The Lion and the Lamb

The noun λαος (laos) is one of a few Greek words meaning men or people. In the Bible it may denote people in general (Matthew 26:5, Luke 1:10), a society at large (Luke 2:10, Acts 4:25), but most often the common people as distinguished from leaders and big shots (Matthew 26:5, Mark 11:32). The latter sense is preserved in our English nouns layman and laity.

It's formally a mystery where this word comes from, but here at Abarim Publications we're pretty confident that it was imported into Greek along with the alphabet and a slew of handy abstractions from the Greek's ever generous trading partners the Phoenicians, who spoke a Semitic language closely related to Biblical Hebrew (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of Greek). The Hebrew word for people is לאם (le'om) or לאום (le'om), from the verb לאם (la'am), which probably meant to be together or assemble in some formal or political sense (an organic or tribal "people" was known by the word עם, am).

Our noun λαος (laos) is used 142 times in the New Testament; see full concordance. Other words for people are: δημος (demos), εθνος (ethnos) or even οχλος (ochlos).

The noun λαας (laas) means stone and although this word is a rarer synonym of the familiar noun λιθος (lithos), it occurs quite frequently in Homer. This word's genitive and dative is λαος (laos). Its plural form is λαες (laes), its plural genitive is λαων (laon). See for a more detailed look at stones in the Bible our article on the noun λιθος (lithos), but in summary: the first stones were hewn to be monuments or memorials. In English, stone may be proverbially hard or cold, in antiquity stone was a proverbial recording device. The Temple of YHWH was not only the organizational heart of the people of Israel, it was also a self-similar reflection of it (or vice versa, rather). It was as much a tribute to YHWH as to information technology, and served as the nucleus of society, where all records and governmental information were stored.

Hence, when Peter spoke of believers being living stones that are built up as a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), the metaphor was well-established within Biblical tradition. Permanent records were chiseled in stone, and "living stones" are living record keepers: keepers of the information of the kingdom of God. But the stones of the temple were not chiseled into place on location, but rather planned from their own point of origin (1 Kings 6:7), and in that sense, the temple fulfilled the role of the earthen altar, which God commanded Moses to construct, right after receiving the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:25, also see 2 Corinthians 2:15, Philippians 4:18, Revelation 8:4).

Our noun λαας (laas), stone, itself does not occur in the New Testament but from it derives:

The adverb λιαν (lian) means very, very much or greatly. It occurs 14 times; see full concordance.

The adjective ιλαος (hilaos) means propitious, gracious or kindly favored toward. In the Greek classics this verb signified the attitude of the Olympic deities toward men, which in the New Testament became quite obviously applied to the God of Israel (albeit by use of other words): "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased" (Luke 2:14).

In the classics, this quality could be applied to things, which were then considered atoned for or blameless (in whatever way that was perceived). Likewise, men could be thought of as ιλαος (hilaos) when they were kind or gracious toward other men. Note the accidental proximity of these words and the noun ιλη (ile), a troop or band of men, and the verb ειλω (eilo), to roll up or pack close — we discuss these words in our article on απειλεω (apeileo), to hold in suspense.

Our adjective ιλαος (hilaos) is thought to come from a Proto-Indo-European root "selh-", which probably had to do with mercy or the giving of comfort: it's also the source of words like the Latin solor, comfort, hence our English word "solace", the German selig (overjoyed) and the Dutch zalig (the Dutch word for "beatitude" is zaligspreking or happy-speaking, and zalig became an informal synonym for being saved in a religious sense). For some reason — and this perhaps to do with the Catholic use of the words selig and zalig — the English language treated our root "selh-" as a joke, and drew upon it for the words "silly" and "hilarious".

All these words (apart from "hilarious", which derives from the Greek) start with an "s/z" and our Greek adjective doesn't, but this is due to a familiar tendency of Greek to drop the leading sigma of words, or add one when none was there: see a list of examples of this under our article on the noun σειρα (seira), cord or rope.

A crucially important principle at work in these matters is the idea that it is not good for a man to be alone, and that instead, great things can be achieved when men work together. Pagans like to believe that their deity is their own personal lord and savior, but the Greeks had come to understand that whatever makes a human a human, and that would be one's "humanity", is a collective affair (see our article on the name Adam). Language, to start with, is always collective, and "words" are names of sets of things upon which, in deep antiquity, large groups of otherwise unrelated people slowly settled, simply by imitating the other guy and ever so slowly aligning their own unique consideration of things to the one shared with everybody else.

The world that thus emerged, the world whose fabric is verbal and whose atoms are words, is the world we live in. It's tempting to think that what we see out there is actually out there, but no, we are only aware of a thing out there when some sort of signal (light reflecting, or sound, or smell, or vibration) has traveled from the object, all the way through space, until it reached any of our bodily sensors (eyes, ears, nose, skin) and made contact and passed the information about the object like a baton to the next runner, namely an electrical current that starts to run away from our bodily sensor and toward our brain. Only when that signal reaches our brain, is translated into something to behold and is incorporated in our consciousness, only then are we made aware of the object out there. But our awareness of that object is always inside us. We are not aware of anything outside us, and inside us we are only aware of information that has been translated into words, that have subsequently been spliced into the story that is our consciousness. That means that inside our mind, the phrase "coffee mug" is of the same substance as the term "unicorn". And the two are equally real. Or not. But the bottom line is that we live in an entirely made-up world, and the only way to confirm that we're not making the whole thing up (and are nothing but a "brain in a vat") is to ask the next guy whether he sees what we are seeing.

And the kicker: when that next guy confirms that he sees what we are seeing we might still be making the whole thing up, including that next guy. Only when that next guy says something entirely unexpected — anything fabulously stupid, maliciously cruel or wonderfully original — we can be sure that we're not making it up. We couldn't have. The world we live in is a wonderfully frightening, cruel and stupid world that is entirely supernatural and does not exist outside the unified language that lives within all of our heads combined.

Language is supernatural. It's synthetic and technological, and emerged from very early humanity like a mist that rose from the earth and watered all the earth, and gathered into streams and then the world's great rivers (see Revelation 17:15, and our article on Tigris). Language allows humans to think about invisible things: feelings and sentiments but also abstractions and theories and events that might happen tomorrow (Hebrews 11:1). Language allows us to agree on things, both visible and invisible. It allows us to make complex agreements, and thus law and thus our modern world of cities and the global market, where forces of supply and demand shape us and form us and may ultimately lead us to a paradise where ελευθερια (eleutheria), or freedom-by-law, is the achieved ideal, and πονηρος (poneros), evil, from the verb πενομαι (penomai), having to toil or labor, exists no more.

A myth — from μυθος (muthos), story, — is not simply a story that isn't true. Instead, a myth is a story without an author: a story that may have sprung from some real seed but was otherwise spun from the countless contributions of ordinary folk gossiping over the hedge and by the water fountain. A myth is a story that settles in its final form just like a word. Its business is not be true or false, or even to instruct, but rather to be a roost for the ever fleeting nameless fears, hopes and concerns of people that have no real idea what they are talking about or even that they agree with other people that do neither. Stories of abducting aliens, bigfoot and the monster of Loch Ness are not simply not true, but rather reflect real concerns that really play among real folk that have no other words or images available for what they truly believe is going on (technological overlords or superior foreign regimes, perhaps, or subliminal vestiges of mankind's pagan or bestial origins, and so on).

The tropes and archetypes of myths are super-words that help us describe reality just like ordinary words do. The fancy name for this idea is the Structuralist Theory of Mythology. It explains why there is a Nobel Prize for Literature but not one for philosophy or psychology. The study of mythology is to the mind what the study of financial charts is to the economy. Mythology is to mankind's social mind what an anthill is to ants or a quantum impact pattern to quanta. It makes the invisible visible. Just like words allow us to build a world of cities, so mythology allows us to build a universe of worlds.

The difference between people like Plato, Caesar, Napoleon and Adolf on one hand and Homer, Moses, Isaiah, Paul and Jesus on the other is that the first are solitary men who imagined that their own personal views were so superior to anybody else's that the whole human world should obey them, whereas the second are literary (or legendary) composite characters that reflect large groups of people who somehow found a way to bundle and harmonize their voices into a unified text (see Proverbs 3:5-6 and our article on YHWH). Plato's speculative philosophy was once as crispy hip as AI images and text are to us today. And when people began to discover that there is something disastrously wrong with the way of Plato, it was already too late to stop any of it, and people had to learn how to differentiate between a true text that was the product of the whole of interacting humanity, or a fake one that was the result of a single man, his small array of axioms and the prompt he fed into it.

"It's like we've been designed to be collectively smart" says James Surowiecki in his 2004 book The Wisdom Of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business. Likewise, "Mythology and bureaucracy are the twin pillars of every large society," declares Yuval Noah Harari by no means facetiously in his 2024 book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.

We moderns love our teachers but every teacher is only human, and certainly limited and unavoidably biased. Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, believed that rationality would answer everything, but in modern times humanity stumbled upon the very boundaries of reason: Russel's paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, Turin's halting problem: absolute existential horror to anybody who cherishes an irrational belief in rationality, but business as usual to everybody who knows about the love of Christ "which surpasses all knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19) and the peace of God "which surpasses all comprehension" (Philippians 4:7).

The only window upon the mind of all of us is the window of mythology. True mythology is open source. Private speculations have a single author, and must therefore be incomplete. And although some speculations and teachings may seem fancy like a shiny jewel to whomever is like the author, to people that are not, these speculations are ridiculous and violently offensive and not rarely the motivation behind pogroms and holocausts.

Plato's Republic or his Dialogues are of the latter sort. The Bible of the former. Even the individual books of the Bible are nearly all compositions of countless oral strands that were formed organically within the even greater conversation of all ordinary people who sat around campfires — night after night, afraid or confident, hopeful or disillusioned, on their way to the market or on their way home, young and eager to learn or old and settled in their experiences — and delighted in retelling and discussing the great stories, and so doing refined them and themselves ever further. Likewise Isaiah was not one man but an entire school, whose book was assessed by the world at large and recognized as brilliant beyond compare, and maintained by generations of copyist who copied whatever the market at large would buy. Homer, likewise, was a school that operated for several centuries and who sculpted their works out of the oral traditions they found wherever caravans stopped for the night (Judges 5:11).

The only real Jesus is a literary character. To the inattentive reader, Jesus is described as a young man who lived in the first century. But anyone who actually cares about Jesus, and who carefully reads his story, soon realizes that the historical Jesus was always a people movement that emerged in the decade between the death of Herod (4 BC) and the appointment of Quirinius in Syria (6 AD), that was violently oppressed and left for dead upon the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, but which rose from the dead and spread out into the whole world to preach the gospel of collectivity and warn against the solitary man who thinks he should rule the world: "Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is broad — πλατυς (platus), hence the name Plato — that leads to destruction" (Matthew 7:13).

Paul famously wrote that "by grace you have been saved" (Ephesians 2:8), but it's not emphasized often enough that the word for grace, namely χαρις (charis) expresses collective or communal joy (think of the closely related word χορος, choros, choir).

From the perspective of the deity, natural humans are nothing but competing and self-serving animals (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10), and the only way to turn that heap of infighting morons into a unified bride is to make it contract, like a clouds of hydrogen atoms in space, so that the individuals bounce and grind but slowly gravitate (αγαπη, agape) upon a common center that suddenly, in the blink of an eye, switches to nuclear fusion and the whole heaving grinding cloud ignites and becomes reborn as a star.

The goodwill of God makes human societies contract, and although that causes friction, it also causes ever more unity, and ever more unity brings ever more freedom (Galatians 5:1). It's humanity's purpose to ultimately fill the entire universe, blended together with the creator without there being a boundary that separates the two. That's the kind of goodwill that this adjective speaks of. It's a kind of goodwill that the Greeks never quite understood, until the gospel of Jesus Christ was preached among them.

Our adjective ιλαος (hilaos) means to be of [divine] good will, but (quite crucially), does not describe someone's private feelings or inner convictions, but rather one's relationship with other people. Our word is a communal or societal word that describes the quality of one's relationship with one's neighbors and the human world at large. Our adjective is not used independently in the New Testament, but from it derive:

The verb απολαυω (apolauo) means to enjoy, or rather to have the enjoyment, use or benefit of (1 Timothy 6:17 and Hebrews 11:25 only). This word is fairly common in the classics and obviously consists of the preposition απο (apo), meaning from or out of, and an otherwise not extant verb λαυω (lauo). The meaning of this verb can no longer be tried (because there are no occurrences of it in existence), but it appears to derive from a widely attested Proto-Indo-European root "lehw-", meaning profit or gain. Other words from this same root are λαος (laos), people (see above), λαρος (laros), sweet or delicious, ληις (leis), booty or spoil, and the Latin noun lucrum, profit, from which English has the adjective lucrative.

The noun λεον (leon) is the common Greek and hence Latin, Germanic and thus English word for lion. It occurs 9 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

Our noun is of unclear origin but it looks suspiciously like it has to do with a plural genitive of whatever the adverb λεως (leos) has to do with. The adverb relates to the noun λαος (laos), meaning people, but means entirely or wholly, and the noun λεον (leon) looks like it means "all a y'all". But as always, there's much more: