LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 121including the Jews, who initially dominate and then share the stage with
Christians and pagans. This fantastic, eclectic tale, speaking to diverse reli-
gious audiences of the period, initiates the gnostic drama that will persist on
many sundry stages for the next thirteen or fourteen hundred years.^3
The Book of Baruch has three principles: two male and one female. The
two male principles are the Good and Elohim, the father of all, who is sta-
tioned below the Good. The transcendent Good as the highest divine mani-
festation clearly goes back to the good as the highest principle in platonic
philosophy. The third figure is the female principle, Edem (earth) or Eden
(garden), inferior to both, who is half woman and half beast. She participates
in both upper and lower worlds. Humans are the fruit of the union of Elohim
with Edem, from whom they receive spirit and soul respectively.^4
Father Elohim represents spirit and breathes spirit (pneuma) into the first-
born Adam, while mother Edem, representing soul and earth, breathes soul
(psyche) into Adam. When Elohim dumps Edem in Eden and returns to his
creator, the Good, Edem is jealous and revengeful. As the drama unfolds and
Edem brings out her angels, including the serpent Naas (from nahash, He-
brew for "serpent"), to fight against what is left of Elohim's spirit on earth,
Baruch, a top angel of the Good, sends a series of liberators—Moses, Herak-
les, prophets, and finally Jesus—to ensure redemption and return.
As the female principle, Edem in Baruch has many essences: she is garden;
earth; Israel; creator of humans, beasts, and the soul; and a symbol of Eve, who
is her creation and her double as the earth mother. Edem recalls the gnostic
creator Sophia, thought and wisdom, who because of a disturbance and inad-
equacy in god was separated from the One, fell from the pleroma, and created
the world. The Good is the entirely new personage in this triadic system of
principles, and he is already a gnostic figure in name and transcendent pow-
ers. Elohim and Edem have a biblical past and a gnostic future. Elohim is still
seen as a benign creator god and father, not the demiurge who imprisons par-
ticles of light in earthly bodies, yet he now must rise to heaven, report to the
Good, and confess his error in thinking himself the lord. Then he is redeemed.
3.From the vantage of Jewish orthodoxy, the violation of monotheism has also begun in the
dualistic reception of a Jew called Jesus not only as the messiah—who in Judaism is foreseen as
a human leader anointed and sent by god—but as a messiah (Christ) celebrated as god himself
or as god's son or equal, sitting beside god in heaven on the closest throne.
- See Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, p. 169.