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2006 John D. Brey.The resemblance between testimony, testify, testis, and testicle shows an etymological relationship, but linguists are not agreed on precisely how English testis came to have its current meaning. The Latin testis originally meant “witness,” and etymologically means “third (person) standing by” . . .How this also came to refer to the body part(s) is disputed. An old theory has it that the Romans placed their right hands on their testicles and swore by them before giving testimony in court.
Dictionary.com
If it’s true that, “. . .
a word never – well hardly ever – shakes off its etymology” (JL Austin),
then God’s “testimonial” stones are the legal witness for or against someone or
something? ---- We know that the tablets of the Law were written to codify (or
make legal) God’s first relationship with a human representative, sworn to
faithfulness concerning the dissemination of His Word. So when Moses breaks the
first testicle stones of God, how should we read that narrative? --- Paul read
it as the end of the natural covenant based on intact testes and the
prefiguring of a disfiguring of the Deliverer of the testimony.
Hagar naturally shows not the slightest concern about whether Abraham’s testes are broken or whether his male-member is disfigured and wrapped in a linen shroud to bear witness to the blood of the pierced Deliverer?
Hagar couldn’t care less about what happened to Abraham’s testimonial stones, or that their Deliverer should be so disfigured that “the edges of this cut” and his dried blood “support the veil and hold it out like a tent” (Derrida). She cares not a wink so long as she has the living witness of her relationship to Abraham (pre-senescent seminal offspring: Ishmael). The fact that Abraham’s testes were broken after the birth of Ishmael only increased Hagar’s belligerence toward Sarah, the Gentile bride of Abraham whose barrenness was a source of Hagar’s culturally based sense of superiority.
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If it’s the case that Abraham’s stones (as Maimonides calls them) are scripturally linked to God’s stones at Sinai, then both stones (all stones of this sort) require a “deliverer” who will put the seminality that is in, or on, the stones into their legitimate target. Anthropomorphically speaking this “deliverer” would be represented by the “phallus.” Ergo, why should we be shocked if nearly all the ancient Pagan cultures worshipped the phallus, or the lingam -- or whatever else they called it --- as though it were the anthropomorphic symbol par excellence for the link between God’s seed and His human bride?
Likewise, how should we read the Torah’s mysterious passion for cutting, removing, making limp, or emasculating the phallic deliverer? Why would the Torah, in opposition to the Pagans, make the “cutting off” of the deliverer seminal in Jewish thought? --- Why did the Christians follow in lockstep and smash all the phallic standing stones of the Pagans? Why, when Jacob was wrestling with God did God make his thigh (a euphemism for the phallus) go limp before renaming him “Israel”:
The Bible calls Jacob’s penis the sinew that shrank, lying “upon the hollow of his thigh.” Scholars have tried to interpret this limp penis as something else: a severed tendon, or a certain thigh muscle, which Jews were forbidden to eat (Genesis 32:32). But medieval translators frankly recognized the phallic meaning of the “sinew.” They said the god-man’s blighted touch on Jacob’s shrunken member was “to cool the fires of concupiscence.”
Barbra Walker, Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends, p.794.
As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible . . ..
Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, p. 378.
Abram weakens the organ of
regeneration as far as possible by taking a blade to it: God renames him
“Abraham.” God puts the Vulcan pinch on Jacob’s limpid organ of delivery and it
goes limp: God renames him “Israel.”---- What is the relationship between
“cooling the fires of concupiscence” . . . “weakening the organ of generation
as far as possible” . . . and the act of “renaming” or making of a “new man.”
It’s clear that the “new man” comes about by making limp (euphemism for emasculation) the deliver, and renaming the old man, thereafter giving him a resurrected deliverer and a new name! Only after the crucifixion (so to speak) of the first deliverer (attached to broken stones) is a new name given so that spiritual progeny arise through a resurrected deliverer attached to restored stones.
It would seem to be fair to say that the gist of the Torah is a narrative of the natural man seeing his first stones broken and their deliverer made limp, or bloody, or emasculate, prior to God restoring the stones and resurrecting the deliverer . . . thereafter renaming the natural man so that he becomes a “new man”? Couldn’t we with this establish a Torah inspired Gospel? We have broken testimony stones, limp or emasculated, or “cut off” deliverer, restored stones, resurrected deliverer, new man.
* * *
The home of the broken testimony stones (testes) is called “the Ark of the Testimony.” The Hebrew word for “testimony” (eduwth) means “witnesses” or "testifiers." Etymologically the word’s root is always plural. The two “testimonial” stones are synonymous with the two testes of God: His seminal thoughts toward mankind. Therefore, the golden ark could rightly be thought of as part of the divine genitalia containing God's testes, or testimonial stones. The wings of the cherubs on either side of the throne represent the penne, or pen-is, that will take the testimony in the stones and scribe them on the hearts of man.
The word “penne” is given to the long wing and tail feather of birds. From that etymology come the words “pen,” and “penis.” ---- Long feathers were plucked from birds, filled with ink, and then the feathers were used to make a virgin page pregnant; when the “penne” (pen or pen-is) scribed the white veil of the page, the page’s virginity was ruptured, and the author’s meaning was born out of the intercourse between pen and page. Seminal ink has been spilled on pages innumerable as the race of words expand keeping pace with biological inflation.
. . . it is not the phallus in itself which is revered but that for which it is the sign – the progenitor, the cosmic individual Shiva for whom it is the symbol.
Shiva Purāna, 1.16.106-7.
Shiva was represented as the
axis of the world, a pillar of light that traversed the universe “from one
side to the other and is visible to those who have attained a transcendental
level of perception” (Alain Daniélou, The Phallus). The Cosmic
Individual (Shiva) is represented as a phallic beam of light that traverses the
universe. When the Jewish high priest entered behind the hymenal veil in the
Holy of Holies he sprinkled blood between the feathers of the cherub’s wings
signifying the emasculation of God’s Deliverer. Once the holy circumcision took
place, the transcendental phallus lit up the entire tabernacle so that a beam
of light escaped into the heavens.
In type, the transcendental phallus, the Light of the world, is invisible until the male-member most intimately associated with God’s own testicles is “cut-off” (Dan. 9:26). --- Accordingly, until the Messiah, who is the mediator of the Law (the Testimony in God’s stones), is “cut-off” the Light of the world is veiled from the world. Only after the crucifixion of the Messiah is the Light of the world visible to those who are transcendentally born-again by means of the Light of the world.
* * *
Buber says: “Moses himself brought forth the bones of Joseph, namely the mummy-coffin which is designated in the Hebrew text [Gen. 50:26], assuredly not without intention, by a word [awrone] bearing the meaning of a coffin nowhere else, but used for that Holy Ark which was the symbol of the covenant established between YHVH and Israel by the words of Moses.” Buber dares us to think of the Ark bearing the testesmonial stones of the broken covenant between YHVH and Israel as a “coffin of the testimony.”
Now just as the Hebrew speaks of Abraham’s testes as the quarry, or stones from whence the "people" of Israel are hewn, we surely cannot be remiss in thinking of God’s testesmony stones as the quarry, or stones from whence the “nation” of Israel is hewn??
It would be fair to say that since Abraham’s testes were dead, or broken, prior to the birth of Isaac, it can’t be too outrageous to think of the place where Abraham’s stones rest as a sort of “coffin of the covenant”?? --- If the covenant between God and Abraham (which says he will birth a son through his own broken testes) is still intact after Abraham’s testes aren’t . . . then the covenant could rightly be called the covenant of Abraham’s broken testes; and the place where his stones rest could be called the “coffin of the covenant.”
--- Why wouldn’t the same principal apply to the Ark of the Covenant?
Why could't we think of the Ark of the Covenant as the “coffin of the covenant,” ala Buber, or the “receptacle of God’s broken testes”? --- If God’s Promise to Abraham is required to rise from broken stones, from the biological container for Abraham’s broken testimony, then why would it be so outlandish to think that God’s covenant to Israel would arise from broken stones in a coffin of broken testimony?