Chapter 4 - Dealing More Respectfully With Ancient Texts

Once We discover that the ancient and sacred texts and narratives were severely corrupted and abused by the Old Authorities, We will have to reencounter them respectfully, with New Eyes and New Ears.

Ancient Hebrew was not called "Hebrew", but was refered to as "the language of Canaan."

The mutually intelligible set of dialects from the "language of Canaan" appear to be Phoenecian in origin, with Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew being very similar to one another.

The Phoenician alphabet subsequently spread to Greece, eventually becoming the source of all modern European scripts.

In its earliest forms, Hebrew was written without vowels, using the consonants of the Phoenician language.

The vowel sounds were introduced millennia later, during the reconstruction of the Hebrew language by the school of Tiberias.

According to scholars, we only know ancient Hebrew as it was reconstructed near the end of the first millennium after Jesus. Thousands of years after the events of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.

This reconstruction was accomplished by the Masoretes in the Galilean city of Tiberias between 750 to 950 AD during the Abbasid Caliphate, giving rise to the so called "Masoretic Text", which has been printed in Hebrew Bibles since the 15th century AD.

During the reconstruction of Hebrew, the Masoretic Text was assembled with a far stronger eye towards the theological and political implications of various currents of Judaism, than the actual integrity, meaning, and grammatical structure of the ancient language that was being reconstructed.

Similar ideological and theological overlays have continued to mar the subsequent translations into other languages up to the present day.

It is crucial for humanity to understand, therefore, that when it reads the bible, it is reading a heavily redacted and corrupted version of far older Source Narratives.

When we read the Bible, we are reading a text forged along a millennia-long ideological pathway, rather than a rigorous historical and grammatical pathway.

Many of the linguistic and grammatical rules relating to Masoretic Hebrew were developed subsequently, significantly influenced by the dogmatic ideological presuppositions and agendas of the translators.

After centuries of abuse by the Old Authorities, when We approach the ancient texts, it is crucial to understand that even the agreement of the entire academic establishment, over hundreds of years, does not create certainty as to the original meaning.

As humanity works to sort out the millennia of endarkenment it has been enslaved under, it therefore must approach with New Eyes many of the texts, interpretations, and narratives it previously accepted from the Old Authorities as sacred.

It will be likely be shocked at what it discovers.


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