Give up.

I was talking to a Christian Egyptian friend in the gym and he asked me what non-Arab Muslims did about understanding the Koran since a great part of the Koran’s wonder is in the language. I explained that the Koran cannot be translated but is interpreted in other languages and in reality the same is true about the Bible.

My friend disagreed about the Bible. He was under the impression that the English translation was in fact a reasonable translation. I explained that this was impossible since the old testament was written in Hebrew which has no vowels (like Arabic anther Semitic sister language). Moreover the Old Testament was written without any spaces between words and no punctuations to tell us where a word began and ended.

So comes the English version of this way of writing. This is an example: mgnfnglshwswrttnlkths. It could be: Mage in fun gals how swear to tan like this.
Or: Mug no fang lose. How’s war to tune lake to his.

In fact it was: Imagine if English was written like this.

I next explained to my friend that this allowed many different readings of the Bible. For example the following is a mystical understanding of the first sentence of Genesis (from Cabala): The beginningness created the heavens, the earths and the Gods.

I love this understanding since it tends to say that there are multiple universes. Also note that there is an unknown (The beginningness – Ein Sauf of Cabala) which created the Elohim (Gods). Again it is important to understand that the God mentioned in Genesis one is the Elohim which is a plural word (hence Gods) formed with a plural masculine ending of a word which is feminine in the singular.

To me this paradox of the word Elohim means that God is beyond gender and any description (plural-singular) and as the Tao Te Ching writes the ultimate reality is ineffable (cannot be put into words) and I suppose the rest is silence….

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