davidstarlingm

There are many occasions of anthropomorphizing God within the Bible. If we insist that the ancient Hebrews believed God had to physically "come down" to "see" what was going on, we might as well assume they thought he had physical eyes, lungs, biceps, wings, and chariots.

Toto

You can read what the text says, or you can impose your own more modern ideas on it.

davidstarlingm

This has a little in common with When the plain sense makes ancient sense.... regarding the way things ought to be interpreted. Unless we seriously assert that the ancient Jews thought YHWH had wings (Psalm 36:7), we should accept that anthropomorphisms (or, as the case may be, orthnimorphisms) can and will arise as mere forms of expression, explanation, or figures of speech.

We can read what the text says, acknowledging that the ancients were entirely capable of using figurative anthropomorphism, or we can impose our own modern ideas of Babylonian cosmology on it.

shalak

So you are saying that in the tower of Babel account the writers were not really saying God did come down to see what man had done but rather figuratively came down? I agree that there are many examples of God being characteristics that were not intended to be literal. Isaiah's vision of God is one of those I believe.

Toto

The text indicates that the ancient Hebrews did think that YWHW was some sort of enhanced human, who needed to walk around on earth to see what was happening and commanded that the Israelites not leave their waste where he might trip on it. It was only later that the language was reinterpreted as metaphor. What do you find wrong with this view? Do you think that the ancients were enlightened thinkers?

davidstarlingm

"Figuratively came down" might be one way of explaining it. If I say, "I'm going down to visit my parents this weekend", I am not lying even though my parents' house is geographically north of and at a higher elevation than my own. To say that God "came down to see" is merely a literary device to move from the description of the city to God's opinion of the whole ordeal. I don't propose to know how an omniscient, omnipresent mind "focuses" on anything specifically, but that's simply because I have no experience with omniscience or omnipresence.

The "tripping" business -- is that Biblical, or a modern idea you've imposed on it?

I must ask you again whether you think the ancient Hebrews thought this metahuman YHWH had wings.

Do you think that the ancients were less intelligent than we are?

Toto

They might have been smarter, since the dumber ones were less likely to survive. But we have the advantage of a vast amount of knowledge and understanding accumulated over the past few millenia, and in particular the past few centuries, so we know and understand a lot more.

I don't see the point of trying to pretend that the Bible was written by rationalistic, scientifically minded skeptics.

davidstarlingm

Neither do I. But I think there is a great deal of silliness in pretending that we have everything figured out about the evolution of religious ideas in ancient times. Only a very lazy historian would assume that every ancient people had the same cosmological and religious progression of ideas.

mountainman

The ancient historian Robin Lane-Fox writes about the publisher of the bible as being "alive to the arguments of skeptics " ....

We also tend to forget that a progression of ideas can come about virtually overnight during a revolution, and do not require hundreds of years to organically develop.

Jedi Mind Trick

The story, if I am not mistaken, comes to the Hebrews from earlier Sumerian sources. There it was the gods and not a one God who were afraid of the undertakings of man. The Hebrews just adopted the Sumerian myth to a monotheistic God, but notice that they kept the plurality of the dialogue between the gods about their concerns.