Apps

We have made some significant changes in the organization of the TT and 400 apps. In this post I go over what we have done and why. Read on for more.

Ezra The Editor

Ezra is traditionally credited as being the canonizer of most of the material at the end of the OT as we know it now. But since Ezra is one of the villains in the story of Acts 15, maybe we should think of him as the major editor of that material instead.

Ryan read through all of that material and became pretty convinced most of this was simply Ezra's additions to a much simpler underling text. With many of the Minor Prophets not inspired at all.

So we have marked in the BRB that we think most of the material in the Minor Prophets was likely edited by Ezra. We have also removed that material from the TT. Ezra's commission was to set up organized religion as we understand it now, and this drives much of his work.

The bulk of the material you read in the Major Prophets, especially Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, is also in this same voice and was also done at the hand of Ezra as an editor, and not as an inspired voice.

Finally, the books that create church function, like Psalms, are also going to be his work.

Once through with that pass we reduced the possible number of original authors and could finally get a grip on the organization of the material late in the OT canon.

Kings

I have not written much about this on the blog, but who occupies the 25 thrones in the Book of Revelation's throne room is a question we have thought about for many years.

Our working assumption has been Joshua in the middle, with the other 24 thrones filled in by 12 prophets and 12 apostles. These people would all be walk offs and be the kings who come and go from earth to this day.

Once we found Abram, Isaac and Jacob as walk offs this pushes more people from the OT into those thrones. Considering the importance in history of some of these characters it makes sense that Abram, say, would be in one of those thrones, and thus be a king.

What we now think is going on is Joshua remains in the center throne. But the 24 thrones around the center are 24 walk offs who are also the writers of all the OT material. Starting at Enoch and ending with Haggai.

To mark their location in the order each has some recorded life event that marks their place on the alphabet. They fold to each other in the same way the alphabet folds on itself. Their stories also map onto the ground every time the 5x5 grid of the alphabet maps onto the ground.

Abram

For an example, Abram, as an author, maps to the Ba, or Tent. He left Ur and lived in tents near Shechem, a feature of his life.

On the ground in the USA, the Ba letter maps to the Orlando area in Florida. The Shechem area where Abram had his ranch was the location for the Tabernacles holiday. Of course the Orlando theme parks are major modern holiday destinations.

Abram is also told to look up and number the stars, if he could, and on the ground in that region we also find the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando where people reach for the stars.

Multiple Works

Just as we find Paul writing many times across the NT material, it looks like something similar happened in some situations in the OT. Moses, for example, wrote different books at different times in his life.

The book of Daniel, for example, has a front part written in 3rd person, and a back part written in 1st person. This may be either 1 or 2 individual written works, which is still unclear.

Haggai, is another example. He is named in the Book of Haggai but probably also authored the other works from that era. Esther references a Haggai, who was probably the witness and wrote the inspired account. Similarly, Nehemiah was likely written at the hand of Haggai, as Nehemiah was likely not qualified to write in the inspired language.

TT Organization

These insights give us a much stronger insight into the authors and the order of their writings across the OT, especially the prophets and their writings that go at the end of the OT. In today's update of the TT we have incorporated these insights.

The TT is also being returned to the 8 scroll and 16 side model that we used in the past. This is also particularly well organized for Tabernacles reading, which this year begins on August 1, 2021, for those that want to read through the text.

400 Organization

The 400 app is also being simplified to follow just the 400 stories, without the other layers of organization. This makes it much easier to understand.

How the author's individual works spreads into books and how those books spread across the 400 stories is still being worked on. With these updates those problems will get addressed as we go forward, without the need for massive gaps in an unhelpful superstructure.

Audit

About a year ago we changed the structure of the 400 and the TT that we are undoing now. At that time the 400 got more layers and the TT got a forced number of books. This was as a result of a prophetic dream that came during Tabernacles. That dream seems instead to have pointed at an audit pattern at the letter level.

An off handed comment over a lunch a few months ago cracked the riddle of the dream and lead to my current work on code for this new audit pattern. This started a new phase in the hunt for the letter level audit.

Fiddler

First step, about 7 weeks of coding, was to visualize the audit pattern itself. Though it could manually fiddle letters it was instantly clear this audit could not be done by hand, there are too many combinations that must be checked.

It was also clear that most of the work would be in hand annotation that needs to be done to the inbound texts passed to us from history. Even with the best of software, this involves much manual work. It is not a quick job.

This phase of the work agreed with parables in Matthew chapter 13 that this recovery cannot be done by hand, so we were at least heading in the right direction.

Javascript

The second program was a solver to run the audit by machine. This too took several weeks of intense work to code and test. Because of a large existing library of Javascript routines, I wrote this tool in Javascript too. This made reading, quoting, and navigating in Bible text easy to code since I could use existing code from within our app and build systems that handle the text all the time.

I was able to work out most of the reduction steps needed to move from text as passed by history to the inspired text. But test cases must allow the computer to test a variation of the inbound text that allows the outbound text to be inspired. Every test variation usually doubles the solver's computer run time, so solving speed is of paramount importance.

As we don't yet know for certain the Paleo Language, we must run massive test cases to try and catch the inspired form. Once we know inspired Paleo with certainty, the test case variations will go down and things will speed up. But, it quickly became apparent that Javascript itself was the limiting factor in reaching break-in.

Even with carefully crafted solving routines, Javascript does not perform at the scale needed here. In particular Javascript does not scale up to apps that might usefully need 100+ gigabytes of memory, nor does it have support for threads.

Rust

So... I am currently writing the solver again. This time in Rust, a modern, fast, safe, systems programming language that creates programs at the best speed of the hardware. Rust programs can access all of memory and Rust supports threads. Though Rust is fussier when writing code and the language is new to me.

Because our software world has been in Javascript, many custom functions I take for granted must be rewritten as I go through this. So this is not a quick rewrite of the solver itself. Most of the work is in those libraries.

In designing this version, I can see Rust based performance tricks at certain steps of the solve which are impossible in Javascript. This is especially true for fast lookups across big blocks of main memory... so I have high hopes for this version being significantly faster.

Bletchley Park

Curiously, the auditing process now looks like the work of the code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II. Decryption of German codes was thought impossible, but it was a job the people of Bletchley Park ultimately pulled off.

Our villain editors were not just editing, they were encrypting a secondary string of inspired text. The problem of finding the inspired text now ultimately looks like a tricky decryption problem.

Pray for the work, that we will reach break-in for this most difficult of problems.

More Later,

Phil