This is an unusually long blog post—but for most of my readers, I think they will find it worth the time to read it.
It has been about a month since my last post. I have been working on something that is speculative. So, in years to come, it is not inconceivable that what you are about to read may be a bit embarrassing to me (if it turns out to be complete science fiction).
With that as a caveat disclaimer, here goes…
Here are some facts (this part is not speculative):
- People who are raised in the traditions and educational institutions of Judaism have proportionately far more impact (success) in business and politics and the arts than other people in the society.
- The Hebrew language is the only remaining (currently spoken by a significant population) language in its language group. (There are 98 different language groups. For example, English, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and about 439 other currently spoken languages, are all part of the same language group known as the Indo-European language group. Another example, the Sino-Tebetan language group has more than 400 languages in its language group, one of which is Mandarin Chinese.
- Traditionally, Jewish boys (and in more modern times, also Jewish girls) were required by custom and tradition to attend Hebrew school for several years. In Hebrew school, they were required to learn to speak and read significant portions of the Hebrew Tanakh Jewish Bible (which Christians call the Old Testament).
- In the early 1980s, I was the developer of Cortical Thought Theory, which became the theoretical basis for a large government project back in the 1990s that developed a human brain-like cognitive processor which read and understood (with common sense understanding that was not statistically distinguishable from human expert intelligence analysts based on outcome performance) newspaper accounts of various topics of interest to the U.S. intelligence community. I was a consultant on this project and was privy to the details of its architecture.
- The architecture of this human-like cognitive processor was comprised, in part, of multiple levels of well-defined syntactic and semantic cognitive processing. All of this architecture was dependent on the fact that English is a language that conjugates its verbs based on time (past, present and future tenses).
- Hebrew does NOT conjugate its verbs based on time. It conjugates its verbs based on action—specifically, whether and action is completed or ongoing.
- If we had built a human-like cognitive processor that spoke Hebrew instead of English, this change would have necessitated some pretty radical differences in several of the syntactic and semantic levels in that machine. In other words, if a person speaks (and thinks) in Hebrew, at least some of their cognitive analysis processes are different from those of a person who speaks (and thinks) in a language that conjugates its verbs based on time (like English, or most of the rest of the currently spoken languages on earth).
- Adam and Eve were evidently created with fully developed language ability. They did not need to learn a language over years as is done by all humans in this world today. God created them with fully formed language ability. This begs the question: What language was it?
- People spoke this one language up until Babel in about 2200 B.C. At that time, God confused human communication by creating at least 97 other languages (and spreading them around to the general population).
Now for the speculation:
- Dr. Stephen Armstrong (and perhaps others) has made a compelling case for the proposition that Hebrew was the original language spoken by Adam and Eve. One of the evidences he cites for this is that the names for the people in Genesis prior to Noah’s flood were Hebrew names—often made up of common Hebrew words that are still in use in Hebrew as it is spoken today and as it appears throughout the Hebrew Tanakh Jewish Bible.
- What if Hebrew was intelligently designed by the same God who created the human brain to be the optimal language for the way the human brain processes concepts? If that were the case, then people who speak (and think in) Hebrew, might have a significant advantage in thinking wisely (effectively) about things in life. This could help to explain why those who learn Hebrew as children tend to be more successful than those who don’t.
- If it is true that learning Hebrew helps one to think more like God designed them to think, would it not also follow that they will be better able to grasp some of the intricacies of God’s word when it is read in Hebrew, that might otherwise be masked when reading it in a another language? Would thinking more clearly the thoughts of God also give someone a significant advantage when it comes to addressing the challenges one finds in life?
Because of my background in discovering how to build computers that are able think like humans in English, it seems to me that conjugating verbs based on action instead of time is no small thing. The fact that one can communicate effectively if one only focuses on whether or not an action is completed or whether it is not completed but is an ongoing action is quite profound to someone like me whose human-like cognitive processor REQUIRED it to know whether a verb was being conjugated in the past, present, or future. The realization that this “time” distinction may actually obscure proper thinking and analysis, is a radical thought.
One example where the very throne of God communicates differently along these lines with the Hebrew mind and the Greek mind can be found in the words uttered from the throne of God. In Isaiah 6:3, the angels at God’s throne communicate to a Hebrew mind with the words, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” But in Revelation 4:8, when those same angels communicate with a Greek speaking audience, they say, “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.” This is an example where the characteristic of God being communicated is to “all the earth” when speaking to a Hebrew mind, but to “all of time” when speaking to a Greek mind. (English speakers have a Greek mind.)
But Greek was not the original language. Greek, in all of its elaborate intricacies (which are far more complex than English), is not the language designed to best match the design of man’s brain, which presumably is the one that Adam and Eve had when God created them in the image of God. So, does this mean that Hebrew is more a representation of the true image of God than is Greek? That is speculation.
There are several things about Hebrew that intrigue me. I continue to study Hebrew from the perspective of one who knows how to analyze human language in such precise detail that one is able to give human reasoning to a computer. From this perspective, Hebrew is not just another human language. There are many VERY profound aspects of this language, and as I learn it, I am intrigued. Perhaps I will talk about some of the other profound observations I have about Hebrew in later blogs. But suffice it to say that if I had it all to do over again, I would make sure all my home-schooled children minored in Greek, but majored in Hebrew.
This was post from the blog at https://beholdthechrist.com
written by Dr. Richard Routh
January 31, 2020