7. Zayin | Paleo Hebrew Alphabet | Father’s Refining Fire, Gold Digging, and more
Gold digging, The Refiner’s fire, olive trees, and how the Hebrew letter Zayin prepares the ground for seed.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Claim jumping
0:26 How the letter Zayin is used in Hebrew
1:32 Zayin in farming
1:53 Shaking things up
2:19 Word study: Olive tree (“Zayith”)
3:13 Out digging for gold (“Zahab”)
5:40 The Refiner’s Fire
7:43 Paleo in the wild
8:01 There’s no Z in Zion
8:45 Song: “Sanctuary”
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Transcript:
Dawson: Pardon me, mister.
Carlos: Yeah?
Dawson: What are you doing?
Carlos: Well, you got to ask yourself… Did I just find this nice place full of gold or is he “(claim) jumping”? Hear the gunshot? I gotta get out of here.
Dawson: Today’s letter is zayin and it’s a picture of the part of a plough which digs into earth and prepares the ground for new seed. As many of you probably already know, when you have a new planting, part of the process involves getting rid of the remnants of an old planting and that means digging into the earth and cutting up any old roots that were left over from last season. It also means cutting up weeds, loosening up the soil and shaking it up to make room for the new seeds and also for water that can nourish it.
So, what we see with the letter zayin is it has the sense of making ready of preparing, of cutting, just as the plough cuts through the ground, of loosening and also of shaking and there’s also a timing element to farming. There’s a season in which you can plant and so with the letter zayin, in some cases, it has the meaning of now as in the time is now.
Since the zayin is a farm tool, in Hebrew we see it used in a lot of the words that have to do with farming, with seed and sowing seed, winnowing, scattering and pruning. All of those are words in Hebrew which use the letter zayin to contribute to their meaning.
One of the uses for the letter zayin is for shaking as it goes into the ground and it shakes things up and we see that in many words that have to do with the sense of shaking such as shaking with terror or with fear or being afraid. The word “quake” is a word with the letter zayin and we also see it when it comes to crops.
One example would be in a crop that is very prevalent in the land that Father gave to Abraham and his descendants and that is the olive tree. Zayith is the word for olive or olive tree and the letters are zayin, yod, tav.
So, by the letters, what an olive tree represents is shaking with the arm very strongly and if you were to ever take a look at the olive tree harvesting process, you would see that it describes that pretty much to a Tee. The way you get olives off of a tree is you have to shake the tree and so today there are devices and machines that they use to shake the trunks and to put up into the leaves and shake the branches. But back in the old days, you could do the same thing just with brute force with your arms and your hands.
We don’t have any farm land up here. Otherwise, I would show you guys a zayin in action but what we do have is perhaps a few places where you could find some zahab and zahab is Hebrew for gold. By the letters, zahab is a picture of digging to reveal what’s inside. So let’s see what we find.
I’m about to lek ha’tel.
Carlos: What does that mean?
Dawson: OK. Lek is a word that was learned very, very deeply by all the patriarchs and it means walk. So, I shall walk.
Carlos: Walk the hill is lek ha’tel – the hill. Lek, walk; ha, the; tel, hill.
[Music]
Carlos: So HE made zahab and HE put it all through the eretz, the earth, and it’s very heavy. So, after a rain, we usually want to go up a nice gully like this that washes away hard and you want to see where gold gets trapped because it’s very heavy. So, we’re going to take some samples of zahab probably from here. That looks pretty good, like a good little runoff.
So, let’s try it out. So, we’ve seen quite a bit and you notice I’m trying to get it from the roots because it catches the smaller ones and we’re only going to take samples and if we find something in the samples, we will be back for the motherload of – how you say gold in Hebrew?
Dawson: Zahab.
Carlos: Spell it.
Dawson: Zayin, hey, beyt.
Carlos: Exactly, zahab. May we score some! Anyway, we will take this back and we’re going to see what we got.
[Music]
Dawson: Many years ago, Father had me study the subject of gold and since we’re looking at zahab today, I thought I would share a few things that I learned about the refinement process. Most gold that comes out of the ground is not pure. It’s alloyed and the formal definition for alloyed is debased by a mixture of inferior elements. It could be copper. It could be tin, but it’s anything but gold that is bonded to the gold and needs to be removed.
So what a refiner does is he frees the gold through a few steps. The first step is he adds lead to the gold alloy. Lead is an even more inferior element but there’s a reason for this.
The other elements that have bonded to the gold during the process will get removed from the gold and be bonded to this lead which can then be blown away through a blast of wind.
So, in order to get these other things to stick to the lead, fire is required. The impurities dissolve into the lead during this heat process and they start to change form and the form that they change into is a powdery substance which the refiner can then blow away with wind and that’s what he does. Once that’s done, he is left with pure gold.
Pure gold is impervious to the elements. That means it’s completely solid. Nothing can pass through it. Nothing can infiltrate it. Nothing can affect it. It cannot rust. It cannot corrode and it’s not degradable by other elements. Its shape will remain for a thousand years if you don’t wear it away and you can literally beat on it and it tends not to crack. You can hammer it out so thin that light will pass through it and so the refiner, once he’s done with this process has created a product which is built to last on this earth.
Look at this.
Carlos: What you got?
Dawson: It’s paleo.
Carlos: What does it say?
Dawson: Nun.
Carlos: Nun.
Dawson: Chet.
Carlos: Chet.
Dawson: Shin.
Carlos: Shin. Nachash! Snake! Snake!
Lisa: Ba! (come!), ba (come!), nachash (snake)!
Dawson: Run! Come, come, come.
Did you know there’s actually no letter zayin in the word ets?
Lisa: No way.
Dawson: Yeah, it’s true.
Lisa: That’s interesting. So what about the City of Zion?
Dawson: No, no Z. It’s a tsade.
Lisa: Wow. What about the sons of Zadok?
Dawson: No, no zayin.
Lisa: OK. Then how about the City of Zoar?
Dawson: Nope, also a tsade…
Wait, did you find gold?
Carlos: We’s claim jumpin – you ain’t supposed to be filming this because we’re claim jumpers.
Dawson: And there you have it folks. That’s it for zayin and for zahab. Hopefully we will be back next week to talk about saints and sinners. See you guys.
[Music]
[End of transcript]
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