Metaphor vs. Literal

As I've said many many times I'm trying to avoid this kind of argument because there are too many subjective factors involved. I don't know how to establish the criteria. I'm saying only that inerrantists read the Bible straight, as it presents itself. If we don't doubt how it presents itself although so many others do doubt it, this may very well be simply because we believe it to be God's word, but that doesn't change the fact that we read it straight, as it presents itself, as one would simply read a report on anything one had every reason to trust.This message has been edited by Faith, 10-02-2005 10:00 PM

well, something in the book of genesis made you think it should be read as history, per your claim. i'm just asking that you think about it a little, compare genesis to other comparable histories, and other comparable ancient literature, to see if you can establish what the differences and similarities are. this is basic comparative literature. they most certainly do not! answer purpledawn's question: do you believe in the bible's description of a flat earth, and domed solid heaven? because read straight, that's the image genesis 1 presents. as i've argued time and time again here, inerrantists are apologists. they don't care to read the bible as it presents itself, they care about the bible being inerrant -- truthful and accurate. perhaps this is the problem. we science-minded folks like to question everything. for me, this starts on HOW the bible, especially genesis, presents itself. how do you know the book of genesis is presented as a hstory? in my educated opinion, i see it presenting itself as a history of cultural tradition, not events. this is not based on content -- i think the book of kings to be inaccurate in its content, but i'm holding it up as an example of a history.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 10-02-2005 11:41 PM

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אָרַח

AS I SAID, I do not know how to establish the criteria. Let us leave it at the fact that I accept from multitudinous sources that it is the Word of God and that there is nothing internal to it to tell me it is anything but straight narrative history. I'm sorry but you are simply on some private mission of your own that has nothing whatever to do with the Bible as it is in itself, or how it has been read through the millennia. You don't know how to read the Bible straight but you claim that you and only you do. Those who read it straight do not get a flat earth or a domed solid heaven out of it. Only literalists who don't know how to read it get such ideas out of it. So you say, but all conservative Christian Biblical exegesis is against you. Perhaps this is the problem, as the Bible only yields itself to respect and trust. By reading it, one word after another. You are welcome to your opinion. I will stay with the conservative Christian Bible interpretation camp myself, thanks.

yet i have pointed out numerous internal things -- objective and subjective -- that point to genesis NOT being history. you are being willfully ignorant here. you're not even willing to try to establish what could and what would not make something a history. when presented with examples, you dodge them. you haven't explained to me WHY genesis reads differently than gilgamesh. i've read both. have you? no, faith, i'm not. do you think i'd even be arguing here if i didn't find the bible more interesting or somehow truthful that gilgamesh or beowulf? i'm not studying sumerian or old english, i'm studying hebrew. why do you think that is?i'm just for an HONEST presentation of what the bible is and what it says. any attempt to make it into something else, imho, amounts to blasphemy. oh, the irony here! then why does purpledawn agree? do we look like flat-earthers to you? she's pointed out that it's entirely consistent with sumerian ancient cosmology, as well as just about every other culture of the area at the time.the bits about a "firmament" called heaven separating waters above from below? what do you suppose that means? i read it literally. do you? at a certain point, children must grow up. can you imagine a 40 year old who still lives at home with mommy, makes his bed everyday, does his chores. he respects and trusts his parents, sure. seen, but not heard, never questioning.and is probably a really boring conversationalist. do you honestly think all god wants is our blind obedience? our respect and trust? it's hard to hold a conversation if all you say is "yes, sir." you haven't answered the question. how do you know it's presented as history? is it something someone TOLD you? did you come to this conclusion yourself? if so, how? what signs gave it away?all i'm asking is that you THINK a little. it's not a sin. yet you haven't given a single credible reason for such. if it's just blind faith, against all reason, knowledge, and understanding -- say so.

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אָרַח

I find it interesting that Faith has managed to provide support for my conclusion in message 83. She has clearly shown that her faith influences her process of reading and comprehending the Bible. What I don't understand is why she seems to find it difficult to just say so.She made it very clear in another thread that Genesis can't be anything other than history to her because it is foundational to her belief system. I can respect that, but I'm not sure why she would have a problem with the fact that the ancients thought the world was flat since the attributes of the planet are not the basis for the Christian faith.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

The reason is that she holds the untenable possition of biblical inerrancy. Since the universe is quite obviously NOT what the bible describes, it punctures that baloon all together.Inerrantists have built a whole field of quackery dedicated to reconsiling this cosmology with ACTUAL, verified, cosmology. Thus we get dumb ideas like vapor canopies, hydroplate theory, and hyper continental drift.All that load of bunk because of a few versus that are consistent with the erroneous beliefs of the people who penned them. Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh ot cry.This message has been edited by Yaro, 10-04-2005 06:13 PM

which, of course, is not exactly what the bible describes. it's like, well, a bastardized version of it. bastardized... bible... think about it for a second.

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אָרַח

no, i can't really. because it's just bad theology. a literal history of genesis is nto required for salvation. we don't need a flood or a "fall" to be saved from. we are quite good at committing our OWN sins.since this came up in another thread, i'll mention it here too.

quote:

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Deu 24:16 The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.

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kind of borks that whole "original sin" idea, doesn't it? so the question is really priorities: which parts are integral, which parts are literal, and which parts are read according dogma. yet she claims that we are reading something strange here. this is a confirmation bias problem, i think. she reads it straight, but not close enough. when she sees things that make sense, she remembers them, but ignores the parts that don't affirm her modern knowledge.don't get me wrong -- we're all guilty of this. i know that for the life of me i could not figure out what genesis 1 was describing for YEARS. so i just ignored. i didn't know, so it wasn't a problem. yet she can't seem to say so. if that's what it is, just be honest about it. but pretending that it somehow reads like history is ridiculous. especially since she can't seem to give me a single standard on which to call it history, and can't compare and contrast it with other similar works.

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אָרַח

Not trying to lurk, but started at the top and until now the thread seemed so off topic it wasn't worth asking my question.Finally, Faith brings it back around.I have a question about literal truth vs. metaphor and how we determine which is which.Did it really rain 40 days and 40 nights? Or was it 28 days, but it felt like 40?Did Sampson kill everyone with the jaw of an ass, or did he kill a bunch of guys and the others just ran away?In other words, is the Bible exagerating to make a point? Or are we to take what it says as real?

Excellent point, Ben.I use a similiar argument to explain why I don't believe you can "translate" one language to another. You can describe what the first speaker is saying, but you're never going to get it 100% right.The example I like to point to is the word "Macho". Macho means "manly", but what it means to be a man in Mexico is different than what it means to be a man in Chicago. Or worse, what did it mean to be a man in ancient Greece?The Bible has it even worse, since we're talking about 2000 year gap and translating not from one language to the next, but down the line, from one to another to another to another.

It really rained forty days and forty nights. Sometimes the Bible rounds off numbers in which case it wouldn't have been 28 though possibly 39 or 41, but it was probably exactly 40 in this case. He killed a thousand, but that was probably a rounding-off of anything from 900 to 1100 or simply an estimate as most likely nobody was counting. Except where it is clearly figurative the rule is to take it as real.This message has been edited by Faith, 12-12-2005 04:49 PM

Well, there are people who study these things very closely and know how to explain the differences based on their study. This is the art of translation and the art of interpretation of any ancient text. A well educated preacher of the Bible will have many comparisons available to help him give the most accurate meaning of a passage to his congregation. It is fun to hear someone who has studied Greek and Hebrew and read dozens of commentaries unpack the cultural and historical connotations of a Biblical passage. The fact is that this is just a kind of vague worry that people have who don't know much about the actual history of how the Bible was transmitted. Not that I know all about it, but I do know that there are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible and fragments of manuscripts in all languages still available for translators' use. It is possible to make all kinds of comparisons from century to century and language to language, and to reconstruct gaps in some from the plethora of information from others. There are also many reference works on the cultural and historical contexts.{AbE: Also that is a misimpression that the Bible was simply transmitted "down the line" as copies were made by the dozens and hundreds from a source manuscript to be circulated to other churches, and those copies then became source manuscripts for dozens and hundreds of other copies also to be passed to other churches. Eventually copies had to be made when previous ones wore out too but the main reason was like publishing today -- to get it out to other Christians.People seem to have a sort of vague picture of ONE original copy of the Bible then being copied ONCE to be handed DOWN, but there were hundreds, thousands made in any generation, and from whatever copy was available, sometimes with others for comparison, sometimes not. But you can detect and correct errors by comparing different "lineages" of manuscripts with one another even after 2000 years, using the thousands of fragments still in existence from these various lineages.Also it was individual books or scrolls and not the entire canon that was most likely copied at one time. Not all churches had all the books at any given time.IIRC, and I may not recall exactly, the translators of the King James version made use of a wealth of manuscripts in many languages including earlier English versions, French and German and Syrian as well as the Latin Vulgate and who knows what all others, plus the original Greek and Hebrew, which in those days was a rarety.}This message has been edited by Faith, 12-12-2005 04:55 PM

But how do we know when it is being figurative?You obviously have a much better knowledge of Biblical verse than I do. Can you give an example of when the Bible is being figurative and how you can tell?This is obviously a fake one, but you get the idea:"Lot's wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt... figuratively speaking of course."

Well, here's an example of a small error which makes a big difference. I recently watched a show on the topic and found that very early transcripts of the holy books contain a phrase along the lines of "the wisemen saw a shining star from the East" as oppose to "to the East". (apparently from and to are differentiated by a tiny like sort of like the different between "cat and eat".Now does that change the substance of the story? No.But it does significantly change where the wisemen are coming from.

But this is exactly the sort of problem that is easily solved by reference to the thousands of other manuscripts. Of course they won't all contain that particular passage, but there are probably enough of those that do to make a meaningful comparison.There are questions that need answering here. For instance, what does "very early transcripts" refer to? There is a false idea going about these days that just because a ms. is older than others it must be more authentic. But all mss. are copies, the originals of course no longer exist, and there are NO mss. that are any older than the second century, of which there are very few in any case, and the earliest that exist in great numbers are about the tenth century IIRC. There is nothing to show for sure whether the older ones have any more claim to authenticity than the later ones. It's all a matter of which have happened to survive the ravages of time. In fact the "earliest" ones, the ones that have been given some special status in some minds for this reason, usually have the minority readings on controversial points among the whole body of manuscripts, which SHOULD suggest that they are most likely the ones in error while the majority are the ones to take as the standard.So the question is, What do the MAJORITY of the manuscripts that contain that passage say? Or, How many contain that little mark that you say is like the difference between "cat" and "eat?" It seems to be very popular among contemporary (usually liberal) Bible scholars to imply greater authenticity for a minority reading simply because it is found in an older copy, and they don't bother to inform the interested nonexpert that the vast majority of the manuscripts on which our traditional translations were based may say "eat" when the minority say "cat."Also, I just realized that the problem of the idea of mss being copied in the DOWN direction is probably adding to the confusion here. The earlier ones are usually from a different "lineage" than the majority texts. They are older, but they are fewer and their readings are often at odds with the majority. It is interesting to wonder why their text is not represented in great numbers or even at all in the later mss that exist. The majority no doubt were copied from another lineage and may in fact be the ones that go back to the originals. The absense or scarcity of representatives of the "earlier" form among the later copies, and the other reading existing in greater numbers, should attest to the majority's having been considered to be the authentic ones by those who used them.This message has been edited by Faith, 12-12-2005 07:30 PM