Why is Faith a Virtue?

i'm not exactly fluent in hebrew yet, but i'm a good deal more familiar with the language and idioms and customs than your average church-goer. i assure you, there are contradictions. i agree that many are, in fact, simple misunderstandings. most lists i see are about 50/50. well, no. only the modern revisionist fundamentalist squints their eyes and ignores the details. in this case, this contradiction has been known for at least 400 years, and really probably more like 2600.

quote:

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2Sa 21:19 And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew [the brother of] Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear [was] like a weaver's beam.

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when the KJV puts something in brackets like this, it's because the word or phrase does not exist in the original hebrew. usually it's just a case of a word like "is" (which simply isn't used in present tense in hebrew) or similar issues. in this case, it's to correct a contradiction. the similar passage in chronicles says "brother of" (in the hebrew), and samuel already has goliath dead. the kjv translators saw a problem, and chose to fix it by aligning samuel with chronicles. ...they had to have noticed the problem, in order to fix it.it's also somewhat arguable that the author(s) of chronicles knew about it too. chronicles, like kings, is something of a compiled and scholarly history, and seems to have used samuel and kings as sources. (in the hebrew tanakh, chronicles is relegated to kethuvim, while samuel/kings is in the holier book of nevi'im, the prophets.) so it's quite probable that the author(s) of chronicles saw that goliath was killed twice, and inserted the "brother" bit. this is actually how a number of contradictions are created in the bible -- revision. elsewhere, the author(s) of chronicles took a story of david being prompted to sin by god, and apparently decided that god would not do such a thing, and changed the reference to satan. well, let's be careful here. misunderstood, this custom leads to arguments like crue knight's, where we end up with rather useless genealogies because we can skip generations. we can refer to families as "ben ____" yes. it's rather similar to the icelandic, norse, etc custom of ending family names in -son or -sen. we can see, for instance, that "beni yisrael" applies not just to jacob's twelve sons, but really the entire country founded in their names. but that doesn't mean you can imply that a name is a family name whenever you like, and change the characters of the bible. i promise the jewish scholars have a much better handle on their culture than the christians. Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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on david and solomon? i'm surprised they have any! now i'm curious.

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