Posts by Narkissos

19

Moses was an Israelite Egyptian Military leader who rebeled! Any thoughts or info?

by Witness 007 in

josephus and other non bible sources say moses was an excellent egyptian military commander who defeated the ethiopians.

now while i'm re-reading these bible accounts i get the feeling that moses was a brutal and smart military man.

as the "meekest man" on earth he invaded many nations killing all the inhabitants, taking their land {promised by jehovah} spoils and virgins.

Narkissos

Good points.

What I can't quite figure out yet is how you go from an Egyptian mshh as a 'non-theophoric hypocoristic form' (which I understand functions as personal name, but I may be wrong about that too) to a gentilice (mshy, which I also think predates the Biblical eponym mshh and a fortiori the secondary mshy PN).

Your argument about 2 Kings makes me think that the DH may have known the basic J story after all.

Micah 6:4 is particularly interesting because it has the trio Moses, Aaron and Miriam: on the one hand, the small (and even partly negative) role of Miriam in the Torah may plead for the antiquity of the text (a topos of feminist exegesis :)); otoh, the absence of Aaron (and Miriam) from any other arguably "old" text makes it sound too good to be true...

46

Hostility to God's "name"

by AwSnap in

i was given the brochure the divine name that will endure forever, and was pointed to page 20 which is entitled "hostility to god's name?".

it says that the word jehovah was originally in the hebrew scriptures but was taken out.

is this true?

Narkissos

Ifyhwh is to be regarded as a verbal form (from a 3-letter verbal root, hwh, with a preformant y- indicative of third person "imperfect"), in "normal" conjugation it would have only two syllables: Y?H:W?H (the Masoretic vowel pointing separating the middle consonants, which I indicated by ":", is a "quiescent" or mute shewa, phonetically nothing). Interestingly, the explicative/interpretive pun on the Tetragrammaton in Exodus 3:14ff ("I am / shall be") which uses a similar though distinct root, hyh, is written 'hyh and vocalised 'ehyeh (four letters, hyh + preformant ' = 1st person imperfect, two syllables); the 3rd person equivalent would be yihyeh, "he is / shall be".

If the first vowel is "a" (as indicated by almost all vocalic transliterations of the theonym or theophoric names, from Akkadian to Greek), this would suggest an "imperfect" hifil (yaqtil) rather than qal (yiqtol), with causative or at least transitive value (depending on the verb).

But of course the theonym Yhwh predates Biblical Hebrew so nothing of the above is absolutely conclusive about its original pronunciation.

46

Hostility to God's "name"

by AwSnap in

i was given the brochure the divine name that will endure forever, and was pointed to page 20 which is entitled "hostility to god's name?".

it says that the word jehovah was originally in the hebrew scriptures but was taken out.

is this true?

Narkissos

About the issue of transliteration / pronunciation, I noticed that in the French NWT revision sometime in the 90s they moved a number of Hebrew names from the usual French transliteration (which is found in most bibles and derives mostly from the Latin Vulgate) to a stricter one (which used to be applied only when no usual transliteration was widely known). This is striking in the titles of the Twelve Prophets, Joël -> Yoël, Abdias -> Obadia, Jonas -> Yona, Michée -> Mika, Sophonie -> Tsephania, Aggée -> Haggaï, Malachie -> Malaki. This must have pretty disturbed French-speaking JWs I suppose (I had left the decade before and was not there to... witness it), but the strangest thing to me is that seems to have been a purely French move since there was no similar change in the English NWT (other than that the French revision followed the English even more slavishly than before)... Whatever the case, I find it amusing that the (French) WT went out of its way to transliterate and pronounce Tsephania more "correctly" and did not bother to do the same thing with Yahweh...

80

Are we following men?

by jookbeard in

jw
friends

schipper, you never answered the post's on your previous topic, and you go and open another topic, go back to your previous topic please.

Narkissos

You will find many Pears of Wisdom..

Wasn't that the forbidden fruit? ;)

40

"My God and My Lord" Ps. 35:23 - Need OT version

by jonathan dough in

when thomas said "my lord and my god," he used the exact words that david used at psalm 35:23 with reference to god, writing, "awake, be vigilant in my defense, in my cause, my god and my lord," (rsv, nab, kjv and green's literal translation).

"lord" here is translated from the hebrew adonai used exclusively of god.

thomas would never have used these same words when addressing the risen christ if he were just a man.

Narkissos

PS: There are many introductions and commentaries available, but you might start with this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gospel-Epistles-John-Raymond-Brown/dp/0814612830

19

Moses was an Israelite Egyptian Military leader who rebeled! Any thoughts or info?

by Witness 007 in

josephus and other non bible sources say moses was an excellent egyptian military commander who defeated the ethiopians.

now while i'm re-reading these bible accounts i get the feeling that moses was a brutal and smart military man.

as the "meekest man" on earth he invaded many nations killing all the inhabitants, taking their land {promised by jehovah} spoils and virgins.

Narkissos

Leolaia,

Thank you for this excellent post.

There are a number of threads I had noticed in the past (especially genealogical overlapping between Edom and Caleb, the connection between the Shasu Yhw and Seir, the Yahwistic Qenites -- cf. Genesis 4:26! -- and Timna as a place of Egyptian-Semitic encounter and possible syncretism) but I had never thought of linking them with the early "Levite" tradition, and this makes a lot of sense.

I'm still wondering about your suggestion of Moses (Mshh)'s name being traditional. The different genealogical inscription of Mushi(tes) in Exodus 6:19 (Numbers 3:20,33; 1 Chronicles 6:4,32; 23:21,23; 24:26,30) and Numbers 26:58 argues for the antiquity of the gentilice; the copper serpent (cf. 2 Kings 18:4, nchsh nchsht) may predate Numbers 21 (etiology?) and both almost certainly point back to the Timna region as the origin of the cultual practice, but it is uncertain to me that the connection with Moses (as an individual, Egyptian-like theophoric name lacking a theonym) predates Deuteronomistic redaction (cf. v. 6,12 and 1 Samuel 12:6,8; 1 Kings 2:3; 8:9,53,56; 2 Kings 14:6; 21:8; 23:35 for other occurrences of Moses which clearly presuppose the Exodus and/or Torah traditions). Are there other clues I am not thinking of?

80

Are we following men?

by jookbeard in

jw
friends

schipper, you never answered the post's on your previous topic, and you go and open another topic, go back to your previous topic please.

Narkissos

do you really believe that anyone reads your Freddy-like answers?

I did. And that spared me a post because I was about to make some of her points in less colourful style... :)

46

Hostility to God's "name"

by AwSnap in

i was given the brochure the divine name that will endure forever, and was pointed to page 20 which is entitled "hostility to god's name?".

it says that the word jehovah was originally in the hebrew scriptures but was taken out.

is this true?

Narkissos

Welcome!

As far as the Hebrew Scriptures = Old Testament are concerned, the Tetragrammaton was never taken out, it's still there in Hebrew editions; a number of English translations substitute it with LORD but others don't and transliterate it as Yahweh (Jehovah in older versions).

It is very different with the Greek Scriptures = New Testament where no single manuscript has any occurrence of the Tetragrammaton in any form. There the WT assumes that it was "taken out" in the early 2nd century or so and claims to restore it whereas there is no evidence at all that it was there in the first place (and much evidence to the contrary).

Mixing up the two issues obfuscates the problem; the practice of substituting LORD to Yhwh in the OT is questionable; the practice of substituting Jehovah to kurios in the NT is even more questionable; but the confusion makes it look like the WT is pursuing the same noble cause in both cases.

14

'Sign of the times'

by wantstoleave in

as someone who is still wading my way through fading/leaving.....im looking for thoughts on 'signs of the times'.

example, 'earthquakes in one place after another'......things like that.

world powers etc......peace and security....basically anything that has been taken from the bible to signify living in the last days.. i have to admit, when i hear about all the earthquakes around the place, especially in recent years being so many, i get a shiver of fear.

Narkissos

wantstoleave,

The magical bubble of "Bible prophecies" (in the sense of long-range predictions making up a "script" of events to happen in the future, close or distant) can be burst in a number of ways. Wrapping your head around history, what it is and how it works, the part of chance and free interaction of many things and subjects it involves every minute, may help you realise that the future cannot be actually written in advance anywhere, anymore than you can get the weather forecast for next month exactly right, for exactly the same reason: over a certain number of parameters prediction is strictly impossible, unless they are no parameters at all and we are just characters and props in an already shot movie -- in which case any sense of "we" implodes. That's probably the shortest way for even a mildly rational mind.

Now if your idea of "God" prevents you from reaching such a conclusion by a "rationalistic" way, because the Bible can be a magical book after all, I'm afraid you'll have to embark in the more difficult (although interesting) task of historical exegesis: figuring out how the texts were written and what they were originally about, how their first meanings were lost and drifted along the centuries to become material for modern prophecy-making.

You will then find how the "Olivet discourse" was modified from Mark 13 to Matthew 24 and Luke 17; 21, how "the coming of the Son of Man" was expected before, along with, immediately after and then much later than Jerusalem's fall to the Romans in 70 AD. You will analyse the context of 1 Thessalonians and find out that "peace and security" is actually not a forewarning sign, but the normal state of events (like people "eating, drinking, marrying, buying, selling" in Luke 17) before the "day" comes "like a thief in the night" (i.e. anytime). And you will see how this "no-sign scenario" is explicitly contradicted in 2 Thessalonians 2. You will notice how a number of early Christians thought they were the "last generation" before the perspective changed...

Actually you will get back to the first approach: understanding how history works, only within the Bible itself.

5

the worldwide agenda

by ninja in

jw
friends

britain........http://www.reuters.com/article/latestcrisis/iduslb658876.

america.....http://www.newsweek.com/id/215291/page/1.

why do we see the optimum population trust patron david attenorough say...... "he is frightened by the number of people in the world and says the human race needs to be reduced"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6121737.ece.

Narkissos

ninja,

Conspiracy stuff aside, what should really scare us is the issue of world population (which is in a sense the problem of all problems, and a tricky one as it results directly from our historical "solutions": mankind has been too good at protecting itself) not being adequately addressed (or, more realistically, consistently swept under the carpet) by the political spheres. At this point the lack of (working) conspiracy is scarier than the worst conspiracy you can imagine.