by Gill 21 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
LOL, I didn't see jgnat's post before posting mine...
Although the Catholic Encyclopedia's assessment (from the early 20th century) might be modified by later discoveries (especially the Ras-Shamra = Ugarit texts which contain a lot of fascinating poetry, some of which had direct influence on Biblical texts), the literary quality of most of the Hebrew Bible still stands out, as Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God etc.) for instance has repeatedly pointed out.
They must have been very advanced...
After all, who was it that created the pyramid measurements which led or reinforced CTR to the 1974, 1913, 1914, 1918, etc. prophecies?
The "earnest Bible Students who follow Charles Taze" told us so in two threads already this week.
Just ask any Mason.
James
Isreal never managed anything as grand or complex as an empire (the story about solomon/david's empire is fake). Meanwhile, the babylonians, persians, greeks, romans, british put together empires. The egyptians build humongous, complex pyramids. The best the jews were able to muster was cobbling together their tribal book using some of their own characters and history, and borrowing from the cultures around them; the zorostrians, babylonians, egyptians, palestinians.
S
Narkissos - That is very interesting information about the actual time when these early Jewish writings were made. No one doubts they had a lot to say but their 'doings' seemed to be not so impressive.
The Watchtower is always pointing out how enlightened the Isreaelites were because they crapped outside their camp.
It stinks and attracts flies. Is that hard to figure out? Do you need Jehovah to tell you that?
Why didn't God tell the Jews to boil the water?
Why were men allowed to divorce women but women couldn't divorce men? The Egyptian women could divorce their husbands.
The law is riddled with "magic". One example is Leviticus 14. Take two birds. Cedarwood, coccus scarlet material and hyssop. Kill one bird in a clay pot over running water. Take the live bird dip it in the blood of the dead bird. Spatter the leper with the blood seven times. Release the live bird. Declare the leper clean.
This is nonsense. Fred Franz (Jewish Pharisee Wannabe) was obssessed by the old law. That's why he got the whole organization off on the blood transfusion tangent.
Proplog2 -Put like that, you get to understand the nonsense involved in the old Jewish laws. Certainly makes you understand why an organization that reverrs the old, ancient Israelite system could come up with such crap as the Blood Transfusion ban, because blood is sacred........In what? Magic practicing tradition of the Kabbalists!
A noteworthy characteristic of the Hebrew of the Biblical period is its uniform stability. All due allowance being made for scribal alterations whereby archaic passages may have been made more intelligible to later generations, the astounding fact still remains that throughout the many centuries during which the Old-Testament writings were produced the sacred language remained almost without perceptible change-a phenomenon of fixity which has no parallel in the history of any of our Western languages.
It is a significant point worth making that where a national group has a unified body of literature or one great book there is a stabilizing effect on the language and consequently a stabilizing effect on unification.
The Arabs had the Koran. The French had Les Miserables. The English had Shakespeare. The Greeks had Homer.
Etc. etc.
A language, a vocabulary that is ever-shifting is like a foundation of quicksand.
Look at Africa. All those dialects and they are practically a stoneage people.
China is an interesting case in point. The dynasty-centric progress was in flux because it surrounded the lifespans of personality. The so-called "sleeping giant" is ever swallowed up by ideology and the tyrant's hand. There is no core to its society other than indoctrination.
The Hebrew language was meat and potatoes unlike the Greek language which was rife with nuance, shades of gray and a toolbox for philosophy and science. Hebrew is best for poetry because the metaphor is fond of person, place and thing.
Terry:
A professor of African languages once corrected me on referring to African Languages as dialects. They are all distinct languages and only referred to as dialects by the "Superior" european colonialists.
I believe China has a much more advanced society based on a book I can't read, translated by dead people I don't know, and interpreted by fallible humans, published in a subjective monthly magazine anonymously, not available for subscription.
The Arabs had the Koran. The French had Les Miserables. The English had Shakespeare. The Greeks had Homer.
Look at Africa. All those dialects and they are practically a stoneage people.
The Hebrew language was meat and potatoes
