Theology:Spaces Hypothesis

This is a theological conjecture put forward by Victor Porton 9 Oct 2014:

We probably have no right to ignore spaces in Hebrew Bible, as apparently Moses and co wrote Hebrew Bible with explicit spaces. So spaces in Hebrew Bible are a part of the word of God. (Remark: In contrast to this New Testament was written without spaces.)

But there are many places in Bible which just enumerate proper names. It seems not feasible that God has written in His word fragments with so little meanings for modern readers of Bible. This tempts to read such fragments of Bible without space to add more meaning.

So a conjecture: While we cannot remove existing spaces, we can add new spaces in the middle of words (especially proper names). This probably will allow to see more meanings in "proper name enumeration" fragments of Bible.

An additional question: Can we consider prefixes like ל or ה as separate words?

We will denote variants of translation governed by this hypothesis by Spaces Hypothesis title. With "additional question" (that it considering like ל or ה as separate words) we will denote it by the title Spaces Hypothesis with prefixes.

Logical rationale for spaces hypothesis

Logically the following options may exist:

1. never add nor remove any spaces in Tanakh text
2. add but not remove spaces in Tanakh text
3. remove but not add spaces in Tanakh text
4. both add and remove spaces in Tanakh text

The variant 1 is expected to be wrong because some passages in Tanakh appear to boring when reading with standard spaces.

The variant 3 seems wrong, because it leads mainly to long nonsensical words.

The variant 4 is just ignoring spaces. But the scrolls claimed to be identical with original writings of Moses consist spaces, and total ignoring spaces would be against word of God.

So only the variant 2 remains.

Current research status

Victor Porton started a research on Spaces Hypothesis. Preliminary result is that Spaces Hypothesis does not work, or at least Victor Porton was unable to manage to find this deeper meaning of Tanakh. Victor Porton tried to apply Spaces Hypothesis to Genesis 1:1-5:2. As it failed (and took too much time for the research), Victor decided now to try to apply Spaces Hypothesis only to proper names.