Ivrit shel Targum (Boundary Crosser's Translation)
"Targum" means "translation" in Hebrew. The word "Ivrit" comes from the root "ayin bet resh" and means to cross over a boundary, or to transgress. It is also the word for "Hebrews," a people who crossed many boundaries during their storied and historical travels. I started studying the Hebrew Bible in 2001, after the planes flew into the twin towers. My motivation for undertaking an interpretive approach to a translation of the first several chapters of the book of Genesis is that I want a version of the Hebrew Bible that has meaning for me, rather than constantly being something I have to de-code and struggle with. So much of the Bible's language and interpretive traditions are filled with oppression of homosexual and gender variant people that, as a transsexual gay man, it can be hard to find help or succor in its pages. I want to see if the way I see and make sense of the world can be found in these verses. I think it can, else I would not be pursuing this work. Also, I am interested to see if there is some internal consistency to the de-coding scheme I'm employing (explained in the commentary.) It's evolving as I work. --Noach Dzmura (begun in 2006, re-started in 2012).
Hebrew Bible Genesis 1.1
_א בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ
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1 In a beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
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Ivrit Shel Targum (Boundary Crosser's Translation)
[interactivity]
[images] [What question are you trying to answer] [goal: to verse 13 by 26 Feb] 1. Once, the vast Universe began to experience itself as planets and stars and space and matter and energy and pebbles and trees and plants and humans and other entities of countless number. Some parts were living and some were non-living. Some possessed sentience and some did not. This 'Once" gave birth to Time, a linear filter on perception. In fact, we might call this Once, upon a Time. All of the Universe's parts lived for a time as one kind of thing, and then changed form into another kind of thing. As the Universe gained experience of all these different forms, how they emerged and how they changed, It grew to understand Itself. As Universes go, ours is still quite young. Each of our lives exists within that vast learning Universe. We are each a node in the Universe's sensory array. As we experience our own lives in our communities and as part of a single Planetary Life and as part of a much larger Universe, so does the Universe become that much more aware of Itself. Our tiny sparks of experience are the fleeting sparks of a Universal Consciousness that will one day become aware of Itself as a Totality, instead of just being aware of all its bits and pieces. As we start our human awareness with recognizing our self and another, and then we begin to recognize our hands, say, or our noses and our shoes, so our Universe comes to know itself, too. All of our lives comprise but a single moment in the development of the Universe's sentience. Right now it is a toddler Totality, just taking Its first steps. When each galaxy becomes aware of each note in its own song (and you and I become aware of those songs), we will be much closer to the day of the Universe's adolescence than we are today. When each life recognizes its own, individual limited sentience as well catching glimpses of itself as part of the sentient Totality, we will be much, much closer to the day of the Universe's adulthood. As you can imagine, that will take many, many, many planets worth of lifetimes. | Commentary
__1. The One is Many and the Many are One. The drive of the Universe is toward increased individual and collective sentience.
Every moment is a beginning, middle or end, depending on who's telling the story. This is not a story of origins; that story is still being written. It is a story of the emergence of collective sentience. "God" is code for "Everything that is, was, and might be." "God" is a synonym for "the Universe." "God" is an emergent collective Sentience. "Heaven" and "Earth" are code for "Other" and "Self;" two of the 'parts' of the Universe. |
Hebrew Bible Genesis 1.2
_ב וְהָאָרֶץ, הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ, וְחֹשֶׁךְ, עַל-פְּנֵי תְהוֹם; וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים, מְרַחֶפֶת עַל-פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם.
| 2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the
face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the
waters.
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Targum
2. The trees, the rocks, the lightning bolts, the diatomaceous earth, the birds and the humans were filled with consciousness of their own experiences, but they were unconscious and empty of experience of the Totality. The Totality recognized them as a part of It, but they did not recognize themselves as a part of the Totality.
| Commentary
_2. Relatedness - the friction between self-knowledge and knowledge of the other - gives birth to sentience. "The Deep" is code for "unconscious desire" or "unknown potential."
"Darkness" is code for "hidden." A face is a surface veil, a 'skin of matter' over the
spirit, true nature, or totality of a self. The "spirit of God" is the
emergent cumulative sentience of everything that is, was and might be (the Totality). "The waters" include "the shallow" as well as "the deep." If the deep is unconscious desire or unknown potential, the shallow is conscious desire and known potential.
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Hebrew Bible Genesis 1.3
_ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, יְהִי אוֹר; וַיְהִי-אוֹר.
| _3 And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light.
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3. The Totality spoke and heard itself speak. The Totality recognized and named speech and hearing and the other senses as the way the Totality is filtered and becomes known to some of the parts of the universe. The Totality named those filters "Discourse." In that moment, the skin of matter was made permeable to desire, awareness and knowledge, and the parts of the Universe that participated in Discourse recognized the presence of the Totality for a fleeting nanosecond.
| 3. The Totality speaks and hears; speech is an action and hearing is a perception. We experience the world through our perceptions; we grow aware of our presence (and our individual selves) by perceiving the effects of our actions. Once we have a sense of self, we recognize our desires as motivating our actions. If darkness is 'the hidden," then light is "the revealed." Our senses are the way we come to know the world, as Parts increasing the consciousness of the Totality.
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Hebrew Bible Genesis 1.4
_ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאוֹר, כִּי-טוֹב; וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים, בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ.
| 4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
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4. For the first time, the Totality experienced Discourse of Its Parts, and some of the Parts experienced that the Totality was being indicated by the shape of their Discourse. The experience was temporary, fleeting. The memory of Discourse brought a new motivation to the parts of the Universe -a kind of longing to recognize the shape of Totality within Discourse again.
| 4. The Hebrew word "tov" (which is usually translated as 'good') has the connotation of 'complete' or 'finite'.
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Hebrew Bible Genesis 1.5
ה וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם, וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה; וַיְהִי-עֶרֶב וַיְהִי-בֹקֶר, יוֹם אֶחָד.
| _5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
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5. The Totality named the discourse that was revealed Openness, and the part of discourse that was hidden he called the Closet. And the measure of the degree of sentience of the Totality became the distance from awareness of the threshold of the closet to the moment of empathy that follows in the wake of Openness.
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ו וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, יְהִי רָקִיעַ בְּתוֹךְ הַמָּיִם, וִיהִי מַבְדִּיל, בֵּין מַיִם לָמָיִם.
6 _And God said: 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.' | 6. The Totality erected a barrier between the Individual and the Totality so that they could not mix. The parts saw themselves as Individuals. The desire to perceive themselves as part of the Totality was hidden behind the filter of time and a skin of matter that covered the true form of each part of the Universe. The parts of the Universe started to develop awareness of the Totality when friction arose between the experience of their own lives, and the experience of something outside of their own lives, to which they were somehow still connected.
| 6. In verse 2 we learned that the waters are comprised of "the deep" (which is unconscious desire or unknown potential) and the shallow (which is conscious desire and known potential). The firmament divides conscious from unconscious.
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