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Title: Germany believes euro zone could cope with Greece exit: report
Source:
Reuters
URL Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015 ... -germany-idUSKBN0KC0HZ20150103
Published: Jan 4, 2015
Author: Erik Kirschbaum
Post Date: 2015-01-04 11:27:07 by nativist nationalist
Keywords: None
Views: 5527
Comments: 16
The German government believes that the euro zone would now be able to cope with a Greece exit if that proved to be necessary, Der Spiegel news magazine reported on Saturday, citing unnamed government sources. Both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble believe the euro zone has implemented enough reforms since the height of the regional crisis in 2012 to make a potential Greece exit manageable, Der Spiegel reported. "The danger of contagion is limited because Portugal and Ireland are considered rehabilitated," the weekly news magazine quoted one government source saying. In addition, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone's bailout fund, is an "effective" rescue mechanism and was now available, another source added. Major banks would be protected by the banking union. The German government in Berlin could not be reached for comment. It is still unclear how a euro zone member country could leave the euro and still remain in the European Union, but Der Spiegel quoted a "high-ranking currency expert" as saying that "resourceful lawyers" would be able to clarify. According to the report, the German government considers a Greece exit almost unavoidable if the leftwing Syriza opposition party led by Alexis Tsipras wins an election set for Jan. 25. The Greek election was called after lawmakers failed to elect a president last month. It pits Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' conservative New Democracy party, which imposed unpopular budget cuts under Greece's bailout deal, against Tsipras' Syriza, who want to cancel austerity measures and a chunk of Greek debt. Opinion polls show Syriza is holding a lead over New Democracy, although its margin has narrowed to about three percentage points in the run-up to the vote. German Finance Minister Schaeuble has already warned Greece against straying from a path of economic reform, saying any new government would be held to the pledges made by the current Samaras government.
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#1. To: nativist nationalist (#0)
The Greeks should elect Tsipras, and he should be bold and cancel the entirety of Greek debt, government and personal. Proclaim a Jubilee and wipe out the debt utterly. Then establish new rules for debt and credit going forward, with debt annullment every seven years. If people and the government were completely unburdened with debt, it is true that some services and business (that run by lending money) would be lost. But the bones of the society would knit pretty well, and under a new regime of 6-year debt only, things would rapidly adjust to it. It would not be a "Western" model, to be sure, but the Greeks who were willing to work (planting and harvesting their own gardens, and settling hinterlands and islands) would end up being far better off for it: happier, freer. Germany wouldn't like it, but who are the Germans to rule Greece?
Under the seven year system people would be debt free at least every seven years but I don't see how that would fix a society of credit junkies. The first year you could get (and would give) loans with a seven year term, the next year only six year terms ... And so on until the last year when you could only get a term until years end, with huge interest rates to mitigate risk. Which the foolish would agree to, similar to paycheck loans. Seems an ok system, even if just for the debt clearing, but not too much better.
. But the bones of the society would knit pretty well, and under a new regime of 6-year debt only, things would rapidly adjust to it. It would not be a "Western" model, to be sure, but the Greeks who were willing to work (planting and harvesting their own gardens, and settling hinterlands and islands) would end up being far better off for it: happier, freer. Would the seven year cycle be for a fixed period of time, or for each debt as in was incurred?
They would make shorter term loans when they are risky. They wouldn't loan near the end of the period.
Why 7 years. I may be wrong but if I remember correctly a Jubilee was every 40 years.
I'll reply later with the comprehensive rules as God laid them out end to end. The natural thing that a modern person does (and an ancient too) faced with God's economic plan is resist it, because it doesn't let men get where they want to get (which is to a position where their money is earning money so they don't have to work, but others do). That objective of men is not a legitimate one, and God's economic plan doesn't let men do that. So men don't like it. Which means that they don't like God's view of things and are wrong. It does not mean that God is naive, or foolish, or doesn't understand how economics work. It means that the way God wants men to live is not the way many men want to live, so they ignore him. The Jubilee was every 50 years, and the Sabbatical was every 7. But as I say, I'll post the whole economic structure later, when I have time, and then I'll apply it to modern life. I guess the core of it is that a place to live is a birthright that man is intended by God to have for free. So you have to factor in that under God's economic plan, lodging is a zero cost, for life. So when you're trying to grapple with how a Biblically-precise economy would work, you need to start with the recognition that nobody would have a mortgage or a rent payment on his primary residence, and that this residence could never be taken for tax, debt or any other reason. IT is secure and absolute, and free. Housing is not an area where God intended for men to be able to exert dominance over other men.
7 years is the annual sabbath, to correspond to the 7th day weekly sabbath. Why? Because that was the pattern God set.
I read it as the Jubilee is every 50 years. That would be debt eliminated every 50 years not 7. "And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession."
Yes, there is the 50 year Jubilee, but there is also the 7th year Sabbatical, when debts are relaxed and the land lies fallow and servants are released. The 50th year Jubilee follows the 49th year Sabbath, so there are two consecutive years in which the Israelites were not to sow or reap (conduct a harvest, to store and sell), but only to eat whatever grows directly out of the field. A full year or two without a planting does a few things: it requires relying entirely on God (which is part of the point). But I'll have to take this back up in detail after work.
Ok, it's after work, and now I'm sitting here with an absolutely daunting task in front of me: trying to distill down the government of God. We started with the Sabbatical and the Jubilee, but I realize already that that won't work. It won't work because it's an arbitrary place to begin, and deeply embedded in the Law for Israel, and after having spelled it all out, one can always turn away and say: "Well, that was the Law, for Israel, but the Law was nailed to the Cross, so it's irrelevant anyway. Now we're in the age of grace." And that's true too, to a significant extent (though not completely): the constitution of Israel, as laid out in the Torah, really isn't imposed directly on us Gentiles in our Gentile states. Understanding how it applies to us after all, indirectly, as a source of wisdom, takes a light touch and some thought. To prime that thought and get to that proper perspective, I think we have to start somewhere else in God's law and move forward. Ultimately, God's law is a seamless garment. It all hangs together as a whole. Cut any one piece out of it, and you end up having the whole thing unravel. When God made the laws for Israel, it was the one and only time that God ever set up a nation state, and Israel was the only state that he ruled directly, as King, for centuries, before the Israelites foolishly decided to reject him as King and clamor for a human king. God gave them Saul, who was a disaster. Then he gave them David, who was beloved of God but who fell into sin and inflicted disaster on his kingdom. He was succeeded by Solomon, the wisest man ever...who fell utterly into lust and, through lust, idolatry, and who wrecked the finances and strained the goodwill of his subjects such that practically as soon as his son Rehoboam took the throne, the Kingdom of Israel fell apart into the separate kingdoms of Judah and Israel, never to be reunited again until both were destroyed by Mespotamians. God let Israel be destroyed because they didn't obey his law. He let Judah be rebuilt, by repentant exiles, but within a few centuries he destroyed it again this time for good, when its corrupt priests and government leaders saw to it that His own Son was slaughtered. After the scourge of the Holocaust in World War II, God has allowed the Jews to reassemble in the land of Israel today, and reconstitute a Jewish republic, but it is very secular and does not obey his laws even still, other than in a few forms. There is no priesthood and no sacrifices, so it's really a simulacrum that goes by the name "Israel", but is not a reconstitution of God's original state at all. Christian Zionism is pretty popular in America, but a more sober look at what the state of Israel is, as compared to what the state of Israel mandated by God is supposed to be, will cause one to realize that even if the modern state of Israel is a divine miracle, a reconstitution of the homeland of the Jews in recognition of the ancient covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the Hebrews of the Exodus, that the incredible distance between the laws and customs of modern Israel, and the laws and customs prescribed for Israel by God, are so wide that without wholesale repentance in ashes and sackcloth, and change, that modern-day Israel cannot look forward to anything but destruction, once again, at the hands of God for having failed utterly, once again, to fulfill his commandments, ordinances, statutes, decrees and judgments. Nor is there any solace in looking at the Arab countries all around Israel and saying "They're so much worse!" That's true, they are. But then, the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians and Romans were very much worse than the ancient Israelites and Judahites, and worse than the modern Muslim Arabs too (a third of the population of the Arab world are not slaves, and the Muslims do not feed whole families to the lions in arenas packed with screaming crowds, illuminated by human torches). That these other nations were very much worse than the Jews on a relative scale did not stop God from using those very nations to destroy Israel anyway. Why? Because God's standards have never been relative, but have always been absolute. Israel was his chosen nation, his "boy" in the world. The pagan nations all got theirs for what they did, but so did Israel. Israel was not spared devastation, even though its crimes were RELATIVELY light. Once one is chosen by God, there is no "relative": you obey everything and do what he says, or he crushes you with punishment. God is holy, and that which would approach the throne of God (willingly or no) must be holy or it will be beaten by him. That's the way it is. Anyway, God's law is a seamless garment, with everything depending on everything else, but starting somewhere in the middle of the fabric will lead only to confusion, not enlightenment. To really understand it, it is best to discuss it in the order that God revealed it. That way the overlay of each successive revelation can be seen, and seen from the vantage point that God revealed it, which itself is significant. After all, God is omniscient and always knew what he was doing, so if HE decided to reveal some things first, then those first things are best looked at first, and in order. So that's what we'll do. This has already gone long, so I'll start the analysis back in Genesis, in the next essay.
ESSAY 2: "In the Beginning..." We have to trace the law in the order it was revealed. That's the best way, because it's the way God revealed it, and who knows better than him? We start, then, with Genesis 1. Here, God reveals the physics and defines words that will be used throughout the rest of everything he says. This first "chapter" of the Bible is not REALLY a "chapter" - all of these chapter and verse designations are just medieval additions - but the opening part of the text is a lexicon that defines terms for the rest of the text. Here are some of the many words and concepts introduced: "God": "God", which is the Old English word "good", does not appear in Genesis. In fact, "good" as the name for the deity, doesn't appear in the Scripture until Jesus asks "Why do you call me good? There is only one good: the deity [God = Good]." The word that appears in Genesis openly is "Elohiym", which means POWERS. "El", which means Power or Mighty One, is also there. This concept of Elohiym will be a hard one, because it is a plural, and the Elohiym speak as a plural. The Mighty Ones seem to be El Elyon - "The Mightiest One" ("'God' Most High") PLUS the angelic host, "wisdom" (who speaks in her own voice in proverbs), "the Word", "Ruach" (the Holy Wind or Spirit), the "Shekinah" (the glory of God) and YHWH. Jesus will identify the highest Power as his own Father, and as the spiritual father of his followers - the Father is "Jesus' God" in our translations. But the Greek "theos", which we translate as "God" is, once again, a reference to power. We would do well to recall our own old English words. The word for mighty ones in English used to be "Aesir". The singular of that is "Ace", which is why the Ace is above the king in the deck of cards. The GOOD Ace was called "God" (good) which is the Christian God. So, among the Aesir, the pagan Norse as they converted saw the Christian Ace as the GOOD one, hence "God". Of course that's not in Genesis 1. There, all that we have is Aesir, Aces in modern English. The Aces (Elohiym in Hebrew) are the actor(s) in Genesis. Jews and Muslims will panic at the overt plurality of the word God in Genesis, noting that it takes a singular verb and must not be translated as "gods". Christian Trinitarians do not have a problem understanding how God can be a plural word that takes a singular noun. And right there in the first sentence of Scripture we have the Elohiym (plural), Alpha-Omega (Aleph-Tav in Hebrew), and we have the Ruach Elohiym - the wind or spirit of God hovering over the primordial chaos. It's all there, really. It's just hard. That's why we're going through it. "Beginning": the word is not "beginning" or "in the beginning". It's "head" or "summit". "In head" is the first word. "Created": there is no "creating" in Genesis. What there is, is "fattening", "filling up", "making substantial". It's a subtle difference, but it's important. Genesis does not start with nothing. It starts with Elohiym, and darkness, and the wind/breath/spirit of the Elohiym fluttering the face of the "mayim", which is chaos. "Earth". There is no "earth" in Genesis (or anywhere else in the Bible). "The Earth", an orb robed in blue hanging in space, is never spoken of in the Bible. Rather, what is spoken of is "ha'aretz", which is "the land". "The land" is initially described as chaotic and unfilled. Later, once something substantial emerges from the seas, this is defined as dry land, by the word "ha'aretz": the land. So, "the land" does not start out as LAND, it starts out meaning something chaotic and unfilled - substance, perhaps, or matter, but not "land". And never, ever "earth". The Bible has LAND in it, and it has SOIL. It has DUST and POWDER. But the global concept of EARTH, the planet, never appears in the Scriptures. There is only "Land" in the Hebrew. In the Greek, later, there will be other words. There is a word that is translated as "world", but it doesn't mean the planet earth either. Caesar Augustus, in Luke, proclaims a census of "the whole world". Of course he doesn't! The whole world includes Brazil and China. The actual word in the Scripture is "kosmos". Caesar proclaimed a census of the whole cosmos. Oh dear. That's worse, isn't it? It is if we think that "cosmos" means what we have said it means, which is the universe of stars and galaxies. Cosmos in ancient Greek meant what we would mean when we say "the Roman World", which has nothing at all to do with the PLANET, but which really means "the cultural space". The planet earth never appears in Scripture. Not ever. There is the land, and there is the cultural space (later). There's soil and dirt and dust and powder. But there is no earth. This is important, because people can read in "earth" and start thinking in terms of the creation of the cosmos, but it is not there. Scripture simply doesn't address that. Which is important to realize, because a great deal of the fight between so-called "Creationists" and so-called "Evolutionists" is over language that is assumed to be in the Bible but is not. The Bible is talking about something narrower and more specific: the filling up of the land and sky. The "Earth" is not in Genesis or anywhere else in the Bible, and there is no "Creation", there is "filling up". The Aces do not talk in Genesis about what most people think they're talking about. What the English is said to say and what the Hebrew actually says are very different things. It's important to know that, because the use of these words will affect the understanding of other things down the line. It's also important to know that because Genesis does not actually pit science versus religion at the get go. Genesis is not talking about what people think it's talking about. "Heaven": is not in Scripture. It's not in either testament. There is only "Ha'shamayim" in Hebrew, and "Ouranos" in Greek. And these words are: the sky. There is no "heaven" in Scripture, anywhere. There is only the sky. There is no "earth" in Scripture. There is only the land. There is no "God" in Scripture until Jesus calls the Father that. Before that, there are only "The Powers", The Highest Power, And "He is" or "He will be" - the name YHWH. Is this important? It's only important to the extent that you RESIST it. These words are what Scripture actually SAYS. The words you're used to is what it has been translated to say. Vast traditions have been built around the translated words, but those traditions often depart from the story, or they queer it. Using the right words cleans up a great deal. It also renders some things so ambiguous that they cannot be fought about. "The skies" as the sky above do not appear until the second day. The sentence that reads "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" does not exist. Rather, Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 are in fact one long Hebrew sentence which reads: "In summit when Powers Alpha-Omega (or El-Cross) fattened the skies and the land, the land existed chaotic and unfilled (the Hebrew "tohu-vavohu" is nonsense words that carry the same meaning and structure as topsy-turvy or higgledy-piggledy), and darkness upon faces of the chaotic abyss and the Powers' wind/spirit fluttered much upon faces of the chaos/waters." "Without form and void": Very stately. Except that the Hebrew "tohu-vavohu" are nonsense words that mean a jumble. They are literal equivalents of higgledy-piggledy, or topsy-turvy in English, nonsense words that, put together, mean a jumbled mess. "The earth was without form and void" is very stately, and very not in the Bible. "The land was higgledy-piggledy" is what the text literally says. Some have reacted negatively to this, considering that it's disrespectful of God. But God is the one who used a playful term: tohu-vavohu. Tohu vavohu is the term that Jewish parents use when describing the otherwise indescribable chaos of a child's room. A child's room is not "disorderly" or, "without form and void". It's a mess. It's higgledy- piggledy. It's...tohu vavohu. If you can't accept the simple, playful language of the actual text, you're being more formal than God was when he gave these words of Genesis. Best to stand down from that and stick with him. Remember, God is your Father telling you around the ancient campfire the story of everything important. He's not the Grammar Police looking to hang you on fine points of theology. Really, remember that, because it will keep your mind in the right frame. "'Let there be Light!' And there was light." Sort of. The Hebrew of "Let there be light" consists of two words: YeHi and AwR ("or"). Now, Hebrew is consonantal. The oldest texts are just consonants (some of the letters that are called silent consonants today were vowels in the old Hebrew). Ha'aretz newspaper, today's Jerusalem newspaper read by Jews all over the world, is written in Hebrew consonants without any vowels. Hebrew operates on a root consonant system that has a logic to it, such that Hebrew can be written and read without vowels, to the extent that Hebrew newspapers today are printed with consonants only - no vowels. Vowels were added to the consonants by the Massoretes in the 600s and 700s AD. From the Dead Sea Scrolls we know that the ancient manuscripts didn't have vowels, but that they used some letters that today are considered consonants (often silent consonants) as vowels. For example, the Massoretic Hebrew spells the name "David" as DWD, with vowel points, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, without vowel points, have DWYD. This isn't just random information - we're going somewhere with this. What we discover when we look at the word "Be" - as in Let there be light - is that the same consonants in Hebrew form the verb "to be", "to live", "to exist" and "to breathe", and also the noun "breath", and the word we translate as spirit...and the name of God "YHWH" is the word "He lives" or "He will exist" or "He is" or "He Breathes", and the name HWH - the last three letters of YHWH, is the name translated as "Eve" which means "life"...or "existence" or being. In ENGLISH, "to be" and "to exist" are synonyms, but "to breathe" and "to live" are considered completely separate things. Also, in English, "spirit" and "wind" are different words, but in Hebrew (and Greek) they are one word. So the "wind of God" - God's breath - IS spirit, and Life, and Existence, and Being - it's all the same word, the same letters. We parse this out because we think of it all as different things, but that is not what is actually IN Scripture. An example from the fifth and sixth day, the word we translate as "soul". This word, "nephesh" in Hebrew, is composed of elements that are "seed having breath". The word we translate as "soul" is literally "breather", or "living one" - life and breath and existence are one word in Hebrew. We think these are very different things, but they're not. As long as you remember that life, breath and being are the same word set in Hebrew, the same letters with perhaps a different vowel, then things throughout the text make tremendous sense. All of a sudden we see why some translations have "a wind from God hovering over the waters" in Genesis 1:2, while others have "the spirit of God". Wind and spirit (and breath) are the same thing. To live is to have breath, and breath is spirit. So, to be a soul is to be a breather, which is to say, a spirit, which is to say, to live, which is to say "to be". When Jesus says "God is the God of the living...", he is actually using the very NAME of God: "YHWH", for "I AM" and "I LIVE" are both the same thing, in Hebrew. Not in English. The Mighty One revealed creation in Hebrew, not in English, so we need to broaden our understanding to grasp these linked concepts and the use of one Hebrew word where we use four English words. In English, we say that there is the sky and then there is heaven. Not so. In English, we say that the land is different from the earth. Not so. In English, we say that life, existence, being and breathing are different concepts. Not so. In English, we think of the soul as something that leaves the body and goes to heaven. Not so. The breathing body IS a soul. When the breath leaves the body, the breath continues (breath is the word spirit, spirit is the word breath: one thing, not two), and the body falls to powder: the SOUL, the breather, ceases to exist at death. The powder of the body remains, and the breath/spirit lives on. The SOUL does not reconstitute itself until the resurrection, when breath re-enters body. But we are getting way ahead of ourselves. None of that is revealed in Genesis 1! "Light" is the word "AWR" - "Or". "DR" is the Hebrew root that means organization or sequence. OR-DR means...order. So "or" is light, yes, but light is part of the root of order. Physically speaking, chaos is entropy. To overcome chaos in physics and bring order out of it, one must apply energy. Light, of course, is the visible form of energy. Now, consider what you've read: the land is chaotic - higgledy-piggledy - and there is darkness over abyssal chaos. And God says "Let there be order" - and there is energy, which is to say OR - light. Or brings ordr - light (or) brings ordr, order. In Physics. And in Genesis. How can anybody see that and still think that this is just Bronze Age mythology? So, "Let there be light" is really "Light/Energy/Order exist!" Light is light, yes. What is the visible form of energy to a bedouin? Light. Now, there are two words that are important to the text that are different in English but close in Hebrew. YM - yam - is the word "sea". Pictographically, this is an arm upon the water. "The Sea" to the Hebrews was the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the Hebrew word "West" is just "the Sea" (and the Hebrew word "east" is Kedem: the dawn). When the word "Sea" is defined as the gathering of the waters, we have the mighty arm of God separating the waters. Hence the ancient pictograph of the arm and the water, and that is "Sea". As the old Navy Hymn goes: "Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave...". Indeed. If you add a tent peg between the Y and the M, you get YOM. So, here we have the arm and hand (of God, or of anybody) pointing to the water. Where does the sun set in Israel? In the sea, always. "Yom" is defined as the period of light, what we call "day" but only the daytime portion of day. And when is the "day"? It's the time that the sun is rushing overhead towards the sea: Yom is the time of Or, when the light rushes towards the Yam, towards the sea. YM: sea. YOM: "day" (really, light period). Note that THIS is why Jesus was "three days" in the tomb, even though he died on Friday about 3 PM and was resurrected on Sunday morning. How is that three days? It's only 39 hours! Hebrew days - the YOM as defined in Genesis - are not 24 hour periods. They are the period of Light. On Friday Jesus died during the day: YOM. Saturday day came: YOM. Sunday dawned and he was resurrected: YOM. There is no contradiction or logical problem in the Scripture. The problem is that people who are reading Scripture define a "day" as 24 hours. The 24 day does not exist in Scripture. A "day" is the period of light that begins with the sunrise. The opposite of YOM is "night" - Lailah. The Letters her are LYL. L is a shepherd's crook. Y is the arm and hand again. And L, shepherd's crook. LYL is the night. And its root, LL is howl. The night and howling are together. And a pastoral society did what when the wolves howled at night? They were the good shepherds keeping their watch, shepherd's crook, strong ark, shepherd's crook, through the darkness. Night is defined as the darkness. "Three Days and Three Nights"...the "days" has been explained: Yom is light, not 24 hours. So Friday, Saturday and Sunday dawn light gives three yom, but there's still only Friday night and Saturday night, two nights. Contradiction! Clearly Jesus wasn't crucified on Friday...we've all read the arguments. But "day" is not a civil day. It's the period of light. And night is not the civil evening, it's the period of darkness. What happened when Jesus died? What came upon the earth (really the land)? Tenebrae. Darkness fell. Night ONE, on Friday, when the sun should have shown but there was darkness. Then there was a brief period of light before sunset. Yom 1. Then darkness came again with Friday night sunset: NIGHT 2. Then Saturday Day came: YOM 2. Then the night fell: LAILAH 3. And then dawn Sunday came, and with it, the Resurrection: YOM 3. Three days and three nights - when DAY is understood as GOD defined it: the period of LIGHT, and NIGHT is understood as GOD defined it: the period of darkness. And that is right in Genesis. And that is why Jesus was crucified and died on Friday, and was dead three days and three nights. That is how. Literally. Without playing around with Roman calendars and Hebrew concepts. Just using the definitions of words as GOD defined them in Genesis, it's all right there. That is why spending time on the words in Genesis 1 is so important. Every time the word sky, (or heaven) or land (or earth), or day, or night, or sea is used by God in the Scriptures, those mean what God defined them to mean, and they only mean that, and they DO NOT MEAN what English meanings they have. If you stick with English, you have to crucify Jesus on Wednesday to have him dead three days and three nights. But that's because you think that a "day" is a 24 hour period. But a day is the period of light. And the night is the period of dark. That's how God defined it. Note that at the North Pole, the year is one day long. The sun rises once, for six months. And then it sets and there is darkness for 6 months. One period of light. One day. In Lappland, where there are 70 days of midnight sun, and 70 days of darkness, the year is 295 days long. There is no 24 hour day in the Bible. There is only the period of light: day - yom, and the period of dark: night - laylah...when the wolves howl - lalah. There's more to do in Genesis, because the lexicon is so important. I apologize for seeming to wander, but I'm not really. By the time we're done, you have to stop reading "earth" and "heaven" and see, rather, "land" and "sky", and you have to stop seeing "breath", "wind" and "spirit" but see one thing that is all three. And you have to see Powers - Aces - when you see God. And you have to see order and energy as well as light when you see light. And you have to hear the wolves howl in the darkness, and see how the shepherd's crook is there with the strong arm. And when you see the simplest form of the name of God, "El", you have to see "AL", which is an ox-head and means leader, head, lord, and the lamed - the shepherd's crook. And you have to see that the simplest name of God: "EL" is in fact two hieroglyphs that spell out "The Lord is my Shepherd". When you see these things, you will begin to understand what God was teaching the Hebrews with Genesis, in their language and in their culture. And then when you see the words as he defined them, so much else will fall in place. Jesus calls himself the Alpha and the Omega in the last book of the Bible. But the first time that the name of God appears in Scripture for the first time, as Elohiym - the Powers, the Aces - it is followed by Aleph-Tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is to say "Alpha-Omega" by function. And you also have to realize that "Aleph" was, most anciently "El" (this is why the Hebrews made the image of their God a golden calf, because "El" is the letter "Aleph", and represented by the head of an ox in the pictograph. El is "the lord is my shepherd", and Tav, the next letter in AT, is a cross. In the head of things, when the Powers - Aleph-Tav/Alpha-Omega/El-the lord is my shepherd - to Tav: the cross - began to fill up the land... Genesis 1 is hard because God wrote it (who else was there to see it) and he packed the whole story of it all into pictographs and hieroglyphs and definitions. As you go through it and see things unfold, it defines the words and sets the basis for everything else. Oh, and creationism versus evolution? Well, on each of the day that Elohiym, the powers, make something substantial, they BEGIN to do it. It isn't finished until the seventh Yom. And Yom? Yes, it is a period of light, but light is order also. These are periods of order and organizing, and everything is happening simultaneously, but beginning in a certain period of order. In other words, God doesn't answer the question neatly. What he actually says is very complicated and has to be taken on its own terms. What is NOT there is "creation out of nothing". But what IS there, in the first word pictographs, is the divison of El himself, pointing to the cross. So we don't hear the Son, the Word, or Wisdom, when we read it, but if we read the hieroglyphs, we see what happened "in head" before even the fattening, and there we see what Wisdom describes when she speaks in the Book of Proverbs, of before the making of the material things. Oh, and one other detail that we'll see: "Male and female he made them...in Elohiym's image". We have El, masculine singular. And we have the Ruach Elohiym, the Spirit of Elohiym, moving on the face of the waters. Ruach Elohiym, the Holy Spirit, is a feminine noun. The Holy Spirit is a girl. So is the Glory of God, the Shekinah. The Elohiym are male and female. It's all right there...in the Hebrew. It's not there in the English. A translation is but an echo.
ESSAY 3 - More Genesis 1 vocabulary. To review Essay 2, the following words are words used in the standard English translation of Genesis 1, but have the actual specific meanings shown. "In the beginning" IS REALLY "In head" or "In summit". "God" IS REALLY "Powers". "created" IS REALLY "fattened" or "filled up" "heaven" IS REALLY "skies" (and skies is a dual-plural) "earth" IS REALLY "land", but it is not "dry land" until the third day, when God separates the dry land from the seas and specifically calls it "land". Before that, on days 1 and 2 (and before that), "land" is not determined. It may refer to matter, dissolved into the primordial chaos. The planet "Earth" never appears in Scripture. So, when you read "throughout the earth", you must always read "throughtout the land", because that is what it says - and it is never clear from the world itself that all of the dry land on the planet is being spoken of, or the entirety of a specific land. The word is not ambiguous as far as meaning "dry land" - that's what it means - but it is always ambiguous as far as the extent of the land being spoken of. "in all the land" in English, does not mean the same thing as "in all the earth". "In all the earth" means "worldwide". But there is no Hebrew or Greek word for that, and the concept does not clearly appear in the Scripture. This is important, because wherever we see "earth" we think of the whole world, but the Scripture only speaks of "the land", which could very well just mean "the area". This is non-trivial, and it is WHY one cannot assert global meaning to some things where "the land" is mentioned. And it is why "the earth" is a bad word to use in translation and should not be used at all. "The Earth" does not appear in the Scripture. Putting it there is deceptive and very easily leads to misunderstanding. There is no "earth" in scripture. There is the LAND, and there is DIRT. Both of those things are "earth" in English, but so is the planet. There's no "planet" in Scripture. (And the planets - Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc., in scripture are just "stars" - which does not mean bright solar furnaces, but means "bright points of light in the skies". Meteors are stars also. Anything bright in the sky except the Sun and Moon is a star (and the Sun is not a star: Genesis does not use modern taxonomy, but God's taxonomy, which was aimed at things that ancient Bedouins could see and experience). "seas" are not defined until the third day, as the collection of waters after the dry land appears. Before that, it's potentially complicated. The words "skies" itself is "ha'shamayim". It composed of the word 'ha", which is literally just an exhaled breath - and an exhaled breath establishes a noun subject, so "ha" is "the" - remember, as we will see just below, breath is spirit and life and existence, so when God breathes out a breath, it is an explusion of spirit that establishes a thing - that is why "ha" is "the". "Shamayim", is a combination of two words: "mayim" which is the word that is translated as "waters", and which itself is three pictographs MYM. "M" is a pictograph of waves, and shows flow. M is the word "mem", and it is the root of all things that flow, or things that are in flux and undefined, the primordial chaos. Y is the strong arm and pointing hand. So, the concept of "water" - mayim - is a plural of "mem", which is the letter "M" and the pictograph for flow. Mem is the primordial chaos, the soup, perhaps pre- molecular water. Water, Mayim, is Mem linked to Men by the strong arm and hand of God - God places his hand (and breath) on the chaos, and introduces or-dr - order, through energy, which is light (thus energy organizes the entropy), and from the chaos of Mem, mastered by the arm of God, comes MYM - mayim - which is the waters. The SKY is the plural Ha - the (a breath) + the letter Sh + Mayim (the waters). The letter Sh is "Shin" is a pictograph of two front teeth, and its significance is to divide (in two), to cut, to separate. Read about God "spreading out the sheet" (not "making a dome") to separate the waters from the waters. THAT is the sky. Now recognize that the word "skies" itself has a breath (from God) dividing in two (Sh) the mayim. In other words, the pictographs OF the word "Skies" parallels the sentence about the formation of the skies. None of this is coincidental or imaginative. The duality and overlap of the pictographs, the letter meetings, the roots, the overlying words and the narrative are utterly relentless in Genesis 1. And, of course, Genesis 1 is the one part of the Scripture that had to come fully from the mind of God, because there was no man there to see any of the creation, so it had to be revealed. It is not surprising, then, that the most detailed, rich and overlapping - indeed holographic fractal - language of the Bible is God's own description of filling up the world. And it's why when God defines words here, "at the beginning" that we HAVE TO use the words as HE defined them, and NOT simply follow our traditions and make up stories that seem to fit. "day" - yom - is defined by God as the light. When it is dark, that is "night". There is no 24-hour day in Scripture. Days are of varying lengths depending on where you are in the world and the season. Days are shorter or longer. Nighttime is not the day. It's the night, laylah. The modern taxonomy of time passage and day measurement is completely useless in Scripture. God defined two terms: DAY, which means the light. And NIGHT, which means the darkness. At the north pole, a day is one-half year long, because the sun is in the sky for 6 months, and then the night is one-half year long. At the equator, days and nights are generally the same length. A day IS NOT a 24 hour period. The DAY begins at dawn and ends at sunset. The NIGHT begins at sunset and ends at sunrise. The night is appended to the day by reference (once the day ends, at sunset, the next day is in preparation). Note well that this parallels creation. Things begin in darkness. Then comes the light - the "or" (order). The darkness again. The DAY is the light portion. A "day unit" is the darkness and the light, but the day is only the light. This also parallels the Hebrew calendar: the month begins on the New Moon, which is to say, it begins in darkness. Then, night by night, the light of the moon appears more and more until it is full, and then it passes. Once there are stars and the moon, the night, laylah, is no longer passed in complete darkness. There is still some light. So the period of lesser light and greater light - moon and sun - form a yom echad - a day unit (and not "the first day", but "one day"), so with the light of the night, the darkness before the skies were filled is not the darkness of the abyss that existed before God filled the skies and the land. The night period can be tacked onto the day period to form a day unit, but the day proper is only the light. And the night is the darkness. Which is why it is always night in a cave in the ground. It is day above, but it is night below. Day is not a temporal period. It's a state. It IS day above, it IS night below. At the South Pole, the 182 24 hour periods of continuous light is not 182 days, because it's dark somewhere. It is ONE DAY. Days are not of fixed length. In the winter in the North, days are shorter and nights are longer. In the summer, days are longer and nights are shorter. In the Hebrew is there is no fixed "24 hour backstop" that is REALLY a day. Rather, a day is REALLY only the time when the sun is up. It is not a fixed length of time. To discipline one's self to use the terms as God uses them is not hard, but it does require leaving aside some familiar fond arguments. Example: that creation describes 7 consecutive 24-hour day periods is false. There is no 24 hour day in the Bible. Ever. The DAY is the period of light, of whatever length. It is NOT any of these latter-day taxonomies we have placed on it. When we come to the animals, we will find that God did NOT "create" "the fowls" or "the birds" on the fifth day. Nor did "he" "create" the "fish" on that day. The Powers (Elohiym) BEGAN to fatten, or make substantial, FLYERS and SWIMMERS and SWARMERS during that period of light/order. They (the Powers) didn't complete the flyers, swimmers and swarmers until the seventh day. Likewise, later we will see "bats" among the list of "unclean birds", and we will cry out (with our 19th century taxonomy) that "bats" are "mammals" not "birds". Which is fine, but God did not speak of birds. He spoke of FLYERS, which would include bats, and butterflies, and pteranadons. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. "In head" "fattened/filled up/made substantial" "Powers" "AT - El-Tav - Alpha-Omega - Mighty One to the Cross" "skies" "land" "waters" (and chaos) as "mem" means flowing things, and includes chaos. Think for a moment about what we know about the universe. What is it made up of? Our scientists tell us that it's 73.9% Hydrogen, 24% Helium and 1.04% Oxygen, .134% is Neon and .096% is Nitrogen gas. So, 98.94% of the physical matter in the universe is composed of just a few gases. Of the remaining 1.06%, .46% is Carbon, .109% is Iron, and .0605% is Silicon., with Magnesium and Sulfur between them composing .120%. Now consider this: if "light" is understood as energy, as the ordering of entropy that energy can do, what was the state of all of that matter - all of those gasses and solid elements BEFORE light/energy? The absence of energy is absolute zero. At absolute zero, Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen and Neon are a LIQUID. Hydrogen and Helium not have the requisite atomic structure to form crystals. The rest of the elements, the trace elements that come together to form solid things, to form the "land", are dissolved and spread out within the vast abyssal sea of inert, frigid, liquid hydrogen and helium and oxygen. The land was unformed, invisible, tumbled and chaotic - DISSOLVED into the abyssal sea of clumped liquid hydrogen, in the energyless darkness. And God said "Let there be energy!" - and then immediately things happen, the matter becomes animated, and divides, and is attenuated. And the Powers keep periodically shooting energy into this abyssal blob, the "land" part, the dissolved elements, clump and congeal, and dry land appears out of the fluid chaos. Is liquid hydrogen "water"? Of course it is. "Water" is NOW defined by US as "H2O", but the Hebrew word "liquid" IS "water". We should not be surprised. Look at the periodic table of the elements. There are precisely TWO elements that are liquids at normal earth temperatures: mercury and Bromine, and neither of those is present in any abundance on the surface. So, what liquids did an ancient ever see? He saw water, fresh or salt or rain. He saw milk, which he called "fat". He saw blood, which he called "blood". He saw urine, which he called "water". And he saw semen, which he called "seed". "Water" in ancient Hebrew refers to liquid of whatever sort, unless it is a specifically named thing. This is another case where modern taxonomy will obscure meaning. We have decided that "water" is a very specific and unique chemical compound, but when God uses the word "water" in Scripture, it means "liquid". We might say "liquid that looks like water, but really isn't", but that would be us being stubborn and wrong. Water IS NOT H2O. About 100 years ago, we DECIDED that we would limit the meaning of water specifically to "H2O", and we're so accustomed to our practice that we think that is reality. It is not reality. It is our new naming convention. "Water" in Scripture is the word "liquid" in modern English. Liquids that had a specific name are called by that specific name ("Blood", for example). "Strong Water" in Hebrew is the word for glue. I belabor these points because lots of people play "gotcha" with Scripture by pretending it was written in English, or pretending that it is "inaccurate" because it does not follow our recently-devised naming conventions. But Scripture must be read using GOD'S naming conventions. God is not INACCURATE. Rather, we attempt to impose excessive rigidity and narrowness on what God says by our own re-definitions of words. The best example is "land" versus "earth". There is no Hebrew word for "the earth". There is only "land" and "dirt". If we mean soil when we say "earth", then the word is dirt (or dust, or powder, depending on how one translates it). If we mean "land" when we say "earth", then the word is "land". If we mean "the whole planet" when we say earth, there is no word for that in Hebrew. The only word is "the land", and "all the land" MAY mean the whole planet, or it MAY mean "all the land around", (When we write "there was peace in all the land" we mean that the country is peaceful, not that there was peace in every corner of soil on the globe). "Land" and "country" can be synonyms. "The Land of Israel" means the country that is Israel. "The whole country" is not interpreted as "the planet", but "the whole country" and "all the land" are the same expression. (I dwell on this because there is a great thick carapace of very precise theology, both "pro-Genesis" and "anti-Genesis" that has grown up by precisely parsing the English. Trouble is, the English itself is often quite far from the Hebrew meaning, so people are arguing and digging in and taking stances based on language that is not in Scripture. Once they've expended a lot of energy and built up beliefs around their traditional interpretations of the English, they often fall into the error of traditionalism, and assert that the English IS the proper translation of the Hebrew, or even that the English is MORE AUTHORITATIVE than the Hebrew (the extreme form of KJV-Onlyism says that). This is patently absurd. God told us the story of creation. He told it in detailed Hebrew, both words and pictures. The English echoes the Hebrew and can give us what God said, if we are very careful to keep correcting the English back to the Hebrew. Plunk down planet earth and heaven and "created" into Genesis 1, though, and you've run out on the Hebrew and are following a story line that was written in the 1500s. In the actual Scriptures, it's land, skies and fattened/filled, and these are distinctions with a difference. That's why, before we go onto the rest of the law, we're spending a few essays to really focus on God's lexicon. Legal contracts usually have the defined terms right up front, so that everybody knows what words in the contract mean. When God told the story in Genesis, he did likewise. "seas" = collected waters "wind" = "spirit" "light" (and order) "day" = light "night" = darkness "to be" = "to exist" = "to live" = "to breathe" "the sheet" = what the Powers stretched out when they breathed out the division of the waters from the waters to make the skies. It's not a "dome" and it's not a "firmament" (what IS a "firmament" anyway?). It's a SHEET. If you've ever been in a Bedouin tent in the desert (redleghunter, perhaps you have; I have) if the fabric is dark spun hair you see the light come through the little gaps, and it looks like stars at night. This is the image to which God was referring when he spoke of spreading the tent sheet to divide the "waters" from the "waters". Alright. We've gotten through "Day One", pretty much, and looked forward to some of Day 2 and beyond. There's a lot of dense stuff here, and it is unsettling, but it is salutary. God setting up laws and bounds for matter and energy is deep and hard stuff. Physics and Chemistry, and then Biology, are not simple subjects, and God had to tell a story that was factually true in every detail, in every generation, that could be understood by Bedouins with the knowledge and language of 2000 BC. No man could possibly do that - and no man back then could have anything like the knowledge necessary to get the details right. Some say that Genesis is like the Mesopotamian myths. Truth is, it's not. At all. You can pull up the Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths and read them. They've got gods building places of their own bodies and personalities doing this and that. Genesis has only one actor, and the story is austere in its presentation. Sure, there's a Flood in the Mesopotamian (and everybody else's) legends because...there WAS a flood, and everybody in Mesopotamia, and China, and among the Chippewa with their flood story, all is descended from at least four of the eight people on the Ark (Noah and his wife, and one of Noah's sons and his wife). So all of humanity has, as a common setpoint, distant ancestors who all shared the same experiences, and whose grandchildren all remember some of it, albeit twisted. In a world without writing, tales grow taller with the telling. God's recounting of what REALLY happened, in Genesis, comes later in time than the writing down of legends in Mesopotamia, but that doesn't mean that Genesis CAME FROM the Mesopotamian legends. Rather, the Mesopotamians and the Hebrews and the Egyptians too are all descended from people who were on the ark, so basics were remembered in the legends. But the whole world fell into the thrall of fallen angels who held themselves out as gods and who had some degree of power and wonder exceeding man. Some were more malign and some more benevolent (or less wicked) than others, but all focused the story on themselves. El Elyon, God most high, the father and creator of all those angels, and all men, chose a mix of slaves - nobodies - pulled them out of the greatest empire and made a people out of a no-people, gave them a pictographic language, and told the story of creation in it, along with giving laws. There is no antecedent work in Hebrew. The Torah is not the culmination of centuries of literary history, it's the FIRST thing written in literary Hebrew, and the greatest. It's as though Shakespeare emerged in the fens of East Anglia among the swamp serfs, in 1067, before the English language was a literary language, before it even assumed its final spoken form. All of these things merely confirm that it IS divinely inspired, and no Bronze Age myth. But it also means that we cannot IMPROVE upon the text by clever translation. We can only mar it. God told the complete, accurate story of creation, in scientifically accurate detail, using the language available to Bedouins of 5000BC. The reason to read it slowly and correctly, in that light, using the words as he used them is that He's God, and his laws are real and true, and the only way to know what the heck they are is to read them on HIS terms, and not as we would perhaps like them to be. That's why this is worth the effort. Everything speeds up after Genesis 1, but let's plow on. End of Essay 3.
Ffs tl;dr If aka had to pay you by the word we'd be having weekly fundraisers.
. Nobody is required to read it.
And nobody DOES! LOL
I do but have to set aside some time given the length. Business is booming right now:)
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name (John 1:12)
#2. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
Nobody calls me Mad Dog.
#3. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
If people and the government were completely unburdened with debt, it is true that some services and business (that run by lending money) would be lost.
#4. To: Biff Tannen (#2)
but I don't see how that would fix a society of credit junkies.
#5. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
Then establish new rules for debt and credit going forward, with debt annullment every seven years.
#6. To: A K A Stone (#5)
#7. To: A K A Stone (#5)
#8. To: Vicomte13 (#1)
#9. To: A K A Stone (#8)
read it as the Jubilee is every 50 years. That would be debt eliminated every 50 years not 7.
#10. To: A K A Stone, redleghunter, Too Conservative, listener (#8)
(Edited)
#11. To: A K A Stone, redleghunter, Too Conservative, listener (#10)
#12. To: A K A Stone, redleghunter, Too Conservative, listener (#11)
#13. To: Vicomte13 (#12)
Nobody calls me Mad Dog.
#14. To: Biff Tannen (#13)
If aka had to pay you by the word we'd be having weekly fundraisers.
#15. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
Nobody is required to read it.
#16. To: Vicomte13 (#15)
Nobody is required to read it. And nobody DOES! LOL
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