Isaac meaning

Meaning

Laughter, He Will Laugh, Social Felicity

Etymology

From the verbs צחק (sahaq) and שחק (sahaq), to laugh or make fun.

Isaac is the son of Abraham with Sarah (Genesis 21:3). His wife is named Rebekah (Genesis 24:15) and his sons are Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:25-26).

Isaac receives quite a bit of Biblical screen time in the New Testament (where his name is spelled Ισαακ). Two thousand years after Isaac breathed his last, Jesus proclaimed him, his father and his son as being alive and well, and not dead (Luke 20:37). Isaac is mentioned twice in relation to Abraham's willingness to sacrifice him on Mount Moriah (Hebrews 11:17, James 2:21), which is a difficult story that we'll look at in some detail below, and he is celebrated as the child of the promise three times (Romans 9:7, Galatians 4:28, Hebrews 11:18).

The name Isaac occurs 20 times in the New Testament; see full concordance (against 42 for Jacob and 72 for Abraham).

The name Isaac is usually spelled יצחק and sometimes ישחק. It comes from the verbs צחק (sahaq) and שחק (sahaq) meaning to laugh:

The question whether Sarah laughed out of joy or out of mockery (Genesis 18:12) is usually answered in her disfavor but incorrectly so. Abraham had laughed as well and for the same reason, namely out of gladness for being promised a son (Genesis 17:17).

To mark that promise, Abraham had circumcised himself, his son Ishmael and the entire tribe he ruled (Genesis 17:23; see our article on How Circumcision Created the Modern World). And to put that in perspective: previously, Abraham had waged a war with 318 men that were born in his house (Genesis 14:14). Add to them their elderly fathers, younger brothers and an untold number of foreign-born men and we get an idea of what an operation this would have been. Assuming that Abraham was not a violent tyrant, he must have been great at explaining things, as he got it all done without triggering an understandable insurrection. Sarah, or so it's likewise implied, must have been busy for months appeasing the women.

When Isaac was finally born, Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me". (Genesis 21:6). Centuries later, Paul wrote, "By faith even Sarah herself received ability to conceive, even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered him faithful who had promised". (Hebrews 11:11) Sarah's faith therefore existed before she conceived of Isaac, not after, and she laughed because of that faith.

For a meaning of the name Isaac, NOBSE Study Bible Name List has Laughter and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names has Laughing. BDB Theological Dictionary proposes He Laugheth.

As one of the most seductive scenes in the Bible, the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah has attracted its fair amount of scorn. Far be it from us here at Abarim Publications to tell the reader what to think (this story, like any story, exists so that the reader can make up their own mind about the difficult truths about being human) but a few pointers might help sort things out:

First of all: the story of Isaac's sacrifice on Moriah is part of a tradition that very clearly abhors human sacrifice and specifically child sacrifice: 2 Kings 3:27, 16:3, 17:17-18, 23:10, Psalm 106:37-39, Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, 32:35, Ezekiel 16:21.

Then, as we often mention in our articles, the Bible, and particularly the book of Genesis is a fractal, whose defining structures repeat at various levels of complexity, and also follows the progression of mankind's signature mind as it arose naturally from the animal plain. Humanity's mind is one of words — basically, without speech there is no conscious thought and without the word (ονομα, onoma) there is no law (νομος, nomos) — and words are social things that formed like mist in the cooling night, spontaneously in the vast realm of increasingly calm and cooperative social interactions. Very early humans probably demonstrated their peaceful intentions by imitating others. The others did the same, and their mutual expressions gravitated toward shared verbal symbols that became the first words. That means that the sapiens-part of the familiar term homo sapiens says something about humanity's social development rather than physical evolution, and about the depth of mankind's social complexity rather than the shape or form of one single brain.

In Hebrew symbolic jargon, water, light and human culture are discussed with the same set of words (see our article on the name Tigris for a more detailed look at this), which is how in the Bible the beginning of mankind is marked by a mist rising from the earth (Genesis 2:6).

Humanity, or Adam, was "born" when the first words had been accepted as legal tender in an economy of information that began to rise from the animal world and began to form its own hydrological cycle of reason (Genesis 2:7). With his first words, man began to name the other animals (Genesis 2:19-20), and try his hand at the first rudiments of agriculture (Cain), animal husbandry (Abel), music (Jubal), tent-living (Jabal), and metallurgy (Tubal-cain). But mankind's true breach from the animal world came as a result of man's quest for wisdom (skill, knowledge, science, technology, and the deliberate pursuit thereof), which the Torah represents as the line descending from Seth and particularly his son Enosh, in whose days "men began to call upon the name YHWH" (Genesis 4:26).

The line of Seth culminated in Noah, whose flood definitively separated mankind from animal kind. This is how Jesus could declare that "they knew not until the flood came" (Matthew 24:39), and also explains the Bible often visited insistence on beast-man symmetry prior to reason: Psalm 49:20, 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10. After the flood, Noah planted a vineyard (Genesis 9:20) and vineyards in the Bible serve to depict mankind as a collective, social, cultural and intellectual entity rather than a physical entity (Isaiah 5:1, Matthew 21:33-41; also see our article on the noun αμπελος, ampelos, vine).

Mankind's first great urban centers were the capitals of centralized empires (towers of Babel), but their sovereignty became challenged by rebels who started traveling and trading between these centers (Abraham). Social contracts became more complex, and began to emphasize genetic diversity over tribal exclusivity (see our article on γαμος, gamos, marriage), and just before Jacob began to "build houses for him and his livestock" (Succoth), Abraham had attempted to sacrifice Isaac on Moriah.

Classical languages use the singular form to describe a class — the crop was eaten by the locust, the town was sacked by the Assyrian, the way was shown by the star — whilst not for a moment suggesting that there was ever only one: one single locust that ate all the crops, one single Asyrian who sacked the town, or one single star that showed the way. Entirely likewise, the king and the high priest of Israel is every free man (Exodus 19:6), and the Christ is every person who is as such anointed into personal sovereignty (John 17:20-23, Ephesians 4:3-6, Galatians 5:1, 1 John 2:20-27).

In our modern day and age it's hard to imagine that there ever were no laptops or smart phones or Internet or even electricity or motor cars, and that mankind existed in a world that worked fine but had simply not yet conceived of these things. Literary realism, entirely likewise, didn't exist in antiquity; it hadn't been invented yet. That means that insisting that the Bible is historical and factual in a journalistic sort of sense is like saying that it originated as a blog post or a tweet. And that is was originally written in MS Word, by ambient led-light, over cappuccino, in the back of a bus. It's anachronistic nonsense. Riddikulus!

In the summer of 1998, J. K. Rowling stated that "Harry Potter "came to me" on a train in 1990. I was sitting just staring out of the window, and the idea just fell out of nowhere. It was the purest stroke of inspiration I have ever had in my life and I've been writing about him ever since." The first Harry Potter Book, namely Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, had been published only a year before. In the years after, the series would go on to be the best-sold in history (very far ahead of Narnia, Peter Rabbit or even James Bond). This is relevant to theologians, because God never forces anything upon anybody and always uses natural dynamics to bring things about. Said simpler: God doesn't break natural law, and the popularity of Harry Potter stems from exactly the same combination of market dynamics and human interests as does the popularity of the Bible (2 Timothy 3:16).

As everybody knows, the European trope of the wizard (i.e. wise-art, man of wisdom) derives from that of the Medieval scholar, and back then, scholars were predominantly Jewish (the signature wizard hat derives from the Jewish hat, and the wand from the ραβδος, rabdos, which is not unlike the word Rabbi), and subsequently mysterious on several levels. Entirely obvious to all wizards working today — whether full-blood, muggle-born or mixed; in the world of wizardry what counts is where you are going, not where you came from — the wildly popular account of Harry Potter is an appreciative muggle's perspective on the world of wizardry: a non-Hebrew perspective on the utterly alien Hebrew scholarly world (the reverse, namely stories that convey modern Jewish perspectives on the common world, also abound: from Superman to Star Wars to Men In Black).

And one particular item that muggles invariably get wrong about wizards is that the entire world of wizardry exists to serve and protect the muggle world. And all the creatures of planet earth. The primary and sole objective of the wizards is grand unification: to bring about the peaceful existence of all terrestrials, to liberate whoever seeks freedom and to govern whoever seeks governance. And this is why wizards who know their craft don't invest in power (whether physical, tribal, military, financial or political) and only in wisdom, in learning it and teaching it. And celebrating it, of course.

But bottom line: only the dumbest among the muggles believe that Harry Potter is unreal fiction. All others realize that its popularity demonstrates its superior reality, and that literary realism is only a very recent degradation and the lowest form of writing: a Dobby kind of literary genre, bound to servitude and only a very small step above the dusty floor of computer coding — which is certainly very useful writing but writing utterly undone of all liquidity and all soul and all living mind. Reality, after all, is always experienced: reality is a function of consciousness, and the purpose of mythology is to reduce the observable world like fractions (like reducing a real-world 21/35 to a mythological 3/5).

Think of mythology as the software of the mind. A human mind runs within an exact environment (the Übermind that fills the universe) and upon a set of very exact instructions with which individual minds interact with other minds (including the Übermind). Think of the various spells that wizards utter as functions and variables of a code (what "Oculus Reparo!" does in the world of Harry Potter is what, say, "oculusReparo(harrysGlasses)" might do in a JavaScript environment).

Mythology is a natural extension of natural language. It grows naturally within the great global conversation and nobody governs or guides it. With a Dobby text, with an item of literary realism, nobody but the author determines meaning: the author is the sole master of Dobby. But the meaning of mythology is determined solely by the audience at large, and the author is a mere medium, a postal delivery person, if you will — so no, we need not ask J. K. Rowling what her books mean, and she possibly doesn't even know it. In a way, and respectfully spoken, she's only the owl that conveyed it.

With mythology, only the appreciative audience declares meaning and determines what constructions become jargon first, then expressions, then tropes, then archetypes and then foundational texts. Mythology is alive. Its narrative reductions behave precisely like words do in a story, because mythology does precisely the same thing that language does, namely think up terms for qualities that a large group of items have in common (for instance: all things endowed with "appleness" are apples; mythology would spin up a story about the Apple). And that is what the rational mind does all day: invent and handle reductive terms for ratios that represent large swathes of observable reality: not as metaphors but as self-similarities, fractals that retain the relative structures that exist between phenomena (for more on fractals, see out article on the Many Hearts of Wisdom).

Mythology is the highest form of literature. Its purpose is not to convey information but to demonstrate reality, for the observer to freely romp around in (Psalm 33:9). Mythology reflects the nature, fabric and working principles of the mind: not boringly linear but multi-dimensional, not accumulative like a tower of bricks but as a vast living unified organism whose associative webs are the mere skeleton upon which ripples of living information dance into patterns that are thoughts and realities far beyond what can be seen with the naked eye: the invisible (for muggles) realities upon which the observable (i.e. the consciously experienced) world stands. That's not to say that Harry Potter books are examples of the highest form of literature (they really aren't), only that they reflect an awareness of it and an awakening onto it — kind of like a soap opera about a team of brain surgeons, lovingly written by someone who can only guess at what happens behind those doors, and has our brain surgeons flirt, gossip and compete, while esoteric machines beep and blood splatters all over the place and the chief surgeon has to swoop in to sternly restore the brain surgery order.

Equally obvious to all wizards, the modern world is a European world, which is a Greco-Roman world, derived from Alexander's empire, which extended Philip's kingdom (three wands — or any symbol comprising three vertical strokes such as a trident or the letter ש, shin — is the oldest known symbol for God or the Great Soul (or the Übermind) and appears from Egypt to Macedon and China, says Basil Chulev in his riveting Ancient Macedonia, the Gods of Macedon, 2016). And that Greco-Roman world didn't emerge spontaneously by itself, but stands firmly grounded in the culture that gave the world the alphabet (and animal husbandry, agriculture, the week, the vacation, law and thus government, roads, the postal service and thus the Internet, the popular school, science and thus modern technology, modern finance and much more). That culture, of course, was the Semitic one: the Phoenicians but also the Chaldeans (hence the μαγοι, magoi, men-of-magic who first identified the Christ) and of course the Jews (see our articles on the many Hebrew roots of the Greek language and the names Aeneas and Troy).

The central stage of the Harry Potter story is Hogwarts: not a den of robbers or circus of law-breakers but a school where pure-blood, muggle-born and children of mixed legacies (Exodus 12:38, Ezra 6:21, Esther 8:17) learn the natural law involved in magic, meaning that magic is never about breaking law but always about obeying and mastering it (Luke 16:17, Romans 1:20, 1 Thessalonians 5:21; see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, or freedom-by-law).

The name Harry comes from the Germanic words haimaz, home (hence also Heimat and "home") and riks, king (hence words like Reich and rich). Harry's middle name, James, is the same as Jacob (see Genesis 25:27). And for Potter, see Isaiah 29:16, 41:25, 64:8, Jeremiah 18:2-4, Daniel 2:41-43, Matthew 27:7, Romans 9:21, Revelation 2:27.

The entity called Harry James Potter is on all accounts a genuine reduced character, a very real thing whittled down to its literary DNA, which commenced not in a private burst of creative fancy but a Pauline stroke of clairvoyance (John 7:15). On the same day that Rowling envisioned Harry Potter on platform 9-3/4 on his way to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, there surely were countless others who envisioned creatures nobody would ever hear about (young Bobby Smith on platform 7-1/3 on his way to Twinkle Toe School of Yarn) because they were the private concoctions of addled minds and did not resonate with anything that the world at large resonates with. The popularity of the subsequent Harry Potter books, films, theme parks and derived literary genres stem solely from the Western world's waking up to its own Hebrew core, and the reality of a law-based realm of ideas and consciousness beyond the visible physical one. As all wizards know, the entire civilized world has always been Jewish (Zechariah 8:23), but its Hebrew heart was slain and buried in its pagan soils. But in the modern age it is rather spectacularly resurrecting, and this much to the delight of the enslaved masses (and not so much of the ruling elite). (This also explains why most Potterian spells are Latin derivatives, and only the most ancient and formidable ones, for instance Avada Kedavra and the name of the Über-prison Azkaban, obviously derive from familiar Hebrew/Aramaic terms.)

In precisely the same way that Harry Potter came to J. K. Rowling ("it chose me rather than me choosing it"), so the Word of YHWH came to Abraham (Genesis 15:1, and see our article on How Imagination Builds God's Temple). And in precisely the same way in which Rowling's first vision expanded into a huge universe with countless spin-offs and piles of merch, so Abraham's original vision expanded into the Bible and the Bible into the modern world and all its perks — namely by the natural dynamics of the free and unstoppable commercial market (which is why every despot always first tries to control the market).

The literary character called Abraham — regardless of whether or not this literary character was based on one or any "real" or "historical" flesh-and-bones persons who have long since died (Matthew 22:32); the story is not about that — marks the level of complexity in the great human kosmos of global interaction of information: a kind of human intellectual instinct regarding social codes and manners and such, that allows every human individual to engage any other anywhere in the world one in some rudimentary form of reasonable conversation (without a common language, humans can use globally recognized gestures and facial expressions).

Consciousness and self-awareness are ubiquitous in the animal world. Even some tiny insect can somehow tell the difference between a prey (something nutritious that it can overpower) and a mate (something highly similar but still quite other), and is therefore conscious and self-aware. It won't write sonnets because it has no language, but not because it has no thoughts. It does. It probably even has feelings because insects too have gut microbiomes.

Fear, however, is a thing that insects don't have, because fear, like rationality and writing sonnets, requires the sort of advanced mental machinery that insects simply don't possess. Said crudely: insects are too dumb to be afraid. But Abraham wasn't.

Fear is mental music from a very large mental orchestra, in which many groups of musicians (senses, hormones, memories, genes, microbiomes) add to the symphony at large. As John put it: fear involves punishment (1 John 4:18), which requires a sense of self relative to some dominant power: some big beast, some authority (whose will is at odds with ours), some code, some ideal. It requires an understanding of inadequacy or impending failure, and therefore a desire or hope for conditions other than those presented. Every animal that is capable of fear is capable of recognizing something with the power to seriously interfere with one's own objectives. That is a very big deal. It's also why we clever humans are able to create Artificial Intelligence, but not Artificial Fear (any Turing Test tester should test for genuine fear: if no fear can be detected, the thing is a computer).

Fear is the Red Sea through which any evolving creature must wade in order to get to the other side: where it exists fearlessly, perfectly and redeemed from all inadequacies. In other words: fear requires bravery and only cowards avoid it. And when the Word of YHWH first came to Abraham, the first rational declaration ever uttered by human rationality in conscious self-reflection was: "Have no fear. I AM a shield to you." (Genesis 15:1; Abraham was the first called "Hebrew", which means "Crossed Over" or "He From The Other Side": Genesis 14:13).

As John continues to explain: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear...". And although love is often explained to involve feelings and panting and such, it really doesn't, or at least it didn't when the Bible was written. Back then, the word αγαπη (agape), "love", simply described in the mental world what the word "gravity" describes in the material world: the nearing of freely moving things (things like specks of space dust), their gradual convergence upon a common center, their increasing exchange of energy, heating up and possibly even fusing and stellar igniting.

Love is about reducing the distance or separateness between two or more travelers. It's therefore always collective (despite the lovely song, there is no such thing as "loving" yourself) and is very closely related to what is called entropy in thermodynamics: love causes any accumulation of energy (in the mental world that would be wealth and information) to spread out evenly among the participants. Language, typically, is a thing produced by love. People who share a language can exchange information very easily, and language emerges in the natural world when creatures start to imitate each other in search of togetherness, similarity and harmony.

Everybody knows about "salvation by grace" (Ephesians 2:8), but what few emphasize is that the word translated with grace, namely χαρις (charis), expresses social felicity: joy experienced among peers — hence words like charisma, charm, charity, choir, which are all things that don't happen when there's only one person and only happen when there are a bunch (despite the lovely sentiment, there is no such thing as a "personal" Lord and Savior: salvation is always communal; damnation is private).

And that brings us to laughter, which is always a communal thing, and never a private thing. Of course, we can laugh within ourselves (Genesis 18:12) just like we can talk to ourselves. But language does not emerge naturally from a single person and only emerges from many people communicating every day a little better. Speech (always collective) relates to feelings (always private) the way laughter (always communal) relates to fear (always private). Laughter too emerges from a core of social consideration and is a social selection mechanism.

Physiologically, laughter is very similar to crying or howling with fear, but mentally laughter is a form of language: it confirms the mutual acknowledgement of social standards and thus allows rough and tumble play (by reducing the risk of being perceived as an aggressor), the identification of anything odd or extraordinary, and therewith that of an obvious common center of normalcy for learners of the social graces to gravitate upon. Getting laughed at while not trying to be funny is an extremely powerful incentive for people to adjust their behavior. This also explains why laughter is so infectious: whoever doesn't "get" the joke is obviously not in tune with the community's governing standards and is therefore a stranger. We laugh because everybody else is laughing and not because the joke is funny (Matthew 11:17).

Laughing at a weirdo takes very little effort but, as every unintentionally "different" child will tell you, getting laughed at is a death sentence. Societies are always on their guard for intruders but the social immune system is not always capable of distinguishing between true strangers and those among us who simply can't keep up. Because in some societies, not being able to keep up means getting left behind, and that means getting picked up by trailing wolves and the likes. And that is obviously a very serious matter, because not only does it normalize the sacrifice of the weak, it also forces society's evolution upon a false ideal (like everybody being constantly hysterical even when there's nothing overly funny) without the hope of ever being freed from that because society just sacrificed everybody who might have.

Isaac didn't go up to Moriah to die but to learn how he didn't have to. The killing of society's weak was the given that Abraham had to solve for. God did not say: "Go to Moriah to sacrifice Isaac", but "Go to Moriah to sacrifice Isaac" (Genesis 22:2). Abraham had to take the existing aspects of his unavoidable nature and take it into a new environment.

The Book of Genesis is one of the most brilliant pieces of literature ever produced by humankind. Harry Potter will have been largely forgotten in a few decades but Genesis will never be forgotten, and has been studied by humanity's best and brightest for as long as it has existed. It was produced not by a single author or a small committee but by a "smart swarm" and relates to one single human mind the way an entire beehive relates to a single bee. Genesis is magnificent, like a perfect lens, clairvoyant to the extreme and deep and wide without bottom or end.

Genesis reduces the entire scope of observable existence into a handful of colorful characters by making use of narrative fractals (Psalm 78:2, Ecclesiastes 1:9, Matthew 13:35). The patriarchal story of Abraham is self-similar to a handful of pivotal and fundamental structures in nature, but probably most recognizably to: (1) the Standard Model of Elementary Particles ("like the dust of the earth": 12 sons of light-bearing Israel, 12 sons of bowman Ishmael and 8 + 4 sons of force-man Nahor), and (2) the emergence of social behavior (specifically among mammals) within the biosphere. All this is important because the material world, the biosphere and the mental sphere are self-similar and develop according to the same basic patterns ("...for there are three that testify: the spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are as One", 1 John 5:8). That means that the mental world is very much alike the biosphere, a place where mental buffalo roam the mental plains, mental lions chase them and mental great apes observes the whole crazy circus from the branches of their high mental trees.

We go into this structure in much greater detail in our e-book on How the Mind Works, but specifically, the patriarchal cycle conveys the story of how mammaldom emerged in the reptile-dominated biosphere, and how its two most recognizable categories came to pass. The story of the twins Jacob and Esau tells of the split between toe-walking digitigrade (Esau) and flat-foot plantigrade (Jacob), "Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a peaceful man, living in tents" (Genesis 25:27).

Digitigrade animals (Esau) are animals that walk on their toes (cows, horses, sheep, pigs, giraffes; all herdlings), because the evolutionary forces within their branch (i.e. competition among males) select for ever greater personal prowess. Because the toe-walkers are built for speed, they don't like confined spaces and prefer the open range. That in turn means that toe-walkers typically will run toward what they like and run away from what they don't like. This essential separation between the preferred "good" and not-preferred "evil" is the basis for a bi-polar reality model and ultimately polytheism (remember that Jacob and Esau also mark an essential structure in the mental world).

Plantigrade animals (Jacob) are animals that walk on their flat feet (mice, rabbits, beavers, squirrels, apes and thus humans), because they set their heel down (see our article on πτερνα, pterna, heel). Plantigrade is an adaptation of digitigrade (Jacob was younger than Esau), which means that Abraham was a digitigrade whose imaginative mind considered plantigrade even though his body wouldn't yet cooperate. It's not quite clear what precisely triggered plantigrade in the biosphere, but Genesis emphasizes Abraham's desire to stop roaming and settle down. And sure enough, plantigrade animals typically live in holes, burrows, lodges, (tents in the case of Jacob) and later stone houses.

This suggests two things: (1) plain-dwelling animals regard a tree as a confined space that you can't easily escape from: an ape in a tree is very much alike a rabbit in a hole, and (2) plantigrade emerged from animals digging holes to live in. And since flat feet are better suited for digging, evolution (i.e. the tastes of the females) selected favorably for flat feet. Hence Isaiah's famous observation: "How beautiful are the feet..." (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15).

Unlike digitigrade animals whose entire existence pivots on their distinction between good (run toward) and evil (run away from), plantigrade animals always run home. To plantigrades, not their own private tastes sits at the heart of all reality but rather the home. And the home of plantigrades most often is a shared communal home. Home is where everybody gathers in safety. Home is where the weak, young and old are safely cared for. Unlike plantigrades, digitigrades have no elders (to speak of). Plantigrades have a lifestyle most conductive of monotheism: a reality centered upon one common stationary home (the Hebrew word for house is also the word for temple: בית, bayit), in which elders remember and pass on their knowledge to the very young.

Digitigrades have no home and aren't collectively centered. And although they roam about in vast herds, they have no sense of community and, when triggered, run off as fast as they can, ahead of everybody else, and therewith drive their young, weak and old to the back end of the herd, where they are easy pickings for predators. And here's the rub: all mammalian predators — all feliform cat-like ones such as lions and tigers and all caniform dog-like ones such as wolves and bears — are toe-walkers just like the herdlings they hunt. Carnivorous predators are close cousins of the herdlings and the logical consequence of the herdlings' investment in personal speed. In the mental world, these predators are commonly recognized as demons (who, fortunately, are not so common anymore in our modern world).

In the wild, herds of digitigrades usually have native leaders: lead bulls, lead stallions, lead rams. But when the presence of predators overwhelms the directives of native leaders from within, the predators begin to drive the herds from without. This explains modern governments, which don't consist of natural patriarchs but of predatorial parasites whose sole motivation is not to govern the herds (that's a mere side effect) but to feed on them. A human government is a creature whose sole objective is to keep itself alive, and does that by killing and eating the weak that the herdlings willingly offer.

And that's where Abraham began to do things differently.

Maturity in the digitigrade world isn't much of a deal. Any kid can do it. Young herdlings can run with the adults within a few hours after birth, and not a whole lot of growing up happens after that. Plantigrade animals, on the other hand, are continuously exposed to a much wider range of being, as they share their home with helpless infants, adults in their prime and aging elders. Plantigrades are naturally disposed to preserve information between generations, to understand personal uniqueness and individual growth (and decline).

Digitigrades live only in one environment, the range, whereas plantigrades divide their time equally between the loud and bustling world outside their central home and the stimuli poor environment inside. In order for a plantigrade to establish whether it is safe to go outside, it has to pay very close attention to signals that make it in: trickles of sounds, smells and even vibrations. And to make sense of those signals, and construct from them a usable picture of the outside world, it has to learn to connect them to elements of the outside world, whose images it therefore has to retain as discrete data packages in its memory. Said simpler: the lifestyle of plantigrades stimulates the formation of language, the rudiments of imagination and ultimate expands the boundaries of animal consciousness into rationality.

Far from obvious when Jacob and Esau were still individuals (in a the sense: the first plantigrade versus the decisive digitigrade), Esau's running around would in time give rise to a wide spectrum of demonic murderers, whereas from Jacob came the primate and from the primate came the human. But the true miracle of humanity was not its intelligence (intelligence is overrated; if machines can do it, it's not very special) but rather its ability to work together with other species: cross-chain interoperability in a biological sense. The true miracle of humanity began when hominids (second temple Jews) and dogs (Homeric Greeks) domesticated each other and the two teamed up and began to govern the herds, and build stables for them and fences and combat wild predators — the societal equivalent of endosymbiotic eukaryosynthesis. Not all humans and dogs are shepherds, of course, and not all are virtuous or enlightened or even careful, but most try to liberate whoever seeks liberty and govern whoever seeks government.

The herdlings, however, only know the dogs (their own kind) and may at times see a clothed great ape wander about the field but cannot begin to guess at the nature and workings of the wondrous world of the humans, who live in cities far beyond the scope and comprehension of the herdlings, and pursue dreams that cannot enter the herdlings' mind. Humans have wisdom and technology that neither dogs nor herdlings can begin to fathom. They have networks that span the globe and telescopic instruments that stare farther afield than any natural eye could have.

The animal that Abraham finds to sacrifice instead of Isaac (Genesis 22:13) is called an איל ('ayil), which is not a specific animal (as translations commonly imply) but "one that sticks out" or "one that leads". This very common word could indeed describe a wool-yielding ram (2 Kings 3:4) or a protruding deer (Genesis 49:21, Psalm 42:1, Isaiah 35:6), in general the "leaders" of the flocks (Genesis 31:38), or the tribal leaders of man (Exodus 15:5, 2 Kings 24:15, Ezekiel 17:13).

Mount Moriah becomes the place where Abraham first understood that any tribal leader is a leader because he runs faster (or is stronger, richer, more powerful) than all the others. And by simply being himself, namely fearful and prone to stampede, the tribal leader sacrifices his own weak children to the very pursuing demons he's trying to get away from.

The most evil and suicidal movements to have ever plagued humanity (fascism, communism, capitalism) were all typically leader-obsessed: from Adolf the Führer, to communism's cult of the Beloved Leaders, to capitalism's glorified billionaires. And all their minions were "just" following orders (or "dreams" or "devotions") and gladly partook in the psychotic sacrifice of the defenceless, to only wake up when the crowd turned their machinal eyes on them and called purge.

The idea that a society will overall become better simply by identifying and removing its bad apples has always appealed to humanity's leaders. But there is an aspect to this that continues to elude most. And this is why no leader with such ideas has left the world an empire that lasted as long as it was designed to.

It appears to be a fixed law of nature that whenever some population (some herd) begins to progress (to run, to accumulate, to reach, to aspire) toward some ideal and away from the lack thereof, this population will automatically stretch and divide into classes — and the classes add up to the so-called κοσμος (kosmos), or "world-order" (and see 1 John 2:15-17) — with the best performers up front and the poorest in the back. That wouldn't be anything for the front-end to worry about if that same law of nature didn't also allow the back-end to split sideways. Let's say that the whole herd runs in the direction of an imaginary arrow, with the best-performers in the arrow's tip and the weaklings in the feathered back-end (called the arrow's fletching). In evolutionary terms, the pointy leadership class will very specifically select for prowess, but the fledgling class will come to understand that it will never catch up with the leaders and will begin to seek other means to sustain itself and fan out into a wide array of qualities that differ from the leadership's ideal but successfully compensate for the obvious lack thereof.

When the arrow stretches long enough, the fledgling class will begin to adapt in two main ways but both sideways, in two main directions away from the main shaft: defensive and offensive. The first sideways reaction is offensive: the fledgling class will succumb to internal competition and the stronger of the weak will develop qualities that allow them to dominate their even weaker brethren with especially developed stronger teeth and sharper claws. In mammalian terms, this explains the rise of the predatorial toe-walkers. The second sideways reaction is defensive, performed by the weaker weaklings who now have to deal not only with their too fast leaders but also with their stronger bully brethren. The defensive group will start to select for the ability to dig holes to hide in. In mammalian terms, this explains the rise of the flat-footers.

Once we recognize this general pattern, we find it everywhere, including in human history. And rather typically, while the defensive flat-foot counter-movements recede into the underground and consciously endeavor to stay away from the public eye, the offensive toe-walking counter-movements are bent on rebellion and ultimately domination, government by force and the identification of classes, races and other such nonsense, and thus invariably speak of brotherhood and fatherland and Ausländers and barbarians: friends and foes, innies and outies, us good guys versus them bad guys.

These groups are typically all about hierarchy and thus leadership and thus following orders (Befehl ist Befehl), and identifying and eliminating the enemy: the outliers, the bad guys, the ones marked for destruction. Groups like that typically take great pride in their appearance (flags, uniforms, salutes, standards, and thus titles, epithets, creeds and mantras) and most commonly draw toward square and cross-shaped symbols (the X always symbolizes forbiddenness and thus exclusivity, or eradication and thus danger): from the skull and bones or rebellious pirates (☠) to communism's hammer and sickle (☭) to Adolf's swastika and Christianity's quite dubious empty cross — which is like celebrating the works of Shakespeare with an image of an abandoned burned-down Globe Theatre.

It's not emphasized often enough but the Bible's word for "cross" has nothing to do with a cross or anything crossing or being crucified or anything excruciating. Instead, the word that is translated with "cross" is σταυρος (stauros), stander or standard, from the verb ιστημι (histemi), meaning to stand, to substantiate or to rise up (from this verb also come words like αναστασις, anastasis, resurrection, εκστασις, ekstasis, ecstasy, and σταμνος, stamnos, stamina). So no, there is no such thing as the "cross of Christ" or even the "crucified Christ". There is only the "lifted up Christ" or the "publicly substantiated Christ" (John 12:32).

And while we're on the topic: there's also no such thing as "leading someone to Christ", simply because a person will either follow Christ to wherever Christ wants that person to be, or she will follow someone else somewhere else. One cannot serve both God and the Mammon and entirely likewise one cannot both follow Christ and one's beloved human leader. Contrary to what is often claimed, Christ calls nobody to lead and be a leader. Instead he says: "Do not be called leaders; for one is your leader, and that is, Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant."

Christ calls his people to serve and be servants. Christ is all about freedom and sovereignty, and Christ calls his people to liberate others from whatever binds them and causes them to be unfree. Once freed, Christ will lead his people to their own respective maturities, and no human knows what any other human might become once liberated from their shackles, their shame and ignorance and general darkness.

Quite unlike modern Evangelicals — who appear to delight in the obscene idea that they (the good guys) will get raptured (on account of their being so very special) whereas the rest of mankind (the bad guys) will be left behind to be torn asunder by demons — the actual Biblical People of the Way understand that the purpose of their salvation is not their private enjoyment but rather their servitude. Quite unlike the familiar and rather ridiculous pretenders, actual followers of Christ seek their salvation so that they (like Christ before them) may turn right back to earth (Philippians 2:4-8) and call and serve their fellow humans who have not yet had the gospel properly explained to them. In other words, the knowledge of one's own salvation comes accompanied with one's understanding that the work of the saved isn't done until the whole earth enjoys the freedom of Christ: Galatians 5:1, see Leviticus 24:22, Deuteronomy 10:17, Job 34:19, Acts 15:8-9, Romans 2:11, 3:9, James 2:9; also see Genesis 12:3, Isaiah 40:5, Mark 16:15 and Matthew 24:14, Philippians 2:10, Revelation 21:24.

The original and most dominant symbol of the People of the Way was the ιχθυς (ichtus), meaning fish: an emphatically rounded bulb with a diminutive crossing to the side (i.e. a very large decentralized community with a tiny supportive faculty on the side for administration and simple house rules and such). Roman Emperor Constantine's great crime, of course, was that he transformed the Ichthus into the cross, and made the People of the Way into a machine, degraded their freedom into bondage and usurped their divine governance and replaced it with the right of kings.

It's not quite clear what sign Constantine famously saw that day on the Milvian Bridge, but the swastika originally appears to have depicted the movement of the night sky around Polaris, flanked on two sides by the flag-shaped constellations Ursa Major and Minor, and ultimately depicts the cage of state machinery within which the human κοσμος (kosmos), is forcibly contained. Humanity's most creative writers have always commented upon oppressive regimes by eluding to this unholy pseudo-cosmic structure: from the Bible ubiquitous killer tree (Genesis 2:17, Deuteronomy 21:22-23, 2 Samuel 18:9, Acts 5:30) to Don Quixote's windmills to Tolkien's giant spiders to the two caged polar bears in LOST; also compare Luke 23:33 to Zechariah 4:5, 1 Kings 3:16-27 and ultimately to Genesis 1:7.

In modern times, some folks have noted that human civilization progresses cyclically. Had these people read the Bible they would also have noted that the world's wizardry has known of these cycles for millennia. Human individuals pass on their possessions, positions and seats of government from generation to generation every 30-50 years or so, human societies do the same but in cycles of about half a millennium. The high-water marks of Noah (2500 BC), Abraham (2000 BC), Goshen (1500 BC), David (1000 BC), Zerubbabel (500 BC), Christ, then the start of the Middle Ages (500 AD), the Crusades (1000 AD), the Renaissance (1500 AD) and the present time (2000 AD) are always roughly 500 years apart. This corresponds with the legend of the Phoenix, who dies and resurrects every 500 years. Guardians of this cycle (or rather of the world as it undergoes one) are known by the name "Order of the Phoenix" (in Harry Potter) because boy o boy, whenever the Phoenix falters, the dunces gather.

The Order of the Phoenix is necessary to counteract the inevitable bands of morons who think they can and should speed things up for the greater good. The latest incarnation of this is called Accelerationism (acc-ism or X-ism): the idea that when societal collapse is immanent, you might as well help it along in a kind of controlled demolition — hence Musk's X, Madonna's Madame X, Marvel's X-men. And whose societal structures do these masters of progression aim to carefully demolish? Their own? Or perhaps someone else's? Some carefully selected and helpfully pointed out bad guys, perhaps?

What these clueless finger-pointing Accelerationists don't seem to comprehend is that societies are as One as any natural ecosystem, and that all members are connected to all others through vast natural webs of dependency and symbiosis. Social species and substrata can't simply be extracted from society while simultaneously preserving the rest of it. Moreover, these societal cycles derive not from the rotations of some mysterious mechanical wheels, as some seem to suggest, but are birth-cycles, brought about by degrees of societal maturity. Civilizations are living females (Genesis 2:22, see our article on Eve, Isaiah 7:14, see our article on Athens, Galatians 4:22-31, Revelation 17:5) and give birth to a next generation simply because they are with child. They will do so when they are good and ready, and trying to speed this process up is utter folly and a typical man-thing to consider. Accelerationism is like the caveman who notices a correlation between his woman's collapse and the arrival of a child, and then decides to beat the crap out of his woman so as to generate more offspring.

In Harry Potter, Voldemort has no nose, because every wizard knows that the Greek word for the intelligent mind is νους (nous), and see our article on Eliphaz, meaning elephant. Jesus too spoke of shortening the days of tribulation (Matthew 24:22), but instead of de-nosing he spoke of de-horning (by using the verb κολοβοω, koloboo, to cut off, to make less bully).

It's been said (for instance in Leave the World Behind, 2020/2023, by G.H. Scott) that the one thing scarier than a global cabal that calls the global shots is the absence of such a cabal, and the realization that no one is in control, and that even the mighty billionaires watch in horror as their whole world goes up in smoke. People who know the Bible share no such fears, of course (Malachi 3:5), but dig in, stock up and calm everybody down, while they simply wait for the panicky toe-walkers above to be done with running and settle down again.

The underground flat-foot movements stay underground until they are confident enough to re-emerge from the earth, and may ultimately succeed the original leadership (as eluded to in Luke 15:11-32). Not all flat-foot movements indeed yield entities capable of governing the entire earth, but in the mammalian world, the flat-footers yielded Homo sapiens, and they made friends with dogs, then created farms first and cities and parks later and turned the entire earth into the lush and well-managed Paradise it is today (ahem). And in the realm of wisdom, the flat-foot movement broke with all mainstream herd-traditions and became science, the once so perfect republic (now increasingly diseased) which indeed runs earth today.

Flat-footers certainly recognize differences but respect of each creature its own ways and leave each creature its own place to live in. Flat-footers think in global terms and not in hierarchical terms (or innies and outies, friends or foes, "higher" beings and "lower" beings). They essentially show no favoritism, and instead serve every creature wholeheartedly in their quest to make the whole earth one.

And if they feel like doing so (very often not), flat-footers most commonly draw toward symbols that derive from a circle. In world politics, the circle-shaped flat-foot movement resulted in the Republic (hence Betsy Ross' flag and Europe's circle of stars). Non-credal and decentralized systems of wisdom (anything from science to holistic philosophies) assume or are associated with symbols like the familiar Yin Yang (☯), the Star and Crescent (☪), the Star of David (✡), the Pentagram (⛤), or simply the circle and hence π (pi) and thus the many playful references to pie (apple pie, pizza pie) in literature and movies. Open source and decentralized networks (Wikipedia, Bitcoin, Cardano) too tend to opt for circle-derived icons.

Movements that still depend on central government (and are thus human governed rather than God-governed) but nevertheless strive to serve the world without distinguishing between classes, races or leanings, are like domesticated shepherd dogs. These movements tend to draw toward symbols that are cross-born but circular in their application: the Knights Hospitaller's strongly indented Maltese Cross (✠), the haloed Celtic cross (🕈), the lauburu of the Basques, the Ghanese nkontim, and so on. Even the formation of the familiar Egyptian symbol Ankh (☥), meaning life, may have specifically referred to civilized life and thus domestication.

Our word איל ('ayil), stick-out, is identical to איל ('ayil) meaning terebinth — in Genesis 18:1, Abraham is living among the "terebinths" of Mamre, evidently still trying to blend in — and those words are closely similar to אול ('awil), to be foolish, or more precise, to be at odds with one's community, to live in one's own reality and by one's own law. This word closely corresponds to the ever useful Greek word ιδιωτης (idiotes), which literally means "in a category of their own" or rather "antisocial" (the adjective ιδιος, idios, means one's own or private as opposed to public). In Hebrew, an אויל ('ewil) is a fool, someone who despises wisdom and instruction (Proverbs 1:7) and whom anger kills (Job 5:2).

Of course, children always need to be governed, but a community of adults can only properly function when no single one seeks to dominate any other and only invests their natural talents in the perpetual service of the less endowed. On Moriah, Abraham began to see that domination kills social felicity, and sacrificed the phenomenon of leadership so that his son Isaac wouldn't be.

In Greek mythology these very same themes are contemplated in the story of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter. This Greek version tells how king Agamemnon, on his way to fight at Troy, prepares his army for crossing over at Aulis (from αυλη, aule, booth, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Succoth) but ventures into a forest sacred to Artemis and kills a deer there. The offended goddess withholds the wind (ανεμος, anemos) because of which the Greeks can't sail to Troy. The prophet Calchas — who features prominently in the opening chapter of the Iliad — informs Agamemnon that to appease Artemis, he has to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia. He does so, the winds pick up and the Greeks proceed.

As we discuss more elaborately in our article on Thyatira, the Greco-Roman cultures abhorred child sacrifice (and the Phoenician practice of it may have helped trigger Rome's destruction of Carthage), and many later Greek authors tried to amend the horrific story of Iphigenia, or at least reinterpret it figuratively. The fifth century BC poet Euripides explained that when the priest thrust his knife into the girl's throat, her soul was lifted up to "live among the gods" while her earthly body transformed into that of a deer, offered to the Greeks by the forgiving Artemis herself.

The obvious difference between the Hebrew and the Greek version of our story (which is ultimately a meditation on statecraft and society) is that Iphigenia was a woman and Isaac a man. A society in which the strong have the say-so and the weak do forcibly as they are told will develop wholly different than a society where the weak have the say-so and the strong do willingly as they are told. When Abraham sent Eliezer to acquire a wife for Isaac, he specifically emphasized the girl's right to choose (Genesis 24:5-8, also see 24:57), which was probably rather revolutionary in those days but it brought about the first step away from tyranny and toward the republic that guarantees the security, dignity and freedom of everybody, including the weak.

For many people, the word "God" refers to the one and only Creator of the universe (and thus the divine laws upon which nature runs). But more general and no less correctly, the word "god" refers to whatever one's life revolves around (1 Corinthians 8:5). One's god might be one's desires or one's fears, one's might or one's machinery, one's entertainment or one's fantasies, one's addictions or one's liberties, one's belly or one's genitals. One's god is whatever one's life revolves around. To many people, their god is whatever is stronger than they: whatever they fear or are enslaved by and are forced to obey. Others, and particularly others who are strong or smart enough to not have to fear anything, may have lives that revolve around the requirements of the weak. To those people, depicting God as a child makes perfect sense.

When an alien famously asks to be taken to the leader, and is subsequently taken to a huge body-builder in a fortified palace, she knows that the society she is in is one of slaves and cowards. But if she is taken to a child, she knows that she is among a truly mighty people.

Probably the most obvious point of agreement between the Hebrew and the Greek version of these considerations is reflected in the name Iphigenia, which means Born By Strength (from ιφι, iphi, the instrumental of ις, is, strength, plus γινομαι, ginomai, to begin to be or to generate). Both versions of our story emphasize that while the animal world functions by survival of the fittest, the human world works when personal strength is understood as a reason to serve rather than to bully. The force that ties the human world together, its very fabric and essence at its atomic level, is weakness. It's weakness and dependency that entices people to reach out to others, in search for support or companionship. Weakness caused language and reason. Weakness guided us into cities first, then technology and finally into space itself (the New Jerusalem is a city, which is a technological complex).

The name Enosh (of the son of Seth and grandson of Adam), means Weakling: "To Seth also a son was born; and he called him Enosh. Then men began to call upon the name of YHWH" (Genesis 4:26). In the words of the prophet Zechariah: "This is the word of YHWH to Zerubbabel saying, 'Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit" (Zechariah 4:6). Or as Paul put it:

"And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

Very early farmers could fortify their own homes by surrounding it with a domesticated herd, so that any predator would target a sacrificial animal long before it would reach the house and go after the farmer's children. The pros and cons of such devices are of course most obviously reviewed in the familiar story of Jephthah's daughter.

Preventing that protective herd from wandering off depended on taking out its native leader, or at the very least the source of all that "leadership" within the leader. This is of course precisely what our modern governments are designed to do: remove any natural authority from the bigger sluggers among us and replace it with either domesticated carnivores or state machinery. Unfortunately, many governments have rebelled against the true shepherds of our world and have gone so far as to even remove the natural authority of our familial elders (parents, grandparents, patri- and matriarchs) and make every child the property of the state. When John spoke of the "healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2), he doubtlessly referred to the removal of predatorial governments and the reinstalment of parental authority.

You'll be pleased to know that the noun "hog" comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root as our English verb "to hew" and originally specifically designated a castrated pig. The noun "wart", in turn, comes from an ancient root that means elevation and also described geographic highlands (the equivalent of the ubiquitous רום, rum, in Biblical toponyms). So no, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is not named after the warts on a pig, but about the heights attainable when non-parental supremacy is abolished.

This very modest idea — that the formal appointment of leaders entails the formal sacrifice of children (and subsequent rise of demonic hunters) and, conversely, that the abolishment of leadership entails peace on earth in all its corners — is the seed from which the entire spectrum of egalitarian and monotheistic world views commences (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 7:12, 1 Corinthians 1:10), including the Republic (1 Samuel 8:11, 1 Corinthians 15:24) and science (1 Kings 4:33, Romans 1:20, 1 Thessalonians 5:21). It's also the central theme of the most insightful novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J. K. Rowling, 2007), which holds the world record of most copies sold in the first 24 hours after a book's release. One may only hope that the generation of kids that read it back then will soon be ready to apply it.

And so, roughly a millennium after Abraham's adventure on Moriah, and about half a millennium after Moses first built the tabernacle, kings Solomon of Judah and Hiram of Tyre built the Temple of YHWH right there on mount Moriah (2 Chronicles 3:1), which now also hosted the city of Jerusalem, which had grown out of Salem, where Melchizedek is the perpetual king (Genesis 14:18, Psalm 76:2, Hebrews 5:6-10).

The Phoenician First Temple was sacked by the Babylonians. A second one was ordered, designed and paid for by the Persians (and built by Zerubbabel and Nehemiah and friends). This Persian Second Temple was expanded into the Roman Temple of Herod (who was an Idumean, a toe-walking descendant of Esau, who, true to form, killed his own two sons and all the infants of Bethlehem).

The proper Third Temple is a global one and a living one, namely the Body of Christ (1 Peter 2:5), which has nothing to do with any religion but is an entity that relates to the human mind the way human agriculture relates to the biosphere: a miraculous but perfectly natural entity whose qualities and working principles vasty exceed the imaginations of any creature not in it (Isaiah 64:4, 1 Corinthians 2:9).