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A single triliteral for hearing runs from the Torah's command to Paul's formula on trust to the Qurʾan's contrast between obedient and disobedient hearing.
Each Word a Universe: Turning Bones, Not Stones. A daily word of Scripture, heard across the three scrolls of Abraham.
A single triliteral for hearing runs from the Torah's command to Paul's formula on trust to the Qurʾan's contrast between obedient and disobedient hearing.
The limmudim, the disciplined ones, are made through an opened ear: adab enters the body by hearing. The carrier scroll reduces the doctrine to a formula: hē pistis ex akoēs (ἡ πίστις ἐξ ἀκοῆς), “trust comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17)—pistis is not attained at the summit of an ascent. It arrives through the ear of a slave. And the third scroll conjugates obedience itself as hearing, in the same triliteral the first scroll commands, ש-מ-ע one function with س-م-ع: samiʿnā wa-aṭaʿnā (سَمِعْنَا وَأَطَعْنَا), “we hear and we obey” (Sūrat al-Baqara 2:285), against the calfmakers’ samiʿnā wa-ʿaṣaynā (سَمِعْنَا وَعَصَیْنَا), “we hear and we disobey” (Sūrat al-Baqara 2:93).
Marc Philip Boulos, Man of Letters (OCABS Press, 2026), p. 71
The root: ש-מ-ע · س-م-ع (š-m-ʿ)
Heard in: Romans 10:17; Sūrat al-Baqara 2:285
Opening music: Oriental Style Song, oud and darbuka, by Surprising_Media (Pixabay).
The quotation is from Marc Philip Boulos; it is read by the digital voice Fāṭima.
The digital voice Fāṭima (فَاطِمَة) is named in honor of the learned women of al-Andalus, particularly Fāṭima bint Yaḥyā al-Maghāmī, Fāṭima al-Sharrāṭ, and Fāṭima bint al-Muthannā, whose legacies embody the Andalusian traditions of scriptural scholarship, jurisprudence, education, and wisdom.
The Greeks said each person is a universe, and built their cities so that everything would turn around man. Scripture says everything turns around God, and God is not set before us as an idea to contemplate or an image to behold, but as a scroll to be heard. Each word of that scroll carries the functionality of his scriptural universe.
Each day this podcast takes a single passage and follows one word through the three scrolls of Abraham: the Hebrew root, its Greek carrier in the Septuagint and the New Testament, and its Arabic cognate in the Qurʾan. The aim isn't to find a meaning to admire but to hear a function at work, the same consonantal skeleton speaking in Genesis, in Luke, and in the clear Arabic tongue.
This is samāʿ, hearing as turning. The prophet turns the bones of the word, as Ezekiel spoke over the valley until the dry bones came together and lived. Ours is to hear, not to pile up the stones of Babel.
A few minutes a day. One word. God at the center, and the scroll in our hands.