h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Linus - David was punished and then forgiven but he also experienced the consequences of his sin. The punishment was that the child conceived during the affair died. The consequence Nathan the prophet told him, was that violence would never leave his house. David's son Absalom tried to usurp David and was killed. Another son Amnon raped David's daughter Tamar (another Tamar).

PT - I am not following the post Babylonian captivity idea. Can you expand? Also can you explain more about the two Gods of the OT?

Wouldn't the OT have to be rooted in oral tradition? Job is possibly the oldest book and it certainly seems to have been developed from oral renderings, the imagery, repetition and poetic nature all point to an oral beginning. Supposedly Moses put pen to papyrus in writing the pentateuch but he didn't get those stories from air.

I think by the post Egyptian captivity there was some method of record keeping. After the religion of the Jews fell into paganism there is mention of finding scrolls in the abandoned temple. Those scrolls were, at a minimum, the law because that is what the passage says. I don't know much extra-biblically other than scholars generally agree that the ability to write/record was there by the time of Moses.

my reading of the stories in Genesis is that the human beings were intent on having their own way -just like now .Which helps to explain why their is so much violence, instead of everybody cooperating

It was with the establishment of the Kings that the oral tradition was converted to paper - David being the first to set up the royal archives. So essentially everything that pre-dates King David is definitely oral tradition. Job is a great big long poem so it presumably comes from wherever poems come from (guaranteed not to have been composed on paper).

In my view (and I am not being falsely humble here, there is a lot to be known about this stuff that I don't know), the bible holds a number of things in tension.

1) There is a God who is there (all powerful, present everywhere, knowing everything) and a God who is "not" (must wait for people to do things, is found in silences not in grandeur).

2) There is a God of authority and inscrutability and a God of love.

3) A God who reveals himself through action and a God who is perceived.

Many people assume that these tensions are contradictory or they ignore one of the parts of the tension in favour of their preferred vision of God. Instead, and I think that 3 holds the key, I believe that

* the bible is about a true God
* that this God is not easily catpured in a static text
* a perceived God will be perceived in different ways by different people (even through the same events)
* a revealed God needs to be engaged with

But the stories of David that I wrote about put contradictory retellings of the same tale together. I don't see the contradictions as signals of untruth but of the underlying tention throughout the OT (and NT) of being generous to multiple experiences. There are also chronological contradictions: the cultural decision to abandon the kings (while in exile Babylon) lead to a understanding of the transendence of God: that is an OT God much closer to the God of the NT.

There is a question of whether this approach will degenerate into pluralism. This comes close to the problem of doctrine vs heresy.

PT

Hermi - It still seems a small price to pay for entry into heaven for all eternity, when it comes down to it.

PT - im not ignoring you, just nothing worthwhile to add at this point.

PT - Well said. What conflicting stories regarding David? None come to mind so I think I'm not following your drift.

Linus - I'm sure you're referring to the repentance as being a small price rather than the loss of a child. Repentance/faith is a small price and yet it is also the most difficult. It goes far beyond an intellectual recognition of God.

There are plenty of Bible verses that say a faith in Christ requires simply belief (or trust is more common in some translations), Romans 10:9 for example. Sure we tie other stuff into it. Baptists are big into repentence. Others may stress love or obedience or sacraments. Ultimately it comes down to belief/trust but the belief isn't in the facts of the Bible (intellectual recognition), the belief is active and relates directly to the eminence of Christ. David's repentance had more to do with submitting to the sovereignity of God than the confession of his sin. That was why he said he sinned against God rather than Uriah. (Bet Uriah might have argued that a bit.)

How many people have the strength (or weakness depending on your point of view) to believe/trust like that? It's easy and simple, right? Just believe. Yet the process of arriving at that level of belief is incredibly hard. It means recognizing that life, the universe and everything isn't about you, recognizing that you aren't right - about anything, deciding consciously to place someone other than yourself at the helm of your life and desiring your self/person to be broken and changed.

How many people desire that? They desire Heaven, yes. Preferably after a long fruitful life. But brokeness? Bowing and scraping for an invisible God while the world around you goes to hell?

No small price.

Hermi,

No i was actually thinking that there would be plenty of people who would sacrifice a few lives, family or not, if it guaranteed their entry into heaven for all eternity.

Whew! Having lost three babies, I have a strong opinion about that.

I'm sure you are right though. There were plenty of religions that required child sacrifice. It would have been common in David's time, but he didn't sacrifice the child, it died. The passage describes David's despair and efforts to get God to change his mind. It was an unusual amount of effort for a newborn. I've heard that children weren't really considered born until they survived their 8th day, and in the case of males, were circumcised.

Anyway, the baby was the punishment not the price. The price was David's submission.

Initially David was Saul's general but fell out of favour and took to the Hills. In odd verses here and there (especially when talking about David's continuing friendship with Saul's eldest son), David is still in Saul's favour. One person I read argued that Saul was historically revised into a bad king and that old bits of text still remain. Who knows - I don't.

There are also two tails of David in the cave cutting a corner of Saul's cloak, as well as other examples.

I have just been reading Samuel I and am about to continue with Samuel II. Wierd since the old boy dies at the end of his first book - I can't see him making a sudden reappearence in Vol II (he was called back from the dead at the end of Vol I and was not a happy boy even then). All is go in my corner of the world.

PT

So PT, if I follow you right, the conflict is the inconsistencies within the characters? Saul is good one moment, weirded-out the next? David is fine and upright, mostly, but then makes some very bad decisions? (Great word play in your entry. Was the tail intentional?)

I guess I just thought they were like the rest of us -- not always bad or good - screwing-up because they were human. I can't think of a single substantial Bible character, other than Christ, that is all good, without recorded mistakes. So much for our sin being forgotten. I guess that must be just eternally rather than temporally.

Let me know if Samuel suddenly reappears - again.

Will do. Didn't get a chance over the weekend to check it out. Hopefully I will get a chance this week to see if Dave makes gets to be King. The Samual thing still worries me. It's a bit like when you are young and you read the chapter headings at the beginning of the book and discover that the Famous 5 do make it - even though at the end of Chapter 3 it looked as if they were all going to be caught and the story would end there.

I accidentally clicked "post" before I had a chance to proof read the previous post (or even finish it!).

I don't think that Saul and David had personality disorders. I would argue that the bible overall assigns multiple personalities to God - and that is deliberate. But the very early human characters are drawn from multiple diverse tales (correct spelling this time).

I suspect that Saul was not as bad to David as some of the stories made out. The Isrealites had bad experiences with kings (in general) and possibly there was some revisionist history being written. When the tales were canonised by the scribes, they included every version that was current: the revisionist stories, the early stories (from those people who had preserved them) and stuff.

This is not to say that anything included is untrue. It might not be "historical" writing as we might understand it to be, but it is the truth as different tribes (families) recall it as being. When you writing about God, no one has a monopoly on truth so you have to include it all. The notion of a single story encompassing a thousand person's experiences of a single past event, must be one of the great hubris's of 20th Century thought.

PT

PT

Do you know when the OT was "finished" or accepted pretty much as we see it now?

The great hubris of 20th Century thought... Well said.

When did we decide that we couldn't speak for ourselves? Or that we had to speak for others? Or that we had to have a consistent story for the same event? I read once that you can show a video to a group of 10 people. When discussing what the video was about, have one person introduce a wrong idea strongly, and the chances are that the entire group will be swayed to agree with the wrong idea. (Presumably to achieve consensus.) The number was something like 85% will agree to a wrong idea if it builds consensus or deflects attention and disagreement from them.

Hermi,

In your last example, people disagree about what happened: they still all agree that one view of the event can encompass what happened. Then, in discussion (or in court), they settle down to work out what that view should be, however dodgy that process becomes.

Some time ago, this desire to agree on a story was not nearly as strong (it still existed but not overriding everything else). So in our case, David and Saul are presented as complex individuals observed by different people. The views of those who sympathised with them are placed right next to those who vilify them.

A modern reader can claim that the truth in the bible is underminded by this inconsistency (read any discussion hounding Justin the Preacher). A fairer view is that no complex relationship between a king and his successor can be accurately described in a few thousand words - certainly not seven thousand years after the event. The inclusion of the inconsistencies is, maybe, the scribes' clearest way to highlight how complex the relationship was.

However, the logical positivists and the cheaper end of the scientific press may not agree with me.



PS: I am not attempting to justify Justin here, but biblical contradictions do come up as a method of attacking him fairly often.

Hey PT I get it. Conflicting accounts are no less true because they are colored by the viewpoint of the story teller. And here I'd heard that Saul suffered from VD and that's why he had such erratic behavior. (Is there a tongue in cheek smiley?)

The story I told before was more to agree that we are developing into a society that cannot sustain strong opposing positions. We strive for tolerance to the degree that we are intolerant of opinions that are by their nature exclusive, like Justin's. Instead we try to wrap things up nicely with an "all beliefs are equal and good" philosophy.

I appreciated Recumbentman's opinions on this thread in part because I knew he definitely did not agree with me. I need to hear something other than the usual Sunday morning schtick or I won't really try to understand what I believe. In the end each individual selects their beliefs and pronounces them, at least personally, better than the others.

near the beginning of this thread, someone asked about Adam and Eve and incest
one important thing to remember is that incest wasn't a sin yet, since God hadn't told people not to
another thing to remember is that Genesis never mentioned the daughters of Adam and Eve, probably because they "weren't important"
>8^B

In fact, Abraham made sure that his son married a family member. It definitely wasn't a sin at that point.

I have pretty much accepted that was the case back then which lead me to ask when it was outlawed (and why for that matter)

My other query was about if other people were arounfd then they would not have all had original sin at birth (based in my long distant child/teenage recollection of RC teaching this causes major problems with the entire religion)

Nice discussion, wish I'd found it earlier.

13:<many religious teachers i have had discussions with will happily concede that Adam & Eve, for example, should not be taken literally.>
A common view, but a rather non-sensical one. Open a Bible to the end of Luke chapter 3. Ask them who was Jesus' father. Joseph, of course. So who was Josephs father? You can keep going all the way up through the list, through David, Jacob, Abraham, Noah, and eventually Adam. If Adam wasn't a literal person then neither was Seth, and so on until you get to Jesus.

16:
There are a few words that the KJV translates as hell, one of them did indeed refer to the Valley of Hinnom, a kind of primitive incinerator, I think the others all refer to the common grave of mankind.

22:
It could certainly be defined as taking control of his own destiny, but I don't think gathering/farming was the issue. After all, Adam was told to 'cultivate the Garden of Eden and take care of it', which is little different from farming anyway. The point is simply that Adam wanted independance from God, wanted to be allowed to rule himself.

30:
I think the best evidence is that, when God counseled Cain in Genesis 4:7, he said, 'If you turn to doing good, will there not be an exaltation? But if you do not turn to doing good, there is sin crouching at the entrance, and for you is its craving; and will you, for your part, get the mastery over it?' God here counseled Cain, not on his choice of sacrifice, but on the fact that he, in his general life, was not 'doing good'.

34:
I assume what are being referred to as 'the worst parts' are the parts in which God punishes people. The difference now is that he does not punish people immediately, but allows time for them to repent in the basis of the sacrifice of Jesus. The end result, God's purpose, has not changed. Neither has he.

35:
I'm a Jehovah's Witness. (Jehovah is thought to be the English version of the name of 'God the Father', as you refer to him.) We're not 'Jesus Witnesses'. We consider that Jesus came to allow us to come back to a close relationship with God, not that Jesus wanted to be worshipped himself. (I think it must be particularly hurtful to Jesus, who always stressed his father's superiority over him, when people claim that Jesus himself is God.)

57:
It is logical that some of the Mosaic law, like sacrifice, the showing of mercy and love etc. was given primarily to convey God's will, but that other parts of it were given mainly for the physical benefit of it's followers, such as the burying of excrement (as Reverend Lovejoy said, 'Oh Marge, practically everything is a sin. Have you ever actually read this thing? You know, technically, we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom!'), the washing of hands (although this also had symbolic meaning), the resting on the Sabbath (see Mark 2:27), and, indeed, the law of incest. Laws that were given for man's benefit may no longer be important today. We don't need to bury our excrement - we have toilets. We don't need to rest on the Sabbath, we have plenty of free time nowadays (or at least we can have, if we don't strive for excessive material wealth). And incest may not be particularly hurtful to God, but have been outlawed because of it's being dangerous to mankind, due to the much higher probability that a person will have two of the same chromosome and therefore has a much greater chance of having two of the same recessive duff gene. However, it wouldn't have been so dangerous back when mankind had not been around for long, and fewer genetic mutations had taken place since Adam and Eve were created perfect, and few, if any, duff genes would exist. And anyway, a law created for man's benefit could not logically apply in a case, such as Adam and Eves children, in which the breaking of it was vital to the survival of mankind.

Cool post Insight.

I still would argue that the Garden of Eden story MUST be read allegorically as well as (if you want) semi-literally.

No encounter with God can be expressed in a finitely told story so the GofE story is necessarily incomplete. If you are going to leave stuff out, would you drop out incidental facts or the details about Adam and Eve's encounter with God. The Jewish historians will have, if no-one else did, kept those key points in the story which relate to the truth of a revealed God recounted through the action of the events.

There is no no species of tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil. So if God expells one from a garden for having eaten of it, God is clearly trying to tell one something unrelated to horticulture.

I don't know that it even makes sense to worry about who else was around on the day and who had an incestuous sex-life with whom becuase I don't believe the story can possibly be considered to be complete in those sorts of details. Not least, it is likely (in my ever so humble opinion) to lead one to missing the points that God went to so much creative effort to make.

my point about other people being around is to do with the whole 'original sin' concept.

Is this only important in the RC religion, or is it also found in other christian (and non-christian religions)?