Jayhawker Soule

To quote spin yet again: You back yourself into this corner. Get out by yourself.

spin

The problem with those who approach texts as though the texts are inerrant is that they don't read the text. They don't want it to be incoherent, so they subconsciously try to manipulate it so that they ease their awareness of the rough edges of the text. They want to believe that there is nothing wrong with it so there isn't. So, Shimei went to Gath, found his slaves and came back. The text says he stayed in Jerusalem for three years prior to the trip to Gath, then we get a continuous narrative about him leaving followed by his suffering the consequences. You have to invent the notion that the writer had a concept of time like the one you are trying to impose.

Nevertheless, we see you plainly espousing fabrications in order to make Gen 2:17 fit your concept of how it ideally should be. 1 K 2:36-42 shows that the creative interpretation you're peddling about "doom" is unrelated to the text. It shows the king acting as soon as he could to fulfill the promise to Shimei, and reading the text requires you to consider the action all on the one day from the time he left Jerusalem to the time he died.

Gen 2:17 says nothing about doom, none of the words give any wriggle room in that direction. As I have indicated it talks specifically about death on the day, just as 1 K 2:36 talks about death on the day.


spin

Jayhawker Soule

I suspect that once you devolve to petty and preposterous ad hominem, it's a good time to end the dialogue.

Should anyone else fear that the thread has been infected by a closet inerrantist, please refer to post #59 and draw your own conclusions. Thanks.

Mihilz

I completely agree. What we've seen on this discussion so far are different, mutually exclusive, excuses all trying to prove the same thing: that God didn't lie.

We've also seen typical freethinking viewpoints twisted around and turned into fallacious God-honouring rhetoric.

Amaleq13

Given a human king with all the limitations that entails, no, there is no reason to assume the king was promising to kill him on the day he disobeyed. It is not reasonable to assume he had such an awesome intelligence service nor magical knowledge of distant event so as to allow a literally immediate response. However, and this is what is truly relevant, there is every reason to assume that the king fully intended to carry out his threat on the very day he learned of the disobedience. I would even be willing to eliminate any specificity on time limits and simply say that the king intended to carry out his threat as soon as it was possible for him to do so.

And, though I would think it goes without saying, none of this lends any support to the proposed reinterpretation of Genesis.

I do not dispute this interpretation of the passage but you appear to me to be continuing to ignore the most relevant aspect of the situation (ie the power and authority of the one making the threat).

When a king, let alone a god, makes such a threat it is certainly implicit that the consequences will be carried out and without delay. To suggest otherwise simply makes no sense.

dzim77

Genesis 3:14-19 lists the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin. In verse 19 we can see that mortality was one of those consequences... "dust to dust". We can conclude then, that before A&E sinned they were immortal.

More directly, we see that A&E were not allowed to continue to eat from the tree of life and live forever as a result of being banished from the garden.

dzim77

The point is that God intended Adam to live forever and gave him free access to the tree of life. (The text is silent as to how *exactly* that worked) As a consequence of his sin Adam was banished from the garden and denied access to the tree of life... (he was subject to mortatlity).

Ben C Smith

I do not think those English examples quite pick up on the flavor of the Hebrew infinitive absolute. In the Hebrew it is not a verb and a cognate object; it is an infinitive and a cognate conjugated verb. Literalistically, it would come out as to die you will die or dying you will die.

But to squeeze English meaning out of the structure of this Hebrew construction would be to ignore the very nature of idiom; an idiom does not have to make literal sense. I think the Hebrew infinitive absolute is just intensive. If the conjugated verb itself would mean that Adam would die, then the infinitive absolute means that he will surely die, most certainly die, absolutely die, or something like that. An intensive is always a good thing to use with a threat or warning.

So I think that this construction is indeed emphatic here, but I do agree with you that the construction itself has nothing to do with the timing of the death. Rather, the timing of the death will surely have something to do with the temporal indicator, on the day.

What I am wondering is what the compiler or author was thinking here. Finding tensions or contradictions is a great sport and loads of fun, but sometimes the contradiction seems too big to be true. Why would an author go out of his way to emphasize the immediacy of the death, but then forget all about that and just have Adam kicked out of the garden instead? Was he juggling different strands of tradition and having trouble getting them all tied up together?

Ben.

Jack the Bodiless

So "silent" as to be nonexistent. Nowhere in the text does it say that A&E were already eating from the Tree of Life. Indeed, the ONLY stated reason they were expelled from Eden was to PREVENT them eating of the Tree of Life.

Furthermore, eating from the Tree of Life is described in a manner which strongly suggests it's something you only ever have to do once to obtain the benefit of immortality: "...lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever..." Reach, take, munch, be immortal. Exactly how the other magical fruit worked.

The Bible simply doesn't say what you apparently want it to say.

spin

When did you enter into dialogue? When did you enter into analysis? You put forward whoever's translations and explanations you accepted and presented them as truth. Why not get your own hands dirty in the text?

A literal translation is an attempt to get closest to the semantic content of a text without adding content to make it better in the target language. It doesn't allow for interpretation of a non-textual kind, ie translation should not involve eisegesis. That is what manipulating the significance of a phrase such as MWT TMWT is. The significance that you proffered isn't in the text. It comes from outside it in order to make it work in the manner you need. Preposterous avoidance of the significance of the text is certainly a "devolution" of a conversation about the significance of a text.

When you want to talk about significance of text, you can't run to a translation, because you cannot trust the translation to get it right when you need it. When you have to understand what a text says, you have to show yourself that you can read it, rather than depend on others.

"[I]nfected"? Interesting choice of words.

What's the difference between an inerrantist and a closet inerrantist?

Do you think your post #59 is significant, huh? It's interesting that you cite Pseudo-Jonathan regarding Gen 2:17, but you don't cite Onkelas, the more literal targum. Why? All you have to do is look at that translation: "for in the day that thou eatest of it dying thou shalt die." Oh, now I know why you didn't cite it: it doesn't try to interpret beyond what the text actually says. In the two biblical texts I've seen you deal with, unfortunately that's exactly what you do.


spin