A non-Augustinian hermeneutic

This hermeneutic is incompatible with Catholic and Protestant hermeneutic inherited from Augustine (making conversation difficult, so I appreciate your patience). The church has been troubled with free-for-all allegory, yet you can see much of it in the discussions. In this Hebrew hermeneutic, a metaphor is the same everywhere it appears, and has a self-correcting nature about it. Typology has a different flavor. Greek typology is based on the characteristics of objects. Hebrew typology is based in word play, riddle and pattern.

As such, it doesn't make sense to post this in the various sub-threads as though it is a challenge to them, since a more productive approach is to try and understand it in it's own context.

Darkness

Before God said "Let there be light" he dwelt in darkness. He did not dwell in evil. Though the Greek does not claim that God dwells in evil, the inconsistency of the type is excused by simply not applying the type in this case.

John explains the pun of Elohim. אלחום 'alokhoom' which means 'not dark':

1Jo 1:5 ¶ This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

In John 1 he said that Jesus was the Light. He was the 'not dark'. this can be said from the word play of Elohim. John also said that Jesus was the Life. this also comes from a pun of Elohim (אלהים): God's Life אלחיים (Elochaim).

Although the Light was not yet expressed, it was hidden in his name. And God was engulfed in darkness. The two primary attributes of God are Love and Holiness. Holiness is expressed through separation, but prior to the creation of Light, God was not separate from anything. He existed in perfect unity. Though he had all the attributes of Holiness it could not be expressed since there was nothing to be separate from.

The letter alef א has a primary metaphor of God speaking and creating the heavens and the earth. It is also the firmament separating the waters, and the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters (two waters, one face). John uses it to represent the Spirit which hovered over the waters in 1Joh 5.8.

(The word for earth ארץ has three letters which have the meaning: א Spirit hovering over the face of the waters, ר the living Torah which is the living Water, and ץ representing the blood of the righteous man in the grave. By the way, the three consonants in heaven שמים represent the Spirit (giving life and making the word not void), the Father (declaring a covenant in heaven) and the Son (fulfilling the covenant on earth) And both words for heaven and earth have a gematria of three (there are three in heaven and three on earth).

We get ברא to be the Son בר who spoke and created the heavens and the earth... by separation א. God is separate from his creation. He is Holy. His first expression "Let there be Light" is an expression of His holiness, which was hidden in his name.

This leaves darkness to be Love. The popular meaning for darkness as 'evil' is related but is from a different perspective. God dwelt in perfect love (darkness) before there was light.

When men are in God's Love, they are requiring grace. If man is not holy and is not yet judged, he is receiving grace. He is in darkness. His sin is hidden in darkness, and he loves the grace. But God commands sinful men to be holy; to come into the light.

John can explain the word-play saying that there is no darkness 'in' God, and truthfully say that there is no Love 'in' God. It is not 'in' him since He IS Love (1Jo 4:8). It is not a separate thing which is contained 'in' him.

Void

The Hebrew ontology is different from the Greek. Looking at a black and white checker board, the Greek would say that the white squares, representing the things we see, are the underlying reality. The Hebrew says that God (the black squares) are the underlying reality.

Genesis suggests that originally the board was nothing but black squares. When God chose to create, he could not create outside of himself since there is no container bigger than God. "The heaven of heavens cannot contain thee".

So God created the earthly things by expanding himself to make room for us in the voids. He first created the white squares which are void. We are made of nothing. "In him all things hold together and have their being". We are clusters of voids within God, rather than particles of stuff in a vacuum.

So what is real is God, and this life is but a shadow. "...all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? " Ec 6:12 "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Heb 11:3

Like a 3D negative, what we think is real is the void, and what we think is the void is the reality of God. When you remove everything from a box to create a vacuum, God is still there.

I think it was Justin Martyr who said that the Greek philosophers had plagiarized Hebrew wisdom. To them there is a prototype idea which is the essence of something, making something invisible the reality and the physical just a representation of it as a bit of a twist on the Hebrew ontology.