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SHIBBOLETH

Talk about the lecture of the fellowcraft degree and you are instantly reminded of the winding stairs consisting of three, five and seven steps. Those who have had the opportunity of performing the role of the Senior Deacon in the second section of the conferral of this degree will readily say it is one of the most beautiful teachings of the Craft. In it the three pillars consisting of Wisdom, Strength and Beauty are succinctly explained as are the five orders of Architecture comprising the Tuscan, the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian and the Composite. So are the seven liberal arts and sciences which, although no longer explained in detail, are actually grouped into the trivium which is composed of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic; and the quadrivium- that comprise the analytical fields of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.
Browsing back at the opening paragraphs before the winding stairs were recited, the candidate is told that our ancient brethren already knew that the world is round, that it revolves around the sun and that it also rotates in diurnal rotation upon its own axis. How amusing that the Roman Church only lifted the excommunication of Galileo in the middle of the 20th century for declaring that the world is round some four hundred years before!
But this article is not about the winding stairs nor of the sphericity of planet earth as this was already known to the ancient Egyptians from whom Julius Caesar borrowed and had decreed the use of the Julian Calendar which is now indelibly enshrined in our everyday life. He, after all, officially promulgated the world’s calendar as consisting of 365 days for three successive years and adding another day on the fourth by calling it a leap year.
Of course, the Julian Calendar was not precisely accurate! Exact calculations reveal that the earth takes a complete turn around the sun in exactly 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds and is therefore 11 minutes and 14 seconds short of the Julian calendar. For the time being however, this discrepancy will be shelved temporarily and the commentary set for a later date in favor of the topic that will be discussed below.
For the purpose of this article, there is another lesson in the lecture of the fellowcraft degree, the impact of the lecture on the winding stairs of which has apparently been relegated to mediocrity and oblivion. It is the unique role played by Jephthah, judge of Israel, and how the word “Shibboleth” was adopted as a password in gaining admission to every regular lodge of fellowcraft masons.
The Book of Judges of the Holy Bible tells us that Jephthah is the great, great grandson of Joseph (genealogy starts with Joseph, brother of Judah, and is followed by Mannaseh, Machir, Gilead and Jephthah) and the son of Gilead by a harlot. At the death of Gilead, Jephthah was driven away by his elder brothers to disinherit him from the estate that his deceased father left behind. Taking residence in the land of Tob, he was joined by other brigands and there prospered. After some time, the Ammonites (the descendants of Lot of Sodom and Gommorah) warred upon the sub-tribe of Mannaseh of the tribe of Joseph that include the Gileadites. The elders of Gilead therefore, convinced Jephthah to return and lead them in battle with the promise that he will be made chieftain should they win, which Jephthah accepted and did.
The other sub-tribe of Joseph named the Ephraimites (descendants of Ephraim, the younger brother of Mannaseh), however, incensed at not being called to fight and share in the rich spoils of the Ammonitish war, assembled its army and crossed the river Jordan to give Jephthah battle but were soundly defeated by the Gileadites under Jephthah’s able leadership.
But this is not the end of the story. Jephthah, aware that the Ephraimites will still attempt to cross the river Jordan by sending their own spies, stationed guards at the fords of the river with the specific instructions that should any stranger pass by that way, he should demand of him to pronounce the word “Shibboleth" which resulted in the death of so many Ephraimites, and here now lies the perplexing situation.
Our second-degree monitor said that the Ephraimites are of a different tribe and consequently could not pronounce the word aright, but biblical narration does not support this allegation. Mannaseh and Ephraim are the two sons of Joseph who became the vizier of Egypt and therefore belonged to the same tribe. Likewise, the lapse of only five generations (from Joseph to Jephthah- see Numbers, Chapter 36) could not possibly drastically change intonation of dialects and/or languages as development of phonetics usually takes aeons and therefore could not support this conclusion. Also, it is doubtful if four generations of Ephraimites can produce a sub-tribe consisting of forty thousand five hundred able-bodied men of twenty years and above as Chapter 1 of the Book of Numbers also show.
Which now favors the theory that the twelve tribes of Israel did not actually come from only the genealogy of the twelve children of Jacob but are in reality tribes that already existed when the children of Israel left Egypt. If it ever did, the genealogy must have involved more than five generations and that they were joined by other leaderless Israelites that automatically created a peculiar phonetic accent and intonation among the different tribes. Under this hypothesis, the descendants coming from the children of Jacob became the automatic leaders of these tribes because they were the Israelites who were able to gain positions of leadership during Joseph’s incumbency as vizier in Egypt and had retained this influence when they left Egypt for the promised land.
Let this writer now offer a hypothesis based on a local setting (with due apologies to our brother Kapampangans, of course!) .
Imagine the Israelites as Malays who migrated from Borneo to the Philippines in the early tenth century. The tribe of Joseph from which both the Ephraimites and the Mannasites (which include the Gileadites) belong were allotted to occupy Central Luzon and with the tribe of Ephraim settling in the Pampanga area while the Gileadites settled in the Bulacan area. The boundary that separated the two sub-tribes was the Apalit-Calumpit river. After the passage of time, the Kapampangans (nee Ephraimites), while still retaining most of the words in the vernacular, have lost the “h” in their pronunciation, thus the English word “house” is pronounced “ba’ay”, while the Gileadites (nee Bulakeños) have still retained theirs and thus pronounce it as “bahay.”
This was already the case when the Ammonitish war erupted and later, when the Ephraimites were soundly defeated by the Gileadites as narrated earlier, Jephthah ordered his guards that were stationed at the fords of the Calumpit-Apalit river, that should any stranger pass by that way, then he should demand of him to pronounce the word “bahay”. Which, of course, could not be pronounced correctly by the Kapampangans as reasonably the word will be pronounced with the letter “h” lost in the pronunciation. .
With due cognizance also to our Filipino and other brethren who have already settled in the land of the brave and the home of the free and therefore may no longer be familiar with local regional dialects and intonations, perhaps they can also coin a parallel analogy, a situation similar to what has already been described and which it is hoped can roughly be found somewhere at the opposite banks of the imaginary Dixie lines of the American river.
And so ends this short article for the day!!

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