Phoenicia meaning

Meaning

Palm Land, Victorious Palm Tree

Alert Ones, Realm Of Those Who Turn or Make Others Turn, Your [God's] Face, Your [God's] Presence

Etymology

From φοινιξ (phoinix), palm tree, plus (tongue in cheek:) νικη (nike), victory.

From פנה (pana), to turn to, or פני, face of ... , plus the pronoun ך (cha), your.

Related names

• Via φοινιξ (phoinix): Phoenix

• Via νικη (nike): Andronicus, Bernice, Eunice, Nicanor, Nicodemus, Nicolaitans, Nicolas, Nicopolis, Thessalonica

• Via פנה (pana): Hazelelponi, Jephunneh, Peniel, Peninnah, Penuel, Phanuel, Phinehas, Pinon, Punon

By the first century, the name Phoenicia referred to a narrow strip of land just north of Judea, and occurs in the New Testament in Acts 11:19, 15:3 and 21:2 only. But much more so, the name Phoenicia also referred to an ancient phenomenon that was still spoken of in terms of hushed wonder: a mystical Paradisical world of maritime trade that had somehow declined into mundanity, but not before leaving us our modern world. The Phoenicians of antiquity were the Ancient Aliens of the classical world, who had landed out of nowhere on the primitive European shores in their floating wooden horses — so named after the horse heads mounted conspicuously on the bow — in billowing colors carrying strangely sounding people, bearings gifts of splendor and marvel.

Like the Spirit of God had in even deeper antiquity (Genesis 1:2), and Jesus would many centuries later (Matthew 14:25-27), the Phoenicians too walked on water. Back then, a ship (ναυς, naus) was something of a movable temple (ναος, naos), from which flowed (ναω, nao) rivers of pure mind (νουσ, nous) that made the world new (νεοσ, neos). In Hebrew, the verb נאס (na'as) means to utter a prophesy, and noun נאס (ne'os) means utterance or revelation, while נשא (nasa') means to lift up (Genesis 7:17). This is significant, because the Greek word for resurrection, namely αναστασις (anastasis), describes not a single and sudden event but rather a process of continued rising or bringing up out of: an extraction, in other words, or a harvest.

Most significantly, the Phoenicians, who spoke a language closely similar to Biblical Hebrew, gave the world the alphabet and triggered the first real software revolution of the modern age as the world at large became literate. The Phoenicians quite literally built the original Internet. They sprayed the alphabet like seeds from a burst pod all over the Mediterranean coasts, and simply watched what would sprout into intellectual life and what fruits could be picked from whatever popped up (Matthew 13:1-9, Genesis 2:16).

The name Phoenicia is an exonym, given by non-Phoenicians to members of the maritime trading culture that had emerged in the power vacuum left by the Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century BCE (see Eric H. Cline's book 1177 BC: the Year Civilization Ended). Up to that collapse, in which the world quite literally ended, the Phoenician cities had been under Egyptian rule and were little more than slaves. But, as the story tells, Pharaoh and his armies were drowned in the Sea of Reeds, and by the time of Israel's first kings (1000 BC), the Phoenician sphere stretched across the north coast of Africa, from its founding cities Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Byblos in Canaan to the Atlantic coast of Spain and possibly the British Isles, where much of Europe's tin originated. This was not an "empire", as it had no emperor or even central government, and was kept consistent solely by common convictions and a broadly shared enthusiasm for mutually beneficial trade.

These earliest, post-collapse Phoenicians were unique in that they avoided violent conquest and rather ever expanded their world by being generous and respectfully curious about their neighbors and theirs and theirs, and what goods they might have to offer, what technologies they might have invented and what stories they might have come up with. The collapse had wiped out all tradition of societal government, all "elders" if you will, and the Phoenicians were societal children going around in virginal innocence looking for other kids to play with. Their "empire" was an empire of collective wisdom, pooled resources and the facilitation and accommodation of human diversity: a truly Republican dream-world, which the shaken peoples of the world willingly joined and contributed to.

The Phoenicians not only gave the world the alphabet, they also invented insurance when their individual ships began to offer small sums into a collective treasury, to reimburse anyone whose ship had been lost at sea. In Roman times this principle became known as Lex Rhodia (Rhodian Law), which became the basis of all effective insurance. The profundity of this may escape the casual reader but Paul says it this way: "Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

Originally, the main city of the Phoenicians was Tyre, and through the prophet Ezekiel, God said to the proverbial king of Tyre: "You had the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God [...]. You were the anointed cherub who covers, and I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God" (Ezekiel 28:12-14).

But, as William Wordsworth would famously note, the child became the father of the man, and the man lost his innocence and his Paradise of abundance and splendor went up in the smoke of greed and fear. Most shamefully, the once-hallowed name Tyre morphed into the name of the widely abhorred principle of "tyranny".

In her outstanding study In Search of the Phoenicians (2018), Josephine Quinn explains that the actual members of that ancient and innocent maritime trading culture didn't consider themselves a single unified people and didn't call themselves Phoenicians, in the very same way that the first settlers of the American colonies didn't refer to themselves as "Americans", and the members of the modern Western World don't consider themselves part of one people or call themselves People Of The Dollar.

In fact, the name Phoenician didn't exist, and the oneness of the Phoenicians wasn't there beyond a roughly-common language, mostly the same deities and a shared appreciation of peaceful trade, until in the 7th century BCE the Lydians invented coin money — and note the obvious pun in the Lucan character of Lydia the purple-merchant of Thyatira (Acts 16:14).

The most signature quality of the Phoenicians was their world famous purple dye that was referred to by its trademark "Phoenician" in the same way that products like champagne, parchment and eau-de-cologne were named after the place they were invented, respectively: French Champagne, Greek Pergamum and German Cologne.

The color purple (yes, like the film) was widely associated with regalness, which is why the Roman soldiers donned Jesus in a purple robe (John 19:2). These royal robes obtained their color from a highly prized dye, that in turn came from a tiny marine creature called πορφυρα (porphura) or Murex. In Hebrew, this creature was referred to by the common word for worm or maggot, namely תולעת (tola'at), hence the word תולע (tola'a), meaning crimson (as in "...though they are red like crimson, as wool they shall be"; Isaiah 1:18). It's precisely that creature called תולעת (tola'at) that ruined Jonah's shady plant (Jonah 4:7).

The word used to describe Jonah's plant, namely קיקיון (qiqayon), occurs nowhere else in the Bible, so we don't know what plant the original story teller had in mind. But whatever plant it was, the word that described it was clearly not dissimilar to the word קיקלון (qiqalon), meaning shame or futility (Habakkuk 2:16 only), from the verb קלל (qalal), to be light, swift or fleeting, which is not unlike the sentiments expressed in the name of Abel, the brother of Cain. A beginning hearer of Hebrew may be forgiven to confuse our verb קלל (qalal) with גלל (galal), to be round or to roll around (hence names like Galilee and Golgotha), and our word קיקלון (qiqalon) with גלגל (galgal), meaning wheel, and ultimately with the familiar word κυκλος, (kuklos), meaning circle, from a Proto-Indo-European root "kwel-", meaning to go around and around.

The Lydian invention of standardized coin money allowed for a much more complex economy, and formed a realm of reciprocative trade very similar to a language basin in which common coinage was the language in which the economy was conducted. By that time, this largely similar meta-culture that dominated the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean and radiated out from its founding cities of Tyre and Sidon, began to be more identified with Tyre's increasingly successful "daughter" Carthage, in modern Tunis. When the Carthaginians began to mint their own coin, the economy that this coin pervaded began to find Carthage as its new center of gravity. This Carthaginian coin featured a palm tree, which in Greek is φοινιξ (phoinix):

And so, the people of that coin began to be known by outsiders as the Palm People, although, as we will discuss further below, the epithet Palm People probably came first and the coin came after.

The name Phoenician meant in antiquity precisely the same thing as what Dollar-People or Eagle-People would mean today if the world at large would have chosen to refer to Americans that way (and yes, Tolkien's famous books comment on the two world wars, and the Eagles obviously correspond to the role of the Americans in both). That is rather remarkable, because the US is to Great Britain what Carthage was to Tyre.

Phoenicia in the time of the New Testament was what Britain is in ours: the battered and reduced core of a once great eagle, whose wings now folded once embraced the whole world and gave it its freedom and splendor. Mistakes were made and atrocities were committed, and the reasons for its ultimate reduction will remain clearly displayed forever. But its trailblazing glory too will be remembered in perpetuity.

When the Egyptian and Hittite empires succumbed in the Bronze Age Collapse, the Phoenicians arose in a world with no significant natural predators and flourished like quails in a shaded down. That changed in the 8th century, when first Assyria and later the Persians and finally the Greeks rose in power, continuously laid siege to Phoenicia and drove many to seek refuge west, to any land that would take them. The poets declared that in the very same year, namely 753 BC, Carthage was founded as a colony of Tyre, and Rome as a colony of Troy — the settlements had been there since deep antiquity; what the foundational legends tell of is the beginning of their monarchal governments and hence of them as political identities. The increasingly vicious competition between Rome and Carthage resulted in the Punic Wars, the third of which ended in 146 BCE, in the complete annihilation of Carthage by Rome. This beastly act of fratricide was an earth-shattering atrocity that required the Roman invention of systematic genocide. The trauma this caused was still fresh in New Testament times: the story told in Mark 7:24-30 clearly alludes to it.

For more Biblical allusions to the decline of Phoenicia, and ultimately the destruction of Carthage, see our article on Hannibal. In this article, we will focus on the pre-Carthage proto-Phoenicians.

The name Britain is rumored to derive from a Celtic original of unclear meaning. In Greek, however, Britain was known as Βρεττανιαι (Brettaniai) since at least the fourth century BCE when the Greek explorer Pytheas visited the islands and wrote about that. At the time, Pytheas was living in Massalia, a Greek colony since the 7th century BCE that sat where modern Marseille still sits, namely on the Mediterranean coast of France. And while the Mare Nostrum was bound in the south and east by the Phoenicians, in the west there stood the formidable Pillars of Hercules, whose motto nec plus ultra proclaimed that nothing existed beyond. Yet Britain did, somehow in existential limbo, as much on earth as in some mythological heaven.

Around that same time, the famous philosopher Plato — whose name derives from the adjective πλατυς (platus), meaning broad, wide or vulgar: populistic — advocated the ideal state through vigorous law enforcement, and when Jesus warned against the broad road to destruction and praised the narrow gate to salvation (Matthew 7:13-14), only very few people in his original audience would have missed the pun. The pun continues in modern times in the signature double lines of the symbols for coins like the dollar, the euro and even Bitcoin. Even the design of the former World Trade Center, the Twin Towers, was based on the Pillars of Hercules and the assault on that building complex was above all an assault on the Free Market.

Contrary to common belief: a physical human is a mere animal (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10) and the hallowed quality of "humanity" or that which the Bible calls Adam, emerges solely from human interaction and trade (of goods, services, entertainment, information and kindness). Hence trade is creationary, generative and holy (see our article on Abraham, the "father" of international trade), and standardized money facilitates a much greater economic complexity than non-standard chunks of gold, or even barter or memorizing the complex balances of outstanding favors (explains David Graeber in his riveting book Debt: The First 500 Years, 2011). Love, however, exceeds all record keeping (see our article on Mammon), and the "love of money" is an oxymoron, the playful opposite of being a "slave to freedom" (Romans 6:16-23). The latter is the root of all virtue and the former the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

The works of Pytheas were widely read in the ancient world, and the name by which he referred to the mystical islands beyond, namely Βρεττανιαι (Brettaniai), would have reminded everybody of the term Βρεττιος (Brettios), or Bruttian. This name Bruttian actually more specifically referred to a tribe of immigrants in the foot of the boot of Italy, and probably ultimately relates to some ancient word for deer. To Latin speakers, the name Bruttian would probably have reminded of the formally unrelated term brutus, which rather relates to the familiar noun βαρβαρος (barbaros), barbarian. But via whatever way, the name Bruttian became a widely used synonym for rebels or fugitive slaves in much the same way that the ethnonyms Cretan (someone from Crete) and Gypsy (someone from Egypt) and Jew (someone from Judea) also became synonymous with certain real or imagined traits.

This original tribe of Bruttians, or so reports the first century BC historian Diodorus Siculus (Lib.16.15), was not actually a real tribe but rather an amalgamation of escapees from all over the place, who had somehow found each other, then banded together, conquered some land and formed a government that made them thrive and gave them formidable importance in the wider region. All this is notable not only because this is precisely how Israel had formed, much earlier (see our article on the Gospel of Impurity), and how the United States of America would form, much later, but also because the Roman nobles (including the Julio-Claudians) insisted that they too were the descendants of fugitives, namely Trojan survivors of the Trojan War (explains Virgil in his Aeneid).

Another word that may have been associated with the name Βρεττανιαι (Brettaniai) is the noun βρετος (bretos), which describes the image of some deity (Zeus, Athena). That word too is of unknown origin, but here at Abarim Publications we suspect that all these terms may have been helped into existence by their proximity to the Hebrew words ברר (barar), to clean or purify, באר (be'er), water-well (hence also the name Beirut, meaning "wells"), and finally ברית (berit), meaning covenant, as in Ark of the Covenant (ארון הברית, aron ha berit), and the Modern Hebrew name for the United States: ארצות הברית (arzot ha berit), which literally means Lands of the Covenant.

But what, one wonders, is a covenant that both the most important Scriptural principle and the two most powerful empires in the history of mankind were named after it?

A covenant is a synthetic or unnatural "force" that binds together parties that are not bound by any natural means including gravity, electromagnetism and sentimental or biological ones like desires, greed, fear, nepotism, hero worship, tribal favoritism. A covenant is a norm, a standard, a coupling entirely devoid of sentiment and emotion, within which two or more naturally separate parties are artificially unified (to the great sentimental joy of all involved). A covenant is a ratio, and the basis of rationality. And like the Greek word αναστασις (anastasis), resurrection, that we mentioned earlier, our word covenant describes not an instant or singular event but rather a very long process of unification toward the whole and perfect oneness of the Creator.

God has been making covenants with humanity since Adam, which are all the same covenant: it's the zipper that slowly but surely zips together the realm of the deity and his creation. It's the covenant of ever more unity, from the first flicker of societal interest in one's neighbor (Genesis 4:26) to the formation of language, then a common law, the building of the central Temple to Rationality (that's the "First" one), which made possible the decentralized Republic (that's the "Second" one), which makes possible a global realm of perfect righteousness and efficiency and joy (that'll be the "Third" one).

The covenant is the atom of law, and therefore all predictability and wisdom. No large kingdom or empire can exist by merit of feelings or tribal allegiance, and only by merit of a rational law that supersedes all natural priorities (hence Exodus 12:49, Luke 14:26, Romans 2:11). Only a covenant-based lifestyle can have a global or universal scope (Isaiah 11:3, John 7:24), and the constitution of that is given in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, which is why many people who are serious about the covenant and the eternal worldwide kingdom, recite these verses twice daily (it's called the Shema).

All ancient kings with any sense knew this and refused to use their power for personal gain and battled corruption and all sorts of lawlessness simply for the sake of the continuity of their empire (as delightfully described in the cycle that runs from Genesis 12:17 to 20:3 to 26:8; but hence also 2 Samuel 12:9-14). All language is based on law, and so is all science and even all culture and art. And it's precisely that which makes us human and no longer animal: the comprehension of the principle of covenant.

The principle of covenant was why the ark was built, and that by highly skilled technicians (Exodus 31:1-3-6) — hence Jesus was a τεκτων (tekton), a technician or assembler; not a "carpenter", not a shaver, hacker, molder, breaker or bender, but a weaver of available goods and services (Exodus 20:25, 1 Kings 6:7). And the ark was why the tabernacle was built, and the tabernacle was why the temple was built. It's what Israel was organized around, and remained its most obvious signifier. It's literally what the whole human world is centered on. The Ark may be "lost" but the Covenant is everywhere you look.

It's officially a mystery why there are so many Jews living in New York, but New York was named after the original York in Britain, whose name appears to derive from some obscure and inconsequential Norsk or Celtic word yorvik — ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European term hebros, assumed to describe some sort of tree but suspiciously similar to the word Hebrew — but which from the middle ages onward began to look ever more alike the very common Hebrew noun ירך (yarek), which translators commonly euphemize as "thigh" but which in practical sense denotes that particular bodily organ via which one man settled a personal oath or covenant with another man (most famously Eliezer and Abraham: Genesis 24:2).

And is it Aberdeen or עבר דין ('abar dyn)? And is it Edinburgh or עדן ברך ('eden baruch, or even ברק, baraq)? And is it Glasgow, or גלס גאה (galas ga'a; see Amos 6:8)? And while you consider that, see the outstanding book When Scotland was Jewish, by Elizabeth Caldwell Hirshman and Donald N. Yates (2007).

Remember that the name Phoenician had become a trademark referring to purple dye and all things dyed purple? The Latin word for painted one is pictus, from the verb pingere, to paint. The plural of our word pictus is picti, which from at least the third century AD was used to refer to a formidable tribe in the unconquered north of Scotland, the Picts. And is it Alba, Albany and Albania, from the Latin albus, white, or הלבן (ha laban), White One (hence also Lebanon)?

The name Scotland relates to the Greek noun σκοτος (skotos), which means darkness and which in the classics commonly refers to the netherworld or the realm of the dead. Contrary to what we read in the gospels, the Nicene Creed insists that Jesus descended into hell. This has always been assumed to be an appeal to Greek myth, but it may very well refer to Semitic refugees in Scotland, who resisted the Roman advances until Hadrian gave up and built his famous wall.

The point we're making is that, even though today Britain isn't so Great anymore, the whole world still speaks English. Entirely likewise, even though in the first century CE the name Phoenicia belonged to a modest stretch of coast immediately north of Judea, nobody had forgotten that Phoenicia once ruled the waves, and that everybody with any international interest had spoken their Semitic language and tried to learn their amazing Semitic alphabet. It was their alphabet, that baffling feat of linguistic engineering, that was adapted into the Greek alphabet first and later the Latin one. The Latin one is the one you are reading right now.

Our great human library has been jotted down because the alphabet made it possible to do so. It's literally where our collective, modern humanity comes from. And it arose like crystal filaments within the popular dialogue of the Semitic language basin, spun from a proto-Canaanite set of symbols, which probably functioned as a sort of short-hand for basic administration and which in turn was adapted from a smattering of the most useful Egyptian hieroglyphs. From that same Semitic language basin emerged the stories of the Bible and the two evolved simultaneously, in mutual dependence, forming and sustaining each other like the DNA and the body of a living cell.

The alphabet quickly spread around the world, carried like seed within the fleshy vehicle of the Scriptures, merging with native tales as it went along the Mediterranean coasts. Our humanity emerged from our great human library, of which every book and every story exists like neurons in a brain, mutually formative and in entire dependence on all the others. The Hebrew Bible is the Granddaddy of them all, with in its heart of hearts the majestic covenant that is the alphabet (John 21:25).

It is not emphasized often enough how pervasively god-breathed and deeply salvific the art of writing is (2 Timothy 3:16), and what it represented to people who had never imagined that such a thing was possible or could ever exist (1 Corinthians 2:9-11). Back then, everything was theology, and to most people, theology meant slavish obedience to some remote deity, or at least their clergy who helpfully accepted all offerings in the god's absence.

In those days, everything depended on the deity's entirely unpredictable mood, and each blessing had to be wrested from their wily mind by endless homage and supplications. All that changed when the Phoenicians began to preach a theology based on information technology (which is what script is), and learnedness and informed cooperation between sovereign individuals — and that is precisely the covenant that the Bible speaks about: the kind of covenant that brings about a republican government rather than a tyrannical one, and science rather than orthodoxy, and trade rather than plunder and heists. The covenant of which the Bible speaks is a covenant of freedom, and freedom is the purpose of the gospel (Galatians 5:1) — see our article on ελευθερια (eleutheria), meaning freedom-by-law.

What the illiterate world discovered was that all humans are equal, but some humans are more equal than others. It was a mystery how they did it, but the palm-branch offering Phoenicians always knew precisely what the others were up to, what trades had preceded, and what goods were stored up outside anybody's immediate scope. They had a bewildering range of knowledge that they somehow drew from strange cloths with magic markings (Luke 2:7). And when one year, Knut Galut from the third house to the left over the second hill, made a down-payment for a silver bowl and a purple shirt, then the next year, some entirely other ship with other people brought his bowl and shirt, and managed to keep them separate from all the other goods, until they reached him exactly like an answer to a prayer in his own house, just over the second hill (Genesis 28:12).

Humans have used common symbols since deep pre-history (argues Genevieve von Petzinger in her illuminating work The First Signs, Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols, 2016), but script rarely rose beyond the hieroglyphic stage, and when it did, the systems remained so complicated and cumbersome that only specially initiated priests were any good at it. It were always these exclusive priests who had the monopoly on the population's histories, legends, wisdoms and administrative records. And when the fragile organic brain of the tribe's shaman was somehow compromised, the tribe's entire library of knowledge and records went away with it.

The Phoenician alphabet changed the world in ways that can now scarcely be imagined. Massive popular literacy was still many centuries away, but the Phoenician alphabet allowed any common man to become like a priest (Exodus 19:6), and keep records and exchange information with any other common man. It's that very early stage of popular literacy that changed the very mind of man. The massively increased velocity of information introduced humanity to a rule-based universe — a universe full of laws, a lawful universe — that can be explored and studied and ultimately predicted and finally mastered if one abides by its laws and by so doing, transcend it (hence Philippians 3:10, but also Philippians 4:7 and Ephesians 3:19). All animals are subjected to the natural law that brought them about but humans are invited to partake in natural law and embody it and ultimately be as eternal as the universe itself (2 Peter 1:4, 1 John 2:27).

The alphabet literally created history and with that a sense of the future, and a desire to plan, and the courage to imagine all the way out to the final attractor of all intellectual evolution (from the Latin evolutio, the un-rolling of a scroll: Revelation 5:1-14), where all men are free and freely bind themselves into a collective wholeness that rises to meet the Creator and merges with him like a bride does her betrothed.

The Phoenician alphabet allowed the peoples of the world to write down their oral traditions, so that their legacies became immortal (Psalm 16:10). It allowed complex administration that accommodated complex government that in turn allowed cities to grow far beyond shouting range. Script demanded standards, which smoothed out dialectal variations and equalized very large language basins (Isaiah 35:8), which in turn broadened vocabularies and deepened man's thoughts. It accommodated complex agreements, that facilitated vast networks of trade that in turn inspired peace and cooperation between neighboring peoples. Without the alphabet, there would have been no Greek golden age, no philosophy or democracy or even drama and theatre. Without the alphabet, there would have been no Roman Republic, let alone the Empire. There would have been no postal system, and hence no Internet.

All these things are not minor details, but entirely central to the Bible. It's literally what the Bible is about: the rise of information technology and the unified global mind it produced. The Phoenicians are celebrated for having invented the alphabet, but theirs was rather an abjad and consisted of only consonants. The key to a working alphabet was vowel notation, and that appears to have been invented by Israel around the time of king David (1000 BC). To note vowels, the Hebrew scribes took three Phoenician symbols that already represented consonants and gave them double duty: now they could represent both consonants and vowels depending on where in a word they occurred. This invention perfected the alphabet, and this final version is the one that conquered the world.

The three symbols that took on this double duty and hence allowed for vowel notation were: the י (yod), the ה (he) and the ו (waw), which together spell the name יהוה (yhwh): the name of the God of the Vowel People (in the words of Joel Hoffman's In The Beginning, 2004). The Bible tells of this magnificent completion of the alphabet as the story of the building of the Temple of YHWH by kings Solomon of Israel and Hiram of Tyre. That temple was never lost. It still sits at the very heart of the whole of the human cosmos (Judges 8:23, Matthew 23:10, 1 Corinthians 15:24).

Long before either the palm-coin or the name Palm People caught on, the Psalmist wrote: "The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Planted in the House of YHWH, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still yield fruit in old age. They shall be fat and luxurious, proclaiming, 'YHWH is level (Jeshurun); he is my Rock (Tyre), and there is no injustice in him'" (Psalm 92:12-15).

The Phoenicians had managed to distill the abjad out of the audible conversations of people who usually talked all at once, in widely varying dialects and rarely in proper sentences and commonly with more howls, laughs and other such non-words than words. There was no linguistic standard (Judges 17:6). Everybody simply yelled whatever they thought should be perfectly understandable to the other guy: Iberians, Italians, Celts, Greeks, Africans, all "conversing" in the common tongue of the Phoenicians (compare Revelation 14:2 to 17:1), trying to sell their wares for an extra special price to their eagerly ogling customers.

What the Phoenicians achieved, a common market plus a working abjad, is inconceivably brilliant. But where is their literature? We have the great European stories from Homer to Romulus and Remus to Huginn and Muninn, but where are the stories of the Phoenicians? Their language was spoken all over the known world, but all we have of it are a smattering of inscriptions on tombs and walls. Where are the books?

In The Invention of the Jewish People (2008), Shlomo Sand of the University of Tel Aviv explains that the idea of a cohesive Jewish people may have been a recent invention that catered to race theory rather than proper history and only became interesting when certain folks reimagined systematic genocide and had to find ways to tell a Jew apart from a non-Jew.

For those without such needs, the rule is simple: you are a Jew only when other Jews say you are. In precisely the same manner, you hold a PhD only when other holders of PhD's say you do. One is a speaker of Swahili only when other speakers of Swahili say you are. And one is a woman only when other women say you are. In these matters, the opinions of non-women, non-Swahili-speakers, non-PhD-holders and non-Jews are wholly irrelevant and quite often entirely ridiculous.

The Jews of which the Bible tells are the working core of a much larger world (Genesis 12:3). The work which identified a Jew (among themselves) was the making of text and the compression of all the stories in the world into a brilliant crystal of pure mind (1 Kings 10:23-25). That crystal, which became the Hebrew Bible, reflected upon the history of the whole of mankind as it emerged from the animal realm and learned speech first and then discovered the powerful importance of standards, and invented writing and hence formal law. The story of the Bible has always been the story of the whole of mankind, not only of one chosen people, who were only "chosen" to tell the world its own foundational story (Genesis 2:19-20, see 6:19-20). The story of the Bible is about anybody who partakes in the covenant.

The Bible is not a history of events that "really happened", uniquely that one time. Instead, the Bible tells of the natural law upon which the entire human cosmos runs. It's the blueprint of the whole of experienced human reality, so that anything that can happen in our world is already described somewhere in the Bible. The Bible is literally a genetic blueprint of anything that can happen: the data-compressed version of the entire universe that sits like DNA at the heart of any mind that knows how reality works (and see our article on Gog and Magog for a more detailed look at this).

What any aspiring Bible student needs to understand is that unlike any other language, in Hebrew, every word is a legal entity, not a majority vote. Each Hebrew word may have originated as an organic Phoenician majority vote — of a majority of speakers whose utterings came to settle on some agreed norm — but once a word becomes an inaugurated Hebrew word, it can no longer change, as natural words do, and neither can the context in which it occurs (even in variant spellings) in the text. This is why the Hebrew text hasn't changed for millennia. Perpetuity and unchangeability is its very nature (Matthew 5:18, Deuteronomy 4:2).

Something very similar is happening in our modern time. It took humanity 6,000 years of cultural and intellectual evolution to produce our precious human library, in which the entire quale (the what's-it-like-ness) of being human is expounded and explored. But just as when the pagan nations began to massively produce writing, and dilute and overwhelm the divine unity of the Semitic literary core with their incorrigible polytheistic approximations, imitation, deception and corruption (that in turn increasingly inspired succeeding generations until the whole world became the intellectual swamp we have today), so Artificial Intelligence has begun to dilute human correspondence with accumulative more-of-the-same, so that within a few years, true humanity may only be found in literature that's been produced no later than the early 2000's.

All words are synthetic (words don't grow on trees), but the same is true for literary tropes: the horse as it appears in literature says more about humans than horses. Likewise, any other literary stock character, from Tramp to Beagle Boy, and from Adam to Jesus, exist solely within the theatre of the human cosmos. These characters are the building blocks of who were are. And their diversity is dwindling almost as fast as that of the biosphere. A great dying is upon us. We're evolving the wrong way.

The true human library, from which people can truly learn about being human, will be the New Scriptures, eternal and unchanging, and constructive access to it has begun to close. Humanity has begun to die, or rather, it has begun to split into machine-fed humans and truly living ones, who refuse to read any prose produced by bots (Deuteronomy 14:3). Modern humanity formed from readers reading, who thus inspired wrote new reflections as augmentations that always stood on the shoulders of preceding giants. That process has now stopped, and humanity is splitting into a tiny cluster that cherishes the works of old, and a very large group that no longer reads literature and that uses writing only for curt slogans and tweets. This latter group will assume a lifestyle that does not require an extensive vocabulary, which in turn reduces the depth of thought these new humans have immediate access to and may discuss with peers. Ultimately, they will devolve into something less unified than modern humanity is today, and will return to the animal world from which we all sprang.

Entirely likewise, the ancients stopped constructing the Hebrew texts of the Bible, and took to reading it and living by it and "innovating" it into a vast library of post-Biblical writings that were not touched by the well-meaning musings of non-Hebrews.

The Hebrew Bible does not tell about God, but demonstrates God, by demonstrating a perfect oneness of many separate words, whose meanings, likewise, add up to the oneness of the world they describe. Rather than depending on external dictionaries and grammar books, the stories of the Bible demonstrate the legal meanings of the Hebrew words, plus the grammar that binds them together. That's why the Bible is not credal or doctrinal but simply Hebrew: the functional essence of the Bible is seated in how the Hebrew language works, how its every word explains all other words and how they are all connected in a multi-dimensional fractal matrix like a big buzzing verbal brain that carries a single living Spirit that has no parts or fractures and repairs the broken mind of any reader simply by being exposed to it, so that the reader's mind will come to synchronize with it and resonate with it and come to be precisely like it and merge with it without a seam (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 5:1, 1 Corinthians 11:1).

This may seem anti-intuitive to non-native students of the Bible (who therefore only speak malleable and ever shifting natural languages: Matthew 7:27), so the authors of the gospels (whose purpose it was to bring Greek-speakers back to Hebrew) demonstrated this very important principle at the core of their story, so that everybody could reflect on it and meditate on it and discuss it with others and be cleansed of any excuse for not knowing about these things:

As fortunately everybody knows, femineity emerges from masculinity because men have XY chromosomes and women have double X's. That means that masculinity is a quality that has femininity natively within it, which is why (1) God is masculine and creation feminine and the latter emerges from the former, and (2) Eve emerged from Adam's rib and not from anywhere else. Femininity has no masculinity within it, unless a man put it in there, and if a woman brings something forth without the help of an external man, the product can only be a clone of herself.

To teach this (to demonstrate this), the authors of the gospel explained Jesus of Nazareth as having been born of a legal virgin, which is a human female older than three and still fertile but never entered by a man — and societies and spontaneous people movements are in Hebrew stories always depicted as women (sometimes queens), whereas centralizing and law-enforcing governments are their kingly husbands (which is why God is king). As the authors strongly emphasized: Mary was a cousin of Elizabeth, who was a Levite, which meant that biologically, Jesus could only have been what Mary was, namely a Levite female. But legally he was a son of Joseph, who was a full-blood Jew. Since Jesus was indeed without any doubt a Jewish man, his entire person and character as it occurs in the Bible is a legal entity that has nothing to do with his biological origin (hence John 2:4, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"), and everything with his legal father, namely Joseph (his "father-by-law", Luke 3:23; the term "according to the flesh" is also a legal term, Romans 1:3, see 1 Corinthians 15:39 and our article on בשר, basar, flesh).

Jesus had biologically nothing to do with Joseph and everything with Mary, but legally nothing with Mary and everything with Jospeh. For precisely the same reason, the People of the Way have their legal citizenship in heaven (Philippians 3:20), not in any natural tribe, nation, religion, dogma, feeling or sentiment (hence texts like Galatians 3:28 and Matthew 10:37). Also for this very reason, every church worth its name begins every gathering with a firm declaration that the story of Jesus is absolutely not about natural, biological or historical entities (1 Corinthians 9:9), but only legal entities: entities whose sole purpose it is to demonstrate the perfect law of liberty (James 1:25).

If mind relates to life the way life relates to matter, then all living things are the "dust of the earth," and the world that is the human mental cosmos is organized like a living cell. The two tablets of the law is its nucleic DNA — so that all of the Bible's 613 laws and all goings on in all the narratives ultimately derive from the Big Ten (which in turn can be compressed into the Big Two, Matthew 22:36-40, and the Big Two into the Big One: Matthew 7:12; the "two" represent the Father and the Mother, and the "one" represents the how and why of the relationship between Creator and creation, even when there was no femininity beyond what was natively contained within the One Creator: hence John 1:1). The Jews, in this model, are those proteins that form, repair and reproduce the nucleic DNA, whereas the Phoenicians are those closely related elements that keep the rest of the organelles of the cell together.

As noted above, by the time of Israel's first kings, there was no particular word for the Phoenicians because nobody really regarded them as a single people, and apart from some obvious references to the vast proto-Phoenician merchant fleet (1 Kings 10:22, Ezekiel 27:3, Isaiah 23:1), Biblical references to this magnificent people come in the form of some very obvious hints.

Paul famously wrote that "by grace you have been saved" (Ephesians 2:8). What is not commonly emphasized is that the word for grace, namely χαρις (charis), typically describes a collective joy, and the secret sits in the collectiveness: it's the joyful working together that is conductive of salvation (Romans 8:28, Ephesians 4:3-6). A closely similar word that expresses a similar sentiment is the noun χορος (choros), meaning choir.

One of a few Hebrew words that describe similar manifestations of collective felicity is the noun מחול (mahol), which describes a (whirling) dance. The idea here is that a great many loose elements may still achieve some kind of cohesion when all of them are caught up in some collective circulation. The Phoenician fleet did precisely that same thing, and despite the autonomy of each ship, the fleet circled the Mediterranean like dancers in a whirling dance, producing salvific joy in everyone involved. The verb from which this noun derives is חול (hul), meaning to whirl. Another noun from this same verb is חל (hol), meaning sand, but sand that is caught up in some whirling gust of wind or storm.

In Job 29:18, the protagonist Job says: "I shall die in my nest [קן, qen], and I shall multiply my days as the חול (hul)". The word for nest, קן (qen), comes from the verb קנן (qanan), which describes the weaving of many strands into a dynamic and interlocked network: a bird's nest, an organic brain, a trading network, the Internet. This same verb also produced the noun קין (qain), meaning spear (see our article on κυριος, kurios, meaning "spear-man") and the identical name Cain (whose final descendants filled the world with implements of bronze and iron; Genesis 4:22) as well as the name Cana (where at the wedding, Jesus denounced his mother and performed his first miracle). Uncomfortable with having Job very obviously referring to the myth of the Phoenix bird, modern translations commonly but curiously have Job multiply his days either as the sand, or as the palm tree:

• The KJV, NAS, NIV and many other modern English translations read "I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply [my] days as the sand."
• The Septuagint, Vulgate and several Catholic translations read "I shall die in my nest, and as a palm tree shall multiply my days".
• Most Hebrew commentators, the JSP and some English translations like the NAB and NRSV have "I shall die with my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the Phoenix."

An identical second verb חול (hul), which might actually be the same one, means to be strong or mighty. Its primary derivative is the noun חיל (hayil), meaning might. It's precisely that word חיל (hayil) that is used to form the term גבור חיל (gibbor hayil), "Mighty Man" (Judges 6:12, 11:1, Ruth 2:1, 1 Samuel 9:1). By the time of the kings, this term Mighty Man had become a social denominator, like a rank: "When Saul saw any mighty man or any valiant man, he attached him to his staff" (1 Samuel 14:52). David, who was not a soldier but a young shepherd and a musician, was nevertheless considered such a Mighty Man (1 Samuel 16:18). The significant difference between famous heroes such as Hercules, Samson and Goliath, is that these were solitary brutes whereas the Mighty Men were mighty because they worked together.

By the time of David, the Mighty Men had formed a sort of council consisting of 37 Mighty Men (2 Samuel 23:8-38; now formally reduced to the word gibbor, but ascribed the quality of hayil in the narrative). The text deliberately emphasizes the diverse heritage of these Might Men, who even included Uriah the Hittite (23:38). The choicest of the Mighty Men were the Three Mighty Men, among whom was a man named Eleazar (23:9), whose father was Dodo the Ahohite (and Ahohite means Brotherly).

The name Dodo (דודו) is very obviously very similar to David (דוד). But possibly even more striking is that Dodo is also closely similar to Dido, the name of a famous princess or even queen of Tyre, whose once glorious city was rapidly succumbing to violence and tyranny. When her brother Pygmalion killed her husband, Dido fled west and founded Carthage (means New City, like Naples and Newton). This widely venerated female founder of what would ultimately become the actual Phoenician trading empire, the one with the palm-tree coin, was also known as Elissa. These are not coincidences.

In Hebrew, the idea of a wilderness is not restricted to a geographic wilderness (lots of sand) but also a cultural one, a human population without a structuring law or even a properly standardized language. The Hebrew word for wilderness is מדבר (midbar), which derives from the verb דבר (dabar), meaning to speak intelligently. From this same verb also stems the noun דבר (dabar), meaning "word" in the sense of message or teaching, the Hebrew version of the familiar Greek word Logos. Also from this same verb comes the name Deborah, which belonged to the uniquely female judge, who was famously seated beneath a palm tree (Judges 4:5).

To anyone steeped in Greek mythology, both the story of Dido and that of Deborah would have seemed variations on the Greek foundational legend — which told of the birth of the Greek national deity Apollo and his twin sister Artemis. When Zeus had impregnated their mother Leto, she was forced to flee from Hera, Zeus' angered wife, who had forbidden all nations to shelter her. The nations whose lands touched others and so were part of the socio-economic continuum of the day, complied, and Leto ended up on the barren island of Delos (from δηλος, delos, conspicuous, obvious, clearly visible). There she gave birth to the twins beneath a palm tree.

In any desert, there is usually plenty of fresh water, but it commonly sits right below the sandy surface, invisible to any thirsty traveler. But a clear indication of water just below the surface is the presence of a palm tree. This would cause caravans of merchants to travel from oasis to oasis, simply by scanning the horizon for palm trees. From these clusters of palm trees would grow human settlements, and from those settlements grew cities.

As we describe in our article on the verb נהר (nahar), which both means to flow (what water does) and to shine (what a star does), the Hebrew language maintains a strong correlation between all things to do with water and all things to do with light, and that includes the enlightenment of minds.

In other words, long before the Phoenicians got their name, and even long before the Carthaginians minted their coin, the lavish smattering of proto-Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean coasts became known primarily for the enlightenment they offered — enlightenment by means of their language, their script, their laws and their stories: they became known as lights in the darkness and the palm trees in the desert (hence also the story of the woman at the well: John 4:1-26, but also Matthew 5:14, Isaiah 35:1, Ezekiel 47:1, Micah 4:2, and so on).

The Hebrew word for the palm tree is the masculine noun תמר (tamar), which became the decidedly feminine name Tamar. This name belonged to (1) the mistreated widow who pretended to be a prostitute and ended up becoming the arch-mother of the tribe Judah, and (2) a daughter and a niece of king David, the first of whom was raped by her half-brother, namely David's first-born son Amnon.

And speaking of violence and grief: like Dido would centuries after, the judge Deborah too came to heads with the king of Canaan, now called Jabin. This king Jabin's general Sisera was killed by Jael, again a woman. And the word תמר (tamar), palm, looks suspiciously like a word derived from the verb מרר (marar), to be bitter, hence also names like Mara (the other name of Naomi), Miriam and Mary: all belonging to women who played crucial roles in the perpetuity of Israel but always as cradle or vehicle of some law-bringing or law-fulfilling man (Boaz, Moses and Jesus respectively).

The verb חול (hul), to whirl, may also refer to a whirling or writhing in pain, especially the pain of childbirth. Or in the words of Solomon: "In much wisdom is much vexation, and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow" (Ecclesiastes 1:18).

It's a widely held understanding that, on average and in the long run and despite frequent and much celebrated wins, a whopping ninety percent of traders in the financial market lose money, even with access to all the latest theories, tools and computer programs. And although the number is probably more mythological than arithmetic, it yields the startling revelation that clinging to popular orthodoxy is a sure way to get wrecked. There's simply no everlasting algorithm that consistently makes its authors money (Acts 16:16-18). Instead, there's something non-algorithmical, non-linear and non-rational that dominates from the background, that weeds and governs and ultimately gets the gettings.

How the consistently winning ten percent do it remains a lasting mystery to the ever-losing ninety, but the winners win because they do something that is entirely incomparable to popular orthodoxy. They are quite aware of "what the charts say", but what the charts say is not what ultimately informs their decision (Numbers 22:18). What actually does may not even be consciously clear to the winners, since all conscious analysis is done in the language of orthodoxy, but they end up doing right when the herd goes left.

And since the winners also are the ones who keep the whole thing going — it's clear that without the continuously winning ten percent, the whole system would very quickly be abandoned or collapse upon itself or dissipate and go up in smoke (Revelation 18:2) — the reality of the financial market rests upon formative principles that have nothing to do with what most of us think it does. That's perhaps disconcerting, because that makes the winning ways of the ten percent (or the One) entirely invisible to eyes of the ninety (the Nine) who only know orthodoxy.

The Nine consistently lose money, which is why they have to go through life converting labor into money (and forcing others into labor), or else produce products that they can exchange for money. That in turn means that whatever the One are up to, they do not perform labor (what counts as labor), within the system, or produce products within the system. Instead, they labor above the system, and their product is the system. The One move in shadows, behind the scenes, in the service corridors behind the facades of the evening news. But it's the One who bind the whole thing together, like a glass skeleton, like a lymphatic system that sits wholly undetected beside the much more obvious cardiovascular system. The One are the mystics versus the learned Nine (1 Corinthians 1:26-28), the proprietors of the casino, where the pampered come to consistently lose against the house.

When one is able to extract resources from a system without having to put anything back in, and can do that at will whilst keeping the system stable and healthy, one also no longer has the need to hoard any of it. That means that the billionaires of our world are not the One but rather the Ninest of the Nine, the cardinals of financial orthodoxy, the masters of the art of coming up short.

The Bronze Age Collapse commenced when the Egyptian government lost control over its army, that had begun to help themselves to the resources of the common masses. Likewise, the Roman Republic began to end when generals like Pompey and Julius Caesar began to enrich themselves, and bought their way into the senate. In our modern day and age, governments have likewise lost control over the financial world, and while billionaires buy their way into the once sacred halls of senatorial discourse, the plebs is getting scraped, sniped, rugged and dark-pooled out of any last modicum of hope of any political clout. This, we know from the many reruns of history, is an unstable and unsustainable situation. We also know precisely how it will end.

In our time, the financial system is about to implode because for the first time in history, clairvoyance is no longer the purview of the clairvoyant — those naturally gifted few who have always guided human societies, out of a shabby hut on the edge of the village, securely bound to all other mystics and humbled by knowing full well the origin, purpose and great dangers of their prophetic gift. Today, we have machines for that. And the owners of those machines don't accept humble huts on the edge of town but rather live in palaces at the heart of it, and invest their money into real companies, where real people waste lives producing goods that nobody needs and everybody buys because the algorithm tells them to.

For the first time ever, modern trading platforms have access to what the herd plans to do before they do it, and are increasingly simply betting against that. And since the herd loses, the house wins. They simply oppose (in Hebrew: שטן, satan), and have become the New One, certainly not the rightful princes of mankind but brutal task masters who couldn't care less about who they prey upon. In Greek, the common word for "evil", namely the adjective πονηρος (poneros), derives from the verb πενομαι (penomai), meaning to have to toil or labor, which is the polar opposite of ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law.

These predatorial New One are not above the system but very much part of it. They don't understand the system or why it exists or how to keep it healthy and moving forward in happiness and health. Instead, they let the reflexes of the herd drive the system, so that the herd is in a perpetual state of stampede, and the physically strong run ahead of it and in their panic distantiate themselves from the slow and weak who are increasingly driven out to the back as some desperate sacrifice for the New One to feast upon. It's hard to see for anyone who's never seen anything else, but the modern, competition-driven economy is Molech all over again (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

The original One that got the herd this far, have long extracted themselves from the equation (or were driven out), and are now in some undisclosed location waiting for the whole heaving, infested mass to drive itself off a cliff somewhere (Matthew 28:20). To the perplexed, this may seem like a disastrous global collapse, but to those in the know, it's a controlled demolition, like the breaking of an egg shell, the abscission of a blossom's petals or the burning of a field after the harvest. If this controlled demolition of our world isn't happening already, it will probably start going within the next few years or so. And after that, a whole new round of childlike Palm People will rebuild the world from its ashes (Matthew 5:3-12).

But why, one may ask, is the One not mercifully informing everybody about these things? Well, one may remember that it is said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That's not true. That's what the blind say. When in the land of the blind someone somehow begins to attain sight and sees something big and dangerous approaching and calls out: "Watch out everybody, there something big and dangerous coming!" then immediately, twenty blind guys will gather behind the seeing one and shout: "Yes! I can see it too! Follow me everyone! And give me all your money!". When the seeing one protests, he is rounded up and put in concentration camps and gassed. So no, we're done with warning everyone. Now we remain in the shadows, working quietly and calling softly. Whoever is able to hear our voice, and recognizes in our voice a much more primary Voice that they have heard their entire lives, have always belonged to us, and ultimately to the One. Those are slowly but surely trickling out of the world and into us, like a mist ascending. That will go on until some saturation point and the rains start. But that time, the world will be on fire.

It goes without saying that in the Bible, the One is mostly associated with the Semitic culture of the eastern and southern Mediterranean coast, whereas the Nine are mostly associated with the Egyptian and Indo-European cultures to the north — see for more details on this our article on the word εννεα (ennea), meaning nine. And this phenomenon is not unique to the financial system, or else we would probably not have known about it (if you're with the Nine) or talked about it (if you're with the One). Instead, the One/Nine principle dominates the whole of our earthly reality at every level of complexity:

A living cell has an unchanging nucleus (the king's house) that contains all the information to run the dynamic and every changing cellular body (the king's kingdom) and direct its internal economy and its interactions with the outer world and any neighboring cells. The various organelles within the cell body obtain energy from outside and convert it into whatever the internal cell is in need of. What the nucleus actually does (and contains) remains a mystery to the body at large, but if that nucleus were to be removed from the cell body, the body would soon die and fall apart.

A material atom, entirely likewise, consists of a static nucleus that contains all the information to run the dynamic cloud of electrons that make up the body of the atom. The core determines the cloud's properties and its behavior relative to neighboring atoms. If the nucleus of an atom is somehow removed, its cloud of electrons quickly disperses.

A single conscious mind, again entirely likewise, consists of a static nucleus and a dynamic body: the nucleus of the mind is the physical body (bones, muscles, brain), that sits in a much larger mental body that consists of all the real-world things that the mind is conscious of. The properties of the unchanging physical body (be it a squirrel, a human or a spider), determine the qualities of the dynamic mental body: the entire sphere of what the mind is conscious of, which is constantly invaded by impressions and evacuated of events that the mind forgets.

Jesus said: "In my Father's House are many houses" (John 14:2), which argues for the fractal nature of the whole system: many atoms make up one cell, and many cells make one mind, and many minds make one society, but each time with the same basic anatomy and functionality. But which one is the causative top-layer from which all "lower" levels derive? Modern philosophers tend to think that the universe began with matter, and that life sort of accidentally emerged from that, and mind from that. But a slow but surely growing school of thought insists that mind comes first, and is most fundamental, so that mind births life and living things shape matter rather than matter shaping life. Wholly likewise, to the Nine, the mind is seated within the brain. To the One, the brain is seated within the mind. The One received the Law at Sinai. The Nine receive the Law from the One (compare Galatians 3:19 to Zechariah 12:8).

Should the brain be removed from the mind, the mind disperses into nothingness. This occurs when the brain dies, and its mind has always been alien to the Mind that is demonstrated by the Hebrew Bible (1 Corinthians 2:16, Matthew 7:23). And it may also occur when the body grows too large for the brain to keep together, and relatively, the brain becomes too small for the mental body it tries to support. The result of that is madness. Since we moderns are increasingly exposed to a virtual world whose elements don't add up to a natural oneness and whose environments are not founded on perfectly symmetrical natural laws (see 2 Thessalonians 2:3), we are headed for a global collapse of sanity with near perfect certainty (2 Peter 3:12).

To the nations, the world is international and the Jews live dispersed in isolated communities among the continuum formed by the interlinked governments. To the Jews, the world is Jewish and the nations hang like fluttering leaves from Jewish branches. To the Europeans, the holocaust was about the destruction of Europe's Jews. To the Jews, the holocaust was about the destruction of Europe proper. Europe may think they got away with it, but no, they didn't.

A popular social credit system always begins with the glorification of the local norms, which are always largely arbitrary and firmly divorced from how the universe actually works. Step two is a gradual euthanasia of the least fit (a lower social score has precisely that effect: higher mortality at society's lower rungs). Step three starts when the outcasts begin to overwhelm the normals, and the world (or city) of the normals begins to collapse and the outcasts flood back in to repeople the ruins. Now that's how the universe works.

To any Greek speaker, the name Phoenicia would simply mean Palm Land, while the ethnonym Phoenician would also mean "purple item" or "royal clothing" in the same way in which, since antiquity, the ethnonym Persian has referred to luxury items such as expensive carpets, cats and fruits (namely peaches), an Afghan is also a sort of blanket, and a Hamburger is also a grilled patty of meat on a bun.

By the time it began to matter, the words Phoenicia and Phoenician meant what they did because of how they were used and not because of the origin of the term, because that has quite evidently always been missing in action. What was clear to everybody was that the name Phoenicia, the name of the Phoenix bird, the Greek word for palm (φοινιξ, phoinix), and even some Egyptian word fnhw (possibly meaning wood cutter and possible referring to Canaanite or Lebanese lumber traders, or pretty much any exotic far-away land, explains Andrea Ercolani in her delightfully complete Phoinikes: the history of an ethnonym, 2023) were all obviously related. Not at all clear was which had come first and what the original source of all these related terms might have been.

Since at least Homeric times, our word φοινιξ (phoinix), meaning palm and hence our name Phoenicia had been recognized as notably similar to the adjective φοινος (phoinos), meaning blood-red in the sense of looking deadly or murderous (Iliad 16.159). That in turn has raised a few eyebrows since palm trees are neither red nor murderous. Perhaps a dropping coconut might have knocked off a careless bystander, but no such tale is told, and our word tends to denote the date palm rather than the coconut palm. Still, even though the link with our name is probably not etymologically sound, it seems to have generated a legitimate folk-association between our ethnonym Phoenician (denoting people, palms and purple) and the noun φονος (phonos), meaning a murder or a slaying (which once again doesn't seem to be technically related to φοινος, phoinos, but certainly linked by popular association). But that would link our word for palm with the verb φενω (pheno), to slay. And this word, peculiarly, is rather similar to the verb φαινω (phaino), to emit light.

Why people in antiquity insisted on an association between bloody murder and the typically peace-loving Palm People has long been a mystery. Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, of course, but we would like to observe that in antiquity, blood-redness not only referred to violent murder but much rather to beginnings — suggesting that blood was named after redness (instead of redness after blood) and redness was primarily the color of dawn and the beginning (rather than the ending) of life and enlightenment (see our articles on typical red- or dawn-names like Red Sea, Adam/Edom and Augustus).

Still, as we have repeatedly noted, the Palm People were also somehow associated with receiving or bringing sorrow. Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the answer to this conundrum can be found with the only reference to writing in Homer, who calls writing "fatal tokens; many murderous signs incised in a folded tablet" (Iliad 6.169, quoted from Peter Greens most riveting translation of 2015). Why Homer thought of writing this way has been debated since he exclaimed it but here at Abarim Publications we surmise that he referred to the effect of standardization, namely the reduction of diversity.

Students of the Bible need to understand that both the books of Moses and those of Homer play in and around the Bronze Age Collapse, but were written down in their present form only as late as the 7th century. They relate like shepherd (ποιμην, poimen) and dog (κυων, kuon), which is why the New Testament could be presented in Greek to a Greek-speaking audience by Hebrew-speaking Jews. The job of the New Testament is two-fold: (1) to train the dog and extend the governance of the shepherd via the dog onto the herd, and (2) to identify any feral humans who were born among either the herds or the dogs (whose ancestors once "forgot" that they were humans, and who now have no idea why they have so much trouble fitting into their herd or clan), extract them, feed, wash and clothe them and put them to work in the shepherd side of things.

Homer's Iliad has remained so very popular because it, like Moses, tells of what it is like to be human, and a domesticated dog is a human animal just like the Mona Lisa is a human painting. A domesticated animal is human because it follows human ways, even though it can never understand them or even guess their function. Modern humanity would not have existed without domesticated animals, which means that the umbrella term "humanity" comprises humans and domesticated animals and technology and music and all that. And this whole complex called humanity has at its core precisely what the Iliad contemplates: the eternal tug of war between what the heart wants and what the ratio wants, or what the heart desires and the ratio decrees — hence literature's many versions of the battered shepherd girl and her allusive lover king: the story of how the wanna-be governed (female: the stellar population) forever search for the wanna-be government (male: the solar monarch).

Our English word "government" shares its root with (and is closely similar to) the word "cybernetics", which originated as an engineering discipline that studied the control of large complex and dynamic installations (a system with a great many input streams, moving parts and interdependent setpoints, feedback loops, links and leverages). Ultimately, these words stem from the Greek verb κυβερναω (kubernao), meaning to pilot a ship, which indeed is a complex system with a lot of moving parts and a variety of inputs (wind, current, rocks, the psychology of crew, customers and the ubiquitous pirates and cut throats). One of a few Hebrew words for ship is צי (si), which is an Egyptian loanword but one that fitted right into the root ציה (si), to be dry, from which comes the noun ציון (sion), dry place. This latter noun is spelled identically to the familiar name Zion, which would mean signpost or monument if we instead derive it from the verb צוה (sawa), to command, from which also derives the familiar noun מצוה (miswa), command, the issue of which signifies a government or at least a master. A more common Hebrew word for ship is אניה (oniya), whose root is identical to the verb אנה ('ana), to mourn or lament.

The Iliad tells of the strained relationship between sentimental impulse (Helen at Troy, where she wanted to be) versus the restrictions of covenant and law (Helen at Sparta, where she agreed to be). The heart does what it wants at whatever cost but reason is merciless and will ultimately reign. When the two come to blows, the war will be fierce but despite its splendor and undisputed popularity (Iliad 2.803-804), sentimental Troy must fall and the covenantal Greeks must win. So dazed, with broken heart and crushed spirit, the hero of our story must walk away from the ruins of that sacred and wholly beloved citadel, and observe villages and towns to learn how rational government leads to a much greater world (Odyssey 1.1-5).

Homer cast Odysseus as the leader of the soldiers who hid in the Wooden Horse, and these were the actual ones who sacked the great city while the Greek armies had withdrawn to their ships and taken to sea. The story doesn't tell what the Wooden Horse looked like, but its architect Epeius of Phoicis would certainly have benefitted from the tools, materials and skills of the Greek military ship builders.

Readers with a sensitivity to narrative patterns will have noted by now that the famous Wooden Horse, its seductive entry into the city and its sudden and unexpected release of Greek soldiers is rather obviously modelled upon the act of copulation, which brings ruin and shame to our naive shepherd girl, unless she girds herself with governance and discipline (see Iliad.24.804). Such readers may further note the parallel between Odysseus within the Wooden Horse, Noah's family within in the Ark, Jonah within the Great Fish, Jason among the Argonauts (αργος, argos, means white; αργυρος, arguros, means silver), Jesus among the disciples (and see our article on Stephen), his triumphant entry of Jerusalem on a donkey, the Revelator's sword-disgorging White Horseman, even Aladdin and the Genie in the Bottle, and ultimately, Moses' burning bush — the word for which is סנה (seneh), hence the name Sinai, of the mountain where the Law was given — which was succeeded by the Tent of Meeting, which became the temple built by Solomon and Hiram: all stories that seek the balance between the singularity of the governing masculine and the passionate chaos of the government seeking feminine.

The name Odysseus probably already existed when Homer incorporated it into his story, but he himself explains this name by linking it to the verb οδυσσομαι (odussomai), meaning to hate (see Odyssey 19.407). This verb comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to bite or prick, from which also stems the noun οδυνη (odune), a grinding pain (see 1 Timothy 6:10), and οδους (odous), meaning tooth, and possibly οδος (hodos), meaning road or way (before the age of concrete, roads came about organically, beneath the shuffling feet of lots of travelers going the same way). This is significant because the Hebrew verb to hate, namely שנא (sane) looks like it has to do with the word for tooth, namely שן (shen), which comes from the verb שנן (shanan), which means to repeat or to sharpen and may be used of knives as well as of minds (sharpening one's mind means to learn and become wiser). All this is significant because the noun שני (shani) denotes the color purple, the signature color of the Phoenicians (Exodus 26:1, Leviticus 14:4, Joshua 2:18).

In the European Bronze Age, the story of the Wooden Horse story was evidently so well known that Homer doesn't even mention it in the Iliad, and tells of it only at the end of Book 8 of the Odyssey, as the brief prelude to a much longer scene of lament over the loss of the sacred citadel. Rather than discuss the why of the war, or how it ended, the Iliad covers a mere few weeks of the ten year war, and assumes that the audience knows very well what caused it and who won and why and how. This strongly suggests that the Iliad was a spin-off, an elaboration or even a commentary on material that had long been established in popular lore — for instance, a Hebrew version of this quintessential competition between covenantal fidelity and sentimental desire/fear plays out in the "ten year" stay in Moab of Naomi and company (Ruth 1:4).

The Wooden Horse ties into the greater Indo-European trope of the horse (ιππος, hippos), whose introduction to Europe from the alien east translated it into a vehicle of warfare, but more so as an animal that, like the dog, greatly helped improved the business of shepherding. As clearly demonstrated as recently as the nineteenth century in the New World, the horse allowed much greater herds, and hence beef and wool production at industrial scales, which in turn allowed much greater specialization among humans. The horse could transport heavy loads and brought civilization, culture and modern humanity on a vast myriad of stamping hooves (see Job 39:20 and our articles on Nahor and Persia). Most clearly, however, the domesticated horse would become the symbol of a disciplined mind: with rationality as an angelic "spear-man" brandishing his spear-of-discipline toward the serpentine coils of one's base emotions (doomed to eat and dwell in the dust of physical reality: Genesis 3:14). Hence Bellerophon on Pegasus became saint George on his white horse and Muhammad on Buraq, Alexander on Bucephalus and Napoleon on Marengo — all drawing from the same pervasive and hyper-familiar archetype of personal, national and even international governance. This in turn informs the radical departure from this image in Zechariah 9:9, which explains why the Hebrew way leads to a Republic, whereas the European way invariably results in tyranny (also see our paragraph on Longinus, in our article on λογχη, logche, spear-head, under λογος, logos, word, from the verb λεγω, lego, to speak).

The Wooden Horse as it appears in Homer clearly refers to the Wunderwaffe of the Bronze Age: the Semitic library that the Phoenicians gifted the world via the Greeks, within which was inadvertently imported the thirty or so murderous signs of the alphabet (compare Il.13.23-31 to Od.1.4 and Exodus 15:1; also see our article on Malta). Bards who had learned the entire Homeric epics and all the Books of Moses by heart suddenly saw their trade made obsolete, and their skill once so crucial and hallowed now reduced to little more than a party trick. Their authority in matters of textual authenticity became superseded by a scroll for all to consult, and they and their knowledge became part of a public road for anybody to trample on.

In the words of Eric A. Havelock: "[The transcription of Homer's epics] constituted an intrusion into culture, with results that proved irreversible. It laid the basis for the destruction of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought" (The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, 1982).

In matters of text and speech, the limitation of executive diversity reduces people's misunderstanding of each other, and is in turn strongly conductive of a much greater complexity. This ties into the principle of freedom-by-law that we spoke of earlier, since freedom of speech can only come about when everybody first submits to the same words being used in the same way. But that also means that some have to lose their head, or sacrifice their local dialect in favor of the Common Way. The word for "folded tablet" that Homer uses in the above quote is πιναξ (pinax), which is the same word that describes the "platter" upon which the head of John the Baptist was presented to Salome, whose name is the female version of Solomon (Matthew 14:8). Again, that's no coincidence.

Paul says it this way: "Our adequacy is from God who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. But if the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, how will the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory?" (2 Corinthians 3:5-8).

Quite similarly, Jesus (a.k.a. the Word), said: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And John the Revelator said of the White Horseman he envisioned: "From his mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it he may strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15).

Here at Abarim Publications we would further guess that the palm came first — albeit not the plant itself but rather what the plant would do when spotted by thirsty desert travelers: it would make them turn toward it in the sure hope of finding water beneath it (Hebrews 11:1).

The idea of turning, and particularly a repeated visit to the same water indicating plant, clearly agrees with the verb חול (hul), to whirl or go around in circles. The proper verb for to turn or turn toward, namely פנה (pana), is also the root of the plural noun פנים (panim), meaning face or "one's turning ones" (i.e. the array of sensory organs that together turn in unison). Figuratively, this word refers to one's attentions or one's inclinations or considerations. Remember Paul's quote in which he links the murderous signs of writing with the glowing of the face of Moses, the servant of God:

The suffix "-ix" of our word φοινιξ (phoinix) has long troubled linguists because many Greek words come equipped with it but there's no faculty native to Greek that can explain it. The "-ix" suffix is much more common to Celtic words, although these tend to end in "-rix", meaning king (hence Asterix the Gaul, but also the familiar German word Reich and the name Richard). Hence, slightly more attractive is the Hebrew second person personal pronoun that is added to words in the form of a suffix (-ech, feminine, or -cha, masculine). Adding such a suffix puts a word in a so-called construct state (causing the "m" to drop out), and the very common term פניך (panecha) means "your face" (see Genesis 4:14, where Cain says: "from Your Face I will be hidden").

All this suggests that the Greek word for palm may in fact be one of a long list of pseudo-Greek word that are actually Semitic terms, and were imported into Greek along with the alphabet (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of the Greek language). It also means that for creative Hebrew speakers, the name Phoenicia may have meant Realm Of The Alert Ones or simply Your Face, with the personal pronoun referring to the leader of the chosen ones: "I will stand before you" (Exodus 17:6), "I will send an angel before you" (Exodus 23:20), or directly to God: "Mercy and truth precede Your Presence" (Psalm 89:14), "They will be glad in Your Presence" (Isaiah 9:3).

It's important to remember that our word פנים (panim) refers to a thing's surface or a person's face, which means that it also denotes the boundary between the owner of the face and anyone looking at the face from the outside of that person. Since God is One, unity is divine, and a people who are categorically more unified than another people (because they are literate or well-informed or disciplined), will appear significantly more divine to that other people. To the not-united people, the united people will seem as if God is seated within them (Revelation 4:2-4, also see 21:22-24), because God is One and therefore the effective source of the people's unity (Luke 17:21). Or in the words of Zechariah: "...the house of David will be like God, like the angel of YHWH before them" (Zechariah 12:8).

Being divine (being unified) is of course not the same thing as being God (being One), since the former is a feminine quality and the latter a masculine one (hence John 17:20-26). But, as we discussed above, the oneness of the feminine can only come from the external masculine, and when that happens, the two have already merged. Observers outside this union, that look up at that union, can't see where one partner ends and the other begins, so these outsiders see only one covenantal unity.

Many have wondered why the Bible's common word for God is a plural word, namely אלהים ('elohim), the plural of אלה ('eloha). The answer that is commonly given is that our word אלהים ('elohim) employs a "majestic" plural. The problem here is that although Hebrew uses an emphatic plural (like "very, very much", or "creepers that creep" or "vanity of vanities"), nowhere in the Bible occurs such a "majestic" plural. Instead, the Bible is emphatically adamant that God is One (Deuteronomy 6:4, Isaiah 45:5-7, Ephesians 4:3-6), and makes extra efforts to remove any hint that perhaps in certain circumstances, God is indeed a multitude, just as the polytheists have always believed (Exodus 20:3).

And despite all those security measures and all the warnings and all the emphases, our plural word אלהים ('elohim) is not only used to refer to the One God, but also to any one or council of human authority figures (Genesis 23:6, Exodus 4:16, 7:1, 21:6, 22:9, Deuteronomy 10:17, Joshua 22:22, Psalm 82:1, 82:6, 136:2, 138:1). That is significant because the singular form of our plural word אלהים ('elohim), namely אלה ('eloha), is closely similar to אלה ('elah), meaning oak, from the root אול ('awel), to stick out, protrude or lead ahead — hence also the noun איל ('ayil), meaning "that which sticks out": a fat man's belly, a house's porch, a ram, a stag, a human leader, any huge or otherwise conspicuous tree (like a palm in the desert).

The solution comes with understanding how God (One) and the godly (many) relate:

Compare it with one of those spherical milky-white lamps that hang from ceilings. All a floor-based observer sees is the milky white lamp from which the light flows. That's the lamp: the thing from where the light comes. What the floor-based observer cannot see is what goes on inside the lamp. On the inside, namely, there might be a bug that got locked in. To the bug, the milky white glass is the floor, and when the bug looks up, it too sees a spherical milky white lamp up there. That's the light bulb. And what the bug can't see is what goes on inside that lightbulb. That means that there is very little difference between the world of the floor-bound observer and the locked-in bug when both look up toward the source of light. The difference between their worlds only becomes evident when they try to communicate between themselves, between the realms. The floor-bound observer will hear a voice coming out of the lamp, from the very source of light, and would obviously not know that the voice comes from a fellow creature rather than the Creator, unless this fellow creature would helpfully clarify this (Acts 14:15, Revelation 19:10, 22:9).

When we stand in the wilderness, in the outer darkness of lawlessness, and we look up ahead toward the light streaming out of the temple complex in the distance, then all we see is the radiant outer wall around the outer court. Should we make it onto the outer court (Matthew 21:12), we would only see the beaming glow of the wall around the inner court. From the inner court we would only see the outside of the Holy. From within the Holy we would only see the entrance to the Holy of Holies. From the Holy of Holies we only see the Ark, and there's no telling what goes on between the cherubim (Exodus 25:22) and how far the goings go on.

The reality of which we are part consists of layers upon layers of ever increasing unity, which can't be told apart from any lower level. And that also means that no one ever knows quite how far up the ladder one is. Still, we earthlings have barely figured out that we're not alone in the galactic neighborhood, let alone what might bind entire galaxies together, or even whole universes and realities. But, the trick is to take it easy, and to worry only about the task at hand, and at the level we're at.

That said: the Creator God, the angel of YHWH and the people who are infused with the Spirit can't be told apart by anyone outside — hence the noted overlap in Hosea 12:4, but also confusing statements such as Genesis 33:10, Numbers 22:32, Judges 6:11, and so on, which all must be regarded relatively and not absolutely. There are always people in the world who are more unified than us (or in ways other than our ways), which is why people with any sense understand that the world does not end with them, and there is always some more unity to aspire to, and some higher-uppers to learn from. And since we all love symbols, some of us wear a little hat on our head to symbolize that we know that above us, there's ever more divinity to pursue and be directed by. But of course, that little hat is optional: taking off your wedding ring doesn't make you less married, just like putting one on doesn't make you more so. Whether visibly or not, the People of the Covenant are among us, and whether obviously or not, gently guide us onto ever more unity (Isaiah 40:11).

This ties our name Phoenicia quite firmly to the doctrine of Immanuel, meaning God With Us, and of course the Bread of the Presence (לחם פנים, lechem panim) within the Holy of the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:30), and via Bethlehem (meaning both House Of Bread and House Of War) to the birth of Jesus Christ (also see our article on αρτος, artos, bread). That puts the Phoenicians quite literally all over the Biblical map.

For people with even more creativity of thought, the final end of our name Φοινικη (Phoenicia) may have reminded of the familiar word νικη (nike), victory:

In that sense, the name Phoenicia would mean Victory Of The Palm or Victory Of The Alert Ones. The element -φι (-phi) may further remind of a relatively common Greek suffix that forms nouns with an inherent dependency (that functions as an instrumental, dative, genitive or locative case) and an obscured number (we can't tell how many elements there are inside the thing, could be one or a billion). Hence, phi-nike would mean Victory of the Interdependent Uncountable Multitude! In Hebrew this suffix exists as the autonomous particle פי (pi), which literally means mouth, but which may also mean "fold" or "times" (as in seven-"fold"). And of course, פי (pi) is also how you say pi in Hebrew: the ratio between diameter and circumference of any circle: The Circle Wins!