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.

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

Human history: Murder most foul

Here at Abarim Publications we rarely get upset, but the chauvinism of the evolutionary paradigm has us frequently yawping barbarically over the roofs of the world.

Since Roman times folks have insisted that whatever is not like us is inferior, and this spawned in more recent times the idea that our anatomically identical ancestors must have been frightened oafs, huddled naked around campfires waiting for their big empty heads to somehow fill with the knowledge of how to farm and the good taste to appoint leaders to pliantly obey (at around 9,000 BC).

It has been said that we are a species with amnesia, but it's worse than that: cultural chauvinism has green lighted the murder most foul of countless millions of fellow moderns, and robbed the rest of us of our collective childhood.

Energy (what the material world is made of), DNA (what the biosphere is made of) and consciousness (what human culture is made of) have so much in common that they are most probable three iterations of one primary principle; three times the same basic idea. All three of these media showed up in its entirety out of nowhere and then stayed the same in essence but changed drastically in application, like a car that can be parked or roar down the highway all because that's what its essence allows.

The universe went from singularity (car parked) to its present form (car going 150 kph) because it has been able to do so from the beginning (when a brand new car rolled off the lot, for no apparent reason). Despite the play-down of certain people, life does the same thing. The mainstream estimate is that life started 4 billion years ago, as a myriad of tiny cells that all had our ancestral DNA in them.

This ancestral DNA was then (car parked) as vastly complex as it is now (car going 150). Much to the detriment of classical evolution theory: life didn't start out at the wheelbarrow level or even the bicycle level. It started fully-formed at the Model-T level and hasn't substantially changed since. Our most remote single cellular ancestor ran on the very same genetic software that all living things run on today; namely a colossal array of instructions written in a fully formed genetic language.

Life may change form, just like energy, but was wholly there from the get go.

The realm of consciousness follows the exact same profile: fully there from the beginning and lacking only convention (broad ranging intellectual agreement). Homo sapiens has been around for at least 200,000 years and they have always been exactly like us. They had our emotions, our sense of compassion, our theory of mind, or sense of planning, logic and problem solving.

Prior to the emergence of formal language (which requires advanced broad ranging agreement), people were just as smart as they are today and they certainly weren't mute. They had the same brains and voice boxes as we do and were able to imitate every animal in the forest. In fact, prior to the emergence of language, humans must have communicated largely via intonations and inflections, changes of pitch and rhythm and clacks and clicks made with the tongue and lips, which is precisely how their fellow creatures produced sounds.

In other words: ancient Homo Sapiens (and quite probably to some extent Australopithecus and Neanderthals as well) may not have spoken the king's English, they were fluent in lion, wildebeest, monkey and all the other animal "languages" in the world. Ancient humans understood precisely what an animal was on about when it produced vocal sound (signaling fear, anger, hunger, loneliness; all that) and was able to devise appropriate action. And because they most likely discussed animals by imitating the sound they made, the first real words were probably onomatopoeic; adaptations of animal sounds.

Unlike the parodial Flintstones, The Croods is indicative of the general changing attitude towards early man

From the get go, our ancestors told stories, laughed and cried, dreamed and plotted. Their minds were filled to the brim with knowledge about the natural world, and their ability to join forces made them practically invincible. Animal behavior could be predicted to such an extent that a daily patrol could keep vast areas confirmed clear of predators. Close cooperating human teams easily outsmarted giant lions and mastodons and killed them as a matter of routine. They strode the land proud as bears and nimble as packs of wolves. Our ancestors had absolutely nothing to fear. Compared to modern city slickers, ancient man truly lived in a garden of Eden

Humans are born problem solvers and the very fact that we barely changed our behavior for tens of thousands of years demonstrates that we had very few problems to solve. Most of the time, food came in oodles, just growing on trees. Studies show that ancient humans needed to spend only a little time on the necessities of life and could devote the rest of their time to socializing.

The Geissenklostere flute, dated to 40,000 BC, is one of many found

Forty-thousand year old, three and five-holed flutes were found in Germany, and whatever remains after such a long time must have been part of a huge collection. The German flutes were made of bone and ivory and must have taken a long time to make. That means that flutes and music were not invented the day before. Tens of thousands of years before of our ancestors took up farming, they must have been jamming away in the forest. There's no real reason to assume that they didn't form orchestras and choirs and took their craft as seriously as we do today.

Paintings from Chauvet Cave date from 30,000 BC

Around the same time that our ancestors started making music, they took up painting and sculpting and the very fact that so many Stone Age artifacts are still with us (occupied places usually stay occupied, and a living place that doesn't get redecorated for eons is extremely rare) means that the whole human world must have been littered with graffiti, then as much as now.

Our ancestors weren't quiet and they didn't hide. Quite the opposite. They were doing their utmost to get noticed. There was very little competition and the only thing humans could have craved was entertainment and excitement. Just like dolphins who spend most of their time playing, early humans must have played all the time, with whoever of the neighboring tribes cared to swing by.

The complex at Gobekli Tepe was built long before people began to farm or congregate in cities.

Just like our internet today, the internet of the old world served largely to stay up to snuff with the latest lyrics and campfire hits. So much even that they created elaborate central hubs long before they settled as farmers. The 10th millennium BC complex at Gobekli Tepe, for instance, has chagrined all the right people and shifted the paradigm away from the presumption that our foraging ancients were clueless brutes and toward the understanding that they had the grace and the skills but simply not the desire to give up living off the fat of the land, and only congregate at pow-wows.

Our ancestors had the same soif-de-vivre we have today. Tens of thousands of years before anybody took up farming, our ancestors had ships in the water, and they were most likely navigating by the stars. For no necessity or dire circumstance whatsoever, they crossed vast stretches of ocean and created colonies all over the world -- and a colony requires a bare minimal viable population of about 20 people, which means that a colony never happens by accident.

Man built whatever he wanted and went wherever he chose. He thrived and dominated the whole natural world long before he started to domesticate plants, animals and ultimately himself.

Why you probably aren't a Christian (but something even better)

Over the years my homies have suffered their share of my rogue theologies but nothing sends them into hurls and recoil as much as my confessing that I'm not a Christian. Bible studies that center on being a Christian commonly conclude in hysteria and once or twice I ended up duct taped upside down to the bathroom ceiling.


My homies, you see, are Christians first and foremost, and reasonable only after all other avenues of sapience have been exhaustively explored. With all those bloodthirsty immigrants and terrorists lurking on the horizon these days, declarations of allegiance are like secret passwords and the confident examination of alternatives has been long retired in favor of banner waving, rally crying and mud slinging to all things other.

But, as He said through the words of Isaiah: Come and let us reason together (Isaiah 1:18).

In old Israel, you see, a king was not crowned but anointed into office. The verb for that is masah and an "anointed one" (a king), was called messiah. In Greek this verb is chrio and the corresponding noun is christus (from whence comes our word Christ).

When in 63 BC the Roman general Pompey put an end to the royal Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, nationalistic Jews arose who resisted the Roman occupation, and aimed to reinstate a Jewish king on the throne of Judea (see John 6:15). Since the world at that time spoke Greek, such a Jewish king would have been known as christus. These nationalistic Jews in turn would have been known as christianos or Christians; those pertaining to the anointing. When Jesus arrived and it became clear that nobody but He was the real Christus, things became complicated.

In the Bible, all people who held a unique office had unique names. That's why there are only one Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, David and Solomon in the Bible. The name Jesus, on the other hand, was as common as Bobby is to us today. That means something.

Anybody who held any intellectual clout in the old world adopted as surname the place where he enjoyed his formative education or held his signature sway. That's why we speak of Paul of Tarsus, Archimedes of Syracuse, Simon of Cyrene and Hypathia of Alexandria. The biographers of Jesus (who knew what they were doing, I must insist) didn't tie Him to Bethlehem (to subscribe to His royal descent) or even Jerusalem (to accentuate His intellectual leaning) but to Nazareth, and Nazareth was either such an obscure hamlet that no other writer of that time mentions it, or else it's not a town at all but rather a moniker that means "Scattered".

In other words: the name Jesus of Nazareth perfectly paraphrases as John Doe from Anywhere, and a reader without bias or preconception may surely be forgiven to conclude that the gospel writers deployed this name as literary device to make their central points extra very clear.

The gospel of Jesus explains that the ultimate manifestation of humanity lies not in an empire in which every individual is subject to the whims of one deified emperor (even if he was dubbed King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Son of God, Savior of the World, as was Augustus, who reigned when Jesus was born; again no coincidence) but rather in the autonomy of every human individual, whatever named, wherever from. For humanity to reach its ultimate potential, every human must be an anointed king: someone without an earthly superior, someone wholly free and therefore entirely responsible for his or her own actions.



The authors of the New Testament overly explained that the followers of Jesus do not pertain to the anointing but partake in the anointing (2 Corinthians 1:21, Hebrews 1:9, 1 John 2:20). And please let that sink in: Pertainers to the anointing are not the anointed king but support the anointed. Followers of Jesus do not support the anointed but are anointed. They are Christs.

The Greek word christianos occurs three times in the Bible:

• In Acts 11:26 the author notes that in Antioch the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. That's usually explained as referring to the birth of the word, but obviously the author expresses his frustration about their divine liberation movement being confused with some noisy political party.
• In Acts 26:28 Paul reasons with Herod Agrippa, after which the king snickers that Paul is so convincing that he might actually turn him into a christianos. This is sort of half-funny because although Herod's family ruled Judea as puppet kings, they were Idumean and not Jewish, and doubtlessly suffered their share from nationalistic opposition.
• In 1 Peter 4:14-16 it's made even more clear: If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed. Don't get into a situation in which you might be accused of being a murderer, thief or evildoer (simply by not being one), but if misinformed folks start calling you christianos, then take courage in the name Christ (and obviously not in christianos). 

Followers of Jesus are not Christians but Christs. Not some distant emperor but every Christ is Son of God and Savior of the World. Not some leader in a fortress somewhere will guide us to the New Jerusalem but the liberty and autonomy of every person under God. The Creator Himself communicates directly into the heart of everyone who is anointed with the Holy Spirit, and there is no authority higher than that.

After the Jewish revolt of 66-70 AD, three centuries followed in which the Roman empire attempted to subdue the most corroding revolt of all: the belief that one individual -- any individual -- mattered and had value, even as much value as the next dude, even if that were the emperor. The Roman Empire could only function if its subjects shivered in fear for their leadership and asked no questions. Talk of abolishing all rule, and all authority and power (1 Corinthians 15:24) and "don't call anyone your leader" (Matthew 23:10) was treason of the highest order and detrimental to the Roman state machinery.

But this idea proved so attractive to the plebs that no amount of slaughter and torture could kill it and make it stay dead; it kept resurrecting! These people had no leader to assassinate, no capital to sack, no regalia to desecrate. They sprouted up everywhere, like green grass amidst the boulders of Rome's temples. They ignored political borders like birds on their trek. They worshiped nobody but the actual Creator alone. They studied nature to learn of the divine (Romans 1:20) and wouldn't hear of the magic rituals that kept belief in the empire going.

Constantine the not-so-great

Finally, in the fourth century, aspiring-emperor Constantine had a brilliant idea. If he couldn't bring Moses to the mountain, he would bring the mountain to Moses. If these terrible rebels wouldn't succumb to the personality cult of the Caesar, he would make the cult succumb to them! And so Constantine made John Doe from Anywhere the impromptu Caesar.

It took some work, but with the help of large numbers of scholars, Christianity was formalized to fit precisely the mold of Roman Imperial Theology and to seamlessly take over its primary function: the control of the masses.

It was announced that there were no myriads of anointed free individuals, there was only one: the Christ, the emperor of the universe in whose direct stead the earthly Caesars ruled. All other people had to bow down and obey the one and only Christ who was represented by the emperor for everybody's convenience.

The relationship between the one and only Christ and the Creator and His Spirit was explained in such a way that monotheism was effectively abandoned. The Trinitarian dogma solved a problem that had never occurred to anyone in the thousand years of Judaism, and although it was wholly artificial, it also neatly provided a parallel between the new faith and the old Capitoline Triad, which was worshiped in the heart of Rome.

The Capitoline Triad

The "descent into hell" of Jesus likewise is not discussed anywhere in Scriptures and is nothing but a revival of familiar Greco-Roman myth.

Shepherds don't abide in the field in dead winter, yet the birth of the Christ was stuck to the year's shortest day, following the cult of Sol Invictus.

Likewise Easter was Astarte's spring festival reloaded.

The word saint, in the Bible consistently applied to all believers, became a religious rank. Its blessed cluster quietly usurped the familiar image of demi-gods that once surrounded the throne of Jupiter in praise.

The highest good in this new Christianity was compliance to the social order and thus its leadership. That is why in most Christian churches people sit or stand in neat rows, listening to one preacher without the right to engage him or challenge his thoughts. This arrangement is not natural (God-made) but mimics the philosophies behind the modus operandi of a Roman legion.

Jesus' most central message of individual freedom via inspiration by the Holy Spirit was simply erased and was replaced by esoteric knowledge that had to be studied. Its fraternity of practitioners became society's new elite, and entry into its embrace was governed by elaborate rituals that revived the magic of yester years.

People today are tempted to think that the main struggle on earth is faith versus science, or Islam versus Christianity, or greenlings versus McDonalds, but no. The most fundamental and most cosmic struggle on earth is that of autonomous individual versus empire, also known as, you guessed it: Christ versus Antichrist.

You can recognize a typical empire by its leadership cult, its disdain for the common bloke and the uniforms he is made to wear to nullify his individuality. You'll recognize an empire by its rigid organizational manifesto and insistence on membership administration and ranks, labels, categories, stamps and passes, symbols, and usually a wide spectrum of elaborate promises and oaths by either the representatives or else the replacements of God on earth.

You can recognize free individuals by the absence of all these things and the blind hate imperialists have for them.

Look at the house-style of the Nazis. It's precisely the same as that of Caesarean Rome, and the only difference between Hitler and Augustus is that Augustus won.



Both Rome and Germany hated Jews, because both worshiped their machine-like state and Jews embodied something beyond political non-compliance and subversion: the worship of only the Creator.

People like that can't be opposed, debated or enticed. You can't convert them into the state religion because these people aren't religious to begin with. That is why the exasperated 1st century Roman historian Cassius Dio could call atheism "a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned" (67.14).

It's nice to be liked, but there are more important things than that. You'll have to crawl away from a beating now and then, but by God don't kneel to any regime, not to the Romans, not to the Germans, not to any of them. We belong to God, and we stand continuously in His presence, blameless with great joy.

Don't pertain, partake!

How Beer ties into the Promise of Salvation

For eons mainstream historians have tried to make us believe that humanity made the transition from being hunter-gatherers to living in agricultural and urban societies, because of such mundane considerations as religion or people's desire to huddle up and be safe. A recent revolution has changed all that. Now we know the real reason for the agricultural revolution: beer!

Yes folks, people domesticated barley and brew beer millennia before they baked bread, and beer has saved humanity more than once since (watch the riveting and wonderfully entertaining documentary below if you don't believe it).

But if beer was such an important catalyst in human development, why is beer not mentioned in the Bible? It's generally accepted that the agricultural revolution is described in the late Patriarchal cycle, specifically when Jacob began to build booths for his cattle (Genesis 33:17). But where's the beer (not counting the names He-Brew and Beer-sheba for argument sake)?

The answer may very well lie in the word nazid, which comes from the verb zud, meaning to boil. Our word occurs six times in the Bible, divided over a mere three scenes:

(1) The prophet Haggai describes a complete meal in Haggai 2:12, which contains our word but no beer (which in antiquity would be a part of any well balanced meal).

(2) The prophet Elisha was called to the rescue when during a famine some prophets had concocted a brew (nazid) from unknown ingredients, and it was awful. Elisha ordered the men to add some qemah, and what that is we don't know but it has to do with a grain product, usually translated with meal or flour but that's just a guess. And the brew was fine! Could qemah have been hop?

(3) But most revealing is the use of our word nazid in the story of Esau (the hunter and man of the field) and Jacob (the home boy). One day Esau came home from hunting and found Jacob stirring some nazid (Genesis 25:27-34). Esau famously traded his birth right for some of it, and when father Isaac was about to dispense his blessings, he blessed Jacob who brought him a dish made from domesticated goat-kid and had little blessing left for Esau and his fresh kill (Genesis 27).

And as a footnote: it's generally assumed that Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him, but that's patently untrue. Isaac was blind and Jacob's visual disguise would hardly have made much difference to Isaac. In his letter to the Hebrews, Paul wrote that Isaac knew very well what he was doing, and blessed his sons according to his understanding of the things to come (Hebrews 11:20).

And beer? Besides securing Jacob's blessing and Israel's future, beer brought people together and caused society.

Beer kept the ancients healthy by producing the 20th century wonder of antibiotics naturally. Beer caused the American Revolution and was responsible for a pre-computer Internet.

Because of beer, people invented refrigeration and machines that replaced child labor.

So next time you pop a cold one, proclaim of the immortal words of John Nash: I have respect for beer!

Cheers!

Oh, and watch this cheerful and most excellent documentary on How Beer Saved The World:

What do Fight Club and the Gospel of Jesus Christ have in common?

Fight Club - brutal but surprisingly Biblical

New words are invented every day, because when people think of new things to say, they need new words to do so. That conversely means that certain ideas that have been around since time immemorial are known by words that are very old. And we know when words are very old when they are used over vast language areas. The general rule is: the older, the wider its spread, and the wider its spread, the older it is.

Take the word "you" for instance. People have addressed other people for a while now, so the earliest word for "you" has remnants in all Eurasian languages. It obviously exists in the north European languages since English is one of those (together with German, Dutch and a few others), but also in the Latin rooted south (the French tu), and the Slavic east (the Serbian ti). It even occurs in Vedic Sanskrit (as yuyam), which demonstrates it's really fantastically old.

Slightly less intuitively is the prevalence of the word "soap".

We've been told that our ancestors were unrelenting barbarians until roughly the invention of the DVD, and shouldn't be expected to have ever washed, let alone have a word for such a commodity as refined as soap. Turns out that tradition is wrong, and the ancients talked about soap pretty much as long as they talked about someone in his face.

To quote our exhilarating article on the mysterious Hebrew word 'ezob:

"Our English word "soap" probably comes from an old Germanic stem, with a root so old that it also existed in Latin (as sebum) and lives on today in most European languages (Basque: xaboi; Bosnian: sabo; Danish: saebe; Dutch: zeep; German: Seife; Estonian: seep; Spanish: jabon; French: savon; Finnish: saippua; Icelandic: sapa; Kurdish: sabun).  

Its prevalence across such a wide language base makes linguists suspect that our word existed in pre-Indo-European (probably sounding like seib), and that would make it not only contemporary with our word 'ezob; it may very well be its cognate, and thus that of the Greek noun hussopos (hyssop).

The link between soap and hyssop (a plant) lies probably in the fabrication of the earliest sponge or shrub, namely from a bundle of fine twigs or a grass-like wad.

It turns out that the ancients were obsessed with cleanliness. Texts from the very dawn of recorded history speak of soap and the importance of keeping things clean. This was obviously long before the advent of proper germ theory (of which the first proposals were made in the 16th century, but proof came only a century later) and the observable effects of cleanliness were deemed miraculous.

Dirtiness of body and dirtiness of conscience became expressed in similar imagery, which led to the familiar but controversial "washing away" of moral sins with physical water and soap (Psalm 51:7). Still, the amazing properties of soap were rightly so tied to the divine. Soap demonstrably warded off disease, stench and even death; it purified and strengthened, just like the very Word of God.

And the best part was that it came natural, as element of creation. Natural soap can be found around the organs of mammals, where it is often produced as the result of some bodily injury (hence Tyler Durden's interest in producing soap, get it?).

In the translated Bible there is an additional theme of washing items such as pots and pan and even white garments in blood (Numbers 19, Revelation 7:14), which is obviously rather curious. But since blood, like soap, is a natural bodily fluid, the solution to this conundrum comes when we allow the word for blood (dam) to cover all fluids, including soap.

But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5 

Game of Thrones, the Bible and JUDGED

There is quite a bit of brouhaha going on in Christian circles about Game of Thrones being too violent, and, worse, too nude! But what a nonsense. The only thing Game of Thrones has and the Bible doesn't is an imp (not counting Paul and Zaccheus).

"The imp" Tyrion Lannister, in the foreground directly below the M of Game

In fact, I think we should start lobbying for a a brand new Bible TV series that for once isn't peopled by piously smiling Caucasian Colgate models but actually by the characters that appear in the Bible. We could call it JUDGED, and make it the bloodiest and nudest series ever to air on prime time! I bet we could get a Emmy for the Paradise episode alone.

Think of all the blood and boobs we could show in the antediluvian episode - move over Darren Aronofsky!

David with the head of Goliath
M. Caravaggio

The one on the Book of Judges would be a two-parter, of course, with weeks of teasers that warn folks to put their kids to bed before it airs. It would have extra emphasis on the destruction of the cities of the plain and the atrocities committed at Gibeah.

Ah, just imagine watching Abimelech deal with Shechem, or Jephthah with his daughter. And need we mention the virgin heist at Shiloh? We think not...

For the much anticipated incest special, we could casually mention that Sarah was Abraham's half-sister, before moving on to Lot who impregnated his daughters and Judah who impregnated his daughter in law. David's son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and speaking of rape, we would have to squeeze Shechem's rape of Dinah in there too somewhere, followed by Levi and Simeon's excellently bloody revenge.

Bathsheba's toilet
C.C. van Haarlem

We could do a snazzy Lydia Bixby crossover thing when we execute the five sons of Merab. The stories of Isaac and Rebekah and of David and Bathsheba would cater to the voyeuristic minority among our projected audience, and if we do it tasteful, we could certainly move the boundaries of allowable porn when we have a go at the Song of Solomon.

The New Testament episode(s) would have to center on the Roman occupation, although we could turn the Lazarus cycle and the resurrected thousands upon Jesus' death into a zombie apocalypse kind of thing.

Gibson set the standard for torture-porn crucifixion-fiction and lest we look like a rip off, perhaps we could go into the theological ramifications of Jesus' death. That could give JUDGED the disturbing psychotic edge that Games hardly has.

Matthew 27:52-54

And just imagine the horror, the bottomless horror we could whip up for the show's grand finale: JUDGED - JUDGEMENT DAY.

I'd warn the producers to stay away from the silly medieval image of little red fire devils poking naked people with pitchforks. That image went out with the flat earth and our target audience is obviously beyond that.

In stead we could follow some John Doe as he notices his every day world becoming bleaker and bleaker until one day he finds himself (screaming, of course) adrift in an unbound darkness with no features whatsoever and no one around and even void of the hope to ever meet someone or something.

There won't be anything to catch his bearings on. His memories will be indistinguishable from his imaginations. He will slowly loose faith in reality, and no longer be sure that the world has ever existed. He might be a creature produced by some random process, that began to imagine things and so ended up on a make-believe planet with make-believe friends and family. He might have made it all up. He might not be human, but there's no light to check the shape of his body. And he could be making up his sense of touch too.

And as the camera zooms out, we hear poor John Doe screaming hysterical screams, as he gets smaller and smaller in a silent blackness that won't even provide him with the assurance that he himself exists.

Wow. There won't be a globe golden enough...