The Light of Judaism

The Bible has been translated into nearly every language in the modern world and it is the cornerstone of religious faith. Its texts are codified, debated, cherished, interpreted in a myriad of ways by those who believe they are being faithful to its word. The results of the proliferation of this sacred text has been the impetus for both benevolent and malevolent thoughts and actions. On one hand the Bible has inspired charity but on the other it has inspired seperation and subsequent violent atrocities. 

While the Bible is so beloved by many I want to state something very clearly: the millions of its adherents have never read it.  This is not to say that religious people haven't poured over the texts or that some havent even memorized the entire text. However, those people still have not read it. Let me clarify...

The Bible is written in an ancient Hebrew code language. I say code because the text as the ancient Hebrews related to it was not a compendium of myths, legends and stories as we have in our possession today. A Torah scroll is a long string of letters and numerical sequences. It is almost impossible to translate this sequence into the English language nor into any other language for that matter. In order to translate, the meaning of the text has to be conveyed. How do you convey all of the nuances of the grammatical and numerical correspondences which occur in the Hebrew text? The very first verse of Genesis alone has over 900 legitimate readings! Let me give an example: The very first letter of the Hebrew Torah is the letter beit. Beit can have a hard sound as in the English letter "B" or a soft sound as in the English letter "V." Today in modern Hebrew we designate a dagesh which is a point in the middle of the beit to indicate how it should be pronounced but ancient Hebrew didn't have this. Further the beit has the numerical value of 2- how do you incorporate this numerical value in a translated text? The beit also has a pictorial quality of denoting a house... the archetypal imagery of the beit further denotes a boundary or a container- it has three connecting sides consisting of 3 vav(im)... beit is also broken down into its own spelling- i.e. beit = beit (2), yud (10), tav (400) = with the combined value 412. The beit is also enlarged above all of the other letters at the beginning of the Torah which has its own implications. There are many other mysteries of this one single letter which acts as a pre-fix in this context. Every single letter (22 in all) which make up the text of the Bible is just as deep in meaning. In fact, each letter has to be understood and its individual meaning translated "before" a story can be assembled from the Biblical text. So what does it all mean? It means an innumerable amount of things!

A translation has to take into account that from its outset it cannot convey the depth of the Hebrew text and further a legitmate translation in any language would convey a very different message and meaning than the superficial and generic translations currently available.

All modern translations are not accurate to the intended meaning of the Hebrew texts. It doesnt matter if your prefered translation is the Jewish Stone or Artscroll editions or if they are the common Christian versions such as: KJV, NRSV, NIV, etc. They are all hopelessly inadequate.

An accurate translation of the Hebrew text is based on an understanding of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in terms of a basic self-consistent set of abstract creative energies - can be used to decode practically every letter and word of the Torah. An explication of the Bibles central archetypes (and our psyches) is the authentic Biblical language of biologically-structured energy and consciousness.

Why bother with any of this?

One good reason is that an authenticc rendering of the Hebrew code offers the opportunity to "decode" some of our most basic and unconscious psychological programming.

Buried in our individual psyches are archetypal patterns of meaning and energy, the light of which casts shadows (our defensive reactions) on awareness that we perceive as traditional myths and meanings. We are largely unconscious of the effects of the meanings that we assign to these shadows. Whether we identify with a Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith or not, the myths remain in the background of our belief and moral structures as basic assumptions about creation, God, man, woman, good, evil, sin, punishment and redemption. Whether we believe it or not, we think we know the story and accept the traditional meanings, which are not relevant to humanity.

The stories and archetypes that have shaped Western civilization from the beginning are alive in our psyches, more so than we can imagine, and it is hard to think of a better way of knowing thyself   (at least for the Western psyche) than finding and identifying the true nature of these archetypes within one's own self

Speaking on this subject C. Suares comments:

"You consider Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and others to have lived in the past. That is not so. They never existed in the past, but they are perfectly alive inside you and they are doing exactly the opposite of what you believe they did. . . .The energies that are expressed in the original equations now mis-translated as Elohim and YHVH are inside you but almost dead from the beatings you give them. But now we have reached a point where there is no choice. You are condemned to live joyfully in the explosive fulfillment of everything that you have previously distorted in your vain efforts to believe instead of to know."

The archetypes of the Bible are fundamental patterns of energy/consciousness that are themselves composed of archetypal energies and which participate in a larger archetypal reality. This makes the decoding process relatively straightforward and subject to experimental verification: simply assemble the meaning of the archetype from the decoded component letter-meanings and check for internal consistency and semantic content.

In future blogs I will give examples of translated texts that reveal the inner meaning via the structure of the Hebrew semantics.