Maurio Biglino - Ruach - 2023-03-12

Rand the world have turned to the Bible for information about God. Two scholars, Maro Bilino and Paul Wallace, argue for a radically different interpretation.

Seeking out the root meanings of key words in these ancient texts, they find another quite different story emerges, one with enormous implications for our understanding of the human race and our place in the universe. For more than two millennia, readers have interpreted the ancient texts of the Bible as stories of God, a seamless narrative in which God creates the heavens and the earth, botanical and animal life, and eventually the human race. However, a number of anomalies in the texts, along with intriguing questions of translation, point to another possibility. Paul Wallace is an internationally best selling author, researcher and scholar of ancient mythologies. Over the last decade, Paul's work has probed the world's mythologies and ancestral narratives for the insights they hold on our origins as a species and our potential as human beings.

As a senior churchman, Paul served as a church doctor, a theological educator, and an archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. Paul's work in church ministry has included training pastors in the interpretation of biblical texts. His work in biblical translation and interpretation has revealed a forgotten layer of ancient story with far reaching implications for our understanding of human origins and our place in the cosmos.

Maro Bilino is an internationally best selling italian author, researcher, and highly regarded scholar of ancient Hebrew. For many years he worked for Rome's St. Paul Press as a Bible translator, providing with great precision the literal meaning of hebrew words for Vatican approved interlinear bibles. It is an exacting discipline. The scholar must be rigorous in avoiding any kind of interpretation of the word and give only the literal, etymological meaning of each word part Morrow's findings set him at ods with the conventional expectations of the catholic world and propelled him onto the international stage, where his work has opened up a world of cultural memory recorded in the Bible, yet hidden from the public for centuries by mistaken translation and the dogmas of the church.

Together, Morrow and Paul show that the root meanings of a series of keywords in the bibles reveal an earlier layer of information very different to the story of God associated with the Bible. Hidden plain sight in the pages of Genesis is an even more ancient narrative, one which reframes the whole story of human beginnings.

Good morning, everyone, and a warm greeting to Paul after our last conversation about Kavod. Today, Paul and I will address another very important topic in the Bible, the ruach, the so called spirit of God. But today I would like to talk about it in a special way. I will, of course, give examples from the Bible. But mostly I will propose two very simple arguments that will help us to understand how the Bible is usually interpreted in a strictly dogmatic way, and how, on the other hand, we can understand exactly what it says.

In this way, we can be sure that we are respecting the concreteness of the ancient totors. This is the purpose of the videos that Paul and I are making in this collaboration. We may be especially far away, but we are spiritually close by. No coincidence. Today we are talking about ruach.

Ruach is a term that is always translated as a spirit, because theology always tends to give a spiritual reading to all biblical tales. But we will see that this is not the case. The ruach first appears at the very beginning of the Old Testament, where in verse two of the first chapter of Genesis, it is narrated that the spirit of God hovered over the waters. Actually, the Bible says that the ruach of the eloim, remember it is the plural term, was Merahefet over the surface of the water. Merahefet is the verb rahaf expressed in the past participle, and it indicates precisely a particular type of flight.

For example, it means the kind of flight typical of hunting birds. When they spread their wings and holding them almost still, they let themselves be carried by the wind. The verb rachaf is used in the Old Testament, in Jeremiah and Deuteronomy, where it indicates trembling and the soaring of an eagle over its nest. So the situation that is described in Genesis becomes very clear and concrete. The Halloween hovered over the waters using this medium that is called ruach.

Ruach means wind, the air that moves, or even something that moves in the air. Successively. Its meaning evolved over time until it became spirit. This is the term that theologians and exegetes of various religions have always been using to translate ruach. However, we will see that this choice is not necessarily correct.

So we have just seen that this alleged spirit of God hovers over the waters, which means that it is not found everywhere. As we have already seen in the video dedicated to the cabood. These flying objects always have a precise location. In this case, the ruach is above the waters. Therefore, at that moment it is not on dry land.

Therefore, it is something limited in space and in movement. This is a characteristic that cannot be attributed to the spirit of God, which would obviously be present everywhere. The concreteness of this ruach is represented on many other occasions. I will only give a few examples because I am interested in making those arguments I mentioned in the beginning, which in my opinion may even be more important than the examples themselves. First, let us talk about the so called visions of Ezekiel.

The term visions is a translation of the hebrew word mare. But even there, the interpretation given does not take into account the concreteness of the hebrew language. Therefore, a clarification is necessary in order to understand the real meaning of a term that in the religious sphere has taken on a meaning that is misleading for the readers of the Bible. When we speak of vision, we are immediately led to think of a phenomenon that leads people to almost physically perceive realities that are considered supernatural. The hebrew term mare, on the other hand, indicates the concrete act of seeing something real.

More precisely, we can even say that it indicates precisely that which is observed. An object, a person, a situation, a scene, an event, a phenomenon, and thus naturally also the concept of physical appearance.

In essence, it refers to something that is actually seen with one sound eyes. Let's never forget that ancient Hebrew is a very, very concrete language. Having note this, let's move on with a few more examples before making our reasoning that will prove to be very important for understanding the Old Testament. Ezekiel in his book tells us that he saw visions of the Elohim Mariot Elohim I looked and behold, a word. Wind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the mist thereof, as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Thus, Ezekiel claims to have concretely seen events in which the Elohim are present with their flying structures. And it is the letter in particular that struck the prophet, who was so impressed by them that he remembered the exact day and place, the fifth day of the fourth month of the fifth year, probably 593 592 BC, of the exile of Yoakin. We should make here an important clarification. The ruach, I. E.

The alleged divine spirit for theologists, presents itself with obvious physical manifestations, both visually and with sound. The ruak comes from a precise geographic direction, the north, whereas Ezekiel is on the banks of a canal, the kevar, which was a water course that branches from the Euphrates in lower Mesopotamia.

We are not in the presence of a mystical experience or a dream vision, but of a concrete event, an experience actually lived by the prophet and described in detail. We thus have the description of what could be a real close encounter with an unidentified object that was undoubtedly in the air, a storm cloud coming from north, which has in its center some fire of propulsion systems rotating on itself. The cloud is surrounded by a luminous hallow, and at its center something shining like amber. This term was translated by the Greeks as electron. This image probably served to describe the color and luminescence of the central part, or perhaps it represented some electromagnetic phenomenon, as the electrical properties of the electron were already well known in antiquity.

Thus, calling such an object as described above Ruach was a way for the hebrew language back then to represent something extraordinary that produced stormlike effects, but for which there were no exact terms. This is only a very small part of the contents of the Book of Ezekiel, and in the previous video dedicated to the kavod, Paul has already quoted many interesting passages from Ezekiel, so I will move on to the prophet Elijah because he has well went up on a ruach. The episode is found in chapter two of the second book of Kings and is known as the abduction of Elijah, even though the term abduction does not seem appropriate because what happened to the prophet was known in advance, and Elijah consciously shows up accompanied by his followers, who are themselves aware of what is about to happen. Let's see the episode in brief. The chapter begins with the departure of Elijah and his disciple Elisha from the city of Galgala.

The prophet invites his young disciple not to follow him, telling him that Yahweh has commanded him to go alone to Betel, which means house of El, I e. The place where one of the Halloween dwelled. However, Elisha decides to follow his master anyway. On their way, Elijah and Elijah meet other disciples of the prophet, and they tell Elijah that they are aware that Yahweh is about to take Elijah on high with his whirlwind. Here the concept of the storm wind returns, as in Ezekiel's verses once again, so there is no doubt that everyone is aware of what is about to take place.

Yahweh is about to take up and hide the prophet Elijah. Elijah and Elijah then go to Jericho, and here too there are disciples who are aware of Elijah's imminent departure. The two set off in the direction of the Jordan, followed by 50 disciples, and across the river a fiery chariot arrives to take Elijah. The episode is thus clear. Elijah ascends to heaven in a chariot, and this pickup was widely expected and known by all the prophets'disciples, who were there, that this is a true physical elevation, and it is then confirmed by the following verses.

The letters are very important because they narrate exactly what Elijah did and in particular what their followers thought they were doing. In fact, they immediately manifest their intention to go and look for Elijah because per adventure, the spirit of the Lord had taken him up and cast him upon some mountain or into some valley. With their behavior, the disciples clearly demonstrate that what they had witnessed was real. The ruach of Yahweh had physically taken Elijah and, according to them, may have dropped him somewhere in the surrounding territory. The search of Elijah destination was carried out over the next three days, but to no avail.

Elijah had disappeared for good, carried into the heavens by Yevez's chariot, the ruach. We are therefore faced with an event that had been pronounced, which was known in advance by those concerned. Therefore, this encounter was planned by the Elohim, who had decided to take Elijah as their representative. As usual, the concreteness of this episode is documented by the richness of detail with which it is narrated from beginning to end. The Bible could not be any clearer than this.

One does not search for three days, toiling through mountains and valleys a person who has been kidnapped only in a vision or in a dream. Dr. Jeff Benner, whom we already know, founder and administrator of the ancient Hebrew Research center, says that the root of the word ruach, together with his parents'roots indicate a traveler or something that follows a prescribed path, just like the moon does. The etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, written by Rabbi Maticiao Clark and based on the commentaries of Samsung, Raphael Irsch, places force open space as the first meaning. Thus we have several direct, indirect confirmations.

But let's now come to the consideration I have mentioned at the beginning of this video. The Hebrew language, like all others, is polysemic. That is, each word can have several meanings. The problem arises when, for religious and dogmatic reasons, only one of these meanings ends up being used more than the others. It is surely the case of theological exegutes whom have always translated Ruach as spirit of God.

This is a mistake. To better understand this, let's take a few examples from contemporary English and see the possible meanings of the term spirit. If I say these sentences, the spirit of the times, it indicates the predominant cultural trends in a society. To raise someone's spirit, I mean that I am brightening someone's mood. Team spirit means the feeling of camaraderie among the members of a group.

He is a noble spirit. I mean to emphasize someone's particular vocation to living with ig ethical standards. A man of spirit means a very courageous man. The spirit of the law is the aim or purpose of a law. When it was written, spirit trade is a phrase that refers to the trade of alcoholic substances.

Italy is known, among other things, for the grappa spirit. But when we distill spirit from mark, we are certainly not distilling the spirit of God as you can see I have cited numerous examples of the use of the word spirit, and in each one of them the term has a specific meaning which differs from all the others based on the context. The same applies to the hebrew word ruach. What makes us realize what the correct meaning is each time? As usual, it is the context.

That is why Paul and I keep pointing out which words we should not translate but live in Hebrew with the examples before we made it clear that translated Ruach every time with the word spirit, understood as the spirit of God or a soul, is absolutely wrong because in many cases it refers to a very concrete object. The ancient authors described it clearly together with these functions. So when we find the word spirit, let's replace it with Ruach and use the context in order to understand what the ancient authors wanted to tell us. And now, greetings to you all. Thank you and have a good continuation with our friend Paul.

Graze maro ed bello estere di nuovo enciache sempre la tua precione. I fully agree with Maro that the word ruach in the Bible is a word with great elasticity. There are a great number of usages that we see the word ruach put to, but I'm going to suggest that across that great spectrum of meanings that Mauro listed for us, there is a root meaning, and it has to do with a movement of air ranging from a hurricane to a breath. A person with breath in them is a person with the spirit in them. And that's how we get to a person of spirit or team spirit.

That sense of the word is preserved in the ancient ethiopian amharic language, where Roha is a fan, a device for creating a movement of air. When we go to Genesis one, to the words first appearance in the Bible, what does it mean? Does it mean spirit in the sense of the spirit of a person, the spirit of God? Does it mean a movement of air like a breath, or does it refer to a device that creates a movement of air? I am going to argue that that's exactly what it means, that ruach in Genesis one is a device, a piece of technology that creates great blasts of wind.

And I'm going to get there from two start points. And one is to compare the story of origins in Genesis one with other stories of origins from around the world. And the other route is to look at the use of the word ruach in the writing of Ezekiel. Now, when the ruach appears in Genesis one, it hovers over the waters to begin the work of terraforming so I'd flag right away that the story we think of as a creation narrative is really a recovery story, because the planet already exists. When the ruach turns up, it's shrouded in darkness, it's flooded, it's in a state of Tohu Wabohu, a state of devastation, and it needs recovery and terraforming, and it's the ruach that's going to do it.

So it arrives and hovers over the floodwaters. And the word hovers, as Maro pointed out, is merahethit, which means it hovers like a hawk. It's not moving any wings. It's just riding on a current of air and creating currents of air. Now, I find this very interesting when I compare it with the story of origins in the Popol vu.

So that's the story from out of Guatemala, the mayan telling of the story of beginnings. Once again, it begins on a planet that already exists, shrouded in darkness and covered in floodwaters. The Popol vu tells us that the progenitors arrived and hovered over the floodwaters. Progenitors is a very interesting word. They are the people we came from.

They are our parents. They are those who formed us, those who engineered us, as one translation puts it. So the progenitors are hovering over the waters in what? Well, we're not quite told at that point, just that they are hovering over floodwaters, which is a neat little correlation. They then have conversations about how to terraform the planet and recover life on Earth.

If you travel from there to the Philippines, there's an interesting nuance in that telling of the story. Now, it's in an indigenous story from out of the Philippines. And the thing about indigenous story is that if your country has ever been colonized by a religious based society and most colonization has been done that way, then you're going to find that the indigenous story gets pushed to the grassroots. It's not taught at school, it's not on the tv. And so when I say indigenous filipino story, it's not a story that everyone in the Philippines knows, but it is a story that's been told from generation to generation of the origins of this civilization.

And it begins when the tagalog, the hawk, hovers over the floodwaters and uses its wings to create vortices of wind, to clear the ocean water away from the high ground, to create islands, and then to separate the seawater, the salt water, from freshwater, so that life on those islands can be rebooted. Remember that hebrew word metahefhet? Hovers like a hawk. And here in the Philippines is the story of the hawk hovering and creating vortices of wind. There's that Ruach concept, the movement of air.

If we go to the source narratives for the biblical stories, we're going to find ourselves in the writings of ancient scenario. And in the Enuma Elish, we discover that planet Earth is terraformed when the four winds start separating the waters, salt water from fresh water, so that life on earth can be rebooted. So that's quite a number of correlations that the work of rehabilitation begins with separating waters, which is what we would do if we go into territory that's been devastated through flooding. The first thing we have to do is create safe living environments and potable water. So we have to separate the salt water from the freshwater.

But the fact that the sumerian story says it's done by winds, the fact that the filipino story says it was done by winds created by the wings of a hawk that hovered over the floodwaters. And then we go into genesis and we see the ruach metahat over the floodwaters to separate the salt water from the fresh water, the land from the sea. Well, that's an interesting matrix of correlations, and it leads me to believe that all these ancestral narratives are the recollections of visual memory. Our ancestors are telling us what they saw and finding various language to report what was experienced. Now, if that's the correct context, then Ruach is a device that creates winds.

And one might almost think of Ruach as an automatopeic word. It sounds like what it is. Ruach is breath. Ruach is the thing that creates the great blast of air. Now, this is not the only place in the Bible where the ruach creates blasts of air.

Another place it does, it is in the book of Ezekiel. Now, in the previous episode Maro and I did on the word kavod, which gets translated as glory, we discovered that Kavod was a piece of technology that has seats in it that can be piloted and flown around. It makes a particular sound, it arrives in a particular way, very disruptive to the environment around it. It has textures like metal, textures like glass, and it creates great blasts of air when it moves. There's that ruach concept, the movement of air.

Ezekiel describes that craft using two words interchangeably, cavod and ruach. So once again, we have a text where a ruach cannot be interpreted as breath or spirit, because in Ezekiel, the ruach is made of metal, is made of a glass like substance, has a pilot to pilot. It has seats in it that can take passengers, which include Ezekiel, can be flown and directed. The wings respond to voice commands. And it has wheels.

The omnidirectional wheel, which, if you remember, NASA has a patent on, actually uses patent established in 1974 by Joseph Blumrich. So clearly, the spirit of God doesn't have wheels. NASA doesn't have a patent on the spirit of God. This usage of the word ruach is a reference to ancient technology.

Now, it's worth noting that when Ezekiel uses these words kavod and ruach, to describe this craft that arrives from the sky out of a whirlwind wind, and we'll come back to that in a moment that he can climb into and be flown in. He uses these words cavod and ruach in a way that he expects his readers to understand. He expects Ruach and kavod to conjure up in the minds of his readers a craft. And so that tells us that there was a body of knowledge widely held about ancient spacefaring technology, knowledge which has since been lost. And I argue in my Eden books that the knowledge was lost through mistranslation, some accidental and some possibly deliberate, as the stories of Paleo contact were obscured in the Bible in the 6th century BCE, when the redactors worked over the great library of hebrew texts to turn the Bible into a seamless story of God from beginning to end.

But those texts have, in fact, been curated so faithfully from generation to generation by jewish priests and scribes, that we can go back to the texts today and ask the question, what do those words really mean? I was very fortunate at school to learn French, German, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Greek. And so I have a great love of languages. And so, through my years teaching pastors hermeneutics the principles of interpreting ancient texts, the question I would always keep in front of my students was, what do the words mean? Now I'm arguing that there is this technological use of the word ruach, and it's not to deny other uses of the word later in the scriptures.

But rather than get into an argument about translation, I'm going to return to the point that Mauro really championed with the Edizione Sao Paulo, because the translations of the Pentateuch and the prophets carried by that publisher were supervised by Mauro. And one of his great contributions to that publishing house's work was to argue that some of these controversial words ought to be left untranslated rather than given an artificial theological gloss. Leave them untranslated so that the reader can see how these words behave in the text. How does the word yahweh behave in the text? How does the word Elohim behave in the text?

And so, again, I would suggest all the words we've looked at. Elohim, elion el shaddai, yahweh, olam, kavod, luach. Leave them untranslated in the text and watch how they behave. What does a kavod do? What does a ruach do?

And the picture that emerges is of the work of heavy technology. In Ezekiel, we're told that the ruach appears from out of a whirlwind wind that the heavens open. There's a whirlwind wind, and then the ruach comes down. This is very similar language. When we look at the abduction of Elijah, again, the heavens open, there's a whirlwind wind, and the chariot of fire comes down and carries Elijah away.

Now, again, if this is one of our ancestors describing what he saw, we have other language to describe that today. But picture what we're being told. The sky opens, there's a hole in the sky. And now, through something that looks like a whirlwind, a craft arrives, picks somebody up, and then departs. We do have language for that, and we could translate it as wormhole, but I'll concede that's an interpretation of what is described.

Far better to leave certain words untranslated or understand that we're being given a metaphor. The writer is saying, I saw something, and it looked like this. And if we approach it that way, then we realize that the Bible is full of ancient technology. And in the case of the kavad and the ruach, it was technology that the writer Ezekiel, expected the readers to know about. The reason we don't know about it today, the reason we don't find technological language in the Bible, is because part of the agenda of that redaction in the 6th century BCE was to eradicate memories of paleo contact in the Bible.

The agenda of that redaction was, as Mauro said in an earlier episode, an ideological one, not primarily a grammatical exercise of translation. There's a very broad scholarly consensus that the agenda of that final redaction was essentially a follow on from the priestly reforms of Josiah in the 7th century BCE. King Josiah wanted to monotheize Judaism and clean up jewish ritual. And so all these memories of encounters with other advanced beings, represented by the standing stones erected where those encounters happened and the temples erected to these other entities like Asherah, all that had to be gotten rid of. So the Asherah temples, the Asherah installations were destroyed, the Asherah figurines were all broken.

And then a century later, the redaction of the scriptures attempted a similar cleanup of the hebrew scriptures. So all the memories of other advanced beings and their technology had to be airbrushed out. And so there really has been a work of redaction and translation from that time to this to get us to interpret these texts as theology, as monotheism. Whereas in fact, even today you can go to the texts and find the vestiges of this earlier layer of story. Ruach is a real smoking gun word when you follow its usage in the Bible from start to finish, from this dramatic terraforming, using technology, creating hurricane force winds, to the use of ruach as breath and spirit, you come to a psalm and you hear the psalmist say, take not your holy spirit from me.

And clearly there is a beautiful spiritual meaning to that. But don't paste that over the earlier occurrences where we are being told something about our planet's history and our origins as a species when we leave the words untranslated or go to the root meanings. As I argue in my Eden books, a whole other world opens up. And it's a world that deserves fresh inspection by a new generation, because there is exciting information bequeathed to us by our ancestors to empower us for our life in the world today.

The final edit of the Old Testament of the Bible, the hebrew canon, included the layering of some beautiful and profound theology over the top of ancient texts. Unfortunately, mistranslating traumatic ancestral memories as if they were encounters with God is a choice with far reaching consequences. Belief in a violent, xenophobic, hierarchical God has been used through the ages to justify violent wars and all manner of abuses. However, the fidelity which the ancient manuscripts have been curated in the hebrew canon by countless generations of priests and scribes means that in our generation, we can now return to these fascinating artifacts of our prehistory and ask how differently they might be translated.

To find out more about Paul Wallace and Maro Bilino, along with links to their published works, follow the links in the video description. Thanks for watching the fifth kind.