I think I know how serpents must feel when they are crawling on a dusty surface. I am a dust eater myself like all human and non-human beings on this dusty planet, because those minute particles of matter (and it matters not what kind of matter it is) are everywhere and we certainly inhale them and eat them. I have finished dusting my house a few hours ago and I can already write my name in the dust on top of the computer. Where the devil does it come from? Perhaps, only the serpent knows the answer. I have been musing today on that idea of dust which is used in the Bible with so many different meanings attached to it. Look at those three quotes: “Then Jehovah Elohim formed man of dust from the ground (Gen.2:7) “and to serpent he said:upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat” (Gen.3:14) and when Jacob is dreaming about ladders and angels, Jehowah tells him that he will give the earth on which Jacob is lying “ to thee and to your seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth…” . Ancient people spoke in colourful metaphors which do not translate well into modern languages. In the first quote above, the writer is punning on two words which may well have many hidden meanings.”et hadam aphar min h.adamah” means literally that JE formed “adam from the dust (aphar) of adamah” or as near as I can get it in English “an earthling from the dust of the earth”. Adam is a masculine noun and the earth (adamah) is feminine, which only proves that it was The Eternal Female who provided the atoms for the Great Potter to make his clay male toyboy. My third quote seems to agree with that atomic dust of creation, because the metaphor is now linked to human seed. But why is that seeded atomic dust given as food to the snake? Did our distant ancestors know about the shape of the DNA , the atomic dust, and associated it with the coils of the snake? Who knows…I can only make a bold guess and hope they will be proven one day from other sources. In the quote about Jacob, the word “dust” obviously stands for a very large number which modern mathematician would call a “googol” (10100) but the ancient people,perhaps, called “aphar-dust”. Well, DNA has millions of genes and they are made of particles whose number is “dust”-googol. Meanwhile, modern technology has provided me with a mechanical snake which licks the dust off my carpets and thus fulfills the literal curse on his serpent-prototype from the beginning of times.
Tags: Dust as symbol, googol, Hebrew aphar, seed, serpent
22/01/2009 at 17:25 |
I have heard another definition for aphar. how about “smallest created particle?”
25/01/2009 at 14:27 |
LaJuanaDorris: The problem with this definition is that in teh current stage of knowledge about atomic sub-particles, “the smallest” would be verz difficult to name: muon, hadron, pion or perhaps “charm” yes that might be “aphar”