10 Biblical Pillars of Rastafari Reasoning

The Sacred Code: 10 Biblical Pillars of Rastafari Reasoning

To the uninitiated, the Bible is a Western book. But to the Rastafari, the scriptures are a map—one that was intentionally hidden and "colonized" to obscure the true identity of the African diaspora.

Through the practice of Reasoning, Rastafari look past standard translations to reclaim their heritage. From the divinity of the Emperor to the sacredness of the "Herb," here are the core KJV verses that form the bedrock of the movement.

Note to Readers: While the Bible is a primary source of "Reasoning" for many in the movement, Rastafari is a diverse and evolving global community. For many Rastas, livity is defined by direct ancestral connection, natural law, and personal meditation rather than strict scriptural adherence. This post explores one specific—though significant—branch of Rastafari thought, acknowledging that the "Word" takes many forms beyond the printed page.

 So in other word ,Rastafari is not a "religion of the book" in the traditional sense. It is a movement of Word, Sound, and Power. So though many use the King James Version to verify prophecy, or versions that contain Apocryphal texts like The Ethiopian Bible, others find their truth in the earth, the drums, and the divine spirit within. These pillars I discuss here represents a scriptural perspective, but the heart of a Rasta is far wider than any single text.

You can’t box a Rasta! While we’re diving into the biblical roots that many elders use to ground their faith, just remember that Rastafari is a broad house. Not every believer looks to the Bible to define their identity; for many, the spirit of Jah is found in the land, the culture, and the heartbeat of the people. Take these verses as one path in a journey of many roads. Selah!

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1. The Throne of the Living God

Rastafari is unique in its belief in the divinity of Emperor Haile Selassie I. This isn't just a political stance; it is a prophetic fulfillment.

• Revelation 5:5: "Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book..."

• Revelation 19:16: identifies him as the "King Of Kings, And Lord Of Lords."

• Daniel 7:9: describes the "Ancient of Days" with hair like "pure wool," a clear reference to the African physical phenotype.

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2. Ethiopia: The Stretching of Hands

The movement’s Afrocentricity is rooted in the belief that Ethiopia is the spiritual and physical center of the world for the Black man.

• Psalm 68:31: "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God."This is the foundational prophecy that sparked the movement in 1930s Jamaica.

• Amos 9:7: asks a rhetorical question that many Rastas live by: "Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?"

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3. The Nazarite Vow: Why the Locks?

The dreadlocks of a Rasta are a "covenant" on the head. It is a commitment to the Nazarite Vow found in the Torah.

• Numbers 6:5: "There shall no razor come upon his head... he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow."

• Leviticus 21:5: forbids the "making of baldness," reinforcing the natural state of the body as a temple.

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4. Ital Livity and the Holy Herb

Dietary laws (Ital) and the use of Ganja are seen as commands from the Creator to maintain "Livity" (life energy).

• Genesis 1:29: "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed... to you it shall be for meat."

• Revelation 22:2: mentions the "leaves of the tree" being for the "healing of the nations." In the Rasta tradition, this is a direct reference to the spiritual and medicinal power of cannabis.

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5. The "Isles of the Sea" and the 144,000

One of the most profound aspects of Rastafari Reasoning is the mystical link between Jamaica and the Bible.

• Isaiah 24:15: specifically calls for the glorification of God in the "isles of the sea."

• The Gematria of the Island: Many Elders point to Revelation 7:4, which mentions the 144,000 sealed elect. Through "Rasta Math," the square mileage of Jamaica is often linked to the number 144 ($12 \times 12$), marking the island as a sacred training ground for the spiritual elite.

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Zion vs. Babylon: The Great Divide

Concept	Biblical Term	The Rastafari "Reasoning"
Africa	Zion	The Promised Land; the source of life.
The West	Babylon	The oppressive, colonial system to be "chanted down."
The Journey	Exodus	The mental and physical return to African roots.

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Final Thought

When a Rasta opens the Bible, they aren't looking for a story of the past; they are looking for their reflection in the present. By reclaiming these verses, the movement turned a tool of colonial control into a weapon of spiritual liberation.

What do you think? Does seeing these verses change your perspective on the movement? Let us know in the comments below.

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Share this post on Facebook and join the conversation! #Rastafari #BiblicalProphecy #TheMontegonian #Zion #BlackSpirituality #ItalLivity

 

Earth's Most Strangest Man

The Earth’s Most Strangest Man
A provocative and mysterious work that reflects the radical religious imagination circulating in early Rastafari circles. Part polemic, part prophecy, this text challenges colonial Christianity and pushes readers toward a more African-centered interpretation of divine history.
Click the image to read the full document.

A Review

The radio and television are abuzz with talk of World War III and Iran and Trump, street corners rage with debate about global politics. So escape the noise and clutter I beg thee, that you may sit with Planno’s manuscript on a verandah in Montego Bay as I do, hearing Spanish speaking neighbours new to the community walk by on their way to the community shop or maybe you have the luxury of a good view and are watching the cruise ships drift past, But whatever you do, know that the real Jamaica simmers below the tourist line and you realize that Planno's work isn’t just scholarship—it’s testimony. The Earth Most Strangest Man arrives like a letter from a wise older head who happens to be your uncle, your teacher, and your prophet all at once. Written in 1969, when the island was still shaking off the performance of independence and finding its feet in a world that wanted to reduce Rastafari to a soundtrack, Planno’s work reads less like a textbook and more like a reasoning that got too heavy for the yard and had to be put down on paper before the wisdom escaped.

Today we as Rastafari stand at a crossroads as we watch Cuba, the birthplace of Planno suffer the wrath of America's imperial plan and the newly dubbed Donroe Doctrine. So it is no small thing to note that Planno stands at a peculiar crossroads—he’s the man who walked with Haile Selassie I in 1966, who helped steady the crowd when the Lion landed at Palisadoes, who mentored Marley, and who went on the 1961 Mission to Africa when repatriation was still a concrete plan rather than a metaphor. Because of this, his writing carries a weight that theoretical treatises simply can’t capture. He isn’t observing Rastafari from outside; he’s mapping the terrain from within, navigating between the theological urgency of the Nyabinghi grounds and the cold pragmatism of diplomatic halls. When he writes about Selassie, it isn’t abstract Christology—it’s the theology of a man who stood three feet from the King and felt the earth shift. He traces the titles—“King of Kings, Lion of Judah”—not as academic footnotes but as living evidence, proof that the God of the oppressed chose to manifest in Black royalty precisely when the world was busy denying Black humanity.

What strikes you most, reading this in Montego Bay where the hills still remember the Coral Gardens massacre and where police harassment remains a background hum, is how Planno refuses to let slavery remain in the past. He insists it shape-shifts: from the ships to the banks, from the whip to the curriculum, from the plantation to the political party headquarters. It’s a four-headed beast—chattel, economic, mental, and political—and he names it clearly enough that a youth in Flankers or a elder in Granville can recognize the pattern without needing a sociology degree. When he critiques the PNP and JLP, he isn’t just picking sides; he’s showing how both manage the same colonial estate, just with different color paint. The brown elite still hold the keys, the economy still feeds the former master, and independence remains a costume ball where the chains got lighter but didn’t vanish.

Planno’s structure mirrors how we actually talk—circular, returning, building. He moves from scripture to personal memory to political prophecy without warning, because that’s how truth arrives in a reasoning session. One moment he’s decoding Revelation through Ethiopian eyes, rejecting the missionary interpretations that taught us to hate ourselves; the next he’s detailing the 1961 Mission’s failures, the Shashamane land grants that the government tried to sabotage, or the internal fractures within the movement itself. He doesn’t hide the tensions—between those who want to fly to Africa tomorrow and those who believe we must heal Jamaica first, between the locksmen and the house Rastas, between the dreamers and the diplomats. It’s honest work, vulnerable even, which is rare in writings about faith.

The language itself breathes resistance. Planno writes in English that hasn’t forgotten its Creole roots—straight enough that the message carries, but rhythmic enough that you hear the drums underneath. When he uses “I and I,” it’s not a gimmick; it’s the theological spine of the whole piece, the understanding that divinity sits within the person, that the individual and the collective share one breath, that we are all fragments of the same sacred whole. It’s a grammar of unity in a world designed to separate.

For those of us trying to hold both the academy and the community—writing papers by day and attending groundation by night—Planno offers a blueprint for integrity. He demonstrates that you can analyze neocolonial economics while acknowledging that prophecy is real data. You can critique the movement’s internal contradictions without betraying it to Babylon’s cameras. The manuscript’s physicality, even down to the multi-colored ink he used, suggests that this knowledge is alive, color-coded, refusing to be standardized into the black-and-white of colonial print.

Reading him now, with all the hindsight of reggae’s globalization and the ongoing struggle for reparations, his warnings about neo-colonial politics feel almost painfully prescient. He knew that political independence without economic and psychological liberation was just a changing of the guards. He understood that repatriation had to happen in the mind before it could happen at the airport—that Zion is as much a consciousness as a coordinate.

So when we talk about Planno in the yards today, we’re not just citing a historical figure. We’re acknowledging an elder who managed to put the thunder of Trench Town into sentences without losing the thunder. His work reminds us that Rastafari isn’t a museum piece for tourists to photograph; it’s a continuous, difficult, beautiful argument with history, demanding that we recognize the “strangest” perspectives often contain the truest truths. For the bredren in the university library and the sistren selling ital stew by the roadside, his voice bridges those worlds—not by watering down either one, but by showing that deep thought and rooted culture have always been the same conversation.

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LALIBELA, Ethiopia & E.T. Extraterrestial Stargates of the Ancient AFRIC...

haile selassie JFK in usa 1.avi

Haile Selassie Meets The Queen of England

More on the Haile Selassie's alleged death!

Yogiraj on Meeting Haile Selassie

Yogiraj Recounts His 1982 Meeting With Haile Selassie, Conquering Lion Of The Tribe Of Judah!

OCCUPY PINNACLE

As you may be aware there is movement afoot to get the issue that surround Pinnacle addressed... contribute and play apart...

If you are in Jamaica donate at any National Commercial Bank (NCB)... Leonard P Howell Foundation Act # 1000003 Originally opened at Manor Parkway branch ( if they need to know) Also you may send your US$20 contribution to http://lphfoundation.org/donate/

Jamaica, Black Leadership and the Future!

It's been over a year since Jamaica 50 and sometimes I wonder have we forgotten who we are as a people and has the media forgotten who we are! 

There was a time when PanAfricanism was ripe in the island, with the likes of Walter Rodney and Rastafari played a role as the memory of the people, when people remembered their Africaness. There was a time when Michael Manley was in dialogue with Kwame Nkruma and Julius Nyrere. 

Oh come on, for goodness sake! We were a people that inspired Haile Selassie to come here, a man so revered he was on the cover of Time several times and featured in the national geographic and is even spoken of highly still today in modern literature such as Robert Greene's Strategies of War and Laws of Power, as well as Wings to Freedom by and Indian Yogi named Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath. Jamaicans are a people that inspired Nelson Mandela to come here. We produced Marcus Garvey one of the greatest black icons and PanAfricanist of all times. We produced Bob Marley who not only the world loved but Africans.

So why is it then that as Africa is now being looted and plundered by Europe and America, commercially colonized by China with a renewed 21st century thrust... Why is no one speaking out about it? Europeans are streaming into northwest Africa en masse, the huge U.S. airlift capacity may soon be necessary to keep the “Crusaders” supplied and the military industrial complex oiled and firing. African militaries are being cobbled to do the Caucasian’s bidding. 

The U.S. has almost practically establish a Somalia-like operation on the near side of Africa – with Americans at the helm. A sentiment echoed by even republican politician in the states Ron Paul who said "U.S. Action in Mali is Another Undeclared War".

All this while in America itself under the Obama administration the plight of Black Americans has worsened:  A recent interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” NAACP CEO and president, Ben Jealous, told the show’s host that black Americans “are doing far worse” than when President Obama first took office. “The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started,” Jealous told show host David Gregory. “White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing far worse.”  Dr. Julianne Malveaux of Your Black World recently wrote that the Obama Administration needs to speak out more about existing racial disparities and persistent problems in black unemployment.

The Black Diaspora has seen the US elect thousands of African American local and state officials and re-elect the first black president. But Obama seems to have proven just a symbol, symbolic and nothing more. Nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing progressive as it pertains to the plight of blacks.

The media is slow and unwilling to note that our black leaders are dithering. Floundering. Flailing... failing and falling even. Symbolism supersedes the fact that black leadership has few or no victories to boast for the seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. 

No black leader is man enough to speak to or look at the fact that the war on drugs and the prison state sprung up in north America. The symbol of Obama over rides the fact that black unemployment remains at record levels, that US wages have not risen in thirty years and that the first black president apparently forgot his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour almost as soon as he made it. And what has been done for the Caribbean? Nothing. He continues an illegal international embargo on Cuba, he continues Gitmo torture in our territory, and turned down our request to exonerate Jamaica's hero and Rastafari Icon Marcus Garvey. 

Obama seems a symbol used to nullify and quiet the analytic black mind and voice. "Nigger shut up we got a black president now!" 1 black President... and 10 million  black persons still suffering. And let us not examine his neglect of his black family in Kenya, or his brother that lives in a Shanty Town.

Who in Jamaica or the media is willing to look past the fact that he is JUST a black president and willing to examine the fact that the black role model president conducts weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House basement at which he dispatches drones to murder and special forces to kidnap and torture in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across the African continent. It matters not at all that the First Lady is a shameless flack for Wal-Mart, that the Department of Justice prosecutes whistle blowers instead of war criminals, or that black military and diplomats like Susan Rice are up to their armpits in African blood.

The black political class at home and abroad is utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to demand higher wages, a massive jobs program to relieve unemployment, a new paradigm of urban economic development that isn't just moving poor people out of neighborhoods and richer ones in. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbours and friends.

For them, the election and and re-election of Barack Obama is the end of black history. The be all and end all of our history. Addressing black unemployment, pervasive economic injustice, opposing the neoliberal agenda of privatization and austerity put forth not just by the black president, but by an entire layer of black thinkers are, in their language not pragmatic or “realistic.”

So if our black leaders have anything to say about it, more years of Barack Obama means more years of black silence and irrelevance on the issues that matter most to our communities; on jobs and economic injustice. It means black leadership will wring its hands and do nothing as American federal policies drive the militarization of Africa. Our politicians will continue to philander and spinelessly acquiesce to whatever old might Uncle Sam says, we will genuflect at his very whim. We will not be the bold humans, bold leaders that stood down injustice and untruths in the past we will be the bandwagonists of a new age much to our demise!

Marcus Mosiah Garvey: Commemoration!

QUICK FACTS

NAME: Marcus Garvey
OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist

BIRTH DATE: August 17, 1887
DEATH DATE: June 10, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH: St Ann's Bay, Jamaica
PLACE OF DEATH: London, England

BEST KNOWN FOR

Marcus Garvey was a proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, inspiring the Nation of Islam and the Rastafarian movement.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940), was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).

He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. Prior to the twentieth century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnetadvocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.

Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (which proclaims Garvey as a prophet). The intent of the movement was for those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it. His essential ideas about Africa were stated in an editorial in the Negro World entitled "African Fundamentalism", where he wrote: "Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… to let us hold together under all climes and in every country…"

The Marcus Garvey Awards!

Saturday, August 17, 2013

7 Pm
East Lawn, Devon House.

Snoop Lion: The Ethics of using Rastafari Imagery!

What are your thoughts on the use and appropriation of Rastafari imagery in society today?

Happy Belated EarthStrong to the King!

"Conquering Lion of Judah...Triumphantly we all must sing" 

JULY 23, 1892 

My God, the Black God!
226 in the line of King David...

Haile Selassie I (Ge'ez: ቀዳማዊ ኃይለ ሥላሴ qädamawi haylä səllasé[nb 1]; Amharic: [ha.ɪlɜ sɨlːase]

(23 July 1892 – 27 August 1975), born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael, was Ethiopia's regent from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. 

He was the heir to a dynasty that traced its origins by tradition from King Solomon and Queen Makeda, Empress of Axum, known in the Abrahamic tradition as the Queen of Sheba. Haile Selassie is a defining figure in both Ethiopian and African history.

Listen to this Yogi from India speak on meeting Haile Selassie in 1982! (note the date)

Women in Africa and Rastafari: A Renewed Idea of The Black Woman!

For Our Daughters Documentary - A Film for Black Girls, And Those Who Care for Them

Omega Rising: Women in Rastafari

Dr. Ivan Van Sertima's Lecture: Black Woman in Antiquity

The Glory of Empress Menen!

Skin Deep