Holy: Understanding it Better Through Understanding Context Errors

Perhaps no other discipline than anthropology warns about importing outsider ideas into insider ideas to interpret a context.  Just yesterday, I read a fascinating article on how the Ancient Hebrew alphabet of 22 letters could possibly have been expanded into 66 letters at one time in its history.  In other words, each letter could have been written 3 different ways to enhance communication.  I don't think we do that in our context (English in my case).  We can easily miss patterns like this one and then substitute our own. 

My special concern when I mention that is the idea that we see words as synonymously parallel that may instead have a different relationship.  I first became aware of this through a commentator (I'm sorry this older commentator now eludes me -- it could have been Adam Clarke) who explained the way our English translators dealt with the translation of righteousness and justice from the Hebrew and which contexts would the form for justice be translated instead as judgment and that judgment meant both righteousness and justice altogether. 

The pattern here is somewhat rare in our contemporary thinking.  I know I never was made aware of this pattern before.  I had heard of the idea that the lesser can be used to refer to or mean the greater, but I had never thought of things in quite this way. 

Then add to this that a Hebrew scholar years ago that had pointed out that righteousness and justice were not the same things.  Suddenly, I began to see a pattern that did not come from my culture. 

Two different words side by side that were not synonymous.  That is not Shakespearean.  Then these two words, I later discovered were actually perpendicular measurements to one another, not synonymous measurements through the analogy of carpentry and the plumb line and level line. 

Then add to this the context of Hebrew where righteousness seems so far to always appear before justice and then Aramaic where justice seems to appear first instead.  Here I am reminded how the Bible is able to cope in translation with grammatical systems that have different requirements and yet still send the same message. 

All of this adds up to a different context than my own, with the danger that my context cannot be read into theirs.  It appears now that there is a pattern that Hebrew at least likes to honor even on the surface level: 1) greater, 2) lesser, and 3) greatest (the two altogether).  Righteousness would then be the greater, justice the lesser, and judgment the greatest.

So now let's apply that context rule to holy.  What if blessed is the greater, what if holy is the lesser and what if "holiness" (the two altogether) is the greatest.  Could that be the contextual rule that we have been lacking in place of synonymous parallelism too frequently applied?  Could we be missing a major contextual indicator?  I'm just asking in the spirit of my anthropology professors.

Sincerely,

Jon