Nephilim, or, How to Read

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

When I hear a friend tell a story of something we experienced together – even if it only occurred a moment before the telling – I often have the eerie impression that I am part of the audience instead of an actor. There’s an odd gap between the experience and the story, between the event and the word. It becomes clear that anyone hearing the story is not being connected to the event itself in any real way, but rather is having a new experience, that of hearing the story.

Which interpretation of a text is the “true” one? There are as many “meanings” to a text as there are readings of it. It’s a trick of language that allows you to believe that you can read the same text twice; maybe the arrangement of words on the page doesn’t change from one reading to the next, but YOU do – five minutes from now you will be five minutes older than you are now and the conceptual structure into which you assimilate new patterns will be five minutes more complex, etc. St. Augustine (?) said, “You can never stand in the same river twice.” A text in translation is so many steps further from the original intentions of its author, being an interpretation of an interpretation, from which we extrapolate our own interpretations colored by personal prejudices…

I don’t think it’s possible to know what “really happened” based on a book. You kinda have to be there to know. For this reason I try not to have opinions about things that happened before I was born (people I’ve never met, foods I’ve never tried, etc).

So far as the Bible is concerned, Jack Miles has noted that it is ruthlessly economical, allowing no space for idle mood-setting or character development: if information is included, it is as if it were in a spotlight. One must assume that everything included is important, and nothing necessary has been excluded. Reading the bible does seem at times a bit like reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, with magical non-sequiturs in abundance.

I think it is an error to separate the reading of it from the moment – to fail to connect “the past” with “the present” at the locus of consciousness; also to think that the “final Amen” at the end of Revelations happens at the point in time at which you read it.

Is the Bible true? There’s been a pointed debate over “the search for the historical Jesus” – which inspired the cognitive separation of the (objective) Jesus of history and the (personal) Christ of faith. Ultimately one is forced to admit that there is a gap between what we know and what we believe precisely because we have opinions on things none of us experienced (like the creation of the universe or the ministry of Jesus). One could legitimately question why we need to have these opinions: what difference does it make to you how the universe started? Here you are, and there it is.

I had wanted to tie all this into a nice neat ending, but instead I just keep writing more and more. I hope you have enjoyed this rambling monologue. The end.

Link to Staff Report, edited in by Dex: In the Bible, who were the giant sons of God?

[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 11-27-2001 at 05:22 PM]

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While your point is interesting, I think it misses the point of debating Sitchin et al. What Sitchin, Velikovsky and the other folks claim is verifiable objectively by known methods of astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. etc. I happen to be familiar with astronomy, and could name a litany (haha) of problems with such claims. His mythology is subject to interpretation, maybe, but his claims of physical ramifications are not. That is what we touched on in the other thread.

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Thank you for a beautiful illustration. You understood the text above in the context of a conversation you’ve been having elsewhere on this board. I wasn’t saying anything that had anything whatsoever to do with Sitchin, but you supplied the connection. In my mind, the Bible and the Nephilim have nothing to do with anyone named Sitchin, while to you Sitchin seems to be a central element of the constellation.

How can you separate the perceiver from the perception? Is the sky’s blueness an inherent attribute of the sky or is it relative to an eye that interprets vibrations as blueness? You cannot divorce the reading of a text from its reader, the object from the subject.

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I disgaree. You put the word “Nephilim” in the topic of the thread, in a category on SDMB that has only a handful of active topics, one of which is Stichin’s description of the Nephilim. You also talk about intrepreting books, which is a very important topic in that thread as well. The connection was strongly implied by you. Any leap I made was very, very small.

And if you wanna talk about blue skies, well, I can talk reams about that. :wink:

5

Yonder, welcome to the Message Boards. When you start a new topic, it is helpful if you provide a link, so that later readers will understand what you’re talking about. I’ve edited such a link into your post.

I think the quote about “stepping into a river twice” is way older than Augustine. I think goes back to ancient Greece. And it was Heraclites, an ancient Greek philosopher, who tried to disprove it by stepping in the same river DOWNSTREAM. So he walked, stepped, walked, stepped, walked, stepped, trying to step into the same river twice… until he walked all the way down to the Aegean Sea and drowned. So much for Greek philosophers.

In terms of the Biblical texts, the point is that such texts were authored (or edited) into final versions, and their canonicity was determined by thorough and minute investigation. It is thus fair to accept the Bible as a single work of art, and to answer questions within that context (which is what I tried to do in the Staff Report, rather than worry about historic/archaeological evidence – of which there is none.)

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I guess I’m taking issue with the misconception that “scientific objectivity” has anything to do with the discourse. We don’t know that the Bible was edited, it’s just a theory that allows one to remain more or less internally consistant, given a certain set of other beliefs which happen to be in vogue. It’s a strong theory, but you can’t call it fact because the conclusion is based on inferences. And talking of blue skies, isn’t relativity preventing the erection of a Grand Unified Theory? The measurement is affected by the act of measurement itself. Am I wrong?

Also, one of the things I dislike about the internet is the loss of intonation and gesture, which flattens conversation and can make me sound bitchier than I intend (sorry).

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Dex, I think I was arguing something different than you. But I have to work now. Play later.

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I guess I was arguing that:

(a) The Biblical text can be viewed as a coherent whole; and
(b) While there may be depths and layers of meaning in such text (as with any great work of art), there is also a simple, plain, straight-forward reading.

The Staff Report was based upon these two premises. The discussion on the Message Boards has gone into the multiple layers that you bring up (such as, “Were the Nephilim really space-aliens?” and “Do other ancient mythologies refer to giants?”)

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Yonderboy, I followed that your intent was wholely different than discussing Sitchen’s claims. Rather, more of a philosophical view of what reading is. Fine.

However, some comments still got my attention.

Um, I think we know this as surely as we can know anything we ourselves didn’t directly witness, i.e. there are written records of discussions about texts and multiple versions that have been carried forward. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls. To think that this is not proven is to have an unreasonable definition of proof.

Unless you’re talking more about Genesis having been a compilition prior to any records from Rome on.

I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. For one thing, you’re confusing relativity with quantum physics. Quantum physics is the theory involving the act of measuring affecting the measurement. Also, I don’t think either of those theories are standing in the way of a Grand Unification Theory. They are, in fact, playing a role in the creation of the GUT. It is just there is more info needed.