Anon asked Staff ago Dear Daat Emet:
I agree with many things you write, especially about how the early rabbis distorted the meaning of the Torah. But there is an issue that continues to puzzle me. Even though the Torah may have been written by men and may be
historicaly and scientifically wrong, and full of darkness, and there were different versions in circulation till the text we have today was chosen and when we read it without the rabbinic interpretations we can find things that can terrify us and discover that is a very different text than the one the rabbis tell it is, this is my question:
There are many things related to the Hebrew language as it appears in today’s Torah text which seem to suggest that “sparks of God’s light” are present in it (even though there are some gematriot and associations which
seem very stupid there are others which seem very rational. By the way, I have read as a funny thing that the numerical number for “messiah” and “snake” in Hebrew is the same, but that seems, so to speak, not to refute the gematria system but to prove how wrong rabbinic Judaism is in giving so
much importance to a human being). The Torah may be wrong and even horrific in many places, but does it necessarily mean that there are no sparks of Godliness in it?What I ask from you is an answer not regarding neither history nor science nor literature nor if we agree or not with the way God is depicted in the Torah itself, but only an answer regarding the mystical insights of the Hebrew language. Please, an objective answer would be very helpful to my tormented mind.
Facundo,
Shalom.
jsadmin Staff answered 19 years ago
Dear Martin,
It is not clear what you mean by “the mystical insights of the Hebrew language.” And of course, gematria is not part of a language system; it’s just an outgrowth of the idea to assign numerical values to letters of the alphabet, which is itself a kind of mathematical, not linguistic, notation. In fact, the concept of gematria (whose very name is a garbled form of Greek geo:metria) had been borrowed by Hebrew-speaking and Hebrew-writing Jews from the Greek civilization during the late Second Temple period.
By the way, the belief that Hebrew was the original language of mankind is simply mistaken. Hebrew belongs to the family of Semitic languages (which is itself a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic family of languages), and comparative Semitic linguistics shows, for example, that the original phonological inventory of Semitic languages (consonants and vowels) has been preserved most fully in Classical Arabic and/or Old South Arabian languages, known from inscriptions discovered mostly in present-day Yemen and dated to the 1st millennium BCE and the early 1st millennium CE. (The question is somewhat complicated because, on the one hand, Old South Arabian languages have all the original 29 Semitic consonants, while Classical Arabic has only 28; and on the other hand, Classical Arabic has all the original Semitic vowels, and only those vowels – short and long a, i, u – while the vowel inventory of Old South Arabian is not known precisely, due to the orthography of inscriptions in those languages.) See John Huehnergard, “Proto-Semitic Language and Culture”
(http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html).
Regards,
Daat Emet