|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Can fundamentalists explain Job 26:12-13 for me? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
It mentions Rahab (the much forgotten Rahab, not the harlot of Jericho) and the period of chaos before the creation (or just during it) of man, near the very beginning.
I think it refers to a mythological dragon, and thus the debate among fundamentalists should be whether the Canaanites borrowed the dragon myth from the Hebrews (which fundamentalists assume to have existed before the 13th century) or whether the Hebrews borrowed it from the Canaanites. But before we get to that stage, we need to figure out if a primeval dragon is even mentioned here in Job 26. (Can we all agree that the primeval period is the subject?) Actually the first step is to refuse to ignore the issue. Those on this site are less likely to ignore the issue and its implications. The fundamentalist community at large (and the entire world for the matter, Christian or not) is another issue. Ignorance is the order of the day - naturally. But since we are on EVC, then we can skip the last paragraph and its "first step" question. Lets first ask if a primeval dragon is even being covered in the text of Job 26:12-13. Then we should ask who borrowed from whom. Who is the who and who is the whom? This is a question that has lots of potential for clarity, though questions exist. (for example, Lambert says that Enuma Elish wasn't written till 1074 BCE and that the dragon slaying myth most likely came from the Levant, and not from Mesopotamia, and infact the Canaanites - if not the Hebrews - had the theme first.) I start out quite impressed by the amount of evidence that we have to answer this question, anyway. So start answering so I can watch the discussion. Thanks alot.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
This is the entire chapter. Notice, below, how verse 10 is parallel to the dry land appearing (a feature of one of the days in Genesis), verses 12 to 13 mention the waters below being separated from the waters above, etc. The piercing of the "fleeing serpent" is a reference to the Rahab monster just mentioned. It clearly refers to the heavens being separated.
quote: This was the New Revised Standard Version. We never hear about a sea monster when we have to deal with creation science and school classroom issues. It needs to be brought up (for sure) when discussing this creation evolution issue. And this entire chapter covers the time before the creation of any life - sealife or otherwise. This is the primeval period, essentially the period of chaos and early creation. This was a chaos monster. Job 26 ( alone!) is solid evidence that the early days of Genesis clearly are related to an earlier Enuma Elish type of situation with a pierced monster being used to associate the separation of waters for the heavens (and the associated dome), earthly waters, and separation/creation of dry land. See Psalms 89 too.
quote: Here we have Psalms 89:9-11 and the context of creation of the heavens. "You rule the raging of the sea;when its waves rise, you still them. You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm. The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in ityou have founded them." Just like Job 26:12-13 "By his power he stilled the Sea;by his understanding he struck down Rahab. By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent." The evidence is like 99.9% that the Israelites saw the creation story as part of a myth involving a mythological dragon being slayed to create the heavens. How can anyone deny it? Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AdminPhat Inactive Member |
Thread copied here from the Can fundamentalists explain Job 26:12-13 for me? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
kbertsche Member (Idle past 2131 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined:
|
LNA writes:
Note that these are poetic passages. This is poetic imagery, saying that the true God is more powerful than the gods and fearful monsters of the other nations. The OT has quite a few such polemical statements against the gods of Egypt and Canaan.
Here we have Psalms 89:9-11 and the context of creation of the heavens. "You rule the raging of the sea;when its waves rise, you still them. You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm. The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in ityou have founded them." Just like Job 26:12-13 "By his power he stilled the Sea;by his understanding he struck down Rahab. By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent." The evidence is like 99.9% that the Israelites saw the creation story as part of a myth involving a mythological dragon being slayed to create the heavens.
You have not showed this, and I disagree. I think these are just poetic ways of saying that the true God is stronger than the gods of Egypt and Canaan."Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert Einstein I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: But, can the same be said of Genesis 1? Verses 6-8 talk of the firmament (atmosphere?) being placed to separate the waters above from the waters below. Is that poetry? Is the sudden creation of man - as opposed to a millions of years evolutionary process - also part of the poetry and polemic? Would a 1000 BCE Israelite know how to distinguish the unhistorical lines from the literal? Tell me this. Which verses in Job are literally true? Which use poetic imagery that feature unhistorical mythological events from the primeval period placed in the hands of the Israelite God? Place the Rahab serpent in its Genesis 1 context. Place the rest of Job 26 and its 14 verses in context (if possible). Which verses (that can be placed in Genesis 1 or not) are historical and which aren't? I'm wondering if the Rahab verses are the only ones you discriminate against in this way.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: From the first lines of Enuma Elish
quote: It's an old translation. Marduk then killed her.
quote: Then the use (of her ribs or crotch in newer translations) of Tiamat as a firmament to hold back her heavenly waters.
quote: This was the sacred texts site but here is the Wikipedia page linkTiamat - Wikipedia Job 26:12-13 seems very similar. By his power he stilled the Sea;by his understanding he struck down Rahab. By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. Psalms talks about God crushing Rahab like Marduk did to Tiamat. Rahab is a serpent and the sea, like Tiamat. The primeval chaos waters and serpent monster that was the universal sea, which was then divided into upper and lower waters. Enuma Elish might not be the source for Genesis 1, Job 26, and Psalms 89, but it does indeed show us what the people of that region believed. Enuma Elish and the biblical creation accounts could be later writings of a common ancestral motif of the primeval period. A creation by God using a giant sea monster is actually more difficult to falsify then a 6 day creation that is now 6000 years ago old with a universal global flood 4200 years ago. Creationists ignore it because it sounds so "mythological" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it just reeks of pagan mythology. But, why not just say the pagans got the idea from the pristine Hebrew scriptures with their literal historical truths? It seems that it is another example of airbrushing out the parts of scripture that are culturally embarrassing. In our modern culture (church culture and secular culture alike), it just seems embarrassing I suppose. Plus people aren't conditioned to it. Should it be seen as historical? By "his hand pierced the fleeing serpent". God's hand. On the other hand, we have another perspective. Jesus said (in Matthew 19) that divorce notes were allowed to be written by Moses because of the cultural attitudes of the Israelites, but from the beginning it was never allowed. Cultural sensitivity allowed (according to Jesus) severe moral lapses to be tolerated and even enshrined in sacred scripture as moral and good. A grave sin to God was recorded in scripture as o.k. Perhaps cultural sensitivity caused a situation where sacred scripture had a record of a mythological creation event that never happened? Interesting questions because we have a fundamentalist community that includes both open-minded people that explore the issue(s) with integrity, and the other more dominant group that ignores inconvenient issues yet makes a crusade like effort to impose their own (selective) "biblical" issues on everybody else. It would be interesting regardless, just from a humanistic perspective to understand history and texts, but this is a political issue - a vitally important one at that, Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: Then
quote: (quotation marks added above and below to site text by me LamarkNewAge because EVC wont let me space the translation of the ancient text to create a margin)
quote: The preexisting chaos creature seems to make up the matter of the entire universe. Marduk and his "evil wind" (like YHWH and his ru'ach or spirit/mighty wind) blew across the primeval waters/sea/Tiamat (like Tehom/The Deep in Genesis 1:1-1:3). Interesting that the starts weren't yet mentioned in Job 26. But it mentions the heavens in verse 13 after the defeating of Rahab and piercing of the serpent (like Marduk exactly did). Tiamat was the Tehom ("The Deep") and "the firmament" of Genesis plus the waters in the sky and below in the sea (and Tigris and Euphrates). Tiamat even was used to make up stars - her tail to be specific. She was a serpent and then the stars too. Stars came to be in Genesis after "the firmament" was made. Stars were placed "in the firmament" in Genesis 1. How can stars be places in what is essentially thought by Christians to be the atmosphere? Enuma Elish shows us that the primeval dragon was the material for the invisible dome/atmosphere, the outer space water, and the stars! The primeval dragon is the focus of creation in both the Bible and the ancient near east (especially Enuma Elish). It is the fundamental ingredient with YHWH in the Bible. Absolutely fundamental. 100% important. Not to be ignored (at all).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
kbertsche Member (Idle past 2131 days) Posts: 1427 From: San Jose, CA, USA Joined: |
LNA writes:
The book of Job is essentially all poetry, filled with poetic imagery. All of Job is "true". But I don't know what you mean by "literally true" in this context.
Tell me this. Which verses in Job are literally true? Which use poetic imagery that feature unhistorical mythological events from the primeval period placed in the hands of the Israelite God? LNA writes:
I'm not sure that the Job passage matches exactly to Genesis 1. But if it does, it's probably to verse 2, where "darkness was over the face of the deep". The word "deep" here is the Hebrew "tehom", which means "abyss". The word "yam" ("sea") could have been used and probably would have been a more normal word choice. I think "tehom" was used because it sounds somewhat like "Tiamat", the pagan sea god. The ancients were afraid of the sea and the dark, both present in Gen 1:2. The true God steps in and defeats these elements.
Place the Rahab serpent in its Genesis 1 context. Place the rest of Job 26 and its 14 verses in context (if possible). Which verses (that can be placed in Genesis 1 or not) are historical and which aren't? There may also be an allusion to Rahab/Leviathan/SeaMonster in 1:21, where God creates the great sea monsters. They are nothing to be afraid of, they do not challenge God for power, they are just His created playthings. Similar in Psalm 104:26 where God created Leviathan to play in the water.
LNA writes:
??? Where have I "discriminated against" any Rahab verses?? Or any other verses?? I'm simply trying to explain what I understand them to mean. Perhaps my interpretation "discriminates against" your interpretation, but I don't believe that it "discriminates against" the text in any way.
I'm wondering if the Rahab verses are the only ones you discriminate against in this way. (P.S. I would NOT call myself a "fundamentalist", so perhaps I should not have answered your question at all.) Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given. Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given."Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert Einstein I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member |
Just a couple of general comments or questions.
First, having a tie to some earlier story in Job does not have quite the same impact as having the same story found in Genesis. Job might be using any number of sources including astrology and myth in order to describe how great his God was. So how do you address the thought that maybe mapping some parts of the story to Genesis and then dragging in all of Job 26 to be a story of the origin of the universe may be an argument with some holes in it. Secondly, not all of the examples in Job 26 seem to allude directly to creation. The intent is to describe awesomeness, but creation is just one such awesome thing. Things like binding water into clouds, covering the face of the moon, and stilling raging seas are things God does everyday and not just during 'Creation Week'. How do you sort out for sure when the serpent got speared? Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
jar Member (Idle past 393 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Job is a morality tale dealing with some pretty profound questions like why do bad things happen to good people and when that does happen how should a theist of his period respond.
Trying to pretend it is a Creation Myth or biology text serves no purpose and has no value.Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: I said this: "Tell me this. Which verses in Job are literally true? Which use poetic imagery that feature unhistorical mythological events from the primeval period placed in the hands of the Israelite God?" How do you distinguish the mythic parts from the historical? Forget about whether it is poetry or prose.
quote: o.k. Then you quoted me asking "I'm wondering if the Rahab verses are the only ones you discriminate against in this way." You responded
quote: I was simply asking how you are able to distinguish between the lines that are supposedly meant to be taken for granted as unhistorical imagery and then the historical lines.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: Job isn't in the first pages of the Bible, that's for sure. Now Job might be using stories from diverse sources but he said that the hand of God pierced the primeval serpent and he placed the creation of the heavens right in between his Rabah serpent revelation. Job was the one that talked about the creation of the heavens. Verses 10 to 13 are: 10He has described a circle on the face of the waters,at the boundary between light and darkness. 11 The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astounded at his rebuke. 12 By his power he stilled the Sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahab. 13By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. Fundamentalists use verse 7 to say that God placed a spherical earth into empty space. They say that "Job said it in God's great book, so it must be true". Job said the hand of God did something, so however obscure it is due to its being deep into the Holy Bible (away from the page 1 creation of Genesis), Job still said God did it. He pierced the serpent while making the heavens.
quote: Verses 7 to 13 are about the primeval period, which was a period of God's creation. God made the heavens. I sort out the spearing as during the making of the heavens. The Rahab line was immediately followed by God making the heavens then right back to the speared serpent. The context is very clear to objective ears.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LamarkNewAge Member (Idle past 737 days) Posts: 2236 Joined: |
quote: This quote?
quote: Or this quote?
quote: Sorry but shouldn't this be used to present the argument and put Job 26 into its context? I was mad at myself for not quoting from Genesis 1, but I saved space by trusting that people here were familiar with it. God made the heavens while piercing the serpent Rahab. It has a clear cognate in the Ancient Middle east.
quote: Well, I said it covered the period before biological life was formed. And I didn't say that a Creation Myth is the exact same thing as a biology text (especially not a modern one). I don't see why it isn't a creation myth. You must have a very strict criteria, that's for sure. Yes it does have morality tales in it. Job still said God pierced the primeval dragon while making the heavens. Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
jar Member (Idle past 393 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
LamarkNewAge writes: Sorry but shouldn't this be used to present the argument and put Job 26 into its context? I was mad at myself for not quoting from Genesis 1, but I saved space by trusting that people here were familiar with it. God made the heavens while piercing the serpent Rahab. It has a clear cognate in the Ancient Middle east. Nope, it really shouldn't be used and it does not put Job into context, rather it simply avoids dealing with the actual context of Job.
LamarkNewAge writes: Well, I said it covered the period before biological life was formed. And I didn't say that a Creation Myth is the exact same thing as a biology text (especially not a modern one). I don't see why it isn't a creation myth. You must have a very strict criteria, that's for sure. Yes it does have morality tales in it. Job still said God pierced the primeval dragon while making the heavens. Which even if true is still just a total irrelevancy, a pointless exercise in avoiding discussing what Job is all about.Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Phat Member Posts: 18262 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
...Which even if true is still just a total irrelevancy, a pointless exercise in avoiding discussing what Job is all about. So what is Job all about? Thats my question. I of course have opinions and shall discuss them shortly---after rereading job, of course.Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024