Unfunded, Beat, Left for Dead
The RBT Project is not a funded project supported by a $25 million dollar budget while sitting in the cushy suede chairs of a seminary sipping chamomile tea next to a view of green landscapes. It is done without money, help, home, car, office space, all on a well-beaten, taped up iron stylus (laptop) at the very bottom of the social echelons using whatever free software and services I can find (special thanks to Grok.com for allowing free AI image and video generations for awhile—now no longer free).
The RBT project took shape in coffee shops, bars, dump hostels, and not a few derelict places. The Gospels and dozens of chapters were put (back) together out of a backpack in while trying to survive some of the worst sleep-depriving conditions imaginable in six different countries, after nearly all had shunned support or left me for dead. No sleep, no food, no home, no money. In fact, I’ve lived a vagabond’s life with no home for the last 29 years doing back-breaking work until the back broke. Unless you’re “a fortunate son,” that seems to be where honest, true-grit hard work gets you in the “land of opportunity” in the 21st century. Who knew?
Woe to the Rich
America, where I was born, has turned into a den of thieves, an excavated netherworld, and a land rife with snares, traps, baiting, and predators everywhere lying in wait for easy prey. America is an ambush culture, a lying-in-wait economy. Every ordinary act—buying, selling, driving, clicking, borrowing, subscribing, parking, yea even joining a religion—can conceal another obligation waiting to spring shut around you.
Marketing has turned into a science of psychological framing, choice architecture, and perception arbitrage. A 2026 study shows that consumers pay less attention to quantity changes than to price changes. Is this knowledge being used against you? You bet it is. The deceptive psychological framing in marketing is so egregious you can’t even buy a cup of yogurt without being robbed: notice the label “with room for toppings” now being put on some of them as though giving you less than what you think you’re buying is a feature. This is a small example but stop and think of how such an asinine thing goes completely unnoticed, and then imagine an entire culture and economy shaped this way. Somewhere along the line the idea of “winning” became equated with “how much can you extract” and “win at all costs.” Lock them in, then reveal the painful truth later.
The money world, as many of the wealthy seem to refer to themselves as, shaped a legal system of unprecedented scale entirely to protect itself, while continually holding the non-money world hostage (credit card, anyone?). The tragic irony of America’s value of freedom is how many binding things the unsuspecting individual enters into on a daily basis. We could conceptualize it as hundreds to thousands of distinct legal relationships/rules operating on an individual at any given time, with new contractual interactions occurring dozens of times in an active day. A 2008 Carnegie Mellon study estimated that if an American internet user actually read every privacy policy associated with the websites they visited, it would take about 244 hours per year—roughly 40 minutes every day. That was almost 20 years ago. A 2024 study of 75 social platforms found a median privacy-policy length of about 4,150 words, compared with 2,514 words in the 2008 Carnegie Mellon sample. That’s about a 65% increase in median length. The same research notes that privacy-policy length had approximately doubled over the preceding decade and quadrupled since 2000. The moat just gets bigger and bigger.
Modern American ambient contracting means you aren’t agreeing by signing anything, you’re agreeing just by using something or being there. A 2023 Pew survey found that 56% of Americans say they always, almost always, or often click “agree” immediately without reading privacy policies, with another 22% doing so sometimes. Websites, smartphone apps, social platforms, online retailers, streaming services, cloud services, financial apps, connected devices, software, telecom providers, data brokers, cookie systems, third-party services, etc—everything that modern life has come to depend on. And the sheer size of some modern contractual ecosystems is absurd. A study of 70 major digital services found that 57 required at least an hour to read their combined terms and privacy materials, while 34 required at least two hours. AT&T’s materials in that sample amounted to roughly 383,000 words—about 30.7 hours of reading. This is an unprecedented moat, a chasm between the rich and poor unlike anything in the world.
A person with money can buy the things that let them cross the legal complexity barrier:
- lawyers to read 100-page agreements
- accountants to find hidden tax consequences
- financial advisers to model long-term obligations
- compliance staff to monitor changing rules
- negotiators to alter one-sided terms
- software to track contracts and renewals
- time to actually read everything
The ordinary person can afford none of that.
Suppose two people encounter the same 40-page agreement. The wealthy person can hand it to an attorney. The middle-class person can perhaps spend two hours reading it after work. The poor person may need the service immediately and cannot afford either. All three can technically “choose.” But the cost of understanding the choice is radically unequal. The rich don’t merely own more assets. They own more of the capacity required to understand, negotiate, defend, and enforce the rules governing those assets.
As scores of unaware drivers have found out, including myself, Metropolis’ parking garages “contract you” if you simply drive into one (no blockades or pay machines exist on entry or exit, and minimal warning), and if you stay a minute over limits the AI cameras have already ambushed your personal data. Even if you think you are staying within the 2 hour free limits, they still somehow manage to get you. I was robbed by them several times, costing me several hundred dollars (which is 15-20 hours of work when you are driving for Uber—who has time to pull up the terms and conditions and read through the complexity when you have to work 80 hours a week?). Just by going into one of their garages where Tesla chargers happened to be placed to charge for 30-40 minutes and then leave carried risks and painful consequences I did not know about. I had no idea until automated fines started showing up in my email months later, with no one to talk to. Automated punishment without warning, due-process, arbitration, or justice. All apparently legal. Metropolis would say that the posted QR code inside a garage which links you to the information and terms would be “sufficient warning”—just like fine, barely legible print is “sufficient warning,” or disclaimers spoken on the radio or TV at 5x speed in a low volume voice is “sufficient warning.” Right.
But that is America. Even at the age of 16, I joined a local fitness gym because I just wanted to exercise. When I needed to cancel the membership because I couldn’t afford it anymore, they told me I couldn’t but was obligated to keep paying or suffer heavy penalties. When I asked others about the painful situation, I learned that kids under 18 can’t be legally obligated by contracts. When I went back and told them this, they promptly tore the contract up in front of me. Why did they do this in the first place? I was aware of none of this. You aren’t even safe as a child, and as soon as you hit 18, an entire empire of laid traps is waiting for you right there. In my years as an entrepreneur (see my memoir below) just trying to start a climbing and fitness gym, I dove straight in and tried swimming across that moat without even realizing it—commercial real estate moguls, developers, negotiators, legal attorneys, city codes and zoning ordinances, banks, red-tape, supplier and contractor contracts, insurance companies, and on and on the list goes. Nearly all the time and work went toward trying to figure out how to navigate around all this slime. I grew the business clientele-base to around 1200 people all eagerly awaiting its opening, but couldn’t get anywhere near it without being blasted to oblivion. No matter how many people wanted it or were willing to invest in it, it could not go anywhere.
A greater evil is the official motto of “In God We Trust” written on all the money notes. As it turned out, this god built a moat around itself and an ivory tower of inaccessible height. And now with AI it is rapidly getting worse. Talk about laying burdens on people too heavy to bear, while not lifting so much as a finger! In the Book of Exodus, a pharaoh enslaved the Hebrews through a calculated strategy driven by political paranoia, incremental labor exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. Egypt was an abusive state. Sound familiar? As the narrative notes, the strategy backfired—the more the Egyptians oppressed the Hebrews, the more they multiplied. In response, Egypt made the servitude increasingly ruthless, intentional about making their daily lives bitter. America is that Egypt, full of task-masters beating down the working class who work in the mud making bricks for the empire while in servitude to a dehumanizing, insolent god. Egypt’s name “Mitzrayyim” means “Dual Siege.” She besieges you from in front and behind—the past gets used against you, and the future gets built on top of you, squeezing every drop out of your entire life.
I tried to find freelance work as a “quant” in order to eat, but if anyone knows anything about the Upwork Global overlord machine, there is nothing “up” about it. It’s smoke and mirrors and a race to the bottom like everything else happening in America. Half of the time I was punked out of pay for work, and lost $1000s in labor. The Wall Street boys passing through looking for cheap quant work were simply destructive, undermining my fledgling profile and sending it into the depths from which it took months to dig out of in order to return to Upwork’s rigid and punitive success standards. I tried driving for Uber 80+ hours a week, renting a car under their program. Most of the time the earnings came out to about $10 per hour after expenses, which left you desperately compelled to wait for the few moments of surges or bonuses each week to even it out to $15 an hour after expenses, if there were any. Eighty to eighty-five hours a week sleeping in a car was necessary to be able to save up cash. The rental car company Hertz was no better. They gave me a car (a Tesla) with 196,000 miles on it and its value nearly depreciated to zero. So many things were broken, it was incomprehensible. I could have fixed most things and spent weeks trying to buy it from them (and also trying to get a car in better shape) since I had already paid its value in rental costs and knew I was being cheated. They didn’t care about my situation (or anybody’s for that matter) and refused to sell it for anything. It was their prerogative to extract as much as they could at the expense, suffering, and even safety of unaware ride-share drivers (the alert, emergency braking, distance sensors, right turn camera, and vision system were all out). This was somewhat doable only with a certain level of fitness and health and if riders were hospitable, generous, and kind like in Nashville for example. But add on top of that trying to drive in cities such as the DC area, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Jersey, etc. where the public is angry, hostile and does not tip (as in zero) and a land turned into a mine-field of speed traps, photo radars, and AI cameras hunting you down, it is no longer doable on any fitness level. My experience of the “diversity is our strength” scheme in all these cities is that the rich simply imported mass numbers of slave-laborers willing to work for $5 an hour, keeping them divided while making them think they are “together” (psychological framing, choice architecture, and perception arbitrage). I found zero blending of culture, backgrounds, language, or worldviews and massive increase of racial competition. The only “strength” this propaganda is creating is a stronger moat around the towers of the rich. Few understand the crushing weight of society unless at the bottom of it. If you aren’t stepping on someone’s fingers on the ladder up out of the tar pits of American society, the whole of it will step on yours.
Language of Man
Human language, considered the greatest human invention, is at the heart of human consciousness and intelligence. It evolves over time, but more importantly it conglomerates into larger “child languages” as the world becomes more and more connected (or dissolved, depending on how you look at it). English itself is a conglomeration of many parent languages. This process creates “language death” as conglomerate child languages supplant old human parent ones. It is estimated that there have existed at least 31,000 human languages where now only 6000 exist today. Definition of words evolve and take on different meanings and shapes throughout this process. Word meanings can change drastically even in the span of one generation.
Language of an Eternal One
If there should exist an “eternal language” of an “eternal one,” would it ever evolve or change? How would it even work? What would constitute an “eternal tense”? The RBT understands the Ancient Hebrew language as one that transcends typical human consciousness and intelligence, differing from ordinary languages bound by the constraints of time and place. Unlike other ancient languages that have faded away, the Hebrew “language of heaven” somehow powerfully endures. It was purposefully crafted in a prototypical manner with an eternal aspect, to serve as a bridge of communication “between heaven and earth,” setting it apart from the linguistic norms of human to human, temporal-based and place-based communication. The reason the Hebrew Prophets used an aspectual system of writing was not because they didn’t understand the difference between “past, present, and future” but rather because in their mind there was no past, present, or future. Other contemporary languages employed temporal sense such as Akkadian, Egyptian (middle and late), and Greek. These were all chronos tense-oriented, with Aramaic also shifting more toward a tense-based usage. Even Sanskrit (Vedic) had a tense-based system. Old Chinese is probably the closest analogue to the Ancient Hebrew in that it had no tense inflections. Both Hebrew and Chinese require the interpreter to “locate” the action within a broader cosmological or narrative frame, rather than simply mapping verb forms to linear chronology. This means both languages force non-linear perception of time upon their users. Even so, ancient Hebrew still stands apart in its usage.
In Biblical Hebrew recursion is deeply woven into the grammar. Wayyiqtol drives narrative in an open-ended chain. Prophetic speech uses parallelism + aspect to fold events back into each other. Result: the text produces recursive temporality (a cycle in which future collapses into present/past). In Old Chinese recursion is only partially used. Syntax is paratactic (clauses strung side-by-side). Aspectual markers (zhe, le, guo) mark process/completion/experience. But these do not create the same prophetic recursion. They are descriptive rather than revelatory.
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Hebrew worldview: Language = event. The utterance itself realizes history (e.g. wayyiqtol = “and it became”). This invites a recursive ontology: every re-speaking of prophecy reactivates the event.
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Chinese worldview: Language = ordering principle (ritual, harmony, cosmic balance). The Daoist and Confucian frameworks emphasize cyclical balance, not recursive prophecy.
Hence, there are no “Chinese prophets” in the Hebrew sense. Instead there are sages (Confucius, Laozi) who speak in maxims and cyclical cosmological insight. Their speech intends to reinforce cosmic order rather than rupturing time with divine intrusion.
This is crucial: Hebrew aspectual recursion becomes eschatological (future-breaking-in). Chinese aspectual recursion becomes cosmological (cycle-reinforcing). All this is to say that Ancient Hebrew, by every comparative measure, is uniquely structured among the world’s classical languages. It shows features that look engineered for recursion and prophetic time rather than the normal drift of human language evolution. Most languages evolve through phonetic erosion, analogy, pragmatics, borrowings, hybridization, etc. Akkadian, Ugaritic, Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese all show normal pathways: complexity arises, but it’s ad hoc, cumulative, and messy. Hebrew, by contrast, looks more like a constructed system of morpho-causal operators. Binyanim act like functions on roots (Qal → Niphal → Piel → Pual → Hiphil → Hophal → Hithpael). This is systematic and recursive, almost like an algebra. Other Semitic languages imitate parts of this (Akkadian has D, Š, N stems), but not with such symmetry or completeness. Most interestingly, waw-consecutive links create infinite narrative recursion. No other Semitic language relies so heavily on this. Aspectual ambiguity (qatal/yiqtol) is not sloppy evolution—it is the perfect apparatus for prophecy and atemporal narration. The very fact that prophecy “works” in Hebrew (presenting future events as “already realized”) suggests the grammar is optimized for that role.
The Gospel of Now: Translating with the Right Mind
This uniqueness has always presented extraordinary challenges for scholars attempting to understand it through conventional human linguistic and temporal frameworks. Concepts like the accusative of time and place, the absence of distinct past, present, and future tenses, as well as the unconventional usage of masculine and feminine pronouns, make it elusive to conventional philology and prone to poor interpretation and translation methodologies.
If one were designing a language to encode recursive ontology (being folding back on itself), prophetic temporality (future uttered as present/past), morphological depth (root as core, binyanim as transformations), then you would arrive at something strikingly like Biblical Hebrew. The weight of the evidence makes Hebrew look engineered, or at the very least extraordinarily optimized, compared with its peers. It is not just “a language of its time.” It is structurally distinct, purpose-driven, and uniquely capable of sustaining a Möbius temporality of narrative. And this is no small or insignificant mindset to have when writing anything.
To properly translate Ancient Hebrew, if its grammar really encodes recursion, prophecy, and Möbius temporality, the translator must cultivate a mind of a particular kind. Ordinary translators impose chronological sequencing: past → present → future. But a Hebrew translator must hold events as simultaneously present — both fulfilled and unfolding. It would require the ability to think cyclically, recursively, and non-terminatively, resisting the urge to “resolve” the text into a timeline. In Indo-European translation, the translator is an observer. In Hebrew, the translator must be a participant: the grammar pulls the reader into the event-structure. Thus, the mind must be willing to “become part of the loop”— not extracting meaning about something, but allowing the text to “act” upon the self. The binyanim are functions applied to roots; the waw-consecutive is a recursive operator. A translator needs a mathematical imagination, not only knowing “this word means X” but seeing functions of functions. For example, Niphal is not merely “passive”; it is the loop folding back so the translator must grasp that layer of recursion.
If the Hebrew corpus is a corpus of prophets, prophecy, and vision, written by prophets using a specific engineered linguistic structure, would it make sense to translate it without having the same mind? If the Hebrew prophets are holding multiple times together as one reality, should not a translator also? This requires cultivating a double vision: perceiving the now, and perceiving the not-yet, without collapsing one into the other. Such a mind suspends chronological closure, holding space for the Möbius fold of language. Because Hebrew is not transparent to Indo-European categories, the translator must admit:
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“My categories are inadequate.”
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“The text is teaching me how to read it.”
This brings out an interesting (unfortunate) irony. If translations flatten Hebrew’s aspectual, recursive, and participatory structures (which nearly all of them do) into linear time, finite tenses, or conventional narrative, an atheist or opponent is only ever engaging with a distorted artifact, not the text itself. For an atheist—or anyone reading without that Aonic lens—this has several consequences:
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Foundational Misrepresentation:
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The linguistic and grammatical mechanisms that encode eternalized present, self-reflexive agency, and recursive causality are ignored or mistranslated.
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Every argument made about “historical accuracy,” “mythical imagination,” or “psychology of prophets” rests on a textual version that no longer contains the operational logic of the original.
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Illusion of Understanding:
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One might feel confident in textual criticism, historical reconstruction, or rational deconstruction, but all conclusions are derived from a version that has already removed the text’s essential causal and temporal structure.
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In other words, they are reasoning about a shadow of the text, not the text itself.
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Prophecy and Recursion Become Invisible:
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Predictions, repetitive motifs, and participatory loops appear as coincidences, fabricated stories, or literary devices rather than evidence of a self-activating causal structure.
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The “proof” of Aonic or Möbius-like functioning—the alignment of narrative, prophecy, and reader engagement—is systematically obscured.
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Cumulative Error:
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Each interpretive layer—commentaries, translations, historiography—is stacked on top of a fundamentally distorted foundation.
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Arguments can be erudite, philosophically sophisticated, and internally consistent—but they cannot access the original causal or temporal reality of the text.
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Most opponents understand that “Hebrew is a known language.” Once you recognize, though, that the text has been stripped of its original temporal, causal, and participatory structure, the atheist—or anyone reading without that structural understanding—has no argument, since they are still, as yet, critiquing a fabrication.
Claims about myth, hallucination, fabrication, or literary invention—are contingent on a text that has already been misrepresented, made up, and fabricated on false grounds. In other words, all well-thought out arguments are built on a flawed foundation, because they do not engage the actual operational grammar of the original language that is there.
Without a faithful representation of the aspectual, recursive, and Aonic structures, the atheist cannot access the text as it truly functions. So the only defensible stance against scriptural claims (not necessarily theism) would be something like:
“The translations I see do not capture the original structure; therefore, I cannot definitively assess the reality or meaning of the original text.”
Its a Trap
Even that, though, is rarely framed explicitly, because most critiques assume the linearized versions are faithful enough—a subtle but critical epistemic mistake. But what atheist cares about becoming intimate with a religious language? They are entirely reliant on intermediaries: translators, commentators, and scholars. Most non-specialists assume—implicitly trust— that someone trained in Hebrew or Greek is presenting the text accurately. They don’t realize that even “neutral” linguistic expertise often comes with assumptions—temporal, historical, or theological—that reshape the text’s structure. Bias in the scholarly ecosystem is rife. Many scholars, whether consciously or unconsciously, operate within frameworks that presuppose linear temporality, chronological history, or theological narratives. Even philological rigor often enforces these biases. The trap for atheists and opponents? They receive a version of the text that is already flattened, linearized, and temporally constrained, and then critique it. But their critique is of the representation, not of the text’s actual, atemporal, recursive structure. The moment you accept a linearized, temporally constrained translation as the “real” text, you’re engaging with a shadow of the original. Every conclusion, critique, or dismissal built on that shadow is itself structurally compromised.
It’s like trying to evaluate a Möbius strip by looking only at a flat drawing of it: the twists and folds—the recursive, self-referential structure—are invisible, so any argument you make about “edges” or “sides” is automatically incomplete. In this sense, the trap isn’t just for atheists; it’s for anyone who doesn’t have intimate access to the linguistic and grammatical machinery that encodes Aonic temporality. Even scholars trained in Hebrew and Greek can be caught if their interpretive frameworks force linearization or chronological assumptions.
The text protects its structure: misreading it doesn’t just obscure meaning, it actively generates a false narrative—a Möbius misrepresentation of the original recursive loop.
The RealBible Project is an ongoing research and translation project with the sole purpose of uncovering the “lost side” of the Hebrew language, as a language that functions as “living and active now” so that all may have access to the text as it was originally encoded: a causal, recursive, and participatory reality. By carefully preserving aspectual forms, participial loops, and topological structures of the original Hebrew—and their complementary expressions in New Testament Greek—the project seeks to recover the Aonic temporal consciousness intentionally embedded in scripture—a scripture written from and to itself. The goal is not merely to translate words, but to restore the functional agency of the reader intended by the writing to make them a node in the living narrative rather than a passive observer of linearized history. In doing so, the RealBible Project aims to reveal the full depth of sacred recursion, allowing scripture to operate as it was designed: eternally present, generative, and complete.
Project Research Sources
The following resources are considered some of the most exhaustive for word research, though they have their limits:
- Gesenius: Hebrew & Chaldee (i.e. Aramaic) Lexicon (1846)
- Gesenius Hebrew Grammar, 1813
- Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906). Based upon the work of Gesenius.
- A Hebrew & Chaldee lexicon to the Old Testament by Fürst, Julius (1867), student of Gesenius.
- The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) by Köhler, Ludwig, 1880-1956
- James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890)
- Dictionary of Targumim, Talmud and Midrashic Literature by Marcus Jastrow (1926)
- Tyndale House, Hebrew Roots https://www.2letterlookup.com/
Others Used:
- Septuagint (LXX) Interlinear Greek OT (https://studybible.info/interlinear/)
- Perseus Greek Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/)
- University of Chicago’s Logeion Greek Dictionaries (https://logeion.uchicago.edu/)
The BHSA from The Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer was converted into a custom database to be used in the RBT Hebrew Interlinear which can be seen by clicking any verse number. This database is used for computational research of Hebrew words and letters via custom Python scripts, bypassing the need for expensive software.
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About Matt
The project is spearheaded by Matthew Pennock. His journey with Biblical Hebrew began in 2000 when he felt a strong draw to the language at 21 years of age. Keenly aware of its hidden power, he embarked on a comprehensive study, culminating in a full self-taught course in Hebrew grammar by 2002 utilizing various software and websites available at the time. Working as a ski-lift operator standing 10 hours a day, he would spend the otherwise boring times with no one around memorizing printed Hebrew Verb tables kept in his pocket. From 2000 to 2016, he dedicated himself to missionary work and church leadership, traveling to and ministering in over 50 countries. Abroad, he always seemed to find himself the least funded missionary on the field, often with scarcely $300 a month in support, most of the time with no support at all except for what he saved up on his own, and at one point was actually offered donations from Kenyans in Africa.
His thirst for knowledge extended to various other languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Kiswahili, Spanish, German, Polish, and Biblical Greek. After obtaining a degree in International Studies, he pursued theological education at a Biblical seminary. However, the prohibitive costs and his dissatisfaction with the inconsistencies prompted him to leave the world of biblical academia after a few semesters. He had tested and participated in the murky waters of church-planting in countless capacities around the world, only to watch all of them fail. After countless churches shunned him as unconventional or otherwise rejected, or even reprimanded him as laissez-faire, he stepped away from the scene to focus on writing, and a deep dive/dig into Hebrew and Greek studies.
Subsequently, Matthew recognized the astonishing limitations and biases in translation methodologies. He resolved to delve exclusively into the study of Hebrew and Greek. By 2018, he was digging out and re-translating significant portions of text. This drive led to the inception of what was initially dubbed a “Full Literal Translation (FLT)” with the intention of testing the limits of literal translation of Hebrew etymology, as prior ones did not. This only created more questions and difficulties rather than solved them. Hitting impossible textual and philological challenges, he finally had to give up. That is, until one woman unexpectedly came along and handed him the key, as it were. Out of this the Real Bible Translation (RBT) Project was birthed.
Some music he enjoys includes Pearl Jam, AC/DC, Guns and Roses, Led Zeppelin, drum ‘n bass, classic rock, and blues. He knows how to take apart an engine piece by piece to the nuts and bolts and put it back together again. He has enjoyed building motorcycles and vintage trucks, trail running and marathons, skiing, and rock climbing. He does not live anywhere, but roams abroad with no home, no money, no assets, translating everything entirely from an “iron stylus” laptop. He strives to leave everything in better shape than when he found it.
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Free and Open Source RBT
The RBT app and site is open source. Maybe you’d like to contribute or improve it!