I wish I knew enough about the details of ancient Hebrew to comment on the grammar (but I don't). I'm glad that arachnophilia was able to shed some light on that (
Message 4 and
Message 10). Equally important, I think, was this comment from jaywill (
Message 11):
You have at least 40 different authors over a period of some 1,600 years. I am acutely aware of how God used many authors to convey His revelation in the Bible.
His numbers are a little different from arachnophilia's, but it makes the same point, and I would add: at least dozens of translators, and who knows how many copyists. And add on top of that: how much of the content came originally by way of oral tradition, passed by word of mouth over many generations before the means were available to write it down. In any event, whether spoken or written, human language is intrinsically ambiguous and inescapably fallible.
There's a lot more to the problem than can be handled by saying "the writers were inspired/guided/spoken to by God." The real difficulty -- and most of the trouble and strife, and the reason why there are so many incompatible branches of Christianity/Judaism/Islam -- is the problem of the readers trying to get it right. (update: rather, it's the readers who believe they got it right, to the extent that they assert all others are wrong)
There's an interesting thing about translating from one written language to another: no two translators will ever produce the same result from a given source text. I've seen this myself, with 10 different people translating the same set of basic news stories from Arabic newspapers into English. In general, there's a level at which all the translations were "equivalent" (they conveyed the same basic facts), but there were differences at many points in word choice and word order, to the extent that finding any one sentence come out the same from two different people was a rare exception. For simple statements of fact or observation, this wouldn't matter much, but for statements of opinion and conjecture, and crucially for a reader's response in terms of inferences and presuppositions ("reading between the lines"), the differences can be significant.
There is a lot to be learned here about the complexities of using natural human languages to transfer information, above and beyond the obvious issues of "performance errors" (inadequacies and outright mistakes in both speech and writing). And the case of translation is really just an amplification of what happens with text that was originally written in a reader's own native language.
Drawing another insight from jaywill, on February 2 (
Message 3) he said:
Today, my opinion is that perhaps the name of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given to it by an enemy of God...
Now I could have it wrong. And I admit that this is how I presently feel today.
Maybe his opinion has changed since then -- I certainly would have no problem with that. The variety of opinions expressed about the meaning of the first-person-plural in the cited passages from Genesis (the Christian trinity, a simple foible of Hebrew usage, etc) have all been enlightening. (I learned about the three genders of God expressed in the qabala; and I had never heard before that Michael was "the Son" before Jesus was born -- where is that stated in scripture, I wonder?)
I think that if you say "What is the correct way to interpret this?" that is the wrong question to ask. The right thing to ask is: "How many ways have people interpreted this so far? Are there other ways? What are the reasons people have for their various interpretations?" This thread has been a gold mine for answers to those questions. Keep an open mind about it. Then, as jaywill would do, make up your mind yourself about which interpretation makes the most sense to you right now, and accept the possibility that you might change your mind about it later.
This is not really a scientific approach, because it doesn't really rely on what scientists would call "evidence." (In fact, this thread clearly demonstrates why the Bible should not be taken as the basis for understanding physical reality, and why the Young Earth Creationists are so colossally wrong. Understanding the Bible is an inherently personal, internal process, not subject to empirical research, and likewise, empirical research on geology, biology and astronomy cannot be constrained or dismissed by particular interpretations of the Bible.)
This is simply an open-minded and reasonable approach that ought to keep you from getting into fruitless battles about holding strictly to one doctrine rather than another. (There's always the risk that others will fight with you anyway, just because you don't adopt their particular interpretation/doctrine. Let's hope you don't run into a lot of people like that.)
Edited by Otto Tellick, : added to 3rd paragraph (as noted there), minor rewording elsewhere.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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