ELTBefore Introduction
When I first set out to learn Hebrew, my primary goal was to gain enough understanding to verify whether the meanings people were attributing to the language were truly accurate. The Hebrew alphabet was so unfamiliar to me that I struggled to even recognize the letters, let alone distinguish between similar ones. To overcome this, I started with a children's primer and spent time tracing the letters to build my familiarity with them.
I also began to use Strong's Concordance and Harris' Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament to explore the meanings behind Hebrew words. However, my observations quickly led me to a troubling conclusion: much of the material I encountered was unreliable. The Theological Wordbook, for example, was based on the modern system of vowel markings (nikud), which were only introduced in 600 AD. This was a problem, as Jesus never saw these vowels. The references in the book often included phrases like:
4a – Assumed root… 1a – Assumed root… 27a – Assumed root…
In essence, the book admitted that many of its conclusions were speculative at best, and they made up a great deal of the information. I didn’t want to rely on guesses and assumptions, especially when studying the language of Scripture.
Determined to learn Hebrew more accurately, I turned to the teachings of the Rabbis. However, this was a double-edged sword. While their understanding of Hebrew was deeper in some ways, the Rabbis, unfortunately, reject Christ, which means their interpretations are often skewed and lead one away from Him. While it’s possible that some of their insights are inadvertently correct, the majority of their teachings are not.
A clear example of this is their false claim made to Jerome that there were only 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In reality, the Rabbis teach that Hebrew has 28 letters, each carrying its own unique meaning. This is why final forms are unique letters. Six of these are called "final forms," which are used only when certain letters appear at the end of words. One of these final forms is even used in the priest's garment but is never found in any word. Interestingly, 28 is a much more appealing number than 22, and the Rabbis' explanation of this idea seemed to further obscure the truth.
Additionally, the Rabbis misled Jerome by telling him that Hebrew was like Greek, with three-letter roots for every word. This claim overlooks a crucial aspect of the language: the meaning of Hebrew letters comes from the strokes and shapes within them. The Rabbis failed to account for the profound significance of these individual strokes in the letters, which is key to understanding Hebrew words more deeply.
I realized that in order to understand Hebrew in its truest sense, I would need to look beyond the conventional methods and develop a way to read Hebrew from the meaning embedded in the very letters themselves. Since the Rabbis had forgotten the ancient method of interpreting the language, I decided to reverse-engineer the language based on my own observations and insights.
I began by taking around 8,000 Hebrew lemmas from Strong’s Concordance and breaking them down to their component letters. I re-examined the strokes that make up each letter, treating Hebrew like a giant multidimensional crossword puzzle. Through this method, I started to see connections and patterns emerge, and when I applied this framework to the first verse of Genesis (Gen 1:1), I felt like I had made a significant breakthrough.
My work is far from complete, and it would benefit from others reviewing and contributing their thoughts. However, it has been a productive and fruitful endeavor so far, and I am confident that I am on the right track to unlocking the deeper meanings of the Hebrew language and, by extension, the Scriptures.
