ב Ge 1:2

והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך עלפני תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת עלפני המים

ג Ge 1:3

ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהיאור

ד Ge 1:4

וירא אלהים אתהאור כיטוב ויבדל אלהים בין האור ובין החשך

ה Ge 1:5

ויקרא אלהים לאור יום ולחשך קרא לילה ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום אחד

ו Ge 1:6

ויאמר אלהים יהי רקיע בתוך המים ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים

ז Ge 1:7

ויעש אלהים את-הרקיע ויבדל בין המים אשר מתחת לרקיע ובין המים אשר מעל לרקיע ויהיכן

ח Ge 1:8

ויקרא אלהים לרקיע שמים ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום שני

ט Ge 1:9

ויאמר אלהים יקוו המים מתחת השמים אלמקום אחד ותראה היבשה ויהיכן

י Ge 1:10

ויקרא אלהים ליבשה ארץ ולמקוה המים קרא ימים וירא אלהים כיטוב

יא Ge 1:11

ויאמר אלהים תדשא הארץ דשא עשב מזריע זרע עץ פרי עשה פרי למינו אשר זרעובו עלהארץ ויהיכן

יב Ge 1:12

ותוצא הארץ דשא עשב מזריע זרע למינהו ועץ עשהפרי אשר זרעובו למינהו וירא אלהים כיטוב

יג Ge 1:13

ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום שלישי

יד Ge 1:14

ויאמר אלהים יהי מארת ברקיע השמים להבדיל בין היום ובין הלילה והיו לאתת ולמועדים ולימים ושנים

טו Ge 1:15

והיו למאורת ברקיע השמים להאיר עלהארץ ויהיכן

טז Ge 1:16

ויעש אלהים אתשני המארת הגדלים אתהמאור הגדל לממשלת היום ואתהמאור הקטן לממשלת הלילה ואת הכוכבים

יז Ge 1:17

ויתן אתם אלהים ברקיע השמים להאיר עלהארץ

יח Ge 1:18

ולמשל ביום ובלילה ולהבדיל בין האור ובין החשך וירא אלהים כיטוב

יט Ge 1:19

ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום רביעי

כ Ge 1:20

ויאמר אלהים ישרצו המים שרץ נפש חיה ועוף יעופף עלהארץ עלפני רקיע השמים

כא Ge 1:21

ויברא אלהים אתהתנינם הגדלים ואת כלנפש החיה הרמשת אשר שרצו המים למינהם ואת כלעוף כנף למינהו וירא אלהים כיטוב

כב Ge 1:22

ויברך אתם אלהים לאמר פרו ורבו ומלאו אתהמים בימים והעוף ירב בארץ

כג Ge 1:23

ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום חמישי

כד Ge 1:24

ויאמר אלהים תוצא הארץ נפש חיה למינה בהמה ורמש וחיתוארץ למינה ויהיכן

כה Ge 1:25

ויעש אלהים אתחית הארץ למינה ואתהבהמה למינה ואת כלרמש האדמה למינהו וירא אלהים כיטוב

כו Ge 1:26

ויאמר אלהים נעשה אדם בצלמנו כדמותנו וירדו בדגת הים ובעוף השמים ובבהמה ובכלהארץ ובכלהרמש הרמש עלהארץ

כז Ge 1:27

ויברא אלהים אתהאדם בצלמו בצלם אלהים ברא אתו זכר ונקבה ברא אתם

כח Ge 1:28

ויברך אתם אלהים ויאמר להם אלהים פרו ורבו ומלאו אתהארץ וכבשה ורדו בדגת הים ובעוף השמים ובכלחיה הרמשת עלהארץ

כט Ge 1:29

ויאמר אלהים הנה נתתי לכם אתכלעשב זרע זרע אשר עלפני כלהארץ ואתכלהעץ אשרבו פריעץ זרע זרע לכם יהיה לאכלה

ל Ge 1:30

ולכלחית הארץ ולכלעוף השמים ולכל רומש עלהארץ אשרבו נפש חיה אתכלירק עשב לאכלה ויהיכן

לא Ge 1:31

וירא אלהים אתכלאשר עשה והנהטוב מאד ויהיערב ויהיבקר יום הששי

Notes

bereshith

My rabbi friend said that 'created' (bara) can be understood as 'created by the word', since, in their hermeneutic, whenever God created, he did so by speaking. It is not much of a stretch to understand it as 'the word which created'.

My friend points out that if one does not know the meaning of a Hebrew word, it can be discerned using the combined metaphor of the letters comprising it. And that various combinations of the letter contribute to the meaning of the word. Many of the rabbis play these word games. Some go so far as to scramble the letter, which violates the more fundamental 2-letter construct called a 'gate'. When two letters are reversed, the meaning is reversed. It is not quite the same as opposite. The rabbis who do these things don't agree on the letter metaphor, but I have found a particular set to be 'interesting' in what it produces

So my friend shows me that בראשית can be discerned as ברא created שית six, since God created in six days. And I show him that it can also be discerned as בר the son א spoke and created the heavens and the earth שית in six.

Since the rabbis ask why the Torah doesn't begin with the first letter of the alphabet, I have placed it before bereshith to show that it really does. It is silent and invisible:

א-ב-ר-א-ש-י-ת

א - God spoke and created the heavens and the earth. Aleph is silent, because no one heard him do it. It is invisible because no one saw him do it.

ב - This is a revelation to man. ר - It is revealed that א - God spoke and created the heavens and the earth ש - When he spoke, his word did not return void. י - What he intended to do ת - He completed.

ב-ראש-י-ת in - the authority (heads of) - the creator - (made to be an object) בר-אש-ית as ברית with אש in the center. A covenant with man at the center. בר-א-שית the son created an appointment (the appointed time) בר-אשי-ת the son - offered total devotion (the burnt offering) - (made to be an object)

And last but certainly not least we observe that ברא is in בראשית : The Word which created was 'in the beginning'.

ברא is next to Elohim, so the Word was with God.

ברא describes God (and the Son) as the creator, so the Word was God.

Should we doubt this, it is confirmed by other word-play nearby:

אמר amar is 'said' or 'the word'. It is also 'lamb'. When God said, "Let there be light", he created light by the אמר lamb. The Lamb of God is the word of God and is the creator.

Just some observations. Do with them what you may.

Incidentally, Elohim has puns meaning 'light', 'life' and 'bread', which John also uses. Could modern rabbis retain some semblance of the first century hermeneutic of John, be it somewhat distorted with time, and early intent to hide Christ from their own (such as violating the principle of gates)?

p.s. there is a kind of fractal expansion from the alef to the bereshith to Gen 1.1 to Gen 1 to the rest of the Bible. They each say, in greater detail, that God spoke and created the heavens and the earth.

A non-Augustinian hermeneutic

This hermeneutic is incompatible with Catholic and Protestant hermeneutic inherited from Augustine (making conversation difficult, so I appreciate your patience). The church has been troubled with free-for-all allegory, yet you can see much of it in the discussions. In this Hebrew hermeneutic, a metaphor is the same everywhere it appears, and has a self-correcting nature about it. Typology has a different flavor. Greek typology is based on the characteristics of objects. Hebrew typology is based in word play, riddle and pattern.

As such, it doesn't make sense to post this in the various sub-threads as though it is a challenge to them, since a more productive approach is to try and understand it in it's own context.

Darkness Before God said "Let there be light" he dwelt in darkness. He did not dwell in evil. Though the Greek does not claim that God dwells in evil, the inconsistency of the type is excused by simply not applying the type in this case.

John explains the pun of Elohim. אלחום 'alokhoom' which means 'not dark':

1Jo 1:5 ¶ This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

In John 1 he said that Jesus was the Light. He was the 'not dark'. this can be said from the word play of Elohim. John also said that Jesus was the Life. this also comes from a pun of Elohim (אלהים): God's Life אלחיים (Elochaim).

Although the Light was not yet expressed, it was hidden in his name. And God was engulfed in darkness. The two primary attributes of God are Love and Holiness. Holiness is expressed through separation, but prior to the creation of Light, God was not separate from anything. He existed in perfect unity. Though he had all the attributes of Holiness it could not be expressed since there was nothing to be separate from.

The letter alef א has a primary metaphor of God speaking and creating the heavens and the earth. It is also the firmament separating the waters, and the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters (two waters, one face). John uses it to represent the Spirit which hovered over the waters in 1 Joh 5.8.

(The word for earth ארץ has three letters which have the meaning: א Spirit hovering over the face of the waters, ר the living Torah which is the living Water, and ץ representing the blood of the righteous man in the grave. By the way, the three consonants in heaven שמים represent the Spirit (giving life and making the word not void), the Father (declaring a covenant in heaven) and the Son (fulfilling the covenant on earth) And both words for heaven and earth have a gematria of three (there are three in heaven and three on earth).

We get ברא to be the Son בר who spoke and created the heavens and the earth... by separation א. God is separate from his creation. He is Holy. His first expression "Let there be Light" is an expression of His holiness, which was hidden in his name.

This leaves darkness to be Love. The popular meaning for darkness as 'evil' is related but is from a different perspective. God dwelt in perfect love (darkness) before there was light.

When men are in God's Love, they are requiring grace. If man is not holy and is not yet judged, he is receiving grace. He is in darkness. His sin is hidden in darkness, and he loves the grace. But God commands sinful men to be holy; to come into the light.

John can explain the word-play saying that there is no darkness 'in' God, and truthfully say that there is no Love 'in' God. It is not 'in' him since He IS Love (1Jo 4:8). It is not a separate thing which is contained 'in' him.

Void The Hebrew ontology is different from the Greek. Looking at a black and white checker board, the Greek would say that the white squares, representing the things we see, are the underlying reality. The Hebrew says that God (the black squares) are the underlying reality.

Genesis suggests that originally the board was nothing but black squares. When God chose to create, he could not create outside of himself since there is no container bigger than God. "The heaven of heavens cannot contain thee".

So God created the earthly things by expanding himself to make room for us in the voids. He first created the white squares which are void. We are made of nothing. "In him all things hold together and have their being". We are clusters of voids within God, rather than particles of stuff in a vacuum.

So what is real is God, and this life is but a shadow. "...all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? " Ec 6:12 "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Heb 11:3

Like a 3D negative, what we think is real is the void, and what we think is the void is the reality of God. When you remove everything from a box to create a vacuum, God is still there.

I think it was Clement who said that the Greek philosophers had plagiarized Hebrew wisdom. To them there is a prototype idea which is the essence of something, making something invisible the reality and the physical just a representation of it as a bit of a twist on the Hebrew ontology.

Day יום yom

The interesting thing about the set of alphbetic metaphor is that they are reusable, and continually throw a different perspective on things. The different perspective is always Christocentric.

The vav ו when used asa prefix, means 'and'. It's primary metaphor is that God spoke into the void to reveal his holiness or separateness from his creation. Like 'and' the vav distinguished between two things while joining them. It can be said that it 'clarifies' or 'makes distinct'.

From previous usage the yud י represents all that God intended to do, and the final mem ם represents the Son completing the covenant made by the Father.

In יום yom, what God intended to do is made distinct from what the Son completed. It is 'clarified'. We find that each day is a distinct picture of Christ.

Furthermore the days act like table of contents entries pointing to seven other sections of scripture, each of which are also pictures of Christ.

Day 1 - Light is created pointing to the narrative of Adam up through Genesis 5. In this hidden prpophecy of Christ, the main theme is that God is made known as being Holy and Love or Light and Dark.

Day 2 - The separation of the waters points to the narrative of Noah who represents Christ as the firmament between the waters above and the waters below.

Day 3 - The dry land points to the narrative of the Fathers where the theme is the inheritance of the land. This portion continues through the narrative of Joseph, who is not one of the Fathers, but is the Son who became the king of kings.

Day 4 - The lights are placed in the firmament as Israel is chosen to be witnesses of God in a world demanding grace. Israel is born out of Egypt by the pillars of light and the cloud. This vignette of Christ continues through the 40 years of Israel's sojourn in the desert.

Day 5 - The life which is abundant points to Israel in the promised land. Though in the historical reality, Israel was not very faithful to God, the prophecy of Christ concerns The Son and his unfaithful bride who were fruitful in the flesh.

Day 6. the flocks and the man and his bride point to the life of Christ when Jesus came as the Shepherd to gather his sheep, and to arrange the marriage of the Lamb.

Day 7 - As the church enters the rest of Christ through the cross, the man and his bride are fruitful and multuiplying. The bride is a virgin bride whoi is fruitful by the fruit of the Spirit, and multiplies through teaching and discipleship.

This layer of the 'fractal' nature of scripture is the fourth layer. The first layer is the unity of the whole Bible, the second is the division between Old and New covenants, the third layer reveals the portions of scripture written by each of the persons of the Godhead.

Genesis is the book of the Father, where the Father says "Look at my Son". The story of Israel is a two part story by the Son who tells in great detail how he loves, woos, and works for his bride, and how she breaks his heart. The New Testament is the two-part story of the Holy Ghost saying "Here comes the bridegroom, and see the marriage of the lamb and their fruitfulness.

This fourth layer (the layer of the days of Genesis 1) divides the history of man into seven section, each being a picture of Christ. Each of these sections divides into vignettes of Christ, and they each divide into smaller pictures down to the yud and vav's (the strokes) making up the individual letters of the alphabet. (BTW jot = iota which is derived from yod. The tittle is a horn. Symbolically the horn is blown at the beginning of a declaration. It distinguished what follows... just like the vav.)