Bereshit Read Through Its Paleo-Hebrew Pictographs

Bet. Resh. Aleph. Shin. Yod. Tav. Six pictures. One declaration.
Written before anything else existed.

Part 2 of 9

(Special thanks to MWM Contributor, Lisa MacPeek)

 

How to Read What Moshe Actually Wrote

The previous document established that Bereshit, the first word of the Torah, is not merely a timestamp. It is a declaration. And that declaration was written in a script where every letter was a picture.

Moshe (Moses) wrote the Torah in Paleo-Hebrew, the pictographic alphabet in use throughout the kingdoms of Israel and Judah before the Babylonian exile. In this script each of the twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew language was originally drawn as a recognizable image from the physical world. The letter was not an abstract symbol representing only a sound. It was a picture that carried meaning, and when letters were combined into words, the pictures combined into declarations.

When Ezra transcribed the Torah into the square Aramaic-derived script around 458 BCE, the sounds transferred perfectly, one letter to one letter, no change in count, no change in words. But the pictures became strokes. The hand that was drawn as a hand became a vertical stroke with a small extension. The nail that was drawn as a tent peg became a simple vertical line. The cross that was drawn as two crossed sticks became a mark. The pictures became abstract. And what the pictures were declaring became visible only to those who knew what the letters had originally shown.

What follows is a reading of Bereshit’s six letters through their established Paleo-Hebrew pictographic values, the values documented in the archaeological and linguistic record of the proto-Sinaitic and early Semitic alphabets. Each pictographic value is established. What the six pictures say together is what this document presents, precisely, with the honest acknowledgment that pictographic word-reading is an interpretation of those values, not a claim of linguistic certainty. But it is an interpretation the pictures support. And it is an interpretation that produces a declaration the rest of the covenant history confirms.

 

The Six Pictures of Bereshit

Bereshit is spelled Bet, Resh, Aleph, Shin, Yod, Tav, read from right to left as Hebrew is written. Six letters. Six pictures. Each one carrying established pictographic meaning from the oldest form of the alphabet.

 

Bet ב   —   A House or Tent

Meaning: The dwelling place. The home. The place where family lives and where God tabernacles among his people.

The Bet opens the Torah and opens Bereshit. Before anything is declared, a house. The first picture in the first word of the covenant text is a dwelling. This is the house that the entire covenant history is building toward. Not a structure of stone. The house where YHWH dwells with all flesh.

 

Resh ר   —   The Head of a Man

Meaning: A person. The first. The head. The chief. The one who stands at the beginning.

Bet and Resh together form the Aramaic word bar, son. The first two letters of the Torah spell son. Before God is named. Before the creation is described. The Torah opens with son embedded in its first word. The head of a man inside the house. The one who will dwell there.

 

Aleph א   —   The Head of an Ox — Strength, Power, Sacrifice

Meaning: The first and greatest. The source of strength. The leader. And, the ox as the primary sacrificial animal, sacrifice itself. God.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the first letter of Elohim, God. It represents both divine strength and sacrificial offering. The ox was the primary animal of the covenant sacrificial system, what was given, what was consumed on the altar, what pointed toward the one offering who would complete all offerings. Bar-Aleph. Son of God. The first three letters of the Torah declare it.

 

Shin ש   —   Teeth — To Consume, To Destroy, To Press

Meaning: The function of teeth when pressed together, consuming, crushing, destroying. What the fire does to the offering.

The Son of God, destroyed. The Shin takes the declaration built by the first three letters and declares what will happen to the one it identifies. Not incidentally. Not as a footnote. As the fourth letter of the first word. The destruction is built into the declaration before the creation narrative begins.

 

Yod י   —   A Hand or Arm — Work, Action, What the Hand Does

Meaning: The working hand. The outstretched arm. The hand that acts, makes, gives, and offers willingly.

The same letter that begins the name YHWH, the same letter that sits first in the divine name’s declaration of behold the hand. Here it declares the manner of the destruction. By his own hand. Willingly. The hand is not coerced. The arm is outstretched by choice. The Yod declares the voluntary nature of what the Shin declared would happen.

 

Tav ת   —   Two Crossed Sticks — A Cross, A Mark, A Sign, A Covenant

Meaning: The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The mark. The sign. The covenant seal. Two sticks forming a cross.

The Tav closes Bereshit and in doing so closes the declaration. The Son of God destroyed by his own hand, on a cross. The covenant is the cross. The mark that seals it. The sign that identifies it. And the Tav is the last letter of the alphabet, Yeshua (Jesus) declared himself the Aleph and the Tav, the first and the last, before the world began and in Revelation’s final vision. The first word of the Torah ends with the last letter. And the last letter is the cross.

The Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross.

 

 

The Declaration Read Whole

Bet. A house. Resh. A man, a son. Aleph. God, sacrifice. Shin. Destroyed. Yod. By his own hand. Tav. On the cross.

The house where the Son of God who was destroyed by his own hand on the cross will dwell.

Or more precisely, following the pictographic sequence from right to left as Hebrew is read, the Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross, so that the house can be established.

This is what the first word of the Torah declares in its oldest pictographic form. Before Elohim is introduced in the third word. Before the creation of anything is described. Before light exists. The declaration is already complete in the first word. Six pictures. One sentence. The entire gospel embedded in the first breath of the covenant text.

The house, Bet, frames the declaration. It opens the word and it is what the declaration establishes. The dwelling of YHWH among all flesh. The tabernacle that Yochanan (John) described when he said the Word became flesh and dwelt, literally tabernacled, among us. The house is not a structure. It is the presence. And the presence was established by the destruction of the Son by his own hand on the cross.

This is not a reading forced on the text. It is what the pictures say when they are allowed to say what they show.

Six pictures. One declaration. The Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross, so that the house can be established. Written before God is named. Written before anything is created. The gospel is not the conclusion of the Torah. It is the first word.

 

On the Question of Authority

A pattern exists in the scholarly treatment of Paleo-Hebrew pictographic readings that must be named plainly.

The same linguistic tradition that established the pictographic values of these letters, the tradition whose archaeological and lexical work identified Bet as a house, Resh as the head of a man, Aleph as the head of an ox, Shin as teeth, Yod as a hand, Tav as two crossed sticks, is the same tradition that has raised questions about whether those pictographs can be read as declarations within words.

The pattern of acceptance and rejection is not random. Bar, two letters, Bet and Resh, is accepted as son without reservation. Brit, covenant, is accepted without reservation. Torah itself, spelled Tav-Vav-Resh-Heh, read pictographically as cross-nail-head of man-behold, is taught freely in Jewish learning environments. The enlarged Vav at the center of the Torah is acknowledged and documented in the Talmud. These pictographic readings are used where they serve the framework that is already in place.

The objections appear with precision at the point where the pictographic reading points to Yeshua. At that point, the method that was just employed without question becomes suddenly uncertain. The authority that was just invoked becomes suddenly unreliable. The declaration that the pictures produce becomes suddenly a matter of scholarly debate.

This is not neutrality. This is a filter. And it is a filter applied by the same tradition that changed the name they were commanded not to change, that questioned the letter count without documented warrant, that built a fence around the Torah and called the fence the Torah, that accepted Paleo-Hebrew wherever it agreed with them and rejected it precisely where it points to Mashiach.

We are not obligated to import that filter into our research and present it as balanced caution. We are not being intellectually honest by doing so, we are being selectively dishonest, deferring to an authority whose pattern of selectivity is itself the evidence under examination.

The pictographic values are established. The reading of Bereshit through those values is coherent, not fragmented, not forced, but a complete declaration that the entire covenant history confirms. Yeshua himself said the scriptures testify about him. The Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets, all of it. The first word of the Torah testifies. The pictures say what they say. And the one who is named in every document of this series is the one the first word declares.

 

Bet. Resh. Aleph. Shin. Yod. Tav.

 

A house. The Son of God. Destroyed. By his own hand. On the cross.

 

Six letters. One declaration. Written first.

 

The Torah does not build toward the gospel. The Torah opens with it.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams