Ok so my technical ability isn't up to my ability to state the bleed'n' obvious. I hope that l have shared an article on this subject which l have found useful.
Jan from Tam
God cannot lie
by psyco 41 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Hopeless1
Thank you Jan, l found that article useful too,
best wishes..
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stan livedeath
the bleedin obvious--- ( for those who just dont get it )
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nicolaou
How long does it take to eat a piece of fruit?
Adam and Eve had no expectation of living forever so where's the punishment if the death sentence is imposed at the very end of their lives when they would have died anyway?
Please answer for yourselves, don't hide behind links to someone else's apologetics.
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Ron.W.
That Fawlty Towers scene never ceases to crack me up!!👍
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jhine
There are two deaths.
Rev 2: 11 " Whoever has ears , let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches . The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death. "
Rev 20 : 6 Blessed are they who share in the in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them , but they will be priests of God and Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years "
Rev 20 ;14 " Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire . The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire "
So Adam and Eve subjected themselves to the second death.
Jan from Tam
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nicolaou
Lakes of fire, first resurrections, second deaths? I abandon you to your mumbo-jumbo.
I don't know what I expected really. When Christians defend God's killing of innocent children they're hardly going to flinch at hiding his lies.
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PioneerSchmioneer
I do not see the connection between the OP and Adam and Eve. But whatever it is, I don't believe people need to follow the Bible or some religion after leaving the Watchtower to find answers. But since that is what we are talking about...
The original question was based on the Watchtower conundrum caused by the Biblical texts of Numbers 23:19, Titus 1:2, and Hebrews 6:18 in light of the narrative where God sends a “lying spirit” into the mouth of prophets found at 1 Kings 22:21-23 and 2 Chronicles 18:21-23.
Fundamentalist Christians also face this same problem due to their literal interpretation of Scripture. I think this is quite a bother for quite a few people who want all things to fit in a nice perfect package, and they try to make everything work together with creative but often failed reasoning instead of looking at narratives for what they are.
However, even with a literalist view of the Fall of Man, very few if any pick on the phrase found at Genesis 2:17, BEYOWIM, which often gets translated as “on the day” in formal equivalence Bible translations, but in Hebrew actually means “then/when/at that time” and appears over 2300 times in the Hebrew text, and many times it never even means “day” at all: Ge 30:33; Le 14:57; Nu 6:13; 1 Sa 18:10; 1 Ch 12:23, etc.
Some formal equivalence translations do not render the word “day” in the instance at Genesis 2:17:
From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die.--NABRE.
But if you use the word “day,” it means the same thing as when a parent tells a child: “You will rue the day you ever did that!” It is an old form of English, and it doesn’t mean that something will happen on a certain day. To “rue the day” is a phrase Shakespeare made famous that means “to regret.” The way the King James Version rendered Genesis 2:17 trickled down to many other Bibles, and the phrase became a standard in English--until recently due to its misunderstanding.
To sound like an old broken record with a previous post:
Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, essentially taught that there was no difference between creating an image out of wood or stone and worshiping that or creating one out of words and calling that your god. Either way, you are still making an idol, he explained, visible or out of words, shaping it to look and act like a human, and calling it God--even though it was in your image and acting like a man or woman: lying, being jealous, angry, etc. That, Maimonides taught, is not God. That is an idol, even if it just made out of words found from the Scriptures.
The stories written by ancient Bible writers, though very pious and faithful, were limited due to their culture and even (as the prophets would condemn them for) their worship practices, to think of their own Deity under the limits of Levant religions which thought of gods as human monarchs, sitting on thrones, acting like kings, controlling the earth from on high. Those concepts, Maimonides argued, were inventions of humans. If there was a God he proposed, then such descriptions could not be used to properly fit the Deity.
Stories about God sitting on a throne and arguing with humans and getting mad and angry and having a head and arms and having any kind of attribute a human would have, including lying, is anthropomorphic. That is one way we know a Biblical story is either mythological, folklore or legend.
Mainstream religion answered this question in the Middle Ages--that's a long time ago. The Jehovah's Witnesses came from the Second Great Awakening where they rejected teachings from higher learning, history, the Jewish sages, and even the Church Fathers. If it wasn't written between the pages of a King James Bible, it wasn't truth.
It was a sad way to look at the world, with Millerites sitting on top of roofs after having given away all their earthly belongings waiting for Jesus to return--something we would see repeat itself again and again in certain ways among the JWs with their failed prophecies too.
It's not so much the Bible itself that is the problem. It's a group of people who can't get out of a cave of lesser learning and apparently won't do it.
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peacefulpete
Jhine....Your link points out the Hebrew idiom "dying you/they shall die" was often used in the OT. Never in those usages does the expression suggest "eventually" or "gradually" as the writer of the article proposes for Genesis 2. Yes, the "the day" was referring to the day they ate, but it equally refers to the time of death. Elsewise the inclusion of "the day" becomes superfluous.
It is difficult to extrapolate exactly what (J) had in mind but likely his brief narrative was meant to stand alone as a warning tale. The expansions and bridges of later redactors created the continuity issue. Possibly the redactor and later sages were not concerned by this as they had inherited a larger body of tradition that made some explanation possible even obvious. (i.e. God's mercy.)
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peacefulpete
And there is no such thing as a "creative day". The story defines the days as consisting of an 'evening and morning', not millions of 'evenings and mornings'. OTOH if a reader assumes this was a symbolic or metaphoric day, then what else ought we regard as metaphor? The man named "mankind/man" the woman named "mother"? God's tree with forbidden fruit? the wise talking snake? The nakedness?