Hebrew is a very interesting language. For
one thing, there are
numbers associated with every Hebrew
letter, and the
numerical value of a word is considered
just as important as the "word" itself (although in Hebrew, the number is
part of the "word itself"--you can't really
separate them). This
numbered letter thing is known as
gematria.
Anyway.
All that was just to build up to pointing out, for anyone who didn't know, that
in the Torah (the original
Old Testament of the
Bible), the word that is the
name of the serpent in Genesis has the
same numerical value as the word
Messiah, the name for the
coming saviour. That number is 358.
This
makes a lot of sense if you've read
Genesis a couple times, especially if you've read it in
Greek or Hebrew. You think...well, the
serpent got us to
eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and this
pissed God off, because once we ate that
apple-ish thing, the only thing
separating us from godhood was the fact that we weren't immortal--that is, we hadn't eaten from
The Tree of Life. So we get
banished from the Garden, yadda yadda, and in a few
millennia along comes
Jesus--with the same
purpose hiding behind
his name as was hiding behind the serpent's--and he
promises everybody
eternal life. Hmm...
coincidence?
And then, if
you're really crazy, along comes Nietzsche and says things like
"There is no god but man". DaMn, My HeAd HuRtS aGaIn...