Jonah and the Big Fish

I continue to work on Jonah. I must not be in a hurry. [a month later] Here is the playlist.

An English to Biblical Hebrew alphabet book

The beginning of a list of the animals in the Bible

Have you ever wondered about all the animals, or all the body parts in the Bible?

Bob's Bible: A is for Abandon (and by the way, B is for baboon) is a source for such a journey. This semantic analysis of every word in the Bible is a simple way of thinking about all those words in 7 broad domains and subdivided into 109 distinct sub-domains. So if someone makes a claim about the uniqueness of a word signifying light in the Bible, you can check it out. What are the stems related to light? And if you have the concordance as well, (check it out) where do they occur?

This volume contains a translator's introduction with several examples of the types of decisions I made in the translation process.

Lullaby for an infant humanity

The incarnation role in my oratorio is taken by the harp. Here is a duet for the harp and alto (who must be wisdom) with an optional soprano second part at the end. After hearing yesterday's reading for Trinity, I clearly saw this passage would fill a hole in my design, a hole that I had created by moving Psalm 19 to day 1. So I looked at it and what do you know, it formed itself into a lullaby.

Verse 23 has an astonishingly simple shape. It has no mid-verse rest but is simply g, f#, e. "From everlasting I have offered libation from the beginning, out of the precedents of earth." It shares this phrase with Psalms 76:5. "Light-giving you are more excellent than mountains of prey."

 I have begun a presentation of Jonah based on the music of the accents - we'll see if it turns out. Allow me a few months elapsed time. I am just working on the storm scene. I think chapter 2 will provide some hilarity and at least one moral chorus.

Jonah is ready (July 27)
Unleashing Leviathan here. (unleashed?)

Much more to do when I find performers...

Composers - look here - hundreds of pages of inspirational possibilities - you too could write an oratorio! Or a song - using the melodies that are written into the Biblical text.

Volume 8

Volume 8 of Bob's Bible is my full data base of the Hebrew Bible in its Hebrew to English form, a concordance of every Hebrew word and its full English gloss.

The volume contains every word in the Hebrew Bible. The glosses provided are for a close translation for the Music. The sequence presented is by Hebrew stem, Hebrew word form, Tanakh sequence, chapter, verse, and word sequence. In principle, the entire translation can be reconstructed from this data. (Just under 750,000 words).

This is Bob's Hebrew-English glossary after 8 years of my very human processing. What does a stem indicate in translation? How many differing senses can it have? Does it overlap with other stems? And so on. This glossary reduces the overlap of senses to a minimum. You may know about punishment, that there is no Hebrew stem that has punish as its dominant gloss. That is not true in traditional translations, where several Hebrew stems are rendered punish. They make the Bible read as if it was a book about rules and punishment. It is not such a book. Bob's Bible never uses this gloss. Search. You will not find it. The Bible is a book of instruction in love and a book about the depth of kindness from start to finish. There is no need for the wrong type of fear, a fear of torment. Healthy fear, of course, is quite appropriate. After all, we do not know everything, or even anything, fully.

Volume 9, A is for Abandon, will be out soon (next week!). This is the English-Hebrew equivalent with introduction and semantic analysis. It is a much shorter book (under 55,000 words). Every lemma form is listed with its stem and usage frequency.

Abandon assumptions (not hope).

These volumes reveal all my successes and compromises with concordance. Because no translation I am aware of has been done by a single translator with computer assisted pattern recognition and rules to show all failures of concordance, I suspect my translation has a far higher degree of concordance than any other available.

Volume 9 contains a list of all the stems that are exceptions to the glossing rules in the translation for the music, with their semantic sub-domain. Any single English lemma form that rendered two distinct Hebrew stems was flagged and investigated.

Exceptions were allowed in acrostic poems, word play, and of course for Aramaic. Also for English and Hebrew homonyms, closely related Hebrew stems through derivation or spelling, a few multi-faceted common words, and finally for some prepositions, particles, and conjunctions.

Not writing much

But I got this question from a conversation on Ian Paul's site - https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/is-the-bible-clear-on-marriage-or-anything-at-all/

"Are you sure you are not letting the media narrative of convenience, which allows little dissent, shape your view, rather than science doing so?"

Thanks for the question. I am not sure anyone will find my 'answer' satisfactory. What shapes my view? Certainly not 'the media narrative of convenience'. Nor do I seek 'dissent'. There is enough of that without seeking it. As for science, in this question it is not competent. The data are subjective. I cannot even identify myself without ambiguity. Can I even know if there are people who hate the gay agenda out of their own fears of who they are in themselves?

I was made a musician. I loved the music of Britten. How could I reconcile loving this music with despising its creator? I, a wasp, was made a scientist and a systems engineer. How could I pretend to understand all the stimuli in social structures that let me stay or think or act within an environment that was inherently prejudiced on dozens of fronts.

I found a starting point in Christ some 45 or so years ago. I am nearly 'finished' - on my way to the usual grave solution... but I can hardly say I have come to the end of the riches I have encountered. There is neither gay nor straight in the place which I have entered.

About 13 years ago, a voice in me said, How can you possibly understand the image of the son without learning the scriptures in the tongue I learned them in?

So I learned Hebrew and read the text and wrote it all out in English using my own computer programs to discover and enforce patterns in the source.

There is no substitution for actually reading the text.

I found there a full musical score embedded in hand signals in the text itself. This completely undoes the rigid logic of intellectual right and wrong that governs so much of our thinking.

We seek power. It is sin to take power without permission. I find now I cannot draw conclusions for others - individuals or groups - out of the Bible as if I had power over them because of my knowledge. I have no such power and cannot pretend to have it. "Knowledge puffs up".

Qohelet has a pithy verse that reminds me of the limits of ecclesiastical opinion. 4:17 (5:1 English) Keep your footing as you are walking to the house of God, and approach more to hear than to give an offering among the dullards, for they haven't a clue that what they do is evil (רע).

So here we are in 'the house of God' and we comment furiously regardless of the hurt (רע) that we might cause. We are the sea - we are leviathan, (am I the sea or a dragon that you put a guard over me? Job 7:12) we are brutes, (behemoth I was to you, Psalms 73:22).

Let's stop. Let's love someone who is excluded. We will certainly find the cost of love there.

Biblical Studies Carnival (159)

Claude Mariottini has posted the next carnival here.