Three Taverns meaning

Meaning

Three Taverns, Three Wooden Objects, Smallest Degree Of Violent Law Enforcement [Fascism]

Etymology

From (1) τρεις (treis), three, and (2) ταβερνα, taberna, tavern, from trabs, anything wooden.

The name Τρεις Ταβερναι (Treis Tavernai) is Greek for the Latin name Tres Tabernae, or Three Taverns, which belonged to a station on the Appian Way, 50 kilometers south of Rome: the last major station before arriving at Rome proper, or the first station out — that is, if one made it out. Ninety-five percent of Rome's population lived well below the poverty line in cramped and rat infested apartment blocks. Disease, starvation, floodings, violent crime, violent law enforcement and violent slavery killed them in vast numbers. Fifty percent of children died before the age of ten and common people rarely lived beyond thirty. Especially during the hot summers, tens of thousands of corpses were carried out via the Appian Way to the burial and cremation pits that surrounded the city. Criminals were crucified along the Appian Way, sometimes by the thousands, so that people traveling to Rome were forced to witness miles upon miles of unspeakable agony, that was put there for the sole purpose of reminding the traveler to behave.

Every day, entire herds of pigs and goats were driven in to be slaughtered there. Heavy lifting and all manner of transport was done with mules, horses and oxen, and their manure was carted out by endless trains of wagons that unloaded as soon as it was legal, creating mountains of heaving dung, mixed with shards from broken pottery and other wastes. Death was everywhere. Rats, flees and flies were ubiquitous. The stench was unbearable.

With a staggering million human inhabitants, Rome was by far the largest city of the ancient world, and although Christian writers have glorified it, in the first century it was widely considered the capital of a global death machine. In the self-loathing words of Tacitus (imaginarily quoting Calgacus): "These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations are rifling the oceans ... To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles they call "empire", and where they make a desert they call it "peace"" (Agr.30). And Tacitus was not the only one: from the Liberators who killed Julius Caesar to the possibly wrongly vilified Pontius Pilate, Rome was hated as much by Romans as non-Romans, and many in the first century went to all lengths to stop the beast it was becoming.

Contrary to what is commonly believed, the idea of hell — a place of living death with smoking pits everywhere, where demons torture for entertainment, and all are submitted to the Lord of the Flies — is not based on anything with that clear description in the Bible. It's rather based on Rome.

The Paradisal City of God, as described in great detail in John's book of Revelation and less emphatic in the rest of the New Testament, is in many ways simply the opposite of what was known about Rome. Why and when Three Taverns was named isn't clear, but ancient reports tell of three or four roads meeting at that point, to go on united as the Appian Way, the Road of Death, in contrast to the New Jerusalem's River of Life (Revelation 22:1, see Ezekiel 47:1 and Isaiah 2:3) and the four rivers of Eden (Genesis 2:10).

Likewise, nobody in the original audience of the book of Acts would have missed in Luke's reference to Rome's Three Taverns the reactionary vision of the transfiguration of Jesus, when Peter offered to build τρεις (treis) σκηνας (skenas) in Greek and tria tabernacula in the Latin Vulgate (Matthew 17:4).

The name Three Taverns occurs in the Bible in Acts 28:15 only, and although popular commentators curiously insist that Luke wrote in the journalistic realism that we moderns are used to, he rather obviously catered to the vastly superior literary tastes of his own contemporaries (see this further discussed in our articles on Adramyttium, Malta and Phoenix). And so, Luke tells us that evidently two independent companies of brethren met Paul at the Appian Forum and at Three Taverns. This is not an anecdotal detail but rather a reference to a letter by the Roman statesman Cicero (who died in 43 BCE, a year after Julius Caesar) to his friend Atticus (who had fled from Rome to Athens, from which his name derives). This letter was written on April 18, 59 BCE, but wasn't published until the middle of the first century CE and evidently caused quite a stir (because we still have it). In it, Cicero writes:

Cicero to Atticus, greetings. So, they deny that Publius has been made a plebeian, do they? This is certainly sheer tyranny and not to be borne. [...] Fancy two such delightful letters of yours being delivered at one and at the same time! I don't know how to pay you back for the good news [while writing mostly in Latin, here Cicero uses the Greek word ευαγγελια, euaggelia], though I candidly confess my debt. Here's a coincidence. I had just taken the turn off the road to Antium on to the Appian Way at the Three Taverns on the very day of the Cerealia, when my friend Curio met me, fresh from Rome, and at the very same moment your man with a letter. Curio inquired whether I hadn't heard the news. "No," said I. "Publius is standing for the tribuneship," says he. "You don't say so!" "And he is at deadly enmity with Caesar," he replies, "and wants to annul all those laws of his." ... What a lot of nonsense is talked about ζωσης φωνης (zoses phones)(i.e. viva vox, by living word, by word of mouth). [...] When things have settled down, my writing will be more clarified. Though you may not get anything from me at once, you shall be the first to have it however, and no one else for a long time. (Ad Atticum, ii.xii, Cicero Letters to Atticus 1, with an English translation by E.O. Winstedt, M.A. Volume I, Putnam, MCMXIX).

The name Three Taverns comprises two elements, the first being the numeral τρεις (treis), meaning three. The second part of our name is a plural of the Latin noun taberna, which was initially used to refer to any sort of hut or shed and went on to denote specifically places of business and community: taverns, inns, shops. Our English word "tavern" obviously derives from this Latin noun, and so does the noun "tabernacle", from the Latin tabernaculum, tent or small booth, the diminutive of taberna.

The facility known as The Tabernacle is in Hebrew called the Tent of Meeting (namely of God and man), which is a process that ultimately results in the New Jerusalem, that emerges out of the Temple of YHWH, that grew out of the Tabernacle, which was a continuation of the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:2), which was a continuation of the first meeting of the Word of God with a human (Genesis 15:1), after continuous communion was lost in Eden (Genesis 3:8). People who are alien to this story tend to think that the meeting of God and man is about the meeting of two discrete beings who both have location in space and time (who are somewhere and some-when), but this is not what's going on.

The singularity from which the entire universe emerged was never comprised, and the symmetry was never lost. This not only means that all objects and forces exist like leaves on one huge energy tree, that itself emerged from a single seed, and that all things are therefore related, it also means that the unity from which everything came is more primal and more fundamental than anything else, and everything else emerged by merit of that unity. All things exist because they exist relative to all other things, and all things exist together and their relative existing adds up to the whole of "existence" (Colossians 1:16-17). God does not exist, because if he did, he would depend on existence and existence would be greater than he. Instead, God is greater than existence, and existence depends on God. Said otherwise: God is not a thing among things, but that which lets all things be things because all things are things because they exists among all other things that exist. The Oneness of God is that from which the oneness of creation derives, but oneness is not a thing that you can have two of. There's only one Oneness, just like the Name or Spirit of God can rest on beings that are not God.

Long story short: God is everywhere, so he cannot be approached or abandoned. That means that the Tent of Meeting is not a place where God and humans come together, but rather a place where humanity unifies and contracts and becomes ever more One and hence ever more divine. Humanity comes closer to God by becoming more Godly.

Best part: the Hebrew word for tent, namely אהל ('ohel) comes from the verb אהל ('ahal) that also means to shine or to smell sweet, and essentially speaks of bringing people together in festive harmony (see the name Ohel). The word for meeting, מועד (mo'ed), comes from יעד (ya'ad), to meet, whereas מעדן (ma'adan) means delight and closely relates to עדן ('eden), the name Eden. Our word for meeting, מועד (mo'ed), also occurs in the list of functions of the celestial light: namely to divide between night and day, and to be for signs and for מועדים (mo'adim), and for days and years (Genesis 1:14).

Humanity unifies because of language and writing, and writing is information technology, whose evolution is part of the greater technological evolution of mankind. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Bible is primarily about language formation and the development of writing (and see our article on the noun χιτων, chiton, garment) within the greater compass of technology (see Exodus 31:1-11).

In that regard, no greater gift ever came to mankind than the alphabet, which was introduced to the world by the Phoenicians. The story of Moses among the "reeds" of Egypt rather obviously tells of the emergence of the Torah among the received legends within Egypt's literary tradition, and later Israel's crossing the Sea of Reeds expands on that (whilst borrowing the image of the second day of creation, which also informs the account of Jesus' dying on Golgotha). Even our word "Bible" derives from the noun βιβλος (biblos), meaning papyrus. A rivalling system wrote on parchment, from Pergamum, whose name derives from Priam, of the king of Troy, whose city was destroyed by the Achaeans, or so it was told by Homer. Trojan survivors sailed west to Italy, where they founded a new royal dynasty among the local population, which over the centuries grew out into the governing elite of Rome, or so it was told in Virgil's Aeneid.

Our English word "library" comes from the Latin word liber, which not only refers to freedom, but also to bark that hung loose from trees. Unlike the Egyptians, who wrote on papyrus, or the Trojans, who wrote on parchment, the Latins wrote on loose bark. And although it doesn't matter in the least bit what one writes on, and only what one writes about and in what language, loose hanging bark was mostly associated with the Latin language. The Latin language in turn was associated with the philosophy of violent law enforcement, which was entirely alien to Israel, and eyed with suspicion by the freedom-loving Greeks, who famously did not cast aspersions on their neighbor's choice of pleasures. That changed with the rise of the rational schools, when violent law enforcement became promoted with idealistic zeal by people like Plato. From Platonic thought comes any sort of idealized competition and hence oppression and ultimately fascism and holocausts.

A language is a living spirit that lives unified in multiple heads, which eats and secrets and evolves like any living thing and fights other languages for resources — not merely "speakers" of the language but rather information that lives natively within the language before any story has even started: information that lives in the etymological ligaments between words, but also mythological material that arises naturally like super-words without any particular author (i.e. not by the "will" of a man) and is simply picked up and made their own by the speakers as they would any individual word. The purpose of myths is the same as that of words: namely to be a name of some class of things, to provide a roost for anything that cannot otherwise be discussed but which is very real in the experience of people (Daniel 10:20-21). Stories of Bigfoot, abducting aliens and the Loch Ness Monster are not simply untrue, but are the recognizable labels on the glass jars in which people collectively store their fears of human barbarism, technological overlords and things for which society has no words and which abides in the cultural subconscious from which it occasionally emerges as an inexplicable social movement that leaves a trail of death and destruction before submerging once again into the nameless void from which it sprang.

Every language has innate intelligence, which has to do with the etymological (and playfully poetic) links between words. The Hebrew language is as incomparably complex as a human brain, whose words link like neurons to all other words, and is said to contain anything that can be said in any other language (John 21:25, Acts 2:6, 1 Corinthians 2:4), and if Hebrew is the world's shepherd (ποιμην, poimen), then Greek is the shepherd's dog (κυων, kuon), not only intelligent beyond all other animals but also extremely loyal and helpful. Latin, however, is a vile and bloodthirsty monster. The familiar Torahic injunction "cursed in everyone who is hung on a tree" (Deuteronomy 21:23, hence Galatians 3:13) is from the 7th century BC, when Latin began to be a rival to Greek and Hebrew, and is very clearly a reaction to the horrors that Latin would later dream up.

Our Latin noun taberna, describes any sort of hut or wooden shed, and stems from the very common Latin noun trabs, which refers to any kind of timber or the trunk of any living tree (see the name Silas), and by extension anything made from wooden beams: ships, roofs, battering rams, tables, torches and weapons like clubs and spears. For comparison: our English word "wood" stems from PIE "dwi-", apart, and "deh-", to put, and also derives from what people did with tree trunks after they cut them: set them up in evenly spaced rows or grids. A small trabs was known as a trabecula. And big ones were used for the foundation of big buildings, or as rafters of huge roofs. In Greek, such a colossal wooden beam was known as a δοκος (dokos), and was on occasion found lodged in someone's eye — again in obvious reference to Latin thought, and a discussion on how and how not to deal with that kind of thinking.

This noun trabs stems from a widely attested Proto-Indo-European root "treb-", meaning building or dwelling or small cluster of dwellings. From that same root come the German word Dorf, meaning village (as in Düsseldorf), the Dutch dorp (as in Hoofddorp) and the English "thorp" and "troop".

Now that we know that the noun trabs refers to anything wooden, out attention is drawn to the familiar term "fascism", which derives from the Latin term fasces. This word fasces described a bundle of wooden rods bound tightly around an ax, which initially served as a rallying totem for soldiers, but came to denote violent law enforcement. Rulers of a certain leaning adopted the fasces as their signature symbol. See for instance the front of the throne of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and the left talon of the eagle of the Great Seal of the United States. In its right talon the eagle holds an olive branch, which appears to indicate that the US offers violent law enforcement as one of two options.

The key here is that three is the smallest amount of sticks within which an ax can be bound. That means that any cluster of three wooden things — any three sticks: three arrows (1 Samuel 20:20), three crosses (Matthew 27:38), three taverns — would remind a Latin speaker of violent law enforcement, even when a Hebrew speaker might (in the case of Golgotha, as mentioned above) be reminded of the broken symmetry of the second creation day (Jesus corresponding with the heavenly firmament and the repenting criminal with the waters under the firmament, from which first dry land emerges and then all life).

There is of course nothing wrong with combining resources, working together and creating federations, but there is something very wrong with creating weapons out of such alliances (Isaiah 30:1). One of the main themes of the Bible is precisely that broken symmetry, between peaceful congregation of mutually serving participants on one hand, and a chain gang of forcibly attached prisoners on the other. The first kind of society is the so-called Hebrew Republic, which is signified by a free exchange of goods, service and information, in which all participants are autonomous and sovereign and got there by having studied the matter, as freedom is not a natural phenomenon but an acquired skill — for more on freedom, see our article on ελευθερια (eleutheria), meaning freedom-by-law. For more on the Hebrew Republic, see The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought by Eric Nelson (Harvard University Press, 2010), or our articles on Gog and Magog, Philistine, Mesopotamia, Timaeus.

The Hebrew Republic is the only republic that has remained stable since its inception (Exodus 18:13-27, Deuteronomy 1:9-18), and is still going strong in the world today, wherever there is a synagogue and people study Torah. All other forms of government and all states based on such other forms of government are inherently unstable and will fall apart. This is because the universe is a Hebrew Republic — in which all elements are both Free and One — and anything within the universe that tries to exist according to rules that are alien to the universe will be rent asunder by the forces of the universe.

Any system in which one guy aims to enforce his visions on others and demands that the others form into an object after the first guy's own image, is an unstable anti-One sort of thing. It's the idea behind all law enforcement, all centralized government, all tyranny, all legions, all classrooms and all churches in which people are positioned like legionnaires in rows and listen to the commander up front who tells them how it is. A Hebrew Republic, contrarily, comprises a very large general population that is centered upon an eternally accessible gathering of wise people, who are in continuous touch with the population and converse with their fellows until a well-informed consensus yields policies that nobody opposes (see our article on Tyrannus).

The Hebrew Republic is the only stable sort of human society, and it is extremely difficult to organize because it depends on the maturity of everyone involved. People who are not mature require government that doesn't ask their opinion, and is therefore forcible. As long as there are Hebrews on earth, these Hebrews form the inner court of the Temple complex, the House of David, if you will (Zechariah 12:8). Around that nucleic House David, from where the human world is actually governed, there is the court of the nations. Not all nations are on that court, but they are all invited (Genesis 22:18, Haggai 2:7, Matthew 28:19, Revelation 22:2). It's where House David teaches everybody their ABC's, their Ten Commandments, and of course the Hebrew language which is the language of nature (because no, not mathematics but Hebrew is the language of nature). And as long as these nations haven't attained freedom, they must be governed by force, albeit by loving force the way a father chastises his child (Proverbs 23:13-14, Matthew 21:12, Revelation 19:15).

Eventually, all nations will either attain societal maturity — that is ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law (Galatians 5:1, 1 Corinthians 15:24, 2 Corinthians 3:17) — or they will destabilize, die and turn to dust, after which their survivors will stumble across the wilderness to try to make it to one of the free states. But as long as freedom-by-law is rare, the saints are a minority and the fascists vastly outnumber them. Some people wonder why the saints don't summon fire from heaven to consume the fascists, but that's precisely the thing that fascists do (Proverbs 28:5). Saints don't want to be fascists, and rather die than dominate or oppress somebody else (Zechariah 4:6, Matthew 5:43-44, Luke 23:34).

The fascist majority in the Hebrew Bible is usually identified by references to Esau in general or the Amalekites specifically. In the New Testament, the fascist majority is of course anything Roman, but most specifically anything broad or rude or populistic. The word for this is πλατυς (platus), from which derives the name Plato, the father of Statecraft from violent law enforcement (John 8:44), and this covers anything from police to propaganda, from uniforms to banners, from parties to symbols, and of course the continued identification of "the others", the aliens and weirdos who don't fit in and who must be "healed" or else "euthanized" for their own good and that of society at large (Revelation 20:9). In Christ, who embodies the senatorial discourse at the heart of the Hebrew Republic (Matthew 18:20), there are no such divisions (Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11), and in Christ the prime directive is the preservation of unity (Ephesians 4:1-6, John 17:21), and hence the accommodation of safety and security and inclusion for the weak and challenged (Isaiah 1:17, Micah 6:8, Psalm 140:12, Matthew 19:14).

"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it" (Matthew 7:13).

Another word that derives from the noun trabs is trabea, which described a white mantel that was richly ornamented with horizontal bands of scarlet and gold and evidently reminded of a tree trunk, perhaps a birch. These robes were distinctive and worn only by the highest ranking officers and kings. Note the pun in Genesis 30:37 — as noted above, Jacob's brother Esau would become synonymous with Europe and his grandson Amalek with Rome.

Rome's second emperor Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 CE, and was therefore the emperor at the time of Jesus' public ministry and crucifixion. The name Tiberius derives from the name Tiber, of Rome's river, but may also have borne enough resemblance to our noun taberna to associate Tiberius, and by extension the Emperor in general, with the theatrical stock character of the innkeeper. That would add to the depth of the observation that there was no room in the "inn" for Jesus and his parents, as well as to that of the story of the Good Samaritan and the beaten and battered traveler.

In our article on the name Isaac, we point out that any symbol comprising three vertical strokes such as a trident or the letter ש (shin) usually ties into the oldest known Indo-European symbol for God or Earth Soul or Great Spirit. Much better informed than she lets on, author J. K. Rowling graced everybody's favorite Hogsmeade Tavern with the name The Three Broomsticks (and "mead" comes from μεθυ, methu, hence the name Malta, where Paul met Publius). And that's not a creative coincidence. The whole living painting motif is supported by the Christian Orthodox understanding of Icons. The Chamber of Secrets somewhere in the invisible castle that is the School of Wizardry (a wizard is a wise-art), makes heavy use of Hekhalot mysticism. And mister Weasley's blue flying Ford Anglia not only ties into Pinocchio's Blue Fairy but also Merkabah mysticism.