We know, to some degree, the nature of man, so we understand that Jesus hungered and thirsted. In order that God should communicate with us, it would seem that He saw fit to manifest Himself in a way that we could understand. To get some grasp upon the meaning of the Bible, we may use our knowledge of man and know that the physical suffering of Jesus was of the same nature as our own would have been in similar circumstances.
In more ancient times, however, it is difficult to describe the form in which God appeared. No word like "man" has been given to the more ancient manifestation, yet in Old Testament times God also needed to interact with people in a way just as physical as in the New Testament. Just what embodiment God took in the most ancient days is the subject of this book. This embodiment need not be considered divine today; as in the case of Jesus, man is not considered divine today. A science of this embodiment may well exist today just as the science or knowledge of man exists today.
In our search into fabulous antiquity for this embodiment, we will acknowledge the significance of many ancient traditions, particularly that of the Bible. Our journey will be down a well-hidden path, if not a secret one, however. The similarity of the words "secret" and "sacred" testifies to their common origin in hoary antiquity and suggests that what was once the most sacred was also the most secret.
Our journey into the past will be similar to a journey into the subconscious parts of the mind. This may be pictured as a region of only partial recall, filled with the symbolism of dreams, and motivated by dark, mysterious forces. As with dreams, we may not always take the images from the historical past at their face value; we must endeavor to learn their secret, allegorical meanings. Just as one of the important motivations of the psyche is the sexual nature of man, so a corresponding aspect will be shown to have importance in understanding man's ancient belief In God. One part of this sexual viewpoint of God, for instance, implies that just as a man and woman have their secret parts, God also had a hidden aspect. After all, man was made in the image of God, was he not?
Our examination of the religions of the ancient past or subconsciousness of society is to be accomplished by the presently accepted physical laws of science or the consciousness of society. Like the patient that is to be hypnotised, the reader must allow himself to relax from the present conventionalities and think of nothing except the key that will dangle before him, even though at first it will seem a bizarre, if not a ridiculous idea. Trust me to open, to you, then a whole new attitude and power of understanding the ancients. So important is it that you grant me this initial trust; it is useless to proceed without it.
Direct your attention then to the key which is the title of this book, YHWH, the ineffable name of God for Israel. These hallowed symbols will be your key of entry into a house with many mansions, having a window which we only presently see through the glass darkly.
The tetragrammaton, YHWH, is the transliteration of four Hebrew consonants which signify the name of the Israelite God. The symbols are not believed to be the name itself, but only a substitute for the secret name. The real name was supposedly too sacred to be uttered by the common Israelite in public. It is believed, by some, that the letters of this tetragrammaton may have been an abbreviation, perhaps like the first letters of our R.S.V.P. or U.S.A. A most remarkable thing has occurred here, though. Surprisingly, the meaning and thus significance of the symbols, YHWH, have been lost, though numerous suggestions have been advanced. Not the name of a lowly priest or prophet, but the name of the cornerstone of the Israelite religion has lost its meaning. What word would be more important to understand in the Old Testament?
The standard approach of scholars merely ignores this circumstance and assumes it irrelevant. Not even embarrassment is shown. Translators use the word "Lord" for YHWH in the English Bible, and the general public takes the meaning of "Lord" to be synonymous with "God".
For the diligent student of the Scripture, YHWH is more than just another appellative for God. Under the title "YHWH" God was to have revealed to Israel a Special knowledge. This viewpoint is expressed in Deuteronomy 32:8-12:
When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam he set the bounds of the people according to the number of children of Israel. For the Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings; so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with Him.Not only does this passage acknowledge that YHWH (Lord) was a kind of tribal God for Jacob alone, it allows us to believe that strange or foreign Gods served other people. The words "Most High" signify a different meaning from "Lord" and may have a meaning like our "Universal God". Just what particular aspects of the Universal God were involved in YHWH or Lord is the interest of this author.
Because of YHWH, Israel believed that it was chosen among nations and that it had a special role in history. It was for this reason, perhaps, that Israel was motivated to such a superior effort in the writing of the Old Testament. This supreme effort by this rather small number of people was too unusual to be called a natural behavior of a culture. Some cause must be sought to have encouraged Israel to have extended itself so far in this direction. Why were these books written, compiled, and protected so long by tradition? It could hardly be because Israel was rich and powerful throughout its history.
Millions of people will agree to the answer to this question. It was of course the God, YHWH, who has made this work so important, they will say. The Old Testament was written because of the inspiration of God. Although this set of books is truly a remarkable collection of erudition, it is considered more than a scholarly work from which historical information can be directly obtained. Without the participation of the deity, they will say that the Bible would be without value.
Allow me to shed some light on this attitude by crudely comparing the Bible to a large sophisticated computer. With its many complicated components exactly placed in relationship with each other, the modern computer is a monument to science, if not to mankind. Yet the computer is without value unless it is plugged into an electrical outlet. Without electricity the computer would never have been built, just as without YHWH, the Bible would not have been written. The Bible is more than words, as the computer is more than components. Many would say that the Bible, unless connected with the idea of YHWH, is just as valueless as the computer without electricity.
The strange fact is that Israel has forgotten the significance of the name YHWH. This would be comparable to the modern scientist forgetting the meaning of the word electricity, which seems a remote possibility indeed.
While many will say that YHWH was the motivation for the writing of the Old Testament, for another group, the scientists, YHWH does not even enter their vocabulary. Causes are never referred to God or YHWH. Despite the testimony of the past, no importance is given to the Lord. The people of the past are for the most part considered superstitious and sometimes downright stupid. Little aid can be obtained in discovering the mystery of YHWH with this attitude.
On the other hand, the popular standard approach to the Bible has lost the meaning of YHWH. To most, Lord (YHWH) and God have become names indistinguishable in meaning. The resulting attributes of YHWH such as being omnipotent and omnipresent make the idea of YHWH so totally encompassing, that the idea of YHWH gives no suitable idea between events in the Bible. This idea of God does not offer information in a way that one might expect the occurrences of certain laws or customs in the Old Testament. The idea if YHWH does little in the way of delineating possibilities for judging the faithfulness of the Biblical tradition. With the acceptance of YHWH as simply the universal God, there is little hope to refine the meaning of YHWH into the organizing principle of the Old Testament as well as that of the other religions of the ancient past.
It is not enough just to discover the significance of YHWH, we must explain the loss of its meaning which is too important in itself to be left to chance. One scholar writes:
The prevailing ignorance as regards the pronunciation of the 'explicit name' (for which YHWH is substituted) is certainly not the result of 'forgetfulness' nor of a purely human decision arrived more than two thousand years ago. The suppression of the teaching and pronunciation of this name -- by decree of the traditional authority -- is so categorical and so radical in its consequences that it can be affirmed that God himself has withdrawn this name from the mass of the people of Israel.In hope that we might at least obtain an answer to this unusual twist to the situation, let us dare to use our analogy again.
If we search for a reason for the loss of the meaning of YHWH in terms of our comparison with the computer by asking ourselves what might cause the modern world to forget the meaning of electricity, an interesting solution presents itself. About the only way that the meaning of electricity could be forgotten is for this form of energy to cease. The electrical wires would have to go dead. We would not imagine the discontinuance of all energy, just that of electricity. The comparison with the Bible yields us the solution that the form of God, YHWH, must have died. Just one aspect of the Godhead, not the complete deity, must have stopped manifesting itself.
This is surely not hard to believe when we consider that the Scriptures are divided into two parts, the Old and New Testaments. The time of Jesus must have been when God ended his manifestation as YHWH, and started his manifestation as Christ.
The Jewish historian, Josephus, states that a mysterious light "shined out when God was present at their sacrifices" but that this shining ceased two hundred years before his time..."God having been displeased at the transgression of His laws." He states that the Greeks would call this shining an oracle.
At about this same time in history, within a century after Christ, the Greek Plutarch wrote an essay entitled "Why the oracles cease to give answers". Plutarch has been described as a priest at the Delphic Oracle. Both authors wrote extensively and were acquainted with many people and countries around the Mediterranean. Both authors seem sober in their interest in facts and seem to write to inform their readers rather than to entertain them. If we are to believe their testimony, we can understand one of the reasons why after thousands of years, the pagans suddenly gave up their gods and embraced Christianity.
If in our model of the past, the electrical energy on the earth today were to cease, as we imagine the energy of YHWH to have ceased near the lance of Christ, we could imagine the development of two different philosophies ol life. One set of people would develop a new set of institutions and rules of behavior in order to adjust to the new situation. Electric toasters would be replaced by new gas-fueled ones, perhaps. These people would correspond to the Christians of the past. Another group would cling stubbornly to the old ways and hope for a return of the electrical. energy. These people would correspond to the Jews and to some extent to the members of certain secret societies like the Free Masons and Rosicrucians.
If we take our analogy even further, we might reach a humorous, but instructive finale. Imagine centuries later, after the loss of electrical power. After years of destruction and decay, few artifacts are left from the electrical age. But under a pile of rubble a young archeologist comes upon the once common bread toaster. "What could it be?" races through his mind.
The first answer to which he might arrive is that the toaster is an idol of the electrical God of the past. The people must have worshipped mice; the cord looks much like a tail. And notice the two holes at the top, stones must have been inserted here for ears. These people must have worshipped this stylized mouse. Along with other such artifacts, it might be assumed that these ancients worshipped more than one God. Naturally these ancients could not have been as intelligent as the living people of that later day.
With this scene in mind, we might be careful about rushing to conclusions about our ancient past. The answer that the people were not intelligent in their actions can be too easily applied to be a useful idea. This should, at most, be a last resort in explaining the past.
Though this may be the attitude and, perhaps, pitfall of many a scientist, we need not eliminate science in our quest to find the true significance of YHWH. In fact it is the purpose here to place the Bible in the context of the modern age of science and to look for a way to interpret this puzzling idea of YHWH. More and more today the Bible is considered to be mostly myth, exaggeration, or poetic imagination. To be understood and accepted by the modern person living in the age of science and technology, the Bible may need a new translation or interpretation which relies more on the laws of science which are accepted as truth today.
It is the idea here to unite again the ideas of religion and science. These two great sectors of thought have for the most part ignored each other the past 2000 years. There must be some truth or significance to both bodies of knowledge, likewise both must admit to some false convictions. Both viewpoints have an idea of perfection toward which they strive, but both must admit to falling short. There is no hope for a total understanding of man's position in the world if the priests of science and religion ignore each other.
It is not the intention here to eliminate or belittle the supernatural quality of Biblical events (supernatural meaning "not ordinarily expected of nature"). Indeed the focus of the following is on the supernatural. A set of supernatural events (miracles) are here shown to be the natural outcome of one supernatural condition. The laws of nature are used to show how this supernatural condition manifests itself in different yet consistent ways. This supernatural condition is not associated with a completely new set of phenomena but can be characterised by the change of a certain variable which describes the world as it exists today. This condition eventually diminishes, causing the need for the New Testament.
As an example only of this alteration of a physical condition, let us take our characterizing variable to be temperature. Scientists, in fact, say that over certain periods of the earth's history the temperature was much lower than today causing the ice ages. With this hypothesis they can account for a change in fauna, movement of rocks, and changing coastlines. It is true that they need to hypothesize a miraculously high sheet of ice (about one mile), but this does not deter them. It is not believed by the scientists that the natural laws of the world were different during the ice ages. These natural laws were just operating under different circumstnaces.
In the same way it is imagined here that the "age" of the Old Testament of the Bible was different from ours, yet the laws of nature still operated. As the scientist is allowed the freedom to change one variable, temperature, and see its effect on interpreting the fossils of the earth, so we change our one certain variable and see its result on interpreting the age-old book of the Bible. While the scientist goes back about 10,000 years to place his sheets of ice, we go back 4,000 years to reconstruct the time of Moses.
The interpretation of miraculous events in the Bible by comparison with actual but not so dramatic occurrences of today has been carried through by many authors. Such occurrences could hardly be sufficient to initiate a religion lasting thousands of years. The fundamentally new idea brought forward here is the acknowledgement of a single dramatic difference in ancient times as compared to the present. This single difference, again, is the change of a certain variable to a value different from its value today. Assuming this, a whole new set of consequences result according to the presently known laws of nature.
It is not the intent here to prove the existence or nonexistence of the universal, personalised God operating explicitly in the Old Testament by controlling a certain physical variable. The viewpoint is that things were indeed different in ancient times and that this difference was at times significant and unusual enough to be labeled as supernatural.
The main source of information for this study is the Bible. To say the least, the author believes it to be a great book. The Bible though has many translations. Which is more correct? Perhaps one translation is better than another depending on the reader. Few would argue against the idea that over the ages new translations are needed. As people change, so the words of the Bible must change. While the words must change, it is the message of the Bible which needs to remain intact.
A possible example of where the King James translation (All Biblical quotes will be taken from this translation except were noted.) could be revised to aid its more informed, modern readership is Isaiah 9:2 which reads:
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light, they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them bath the light shined.In this translation "the light" comes from the Hebrew word "Noga". Besides meaning light, "Noga" is the ordinary word for the planet Venus. When in earlier times the peoples of the world believed in a pantheon of planetary Gods, the inclusion of a word meaning Venus in the text of a language might well have given an earlier reader the wrong idea as to the meaning of the passage.
Today the reader has a better understanding of the idea of the planets, at least he knows they are not Gods. Earlier the word Venus might have distracted from the meaning; now for the modern reader only slightly knowledgeable in science, the use of the word, Venus, would offer a more specific and concrete idea than the general, vague, and mysterious idea obtained from "the light". Which is the correct translation? Whichever is chosen, it had best fit the context of the passage, which had best fit the context of the remainder of the Bible, which had best fit the context of secular thought of ancient times.
The viewpoint of this book is along these lines of interpreting the text of the Bible according to the new understanding of people today. With the new laws of nature discovered in the last few hundred years a new interpretation of the events of the past may be possible. Here this recently acquired knowledge is employed in the search of truth and, though not intending to do so, shows a consistency of the Bible message. In so doing, it is believed that the text we have today needs to be changed so that the message remains closer to its earliest meaning. This change gives not a small but a large shift in the present meaning and emphasis.
Since this revision in the sense of the text is not minor, there is little hope at present for any new translations along these lines. One cannot expect the Biblical tradition to be altered very easily. For this very reason the Bible is so interesting today. Yet unless an effort is put forth to write the Bible in terms acknowledged by present systems of thought, the Bible will move ever closer to being considered exaggeration, metaphor, and myth for the modern reader.
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