Each Word a Universe: Turning Bones, Not Stones

On hearing rather than seeing: a deity with no image, a word carried rather than a figure beheld.

Show Notes

Each Word a Universe: Turning Bones, Not Stones. A daily word of Scripture, heard across the three scrolls of Abraham.
On hearing rather than seeing: a deity with no image, a word carried rather than a figure beheld.
Paul’s observation, “that he was not known by sight” (1:22), and was “only heard” in Judea (1:23), emphasizes this association, since those searching the empty tomb find nothing but a word from the angel; a deity with no effigy (Luke 24:7–8; Mark 16:6–7).
Marc Philip Boulos, Torah to the Gentiles: St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians (OCABS Press, 2014), p. 58
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.

What is Each Word a Universe: Turning Bones, Not Stones?

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.