Are There Secret Pictographic Meanings in the Letters of the Hebrew Bible?

The following program is recorded content created by The Truth Network. The following is a pre-recorded program.

Is it true that the ancient Hebrew script, the paleo script, is based on pictures and those pictures still have meaning in the Bible today? It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Michael Brown is the director of the Coalition of Conscience and president of Fire School of Ministry. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. That's 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hey friends, welcome to our Thoroughly Jewish Thursday broadcast. So this week I've been attending the ETS conference of Evangelical Theological Society conference in Fort Worth, Texas, and thousands of scholars come together, Biblical scholars, theologians, different ones, different backgrounds, and you have these different sections. You present different papers, you have discussion, et cetera. Get to catch up with people. And I thought, okay, what can I do on Thoroughly Jewish Thursday that will be in keeping with a little more academic? So I want to dig into a subject today, but I want to do my best to make it intelligible to everyone.

So if it's brand new to you, if you've been studying for some years, I want to make this as intelligible as possible. And I'm going to play extended clips of a video that I did a few years ago. It took a lot of time for me to prepare the right material, to get the right quotes, the right slides to show you, and then have our team put it together.

So I don't mean months and months and months of work for one video, but I mean a good amount of preparation, thinking it through, getting the right material to present in a certain way. So there would be no doubt in anyone's mind after watching it, we're the truth line. Truth line. Ideally, that would be the case if people were thinking logically about this, but unfortunately many have been so misinformed that this is now almost a gospel doctrine to them. And our videos, which are normally on average, I guess, 95 to 98% sums up because most of the people watching are in agreement, or at least if they disagree, they still like the way I presented things.

This was like, I don't know, 60, 40, maybe something like that. And you would not believe the angry comments and you're a false teacher and you're a liar, you don't know anything. It was kind of amazing to see, but I have to tell you in all candor that the things that we're discussing here are no more debatable from an academic viewpoint than do I have a nose on my face or do I have a mustache under that nose? There's no debating these things. There's not a discussion to be had, and yet this has become gospel for some. So it's the idea that the ancient script called the paleo script, all right, that that goes back to pictures originally.

That's true. And that the script still contains the meaning of those pictures. So if you can decipher that, you can get to the hidden meaning of biblical text that is utterly and completely bogus. It is based 100% on misinformation. It doesn't matter what someone says on YouTube.

It doesn't matter if they've put material together to back it up. It doesn't matter if it's a rabbi telling you there is zero academic support and there is not a Hebrew scholar on the planet that would accept this as, yes, this is how you interpret the hidden meaning of the scriptures. You say, okay, I still don't get what the issue is. Well, let's, let's go through it. Let's open it up.

I'm going to take you back into this video, play clips for several minutes and then jump in and give further explanation. All right, let's get started right here. I want to take some time to address a dangerous false teaching that is rapidly spreading on the internet and by other means these days.

It is the idea that the Hebrew alphabet still maintains a pictographic meaning and that if you understand the original pictographic meaning of the letters, you can then get more insight into the scriptures. This is completely false. It is 100% without merit, but I don't just want you to take my word for it. I want to explain it so you'll be able to understand and then let this nonsense disappear. For those who don't know me, my PhD from NYU is in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. This is a field I have worked in on a scholarly level for decades.

I'm not talking about disputed things, I'm not talking about questionable things. Everything I'm going to lay out in this video is plain and simple and universally recognized by top Semitic scholars and Hebrew scholars. So, let's start here. Let's start and understand how we go from pictograph to alphabet. In other words, from writings that just use various pictures and they start with that and then it goes from pictures to syllables and then syllables to an alphabet and that alphabet no longer retains any connection to the original pictograph meanings. Listen to what Professor Joseph Navei has to say in his book, Early History of the Alphabet. He writes this, hieroglyph is a Greek word meaning sacred carving.

When the Greeks occupied Egypt, they were impressed by the monumental inscriptions engraved on the walls of the Egyptian temples. However, hieroglyphic writing was used not only for engraving texts, but also in primarily as a pictographic script consisting of drawn pictures. As in Sumerian writing, each pictograph initially designated a word and later there evolved a series of syllabic symbols. So let's take a look at this.

Let's understand this. If you've seen hieroglyphs, you know what they look like. In fact, let's take a look at some hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic inscription and you see here all the different images that are used and you see, I mean, you've got something that looks like a man or an old man sitting on a throne. You've got something that looks like a hawk or a falcon. You've got various animals.

You've got legs. So these are typical hieroglyphs. You can see they're originally pictures and that's why there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.

Just look at all the different images. So leg, I mean, that could stand for walk or bird could stand for particular bird or for flying and that's how pictographs would work. So you know, if you look at, for example, the original Chinese alphabet, that is also several thousand characters, ancient hieroglyphs, several thousand characters, ancient Sumerian pictographs, several thousand characters. So Navey explains it like this, he writes this, initially pictures were scratched on tablets to designate various words.

In time, they improve their writing. The pictographs gave way to wedge-shaped linear signs, which were impressed by a stylus on the wet clay and many signs came to indicate syllables. All right, I'm going to jump in there for a moment.

So hopefully you're with us so far. In the earliest stages of writing, people conveyed things by drawing pictures, right? So you needed a lot of different pictures.

Let's just say that I want to tell you after the radio broadcast today, I will be going to the airport to catch a flight to Texas, which is correct, all right? So think of trying to draw that with picture, it would be me and then sitting behind a mic and then maybe, you know, walking to, you know, dots to a car and then a car, an arrow then to a plane and then a plane up and then down and then a picture of Texas. So you have to have a lot of different pictures to convey that. If you're writing a book, you tell your whole story as accurately as you can, need a lot of pictures and then you develop within that, that this picture can have a double meaning.

This could be plane, this could be flying in a plane, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where it starts, ancient Sumerian, ancient hieroglyphs, ancient Chinese alphabet. And then when it goes to what's called cuneiform, which is wedge-shaped, it looks, if you've seen the ancient inscriptions in these stones, it looks like chicken feet, right? Those are, those are all printed like that. So you went from something that was a picture and then you put it in these wedge shapes so it doesn't really look like a picture anymore, but that's where it originally came from.

Okay. Back to the video explanation. This is what's called cuneiform. So in other words, that looks like chicken feet. If you've ever seen the inscriptions just with a stylus engraved, that looks like chicken feet called cuneiform or wedge-shaped. So you went from the pictures to then putting it in wedge shapes. And then you went from just pictures to what do those pictures represent with sounds? And then that developed into syllables.

Are you with me so far? Let's take a look at this and we'll see, say from Sumerian into cuneiform. Let's take a look. So for example, ancient Sumerian, there you've got sog, head, okay? And then after its initial writing, then at a certain point it gets turned on its side and then it comes into wedge-shaped cuneiform. So you can see by the time you get to 1000 BC, that was around the time of King David, it's no longer looking like a head at all, all right? Or the same thing with shoe, hand. You see originally, there it is with fingers, a thumb, that's a hand, then it gets turned a certain way. Then by the time it gets to cuneiform, you'd have to know that originally it meant hand, all right? Same thing with ninda, bread. You can see by the time you get to the end, cuneiform, you won't know that that's bread. So what happened was that with these signs, they now came to, they could represent the word or they could represent the syllables.

That's the big thing. Well, now they no longer represented pictures, they represented syllables, okay? So it could be shoe, shaw, shit, it could be ash, ash, oosh.

That's how it would go. It was no longer a picture, it was now a sound, a syllable. So let's take a look at the cuneiform script. This is called Akkadian. If you've heard of Hammurabi's code, it was written in this.

This is the language of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians. So you can see these pictographs originally were pictures, now they're just wedge-shaped. They're no longer pictures, they are now just sounds, na, ah, shaw, shu, gal, ki, mu, ma, all right? That's how it developed. From pictographs now to cuneiform to wedge-shaped, and you only had about 600 of those. So you went from, say, 3,000 pictographs to maybe 600 that represented various syllables and sounds. Some of them could still represent the thing, like the word that follows this is a word for a god, all right?

Or it could just be the syllables involved in the name for god. And that's how it developed. Now Joseph Nave is going to further explain the development.

I hope you're with me. It's really important you understand the development. By the time we get to the alphabet, it bears no connection whatsoever to pictographs anymore. Zero. And to try to read the pictograph meaning into the Hebrew Bible is just like trying to read it into my name or your name in English. It does not work. It is completely 100% bogus, and it's dangerous because you can read in anything that you want to read in. You can create anything you want to create. So let's go back to Professor Joseph Nave.

Here's what he has to say. The turning point that marks the beginning of modern research on the origin of the alphabet was Flinders Petrie's discovery in 1905 of the temple at Serbit al-Khadim on the Sinai Peninsula in this temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, and the turquoise mines nearby there came to light about a score of relatively short inscriptions in a formerly unknown script. The script consisted of pictures, but these pictographs numbered fewer than 30. It was soon realized that this was an alphabetic, albeit pictographic, script.

All right, so this is the big turning point. Remember, you start with thousands of pictures, and then you end up with an alphabet of maybe 30 letters, or in English, what's our alphabet, 26, Hebrew 22. So you end up with that, and you say, okay, well, they can't just represent pictures then. There's no possible way that you can tell a story or give a message or give instructions for thousands and thousands of different issues using 25 or 30 pictures. They're no longer pictures.

They are letters in an alphabet, and that's how the Word of God was written, with letters, not pictures. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back, friends, to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

This is Michael Brown, delighted to have you with us. This is a broadcast you've got to do your best to get all of, so if you're just tuning in as you're driving, do your best to get to the podcast afterwards. Or better still, go to my website, AskDrBrown.org, or to our YouTube channel, ASKDrBrown, and watch the actual video, because I'm interacting with a previous video presentation I did. I'm explaining things as best as I can orally, but if you can see as well, it's even better. So we are addressing the myth that the Hebrew Bible actually contains secret messages written in picture form, and that if we can go back to the original Hebrew alphabet, called the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which is best understood as borrowed from the Phoenicians. There's debate about the origin of that, but most scholars would say it was borrowed from the Phoenicians, and it's what we call Paleo-Hebrew.

It's not an actual dialect of Hebrew, it's the older script. Just like if you've ever seen something written in old English script, it's different than modern English script. So the same way, the idea is, well, we know that the alphabet originally came from pictures, so each letter, therefore, has a pictographic meaning, and when you read the Bible in that light, wow, it's amazing, the insights. Here, let me just tell you something, aside from the fact that that's inaccurate in terms of that, the letters still have pictographic meanings, as we'll demonstrate in a moment as we go on. By the way, the English alphabet, American alphabet, comes from Greek, and the Greek comes from the Paleo-Hebrew, okay, or Phoenician, if you want to say. In other words, our English alphabet originally comes from pictures.

If you trace it back all the way, it doesn't mean there's pictographic meaning in the English alphabet today, but if you were to do this consistently and take the alleged pictographic meaning, which then could mean anything, I mean, head, water, arm, okay, what does that mean? Well, we're going to put a meaning on it, 90 plus percent, 99 percent of the time, I'll have no meaning whatsoever as you go through verse after verse, oh, but it means something here. You cannot work out a system, friends, that 90 or 99 percent of the time is wrong, and 99 percent with ingenious interpretation may give an interesting meaning, no, that is absolute reading into the Bible, picking and choosing, creating things that are not there. And again, this is in the academic world, and I read the word on my face, I read the word seeking God earnestly, I read the word asking God for spiritual insight, to open my heart, to open my mind, and I use my brain, just like you're using your brain to listen, you're using your brain when you read the English or whatever translation you're reading in it, whatever language, you're using your brain to understand these words mean this, this sentence means this, right? And you're asking God to open your heart and your mind, it's both, and that we miss what God is saying by reading other stuff into it that's not even there, it's dangerous.

And sadly, when I have dealt with this, because it has been controversial, because people have been misled, the reaction against me is crazy over, oh, you're just dead in your scholarship, or you don't know anything, you're a false teacher, think, wow, again, I don't mind the attack, it's not a problem for me, let me be your dartboard and throw the darts at it if it makes you feel better, but the sadness I have over people being so terribly misled. All right, let's go back to the video as we continue the discussion. All right, so here's what Professor Naave is saying, that you went from 3,000 pictographs, because you need all these different pictures to depict things, right, you went from there to a few hundred, now, syllabic signs, now you go to about 30, you think, what, how can you convey things with just 30 pictures? Picture if I sit around, I want you to communicate, and you have 30 pictures to work with, you can use a car, you can use a plane, you can use an adult, you can use a child, how in the world are we going to communicate language sentences? So when you see just 30, that's telling you, oh, this is an alphabet. This is one of the first instances of an alphabet, just like our English alphabet, that it's not a picture, all right, it's not a pictograph, it is simply a sound, A, B, C, well, what is the A came from, what does the B come from?

That doesn't matter, A is A and B is B, it is an alphabet, and that's how it works. Professor Narvey continues, listen, the first step towards its decipherment was made in 1916 by Gardner, who pointed out that in these so-called protocyanic inscriptions, a certain series of pictures recurred several times, ox code, house, I, ox code, cross. He suggested that these pictographs have acrophonic values of the equivalent Canaanite words, lambate, ein, lambtav, that is, each picture symbolizes not the depicted word, but only its initial sound.

What is acrophonic? It's telling you that the letter represents the first sound of the picture it originally represented. So the letter that originally was a picture of, say, the word house by it, all it is now is buh, that's what it is, period, that's simple. Or the letter that originally came from the picture, delet, door, is just duh, it is acrophonic, it is simply the first sound. And as the scholars were deciphering this, it's like, well, of course, it's not ox code, house, I, what's the meaning of ox code, ox code, house, no, no, these are letters, it's an alphabet. Let me go a little further, this is Professor John Healy in the book Reading the Past, Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, this is what he has to say. This achievement, namely the invention of the alphabet, is essentially the insight that writing could be most easily organized if each distinct single sound of a particular language were represented by a single distinctive sign.

Since the number of separate sounds is in most languages rather small, the number of signs needed is also rather small, about 40 at the most. If we compare this with the writing systems already then in existence, though it seems unlikely that the inventor of the alphabet was an expert in any of these older systems, it implies a glorious simplification. Ah, so this is now kind of a genius development in human beings, and it could be, excuse me, just by divine gifting and inspiration, that suddenly you go from the only way we can communicate in writing, is with all these pictures, or then with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of complex signs that came from that, just like, well, hang on, we'll take a picture of a car, and that now stands for cuh. All right, so, and now we'll take that picture of a car and make it really simple and just kind of like a curved thing like that, and, because people don't need to know it's a car anymore, it just is cuh, and here, let's take something that looks like a hand, and that just stands for huh, h, and then we'll take this, let's just say, oh, it's something that worked with a vowel, an or, right, and here we got an or for boat, we'll just take that for the aw sound, and we use, when we have that, it's the aw sound, and now you can just put together anything, right, and now with just 25 or 30 characters, 40 max for all the different sounds the language might have, that you can say anything, and you can say it with precision.

Exactly what I'm saying, you can write out. Now, in point of fact, to repeat, the English alphabet goes back to Greek, which ultimately goes back to Phoenician, or we call Paleo-Hebrew, goes back to that. So my name Michael, I'm going to go through this, well, the M, that stands for Mayim, water, and the I that goes back to yud, and that would be hand, and then, no, no, my name is Michael, all right, it's just spelled, it's just a name, and there's nothing mystic, and now it goes back to Hebrew, mikael, so they're actually words, who is like God. That's what it means.

It does not have some mystic meaning, if you can just go back and understand the original script, and then from there, then you'll see all the pictographs, it has nothing to do with pictographs, it is an alphabet, and that's why over time, even as Paleo-Hebrew develops that script, and then it comes into the block script that's commonly used today in print, that there's no resemblance anymore whatsoever to the original pictograph. Okay, a little bit more from this video, and this is going to get more and more interesting as we go. So let's see where things went. Let's see how they developed. Let's go from ancient Egyptian to the Roman script, which is what we use today. Let's take a look at this, so 3000 BC, that's an ox head, right, pretty clearly an ox head, and then that would have been a representation of it, and then, you know, whatever cattle you're talking about, okay, so it would come from there.

All right, now, by the time you get a little over a thousand years later, Sinai and some of these other early inscriptions, you can see it, it still bears those characteristics, but not so much. The Phoenician alphabet, which was then borrowed by the Hebrews and the Greeks, look, it just, it doesn't really look like an ox head anymore. If you looked at that, if I showed that to a hundred people and said, what is that, they're not going to say, that's obviously an ox head. Now, as it's borrowed by Greeks, look at the Greek alpha, looks more just like a flag, and as it's borrowed into the Roman alphabet, which is our English alphabet, there's a letter A, okay? Our letter A originally comes from ox head. Does that mean that when you see the letter A in English, then you could say, oh, that we have to understand, that's originally ox head? No, that's bogus, that's complete nonsense, that's idiocy, that is linguistic, alphabetic idiocy to try to do that. The letter B, what does that come from? That comes from the Roman alphabet, which is borrowed from the Greek alphabet, which is borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet, same as the Hebrew. That originally, that B was originally buy it house, it looked like an enclosure. Oh, so in the name brown, the first means bait, buy it house, so it has to do with house.

No, no, do you understand the insanity of it? It's just the same doing it with the Hebrew. Here, let's take a look at the development of the Hebrew letter Aleph, all right? So Phoenician form, you see it originally, this is ox head, you see it, it's now on its side, no longer bears any resemblance to an ox head. Now it goes into Hebrew script, and you see in the Hebrew script, what? That's got nothing to do, the Hebrew Aramaic script, that's got nothing to do with ox head? Of course not, because it has no connection, it's just a letter, it's just the letter Aleph, and then look in Syriac, so it completely changed in Arabic, it's just a straight line. Why?

Because they're just letters, they're not pictographs, they have no pictographic meaning. All right, so that friends is the beginning, we're gonna start to apply this to verses in the Bible, show you what people have done, but please hear me, I have no goal other than to help people. I have nothing to gain from this, I do a video like this, I do a broadcast like this, and people, anger, choosing, attacking, we thought you were spiritual, we thought you were trustworthy, I'm trying to help, trying to help people read the Bible as God gave it to us, and not get caught up with the dangerous deception.

It's The Line of Fire, with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution, here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome, welcome to our thoroughly Jewish Thursday broadcast, as I have been attending the Evangelical Theological Society Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, in fact, as you're listening to this today, earlier today presented a paper, well, yeah, well, right about the same time as the broadcast, actually, presented a paper in a Messianic Jewish group, and then yesterday presented a paper in an Old Testament group, it's actually Messianic Jewish reflections on repentance, subject of repentance in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Anyway, I thought today's broadcast that we're especially prepared for you in advance, that we get a little more academic, dig a little deeper, and revisit the deception, the idea that in the Hebrew Bible, if we read it and can reconstruct the original pictographic meanings of the letters that will find deeper meanings, again, utterly false, again, a deception, again something that's very dangerous, because you can, the sky's the limit, you can read into it almost anything you want.

And the fact that one time out of 100 you come up with something interesting does not negate the fact that 99 other times you read something into the Bible that wasn't there, or you drank in deception or error. So we're taking you through a video, there are a lot of graphics on it, so I'm referencing what you see, but I'm constantly trying to explain this, and if you're just joining us now, we've shown how the earliest scripts, the earliest ways of communicating were in pictograph and then ultimately developed into alphabets, it's called acrophonics. So the alphabet, the letter would represent the first sound of what that picture represented. So if it was a picture for a house in Hebrew, by it, now the letter just represented B, and as it was written more and more over the centuries, didn't even look like a house anymore or an enclosure, not at all, or something that originally yawed, hand, now it just became the Y sound or a sound where this could be used as a vowel, and doesn't even have to look like a hand anymore, because it's no longer a picture, it is a letter in the alphabet. So let's return to the video lecture on this. I can guarantee you that if you asked a thousand Israelites in the ancient world that knew how to read, and they could read the alphabet, and if you said, explain this in pictographic form, they'd have no more clue what you were talking about than if you talked about, I just came from a mission to Mars, these are just letters, just like in English, they're just letters, and in Greek, they're just letters, they go back to the same original alphabet, and that alphabet goes back to pictographs, but once it becomes an alphabet, it's no longer pictographic, it just represents the initial sounds of what those words once were, period.

So now, here's the way it's taught, here's the way people want us to get it today, and I'm not mentioning books of authors who've become well-known for this stuff, I'm not calling out websites, I don't want to embarrass anybody anymore, once, if they will come to grips with the truth of what I'm saying, they have to pull all their material, renounce it, get rid of the website books and say, I'm sorry for misleading you, but I'm talking more to those who have been misled by these teachers, they may be sincere, they may be orthodox in other things that they believe, but this is false, dangerous, bogus, in a real sense, it's adding to the Bible, in fact, it's creating your own Bible, because you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean. So let's look at this, okay? Here's a chart, and we see, here's the pictograph, all right, so we just start with olive, originally the pictograph, ox, well, if it's ox, then it could mean strength, it could mean leader, so now we start to deduce more things from this, right? Naked, goes back to buy it, house, or it could mean inn, or gimel, foot, or camel, well it could be pride, and dollop, tent, door, well, maybe that means pathway, and so now you can start reading into things whatever you want, so if I was looking at my name, okay, brown, so it'd be house, then I'd go down to the race, house, head, maybe because I'm the head of my house, could that be in for the, oh, I'd go to a vob, that's nail peg, maybe on the head of the house, I'm like a nail, a peg in the wall, and then vob, that's a hook, and then nun, a seed, or maybe fish, because I'm like a fisher, but it's bogus nonsense, it's playing games, that's all it is, all right, here's going back again, let's take a look at the Phoenician alphabet, all right, Phoenician alphabet about 1400 BC, all right, and as we look at this, we start on the right, olive, bait, you can see that even though we're told that all these meanings are there, you're not gonna know it looking at it, and again, it is simply an alphabet, all right, you wanna know what people do with this, you wanna know how far they go, you wanna know how crazy it becomes, and I plead with you, don't waste your time, it is nonsense, better look for the latest sighting of Elvis Presley, better find out if there's life on Mars, and if we need to send a mission to Mars to reach the Martians with the gospel, that's more credible, that's more worthy of your time than this nonsense. All right, so there were folks who were upset with me, saying, Dr. Brown, your tone was too demeaning, you ridiculed these people who believe these things, you were too insulting, and that drove people away, if that's how you felt watching it, I truly apologize if that was off-putting to you, if that turned you off, if that did not invite you in, my intention was to help, my intention is to help. Having said that, every word I said was true and accurate, in other words, this is an error that needs to be rebuked. So all the stuff I'm going through, all these charts, friends, if you don't believe me when I say people push back on this, and people are caught up in deception on this, just go back to the video, we'll have the link in the description, watch it straight through, but then look, notice that the likes versus dislikes, so like 700 something likes, 400 something dislikes, that's how many people had an issue with this, and then read comments.

There may have been some that were so vulgar wrong we had to remove, but I think the vast majority of the negative, ugly comments are there. Read through what people are saying, it really is quite mind-boggling, it's like, what did we touch here, what was so sacred about this, oh no, but there are these deeper meanings. The word means what it says, here, when I say to you, let's say that you are driving me to the airport today, and I say, alright, meet me at the front door at 4.05 PM, and instead, you're at the back door at midnight because you found a hidden meaning in my words, we're not communicating, oh, but the Bible's different, no, the Bible is not different.

Here, how do I know it? Because the Bible quotes itself, because God will say, don't commit adultery, and when the people committed adultery, he'll say, I told you not to commit adultery, God said certain things would happen prophetically, and they happened as he said they would happen, alright? And we know that nowhere, ever, in the Bible, our secret pictographic meanings of words derived, quoted, referenced, it just does not happen. You say, well, is there no knowledge anywhere that, say, vov could have originally meant hook? No, because the word could still be used as hook, alright? So it's a letter, alright, and there's also a word with the same syllable there.

That's a totally different issue. It's not the case that when it comes to the letter Aleph that it can secretly mean an ox head, and if it means an ox head, it must mean strength and power. That is something that someone else read in, alright? And the reason you can buy all the top Hebrew dictionaries on the planet, every single one of them, and I own them, alright, in any Hebrew to Hebrew or into English or German or whatever the top dictionaries are, lexicons, you won't find any of this because it is a myth. You say, but I was getting all these special meanings. Let the Holy Spirit just speak to you through what's written, alright?

Let him speak to you through the words on the page as opposed to mystical things you have to read into it. Okay, let's get back into the video. Alright, so let's debunk it once and for all. Let's take a look at Hebrew writings, say, from the Dead Sea Scrolls or Hebrew writings from some documents that we have from even a few hundred years before that in Aramaic or Hebrew. Just look at what the script looks like, okay?

So I want you to see this, alright? So Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, this is just an alphabet. There is no pictographic meaning found in any of these words whatsoever. And again, Dead Sea Scrolls or Aramaic inscriptions from other places a couple hundred years earlier, this is how the script would look and there's nothing pictographic about it whatsoever.

It is simply an alphabet. Nonetheless, here's what we're told, okay? This is what we're told.

I'm not mentioning the website, but I'm going to take you through with this one website claims, and it's going to go through the first word in Genesis, bereshit, which is beresh, alershen, vav, tav. And this is now allegedly the meaning we're going to get for it. Alright, so here we go. So you've got, here's the letter, beit, pictographic meaning, house tent, or that's what it stands for. And the meanings, alleged meanings, family house inside. Alright, and now resh, man's head, that's first, top, beginning. So let's just look at the meanings. It's family first, strong, sharp, work, mark, and this is allegedly now all found in the first word of Genesis. This is no more reality, friends, than what I just did with my name, Brown, okay?

There's no more reality to this than what I just did with my own name, Brown. It is that bogus. So now, again, I'm not giving you the website, but here's what this particular author has to say. He's now going to read into, you're going to be shocked to find out what he now reads into this based on the alleged original pictographic meaning. If you sat down with Moses and talked to him about it, he'd go, what in the world are you talking about?

Alright, so here we go. While each pictograph has a meaning of its own, Hebrews always form words by combining pictographs to convey an idea, nonsense, bogus. In this instance, the first two pictographs, beit and resh, form the word bar, which means son of.

For instance, Jewish males have their bar mitzvah at age 13, announcing that they are a son of the covenant. So not only are they reading meanings that had no connection whatsoever to the alphabet anymore, not only that, they're now dividing the word up. Alright, let's go.

Let's continue. He says this. The next letter is the Aleph, which is depicted as an ox's head with the ox having the connotation of strength and power. Not surprisingly, this symbol was often associated with God. The symbology of this letter even appears to have been employed by God in the sacrifice of the red heifer, which is a portrayal of Jesus eventual death at the cross. So in this instance, we could translate this letter as God. The guy's making this up.

He's totally, 100 percent, sorry, just jumped in the middle of a sentence there, cut myself off. Okay, I'm looking at the clock. Can I tell you something really interesting? When I started watching that video, alright, when I started watching the, and I'm reading what this guy's saying, I wanted to jump in live and interrupt and say, no, it's like this, that's what I actually did there.

I can't tell you how grievous this is. Well, the symbology of the letter, it's a letter. Friends, please, if you've bought into this, if you thought it's enriched your walk with God, you've bought into someone else's ideas being read into the Bible. And the further you follow this path, the more you'll get away from the plain sense of scripture. It'll be like there's a stop sign and it says stop and you go, oh, stop, well the S stands for this and the T stands for this, so I'm going to drive right through and you get in an accident.

It would be that dangerous. Okay, we're going to finish this up on the other side of the break, so stay right here on the special edition of Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome back to Thoroughly Jewish Thursday.

Michael Brown here. You know, Yeshua said in John 6, the words I speak to, they are spirit and they are life. And Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2 that the spiritually minded person understands all things and that we have the mind of the Messiah. It's true that the Word of God is deeply spiritual and deeply rich, and if we just read it like words on a page without recognizing God is speaking to us and through those words and that those words are his words, then we'll miss the meaning, we'll miss the power, we'll miss the application. But to say that the words are spirit and life does not mean that they have mystical meanings different than what the actual words say, that they have mystical meanings based on alleged pictographic meanings in words.

That's completely different. And again, if you follow this logic, you can do the same with the Greek New Testament because the Greek goes back ultimately the Paleo, Hebrew, ancient Phoenician alphabet the same way. You can read all kinds of mystical meanings into that or write into English today because the Roman alphabet that we use in our English language ultimately goes back to those same origins. So, to repeat ultimately our alphabet originally goes back to pictographs, and yet we understand it is just an alphabet. So please, if you've bought into this pictographic deception, may the Spirit of Truth deliver you.

God is more than enough and rich enough and the treasures are deep enough based on the actual words written with actual alphabets. Okay, let's go back. We're going to finish off this video presentation. We'll have the link in our description to the video so you can go back and watch the whole thing. And again, if you think I'm exaggerating the level of deception people are in, look at the likes versus dislikes and look at some of the comments. All right, last clip.

This is totally 100% making stuff up based on this fundamental misunderstanding. All right, now he continues. Now we come to the letter Shen, which is depicted as two front teeth. This symbol represents the act of biting or pressing against something or eating or destroying something. It also represents the number two since there are two front teeth in the pictograph.

But in this instance we adopt the idea of being pressed by those consuming teeth. And there is the yud, which has the pictograph and extended arm and hand. Since we do our work with our arms and hands, this symbol would point to the ideas of work or effort or throwing something, even throwing worship to God.

Of course, it can also have the symbolic meaning of the arm and or hand. I mean, this is staggering. This is staggeringly bizarre. This is staggeringly bizarre beyond the point of any connection to reality.

This is pure fantasy. And we're being told this is the hidden meaning in Genesis 1 and 1 in the opening word. And people are like, wow, that's amazing, it's not in the Bible. This has been made up, completely made up. Basically everything you read here, aside from the fact that many, many, many, many centuries before these letters originally had a pictographic meaning, aside from that, everything, every single word you read there was nonsense fantasy.

Okay, then he says this. Finally, we have the top, which is made by crossing two sticks in the shape of a cross, which was the way that the Hebrews actually used sticks to keep the ribcage of a lamb open while they roasted it. This symbol also has the meaning of a marker sign or a signal or monument that in this analysis will just use the idea of a cross, of course, and by the way, a cross in terms of crucifixion or anything like that didn't exist in the world at that point. That was invented by the Romans many centuries later. So here's the message.

Are you ready? This is what this got. Well meaning, I think. This is what it's going to come up with, based on the alleged pictographic meaning, then with all their fantasy stuff built into it in the first word in Genesis.

Here we go. When combined, then, the overall message that can be gleaned from this first word of the Bible is the following. The Son of God will be pressed by his own hand on a cross. I'm sorry to laugh. That's the most absurd thing I've ever read.

The Son of God will be pressed by his own hand on a cross. Isn't that fascinating? No, it's not fascinating. It's bogus. You just made something up and put it on the Bible, and it's been hiding right there in plain sight for thousands of years. It's not hiding.

It's not there. And in case you think that's not what this message is claiming, consider how well the message correlates to everything we know about the destiny of Jesus in this world, according to his own words. So in other words, you're going to now take the Gospel message and throw it back where it never occurred, and throw it back by dividing up, mixing up, importing meanings into letters that are not there in the Hebrew.

Look, if you do this after this video, you're doing it with your eyes wide open. You are willfully deceived. You're willfully deceiving others. Bogus, nonsense.

I don't care if your books took off, I don't care if your ministry took off, I don't care if your websites took off. You need to pull the books, you need to pull the websites, you need to publicly apologize for misleading people. It is based on false information, and you just read stuff into the Bible.

It's not there. I don't care if it's the Orthodox Gospel. You just made it up in terms of Genesis. So I'm going to give you a series of facts, one after the other. Indisputable, non-negotiable facts. I challenge any scholar on the planet to challenge a word of these, and it's not going to happen because no scholar would.

All right. Fact. There is not a single hint that the ancient Greeks, who borrowed the ancient Phoenician alphabet, retained or even understood the original pictographic meaning of the letters.

It is the same friends with the ancient Hebrews, but Greeks, let's use that as an example, they're borrowing the same alphabet, not a hint that an original pictographic meaning was understood in now the new letters that they were going to be using. Fact. There's not a single hint in a single verse of the Bible that the Hebrew letters are to be understood in a pictographic sense. Not maybe, not possibly, fact. Next fact. There is not a single example in all ancient Jewish literature, talking about thousands of writings of the rabbis, that the Hebrew letters were to be understood in a pictographic sense. Fact.

Next fact. There is not a single scholarly dictionary of biblical Hebrew, I own them all, that places any meaning on or derives any definition from the alleged pictographic meanings of the Hebrew letters. And finally, fact, it is a dangerous practice to interpret the Hebrew scriptures based on the alleged pictographic meanings of the letters. To do so is to turn the plain meaning of the Bible into a meaningless code of gibberish and to add one's ideas to the scriptures. All right, listen, you've been warned, we've laid things out, we've made them plain.

The Bible as God gave it to us is rich enough. Let's explore what God said and not get in the realm of fantasy. You say, oh, Dr. Brown, you just took away a precious truth how the gospel of Jesus and the crucifixion is preached in the first word of Genesis. No, I didn't take it away, it's not there.

It's never been there. Someone imagined it to be there. Someone refashioned the meaning of the Hebrew and then put things together in a bizarre way to get a message.

One thousand different people believing that those original pictographs had meanings. So the first letter of Genesis 1, 1, right? That the first letter meant house and the second letter meant head and you go on from there, right? And now you're going to come up with, everyone would come up with a different interpretation on top of it, all right? Friends, the word of God, as I just said, is rich enough as is. Words have meaning. What do we learn from Genesis 1?

That God is the extraordinary creator of all things and the one who brings light out of darkness and the one who sets things in order and overcomes all the powers of chaos and the one who majestically says let us make man in our image and who creates human beings in his own image as the pinnacle of creation. That's what we learn from it. Not a secret code that in Genesis 1 when Jesus is going to be crucified. By the way, in the video I said the Romans invented crucifixion, I meant to say the Persians and then the Greeks learned from the Persians and the Romans learned from them and then ultimately outlawed it, but we have no clue that crucifixion was practiced in the days when Moses would have been writing or when the first words of Genesis would have been written, all right?

So it comes much, much later, but that's completely besides the point. What troubles me is no matter what you present factually and truthfully, if I show someone, okay, let me explain why I say two plus two is four, all right, so let's just with fingers, one two plus one two, let's count one, two, three, four, oh no, no! I learned that that is actually six.

Why? Because the two plus two inherent, there's another two and therefore it's six and actually it means peace, peace and that it's a code for Isaiah when you say two plus two means four, it's a code for an Isaiah where God speaks peace and he says peace, peace, think, oh my, oh my, how do we help someone to say no? Two plus two equals four. That's genuinely what pains me and what grieves me. Paul speaks in 2 Thessalonians 2 of deception coming on those who refused to believe the truth or love the truth and Paul warned Timothy in 2 Timothy 4 about those who would just heap for themselves false teachers to tell them what their itching ears wanted to hear. No matter what the message is that comes out of this alleged pictograph meanings continuing in the Hebrew text today, whatever message comes out, even if you get some cool thing about the name of Yahweh and it's, oh, it has to do with the cross or something like that, it's bogus. It's ultimately a false teaching.

It's giving you false information. And if you go through verse after verse in the Bible, the sky's the limit. You could come up with every kind of meaning and it's no longer the Bible. It's no longer the Bible. It would be as if I'm going to get meanings from the Bible by reading the first word of each verse and then putting those together and then scrambling them until it means something. It's no longer God's word. Whatever you're doing with this has nothing to do with God's word.

It has to do with a fantasy being created based on a misunderstanding of the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew language. So if you're missing anything, by all means, give us a call. We'll do our best to sort things out.

You can call. Tomorrow's broadcast is we're taking questions and follow up. Do our best to help you. My goal is not to mock or ridicule a person. My goal is to expose a deeply flawed, erroneous, and potentially very dangerous false teaching.

Once again, I want to urge those teaching it, maybe you did it sincerely, maybe you thought you really discovered something, humble yourself, pull down the websites, take the books out of print, and just rejoice in the word as God gave it. Hey friends, let me remind you to sign up for our emails if you haven't done that. AskDrBrown.org. I've got a great free mini book I want to send you, Seven Secrets of the Real Messiah. We'll send it when you write in. So just sign up for our emails, you'll get it automatically. AskDrBrown.org, be blessed. See you next time.