I The Alphabet As Immutable Order;

II. Order of Time: Signs of Seasons;

A. Order as requiring a Leader;

B. Ordering of space, the physical world;

I. As Immutable Order.

            In the beginning God created Order, (aleph ve tau) a concept.  This divine Order manifests itself as Wisdom, the Logos.  Before God spoke a word He created the order which gives meaning to language, syntax, for a word without a linguistic context is meaningless.  Without syntax His words would, like the earth, also have been chaotic.  This beginning of creation is described in Proverbs 8:22-31:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of His acts of old.  Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.  Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.  When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men. (RSV)

             In the English translations this original act of creation is not apparent in Genesis 1:1, but there is an untranslated word ‘eth, spelled aleph ve tau with another vowel, as marker of a direct object, in the original Hebrew of that verse which is the sign of syntax, Order, the Logos:  “In the beginning God created – (Bereshith bara Elohim – ).”   Here we find that the next word is not the translated words ‘the heavens and the earth,’ but the untranslated syntactical sign ’eth, spelled with the letters aleph and tau.

            The essential original act of creation was, therefore, the creation of Order.  That creation is expressed by the word ’eth and was initially demonstrated by the linguistic act of speaking the Word that brought forth Light as an Ordered sequence.

            Light then became the medium through which the raw material of creation was made orderly.  Light, as the intermediary between the concept and the physical creation, was made manifest intellectually through the immutable Word of God.  It was made manifest spiritually through the knowledge of God by Revelation of Himself.  It was then manifested physically in the creation of the immutable order of the great lights, sun, moon and stars, the time-indicators.

            Time is, above all, the awareness of an Immutable Order.  The immutable order in the motions of the great lights made it possible for Man to count the units and revolutions of that order.  It is this counting of the order of the great lights that we call ‘Time’.  This Immutable Order is the prototype of Law, and a proof of the covenant-keeping God.  This appears in the word translated “fixed order” (RSV) in Jeremiah 31:35, 36:

Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar – the Lord of hosts is his name: ‘If this fixed order departs from before me, says the Lord, then shall the descendants of Israel cease from being a nation before me for ever.’ (RSV)

The Hebrew for ‘fixed order’ is chôq, primary meaning of which is: ‘that which is established, or definite.’  It is from the triliteral root châqaq, meaning ‘to cut in, inscribe, decree.’

            The same word is used again in an almost identical context in Jeremiah 33:25-26 where it is translated ‘ordinance’:

Thus says the Lord: If I have not established my covenant with day and night and the ordinance of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his descendants to rule over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

            The idea is that a law, ordinance or decree was carved or written in stone in such a way as to be permanent.  Yet God had a better, more permanent and immutable way to write His laws: to inscribe them upon the heavens.  In the creation account of Proverbs 8 quoted above, forms of the word choq are translated ‘drew (a circle)’ in verse 27 and ‘marked out‘ and ‘limits‘ in verse 29.  In a similar context Job 26:10 uses the word again when describing the creation: “He has described a circle upon the face of the waters.”

            This circle which God drew in the creation may literally be what mankind perceives as the circle of the ecliptic.  Proverbs describes it as “upon the face of the deep,” while Job describes it as “upon the face of the waters.”  In Proverbs 8:29 He assigned to the sea its limits, chôq.

            In Psalm 148:6 it is the fixed bound of the “waters above the heavens” that cannot be passed over, as well as the bounds of the sun, moon, and shining stars.  So the great circle drawn in the creation may have been, not only of the horizons of the oceans of the earth, but primarily that of the great ecliptic of the heavens.

            This is further borne out by the fact that the word chôq is used to mean ‘statutes and ordinances.’  (Deut. 4:5, 8, 14; 6:24; 11:32; 12:l, to name a few.)  Some of these, for example the Passover law, (Exod. 12:24), and the law for tending the eternal light in the tabernacle, (Exod. 27:22, BH, 27:21 in RSV) are called a “statute forever” (RSV), or “everlasting law,” (Ges. Lexicon). The words ‘forever’ and ‘everlasting’ are from the Hebrew ‘olam, usually translated ‘eternal.’  These are ‘olam laws; ‘olam perhaps should include the meaning ‘infinite’, referring to both time and space.

            Job 14:5 applies these immutable (‘olam) laws to Man: “You have appointed his bounds (chuqaw, a form of chôq) that he cannot pass over.”  These “bounds” are time-bounds, 14:13: “O that thou wouldst appoint me a set time (chôq) and remember me.”  He sees that these laws of the heavens, these time-bounds, rule the earth, though Man cannot control them: 38:33:

Do you know the ordinances, (chûqoth), of the heavens?  Can you establish their rule on the earth? RSV

            To return to the use of choqaq, it is used in Isaiah 30:8 and Ezekiel 4:1 to mean ‘to engrave letters and figures on a tablet‘, that is, to write.  It is translated to the Greek graphein, ‘to write,’ perhaps ‘to delineate, to paint,’ in Isaiah 49:16 and Ezekiel 23:14, (Ges. Lexicon s.v.).

            A word parallel to choqaq is the word chaqah, meaning ‘to represent, imitate’ (BDB).  Here we have the basis for the philosophy that the heavens are to be reflected or represented on the earth; that the ‘signs’ of the heavens are to reflect the heavens to teach us and guide us.  They represent the eternal, immutable law of God and are a witness, as a written record, to His covenant.

 II. Ordering of Time: Signs of Seasons

            The great lights were given for “signs of seasons“; the alphabet represented the units of the order of the seasons and the naming of the units so that they might be reckoned with in order.[1]  The pluralized form represented the group or entire circle.  This counting and naming of the units of time was probably the first mundane use of the signs which finally developed into writing.  The graphic shapes of these first signs may have been stylized copies of the outlines of the constellations of the stars, or conventionalized representations of astral phenomena, following the basic idea that things on the earth are copies of things in the heavens.

            The oldest meaningful written signs that have been discovered and deciphered are calendar markings.  The cave paintings discovered at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are probably some of the oldest graphic records.  Some of these can only be seen as art, yet others seem to represent seasonal groupings of flora and fauna, and the figures of the ecliptic or other constellations of the stars.  Alexander Marshack of Harvard’s Peabody Museum believes that systems of time-notation may have existed twenty-five thousand years ago or more.[2]

            Time-reckoning notations have been discovered in systems of holes punched in stone, markings on bone, and in various other ways, that seem to represent a system of counting the phases of the moon, days of the months, etc.  Although some of these markings were crude, others were sophisticated enough to be read with precision, for it was from such time keeping records that the ancients discovered the precession of the equinox.[3]  This did not and could not have developed from the mere observance of seasonal changes; it was both a science and an art, requiring exact descriptions and precise references.  In other words, the discovery of the precession of the equinox required a long period of calendar markings, – thousands of years, – that were so exact that they must be called writing.[4]  Or, that it was passed down from Adam who was taught by God Himself.

            Counting of time in primitive cultures is usually based primarily on counting of days, as this is the most immediate and the most easily observed recurrence of heavenly phenomenon.  Larger cycles then are based on observation of the moon.  In many languages the very concept of numbering and measuring comes from the original counting of time from the cycles of the moon.  In fact, Nilsson says: “Practically everywhere the month as a unit of enumeration or a measure is denoted by the same word as moon (Nilsson, 148).”

            In our calendars the period known as a month, (from ‘moon’) is marked by the division of the ecliptic of the heavens through which the sun passes during a cycle of the moon, (i.e. from new moon to new moon).  In the course of a solar year there are twelve of these divisions plus a period of about eleven days.  These twelve divisions, (or thirteen, counting the eleven days as a division), are known as the zodiac from the Greeks, meaning ‘circle of animals.’

            The name for this circle as well as its divisions is quite different in various cultures throughout the world due to differences in the philosophy of time and the methods of time-reckoning.  Whereas some other cultures adopted or adapted the idea of a circle of animals, the heirs of the tradition from which our Bible comes, the Hebrews, rejected images of creatures and named the divisions of the ecliptic from abstract figures which became the numero-alphabet, numerals and letters.

            Months as units of recurring phenomena that could be predicted made it possible to designate the months of the year consecutively by number, starting from a certain point.[5]  In this process the stars were grouped together in what we know as ‘constellations.’  The oldest Semitic records that describe the months show that the word for month is written, (transliterated), itu, ittu, or attu.  In a Semitic language, this word would have had an initial silent consonant, probably aleph, to carry the vowel, so the probable transliteration of itu would be aleph, tau, vau, ‘itu, meaning ‘sign.’