Ziklag F 6.14

Bad Men, Good God, and a particularly martial form of Entish

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

A bad man shames others for his goodness. A good man shares goodness even with the bad. cf Pr. 10:11

God is good. cf Mt. 9:13

Mastery is liberty, the prudence to come and go. cf Sun Tzu 6:10

From Today’s Stack

2000 sols BCE, the Hittites emerged to become a dominant trans-territorial empire in the region of ancient Anatolia. This biblical era Empire coincided with the rise of Hammurabi in Babylon “Between the Two Rivers” and Mizraim’s “Middle Kingdom,” (the one that collapses after the life of Joseph.)

The Hittite Zeitgeist is a merger of two previously regional societies, the Hattians and the Hurrians. The HTTs are the indigenous migrants to Anatolia “off the boat and during/after the tower.” The HRRs migrated into southeastern “Turkey” from northern Aram-Syria, bringing with them a non-Semitic, non-Indo-Europeans “agglutinative” language, classified as a relative of Urartian. Rooted in the Kingdom language of Mitanni, the HRR brought chariots and military prowess.

Why we talk about the Hittites rather than the Hurrites is probably not too dissimilar to why we call it “Syria” and not “Aram.”

Both peoples spoke non-Indo-European tongues, neither of which is reflected in archeological Hittite, yet it is their art-religion-architecture that is the Hittite “style.”

Japanese is a modern agglutinative language.

Non-alphabetical, agglunatives form meaning by stringing together “morphemes” (the smallest units of mark) in pursuit of a linear sequence that explains an understanding. Each morpheme (think, “drawing,”) represents a single grammatical function, including varieties for tense, number, case, or mood. These engage a root in order to form full phrases, sentences or stories in a single character without any semantic loss of function for any of the marks.

For alphabetical thinkers, agglunatives communicate beyond the boundaries of imagination. We still have vine of HTT-atia-atolian in the agglutinative modern Turkish, though I will stick with imagining the usurped, evidently inefficient Hurrian dialect as a particularly martial form of Entish.

From the Archive

from Without Flesh

Wherever the story of Jesus’ resurrection spread, the people who believed it were not the wise, the successful, and the royal. Those types all diligently stayed away. On Mars Hill where the scholars lounged, they laughed at St. Paul.

Christianity was a religion that made its mark by converting the weak, the impoverished, and the unimpressive. These people did not become powerful, rich, or impending by their conversion. They became ***fearless***. They were not fearless because their mission always succeeded, nor because their personal lives became suddenly marked by a string of divinely inspired victorious moments. As we would define “success” today, the early churches were total failures. They never won over the culture. They never dominated the market, and the vast majority of their leaders all wound up dead before their time. Instead of detouring them, instead of turning them away, this is what inspired them. This is why they were fearless. This is how they demonstrated their courage.

They did not need to see in order to believe. Rather, they believed what they had heard, and this became in them the supernatural ability to see beyond the merely human possibilities of their present, evil age.

Now here we are, some two millennia later, arrogantly believing that we live in exceptional times. It is in ***fear*** of our present evil age we hear our churches preach, “We must change or die.” It is the overt trust in what is seen that has stolen from us the power to convert.