It may also be meaningful that following their three days’ journey the number of encampments until the Israelites reached Sinai was the spiritual number seven. I am not now prepared to comment on the thirty encampments listed thereafter which brought them to the plains of Moab by the Jordan, other than to note it amounts to the same sacred number three, times ten.

8. Jon 3,3: “Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth.”

It is pathetic what a literal translation of this spiritual book, so meaningful to the early Christians, and referenced by Christ in his “sign of Jonah” remarks, does to its meaning. It is so loaded with spiritual metaphors tied into the process of ancient initiation that no effort can here be made to address any significant part of them. Suffice it to say that when Jonah is told to “Arise, go to Ninevah . . .”, he was being told to make a spiritual journey amounting to initiation, to a city “three days’ journey” in breadth. No city in that day could have been so wide, so to salvage the accuracy of the account it must have been a spiritual description, namely, a city one reaches only by the process of initiation. Jonah complies with this requirement, only to be commanded to go on from there, an inevitable consequence of initiation. Of course, every spiritual level lays on additional burdens. Jonah’s later desire to rest in the shade reminds us of the enlightenment of arriving at the spiritual destination called “Under the Tree”—but there is no such rest, only added commitment. How unspeakably glorious is this message in such spiritual context— but it is not limited to just this, as the Commentary on this passage will show.

In summary, as mentioned above, “three days’ journey” appears only in three scriptural settings, Jacob’s setting out on the mission of Israel, Moses’ later setting out on the Hebrew mission, and Jonah’s journey to the spiritual city of Ninevah. (See “Three Bodies,” #29.)

We can thus see the enormous spiritual significance of the concept of the “three days’ journey.” It relates to the “three days” of Jesus’ entombment (although obviously it was for less than two, an otherwise tortuous anomaly to the thinking mind). And, as Steiner shows, it relates to the entombment of Lazarus, which was “a sickness not unto death” but unto the “three days’ journey” of initiation by Jesus himself (although likewise obviously not for three, or three and a half, days, but four). This is not to equate the raising of Lazarus with that of Jesus, except as one spiritual level relates to a higher one—not equivalent, but of like, though embryonic, character.

Again, the “three days’ journey” of ancient initiation dealt with the “temple sleep,” normally three (or three and a half) days, which was part of the Mysteries of ancient times. However, it is misleading to stop there without saying that the coming of Christ brought about a different method of initiation. The “temple sleep” of ancient times would be dangerous to the human being today, for its body is more solid now. Christ’s passion, death and Resurrection brought the Mysteries out into the light of day (see CMF), though this is as yet misunderstood. It was an enactment, not a repudiation, of the spiritual process of the Mysteries. The Bible speaks often of mystery (see “Mysteries”), as do the great contemporary Greek works. It is important that the human being learn the meaning of all this, for it is the essential message of the Bible—vital to the future evolutionary progress of humanity.⁵

While in “Mysteries” herein the initiation of Elijah is clearly shown, it would appear that the scriptural description of his initiation indicates that he made a “three days’ journey,” though such phrase itself is not used. Rather we are told (1 K 19) how in his first day he lay down “under a broom tree” (see “Under the Tree”), then in his second lodged in a “cave,” and then in his third heard a “still small voice” commanding him back to the “wilderness of Damascus” (cf. Acts 9,8-19 and Gal 1,17). The word “cave” was used from ancient times to describe the initiation process. Plato used the metaphor in his celebrated “cave parable” (The Republic, Book VII, 7 GB 388), and the entombment process of both Lazarus and Jesus embodies the same concept. It is worthwhile to contemplate the various Biblical uses of the term “cave,” shown by any good concordance. And the “still small voice” implies the spiritual “hearing” of the second aspect of initiation (see I-31 and I-30, as well as the seminal passage in Is 6,9-10).

While John was “loved” and uniquely initiated by Jesus, as described in Jn 11, it seems almost certain that Paul’s Damascus Road experience precipitated a similar initiation by Christ after his Resurrection.⁶ This is indicated by the “Three Days” in Acts 9,9, as well as by comments like 2 Cor 12,2-4 (cf. SE, Lect. 5, p. 65). The sensitive reader can come to see the urgent necessity for a revitalizing enlightenment to come upon the adumbral theology of the last two millennia, especially that of the last two centuries which sees in the “three days’ journey” phrase either a description of physical dimension or a Bible pathetically in error and thus irrelevant. If the deeper truths of the Bible can be brought to the light of anthroposophical knowledge, it will take on the vital new meaning demanded by the spiritual needs of our era.