According to ancient mystical teachings, the Ancient Hebrew letter א (aleph) has the numerical value of one and is closely connected with the unity of the monotheistic God. With this in mind, it is interesting to look at various Biblical Hebrew vocabulary words that begin with א, and, armed with a fuller understanding of the Biblical context and Ancient Hebrew, we can better understanding the deeper meaning behind some of these words.
- אָדָם (adam) means "human" in Biblical Hebrew. The last two letters of the word (דם) means "blood" in the Ancient Hebrew language, as well as in Modern Hebrew. If we understand that the א represents the monotheistic God, then we see that without God, man is simply blood – his most basic physical component. In other words, with a more complete understanding, we understand that the Biblical Hebrew word for "human" includes an implicit explanation that without the divine spark, humans are nothing more than blood, flesh and bones.
- אֱמֶת (emet) means "truth" in Biblical Hebrew. This is also one of the many names for the Lord found in the Hebrew Bible, and it therefore has a bit of a more spiritual connotation than the word "truth" in English. If we remove the letter א from the word, we get the word מת (met), meaning "dead". Similar to what we found with the Ancient Hebrew word for "human", here we find that in the Biblical Hebrew language, truth without its divine aspect is simply dead, empty and lacking content.
- אִישׁ (eesh) means "man" in Biblical Hebrew. As with the Biblical Hebrew words for both "human" and "truth", we find that with "man", the meaning of the word changes dramatically (and in terms of significance) when we take out the letter א, which is associated with God. Here, we are left with the word יש (yesh), meaning "there is", relating to existence. From this we can conclude that just as a human without the divine aspect is just blood, flesh and bones, man without the divine aspect is just something which exists, but is devoid of spirit.
0 comments:
Post a Comment