A Little Study of the 7 Thunders

Now it's time to discuss something I find very interesting, something that's hard to grasp at first.

When reading the Bible in English we can miss a lot. Stuff gets lost in translation. Stuff gets lost simply because we treat written language different from the way the early church did.

Let's go back in time, back to the time of Moses. You have a story, it's an important story. You want your children and grandchildren to remember it. You want their children and grandchildren to remember it. You could write it down. But you know, unfortunately, that a large percentage of your descendants will not know how to read. To make things worse, it's very hard to make copies of the story, so there would only be so many copies to share.

How are they going to remember it! It's simple - make it into a poem or a song or a Meme! Yep! That works!

Seriously, haven't you had a song that you just can't get out of your head! Ha!

Now poems and songs have simple structures and repetition, rhythm and rhyme. Some use word play - similar words - contrasting words. These are all memory techniques and they are used extensively throughout the Scriptures. In English it's hard to see all that because two words in Greek that might sound similar but when translated into English have nothing in common.

Jesus was from Nazereth and was called a Nazarene. There's a prophecy about the Messiah being a Branch. So? Well in Hebrew Branch and Nazarene sounded almost identical. You don't see that in English, or, in fact, most any other translation.

So we are going to want to look for these poetical structures - they will help not only to remember but to understand deeper meaning in the text.

Now let's add a little more to what we just learned about how the early church treat written language.

When John wrote the Book of Revelation he used common (Koine) Greek and it was written the way Greek was written in those days. There were no chapters or chapter numbers. There were no verses or verse numbers. There wasn't even any punctuation! There was no such thing as "lower case" letters - all the letters were uppercase since that's all they had.

Crazy! I know! How could you possibly read anything!

To give you an idea of what this is like, here is John 1:1-14:

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD AND THE WORD WAS GOD THE SAME WAS IN THE BEGINNING WITH GOD ALL THINGS WERE MADE BY HIM AND WITHOUT HIM WAS NOT ANYTHING MADE THAT WAS MADE IN HIM WAS LIFE AND THE LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN AND THE LIGHT SHINETH IN DARKNESS AND THE DARKNESS COMPREHENDED IT NOT THERE WAS A MAN SENT FROM GOD WHOSE NAME WAS JOHN THE SAME CAME FOR A WITNESS TO BEAR WITNESS OF THE LIGHT THAT ALL MEN THROUGH HIM MIGHT BELIEVE HE WAS NOT THAT LIGHT BUT WAS SENT TO BEAR WITNESS OF THAT LIGHT THAT WAS THE TRUE LIGHT WHICH LIGHTETH EVERY MAN THAT COMETH INTO THE WORLD HE WAS IN THE WORLD AND THE WORLD WAS MADE BY HIM AND THE WORLD KNEW HIM NOT HE CAME UNTO HIS OWN AND HIS OWN RECEIVED HIM NOT BUT AS MANY AS RECEIVED HIM TO THEM GAVE HE POWER TO BECOME THE SONS OF GOD EVEN TO THEM THAT BELIEVE ON HIS NAME WHICH WERE BORN NOT OF BLOOD NOR OF THE WILL OF THE FLESH NOR OF THE WILL OF MAN BUT OF GOD AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US AND WE BEHELD HIS GLORY THE GLORY AS OF THE ONLY BEGOTTEN OF THE FATHER FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH

It seems to me that the only way to read this fast is to already know what it says. But for the first time you read it, you have to look for words and phrases that you recognize.

You might notice repetition in different sections: Like near the start we see "WORD", "GOD", "BEGINNING." After that there's a section with "MADE", "HIM", "THING." And then another section with "LIGHT", "DARKNESS."

That helps. That's part of the structure to help remember the story.

Again, one of the lessons here is the difference in how we treat written text. We treat written text as a way to clearly understand how the language was spoken. We don't have to know what it says before we read it. Everything is there for us: separated words, punctuation, pauses, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters.  And, yes, of course, emojis! 😁

They treated written text, or at least a lot of it, as a "helper" to be able to recite the Scriptures. Yes, they had to learn what it says, but in general, reading it after learning it simply meant remembering it and using the written text only as a helper.

Of course, not all text was treated this way. There were official announcements and legal documents. But even today, in English, legal documents follow a lot of preset and predetermined text. A lot of the text has to be memorized.  That's why you need a lawyer!

So the next lesson we need to learn is that, for them, all Scripture needed to be memorized, even if it was written down.