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The Palm Tree in the Bible (5)
The ‘language’ of the palm tree
André H. Roosma
2 May 2012
(NL orig.: 20 March 2012)
This article deals with the language – spoken and written – of
the palm tree. It is a sequel to earlier articles in the series about the
palm tree in the Bible, a.o. as sign of God’s presence and speaking en about Moses and the big fire in the
palm-top and the article about the great golden Menorah.
In the very first
article in this series we saw already that the palm tree symbol stood
for the ancestor of the Hebrew letters sin and samekh.
The Hebrew word for language is שָׂפָה - saphah or
שֶׂפֶת
- sephet.
The remarkable thing now is that in the old pictographic script1 this was
probably written as:    -
literally: wonder/ worship/ joy/ life from the mouth of the palm tree, or
the palm tree makes your mouth worship; and:  - sign(s) from the mouth of the palm tree,
respectively!
Combine that to what I wrote in the previous parts about God’s
speaking from the crown of a palm tree and the association becomes very
clear...
Also, those Indians may be more right than commonly believed, where they
said that the Creator or Original God, the Great Spirit, originally gave man
the script and language, written on palm leaves...2
About the end times God says via one of His prophets: For then will I turn to the people a pure language
(שָׂפָה
בְרוּרָה), that they
may all call upon the Name [of] YaHUaH, to serve Him with one consent.
Tsephan-Yahu (Zephaniah) 3: 9
Note what the cleaned language is meant for: “that they may all call upon the Name [of] YaHUaH, to serve Him with one
consent”.
Being turned to a pure language leads to calling upon the Name [of] YaHUaH (which was hardly ever done in about 2400 year but is coming up
now in different places in the world), and that leads to
serving Him with one consent... Something to think about!
By the way, I know only one passage in the First Testament of the
Bible where the language of Isra’el gets a name.
The passage I am talking about, is in Yesha-Yahu
(Isaiah) 19: 18.
And the name mentioned is not ‘Hebrew’ but שְׂפַת
כְּנַעַן -
sephat Kena‘an - ‘the language of Canaan’. Usually this sephat Kena‘an is interpreted as the language of Isra’el – what we now
denote as the old Biblical Hebrew (more specifically: the
Paleo-Hebrew; incl. the associated old Biblical Paleo-Hebrew script).
Yesha-Yahu denotes this as: the language of
Canaan; so: what is now called: Old Canaanite. This affirms the proposition
that its ancestor, what linguists call Proto-Canaanite (a
dialect within the early Semitic language family and the ancestor of
Paleo-Hebrew), was indeed the old language and the script of Isra’el and
the Bible in the second millennium before Christ.1
Hallelu YaH !
Notes
| 1 |
More information on the old Biblical script, as referred
to here, in the Hallelu-YaH Draft Research Report:
‘The Written Language of Abraham,
Moses and David – A study of the pictographic roots and basic notions
in the underlying fabric of the earliest Biblical script’  , a
living document by André H. Roosma, 1st
English version: 18 April 2011 (1st Dutch original: January 2011). |
| 2 |
Pliny, the Roman scholar, still recalled that one of
the oldest methods of writing was on palm leaves (with a metal peg)
(Plinius, N.H. 13. 69: in palmarum foliis primo scriptatum ... Suid.
s.v.). In India this was still commonly practiced in the
19th century.
Of the inhabitants of Krete in antiquity it is said that they regularly
re-affirmed that ‘Phoenician Script’ did not denote: ‘Script
of the Phoenicians’, but ‘Script on palm leaves’ referring
to their assumed invention of it.
Sources: James Townley, Biblical Literature –
Exhibiting The History and Fate of The Sacret Writings from the earliest period
to the present century, Vol.1, G. Lane & P.P. Sandford, New York, 1842;
p.30; and: Alice E. Kober, ‘The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory’,
American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan.- Mar. 1948),
pp.82-103; p.91. |
This article is part of a series on ‘The Palm Tree in the Bible’.
The other articles in this series are: ‘(1) - Symbol of the
Tree of Life’, ‘(2) - Full of Rich
Symbolism’, ‘(3) - Sign of
God’s presence and speaking’, ‘(4) - Moses and the
Big Fire in the Palm-Top’, ‘(6) - Pole and Palisade’, ‘(7) - More on the word
Tamar and a very young Palm Tree’, ‘The great golden Menorah – Sign of
God’s Presence’.
The previous article was: Tsitsit – A sign of
flourishing, to remember the blessing and reigning hand of
YaHUaH.
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