The "Circle of the Earth"

Not if it is the typical Biblical Christian Bling-bling Pimp Daddy God.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

As much as I appreciate that as an alternative rendering and have embraced it in past, I am not now convinced that it is the be all end all of translations. I like that it pretty much obviates the notion of creation ex nihilo. i.e. When god began creating ... there already existed a body of water beneath which lay an earth waiting to be revealed. Two things:1) Many scholars see verses 1 and 2 as prologue, subsequent to which the acts of creation are narrated according to daily order. 2) When the "dry [land]" appears, God calls it "Earth." What reason can you offer to substantiate that conclusion? It's not like we don't know what tohu and bohu really mean. These words are used elsewhere in the Scripture. Yet nowhere else do Bible pundits offer so intangible a ”definition’ as here in the opening words of the text.Hope I have addressed your points.

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Theology is the science of Dominion.
- - - My God is your god's Boss - - -

Indeed. I'm sure our friend would benefit from a screening of that memorable classic, a copy of which no free thinking home should be without.I have upgraded my copy to DVD. Anyone care to buy a slightly worn VHS?

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Theology is the science of Dominion.
- - - My God is your god's Boss - - -

The passage you are referring to is Ezekiel's vision, not God's "need" of the Enterprise.Ray

four headed secret service folks. with the faces of a man, a lion, and ox, and an eagle, each. er, but that's what the text is describing. four wheels below four angels, upon which god sits. it's a chariot, the merkabah. if you want to pick an anachronistic term for it, it would not be "UFO." it would be "tank." your concept makes god a space alien. not a god. er, no, you've missed the point again. but amusingly shot yourself in the foot. the issue is not height, but the superiority of god. talking about god's eyesight as if that is what the verse even means is completely beside the point. it's not about eyesight. it's about power. so you've taken lofty extended poetics, and condescended them to nonsensical non-sequitors. brilliant. you wonder why we laugh at your points. look. it's obvious don't care one bit about what the text says or what it means. you simply see the bible as a vast an illogical jumble of words, a source from which to quotemine your prooftexts. basic, straightforwad literary analysis (as in isaiah) is lost on you. i cannot hope to hold an intellectual discussion with you on books like ezekiel, that are full of symbolism and metaphor. you just go right on reading whatever you want into the text, with utter disregard and disrepect for the bible and what it really says and means. this is precisely the problem. instead of applying any critical thought or literary analysis to the text, you jump right into belief. the bible might as well not even exist -- it's just the means by which you try to support your belief.no, the bible comes first. what the text says comes first. personal belief is irrelevent to what the text says. you do. this whole chapter of isaiah -- like so many others in the bible -- is about the abstract power and majesty of god. god, a supernatural entity, creator of everything. it's full of poetic devices that are a testament to that awesome might.to try to rectify that with some modern scientific understanding, and explain god away as a space alien in a flying saucer takes away from that. it turns god from the supernatural master of all existence into a more natural thing we could safely say "hm, that sounds reasonable" to. i realize that's always been your goal here, to make god seem ok with science. but it betrays god, and it betrays science. we've discussed this before, simple. you should look harder.

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no, but i'm not sure anything CAN be the "be all end all" of translations. concepts and implications work differently in other languages, and there's no way to translate precisely what the text says and means. this is just one implication of the text that i feel is generally overlooked. yes, i do like that feature as well. er, that's a feature i rather vehemently dislike. but for that, i will direct the discussion to the appropriate thread. well, that was precisely what i was talking about -- the two rhyming "waste" words in hebrew seem to imply that the earth was nonexistant. not that it was there and simply empty. at least that's the sense i get from it. tohu, at least, is often used in the expression, "in vain," —, literally "for nothing." it's used frequently to describe "the wilderness" in the sense that there is nothing (worthwhile) there. the traditional meaning is "waste" as i'm sure you are well aware, but that comes more from the idea of wastelands having nothing in them. i think the word more accurately means "nothing." it's certainly one of the uses in modern hebrew.bohu, on the other hand, is only used three times in the bible, and every instance is in conjunction (and as the pair to) tohu.

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now, i have seen everything.

I didn't stick Him in the thing, the bible did. We must assume He likes it, or why would He ride it??

God is a pimp, now you think?? How did you come up with that??

A vision means seeing something. What he saw, like Daniel, was God's throne, and wheels.To try and pawn it off as some sort of meaningless hallucination is to spit on the bible as any sort of real document from any sort of real God.

The book actually, is not Isiah, but Ezekiel. There is no need to mythify it, as you seem to want to do, pretending to strain out lofty high meanings, that make the bible worthless.You say that the grasshopper reference is about power, but you don't back it up' Of course He is powerful, that is a given.The circle of the earth, and the view up there are the issues here. You seem to want to end up at some conclusion that the bible is claptrap nonsense, because it makes the earth sound like a circle, or some such? Rather than an interpretation that fits.God walked in the garden with Adam, don't give us that fairy tale, pie in the sky, impersonal stuff, that He doesn't fly in the sort of wheels that the bible describes!Now, the throne may sit on wheels, but let's not pretend you know all about it's size and shape. It is safe to say the Almighty has wheels!!

No. The book actually is Isaiah:

quote:

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Isa 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
Isa 40:23 That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.

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This is the passage we have been discussing. The topic is "The Circle of the Earth", not Ezekiel's wheels. See Message 1.Edited by Ringo, : Spelelling.

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place”
-- Joseph Goebbels
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You are the one that described your God as some little third rate bling-bling pimp daddy riding in da sapphire hoodoo.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I agree, of course, that tohu is a reference to wasteland. And you are surely aware that the expression tohu bohu is utilized at Jeremiah 4:23 to describe the ruin of Jerusalem and its environs. Here, tohu bohu, apparently purposefully, calls to mind the creation story of Genesis chapter one.

quote:

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I beheld the earth, and, lo, [it was] without form, and void; and the heavens, and they [had] no light.

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Much of the imagery here is identical to that of Genesis. No humans. No animals. Only a ruin; a miserable waste. Oddly enough, the Septuagint apparently (according to Brenton) chooses this circumstance to comply with what you would have of tohu/bohu at Genesis 1:2.

quote:

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I looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was not;

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I do not, at this time, pretend to know a better translation of this. Interpretations of poetry are difficult, even in one's native tongue. What intriques me about this reading is it may suggest that in order to be fully 'erets, a place should be habitable (impossible amidst the ruins of Jeremiah's vision; and impossible in the newly revealed 'erets of verse 9 (lacking flora and fauna). Correct me if I misunderstand your point but I suspect the assertion is not precisely true in this instance.In closing I would like to lay out Dr. Strong's etymology of tohu and bohu, and ask if you have a problem with it and/or can offer a better, or perhaps more authoritative one.

quote:

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{tohu} ... from an unused root meaning to lie waste; a desolation (of surface), i.e. desert; figuratively - a worthless thing; adverbially - in vain

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{bohu} ... from an unused root (meaning to be empty; a vacuity, i.e. (superficially) an undistinguishable ruin

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I submit that the root meaning of tohu is concrete rather than figurative, thus putting 'waste(land)' at the top of the list of conceivable English substitutes. Coupling that with the notion of 'empty(ruin)' attributed to bohu suggests a meaning of "uninhabited wasteland," such as was the condition of the Mesopotamian prior to establishment of agriculture; and the environs of Jerusalem in Jeremiah's vision. Here again: Jeremiah 4:23, this time from the old Living Bible:

quote:

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I looked down upon their land and as far as I could see in all directions everything was ruins.

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This comparison is important in so many ways, not least of which is confirmation of the true meaning of 'erets or arats if you will; although I am personally tempted to give it eretz as do English writing citizens of Israel today.I'm sure you must see where this leads. I, of course, am not the first to notice it. Wasn't it Josephus who first penned the notion that 'earth' had been created (or re-created), many times? A proper understanding of eretz does nothing to detract from that assertion.

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Theology is the science of Dominion.
- - - My God is your god's Boss - - -

uh, no. as ringo points out, we're talking about a verse in isaiah. you introduced stuff from ezekiel that doesn't have anything to do with the topic. your reading, like so many of your interpretations, make the bible worthless. you discard religious symbolism and message for... UFOs. i'm sorry, i really can't break it down too much further for you. try reading the verse. in context of the rest of the chapter. wait, the person who brought up UFOs is accusing me of "claptrap nonsense?" oh, wait, no, i'm sorry. this stuff about them thinking the earth was flat -- that's totally consistent with what everyone thought about the world at that time -- is just silly. SPACE ALIENS, that's the answer. it doesn't fit. you haven't even proven that you can read the verse, let alone interpret it. all you've done is taken your latest pet theory, and ripped a verse or two out of context to try to support it. that fails as "interpretation." it's a simple fact that you're just going to have to accept. the descriptions of god are more personal in some books than in others. it doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. you bring up god walking in the garden with adam -- but what about the god whose very sight would kill anyone who gazed upon him in exodus? and those two books are the in same tradition.many of the prophets near the exile describe a god who less personal, more intensely and abstractly powerful, and quite often angry. which is not what this verse in isaiah is talking about. at all. you're reading UFOs into the bible anywhere you see fit, even verses like this where it rather clearly isn't talking about that. and anyways, i think there was a topic about UFOs in the bible -- go post your claptrap there.

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