But, and except for the cultural ramifications, I wouldn’t take too seriously the word meanings of the Old Testament. The Hebrews were late arrivals in the Levant, no earlier than 1100 BCE. My goodness. Sumeria was already forgotten to memory. Egypt was entering into its Middle Kingdom I think. The high civilization of the Minoans had already been swallowed up by both man made and natural disasters. And the conquest of Troy by the Myceneans was about to be a done deal.

We all know how Europeans landing in the Americas called the two continents virgin territory. I hope we all know the Americas had for a good two thousand years supported thriving civilizations prior to the arrival. The case is parallel.

When the Hebrews entered the Levant, coming out of the desert, they met with highly organized societies tending to the matrifocal. In order to establish themselves they had to call foul on all their neighbor-competitors, which they certainly did. And so the Goddess becomes a God, the notion of which has been a bugger boo ever since. Blake said it best when he called God a demi-urge and the Noboddaddy.

You say this: “That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.”

Here is the thing. To the ancient Egyptians, to Sumeria, even to the early Greeks, Chaos was known as generative and she was called Mother to all the Gods.

One other thing. “In the beginning was the word” is a Greek translation of the ancient Hebrew. Word in Greek is logos. In Greek it means truth. I think Jung rightly pointed out that the greatness of Greek Civ. depended upon the two essentials it understood, the play, the dynamic, between Logos and Eros.

By itself the word is never enough. Neither is truth in my opinion

Tere
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.
I was showing off my brand new
old unabridged dictionary, huge,
nearly two hands thick.
Over fifty years old. Paid two dollars
at a garage sale up in town.
We all agreed that a ‘51 UD was worth at least
a couple of bucks, but what the hell for?
Who needs that many useless obsolete words?

I said nothing is more important than words.
They teach us and nurture and lead.
They led us to civilization, right?
And what was it that God said
about words?

.
Copyright 2008 – SOFTWOOD-Seventy-eight Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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The other day I stumbled upon a strangely designed tome, the Jewish Publication Society’s Denim Bible.

Then there are editions of Bibles famous for their mangling of the text, e.g., the “Wife-hater Bible” of 1810 in which Luke 14:26 says “If any man come to me, and hates not his father… and his own wife also”, instead of “his own life.”
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Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all.
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The only thing more amusing is to have a bible-thumper quote that moldy old book to an atheist or a skeptic as if it had some authority. When God was passing out logic these guys must have been in the wrong line. Probably the one for self-righteous certainty.
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