The amazing profundity of being sheep

One of the most endearing Biblical metaphors that describe the relationship of man and God is that of the shepherd and his sheep (Psalm 23, John 10:11).

But as familiar as this image might be, its ultimate profundity goes quite a bit beyond the usual green pastures. Sheep, to start with, are human.

Let me explain

The woolly sheep we are familiar with don't occur in nature. They were bred from feral ancestors in the late Stone Age, along with about a dozen others species (roughly the same amount as there are tribes in Israel).

How precisely this happened isn't clear, but most probably the ancestors of our domesticated friends stood out from other animal species by (1) their innate tendency to bond socially, and (2) their kindness and calm behavior. That initial approachability must have led to their taming, which was followed by their moving in.

Sheep and such may have a bit of a bad rep in modern culture, but since every animal is basically after food and safety, moving in with the humans was the smartest thing they could do. And not all animals could pull it off either. Cows and sheep aren't proverbially dumb, they are proverbially elected on account of their natural agreeable disposition and their ultimate potential.

Rhianna

After their initial taming, humans began to specifically breed their animals into their modern forms, and there's the rub. Modern sheep are living sculptures and as much part of humanity as a song by Rhianna. And just like Rhianna's latest production moves us, so did the presence of domesticated animals help form modern humanity.

Animal husbandry and farming allowed humans to engage in their celebrated cultural evolution, and transcend their natural state and become the epitomes of sophistication and godly glory we are today. We would not have our cities and libraries and academia if our ancestors hadn't adopted kind animals into their own immediate homes.

Modern humanity is a symbiotic collective that comprises humans as well as domesticated animals and plants. And none of them could exists or survive without the other members of that collective.

I'll say that again: there would be no smart-phone carrying, Rhianna-listening human beings if there were no sheep, pigs, cows, rice, potatoes and corn. You can't have one without the other. There is no division between domesticated animals and the humans that depend on them. We are one with them, and together we are humanity.

Why humans "invented" husbandry

In archaeological circles it's considered a bit of a mystery why humans began to domesticate animals and plants, because quite frankly, the ultimate effect (libraries, french fries, Rhianna) is not at all evident when the first wild mouflon wanders into one's Stone Age village and doesn't seem to want to leave.

The first appealing results of selective breeding become evident after hundreds of generations, so visions of the ultimate result may not have been the reason why our ancestors began doing it. It appears that humans began to domesticate animals because from some deep level they were driven to. How deep was that level? Well, the urge to enter into a symbiotic partnership with other animals may very well have stemmed from the atomic level.

Nature is a giant fractal, in which the same shape repeats at different levels of complexity. There are three main levels, which the Bible lovingly calls water, blood and spirit (1 John 5:8), or matter, life and society. All three levels have their basic building block, and all three building blocks have the same basic form, namely that of a nucleus that contains all information to run the building block and a larger body that (1) acts according to the information stored in the nucleus, and (2) interacts with neighboring building blocks in order to create structures.

The Household Set dictates that matter, life and society consist of self-similar basic building blocks

Water 
At the level of matter we have the atom, of which the nucleic information determines the quality and characteristics of the atom. Depending on the kind of atoms, atoms can cluster into molecules and huge objects.

Blood
At the level of life we have the living cell, with again the genetic information that determines the qualities and characteristics of the cell. Cells can cluster up into colonies and even multi-cellular creatures.

Spirit
At the level of society we have the household, with the house-father as nucleus and the members of his household and the range of their economic activities as body.

Husbandry too occurs on all three levels.

Husbandry at water level
Atoms started out as simple hydrogen atoms. They have one proton for a nucleus, one electron zipping around it and a photonic force field that binds the two together. But all hydrogen atoms can do is huddle up and drift through space as a cloud. They can't bind together to make rocks and planets. And so they drift together until they are plentiful enough to collapse under their own gravity and form a star. Within that star a process called fission begins to occur, and that comes down to protons absorbing electrons to make a whole new symbiotic whole: the neutron.

Husbandry at the atomic level

The neutron is really a proton and an electron living as one, and an unbound neutron will in roughly a quarter of an hour fall apart into again a proton and an electron. But with neutrons as glue, neutrons and protons can stick together into colossal nuclei, which attract swarms of electrons and form all the elements of the periodic table. Contrary to their hydrogenic ancestors, these guys are able to bond with each other and form majestic molecules and objects. And finally cells.

Husbandry at the blood level

Husbandry at the cellular level

Cells too started out simple and virtually unable to create complex colonies. The earliest cells are called prokaryotes, and all they can do is just swarm about. Things changed when certain complicated prokaryotes opened their doors for a certain kind of simple bacterium and, in stead of digesting it, adopted it into its very own body. These bacteria kept their own autonomous DNA and became mitochondria, also known as the power-houses of the cell, and cells became eukaryotes. Contrary to their prokaryotic ancestors, these super-powered eukaryotes were able to create specialized colonies and finally multi-cellular creatures.

So why did humans finally took up husbandry? Every atom and every cell in their body was telling them to. Humans had existed in hydrogen-slash-prokaryotic form, but somehow (most likely to do with population density) an urge occurred to tame and domesticate other animals the way protons domesticated electrons and prokaryotes domesticated bacteria.

Who are God's sheep?

According to John the Revelator, humanity will breach into two kinds. One will populate the earth, and the other will populate the New Jerusalem, where it will govern the earth together with God. That obviously follows the same general principle that gave the world its neutrons, eukaryotes and Rhianna, and besides demonstrating that the ancients were a whole lot better informed than we give them credit for, it also invites contemporary humans to contemplate which of the modern human expressions might be deemed worthy to be absorbed into the House of Divinity. Certainly all available philosophies and religions claim that they're the one, but claiming and being is not the same thing.

Husbandry at the Divine level

All human mentalities will claim that they are the pinnacle of existence, just like every bear and lion will gladly submit that they are the best animals ever to roam the earth. But when our ancestors began to look for animals to take into their home and treat like family members, they weren't looking for superior prowess but rather for compatibility. Likewise the humanities that God targets to bring into His home are not necessarily those excelling in certain traits.

Here at Abarim Publications we guess that the realm of humanity is as psycho-diverse as the biosphere is bio-diverse, and that nature is producing this diversity deliberately (that is to say: in order to satisfy a natural law, such as the second law of thermodynamics).

In other words: in our world today there are humanities (philosophies, religions, -isms and schools of thought) that relate to the rest of mankind the way, say, bears and wolves relate to the whole of the biosphere. And the biosphere appears to be geared to grow towards a situation in which a group of separate creatures can unite to form a symbiotic super-creature.

Which creatures or humanities that will ultimately be depends not so much on the gloriousness of each separate creature, but much rather on how the whole bunch operates together. After all, to herd sheep you need a sheep-dog, not a whale.

You can't have humans reading books without cows, sheep, dogs and pigs. And you can't have those without first having aurochs, mouflon, wolves and boar. And you can't have those without also having ants and tigers and octopuses. And that explains the biosphere.

But one thing is abundantly clear: the House of Divinity that the Creator is compiling according to wholly natural processes is not just for fun. It has a job. And that job is to govern creation and make it run the way the Creator wants it run.

Here at Abarim Publications we bet that tribe of the Scientific Method stands an excellent chance of being included. The tribe of the scud missile, not so. Tolerance will surely be incorporated, but corporate fascism probably not.

We'll see. The New Jerusalem will be peopled with domesticated humanities. And the earth will be peopled with humanities that are useful even though they can't be domesticated. And there will be quite a few humanities that will die out on account of their worthlessness.

"And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever"

Psalm 23 - The Lord is my Shepherd

Crop circles, pyramids, the Ark and the Bible

There is a phenomenon going on on earth that only very few people recognize, and that by itself it highly remarkable. 

Most of us have heard of crop circles, which are intricate works of art that are formed in grain fields, usually by bending areas of grain into patterns, and usually anonymous.



Enthusiasts ascribe these wonderful formations to the handiwork of extraterrestrials, and some go as far as to forward elaborate schemes involving mother-ships, distant galaxies and interstellar councils, or else the moaning and groaning of mother earth, glowing ley lines and vibrating energies that combined produce instances of higher math (with which the observer has to resonate in order ascend into the fifth dimension, and so on).

Take me to your dealer

Mainstream commentators, however, are sure that all of them are man-made. Some feel confident that all these formations can be reproduced by regular humans with regular human skills, while others derive their confidence from reduction and elimination, being equally sure that any movement towards the alternative would constitute the narrow end of the wedge that will separate humanity from its most practical beliefs, which in turn would lead to collective psychosis, anarchy and ultimately collapse and annihilation.

Some farmers are eager to know the perpetrators so that they can sue them for the damage, while others note with hardly suppressed glee that the affected grain was not at all destroyed but remained alive and in a far better condition than the grain that wasn't touched (longer stems, fuller heads; all that).

More to the point, however

But crop circles is not the phenomenon I want to talk about. Imagine that it was you who one day woke up with the idea of placing the whopping double triskelion in a field near Milk Hill in England.

This perfectly executed Catherine Wheel consists of 409 circles of varying sizes, laid out in a pattern that is 240 meters across (yes, that's people in the central circle below).

The whopping Milk Hill Catherine Wheel

How do you get from waking up that one morning to sitting atop Milk Hill at sunrise on 14 August 2001, undiscovered and gloating over you creation?

You would first have to be rather fanatic, that goes without saying. Then you would have to have considerable mathematical skills in addition to knowing that the Celts had a thing for triskelions, and then, for some reason, come up with the desire to make it even more difficult for everybody and create a double one.

You would have to engineer a way to print your design onto the grain, and that would take a trick or two. The greater form would have to be created at once because stamping out the circles consecutively would certainly result in misalignment. The smaller ones might be added later, but still, not a single error is permitted. I've been an engineer for three decades, and I would have to think very long and very hard for a way to pull this off. It takes a rare set of highly developed skills, and I humbly submit that I can't even think of a way to replicate this, let alone come up with it in the first place.

The colossal Oregon Sri Yantra geoglyph and the Nazca Monkey are anonymous. So is the portrait of John Williams that appeared in August 2014, just off the Old Town side of the Branko Bridge in Belgrade, Serbia.

You would probably realize right soon that you would not be able to design the whole process by yourself, let alone execute it. So you would have to recruit others, and that would take yet another trick or two.

Covert operations are nothing new in our world, but to set one up out of the blue without the benefit of an existing organization (such as the military or some secret club that is really secret) or without a formidable incentive (believable threats or lots of money) is nearly undoable. Trying to get your band together would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans either before or after the operation.

And there's the rub, there is the phenomenon I wanted to talk about. If you were the one who designed the Milk Hill Catherine Wheel, produced it overnight AND kept everything secret, even after all the media coverage, please contact the Abarim Publications Recruitment Center because we would like to hire you.

Mum's the word

Certain companies actually have realized the commercial appeal of crop formations and their monetary injection has produced certain formations that are obviously not extraterrestrial in origin, but why are there groups of people (or aliens) who go to great lengths to anonymously produce great work of art, which won't last beyond the day of the harvest? Or, to expand the scope of the question: what explains the phenomenon of anonymous art in which the anonymity of the artist(s) is part of the final work?

Artists sign their work to be recognized and to be reckoned (and paid) for the entire body of their work. And in case the artist is working on a medium that isn't his or hers (say, graffiti artists who spray paint trains or buildings), they will often sign their work anyway with a signature that is recognizable by the scene but not by the cops. If an artist knows he's doing a one time thing, he might use anonymity as a means to publicity.

Georgia Guide Stones -- anonymous

Take the Georgia Guide Stones for instance, which, had they been commissioned by Ed Koch and erected on Time Square, would have been surely recognized for the pseudo-portentous crap they are. But now that the makers and funders are incisively anonymous, the media was and still is all over them and a disproportional percentage of people have heard of them. 

But most of the crop circles are made by people who don't claim them as their productions, and history has shown that their mere appearance serve the sole purpose of fueling the greater discussion on who were are, where we're going and whether we are alone in the universe.

Sure, some of us find that whole discussion a waste of time, but would those people engineer elaborate pranks just to watch hapless others go alien-crazy over that? There's no good reason to exclude this from the whole pallet of reasons of why people make crop circles, but I'd like to propose that the creating of crop circles ties not into humanity's inherent desire to deceive, but rather in our inherent desire to make wise.

Whichever ancient wisdom tradition we look at, they all consist of several separate exercises or disciplines. Most traditions value scientific examinations of the observable world and subsequent data retention and transmission, but most also value prayer or meditation and periods of rest. The Semitic wisdom traditions additionally utilized a technique that probably also had an entertainment value, namely the posing of riddles, and a Hebrew riddle was not a silly question the audience had to guess the answer of but a problem of which the answer had to be worked out by means of logic and reason (Judges 14, 1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word for riddle is hida, which is possibly related to the verb hadad, which means to be sharp, keen or swift. 

The various religions of our earth have managed to whittle the ancient wisdom traditions down to a skeleton, like a rock band that slipped further and further away from its original purpose and kept losing its founding members to the wish to go solo. Science has always been a major part of theology, but when religion began to dictate what's true or not, science broke away and pursued its whopping solo-career. Mystery, on the other hand, broke away from religion but never made it much further than silly game shows and TV quizzes. Some writers speak of a "God-shaped hole" in people who don't believe, but I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm guessing that mankind has a natural need for mystery; to be in awe of the unimaginable or to be flabbergasted by the inexplicable.

I bet that religion's failure to provide mankind with proper mystery is the reason that groups of people go out into fields and painstakingly create phenomenally mysterious images without damaging a farmer's crop.

The ear-deafening silence

Everybody knows that the Ark of the Covenant has gone missing some time after king Solomon placed it in the Temple, and over the years a generous plethora of theories have been proposed to explain its disappearance. But what theorists rarely recognize is the distinctive silence of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the fate of the Ark. This silence is so loud even, that observant readers of the Bible recognize it as an actual character of the story.

In other words: the very fact that no Hebrew author (save for perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees) spends a single word discussing the fate of the Ark, which was the reason why the Temple was built and the very item that kept Israel together, very strongly suggests that the disappearance of the Ark was part of its proper function. Nothing unexpected happened to the Ark, and it's not "lost" at all. 

And what about the great pyramids of Giza? Their origin and ultimate purpose is much debated, but why does no ancient Egyptian text talk about the actual building of them or purpose they might have? The Egyptians were great masons, but why is there not a single carving anywhere on these mysterious monuments that would make them a little less mysterious? The only answer, again, is that their mystery is part of their function. Whatever they might have been for in the ancient past, their function now is that we ponder them and subsequently doubt whatever theory is presently peddled as truth. It's almost as if these monuments are monuments to the gift of doubt, because doubt leads to renewal and renewal leads to truth. 

In recent years, a slowly growing body of scholars is advocating the idea that the Bible isn't what we always thought it was. It doesn't work they way we figured, nor does it tell the story we shoehorned into it. The familiar titles of the Books of the Bible aren't part of them and were mostly added later, and only recently have scholars mustered up the courage to admit that we have no idea who wrote the Bible, or even when or where. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible came to pass via a hugely complex process that probably involved hundreds (thousands?) of poets, scientists, scribes, compilers, editors, redactors and proof readers. This is highly remarkable by itself, but what is even more so is that this process is nowhere referred to in the Bible, and its complexity has only in recent times been recognized.

So who wrote the Bible, built the pyramids, hid the Ark and created the crop circles? Well, here at Abarim Publications we believe that humans did all of it, but we also believe that these humans were either specifically or else generally inspired by greater forces than the usual selfish claim to fame.

And whether these greater forces are mother-ships, fifth dimensions or the angels of the Most High God, well as the prophet formerly known as Isaiah says: "Come now, and let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).

Come now, and let us reason together" -- Isaiah 1:18

Why Nobel Prize winners are so often Jewish

So why is such a disproportionally large portion of Nobel Prize laureates Jewish?

Jews comprise 0.2% of the world's population and 2% of the American population. Yet 22% of Nobel Prize recipients world-wide have been Jews and 36% of all US recipients were Jews. Women score even better: 33% and 50% of women recipients, worldwide and American respectively, were Jews.

Jews are not inherently more intelligent than non-Jews (and intelligence is only a factor of success in science) and conspiracy theories aside, there shouldn't be any reason why Jews do better science. Or should there...?

Shalom

An often neglected requirement of good stewardship is an understanding of what's going on. In my nearly three decades as a professional engineer, I've seen great numbers of well-willing morons destroy things simply because their actions were sanctioned by a complete lack of applicable knowledge.

Here at Abarim Publications we understand that good stewardship of the earth goes hand in hand with a proper scientific knowledge of Creation. Even theology should be permeated by the principles of natural law, since no less than the very character and attributes of the Creator are manifested in nature (Romans 1:20).

Paul speaks twice of the renewing of one's mind (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23) and although that's often explained to mean that a renewed mind is a pious and unquestioning mind, but there's no real reason to conclude that a new mind isn't one that resonates with the rings of creation. Here at Abarim Publications we're pretty sure that where an old mind is riddled with superstitious nonsense, a renewed mind is a scientific mind.

At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus addressed His disciples and "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45). Since creation and revelation are God's two witnesses, the two should (1) work the same way, and (2) explain each other, and that's where the Nobel Prizes come in.

People who have been exposed since early childhood to the fabric and workings of Biblical Scriptures have in effect been exposed to the very workings of creation. They have more familiarity with it and thus a slight advantage over people who find themselves looking at wholly new things.

Just like a child that grows up in a household of violin players might some day have a demonstrable advantage in piano class, so does a Jewish kid who's been steeped in Hebrew Scriptures have an measurable advantage in the scientific arena over people who grew up watching Barney the Dinosaur and MacGyver.

In case you haven't seen Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, you really should. And if you thought that Close Encounters was about people having telepathic hunches about spaceships, you really should watch it again. Steven Spielberg is one of those Jewish story tellers and particularly his earlier work is deeply steeped in natural and Torahic principles.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Exodus 19:16-17)

The Hebrew word for light is 'or and the word for lamp is nahar. Those two words don't look much alike transliterated into Latin script but in Hebrew they are so similar that one could pass for a conjugated form of the other so that the word for lamp literally means 'lighting' in the sense of 'illuminating'.

Calling a lamp an illuminator isn't such a big deal, but the deal gets a whole lot bigger when we look at the regular Hebrew word for river: nahar, which is identical to the word for lamp. This noun comes from the identical verb nahar, which means to flow. The regular Hebrew word for Nile is ye'or, which also comes from the word for light, 'or, and means something like 'it shall illuminate'.

Guess who

Imagine being six years old, and hearing the old stories. Wouldn't you wonder why rivers would be known by a word that also means lamp or illuminator? Why is the word that describes the flowing of water the same as the word that describes what light does?

Most ancient cultures sprung up around rivers, so the link between a river and a tribe's central fire may seem obvious apart from the paradox of calling water after a word for fire (in the old world, all light came either from flames or celestial bodies). But still, on the mental desktop of a Hebrew six year old, the icon for river was the same as the icon for lamp, whether intentional or not.

Light, we know now, travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometer per second, which is geek-speak for saying that light is either there or it isn't and you don't see it coming or going. It's too fast; you can't see it move. Light does not visibly travel, and the fact that it travels should not have been known to the ancients. It's therefor a mystery why the Hebrews would associate light with water, but this association is both anti-intuitive and spot on.

What nobody in the ancient world was supposed to know is that light propagates, that it is substantial and obeys the laws of gravity, precisely like water. As Max Planck spectacularly discovered in the early 1900's, light, like water, is not as continuous as it seems but consists of droplets called photons. But light, like water, also comes in waves.

There is absolutely no intuitive connection between matter and light, but everybody now knows that matter is polarized light. Yet the Hebrews calmly maintained that dry land arises from water (Genesis 1:9). The fundamental natural force of electromagnetism is carried by photons, and this same force is what keeps atoms together. That means that light indeed comes before all things, and indeed holds all things together (Colossians 1:17).

Imagine being a six year old, reviewing all these things. And then ending up working in some dusty patent office, wondering why your life is slipping away like sand through stretched fingers. And then you wonder if there isn't more to reality than meets the eye. And then you remember that in Hebrew the word for eye, 'ayin, is the same as the word for fountain.

Wouldn't that make you glad that you never heard of MacGyver?

Abraham & The Standard Model of Elementary Particles

"And I will make your descendants a the dust of the earth, so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered" (Genesis 13:16).

In Genesis 13:16 God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the dust of the earth, so that if the dust of the earth could be numbered, so could his descendants be.

In the course of the twentieth century the dust of the earth was indeed numbered and organized in what became known as the Standard Model of Elementary Particles (for more details, see our celebrated Introduction to Quantum Mechanics).

Here it is:

Dust of the earth	Abraham's family
The universe expands	Collapse of the tower and dispersal of man and language
Mater-antimatter	Peleg; the "earth" is divided
Primordeal black holes; the blueprint for all later structures	Haran
Matter polarizes:	The promised land:
12 quarks, which hold most of the universe's space curving mass	12 sons of the archer Ishmael (Abraham's son)
12 leptons, including the electron	12 sons of Israel (Abraham's grandson), including Judah
12 bosons that convey forces: 8 strong gluons and 4 electroweak bosons	12 sons of Nahor (means force; Abraham's brother): 8 with wife Milcah and 4 with concubine Reumah
In the early universe most quarks and leptons died out due to decreasing energy density and collisions.	During the kingdom years, most tribes were lost to famine and wars
Of the quarks, only the Up and Down quarks survived and formed today's atomic nuclei	Nebaioth and Kedar were mentioned among the surviving Ishmaelite tribes who will be gathered up into the eternal kingdom (Isaiah 60:7)
Of the leptons, only the electron and its invisible e-neutrino survived	Only Judah survived, as did those members of Simeon and Levi who had settled within the region of Judah
Quarks formed free-flying nuclei but when the energy density sank below a critical level, suddenly the electrons bound to the nuclei by means of electromagnetism (light)	From Judah came Jesus of Nazareth. His death, resurrection and spreading of the gospel through the Roman empire ensued; the Jewish gospel quite literally grabbed the wealth of pagan science and skills
The universe became transparent, matter became alive and stable, and larger objects became possible	To the people living in darkness, a great light began to shine; people obtained eternal life

However, as overly reported of in the news lately, the Standard Model appears to be not wholly complete. And the family of Abraham also lacks some representation, namely the six sons of Keturah, Abraham's second wife (Genesis 25:1-2).

As we here at Abarim Publications predicted as much as twenty years ago, there should in addition to the particles presented in the Standard Model, be six additional Fermionic particles that possibly have leptonic properties (as Keturah was a wife like Sarah, not a concubine like Hagar).

Probably most significant is Keturah's son Midian, who initially provided Moses with his wife Zipporah and her socially smart father Jethro, but who later became one of Israel's proverbial enemies. All this seems to suggest that Midian represents a particle (a form of cosmic radiation) that has been instrumental in forming DNA.

Abraham the instigator; the first of a lot of things

International trade arose from curiosity

When the beginning of global trade is discussed, scholars commonly emphasize the exchange of goods and violence, and neglect to mention that the exchange of ideas, skills and knowledge (and even DNA) did most of the shaping of humanity's early cultural world.

Various crafts emerged simultaneously all over the Eurasian landmass, which nowadays is admitted to be caused by a huge prehistoric network of blather. Sensational history telling has us believe that the people of the old world were continuously at war with each other, but that is as illogical as far from the truth.

Fighting is a supremely inefficient means to get by, and population densities were so low that very little competition resulted in very little friction and very little wars. Even in today's overcrowded day and age, most violent conflicts happen on TV and not outdoors.

It takes some getting used to but Biblical time is not the same as historical time. It's rather a schedule in complexity, somewhat similar to the "four years" of high school which actually takes you six years of historical time to complete. Hence, when we discuss Biblical history, the word "first" marks a level of complexity not a particular point in time.

As such, Abraham is the "first" character in the Bible who properly itinerates and even circulates (and read our article on the name Hebrew for a look at the typical inquisitive nature of Abraham's journey), the first to be rich (in cattle and precious metals; Genesis 13:2), the first to compete and to establish a peaceful economic pact (with Lot; 13:6-12), the first to view the entire world as his oyster (13:14-15) and to whom the sky was the limit (15:5).

Abraham was the first to pay property tax, namely 10% (to Melchizedek; Genesis 14:20), and this was adopted into Israel's national policy (Genesis 28:22, Numbers 18:26, Hebrews 7:5). The first time the Bible speaks of a commercial purchase is in Genesis 17, where circumcision is instituted as sign of the great covenant, and YHWH orders Abraham to include the men he had acquired via purchase (miqna, which is related to the name Cain).

The first monetary transaction occurs as restitution for Sarah's disgrace by Abimelech (Genesis 20:16; because Abraham was also the first to pimp off his wife, twice: Genesis 20 and 12:11-20).

A first century Shekel

The first actual purchase with money described in the Bible is Abraham's flamboyantly negotiated acquisition of the cave of Machpelah from Ephron, son of Zohar of Heth. Abraham wanted that cave and wanted to pay for it in order to properly burry Sarah (Genesis 23). He paid 400 shekels for it (23:16), according to the "passing of trade" ('aber lasahar, from the same root as the name Hebrew).

The shekel probably started out as a standard weight (proper monetary coinage was probably invented by the Lydians in the 8th century BC), although it's a mystery how this standard was obtained or maintained. Still, a commercial standard based on the common usage of a unit of wealth demonstrates an advanced level of social sophistication.

Abraham the camel man

A somewhat more hairy unit of wealth was the camel, but where the English word "camel" is solely reserved for that humped beast of burden, the Hebrew cognate gamal, meaning camel, comes from the identical verb gamal, which means to trade or invest. In other words: the Hebrew noun gamal does not denote a specific biological genus, it describes a particular economic function, namely that of investing and long-distance trading.

The unit of long distance trade

The camel too gets its Biblical introduction in the Abraham cycle, namely when the Egyptian Pharaoh reimburses Abram for the Sarai incident with sheep, cattle, donkeys, servants and camels (12:16).

The next time Abraham's proverbial camels are mentioned is when Abraham sends his chief of staff (probably Eliezer) north to his family's land with "ten" camels and the whole of Abraham's wealth in his hand (24:10), in order to obtain a wife for Isaac (and note the emphasis on the personal freedom upon which all trade is based: 24:5-8).

The first time the verb gamal is used, surprisingly enough, is in the statement, "The child grew and was weaned (or more literally: invested in during its startup period), and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned" (21:8).

Since the name Isaac means joy or fun, this statement also explains that the result of international trade is play, leisure and entertainment.

The pyramids, the Ark and the case for cold fusion

Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or perhaps not long enough, but when I look at the description of the Temple of YHWH built by Solomon and the Phoenicians, I see a device of some sort (and read our article on the Menorah for a look at the Menorah as machine).

It is of course miraculously daft to forward the idea that the ancient Hebrews had high technology, if it weren't for guys like Christopher Dunn who proposed the same about the pyramids of Giza. More specifically, Dunn proposes that the pyramids are simple too accurately built to have served solely as burial tombs.



Accuracy such as employed at Giza is only required when volatile processes need to be contained and controlled. The pyramids would have looked indistinguishably similar if they had been built with far less precision, and hence during far less man hours of labor and planning, and hence for a fraction of the cost.

Had the pyramids been tombs or even any other kind of monument, they would have been riddled with texts and recognizable imagery. But now that they are sterile and barren, it seems warranted to conclude that they were not monuments at all:



Dunn proposes that the pyramids were meant to be power plants, but stops there. As an engineer, he feels that he should only take measurements and discuss possible applications, but refrain from guessing how the pyramids would fit into Egypt's society at large, and how they would have served this society. Here at Abarim Publications we're engineers too, but in stead of looking at the pyramids, we look at the Bible, and as such have a lot more to go on.

Engineering the Bible

A defining characteristic of the Bible that is often swept under the rug of formal religion is that the Bible speaks of one God for everybody, which can not be represented by anything stationary, and which desires to be known by men. The God of Israel is not to be approached via esoteric rituals and stubborn entreaty but via respectful curiosity and inquisition; not through blind obedience but through learning. The Lord is to be worshiped in truth, and His works and therefore His character can be learned about by studying nature (Romans 1:20). In other words: Yahwism is much more like science in the modern sense of the word than like religion.

The burning of the library at Alexandria in 391 AD

Most people agree that thanks largely to the Romans, the culminated knowledge of the ancient world was destroyed, but when people think of ancient knowledge, they mostly think of flowery philosophies and artsy fartsy stuff. But no, over the last few decades, archeology has unearthed enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the ancients had developped technologies that we simply can't imagine.

We obviously should diligently guard our natural tendency to couple our enthusiasm with our own ability to imagine things, and come up with far-fetched fiction that the ancients might have been able to make reality: time-travel, interstellar travel, you name it, or rather: please don't. That same approach has damaged the field of theology at large almost beyond reasonable repair, and it serves no purpose other than to distort and destroy.

Humanity has lost knowledge; Graham Hancock even calls us a species with amnesia, but perhaps our amnesia is not total. Throughout time there has been a tradition of believing that somehow certain elements could be turned into other elements. That process (or technology) was called Alchemy, and had to do with a device known as the Philosopher's Stone. The wisest people of modern times up until Isaac Newton have been searching for it. Where did we get that belief? Did we really make it up, or do we somehow collectively "remember" that it's bloody well doable; we've just forgotten how!

Alchemy and Fusion

Good news: modern scientists have figured out how to do it, and now it's called Fusion (in stead of Alchemy). You witness fusion every day because sunlight is a result of fusion. In the core of the sun, every four hydrogen atoms are mushed together to make one helium atom, and this is how:

A hydrogen atom consists of (1) one proton (that's the atom's nucleus), (2) one electron zipping around the nucleus, and (3) a force field that holds the electron tied to the nucleus.

The Alchemist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone
Joseph Wright

During fusion, of two hydrogen atoms, the electron gets hammered into the proton, to produce two neutrons, which then get hammered together with the other two hydrogen atoms.

The result is one helium atom which consists of (1) two protons and two neutrons, forming the atom's core, (2) two free electrons zipping around the nucleus, and (3) two force fields to hold the two electrons tied to the nucleus.

The difference between four hydrogen atoms and one helium atom is two force fields. You needed four force fields to keep four hydrogen atoms together, but you only need two for one helium atom.

The two force fields that are no longer needed, wiggle their way out of the sun and become the sunlight that we see.

The bad news: this kind of fusion goes against the laws of thermodynamics, and it takes colossal amounts of energy to get it going in the first place. Hydrogen atoms don't want to get mushed together to form neutrons, and they certainly don't want to huddle up with two more to form one helium atom. In order to perform atomic fusion, you need a monstrous amount of energy and no scruples against doing something to atoms that they themselves don't want to do.

Once you got four hydrogen atoms hammered together, they won't be able to break loose again, unless they somehow acquire energy equal to two little force fields they lost. You can even continue hammering atoms together to form heavier atoms (1 hydrogen atom + one helium atom = one lithium atom + 1 free force field) and distract more and more energy. When you reach iron (26 protons, neutrons, electrons and force fields), the game is up because in order to make heavier elements (like copper, which is number 27) you would have to insert energy in stead of getting it out of the deal.

Elements heavier than iron are produced in events called super novae, and if you can manage to break these heavier elements apart into lighter elements, you would win energy. That process is called Fission, and it's the operating principle of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants.

In other words: alchemy is perfectly possible, but the way we have it today it requires an initial investment of energy that makes the whole thing expensive, cumbersome and dangerous. The Philosopher's Stone we managed to build is too large to be of any use. There's barely enough food in the world to feed the beast.

Stone cold fusion

The original Philosopher's Stone was the size of a poodle. It's working principle was a mysterious process that in our day and age is colloquially known as Cold Fusion, which is a process which the scientific world generally deems impossible. But is it?

In 1989, Fleischmann and Pons famously reported excess energy emanating from an installation that involved so-called "heavy water". Their findings caused an enormous riot, not because it might have worked but because if it had worked it would have engaged a hitherto unknown natural principle. And much worse: this principle promised unlimited and freely available energy for all.

Fleischmann and Pons' nifty Cold Fusion wasn't disproved (beyond the observation that our presently know laws of physics don't support it), it was yelled off the table by hysteric, and may we add: heavily funded, Hot Fusion researchers and their oily backers.

Here at Abarim Publications we are neither physicists nor heavily funded, so our scope grows misty in that direction. But in the direction we are skilled to look (namely Biblical Scriptures), things look suspiciously bright for the cold fusion camp.

On the font-page of our main website, we've already suggested that under specific circumstances, atoms can be persuaded to cluster together to form molecules the size and complexity of DNA. Now we'd like to postulate that cold fusion is possible when atoms are somehow "persuaded" to huddle together into heavier elements and voluntarily release their energy. We don't have complicated mathematics to back all this up, but we do have compelling textual evidence.

The pyramids of Giza are mysterious for more than one reason, and one of these is that no mention exists anywhere in the substantial Egyptian records about them being built. It appears therefore that the pyramids outdate Egypt's recorded history (several other hypothesis point at the same conclusions, but these escape the scope of this article).

If we deem the obsession of our own recent ancestors with alchemy, a mere interest in something that would be nice if it worked is simply not potent enough to explain it. Something similar could be said about the obsession of the ancient Egyptians with the sun. What was it about the sun that was so compelling that it outshone all other elements and tributaries of life and being alive, and became the prime object of national obsession? The usual explanations of religious fervor simply don't cut it (and never have, if you ask me), and I'm sure that both the obsession with the sun and that with transmutation of elements came from the same source: the lost knowledge of cold fusion.

Water, water everywhere

One of the reasons why some researchers believe that at least the sphinx of Giza is a lot older than is generally supposed comes from the patterns of erosion on the statue itself and the basin it sits in.

Robert M. Schock, a geologist at Boston University concluded that these patterns came from centuries of accumulative water damage. Rainfall substantial enough to have caused this did not occur in Egypt after about 4000 BC, and we know that from archaeological and geological examinations of the environment there.

 But what is the water that damaged the sphinx and made the dessert bloom wasn't caused by rainfall in the conventional sense?

These days it's common knowledge that the designs and functions of the tabernacle, which Moses built from heavenly patterns that he was shown on the mountain (Exodus 25:9, 25:40, Numbers 8:4, Hebrews 8:5), and the Ark of the Covenant were to some extend also known in Egypt.

The function of the Ark was (1) to be a receptacle for the Law, and (2) to be a seat for the Lord and a place where man could meet Him. What strikes about the Ark is that it somehow was associated with a pillar of smoke and fire, known as the Shekinah. Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or not long enough, but when I hear of fire and smoke I automatically think in terms of energy and fuel.

I don't want to sound disrespectful or un-spiritual, but if the Lord forms a column of smoke and fire, He essentially brings things together that produce the effect. Better yet: if the Lord wants us to observe creation in order to know Him better, He would stay very far away from so-called super-natural events, that is: events brought about by reasons other than natural laws, known or not.

In still other words: if the Lord wants to be known by the things He's made, He wants us to think about the Shekinah in terms of physics and chemistry, and not stay away from investigating it because it would be too holy. The pillar was observable, so the principles that brought it about are observable too.

An artist's rendering of the Shekinah

The pillar of smoke and fire represented the presence of the Lord, and showed up directly after Israel's departure from Egypt (Exodus 13). This happened before the Law was received (Exodus 19), which happened before the Ark was constructed (Exodus 25). The Ark was deposited in the tabernacle and the tabernacle became the temple. When the Ark was placed into the temple's Holy of Holies, the glory of the Lord returned and the place was filled with so much smoke that the priests had to get out of the building (2 Chronicles 5:13-14). To me that looks like someone pushed the on-button.

A natural process always consists of things going in, things being done, and things coming out. We know that the "things going in" consisted of enormous amounts of animals and vegetation, but it's not clear if these were actual organisms or rather another way of saying "food for humans" (1 Kings 8:63-64). What the "things being done" were precisely isn't clear, but it had to do with fire coming from heaven (2 Chronicles 7:1). What the "things coming out" were is even more obscure. Apart from it being a great blessing, we have no idea what the temple did apart from being spectacular.

Another instance of fire coming down from heaven and consuming a bull, happened when the prophet Elijah taunted the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18). Now note that the Giza complex was a lot larger than Solomon's temple complex, and that Elijah's altar was a lot smaller than the temple. It is as if these accounts also indicate that whatever it was, we were already forgetting about it. Another key to what was going on, however, is that Elijah battled the Baal priests in the middle of a period of drought (1 Kings 17:1). Immediately after Elijah's victory over the Baal priests, which consisted of the Lord sending fire from heaven, the rains came (1 Kings 18:41-46).

Streams of Living Water

The temple was destroyed by the Babylonians but several visionaries saw a time in which it would be built again, and in a way that would exceed its former glory. The prophet Ezekiel saw a vision of the new temple, and noted among other things that water flowed from it (Ezekiel 47:8).


Likewise the prophet Zechariah foresaw a time at which "living" water would flow from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8). John the Revelator even went so far as to speak of the River of Life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, with the Tree of Life on its either shore, yielding fruits of every kind and leaves to heal the nations (Revelation 22:1-2).

But in John's world there are no temples in the conventional sense (Revelation 21:22). The River of Life comes from a Living Temple, namely from a collective of people that are united into one mind and without being coerced (John 7:38, 1 Peter 2:5; the "things going in" being the blood and body of the Lamb).

Throughout the ages, political leaders have tried to pummel their realms into shape by force, and the sun has spectacularly persisted as preferred emblem to those endeavors. The Romans worshiped Sol Invictus, the invisible sun, and modern Christianity is unfortunately much more based on the Solar cult than on the Bible (read for more details our article on the name Nazarene).

Obedience to God is perpendicularly opposite to obedience to formal doctrine and clerical structures. Obedience to God equals freedom of the individual (of course within certain restrictions such as don't kill, don't steel, et cetera), and freedom of the individual is a nightmare to any totalitarian leader. Josephus wrote that during any of the three week-long Judaic feasts, three million people would converge onto Jerusalem. Then realize that the entire Roman empire contained 300 million people -- meaning that three times a year, one percent of the population would abandon positions of servitude and production to go party in the homeland -- and you can figure out why Rome's battle with the Jews was about more than religious bickering.

The final conclusion of all this (and where's my drum roll?) is that totalitarian coercion is the social equivalent of Hot Fusion -- and don't delude yourself into believing that we're presently living in a democracy, because we're not. The social equivalent of Cold Fusion is, well, whatever it is that makes the Body of Christ tick -- and don't delude yourself again; most churches today are wholly similar to the congregations devoted to Baal in Elijah's days. Enthusiasm, fervor and even certainty and faith are no signs of being right, see 1 Kings 18:28-29. Instead, no effect is a sure sign of being wrong.

The Body of Christ consists of people that are measurably different from the majority of humans, and can certainly be found not only within Christianity. From what we can learn from nuclear physics, these people are typically not focused on personal gain of any kind. That means that most of them are neither rich nor famous, and probably not very popular either. They are not organized in any formal way, there are no symbols or emblems nor mailing lists or membership cards and there are no leaders and bosses. They probably don't have many friends, but they are connected to humanity in a way that defies further explanation. You'll know it when you are one, and you won't ever be able to comprehend it when you are not.

But, don't be dismayed. In stead watch this riveting little documentary on cold fusion:




Or this one, which is more up to date but slightly more technical and a bit more angry:

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.

Human history (II): Language like God's

Speech is an absolute marvel

Speech is an unmitigated miracle, something moderns often forget. It requires specialized bodily hardware and a brain that's capable of incredible abstractions. According to some models, speech began to become possible because of a mutation on the Y-chromosome (Crow, Tyler-Smith) and while some may wonder why, if men invented speech, women got so good at it, more serious investigators may not help notice the obvious parallel with Genesis 2:22.

Language (that which comes about from the ability to speak) is no less a miracle, because it is fundamentally based on agreement, vast agreement across vast areas and during vast amounts of time. Up until late in the 20th century, people were convinced that the various human languages were wholly separate things, and could only marvel at the amazing "coincidence" of the obvious similarities between languages of peoples who could never have met. More advanced linguistic theory, however, began to show that all human languages are in fact quite similar, and are all based on the same operating principle called syntax; all languages consist of things like nouns, verbs and adjectives and they all depend on the contextual relationship between the words.

As diverse as they may seem, the languages of peoples are as identical as their bodies.

Edward O. Wilson

Further amazing studies have revealed that DNA works in several distinct ways precisely like human language (Gariaev, Delrow). Some enthusiasts have concluded that extraterrestrials must have endowed all DNA of planet earth with a greeting in helpfully human language that we somehow managed to develop on our own, but the truth is obviously the reverse. Humans are not only forming their bodily cells according to their DNA, they also form their social bonding from it.

The biologist Edward O. Wilson once remarked that the individual ant does not exist -- ant DNA includes the social behavior that drives ants to build a highly complex ant hill and the same is true for humans and their language. Human languages are so alike because human DNA is so alike and both are so alike because they are really the same thing.

Human language resonates with DNA and DNA is not a boring "code" that we slavishly obey; it's exiting stories that we love to hear. Living things aren't machines that operate on software; they dance on genetic music.




Imagine how many factors must be just right to preserve a charcoal rock-painting for just a few years. The chance than one remains for millennia, let alone for tens of thousands of years, is minute and the very fact that we have found so many demonstrates that the old world was littered with human graffiti: sign posts, totems and probably a whole lot just for the prettiness of it.

Lascaux painting

All language writing evolved from pictures, and it may very well be that early art such as carvings and cave paintings was used primarily to stir up conversations, in order to find agreement on what to call things (Genesis 2:19). It's even likely that prior to speaking with words, people spoke melodically (they hummed, growled and clacked), and that music arose prior to language and primarily as a means of communication and social bonding (speech won from music probably because speech was more amusing).

Language is not an autonomous thing, just like DNA is not. But spoken language is an expression of DNA, and subsequently forms its own verbal biosphere. And just like, according to some models, the biosphere once consisted of a huge amount of different single cellular organisms, so must the realm of human proto-language once have consisted of a huge number of different proto-words (grunts, clacks).

In the biosphere, most single-cellular species died out (although even today, most of the biomass is represented by single cellular creatures) and some survivors began to huddle together in colonies. Likewise human speech began to polarize into languages, in which people of large areas began to represent the same concepts with the same sounds.

Language made it possible to describe and discuss things that weren't directly visible, and the art of story telling must have been a logical consequence. Stories gave people the ability to discuss and exchange abstractions. Stories were told and retold, reshaped and adjusted, like metal in a smithery (Psalm 12:6). Some versions were forgotten, others became campfire hits and became the archetypes that everybody recognized and personified with.

In the biosphere, complex colonies were surpassed in complexity by creatures that were in fact hyper-social colonies of single cellular creatures: multi-cellular creatures. In the realm of language, people began to compile their archetypal stories into the traditions that breathed like a collective soul through people's hearts.

In Hebrew the word for bee, deborah, is the feminine form of the word for 'Word', dabar
which is what we would call -logy in words like mythology.

Critics propose that religions came from fear and wishful thinking, but it's obvious that they don't. Mythologists marvel over the similarities between the various ancient myths of the old world, but the reason for this is that all of them reflect the same principles, namely the operating principles of DNA. All DNA contains code that drives a creature to reproduce this DNA. That's exactly what human language does too; it's a reproduction of DNA. On a genetic level, a bacterium is precisely as complex as a human being, just like on a linguistic level a freshly produced yarn is as complex as an established myth. But story telling follows the precise same kind of progression of complexity as life does.

Archaeologists wonder why after countless millennia of foraging, humans suddenly took up farming (which is a whole lot more work than foraging and yields little additional safety), and several enticing theories have been proposed. Here at Abarim Publications we surmise that the mythologies of very old societies began to tell them that they should, simply because farming can feed more people and more people means more blather and more exchange of ideas.

It's still a scientific mystery where DNA might have come from because as a natural phenomenon it seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Energy fluctuations will eventually even out, and everything will eventually turn into dust; in other words: entropy will increase until the max. But since time is a legitimate dimension of the universe, the loss of entropy due to the initial formation of DNA may be paid for in full-and-then-some by the super-mess (transfinite entropy) living things make during their unpredictable lives.

In fact, the universe may reckon the rise of life as being in more than full agreement with this second law as long as living things move at will (Genesis 15:6).

In terms of a poetic approach to thermodynamics: human DNA is stiller than any other DNA, and the Torah is stiller than any other religious expression. The only possible outcome of evolution, called the New Jerusalem by John the Revelator, will somehow reflect DNA that reflects the universe that reflects God (Revelation 21-22).

... and you will be still