Interesting. So as long as the obeyed God’s stricture against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they could be naked (later found out to be sinful) without problems.
Was nakedness always sinful but it was OK as long as you didn’t know that? Is ignorance bliss?
The whole thing sounds to me like a statement that knowledge is dangerous.
No so much that knowledge is dangerous, but that the cause of man’s suffering is his desire for things beyond what God has given him, or the desire to gain God’s power.
While man had no knowledge of what is right or wrong, he could not be held accountable for sin. After, he must stand in judgement of his actions, because he now has an innate knowledge of good and evil.
The writer seems to regard nakedness as such a wrong that God need not even specifically address its sinful nature. Once their eyes are opened to the nature of good and evil, their sinful nudity is immediately apparent and shameful to them.
There’s an old school of thought that says that “nakedness” is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, but I think the Noah/Ham story gives the lie to that.
References in Leviticus 18 with respect to whose nakedness you may or may not uncover seem to be euphemistically referring to incestuous sex, but I don’t think so. Other passages refer to sex more explicitly. Not that they wanted you to have incestuous sex, but since they didn’t want you to uncover your relatives’ nakedness at all, something pretty much necessary for sex, they figured they had that covered.
I just think the writers of these books had a hang-up about nudity.
That’s okay, we already knew you were shameless.
Of course she was involved in a real estate Ponzi scheme that ripped lots of people off, and lived a lavish lifestyle while appealing to gullible people to send in money to do God’s work.
Pish tosh. :wally
When I was a Bakker fan & even an occasional, very minor contributor, I regarded them as hokey & over-emotional but still devout & caring & well-meaning. When the poop undeniably hit the fan, I thought his conviction & jail time was well deserved & that she should also have been prosecuted. At the time I referred to her as the Marie Antionette of Televangelism. Now, I do wonder how much she was knowledgeable & accountable for the PTL scandals, and I do think she has since learned how to receive & extend grace from her fall.
I even can set aside that Jm J & Tammy Faye trainwreck! :eek:
I will assume that is directed at those who might hold such notions as you quoted, rather than at me… ? :dubious:
I should have mentioned here that I am not a scholar of Hebrew or Greek, and while I know some Latin, I have never read any part of the Bible in that language.
My interpretation comes from agreement between the various English translations I have seen, and therefore, in light of my ignorance of versions closer to the original source material, I more accurately should have attributed the apparent views to the interpreters, unless someone more knowledgeable than me can say that the Hebrew concurs with the standard English translations for these passages.
In the doc I linked to above, she convincingly makes the case that she was kept very much in the dark about PTL finances (even moreso because the tone of the film suggested to me that the filmmakers did not go into the project as Tammy fans). I now hold Jim Bakker solely responsible. I still think she’s kind of freak of nature, but no longer an evil, deceitful freak of nature as I did previously.
At the idea that suffering is caused by the desire for things beyond what God has given, and whoever originated the idea.
[On preview I noticed that everything in a quote is italicized, so I bolded what scotandrsn had italicized.]
I’m going to nitpick this. My reading of the story (Genesis 9:25 - 27) indicates that only Canaan was cursed; not Ham, not Ham’s other descendants, and not Canaan’s descendants. (Why Canaan was cursed for his father’s crime is a question for another place and time.)
I know that white supremacists have used the Noah and Ham story, along with some tortured logic, to conclude that all of Ham’s descendants (i.e., black people) were cursed, and therefore open to any abuse that racists felt inclined to heap on them. (I saw this on an episode of, I believe, Geraldo, since it was many years ago, with a group of Klansmen.) However, my reading of the (English translations of the) text indicates that it was only Canaan. (Which brings up another question: Even assuming that this story is literally true, weren’t the descendants of Canaan destroyed by the Israelites, rendering the white supremacist argument invalid anyway?) By the way, I am in no way accusing scotandrsn of holding these views. I just wanted to nitpick his italicized [now bolded] comments.
On second thought, maybe those comments were referring more to how original sin is passed down to all of Adam and Eve’s descendants, which is a point I will concede, from a Biblical and Theological standpoint, anyway.
I stand corrected.
I think my point, however, that having yourself all your descendants cursed with eternal slavery might be thought in this day and age as a tad extreme, when the offense is more or less the same as your dad walking in on your grandpa in the john, remains.
Eh, the part about Canaan being cursed makes perfect sense. The Israelites had to smite the Canaanites, right? And why? Because they were cursed! It says so right here in the Bible! You always believe the Bible, don’t you kid?
The passage is there to justify the smiting of the Canaanites.
But, unless the story is told another place, or there are different translations, there’s nothing about Canaan’s descendants mentioned. Just Canaan. Again, punishing someone for their father’s crime doesn’t seem fair, but I don’t want to hijack this anymore.
I wouldn’t call it a hijack at all, considering the post that started it was trying to establish a pattern of extremely harsh punishments. Adam and Eve bring punishment on all mankind when they disobey God and find themselves naked. Ham brings punishment down on Canaan for exposing his father’s nakedness.
Anyway, it’s pretty obvious from brief reading of just about any translation I’ve seen that a male’s name is frequently used interchangably for the individual and for his entire line (e.g., sometimes the particular people is referred to as “The Israelites” and sometimes just as “Israel”). In keeping with the point Lemur866 has made, I would say that the use of the word “Canaan” here refers to all peoples arising from his loins, and is certainly consistent with God bringing punishment upon all the descendants of Adam and Eve for their transgression.
Right on!
I consider the two punishment situations to be a little different. First of all, eating the fruit made Adam and Eve mortal. They were punished and changed. They then passed this changed DNA (if you will) and status to all of their children.
In the Noah and Ham story, one person committed a crime, and (for some inexplicable reason) one other person was punished.
But I’d be open to the possibility that “a male’s name is frequently used interchangably for the individual and for his entire line…” Are there any OT examples of this, or examples of it being expressedly stated that someone and their descendants are affected by a blessing or a curse?
Anyone got an answer to whether or not the descendants of Canaan were all destroyed? I suppose I could look it up myself, but I’ve got a Rel 105 final tonight, and I’ve got to study everything else in the Bible. I do seem to recall a story where God got mad at somebody because they didn’t kill everybody in a city as God commanded them to. That could have been the Canaanites. (I’m not sure why I’m pressing this irrelevant question, other than it’s something that I’ve wondered about for about 15 years now.)
But to answer the OP, there are all kinds of prohibitions against seeing any of your close family naked, which is why Ham got in trouble. So I suppose you could argue that it would be OK to join a nudist colony, as long as none of your relatives are there.
Now it is I who must nitpick. (Although, as I mentioned, I can only go by what’s in English translations I’ve seen). And I get to put this into a correct quote box finally!
Now I concede that in Genesis 2:17 God says to Adam, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
But then you are left to reconcile God’s comments to whatever heavenly host to whom he is speaking in 3:22.
Either Adam and Eve were mortal or not. God seems to imply that they will become immortal by eating the Tree of Life, so apparently they are not from the beginning.
So either Genesis 2:17 was an empty threat, or God decided not to kill Adam since he blamed Eve (who may only have gotten the command secondhand from Adam) who blamed the serpent. Mitigating factors, doncha know.
I think God’s curse was not mortality, but ejection from the Garden, along with perpetual pain and suffering during certain routine parts of life.
God’s curse to at least part of the line of Ham was perpetual unpleasantness as well.
To me, they are similar because bith punishments in a sense curse the receiver with perpetual frustration of some sort. Women will always have pain in childbirth, men will always painfully till the soil for sustenance, Canaan will always be the servant of Shem and Japheth.
FWIW, there are several Christian Nudist groups:
Well, no, actually, it’s the reverse. The term commonly translated as “uncovering someone’s nakedness” is always used in the Hebrew Bible in a context that implies sexuality. Therefore, commentators have assumed that Noah’s nakedness was indeed some sort of sexual hanky-panky.
We’re kind of roaming into the Noah Curse story on the side. It’s an interesting story, and in fact I just completed a (lengthy) Staff Report on it that should appear in late January or thereabouts.