Spoke 22

Song of Solomon, Acts, Revelation

And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?

Revelation 5.1

Tav (), the name of the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, means a mark, sign, or cross. In the ancient script it was written alternately as and , the first being identical to the classic form of the Cross of Christ. Gesenius notes that this letter referred to "a sign in the form of a cross branded on the thigh or neck of horses and camels." God used this letter to mark his faithful in the vision given to the Prophet Ezekiel:

And the Lord said, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark (, Tav) upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark (, Tav); and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.

It is here that we come to an ultimate understanding of the overall structure of Scripture and an answer to the question: Why is the entire Bible built upon the Number 22? It is the Divine Seal of Scripture - a perfect Circle, sevenfold symmetric perfection, sealed with the Cross! Could anything be simpler? Could anything be more beautiful?

The ancient Rabbinical tradition calls Tav the Seal of God, the Seal of Truth, and the Seal of Creation. Rabbi Ginsburgh, in his article on Tav , identifies the seal as truth (, emet), spelt with the first, middle, and last of the sacred letters. He then says:

The last letter or seal of the word emet, "truth," itself - the seal of G-d's seal - is the letter tav, simple faith, the conclusion and culmination of all twenty-two forces - letters - active in Creation.

Could the truth shine forth more plainly? Could God have made it any simpler? For nearly two thousand years the truth of God has been lifted high upon the steeples of Christian churches throughout the world. It is the sign of the Cross!  

Emet (truth) also is an anagram of m'eth (), which can be read as From Aleph-Tav. This coheres with the universal intuition expressed in such words a "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Truth falls short if it includes less than the whole, from Aleph to Tav. Likewise, all truth ultimately comes from God, who identifies Himself as the beginning and the end, which is the Aleph and the Tav. It is the eternal foundation of the biblical structure.  

Tav, God's Seal, governs Spoke 22. This manifests in the distribution of words cognate with "seal" upon the Wheel. This graph represents the result of searching the entire King James Bible for all such occurrences:

As the graph makes clear, the vast majority of occurrences of seal and its cognates in the Bible come from its last book. This is because Revelation describes both the opening of the book "sealed with seven seals" (Revelation 5.1) and the sealing of the 144,000 from the tribes of Israel with "the seal of the living God" (Revelation 7.2). The significance of this word distribution can not be overstated. It is a simple demonstration of God's careful design of the Bible in accordance with the structure and symbolic meaning of the Hebrew alphabet as revealed in the text of Scripture and explicated by the ancient Rabbinical tradition.   

The last book of Cycle 1 prefigures the great themes found in the last book of Cycle 3. Just as Revelation explicitly proclaims a promise of everlasting life for the faithful and a warning of fiery judgment for the unbelievers, so ends Cycle 1 in the final verses of the Song of Solomon: 

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. 

The links between Love, Death, and God's Seal () are many and profound. As it is written, 

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. 

And again, 

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? 

And in the most significant sense, Jesus Christ spoke of His own death as his glorification, and His great work that He came into the world to accomplish.

The fundamental Hebrew word for death is (mavet). When this is prefixed with the letter Aleph, we arrive at the verb emuth () meaning I will die. This differs from emet (truth) by the insertion of the vowel-letter Vav. Death and the definitive phrase "The Truth" are both subsumed in the same numerical category:

The Number 446	The Truth (, ha'emet)
	Death (, mavet)

The Bible declares:

Ps 33.4: the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth 

Ps 111.2: The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. His work is honourable and glorious: and his righteousness endureth for ever.

The exact phrase written in the latter verse is:

The Works of the LORD (, Masah YHVH) = 446 

This mathematically integrates with the The Truth, in precise agreement with the verse just quoted:

The Truth (, HaEmet) = 446

The Truth () also is an anagram of (Mah Eth) meaning "What is Aleph Tav?" The answer, therefore, is implicit within the question. 

Tav, as the Seal of Creation, relates back to Genesis when "God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." This further integrates the Number 7 and the Number 22 which govern the geometric structure of the Word (7 canonical divisions distributed upon the Wheel of 22 Spokes.)

Endless echoes ring through these concepts of the Seventh Day, Rest, Death, and the Truth. They reflect the unutterable gravity of the Truth, Life, Death, and creative Work of the Lord God Almighty. They are worthy elements of much meditation.