beanpie

which vrsion are you referring to?

can't find it in the KING JAMES version or, the REVISED STANDARD version.

Toto

1 John 4:12

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.


John 1: 18

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only,[1] ,[2] who is at the Father's side, has made him known.

Footnotes

[1] Or the Only Begotten
[2] Some manuscripts but the only (or only begotten) Son

beanpie

Thank you for, the passages...

Sharon,




What about this?


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Wrestles With God
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
27 The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.
28 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, [5] because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
29 Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, [6] saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, [7] and he was limping because of his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



[Sorry, should have mentioned, this is Genesis, Chapter 32.]

posted by "ceb"


I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

beanpie

The Use of the Word 'Elohim", according to the Catholic Encyclopedia





The Use of the Word

The Hebrews had three common names of God, El, Elohim, and Eloah;
besides, they had the proper name Yahweh. Nestle is authority for the
statement that Yahweh occurs about six thousand times in the Old
Testament, while all the common names of God taken together do not
occur half as often. The name Elohim is found 2570 times; Eloah, 57
times [41 in Job; 4 in Pss.; 4 in Dan.; 2 in Hab.; 2 in Canticle of
Moses (Deut., xxxii); 1 in Prov., 1 in Is.; 1 in Par.; 1 in Neh. (II
Esd.)]; El, 226 times (Elim, 9 times). Lagrange (Etudes sur les
religions sémitiques, Paris, 1905, p. 71) infers from Gen., xlvi, 3
(the most mighty God of thy father), Ex., vi, 3 (by the name of God
Almighty), and from the fact that El replaces Yah in proper names,
the conclusion that El was at first a proper and personal name of
God. Its great age may be shown from its general occurrence among all
the Semitic races, and this in its turn may be illustrated by its
presence in the proper names found in Gen., iv, 18; xxv, 13; xxxvi,
43. Elohim is not found among all the Semitic races; the Aramaeans
alone seem to have had an analogous form. It has been suggested that
the name Elohim must have been formed after the descendants of Shem
had separated into distinct nations.

Meaning of the Word

If Elohim be regarded as derived from El, its original meaning would
be "the strong one" according to Wellhausen's derivation of El, from
ul (Skizzen, III, 169); or "the foremost one", according to Nöldeke's
derivation of El from ul or il, "to be in front" (Sitzungsberichte
der berlinischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1880, pp. 760 sqq.;
1882, pp. 1175 sqq.); or "the mighty one", according to Dillmann's
derivation of El from alah or alay, "to be mighty" (On Genesis, I,
1); or, finally "He after whom one strives", "Who is the goal of all
human aspiration and endeavour", "to whom one has recourse in
distress or when one is in need of guidance", "to who one attaches
oneself closely", coincidentibus interea bono et fine, according to
the derivation of El from the preposition el, "to", advocated by La
Place (cf. Lagarde, Uebersicht, etc., p. 167), Lagarde (op. cit., pp.
159 sqq.), Lagrange (Religions semitiques, pp. 79 sqq.), and others.
A discussion of the arguments which militate for and against each of
the foregoing derivations would lead us too far.

If we have recourse to the use of the word Elohim in the study of its
meaning, we find that in its proper sense it denotes either the true
God or false gods, and metaphorically it is applied to judges,
angels, and kings; and even accompanies other nouns, giving them a
superlative meaning. The presence of the article, the singular
construction of the word, and its context show with sufficient
clearness whether it must be taken in its proper or its metaphorical
sense, and what is its precise meaning in each case. Kautzsch
(Encyclopaedia Biblica, III, 3324, n. 2) endeavours to do away with
the metaphorical sense of Elohim. Instead of the rendering "judges"
he suggests the translation "God", as witness of a lawsuit, as giver
of decisions on points of law, or as dispenser of oracles; for the
rendering "angels" he substitutes "the gods of the heathen", which,
in later post-exilic times, fell to a lower rank. But this
interpretation is not supported by solid proof.

According to Renan (Histoire du peuple d'Israel, I, p. 30) the
Semites believed that the world is surrounded, penetrated, and
governed by the Elohim, myriads of active beings, analogous to the
spirits of the savages, alive, but somehow inseparable from one
another, not even distinguished by their proper names as the gods of
the Aryans, so that they can be considered as a confused totality.
Marti (Geschichte der israelitischen Religion, p. 26), too, finds in
Elohim a trace of the original Semitic polydemonism; he maintains
that the word signified the sum of the divine beings that inhabited
any given place. Baethgen (op. cit., p. 287), F.C. Baur (Symbolik und
Mythologie, I, 304), and Hellmuth-Zimmermann (Elohim, Berlin, 1900)
make Elohim an expression of power, grandeur, and totality. Lagrange
(op. cit., p. 78) urges against these views that even the Semitic
races need distinct units before they have a sum, and distinct parts
before that arrive at a totality. Moreover, the name El is prior to
Elohim (op. cit., p. 77 sq.) and El is both a proper and a common
name of God. Originally it was either a proper name and has become a
common name, or it was a common name has become a proper name. In
either case, El, and, therefore, also its derivative form Elohim,
must have denoted the one true God. This inference becomes clear
after a little reflection. If El was, at first, the proper name of a
false god, it could not become the common name of a false god, it
could not become the common name for deity any more than Jupiter or
Juno could; and if it was, at first, the common name for deity, it
could become the proper name only of that God who combined in him all
the attributes of deity, who was the one true God. This does not
imply that all the Semitic races had from the beginning a clear
concept of God's unit and Divine attributes, though all had
originally the Divine name El.




VIGOUROUX in Dict. de la Bible, s.v.; KNABENBAUER, Lexicon Biblicum
(Paris, 1907), II, 63; KAUTZSCH in Encyclopaedia Biblica (New York,
1902), III, 3323 sq.; LAGRANGE, Etudes sur les religions semitiques
(Paris, 1905), 19, 71, 77 sqq.

A.J. MAAS
Transcribed by Thomas M. Barrett
Dedicated to the glory of God and His Son, Jesus Christ

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V
Copyright © 1909 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 2003 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, May 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor
Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

ceb

I'd love to hear sharon45's take on this passage, but also anyone else who might have more knowledge of its meaning. It seems pretty clear to me that this is saying that Jacob wrestled with God in human form, and beat him.

Also, if God doesn't have a physical body, then the phrase "face-to- face" has no meaning. Please explain, those of you claiming that no one can "survive meeting God face-to-face". What would one see if one were "face-to-face" with a non-physical entity?

Magus55

God the Father has never been seen face to face, but the Word of God has. John always makes the distinction between the Word of God ( Jesus), and the Father. The Father hasn't been seen, but God incarnate has which is most likely who Jacob saw. The trinity is the only thing that makes sense when you look at the Bible as a whole.

Doctor X

So Jacob spends the night fighting a word.

Must have been a tough word . . . "eggregious?" . . . "floccinaucinihilipilification?" . . . "ultramicroscopicovulcanicosiliconosis?" . . . "Belgium?"

--J.D.

tracer

Um ... so far you've got God the Father, which no one has seen, and the Word of God/God Incarnate (Jesus), which is supposedly what Jacob saw (even though it was centuries before Jesus was born).

Where's ol' Number Three of the Trinity in this picture?

Doctor X

It is Pi . . . silly. . . .

--J.D.

spin

Spin:

I'm not complaining that it it not used as a plural, but that it's full significance is not clear, so generalisations based on this lack of clarity won't be particularly meaningful.

They can say whatever they like without evidence.

Pour away. I cheated, in that I did a search of the English "Let us" to see who was speaking.

I have no trouble with the latter idea.

Yes, indeed. It doesn't change my comment.

The problem is the error of assuming the relationship between the art and the text. There are two different pictues on the one amphora which has the text. There are other amphorae with pictures and no text. The Khirbet el-Qom text has no pictures. Your sources are pissing into the wind.

Kuntillet Ajrud texts mention "YHWH of Samaria" and "YHWH of Teiman". These are some of our oldest information about YHWH and they don't support Cross's guess. If you want to shove Cross down my throat, I think you need to show that I need to waste my time with him. (I advise people to be extremely wary of the Albright school of apologetic archaeology and philology.)

(The silliness of the widely accepted alphabet soup model is that its constant use reifies it, when it is assumption riddled. Religious literature shows itself very often to be in constant flux -- at least up to some stage where it becomes "too sacred" to be touched (up) --, not a few relatively datable sources welded together.)

There is a quote at the beginning of Isaiah 27, which is almost word for word of a text from Ugarit. How did it get there? Obviously it wasn't borrowed from Ugarit. Daniel 7 features part of the battle between Baal and Yamm (the sea), again known from Ugarit. How did it get there? These are part of a long running cultural continuum in which the Hebrews lived. I have no doubt that they received the polytheistic religious traditions of their forebearers, not borrowing from Ugarit, but from the same source that Ugarit got it from, their common heritage. This survived until the writing of that part of Isaiah and that part of Daniel. When the names of two descendents of Saul were altered by scribes in Sam/Kgs, we are fortunate that their original names were preserved in the version that Chronicles records. Hopefully all scholars are in agreement that Chronicles is post-exilic. It records a sources which gives the names as Ishbaal and Meribaal. Sam has the insulting names Ishbosheth (man of shame) and Mephibosheth (breaking shame -- where "shame" is equivalent to "idol"). Why does Chronicles not change the names? I'd guess that they were no longer such a sore issue as they were for the scribe in Sam.


spin