Meaning

Rooftop & Place Of The Roof; Global Dialogue & Internet; Enlightenment & Secularization

Etymology

From the noun גג (gag), rooftop.

Related names

• Via גג (gag): Agag, Hamon-gog

Magog is a son of Japheth, son of Noah (Genesis 10:2). Later this name came to denote a region (Ezekiel 38:2).

Magog is often mentioned in conjunction with Gog, which is the name of a Reubenite (1 Chronicles 5:4), but later also the name of a certain prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal (literally the Chief Prince of the Occupied Zone that is The World — Ezekiel 38).

John the Revelator sees Gog (Γωγ) and Magog (Μαγωγ) — "the nations which are in the four corners of the earth" — gathered up by satan for the final battle (Revelation 20:8). This is remarkable because Daniel sees a vision of a male goat whose one horn becomes four horns towards the four winds of heaven, which may allude to a world-wide altar (Daniel 8:8).

The altar on which continuously incense burned (see Ephesians 5:2) had horns on its four corners (Exodus 38:2) and Daniel also speaks of the defilement of the altar (11:31-32). The male goat is explained to be Greece (8:21), or Javan in Hebrew. Javan was a son of Japheth, and a brother of Magog, Meshech and Tubal (Genesis 10:2).

Through the prophet Ezekiel, YHWH foretells an attack upon Israel by Gog, "in order that the nations may know me when I shall be sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog" (38:16), but then diverts onto the undoing of Gog and Magog. Gog will fall where he stands (39:4) and Magog will perish through fire (39:6). The people of Israel will take seven years to burn all the weaponry (39:9) and seven months to bury the people of Gog in the valley of Hamon-gog (39:11-12). And the city (in the valley?) will be called Hamonah (39:16).

The name Magog is the name Gog with a prefixed mem, and nouns that start with a mem usually describe place or agent of the parent verb. That means that Magog simply means Agent of Gog or Place of Gog or even Out Of Gog (i.e. whatever emerges from Gog).

The origin of the name Gog is technically not immediately clear — BDB Theological Dictionary resolutely declares its root unknown — but to anyone not immediately bothered by technicalities, it's rather obviously similar to the common noun גג (gag) and means roof:

Because we've already linked God and Magog to the altar of incense (see above), the most remarkable usage is in Exodus 30:3 and 37:26 where גג (gag) denotes the top of the altar of incense.

Gog may be a region, and Magog is then said to mean From Gog (BDB Theological Dictionary). But Ezekiel 38:2 speaks of a man named Gog who is of the land of Magog (= the land of the land of Gog), which seems overly redundant.

Since Gog may mean Roof, then Magog may subsequently mean Place/Agent Of The Roof and describe a center of wisdom, or someone who runs or works in such a center.

Simple societies like tribes can be governed by a single chieftain, whose own eyes tell him what's going on and whose verbal commands can be heard by anyone involved. When societies become more complex, a proper government depends on the faithful collection of data, and the proper review of that data by a central council of broadly learned and deeply insightful minds. Such data-processing councils would benefit from a high perspective, and would settle on mountains or the roof of very high buildings (Matthew 4:5-11). The quality of the final advise that comes out of such councils depends, of course, on the quality of its members, which is why societies with any sense restrict access to the roof to anyone except a proven few.

In our article on Apollyon, we argue that the Internet is really the old fashioned postal service imagined to its utter efficiency. The technology that supports the Internet is of course beyond the scope of all our ancient forebears (and most of our peers today, for that matter), but the Internet itself could have been logically foreseen by someone who understood the traditional postal service and had a knack for the theoretical elimination of inefficiencies.

That said, it seems to us here at Abarim Publications that Gog represents the Global Debate that the Internet (Magog, the place of Gog) has made possible — or said otherwise: the complete demise of any boundary between informed experts and the throngs of buffoons who base their firmest beliefs on five-minute YouTube clips and demand to be heard and taken seriously. Magog is a place where the general population obtains its medical advice from teenage popstars rather than medics and scientists, where the slants of dousing rods cast doubt on the moon landing and the earth remains flat and peopled by aliens.

And now that we're on the topic of conspiracy theories: the name Google is essentially a variant of the nonsense word googol: the name of a symbolically or proverbially large number, namely ten to the hundredth (10¹⁰⁰). There are about ten to the eightieth (10⁸⁰) protons in the universe, so the googol is 10²⁰ times greater than that, which pretty much marks the asymptotic ceiling of quantifiable reality.

This word googol was invented (or so the legend tells) by the nine year old nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner, an American Jew of Austian extraction. This was 1938, and where the kid got it from isn't clear, but the element גול (gol) reminds of גולה (gola), exile, or גל (gal), heap or pile or anything rolled up (the noun מגלה, megilla, means scroll or rolled-up thing). And the goog-part? Well, who knows what the term goog/gog may have meant to a nine year old Austrian-Jewish kid from New York in the late 1930s.

Note that the name Yahoo is rather obviously similar to the name YHW(H), which may actually be the ancient Hebrew version of the acronym ABC or alpha-bet (see our article on the name YHWH). This is significant because the parent company of Google is called Alphabet.

Also note that the otherwise inexplicable Greek verb γογγυζω (gogguzo) means to mutter or grumble, and may very well stem from our name Gog. The name Apollyon means Destroyer and 1 Corinthians 10:10 reads: "... do not grumble (γογγυζω, gogguzo), as some of them did — and were killed by the destroying angel" (NIV).

Jesus said that a house divided against itself will not stand (Matthew 12:25). Likewise, a house that consists of mostly roof and that invites everybody up there, won't last long either (Judges 16:27-30). Equally significant in this regard is the familiar story of the paralytic man whose four friends tear into the roof of the house where Jesus is and lower their friend down to him. The splitting and rolling up of the sky like a scroll (Revelation 6:14) is similarly significant.

All this illustrates that the arch-enemy Gog is not defeated by any frontal assault by some large and synchronized army but by the intellectual equivalent of guerilla warfare: by the patient corrosion of its despicable fundaments, drip by drip, jab by jab. That said, let's poke some holes in the ceiling that is Gog:

The following was added to this article in January 2025

— Part I: Nested Realism and the Disaster that is the Enlightenment —

Reality is a tricky concept but comfort may come from the maxim that only real things have real effects.

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy is always preserved, which is why telekinesis has never been observed in a controlled environment and only on theatrical stages. But this also means that only material particles affect material particles. Nothing else does. It's how we can tell that something is real: when it affects something else that is real.

If some proposed object fails to affect any other material object — any atom or boson or combination thereof and ultimately the atoms and bosons that make up our senses or instruments — and if no atom bounces off it and no photon gets emitted by it, then we are justified to declare that the first thing is not real within material reality. That's not to say that the thing (i.e. that unicorn in my attic, the Loch Ness Monster, the archangel Michael) has absolutely no ontological essence. It's just to say that if it is real, it is real because it affects the reality in which it is real. If it doesn't, then it isn't.

Reality is all about things exchanging energy and/or information. Like stars that create the space in which they sit, so all things that exchange energy/information create the reality in which those things are real. Reality is like a language, which is an environment whose economy is more or less the same for all speakers, regardless of what they speak about, how loud and for how long. In that sense, a reality is an economy of qualia (one quale, two qualia: a quale is an instance of experience, a what's-it-likeness) that is more or less the same for all real things. Only people with sight know what it is like to see, regardless of what is seen. And if a person wants to share her experience of, say, sighting Nessie, then she can only do that with people who can imagine what it is like to have seen anything.

If a thing has access to the information of what it is like to be another thing, then they share (or rather comprise) a reality. That's not to say that the first thing actually has all that information, but that it could. It's also not to say that a thing that can imagine what it is like to be another thing, actually has the experience of being the other thing. It's just to say that they can communicate and compare each other (and even disagree) within a mutual language of qualia. Thomas Nagel once famously explained that only a bat knows what it is like to be a bat, but from that follows that all bats know what it is like to be any bat, and that the exchange of batness (i.e. all information that bats exchange in any way) creates bat reality.

Realities so described are very often nested. A nested reality happens when one set of players has access to all the information that some other set of players has access to, but not vice versa. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, had access to all the sorts of information that her corgis had access to — she herself was a noted mammal, with eyes and ears and a working nose, but also instruments such as glasses and hearing aids and a whole team of observing servants and physicians with instruments by which they knew the corgis better than the corgis knew themselves. But the corgis had no availability to information regarding statecraft. They lived in a palace and ate top rate food, but they had no idea why all that was so, and what their kindly human mistress might have meant to any of the other humans and why the others treated her which such distinction (she never growled, snipped or snarled, or marked her territory with scent marks, as far as we are told). That means that corgi-reality sat nested within state-reality, and that the corgis never met the Queen (only that kindly human female) and that the corgis could not begin to imagine what it might have been like to exchange information in terms of statecraft (in which they were not even proper subjects but objects described by Property Law and the Animal Welfare Act), or that such an exchange might even exist.

Entirely likewise (and this is where it gets interesting), an electron has access to all the information of what it is like to be a neutrino (i.e. to have mass, 1/2 spin and an ability to exchange information in terms of the Weak Force), whereas neutrinos, having no electric charge, cannot begin to imagine what it is like to exchange information in terms of electromagnetism, or that such an exchange would even exist. That means that neutrino-reality sits nested within electron-reality. An electron has access to neutrino reality, but a neutrino has no access to electron reality, and doesn't even have the faculties to imagine that there may be something like an electron reality that sits wholly outside their own purview, and isn't even real in terms of their own local neutrino reality.

So how may corgis and neutrinos come to suspect that their own reality sits nested within a supervening reality? Simply by observing the effects of that supervening reality upon their own. The corgis could not see the Queen, but they could see, hear, feel and smell the mammalian side of Elizabeth, and they could also see that there somehow was more to her than literally met the eye: something that caused her to change dresses, moods and attention, something that caused observable effects in the people around her, even in the drapes and dressings of the buildings they all lived in. Even though the corgis were not equipped to know what was going on, even to the corgis something obviously was.

Entirely likewise, even though a neutrino cannot begin to imagine what it is like to exchange energy/information in terms of electromagnetism, it is nevertheless affected by strong gravitational fields, which come from the great concentrations of mass of large objects that consist of atoms that are kept together predominantly by electromagnetism. (Mere gravity does not explain why lots of freely floating atoms become stars: their initial contraction happens because of electromagnetism and only at the very end of the contraction, gravity takes over.)

Atoms, likewise, being kept together by electromagnetism, are usually unperturbed by neutrinos zipping through them, but on occasion one directly hits an atomic nucleus and does all kinds of things with it. Even though the neutrino was utterly deaf and blind to the sort of forcefield that made the atom an atom, it might still break its little heart as much as the death of a corgi might have broken Elizabeth's, whose human sadness might have affected her Queenness and even somewhat the State as a whole.

A nested reality can know about any supervening reality when events happen in/to the nested reality that cannot be explained in terms of the nested reality, and that appear to reveal a consistency of which the nature and substance cannot be described in terms of the nested reality. Simply said: a supervening reality makes itself known by "miracles" in the nested reality, and a miracle is not simply a mystery waiting to be solved but rather something perpetually inexplicable, something that cannot ever be explained in available terms. But that certainly does not mean that a miracle violates natural law.

People like to imagine that a miracle equals an event that violates natural law. They do that because in the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume declared it so. What is rarely added, however, is that to David Hume, the term "natural law" had nothing to do with gravity and electromagnetism. Instead, to Hume, the term "natural law" was simply the equivalent of "common sense": that on which we all agree, or that which is, was and always will be obvious to everyone with eyes in their head and a normally operating brain to think with. A miracle is not an event that violates the laws of physics (because how on earth would that work?) but rather an event that is perfectly allowed by the laws of physics but not foreseen by someone who is not wholly up to snuff with all the things one could do with physics once one knows it all. Jesus famously performed miracles, not in order to show that the laws of physics might be violated, but in order to demonstrate what is possible to do when one knows how to do it. Such a person may even do greater things (John 14:12), and would do those greater things by adhering to and utilizing physical law and certainly not by violating it. Anyone who attempts to violate natural law will sooner blow themselves up than achieve their objectives (Matthew 5:18).

And to be clear: when someone causes a cheeseburger to miraculously appear on the table out of nowhere, there's nothing miraculous or strange about the cheeseburger once it's there. Once the cheeseburger is there, it's an "object in the world" that communicates with other objects and is as normally real as any other. But not only the cheeseburger is an object in the world, the process by which it came to be on the table is also an object in the world. That latter object is the miracle, as its elements are inconsistent: the lines and ligaments of that object are broken. There is no continuity. Entirely likewise, once Ramanujan's continued fractions were written down on paper, his fellow mathematicians could examine them with the math that was available between them (i.e. common mathematical sense). But the process by which they emerged in the mind of some Indian amateur, could not, and still can't. Ramanujan was not some deeply learned professor who collected available mathematical knowledge and pieced that together into a construction of unprecedented profundity. Instead, he was some curious kid who somehow caused a mathematical cheeseburger to apparate by means that cannot be explained by anything that came before. In fact, later in England, the brilliant mathematician G. H. Hardy had to force Ramanujan to back-engineer his fractions, to laboriously manufacture a bridge between the mathematics that was commonly available and his new and miraculously conceived fractions. That was frustrating to Ramanujan because such a bridge is ultimately as miraculous as the cheeseburger.

Actually entering a supervening reality requires the acquisition of the ability to exchange the sort of information/energy that makes the supervening reality a reality: it requires learning a whole new species of language or developing a whole new sense, from an original reality in which it cannot be imagined that such a language or sense might even exist. So, yes, that's quite a hurdle, and no, this has nothing to do with the idea of the god-of-the-gaps, whose gaps describe discretely dimensioned holes within our understanding of understandable reality. It has more to do with the incompleteness of any set (in a Russel/Gödel sense) that has exhausted all its own potentialities, and has found no access to the information that might tell it how it relates to everything else. All it knows is that it is incomplete, and that despite its self-confident pride in being so very well informed, it may very well be nothing but an utterly insignificant drop in a much greater ocean that is almost entirely and wholly eternally beyond its scope.

This Matryoshka model of reality — nested realism — has been exhaustively explored in most traditions since deep antiquity, perhaps most recognizably in the idea of an angelic realm above us and an underworld below. And in modern times it remains intimately confided in (albeit perhaps mostly subconsciously) by large swaths of paying audiences: Dante's comedic cosmology, Jules Vernes' extraordinary voyaging, J.K. Rowling's supervening world of wizardry, and films from The Matrix to Men in Black and Barbie are all based on it. It appears in psychology as Freud's id, ego and superego, and in philosophy in at least two separate forms of Simulation Theory: the one that says that Alice predicts Bob by running an internal mental simulation of Bob based on what Alice knows (but obviously not on what Alice doesn't know or can't even begin to imagine but is very much part of Bob's reality, which is why Alice fails to correctly predict Bob and they end up fighting), and the one that says that we are almost certainly living in a simulation that was created by creators that we can never reach or even begin to imagine (but who monitor everything we do or say and possibly think).

This is all very complicated, but what helps is the understanding that no matter how miraculous any supervening reality might seem to any nested one, it's still as regular and lawful and predictable as any: there are still rules there, rules that make the whole thing tick and that were created along with all the rules of the entire universe. As a matter of fact, the "higher" up the supervening ladder one goes, the more rules and regularities one encounters (statecraft rules to the corgis, electromagnetism to the neutrinos, continued fractions to Hardy and co), and the loss of rules demonstrates one's tumbling "lower" down that ladder. That means that the singularity from which the whole universe appears to have sprung was the most lawless thing to ever have existed, and has been establishing rules and creating realities ever since. And look where we are today!

Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, an awful mental disease began to infect humanity some time before Plato. It was somewhat subdued by early Christianity but returned in force during the Enlightenment — hence the enduring literary trope of the Return of the Dark Lord (Sauron, Darth Vader, Voldemort: the proverbial "man of lawlessness" or "bondage"; see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria or Freedom-By-Law). It's the abomination that causes desolation, and starts with the formal rejection of nested realism.

A formal rejection of nested realism (or "antinestism", if you will) proposes that we modern humans, though perhaps still somewhat embryonic in some regards, are in essence fully equipped to process all the kinds of information that occur in or even outside the universe. That means that we therefore have access to all realities in or outside the universe. And that equates us with God, which would of course be jolly great if antinestism was actually dependable. It rather obviously isn't: we have no idea what consciousness is, or even life, what animals think, if there are any rules to consciousness and what those might be, how DNA works and where it came from, if there are aliens, if the universe is infinite and flat, and so on and so forth. We're all so proud that we know what atoms are (we don't actually, we don't know what particles are), that we forget that the universe consists mostly out of stuff we have no idea even how to detect. We call it Dark Matter in the hope that this creates the illusion that we know what we are talking about. We don't. We're fantastically clueless. All we know is that what we know has more screws loose than an old Studebaker, and comes with a faculty that lets us explore what we do know but not what we don't know. Our experience of the universe is mostly through Dark Knowledge, which is a snazzy way of saying: via the miraculous.

But thank God for miracles! Without them, antinestism might actually have a leg to stand on, and that would make it even more infectious than it is now. Antinestism is collective intoxication: a monstrous drunkenness, a vile and deadly insanity that makes one's living consciousness rot off the skeleton of one's most cherished certainties. It's perfectly horrendous, and its intuited effects have even spawned a whole new "fictional" genre: the zombie genre — anything from Night of the Living Dead to World War Z to The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us are all somewhat dramatic but faithful intuitions of the effects of antinestism.

Intellectual zombies imagine that they are at the absolute ceiling of reality (or "base-reality" if you are a Simulation Theory enthusiast). This means that they believe that the rules that govern the zombie's reality (zombie normalism) also govern the other guy's reality, and that there is nothing about the other guy that is hidden to the zombie, and vice versa. That means that if the zombie doesn't get along with the other guy, it's because the other guy is malfunctioning (or stupid or evil) and must be healed or else exterminated.

It also means that ultimately everything can be understood if the zombies just persist in the way they have been going, and that, by persistently stacking logical brick upon logical brick, ultimately, mankind's intellectual tower will reach the highest heaven (Genesis 11:4). This in turn implies that there is nothing above us, no higher level to transcend to, no superiors to be responsible to, no creator simulators that might evaluate our progress, and who might communicate with us via miracles. Instead, the zombies think that we are orphans, and we have to make the best of our accidental situation by clearing up the riff-raff from among us, according to our own best insights. This zombie sort of thinking not only gave us books like Lord Of The Flies, it also gave us the holocaust that this book so obviously contemplates.

To anyone with a bit of sense (and humility and theory of mind), all over observable nature, realties emerge from things exchanging information or energy, and are separated by asymptotic event horizons. Antinestism denies this, but has no proof. This is why it has to recruit fellow believers through symbols and banners and through expressions of hope and by means of seductive imagery of brotherhood and a kind of lofty oneness that factually depends on the violent denial of others — and "others" are people who think differently within our own reality, and those who actually exist in a supervening reality, and those who exist happily, cluelessly and entirely dignified in a nested one.

So how did most of modern mankind managed to get infected with this filth? That's because the pernicious nature of diseases like antinestism is that while their effect is deadly, the catching of one is usually quite pleasurable. Think of syphilis and aids and getting hammered with the lads on a Saturday night. And while you consider that one, please take a moment to compare the lyrics of John Lennon's most enlightened anthem Imagine with the one written by Horst Wessel.

Since a supervening reality (the Queen) has much more influence over the nested one (the corgis) than vice versa, the supervening one tends to govern the nested one. This indeed has to do with "imposing" the rules of the supervening reality upon the nested one (or more precise: to extend these rules into the nested one), but it's important to realize that the nested one always retains the choice to go along with that or not (hence Deuteronomy 30:15-20). The nature of nested realism is such that the members of any nested reality always retain the choice to reject the patterns of any supervening reality and live wild and free from anyone's law and cut off from any supervening authority. And since they retain the choice to reject it, they also retain the choice to accept it and follow the patterns and attain a freedom-by-law that is incomparable to freedom-from-law, that joins the nested reality to the supervening one like the corgis to Elizabeth.

These corgis, it's prudent to note, would not last five minutes in the wild. Unless you have a gun and a Gore-Tex outfit, the wild is terror: cold, stressful, viciously unfair. At Elizabeth's court, the corgis lived in safety and health and were protected in ways they could not begin to comprehend. They served a world they could not know by providing stress-relieving companionship to some friendly old lady who happened to live there too.

Corgis, of course, are dogs and dogs are one of about a dozen kinds of animals whose ancestors once chose domestication by man over existing in the wild. We know that there was some kind of choice involved because attempts to domesticate zebras, giraffes and bears failed: they were too stubborn, too uncreative, too unoriginal and too unimaginative to comprehend the benefits of joining the supervening world of the humans. Or said in Biblical terms: they simply did not believe the miracle.

And as said above, the higher up the supervening ladder you go, the more regular the world becomes, the more orderly it becomes and thus the less entropy it has. The higher up, the more "one" things get. The highest reality, of course, is that of the deity, who is therefore One and King of all the worlds (Psalm 125:2). That means that there are not one but two singularities: the one from which the whole material universe Big Banged forward, and the One upon which the whole living universe converges (and this convergent One is actually the one with causal primality).

The divergent one, from which the Big Bang came, ends in so-called "heat death", which is the situation in which particles have moved so far apart that they are no longer able to exchange energy or information with any other particle, and will forever remain in isolated one-particle non-realities hopelessly adrift in the howling infinite of non-existence.

The convergent One, to the contrary, starts in a heat death — in a kind of social equivalent of heat death. Or rather heat birth. When the first living things blinked into existence, they had never seen another living thing and were therefore perfectly antisocial. But by their very nature, they began to exchange energy and information with their environment and discovered other living things and began to communicate with them and so formed a whole new kind of reality in which living things wove webs of information and formed colonies and cultures. That means that the whole subsequent journey toward the Great Attractor is also a journey of getting to know one's neighbor better and better.

People with an origin oriented priority (blatant nepotists, "own people first" types, the "make our tribe great again and screw the rest" crowd — also see our article on Hanukkah) are naturally drawn toward the divergent singularity, in which all the energy of the world is concentrated in an unimaginable condensed pip of utterly concentrated power and lawless fire. People with a unification oriented priority are naturally drawn toward the convergent singularity, where all soul, mind, intelligence and spirit is concentrated in a utterly lawful and perfectly assembled state of wholesale liberty.

Drawing this into a highly stylized diagram reveals a familiar picture: if you would imagine the diverging singularity as a dot bottom-center (of your screen or paper), then the divergence can be represented by a triangle whose base sits opposite the singularity and represents heat death (beyond which there is no more spacetime, for reasons we explain above: the particles don't exchange energy or information anymore, so their reality is no more). At about a quarter of the way up from the singularity, the universe has cooled enough to sustain atoms and molecules and finally DNA, so there we can draw the heat-birth of life as the base of a second triangle whose singularity sits as far above the universe's heat death as the universe's singularity sits below the heat-birth of life. And this is what you get:

Depending on how you count, there are seven or ten (or more) realities between matter and God: the first level up from matter is life (bacteria, fungi, plants, bugs, corgis, humans). The second is consciousness (bugs, corgis, humans). The third is language (humans and up). And these realities are bound by a single pervasive pattern that emanates from the deity and progresses synchronously throughout all the realities and brings the whole thing into a single resonating state. It's a vast fractal whose details explain the whole and from whose uncompromisable entirety emerge the virtual "parts", that exists without cause and effect, and that causes all effects that make up the world.

But this is only visible for people who know God in the first place, and can look down into diversity from a place of utter oneness. People who can't do that (most of us) have to look at this from the other end, from matter upward, which leaves miraculous holes in the picture. This picture, namely, is a picture of base energy, and the atoms it somehow yields, and the molecules the atoms form, and then somehow the cells, and then somehow the mind. This perspective can't really explain life, let alone consciousness or language and gets stuck with in explicable holes and singularities the further away from quarks and electrons the picture tries to peek. The world when viewed from God's plane, rather than the material plane, is ultimately a narrative: a single unified multi-dimensional fractal account that supervenes upon some sort of reduced but diversified world, that in turn supervenes upon a simpler but more chaotic world, all the way down to the level where individual words become individual things, and then the dust of things.

From the bottom up, the story is that life evolves according to patterns easily recognized in material reality. And consciousness evolves according to patterns found in life. And language evolves according to patterns of consciousness. And that means that the patterns we can find in the Torah also exist in several realities outside of it. Or rather, that the Torah is a pocket format compression of the entire universe and works pretty much in the same way. The patterns exist simultaneously within and without the Torah, and this in a chicken-and-egg sort of sense: there is no first; it's all one.

Time is a function of the universe: it's a thing that the universe does. That means that the universe didn't begin at a point in time but that time begins at a point in the universe. The patterns that we described above are what actually drives the universe, and time is a consequence of that. Time is a bound slave and does what it is told.

In order for the Torah to describe the whole of reality, it cannot be subject to time. Instead, time must be subject to it. That means that the "historic" narratives of the Torah are not "historic" narratives. The stories did not get written following the events, but rather the events followed the stories written. The stories of the Torah are true, but not because they happened uniquely that once. Instead, they are true because everything that happens, happens because of them.

And if that seems far-fetched, consider the familiar formula E=mc². That formula is true but not because it happened once, and some journalist caught it and wrote it down. Instead, E=mc² describes a rule that is always true and "happens" all the time, simply because it is part of the regularities that make reality what it is. Likewise, the Torah is "simply" a kind of formulaic narration that some silly people accidentally confused with journalistic realism (that didn't exist until many centuries after the Torah was written).

The Torah was written in a time when neither journalistic realism nor physics nor mathematical notation had been invented. But the patterns of the Torah correlate to the foundation of all reality: those same patterns that run from the material world up through life, then consciousness, language and up all the way to the Supervening Oneness that governs all. The stories of the Torah happen continuously, all around us. That is fortunate for people who want to be present at Sinai, when the Law is given, and likewise, for people who want to be present at Golgotha, when sins are forgiven.

Just like individual particles, a single human mind is free to take whatever path it wants to take. But just like large objects, large people movements are governed by rules that can't be avoided. That is very convenient for people who like to know what's coming, so that they can stock up if need be or warn the not-so-bright neighbors to buy extra cans of soup, just in case. Because the truth is, once large people movements get locked into one of those patterns, all you can do is ride it out. And the bigger the pattern, the greater the psychological forces that hold real-word events tethered to the story. This of course depends on how contemporary journalists and later historians organize the data, because history is simply a story told and will always tap into familiar terms to understand itself. The ultimate well (or depository or dictionary) of all those familiar terms is the Torah, and willingly or not, history always settles in patterns that are Torahic, familiar and predictable.

The pattern that we're going to look at now covers about a millennium in recent history and correlates to half the "historic" part of the Hebrew Bible. So that's a pretty big pattern.

— Part II: Raiders of the Not So Lost Ark —

Starting in the Netherlands of the late 16th century, the societies of Europe began to dismiss their oppressive kings and embark on the quest for the modern Republic: an ideal and Paradisal society of only freemen with a government for the people by the people. A great idea. But how can you bring about a collective state of freedom if freedom means that you can't force anyone into doing anything? Well, by killing every evildoer who resists, of course!

After a period of outrageous bloodshed, it began to be understood that a Republic is not a simple thing to bring about, and was going to require serious study. Fortunately for the Europeans, inspiration could be drawn from two separate and vast bodies of thought of people who had spent centuries thinking about the mystery that is the Republic: the Greco-Roman classics and the Hebrew classics.

The advantage of the Greco-Roman library was that it had a great reputation and its materials were readily available and not only covered the Republic but also mathematics and philosophy and drama and such. And via Latin, it provided a seamless transition from the ancient world, via the church fathers, to the world of modern Roman Christianity, as first formally established by Constantine in the 4th century AD. Its immediate disadvantage, however, was that no Greco-Roman Republic had ever remained stable, and all of them had succumbed to internal rivalry, bloodshed, tyranny and ultimately ruin and demise. The advantage of the Hebrew library, to the contrary, was that by the 16th century, the Hebrew Republic had been going strong for three millennia and showed no sign of destabilizing.

The term Hebrew Republic was coined in 1582 by Carlo Sigonio in his book De Republica Hebraeorum, and also covers what today is referred to as the crowned republic or constitutional monarchy — two distinct phrases that similarly describe a Republic whose consistency and liberties are guaranteed by the Crown, and whose Crown, in turn, is limited in authority to that specific function by the Republic. Its roughest outline is described in Exodus 18:13-23 (also see Deuteronomy 1:9-17), where Jethro of Midian explains to Moses that a society can only function properly when local communities are locally governed, and a central authority handles anything the locals can't and keeps the whole aligned to a unifying standard that is widely known by everybody involved.

Jethro was of course a devoted Yahwist (Exodus 18:1), and his Midianite system of governance would later morph into the signature soap-bubble synagogue structure of the second temple period. That stellar structure — countless synagogues like stars in the night sky, all with the identical Torah like formative DNA at its nucleic core — typifies the Hebrew Republic, and this Republic kept going even when the Hebrews lost their centralizing king (that's the solar part of the Hebrew cosmos). It even kept going when the Hebrews lost their country (that's the earth in this cosmology) and the people were deported into the howling void of Babylon. (The lunar part of this Hebrew cosmos-statecraft, which is beside our present point, correlates with leisure, fun and games, holidays, feasts, stimulants, play, music and song; Exodus 23:1-25, Deuteronomy 14:26).

On their imposed star trek, lost in space, the innate desire of the Hebrews' synagogues and wisdom centers to maintain a single unifying standard gave rise to what would become the formal postal service, which in turn accommodated a boundlessly free exchange of information among the general population. This stellar economy of information accommodated: (1) the intelligence and administrative apparatus that allowed the functioning of entire empires, (2) the invention of the printing press, and (3) the modern Internet, where millions of autonomous websites shine their light into a massive self-organizing choir of creative information, a myriad of fountains that freely water the entire world.

Nested realism coupled with Midianism gave the world the miracle of the Hebrew Republic. Antinestism coupled with Midianism came to be known as Atheistic Communism. Today the word synagogue (that is: sun, together + ago, to lead) may be mostly associated with places of worship, but it originated as the regular and very common Greek term for any local governing counsel or municipal corporation (today's mayors and their aldermen and team members). This same word in Old Slavonic is suvetu, from su, together, and vetu, to discuss. From this word comes the familiar noun soviet, and the disaster that was the Soviet Union sat not in the "soviet" part but rather in the "union" part. As the Psalmist noted: "Unless YHWH builds the house, its builders labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1).

The signature nature of the centralizing sun (solar, solo → mono, monarch) of Hebrew-style statecraft is that the king (1) is one of and intimately familiar with the stellar community he governs, and (2) so diplomatically gifted and economically generous that he doesn't have to invest in law enforcement and military or financial leverage, (3) does not promote dilution of his people's disciplinary rigor by woke tolerance of fun alternatives, and (4) does not for a moment feels himself elevated above his people. Instead, he serves his community by spending his days studying the Torah together with other experts and scholars, so that his entire kingdom may be a nested reality of God's supervening one (Deuteronomy 17:14-20).

The signature nature of the Greco-Roman sun is that it never sets. It won't let stars shine (and the moon barely). It continuously and completely overwhelms any other source of light by exhaustive legislation, taxation, law enforcement and a propaganda mill that turns any fleeting spark of organic joy into an obscenity. The working principle of the Hebrew Republic was a sort of proto-science: a continued conversation based on free exchange of information and the self-censoring trial-and-error stabilization of the free market — which is free by merit of an overarching standard of operating principles. This kind of proto-science competed on a government level with classical bully-kings, and on a wisdom level with theatrical magic.

Hebrews were bent on finding out how the universe works, and then make things work by working things the way the universe would. That's where science came from. The Greco-Romans, to the contrary, devised a reality model based on endless homage and supplication, so that people who had no idea how to make things happen could entice some distant power-holder to make those things happen anyway (in effect overruling the power-holder). The Hebrews prayed "Thy will be done" and became mighty scientists, even "friends" of the deity (Exodus 33:11, Isaiah 41:8) or "friends" of the Word (John 15:15). The Greco-Romans prayed: "My will be done" and remained whining children forever playing dress-up and make-believe.

Greco-Roman religions are all magic based, if magic has to do with getting what you want without understanding how that happened, and rather by uttering some foreign-sounding spell or performing some complicated ritual that overrides all expectation based on skill, experience or knowledge of natural law. At least, that's the idea. Much more common, and painfully signature of all Greco-Roman liturgies, is a lot of simsalabim and very little actual effects. Jesus told the disciples of John to check out what was happening: the sight of the blind was restored, the lame walked again, the dead were brought back to life and the poor were explained how to not being poor works. And he said to his disciples: "You will do greater things than these". Peddlers in Greco-Roman traditions dress in all the right clothes, sport all the right hats, wave their ornate wands and utter their elaborate spells, and nothing ever happens beyond the continued exploitation of their gullible audiences.

And in case you are wondering: Harry Potter's world of wizardry is emphatically rule based, which is why he and his fellows go to school for seven years: to learn the regularities by which the universe allows things to happen. Harry's world is overseen by a vast (Midianite) Ministry that governs standards and law, and sports a duly bloated administration. Harry Potter is a Hebrew wizard (i.e. wise-ard), not some Greco-Roman magician or "conjurer of cheap tricks" as Gandalf termed it. Hogwarts' invisible castle, its chamber of secrets, the Weasley's flaming red hair and flying car, the challenged dynamic between pure-bloods, squibs and Muggle-borns and the strangely mutually formative arch spanning Harry and Voldemort's sitra acha are very typical elements of Merkabah and Hekhalot mysticism. These are tributaries of Kabbalah, and that in turn is no hocus pocus but a very serious study of the predictable regularities of consciousness, which supervene upon and interact with physical nature. Because the natural laws of physics come from the mind impressing the shadow of God's unity upon the dust of the earth. Our world is not a world in which corgis teach the Queen about statecraft but rather one in which the Queen brings her corgis into the royal fold.

The modern quest for the Republic resulted in the 17th century in a massive interest in anything Hebrew — except of course actual Jews. The term "Jewish Question" was coined in the 1750s in Britain, right around the time when David Hume enjoyed his high water mark. It's this specific question to which Hitler offered his "final solution". This is significant because fascism and capitalism are cousins, just like Midianism and science are. Midianism and science are stellar and rational, and based on a decentralized conversation guaranteed by a fixed set of operating principles. Fascism and capitalism, on the other hand, are solar and empirical. They are forms of mysticism and promote an inspired sense of norms and justice rather than an explained one: fashion rather than principle, taste rather than law and personal experience rather than collective rationality.

Nested realism combined with a solar polarization of the mind results in the most awe-inspiring works of art: prophetic windows that channel the scents of a super-rational reality, or whispers of words that can't be spoken when the rules of its language aren't known (2 Corinthians 12:4). It doesn't happen often but when such a mind experiences a solar eclipse, the results go very far beyond what is described in the DSM (see our article on שחר, shahar). To the contrary, a solar polarization of the mind combined with antinestism results in narcissism, a mental pathology that overwhelms and negates any other light in the sky. Collectively, such all-consuming selfishness yields to sentimental romanticism first and then quickly fascism and capitalism: selfishness without conscience, the very root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

In the 17th century, European Christians who had the nous to note that the Jews routinely pulled off what neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever had, but still somehow considered themselves superior, lunged massively for the Hebrew classics: not merely the familiar "Old Testament" but also the Talmud and Kabbalah, which until recently had been utterly bewildering and humongous bodies of commentaries upon commentaries, uncanonized and uncatalogued and hence only accessible to lifelong devotees from specialized families who did nothing else. Fortunately for the Europeans, during the Spanish Golden Age, two Hebrew scholars (both named Moses) had produced just the kind of handy summaries that allowed the Europeans a good look without having to depend on the cooperation of any living Jews:

In the 13th century, a doctor and lawyer called Moses Maimonides had produced the Misneh Torah, a whopping 13 volume legislative codex that summarized, codified and categorized all discussions and topics of the vast body of Talmudic writings: all the Jewish laws ever derived and extrapolated from the original Torah, given at Sinai, to someday be a blessing for the whole world. Back then, in Europe's late middle ages, there was no separation between state and religion, and the Jews literally maintained their own worldwide Republic within Christian and Islamic kingdoms. As long as the Jews paid their taxes and didn't become too rich and powerful (which is also why they couldn't own land: their mere presence would immediately create a rival country), their host kings didn't mind. (Unfortunately, the Jews couldn't really help being successful, and were robbed and killed or ousted countless times).

Still, for reasons that would only become clear to the general world much later, certain Rabbis in the south of France suspected that Maimonides was not doing the world a favor by making the Talmud accessible to anyone who could read. And so they went to see some friars whom they hoped could nip this thing in the bud. Then somebody began to wonder why the Rabbis wanted this thing nipped, and suggested that it was possibly because they didn't want the world to discover that the Talmud was blasphemous. Greatly alarmed, Pope Gregory IX demanded all Talmuds confiscated. King Louis IX ordered them executed! And in June 1242, twenty-four wagonloads, an estimated 10,000 precious Hebrew manuscripts, were publicly burned in Paris.

Being a scientist himself, Maimonides hadn't much bothered with the artistic or mystic side of Judaism, but Jews living in Christian lands clearly thirsted for it. And hence, about a century after Maimonides, the mystic Moses De León partly compiled and partly composed the Sefer Zohar, a compendium of dazzling profundity and originality, whose allegories within allegories yielded more allegories and comprised a vast atmosphere where spiritual hurricanes stilled into gentle breaths and exposed an ever present expanse of heavenly fire(s). From the Zohar emerged the ever popular form of mysticism called Kabbalah.

It is crucially important to remember, however, that these or any Jewish authors never simply made stuff up but always derived it rationally or received it mystically from reality's great supervening Oneness. Without that Oneness to begin with, no amount of rulery adds up to anything stable, and no amount of visionariness adds up to anything insightful.

Another crucially important point is that by the late 14th century, Christianity occupied lands marked by illiteracy, brutality and pestilence. Judaism and Islam, to the contrary, got along very well, and although their expansion is commonly told of in terms of political and military conquest, their most intimate nature was that of the Republic, and the good news of their ultimate ideal flooded the European wastelands wholly independent of any king's army. Today, nearly the whole world is Republican (in theory), and everybody pretty much agrees that general social welfare depends on the freedom of the individual. That means that the great many conflicts that plague our world are mystic by nature.

The struggles of our modern world have little to do with legislation, because nearly the whole world is governed by some form of Midianism. Instead, our world suffers from mystic wars, which are wars of meaning and purpose. And there remain two man camps. On one hand there's the Hebrew camp, which believes that all is one and will be one, and it's man's job to accommodate whomever God gives life into a single unified state of maximum freedom. On the other hand, there's the Greco-Roman camp, and they'll do whatever it takes to stay on top, and that includes destroying all life on the planet.

In the 17th century, fans of the Greco-Romans felt their clouts wane, and their intellectual investments the recipients of some drafty Hebrew crosswinds. Their counter attack involved what would later be called Modern Bible Criticism. Clearly a spawn of Greek ideals, it praised logic and rationality and demanded that anything pertaining to a superior order had to consist of straight lines and perfect categories and the likes. In other words: they expected the ideal state to be a perfect machine, and its constitution accordingly a perfect code. What they didn't realize was that a perfect state is alive and therefore organic, and organisms don't sport straight lines or perfect categories or even perfectly discrete zeros and ones. Instead, organic things tend to get rather messy when one takes them apart.

This is why up to today, Rabbis applaud anybody's study of the Tanakh (the "Old Testament"), but strenuously forbid gentiles to study the Talmud and Zohar and anything beyond, even to the point where a gentile who does so anyway must die. This rather obviously has nothing to do with a physical execution but rather means that any student of advanced Hebrew Scriptures must first die to his gentile origin (Matthew 10:38-39, John 12:24-25) and must become a Jew in all aspects: utterly observant and wholly dedicated. Anyone who gets into these things out of curiosity or superstitious piety, on their own and without proper training is like someone who wanders into a nuclear power plant wearing nothing but a party hat and a snorkel. Religious people tend to think that being Jewish means being religious. But people who aren't Jews don't realize that being a Jew is being part of a highly disciplined global team that trains all day and gets into action all night. What many have suspected is true, although not in the way that many suspect. Indeed, Jews govern the world, but not as some covert cabal, and certainly not by military might or financial leverage. Instead, their synchronized prayers pulse up the supervening ladder and inform the powers that be about the conditions on earth, while these same powers talk back in terms that appear as patterns in the stories told by natural mystics — hence the formation of the Bible but also Homer's Epics, the Vedas, the Quran and in modern times the inexplicably clairvoyant profundity of authors like Tolkien, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling (2 Timothy 3:16) — and in case you were wondering: Harry was an orphan for the same reason that Frodo was, and Hermione's parents were dentists (see our article on διδασκω, didasko, to teach) for the same reason that Willy Wonka's father was (chocolate, namely, is the candy-that-isn't-sugary-crap, aids the heart and boosts cognition; fans of chocolate frogs should check out our article on the curious link between Jews, frogs and the modern Republic).

This is also why, contrary to Christianity, Judaism was never doctrinal or credal until in the 13th century the political climate demanded that Judaism identified itself ideologically. So pressed, Maimonides managed to produce 13 principles of Jewish "faith", which were so general that they merely showed that Judaism fitted without conflict within the bounds demanded by Christianity and Islam.

Modern Bible Criticism succeeded in discrediting the rationality (or mathematical rigidity) of the Bible, and therefore any system of thought derived thereof. This not only disarmed the Catholic and Protestant proponents of the Hebrew Republic, it also undermined Christianity and religion as a whole. That in turn, crucially, eroded the authority of the Church (or any priesthood) in matters of state, and effectively transferred all control of it into the hands of the Greco-Roman rationalists. Mission accomplished.

The immediate result was the secular Republic, and wholesale secularism all together, which preached antinestism as common sense and dubbed nested realism a ridiculous barbarism. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 declared all men free and equal, which despite its lofty and virtuous tone, effectively ratified antinestism and allowed those in power to legally continue the oppression, colonization and segregation of any and all demographic groups (who were now forced to play by the same rules as their "equal" overlords). The Jews were likewise included and generously deemed "citizens" of the French State, which effectively evacuated Judaism of its political autonomy and made it a mere religion for the first time in history.

Antinestism, or the doctrine of the radical equality of all men, demanded that all men act "normal", which resulted in the stigmatization of people like Jews, who were unable or unwilling to act "normal" and rather preferred to continue in their traditional ways. That quickly resulted in the collective call for "social hygiene", which equated "different" people with "dirty" people who contaminated society with their filthy ways. Evolution theory came along, which opened the door to eugenics, which deteriorated in the rationalization of the mass murder of people who, for whatever reason, failed to act "normal" (gays, autists, schizophrenics, people with Down syndrome). From 1940, Aktion T4 heralded the "euthanasia" of incurable abnormals. From 1941, this began to include Jews.

Greco-Roman mysticism simply arises from a beastly form of consciousness and when properly shepherded produces many useful and friendly animals — remember that the perfect garden of Eden was populated with all sorts of animals. But the most heinous form of mysticism has its origin embarrassingly close to Jacob.

Via Esau's grandson Amalek, the Amalekites too dream of a world peopled by nobles, united under a rational standard, cleaned of filth and advanced far beyond today's common man. It preaches a kind of meta-realism, an impossible hybrid of nested realism and antinestism, in which the Übermensch not merely peoples a supervening world and is tasked to love and govern the Untermensch by learning about his ways and teaching him virtues the benefits of which he is not equipped to comprehend, but goes to war on him and loathes him and seeks to exterminate him and all his kind.

This utterly barbaric hybrid kind of mysticism is native to the first nations and motivated them. Natural tribes are formed from familial relations but when tribal lords began to rule over more people than they knew or were related to, they began to preach a kind of artificial brotherhood that divided the world between "us good guys" and "them bad guys". That strengthened the political cohesion of the realm but had to be demonstrated by the occasional genocide of some unworthy neighboring tribe.

In tone and origin sickeningly close to the Way of Jacob, Esau's way very quickly descended into systematic bloodlust and utter godlessness. Defeated and subdued it lingered in the shadows until Europe's Renaissance revived it, and it quickly found its way to the throne rooms and whispered deception into the ears of fools who subsequently steered their people onto ruin and shame and the abyss of oblivion. In the parched wilderness of Europe's general population it spawned all sorts of neo paganism, from animism to spiritism, and from ancestor worship to the veneration of saints, performers, sport champions and billionaires. It too spoke of salvation but insisted that salvation comes from leaders: Emperors, Führers and Superheroes — and certainly not from loving one's neighbor as oneself and certainly not from within the whole of all of us. We the people are sitting ducks.

The chance that the quality of our lives is seriously reduced because of smoking, drinking, bad food or irresponsible driving is, accumulatively, surprisingly substantial. The chance that our lives are ruined by a terrorist attack, however, is nearly zero. Yet the chance that our lives are ruined because we believe that terrorists lurk around any corner is again quite substantial. So substantial even that most of us succumb to self-medication just to cope with the stress. And that is great for the sale of booze and sedatives.

In our modern world, the gospel of Esau is proclaimed by our favorite TV shows (whether the news or some detective series) that inform us that to all our neighbors, cold-blooded murder is always a perfectly viable option and is routinely considered by everybody we might meet on the street or in the supermarket. And that society's justice depends wholly on a state-funded team of incorruptible officers and officials, unwaveringly devoted to justice and the dignified welfare of the common man. And that the instant execution (preferred) or else arrest of some obvious bad guy, and his deserved removal to a state-funded hell-hole prison, equates to a happy ending for everybody. Since the criminal is an aberration, neither he nor his victims need to be understood. And since his evil is innate, prevention is futile. All the audience needs to understand is that paying taxes is the highest form of worship.

Rationality is a wonderful thing, but there are certain things it won't do because it can't and nobody in their right mind would expect it from it. Rationality only works when it works like a machine — rationality must be a machine or else it's not rational — and like any machine, it requires an operator, preferably one who is sober and up to snuff with the greater goings on. Like any machine, if rationality has any purpose, it has one externally. Something beyond rationality gives rationality its purpose, and without that external operator, rationality is like the ruin of some old car that once took its owner places but is now decaying into nothingness.

Literally as soon as rationalism arose, criticism of rationality arose rationally from among rationalists. Aristotle had held logic in the highest regard and claimed that logic was the instrument by which man could come to know anything. Musicians and artists never quite agreed but they were never in the business of knowing either. Then, around the time of Galileo in the 16th century, dyed-in-the-wool rationalists began to express rational doubt regarding the reach of reason. In other words, it began to appear that rationalism as a way of understanding reality, should also rationally comprehend its own limitations. And with that, it should accept the reality of a world beyond.

In the 18th century, David Hume formulated the Problem of Induction, and pointed out that no known natural law prohibited any other "law" to suddenly stop working — and this for the simple reason that it was never a law to start with but only some situation we happened to have gotten used to, whilst the alternative, though rare, is perfectly real too. Said otherwise, our experience of the sun having risen every morning since recorded history began, gives no perfect certainty that it will rise again tomorrow. A chicken who has experienced the farmer to show up every morning with a handful of grain may very well one day experience the farmer holding an axe. And even if all the swans that anybody has ever seen were always white, one cannot be sure that there may not be a black one somewhere.

Non-rational people may allow themselves such foolish certainty — and let's call a spade a spade here: these are people who sport a non-rational belief in rationalism — but a truly rational person must live with the certainty that past results are no indication of future events.

For two thousand years, mathematicians had sworn by the orthodoxy of Euclid's five postulates, but from the 18th century onward, truly rational ones began to omit the fifth and opened the door to the non-Euclidian geometries of a much greater world. In the 1870s, George Cantor found that infinity came in different sizes, so that one infinite set could sit nested within another one. In 1901, Bertrand Russel formalized a paradox that showed the madness at the heart of all mathematics, as it described a set that both had to and could not contain itself. By 1920, David Hilbert proposed a cleaned up and purified kind of mathematics that would align men's rational minds once and for all. A decade later, Kurt Gödel demonstrated the hopelessness of that proposal, as he showed mathematically that any formal system (including mathematics) must always remain incomplete. In 1936, Alan Turing showed mathematically that the outcome of certain processes cannot be calculated or rationally predicted. By that time, the world had lost its faith in reason and had embraced feelings and intuitions as its guide.

A non-rational belief in rationality holds that rationality is the highest authority and can logically determine anything and has therefore access to all the states of reality in the universe. A rational understanding of rationality, to the emphatic contrary, understands that rationality is bound and can know its boundaries but cannot look beyond them, or even begin to guess how far realities go on beyond its own limited scope.

In other words: truly rational rationality is a corgi who knows it's a corgi within a larger world. But who then is the corgi's Queen whom the corgi will never come to know, and who somehow mysteriously resides in that little old lady with biscuits in her purse?

Take a moment to look around yourself. Unless you are presently in an entirely natural jungle, you are standing in a wholly made up world. The human world is literally a manifestation of mysticism. None of it is real in a natural sense. And that is because the term "mysticism" sums up the entire crazy endeavor of exploration of the human imagination — any mental exercise that produces original literature, music and art, and even scientific theories like relativity, quantum mechanics and the whole of mathematics: entire realms from beyond the boundaries of realism, that were borne out of the howling infinite of the utterly unknown and applied to observable reality only in retrospect, like angels or aliens from far away worlds carrying a gospel of a universe that is greater than hitherto experienced.

Unfortunately, and this is simply the nature of the beast, there are many more fakers and make-believers and false prophets than real ones. Most literature and music (and science) produced at any time is abject nonsense: derivatives of derivatives motivated by all sorts of corruption, violence and self-aggrandizement (Ezra 2:62), even soulless bots and religious rote-repeaters, but all of it ultimately draws from truly original creations that came from a place not tethered to matter and not expressed in atoms or anything observable or measurable.

People who cherish an irrational belief in either rationality or the Bible or both, are unlikely to appreciate the otherwise obvious link between the Hebrew Scriptures and the modern world — the amazing invention of the highly unnatural "day off" (the Sabbath), and subsequently the entirely unnatural concept of the week, and thus a calendar independent from astronomical observations and rather entirely imaginary, which in turn allows long-term planning and the formation of an imaginary civilization; plus the invention of the alphabet, which allowed mass literacy and hence the postal service, the Republic and its administration, the scientific tradition, the Internet — and would certainly be revolted to learn that the ultimate government of the entire world will be a form of Hebrew mysticism.

Mysticism, it should then quickly be explained, experiences God, and hence the Oneness of God, beyond the reach of rational prediction (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7). Or in the haunting words of Maria Callah: "Music is a thing too vast and deep to grasp in language. But one must serve it, and respect it, always with humility. To me, singing is not an act of pride but rather an attempt to reach those heavens where all is perfect harmony."

Biblically, the reaching of that "perfect harmony" that supervenes upon all reality and can't be reached rationally, happened for the first time when Moses experienced God in the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:2). And the word for bush, namely סנה (seneh), is closely similar to the name Sinai, of the mountain from which God gave the Torah to Israel.

Experiencing God is contingent on one's adherence to law, just like freedom of speech is contingent on one's adherence to the rules of language, freedom to produce music is contingent on one's adherence to musical theory, and freedom to traverse the city during rush hour is contingent on one's adherence to the laws of traffic. People who don't (yet) comprehend such laws may experience them as restricting, and perhaps even arbitrary at times. But people who do comprehend them, and know them and abide by them, experience them as something that collectively renders freedom to any individual who seeks to experience God. Or in the words of James: "But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does" (James 1:25).

That experience of God by man through law was subsequently accommodated by the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:22), which was deposited in the Tabernacle or Tent of the Meeting (i.e. the meeting of God and man). After the wandering years and pre-monarchy period of the judges, that tabernacle became the First Temple. After the First Temple came the Second, and after the Second the Third. By the 17th century, this Third Temple wasn't even in its Tabernacle stage. It was barely in its Burning Bush stage. It was rather in the spark stage.

Around the year 1700, somewhere where today Ukraine borders Romania north of Moldova, a boy named Israel was born to some Eliezer and (probably) Sarah. The story goes on to say that Eliezer and Sarah were both about 100 years old, which is a standard Jewish way of declaring without the need for further elucidation that the earthly origin or human identity of the boy Israel is of absolutely no importance since we'll be talking solely about the Abrahamic blessing: i.e. the blessing for all the families of the world (Genesis 12:3, also see Ephesians 3:14-15), even the desire of all nations (Haggai 2:7).

Israel ben Eliezer, a.k.a. the Baal Shem Tov or simply "the Besht" turned out to be the spark that ignited the static Midianite bush once again. The result was Hasidism, the highly ecstatic form of Torah-governed mysticism that set the Jewish world ablaze. This latter day Burning Bush became a Tabernacle, which in turn began to go home to its Mount Moriah, its Zion, where it would solidify into the Third Temple, from which a River of Life would gush forth and water the entire earth and extinguish the mad fires or irrationalism forever.

Today our human world hosts a very small minority with a rational belief in rationality and therefore simultaneously a godly understanding of theology. The rest has either an irrational belief in rationality or a godless theology, or a combination of both.

Anyway, here is the pattern:

When the entire world is at exuberant peace, to the Muslims, everybody is Muslim, to the Christians, everybody is Christian, to the Jews everybody is Jewish and to the rationalists, everybody is rational (to corgis everybody is a corgi and to Harry Potter fans, everybody is a Harry Potter fan). But great emphasis must be made on the voluntary nature of anybody's participation in global peace and Freedom-By-Law.

The Government and the Governed always relate like husband and wife, whose Covenant is entered voluntarily and is upheld in freedom and by love alone. Although mutually obligated, the partners of this covenant remain eternally free to request a divorce and exit the arrangement at any time, without permitted hostilities from the other party. Nations who indeed do so and opt out of a government by Torah, have the sole alternative of handing over the keys to their kingdoms to Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a. Apollyon). These nations will die. The surviving remnants of their populations will be absorbed by the free world.