Tobit

This blog continues reviewing the Apocrypha, this time Tobit. But first, updates to the VR app and status on prep work for manuscript recovery. Also, a review of the headlines for this week's prophetic dates, especially the SCO+ meetings in Kazakstan. Finally, a general headline review. A busy week.

VR App

After reading through the Additions to Esther last week I then turned to the set of manuscripts. At that I realized we don't currently have a copy of the Additions to Esther in our set of Paleo texts.

So I needed to get better understanding of what we do have in our set of files. The VR app, linked above, was updated as a result. Use the drop down menu to understand the list of files that make up the Apocrypha.

The total number of file names in that app currently stands at 94. This is larger than any single canon. Different traditions have different names for different books, which I am combining as makes sense. Some traditions combine books in ways that others do not. Syriac has a stand alone Letter to Jeremiah so that content was broken out into an independent book from the KJVA.

The set of files listed there does not represent any particular tradition, but is a combination of books from the various Christian traditions that include books from the Apocrypha. This is my best guess at this, subject to change as work progresses.

My initial cut was to use the KJV 1611 set of files as these are a known and established set of writings, even though they were dropped from the Protestant canon in the early 1800s. I then augmented this list with the books from the eastern Christian tradition.

Of all the versions in the VR, currently 3 have content from within the set of books that make up the Apocrypha. The KJVA and BST are both in English, the other is interlinear, Syriac and Paleo.

Verse level alignment between the texts is not yet done. We have lexicon related work to do which requires correct versification. Then we can turn to the Lexicon itself which is a complex set of work still ahead of us.

We are currently missing Paleo for Additions to Esther, as I found last week, but we are also missing Paleo for the Prayer of Azariah. I rechecked all the places where we have found other texts in the past, and these do not appear to be available in a form that could be transposed to Paleo. I trust this does not matter.

High Level Statistics

The next thing I set out to do was to understand the general size of the whole set of manuscripts we are using as input to the recovery process. Here are some of the interesting numbers. Note there are a few files with variant versions, so the following slightly inflates the real work ahead.

For reference, a normal English Protestant Bible has 1189 chapters. We are starting recovery with 1529 chapters of raw Paleo text. This is not the best metric because chapter lengths diverge from average. So let me give some other statistics.

A typical Protestant Bible, like the KJV, has 31,102 verses. The KJVA which covers the Apocrypha has 36,819 verses. On the Paleo side, we are starting recovery against a total of 39,299 verses. The 8275 verses in the Apocrypha represent about 21 percent of the work.

Word counts do not transfer well from English because English grammar composes words differently. So comparing word counts against an English manuscript makes little sense. But we can stay on the paleo text and do our own word counts to get yet another view of the huge problem still ahead.

In the Syriac that we are starting with, we find larger single words where many single-letter prefixes have been tacked on the front of root words. Examples of this are letters for words like "in, but, and, who, what, to, of." So total word counts in English is generally higher than Paleo, but the unique word count in English is much lower than Paleo.

For reference, the Protestant part of this Paleo work carries 418,380 words while the entire work comes in at 535,937 words.

Obviously, many words are going to be repeated. So the first pass of word analysis is to look at unique words. Across the entire set of inbound files, there are 58,686 unique words.

This is a stunning number when compared to English. This is a much higher word count than is needed to understand most English writing. Indeed, once anyone has learned about 10,000 English words they are considered to know English.

English vocabulary grows with names and modern technical words. These words push the number of known English words much higher. The total possible English vocabulary is over 100,000 words, but most of those words are strange Latin names for plants.

Our Paleo base text has a much higher number of unique words because the prefix and suffixes are exploding the unique word count compared to English.

Work Steps

Our first mission is to provide a grammatical parse of all of those words into prefix, root and suffix. I am using a programmer's term, root, because I am hesitant to use existing technical language terms while I still don't understand the inspired Paleo grammar. That idea of a root is more formally called the lemma.

I want to see the word structure and grammar grow out of the audit process. Those prefix letters might really become stand alone words in their inspired form. This would be very much faster to learn and to read. We have seen this so many times that even if they do not get forced out as independent words by the audit, we would probably still display them as independent words. Some Hebrew manuscripts do this and it is very helpful.

We have already identified about 4000 different words that are grammatical forms based on root words that are names. Many of those names are found in genealogies, especially in Chronicles. Many are not likely to be inspired. But, they form a set of words that can be worked on as a stand alone project.

This is not easy technical work because we are facing problems we have not seen before. We are more familiar with the Hebrew OT and that manuscript tradition appears to have been under constant editing, perhaps for centuries. Someone reworked Hebrew to wrinkle out the results of the editors.

We think the Syriac tradition was edited to keep up, but only as additions were being created in Hebrew. This means the Syriac side is leaving behind clues as to especially Ezra's revision history. So the Syriac is both older, going back to Aramaic, preceding Hebrew, and then newer, adding in bits as the Hebrew was invented and then passages were expanded.

So we would expect the Syriac/Paleo to have a more irregular structure. We are seeing irregular spelling. We would expect more inconsistencies than in Hebrew because expensive scribal time was not spent to smooth out Syriac as was done with the Hebrew. We are already seeing evidence of this, let me give some examples.

Names

So while I am still working on code, Ryan is working ahead on the parsing process for names. He has had to restart this work a few times already because we are finding strange things in the spelling of names that we need to make sure our tooling can handle.

For example, there are 2 different Paleo spellings of the English name Abel. One spelling appears to deal with a place, the other spelling dealing with the famous person. Why this might be going on is difficult to explain. So we need to carry around enough tracking data to solve this problem later, once both word audit tooling is in place and sentences audit tooling is also in place.

The name Israel is particularly strange given its central use in the known OT narrative. In Syriac, Israel has several different root spellings. Not just different prefixes and suffixes as would be expected.

This strongly suggests that the spelling for Israel was being changed in Hebrew across history. The Hebrew texts eventually were smoothed out and used 1 spelling. But the Syriac did not get this treatment, leaving behind different spellings.

Remember, if Jacob's name was changed to Israel at the same time as Jacob's life, then there would be no future dispute over the spelling of this name. There is no such dispute over the spelling of the name Jacob.

We also see this as after the decision was made to replace some earlier name like Jacob. So there is even more layers to the complexity. In any case, the editor or some later group of scribes could not agree on how to spell Israel, changing their mind but not willing to pay the high cost for fixing the Syriac to keep up with their changes.

The divine name, of course, is also different, suggesting either no divine name, or some other divine name like Joshua, as Ryan suggests in the TT. The Syriac spelling for the OT divine name is close to the spelling for Mary. We expect that to be a word that must be put back to Joshua.

Again, these are examples of issues that we are finding. Each time, we must take time to discuss what might have been going on. We are especially worried about setting up the correct tooling.

Hopefully this is just a boot-strapping discussion, and we will not need to debate every word in the lexicon. From a project perspective I am beginning to wonder how many months of work are still ahead and if we have enough hands on the project to finish it in my lifetime.

Other Vocabulary

So far, it is unclear how many unique, non-name, root words we are dealing with. We will have exact counts once the parsing work is done.

In order to help with the lexicon process we found a couple of Syriac to English dictionaries that are out of copyright, well formatted, and could be easily downloaded. This brings in a trustworthy source of known root words which can be used for the parsing process.

Once all the words are parsed, so once all roots are identified, then we can turn to constructing our own real first draft of a Paleo lexicon. From that comes interlinear English and the all important audit against all the words found in the lexicon.

Once an audit of the lexicon is done, we will have some sense of the real work for recovery.

Watch Date Matches

We were watching for prophetic headlines for 2024-07-03 and 2024-07-04. This was day-for-a-year replays of the last year of Amram and the first year of Aaron within the context of the 2000th anniversaries of Joshua's life.

Amram is without story and not very interesting, but Aaron is Moses' brother and he shows up as a helper with Moses in the plagues against Egypt.

There were 2 general areas of serious headlines across these 2 dates. The first, and best, match was to the annual meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. The second important headline was a landslide shift in UK elections. Let me review each of these headlines.

SCO Summit: Game Changer

The link here is to an article by Pepe Escobar. He summarizes what happened at the summit in Kazakhstan, calling it a game changer. The member countries, and friends, of the SCO see themselves as threatened by the G-7 and the American controlled, hierarchical and lawless international "Rules based order."

So the urgency of working against that system drove many meetings and agreements as Pepe explains in detail. The meetings were a smashing success.

I still see Putin as some sort of Moses prophetic figure fighting Pharaoh's Egypt. Ultimately prophetic Egypt is Israel and their empire which uses the USA as its public face. Within the USA their control is expressed through what is called the Israel Lobby. That lobby effectively controls the US Government.

Since the time of Solomon, the international banking cartel has been Jewish. Control of governments and trade through control of currency has been their game for centuries. So everything SCO is doing to develop alternative trade routes and trade settlement systems is working against prophetic Egypt, what the world would describe as Jewish controlled systems in the earth.

So Moses' brother should be an older brother to Russia, which for this headline looks like Xi from China. We will need to watch and see if Aaron in some prophetic sense has always been the leader of China. Let me say that again, the Moses/Aaron prophetic pair may always be Russia/China. This would provide textual basis for a long history of prophetic words in the USA dealing with an eventual Chinese invasion. This identity would suggest that they together will eventually bring down prophetic Egypt.

Note that Aaron had trouble standing up to the Egyptian factions within the heirs of Jacob that crossed the red sea at the Exodus. Think golden calf. China seems to have similar trouble now standing up to western bankers. They are especially wary of western sanctions.

UK General Elections

The link here deals with the other interesting headline, the election in the UK on July 4.

The Labour party, which has controlled the UK for much of that party's 190 year history, went down to a resounding defeat.

In no way should this be seen as a defeat of globalist control of the UK. At least 1 problem for the UK public is the new UK PM. He is a WEF'r. He is understood to have been under coaching from none other than Barak Obama. (See Hal Turner for details on that.) The Great Arab is at work in the UK too.

The Israel Lobby plays all sides in all elections everywhere they exhibit control. We should not expect much real change in the UK, but we will see.

Apocrypha

I am continuing my read through the Apocryphal writings, scanning for anything that might be inspired, also to get familiar with content. My Protestant upbringing leaves me deficient in this area. This week I read through Tobit. I am continuing to read from the NRSV translation. What follows here are my notes and then my first impressions.

Tobit

This book includes an introduction explaining that it is the story of Tobit, a man who was a refugee from Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian captivity. The book is mostly written in first person. It also focuses on his wife and son named Anna and Tobias respectively. Most of the book is about the journey Tobit's son Tobias took to find his wife.

Our understanding of inspired writing requires there to be an inspired writer, usually a prophet, who understands the complexity of the inspired writing process. Tobit does not appear to fit that qualification, so we would not expect anything from this book to be inspired.

The audit should eventually prove this out. On the other hand the book of Tobit ends at Nineveh and it is possible there was someone who was an heir to Jonah's missionary work who might have still have known the language systems for writing inspired text.

Even if not inspired, Tobit is an ancient writing so it provides a body of work that provides more examples of ancient writing. So to the extent it is using inspired words it may be providing useful secondary examples about how otherwise inspired words were being used in standard ways in history, especially closer to when they were used as everyday words.

Chapter By Chapter Notes

Chapter 1 explains that Tobit was from the region of the tribe of Naphtali, and that he continued to observe the temple related practices at Jerusalem. After being taken as a captive in the Babylonian captivity, he had a government job and was apparently well to do. Tobit left funds in a distant city but then the roads became unsafe to travel. Recovering of those funds becomes the plot complication later in the book.

Tobit describes his acts of charity, especially giving alms and how he regularly buried Israelites who had been killed by acts of the king. This practice would get him into trouble with the king.

Chapter 2 explains his restoration to normal life and his continued interest is seeing proper burial for the dead. He was blinded after bird dung got into his eyes when he was burying someone at night.

Tobit could not work and his wife supported the family. His wife was given a goat as a gift for good behavior in her work. Tobit did not believe her when she explained where it came from. This then caused a rift between them. She rebukes him over his lack of belief.

Chapter 3 Tobit goes into prayer over this, wanting his life taken over his lack of eyesight and apparently his wife's rebuke. On the same day there is a woman named Sarah who is falsely accused of killing her first 7 husbands. She would kill herself too, but instead also goes into prayer. Her prayer is recorded in the same chapter. Both prayers will be answered by a visit of the angel Raphael.

This is another name in the longer list of common angel names found in Christianity. So Tobit is the source document for that name. In my early years I was involved in cross denominational prayer activities and knowing all of the angels was something non-protestants used to advantage over protestants. This was now explaining one of the sources.

Chapter 4 discusses Tobit's charge to his son. That there is money set aside in a distant city. Tobit expounds on the importance of alms giving to the poor. Tobit then instructs his son against fornication. The definition here is to take a wife from anyone besides your own tribe. He uses the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as his defense, how those men were careful to take wives from their own tribe. There are a series of smaller commandments as well, then Tobit turns to the money on deposit in a distant city.

Chapter 5 is Tobit's conversation with his son Tobias about how to retrieve the money from Media. It had been 20 years and there was trouble of how Tobias would prove himself at the other end of the journey. Tobit tells his son to find someone trustworthy to go with him on the journey. He would end up meeting the angel Raphael, under a stage name, who would take him on the journey.

This is a back story for the importance of entertaining strangers because some have entertained angels unaware. It is a textual basis for many angel counter stories that I have heard from others over the years. We today call them kings.

Raphael then visits with Tobit, who still cannot see. Raphael uses a common name and then gets the charge to accompany Tobias on the journey to Media.

Chapter 6 is the journey of the angel and Tobias to Media. They stop for the night on the bank of the Tigres river. A fish leaps from the river and bites Tobias on the foot. The angel explains how parts of the fish can be used for medicine, including the healing of blindness. Parts of the fish are kept, parts are eaten for dinner.

The second night out Raphael explains where they must stay so that Tobias will meet Sarah. Tobias has a family claim and will take Sarah as his wife. They have discussion over her reputation, but Raphael explains what happened. Tobias then wants to marry her.

Chapter 7 is the story of the marriage arrangements, especially how Tobias was the closest of kin and had the right to Sarah as a wife. The marriage is agreed in writing. But the wedding celebration would last 14 days, a delay to the schedule that would matter later. Note that husband and wife are described as becoming like brother and sister, so there is idiomatic use of words here that might have impact on paleo word definitions. We will see.

Chapter 8 is the wedding night. It explains how the demon is driven away and then the prayers and Tobias' prayers and the prayers of Tobias' father-in-law. Chapter 8 also explains the expectation that Tobias would die like Sarah's former husbands. He of course survives and there is a celebration.

Chapter 9 is the story of the angel sent ahead, alone, to fetch both the money and the man who was keeper of the money to come to the wedding celebration of Tobias and Sarah.

Chapter 10 returns to the house of Tobit and his wife Anna. When Tobias is delayed, Anna presumes him to be dead. Tobit wonders if something has happened to the money. This chapter then shifts to the departure of Tobias and Sarah for home.

This chapter does a better job of describing the start of an ideal marriage relation between a man and a woman and the in-laws than anywhere else in the Bible. For this reason alone it is a shame that this was dropped from the Protestant canon. There would be much less wreckage in Christian marriages if this was more commonly read.

Chapter 11 is the story of Tobias returning to his parents Tobit and Anna. Then it tells of the healing of Tobit's blindness, and then Sarah's arrival and another 7 days of wedding feast.

This chapter clearly calls out Nineveh as the city where this is going on. This puts this text in the tradition of Jonah's trip to Nineveh.

Chapter 12 is where the angel Raphael reveals himself to Tobit and Tobias. Raphael explains the importance of alms giving, then the various times in the story when Tobit, especially, had attracted heaven's attention. This is especially so in burying of the dead and gifts to the poor. He then explains everything had been a vision, and then ascends from their presence.

Because much of this is similar to our own experiences I suspect this was written by someone who knew mostly how angel encounters actually work. My only correction would be they are not always visions.

The Book of Tobit deserves special attention when it comes to the audit work. Because of the Nineveh location it is possible that someone there knew enough to write inspired text. The same angel/king could have helped with this writing process.

Chapter 13 is Tobit's prayer of rejoicing over what has happened.

Chapter 14 is a tail in another voice, with interior details hinting of even later tampering, describing the life of Tobit, and the life of Tobias. It references the Book of Nahum, and may itself belie being under the hand of an editor like Ezra.

Commentary On Tobit

Ryan told me after I read Tobit that he expected that I would like the book. Nothing seriously caught my attention in terms of Acts 15 rules of additions. There are some voice changes in the last chapter which would normally mark later editing.

I do not expect this to be an inspired book, but this may just be my Protestant history and unfamiliarity with the material. We will see what the audit finds.

General Headlines This Week

We have another prophetic date on 2024-07-07. This blog goes out on Friday, and that date is Sunday. We will return to that date next week. What follows are links to general headlines that caught my eye this week.

Jury Awards Damages to Employee Fired For No Covid Jab

The link here is to perhaps my favorite headline this week. A worker was fired from an insurance company for refusing to take the Covid Jab. The refusal was in writing and on religious grounds. It eventually went to litigation.

The Jury awarded the fired employee almost $700,000. May there be a thousand more awards like this.

Chinese Rocket Launch

I track SpaceX because it is the first company to seriously plan for reaching Mars. The link here is to a video of the test fire of a rocket being built by a Chinese company trying to build a clone of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

This is not the big new rocket SpaceX is building in Texas, but the smaller rocket which SpaceX uses every few days to deliver Starlink Internet satellites to orbit.

The Chinese clone was not supposed to launch, it was only being tested. But it broke free from the test stand and launched anyway. Not good for the company, but a crazy story anyway.

Biden's Failed Debate

Of course everyone here knows of Biden's debate performance. If you follow regular media his performance was a surprise. To everyone else it was no surprise at all.

The link here is to an article suggesting Michelle Obama might replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. This choice will play the white guilt card and the woman card and, most importantly, return Barack Obama back to the White House.

Of all the scenarios being discussed, this one would bring back the Great Arab to finish his ruin of the country. This would be a so far unfinished close to the 2008 run of prophetic plague dates. Election season is going to be crazy. Term limits should really apply to husband and wife teams.

Branham 1933 Prophecy of Woman US President

For reference, the link here is to the 1933 William Branham vision about a future woman US President. No indication in that vision of the woman's race. Given the social condition of the USA in 1933, that detail may have been kept from Branham. Maybe we should ask about gender, too. Also note, that vision has a reference to Russia, how it will become a great nation. That component of the vision is also coming into focus under Putin's leadership.

F-16 Bases in Ukraine

On the Ukraine front the Russians seem to be focused on damaging the landing bases for F-16s. This to slow down Ukrainian attacks deep into Russian territory. (In Greek, use browser to translate the page.)

Lebanon Warnings

The link here is to one of many articles dealing with government warnings to foreigners to stay out of Lebanon. In this case the warning is by the US Embassy in Beirut. It also explains the Iranian warnings that should Israel attack Lebanon, that Iran will retaliate.

Birth of Moses headline that hints at Lebanon will replay 2024-07-07, another couple days, so this is still an important candidate venue.

Start of War in Lebanon

This link suggests Israeli media are indicating that the Israeli war against Lebanon has begun. This because of a large rocket barrage from Lebanon in response to an Israeli assassination in Lebanon. Watch 2024-07-07, Sunday, the day after Sabbath in Israel, the start of their work week, for more on this front.

More Later,

Phil