Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Hebrew and Base Number Systems

I did a study once called Languages of The Table of Nations where I argued that the language we now call Hebrew was a Canaanite language in origin and the original language of Abraham and his family wasn't one we classify as "Semitic" at all.

Recently I watched videos on alternate Base Number Counting systems by jan Misali, videos titled a better way to count and seximal responses.  They consider the best system to be Base 6 or Seximal, but a lot of discussion of Base 12 aka Dozenal comes up.

Why is this relevant to that earlier post of mine?  Because the Hebrew Language is clearly the product of a Base 10 culture, Ten is the highest number with it's own unique word, when you see "eleven" or "twelve" in English Bibles it's a translation of words that strictly speaking mean 10+1 or 10+2.  That fits the Canaanite origin, like their Alphabet the Greeks seem to have gotten their Base 10 bias from the Phoenicians then passed it on to Rome and modern Europe.

But a lot about the Culture of the Hebrew Bible suggests a more natural affinity for something else.  At first glass it would seem like Hebrew was somewhat chaotically using both Base 12 and Base 7, a Dozen and a Week.  Overall there is more apparent base 12, 12 tribes, 12 months in a year, contexts where a year is thought of as 360 days even though that doesn't astronomically perfectly fit, 24 courses for the Priesthood.  While 7 is used a lot multiples of 7 are only used by itself and by 10.

Thing is 7 as an important number can make sense in a Base 6 system, indeed the origin story of The Sabbath is God creating The World in 6 days then resting.  And then all the base 12 looking stuff can also come from doubling up Base 6. And then going back to the calendar 30 months is better explained by a Base 6 system being 5 times 6.

10 is likely to be a common number even in a non Decimal based culture just from the influence of having 10 fingers.  But symbolically speaking some of the most notable uses of 10 in The Bible seem to represent incompletion, like the Northern Kingdom being 10 of the 12 tribes.  But if 12 was the Base 11 would be the more natural number of incompletion, 10 as a doubling of 5 makes sense as an association with incompletion in a Base 6 culture.  

And then in Daniel 2, Daniel 7 and Revelation the number 10 is associated with the Kingdoms of the Beast's Empire.  And the modern dominance of Base 10 does come from Rome's influence, including the Metric System coming from the French Revolution's fetishization of Roman ideas.  That's why it annoys me how the most popular alternative to Metric is called "Imperial", it's misleading, metric is what actually comes from the original Evil Empire.

Now in that original post I theorized that Abraham and his family were originally Hurrians.  I've googled to see if any historians or archeologists think they know what the Hurrians original base counting system was, but all that comes up is discussion of how they adopted the Mesopotamian system later.

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