h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You can read. That's special. I guess you'll have to prove to me you're not special.

Maybe you're an asteroid in a family full of stars. That's a drag and might lead on to believe they are not special, but I think everybody who gets a body is special.

Do you like TV.

Still, Pika

Thank you.
I do like TV when I'm in a mood to be broadcast at. I usually prefer to read. Books, the internet, magazines, ketchup bottles. It depends on what's available.

What's your favorite book?

I like the Bible, but not for any normal reason. I learned to read Hebrew and Greek and found some stuff. I had read in this book about the Kabbalah, the Jewish Secret Society, that in the last days the Torah would have different spaces between the letters, different vowel points, and will read of completely different things. That was in Gershom Sholem's On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pg 72-76.

I thought that was pretty cool and wondered how that could be possible.

Turns out, the Torah was written with no vowels. Well, there are these things called semivowels, but they don't count. Anyway, there were no spaces between the words when it was written, either. And no punctuation.

nywythrwrnspcsbtwnthwrdswhntwswrttnthr

That's the last sentence. No wonder the Kabbalah book called it a 'jumble of letters'. It is.

So as I was studying I found this weird thing about the Ark of the Covenant.

Does any of this interest you, because if it doesn't, we can chat about something else.

Still, Pika

It's too difficult to choose a favourite book. There are simply too many. I am currently reading adverts on public transport, which can be interesting. Or tedious. Depending on how many times I want to read about how cheap phone calls can be these days.

You can chat about what you like, if it interests me enough, I'll reply.

It's interesting that the Torah is or was written in a way that must make it difficult to read. And last days of what?

Last days refers to the time before the Messiah, who the Jews do not believe has come yet.

I think Jesus died for their sins, too. So the Kabbalah says that before the Messiah comes (maybe that's the second coming) the Torah will change.

That would be now, according to Christians who swear Jesus is due back. I personally believe that when He died, He went to be a spirit guide. He went to simultaneously occupy the hearts of millions of individuals at once, so He could accomplish a great task. So the second coming will be when all the Christians wake up and make this world a place Jesus would want to live in.

Not only is the Torah hard to read, but I think they made some mistakes. For instance, the last sentence in the Book of Genesis says they put Joseph's body in a coffin in Egypt.

The word coffin is arown. This can't be. The word arown is only used for the Ark of the Covenant. So I wrote to a Rabbi. He said that the word arown in that one place means coffin. In a couple of other places, it means box.

But I had done my research. In 195 of 202 times in the Bible, the arown is translated Ark of the Covenant. In 6 it is translated box. In one it is translated coffin.

The Rabbi said that they didn't use coffins back then so they called it by that name because they didn't have the right word.

I went home and looked it up in the Hebrew/English/Hebrew dictionary and he was wrong. The word for Noah's Ark, tibera, I think, is often used for box. So right there in Genesis we have another word for box already used.

Why does it matter? It changes the Bible. If Joseph's body was placed in an Ark of the Covenant, then Moses took an Ark when they left Egypt. They took Joseph's bones with them when they left, and God went with them. Exodus 13 or 11. One of those two, I can't turn on the light to read my Bible, because I can't wake up my son. His computer.

Anyway, when they were about to cross the red sea, Pharoah's Army approached. There were 600,000 men and their families, posessions, and sheep, and one Ark.

The Pillar protected them from the Army. There were over half a million families. It takes weeks for half a million families to move across any given line you drawn on the sand. So the Ark protected them with a pillar, the same pillar associated with the Ark on many other occations.

Why would Pharoah say go and then send out his Army to be destroyed? Because they took an Ark.

If you read Graham Hancock's The Sign and The Seal, you will find that the Ark is said to have power. I think it was radioactive. Aaron's rod budded. Was that a radioacitve rod?

So they have the Ark and Moses leaves to go get something. They strip the gold off the Ark, they use the acacia wood for the fire and they build a statue. They totally radiated everyone, and destroyed the box Moses needed to put the radioactive things in. He had to break them. He didn't have an Ark. He got new ones. He had a new Ark built and then he took the statue of the calf and ground it to dust, threw the dust on the water and made the people drink the water. Then he made the Levites kill everyone.

Now, if you read the Bible, some of this is there, plain as day, and some is not there, but is obvious, once you know Joseph was buried in an Ark in Egypt.

2Kings 6 tells how 2 women boiled and ate a baby. It was bad back then. Feel free to visit my page and read Why I believe there was cannibalism. It's in my Guide Entries section.


Still, Pika

What?

Forgive me for intruding, but this is interesting stuff, Pika!

The theories I had read before for the "Power" of the Ark of the Covenant were predecated on the suggestion that it was a form of "Leyden Jar", or large electrical capacitor used to store the energy of a lightning bolt attracted to a "rod" inserted at the top. Someone built such a device (I've lost the reference, sadly) and found that it could hold a charge of a few thousand volts for the best part of a week; they speculated that in a drier atmosphere (they were in the USA) and with a higher initial charge the potential could be lethal even weeks after "charging".

It's use as a place to store radioactive materials is an interesting concept. Perhaps the words you refer to translate as something like "lead-lined box" (for "lead", think "gold" in this context...) and thus would make sense in the various contexts you find them in?

My recollection of Biblical tales is patchy - how exactly did Joseph die? Was he in regular contact with the Ark of the Covenant? If it's possible his body could have suffered some form of radioactive contamination, then placing it in such a box isn't all that puzzling...

I'm just rambling here, I admit. I don't have the in-depth Biblical knowledge to make a real contribution to the discussion. But I am interested, nonetheless. I (sporadically) run a website on "Belief Systems and the Paranormal" over at http://www.paranormal.org.uk - if you ever fancy writing an article on your theories and findings, I'd be happy to publish it.