Re: A Christmas Message

An adequate response to it is that once you admit the validity of "slicing and dicing" words, anything means anything.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Michael Roberts
  To: David Bradford ; ASA Message Board
  Sent: Sunday, December 12, 2004 12:27 PM
  Subject: Re: A Christmas Message

  I suggest you send this to Anthony Flew. It may convince to be an atheist once more. These type of views like Gentry's and some others make mockery of God's Word.

  I don't care if some see this as pious blather, but our calling is to proclaim God's Word not make it a laughing stock

  Michael
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: David Bradford
    To: ASA Message Board
    Sent: Sunday, December 12, 2004 2:34 PM
    Subject: A Christmas Message

    The approach of Christmas this year is a fitting time to reveal a message that has been lost in the post/mail for almost 3500 years.

    For the edification of this privileged group, I am going to make known the first ever Christmas message to mankind. It is contained - only lightly concealed - within the very first verse of the Bible, in Genesis 1:1. Encrypted in the first fourteen letters of the original Hebrew Torah is a clear and direct reference to the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, many centuries in its future.

    Genesis 1:1 consists of 28 letters, but our message is found in the first 14, exactly half. The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters, but Genesis 1:1 utilises only 11 of them - again exactly half. Given that that verse begins the creation story that is set in a 7-day context, it is striking that it consists of seven words and that there are word-breaks at positions 14, 21 and of course 28. The first three words terminate at letter #14, and account for nine of the eleven different letters.

    The first Hebrew word of the Bible is B'reishith, meaning 'In the beginning', and it consists of six letters, all of them different. The second word, bara, means '(He) created'. It does not use any new letters but repeats the first three. The third word is Elohim, meaning 'God', and it consists of five letters of which three have not previously been utilised.

    Now, B'reishith is a contender for the most versatile word in use in any language. It can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways to create combinations of biblically meaningful new words. In one of these manipulations, letters 2, 3 & 4 may be removed to leave the letters that spell bayit (house), in the correct order. We leave aside the extracted letters for just a moment.

    In the third word, the next three new letters, in order, are lamed, heh (or hey) and mem - where mem is the fourteenth letter of the verse. By setting aside three consecutive letters from the first word, we are left with six letters that spell Bayit-Lehem, which is traditionally pronounced Bethlehem in English. And here is where we see the true significance of the three letters we left out of the first word. Because these letters spell the Hebrew word rosh, which means 'head'. Clearly, we are being shown a distant future and the divine birth at Bethlehem, with the fully formed head emerging through the first word.

    Keep in mind that we have considered only the first use of each letter (ie no duplicates), and we have made use of every one of the first nine, and in the same order they appear in the text. But there is a difficulty in our interpretation that cannot be ignored. The Hebrew name of the town of Bethlehem means 'house of bread', or bakery - note the role of unleavened bread in Judaism. But the lehem we obtained from the third word is not spelled exactly as the Hebrew word for bread, which uses the letter chet where we found a heh (or hey) [The 'ch' in chet is pronounced as in the Scottish word loch, not as in church]. There are two points we should note about these two letters. First, in the script that has always been used in Torah scrolls, the symbols for chet and heh are barely distinguishable from one another (See: http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/4_chart.html). Secondly, as the same chart shows, every Hebrew letter has a symbolic meaning. The chet of bread represents a tent wall which separates inside from outside. The heh we find in Genesis 1:1 however, has always represented a man with arms outstretched above and to the sides. This is the same letter that occurs twice in the four-letter name of God - YHWH - and notably we obtain it from the word 'God' in Genesis 1:1.

    I hope this somewhat delayed message will be a source of hope to ASA members, and promote a joyful Christmas.

    Regards

    David

    P.S. If the 28 letters of Genesis 1:1 are written around the outer layer of a 8x8 chessboard (checkerboard) starting at a corner, a significant linguistic feature emerges. The first three letters are repeated symmetrically about the second corner as the second word. Then the same three letters are found as an expanded symmetrical arrangement in corners 1, 2 & 3. Recall that these letters spell the word that means '(He) created'. But reading around the other half of the square, the letters in corners 1, 4 & 3 spell the word bo, which means 'he came' or 'he entered'. The symbolism is pure delight! At Bethlehem, God came to meet us halfway.
Received on Sun Dec 12 16:40:06 2004