Hebrew story telling (III): Let there be Contact

The Hebrew technique of story-telling allows vast amounts of information (perhaps indeed the whole universe) to be summarized by a relatively small amount of text. And, as endearingly portrayed by Carl Sagan in his novel Contact, once a reader understands the principle -- the basic structure from which all other structures are derived, see Ephesians 3:14-15 and compare to Genesis 12:3 -- plus the relationships between the iterations, the "primer", the entire universe can be constructed.



In the Bible that primary principle is called Dabar YHWH, or Word of God (a.k.a. Logos), which on the complexity scale obviously sits prior to its consequences. Hence John the Evangelist could write that in the beginning was the Word, which was with God and which was God, and that through the Word everything came into being (John 1:1-3). And Paul wrote that the Word is the image of the invisible God, and that He is before all things and that in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).

Contrary to the creation myths of adjacent cultures, the Hebrew account proclaimed that creation hinged on language: God spoke and there was. The periodic table revealed that indeed the material world consist of a language, using a two-letter alphabet of protons and neutrons, from which all the "words" that comprise the world are constructed (Matthew 4:4).

The languages in which the universe is expressed

When DNA was discovered it too appeared to consist of language, using the four-letter alphabet of the nucleotides, and like the Hebrew Torah scrolls, it too appeared as a double helix, in a nucleus, in the heart of a living cell, which is obviously (and deliberately?) similarly to the Ark in the tabernacle in the heart of Israel. Note how the Ten Commandments that defined Israel were organized: on two corresponding tablets, one containing rules pertaining to the father (God) and the other pertaining to the mother (humanity).



The story of Jesus -- His stirring message, His three-day death, His resurrection and His transformation into a human collective "in the world but not of the world" -- precisely follows the story of a conceiving human female: her hormonal (im)balance, her ovulation, which expels and thus kills the ovum (which, like Jesus, only has maternal genes), and her conception, which revives the ovum and brings it back into the maternal economy, but not as just another cell but rather as a mini-human, in every way like herself; in her but not of her.



The event generally referred to as the "Second Coming" corresponds with the birth of this new form of humanity, which will then exist separate from the maternal society and can finally be recognized by her as something wholly new and wonderful (Revelation 21:24).

All these stories were never meant to make people religious. These stories don't tell us how to behave in church (or temple or mosque); they convey the natural processes by which the world operates. They certainly don't predict the superiority or victory of any particular world view, but placidly review natural events which are inevitable by sheer merit of natural law.

The Body of Christ prior to the so-called Second Coming lives within the world the way an unborn baby lives within her mother.

Hebrew story telling (II): Once upon a level of complexity

We moderns tend to align our stories with calendars and clocks, even though our memories typically don't work that way (something experienced a year ago may be reckoned nearer by our mind's eye than something that occurred yesterday).

In our modern stories, events are married to specific points in time, and since time comprises countless points, our histories consist of countless events. This is not very efficient and, due to perceived connections between events, will cause a library to grow faster than the events it discusses. Hebrew story telling works precisely the other way around.

Hebrew story telling marries events to levels of complexity rather than points in time. When a moderner tells of a mountaineer on his journey to the top, he'll describe every step forward and every step back when they occur.

A Hebrew story teller would describe the levels of the mountain, and discuss events where they occur. A moderner must tell a whole different story for each additional climber, but a Hebrew's story covers anyone who would ever attempt the climb.

"She/He Who Climbs To The Top" may be one single character in a Hebrew story,

but it would describe everybody who ever played that part.

Simply put: if the "mountain" we are climbing is the human condition, then the Biblical genealogies from Adam down convey the human condition from general to specific. Adam would thus describe the level of complexity which all living things share. Eve, after all, was the "mother of all life," what we today call the biosphere; Genesis 3:20, and the famous "fall of man" covered the whole of creation: Romans 8:22.

At the level of complexity described in Noah, humans can be distinguished from animals (see Matthew 24:39: "they knew not until the flood"; also see 2 Peter 2:12 and Jude 1:10), which means that Noah's three sons -- Ham, Japheth and Shem -- represent the most fundamental distinctions of human mentalities.

A second major advantage of Hebrew story telling is its lavish use of fractals and broken symmetries. That means that a certain narrative principle can be evoked at any point in the story, like a snippet of autonomous computer code that can be called upon from anywhere in the master code.

The Mandelbrot Set is a fractal that shows the same general form at different levels of complexity.
The Hebrew Bible works the same way.

An example of this is the principle story of the Father with the Three Sons, which is told with the father being Adam (and his sons Cain, Abel and Seth) and told again in Noah (and sons Shem, Ham and Japheth), and again in Terah (and sons Abraham, Nahor and Haran) and again probably in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:15).

There's advanced knowledge of light and relativity theory captured in the inner structure of the Hebrew language (see our article on the words nur nahar), and the Story of the Father and the Three Sons is probably also applicable to light ("father" White and "sons" Blue, Red and Yellow).

Two stories that are somewhat the same convey additional information in the matter in which they differ, and the more instances of the same principle story there are, the more additional information can be conveyed: in the differences between the differences (put mathematically: 3 versions lead to dAB, dBC, dAC but also d[dAB-dBC] and so on).

But this system also predicts that when the similarities of obviously differing stories are understood under the umbrella of an overarching principle, all stories should eventually marry into one, utterly primary principle. Science has dubbed this utterly primary principle the Grand Unified Theory. The Bible calls it, or rather Him, the Word of God, or Logos.

Hebrew story telling: the miracle of the Bible

Vilna Gaon  1720 - 1797

The Bible, though pure and simple in its basic tenets, is vastly complex -- so complex even that Hebrew sages are known to have sighed that the Torah contains the whole universe (Vilna Gaon), and the Ten Commandments the laws that describe it (Shneur Zalman).

Shneur Zalman 1745 - 1812

Later commentators have often scooted these sayings to the realm of zealous hyperbole, apparently forgetting that the Hebrew culture was organized in such a way that surplus of wealth and energy was habitually invested in literary art.


Or in the words of the mathematician and modern (secular Jewish) sage David Berlinski (in the 42nd minute of the first Hoover Institute interview):

"The Old Testament is the greatest repository of human knowledge and wisdom in the history of civilization, any culture, any time, any place. And that really should be the first point of discussion. Because every attitude today -- from Richard Dawkins to me to Christopher Hitchens to lonely pastors in the Bible belt on Sunday morning ranting from a particular text -- is discussed in the Bible. There's a character in the Bible who expresses that point of view, and there's sympathy expressed  for that point of view, and reservations expressed by that sympathy. It's an enormously rich, dramatic piece of work."

Hebrew authors were super authors; arguably the most skilled text-masters the world has ever seen, arguably as bright and well-equipped as the smartest professors today, or Leonardo da Vinci five centuries ago, or the very best masons of Egypt.

Christopher Dunn

The masons of Egypt expressed Egypt's wisdom in stone, but some of Egypt's statues were created with far greater accuracy than traditional tools could ever verify, let alone produce (see the studies of master-machinist Christopher Dunn), so it's a baffling mystery how they did it, or why.

Any observer with any sense at all can only stare awestruck at these buildings realizing that in scope and function these buildings far exceed anything we build today, and obviously came to pass via knowledge we're oblivious of.

In Egypt, wisdoms were expressed in publicly viewable stone when an initiated few made myriads of slaves do want they wanted. In Israel, wisdoms were expressed in publicly viewable texts when myriads of initiated poured over and discussed previously published works.

Ramesses II 1303 - 1213 BC

The wisdom of People Of The Book evolves much faster than that of People Of Stone and the Hebrew authors were far better writers than Egypt's best masons were masons. In other words: the Bible is a far more mysterious thing than the Giza plateau or the extremely precise and symmetrical statues of Ramesses II.

We moderns like to congratulate ourselves with our hard drives and operating systems but information technology didn't start with IBM. All writing is information technology, and was designed to store data, but some technology is more sophisticated than others.

The texts of the ancient Hebrews go so far beyond any other text on earth that the word "text" do them justice as much as the word "animal" does a human justice. The Hebrew Bible achieves data compression by using natural principles, which indeed allows a finite book to contain the whole world (John 21:25).

These texts use techniques that are quite plainly beyond the grasp of the common moderner, and besides tell stories, they "operate" on code the way DNA "operates" on code, using the principles of nature: fractals, broken symmetries and even a built-in copying process that inevitably led to nature's signature variety and diversity.

To the Hebrews, text was life and as sacred as life.

De next two weeks we'll have a look at the complexity of the Bible.

How to tell a Hebrew from a Jew

Semites, Hebrews, Israelites, Jews... we moderns just love our labels. In the Hebrew Bible, however, he various categories don't just occur side by side but often within each other, like a Babushka doll.


Most ethnonyms that are associated with Biblical heroes are subsets of other ethnonyms, much rather than indicative of some group within an ocean of equivalent but competing groups.

The following list of more or less familiar ethnonyms do not denote certain parallel sections of the general population, but rather categories that become more and more narrow. The list starts with the most general category of them all, into which all corporeal creatures fit. All categories that follow are subsets of the previous one(s).

It should further be noted that according to the following model, Biblical time is not the same as real time. In the following model, time is like the four years of high school, which in actuality take six years to complete. It's a journey down a complexity scale and not a temporal one. The following list is not based on the ticking of a clock, but rather of a huge birthday calendar that hangs fully formed on the wall and covers the entire living past:

Adam

In the Biblical sense, Adamites are descendants of Adam, and while Adam is commonly celebrated as being the first human male, at the Biblical level of Adam the symmetry in the world of the living is total. That is to say: at the complexity level of Adam, all living things have a body. Eve, after all, was the "mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20) and not only humans. The phrase 'all living' or kal hay occurs six more times in the Bible and always denotes, well, all living things or the whole biosphere (Genesis 8:21, Job 12:10, 28:21, 30:23, Psalm 143:2, 145:16).


With this we are NOT saying that Adam was a paramecium (please hold your emails), we are saying that whatever goes for Adam goes for every corporeal living thing.

This is the reason why the original sin passes over into the entire biosphere (Romans 8:20-22).

Noah

The second major breach in symmetry occurs in Noah, or rather the flood of Noah, at which point in complexity the human mind becomes distinguishable from animal intelligence - where the 'Sapiens' part of Homo Sapiens becomes distinct from other living beings.

Obvious to all but a few, Noah and the animals in the ark again represent the whole biosphere, but now humans are clearly set separate.

Note that Noah's family consists of seven, like the clean animals (Genesis 7:2), which sets Noah, as solitary head of his family in a literary parallel with God.

Again, with this we are not saying that Noah was an Australopithecus, we're only saying that prior to the complexity level of Noah, humans operate on the same mental software that runs the animal world.

On several occasions the Bible demonstrates a full human-animal symmetry (Ecclesiastes 3:18, Jude 1:10) and Jesus even states quite blatantly: "...and they knew not until the flood came" (Matthew 24:39).

Semites

The Shemites - or in the modern spelling: Semites - are the descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah, who coincide with the most basic structure in all human minds (not wholly on a par with Freud's id and ego and what not, but close).

Traditional models regarded the three sons of Noah as patriarchs of geographically dispersed people groups (after Genesis 10), and had the Shemites people the middle east. Here at Abarim Publications, however, we're pretty sure that the authors of the Bible were not so interested in the physical descent of nations but rather the theological descent of their schools of thought. After all Abraham, arguably the father of all arch-fathers, was not a father in the biological sense but rather the "father of all believers" (Romans 4:16). Likewise the brothers Jabal and Jubal (Genesis 4:20-21) were the "fathers" of flute players and tent dwellers, while their physical lineages were terminated by the flood.

Here at Abarim Publications we hold that all of the genealogies of the Bible are solely about the evolution of wisdom; how different interests and different schools of thought descended from ancestral common ones (and with wisdom we mostly mean practical skills, technology and the science needed to grow crops and defend one's realms and such).

Traditionally Shem's brother Japheth was thought to have peopled Eurasia, with Shem's famous grandson Javan peopling Greece. Here at Abarim Publications we surmise that Javan rather sums up Greek's famous wisdom schools (math, literature, but also the statesmanship that resulted in the invention of democracy, and so on). Ham and his Hamites peopled Africa, which corresponds to mankind's oldest scientific systems, which were considered the 'smallest' rather than the 'youngest' by the authors (Genesis 9:24).

Also note that all three sons of Noah were born before the flood (Genesis 5:32, 11:10). In this particular model this insinuates that the basic structure of the human mind is still wholly pre-human and should be recognized in intelligent animals.

Hebrews

One of the more famous ethnonyms of this list is also one of the most misapplied: in the Biblical sense the Hebrews are the Eberites or "sons of Eber" as mentioned in Genesis 10:21 and 10:25. Who precisely these Eberites are is not clear from the text, but the context within this particular model suggests that the Eberites distinguish from other humans by some ability having to do with language. It might be speech, it might be writing, and it might even be narrative story telling, which marked the beginning of modern information technology.

The Semitic alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians and perfected by the Bible writers (whoever they were) through their brilliant contribution of vowel notation (note that the name of the Lord, YHWH, consists solely out of these vowels; this is no accident). The alphabet lifted writing out of the realm of the esoteric and made it available to the common man (hence a nation of priests ; Exodus 19:6, 1 Peter 2:9). This allowed for a huge influx of mental energy in the academic arena, which in turn resulted in superior wisdom traditions and hence stronger nations.

On the complexity scale, the invention of the alphabet appears to coincide with Israel's exodus from Egypt. In this sense Egypt is not the nation by that name but rather its wisdom tradition that refused to adapt to the alphabetic notation.

In Eber also arises a perspective beyond one's immediate frame of reference. Eber had two sons, namely Peleg and Joktan. In the days of Peleg "the earth was divided" (Genesis 10:25), which, beside all else, marks a global consciousness. The descendants of Joktan culminate in the tower of Babel (10:26-11:1). In other words: The two sons of Eber embody the fundamental competition between empire (Joktan, from Babel to Rome) and autonomous individual (Peleg, from Abraham to Christ).

Abraham

In modern times, the adjective Abrahamic usually refers to the Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity and Islam, but on the Biblical stage Abraham is firstly a son of Peleg (anti-empire), and secondly the embodiment of an international exchange of good and ideas; precisely the opposite of a hoarding, centralized empire. Read our article on the name Abraham for a long look at this particular point on the complexity scale.

Isaac

The name Isaac means laughter and his story is permeated with precisely that: comedy. It's often overlooked that comedy is one of the central and most dominant genres within Biblical Scriptures, but the power of comedy has been recognized and utilized long before Aristotle and Chevy Chase came along.


It may not agree with our modern sense of refined jest, but a centenarian who knocks up his only slightly younger wife (Genesis 17), a son who tries to trick his blind father with a visual disguise (Genesis 27, see Hebrews 11:20), the absurd assassination of fat Eglon (Judges 3:24), Manoah's silly antics, the whole Saul-versus-David roadrunner cycle (on from 1 Samuel 13), even up to Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus (John 3), the latter's whopping 100 liters of myrrh (John 19:39), and even the Pharisees' clownesque ignorance about the birth place of the prophet Jonah (John 7:52, see 2 Kings 14:25 and Matthew 12:40) are all undisguised instances of literary slapstick.

The "great joy" of which Jude so famously speaks (Jude 1:24) is often explained to be some austere and reserved sense of inner glee but no, it's swinging-from-the-rafters and thigh-slapping merriment.

The crucial element of all this is that laughter is a response to something unexpected (because nothing funny is ever seen coming). The original, or animal function of this same mental process is of course fear. That's why laughing and crying are so alike: physically they are exactly the same thing.

The single most repeated command in the Bible is to be not afraid, and although that may sound like the command to suppress a very useful sensation, it's obviously a command to secure your safety.

Laughter comes when one's sense of safety is so strong that strangeness is no longer seen as something potentially harmful, but rather as something potentially beneficial. The Athenian altar dedicated to the "unknown God" (Acts 17:21-23) stood doubtlessly in a comedy club.

Jacob => Israelites

In Isaac the range of human mentality hits an obvious ceiling (and this on a complexity scale; we're still not looking at evolution over time). Isaac marks the level of ultimate personal joy, and there's no bettering that. His son Jacob, subsequently makes no improvement in the vertical sense but rather in the horizontal one. Up to Jacob the covenant of God with humanity was always carried by one man, but in Jacob the earthly partner of the divine covenant becomes a people: Israel (Genesis 32:28).

The transition between masculine individual and feminine collective is most fundamental in the arsenal of Biblical principles. It's initially (of archetypally) expounded in the creation week, in which the one light of day one becomes the many lights of day four, and also lies at the heart of the relation between Jesus (male) and the church (female).

Judah => Jews

Israel expresses safety and joy on a national scale, and there appear to be twelve main sub-functions to that, corresponding with the twelve tribes of Israel. Which traits the twelve tribes specifically represent is not wholly clear at this remove, except for one, namely Joseph, who obviously represents oneirocritics or dream-interpretation.

What this skill is supposed to be on a national scale is not clear, but the story seems to suggest that there is a measurable social equivalent of the memory of a dream that a person might wake up with. Perhaps the ministry of Joseph denotes the systematic analysis of a society's informal or sub-culture. Ancient China had ministers who traveled the lands and viewed people's arts and listened to their music to learn which sentiments played among the people. Perhaps Joseph's ministry was something like that.

Joseph's skill appears to have originated somewhere in Canaan where it was not appreciated (Genesis 37:19). Then it was picked up by Midian in Arabia, who delivered it to Egypt. There too it was first underestimated but then recognized and ultimately firmly incorporated into the nations primary wisdom tradition (Genesis 41:45).

Today the most famous of the twelve tribes is Judah and if the name is anything to go on, these guys where the Praisers. What that precisely means isn't clear, but it probably wasn't anything like what we call praising today. Judah's mother Leah explained the name Judah by saying "this time I will praise the Lord" (Genesis 29:35), which isn't so much about praising as to the object of the praising.

Prior to Judah's birth, Leah was trying to bank the appreciations of Jacob, and Judah's birth marks a shift of focus toward YHWH. That still doesn't make praising a religious endeavor because the name YHWH probably means something like "The Way Things Are/ The Way It Is", and the "praise of YHWH" probably has to do with the pleasure of studying the laws of nature in which the Creator so clearly expresses Himself (Romans 1:20).

While the other Israeli tribes found themselves shanghaied by Assyria (from a word probably also meaning joy or happiness) the Judahites stuck to their turfs slightly longer, until they too were deported but to Babylon.

But the folks living in Judah were not merely the descendants of Judah, since Judah the tribe also contained the descendants of the brothers Levi and Simeon (Genesis 49:5-6). What Levi and Simeon represent isn't clear, except that from Levi came the priestly caste of the Levites, and since back then there was no separation of state and religion, a priest then was of course a wholly different thing than a priest now.

Levi, Jacob Levi

Judging from their names, Simeon (from the verb to hear, a name similar to that of older brother Reuben, from a verb meaning to see) may represent national intelligence.

Levi, from a verb that means to join or couple -- or even to bond -- may have originally represented a kind of diplomatic office (that pieced intel together).

This mixture of Judahites, Simeonites and Levites became collectively known as Jews, and while the other tribes were assimilated by Asshur, the Jews famously thrived in Babylon and later Persia. The exile ended in the so-called return, but the people who returned were a minority compared to those who stayed. The Jews of Babylon/Persia became politically enormously influential, and their wisdom schools enjoyed such enormous respect that emperor Cyrus himself decreed, designed and funded the restored Temple of Jerusalem (Ezra 6). The Jewish centers in Persia kept going strong for centuries. Even long after the age of Christ, the "Babylonian" Talmud vastly outshone the volume and scope of the Jerusalem Talmud.

The prominence of the Jewish elite in Persia became celebrated in the story of Esther, and even when the long awaited Messiah was born, the brethren from Persia seem to have been the first in the know. The Magi who famously showed up in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1) where clearly well-versed in matters of Judaism, and while the Magi were an actual Levite-like tribe of Babylon, the Magi mentioned by Matthew may in fact have been Jews from the Magi region.

It's been long thought that Luke with his "shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flocks" tells a wholly different story (Luke 2:8), but here at Abarim Publications we suspect that these shepherds too are the Jewish leaders of Persia, and Luke and Matthew tell of precisely the same events: the liberation movement of Jesus originated in Roman Judea but was first discovered and subsequently heavily financed by the Jews of Babylon/Persia.