Introduction:
Hebrew
is an ancient language,
dating back over 6000 years. It is in a completely different family
to the English languag. English is part of a family of languages called
"Indo-European". Hebrew is part of the Haimo-Semitic family.
Like English, Hebrew has an alphabet. In fact, our English
word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters
of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph and Beth. The Hebrew alphabet was used
as the basis for the ancient Greek alphabet, which in turn became the
basis for the alphabet used by the Romans, and now by most languages
in Europe.
Unlike English, the Hebrew and Yiddish
language are written from right to left. As an example, here is the
first verse of Genesis, written without the vowel signs.
with vowel signs
Hebrew words have power:
We
tend to take written language
for granted. According to Jewish legend, the Torah (the five books of
the Bible) was written 2000 years before the Universe was created, and
by implication, the letters themselves predated the Universe. God used
the Torah as a blueprint when He created the universe. The Torah is
the utmost truth; since the Torah is a relatively small book, it is
believed that the Torah contains not just the "obvious" reading,
but many, many different hidden meanings as well.For
example, in Genesis, it is written that "the Lord God formed
man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life; and man became a living soul." Later on in Genesis,
"Adam" is referred to, but nowhere is Adam introduced - it's
taken for granted that the reader understands that "Adam"
must be the man in question. Now, in Hebrew, Adam is written like this:
This consists of three letters (right
to left): Aleph, Daleth and Mem.
The word for "blood" in Hebrew is "Dam" -
letter Daleth and letter Mem. LetterAleph by itself not only represents
the "Ah" sound, but also the element of air, or breath - so
"Adam" is seen as blood with the breath of life - the man
created by God.
There are many other such hidden meanings in the Bible - using letters
as numbers, using a "cypher" so that the last letter of the
alphabet corresponds to the first, the penultimate letter corresponding
to the second, and so on, and hidden abbreviations. Scholars have spent
many years finding meaning in these, and the Talmud is a body of writing
which largely consists of commentaries - the "hidden meanings"
- on the Torah. Even today, Jewish scholars are researching such hidden
meanings. In recent years, the "Bible Code" has received a
lot of publicity; this is a system where supposed hidden messages are
teased out of the bible by picking, say, every 31st letter in a sequence,
or every 42nd letter, to reveal new words.
Esoterica
Each
Hebrew letter corresponds
to a number; most Hebrew bibles actually use the letters to indicate
chapter numbers and verse numbers. This means that every single Hebrew
word has a numeric value, and scholars have long been fascinated by
entirely different words that have the same numeric value as each other.
A simple example: the word for love is Ahebah (Alef-Heh-Beth-Heh), which
adds up to 13. The word for unity is Achad (Alef-Cheth-Daleth), which
also adds up to 13. Thus there is a correspondence between love and
unity. The art of finding words with the same numeric value is called
gematria - the concept is vaguely similar to numerology (where a person's
name is reduced to a number, to indicate their personality), except
that gematria is usually conducted on biblical names and the names of
angels.
Finally, Hebrew letters are divided into three categories:
three "mother" letters, which correspond to the three elements
(Air, Water and Fire - Earth is considered to be a combination of all
three elements, and not an element in its own right), seven "double"
letters, which correspond to the seven planets known to the ancients
(Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Double letters
are so called because they historically had two different sounds; for
example, the letter "Peh" can have a "P" sound or
an "F" or "Ph" sound; some of these distinctions
have now disappeared - for instance, the letter "Gimel" only
has a single sound now (a hard "G"), but used to have two
sounds ("G" or "J"). The remaining twelve letters
correspond to the twelve zodiac signs:
