April 15 2024 marks the one year anniversary of the official kickoff of this project.

On April 15 last year, we launched the Bara.Foundation website. Last May we completed our initial database import. This brought in the entire Hebrew scriptures imported primarily from the Masoretic texts. Since the Masoretic data includes diacritics, there was a lot of preparatory work required to make the data more useable.

With the data cleaned up, we spent the summer coding some customized software tools to aid in data analysis, and by late October we had enough words analyzed in a preliminary batch to allow us launch the first beta version of the online Interactive Bible and Dictionary.

The focus then shifted to data analysis in a big way, but our process still relies on manual inspection and real human intelligence to compare contextual and linguistic clues for every single ancient Hebrew word. We are not taking any else’s word on it. That would defeat the whole purpose of this project – a fresh look at the Hebrew text, down to the word.

Since October, we have analyzed close to five hundred words. That’s approximately six percent of the lexicon of over 8000 words. If we can continue at the pace of around 100 words per month, it will take almost seven years to complete this monumental task.

Of those five hundred words, close to two hundred were interesting enough to warrant having their own dictionary entry. Eventually, the goal is that all words will be included, but we are prioritizing based on several factors to ensure that more “important” words are done first.

Along the way, we refined our analytical processes and systems a few times, eventually coming up with a transliterative alphabet that performs a linear algebraic mapping from Hebrew to Latin characters and results in a fully mapped set of standardized spellings with relatively intuitive pronunciation rules – a feat never before accomplished with the Hebrew alphabet. This is a critical key to consistent translation. This new tool started paying off immediately, as it allowed us to easily identify words that have traditionally been unjustifiably misconstrued as separate meanings, even though their spellings are identical. Further contextual analysis then can reveal whether or not the “two separate words” are actually the same word or not.

While we were doing all this, we also managed to start writing what will be our first print publication, tentatively titled “the BARA BIBLE - Parallel Hebrew & English Bible with Commentary - Volume 1: Origins”, and are currently around 32 pages in. Our (possibly overambitious) goal is to get this first volume completed by the end of the year, for publication in 2025.

Along the way, we also had a bit of an identity crisis, caused by new information revealed by our transliterative alphabet. It’s sort of a funny story. One of the early drivers of this project was that we had become aware of a handful of words that highly esteemed biblical scholars were saying did not mean what we all thought they mean. We were inspired by the work of Mauro Biglino, Paul Wallis, and Ellen van Wolde, among others. It was van Wolde who had pointed out that one very important word in particular had been mistranslated and misunderstood. It was a word that would have profound impact upon Judeo-Christian doctrine for it was the foundation of the entire concept of Creationism. That word was “bara”. This was the reason that we named the foundation and the project the way we did. Bara actually means “division”, and we saw this moment of realization as a bit of a dividing point in history (or at least Our history).

The problem was that according to our new transliterative alphabet, the word ‘bara’ does not exist! Instead, the Hebrew ברא maps to ‘bera’. We bought the wrong domain name! So, will we change our name? Well, we are still contemplating that, but it bears noting that ‘bara’ isn’t wrong. It just isn’t the new standard. That doesn’t necessarily mean we need to throw it away. And maybe that is really what this project is truly about. We can learn to see things differently, without necessitating the criminalization of the old perspective.