The worldview of a text, mapped from its words up
Every sentence carries a world. N88 breaks the Hebrew Bible down word by word into the metaphors it is built from, and follows each one down to the basic ideas it rests on: space, order, the body, force, light.
Explore Genesis 1–3How the map is built
Each word is a chain of senses. Reshit, “beginning,” runs from rosh, the head, to the top, to what comes first, to the beginning of a span of time. Each step names what licenses it, so every chain reaches the ground.
- WORLDVIEWMetaphors the text keeps reusing across words, phrases and chapters, with their reach counted from the text.
- PHRASESMappings that only a phrase makes, such as “the heavens and the earth” for everything.
- SENSESEach root’s chain, from its bodily sense to the sense the text uses.
- PRIMITIVESThe ground: 29 basic ideas, each listing what it requires. Space is the only bedrock.
Genesis 1–3 so far
80 verses, 226 roots with chains, and 44 phrase-level mappings. These are the worldview metaphors they carry, ranked by how many chapters each reaches.
| Metaphor | Chapters | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| CREATION IS SEPARATION Order is made by dividing: light from dark, waters from waters, kinds from kinds, the holy day from the others, the garden from the world. | 1, 2, 3 | 33 |
| HUMANS AND LIVING THINGS ARE EARTH Life comes out of the ground and goes back into it: the earth brings forth, the human is formed of its dust, the ground is cursed with him, and he returns to it. | 1, 2, 3 | 30 |
| WORDS SET THINGS IN PLACE Speaking orders the world: God calls things into being and names them; the human names; blessing and cursing are words that act; a command is a boundary. | 1, 2, 3 | 30 |
| TIME IS SPACE Time is built out of space and order: a beginning is a head, the past is in front, a time is a step, 'until' is 'as far as', and days are counted cycles of light and dark. | 1, 2, 3 | 20 |
| KNOWING AND JUDGING ARE SEEING God judges by looking; knowing is having the eyes opened; desire starts with what is pleasing to the eye; shame is being seen. | 1, 2, 3 | 19 |
| A WHOLE IS NAMED BY ITS POLES Totality is said by its extremes: the heavens and the earth, evening and morning, male and female, good and bad. | 1, 2, 3 | 12 |
| LIFE IS MOTION ALONG A PATH Living is going: rivers go out, the human walks with God, the way to the tree of life is a road, and death is a return along the path one came by. | 1, 2, 3 | 11 |
| A LINEAGE IS A PLANT Descent is growth: seed is offspring, kinds reproduce their kind, the world has 'generations', and blessing is being fruitful. | 1, 2, 3 | 10 |
| THE HOLY IS A BOUNDED PLACE God's presence has a place with an edge, entered from the east and guarded, as the tabernacle later is; and a bounded time, the seventh day. | 2, 3 | 19 |
| MORAL THINGS ARE PHYSICAL Moral states and acts have physical shape: guilt hides, shame is nakedness, a prohibition is a fence, a curse lowers, an act changes the ground, a way of life is a road (H10). | 2, 3 | 16 |
| CONTROL IS UP Rank, rule and defeat are height: lights rule from above, humans rule over creatures, the cursed are brought to the dust, and the head is struck from above. | 1, 3 | 8 |
| LIFE IS BREATH To be alive is to have breath: God's wind over the waters, the breath blown into the nostrils, the living throat. | 1, 2 | 7 |
| A WHOLE IS MADE BY JOINING The human alone is a part; the woman is built from his side; they cling and become one flesh; kin are bone and flesh. | 1, 2 | 7 |
A working draft. The sense chains are recalled from knowledge of Hebrew and not yet checked against a lexicon; debated chains list their alternative readings. The worldview metaphors are proposals, and their reach is counted from the text. Hebrew text: the Westminster Leningrad Codex with morphology from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (CC BY 4.0).