Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree

One of the reasons for the current convention that philosophy began in Greece is a purely formal one, in that historians of western thought have taken the view that we have no direct evidence of the discussion of philosophical matters from any other cultural context (other than the Greek oikumene) before the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. This state of affairs is more apparent than real however. The dialogue format was well established from the days of Sumer onwards, and these usually consist of discussion of the relative merits of excellent things. Those dialogues which survive however are highly formalised, and do not explore the abstractions considered in classical Greece. We have no accounts of the kind of abstract discussion which clearly underpins the concept of the king as the perfect man and the embodiment of the divine order. But clearly these discussions took place.

The family resemblances now apparent between aspects of Assyrian, Hebrew and Greek thought open up huge new avenues for research. Each of these cultures possesses a tradition of understanding its divinities in terms of an esoteric abstract ontological model, and it is now possible to begin to understand how these traditions stand in relation to one another. There is of course much which remains to be understood, but, questions concerning the metaphysics of representation, of creation, of the nature of Being, and the author of the world, are co-existent with the phenomenal aspects of the ancient religions which have come down to us. It must now be hard for us to look at philosophy as something which is to be understood simply as successor to religious accounts of the world, emerging into history at a time when religion and mythology were found wanting as explanatory mechanisms.