No problem, Zev. I was wondering if you had anything else than just faith and hope that any of those stories actually happened. I have heard some arguments that the plagues took place based on (interpretations of) the Papyrus of Ipuwer, and I wondered if modern scholarly thought included anything else of archeological significance to bolster major events in the Torah. From your response, it appears not.
Therefore, to me, this whole discussion – did Saul feel this way, why did the Pharaoh do this or that – is moot if we have unreliable evidence that it ever happened at all. Better investigate the psychological workings of the ancient mind(s) that generated this legend.
No. No one has considered that. You are the very first human to ever doubt that the Bible is a true and literal history. Everyone who has replied to this thread thus far, for example, believes every last syllable of the Bible as being absolute concrete proof and evidence of fact. :rolleyes:
Because God gave very specific instructions how He wanted offerings, under many different circumstances. It seems clear to me that if sacrificing an innocent child was abhorrent to Him, there would indeed have been a message.
Well this thread was set up as how a fundamentalist uses the Bible. And so direct quoting of incidents (and taking them at face value) is correct from that viewpoint.
That’s absolutely right. And in no case is a human sacrifice specified.
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God doesn’t have boom out of the heavens every time a wrong is done. If he did so, there would be no free will left in the world. The fact that God was silent in this instance does not indicate that He approved.
Try Acts 15. The relevant section is pretty long, but the gist of it is that there were two factions within the early church, one of which taught that gentile converts to Christianity had to also be circumcized and follow the law of Moses. There was a meeting in Jerusalem, at which the two sides had their say.
However, in the end the council decided to send out a letter to the Gentile converts of Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia:
I imagine that’s the scriptural basis, or the most obvious one. I think there are other, more ambiguous ones scattered throughout the epistles.
It occurs to me that you are also looking at a 4000 year old time with a 2003 lens.
Zev explained before that it was not so bizare, for the time and culture, for a person to sacrifice children. The fact that Abraham was willing to do so does not mean that he was a horrible human being. It means that he was willing to go with the standard idiology of the time. The surprise ending was that God told Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac, albeit at the last moment.
It has been a few millenia since the binding of Isaac, and the concept of life being precious (particularly children) has been circulated. God made that clear - God spent a lot of time and text telling us not to murder, and not to “give our children to Molech” - a specific idolatry which required child sacrifice.
After living in a society where Biblical standards are the norm (even though it is more of a free society, things other than Biblical are contraversial), the concept of child sacrifice horrifies us. The concept that the destruction of innocent lives is with bred into our society. (This is a good thing.)
I’m an atheist.
We are discussing fundamentalists and their viewpoints.
They take quotes from the Bible literally.
So God’s ideology has changed since then? Wish he’d make up his mind - is child sacrifice a good thing, or not? :rolleyes:
The surprise for me is that Abraham was willing to slaughter his child.
Jepthah makes a deal with God. In exchange for military victory, he will sacrifice whatever reaches him first.
It’s his daughter.
Even assuming an omnipotent God couldn’t have foreseen this, why did God give Jepthah his victory, unless He approved?
Why didn’t He produce a handy animal substitute?
God’s ideology has not changed. The surrounding culture’s ideology has changed. It was God’s plan to set it up to LOOK like He was asking for child sacrifice (like the local religions of the time), and then VOIDED it - it was one of the clearest ways to say, “Hey there! Following Me is different than doing what everyone else around here is doing!”
God hasn’t changed. The fact that people today look at the concept of child sacrifice in horror means that society today (in a general way) is a lot closer to what God probably wants from society than it was when Abraham walked the earth.
Wow, on rereading that it came out way way snarkier than I intended it. I meant it much more tongue-in-cheek and it came out instead sounding mean and nasty. I apologize.
The God of the Old Testament demanded Abraham commit child abuse.
I’m certain you can think of a better way for God to mark his religion. :rolleyes:
He also slaughtered an entire generation of Egyptians to force the release of His people, after forcing Pharoah to keep the Israelites prisoner.
He accepted a deal with Jepthah which resulted in human sacrifice to Him.
I haven’t gotten onto the massacre of Sodom and Gomorrah, nor the slaughtering of the prophets of Baal, nor the drowning of the Egyptian army, nor the persecution of Job.
Do you not see any difference between the God of the Old Testament and Jesus?
Thanks, OpalCat, apology accepted. Take another anti-snark pill. I’m glad I waited for a while before replying!
I was going to (but I won’t) sprinkle my reply with numerous quotes from this thread to illustrate my point, which is: while few people may take the bible as serious history or solid commandments from God, many seem to be arguing that Moses said this, Abraham did this, Christ said that, etc., when their very existence is in doubt and the event described may never have occurred. Certainly there is little or no corroborating evidence for much of the bible.
While I don’t claim that my theory of biblical text origin – that it was set down by imaginative scribes and storytellers using oral history sources – is original, I think this thread isn’t giving that theory its due.
Rather than argue what actually happened in a story, I would rather examine the mind of the culture and the scribe for psychological clues of why the story took a particular twist. For example, the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice story seems constructed to instill blind obedience in religious followers. It says that you should trust God without question, no matter how bizarre the commandment, because He knows best and it will all turn out OK in the end. Sort of a super-patriarchal concept, and that matches the culture of the day pretty well, I would say.
Similarly, fairy tales reflect the culture of their day. In a time when every female dreamed of being swept off her feet by a white knight (literally) and carried off to a castle to be cared for forever in luxury, those were the kind of tales that were written. When dragons were thought to exist, dragon slayers appeared in stories. How many (medieval) fairy tales are there about single moms struggling to break the glass ceiling?
I’m glad I waited for a while before replying!