[300] Seven names are missing from the text. Of the five given, Michael, Amen and Gabriel are given in the chapter on the Ophites in Theodore bar Khôni’s Book of Scholia as the first angels created by God, the name of Baruch being replaced by that of “the great Yah.” “Esaddæus” is probably El Shaddai, who is said in the same book to be the angel sent to give the Law to the Jews and to have treacherously persuaded them to worship himself.
[301] Of these twelve names, Babel is written in bar Khôni as Babylon and said to be masculo-feminine, Achamoth is the Hebrew חכמת, Chochmah, Sophia, or Wisdom whom most Gnostics called the Mother of Life, Naas is the Serpent as is explained in the chapter on the Naassenes, Bel, Baal or the Chaldæan Bel, for Belias we should probably read Beliar, the devil of works like the Ascensio Isaiae, Kavithan should probably be Leviathan, Adonaios is the Hebrew Adonai, or the Lord, while Sael, Karkamenos and Lathen cannot be identified. Pharaoh and “Samiel,” a homonym of Satan, appear in bar Khôni’s list of angels who rule one or other of the ten heavens, and Adonaios and Leviathan in the Ophite Diagram described by Celsus. Cf. Forerunners, II, pp. 70 ff.
[302] Gen. ii. 8.
[303] So a Chinese Manichæan treatise lately discovered (see Forerunners, II, p. 352) speaks of demons inhabiting the soul as “trees.”
[304] ξύλον τοῦ εἰδέναι γνῶσιν κ.τ.λ., “the Tree of seeing Knowledge,” etc.
[305] The context shows that it is the unity, etc., of Elohim and Edem that is referred to.
[306] Cf. n. on p. [177] supra.
[307] Gen. i. 28.
[308] Macmahon, “viceregal”; but the “satrap” shows from which country the story comes.
[309] Thus the Armenian version of Marcion’s theology (for which see Forerunners, II, p. 217, n. 2) makes the “God of the Law’s” withdrawal from Hyle or Matter, and his retirement to a higher heaven, the cause of all man’s woes.