in which the person who recognizes it can look at the Bible. He first sees how it was in ancient times, and then, when he can understand correctly, he finds that the description of the Bible is just the same, wants to say the same thing. At that time, those who wrote down these records simply described what they were aware of.