philbar

Really, where???

Or maybe it was a foreshadowing of what he would do with his one and only son. What do you think the whole point of Abraham and Isaac was? To foreshadow God's sacrifice of his one and only son so we can live if we choose to.


Yes, all demon possessed people are merely schizophrenic, epileptic, and bipolar who often die of obnubilation with fever and hypoxemia.

Jack the Bodiless

None of those passages address God's lie in Genesis 2:17. If another author, writing centuries later, imagines that death can occur in stages: how does this affect what the author of Genesis wrote?

There is no "first death" or "second death" in Genesis. There is simply immediate death. And the story then goes on to confirm that the Serpent's version was correct:
God lied, and the Serpent told the truth. It couldn't be plainer!

yalla

I would recommend Thomas Thompson's book The Mythic Past p84ff for a good discussion of the tempatation scene in the garden.

Its a bit difficult for me to try to succintly paraphrase but I'll have a go and hopefully not be too misleading as to the mesage of T.T..

Its a fictional tale that seeks to help us understand the truth of things, about being human. It is not about original sin or good and evil.
Yahweh and the snake are characters in a story. The snake helps people get knowledge but knowledge is nothing, to share in the divine is all. The snake tells the women that by eating the fruit she will gain knowledge. She is the philosopher seeking wisdom. But to seek wisdom is to chase the wind.
instead she [and he] learn fear and that knowledge is not good.
Did eating the fruit bring death? No, they live on, but now are mortal and fearful and naked. Before they had god now they have mortality and the human condition.They are excluded from the garden of Yahweh, from the path of life where we might be his servants and live.

I hope that is not too wide of his message.
Its a good read, I recommmend it.
cheers
yalla

philbar

Show me again where God said, You will die IMMEDIATELY after you eat of the Tree of Knowledge".

Why do you even need to look at the Bible? You have already concluded it is wrong without even understanding it. I have heard some pretty interesting arguments against the Bible and Christianity...but this is stupid.

Amaleq13

and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou dost not eat of it, for in the day of thine eating of it -- dying thou dost die.' (Gen 2:17, YLT, emphasis added)

heretic

Yalla, if its fictional, then whats the rationale for the entire Christian population being misled with the idea of "original sin". Surely thats fictional too..?

philbar

In Gen 2.17 there is an interpretative problem in the text. The Hebrew is:

ומעץ הדעת טוב ורע לא תאכל ממ�*ו כי ביום אכלך ממ�*ו מות תמות

The essential problem is what one is to do with the phrase כי ביום אכלך ממ�*ו מות תמות, and specifically, what ביום connotes in this grammatical context. Various translations translate the passage differently.

Modern translators and interpreters have also tried to understand this text. ביום can mean a variety of things, especially in construction with verbal elements as found in Gen 2:17. Translators are torn since it could mean either “on that particular day” or simply “when,” with the grammatical context and immediacy being indeterminable from the prepositional phrase.

Jack the Bodiless

On the contrary: I have concluded that it's wrong because I understand it well enough to see that (and because I understand the extra-Biblical evidence that contradicts many of its claims).
What is "stupid" about it? The narrator's intent is clear: God lied. Later apologists might not like this view of God, but their dislike is not an argument. The Biblical God has many unpleasant characteristics, being a liar is a very minor one.
The Hebrew "yowm" means "day":
As you can see from the count, "day" applies in 2008 cases out of 2287, or 88% of the time (and the English "day" doesn't always refer to a 24-hour period either: "back in my day..." and so forth). It's assumed to mean "when" 0.4% of the time (and these could be mistranslations). The lie is also clear from the context: the later confirmation that the Serpent was correct, and the historical origin of the "toxic lie" in the Sumerian "Adapa and the South Wind" myth.

Apologists frequently claim that a passage is "ambiguous" or "difficult", when what they actually mean is "I don't like what it says, so I must struggle to find an alternative meaning".

yalla

I was trying to paraphrase Thompson so I should pass the buck over to him to answer your question, but as he is not here I'll have a go as long as you realize I may not be interpreting Thompson correctly.

His overall theme for the entire OT/Tanakh is that it should not be seen as history whatever but as the literature of a past age and a people different to us now.
As such it has many themes /issue/ motifs which are intermingled and retold with variations.
So he makes mention in the Garden scene of other themes I didn't include, for example sexual alienation.
He states frequently through the book that much of the text has been misinterpreted and misunderstood because it has not been recognized for what it is, ie literature and myth, but treated as history instead and taken out of context and interpreted from a different outlook to that of those who wrote it.
When he says it [ garden scene] is not about good and evil or original sin he does not explain that as such but interprets it in the manner I attempted to paraphrase. The main theme is the process of losing god and 'paradise' and becoming human, mortal, without god, by learning knowledge.
"The story stresses an implicit contrast between human understanding and divine wisdom".
I suspect T.T. would answer your question by repeating what you wrote ie "being misled" or perhaps not understanding the text properly by importing into it ideas and concepts that may not be there.

That's the best I can do for you.
I tried in my first post to summarise about 2 pages of text so there is a lot, much of it subtle, that I missed out.
Does that help?
cheers
yalla

heretic

Yes it does. I think I may have misunderstood your viewpoint. Apologies for that.

I frequently hear viewpoints twisted and interpreted to mean different things depending on the conversation.