When I first started work as an auditor back in 1991, one of the areas of work that we as first-year assistants were assigned to carry out was what was then known as Section J, which was the fixed assets of the company we were auditing.
The J lead schedule (or summary page) looks similiar to what you see on the right.
The rows would show the various types of fixed assets (eg. furniture, motor vehicles) while the columns would show their movement during the year (eg. amount brought down from last year, additions and disposals during the year).
During that era, we did not use electronic workpapers yet, which means to say that the J lead schedule was an A3-sized landscape piece of paper, and every single figure had to be manually written onto it.
To ensure that the figures were accurately transcribed, we had to cast (add downwards) and cross-cast (add across) using a calculator. If we arrived at the same grand total, this would give us a reasonable assurance that the individual figures were also accurate.
Of course now with Microsoft Excel, this task is much more simplified, and the casting and cross-casting formulae can be incorporated into the spreadsheet.
Which brings me back to today's subject matter.
The original Scriptures (what we now call the Old Testament) were written in the Hebrew language. In those days, there was no photocopying machine. So if one wanted to make a copy of a particular manuscript, he had to do so page by page, letter by letter.
Each letter of the Hebrew language has a number associated with it. For example, the first letter "aleph" equals one, the second letter "beth" equals two, and so on.
Hence, each and every row and column on a particular page of a manuscript could have a subtotal, similar to the fixed asset lead schedule mentioned above.
After a scribe had painstaking copied a particular page of a manuscript, he will cast and cross-cast to check if he arrived at the sub-totals as indicated on the page he copied from. If any of the sub-totals were wrong, it would mean that he made a mistake somewhere, and would have to throw that away and start all over again (correction fluid was not available in those days).
Those of you out there in my era would be familiar with cassette tapes. Cassette tapes are "analog", hence a recording made of a song, for example, would not retain the quality and clarity of the original. Nowadays, we are in the digital age of CDs and DVDs. These are considered "digital", so copies made retain the quality and fidelity of the original.
God, in His wisdom, had created Hebrew to be a "digital" language, so that the copies that were handwritten by those scribes retained the precision and accuracy of the very first original that was written by Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, etc.
The above revelation was obtained from a sermon by Dr. Larry Ollison entitled "The Hebrew Language". The following is an extract from that sermon where he talks specifically about the digital characteristics of Hebrew.
In closing, let me share with you another very interesting fact. When Moses was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write the Pentateuch, he included in the very first verse of the first chapter of Genesis the Hebrew characters "aleph" and "tav" (which are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet). Because of the digital nature of the language (where sub-totals had to tally downwards and across to ensure precision and accuracy), the scribes could not drop these two characters from the copies that they handwrote, even though these 2 letters appeared superfluous to them.
Tomorrow, I will blog about the significance of those 2 characters, so stay tuned :-)
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