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Bible Support Group Step 2: Exodus!
Loren Michael
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been AFK for an unfortunate chunk of time, but here we go again! I hope most of you have already started...
New people, here's the deal:
This week: Exodus! It's totally badass, and also the name of one of the most powerful enemies of the X-Men and the name of the 22nd Magic: the Gathering expansion, to give it some badass cred.
Wikipedia sez:
"Exodus" is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God Sinai. There YHWH, through Moses, gives the Hebrews their laws and enters into a covenant with them, by which he will give them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness. The book ends with the construction of the Tabernacle.
According to tradition, Exodus and the other four books of the Torah were written by Moses. Modern biblical scholarship places its final textual in the mid 5th century BC, i.e. post-exilic but earlier than the Hellenistic period, although some parts, such as the Song of the sea and the Covenant Code may date to as early as the 9th to 10th century BC.
Written by freaking Moses! But Wikipedia also notes that:
More than a century of archaeological research has discovered nothing which could support the narrative elements of the book of Exodus - the four centuries sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, or the three months journey through the wilderness to Sinai. The Egyptian records themselves have no mention of anything recorded in Exodus, the wilderness of the southern Sinai peninsula shows no traces of a mass-migration such as Exodus describes, and virtually all the place-names mentioned, including Goshen (the area within Egypt where the Israelites supposedly lived), the store-cities of Pithom and Rameses, the site of the crossing of the Red Sea, and even Mt Sinai itself, have resisted identification. The archaeology of Palestine has equally failed to substantiate the bible's account of the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites arriving from Egypt some forty years later - of the 31 cities supposedly conquered by Joshua, only one (Bethel) shows a destruction level that equates to the Biblical narrative, and there is general agreement that the origins of Israel lie within Canaan itself. Even those scholars who hold the Exodus to represent historical truth concede that the most the evidence can suggest is plausibility.
There were also some movies and such.
Obviously, this throws Wikipedia's veracity into question.
Here are our readers and their books, I hope they're all still with us:
Loren Michael - KJV
James - NIV
PolloDiablo - NASB
Lizz the Blizz - KJV
Speaker - KJV
SalmonOfDoubt - NWT
Josiah_9 - NASB
Drake - KJV
Element Brian - KJV
Dagrabbit - RSV
Geod - NIV
ph blake - NIV
Anome - RSV
ResIpsaLoquitur - NRSV
Gorelab - NJB
Centipede Damascus - NASB
CorpseRT - KJV
zakkiel - NRSV
Sarksus - NRSV
Hedgethorn - Latin Vulgate
Jragghen - NAB
Doxa - KJV
Asiina - KJV
joshofalltrades - TNIV
RiemannLives - NRSV
SpectralSpork - NRSV
projectmayhem - KJV
Podly - NRSV
Nackmatholn - NRSV
BlackDragon480 - KJV
LightsOut - NIV
Peter Pwn - NIV
ProfMoriarty -
DeadlySherpa -
DasUberEdward -
ElJeffe -
Organichu -
New people, here's the deal:
Let's read the bible. The Christian Jesus-ey one with all the begats and stuff I mean, the one that everyone's always fussing about. I tried to read it a while back, but it was really boring, and I quit sometime after Genesis or so. That's the kind of task that requires a support group, you know?
So I come to you. Let's read the bible together. Which bible you say? Whichever you please. I'm going to go with the King James version, as I have faith that it's the one true version of the Word Of God. I figure about... maybe a book a week or so is doable, starting with Genesis, then Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, etcetera.
I figure, to make it interesting, let's try to pick a bible and stick with it. By that I mean, I'm going to go with King James, and while I might look at New International out of curiosity, I'm going to fundamentally stick with KJV. Others might go with NIV and peek at other versions for reference or out of curiosity, or whatever.
I plan on starting for realz on Sunday, May 10. I'll be reading Genesis that week, and moving down the line.
I'm only going to be able to do this if I know others are enduring the same. So, post up if you're interested, or have questions or whatever. And let me know what bible you're reading.
So I come to you. Let's read the bible together. Which bible you say? Whichever you please. I'm going to go with the King James version, as I have faith that it's the one true version of the Word Of God. I figure about... maybe a book a week or so is doable, starting with Genesis, then Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, etcetera.
I figure, to make it interesting, let's try to pick a bible and stick with it. By that I mean, I'm going to go with King James, and while I might look at New International out of curiosity, I'm going to fundamentally stick with KJV. Others might go with NIV and peek at other versions for reference or out of curiosity, or whatever.
I plan on starting for realz on Sunday, May 10. I'll be reading Genesis that week, and moving down the line.
I'm only going to be able to do this if I know others are enduring the same. So, post up if you're interested, or have questions or whatever. And let me know what bible you're reading.
This week: Exodus! It's totally badass, and also the name of one of the most powerful enemies of the X-Men and the name of the 22nd Magic: the Gathering expansion, to give it some badass cred.
Wikipedia sez:
"Exodus" is the second book of the Jewish Torah and of the Christian Old Testament. It tells how Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Mountain of God Sinai. There YHWH, through Moses, gives the Hebrews their laws and enters into a covenant with them, by which he will give them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness. The book ends with the construction of the Tabernacle.
According to tradition, Exodus and the other four books of the Torah were written by Moses. Modern biblical scholarship places its final textual in the mid 5th century BC, i.e. post-exilic but earlier than the Hellenistic period, although some parts, such as the Song of the sea and the Covenant Code may date to as early as the 9th to 10th century BC.
Written by freaking Moses! But Wikipedia also notes that:
More than a century of archaeological research has discovered nothing which could support the narrative elements of the book of Exodus - the four centuries sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, or the three months journey through the wilderness to Sinai. The Egyptian records themselves have no mention of anything recorded in Exodus, the wilderness of the southern Sinai peninsula shows no traces of a mass-migration such as Exodus describes, and virtually all the place-names mentioned, including Goshen (the area within Egypt where the Israelites supposedly lived), the store-cities of Pithom and Rameses, the site of the crossing of the Red Sea, and even Mt Sinai itself, have resisted identification. The archaeology of Palestine has equally failed to substantiate the bible's account of the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites arriving from Egypt some forty years later - of the 31 cities supposedly conquered by Joshua, only one (Bethel) shows a destruction level that equates to the Biblical narrative, and there is general agreement that the origins of Israel lie within Canaan itself. Even those scholars who hold the Exodus to represent historical truth concede that the most the evidence can suggest is plausibility.
There were also some movies and such.
Obviously, this throws Wikipedia's veracity into question.
Here are our readers and their books, I hope they're all still with us:
Loren Michael - KJV
James - NIV
PolloDiablo - NASB
Lizz the Blizz - KJV
Speaker - KJV
SalmonOfDoubt - NWT
Josiah_9 - NASB
Drake - KJV
Element Brian - KJV
Dagrabbit - RSV
Geod - NIV
ph blake - NIV
Anome - RSV
ResIpsaLoquitur - NRSV
Gorelab - NJB
Centipede Damascus - NASB
CorpseRT - KJV
zakkiel - NRSV
Sarksus - NRSV
Hedgethorn - Latin Vulgate
Jragghen - NAB
Doxa - KJV
Asiina - KJV
joshofalltrades - TNIV
RiemannLives - NRSV
SpectralSpork - NRSV
projectmayhem - KJV
Podly - NRSV
Nackmatholn - NRSV
BlackDragon480 - KJV
LightsOut - NIV
Peter Pwn - NIV
ProfMoriarty -
DeadlySherpa -
DasUberEdward -
ElJeffe -
Organichu -
Loren Michael on
0
Posts
To some degree the purpose was to show the world that the Israelites were his chosen people and to warn other nations not to screw with them, least they reap the whirlwind. How well has that worked out? Arabs, Persians, Africans, Arabs, Caucasian, Arabs, Caucasian and Arabs have all taken no small amount of delight in persecuting and initiating pogroms against them. Tight work.
I don't really know. I suppose from a Jewish point of view where you just have to follow some rules and everything will work out, it is ok. As a Christian I was taught I have to accept God into my heart and love him, I don't really know how I could be expected to do that even if I believed.
I'm pretty sure that the phrase "And lo, Mosses went forth and did those things God commanded." could cut the length down by about 1/4. Do we really need to see god give him all the damned little details, and then him go tell the people all the details, and then read about the people carrying them out? ugh.
edit: NIV for what it's worth.
The optimistic side of me would like to read it as saying that Pharaoh was a douche through the first half, and it was only after he refused to respond time and again that God finally said, "You know what? You want a hardened heart? I'll give you a hardened heart." God still comes off as vengeful, but at least his anger is in response to something that Pharaoh actually did.
It really rises to a fever pitch in Job, which has an incredibly messed-up moral philosophy behind it...
That's supposed to be why Abraham was such a great man. Because he tried to talk God out of that sort of stuff (like with Sodom and Gemorah)
Namely: this is a myth written by a group of bronze-age nomads with a tribal morality. They had almost zero empathy for anyone outside of their tribal culture group.
You'd expect whitewashing of history; in fact, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that it has happened - if post-printing-press American history can be cheerfully cleaned up, what more the Bible? So this is the whitewashed history, and it really doesn't suggest good things about the societies which formalised the Old Testament.
We already know that we don't think highly of the societies of that age, though. Most of the Torah was probably fixed when Israel was a monarchy, but even if it came together as late as 500 B.C., that's still nearly a hundred years before Plato advocated leaving disabled children out in the woods for wild animals to feed on and Aristotle argued that non-Greeks were naturally suited only for enslavement.
Speaking of genocide, the midianites: I love these guys. They take Moses in from the desert wasteland for 40 years, give him a wife, treat him nice. Then, in Numbers ... well, I won't spoil it.
Edit: incidentally, this is why I refuse to celebrate Passover with my nominally Jewish family.
Wait, the Midianites are the people he stayed with after leaving Egypt? Huh, I never knew that.
Holy Text. The desire to preserve the Word of God or whatever is stronger in this case then the desire to white-wash history. Probably because these things were considered things not to be altered long before the actions therein were considered in need of white-washing.
♪ And that's why we share all we have with you,
♪ Though there's little to be found!
♪ When all you've got is nothing,
♪ There's a lot to go around!
♪ So how do you judge what a man is worth?
♪ By what he builds or buys?
♪ You can never see with your eyes on earth!
♪ Look through heeeeaaaaaaven's eyes!
How do you pronounce that M word?
Mid-ee-an-ite. (With the emphasis on the first syllable)
The whole narrative seems a bit broken up by it, and it does seem to go against the prevailing theme in Exodus that Aaron is super-awesome.
Also, am I a bad person because I almost put this in spoiler tags?
It's possible that the story about the calf-worshippers in Exodus is a relic of an internece battle between the Hebrews. A sect of Hebrews opposed to idol worship apparently won out, and they had access to the history, so they wrote in this story to make idol worship seem evil.
In the gospels, we have a story about how John the Baptist was actually a big Jesus fan. In reality, John's cult and Jesus' cult may well have been rivals. But Jesus' cult got to write the history. This is one of many examples of syncretism—the intentional co-opting of a previous or rival religion by a new religion.
In Exodus, it looks like there's a kind of anti-syncretism, or maybe there's some fancy name for it, where a religion stigmatizes its rival in its own mythology. Similarly, the Christians had the Jews claim that Jesus' blood was on their hands (not the Romans) in the gospels—the non-cult Jews were their schismatic rivals. In Hinduism, Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu sent down to earth to deceive humanity and thin the ranks of heaven, which was getting too crowded for the gods.
I dont think that 'talking god out of it' is the message of that passage, he appeals to God on account of the righteous in the city, of which only four are eventually found. You make it sound like Abraham is in some way morally superior to God but Abraham himself states that he is but 'dust and ashes' compared to God. I think its important to remember that (for those that agree God exists) you cant really disagree with what he does; he kinda is the definition of right.
OT God was hardcore.
I saw a documentary not long ago (History Decoded: Exodus, on the History Channel) that made the claim the plagues Egypt suffered are all explainable by vulcanism. They covered similar (eerily so) events in modern times where these kinds of things have taken place. In that light, I can see these stories coming about to attempt an explanation of the trauma from dealing with these massive upheavals. Pharaoh hardening his heart may be mythologizing the memory of a ruler who is unwilling to release a big chunk of his labor pool when he needs them the most.
That may be the Christian interpretation, but as far as the Jewish interpretation goes, this passage is the reason why, when Abraham is introduced, he is called "A great man", in an unqualified manner, but when Noah is introduced, he is qualified as"A great man in his time."
Because when God came to Noah and said "I'm going to kill everyone in the world", Noah just accepted it, but when God came to Abraham and said "I'm going to kill these two towns full of sinners", Abraham tried to talk him out of it.
It's important to recognize that "this is how many Jews read the text" but there's no actual good reason to interpret the text this way. As I've said before, a lot of Jewish Biblical interpretation involves seizing on insignifcant semantics or simply making shit up to blunt the explicit moral atrocity of the text.
You don't have to like the oral tradition, but it exists, and it still predates Christianity.
Secondly, I don't think you can support your assertion that it predates Christianity. The rabbinic interpretation that gave rise to this Talmudic bullshit about Abraham grew up alongside Christianity. In any case, we don't have any texts dating from much before that.
Whelp, alright.
I'm running a little behind, I'll get to it soon enough.
The oral tradition is more than just the Talmud.
I also think it's absurd that, in order to attack a religion, you insist on reading their holy books literally, even though they do not themselves.
I don't want to drag this thread off topic, so let's just agree not to respond to each other, okay?
I honestly think Abraham would have been a greater man if he had straight up refused to obey Yahweh ever, since Yahweh is, as far as mythological characters go, completely reprehensible and unworthy of worship. But that's getting off on a tangent.
Perhaps it's just me, but between someone who just goes along when his powerful employer issues him an evil command, and someone who knows it's wrong and complains about it but still goes along, the latter ranks lower down on my list. The first guy's just stupid. The second guy is an outright collaborationist.
It takes a peculiar kind of nationalist cultural evolution to create such an attitude, yes. I daresay most societies eventually reach this point. By the time Jesus turns up, the moral culture has shifted such that Peter is wrong for denying Jesus.
On the Jewish oral tradition: didn't it solidify after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem? Roughly coinciding with the early Christian church?
1. I'm not attacking religion in this discussion.
2. The fact that Jews today do not read the Bible "literally" has nothing to do with the context in which this book was originally composed and should be interpreted, if we are reading it like we'd read any other ancient text.
3. "Literalness" of interpretation has nothing to do with our disagreement, anyway.
Why would we do that? And arguing about methods of interpretation isn't exactly off-topic in a Biblical reading thread.
You have to consider the context of the times.
Neither you nor I have ANY interest in being open-minded to what each other has to say on the topic, so if we continue on this, we're just wasting everyone else's time.
There were also all sorts of non-canonical traditions in late antiquity, some of which were probably oral or started out as oral, that show up as extensive Jewish apocalyptic literature and pseudepigrapha (i.e. works that claim to be written by famous/legendary figures like Adam and Enoch).
The rabbinic tradition—the idea that there are these "teachers" who are not priests who are responsible for reading and understanding the sacred text, and even adding addendums to this text—does not appear to predate Christianity significantly, and seems to have grown up alongside it. The rabbinic tradition was probably a response to the unfeasibility of a traditional Jewish state in ancient Rome (largely because their temple got destroyed and they got conquered). The Talmud comes from this tradtiion, mostly.
The Rabbinical tradition is the modern extension of the ancient Pharisees. Jesus himself was, at one point, a Rabbinical student.
The Rabbinical tradition definitely predates CHristianity. That's not to say that it has maintained an identical form, but one of the key tennents of the tradition is the idea that it should be a living, changing thing.
Can anyone confirm this?
Im assuming that this comes from an athiest standpoint, and would like to take a minute to explain why this argument will not really help you in discussions with christians ( or in arguing a case against any deity.)
If your reason for not worshipping a being is solely on the grounds that it is a dick (aka evil) then you run into the problem of the Deity being the moral absolute.
In other words:
If the Deity exists then it is the definer of what is right and what is wrong if you disagree then you are wrong. Choosing not to worship the Deity because you disagree with it would be retarded.
I dont really understand why people keep bringing the 'Your God is a dick' argument up as for someone who does believe it wont hold any water.
Note: this is not an argument for the existence of God just an explanation of how some people will think about the matter.
P.S It would be nice to talk about the content of the book for once without going into the endless flamewar that this topic usualy brings up, any chance we could save the theisim/athiesim for other threads guise?
I'm fairly certain that the idea of a Deity being the embodiment of what is right is a relatively modern conception, and that it doesn't have much to do with how ancient religious adherants thought about it. And since my critisism was of the ancient character of Abraham, and not a modern Christian, I don't see any relevance in your comment.
I think we did quite well in the thread on Genesis. So far no one has seen the need to LORD (lawl) their particular belief system over anyone elses.