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...

Google and Jubilee

One of the key stipulations of the Torah, namely the Sabbath Year and Year of Jubilee, are no longer observed in our modern world, or are they? A closer look at the most successful company in human history might surprise you.

Google in Hebrew letters

Everybody knows about Sabbath, the seventh day of the week upon which people were not to do any work, but rest. This day of Sabbath is still with us, and was even expanded from one day to two days of rest, what we call the weekend.

But what our modern world doesn't observe is the Sabbath year, which was a period of one year every seven years during which arable lands were given rest (Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:1-7), slaves were emancipated (Exodus 21:2-4) and debts were remitted (Deuteronomy 15:1).

The seventh Sabbath Year was known as the Year of Jubilee, during which additionally all property rights regarding fields reverted (Leviticus 25:8-55 and 27:16-33).

The key feature of Sabbath and Jubilee is quickly overlooked but it's nothing other than the suspension of obligation. That's sounds wonderfully anarchistic but it comes down to a huge liberation of human endeavor from the demands of commerce and sustenance.

Most people are creative in some way or other, and periods of time, from a day to a whole year, not having to do what someone else or some situation dictates (basically living off the fat of the land), automatically produces an enormous quantity of unrestrained human interaction: stronger family bonds and doubtlessly baby booms in the year after the Sabbath year, but also new ideas, new technology and science, and new literature and music. In fact, our word school comes from the Greek word skhoie, meaning leisure.

Hard work and doing what you're told may have given us our wealth, but occasional freedom and time to pursue the inclinations of the heart is what has given our world its flavor. And guess what, the Hebrew word Jubilee has nothing to do with being jubilant (which derives from the Latin iubilo, meaning to shout for joy); it comes from the Hebrew verb yabal, which to flow forth or produce. Neither Sabbath nor Jubilee has anything to do with laziness and inertia; both designate periods of increased production of what people naturally seek to bring forth.

Sabbath & Jubilee

In the wake of the industrial revolution, leaders began to turn the human work force into a machine, which ultimately led to the world wars and the great depression in between. After the second world war came the various liberation movements (of blacks, women and youth and as general protest against the human machine, which basically meant that the West became liberated, and the East was conquered and turned into the machine) but the reinvention of the Jubilee principle did not occur until Google turned the business world upside down.

Life at the Google campus

In stead of chaining their employees to their desks and making them do whatever bosses told them to do, Googlists were gently nudged in a desired direction but also instructed to devote twenty percent of their time to not boss-regulated projects.

The main Google campus in California has more than a dozen restaurants where employees can eat whatever they want, without having to pay for it. There are game rooms, massage parlors and parks to stroll in.

Religious leaders often want their followers to believe that obedience to God is the same as obedience to what they say God wants. But the opposite is true. Within the confines of certain ground rules (don't steal, don't murder; all that) being obedient to God equals being free to follow the desires of your heart. Religious leaders will then want you to believe that if people could just follow their hearts, the whole world would spiral into a lawless killing zone, but again the opposite is true.

Watch this flick

As researchers such as Harvard's psychologist Steven Pinker have discovered, there is a clear correlation between a reduction of rulery (specifically religious governance, I'm sort of half-happy to say) and an increase in morality.

In the last forty years, the rate of rape has declined by 80% in the US (while reportings have gone up!). The rate of domestic abuse and child abuse has gone down, as have mistreatments of minority groups and animals. Wars and deaths by wars have plummeted over the last few decades world wide.

The traffic light on the busy intersection near the Abarim Publications campus went bust the other day. It's always a death defying experience to run across the street in the 2.5 second the lights give you to make the transition, because whoever is given a green light will take it by force, and no matter what cripple or distracted Scripture Theorist in is their way, they will tear down the street with ridiculous speeds.

But now that the lights were out, people carefully waited their fair turn, and equally carefully rolled on when they were given a chance by the others. I was able to cross the street in a perfectly normal and relaxed pace, without anyone trying to kill me or even honk at me. That was a good day, until someone turned the lights back on and the blood thirst recommenced.

Apparently, we've collectively reached such a level of responsibility that a relaxation of rules leads to better behavior in stead of worse. Our world is still so highly competitive because we're all scared of falling behind and being left out, but all the signs indicate that if we would just relax the laws of commerce (making goods and services more readily available at reduced costs or even gratis), people would still continue to produce the necessities of life and in addition produce much more of the stuff that makes life worth living in the first place.

Google on, y'all!

The Google corporate slogan

The mysterious case of the giants and the Levites

You wouldn't think it, but after thousands of years the Bible is still chuck-full of unsolved mysteries.

Some of these unsolved mysteries are unsolved simply because they are so complex (like: what happened to the Ark?) but others aren't solved because nobody knows they're there.

One of my favorite ones (which appears to be an original Abarim Publications find) is the mysterious broken symmetry between the four gargantuan sons of Anak at the time of the conquest (Numbers 13:22, Judges 1:10), and four Levite gatekeepers at the time of the return from Babylon (1 Chronicles 9:17).

Note that both the names Hebron and Levite come from verbs that mean to join:

Four giant Hebronites:	Anak	Ahiman	Sheshai	Talmai
Four Levite gatekeepers:	Akkub	Ahiman	Shallum	Talmon

Feel free to leave a comment if you have an idea (or even when you don't)! :)

How power works

Obviously, any person who attains any governmental or military position, automatically believes in human authority and the justice of one guy ruling over the next one. People like that generally fall into two categories:

The Materialists

The Materialists, in the Bible portrayed as the Saducees, deny that anything exists outside the observable, and thus exclude the existence of angels, spirits, God and obviously any form of resurrection. Materialists see the belief in the non-material world as poison to society and will try to eradicate it.

Our good friend Richard Dawkins

Examples of this form of government are Marxism (Mao, Stalin), the European Union, and science-based models (to which we hastily add that science is a wonderful tool as long as it does not overrule or illegitimate other considerations, such as art-based leanings; here at Abarim Publications we love science).

The Vicarians

The Vicarians, in the Bible portrayed as the Pharisees, deny that the belief of most people in anything is detrimental. The Vicarians will try to harness whatever beliefs of whichever people into elaborate religions and associated power structures, of which the top ruler represents the object of people's belief on earth.

Our good friend Pope Francis

Examples of this kind of government are of course Roman Imperialism (which explains the functioning of people like Annas and Ananias) and its greatest admirer: Fascism, as well as most forms of formal Christianity and Islam (and subsets such as the USA and various Arabic nations).

We  hastily add that these are nevertheless all wonderful endeavors with friendly accommodating people. Here at Abarim Publications we aim to be Good Neighbors to all these regimes.

The main objective of these factions is the same: to rule humanity and to hammer it into an efficient, well-oiled machine. Their most dominant symbol is either the sun or the moon, and their most lethal enemy, what they hate and fear most, is anyone who is contrary, non-compliant, or trouble-making: disturbers of their manufactured peace, so to speak.

To them, disturbers are all the same, but to the actual trouble-makers there is a great difference, namely between:

Destroyers

Or people who seek to destroy whatever exists, and that for non-constructive reasons. Among these are people with rare mental disorders, vandals and very rare forms of satanism (because most "satanism" today is of the second order, and designed to counter modern forms of Pharisaism).

Bravehearts

Our good friend William Wallace

Bravehearts are folks who want to achieve a world in which the individual is free from any restriction, free to do whatever he/she wants, including beating up someone who's in their way.

This non-government is based on survival of the fittest, and among these we may count anarchists and nationalists (those who apply anarchy to the individual that is their nation).

The Celts and Germanians appear to have had developed cultures of a very high degree of sophistication across enormous realms based on these ideas, which existed until Rome sacked them.

Israel originally attempted this form of existence, but they wouldn't stop fighting among themselves, and the nation elected to switch to centralized, Pharisaic rule (although the term was obviously invented much later than the time of 1 Samuel 8).

Hodosites

Hodosites (from the Greek word hodos, meaning way, road or path) are people who insist that humans are natural creatures, who function best collectively according to same natural laws that run them individually. Without central rule and with only personal autonomy, bees and ants build huge societies. Imagine what humans might accomplish if we'd just stop telling others what to do.

Our good friends the bees

The society these Hodosites envision is based entirely on an individual's adherence to the only code all individuals can agree on, namely those aforementioned natural laws (Matthew 23:10, 1 Corinthians 15:24).

These folks see humanity as a self-correcting system, in which the whole will always reflect the ultimate. Any insurrection comes from suppression, and should be corrected on both ends (which is also the key to the cure of cancer, by the way).

In a human individual, this code is DNA. In the human collective, this code is the Scriptures, which is a collection of writings that have stood the test of time not because powerful people wanted it so, but because the turning of the human world made these particular writings float to the top.

An individual whose cells don't properly form or interpret DNA will develop cancer, in the same way that that a society whose individuals think they know better than the Scriptures will develop any of the above and will inevitably disintegrate.

The only way to figure out how the Scriptures work is to cross reference them against the scientific record (Romans 1:20), and we're far from getting there.

Today we don't even understand the Bible, let alone see any possible seamless connection between the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas and other Scriptures mankind has been endowed with (John 21:25). But it's either that, or extinction. Either humanity will fall in sync with creation or else creation will annihilate humanity like the plague we are. And when we get there, it will be the beginning of a whole new and quite spectacular thing.

Among the proponents of this view we can count Jesus the Nazarene and people like Nicodemus and Paul, who started out as Pharisees but who later became devoted to the Way, as it's called (John 14:6, Acts 9:2, 22:4).

Much alike these two famous figures, there are a great many people among all above categories who are in fact devoted to the Way and don't know it because they've never heard of it, thanks to the efforts of Pharisaism and Sadduceeism to cloud and oppress it. But now you know better.

Our best friend: DNA (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, Jeremiah 31:33, Luke 17:21, Romans 2:15, Hebrews 10:16)

Score!

Regulars to Abarim Publications will have noticed two things. First, we haven't updated our blog in three years, and second, suddenly the main website at www.abarim-publications.com looks super mega snazzy. Believe it or not, one has to do with the other.

Every webmaster is hooked on stats (a website's statistics, such as visitor and pageview counts), but stats can be misleading. Zarathustra only had one convert when he died, but now more than half the world is Zarathustrian or thinks along those lines, and Paul once said that his life would have been worth it if he had made only one convert. Whether Abarim Publications has actually made a convert no one knows, but it's certainly encouraging to see so many people visit us and "like" us (people actually started "liking" our Facebook page, which has been dead for the same three years. We're resurrecting it along with this blog).

This morning I checked our Alexa rank before I could stop myself, and lo and behold, Abarim Publications is among the 100,000 best performing websites in the United States, and among the 300,000 best in the whole world. And to put that somewhat in perspective, there are about 1,000,000,000 registered domain names, of which 25% are active. That means that (1) there are about 250,000,000 active websites in the world, and (2) Abarim Publications belongs to the top 0.2% of best performing websites in the world. We're not exactly the next Facebook, but we have thousands of people reading our stuff every day. And that ain't hay.

Particularly tickling are close to two dozen references to Abarim Publications on Wikipedia on topics ranging from the photoelectric effect to the names Hebron and Rebekah. Also groovy are five books-in-print, which refer to Abarim Publications as one of there sources. Here they are:

• Un-American Activities: Countercultural Themes in Christianity, by Tom and Kim Wilkens (Fairway Press, 2009)
• The Truth about God, 2012-2022 Ascension, and Who We Really Are, by Theresa Talea (iUniverse, 2012)
• The Muslim Discovery of America by Frederick William Dame (BoD, 2013)
• By Faith - Isaac, by Elsa Henderson (WestBow Press, 2013)
• Pilgrimage in the Holy Land: Israel, by Paul John Wigowsky (AuthorHouse, 2013)

One is glad to be of help.