Giant People in the bible?

whether or not you're quoting it correctly, it's wrong.the root word is נפיל: NPYL, or nephil (5303). the ACTUAL WORD used in the bible is הַנְּפִלִים: ha-nephilym."ha" means "the"
the verb "nephal" means "to fall" and this tense is PAST tense, so "fell"
and the "-ym" or "-im" ending denotes plurality.so, the noun ha-nephalim means "the fallen ones." this kind of fall is physical, and spiritual. it's used to denote people falling on their faces in worship.i think you're thinking "fell" as in "to fell a tree." that would be CUTTING (3722): כרת, or in the text הַכֹּרֵת. ha-karath, the cutter. as in a lumberjack.see:

quote:

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Isaiah 14:8

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Yea, the cypresses rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon: 'Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us.'

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check your concordance, it uses karath, not nephal. wrong word, eddy. it's not a source question eddy. it's how you USE it. as i've demonstrated before, i can make anything say anything i want with your techniques. i did it in the other thread. remember when you were secretly telling me to cut off your head?wanna know the sources i used above? the hebrew bible and some knowledge of hebrew. no no no no NO. says who? ronald pegg? you believe this guy?you seem to own a concordance, what does it do? what's it good for? a concordance for those who don't know is a book that lists every occurance of a word in some piece of literature, and arranges these lists alphabetically. they're not just for the bible, you can get things like a shakespeare concordance.so, tell you what eddy, do me a favor and go buy a shakespeare concordance, and sit down with a copy of hamlet and tell me what shakespeare REALLY means.but more importantly, a concordance DOES NOT define the meanings of the word. it ONLY lists where they occure. dictionaries define words, and bible dictionaries define what words in the bible mean. if you have meanings in yours, you are not using strong's concordance, you are using a combination concordance and bible dictionary, aren't you? see that boring index in the back? THAT is what dr. strong did. not the part you're reading.a bible dictionary is no more of a "decoding key" than an english dictionary. and i believe i've shown you why. did you see how i distorted your meanings? or should i just cut off your head like you suggested i should do? no, it's because not all languages function like english. hebrew lacks some of the creative prepositions that english has. from what i understand of hebrew grammar, things like direct and indirect objects, and prepositional phrases are determined by placement and spelling rather than additional words, as in english. to make these sentances make sense, we have to translate the placement and spelling, which in english involves ADDING WORDS.and no, it's not always perfect, but neither is anything else. there is no need to remove them, and i think you are the most guilty of that here, eddy. i have never seen distortions of biblical text as greivous and criminal as ronald pegg's and yours -- short of the bible code.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 12-04-2004 07:49 PM

we've already discussed this at length.i can't seem to convince you that what you and old ron are doing is logically and linguistically unsound.as for the claims, i don't care one way or the other. it's the technique i attack.do you conceede that i am right in my points above? and yes, that is about what i think of it. only it's kind of lost its humour appeal.

heck, modern concordances and bible dictionaries CAN be of use. when used correctly. for instance, i used one above. i don't have that much knowledge of hebrew. but i know enough to be able to point out eddy's errors.and he has yet to address my points, of course. personally, i'm sort of tired of fighting him. he doesn't listen to me, or understand my objections. at least he removed my words from his website.i think from now on, i'm just gonna post the whole verse in question in masoretic hebrew and septuagint greek, and ask for specific translations.

yeah. but he's not kidding.

seems! no he is. i know not seems.

this is my curse:

quote:

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Pro 26:5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

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seriously, go find our earlier conversations. they're a hoot.

if we look to Enoch for elaboration, enoch calls them giants. they are portrayed as abominations that ravage the earth, slaughtering millions. in response, the angel azazel and a few other teach mankind to make weapons, and it is THAT that prompts god to flood the earth.interesting story, but that's just a reinterpretation from the intertestamental period. don't encourage him!

yeah, that would be one of them.

uh, to my knowledge, no.enoch is one of MANY books that elaborates on the stories in genesis. most are written to explain common questions, such as "where did cain's wife come from?" among others. enoch is essentially no different that jubilees, or the book of adam and eve. and it does show thinking much different from genesis. the depiction of god and his angels is a much more recent view of god, not found in the genesis text.it is, i believe, an intertestamental text.

agreed.when was enoch actually written? do you know? i'm not that familiar with the subject.

yes, that is a good deal later.even at my outrageously late esimate for genesis, 600 bc, which even my bible professor agreed with but wasn't ready to accept for religious reasons.

well, this doesn't reflect the ideology of the people who wrote genesis. they tell the story of the flood in terms of man's wickedness, not interference of outside angelic/demonic forces.it certainly is not mainstream, or in accordance with what became mainstream, even though we find similar ideas in modern christianity. (devil made me do it) not sure on this point, actually. this could certainly be the case. but it could also be the case that enoch was written to further explain the genesis story, and is not directly linked to the older mythology.we have lots of similar books that expound on genesis.genesis does everything but reduce conflict. indeed, it's still there. genesis is full of contradictions. i think it's pretty clear the redactors just didn't care to remove them. so i think this point is probably wrong.

sure. the essenes were around from 200 bc to ad 100.translation on the septuagint began (with a finalized tanakh) in 300 bc.qed, genesis was around prior to the dead sea scrolls. just after 600 bc, during babylonian captivity, is the best guess i got. that's about the time the chaldeans lost ur, and bab-el was rebuilt. good question. no, by the time of his writing, the tanakh had been canonized. he wrote about 180 bc, which is after the septuagint had been completed.the answer to it must lay elsewhere. maybe he was of a slightly different set of beliefs that, where enoch was more important? or maybe he had more texts (such as the book of enoch) available to him?genesis certainly existed and was accepted as part of the torah by then.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 12-20-2004 03:06 AM

possibly. actually, i think we can. the sense of jewish tradition is very strong. if it's considered holy, it's included. if it's not, it's not. the contents of the torah are the very definition of mainstream theology, at least at 200 bc.this probably extends backwards for some time before this date, but there's not much way of showing any real dates. because there is a basic arc of jewish theology over the last few thousand years.originally, god was a member of a pantheon. at some point, he becamse the strongest of the group, and eventually the only member of the group. so we can sort of place about when texts would have occurred (or at least their order) by how polytheistic the books are. and enoch is LESS polytheistic than genesis.genesis describes the actions as being conducted by members of the pantheon (sons of gods), where enoch terms them angels. genesis does not imply their actions are wrong, where enoch does. enoch punishes them, genesis does not.in both they appear to be acting out of god's authority. however, in genesis it appears to be a tradition from before god became viewed as omnipotent, whereas with enoch it appears to from the idea of errant angels. the idea of god relegating his dirty tasks to angels is much later than this tradition, and the idea of FALLEN angles is even later.what i'm saying basically is that BOTH stories contain the same tradition, but enoch's take on it has been mucked with much more recently. because the genesis passage is very cryptic. theology does change. it's quite possible that that part of enoch was written to explain the genesis passage. we have lots of examples of this, and some have worked their way into moder traditions. paradise lost, for instance. no one is arguing that the paradise lost tradition is older than genesis, yet it is far more extensive than genesis. except that genesis talks about neither watchers nor giants. it says sons of gods, or other gods, and men of renown: heroes. the stroy of the nephilim (which do not appear to be giants in the text, or in their other mentions in the bible) does not seek to explain why the earth was destroyed. another explanation is offered for that. the nephilim story just talks about the origins of fabled heroes. it's a etyology of legends, not floods or rainbows.but enoch, who confuses them, must have used a source document that placed one next to each other: genesis. except that genesis was a very common book at the time they were written, and was probably considered part of the torah canon at the time. except that the textual evidence in genesis points to the fact that passage were copied whole, without revision for consistency. it's how we know genesis came from multiple documents. so the manuscript the story of the nephilim was copied from probably was exactly the same as genesis -- for all intents and purposes it IS the genesis account. not at all. i just don't think the evidence points to enoch being technically or theologically older than genesis. the story is obviously older than both, but enoch points to much newer take on the subject. trust me, i would be really excited if it appear to be a source document for genesis. when i first heard about it, i thought it might have been, but evidence, in my opinion, points to that not being the case. you can't expect enoch to have been copied exactly from older traditions, and not genesis.

my dating is not unsupportable rubbish. the dead sea scrolls in their earliest date from around the time the septuagint was finished translation. qed, genesis is older than the dead seac scrolls, even thought it is the oldest HEBREW fragment we have of the book. so what are you shooting for, earlier or later? because that 600 bc date was so late it made my hebrew bible prof itch. although he did mention that there was a rather large group of people who agreed with that date, even if he did not.genesis, to me, looks like a document pieced together from various scraps of other documents. any good reading will agree. it looks like the sort of document people would put together in exile. had they taken their libraries, well, we'd probably have the source documents and not genesis. there's discussion over it today. what's your point? the point is that septuagint demonstrates what the jews had as far as books of the bible in 200 bc, and the version of genesis does not differ significantly (to my knowledge) from the masoretic text. ben sirah would have almost the same version of genesis that we have today. it's not an article of faith, it's an article of LOGIC.frankly, it'd make me feel a lot better faith-wise if genesis was written in the dark ages. yes, well. the sources are clearly older. no one's debating that. genesis's sources are significant older as well. latest date of modification -- the earliest date it existed in its current form, is older for genesis. and the signs point to the story being sourced from genesis. the essenes were collectors of texts. they had lots of non-mainstream stuff, and lots of stuff other sects had. that's why the qumran library was such a find. it represented an overview of what existed at the time. but it is not a representation of the mainstream. the septuagint is.the essenes were an extremist sect, obsessed with ritual cleanliness. they isolated themselves from the mainstream. no, i haven't. genesis existed as it does today, as part of the torah, at the time of the translation of the septuagint. enoch's last date of modifaction was after that date. they were also stashed somewhat haphazardly in caves, not on bookshelves in a library. alright, what is your date for the septuagint then?