Subtract
Subtract

The Trinity in the Old Testament

The Trinity in the Old Testament

The first hint of The Trinity appears in the very first verse of the Bible [0] . Here is an interesting piece of history, the original scribes did not know what exactly Aleph -Tau meant ( the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet ) so they just left it as is untranslated. Centuries later Jesus Christ declared he was the Alpha and the Omega ( the first and last letters of the greek alphabet ) and that he was the first and the last. It was then that it finally dawned that He was The Word of Genesis 1:1

The Creation

Genesis 1 : 1

Original Hebrew
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

Transliterated
Bereshit bara Elohim אֵת hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

Translated
In the beginning God Alpeh – Tau created the heavens and the earth.

So now lets look at Genesis 1: 1-2

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Its as clear as daylight, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the very first verses of the Bible. Here is another one

“And God [Elohim] said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…. (Genesis 1:26)

The verb “said” in the above verse is a masculine singular, but yet the verb “Elohim” is plural. This is one example, there are many other of this type of noun-verb number disagreement would include Genesis 3:22, Genesis 11:7, Joshua 24:19, etc.

“Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us….” (Isaiah 6:8)

Here, the Lord is specifically said to be speaking, and in mid-sentence He changes His self-reference from singular to plural. In this passage, the Lord appears to be seeking to emphasize His triune nature.

The Sh’ma

This is one of the most important and revered prayers in the Torah, in fact its one of only two prayers that are specifically commanded in Torah. It is the oldest fixed daily prayer in Judaism, recited morning and night since ancient times [1] .

Hebrew
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יהוה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יהוה אֶחָד

Transliterated
Sh’ma Yisra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.

Translated
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

The trinity of God is suggested, however, by the use of “echad” in the Sh’ma, which is a word for “one” which is indicative of compounded unity, rather than absolute, monolithic oneness[3].

I chose the creation and the Sh’ma because of their prominence in the Jewish life. Also Im sticking to only the OT texts, The Trinity can be proved beyond doubt using the New Testament and in the early church writings/beliefs.

There are hundreds of other such examples[4], I am listing a few below.

Psalm 2: 7-8

I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.

Isaiah 48:12-17

“Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last. Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spanned the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand up together. All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; which among them hath declared these things? The LORD hath loved him: he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans. I, even I, have spoken; yea, I have called him: I have brought him, and he shall make his way prosperous. Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me. Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go.”

Hosea 1:7

“But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.”

Amos 4:10-11

“‘I sent a plague among you after the manner of Egypt; I slew your young men by the sword along with your captured horses, and I made the stench of your camp rise up in your nostrils; yet you have not returned to Me,’ declares the LORD. ‘I overthrew you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah . . . ‘”

Psalm 45:6-8

Your throne, O God,[a] will last for ever and ever;
a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.
You love righteousness and hate wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions
by anointing you with the oil of joy.

References

https://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php?PageID=635

[http://www.jewfaq.org/shemaref.htm

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/706163/jewish/In-Hebrew.htm

http://www.studytoanswer.net/judaism/uniplurality.html

https://carm.org/christianity/christian-doctrine/yet-another-look-trinity-plurality-study

Further Reading

http://www.answering-islam.org/Trinity/

http://www.contra-mundum.org/schirrmacher/trinoldt.html

http://www.dtl.org/trinity/study/scriptural.htm

Popular Tags

Optimization
Code
Code
Optimization
Startup
Religion

Related Posts

See more

Jobs almost killed the iPhone

The iPod accounted for more than half of Apple’s sales back in the day. It was the cornerstone product Steve Jobs could not allow to fail. However, it became increasingly evident that a music player alone was insufficient, with a phone incorporated it would be much more practical. The solution was plain; Apple had to produce its own future phone in order to stay competitive.

In addition to the iPod, the era of iPod-based Apple was also coming to an end. Engineering personnel within Apple had been proposing this concept since the early 2000s. Despite this, Steve demonstrated conviction. Apple would not create a cellular gadget in the near future. For one, he appeared to have a distaste for corporations. In 1984, when introducing the first-ever Macintosh, Steve presented Apple as a “rebel force” which provided optimism against the “evil empire,” IBM.

Apple grew into a large corporation itself – but not surprisingly it remained in Steve’s view as the “world’s largest startup.” Creating a smartphone necessitated interacting with phone carriers such as Verizon, also known as the malevolent titans of industry.

Jobs, in particular, predicted that smartphones would evolve not as a must-have status symbol, but rather as a glorified Swiss army knife that appealed to a geekier, “pocket protector” crowd, as he called it.

It took herculean efforts of his engineers like Sakoman and others to convince Jobs to build the phone. this was their first iPhone .

The rest they say is history – unlike what most people think it was this iconic move that made apple a trillion dollar company.

If you don’t find ways to kill your product  the market most certainly will

  • 2 mins read

GuerrillaFoo

Guerrilla marketing is always something I’ve been a fan of.  The gist of it is that it’s a  strategy that utilizes unconventional and creative tactics to promote a product or service, typically on a low budget. This type of marketing is highly targeted and aims to create buzz and generate attention. I’ll share a story here that caught my attention during startup school.

Legend has it that there was this big fintech conference happening in the valley and to have your logo featured on the stage and in other places – you needed to pay for a sponsorship that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stripe was a young startup back then and it was taking on PayPal – the Goliath. What the team at Stripe did was take some bank notes, put them in a bucket and froze them overnight. On the day of the conference they turned up to the venue – put the money (now inside ice cubes) near the entrance and held a placard saying – “Paypal freezes your money – Try Stripe !”. This got the attention of EVERY single person at the conference. Stripe also did something clever – they paid the bellhops at the hotels and had them slip a brochure of their product into every room which had conference attendees. This would have cost a bomb to do otherwise – sponsoring the event and include this brochure as part of the SWAG kit. One thing was clear, at the end of this event, every single person knew about Stripe, was discussing their antics and several of them tried Stripe over the coming days.

The next story is somewhat different. On average a successful startup returns about 676% over the course of its lifetime – Wufoo returned around 30,000% ! Yes you red that right if you had invested $10k during their initial fundraise, you would have made around $30M when they were sold to SurveyMonkey a few years later. Such outliers naturally grab my attention and I was looking at some of the things they did right.

I’ll share a story of when they used a form of  Guerrilla marketing to get outsized returns. Most companies in the 2000s used to run hackathons when they came out with a new API and used to give out iPads or iPhones as prizes – this was the norm and was getting kind of boring. Wufoo wanted to try something different, the founding team and early employees were medieval nuts. They contacted a forge and got an actual battle axe built which would be the prize. Talk about weaponizing programming !!

At the end of this hackathon Wufoo got an Android app, an iPhone app and a WordPress plugin for their platform. This would be otherwise impossible to build for the small team with the money and resources they had. Lots of developers continued to remember and discuss this cool hackathon in the coming days and the traction in dev community was unbelievable.

  • 3 mins read

Instaform ?

Ship fast and improve faster based on what customers tell you – this has always been our mantra. The faster we can start getting feedback from customers – the faster we can iterate and improve our offering. This feedback loop is oxygen for startups like us,  it helps us validate our ideas, identify problems early on, and adjust our approach accordingly. A couple of extreme examples of this approach caught my eye recently.

Brex calls themselves the OS of scaling startups and have a great banking experience today – I have tried a few similar services myself and can say their product is among the best. The story is when they started off they just had a web form and a virtual credit card they could generate with an internal tool. With that they started on boarding customers. Imagine running a bank like this – no login, no way to see spends, no way to manage accounts or any of the things we take for granted. EVERY SINGLE one of these features was built in once the product was live and was based on customer feedback and needs. Pretty amazing and takes a lots of guts to do.

The next story is from Instacart – a grocery delivery and pick-up app. This product was launched with just a form on the site. Users literally filled up a form with their grocery list and the founder or her friends drove around, picked up the stuff and delivered. That’s it – simple and scary. Many founders I know will first try and raise a few million dollars, build sophisticated warehousing, inventory management and mobile apps before earning that 1st dollar in revenue.

  • 2 mins read
Subtract

Menu

Subscribe

Sign up for articles on how you can put AI to work for you

©2023 All rights reserved
Scroll to Top