The language of the Old Testament

The western set of moral rules was originally written in Hebrew. As Israelis we were given a rare opportunity to follow the roots of the cultural concepts, from evidences derived from the Hebrew words. In order to understand this issue we shall start with an easy to digest example, the word "water". The word water has great significance; this might be because the Hebrew language has developed among farmers who lived on the border of the desert. Water is a precious resource in the hot desert climate and the word itself is easy to articulate and unambiguous. "Ma'im" is a word that has a symmetrical axis in its pronunciation. Such inner symmetry is a characteristic of important words in Hebrew.  Waiting for the rain, which is essential for agriculture, probably lead to defining the sky with the word "שמיים" (Sha'ma'im). The word symbolizes the great longing of the farmers for the rain drops. Sham-main (there are water). For Hebrew speakers the verbal relation between these two words is obvious, but it is lost when the bible is translated into a different language.
From the water we have moved to the sky in which another example shines: "the sun", another symmetrical word that carries historical importance. Observations of the cyclic movement of the sun in the sky made our ancestors recognize the dimension of time.  Sun clocks were the first to measure time accurately. After we have built them, we could divide time into hours and minutes. Synchronizing time allows us to preplan and an opportunity for cooperation between many people. The accurate measuring of the time axis was necessary for improving our agricultural production processes. ¹
The value of the Hebrew word "סוס" (horse) has decreased since the "Merkava" tank - was invented. The primordial importance of horses, in times when horse power had a mystical meaning, was witnessed by five hundred Spanish pirates.  They landed in a new land and got off their ships riding horses. The greedy gang was dazzled by the amount of gold worn by the natives, and managed to destroy two developed and independent cultures of millions of people (the Inca and Aztec). The Indian warriors were very scared of the horses; it was something they have never seen before. They called the Spanish people and their horses: "The white gods riding on monsters". In the fifteenth century horses were a huge technological and psychological advantage, just like tanks in the Second World War.
Let's look for a moment at the corroborating evidence of a famous and talented zoologist and anthropologist, Desmond Morris. According to Morris the eyesight of the human baby is focused at a distance of just thirty centimeters. From the moment it is born, the baby can focus its eye only at his mother and her feeding breasts. The first two syllables of every baby are a-ah and b-aa. These are the first sounds a baby mumbles in the first months of its life. All babies learn to express themselves with the primary syllable a-ah. ²
As we have seen, important words have symmetry, therefore it is self evident that the parent who is biologically more essential, that is of course the mother, will be called 'aba' (אבא), a symmetrical word made of the first combination of syllables of all the babies in the world. The puzzling fact is that in the Hebrew language this nick marks the father indicates the Memetic selection process our basic definitions went through. After all, a baby would have chosen to naturally mark his mother with the denotation a-ba, because of her crucial importance in his life.

In the following chapter we shall discover how the belief in the existence of a human male father "aba" enabled a fast population growth.