Page 178 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

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CHAPTER 11 LIGHT, DARKNESS, BLACK (HOLES)
CHAPTER 11 LIGHT, DARKNESS, BLACK (HOLES) 157
is particularly bizarre since, in an earlier verse, he shows in no uncertain terms
that he is well aware of Jewish distinction between the different worlds: “All that is
called by my name and for my glory, I have created him [or it]; I have formed him
[or it]; yea, I have made him [or it]” (Isa. 43:7; author’s translation). The same
question of course extends to evil (see above quote form Isaiah). Evil is always
presented in the Bible as the result of human’s thoughts and actions, the outcome
of which is God “hiding” his face (refer, for example, to Deut. 31:18 or Pss. 30:8).
Furthermore, God sometimes even hides the hiding, causing things to look ran-
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dom and not the result of humans’ actions (see, for example, discussion of keri
in section 3.5).
So why are darkness (the apparent result of lack of light), and evil (the apparent
result of humans detaching themselves from God, causing God to “hide his face”)
both presented here as God’s acts of “creation”?
While the answer to this question, with respect to evil, may lay in the realms of
ethics, theology, and philosophy (“Why do bad things happen to good people?”),
the answer regarding created darkness may lie with modern cosmologies (dark
matter).
That is, if one does not refer to Isaiah’s verse as a slip of a tongue. Given biblical
precision language (section 1.3), this is an open question.

11.4 Summary of Main Points

• River and light share in Hebrew the same root; their similarity can be
worked out only by modern physics (section 11.1).
• “Darkness” in Hebrew derives from “deprivation” (of light), making
Genesis’s “and darkness was on the face of the deep” consistent with
modern cosmologies (section 11.2).
• By a bizarre coincidence, the sequence of the last three of the four letters
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comprising “black” in Hebrew (shachor ) means “hole” (chor ), but also
“white” (section 11.3). All these terms are interrelated in modern physics:

if black represents absence of light, and white represents existence of

light, then a black hole represents the confinement of light (no light
escapes a black hole).
• Isaiah refers to both darkness and evil as “created” by God. This is incon-
sistent with biblical Hebrew and other verses in the Bible, where darkness
is the result of “deprivation of light,” and evil is of human doing, causing
the “hiding of God’s face” and occasionally also “hiding of the hiding”
(section 11.3).