Raha
Inactive Member
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Message 9 of 11 (53105)
08-31-2003 7:40 PM
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Very interesting and thought provoking observations, Holmes, indeed. There are other questions also:
- What exactly was meant by this concept of "good and evil"? This concept is not very well explained in Old Testament until Isaiah:
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
001:017 Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
- Zoroastrian influence, most probably.
- Why the hell did God plant those two trees in the garden? He did not need them. Adam and Eve were said not to eat from them. So what was the point?
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Doesn't that, even taken literally, mean that it was man's learning to judge God's creations as right and wrong (and therefore to judge God himself) which is the only sin which concerned God?
Well said. And it was God who made it possible.
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...possibly to remind us that man is " as clay in the hands of the Potter."
For me it is just proof that this part of Old Testament was simply borrowed from Sumerians:
Mix the heart of the clay that is over the abyss,
The good and princely fashioners will thicken the clay,
You, [Nammu] do you bring the limbs into existence;
Ninmah [earth-mother or birth goddess] will work above you,
The goddesses [of birth] . . . will stand by you at your fashioning;
O my mother, decree its [the newborn's] fate,
Ninmah will bind upon it the image (?) of the gods,
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thou shalt surely die. i.e. thou must inevitably become mortal (Symmachus). While this explanation removes the difficulty that Adam and Eve lived a long time after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, it assumes that man was created to be a deathless being. A simpler explanation is that in view of all the circumstances of the temptation, the All-merciful God mercifully modified the penalty, and they did not die on the day of their sin.
Wrong. They were quite definitely mortal. Otherwise the "tree of life" would have no sense at all. Also, expulsion from Eden was not a punishment but protective measure:
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 003:023 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. 003:024 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Conclusions:
- There is actually very little of original writings in the book of Genesis - almost everything is based upon much older myths.
- God is, according to Genesis, rather chaotic and irrational fellow, who never knows what he is doing, is absolutely incompetent in foreseeing the results of his deeds and tries to correct his mistakes by even greater mistakes.
------------------ Life has no meaning but itself.
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 11 by doctrbill, posted 08-31-2003 11:45 PM | | Raha has not replied |
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