Welcome to the new Word Unveiled blog! This used to be the site of my Heaven and Earth blog, which covered all things therein. However, with my deepening focus on Biblical interpretation, it was long overdue for a brand-new start. It has been delayed due to family, floods, and a funeral, and things may change radically several times as I try to master this new WordPress format, but we are up and running now.
Why? What is the purpose of this effort? It is as simple as it is audacious. I seek to use generative artificial intelligence to explore the secrets of the Bible.
The Bible contains many difficult passages. Some of God’s doings are shockingly brutal and must be justified somehow. There are also passages that don’t make any sense and absurdities that offend and confound. And it starts right off with Genesis.
- Days of the week before the sun or the earth were even created? How could that be?
- The entire human race condemned for stealing fruit?
- A talking snake punished by making it crawl as snakes do anyway?
- The first murderer fearful of strangers when there were supposedly no other people? Plus, his descendants are listed, so just whom did he marry?
- The “sons of God” mating with the children of men? And that’s just for starters!
What’s going on here?
Some the Early Fathers of the Church were convinced that the Bible had to conceal higher meanings if it was indeed a book truly worthy of divine inspiration. Several, mainly Origen, the greatest theologian ever, his predecessor Clement of Alexandria, and Jerome, the great translator of the Bible, worked out an intricate system of symbolic meanings for various Scriptural terms.
I have taken what I could find of this system, and compiled it into a “spiritual dictionary”, The Word Unveiled. Since then, I have been trying on my own to apply it to the Bible. It has not been easy, because there are many words and phrases the good Fathers missed, while the more common ones got multiple possible definitions.
I had much more success with the sayings of Jesus. For one thing, the Fathers and their successors did an immense amount of work deciphering them; secondly, the parables are all stories that are meant to be deciphered. Not only that, but Jesus left the correct interpretation of two of them that can be checked.
I developed a technique I call “TSM” — the Term Substitution Method — which consists of simply replacing concrete words and phrases in the text with their symbolic definitions. It seems to work surprisingly well on the parables. Even better, highly intriguing and quite unexpected results are most encouraging. They will be explored in-depth here as demonstrations.
But the question remains if they can be applied to other parts of Scripture. For that I plan to turn to Artificial Intelligence. Even if Large Language Models work by guessing what word is mostly likely to follow, like autocomplete functions do, I hope to see if one trained on the Scriptures and my extensive database can generate some useful spiritual insights or not.
The scheme very well might not work, and the results will likely be contentious in any case. “AI hallucinations” or mistakes in dealing with religious texts could be particularly tricky. If you have ever watched TV with the captions on, you may have noticed how sometimes the AI captioner will get them wrong. When it happens to lectors with accents reading Scripture, such captioning mistakes can be hilarious yet sometimes almost weirdly mystical. It just shows that taking any product of AI too seriously — as some sort of divine oracle — could be spiritually disastrous.
Yet despite these risks, the chance of uncovering genuine hidden treasures buried in the text is too much to resist. Never in history has it been possible before now, and so I plan to make the most of this unique and exciting opportunity.
And so we rise once again.