Talk:Merkabah

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Shouldn't this article be merged with Merkaba? ArcTheLad 22:23, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes. I went ahead and did it.

Old discussion is at Talk:Merkaba

What is meant by 'speculation?' What weight does it carry within Judaism? Is it similar to the Catholic 'tradition?' That part of the article is unclear to me because it seems that the word speculation is used with greater weight than it is normally given.

Changed the word 'speculation' to 'exegeses'. Speculation seems to be too POV to be appropriate. --Shirahadasha 22:16, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Unsourced Material

Seems to be a lot of unsourced material in the article. Not able to tell if perhaps some editors are doing some speculation of theri own. --Shirahadasha 22:16, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Tarot cards -- the difficulty here is that nothing's been identified as a reference, there are only external links. Not all the external links meet the reliable source criteria necessary to serve as references. --Shirahadasha 03:07, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Also, especially for controversial subjects and subjects where different religions, denominations, or scholars have different interpretations and opinions, footnote-style have often been found necessary to identify who proposed or supports what view. --Shirahadasha 03:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Especially notable is the bit about Maimonides, that he said the Book of Ezekial should be destroyed, etc.... I'm fairly certain he said no such thing; in "The Guide" he refers to the Account of the Chariot as a mystery of the Torah that needs to be guarded and kept secret, by which he means the first part of Ezekial. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.173.156.84 (talk • contribs) 22 December 2006

[edit] Images

Moved the image to the Christianity section. In addition to the fact that these images are by Christian artists, Judaism has some difficulties making images of these things, although it certainly uses art for purposes. That is, the idea of using images as a medium for depiction of this represents more of a Christian idea. --Shirahadasha 03:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but it is not Christian-exclusive, and it's nice to give some visual image at the beginning of the page. 03:09, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stop moving image down

It has no Christian-specific iconography or symbolism, and does not express any Christian-specific interpretation, so it really has nothing to do with the Christian-specific section of this article. Furthermore the objections you raise are only the opinion of some among Jews, so I don't see how it's your place to impose one particular view on the article while claiming a putative right to speak on behalf of all Jews. The editors of the multi-volume impeccably-scholarly "Encyclopaedia Judaica" certainly didn't seem to share your opinion when they included many depictions of Biblical scenes by non-Jewish artists within their reference work. Furthermore, the paragraph at the top of the article is not in fact a "Jewish" section -- it's a section defining the basic phenomenon. There then follows two Jewish sections, one Christian section, one New Age section, and one Trivia section -- but the first paragraph does not belong to any of these. AnonMoos 03:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External links

Move links to talk page. Several seem to be selling products or services, mostly of a New Age type, which it is claimed are based on or related to the Merkabah. These claims strike me as dubious. I would suggest limiting links to religious or academic organizations that provide information with some indicia of reliability. I would say the same thing of a site by e.g. an isolated rabbi without additional information to establish the individual's reliability. A couple of these sources may be reliable, I will move them back if they are. Please feel free to weigh in and discuss. --Shirahadasha 05:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Bravo. --mordicai. 18:34, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Alternative explaination....

Could it be possible that Ezekiel took one too many drops of acid instead? - 124.82.8.188 02:27, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

No: there is a parallelism in early twelfth-century France between the Narbonne school of Rabad (the author of the first Kabbalistic text, the Bahir) and the Paris school of Notre Dame, which subseqently split into the Realists and Nominalists on the extremes, with the Conceptualists in the middle. Both schools, one Christian and one Jewish, started from applying neo-platonist thinking to their own theologies and went on to develop, virtually simultaneously, similar transcendent experiences, Pentecostalism and the Merkabah.
It is to be noted that the Roman Catholic claims over dominion crystalised in 1435-6 in Brussels, and I would ask anyone with real knowledge about the Jewish side to correspond with me privately on the subject: I am particularly interested in an explanation why the Desecration pogroms were virtually identical and why the victims appear to have collaborated in their own immolation, in a very similar way to the Templars.Jel 08:10, 13 September 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Egyptian

Strange is your article:
1)there is no Egyptian source explination - Mer: means light; ka: means vital energy; bah: soul(in old Egyptian)
2)everybody knows that the bible is a imitation of the egyptian religion - why there is no connection to the source?
It is very poor! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.227.164.124 (talk) 02:38, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately for your preferred style of "etymologizing", Semitic etymologies proceed by triconsonantal roots, and the root of merkaba is R-K-B. Also, merkaba was a perfectly ordinary word meaning "chariot" for many centuries before it acquired signifcant mystical connotations. And no, "everybody" doesn't know that ancient Israelite religion was an "imitation" of Egyptian religion. There were certain Egyptian influences (generally having far more to do with wisdom literature than with theology as such), but there's no specific evidence that I'm aware of that Ezekiel's vision manifests any meaningful Egyptian influences... AnonMoos (talk) 23:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)