Awake! Special Issue - Can You Trust The Bible? (page 2)

Mrs. Witness

Does this issue also state that there's no mythology in the Bible? Mr. Witness tried to argue these points with me a few weeks ago. I laughed and said "You have to be kidding".

sweetstuff

I for one appreciate the bible's candor. Judges 1:19, God can't do @@@@ all against iron chariots. Yup, that works for me.

The WTS conveniently leaves out HOW the bible came to be in its present form, notably the Council of Nicea. No mention is made over HOW the books were selected and which were left out. Revisionist history at its best.

wherehasmyhairgone

Isaiah 40:22. was always a sticking point for me, the word circle ( then in in one step turn that into a globe) man me wonder weather the bible was right after all.

Until you read that in Isiah Isiah using a completely different word for sphere or globe. After some research in the original text, it turned out you don't need to reply on the way they interpret it. You can just go back to the original

Isiah 40:22 refers to a circle ( a flat object) which when laid against the understanding of that time that the earth was a circle, a flat circle, with a a dome heavens.

Then ( icant find the refence right now) but in about chapter 20 of Isiah Isiah refers to a ball and the word used is COMPLETLY different, to describe it shape.

This shows that the bible writer did not see the earth as a ball/globe of sphere, but as a flat circle.

This can all be research with the original text online.

It was the final nail in the coffin for me with the bible and its claims.

But i am looking forward to the JW's calling with this issue.

edit:

i found a really good explanation of all of this, so i without any regard for intellectual property, i will paste the response here

FULL credit goes to : deadman_932

Here's a fuller bit of info on that one:

(Isaiah 40:18-23) To whom then will ye liken God? ....It is he that sitteth upon the circle (chuwg) of the earth

compare to

(Isaiah 22:18) He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a BALL (duwr) into a large country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy lord's house.

The Hebrew word used in scripture for "circle" is chuwg . If the Bible writer had meant for us to believe that "circle of the earth" meant that the earth was round, the writer would have used the Hebrew word for "ball," which is duwr . The fact that Isaiah didn't use duwr shows that he wasn't trying to tell us the earth was like a ball. A circle is not a ball, nor is a ball a circle. A circle is normally considered to be a two-dimensional shape. There is no reason that I know of to say that the Hebrews of the time didn't know this as well, since they had separate words for each.

Chuwg = Strong's Concordance (no. 2328 here and 2329 here , Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (p.97) and Brown Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (p.295) gives the verbal form of the word as "to draw a circle". The noun is translated as either "circle" or "vault". Young's Literal Translation of Isa 40:22 here also gives "He who is sitting on the circle of the earth"

Other words used metaphorically for "round" include "Pot " (dwd or duwd, Strong's : 1731 here "a pot for boiling also (by resemblance of shape) a basket" ...and tlglg "gulgoleth" (Strong's :1538 here "a skull (as round); by implication a head " These words are never applied to the Earth.

Seybold lists 6 occurrences of "chugh" in the OT . He points out that "structurally, "chugh" belongs with the words based on the basic syllable "hg," "bind, gird," etc., with the basic meaning of "describe a curve." "Chugh choq" (Prov. 8:27; Job 26:10) is rendered "incise a circle." Here

Saint Jerome used the Latin word "gyrus" from the Septuagint Greek "gyros" ("circle" "ring"), not the word "sphera" (Gk. "sphaira") to translate "chugh." Nowhere in the LXX is "chugh" rendered "sphaira," or is "sphaira" used at all, so those Hellenized Jews who translated the Hebrew Scriptures certainly didn't see the notion of a spherical earth implicit in their readings of passages with "chugh."

Church Father Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 250 -c. 325) found the notion of a round earth absurd here " How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps?...is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? or that the things ...hang in an inverted direction? that the crops and trees grow downwards? that the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? (Divine Institutes 3:24)

As late as 548 A.D., the monk Cosmas Indicopleustes here was vigorously defending the flat earth in his book Christian Topography. Book four is Cosmas' description of the figure of the world, and his refutation of the Pagan (hoi ekso) doctrine of the sphere.

Daniel 4:10-11. In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” If the earth were flat, a sufficiently tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” NOT ON A GLOBE ...Furthermore, Matthew 4:8 says, “Once again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory.” This is not possible on a Globe, either

lesterd

Seems like if the world were round, HE would be wrapping HIS cloud around it and not spreading it, like butter on a flat piece of toast.

mkr32208

Nope, sorry, that's NOT what they meant by circle! They were talking about circle like a pizza is a circle! That's how Jeremiah's tree could grow in the center soooo big that everyone could see it. If this was a sphere they were talking about then if the tree was growing in china it wouldn't matter how TALL it grew I couldn't see it in the US!

They literally just crap this stuff out and print it...

still_in74

Chuwg = Strong's Concordance (no. 2328 here and 2329 here , Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (p.97) and Brown Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (p.295) gives the verbal form of the word as "to draw a circle". The noun is translated as either "circle" or "vault". Young's Literal Translation of Isa 40:22 here also gives "He who is sitting on the circle of the earth"

And why arent we allowed to study Hebrew & Greek?

undercover

My 5 year old nephew noticed something interesting on this magazine. Like me, he doesn't read the literarture, but he does look at the pictures.

He saw the picture of Jonah and the shark coming at him and said, "I thought Jonah was eaten by a big fish?" to which a JW family member replied, "That's right...you remember your Book of Bible Stories." to which he then said, "But that's a shark. A shark is not a fish".

It was fun to watch the JW trying to rationalize the drawing in the magazine. I finally came to the defense of the 5 year old (just to antagonize as usual), "he's right, ya know. A shark is not a fish. I wonder which is correct? The bible or the magazine?"

Yea, it's nitpicking, but even a 5 year old can see through the BS sometimes.

Awakened07

-As long as we're nitpicking, a shark is a fish though. Whales, killer whales and dolphins are not fish, but sharks are. However, there are lots of differences between bony fish and sharks (but they still go under 'fish'). But why this Awake! chooses an illustration of what looks like a slightly manipulated version of a great white shark, I don't know. Would perhaps have been better to use a whale shark as an example.

AlmostAtheist

>>The "candor" is mostly a function of the presumption of authorship.

Richard Friedman in his book "Who Wrote the Bible?" makes the point that the modern version the first several books of the Bible are actually mergings of writings from several (four?) groups, edited by yet another group. Each group had its own agenda and recorded what it wanted recorded, making heroes of its heroes and bad-guys of its bad-guys. It is the editor that stitched it into a single tome reflecting the views of all of them. So no candor can be attributed to any of them -- the only "honesty" is of the disinterested sort, by the editor.

Dave

Awake! Special Issue - Can You Trust The Bible?