Sabbath Reads

Saturday, August 14, 2021, starts a new series for Sabbath Reads. We have made some significant changes to the underlying system which will make this next 6 months of reading far different than previous reads. In this post I explain those changes. Read on for more.

Boustrophedon

As part of the letter based recovery work we started thinking again about boustrophedon based writing.

There is an article on Wikipedia with some examples and photos if you have never seen this before. It was common in the ancient world, and especially common in alphabets related to Phoenician, so this is an important format for us to consider. That Wikipedia article does not do justice to the wide variety of known ancient examples.

In this style of writing each row reads in opposite directions. Out across a page on 1 line, then back across the page on the next line. All the while the written text is advancing. In known historical examples, usually carved in marble, the 'face' of the letters reverses row-by-row as well. So it is possible to spot the direction just by surveying a few characters.

Dyslexia is a type of eye injury that can be cured by learning to read English prose through a mirror. There are 4 different ways to mirror an English page. By learning to read through a mirror in all 4 ways, Dyslexia can be cured.

We suspect that boustrophedon formatted inspired text would be text that does not cause Dyslexia to begin with, even though it would be equivalent to only 2 mirrors. Throughout our recovery work, moving towards simple is usually the same path to move towards inspired. Moving towards eye safety might be similar and boustrophedon may well have been the inspired form.

Sabbath Reads

So if an inspired page is boustrophedon, what about high level arrangements of the same material? Might those be boustrophedon also?

We have rearranged the table of 400 to show this off, out across the top row and then back across the next. This pattern repeats 8 times down the Table of 400.

So in Sabbath Reads, readers are taking that table by columns. So what happens with a boustrophedon arrangement?

The letters at the tops of the columns marks the reads on the front of the rows. The back of the rows is the 3D complimentary letter. So reading down for the first sabbath read day will alternate between a Dot story and a Colon story.

The second read, or second week will go Wa then Ta and so on down the read. At the end of the next 25 weeks these will be reversing, with a read of Ta/Wa pairs then Colon/Dot pairs and finally the Quad week.

Letter compliments as we will see in these reads is also how word definitions work. Each word has a primary or front definition and then a secondary or back definition. The secondary definitions are often easier to understand. We expect this next season of Sabbath Reads to be similarly insightful.

This is very different than we have used in the past. Surveying the table shows many, many places where the reads will make more sense across these pairs. This is important enough to study that we have set up the SR app to work this way. We will leave it in this style through the next 6 months so we can get some collective experience with this style.

The Quad is the last column of the read and if you look at the 400 you see it on both ends of each row. Imagine the entire table wrapped on a cylinder. Those 2 ends would lock together and form a single column. We have left that merged woven form for the 25th week in the series.

There are a bunch of variations on this arrangement that are possible. Say by spreading the material out across an entire year instead of 6 months. We will look at those after this 6 months is over and as the rest of the project advances.

Updates

We will update all the apps weekly as usual, so material will move around as we continue to work. As always, if you see something or have questions, use the feedback form in the app's menus.

More Later,

Phil