A new book is availabe. A short summary:
Birth and Being a Twin as a Key to Life
Jacob’s Puzzle of Life is far more than a new interpretation of the biblical story of Jacob. In a "puzzle of thousand and one pieces" the book presents an original interpretive framework that sheds new light not only on the familiar story of the twin brothers Esau and Jacob but also on life’s most fundamental questions.
The author, an equine veterinary specialist, consistently transcends the boundaries of individual disciplines. Drawing on the Book of Genesis, he interweaves his own experiences as a twin, father, and veterinarian with biblical exegesis, the cultural history of the ancient Near East, biological insights into pregnancy and birth, as well as philosophical and scientific concepts. His pen name, Zweistein (“Twinstein”), is not only a playful allusion to Albert Einstein but also points to the central thread running through the book: “two are always born.” Has a twin taken the liberty of generalizing his personal life experience and turning it into a universal theory?
JACOB’S PUZZLE OF LIFE – TWO ARE ALWAYS BORN
A surprising interpretation of the Bible from the perspective of a twin
The Bible is one of humanity’s most influential books and the foundation of humanism and human rights. Yet it is still politically misused to justify violence, as seen in the current war in Iran. Countless interpretations of this “Book of Books” exist. For fundamentalists, it is the infallible “Word of God”; for modern, enlightened thinkers like Albert Einstein, merely “a collection of venerable but rather primitive legends.”
Under the pseudonym Jakob Friedrich Zweistein, the author presents a new approach that seeks to uncover meaning or “blessing” in these seemingly primitive stories. His inspiration is Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling match at the river Jabbok — a mysterious encounter with a man, angel, or God — after which Jacob receives a new name: Israel, “the one who wrestles with God.”
THE JACOB PUZZLE
“The shattered mirror lies broken into countless visible and hidden fragments scattered across the world. Where people still read with their hearts, they can piece them together; where they cannot, the night interferes.”
This poetic “puzzle manual” combines lines from Gertrud von Le Fort’s novel The Pope from the Ghetto with the famous sentence from The Little Prince: “One sees clearly only with the heart.”
Using the number two and the phenomenon of birth, Zweistein constructs a biblical worldview that creates not just an image but a mirror image — pointing toward identity, relationship, and transcendence, echoing the creation of humans as the image or reflection of God in Genesis.
His hermeneutics rely on a “mirror method”: Mysteries in the biblical text are illuminated by reflecting them through familiar experiences from our own lives. These personal images serve as reflections of a higher reality. In fact, classical Arab poetry uses a similar approach by creating an overlapping picture of poet and his horse. The goal of Zweistein is to grasp the core meaning without dissecting the text to death. The universal “image” of human birth becomes the central interpretive key.
Birth as the Principle of Life
Birth is the one event that unites all humans, regardless of origin, status, or destiny. It is the foundational event of identity: it makes us human, children, and later possibly parents.
Birth unites opposites: it is both beginning and end. It is an extreme experience for both mother and child — a radical interdependence and yet a solitary struggle. The child pushes through the narrow birth canal, driven by the mother’s contractions, toward separation — a meaningful separation that leads to reunion on the mother’s chest. Additionally, the birth of the healthy child is a metaphor of life. In opposite to the birth of the afterbirth as a metaphor of death.
Birth is the first “escape room challenge” of every human being, one we all share, yet cannot remember.
Two Are Always Born
This universal understanding of birth becomes a “scientific” lens for interpreting the Bible and its contradictions. Beyond the five principles of birth, the author identifies five perspectives of the three people involved in birth (including the father):
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The unborn child
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The expectant parents
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The mother during birth
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The child during birth
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The twin perspective — the author’s unique contribution
These perspectives are sufficient to interpret the Bible’s core messages and contradictions.
The principle “two are always born” applies literally (child + afterbirth) and symbolically (child + parents). It also appears in Genesis: heaven and earth, darkness and light, evening and morning, land and sea, sun and moon, animals of water and sky, land animals and humans, man and woman. Science confirms this dual structure: matter and antimatter, wave and particle, DNA’s double helix, paired organs, binary code.
The final pair is the most controversial: God and human — “God created humans in His image.”
Heavenly and Earthly Realities
The Bible begins with a duality: heaven and earth. Jesus affirms this distinction in his conversation with Nicodemus about the necessity of being born from above.
In Christian understanding, Jesus is the Son of God, born as a human — our heavenly brother, even our heavenly twin. The Jacob narrative offers an analogy: the unequal twins Esau and Jacob. Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of lentils and later loses the blessing as well. But the true meaning of “firstborn” in the Bible is not privilege but responsibility: to be the one who clears the way for the younger sibling.
Esau’s unusual birth — hairy like an animal, with Jacob grasping his heel — becomes a symbolic model. Esau, the firstborn who opens the way, mirrors the role of Christ as “firstborn of all creation” and “firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:15+18). Esau becomes an archetype of Christ — an unexpected interpretation.
Conclusion
The “primitive legends” of the Bible reveal themselves, through Zweistein’s birth and twin perspective, as vivid metaphors capable of explaining life’s contradictions and mysteries. His theological‑philosophical debut offers a surprisingly simple yet convincing and universally understandable view of life, humanity, God, and Jesus Christ.