What do we mean by “Two books of the Divine” and their “Scientific Linkage”? In this post, I discuss the significance of my research about the Jewish Hebrew Bible and biblical Hebrew.
Since my research findings were first published in a book (Shore, 2007) and later, when these findings had become more widely spread due to Oren Evron’s movie (Evron, 2014, 2015), I have received mixed responses, extending from complete apathy, to attempts to explain away the findings by attributing them to ancient Earthly civilizations that somehow possessed modern scientific knowledge, up to sincere and true appreciation of the implications of the findings as alluding to the divine origin of biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew Torah.
In all these responses, one element seems to have been missing, and that is the inevitable conclusion emerging from the new discoveries:
The two books of the Divine are scientifically linked.
What do we mean by “the two books”?
Since its primary inception at the historic event of receiving the Ten Commandments by Moses at Mount Sinai, Judaism has consistently emphasized the two aspects of the Divine, as experienced by humans: God as creator of the cosmos and Law of Nature (Genesis 1:14, 8:22), and God as source of morality and its dictates.
Those two percepts of the Divine correspond to our own personal experience as concurrently living in two worlds:
* “The World of Law of Nature”, where free will is not feasible since violating law of nature results in immediate, apparent and non-miraculous penalty;
* “The World of Randomness”, where apparently no law exists with adverse consequence for its violation, wherefore we are free to act as we please.
Example for the first world (“Law of Nature”) is jumping from the 100th floor of a high-rise, where ignoring (“violating”) gravity results in immediate unambiguous “penalty”; An example for the second world (“Randomness”) is responding to a beggar’s plea for money, where we exercise free will on how to react, with seemingly no apparent consequence and no implication to our own personal destiny (irrespective of how we have responded).
The Ten Commandments, relevant only to the “World of Randomness”, where free will can be exercised, convey to us the “news”:
By word of the Creator, you are not completely free to act as you please.
Our own personal experience of the world as allowing free will, however only to a confined degree, namely, only in “The world of randomness”, this personal experience is expressed in biblical Hebrew in two concepts of the Divine, as creator and as source of morality. These concepts are epitomized in two names for the Divine, which repeatedly appear throughout the Hebrew Jewish Bible:
Elohim and Jehovah
(Please relate to my talk with Avi Ben-Morechai, accessible on this blog).
Prophet Isiah explicitly reference these two names and what they stand for:
“For thus says Jehovah that created the heavens, Elohim himself that formed Earth and made it, he has established it, not a wasteland created He it .. I am Jehovah and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:18).
The two books of the Divine, corresponding to these two names, are the physical cosmos, subject of investigation by modern physics, and Hebrew Torah. These two books have heretofore been perceived as unrelated to one another (at least not scientifically). For example: To this day, well known physical constants, like the speed of light or the electromagnetic charge of an electron, are accepted by modern physics as given. Furthermore, it is accepted that there is no scientifically established theory to determine these constants, apart from stating that if these constants were minutely changed the cosmos as we know it would not have been in existence (see lengthy discussion of this issue, for example, in Wikipedia, entry “Fine-tuned Universe” and references therein).
Obviously, no one ever linked these physical constants to biblical Hebrew.
The scientific new discoveries have changed this perception. They lead unavoidably to the conclusion that numerical values of biblical Hebrew words represent quantitative values of major physical properties of objects that the words stand for. For example, Eretz (Earth in Hebrew) represents Earth’s geometrical properties (like diameter and surface area) but also Earth’s mass, all of which are major physical properties of Earth. The scientifically unexplainable nature of the physical constants, alluded to earlier, become explainable in light of the new scientifically established discoveries: The speed of light (a physical constant) is what it is because light in Hebrew is Or, with a numerical value of 207 (which, by proper change of scale, converts into the physical speed of light).
By establishing the deep significance of the numerical values of Hebrew words, namely, their relationships to actual physical properties observed in the cosmos, the two worlds experienced in our lives, the “World of Law of Nature” and the “World of Randomness” (where apparently no law prevails unless one regards the Ten Commandments and their derivatives), these two worlds are scientifically unified and experienced as originating in one source. At the same time, the two books of the Divine, “Law of Nature” and “Law of Morality”, Elohim and Jehovah, respectively, no longer are experienced as separate “entities”: One subject to scientific enquiry; the other existing as a controvertible article of faith.
Rather, physical reality and morality are experienced as stemming from a single source.
With this, an ancient prophecy starts to begin to have its imprint on the annals of human history:
“..On that day Jehovah will be one and his name One” (Zechariah 14:9).
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