Hidden in Plain Sight
I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. Revelation 22:18-19 NASB
Takes away – John wrote this verse in Greek, but it intentionally echoes a very important Hebrew verse, Deuteronomy 4:2. Don’t mess with the text! Don’t add to it. Don’t take away from it. Commands from Moses and the apostle that should give us pause in our theological proclivity to change a few things here and there in order to make them consistent with doctrine. But now I want to draw your attention to another element of this idea, something hidden in plain sight.
First, you need to remember the difference between black fire and white fire (here’s the article). Every scroll requires two alphabets; one made of black ink which we read and the other made of white space surrounding the black ink—which we cannot read. If you remove this second, hidden alphabet, you can’t read the text at all since everything would be black ink. Conversely, if you try to read only the white space, there’s nothing there to see. But both are absolutely essential.
Second, you might also find it fascinating that each Hebrew letter also contains a “hidden” part. For example, the letter Aleph is written like this א, but the name of the letter is written like this: אַלֶפ. As you can see, the name includes a hidden part, the לֶפ, which also produces a word (or the letters of other words). And so forth for each of the Hebrew consonants. In other words, every Hebrew word contains hints of other words, or of symbolic connections to words. And, of course, every Hebrew consonant is also a number (there was no separate number system in Hebrew) so each of these hidden parts of a consonant is also a numerical sum. Clearly, there is a lot of room for interpretation and amplification. Have fun!
My point is not about the esoteric elements of Hebrew. My point is that altering the text changes more than the letters. It changes all the hidden parts as well. A change in a single letter affects all kinds of other changes. Taking away even a single letter alters all the black and white alphabets—and all the connections implied in the alphabets.
Why do we care? Because what this essentially means is that God’s word can only really be read in Hebrew. Translations have no way of communicating on all of these levels at the same time. We can learn about these levels through study, but they are only immediately apparent in Hebrew. Therefore, any discussion or argument about the meaning of a text will inevitably be diminished if we don’t understand these levels in Hebrew. In this particular verse, John writes Greek. We don’t have hidden alphabets and hinted words in Greek. But John clearly intends his readers to think about the statement in Deuteronomy where all of these other elements are present. What this means is that we need to be very careful with theological translations. Without even knowing it, we may be taking away from God’s word.
Topical Index: white fire, black fire, hidden, take away, Revelation 22:18, Deuteronomy 4:2
