Zärʾä Yaʿqob
1599-1692 · African Philosophy · Little-known
Zera Yacob was a seventeenth-century Ethiopian who fled persecution and spent two years hiding in a cave. He wrote the Hatata decades later, testing every scripture and every claim of divine chosenness against reason, and landing on one creator, no chosen people, women as men's equals and slavery as wrong. Some scholars dispute his authorship and credit an Italian missionary instead.
Signature
The position Yaʿqob is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Truth
- leans Objective
- Knowledge
- Pure Reason
Positions on the 9 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- The Divine
- leans Describable (30 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (80 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (80 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (80 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (88 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Polity
- leans Liberalism (70 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (30 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (85 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
11 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Yaʿqob refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Wisdom / Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Creation ex Nihilo / Eternal First Cause
What is the origin of reality? - Authority
- Natural Law / Wisdom
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Judgement
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity / The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?