mindovermyth

DfT wrote: " Rom 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
Rom 5:13 (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law.
Rom 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.


Where in the above is there “no room for an earlier corruption of the Earth by Lucifer’s fall?” Pervy is reading something into the text that is not there. Although Romans 5:12 states that by one man sin entered in to the world, the verse does NOT say that sin had never beforehand existed in the world!

Consider this analogy… Wherefore, by one man (Lee Harvey Oswald), the psyche of all Americans and future generations was changed on November 22nd when President Kennedy was assassinated… Does this statement mean that the psyche of Americans had never been affected in the past by previous assassinations? Does this statement mean that Oswald was the first and only person to assassinate a U.S. President?" (Bolded by MoM)

For crying out loud, learn what an analogy is. This is NOT an analogy. Read through your statement 10 times and then tell me that you still think this is a valid analogy. Take your statement to a middle school language teacher and he/she can perhaps help you to see the error of your ways.:banghead:

Correct analogy would of course be if US presidential assassinations entered the world (ie, a first) when Pres. Kennedy was assasinated. Fact is that it was not a first assasination and NO ONE SANE has claimed that it was a first. Sorry, but blunt attempts to dupe like this pisses me off. :devil1:

I will give you a biblically sounding analogy. If you have to retort to twisting, bending and corrupting language to defend your "truth", you have planted your seed on loose soil indeed, and one day you might find your whole world construct mercilessly flushed out to the sea.

DavidfromTexas

LOL!

Do you not see the assumptions that you have made?

You are assuming that sin (assassination in the analogy) came into existence AFTER the first man (Adam).

You are correct in saying that NO ONE SANE would claim that the Kennedy assassination was the first. By the same token, no one sane would say that the sin by Adam was the first sin!


Would you care to give examples of how I have "retorted" to twisting, bending, and corrupting language?

patchy

David, if you ask nice I'll bet an IIDB administrator would let you change your username to Black Knight.

Dean Anderson

In all honesty?

Yes. It's only human to feel good when you get praise.

Just as you would feel good if people were saying that you had done well.

The difference, of course, is that whereas you assume that people will back me out of some kind of misguided dogma or mob-mentality, I assume that the people here will be brutally honest - and that if they think I have done badly and/or that you have done well they will say so.

Hell - I'm an Admin here. I'd bet that most of the users would get a huge kick out of gleefully pointing out my mistakes if they thought I'd done badly. They're perverse like that!

Jack the Bodiless

Some quotes from this very thread, supposedly before the peanut gallery "finally began to speak out on Pervy's behalf":
...And several more expressing such sentiments.

As for specifics:
Let's balance this by listing every case where a peanut-gallery poster has pointed out that Pervy's interpretation of the Hebrew is incorrect. Here goes:

{...}

...So, how do you interpret the gallery as "not speaking out on Pervy's behalf"?


Now, I expect the main reason the "gap theory" doesn't generate much interest is because:

#1: It is false, regardless of whether the Bible supports it. There is too much physical extra-Biblical evidence against it, unless a ridiculous degree of divine fakery is supposed (making it equivalent to "Last-Thusdayism").

#2: It isn't Biblical. It's quite obviously "bolted-on", there is no Biblical book that describes "pre-Adamic" history and events. Again, this is true regardless of whether the Hebrew actually allows such an insertion.

As for the "tohu-bohu" stuff: it's obvious that you're trying to make something out of nothing there. An English perjorative alternative to "desert" would be something like "barren, lifeless wasteland". The notion that God would not create a "barren, lifeless wasteland" is entirely without support. Why would he NOT create a world that could be thusly described, before creating plant and animal life? Why would the Genesis author be reluctant to use such a "perjorative" description when he's just about to describe God's miraculous transformation of this "barren, lifeless wasteland" into something else entirely? The use of such language would add to the glory of the subsequent transformation!

cajela

Actually now that I've read this thread, I had to go back and look a bit more. I *love* the gap theory, it rocks. Just imagine what Neil Gaiman or Mike Carey could do with that. Battles in heaven, demons and angels and lilim, oh my.

I am completely unable to comment on the Hebrew, nor do I care. It could be compatible with the official genesiis myth, or not. Whatever. Pervy argues well and clearly, though, I see no reason for DfT to claim victory.

Jack the Bodiless

Actually, it seems that David is presenting two arguments here:

#1: We have not provided sufficient backing for Pervy. This shows that we know he was refuted, and that David won the argument.

#2: We have provided sufficient backing for Pervy. This shows our "predictable" bias. We are incapable of objectivity on such issues.

These arguments are mutually exclusive. Cognitive dissonance in action.

spin

I find it interesting that the gap theory, despite its stupidity and reliance on bad translation, has survived, but then translation is not a problem if you believe that an old translation was inspired by god and you know nothing about the original languages.

But translation is the fundamental problem, based on a difficult translation into Greek which influenced later European translations, so that the original intention of Gen 1:1 was lost for quite a while.

However, when one grapples with the grammar enough to understand that 1:1, BR)$YT BR) )LHYM )T H$MYM W )T H)RC, needs to be translated as "in the beginning of god's creating the heavens and the earth..." -- this is because BR) ("create") is dependent on R)$YT ("beginning") in a relation called "construct form", so that the whole clause defines the beginning. As early Jewish scholars asked christians who translated it "in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth", "the beginning of what?" Those Jews knew the answer was the beginning of god's act of creation.

To understand how Gen 1 works, one has to realise that god's first act in the story was the creation of light by divine fiat: "Let there be light and there was." That was day #1. Before that act there was no creation: the world as we know it didn't exist. All the prerequisites were there, but all that could be perceived was darkness and the deep.

There was in verse 2 no creation. We just have a description of the prior state of the universe before god started his work. The world was without form and void and yes this is a negative notion. The Jewish god didn't create THW WBHW: his activity over the six days of creation did away with it.

The notion of creatio ex nihilo, incidentally, is not a Jewish notion. The primaeval world was there and god worked on the formlessness to bring form. He worked on the emptiness by filling what he had formed. "In the beginning of god's creating the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, darkness on the deep and the wind of god hovering over the waters, god said, 'Let there be light.'"

God's fight act significantly was to turn the lights on for the creation process. Yes, this was before the sun and moon existed, but that fact is only a problem for naive literalists on both sides of the divide. God separated the light from the darkness giving form to that sphere, allowing it to be later populated with the sun, moon and stars.

The notion of THW WBHW gives the creation its structure. The first three days involve giving form to the world, while the second three days involve filling it. It is the key to this formal creation.

The underlying inherited creation account which is represented in Babylon by a text called "Enuma Elish" tells us of the god's (Marduk's in Babylon) battle with Tiamat, the chaotic waters, the "wide one" (Rahab), who is defeated when god enlist the wind to enter Tiamat's mouth to keep it open so that the god could thrust his sword down her gullet and kill her. If we go back to Gen 1:2, we find THM, the Hebrew equivalent of Tiamat present and we find the wind hovering over the waters. The battle has been omitted here, though it is evident elsewhere, mentioned in passing for example in Isa 51:9 or as Leviathan in Ps 74:14. This same battle is represented in North-West Semitic tradition as the battle between Baal and the sea (Yamm).

When the god slayed Tiamat, he slit her in two, lifting half of her up to the heavens and bolted it up there so it would stay, just as )LHYM divided the waters and lifted half up to the heavens and set up a barrier of beaten metal known to us as the "firmament". And as the god did, so did )LHYM create the world out of the rest of the waters.

The text as it is written in Genesis allows no speculation regarding Satan, who is not present in the scene, nor present in the underlying mythology. Satan as we know him is a christian development on the Judaic adversary, the $+N, a descriptive term for one who opposes and referring to an angel who did god's bidding, combined with a misguided interpretation of a passage about the Babylonian king in Isa 14:12 which talks about the king as though he were the morning star, called Eosforos ("light bearer") in Greek, which in turn was translated into Latin as "Lucifer" ("light bearer"). To put this Satan into Gen 1 is what is commonly called retrojection, ie it wasn't there in the first place, but it is convenient in hindsight that he was there.

THW W BHW are as pejorative as the desert, unpleasant, sterile and worthy of being changed. There is nothing more to be eked out of the terms than for the structure of the passage: the terms explain how the creation worked. It got rid of the waste and void. That did not happen until god started his job by creating light. Before that act the earth as we know it was not.

Naturally the creation was in six ordinary days according to Genesis 1, for god rested on the seventh day, inaugurating the shabbat. Had they not been ordinary days, then the institution of the shabbat would have been meaningless.

Ancient texts are difficult and complex. Their logic quite often is very different from the sorts of naive literalism that we so often want to apply today. Things are much simpler these days: either they are truth or lies. We don't have time to wade through the complexities of long traditions whose origins are obscure and whose form we have captured only in snippets of texts which touch on them while dealing with other things. We often don't know exactly why texts were written. Are words of comfort necessarily truths? Are traditional explanations which don't reflect the world as we know it in the simple truth-lies dichotomy? You often have to struggle with these texts.

You often can't rely on a translation of them (and if you have to, you should use several translations in the hope that together you can get the idea of what the original intended). And fiddling with Strongs is no substitute for interacting with the original language. You remain under the thrall of an antiquated tool created by christians aimed at christians and bearing christian interpretations. Hey, I know you have to make do. Just be aware that there are severe limitations in this approach.

Gen 1 is a pre-christian text and it should be treated as such. You have to deal with a text for what it says before you start dealing with interpretative frameworks. You then have to place it in its ancient, pre-christian context, before getting to the christian approach(es). Projecting christian interpretations onto an earlier text has to be substantially justified, otherwise such intepretations must be seen as irrelevant to the text. If our job is to understand these complicated works we have to remove all impediments. We have to leave our baggage at the door, case the surroundings and then furtively enter, being on guard for what may jump out. Going in with your digital cameras taking all your photos and then going on to the next stop won't help you understand where you've just been. It all becomes a blur. The text doesn't have any impact on you.

When we struggle with Gen 1, we find that it is complex, yet quite an interesting text which does many things at the one time. All these things need to be considered to understand the text. Retrojecting ideas from a different era is probably a sure-fire way to miss the real content of a text. From what I saw of the debate, the pro-gap theory presentation showed little interest in what was in the text. It showed little understanding of the text or the language it was written in. There is no creation before Gen 1:3. What could there be anyway when the first day began with god doing something, as each of the subsequent days do? Each day starts exactly the same way, WYMR )LHYM, "and god said", followed by an act of divine fiat.

Grammatically, the first act is the creation of light. Structurally the first act is the first "let there be", ie light. Thematically, the first act is at the beginning of a real 24 hour day, otherwise the institution of the shabbat has no significance. Mythologically, we know that what happened before Gen 1:3 was precreation. There is no moral content in the terms THW WBHW: they are descriptive of a state of affairs that god's creation resolves. There is no room in the account for an assertion that it involves Satan, the notion of whom didn't even exist at the time as we now understand him through christian theological developments.

DavidFromTexas seems to be flogging a dead horse. (Or as someone in the future will say, "he's dead, Jim."



spin

Sven

You should take a look at his threads in Ev/Cr. Comparisons to a certain Monty Python character are a dime a dozen there...

Ubercat

:rolling: :rolling: :notworthy: -Ubercat