The Handbook of Established Righteousness

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

The Handbook opens not with instruction but with a calling. Ben Elim records the Lord speaking to him directly, explaining that just as Melchizedek went before him to establish Shabuwa among the Eerkodeshoi in his own day, Ben Elim’s task in these tumultuous latter times is to establish Shabuwa among the righteous peoples of the earth, wherever they are found, and among any who will repent and come to Him — with the promise that many will be spared in the tribulation times to come, finding the means to establish righteous communities that express the sevenfold covenant of Shabuwa. The volume is dedicated to all the brave and faithful souls who set their hand to establish the twenty-third High Priest Community. In a separate passage recorded before the book’s proper preface, the Lord describes a host of angels, including Michael, Ge’iyra, and the strong angel Arayah, appointed to accompany this knowledge of established righteousness wherever it travels in the world and to carefully watch over what is done with it, acknowledging that sharing it may bring real threats to those who do — though the Lord assures Ben Elim that the cost need not be measured, since if he could know what these truths will come to mean for His people, he would surely rejoice at having had the chance to share them.

The Foreword explains that this handbook chronicles what has actually been established and lived within Ben Elim’s own community, offered as an aid rather than a rigid template, since the Lord will lead each reader to whatever part of it is meant for them. Much of the culture reflected here is Essene — a Jewish sect first established by Ezekiel and brought to its full form around the time of the Maccabees — representing one interpretation of the Religion of Shabuwa, with a holy-day calendar that varies from what Enoch himself established in his own day. The Foreword is careful to note that Enoch’s time had no formal Community Rule and no days of repentance as such, so later communities are expected to seek the Lord’s own guidance for what they establish, rather than replicate this handbook exactly; what is preserved here, though, are elements of righteous expression and uses of element that have proven effective and enduring over long experience.

The Preface proper turns from the book’s origin to the urgency of the moment it was written into. As this handbook was being prepared for publication, the nations of the world were being judged by Anokeesed, national sovereignty crumbling under purposeful forces driving the world’s peoples into chaos. Ben Elim assumes that anyone who has sought out this volume intends to help establish righteous communities of one kind or another, and acknowledges that chaos naturally brings powerful feelings of vulnerability, pushing some toward pure survivalism — generators for when the power fails, stockpiles of freeze-dried rations, a readiness to defend their provisions to the death — while others choose instead to rely on the Lord’s guidance and trust in Him. Every family, he counsels, must consciously decide the values they will live by and how their resources will be used, gravitating toward others of like persuasion while putting mechanisms in place so those values cannot later be overwhelmed or compromised from within. In his own community, this has meant genuinely living by an application of the Essene Community Rule within the Religion of Shabuwa — a rule that, in practical terms, means no swearing, no disrespectful exchanges, no arguing or contention among the people, which Ben Elim calls, without exaggeration, a monumental achievement. He closes with a caution against being intimidated out of these values by accusations of unfairness, reminding the reader that a righteous community’s first and foremost responsibility is to the Lord Himself, since it is His right to have His people and their right to have Him, and their children are described as nothing less than His future and the crown of their inheritance in heaven.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

How to Use this Book explains that the handbook is meant as an aid to students of the whole Book of Remembrance library, of particular use to those actively engaged in establishing righteous communities under the Religion of Shabuwa, drawing especially on the religious environment of the ancient church — the long stretch of time from when the first parents left Eden until shortly after the Flood and before Abraham. Ben Elim is careful to stress that this handbook is not meant to suggest there is only one acceptable expression of righteousness, since God loves many expressions of it; what he offers instead is a framework for understanding which parts of what follows must be carefully followed and which parts may reasonably vary; and, of course, everything established in any community must ultimately be led by the Spirit of the Lord rather than by the letter of this book.

He lays out this framework as three broad historic models a community might draw from. The first is the modern Christian expression, some form of Western Christianity adapted to contemporary issues and lifestyles, which he considers the easiest to adopt when transitioning directly out of modern culture into community life. The second is the ancient church model itself, which a passage in the Book of Enoch identifies as essential for the righteous of the Last Days to survive the coming tribulation and sweep the earth with righteousness and truth — the same pattern that once carried Enoch’s own righteous people back to Eden now positioned to carry the righteous of these last days into the Arm of the Lord, the great Gathering of Zion, and beyond that into the Second Coming, that space between the fall of Babylon and the Second Coming being the very rest the Lord Himself has earned. Ben Elim reminds his readers that every community must pass through its own process of becoming, and counsels patience with the Lord’s gentle timing even when some lessons must be learned the hard way, offering along the way his own working definition: to establish righteousness means to identify and define the four spirits of life in creation and to set their holy use in place through ceremony and as a way of life, since a righteous human culture cannot simply generate itself but can only be accomplished through the effective joining of God, creation, and man together in equal parts.

On the practical matter of navigating the book itself, Ben Elim notes that while its sectioned structure makes it easy to skip around and zero in on subjects of particular interest, the overall order was deliberately chosen for the flow of its concepts, and first-time readers are strongly encouraged to begin at the beginning rather than skip ahead, since the ideas introduced early on are essential groundwork for everything that follows meaningfully afterward. The later sections, covering ceremonies and the ancient tablets, are more self-contained and can be approached in any order once the first two sections have been read and genuinely absorbed. He closes by reminding readers that the material gathered here reflects a long road of lived experience in righteous communities, including native communities, and asks for patience above all with oneself while working through it — and clarifies that this handbook deliberately does not repeat information already found throughout the other volumes of the Book of Remembrance library, functioning instead as a practical companion to them.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 1 opens with the book’s foundational definitions, starting with righteousness itself. Ben Elim notes that standard dictionaries define it simply as a right relationship with God, but in the pre-Flood ancient church, righteousness meant something considerably broader: a right relationship with God, with other people, and with every element of creation. Since the ancients understood everything in creation — trees, hills, rocks, wind, rivers — to be alive, being righteous meant acting in harmony with what each of these actually feels, knows, and does, interacting with a tree, for instance, the same way one would interact with a person: through an expression of who it is and how it sees itself, and always in a manner consistent with how God Himself views that same thing. This same standard applies to relationships between people, since we are expected to treat our neighbor according to how God views him, not merely according to our own judgment.

This framework leads directly into the meaning of Shabuwa itself, traced to Strong’s Hebrew #7620, “to be sevened,” derived from #7651, meaning to swear a declaration seven times over to make a covenant permanent — the same kind of repeated, binding declaration people already make in marriage, and above all in their renewed covenant to love the Lord as described in the first and second commandments. Section 1 goes on to introduce the Use of Righteous Element, cautioning that while most people are only marginally familiar with the idea beyond well-known examples like anointing oil or the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, the Lord Himself made extensive use of element throughout His ministry — pointing to the elaborate ceremony prescribed for lepers in Leviticus 14, involving cedar, sparrows, scarlet wool, hyssop, running water, and more. An element of righteousness, the text explains, is simply any use of the spirit of life within some part of creation to magnify the Lord’s presence in worship, since spirit and element are joined in holiness — and that spiritual joining is, at its root, the very definition of righteousness. A sobering aside follows concerning the Decadarchoi, whose influence dominates food, clothing, transportation, healthcare, and nearly every other system of modern life; since it is not possible to fully escape these influences while still living in the world, the counsel given is not condemnation but honest remorse — to use what must be used with clear eyes and without ever growing to love it, keeping a weather eye on the day such things can finally be set aside.

The section’s most distinctive contribution is its Dictionary of Righteous Definitions, introduced with real humility: these entries are described not as fixed dogma but as an attempt to put into words a feeling that is, by nature, very hard to express — something meant to be refined over time through lived experience with the Lord’s Spirit rather than memorized as rigid formulas, and traditionally something only men after the Order of Melchizedek are meant to define in the first place. The dictionary catalogs the spirit of life felt in a huge range of birds, animals, plants, and natural features, offering a brief phrase of meaning for each: the American Bittern for the fullness of the gift of life, the Black-Capped Chickadee for happiness, the Blue Jay for righteousness as the north bird whose song celebrates God’s self-revelation, the Brown Creeper for unselfishness, the Brown Thrasher as the west bird associated with repentance and family, the Blue Bird for new life springing from righteousness, and the Cardinal for something new arriving. Elsewhere in Section 1, this same dictionary connects to what the record calls the languages of repentance and glory — a gentle, never-accusatory second witness to the Spirit’s guidance that comes through the Eerkodeshoi’s own voices in creation, offered to remind, alert, or even protect a person who may have missed the Spirit’s first prompting.

Turning to Righteous Leadership in Community, Ben Elim identifies seven leadership groups that together carry the community’s decisions: the Young Mothers, who see to family needs like clothing, education, and health; the Fathers, or Heads of Households, who manage farm and work crews; the Older Elders, tasked with equality of care across the community; the Scribes, who safeguard the religious texts and oversee education; the Storehouse Board; the Orders of Service for both men and women; and the Council of the Community itself, which carries the highest expectation of being led by the Spirit given its presiding role. He is emphatic that none of this constitutes a hierarchy, since a hierarchy grades people into a better-than-another order, and Achee‘s own record identifies exactly this kind of comparison of souls as the devil’s very first evil. Ben Elim draws a sharp contrast with religious structures where a priest or minister effectively forgives a person in God’s place; in righteous expressions of religion, it remains simply the person and the Lord, with every form of leadership meant only to strengthen that direct relationship, since the Lord alone is anyone’s true intercessor. He offers a memorable diagnostic drawn from Grandmothers 4:46, that a particular kind of uncleanness rooted in low self-esteem cannot be washed away by water or ceremony, but only by obedience, repentance, and humbly accepting forgiveness — observing that most contention in community traces back to either pride or low self-esteem. His practical counsel to leaders includes owning one’s own feelings rather than letting others dictate them, offering people the same steady, surprised delight in their goodness that a loving parent gives a child, and making sincere apology and forgiveness a genuine habit of daily life.

The Men of Service are described as tracing back to what Enoch called the Divisions of Elda, Elda being the realm where the Father Anokeesed dwells; each division of ministers lays hold of a different aspect of God’s own will, thoughts, and hopes, applying their particular strengths and knowledge to address that aspect of Him in the lives of the people and the Eerkodeshoi, per the pattern recorded in Enoch 11:26-35. Ben Elim notes this framework was later completed when the Lord, at the establishment of Shabuwa by Melchizedek and Zedeqetelebab, defined for the first time a matching Holy Order for women. On Ordinations, the text turns specifically to the process for entering the Order of Abarah — the order whose members undertake forty days of consecrated seeking, following the pattern of Christ’s own forty days, as well as Elijah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist, and Enoch on Mount Mahujah, with women undertaking twenty-two days for their own designation. Because Ben Elim considers this order essential yet uniquely vulnerable if entered wrongly, he lays out careful safeguards: there must be no pressure, agenda, or status-seeking involved; the calling should never come as a total surprise, since others should already sense it beforehand; candidates should generally be well established in community, ideally well into their third or fourth Omer of spiritual growth; their communication should invite rather than restrict the community’s process of common consent; their skill in repentance and receiving reproval should be thoroughly examined; and any language of repentance they receive during their days must stay clearly tied to the days themselves rather than drift into speculation about others.

The Element of Paint, used throughout the handbook, is made from small colored rocks, rasped, scraped, or filed into powder — the more vibrant the color the better — then wetted and stored in the small depressions of a drilled pipestone paint block or a naturally formed stone cup called a paint kelly, remoistened whenever needed. A specific finger is used to apply it to a person’s face, chosen according to the meaning of that finger, often with a small brush of yucca leaves, rattlesnake master, or nettles, and the position on the face carries its own meaning as well. For sandpaintings, the same dry powder is instead mixed with clean, fine sand and kept dry until use, dribbled out in a controlled line by sliding forefinger and thumb past one another.

The Role of Women in Community opens with real candor: the question of women’s place in religion has been one of the most contentious debates in the Western world for the last forty years, severe enough to split whole denominations, and it was already at its peak when Ben Elim’s own community was first established in 1987. Rather than take a position, they waited on the Lord, working from one underlying principle — that equality is not sameness, so women were never elevated by resembling men, nor were men diminished simply because women could do something they could not. Light on the subject came gradually, through classes, women’s retreats, and eventually the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which revealed that the Essenes seated women on their council with the same importance of function as the men, including women scribes, an elevated and powerful class in that culture. When Achee was received, women were shown to hold high standing in religious affairs generally, and the Guidance Tablet, also called the Family Tablet, went further still: it placed particular emphasis on virtues women seemed able to express more fully than men, and vice versa, showing Christ’s own priesthood symbol on the man’s side of the tablet but not the woman’s, while showing a woman’s capacity for spontaneity, charity, and innocence of heart as remaining highly developed throughout her life, a gift a man carries only in childhood before losing it in maturity. The Book of Remembrance of our Ancient Grandmothers is likewise full of women shaping the ancient world in lasting ways, and Melchizedek finally reveals the whole architecture: spiritual authority at the edge of eternity is called simply the Holy Order, which upon reaching the temporal world divides into two expressions using entirely different resources — the Order of Melchizedek for men and the Order of Zedeqetelebab for women — first formally established together on earth by Shem and his wife Shum. The Lord later touched each of them separately in sleep and gave them their own Anokeesed names as archangels: Shem became Michael, with charge over the Eerkodeshoi; Shum became Ge’iyra, with charge over the abiding angels of the Fourth Station of heaven who protect the Lord’s people.

Before Shabuwa was established, the Order of Melchizedek was known instead as the men of Abarah, a role Enoch had already prophesied while dividing the sons of men, with early traces of it visible clear back in the First Book of Achee and in Enoch’s own record of a wife’s strong connection to that order. Men of this order undertake forty days of prayer and fasting so the Lord can define the specific nature of their ministry — Ben Elim himself completed twenty-two of his forty days, the longest single stretch lasting seven days — following the same pattern kept by Christ, Elijah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist, and Enoch on Mount Mahujah; the potential for good is magnified for a man called to this order, but so is the potential for harm if ego and pride ever take hold, which is why careful safeguards must be in place. Their wives, in turn, must also undergo a revelatory experience of their own, spending three periods of seven days plus one additional day alone with the Lord to receive light on their own ministry and vision, shared with and approved by the community’s council using the same criteria applied to their husbands; scripture records women who entered this order even with wayward husbands, among them Baraka and Iona. A woman of Zedeqetelebab’s recognition ceremony mirrors a man’s, save that she sits on a sheepskin wearing a crown of bulrushes, her hair down, with her sacred bundle and walking stick beside her, dressed in a distinctive leather worship garment wrapped around the middle with a wide band over the left, or power, shoulder — the same garment Ben Elim recognized having already seen on Tipharah in the First Book of Achee. Rather than being called a priesthood, a label Ben Elim feels would invite unnecessary debate, this order’s function is described as protecting, nourishing, and strengthening the righteous, bringing angelic protection especially through the tribulation times still to come; its women may bring protective spirits to bear in various ceremonies, perform Matriarchal Blessings, preside over Safe Delivery Ceremonies, bring the influence of the abiding angels to Joining Ceremonies, and add strong protections to Separation Ceremonies.

Women’s Clans within the community are three: the Protection Clan, the Service Clan, and the Virtue Clan, each led by its own Clan Chief — simply the highest-inscribed woman within that clan, since the community keeps only a single order of inscription rather than separate ones for each clan. Ben Elim admits he knows relatively little about how clan systems work among native peoples generally, where lineage, bravery, or an elder’s designation can all determine membership; in his own community, the three women’s clans, like the four men’s orders of service, are instead based on a person’s vision and the personality that flows from it, discovered the same way a man discovers his own call to service, through a genuine revelatory experience with the Lord. Each woman likewise has her own worship service of affirmation, following the same order of worship used for men’s ordinations but adapted to fit her particular clan, a service meant both to let her share what she has learned of her clan and to instruct and remind her of it further. Among the clans themselves, the order of inscription follows their role in the repentance process: the Protection Clan is inscribed first, the Service Clan second, and the Virtue Clan third.

The Religion of Shabuwa, established by the Lord with the first parents, takes its name from Strong’s Hebrew #7620, meaning sevened or a week of years, itself drawn from #7650, shaba, to be complete or to seven oneself, as if swearing an oath by repeating a declaration seven times to make it complete and irrevocable. It is a covenant of bonding and rich fellowship between the Eerkodeshoi and the righteous, the mother religion underlying all the world’s native righteous peoples, and the fountain of the Living Water pouring out of Eden to empower the children of light throughout the whole course of the earth, its roots reaching back into Elda itself. Standing opposite it is the secret Society of Saycoo, the mother religion of the world’s wicked peoples, a fountain of putrid water gushing from the abyss to empower and mislead the children of darkness, an unholy agreement between the Decadarchoi and wicked mankind rooted instead in Senaseol, the hateful land of the dead. Cavah herself was the first to practice sevening, declaring her joy at being forgiven seven times over in her sacred dance, raising up as she did her part to transform Olam into Eden; from there the idea of sevening spread to all the spirits of life in creation, until Melchizedek gave it its fullest expression by blowing the Trumps of Summons and Assembly every Sabbath for seven weeks, rehearsing the covenant seven times, and on the fiftieth day sounding the final Trump of Assembly to make it permanent and eternal — a ceremony so powerful that Shabuwa became the strongest force to suppress the adversary, who was compelled to hide himself. Because of this, only men of Abarah together with their Zedeqetelebab wives, properly and formally installed, may perform this ceremony on the Day of Instruction, and Ben Elim warns in the strongest terms against anyone else attempting to blow the trump on that day, since doing so without proper preparation places a person directly in the crosshairs of evil. Beyond ceremony, the Religion of Shabuwa is described as a complete way of life and freedom to covenant with creation, with God, with one’s fellows, and with Motsah the Lamb, whom its people hold to be the only way back to the Father; it addresses not only local, present needs but the worldwide needs of Anokeesed Himself, in the spirit of Revelation 5:10’s promise that the righteous will be made kings and priests to reign on the earth. Its adherents consider anyone anywhere responding to the Holy Spirit to be one with them in spirit, which is why Christ ate with sinners and Samaritans, why Essene Baptists like John baptized Roman soldiers, and why the Essenes seated women as scribes and full council members and practiced common consent long before the wider world did; they are gentle and mild, refusing to argue about religion, and once wore yellow-gold on their sleeve openings to remind themselves, each time they slipped their hands into their sleeves, that those hands would perform only acts of lovingkindness.

The Name of God takes direct aim at centuries of mistranslation that have painted God as wrathful. Ben Elim walks through specific examples: in Revelation 19:15, the word usually rendered fierceness is Greek #2312, meaning divinely instructed or in depth, and the word rendered wrath is #3709, meaning simply desires — nothing like the violent connotations readers assume. Hebrew has other words that genuinely do mean anger, such as #2195, to froth at the mouth, or #2534, chema, hot displeasure, which biblical authors could easily have used had that been their intent. Compounding the problem, ancient peoples, including some of the prophets, attributed natural disasters to God’s wrath or anger, when in fact these were the grief responses of the Eerkodeshoi mourning over sin, not divine fury at all. Ben Elim appeals finally to plain common sense: Christ, being exactly like His Father, would say and do only what the Father would; Jesus taught love for enemies and forgiveness seventy times seven and told His followers to pray for those who despitefully used them, so it makes no sense that the same God would simultaneously command genocide or reserve vengeance for Himself, especially since James states plainly that the same mouth cannot both bless and curse. God’s true name, Ben Elim argues, is lovingkindness, and it matters greatly that the righteous learn this now, in a time when so much evil is done in His name; the impersonal answer Moses received at the burning bush, I exist, is described as a clever historical distancing of man from God that has worked against the keeping of the very first commandment, to love Him with all one’s heart, might, mind, and strength.

Prayer Vigils and Watches were practiced by the Essenes with long, profound effectiveness, first established historically by Ezekiel, who was also the founder of Esseneism; Christ Himself is recorded mentioning watches twenty-two times in the Bible. The Essenes at Secacah, or Qumran, held day-and-night watches specifically to call forth the birth of Christ, a practice no other Jewish group of the time observed around the clock; participants took daily communion of the holy food and holy drink and were baptized daily in a Miqveh bath before entering their watch session, and the vigil lasted twenty years before Mary was born, followed by a second watch spanning the whole of Christ’s life. Facilitating these watches required two additions to Essene religious structure: a new type of community council to oversee the watch, and a new watch rule, later revised in over sixty places as the watch’s nature changed and now mistaken by scholars for the Community Rule proper. After Christ’s birth the watch shifted to praying for Him until His ministry began, requiring yet a third kind of council, a traveling one to attend Him wherever He went — His Twelve Apostles, with Peter, James, and John embedded within them as the Three, giving the Essene tradition three types of councils, each structured around a twelve and a three. In the present day, with righteous populations still small, every full member can serve on a single community council; a person of service inscribed on that council can call a watch, typically lasting a few weeks, with the hours of each day divided so someone is always praying, its purpose kept simple and clearly defined so the prayers of many people do not become confused. Participants vary their approach across a watch — praying, reading scripture, singing and praising, or simply walking and talking to the Lord aloud — since repeating the same prayer hour after hour for weeks is not sustainable; mild-topic watches allow ordinary work to continue alongside quiet prayer, while serious ones call for everyone to stop and pray with full concentration during their assigned hour. Watches can be called to deliver someone from evil, to seek out a hidden truth, or even by a small group, such as the mothers of the community praying together over a child’s difficulty. A serious watch requires real preparation beforehand: agreeing together on a brief, clear description of its purpose, discussing what kinds of prayer and study will be needed, doing whatever repentance the topic itself calls for, making sure everyone’s protection element is in order, and confirming that those choosing to pray at difficult hours are spiritually ready to stand against any opposition the Adversary might bring.

Doing Days of Repentance explains the very principle the Community Rule’s whole code of behavior is organized around. In wider society, being reproved feels insulting, disrespectful, and debasing; among the righteous, by contrast, reproval is treated as an invitation to better align oneself with the truth, an opportunity to draw closer to the Lord in deeply personal ways. The essential safeguard is defining repentance narrowly and specifically as changing in relation to the Lord, since not all change qualifies as repentance — a person could, after all, simply change how they crack safes. Real repentance, the text insists, should feel like a happy, exciting, gratifying process, and a call to repentance should be received as one of the most extreme acts of love and compassion a person can be shown; the single most critical element for a genuinely happy life in community is learning to love repentance itself, loving the discovery of how to become a better person, parent, friend, or neighbor. The community also assigns real weight to the specific number of days chosen for a period of repentance or a watch: twenty-two days, matching the twenty-two works of creation, is used to bring a permanent influence into a person’s life, following the pattern of Daniel’s own fast; forty days is more serious still, reserved for bringing God’s word into the world in some genuinely new way, such as recognizing a new man of Abarah or responding to newly emerging light; anything longer than forty days is meant for changing the very course of the earth.

Central to this whole process is a four-stage path toward full membership, each stage called an Omer, each with its own scriptural text drawn from the Book of Remembrance library and no fixed length of time, since a person moves forward only when they and the community are genuinely ready. In the First Omer, the Omer of Repentance, a new resident commits in their heart to do whatever their repentance and discipline requires in order to know the Lord, studying the First Book of Achee. Once the Many judge them ready, they advance to the Second Omer, the Omer of Righteousness, given over to becoming purified and sanctified and increasingly feeling the Lord in all things, studying the Book of Enoch. The Third Omer, of All Things Common, deepens their relationships with Motsah through righteousness in every part of life, working toward the promise that sickness and sorrow will be done away to the extent that the Eerkodeshoi will obey them, using the Book of Remembrance of our Ancient Grandmothers as their text; only after three years or more in community may a person even approach the Many for this stage. Finally, the Fourth Omer of Common Consent enlarges the promise further still, to know and feel both the joys and burdens of Anokeesed and to take part in genuine acts of companionship that comfort Him, using the Book of Melchizedek; once approved by the Council, the person may participate fully in common consent among all the Many. Each transition requires the Many to weigh a person’s case according to the leadings of the Spirit and the counsel of their instructors, and all promises are made publicly at the altar during Ingathering, before all their fellows; anyone who has not reached fourth-year status within seven years must depart from the community, unless the Council decides otherwise.

Council of Community and Common Consent describes the actual mechanics by which every decision in community life is made. Common Consent is emphatically not majority rule but unanimous consent: unless everyone on the deciding body genuinely agrees, no decision is accepted, and only full members not currently serving exclusionary days of repentance may take part. Six courtesies govern the process: treating Common Consent itself as a form of worship, staying positive and saying only virtuous things; speaking only as instructed by the Spirit; showing real respect for the languages of repentance and glory as they arise; never expressing simple self-interest; keeping the common good uppermost at all times; and remaining willing to change at the first sign that some improvement is possible, since this very willingness to adapt as the Spirit directs is the community’s own definition of stability. In practice, each of the three women’s clans tends to contribute its own distinct perspective to a decision — the Protection Clan urging awareness that no one is left out, the Service Clan keeping everyone compassionate toward each other’s circumstances, the Virtue Clan offering clarity about the consequences of a choice — and when these views still leave loose ends, it is often one of the quieter men of Abarah who speaks last and draws everything together, at which point the Spirit bears witness and the whole body consents. Ben Elim defines the word consent precisely: it implies condition, meaning a person yields to the Spirit-led concerns of others, showing accord as independent minds converge under the same guiding influence of the Lord’s Spirit; decisions are recorded out of respect for the process, and the whole procedure stays fully open, since no one in community should ever feel that others are quietly controlling their life in secret. The very last stage before full membership is a formal apprenticeship in common consent itself: attending council meetings, observing in complete silence unless directly called upon, until the person shows they can genuinely integrate into the process without suppressing it, at which point they may become an active, voting member of the council.

The Order of Inscription, referenced throughout the early Essene writings, is simply the ordered list of persons within a righteous community — a concept the ancients applied equally to the angels of heaven, both the faithful Eerkodeshoi and the fallen Decadarchoi. In the early church’s own historical context of Roman occupation, Temple Judaism’s hostility, and the powers of darkness actively working against the coming birth and life of Christ, inscription served a strict, hierarchical, mission-critical function, since failure in their central task simply could not be afforded. In the present day, inscription is reformulated year by year at Ingathering, since the order of the list is fully expected to shift and change as each person’s own walk with the Lord continues to unfold.

The Community Rule itself, drawn from the Dead Sea Scrolls documents scholars call the Damascus Document, is presented at length as the Scroll of the Rule for the Religion of Shabuwa in the Tribulation Time. Ben Elim distinguishes it sharply from what scholars mislabel the Community Rule proper, which he identifies instead as the Watch Rule, a document he has found edited in over sixty places to suit the needs of various prayer vigils. The Rule opens by describing entry into the Community: a candidate is examined by the Overseer and then the Council on their intelligence and deeds, and if suited to the discipline, begins the four Omer classes already described, with the Overseer treating every candidate with genuine kindness and bearing no malice. Those admitted are inscribed in order according to their need for protection and discipline, examined yearly, and expected to reprove each other in truth and humility, settling any anger or hard feelings before sunset and freely confessing their own faults first. The Rule describes a shared life down to eating, blessing, and deliberating in common, with a man of service blessing each meal, and frames the whole undertaking around a striking passage on the nature of Anokeesed, who the righteous of Ma’een regard with the same tender, protective love one feels for a helpless newborn.

A lengthy section on the Two Spirits explains that Anokeesed has allotted humanity two competing spirits, Truth and Perversity, the first flowing from Motsah the Lamb as a fountain of light and the second from the Decadarchoi in Senaseol as a fountain of filthiness, locked in a struggle that will only end when the Arm of the Lord is revealed and Perversity is destroyed forever. Until then, both spirits battle within every person’s heart, and Anokeesed has deliberately limited the reach of the Spirit of Evil so that each person can genuinely discern good from evil rather than being overcome by ignorance, with the destiny of every soul ultimately decreed according to which spirit they walk in. The Rule then lays out very specific ordinances for community conduct: it addresses lying, disrespect, malice, negligence toward the Storehouse, sleeping through worship, immodesty, gossip, and murmuring against the Four Foundations, each carrying its own prescribed days of repentance, while more serious breaches carry graver consequences. Adult-to-adult fornication not resolved through decisive repentance can result in visitor status or expulsion, adultery likewise; adult-to-child sexual activity of any kind, under any circumstances, results in immediate and permanent expulsion with police notified; child-to-child sexual activity is addressed through effective repentance by children and parents together, with the offending family sent away if the repentance proves ineffective; and physical abuse of women, children, the handicapped, the elderly, or the simple results in visitor status if met with real repentance, or permanent departure if not. The Rule also lays out detailed Sabbath observance, including a prohibition on work except gathering righteous element, no discussion of riches or gain, no drawing water, no moving of rocks, and no traveling among the wicked, closing with instructions for the Council’s assembly, where each person sits according to inscription and no one interrupts another mid-thought, and for departing into the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord in times of tribulation, along with detailed ordinances governing the Men of Service and the principal man of Abarah, including two-year probationary examination for any who sin through ignorance rather than deliberate rebellion.

The Process toward Membership in Community lays out the practical mechanics behind the Omer stages already described. A prospective member first visits and receives a welcome ceremony, then becomes a Visitor able to attend services and holy days before requesting entry into First Omer, or first-year, status, which does not require residency but does require a full year of it before any status change can be requested; first-year residents may still spend their own money on themselves, though not on Community, and take the Covenant at Ingathering. Second-year residents stop handling money themselves, relying on designated purse-carriers for purchases, and focus on hearing the Spirit within the group setting and applying the second commandment as an unconditional relational standard; third-year residents participate fully in the Purifications of the Many and no longer spend money at all, with the Storehouse holding their funds in trust should they choose to leave; and fourth-year residents apprentice in Common Consent by sitting silently with the Council until they demonstrate readiness for full voting participation. Anyone who has not reached fourth-year status within seven years must leave the Community unless the Council decides otherwise, and anyone departing forfeits reimbursement for money or labor invested in Community property, since farm equipment, buildings, and shared resources remain held in common.

Virtues in Community lists dozens of specific behavioral markers drawn largely from the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Community Rule, War Rule, Temple Rule, and Damascus Document, describing a virtuous person as one who does not dishonor others, bears no malice, is led by the Spirit, is trustworthy and dependable, assumes the best of others, keeps the Sabbath, and does not betray the Covenant, among many other qualities; breaking these virtues results in days of penance separating the offender from blessings and Common Consent. This is framed within the community’s identity as a First Commandment Community, one that puts God first in every detail of life, down to what is eaten, worn, and planted, following Christ’s charge in Matthew 22:37-38 to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, and mind.

The Four Foundations of Community are named as the Storehouse, Repentance, Common Consent, and Righteousness. The Storehouse provides every sacred and daily necessity to ensure equity and eliminate the divisive influences of private wealth, treating all the earth’s uncorrupted resources as belonging to God’s storehouse; Repentance is defined as change toward the person the Lord desires, something the community insists must be loved rather than merely endured, requiring an honesty that newcomers from the world often need real time to absorb; Common Consent is unanimous rather than majority-based agreement, governed by six courtesies including treating the process as worship, speaking only as the Spirit instructs, and remaining willing to change at any sign of possible improvement; and Righteousness is the correct practical and religious relationship with each element among the Eerkodeshoi. Publicly speaking against these Four Foundations with intent to change, eliminate, or degrade them results in expulsion, though the community welcomes ongoing discussion of how to better express and improve upon them.

The Covenant of the Community is recorded as the Lord’s own direct address to the righteous, promising that those who love Him and internalize the languages of repentance and glory in every part of their lives will be received under a New Covenant as a repentant and sanctified people, with revelations long sealed from the foundation of the world unsealed for them and the Holy Order of His priesthood sent before them as the New Jerusalem upon the Promised Land. The Lord promises to fight their battles, nourish their children, and withhold no blessing, provided each person individually comes to love and repent before Him rather than relying on someone else’s faith or repentance on their behalf; sickness and sorrow will be done away as they develop relationships with Motsah the Lamb through righteousness in all things. Twelve conditions for taking and keeping the Covenant follow, including forming no opinion without first hearing the Lord, developing a full unceasing prayer life with morning and evening prayer corn, studying scripture weekly, respecting the Four Foundations, and remaining loyal to the Lord, one’s religion, and one’s people in all behavior.

The Storehouse of Anokeesed traces the tradition of Melchizedek as keeper of God’s storehouse back to Genesis 14:20, where Abraham gives Him tithes, and Ben Elim draws on his own great-uncle’s lifelong study of some 2,500 attempted intentional communities, nearly all of which failed within three years, typically over the twin drives toward accumulating possessions and achieving dominance over others, principles Ben Elim traces back to Cain’s son founding the city of Enoch. The Essenes addressed this by having a single designated purse-carrier, like Judas, handle all money for the group, a practice the community has followed for more than forty years, with Ben Elim noting that his own grown grandchildren have never personally spent money and, as a result, do not lust after possessions the way he once did as a young man. He walks through the practical stages of the Storehouse system already introduced through the Omer years, describes the community’s extensive self-sufficient industry, from a buggy shop and blacksmith shop to a flour mill and sawmill, all run with horses, and explains the adult family unit, or AFU, system by which garden produce, meat, and other goods are divided by household according to age. A detailed list of forbidden or restricted “Fallen Watcher” items includes radios, cell phones, computers, aluminum cookware, cosmetics, alcohol, copper, cars, and GMOs, alongside inappropriate books involving pornography, astrology, or black arts, with a small number of tolerated exceptions like bulldozers or welders used only temporarily and with the clear intention of eventually being set aside. The section closes with the community’s detailed labor policies, describing habits that foster a happy work culture, the two-stage probation process for chronic poor work habits, and its healthcare policy, which calls for prayer and administration through anointing before seeking outside medical care unless a situation is immediately life-threatening, with the Storehouse covering healthcare costs when this policy is followed through the community’s decision-making bodies.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 2 opens by introducing the Culture of Zion, framed against four broad culture bases found across human societies: object-oriented, action-oriented, precept-oriented, and relationship-oriented. Ben Elim illustrates the difference with a simple example: watching a ball roll, a mother from an object-oriented culture prompts her child to say “ball,” one from a precept-oriented culture prompts “round,” one from an action-oriented culture prompts “roll,” and one from a relationship-oriented culture prompts “share.” Zion is built entirely on this fourth base, with the Religion of Shabuwa standing as its most highly developed expression — a covenant of mutual affection between creation and the righteous in which every person is expected to know the Lord for themselves, since no one else can hear the Spirit of God in their place. Ben Elim is honest that this can be genuinely disorienting for someone transitioning out of the dominant object-oriented culture of the modern West, since Zion asks a person to build their entire life around relationship rather than possessions, actions, or principles, often while still working through past alienation from creation and from other people.

Baptisms are traced all the way back to Eden itself, drawn from Enoch 7:29 and 7:100-102: the Lord immersed Yaatsekawd and Cavah in water, asked them a question as they entered together, and they rose back up with their arms outstretched, echoing the same posture used in Cavah’s sacred dance. Only after leaving Eden, once they came to feel real forgiveness, did this washing become specifically a baptism unto repentance — the same pattern later kept by Messiah Himself under John the Baptist, and practiced repeatedly rather than as a single act of entry among the Essenes, who were baptized daily before taking their place in prayer watches and paired the practice with partaking of what the Dead Sea Scrolls call the pure food and the pure drink. In its most ancient form, the ceremony has the minister speak the Lord’s own words from Enoch 7:100, with the candidate answering in the words of the first parents from the verse that follows.

Altar Protocol calls for washing one’s feet before approaching, since the altar also serves as a sacred space for speaking with the Eerkodeshoi in the presence of Anokeesed or Motsah the Lamb — prayer itself, the text is careful to note, is directed only to God and to the Lamb, never to the Eerkodeshoi directly. One always walks clockwise around an altar, matching the sun’s path across the northern sky, since counter-clockwise movement belongs to those who work in darkness; and righteous altars have never been associated with blood or death, a heathen corruption the record identifies as one of the principal ways righteous peoples were historically led astray. Standing before the altar facing east sends prayers out to God, the Eerkodeshoi, and the righteous of the earth, while facing west from the altar’s east side sends a request out to all of creation, including the wicked and their Decadarchoi — a use reserved for moments that call for real confrontation. Only sacred fire and a specific short list of elements — Harari, Rishoniy, cedar, sage, protection element, and Joshua plant — belong on a righteous altar as incense, and the altar of the white stone in particular, referenced in Revelation 2:17 and 3:12, is treated as a high priest altar never to be used without a man of the Order of Melchizedek and his firekeeper present.

Firekeepers and the Sacred Fire opens with a sobering biblical warning: Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, were consumed by fire from the Lord for offering unauthorized “strange fire” in Leviticus 10:1, a word Ben Elim traces to Strong’s #2114, meaning foreign, profane, or adulterous fire, tying it to the same language used throughout the Old Testament for spiritual unfaithfulness. He connects this directly to the illegitimacy of Aaron’s own priesthood, citing Dead Sea Scroll fragments 4Q265 and 4Q266 barring any of Aaron’s line from sprinkling cleansing water on the Sabbath or ever entering behind the veil, even on the Day of Atonement. From this weighty foundation, the text turns practical: communities that keep a sacred fire use no other kind, entrusting it entirely to a firekeeper who holds sole authority over it, maintaining one ongoing utility fire for daily life alongside separate fires brought for each specific worship. Sacred fire is closely tied to living water, and a firekeeper’s fire bundle is centered on a cattail reed spindle — the same kind of reed mockingly given to Christ as a scepter before His crucifixion, unknowingly affirming Him as the true King of Glory, since every water reed carries the gift of revealing God. The bundle must always be carried and stored horizontally, since only the Lord may hold His own reed upright; training for a new firekeeper traditionally begins in the coldest part of winter, introducing the candidate to the Eerkodeshoi by blowing cattail fluff across frozen or open water so the water elders take notice of his preparation.

The firekeeper’s own ordination ceremony is described in vivid detail: his hands are washed in hot-rock-heated water infused with soapwort and mint, symbolizing that his old hands are being made new as the sacred hands of one who serves the Lord; his face is painted beneath each eye with the colors of the four directions, marking his readiness to receive any language of repentance the fire may bring; and after final instruction from the community, he is given a small, palm-sized wet clay dish to serve as his own personal altar. Holding live coals in this dish, he offers five elements in sequence, each with its own prayer: Joshua plant, asking the fire to bring the people love for the Lord and their own repentance; cedar, held high, asking that the fire bring knowledge of how much God loves them; Harari, asking that the pure be empowered and their prayers sent forth; Rishoniy, inviting the Eerkodeshoi to draw near; and sacred sage, asking the fire to bring peace and tranquility. He is taught strict fire etiquette — never to burn thorns, vines, or anything belonging to the Decadarchoi such as paint, trash, or nails — and told that if he ever lights a fire to ask the Lord something meant to be asked only once, he must afterward burn his own tools, the spindle, base board, and hearth, as a sign the request will never be repeated.

Circle Drawing, or Rain Making, traces back through a lineage of biblical figures: Elijah was a circle drawer, as was Noah, and so, according to a fragment found at the Essene settlement of Secacah, was Honi, John the Baptist’s own maternal grandfather, who is recorded there as having donated the community’s land to the early church. Robert Eisenman’s study James the Brother of Jesus argues that the Lord’s own brother James held this same gift. The Water Tablet behind this practice was written by Enoch and named for the Bedal River flowing into the Aral Sea, Bedal meaning to divide, separate, select, or distinguish between two things; when the Lord Himself explained the tablet to Enoch, drawing it into wet clay with a stick, He said nothing directly about circle drawing, since for Enoch the tablet represented the Living Water and the high spiritual level required to establish successful holy communities — the very same level circle drawing itself demands. The practice must be carried out by a man of the Order of Melchizedek together with his Zedeqetelebab wife, whose role is to call for the protection, nourishment, and strengthening of the righteous by the angels of heaven, praying alongside her husband in the opening and closing of the ceremony without drawing the circles herself. Every circle drawer works in close relationship with four principal Eerkodeshoi — Abariel of the clouds, Rahaviel of the wind, Yatsal of the thunder, and Bawrakel of the rain — learning to know their thoughts and feelings and never acting without their mutual agreement and the Lord’s own direction. Prayers are offered in each Eerkodeshoi’s own language, as recorded in Grandmothers 11:82 for the clouds, 11:89 for the wind, 11:87 for thunder, and 11:86 for rain, shaped into the ancient circular speech pattern called chiasm, where a thought is built outward through a sequence and then carried back through that same sequence to its beginning — fittingly, since water itself moves in circles, falling as rain, gathering into streams and rivers, reaching the sea, and rising again as cloud to fall once more. Elijah’s own demonstration in 1 Kings 18 shows the pattern clearly: four water barrels stood for the four principal Eerkodeshoi, and after the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the offering, Elijah knelt with his face between his knees and drew circles in the dust seven times, a small cloud appearing after the seventh before the whole sky filled with the storm that ended the drought. Ben Elim shares two of his own experiences with the practice: once, watching from a cherry tree half a mile from the eastern village, he saw a single distant cloud stop, turn, come directly overhead to rain on the village, then return the exact way it had come — a path confirmed that same evening on his mother’s television weather map; another time, the community’s own children, playing at the well, sang the Water Song on their own and brought rain back to gardens the circle drawer had deliberately sent it away from, the community simply choosing to accept the resulting wetness rather than undo what the children, in that moment, had proven more powerful than the circle drawer himself to do. The ceremony cannot be performed amid unresolved sin or contention; if the people are willing to repent, the circle drawer may still set the altar, and if the Eerkodeshoi remain hesitant even then, the people may gather to confess and sing the Water Song under a man of Abarah’s direction, a song that belongs to the circle drawer but may be sung with his permission even in his absence, provided it is led by a recognized water elder, someone whose name or sacred bundle is itself tied to the Living Water.

Harari and Harari Makers, along with their meanings for the four directions, are entrusted to both men and women set apart by ceremony for the role, a calling that must come from the Lord and be affirmed by elders or council rather than taken up on one’s own initiative. All use of the element of righteousness centers on the Lord as the Living Water, defined as knowing God in this life and being made happy through the life-giving process of reproval, repentance, and forgiveness. A Harari maker gathers four dried, crumbled elements kept separately, each tied into its own small cloth by color and direction — red for east, yellow for south, brown for west, blue for north — with an empty white cloth reserved for the center. When the first snow of winter begins to fall, the white cloth is laid open flat in the middle of a circle; standing in the east and facing that direction, the maker holds the east element loose in an open hand, prays blessings shaped around that direction’s own meaning, and tries to catch falling snowflakes in the element itself, adding a pinch of snow by hand if the fall is too sparse. Once that prayer is finished, the element is deposited on the white cloth, and the maker moves clockwise to the south, west, and north in turn, repeating the same prayer and deposit at each direction; when all four elements have been combined with snow on the white cloth, they are mixed together and the whole bundle is held up to the Lord, facing east, asking the Eerkodeshoi directly for their blessing on everyone who will use it to send forth prayers and requests. The finished Harari is carried home, combined with whatever has already been prepared, and stored, typically in batches of two quarts to a full gallon.

Rishoniy and Rishoniy Makers describes a strong element of righteousness made by holy women recognized as four-way, used to call spiritual feelings near, gathered across the seasons much like Harari. For the east, Esseeb grass, or wheat, is cut with a stone knife in early spring while eight to ten inches tall, taking care never to pull up the roots so the plant continues living after harvest, then dried until it crumbles and passed through a colander; it carries the definition that Motsah, the wonderful Savior, is present in and through all things among the Eerkodeshoi. For the south, mandrake leaves are gathered in late spring, taking only a single leaf per plant where they are not plentiful so as never to deplete them, drying and crumbling easily; the plant is felt to overflow with love. For the west, maple nuts are collected a little later in late spring, their samara wings shelled away before the nuts are dried and ground, though in years when the nuts have shrunk small, the whole seed must be used instead. For the north, in late fall or early winter, the feather tips of water reed are collected, felt to carry God’s ability to reveal Himself in any need a person has; where reed is unavailable, any soft, feathery-headed water grass seed that blows easily on the wind may be used instead, seed and fluff together. Once all four elements are collected, dried, and passed through a colander and kept separate, the Blessing Ceremony is held at spring’s first thunder, following the same clockwise pattern used in making Harari, with each element’s own definition prayed over in turn before being placed on a white center cloth and used as a seed to mix into whatever Rishoniy has already been stored, in equal parts of all four; the wheat grass, like the maple nuts, must generally be ground coarse. Rishoniy may be given only to those who have gone to the Lord to learn their own repentance to approach each of the twenty-four Eerkodeshoi listed in the appendix chart, a repentance they state publicly before the whole church; further instruction on its use can be found in the appendix of Enoch. Both Harari and Rishoniy makers must be approved by their elders or the community’s council before taking up the role.

Prayer Corn draws its name from Hebrew #7054, qamah, a stock of grain or standing corn, itself from #6965, qoom, meaning to raise, abide, accomplish, confirm, endure one’s enemies, make good, lift up, establish, succeed, and strengthen — a whole cluster of meanings pointing toward giving prayer its richest possible weight. The ancients prayed every morning and evening using various elements to magnify those prayers, and the Essenes kept the same pattern at sunrise and sunset, though Ben Elim knows of no direct source confirming they specifically used cornmeal for it. The Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo peoples, by contrast, all use cornmeal in this way, and Ben Elim’s own Navajo elders tell him the practice traces back all the way to the first parents themselves; in Canyon de Chelly, toeholds and handholds climb some six hundred feet up a sheer cliff face from the old villages to a place where the morning sun can be greeted, visible even now ascending the rock on the far wall from the White House ruins overlook. White cornmeal is used for morning prayers and yellow cornmeal for evening prayers, and holy elders keep a double-sided bag with corn on each side, distinguished in the dark by touch — bison hair marking the evening side, wild turkey plumes marking the morning side — the corn itself magnifying prayer and helping connect the one praying to both the Lord and the Eerkodeshoi as they reflect on the day beginning or the day just walked through with Him.

The Role of Reproval, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Community describes an awareness of Motsah, the Living Water, that flows willingly, humbly, openly, and happily, language drawn directly from the Covenant itself. Since ancient times, flowing water that ripples and reflects light has been called lustral water, and the early Essenes preferred to be baptized in it specifically, following Motsah’s own baptism in the flowing Jordan River, which is why the baths at Secacah were built to carry moving water through their Miqveh. This willing, humble, open, happy dynamic stands in sharp contrast to the wider world, which shrinks back from reproval as an insult, hates repentance as a serious affront, and treats forgiveness as little more than forgetting an offense as quickly as possible. The Community Rule states plainly, in II:3, that the origin of truth is a fountain of light called Motsah the Lamb, while the origin of perversity is a fountain of filthiness flowing from the Decadarchoi who live in Senaseol, and in II:10 that these two are wholly abominable to one another, since no one can walk with both or serve two masters — the very reason most people drawn to righteous community life have already begun unlearning the world’s instinctive aversion to reproval, repentance, and forgiveness. Living in close proximity to others in community means people naturally come to know one another’s shortcomings, which becomes itself a real incentive toward change, but the process has one essential rule: the person who would reprove another must first reprove himself. Ben Elim gives a simple example — someone is habitually late for work, causing hardship for others — in which the one preparing to correct that behavior must first ask himself what he might have done differently, whether he reminded the other person of the time, whether there might be a good reason he doesn’t yet know, and ask the Lord’s forgiveness for any impatience already felt in his own heart. This private repentance on the reprover’s part prepares him to forgive the other person in advance, so that by the time the actual reproval is spoken, the error has already been forgiven, making it far easier for the one being corrected to receive it as an act of love rather than an accusation; Ben Elim points readers to Grandmothers 12:103 for further guidance on cultivating a gentle and kind heart toward one’s fellows.

Dating and Courtship, adapted from a class taught to the community’s youth, distinguishes sharply between the world’s approach to dating as recreation and the community’s insistence that romance be a purposeful, educated process guided by the Lord. Love is defined as projecting one’s life into another’s for their sake and God’s glory, while lust is defined as doing the same for one’s own sake alone, leaving both the other person and God’s glory out of the equation; recreation, treated as neutral, is warned against as a path that quietly teaches a person not to love. The class lays out courtship as a sequence from dating through serious dating, engagement, espousal, and marriage, with espousal gifts serving as powerful elements of righteousness that help a couple discover, honestly, what each most needs the other to contribute to a lasting marriage, following the pattern of Shem and Shum, who independently chose the identical gift for one another. Detailed, practical guidance follows for gentlemen and ladies on maintaining appropriate boundaries during courtship, distinguishing casual touch from stimulating touch, and the community’s broader male-female protocol, including rules against unmarried couples being alone together in a building and requirements that serious counseling situations involve at least two witnesses.

The Sanctity of Marriage and the Wedding Ceremony opens with the striking claim that marriage and parental love delight Anokeesed more than anything else, since Enoch’s record describes creation itself feeling a new fulfillment at the wedding of Yaatsekawd and Cavah, and Eden’s own completion was tied to their coming together. Ben Elim argues that creation cannot function as intended without the sanctity of marriage among mankind, tracing droughts, famines, and other natural disasters partly to fornication, polygamy, and the oppression of women, and insisting that a righteous wedding signals to creation that all is well. He is careful to note that divorce and past fornication are not the unforgivable sin, and that both married and single people alike can uphold the sanctity of marriage as a shared community value. The Ceremony of Marriage itself is described step by step: a runner carries a wedding feather and yellow rose to the bride to confirm her final decision, the sacred fire is lit with a cattail spindle, the bride and groom’s hair is tied and later retied in married style, their cheeks are painted with a thin red line, they wash each other’s feet and drink from each other’s hands in the act that actually marries them, Kelly bread is broken and shared with the congregation, and the couple washes each other’s hair before receiving community blessing and advice recorded by the scribes; the couple then stays in the church overnight and abstains from sexual activity for twenty-two days afterward as an offering to the Lord for any children who will come. The Marriage Song, sung in a mix of an ancient language and English translation, expresses the bride and groom’s mutual dominion, compassion, and joined life, and an Anniversary Ceremony renews the same commitments each year using a simplified version of the same elements, which Ben Elim notes he and his wife used to reaffirm forty-nine years of marriage that began with a conventional church wedding.

Pipemakers and Prayer Censers traces the use of prayer pipes back to God Himself, shown holding two censers, one for righteousness and one for forgiveness, on both the Covenant Tablet and the Judgement Tablet, and connects the practice to Revelation 8:3-5’s golden censer carrying the prayers of the saints. The community’s own censers, mainly effigy pipes connecting the spirit of life in some element to the pipe owner’s vision of created purpose, descend from the people of Achee; a pipemaker receives the vision for a particular person’s pipe up to three times, shares it with spiritual elders for approval, and then actually breathes the breath of life into the pipe while drilling it, making it alive from that point on. Guidelines include always keeping a small ball of sacred sage in the pipe when not in use, never carrying an assembled pipe through a doorway, and undertaking four days of fasting and prayer, one for each direction, to receive light for its use; a sacred bundle built around the pipe is wrapped in brain-tanned deerskin with a red wool wrap for men and blue for women, and only turkey feathers, not eagle feathers, are used except by those recognized as American Indian.

The Use of Seer Stones centers on bringing patriarchal and matriarchal blessings, a practice traced back to Abraham and Jacob, in which the spirit of life Christ placed in fire speaks through a clear thumb-sized crystal seer stone to reveal a person’s vision, guidance, or sometimes even their name. The ceremony is laid out in detail: a sand altar is built for coals, four stone arrowheads in the colors of the four directions are arranged around a central arrowhead with cattail pollen lines drawn between them, and as live coals are dumped into the sand bowl at dusk, the gathered community quietly rehearses only positive things about the person being blessed while the seer watches the coals in the dark and writes down, by feel, whatever shapes or impressions appear, which are later discussed and shaped into a blessing prayer recorded by the scribes. Ben Elim stresses that no negative thought may be present during the ceremony and that the seer must be someone genuinely able to hear the Spirit, since giving false guidance under this kind of authority would carry serious weight; both men and women can serve as seers.

Name Givers, who may be men or women, discern a person’s spiritual name as a feeling or holy definition, most often expressed in ancient Hebrew or a native language, reflecting how the person is seen in their perfect, God-created self; every person in the Religion of Shabuwa carries three names, a family name, an Eerkodeshoi name known to creation, and an Anokeesed name known only to God, a pattern Ben Elim traces to Dead Sea Scroll fragments describing figures like Michael and Melchizedek by three names each. Names are never imposed, and a person must publicly request that others use a name before it takes effect; some spiritual names are kept hidden from outsiders for protection, following the pattern of Melchizedek and Zedeqetelebab’s own hidden identities as Shem and Shum. Water Elders are recognized informally rather than formally installed, identified by some water-related aspect of their own vision, such as a water bug pipe or a water-related name or song, and are called upon to look after the community’s water, lead the Water Song, assist with the Day of the Measure of Miloo, and contribute to baptisms. Songmakers, similarly approved by the Lord and the elders, are installed through a public blessing ceremony after a song they’ve received has been shared and confirmed as usable by the community’s singers, with only men of Abarah permitted to receive songs used in purification worships.

The Use of Oil in the Religion of Shabuwa treats oil, golden in color, as an element that feels the Father’s desire to dwell with His people, kept not casually in homes but in a dedicated outdoor oil center with separate blessed and unblessed sides, tended by an appointed oil keeper; blessed oil, set aside and prayed over each year at the Celebration of New Oil, is used specifically for interpreting meals according to the righteous definitions of the foods served, while unblessed oil serves ordinary cooking, with care taken that access to blessed oil never becomes a status symbol. Kellies, from the Hebrew word for a prepared vessel or weapon, are bread-baking dishes the Lord Himself first made in Eden as protection against feelings of worthlessness or rejection; sized to the husband’s hand for a family or made larger for single people, they are traditionally stone or clay, now soapstone, with the bread never cut but only broken, and none ever fed as scraps to animals. Trumps encompass three distinct instruments: the shofar, a curved horn from sheep or goats used for public signaling and worship calls; the khatsar, a straight horn made from the horn of an oryx and reserved strictly for men of Abarah to summon the Eerkodeshoi for private deliberation, carrying real spiritual risk if blown casually or outside proper leading; and a third signal horn made from bison or cattle horn.

Several smaller but treasured elements round out the section. The Cup and Plate for Anokeesed are small hand-carved stone vessels the community keeps so the Lord can eat with them during holy day ceremonies, while a small linen Pillow for Anokeesed, fringed in dyed orange-gold and stuffed with clean washed wool, is placed on the bed so He may sleep among them, a practice Ben Elim describes as one of the most precious moments of his relationship with God. The Ree, meaning watering or an abundant shower in Hebrew, is a folded bundle of fine grass bound with a four-braided tie at its center, used at weddings to bring the feeling of clean hands and lovingkindness to a married couple; God is said to have made the first wedding ree in Eden, and each couple’s own ree is kept and reused at every subsequent anniversary. The Song of the Dance, performed by our first mother Cavah in Eden as she transformed Olam into Eden, remains the community’s most sacred song and dance, passed down only through direct instruction from the Mother of the Dance to her chosen successor within a group of seven covenanted women, with young girls following along as they learn.

The Language of Repentance and Glory describes the Eerkodeshoi’s gentle, never-accusatory voice speaking through the definitions of creation as a second witness to the Spirit’s guidance, offered when a person has missed or needs reinforcement of what the Spirit has already told them. Ben Elim illustrates the principle through a string of personal stories: a crow’s warning call that led his grandson to abandon a planned escape route just before a falling tree crushed the very spot they’d intended to run, a marsh hawk that reliably signals what his wife is experiencing at that moment in her day, a bumble bee that plunged into a cup of oil during a New Oil ceremony to rebuke the congregation’s doubt that God would provide for them, and a skunk crossing paths peacefully with his dog that confirmed his approach to counseling a sexual abuse survivor. He distinguishes languages of glory, which affirm a person is on the right track, from languages of repentance, which call for a change of course, and closes the section with an extended personal letter and teaching notes from a forty-day fast in which the Lord explained that four spirits of life reside in every element of creation, and that loving repentance and staying close to the Lord are what keep a person able to hear these voices clearly.

The Arm of the Lord is presented as a major prophetic event distinct from, and preceding, the Second Coming, initiating the period of the Gathering that purifies mankind in preparation for Christ’s return. Ben Elim corrects the popular idea that the Arm of the Lord represents raw might, arguing instead, from the length of the forearm as the ancient unit of a cubit, that it represents lovingkindness made visible to all creation, and that natural disasters throughout scripture reflect the Eerkodeshoi’s grief over sin rather than divine wrath. Drawing on Isaiah, the War Scroll, and the Melchizedek document from the Dead Sea Scrolls, he walks through prophecies of a final war in which evil falls “without the help of any man,” decoding several proper names using the prophetic pattern Isaiah demonstrates in chapter 10, and describes the day itself as one in which Christ’s real, personal, spiritual presence becomes suddenly visible to every eye and impossible for anyone, righteous or wicked, to ignore or escape. He closes by quoting at length from the First Book of Achee’s own account of that day, in which the righteous who have longed to see Christ in all things go forth in power while the wicked, unable any longer to sin outside His direct gaze, fall into shame and disarray, urging his readers to prepare now through repentance so they are ready to minister and gather the Lord’s elect when the moment finally comes.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 3 opens by explaining a key phrase carried through much of the book: the intervention of agency, embedded in the Decrees of Creation. To intervene, Ben Elim explains, means to interrupt or redirect some natural process — the way a person needing medical help receives medical intervention — and in the Religion of Shabuwa this same idea applies in a fully spiritual sense, since every holy day calls for specific interventions by both men and women, each paired with their own particular element, so that the community actively participates in bringing about the purposes each day represents rather than simply observing it.

The Enochian Calendar itself is laid out in careful, almost mathematical detail. Rather than months, the year is built from four seasons of ninety-one days each, for a base year of three hundred sixty-four days; a single additional day, Anokeesed’s Day, brings the count to three hundred sixty-five, and every fourth year a further leap day, Motsah’s Day, honors Motsah the Lamb specifically. New Year’s Day always falls on the spring equinox and always lands on the fourth day of the week within this calendar’s own numbering — a point Ben Elim is careful to untangle from a common scholarly confusion, since writers who describe the Enochian New Year as falling on a “Wednesday” are really only describing where the fourth day happens to sit in the unrelated Gregorian week. The day itself begins at sunrise rather than midnight. From there, seven more holy days follow across the year, each one fifty days after the last — a jubilee of days — and each landing on the next successive day of the week: Miloo’s Day of the Measure in spring, the Day of Instruction (Shabuwa) fifty days later, the Feast of Tranquility in summer, the Celebration of Ikar on a Sabbath, the Day of Remembrance in fall, the Celebration of New Oil, and finally the Day of Forgiveness in winter. Ben Elim notes that this same calendar, established by Enoch and later clarified in its full practice by Melchizedek, keeps the Sabbath on the exact same day of the year the Lord Himself kept it while walking the earth — the same Essene calendar that quietly explains why the Gospel accounts never record any controversy over the Sabbath during Christ’s trial, since He was already keeping His own.

The Day of the New Year is described as a ceremony spread across three or four days rather than one, moving from a Sabbath of confession and washing in the brook of the meadow, through Anokeesed’s Day and, in leap years, Motsah’s Day, and finally to New Year’s Day itself, when the community gathers together with their flocks to sing praises and share their hopes for the coming year and their walk with the Lord. Throughout the whole ceremony, the community eats using thorns instead of ordinary utensils — a small, physical reminder, since thorns carry the definition of being loved in spite of one’s sin, a feeling the text considers essential to the holy day’s real purpose.

The Day of the Measure of Miloo falls on the fourth day of the week, the fifteenth day of spring, and centers on giving one’s life to the Lord in full measure before a rock of witness, following the pattern of covenant-making described in Genesis 31:46-48. Men preside first, lighting a fire with a Beni Blossom spindle and speaking to Motsah at the rock of witness one at a time while cedar smoke curls upward as a sign of God’s happiness, and women then preside over a shared sacred meal built around foods chosen to carry specific righteous definitions. Ben Elim appends an extended set of teaching notes for parents on how to raise children who can genuinely give their lives to the Lord, counseling mothers to use divine family titles like Father and Brother from earliest childhood and fathers to speak for the Lord’s feelings in ordinary daily moments, gradually shifting a child’s sense of authority from “because I said so” toward a felt relationship with God’s own love and expectations as they mature.

The Day of Instruction, also called the Feast of Shabuwa or, in New Testament times, Pentecost, is the community’s principal holy day, falling fifty days after Miloo’s Day on the sixty-fifth day of spring and celebrating Motsah’s presence in and through all things. The ceremony unfolds in two parts: first at the usual house of worship, where families are painted with gold on their cheeks and present Kelly bread to be blessed by a man of Abarah and placed in seven baskets while seven dancers circle the altar; then at the community altar itself, restricted to those at least in their First Omer, where a flag of twelve turkey feathers is raised and a sequence of trumps — of Assembly, Welcome, Decree, Declaration, Determination, and Amen — summon and address the Eerkodeshoi of the four directions. Ben Elim stresses this ceremony can never be performed alone or independently of other communities doing the same, since isolated attempts invite overwhelming spiritual opposition; without a man of Abarah present, an outdoor altar may still be used to pray generally for the protection and provision of the righteous worldwide.

The Feast of Tranquility, known outside the community as Passover, is traced back to Eden itself, to the moment after the adversary’s fall when Anokeesed comforted Yaatsekawd and Cavah so completely that all memory of him was suppressed and forgotten. Ben Elim contrasts this origin sharply with the Jewish Passover’s roots in the angel of death and competitive displays of divine power, tracing the calendar’s later distortion through Ezekiel’s exile, Nehemiah’s scribe Zadoc founding Essenism, and Ezra’s subsequent reintroduction of Levitical law, and points to Christ’s own washing of the disciples’ feet at His last Passover as evidence that tranquility and love, not fear or hierarchy, were always the day’s true meaning. The three-day ceremony again features Anokeesed sleeping among the people: women bless heralding bundles and pray over those with special needs on the first day, dancers process to gather and grind wheat on the second, and the community shares a communal meal of Kelly bread made without salt on the sixth day of the week.

The Celebration of Ikar, falling on the Sabbath on the seventy-fourth day of summer, blesses the Lord’s provision for the year and is understood as an act of comfort to Anokeesed, who shares humanity’s own need for provision. Men “plow” a ten-foot circle with digging sticks and draw lines outward from its center while stating their personal commitments to care for the community; the three women’s clans then each contribute their own element in turn — the Protection Clan scattering winter wheat seed while stating commitments to safety, the Service Clan sprinkling fountain water while committing to caring hands, and the Virtue Clan placing twelve string-linked stakes naming virtues to focus on for the coming year — before the community shares a meal eaten alongside Anokeesed’s own small stone plate and cup.

The Day of Remembrance, observed on the first day of the week in autumn, is unusual among the holy days in that most formal worship happens the day before, on the Sabbath, when men call upon the rocks to address a current need of Motsah the Lamb; on the holy day itself women recount the events recorded in the Book of Life while men scribes teach the children, and the whole community spends the day performing labors of love for one another while speaking aloud to Anokeesed as they work. Ben Elim frames the day around comforting a Father whose children can be wayward, expanding the gift of charity, and calling the rocks to remembrance of Yaatsekawd and Cavah’s own desire that all their children return one day to Eden.

The Celebration of New Oil, a Sabbath falling on the eighty-third day of autumn and serving as the Day of Release in a Sabbatical Year, is an elaborate ceremony requiring four days of advance preparation, including a fire kept burning continuously and four braided rings of Father’s grass tied in the colors of the directions. Four oil keepers, dressed and positioned in their respective directions, receive oil poured by a virtuous woman who carries it clockwise around four newly prepared sand paintings — a cradleboard in the east, a butterfly in the south, the Judgement Tablet’s pipes in the west, and the Tree of Life in the north — after which the congregation dips their rings in the blessed oil and is anointed by the men of service, with any new oil keepers anointed last and blessed with sage smoke; oil gathered during the ceremony supplies both anointing oil and the seed oil kept in each village’s oil center for the coming year.

The Day of Forgiveness, falling on the forty-second day of winter, is a day of eating together with Anokeesed, built around peaches, Kelly bread, and honey blessed by dancers over seven rounds. The order of worship reads from Enoch’s account of Cavah setting aside her own idea of motherhood to accept God’s view of her instead, after which the Eerkodeshoi could finally speak to her, and Ben Elim closes the section by distinguishing resolve, an internal decision to change through repentance and humility, from forgiveness, which requires submitting to and acknowledging the truth of how deeply one is loved from outside oneself.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 4 opens by naming the once-in-a-lifetime moments a life passes through — safe deliveries, births, weanings, coming of age, marriage, ordination, and dying — as key times when people learn something essential about why God created them and what they are meant to do with their lives. Marking these moments with righteous element, Ben Elim explains, helps people receive the clearest possible benefit from the inspiration that comes through them; sometimes the resulting revelation saves a life, and often it delivers critically important guidance, as when a little boy at his weaning ceremony became known as someone who might one day choose to be a seer, information his parents carried with them for the rest of his upbringing.

The Safe Delivery Ceremony is meant to help a couple find the Lord’s own will and viewpoint concerning the new soul coming into their family, ideally held early in the third trimester so there is time for the whole family and community to do whatever repentance this new life will need to receive its gift of life fully. In the order of worship, a fire is lit and an opening prayer offered; the mother is adorned with crowns, anklets, and wristlets made of Mothers’ grass and Butterfly Weed flowers, with a turkey feather plume for her hair; the parents share about the pregnancy and any languages of repentance and glory they have received; moving clockwise from the east, each person present feeds the person beside them a pinch of cattail pollen; cedar is passed while everyone prays quietly together; and a man of service prays over the couple with his pipe, using generous Harari so the leftover can later be worn by those attending the birth and eventually placed in the placenta hole during the Birthing Ceremony itself. The gathering closes with the Mothers’ Song, the Fathers’ Song, and a lullaby, followed by a closing prayer.

The Birthing Ceremony unfolds over five days. For the first four, the mother stays home with the baby, and each day’s ceremony must be completed before sunrise, since the timing itself is meant to acknowledge what Motsah the Lamb is doing for the child that day; the baby is kept out of direct light during this period. On the final day, the community gathers on a hilltop before dawn, standing in a semicircle to face the sunrise; at the first glimpse of light the Birthing Song is sung, and the baby’s grandmother unwraps the child to introduce it to all creation, praying a blessing over it, before the whole congregation takes a pinch of corn for morning prayers. The father then leads everyone to a hole he has already dug, placing the placenta inside along with the Harari saved from the Safe Delivery Ceremony; the grandfather offers a prayer of thanksgiving for the baby’s first home, everyone adds a handful of dirt, and the father finishes covering it and sets a rock of witness on top before the whole community returns for a shared breakfast feast.

The Weaning Ceremony, or Baby Blessing, is called a day of Gamal, a Hebrew word meaning to ripen, to wean, or to treat a person well, and is often the occasion when a child’s own vision of created purpose first comes clearly into view, along with guidance on how the child specifically needs to be parented — guidance the record notes has proven, looking back over decades, to be remarkably reliable. It is here that names are often given, since every person in the Religion of Shabuwa carries three: a family name, an Eerkodeshoi name given by a name giver, and Anokeesed’s own name for them. Always held on the first day of the week, the same day Motsah first entered the first parents with His presence to make them the first living souls, the ceremony gathers everyone at sunrise in a high place; no fire is lit, since the sun itself serves as the fire; a grandparent, man of service, or older elder prays over and anoints the still-sleeping child while scribes record what comes, often including further languages of repentance and glory for the parents. The gathering closes with a breakfast of fruit, chosen as the element of righteousness that matches the day’s meaning of ripening.

The Coming of Age Ceremony, likened loosely to a Bar or Bat Mitzvah though very different in its actual use of element, marks a real threshold: around age fourteen for boys, or at a girl’s first cycle, after which the young person may be painted in ceremonies and undertake their own days of repentance independently rather than alongside their parents, boys taking on more serious roles in the work crews and girls becoming more involved in the women’s circle. Like the Weaning Ceremony, it is a day of Gamal held on the first day of the week, unfolding in three parts across sunrise, midday, and sundown, with real differences depending on the candidate’s gender. Preparation begins the day before: new clothes are made, everyone washes their hair, and under a scribe’s direction a large sand painting, roughly three feet by seven, is created as an exact white-and-black replica of the Family Tablet, carefully protected overnight from disturbance. For a girl’s sunrise portion, the men of the community join her and her parents at a fire, singing the fire song together as they cook a cornmeal cake in a shallow pit using heated rocks, the whole preparation shared in genuine warmth and fun before the rest of the day’s ceremony continues.

The Single Ceremony exists to help unmarried people find who God wants them to marry, serving two purposes at once: heralding to the Eerkodeshoi to send feelings toward someone that will result in the two eventually finding an occasion to meet, and helping the single person discover what repentance they still need to do so the Lord can bring such a person to them, since the underlying repentance usually means changing behaviors or habits that will prepare them for the relationship still to come. Preparation includes a round, four-braid crown of Mothers’ grass set with twelve trumpet vine flowers, hanging down for a woman and standing up for a man, along with matching wristlets and anklets of four-braid grass bearing four flowers each. The congregation sits segregated, women to the north and men to the south, so everyone can concentrate more clearly on the candidate’s vision as a future husband or wife; a sacred fire is lit, an opening prayer offered with Harari, and the crowns and wristlets explained and placed on the candidate, who then shares their own process of coming to want a spouse, their needs, whatever repentance they have already found, and what they know of their own vision. After the community discusses any languages of repentance that arise and offers advice and reproval, the candidate states their commitment to the Lord and to what finding their spouse will mean, and their cheeks are painted with the man’s color of light yellow or the woman’s color of pink to mark that commitment. A man of service then anoints the candidate with cattail pollen on the heart, hands, feet, ears, mouth, and head, praying over each part according to the change it will need to make in finding their spouse. The record is careful to note that this ceremony does not reveal who that person will be, only God’s own unmistakable Spirit can do that, but instead magnifies the probability of the two meeting; the man of service, standing east of the altar with his censer facing away from the candidate in offering to the Lord, prays according to all he has heard, watching for a signal on whether the candidate wishes him to continue or to pray for themselves instead, a request Ben Elim notes has come only once in all the times he has performed the ceremony. Several lasting marriages, he adds, have come from it.

The Fertility Ceremony is offered for couples who want children but have not yet been able to have them, and depends heavily on everyone present being comfortable both giving and receiving reproval, gently and lovingly, since there is usually some specific reason the Lord has withheld children so far; physical healing, the text notes, comes through repentance, which is why only a very close and loving community tends to do this ceremony well, and why it demands real preparation and spiritual readiness from the couple themselves. A couple who are already parents offer the opening prayer, the man standing south and the woman north, and the whole congregation enters in careful order of their own progress toward marriage and parenthood — single women, single men, engaged couples, married couples without children, married couples with children, grandparents, and great-grandparents. If anyone resists the reproval offered, or any real controversy arises, the ceremony must be called off entirely, a rule the text notes applies to other ceremonies as well; the record credits the Apostle Thaddeus with performing this very ceremony, citing the First Book of Achee 9:86-87. Preparation is extensive: cattail pollen, leather hair ties, the couple’s own wedding ree, a bouquet of trumpet vine flowers, two crowns of Mother’s grass with twelve butterfly weed blossoms each (the man’s standing up, the woman’s hanging down), matching anklets and wristlets, spring water, mint and soapwort for washing, anointing oil, a folded wild turkey wing as a sending fan, and a large, intricate sand painting some five to six feet across. The painting’s symbolism runs through all four directions: the east holds a deer for the man’s side, showing his authority as a man of the Lord, a river for the woman’s side showing her flowing with life, and two fires representing their shared willingness toward self-examination and humbly accepting reproval; the south holds a seven-petaled daisy where the man stands to recount at least seven things of his own repentance, alongside trumpet vines calling the Eerkodeshoi to bring the gift of life in the Father’s lovingkindness; the west holds the original espousal gifts of the first parents — mint and a peach for the man, a yellow rose and a stone for the woman — together with shocks of wheat showing Christ’s spirit present in everything, Kelly bread as a protection element established by the Lord Himself, and living water spilling over the edge to show that Motsah goes with the couple through their lives; and the north holds a matching seven-petaled daisy where the woman stands for her own repentance, along with a yellow rose and a cradle board serving as the element of righteousness calling for Christ’s healing power to come and fill it.

The Adoption Ceremony makes use of small, pea-sized rocks as its central element, reaching out from parents to a child in a way that echoes birth itself, since with adoption the child’s identity is already known but the parents are not yet. The rocks stand in for the parents’ own identity, their commitment, and Anokeesed’s blessing over the union: after the parents hand a man of service the rocks and make their statement of becoming these children’s parents, he prays over them, placing a rock into each hand of every adoptee in turn as he continues praying for their blessing and for how being adopted will shape their lives, offering counsel freely along the way. The children, still holding their rocks, then turn to face east and pray for their new parents in return, moving through their own blessing of the parents, their commitment to them, and their new identity, stating in careful, specific detail how they intend to help — caring for their parents, cutting wood, and other everyday acts of service. The rocks are then handed to a runner, one to a hand for each of the four directions, kept track of and wrapped in cloth tied by direction; parents and children together place their hands on the rocks at the altar, declaring the adoption before all creation, and both generations close the ceremony in prayer before sharing a meal together. The next morning at sunrise, the runner returns the rocks to a different creek than the one they came from, so the children are not reminded of them by the pull of old friendships; each child keeps the leather bag the rocks were originally gathered in as a lasting rock-bag reminder of their commitment, usable daily like a Harari bag or added to a bundle, and parents may add a feather or an arrowhead of their own to it.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 5 opens with a lengthy Introduction on the actual mechanics of healing, insisting that healers cannot rely on generalized sympathy or borrowed words but must feel a specific compassion mirroring the Lord’s own particular love for the person in front of them, since He was present at their birth and already holds a defined desire for their life that the healer must catch up to. Ben Elim frames this through the concept of the intervention of agency bound up in the Second Decree of Creation, distinguishing between the doings of creation, such as correcting blindness, and the affairs of salvation, such as raising Lazarus, both of which require man, the Lord, and the Eerkodeshoi to decide, act, feel, and know together. He illustrates the principle with his own mother, whose twenty-eight spots of lung cancer were addressed through a healing ceremony after which she lived another thirty-five years before eventually dying of an unrelated cancer at eighty-seven, offering it as evidence that a natural process can genuinely be changed in its course. Repentance functions as the healer’s central tool, since self-consciousness or any hint of wanting personal credit for a healing will keep it from working, and the whole congregation present must share in the same specific compassion rather than merely observing, since a body gathered in that spiritual culture, Ben Elim says plainly, could raise the dead.

Administration for the Sick & Afflicted is introduced through James 5:14-16 on calling the elders to anoint and pray over the sick, and is described as the simplest and most common healing ceremony, built on culturally sensitive anointing paired with real personal empathy. Lighting a fire adds considerably to the ceremony, both for its symbolism and because fire itself is a principal Eerkodeshoi whose presence helps summon the Lord’s own presence in creation; the order of worship moves from preparing with the Lord and lighting the fire, through an opening prayer, fully airing the problem, discussing needed repentance, anointing the candidate with determination paint, laying on of hands, covering the candidate in Harari smoke with a sending fan, and a closing prayer.

The Yo-ani-ah Ceremony, Navajo for carry it away, addresses emotional injury and trauma from violence and abuse, including rape, combat trauma, assault, and similar wounds that leave lingering nightmares and dysfunction. It is an invitation-only ceremony built around twelve stems of the Yo-ani-ah plant, or compass plant, which is sung to and given a small gift of Harari when its first shoot appears each spring so that it will be ready to carry away injury when the time comes. Four identical round sand paintings, one in each direction, each bearing a red cross with white sand clouds sprinkled around it, are laid out around a central altar to create a sacred space understood to exist at the moment of the person’s creation, before any injury occurred, so that the prayers offered there reach directly into Elda in God’s presence where no evil can draw near. The candidate, barefoot, stands in turn on each painting while the man of service uses a sending fan to brush the injury down into the plants underfoot, calling on specific Eerkodeshoi by their own definitions to come and lay hold of the person’s beginning and restore their purity; the Yo-ani-ah Song is sung as the plants are gathered from each direction in turn, after which a designated person carries the plants and the sand paintings away and does not return to the ceremony, going home afterward to bathe. The candidate is then painted with a cross on each forearm, a moon on the chest and a sun on the back joined by a rainbow over the glory shoulder, bathed in mint and soapwort water, dressed in new clothes, and anointed with prayer corn poured out over head and feet to leave an outline on the ground; they are then sent into four days of secluded prayer to fill the empty place left behind once the injury has been carried away, keeping notes of whatever the Spirit reveals and, if needed later, a coal from the fire that can be used sparingly to reinforce the healing.

The Separation Ceremony addresses purification from something evil the person cannot leave behind, whether inherited from upbringing, environment, or direct exposure to occult or corrupting influence, and carries strong authority as an act of the whole community under the Decrees of Creation, sending the effects of the evil back to its perpetrator or into oblivion. The candidate must forgive the perpetrator, following the pattern of Naomi, since forgiveness removes the effects of sin and leaves nothing further to guard against; care is taken never to let the victim feel blamed, and the incident is never revisited once the ceremony concludes. Attendance is restricted to men of service and their wives, the Protection Clan, and the firekeepers, who set their fire bundles in a stack like a tipi before the altar; the order of worship includes an individualized sand painting, tea and Kelly bread for the candidate, sprinkling the painting with fountain water, prayers with Harari and protection pipes forming a crescent facing east, and two sparrows, the first released early bearing gray ashes and the second, marked with Harari to herald the healing to the Eerkodeshoi, released at the ceremony’s close after the assembled prayers are sent back the way they came.

The Joining Ceremony, presided over by women of the Order of Zedeqetelebab, addresses the alienation from earth, God, other people, and oneself that technology and addiction increasingly produce, drawing its central element from the Song of the Dance, the same song Cavah used to join all creation together in harmony after Yaatsekawd first defined its spirits of life. Preparation includes trumpet vine cuttings, a four-braided cord of Father’s grass, a stone gift such as an arrowhead, knife, or awl given to the candidate to keep for life, Kelly bread and cherry juice, and a rock of witness, with the congregation seated separated by sex; the candidate sits at the center of a sand painting built around a five-petaled flower, with four petals representing the relationships or elements they need to be joined to and the fifth, facing east, reserved for the Lord. Up to four women dance around the candidate to join them to whatever has been discussed, after which the candidate’s cheeks are painted, they receive communion and anointing, and the community closes with the Mother’s Song and a final prayer; Ben Elim notes several lasting marriages have come out of the related Single Ceremony process and that a person is typically joined to about four things at a time, since that is as much as anyone can genuinely commit to at once.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 6 gathers ceremonies of blessing that don’t fit neatly under passages or healings, noting that Patriarchal and Matriarchal Blessings, though also a form of blessing, are covered earlier under the use of seer stones. House Blessings gather the whole village or community together to light a fire and follow whatever it indicates, pass around cedar while everyone discusses what they want to feel in their home with the Lord and each other, and pray aloud together before placing their cedar on a flat-stone altar set into the floor, moving clockwise from the east. Blessing Altars follows a related pattern: a knee-high flat, uncut stone serves as the altar at the center of a building, and an Older Elder sprinkles white prayer corn from the east entrance toward it, direction by direction, pausing to pray blessings tied to each direction’s own meaning before depositing the remaining corn on the altar.

Passing of a Loved One describes the community’s practice of holding what amounts to a memorial service before death rather than after, so the dying person can hear the community’s memories and love for them directly and has the chance to offer their own final blessing and guidance in return, a practice Ben Elim traces to the ancient account of Emzara’s death in Melchizedek 12:2. Burial follows the Essene pattern, with the grave oriented north to south and the head placed to the south, so that when the person rises they will already be facing north, the direction of happy endings and hope in Anokeesed.

The Safe Return Ceremony, drawn from the Dead Sea Scrolls, is held before a community member finalizes a decision to travel for business or family visits, centering on what the sacred fire itself communicates about the trip. If the fire will not light at all, the trip is called off outright and any needed repentance is sought before trying again; a coal that sticks to the base board and must be brushed loose signals a need to cling especially close to Community while away, one that clings to the notch in the hearth signals clinging close to the Lord, a fire that comes fast and easy suggests unexpected ministry or blessing ahead, and a fire that is hard to start but blows to life easily warns of a genuinely difficult trip. After the fire is read, the traveler explains the Lord’s purpose for the journey, the community prays together over cedar and places it on the coals in turn, and the man of service closes by blessing a sprig of cedar in the smoke for the traveler to carry, a practice Ben Elim notes has proven remarkably accurate against what travelers actually report back home.

The Welcome Ceremony is held for anyone visiting with an eye toward possibly joining the community, or staying longer than four days, seating the visitor on the west side of the altar to share what brought them and what they have in mind for their visit. The firekeeper shows the visitor his spindle, lets them touch it, and lights the fire; if a coal comes, it is read as the fire itself welcoming them, while a fire that won’t come signals that the visit will be pleasant but temporary, and the community quietly stops considering them for residency without embarrassing them publicly, keeping the scribes’ record of the fire’s voice discreet. A multiple-coal fire is treated especially seriously, with a four-coal fire meaning the visitor must leave right after the meeting; a potluck and round of introductions typically follow. Ben Elim notes that in thirty-three years, the one or two times the community overrode a failed welcome fire and allowed someone to stay anyway, it left lasting, painful consequences.

The Pattern for Blessing with Sage closes the section, used to bless censers, the hands of those charged with handling sacred objects like trumps, and Shabuwa’s own Kelly bread. A small ball of sage is rolled in the palms and touched to a live coal, never blown on, and the object being blessed is then carried through a precise, repeating clockwise-and-through-the-center pattern across all four directions, passing back through the middle of the circle between each direction and rotating clockwise at each stop, while the one performing the blessing quietly prays for the blessings of each direction in turn.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

Section 7 opens by explaining that the stone tablets represent the oldest writing known to mankind, first established wordlessly by Seth, son of Yaatsekawd. The section gathers photographs of the tablets and archaeological copies scholars know by names like the Gateskill, Waverly, and Wilmington Tablets, alongside color-coded drawings of their shared symbols and essays explaining what several of them say; the Water Tablet is covered separately under Circle Drawing, and the Covenant Tablet, also called the Language Tablet, the Tablet of Shabuwa, or the Tablet of Jeshurun, is explained more fully in the Book of Melchizedek, since it is the very source of that book’s vision. A long list of cross-references shows the tablets mentioned throughout Achee, Enoch, Grandmothers, Melchizedek, and the Little Book, and the community’s own copy of the Covenant Tablet is identified with the artifact known to scholars as the Little Book of John.

Before working through any individual tablet, Ben Elim lays out the reading system common to all of them. Right and left are inadequate descriptions of a tablet’s two sides; the terms power and glory are used instead, power meaning the ability to love in spite of sin or failure, glory meaning God’s ability to reveal Himself to sinful people. Every developed tablet is read from the power side to the glory side and from bottom to top, the bottom representing a founding idea and the top its fulfillment, with the two lower glyphs addressing temporal matters and the two upper glyphs addressing spiritual ones. Recurring symbols include wavy lines for the Living Water; twelve bumps representing Jeshurun, the twelve gifts Christ gave the Father, which is why the number twelve recurs throughout scripture from Adam’s twelve sons to the twelve apostles; three columns of gifts that always rise to the head rather than the mouth or body, since they represent ways of thinking rather than material provision; happy, sad, and beauty face paint; a plain dot for conscious awareness, a dot inside a circle for the spirit of God, and a dot and circle together in a palm for a covenant; a veil symbol found on every tablet except the Family Tablet, open or closed to varying degrees depending on the tablet; an endurance symbol showing what must be borne, sometimes marked with a dot to show conscious difficulty; and forward- or backward-facing D-shaped potential symbols whose opening width and depth indicate how much someone depends on whatever the glyph describes.

The Guidance Tablet, also called the Family Tablet, receives the most extensive treatment in the section, illustrated with two separate essays, one drawn from the original Sealed Portion of the Brother of Jared and one written by an apprentice scribe, offered together to show the real room for interpretation the tablets allow. Both essays walk through the same reading: ten dashes and ten dots at the tablet’s base announce ten points of contrast between men and women: their created nature, their relationship with God, life’s burden, parenting, the purification cycle, spiritual gifts, opposition from the adversary, sexuality, priesthood, and their relationship with element. Man is shown made from the dust beside a rock, his hair in two bunches marking him as married, while woman’s single hair bunch and single J-shaped glyph, an exact mirror of the inner curve of man’s own glyph, expresses that she was taken out of him as his rib; God is described as still holding husband and wife as one being from the very moment of creation, before she ever took human form. Woman is made of the feelings of joining, flowing to her freely and surrounding both her and the child in her womb, while man must actively choose the feelings of compassion, which, once chosen, he can never again set aside; woman’s third gift is charity, open at both ends and deeply connected to her sexuality, her monthly purification, her love of the earth, her walk with God, her contest with the adversary, and her potential for purity, while man’s third gift is instead righteousness, tied to his responsibility over the calendar and holy days and every passage of life. The adversary is shown opposing a woman’s charity specifically, while opposing the Living Water in men, appearing to men at times as an angel of light. Woman’s four-day monthly purification cycle is described as a sacred, fully integrated act of body and spirit together, moving from confronting whatever recent unrighteousness she must release, through resolving its effects on those around her, to determining real change, and finally emerging purified and reconnected to the sweetness of the earth around her, symbolized by a small serpent on the glyph; the text urges that this cycle be understood as holy and protected rather than as a burden, and that a woman anywhere in it be shielded from unnecessary distraction. Man’s own purification, by contrast, is described as more occasional and deliberately set aside, following an easier-to-harder order the reverse of woman’s, moving from confidence in his own calling through the harder work of praying over the future security and happiness of his household. The essays close by summarizing that priesthood itself, grounded in compassion, the isolated and separately discernible spirit of God, and righteousness, is shown on the tablet as a created aspect specific to men, while women are instead created around charity and the feelings of joining, integrated seamlessly with the spirit of God within rather than exercised as a separate office.

The apprentice scribe’s essay adds further detail to the Guidance Tablet’s reading. Above the ten dashes and dots, four crests on the glory side represent the Four Orders of Creation — the gift of life, the gift of agency, the sanctity of marriage, and service to Anokeesed — expressed respectively through oceans, rivers, fountains, and rain, with four squiggly marks beneath them representing the four Nephilim who specifically oppose those Four Orders. The Living Water is shown flowing both clockwise, for what is right, easy, or usual, and counterclockwise, for what is difficult or unusual, with the woman’s side of the water fully contained within her while it flanges outward through the man’s three tabs, showing that a woman’s joining with the Living Water is the very foundation of her husband’s priesthood authority. The essay draws out a final distinction of authority and dominion: man deals with eternity to affect the present, while woman deals with the present to affect eternity, so that a man cannot interpret the present into life without a woman, and a woman cannot affect the future of mankind without a man, each remaining trapped, without the other, either in eternity or in an obscured present with no connection to the future. The tablet also carries the Ten Guidances of Anokeesed for happy living, each corresponding to a specific tablet symbol: loving Anokeesed with all one’s heart, mind, and power at the Living Water base; walking always in the sanctity of marriage, tied to the sexuality symbols; following no other religious example but Anokeesed’s lovingkindness, tied to the priesthood symbols; loving one’s neighbor as equal to oneself, tied to the gifts rising to the heads of man and woman; loving and protecting one’s children, tied to the parents’ gifts surrounding the child in the womb; purifying by sevens in all things, tied to the sevenfold purification glyphs; respecting Motsah as the Living Water given to every person without laying claim to another’s portion, tied to the gifts rising from the water; respecting and guarding all life, tied to the serpent in the woman’s glyph and the open veil in the man’s; seeking no authority but that of Elda, tied to the righteousness potential symbols; and bearing oppression without violence, tied to the opposition symbols in both purification glyphs.

The Repentance Tablet, also called the Tablet of Seth, is identified as the very first human writing of all, discovered by Azura as natural markings on a moss-covered stone and then engraved permanently into it by her husband Seth; it tells how Yaatsekawd and Cavah left Eden and how they might return, and unlike later tablets it carries no power-glory division, only a spiritual glyph and a temporal glyph that mirror one another exactly, rotated around a central veil representing the Oaks of Pethach, the gateway between Eden and the temporal world. On the spiritual glyph, Cavah stands inside a juniper tree with her eyes wide open, marking the moment her sin of doubting her own capacity for motherhood opened her eyes to see that the tree no longer shone with the Arm of the Lord, while twelve surrounding tabs of Jeshurun represent Yaatsekawd’s own vision to father twelve sons. Yaatsekawd himself is shown with mourning paint above his eyes and happy paint around his mouth, capturing the grief of the first sin alongside the joy later found in repentance and forgiveness, having learned repentance itself from the spirit of life in the lamb; the temporal glyph mirrors the spiritual one exactly to show that Yaatsekawd and Cavah remained the same people who felt the same things even after losing sight of Eden, since their visions and the Lord who brings repentance and forgiveness followed them through the veil into the temporal world, making it possible for them and all their righteous children to be restored to Eden at last.

The Judgement Tablet, also called the Covenant Tablet of the Gentiles, is the most elaborate of all, written by Achee and preserved on a cicada, and lays out the whole course of history from before creation to after the Final Judgement in terms of seven advocacies Christ makes to the Father on humanity’s behalf and seven corresponding acts of servanthood He performs in response. The tablet’s base and temporal glyph display seven dispensations of history as ascending white dots, from the world of Eden through the Flood, Shabuwa, Christ’s birth, the Gentile arrival in the Americas, the Gathering, and finally the Millennium, with Eden’s own dot bending back up to touch the boundary between the sixth and seventh dispensations to show its promised return at the Second Coming. The spiritual glyph above centers on the red Judgement Bar itself, where each person sits to see their own life through God’s eyes, flanked by the white bread and wine Christ serves there, representing His presence in all element and the joy of forgiveness overshadowing pain, and by the twin stones of Urim through which a person’s works of righteousness and repentance are seen in turn. The seven advocacies move from Christ asking the Father for a reason to create each person, through asking that each be created inherently good, kept in company with the Spirit through repentance, joined to God through element, allowed to see their own life through God’s eyes, granted a permanently renewed judgement, and finally recognized as equal in virtue to God’s own; each is matched by a servanthood in which Christ defines eternity around a person’s vision, encloses their history in the Father’s presence and love, becomes the Word of His Power for them, builds their vision into the fabric of element, prepares them to stand in the Father’s presence, becomes Himself the definition of all human virtue, and finally joins each person completely to God in the midst of eternity. A final section describes what lies beyond the Judgement itself: a closed veil protecting those admitted into the Father’s eternal presence, and a golden bar showing that even in eternity the distinction between power and glory endures forever.

Common Symbols Between the Tablets closes Section 7 with a color-coded key applied across drawings of all six tablets side by side, marking recurring elements such as sky blue for the Urim, yellow for veils, and separate colors for the wife symbol, the woman symbol, the man symbol, spiritual gifts, the opposition symbol, and prayer censers, offered as visual proof that the tablets, despite being written across different times and by different hands, share a single consistent writing system.

From The Handbook of Established Righteousness

The Appendix opens with a Photo Section presenting captioned images of the community’s own ceremonial objects: the Urim and Thummim in use, morning and evening prayer corn bags, a wedding ree, a married Anokeesed pillow, a seer stone with its arrowheads, sets of Anokeesed’s dishes, a signal horn and khatsar with their carrying bags, an open and closed fire bundle, pocket and full-sized paint blocks, a stone kelly shown from the side, a buffalo tail rattle and ayal horn whistle, a Shabuwa lamp, a men’s leather worship garment, samples of Rishoniy and Harari element, a closed oil center, and a naturally occurring rock paint kelly found already holding paint in a creek bed.

The High Priest Communities chart lists twenty-four high priests in historical succession, from Adam through figures like Seth, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Achee, Abraham, Israel, Joseph, Moses, Jonah, Elijah, Isaiah, Josiah, and on to Goker Harim and John the Baptist and Beloved, each paired with a personal Watcher, an element, a meaning of that Watcher’s name, a specific virtue the Watcher teaches, and a New Testament title for Christ associated with that community. A companion chart lists twenty-four things each High Priest Community established about Christ’s own nature and mission, phrased as what Christ was thereby allowed to do for humanity, from reconnecting man to the Father and giving human language and inspired writing, through bearing manhood and compassion as element, having limits to His suffering, governing all things through righteous ceremony, being born in the flesh among sin yet remaining clean, feeling kinship as family, defining human virtue, carrying a spiritual heritage forward through prophets, holding covenant with nations, being resurrected, succeeding in His missions, being personally knowable to each person unchanging, matching man’s holy days to God’s, growing grace upon grace with the Father, healing and restoring, being born of woman, calling forth oneness between God and man, comforting the Father, letting each thing happen in its own time, establishing His kingdom for the Millennium, destroying the wicked kingdoms of Semihazah, gathering the elect, and forgiving sin.

The Historic Inscription of the Eerkodeshoi Explained lays out how the twenty-four leading Watchers were themselves ordered by direction and element from Eden until just before the Flood, with fountains, representing the sanctity of marriage, inscribed first during that era; the Lord then shifted the order so fire came first from the time of the Flood until recently, protecting the righteous from being associated with the very element destroying the wicked, and has now shifted the order back to fountains first as the age of destruction by fire approaches, so the righteous will not be mistaken for enemies when that judgment falls. The Watchers of Holiness chart that follows catalogs the twenty-four faithful Eerkodeshoi in order, from Debariel of fire through Rahaviel of wind, Malakiel of mountains, Ebedel of rocks, Yatsal of thunder, Kabodiel of trees, Bawrakel of rain, Regel of hills, Pawnel of rivers, Abariel of clouds, Anahiel of dew, Rachatsel of grass, Sarahel of oceans, Oreiel of the sun, Kayal of fountains, Shemael of animals, Chafetiel of fruit, Emethiel of the moon, Adahiel of Enoch’s calendar, Chadeshel of springtime, Osherel of summer, Gavahel of fall, Shabathiel of winter, and Racaphiel of the stars, each entry naming what a person must repent of before approaching that Watcher, what body of God’s feeling or attribute it guards, and what wider role it plays as elder, master, teacher, or enemy of some human quality. Individual essays elaborate several of these at length: fire, as leader of all the Eerkodeshoi, is described as the body of the Father’s own delight and Fatherhood, the element through which He eats, hears, and warms His people, and the one most misused by the wicked seeking to appear holy; wind, or Rahaviel, is the flesh of God’s all-seeing spirit, blowing into every hidden place and every private thought and teaching responsibility and preparedness; thunder, or Yatsal, heralds the doings of Messiah and the coming account of the Decadarchoi, illustrated by a story of Yatsal visibly shaking the earth in escalating confirmation during a ceremony calling forth the opening of the seven seals; trees, or Kabodiel, keep an unforgettable record of every human deed, both righteous and wicked, and cannot be fooled or manipulated; rain, or Bawrakel, is the body of God’s own tender and sometimes sorrowful feelings, mother of the rivers and grandmother of the fountains, guardian of the Covenant and its rainbow; and hills, or Regel, carry forever the memory of Christ’s own feet walking upon them and teach unwavering vigilance against evil.

A parallel Fallen Watchers chart catalogs twenty leaders of the Decadarchoi under Semihazah, each paired with an element, an original righteous meaning they were created to hold, and the evil teaching they chose instead: Semihazah himself, associated with the meteorite Eve found, was originally meant to herald Christ’s authority but chose jealousy and became the father of sorcery, teaching Cain to kill Abel by prayer; Artagoph, tied to copper, chose to teach that righteousness is imaginary and became the master of greed and superstition; and eighteen further fallen leaders are tied in turn to coal, phosphorus, marble, petroleum, comets, electricity, and other elements, each teaching a distinct corruption such as loneliness, fear, lying, hatred, oppression, false authority, pollution, mistrust, illness, doubt, self-glory, or laziness, down to Yehaddiel, tied to writing on tombs, who was meant to teach that all real knowledge comes from God but chose instead that only man-made writing is valid, becoming the corrupting force behind rigid, letter-bound religion.

The City of Secacah presents a numbered site analysis of the ancient Essene settlement, offered as informed conjecture supported by inspiration rather than settled archaeology: it identifies Solomon’s Pool, or Eden’s Pool, as the open pool used by large groups; a series of enclosed pools tied to each successive world or dispensation, including one used to call forth the Millennium deliberately placed outside the city’s main enclosure; the likely residence of the community’s High Priest; a central court for the worship of the Merari; dressing rooms, a feet-washing pool for travelers, a sentry room and guard quarters, a general council hall, a pantry connected to the Banquets of the Many, a defensive tower, a main entrance facing east in anticipation of the Messiah, a kiln whose uniform pottery reflected the community’s holding all things in common, kitchens, work stations, a traveler’s inn set apart from the community’s inner life, storage rooms for the element of righteousness, and an open camping area for those attending prayer watches, since no permanent dwellings existed within the watch settlement itself.

A short chart on the Son and the Father in Element, drawn from the First Book of Achee, contrasts the two: Christ came to be in and through all element by the hand of man with Melchizedek, reached through obedience, and functions as Enlightener, bringing knowledge of sin, discernment, restoration, forgiveness, and salvation; the Father came to be in element by the hand of man with Christ in Jeshurun, is reached only through Christ, and functions as Comforter, casting out loneliness and fear, bringing harmony, peace, eternal bonding, and oneness, and witnessing each person’s fulfillment of their created purpose.

An Explanation of the Writing Style of the Book of Remembrance describes the poetic structure underlying the whole library, built on parallelism rather than meter or rhyme, including chiasmus, where ideas repeat in reverse mirrored order, and organized using what researcher J. M. Cascione called arithmelogues, numbered lists whose count itself signals a subject. It walks through the mechanical process of preparing the scripture text for this listing form: removing punctuation except hyphens, using Hebraisms like “and,” “and it came to pass,” and “therefore” to mark new lines and new verses, capitalizing definitions in italics, and preserving the natural, sometimes very long or very short length of each verse as it was originally received, all in service of revealing the beauty of the original poetic thought rather than treating any particular wording as fixed and unalterable in the way of the god of writing, Nebo.

Similarities Between Aaron’s Law and Babylonian Law offers an extensive page-by-page comparison drawn from Driver and Miles, showing that laws throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy on subjects from the sale of slaves and animals, injury and murder, incest, kidnapping, inheritance, oaths, and “an eye for an eye” retaliation closely parallel specific numbered provisions of the Code of Hammurabi, down to Christ’s own bitter-cup jealousy ceremony matching Hammurabi’s law on suspected infidelity. Two accompanying lists, Complaints Against Moses and the times Moses urged Israel to love God, catalog specific verses from Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy: the first records more than thirty instances of the people rebelling against, murmuring at, or disobeying Moses; the second notes that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers combined contain almost no reference to loving God at all, while Deuteronomy, the book most closely tied to Moses’s own voice, contains repeated pleas to love the Lord.

Previously Printed Information on the Use and Function of the Urim gives Ben Elim’s own extended personal account of receiving the community’s Urim and Thummim, comparing its physical form, described as two smooth three-cornered stones fixed in gold bows, to descriptions given by Joseph Smith’s mother and to a Dead Sea Scroll fragment mentioning a left and right stone and three tongues of fire. He recounts the Lord appearing at his bedside holding the instrument fully assembled, instructing him that its purpose is to let him see through the Father’s eyes in exactly two ways, loving in spite of sin and revealing Himself to sinful man, and that he must first feel forgiven using a specific plant before attempting to use it; the account discovers that the instrument is pictured on the Judgement Tablet, also called the Breastplate of Judgement. He describes his own hesitant first attempts, alone at a back fence seeing Adam and Eve, and later at the altar with scribes present, where he witnessed Christ’s seven advocacies before the Father and seven acts of servanthood spanning before creation to after the Final Judgement, along with a difficult session in which the Urim stopped working until he repented of assuming he already understood the nature of creation. He argues at length that the Urim and Thummim function as an instrument of interpretation rather than translation, comparing his experience to accounts of Joseph Smith’s own seer stone, and closes by explaining that receiving the entire Sealed Portion actually required less than twenty-four hours of direct use of the instrument, though writing up what was seen took far longer.

The Revelation by Urim on Judas Iscariot opens with Ben Elim recalling, as a teenager in 1957, weeping over Judas’s fate and receiving personal assurance from the Lord that Judas had been forgiven and remained numbered among the Twelve; decades later, while editing racist elements out of a Community New Testament, he returned to the question and used the Urim to see Judas directly. What he saw contradicted the traditional account entirely: a short, cheerful, devoted young apostle healed by Christ of a loathsome disease, entrusted with the purse precisely because he was diligent, who was approached at Passover by a secretly sympathetic member of the Sanhedrin asking to arrange a private reconciliation between Christ and the authorities; Judas initially refused money to reveal the Lord’s resting place, brought the request to Christ Himself, and only agreed reluctantly when he believed it might bring peace, not realizing a second man was listening in the shadows to relay the location to those planning Christ’s arrest. Judas ran to warn Christ but arrived too late, cried out “Oh Lord, I have been betrayed!”, and, upon realizing the arrest had been planned all along, fled and hanged himself from a dead limb of an old split olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane, his true intentions never known to the other apostles, who assumed the worst and passed that assumption down through the Gospels.

A Message from the Lord for the People of Independence, Missouri records a prophetic warning received by Urim in 2001 during work on the second volume of the Sealed Portion, likening the city and the Restorationist community gathered there to ancient Jerusalem under Zedekiah: a people who received covenant promises regarding their holy city but corrupted themselves, followed the traditions of their fathers, cast out the prophets sent to call them to repentance, and brought destruction upon themselves despite believing their gathering place offered safety. The message warns that Independence will likewise be destroyed by fire due to the whole church’s condemnation and unrepented wickedness, but that those who flee the city and gather instead into places of righteousness, living the Sealed Portion’s teachings with one heart and mind, will be spared; those who remain and are eventually destroyed will, in some future day after the city’s cleansing, be known as the children of the ruins who return to help make Independence part of Zion at last.

The volume closes with a brief Note on Songs, inviting readers to request recordings of the community’s ceremonial songs by email, along with an open invitation to reach out with any further questions about the book.