Atlas Angelico de la Gran Bretaña (Heavenly Atlas of Great Britain)

Daniel Levi de Barrios

1688

Isaiah 19:1

Prophecy of Egypt: The Lord rides a light cloud and will come to Egypt, and Idols of Egypt will move before him, and the heart of Egypt shall melt away in him.

Upon a light cloud the Lord sets out,
Coming swiftly unto Egypt,
Which in two Realms is divided:
One without rain, the other cloudy.
The first no longer worships silent Idols,
For the frightful Turk cast these out,
And the second Realm will melt away, astounded
To learn what has happened there.

Isaiah 19:2

And I shall mix Mitsrayim with Mitsrayim.

Translators use the name Egypt instead of Mitsrayim, and this rendering is very appropriate here because there have been two places called Mitsrayim and called Egypt. The second Mitsrayim had this name in Africa, named after Mitsrayim, the second son of Ham, and was later called Egypt after King Aegyptus, brother of Danaus. The first Mitsrayim encompasses Spain, France, and Germany, in the empire of Great Britain, which is why the Prophet Isaiah calls Mitsrayim an Island in his chapter 20. And they shall be weakened and ashamed of Cush, which was their hope, and of Mitsrayim, which was their glory; and on that day the inhabitant of this Island shall say: Behold, such was our hope. With the names Cush and Mitsrayim, he specifies that this island is Britain, for I have proven that Genesis ch. 2 calls Britain Cush, and Isaiah also calls it Mitsrayim when he names this as an Island, and in the Prediction that I shall mix Mitsrayim with Mitsrayim, because one Mitsrayim is in Africa, named after Mitsrayim the son of Ham, and the other Mitsrayim is England. מצר ים means Narrow Sea, and Mitsrayim is not Sea but Land. This is Britain and not the Mitsrayim in Africa, as it derives from the name Narrow Sea or Channel that separated it from Flanders and from France, being in the Atlantic, which divided Spain from Africa. Therefore Jeremiah in Lamentations applies the name Metsarim (Straits) to the peoples of these two cerulean Straits, lamenting that Judah’s pursuers all overtook her amid straits. The prophet Obadiah distinguishes between these two straits, calling one Tsarfat (France with Belgium and England) and the other Sefarad (Spain), or as St. Jerome has it, Strait, placing the Israelites as far as Tsarfat and the Jerusalemites in Sefarad. The Romans referred to Britain as Ocean. [ . . . ]

Ocean means Sea of Enoch, or Outer Path of Enoch, deriving either from Zee—Flemish for Sea—plus Enoch, or from Chutzah—which in the holy language means from outside or exterior—plus path, both because the Ocean Sea is known as the Outer Sea and because of the path Adam traveled out of Eden in the Scottish region we now know as Edenburg,1 interpreted as Borough of Eden. This is confirmed by the Wisdom in chapter 8 of Proverbs, which uses the term Chutzot (Wards and outlying zones) to refer to Britain, to the Outer Sea, and to the western part of Spain and of Barbary where the Outer Sea begins, and the term Lo, which means No, to refer to both the Non plus ultra Herculeo and the forest of Lovain which still retains that name. He had as yet made No earth or paths or the beginning of the dust of the World. It applies the name Afrot (dust) to the Aphrodisias or Cadiz Islands, and to Flanders, because the Flemish lands are where Adam and Eve were created from the dust, and they gave this name to the future Islands, which at that time were land contiguous with Britain. This is why Solomon calls them Beginning of the dust of the World, and Britain’s former name, Ocean, means Path of Enoch, derived from ḥutzah which in our language means calle [path or outlying area],2 and from Enoch, son of Jared, monarch of all the descendants of Adam up to his time. So says Jafar’s book, as does Alexander Polyhistor on the authority of Eupolemus as reported by Eusebius in book 4, Praeparatio evangelica, chapter 4, affirming that the aforementioned Enoch, father of Methuselah, was called Atlas, which [Bernardo de] Aldrete also records in book 4, Africa, chapter 12. And this Atlas named the Atlantic Sea, which is the start of the immense Ocean Sea, as well as the great Atlantic Island that the Egyptian Priests as well as Solon, Plato, Posidonius, and Strabo place next to the Strait of Hercules. The erudite [José Antonio González de] Salas indicates this in the Second Note in his edition of Pomponius Mela, saying that Tertullian called the Atlantic Aeon. He does not see this name as a corruption of Enoch, or that the 4th book of Esdras,3 chapter 6, metaphorically applies the name Enoch to the Ocean, which is Britain, in the Western Lands: And to Enoch you gave one of the parts that were dry on the third day, that he might have dominion there.

Narrow sea: Mitsrayim interpreted
Two Channels are its undulating arms.
With one, its waves reach the French and the Belgian,
With the other, the brave Libyan and Andalusian;
Therefore it is called Ocean,
On the frothing Atlantean shoulders
Of Angels, a World with the English,
with the Scots, heaven of the Egyptians.

[ . . . ]

The prophecy I shall mix Mitsrayim with Mitsrayim was fulfilled when the Kingdoms of Scotland and England were joined, because England is one Mitsrayim, and the people of Scotland are from another Mitsrayim. The union of these crowns occurred in 1589 when King James VI of Scotland inherited the English scepter from Queen Elizabeth. With his wife, Anne, daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark, he had two sons: one, Henry, who died before him, and another, Charles, who succeeded him as King, and a daughter called Elizabeth who married Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine.

Charles I, King of England and Scotland, married Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henry IV of France. With her he begat four sons and three daughters. The eldest son, called Charles, lived two hours. The second son was born on May 29, 1630, and was also named Charles, Prince of Wales. The third was born on October 13, 1633, and was named James, Duke of York and of Albany. The fourth was born on July 20, 1646, and was named Henry, Duke of Gloucester. The daughters were Mary, wife of William II, Prince of Orange; Elizabeth, who died a maiden; and Henrietta Mary, wife of Philippe, Duke of Orleans, and mother of Louise, Queen of Spain, and of the Duchess of Savoy.

Translated by
Steven
Capsuto
.

Notes

[To bolster his argument about Eden, the author uses this uncommon spelling of Edinburgh, which does appear in some seventeenth-century texts, usually in German.—Trans.]

[The author is playing with two now-archaic meanings of the Spanish word calle: (1) a path, lane, or minor street, and (2) figuratively, an outlying area (literally, a community under the administration of another city or town, under the terms of a charter or privilege). The Hebrew word he compares it to means “outside.”—Trans.]

[4 Esdras is an apocryphal text attributed to the prophet Ezra, included in some Christian editions of the Hebrew Bible.—Trans.]

Credits

Daniel Levi de Barrios (Miguel de Barrios), Atlas Angelico de la Gran Bretaña (Heavenly Atlas of Great Britain) (Amsterdam, 1688), pp. 16–21.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.

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