Trappist-1_The Tree of Life
Page 5
During his research, he discovered a simple Aramaic/Hebrew letter formula which revealed a deeper meaning for known Biblical words. Unlike the English alphabet, each individual letter in the Aramaic and Hebrew language had a known symbol or meaning. When he took the letters of an Aramaic or Hebrew word, such as the Tetragrammaton YHWY, (the name of God) and deconstructed their corresponding letter meaning, something miraculous was revealed. Contained within the structure were the meanings of the “Alpha and Omega,” name of Jesus, title and name of God as well as the words for peace, murder, sin, forgiveness, heaven, the Holy Spirit, truth, grace, saved, faith, works, boast, salvation, Sodom and so many others.
Unlike the work Hannah was doing, which was the normal way of translating a language, he was deconstructing the meaning from each letter to see what it revealed when re-assembled. In the triune language that Hannah discovered, each idea was constructed out of 3 symbols. Each symbol had a meaning and when put together, created a phrase or communicated an idea. What he needed to do was look into the hidden meanings within each character. For example, Nickolas Roshenko discovered a rolled-up amulet bearing the Tetragrammaton, the name of God (the consonantal letters yod, he, waw, he), YHWH.
For Nickolas it was a major find, because the scripture was from the Aaronic or priestly blessing found in Numbers 6:24-25. The owner must have worn it during his lifetime and accompanied him after death. In the end, it was determined to be the oldest extra-biblical evidence for the name of God recovered in Jerusalem. Using this as an example, Jacob found new meaning within the Hebrew characters themselves. For instance, using the letters printed on the amulet, he examined the meaning of each character that formed the word Yahweh:
The name of God - Yahweh: יהוה
י Yud – Man standing with head bowed in prayer. Worship [He is worshiped.]
ה Hey – Man with arms raised [He has power over all things and we raise our arms up to Him. Also symbolic of Jesus’ arms raised up to the cross], breath [His breath gives life], reveal [He reveals Himself to us], look [we look to Him and He sees all.]
ו Vay – Tent peg [looks like a nail. Prophesied His Son being pierced to forgive us. Represents the tent’s foundation. Extra note: Tent means house and temple.], add [Creator of all – adds all creation.], secure [we find secure refuge in Him], Hook [“fishers of men”].
ה Hey – [repeated above]
And once again, God’s essence was clearly shown in the letters of His name as written in the original language. It was this type of work that the General required and he was the best man for the job. After presenting his case, Samuel agreed and within a few hours he was holding those same scriptures in his own hands. The excitement was overwhelming. What mysteries might he unravel and would he find new meaning within the symbolic construct of the characters. There was so much to consider and so opening his blood stained bible, he carefully moved past the first few pages, held in place by masking tape, and stopped at a particular verse that was a favorite of his; and from the very same blessing found by Nickolas, he read from Numbers 6:24-25.
“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;”
Even from his early days as a youth, these words gave him strength and helped him through the hard times when he felt distained and hated. Now his purpose was revealed to him in one mighty moment in history; the very second his hands touched these mysterious books for the first time.
SECONDARY MEANINGS
Hannah Saunders raced down the midway. General Reynolds had called a meeting and she didn’t want to be late. Since coming to Area 51 as a “lifer” she found herself busier that she might have expected. After she was declared “dead” during the Orion 1 mission, she had been relegated to a comfortable living within the confines of one of the most secret installations in the world.
If someone had told her a year ago that she’d not only get to visit Groom Lake, but live out here permanently, she would have dismissed it at pure fantasy. A year ago, she was a Navy cryptologist, working on a carrier and handling communications between multiple countries and deciphering enemy codes in a constant battle of espionage and stealth. It was her job to interpret and unlock the meaning behind cryptic messages, locked up within longer transmissions that would normally pass as background chatter, but held more complex information, dangerous to US interests at home or abroad.
When Major Brooks approached her, she was skeptical at first. He was very vague about the mission and wasn’t forthcoming on her exact duties, but she had to trust the process and in doing so, thrust herself into one of the greatest adventures of her life. Who would have known that she would end up being the first woman to walk on the Moon. It was the greatest achievement that was never told, and her story might be forever hidden in the archives of government secrecy.
She was proud of her work in translating the triune script that graced the wall at Stellae Mysterium. It was there that she found her purpose in life and when the message was finally revealed, it was just moments before her friend and colleague, Jin Lei, was killed in a nuclear blast. There wasn’t a day that went by where she didn’t think back to those horrible minutes and while she wished to forget, it was an impossible task.
Instead, she buried herself in her work, translating all the remaining volumes, which were simply more books of the bible with no new messages or information about the builder. And when General Reynolds introduced her to Jacob Logan, she felt threatened until she understood his level of expertise in biblical studies. In the beginning she thought he was just another cryptologist, but this all changed once she began to see the hidden symbolism in the Hebrew text. He wasn’t trying to challenge her findings, but simply trying to find a deeper meaning within each alien glyph, much as he had done using original Jewish texts.
Now she found herself welcoming his knowledge and as each day passed, she felt a growing kinship to this man and his work. It was only through his vast wisdom that he could look at something and pick out the smallest detail, translate the same phrase to Hebrew and then analyze the differences between the visual aspects of the characters. He was making great progress and it was helping her to understand her work and to perform at a much higher level than she ever thought possible.
When she first examined the writing, she theorized that they were to be translated as logical aggregates or associated compounds. In short, these characters were interpreted by combining two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning. Using a Sonar scanner, she was able to bounce Sonar pulses off of the embossed characters, which either reflected the Sonar back or like the skin of a stealth fighter, reflected it away from the receiver. Each character within a single symbol, reflected sound back at different angles. So if she started scanning a single glyph from the left side and slowly moved to the right, each of the 3 characters that made up the icon would come to life as the Sonar device moved into a position which allowed the pulses to bounce back toward the scanner.
In this manner, a single glyph would reveal 3 separate symbols in a specific order when read from left to right.
An example might include:
‘Walk for 3 days’
“Composed of the pictograms:
‘Walking person’
The number ‘3’, just as she discovered in the book and on the blocks, and…
‘1 Day’
This was based on a single dot and the sun symbol. Hannah believed that many of these characters were phono-semantic compounds which was why there were no phonetic indicators, but sometimes a semantic marker could be used. For example the symbol for ‘male’ or ‘man’ was:
So if she added the accent, she ended up with this symbol.
It now meant ‘man walked for 3 days.’ When viewed from left to right, whoever read it using sound waves would see each symbol individually as they moved from left to right. The subtle angles of the raised characters either directly reflected or deflected the sonar pulses, only making them vis
ible when the person was at the proper angle to view it. So while a human saw a single glyph, a being using Sonar and moving from left to right would see the icons in this order.
However, using her own senses, she could only perceive it as a single icon as shown below.
When she discussed it with Jacob, she explained that the semantic-phonetic compounds were by far the most numerous characters. These characters were composed of two parts; one of a limited set of characters which suggested the meaning of the compound character and then the tertiary glyph to complete the thought. So to be honest this was very much like Chinese writing, but when a human viewed it without the use of Sonar equipment, it almost looked like braille. While Chinese characters were based on two concepts, this language was more complex in that it incorporated 3 ideas into one glyph. If she reversed the order of the characters, she found a different meaning.
Jacob was impressed with her work, but his initial interpretations were mind bending. From his perspective, these were nothing like Chinese at all, but very similar to Hebrew writing. When he studied the same glyphs and then compared them to ancient Hebrew, he found many new concepts that would have forever eluded her, given her lack of knowledge in that area. As an example using the 3 dots:
Instead of the number 3, he assigned a different symbolic value - Father, Son and Holy Spirit [Triune God]. He also explained that in Hebrew, the Segal with 3 dots below a character, in the form of a triangle, represented men or if the 3 dots formed an angle under the character, it meant ‘moon.’
Jacob explained that this next symbol was very similar to the Hebrew letter mem ם, of which one of the meanings was; the name of God. The “dot” in its center, was known as a dagesh. He explained that there were various rules in Hebrew
which stipulated when and why a dagesh was used. It was also similar to the Hebrew letter tav תּ [with dagesh] which meant truth.
So for Jacob, instead of this glyph being translated literally as one day, he assigned additional symbolic values, being the Son of God [All Seeing Eye], John 14:6 “I AM the way, the TRUTH and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” [One God forever and ever as defined by the unending circle].
As for the ‘walking glyph’, he described this as a Gimel.
Instead of a man walking, he saw it as the Hebrew character ג [Gimel]. He taught her that this character originated within the Assyro-Babylonian-Greek system of alphanumeric codes or ciphers, and was later adopted into the Jewish culture, where they assigned numerical values to a word/name/phrase in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bore some relation to each other or bore some relation to the number itself as it might apply to nature, a person's age, the calendar year, or represented the number three.
It was written like a vav with a yud as a "foot", and it resembled a person in motion; symbolically, a rich man running after a poor man to give him charity. In the Hebrew alphabet gimel directly preceded dalet, which signified a poor or lowly man from the Hebrew word dal.
She also learned that the word gimel was related to gemul, which meant 'justified repayment', or the giving of reward and punishment. Gimel was also one of seven letters which received special crowns (called taginn) when written in the Sefer Torah, the holiest book in Judaism. A taginn (tag) was a decoration drawn over some Hebrew letters in the Jewish scrolls.
Because of this, he felt the ‘accent’ above the walking man was actually a crown.
For Jacob, this same triune glyph also had a secondary meaning. When he interpreted the same icon, the meaning was different from what Hannah translated. In this case he described the 3 combined characters as:
“The Triune God sent his son, [Crowned King of the Jews] to walk among his people, symbolically running after his lost sheep. He came as a lowly or poor man from the Hebrew word dal. He came to preach the truth. The gemul also meant ‘justified repayment’ which was characterized as the payment of a loan. Jesus paid the ultimate debt for every man, woman and child on the planet, taking their sins onto himself, so that those who believed might someday stand in the presence of God sinless and clean.”
So this simple combination of 3 icons represented an entire story within itself. It not only had a literal meaning, but a symbolic one as well.
She had to admit that she was impressed. It wasn’t often that someone was able to teach her something new, but he was giving her information that she could only dream of a few months ago. It was clear that General Reynolds was exploring every possible option to finding the truth behind the amazing language discovered inside SM1. This probably didn’t make him very popular with the scientific and military types, but he was doing his job and doing it well. He was considering a full range of ideas ranging from the very bizarre to the very logical.
There were many things to respect about General Reynolds, but his ability to think outside the box and handle situations with an open mind were far beyond anything she had seen before. She had worked with many people who claimed to have an open mind, but in the end, their bias always showed. For Samuel, he never shut down a new theory and always gave credence to any idea, no matter how strange it might seem at the time. Without those characteristics as a leader, they never would have come this far, this fast. If she was comfortable serving under him, it was because of his actions as much as his words. For few could compete with his ability to lead by example and fewer still could process so much information without jumping to conclusions before all the facts were in.
So if there was anyone worthy of her attention and respect, it was the General and being late for one of his meetings would be an affront to everything she believed about the man. If he had something to say, it was important and she didn’t want to be late. So continuing her jog, she rounded the corner and ran up the stairs. Maybe she wouldn’t be late after all.
THE TREE OF LIFE
General Reynold sipped on some coffee and laughed at a joke before starting the meeting. It was good to see him so happy, but he had every reason to be. On Saturday he would be wed to his fiancé Kathi Fried. Soon they would be Samuel and Kathi Reynolds and he couldn’t think of a more perfect match. If there was a more compatible soul-mate for him in this world, he couldn’t imagine it and as he took his seat amongst his peers, he crossed his legs and smiled.
Nickolas was so bored that any distraction from the normal routine was good. He didn’t care what the meeting was about as long as he was invited, and with the extreme “let-down” of coming off the adrenalin rush of his last adventure, he needed ways to break the monotony of his daily existence. So as he leaned back to observe, he felt at peace for the first time in many months. In a way, this was his family and he viewed them as brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and in many ways they represented that and so much more.
For who could serve together under such extreme circumstances and not come out of it unchanged. They knew more about each other than anyone else on the planet and there was a complete trust that went beyond anything he had experience before; with the exception of Natasha. His marriage to her had been a dream unto itself and while he missed their time together, he knew he would see her again when he stepped into the presence of God. When she died after 20 years of marriage, it was as if a part of him died with her and until he met these people, he never believed that he could ever form such a close bond with anyone again.
The training and sacrifice they experienced together would forever link them as people and if one rejoiced, they all rejoiced and if one suffered, they all suffered. Just as the body had many parts, it was still one body and any threat to one member, was a threat to all. For him it was really that simple; so as he gazed around the room he truly felt at home.
The General cleared his throat and sat down.
“Thank you all for coming today. I know everyone has busy schedules so I appreciate the time you are taking to attend this briefing.”
He shuffled some papers and surveyed the table, looking over the top of his reading glasses. Then he
returned his gaze to the papers in front of him and continued.
“As you know I am getting married on Saturday.”
The table erupted in applause, even before he could complete his sentence and using his right hand, he waved in acknowledgement, but also to quiet the room.
“Yes. I am getting married and I want to thank everyone who has helped plan for and share this day with Kathi and myself. I appreciate it because it hasn’t been easy to plan both a wedding and review this report. As you know my recommendations are due and while I’d like to put this to bed before the wedding, I don’t think that will be possible.
I believe everyone can appreciate the importance of this analysis. How we decide to use SM1 in the future will have extreme ramifications to life on this world. It’s not a duty I take lightly and while I would like to take another 2 years to formulate my answer, I don’t have that much time. There’s heavy pressure on me to complete this soon and there are many powerful people who want this for their own pet projects. Any decision I make will have dire consequences for those whose ideas were not selected.”