Because of the 12500Hz frequency I now hear all the time, which is louder at night, I pick an audiobook I've read and/or listened to for many years, and fall asleep with it in my ears. If I pick something new, it would keep me awake, so I usually opt for the familiar (or something that can only hold my interest for about 5 minutes!).
Last night I was listening to Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael, about two classics teachers meeting serendipitously at Delphi. I loved Stewart's earliest work, and she always wrote a great thriller (combining characterization, humor, and a gift for descriptive prose), but she was raised by a bleak Scottish Presbyterian pastor and as an adult strayed from the Christian faith, exploring pagan religions in her fiction.
This book in particular addressed the worship of Apollo at Delphi, and in one passage describes the bow that Apollo always carries. I decided to refresh my memory on Apollo, and the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo) page was sufficient to support my thought that the Apostle John had Apollo in mind when he described the first Horseman of Rev. 6:2. While John was on Patmos island, writing down the apocalypse he had been shown, the oracle of Apollo was still speaking at Delphi. Patmos was at the center of Apollo worship, between Greece and Anatolia (Turkey), and Apollo was part of Patmos' origin mythology.
The whole page is an interesting read. The young blond sun god who could cause plagues with his arrows and also cure them was a rival for Jesus in the Greek and Roman world of the 1st & 2nd century A.D. The mythos attached to him goes back to Babylonian, Assyrian, and even Hittite worship, and it is possible that non-Israelite prophets (like Balaam) were also given visions of the End Times, and mistakenly worshiped the destroyer (which is one of Apollo's titles). The oracle at Delphi was supposedly the voice of the serpent Python, whom Apollo conquered.
Particularly interesting was the epithet "Lyceus," meaning born of a she-wolf. Zepho (https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h6825/bbe/wlc/0-1/) was the grandson of Esau, and his name means "wolf" in Hebrew; according to the book of Jasher, he married a princess of Greece (Chittim) and was the founder of Rome, because he conquered Italy and then trained two men to rule it under him (hence the legend of Romulus and Remus being nurtured by a wolf), while he returned to Edom. Thus, the foundation of Rome's religion seems to date back to Esau's line, of which the Lord said: "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated." (Malachi 1:2-3, Romans 9:13).
So the conclusion of my reading today is that Rome is a foothold of Esau and the enemy of Jacob, and the Antichrist will come from Rome (or the region of the Roman Empire), and appear as Apollo, the blond youthful sun god who rules the "beast from the sea" (the global supply chain), deals deceitfully in plagues, and kills the Jews.
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Note to Isaiah readers: I am currently in chapter 65 on my study channel, and have decided to finish the study there, and then work like crazy to dump all the studies here. The time consuming part is that Substack doesn’t take Telegram formatting, so I have to redo it all. But there will be a flood of Isaiah coming soon, if the Lord tarries and the creek don’t rise!