Ted Walther's Private Diary

In the forward to Toward a Meaningful Life, Rabbi Simon Jacobson says the following:

Existence has no permanent viability on its own. It must be renewed in each moment. Like a stream of words, the physical universe is one of the manifestations of G-d "speaking," a form of energy that requires constant renewal. Life is fragile; the world could cease to exist at any moment. (Tanya chapter 20. Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah, ch. 1.)

excerpt from Toward a Meaningful Life, Simon Jacobson, page xii.

The Tanya is the Chabad textbook on Kabbalah. According to Kabbalah, the world is not good enough to last on its own without God speaking it into existence over and over again every instant.

This brings me to another topic; the speaking of the world into existence. For certain, it was by his word that God created all things. But I believe the truth of this is very different from the mystery that the Babylonian magic-practicers teach us. I believe it is quite simple. Because God is the All-father, the supreme authority, when he speaks, his servants jump to obey. When he said "Let there be light", a bunch of angels got busy and made the huge sheet of fluorescent light that orbits our earth even today. The word that God speaks does come true. Powerfully, but not magically. This also helps us to understand why we are here on earth, and why God doesn't just snap his fingers to fix our problems. God has a job for us to do, and those jobs are part of his plans. He does heal and help us, but he gave us his word, his instructions, our marching orders. He didn't tell us all the reasons for it. But if we aren't obeying him, then his plans aren't being carried out. We need to be obeying him, then we will see his plans unfold. He is our heavenly papa, but we are no longer infants.

In Pentecostals circles I've heard of the "private prayer language". Everyone who gets the genuine speaking in tongues also gets their own "private prayer language". This was described to me as a never ending stream of beautiful words in some unknown tongue. The tongue speaker hears them in the back of their mind all the time. They can tune in and out, but they can never entirely suppress the stream. If the Jews were right that God is speaking the universe into existence every instant, then I would expect those in tune with God to hear that very stream of words. Rocco Erico says that the origin of the word prayer means to "tune in". If you tune in your mind to God, you should hear his voice going on full speed as he recreates everything every instant.

I find it interesting that Pentecostal experience matches up so closely with Jewish philosophy.

Why don't I believe in the private prayer language or in the continual creation of the universe? Several reasons. Firstly, on the seventh day, God rested from his labors. Why would he have to recreate something he had already declared "very good" and rested from? Secondly, if God were always talking to his spirit filled servants (and Pentecostals do say that he does) then why did he make a point of going to tell Abraham face to face about the coming destruction of Sodom and Gommorah? Couldn't Abraham have just "tuned in" to the voice of God running constantly in his head and known about it?

Let us pray for the restoration of the true gifts of the spirit, and a lifting of the scales of blindness that are upon us and our people. May Yehowah's enemies perish forever, and his name be lifted up in song over all the earth.

Scottish poet Robbie Burns wrote a much-loved song called Comin' Through the Rye

1. O, Jenny's a' weet, poor body,
Jenny's seldom dry:
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!

Chorus:
Comin thro' the rye, poor body,
Comin thro' the rye,
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!

2. Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

Chorus

3. Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl' ken?

Chorus

4. Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing's a body's ain.

Chorus

5. Ev'ry Lassie has her laddie,
Nane, they say, have I,
Yet all the lads they smile on me,
When comin' thro' the rye.

Chorus

To my untutored eye the poem seemed straight forward. Poor Jenny! It seemed she was always being grabbed by this young lad or that young lad for a roll in the hay. Rye of course, is a type of grain, which produces hay. If you lie down in a hay field, a person even five feet away from you cannot see you. In a field of several acres, the chance of someone blundering onto you is slim. For a young couple without much privacy in the home, it is the perfect retreat on a hot, lazy afternoon. Or on a dewy morning. All the more reason to return to an agricultural society.

But my grandmother said that is not what the poem is about. Her teacher, told them about the "Rye River" in Scotland. At the time the poem was written, there was no bridge, just a ford. So girls had to lift their petticoats if they were to cross over and not get wet. The young men would take advantage of this. If a young lady was crossing the Rye with a load on her head, and her petticoats held in her other hand, she was defenseless when the young men came up and snatched a kiss. Jenny's petticoats were bedraggled because? Probably because she stopped, dropped her petticoats in the river, and knocked her ardent young suitors with a blow of the fist. :-) That is probably why in the last verse it says Jenny has no laddie. She's been busy running them all off and getting her petticoat wet.

How a bit of knowledge can change things. I thought the poem was about a young slut; instead it was about a young virgin stoutly defending her honor. This is more like the Scottish women I know.

Update, Day 11, Month 11, Year 2728 Sadly for my grandmothers chaste interpretation of the poem, I can't find any references on the web to the Rye River, in Scotland, or even in the UK. Secondly, if the Rye river was the topic of the poem, why wasn't it capitalized?

Update, Day 10, Month 8, Year 2729

A few months ago, I got a nice email from Betty and David Dax.

Date: Day 2, Month 4, Year 2729 (June 16, 2007)
From: Betty and David Dax
Subject: The Rye River

Your research on Bobbie Burns's song came up short. There is a Rye River in North Yorkshire, England, not far from the Scottish border. As for the lack of capitalization of the name Rye, the writing back then — as with the speech — was not as precise as it has been since.

Today I did some web searching to see if they were right. And they were. In the six months since I wrote the original article, more information came available on the web, about the River Rye. Betty and David recommended I look to the River Rye in Yorkshire.

I used the Google Earth program to look at satellite imagery all over the United Kingdom. Would you believe it, in the four months since Betty and David sent their email, even MORE information has come available on the web.

There are two River Ryes in the United Kingdom. And neither of them is the right one! Both River Ryes are the same distance from Ayrshire, the life-long Scottish home of Robert Burns.

The first River Rye is in Yorkshire, and it runs through very rural country. The Yorkshire River Rye is shaded, even hidden by trees for much of its length, as it winds through cow pastures and the like. There are lots of sandbars, which means there could be some fords suitable for the crossings mentioned in the poem.

The second River Rye is a small river in Ireland, a few miles east of Dublin, in Kildare. It runs into the River of Water of Life (River Liffey) at Leixlip. The satellite images for Kildare are very poor, but it looked like the Kildare River Rye also had a few possible fording spots.

The answer to the riddle is that Robbie Burns wasn't writing about any "River Rye", but he was talking about the "Rye Water", a small river in North Ayrshire; exactly where the poet himself lived. The Rye Water meets up with the River Garnock at Dalry in Ayrshire. The actual fording spot was found recently, near a dairy barn.

My grandma was right after all; Jennie's virtue is immortal still.

There is more information on the Rye Water, and the confusion over "Coming Through the Rye" at my newer blog entry here: River Rye Found! Jenny's virtue intact!

For a while now, the royal houses of Europe have had problems with anemia, excessive bleeding. They carry the Leiden Factor V gene combination. This isn't the same as hemophilia, but it makes hemophilia worse. Leiden Factor V doesn't stop scabs from forming. The biggest problem is for the women. Women with Leiden Factor V keep bleeding after giving birth. After several births, they may start to bleed excessively with every menstruation.

Blood transfusions. Something about the nature of Leiden Factor V contraindicates blood transfusions in cases of excessive bleeding. If you have Leiden Factor V, a doctor who knows what he is doing won't give you a blood transfusion for internal bleeding. As a Torah keeper, I believe blood transfusions are not godly. If you can find a copy, Gene Church's book "No Man's Blood" makes a good case that medical care is improved when no blood transfusions are given.

Since ancient times, ergoline has been used to induce abortions. This is called "witchcraft" in the Bible. Ergoline causes the abortion through intoxication. That is, ergoline is a toxin, known to todays scientists as a mycotoxin. Mycotoxin means "A toxin produced by a fungus". Poisoning is witchcraft.

Five hundred years ago, some unknown midwife found that ergoline administered after a birth could stop bleeding. So the women of the royal houses of Europe have been using it ever since. The toxic effect of ergoline on their bodies stops the bleeding, which allows the body to heal. Without ergoline, todays royal families would not exist.

Fungus were not given to us humans as foods; does that mean they can't be used as medicines? Yeast is a type of fungus. Eating live yeast is not healthy. It robs your body of nutrients. But God endorses the consumption of alcohol, which is a product of yeast. God endorses the eating of bread, which is another product of yeast. I believe that using ergoline, a fungus derivitive, and not the fungus itself, is acceptable to use in saving lives.

Oh, and where does LSD come into this? LSD is made from ergoline. Women can tolerate ergoline, but it is deadly to men. LSD is a highly purified and refined form that is safe for men and women. Safe in the same way cocaine, heroin, soda pop, and refined white sugar are safe.

Here is a more sciency type article on ergot: Plant-Derived Drugs: Ergonovine.

Ben Ehrhardt of Vancouver, Washington, the founder of the Hear O' Israel Messianic website told me that the Aramaic version of the New Testament in Philippians 2:10,11 clearly shows that Jesus is the same person as Jehovah of the Old Testament. Another individual pointed to 1 Corinthians 10:1,4 as showing that Jesus is was a pre-existent God. You can read the details here: A Response to Two Defenses of the Trinity.

First, Matthew Janzen weighed in:

From: Matthew Janzen
To: Ted Walther

Moreover brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea... and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them: and that rock was Christ. [1 Corinthians 10:1,4]

No trinitarian believes that Yeshua is a literal rock, and they are correct. Yeshua also did not literally follow the children of Israel in the wilderness, he rather followed them in time. Paul relates this "spiritual drink" (Ex. 17:1-6) with Christ who gives the water of life (Jn. 6:35). BTW, I believe Mr. Buzzard deals with this NT passage on pages 52-53 of his book.

Concerning the use of "Maryah" I am forwarding this message to my good friend John Cordaro, who I know has studied this argument from the Peshitta more fully than myself.

Love you friends,
Matthew Janzen

John Cordaro quickly followed up with the opinions of high respected Aramaic scholars. He showed the convincing sounding Marya defense of the Trinity to be leakier than a spaghetti strainer.

From: John Cordaro
To: Ted Walther

…

Concerning "Marya", notice I wrote it without the "h". There is no "h" on that word in Aramaic. Those who promote the belief that Yahshua is Yahweh use "MarYah" to bolster their claims. I wrote to the top Aramaic scholar in the world (Sebastian Brock) who informed me (if memory serves me correctly) that "marya" is an emphatic form of "mar". I lost his email to me when my computer crashed. I also contacted Wheeler M. Thackston who is an Aramaic scholar at Harvard. He concurs with Brock and states that "marya" means "the Lord" whereas "mar" simply means "lord".

Hebrew substitutes "Adonai" for YHWH. Greek substitutes "Kurios". English substitutes "the LORD" and Aramaic substitutes "Marya". They all mean "the Lord" or "Lord", not Lord Yah. So in Ph.2:11, every tongue will confess that Yahshua Messiah is the Lord/Master, not Yahweh.

Shalom,
John

I believe you can find remnants of Hebrew in every language today. In the Hawaiian language, "kahuna" means the same thing as "cohen" in Hebrew; they both mean "priest". In Tagalog and Bisaya, languages of the Philippines, their word for "dip" is "tabo", which is almost identical to the Hebrew "tabawl". It is very easy for a final "L" sound to disappear. This simple bit of knowledge illuminates the correct method of baptism, which is not necessarily by full body dunking in water, but by having water poured over one from a dipper. To the Filipino, their "tabo" or "dipper" is used every day to bathe themselves with. They ladle water over their bodies, being "dipped", but never "dunked".

Since my post yesterday on the Hebrew origins of dip, deep, and dike, Jake Fronczak wrote in to mention he had found some Hebrew words in the Japanese language.

From: Jacob Fronczak
To: Ted Walther

Your diary entries are increasingly interesting. I wanted to run this by you, I was reminded of it when I saw the common Hebrew etymology of deep, dip, and dike. It's the word "Taberah" in Numbers 11. When the fire of YHWH "consumed" the murmuring Israelim, they called the place Taberah. "Consume" would be translated into Japanese using the verb "taberu" when its meaning is "to eat." "Toboru" or "Tomoru" can be used to mean "to burn." They're all close enough that I suspect a common ancestor.

Thank you Jake! Your blog is getting more interesting too, as I hope to discuss in the next entry here.

Why did God command in Numbers 15:36 to wear blue tassels? Is the color blue significant in some way? The tzitziyot were given to remind us to keep God's laws. How does the color blue remind us of God's laws?

The word for blue used in the scriptures is the same as the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Sanskrit words for "indigo". This puts the lie to the Rabbi's false claim that the only acceptable blue is made at great expense from an unclean shellfish.

What things are blue? The sky, which is the throne of God. And the sky is bluest directly over our heads, which reminds us that God is over us in all things.

Which things are blue? The coverings of the tabernacle, of the menorah, and the altars of shewbread and incense. Everything pertaining to the tabernacle was hidden in blue cloth when it was being transported. The robe of the ephod was of blue. The ephod was that whereby one inquired of God, and heard his word from the mouth of the priest. The curtains were attached with cords of blue; the gold crown saying "Separated unto Yehowah" was attached to the high priests mitre with blue. The jewelled breastplate was attached to the ephod by lace of blue.

The color blue reminds us of the things in the tabernacle, which hold the fabrics together, and which cover that which is most holy from profane eyes.

Just so, the sky, the deep blue sky, is a veil hiding the glory of God from us, that we be not roasted in the manner that we roast our offerings. But when we are given immortal bodies, that veil will no longer be necessary but we will rise up through the clouds to the other mansions of our Father.

The Hindus tell that their god, when he takes away peoples sin and swallows it up for them, his throat turns blue. To the Hindu, the blue symbolizes God's grace in forgiving their sins. Likewise the Mayan gods turned blue when they swallowed the poisonous sins of their people. You can read about this here if you feel inclined: What the Mayans said about 2012. All religions had their start at Babylon. In the beginning, mankind shared one religion as he shared one language. Just as we find remnants of Hebrew in every language today, some of which the Jews themselves have forgotten, so it is that some bits of true religion still remain in the false religions around us. Without the Law, we cannot tell which bits are which.

When you are bruised, your skin turns blue. When your blood is exhausted, sacrificing its load of oxygen so that the body may live, it turns blue. Blue is then a color of sacrifice and injury.

When the world is perfected, will the sky change from blue to gold, to reflect God's perfect joy?

With so many ways to remind us of God and his commands, what other color could the tzitzit be?

Reading through Karl Randolph's Hebrew dictionary tonight, I came across another evidence that the English language developed from Hebrew.

In Hebrew, dalet-yod-qoph (דיק) means "palisade, to keep those inside from escaping".

Sound that out. You get "dike". Today, dikes are used to keep things out. But they are a containment field, a fence designed to keep things in or out. So even in modern English today, we have this ancient Hebrew word with the almost identical meaning.

But the similarity doesn't stop there. The same word can enter the language at different times and evolve with slightly different pronunciations and shades of meaning, even though the linguistic origin is identical. Take "shirt" and "skirt" for instance. But in this case I posit that the English words "dip" and "deep" both come from Hebrew.

One characteristic of Hebrew takes some getting used to. Nouns are used as verbs, and verbs as nouns. When you understand that the letter "i" is most often pronounced with the "ee" sound, you can see that deep and dip are the identical word. Deep is a noun and adjective; it describes a prison, a holding pen, something you would have to climb up out over. This matches the definition that Karl Randolph gave for דיק. Dip is a verb. It means to put someone or something into the deep. When you dip something, you lower it.

It is interesting that deep and dip share a relationship to each other just like Hebrew nouns and verbs do, but there is more suggestive evidence that the word comes from Hebrew. I was once told that the letter qoph, which Hebrews today pronounce with the K sound, was the Hebrew letter for the "F" sound. Several hundred years ago many Germanic languages, including English, shifted many of its "f" sounds to the "p" sound. So we would have gone from saying "dif" and "deef" to "dip" and "deep". Because we know the age of this vowel shift, we can date the arrival of "dip" and "deep" into the English language as happening before the Jews changed ק from a K sound to an F sound.

Beer is listed in the King James Bible as "strong drink". In Hebrew the word is "shekhar". Today we would probably call their shekhar "doppelbock", a German word meaning "double-brewed". It is around 10% in alcohol content. In the Bible, the priests were commanded to offer a big jug of beer on the altar, together with the wine and other daily offerings. Beer and wine were obviously foods approved of by God.

Bread and beer are made from the same variety of yeast. When you throw out your leaven for Pesach (Passover), do you include beer? If you do, how do you start making beer again when Pesach is over? This is a deeper question than it seems to the one untutored in beer and wine making.

Beer yeast is carefully bred and developed. You can catch sourdough yeast from the air quickly and reliably. But finding a good beer yeast in the wild is a secret art. It is so secret that the people who know how to do it aren't even revealing publicly who they are.

The yeasts in use today to make beer are hundreds of years old. Even the Belgian lambic beers, which use wild yeast, are not exclusively made from wild yeast. Some domestic yeast is used to get the fermentation started.

Regular sourdough yeast is too sour; it produces beer with a vinegary taste. In theory, sourdough yeast can be cleaned. The acetophilic bacteria, which produce the acid taste, will die it a very slightly lower temperature than the alcohol producing yeast. If you had precise enough temperature control, you could kill the bad stuff while leaving the good stuff alive. I have a hard time seeing how they would be able to do this thousands of years ago.

The question returns; where did the Israelites get their yeast from to make beer if they had to throw away all their yeast every year?

One possibility is to use wine yeast. The grape harvest comes four months after Pesach. That is a long time to wait for beer. It is almost impossible to imagine. From Pesach to Pentecost is non-stop harvest time, full bore summer work. When a man is out in the field working up a sweat, he needs beer to alleviate the tense muscles and other pain. A pint or two of beer at the end of a day of physical labor is God's way of saying "atta boy".

Remember that the daily offering included a big jug of beer? Nowhere in scripture did God command a change in the daily offering during the week of Pesach. God would not accept leavened bread even outside of Pesach week, but he did accept beer. From this we might conclude that beer and wine are in a different category from leavened bread, and not counted as leaven, or thrown out.

On the other hand, suppose the Israelites had to throw out their beer and wine to complete the getting rid of the leaven in their houses? The daily offering in the tabernacle and the temple required beer. Even during Pesach. This leads us to conclude that the priests were exempt from throwing out the beer and wine in the tabernacle. In that case, the priests would be in possession of the only available beer yeast. If anyone wanted to make beer, they would have to come to the priest to pay their liquor manufacturing license, in the form of purchase cost for fresh yeast.

Think about this. If you developed an excellent beer yeast strain, and you had to throw it away at the end of the year, what would you do? Would you throw it away? Or would you give it to the priests in the temple? If you liked the beer, you would make sure the priests preserved some of your special yeast strain. Imagine everyone doing this. At the end of the year, all the mediocre strains of yeast would die out, and the priests would supply everyone with the best available beer strains in the land. So each year, everyone would develop their yeast strains from the best of the land in the previous year.

Conclusion: after a hundred years of this selective yeast breeding, the Israelites must have had the BEST beer anywhere! And the beer sold by the priests at the temple must have been the best beer of all. The priests and Levites were no doubt the big brewers of their day, just as the priests in Babylon handled the brewing in their cities.

I made a tool for people that are new to music. Using lilypond and an automatic program of my own invention, I made a list of all the different key signatures together with their names. You can now go to a page and see every key signature as it would appear in a piece of sheet music and tell what it is. It is a little thing, a trifle, but I find it very useful in my work on the Reactor Core Hymn Repository. You can view the page by clicking here: An image of each key signature.

In other news, the Reactor Core Hymn Repository is now including lyrics in the PDF files. For ease of use, the address has changed from http://bible.reactor-core.org/hymns/ to http://hymns.reactor-core.org/.

The software behind the hymn repository isn't set up to handle Sacred Harp music, so I am releasing hand-crafted lilypond files and mp3 recordings of the old Sacred Harp hymns. Soon I hope to start automating the Sacred Harp music similar to the way the conventional hymn music is in the rest of the repository.

There is a fun quiz, thirteen questions long. You can take it by clicking here: What American Accent do You Have?

Here were my results:

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

The quiz said my accent was least similar to that of Americas' Northeast. This matches my experience. When I visited New Jersey, it sometimes took ten seconds before my brain could adjust and filter peoples words as if they were normal English.

Also from the quiz, it confirmed that the midlands accent is very close to the west coast accent.

I was surprised when the quiz said my accent was closer to Boston than to the American "deep South". I find Southerners much easier to understand, and more pleasant to listen to, than Bostonians.

It would be fun to see the results of a quiz that had more than thirteen questions. One important distinction they left out could have been covered by this question: "Does the first syllable of Washington rhyme with the first syllable of warship?"

On the day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, two goats are brought forth. One is sacrificed. The other is taken out into the wilderness and driven away from the land.

Christians are divided. They threw away the substance, thinking that they have already acquired the essence. They are in confusion on the meaning of Yom Kippur. Some say that the scape goat, the goat that escapes with its life, is a representation of Satan, who is responsible for all human sinfullness. Others say the scapegoat is a representation of Jesus, upon whom all the sins of the world were put.

I'm just a humble computer programmer, not a theologian, so I don't know if those Christians are right or wrong. But it did pop into my head tonight that the symbolism of Yom Kippur is uncannily similar to the story of Cain and Able. You will recall, Abel offered up a sheep. God accepted it, because Abel was a good man. God didn't accept Cain's offering of vegetables. This is not because anything is wrong with a grain offering, but because God does not accept the prayers, hymns, praises, or other offerings, let alone blood offerings, from a wicked man. Instead of fixing his own problems, Cain killed Abel out of jealousy. God then drove Cain out into the wilderness, out of the land of Eden.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this. There are two types of competition. In the good type, you improve yourself, you improve your work, and you improve your relationships with others. Then they reciprocate in kind. This type of comptetition starts an upward spiral of blessings for everyone. This is capitalism at its best. In the bad type of competition, you make moves solely devoted to tearing someone else down. Instead of improving yourself, and so raising the absolute value of the whole system, you degrade the whole system just to make yourself look relatively better. If you are in a race, and you trip another runner, that is an example of the bad type of competition. Cain's killing of Abel is an extreme example of the bad type of competition. He killed the man better than him, instead of improving himself.

With such strong symbolism, I have to ask, why does Yehowah want the story of Cain and Abel remembered every year in the particular way that it is remembered at Yom Kippur? Is it a morality play, like the morality plays shown throughout Europe in the days of the Roman Church empire? Why the use of goats? And why is it that a woman is cleansed using the same pattern after she gives birth, but using doves instead of goats? For, if she cannot afford a lamb for a male son, she must offer one pigeon for a burnt offering, and another for a sin offering.

Why is it that the offering for cleansing of a leper follows the pattern of Yom Kippur, but using doves?

Leveticus 14:4-7 Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop: And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water: As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water: And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.

After Cain fled, he built the first city. This was the first city of refuge. When God commanded Israel to set aside some cities as cities of refuge, this should have reminded Israel of the original city of refuge, built by Cain.

A spry old man once said that Cain was also the founder of commerce, commerce being the one avenue that was open to him after the ground was doubly cursed to him. Cities, markets, and commerce do go together, making this seem plausible.

The more we know Torah, the more we are going to see that it was already present in seed form in the first few chapters of Genesis. We just needed to have our eyes open. There is a common school of thought that says that the Law, the 613 mitzvot, are actually commentary on the real law; the book of Genesis and the other records of the deeds and doings of Almighty Yehowah. It is an interesting way to view things, and very instructive.

Please write in if you have any thoughts on the symbolism and meaning of Yom Kippur. I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Why do we keep it? Are we lepers? Is that how distant we are from God? Remember, Clay and Egg (Adam and Eve) suddenly felt a need to be covered after they sinned. Lo, likewise a leper must cover himself and not expose his skin. Is there a connection? You can email me at ted (AT) reactor-core (DOT) org.

In the past week I saw two very compelling defenses of the Trinity from a Messianic, Torah keeping standpoint. When I say Trinity, I use it as a short-hand for every set of beliefs that says that Jesus is Jehovah, the Creator of the heavens and earth.

Date: January 2, 2007
To: my friends
Subject: did Buzzard cover this Trinity verse? 1Cor10:4 Phil2:11

In 1 Corinthians 10:4 it talks about the "rock that followed us" through the wilderness of Sinai, and then seems to call him "Christ". Now, Christ means "Anointed". Who was this rock? This was pointed out to me as a Trinitarian verse proving that Messiah pre-existed and was Yahowah, as if Yahowah is the Son and not the Father.

1 Corinthians 10:1-5 Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

Anthony Buzzard wrote The Trinity, Christianity's Self-inflicted Wound and was then knighted by the Queen of England. Did he cover this in his book? Also, does Anthony Buzzard cover the Peshitta? I was pointed at Philippians 2:11, where it says that every tongue should confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But in the Peshitta is uses the word "Maryah" or "Lord Jah" where the Greek only has "kurios" or "Lord". In the Peshitta, the tetragrammaton was taken out and replaced with Maryah throughout the Old Testament, so I was told that in the Peshitta this verse says that Jesus is Jehovah, because "Maryah" is used often in the Peshitta New Testament as well.

Philippians 2:10,11 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Mar is the Aramaic word for Lord; so Maryah is "Lord Jah". This seems identical to the Jewish tradition of replacing YHWH with "Adonai" and the Anglican tradition of replacing YHWH with "the LORD".

Because the Aramaic does not have the sacred name YHWH, my inclination is to dismiss the Peshitta as corrupt rubbish, and to say that 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 is ambiguous until "the Rock that followed us" can be clearly identified, and "Christ" proven to mean Jesus the Christ, as opposed to some other anointed, of whom YHWH has had many, including Kings David and Solomon. Christ is a Greek word that means "ointed", an ointed one, a person ceremonially covered with ointment. Jesus was an ointed, but not the only one. As for God himself, who can oint God? Will he oint himself?

Jacob, congratulations on the miracles of healing and casting out demons that are happening in your congregation as you become more Torah observant. The weekly prayer meetings and Hebrew lessons at your church are an inspiration, as is the steady, rapid growth your congregation is experiencing. I find it a powerful testimony that you were led away from Yahweh and toward the Yehowah pronunciation this week while casting out a demon. I understand that Yehowah is not exactly how the name was pronounced, and what you wrote in your diary entry (Yahuwah) is probably as close to the pronunciation as Yehowah is. If you can ever spare $45, you may benefit from Gerard Gertoux book on the pronunciation of the name, The Name of God Y.eH.oW.aH Which Is Pronounced As It Is Written I_Eh_Ou_Ah: Its Story. It is the most complete coverage I could imagine, with copies of every ancient inscription and lists of every theophoric name, and vast amounts of information on transliteration between Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

Ted

If anyone reading this has some good explanations of Philippians 2:11, and 1 Corinthians 10:1-5, please write in.