There is an ancient riddle asking why Genesis starts with the second letter of the alphabet rather than the first. To us it seems like a silly question. But consider the assumptions that have to be made in order to come up with that question:
1. You must assume that the order of the alphabet is important.
2. You must assume that God wrote Genesis.
3. You must assume there is a reason, relating to the revelation of God as to why he would say things and why he would omit things.
4. You must assume that there is meaning in the letter, not just the word.
This really does have to do with the Trinity...
1. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet are also numbers. There are 28 of them,
2. Christians believe this one way or the other.
3. We observe that Jesus interpreted the OT using the smallest of minutia to give meaning.
4. John describes the meaning of some letters, as mentioned above.
Though the rabbis have several answers to the riddle, they are silly in that they personify the letters and invent conversations between them.
Consider the first letter: aleph א: it is drawn with two yods י and a vav ו. All the letters of the alphabet are formed by combining yods and vavs. The letter is drawn first with the vav, and then the yods are added. Imagine saying a few things from scripture while you draw them:
Father:
God spoke and created
the heavens and
the earth
Son:
The firmament was in the midst
of the waters (above and
below)
Spirit:
The spirit hovered over the face
of the waters (above and
below)
The aleph is a silent letter, it is not pronounced. In Gen 1:1 is also is invisible... When God spoke and created the heavens and the earth, there was no one to see or hear him do it.
If I try to pronounce the strokes of the letters individually yod-vav-yod, it sounds like ee-oo-ee which is very similar to Yaweh. Yahweh is the name that God told Moses to use of him. ee-oo-ee is unpronounceable because the aleph is silent. It is his name before creation. The act of naming is an act of claiming dominion. We cannot claim dominion over God, because we cannot even say his name.
Notice that the aleph has three parts.
Since the first visible letter in Ge 1:1 is the bet in bereshit 'in the beginning' , making the first two letters the invisible aleph and the visible bet, spelling 'ab' or 'father'. But from the beginning (from bereshit) no man has seen the father (because the aleph is invisible).
The first two visible letter we see are בר in bereshit, spelling 'bar' or 'son'. The first thing we see in scripture is the Son who makes the Father known because we ask, why doesn't Ge 1:1 start with the first letter?
<it would appear that the first word of the Bible in Hebrew get filtered by a naughty-word filter lol>
I know you are starting to think this is a bit far-fetched. Consider what else bere-s-h-i-t-h tells us:
bara-s-h-i-t-h - he created six (in six days)
bar-ash-ith - the son burned (totally devoted) to the end
barit with an ish in the middle - a covenant with man at the center
You may find more.
The second word of Genesis 2 is bara ברא 'created'. Rabbis today will tell you that it means "created by the word" or "the word which created".
John says the בראis in בראשית - In the beginning was the Word.
In Ge 1:1 the 3rd word is אלהים 'God'. So bara was next to Elohim, "The word was with God".
Bara is also the 'bar- <aleph> which is the "Son who spoke and created the heavens and the earth." So John says, the Word was God.
Now it is just about too much to believe, but it continues:
Elohim has three puns... I wont bore you with details, you can almost guess: alo-khoom which is 'not dark' or 'light, l'chaim which is 'Life', and lechem which is 'bread'.
I have only shared observations. I personally believe that John got his doctrine of the 'Logos'/Word from Genesis 1:1 not from Philo.
From these observations we see the Father and the Son in roles which are repeated elsewhere in scripture and perhaps even derived from the play of letters and words here.
How does this relate to the Trinity? It gives weight to the testimony within the words and letters themselves to the things which distinguish the 'persons' of the Godhead.
The Hebrew word for 'word' or 'said' is אמר which is identical for lamb אמר. When God said "let there be light" he created light by the Lamb, and when John the Baptist said "Behold the Lamb of God", undoubtedly some heard him say, "Behold the Word of God".
This is really just a teaser because there is so much more concerning the Trinity in the 'mystery which was hidden from the beginning' that the discovery and conversation should not end with only those passages we commonly bring to bear.
