Where did the system of Qaballah come from? To undertand this, we must examine the compensation exchanged between Solomon and Hiram:
1Ki 9:10 ¶And it came to pass at the end of twenty years, when Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the LORD, and the king's house,
11 (Now Hiram the king of Tyre had furnished Solomon with cedar trees and fir trees, and with gold, according to all his desire,) that then king Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee.
12 And Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him; and they pleased him not.
13 And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my brother? And he called them the land of Cabul unto this day.
14 And Hiram sent to the king sixscore talents of gold.
One commentator notes:
The ``land of Cabul'' is a district in Galilee given by Solomon to Hiram and contemptuously called `Cabul' by Hiram. ``Cabul'' means displeasing, or dirty. Josephus says that Cabul, in the Phoenician language, signifies displeasing; and that these cities were situated in the neighbourhood of Tyre. Most commentators are persuaded that the city Cabul in the tribe of Asher was one; and probably from this Hiram took occasion to give this name to all the other cities which Solomon had ceded to him.16
So Hiram scorned the gift of Solomon. Here Solomon is a type of God mixed with the world, of God-likeness mixed with world-likeness--flesh-likeness, of God in the flesh. Hiram is a type of those who reject the gift of God in the flesh. Hiram is a type of those who reject the salvation of Jesus.
Qaballah, and the Freemasonry that is based upon it, reject the true salvation of Jesus. Jesus said that He was the only way to get to God:
Joh 10:9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
Anybody who tries to go around Jesus to get to God is in error:
Joh 10:1 ¶Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
The system of Qaballah tries to do exactly that; it tries to avoid going by way of Jesus to get to God. Qaballah obscures the clarity of God's word:
If Kabbalah means ``tradition,'' then the core of the tradition was the attempt to penetrate the inner meaning of the Bible, which was taken to be the literal (but heavily veiled) word of God. Because the Word was veiled, special techniques were developed to elucidate the true meaning....Kabbalistic theosophy has been deeply influenced by these attempts to find a deep meaning in the Bible.17
But the Bible says:
2Co 4:3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
So we can understand that the Qaballists are indeed lost. This is further amplified by the means that they use to reach God:
The earliest documents (cir. 100-1000 A.D.) associated with Kabbalah describe the attempts of ``Merkabah'' mystics to penetrate the seven halls (Hekaloth) of creation and reach the Merkabah (throne-chariot) of God. These mystics used the familiar methods of shamanism (fasting, repetitious chanting, prayer, posture) to induce trance states in which they literally fought their way past terrible seals and guards to reach an ecstatic state in which they ``saw God.'' An early and highly influential document (Sepher Yetzirah) appears to have originated during the earlier part of this period.
By the early middle ages further, more theosophical developments had taken place, chiefly a description of ``processes'' within God, and a highly esoteric view of creation as a process in which God manifests in a series of emanations. This doctrine of the ``sephiroth'' can be found in a rudimentary form in the ``Yetzirah,'' but by the time of the publication of the book ``Bahir'' (12th. century) it had reached a form not too different from the form it takes today. One of most interesting characters from this period was Abraham Abulafia, who believed that God cannot be described or conceptualised using everyday symbols, and used the Hebrew alphabet in intense meditations lasting many hours to reach ecstatic states. Because his abstract letter combinations were used as keys or entry points to altered states of consciousness, failure to carry through the manipulations correctly could have a drastic effect on the Kabbalist. In ``Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism'' Scholem includes a long extract of one such experiment made by one of Abulafia's students - it has a deep ring of truth about it.18
So we see that Qaballah was alive and well at 100 A.D.--during the Apostolic age of the early church. Low says, ``The word `Kabbalah' means `tradition'.''19 The Masons and the New Age refer to their beliefs as ``philosophy.''20 The apostle Paul warned against these things:
Col 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
It is significant to note that Qaballah was handed down through the middle ages mostly by the Jews. ``Jewish Kabbalah has vast literature which is almost entirely untranslated into English.''21 Low also states, ``A development which took place almost synchronously with Jewish Kabbalah was its adoption by many Christian mystics, magicians and philosphers.''22 How a magician could possibly be Christian is beyond me! It is obviously beyond the scriptural meaning of being a Christian as well:
Ac 13:6 And when they had gone through the isle unto Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Barjesus:
7 Which was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus, a prudent man; who called for Barnabas and Saul, and desired to hear the word of God.
8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so is his name by interpretation) withstood them, seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith.
9 Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him,
10 And said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?
The perversion of Qaballah is a complex structure that is intended to describe the nature of God and the world. It is called ``The Tree of Life.'' It contains a concept called the ``Abyss,'' which is likened to hell. Low states:
The objectification of forms which takes place in a self-conscious being, and the consequent tendency to view the world in terms of limitations and dualities (time and space, here and there, you and me, in and out, God and Man, good and evil...) produces a barrier to perception which most people rarely overcome, and for this reason it has come to be called the Abyss.23
He continues later to say:
There is an eleventh ``something'' which is definitely not a sephira, but is often shown on modern representations of the Tree. The Kabbalistic ``explanation'' runs as follows: when Malkuth ``fell'' out of the Garden of Eden (Fig. 2) it left behind a ``hole'' in the fabric of the Tree, and this ``hole,'' located in the centre of the Abyss, is called Daath, or Knowledge. Daath is not a sephira; it is a hole.24
It is noteworthy that the diagram in Low's fig. 7 omits the Abyss of fig. 6 and replaces it with Daath. This diagram is a network, or graph (in the mathematical sense of graph theory), of states (or vertices, mathematicaly speaking), called sephiroth, that are connected by pathways (or edges). In Low's fig 7, Daath is the only sephira that has exactly two paths connected to it. In his fig. 6, the Abyss is the only sephira that has two paths connected to it. In both cases, these two paths connect to the same sephiroth. This is not only sufficient to establish that these two sephiroth are the ``same'' (mathematicians would say that they are isomorphic), but it also establishes the uniqueness of these sephiroth: there exists no other sephira with this unique property. This may be expressed symbolically in mathematical notation as follows:
Mathematics was preserved and advanced during the middle ages by the Arabs. This is the same time during which Qaballah was also advanced.
There is a fascinating parallel here. An Abyss is a pit--hell. The Daath (Knowledge) of Qaballah is an obvious reference to the ``tree of knowledge of good and evil:''
Ge 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Daath is the ``knowledge'' in The Tree of Life. The scripture above tells us that this knowledge will kill us. We will go to hell. In the structure of The Tree of Life, there are many paths from the world to God, and so it would seem desirable to avoid going through hell, and the knowledge of good and evil, to get to God, but Jesus did go through hell:
Re 1:18 I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
The ``hole-something'' is ``located in the centre of the Abyss.'' Qaballah calls it Daath. The Bible calls it Jesus. Jesus went through hell. Jesus is the hole in Qaballah, the ``something'' that is missing from its doctrine. He went through hell in our place, and He said his way was the only way to do it. All these other paths of the Qaballah do not, in fact, lead to the true God, but rather they lead to a false god: the devil himself. Qaballah is devil worship. Qaballah is Satanism.