by nicolaou 299 Replies latest watchtower bible
Simon - No, he said this is what would happen and it's exactly the same as what god says did happen.
Again, I'm in complete agreement here. God himself, as you pointed out, corroborated this truth regarding their sudden comprehension of good and evil.
And again, nothing in "eating the fruit" would / should have killer her. God decided to murder her for his own failure to prepare and protect them.
Protect them from who? The 'truthful' snake?
so is the Adam and Eve story just that--a story, a myth..a fable?
Do any of us really believe its anything else ?
It sure is funny (and quite pitiful) that there are people who believe that this unoriginal and nonsensical story is actually true. And the people who just accept that it’s all true with no evidence are generally the same people who expect ‘nonbelievers’ to explain complex scientific processes in detail in multiple fields. But they just make up trite excuses for primitive and obviously wrong folklore.
Sea breeze
You can't even provide independently verified evidence of a miracle worker called jesus, and the events that occurred at the supposed crucifixion eg temple curtain ripped in two ,darkness for three hours, earthquake and the holy ones walking out of their tombs. And that only happened about two thousand years ago .
Your Beliefs are based on myths and not facts.
Nicolaou -If everlasting life really had been in store for Adam and Eve don't you think it would've been the first thing God would've told them they'd forfeited after eating the fruit?
This is certainly reasonable to think. However, this specific detail doesn't alter what was said nor what happened.
Jeffro-It sure is funny (and quite pitiful) that there are people who believe that this unoriginal and nonsensical story is actually true. And the people who just accept that it’s all true with no evidence are generally the same people who expect ‘nonbelievers’ to explain complex scientific processes in detail in multiple fields. But they just make up trite excuses for primitive and obviously wrong folklore.
I think it's a good question that nicolaou asked.
I was on my way out (and it's my last day of vacation, so I may not be around for quite some time if at all--I believe have a different road ahead that will take me different places).
However, being a Hebrew speaker, the King James Bible has influenced most English Bible to read: "In the day you eat of it you will surely die..." as if the Hebrew word in this instance is simply YOM.
Is is not YOM as in Genesis 1:5. The word here is BEYOM, and (as a rabbi had it drilled into me--in a very, very, very boring way I might add), though they are related and sound the same because of the root, they do not mean the same thing.
One, YOM, means a literal day, such as when the sun goes up and then the sun sets. But BEYOM refers to a period of the time, such as the expression, "in the day of Moses, such and such happened..."
For instance, notice Leviticus 14:57:
to determine when it is unclean and when it is clean. This is the rule for defiling diseases
Notice the first highlighted use of the word "when." That word in the Hebrew is BEYOM.
And here it is the very first time is appears in the Bible, Genesis 2:4:
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
The KJV, the NAB, and the NIV renders this verse as "in the day they were created" instead of using "when" as the NRSV and RSV above.
Note Genesis 30:33:
So my honesty will answer for me later, when you come to look into my wages with you.
Here, in the above verse, BEYOM is rendered as "in time to come" in the KJV.
It is this Hebrew word, BEYOM, not YOM that is used at Genesis 2:17 and 3:5:
"BEYOM you eat of it, you will die."
In Hebrew, when you are called to the bimah to read this section from the Torah, what does a B'Mitzvah or a nominal Jew understand this portion of the text to mean?
It means something like:
"When you eat of it" or "As soon you bite into it" and not the very 24-hour period or YOM. In other words, death begins with that first bite or "you seal your death with your taking of it," like that.
English is what you call "epigrammatic," meaning very exact in what it says. That is why we are having arguments today about "inclusive language." Should we use the word "maneater" anymore? Is that word, therefore "sexist," implying that such an animal does not eat women too? (Weird, I know.)
Hebrew is the opposite. It's words are layered with meaning. And you cannot match a Hebrew word or phrase between these two languages (English and Hebrew) very easily because of this fact. YOM and BEYOM are very good examples. To the English mind and ear a "day" is just a "day" is just a "day." But this is not the same in Hebrew (this also creates problem with the so-called Jesus rising on the "third day," which I will not go into here, but there you go).
To begin with, this is just an allegory or myth, at least to the Jews. It did not happen. (Sorry JWs and Fundie Christians.) It's a story about God owning a garden in the style of a Babylonian hanging garden of his own and hiring the forebearers of Abraham to work as caretakers. When they steal from God, God banishes them to live outside, "east of Eden." In the eyes of the Jews it is a foreshadowing of the last book of the Torah where Moses, being on the "east of the Jordan," outside of the Promised Land, accepts his fate. Adam and Eve are the same "character" as Moses: all three represent the exiled people of God living "east" of their Promised Land due to breaking the Law as all three characters did (Moses pissed off God too, remember?), thus getting cast out for "breaking the Law" or the Torah. It's an allegory.
God did not "lie" as God probably never told anyone not to steal from him as God never had this conversation or a garden in the first place, etc.
And the word BEYOM, while you can translate as "day" if you want to translate word-for-word, actually means "when" in this case. Translating "word-for-word" doesn't work. It get's you in trouble (try doing that next time you're in Mexico and ordering food or getting directions in Spanish and see what happens)
This story is just a religious lesson to the Jews on not to break the Law Covenant again or they will end up being exiled once more as the Torah was compiled after the Exile to Babylon. God is no less a character than Adam and Eve, the snake, and the talking donkey that later shows up in Numbers chapter 22 of the same book (its all Torah people...just one long book of Law, not history, Law.)
Oy vey. Good night. Live long and prosper. All hail the Rebel Alliance. Snoopy rules!
did you skip the first two chapters of genesis?
notice how the word "day" is used...
If you really take notice, you might see what other readers have since antiquity.
2:4b Starts a second version (J) of the creation story. This one does not use the Sabbath (7 day) week motif but rather simply says God created/ordered the earth and heavens in a day.
The differences do not end there. In the second story, the first living thing God makes is man, then the garden of Eden and plants (no such garden in first version(P)) and then animals which are offered to the man as a partner, but none are found suitable, so then God makes a woman. This is obviously very different from the P version. The P stands for 'Priestly', as this author, unlike J, has a focus on worship (including Sabbath) and Temple functions throughout the Torah.
My point is that the authors had very different schema. One says 7 days one says 1.
Their stories having been collected and laid side by side emphasizes that the compiler recognized their distinctiveness. Do you?
Questions that make me skeptical of a "time period" interpretation for the creative days:
Why does Jesus take Genesis 1–2 as teaching history (Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6)?
Why does Paul take it as history (Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 11:8–9; 15:21–22; 15:45; 1 Timothy 2:12–14)?
Why does Ex 20: 9-ll compare our literal days and week to God's literal creative days and week? Why should I interpret one day literally and another day symbolically in the same verses?
Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. (Ex. 20:9-11)
Why did the ancient, medieval, and modern church—until about 1800—have few commentators (if any) who believed in an ancient universe?
Why do all of the ancient translations and paraphrases, such as the Aramaic Targums, take the words at face value and translate them as “days,” with no hint that they might mean “ages” in Genesis 1?
Why is there little or no classical Rabbinic support for an ancient universe?
Why are there well-qualified PhD scientists who support physical data as consistent with a young-earth view?
Why is The coupling of the word “day” (yom) with an ordinal number (e.g., “second day,” “third day,” etc.) consistently employed throughout the history of the Hebrew Bible as the conventional way to designate a literal day in a literal seven-day week? (Gen. 7:4; 17:12).
Ive been following along and I have a question to anyone claiming the serpent lied.
Gen 2 mentions 2 trees - why hasnt anyone mentioned the 2nd tree?
9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If there was open and free access to the "tree fo life", which granted immortality, as there was to the "tree of knowledge" - how was the serpent to know god would restrict access to it so that adam and eve couldnt live forever after they ate the fruit?
The serpent told adam and eve exactly what would occur- if they ate from the tree of knowledge - they would know good and bad. That happened and it was confirmed by god in Gen 3: 22.
The bible doesnt mention any of the "rules" surrounding the "tree of life".
It amazes me that 6000 years later we are arguing about it and people still base their lives on this incomplete, confusing fairytale.
