dado

the value of the prophets isn't in their predictions, it's in their expressions of concern over social injustice. most of what is generally called prediction isn't even, in fact, prediction, it's warning. i have no objection whatsoever if someone wanted to completely disregard any and all predictive passages...

Magdlyn

OK, the Sox won. Again. Caveman up!

dado

wow. i really am omniscient!

chimaira

thank you dado indeed I need a Jewish bible with the explanation of this passage because this bond does not indicate the place if it is there, makes of it if Jephthah with were réprimandé why the sacrifice became a festival? judges 11, 40.

dado

festival -> holiday -> memorial. we often commemorate things for the purpose of remembering them so they *don't* happen again. ie, this weekend's D-Day "festival".

i don't know of a Mikraot Gedalot that isn't in Hebrew. here is a picture of a couple of pages...

http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/guide/images/h28-bottom.jpg

there are roughly a dozen different texts excerpted onto those two pages, it covers maybe only a dozen or two verses of Tanakh. this is a very big book...

Talmud looks like this...

http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/guide/images/h30-left.jpg

same idea, compressing texts, but here it's even worse because the text itself isn't written in prose, it is written in something resembling a cross between formal logic and a bibliographic citation. extremely dense in content, and thousands of pages long.

Amaleq13

Sorry for the delayed response but my upcoming move keeps stealing all my free time.

This makes no sense. The fact that Jephthah believes he can make a deal with God requires that he believe God capable of accepting the deal and intervening in the upcoming battle. The fact that Jephthah, upon seeing that his daughter was the first to leave the house, did not realize that God would not accept a human sacrifice and wait for the first non-human to leave is extremely problematic for your position. Again, appeals to subsequent attempts to alter the problematic aspects of the story do not change those aspects.

You are missing the point. The problematic nature of the story does not require that God know beforehand that a human will be the first to leave the house and, thus, become the sacrifice. Jephthah won the battle and this clearly gave him the impression that the agreement had been accepted by God. Jephthah proceeds to sacrifice his daughter and that only makes sense if he thought such a sacrifice would be accepted by God. Unlike God's earlier intervention with Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice is allowed to take place. Jephthah is clearly being punished by being allowed to sacrifice his daughter. This was apparently so blatantly problematic that subsequent rabbinical consideration resulted in significant alterations to the story so as to eliminate the problems. Your faith in those subsequent additions to the story has absolutely no relevance to the problems inherent to the original story. An apparently devout Jew is depicted as believing a human sacrifice would be accepted by God and God apparently punishes this same man by allowing him to sacrifice his daughter.

Amaleq13:clearly calls into question the claim that the God of the Hebrew Bible held a consistent view on human sacrifice

Yes and the reason I am entitled to this opinion is because the text supports it.

I noted that Jephthah does not behave as though human sacrifice were forbidden by God and you replied:
So you are not claiming that human sacrifice was forbidden by God? That is not the impression I have obtained from your posts. If it was forbidden, then Jephthah certainly was "supposed to" know this.

The point of this discussion is that, at no point in the story, is Jephthah's willingness to offer a human sacrifice identified as "inappropriate behavior".

That a subsequent editor did not choose to alter the story is entirely independent of the religious beliefs of the individual considering the story. Ignoring subsequent attempts to eliminate the problematic aspects of the story does not require a "Christian perspective" but simply a rational one.

In the original story, Jephthah is never punished for offering a human sacrifice to God. Recognizing this does not require a "x'ian perspective" but only a rational one. Subsequent additions to the story do not change the original.

On the contrary, unless and until you can establish that the additions to which you appeal are as old as the written story, I have no good reason to accept them as relevant to interpreting the written story. If the correcting additions were contemporary with the written version, why would they not have been included in the written version?

dado

of course Jepththah believes it. i don't believe anyone ever suggested otherwise. it would be a rather pointless story if he hadn't. as for the rest of it, we are starting from such radically different assumptions we may as well simply agree to disagree. ultimately, it makes absolutely no difference if either or both of us are right so...

enjoy the rest of your day!

chimaira

yes dado good reasoning you are right but there is a problem bus Yahvé when it always deplores an act bad it it signal, thus for Solomon it regretted for David and Uri and for Ammon and Moab then why it does not deplore the act of jephtah?

LP675

That was well put (A little late I know)

dado

it does - just not in that text. to argue the "omission" is significant is to make the same invalid assumption amelq makes - namely that all texts inside Tanakh are more important than all texts outside Tanakh. this may be a valid assumption from a x'ian point of view, but it runs contrary to how Judaism works.

there also exists a minority opinion - as a general rule Judaism preserves minority opinions - that beleives there was no blood sacrifice. this is based on various references to the first-born male belonging to G-d and the notion females were "sacrificed" by becoming religious prostitutes. note that the daughter goes into the mountains to mourn her virginity, not her impending loss of life. personally i'm not convinced and i think the implication is pretty strong she was actually sacrificed.