Posts by David

43

Why Is YHWH Used Regularly In OT and NEVER in NT?

by minimus in

jw
friends

and if the name jehovah is that important why is it that jesus christ never use that name in a record of scriptures?.

David_Jay

Slimboyfat,

Actually, I've worked on an interconfessional translation of the Scriptures in the early 2000s between Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. I did some work on the Deuterocanonicals, and with help from members of the CBA I got access to the textual materials that went into the current Catholic NABRE. It used a "patchwork" approach to produce its current 2011 revision of these books, including Hebrew manuscripts previously unavailable to produce English versions of Tobit and Ben Sira.

It was during this period that I got access to the Septuagint texts. Jews don't use them much anymore, even though they are Jewish translations of the Tanakh into Greek. This is when I got to see the various fragments for myself (though most in facsimile format due to the fact that the originals cannot be exposed to handling). Pr458 has spaces with dots instead of the Tetragramaton. I've seen it personally as well as the 2nd generation LXX texts with the Divine Name in Hebrew characters.

The Septuagint is a work of the BCE period, not the CE era. The reason the CBA members were so helpful in my introduction to these tests is that the Catholic Church accepted the Canon of the Alexandrian Septuagint prior to the development of both the Marcion canon and the New Testament canon. It is marked as the "LXX" (which is the number 70 in Roman numerals) due to the tradition that 70 scholars of the Jewish diaspora produced it.

So no, I am not relying on Wikipedia but my own educational training I received after leaving the JWs and my personal experience from my professional life.

Your claim that the LXX is a Christian work from the Christian era is neither substantiated by history or dating of the manuscripts themselves. The Septuagint is well-known as a work of the Jewish diaspora Second Temple era, predating Christianity. Some of the quotes of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament come from the LXX, which in itself proves that it came before the first century.

The finalized generations of the Septuagint abandoned the use of retaining the Divine Name centuries before the first Christian texts were composed. Because it was used as a source for Tanakh quotes, the New Testament has no use of the Divine Name when it quotes the LXX. This was even acknowledged in the appendix material of the original 1950 edition of the New World Translation.

Because the LXX has those "extra" books like Ben Sira, Tobit, Wisdom, and editions to Esther and Daniel is the reason the Catholic Church has them in their canon. It was the version of the Old Testament inherited by the original Church. The books of Maccabees, products of the Septuagint, contains the origins of the Jewish celebration of Chanukah and are read by many Jews each year on the 8 nights of celebration. These facts alone show the LXX cannot be a product of the CE period, let alone that secular history records when the LXX was produced.

To demonstrate, a copy of the Septuagint (which legend said was owned by Cleopatra) was reportedly lost in the fire set by Julius Caesar's men during a battle which spread to the Library of Alexandria. This happened during one of his famous battles that occurred in 48 BCE. This footnote to history would have been impossible if the LXX was a product of the Christian era.

Again, as I've stated in my previous post, why believe me, a Jew, right? We wouldn't know our own history or details about our own holy books like the Septuagint, or so it seems by the way many Christians and non-Jews challenge us about the details regarding our own culture.

129

Hi forum

by A Believer in

i proably shouldnt be on here but i feel like saying this.

i have been for the last couple weeks been studying religion.

i've learned the only ones who today do what the bible says to is jw.

David_Jay

"The only ones today who do what the Bible says is Jehovah's Witnesses."

This may be true, and at the same time it can be a very bad thing. The Bible says some people will make grave errors. Are you one of these? At Luke 21:8 Jesus said:

"Beware that you are not lead astray, for many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and 'The time is near!' Do not go after them."

The footnote to this verse in the NRSV says that "I am he" is literally "I am" and scholars point out this can be a reference to the Divine Name, making the verse read: "Many will come in my name, uttering the Divine Name, saying 'The time is near!' Do not go after them."

What religion fulfills this? Who goes about "uttering the Divine Name"? Who else but Jehovah's Witnesses are going about telling people that "the time is near"?

Even if the footnote reading is ignored, what did Jesus say we should do when we encounter people who tell us "the time is near"? Christ's answer: "Do not go after them." Are you obeying this or ignoring this?

Jehovah's Witnesses say world events like wars and earthquakes and the like are signs that the end is soon to come. But Jesus taught the opposite:

"When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately." --Luke 21:9.

Notice, "the end will NOT follow immediately" as the Witnesses have been saying it would. As Jesus states as recorded in Matthew 24:6, "you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but the end is not yet." These are not signs of the end times says Jesus. And again, should his followers hear people saying " the time is near, " they are instructed by Jesus not to follow those who claim such things.

What about how the Witnesses claim that we have been living in the time of Jesus' invisible presence since 1914? Jesus warned: "If they say that the Son of Man is present but far away in the desert somewhere, there is no reason to go with them. If they say: 'He can't be seen because he is in an inner room closed away from sight,' don't fall for that. For just as you can see the flash from a lightning bolt in the East even If you are facing West, it will be no different once the Son of Man is here. If there really is a dead body somewhere, the presence of vultures will prove it. " --Matthew 24:26-28.

Are you disobeying Jesus by following those who tell you the end is near? Do you believe that Jesus has returned, but can't be seen because he is out of sight as if he were away in the wilderness of in some inner room?

Do that if you want to. Follow those Jesus said NOT to follow. It will only prove you will make up any excuse of believe anything except the words of Jesus: "Do not go after them."

43

Why Is YHWH Used Regularly In OT and NEVER in NT?

by minimus in

jw
friends

and if the name jehovah is that important why is it that jesus christ never use that name in a record of scriptures?.

David_Jay

You are correct, Fulltimestudent, with an additional "caveat," as you put it.

It is actually an act of naïveté that some non-Jews and especially Christians make in reference to Jewish religion and worship. Our religious practices and theology have never, ever been static. They not only changed under Hellenistic influence, as you mention, but in every era, with the winds of every political change.

Jews acknowledge a fact that is often disturbingly unamusing to the likes of Jehovah's Witnesses, namely that there was never a truly "pure" form of Judaism. It has never been "one original thing" (even if you read through the Hebrew Bible, which many JWs never have). Christians especially like to think that Judaism only changed with the Second Temple era and mistakenly draw Jesus as a "restorer" of "true" Jewish practice and thought (in reality, he was as much a product of the times as were the Pharisees). Political intrigue and changes to the map of history have always influenced Jewish theology, and it has bent for all types or reasons (not merely survival) with each passing century up to and after Jesus.

It is even a fundamental element to Jewish practice that Judaism never stays aloof and disconnected from the changing world around it. Except for small groups of fundamentalist Jews, the universal tenet of tikkun olam makes this impossible. The acknowledgement of this need for "staying in touch" and changing with the times does not come from many religious groups, like the JWs, who rely on a fictional retelling of Jewish history to make their house-of-card theology work.

As for the Name, part of the reason that it is not used to the extent that God remains essentially "nameless" is that the Jewish concept of "God" is very unlike the Christian and Muslim concept (not to mention the Watchtower brand of "God"). It is actually closer to atheism than the Christian concept of theism.

For Jews, all gods and all religions are false. There is no such thing as a god. Deities are fake. All of them are. The "God" of the Jews is what we recognize as the "Great Cause" and "Ultimate Purpose" of all. What or who is this, we don't know. Can it be truly understood or defined? No, not in Jewish thought.

But since the universe is here, the concept is that we are thus witnessing an "effect." The universe and world we live in is the effect produced by a "cause." This "cause" is what the Abrahamic God is. It is not "god" in the pagan or heathen view. It does not require belief anymore than the "effect" we witness does. The Great Cause of everything is the only thing that can be "God" in the sense that humans can grasp. It also, according to Jews, remains a mystery, much like agnostics acknowledge.

So it is very different from "God" taught in Sunday schools and Watchtower studies. YHWH is the "un-God," if you can grasp my meaning. That is why Jews can be atheist and still pray and worship. The two are not against one another in Judaism.

This makes the Name ineffable. We don't even recognize the pronunciation "Yahweh" in Judaism because it is as invented as the Catholic "Jehovah." It doesn't sound anything like anything in Hebrew. There's nothing like it. We only use "Yahweh" in discussions like this with Christians or those exposed to Christian thought, but the sound and name mean nothing. We don't recognize it as being the same as the YOHD HE VAV HE of HaShem. So there was never anything for Christianity to inherit when it came to a name's pronunciation. "Names" are not the sounds they make in Jewish culture, they are the person and their attributes.

But as one person said: "What do you Jews know about God or the Bible?" Until people listen and learn from the Jews about their God, they will never fully grasp the concepts so many of them hold dear (like Christianity). We Jews are always wrong, and the Gentile Christians and their "scholars" always know better. (Can I hear an "Amen!" from the Governing Body?) Sigh.

43

Why Is YHWH Used Regularly In OT and NEVER in NT?

by minimus in

jw
friends

and if the name jehovah is that important why is it that jesus christ never use that name in a record of scriptures?.

David_Jay

Judaism acknowledges some of the theories you are proposing, Crazyguy (making you not so "crazy" after all).

One theory is that the Hebrews were introduced to YHWH via the people of Sinai, some of which may have been fellow slaves that escaped with them from Egypt during the Exodus. Jewish scholarship points to clues in the Torah itself as to this being possible.

The critical theory centers on the Exodus narrative, where it is not until Moses flees to Midian, meets up with and marries the daughter of Jethro, "the priest of Midian," that Moses comes into contact with YHWH. ( Exodus 2:16; 3:1-6) Moses then returns to Egypt to gather his people to worship this God on the mount where, under Jethro's patronage, he meets God by Name.--Exodus 3:12.

While most Orthodox Jews who read Scripture with a literal approach similar to the myopic view of JWs would disagree, anthropology and archeology (as well as some of the history of the Jews) suggests that the monotheistic God-concept might have been learned from the peoples that the Israelites joined with during this period. It later grew into the form later adopted (and adapted) by Christians and Muslims.

But Jews also acknowledge that their monotheism does not originate from the Bible. That is a Christian misconception. The Tanakh did not play a central role in the development of Jewish monotheism, but instead it's oral tradition which became the Mishnah, not the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Bible stories are liturgical narratives designed for reading in public worship, not a compendium of Jewish history or religious doctrine (like the Mishnah and Talmud). It was only after the Second Temple rose that the Bible took shape, and its use as the composite library we know today came only after the Temple's demise in 70 CE, far too late to be considered the basis for the theology that shaped its pages. So while there may truly be some merit in what you say, it is also impossible to attribute it to Scripture which came only far much later.

43

Why Is YHWH Used Regularly In OT and NEVER in NT?

by minimus in

jw
friends

and if the name jehovah is that important why is it that jesus christ never use that name in a record of scriptures?.

David_Jay

Slimboyfat,

Forgive me, but the claim from the Watchtower that the earliest LXX copies used various forms of the Tetragrammaton is quite false. Second generation fragments have been discovered with it, but originally the LXX had nothing where the Divine Name occurs in the Hebrew.

Papyrus Rylands 458 is the oldest fragment of the LXX. It does not use contain the Divine Name. Instead there are blank spaces, often with a dot. The second generation fragments appear to come next but the practice seems to have been discarded in favor of the substitution.

While the Tetragrammaton is special, it us because we Jews don't see it as a "name" as such. In our culture it is viewed as an "anti-name" or the opposite of a SHEM, a "handle" for which to manage or control one. Some Jews utter "HaShem" when coming across the Four Letters, meaning "THE Name," with the emphasis on the "Ha" or "the," because it is a "name" unlike any other.

The use of it in the LXX was experimental, as its sudden appearance after Pr458 demonstrates. The LXX composers were not sure how to handle it, even employing the very old, long unused Paleo-Hebrew for a while before abandoning it altogether.

And it wasn't left unpronounced because it was "unique," but because it was "holy."

In Jewish theology, holy things are left untouched or at least used less than the mundane, everyday things of life . For instance, the Holy of Holies was rarely entered, and then by only one person each year. The Ten Commandments were hidden from sight in the Ark, and the Ark itself was hidden in the Holy of Holies. If you touched it, like Uzzah did, you would die. (2 Samuel 6:6, 7) The consecrated bread on display was not to be eaten until it had remained before the entrance to the Holy of Holies for a specific amount of time, and then when it could be eaten, only the priests could do so. That is why it was a big thing for David and his men to be offered and eat this bread when they were hungry. It was not for mundane use. (1 Samuel 21:5, 6) And it is the reason Eve adds the injunction not to "touch" the fruit of God's tree when God had only command that it not be eaten, since the Hebrew custom is that the holier something is, the less it is to be used or ever.--Compare Genesis 2:17 to 3:3.

Since the Tetragrammaton is God's Self-Designation beyond the scope of common names, and because it is God's Name, it is like the fruit of the tree, the Ark, the Ten Commandments, the Holy of Holies. If something is to be "hallowed" in Jewish custom, it is not to be used. It can be there for all to see, like the fruit, the Temple that housed the Holy of Holies and the Ark, and even the eating of the presentation bread by the priests, but it is not for common use. That is something more than unique, like the appearance of the Super Moon we are witnessing in the night skies right now. What is unique is more mundane than what is holy.

Pagans repeatedly uttered their divine names to show that these names were unique, special, and even holy to them. Jews did the opposite. The holier something was, the more purposefully far removed it was from use. This is something that might escape a Gentile audience since the culture of Hebrews is not well-understood outside our own people, and Christians are more often to side with their own scholars and teachers over our own Jewish history and experience (as one Christian once told me upon learning I was Jewish: "What do Jews know about the BIble anyway?"), but it is not the good use of critical thought to ignore it.

And by the way, Papyrus Rylands 458 is not from the 3rd century or Christian, as you stated. It dates to the 2nd century BCE and is Jewish.

30

Is Satan really the bad guy in story of creation?

by evilApostate in

i wanted to take an objective look at satan in the story of creation.

this is not meant to offend those of you who are still christians.

i'm agnostic btw.

David_Jay

Yes, Jews as well as Catholic/Orthodox Christianity understand the term "Satan" to merely refer to an "adversary" or "accuser." For instance, the official US Catholic Bible, the NABRE, refers to the "Satan" of Job as "the satan" with a detailed footnote explaining that the individual spoken of is not to be immediately identified with the "Satan" of Christianity.

As to the rest, it may surprise you that the Jewish way of viewing this story of Adam and Even is that it doesn’t end at Genesis 3:24 but at Genesis 11:9. While Jews can differ greatly in how literal or symbolic they view the details of the subject, the following is what is generally understood about the Creation story in Scripture.

The Creation story is told in a series of stages based on the cosmology the Jews shared with their Mesopotamian neighbors:

the universe is a vast sea or abyss of waters,
from the waters a dome is made to hold the waters back in order for the world to be made,
the first world is erased by these waters in order to make room for our present world,
all peoples are assigned to their proper place by tribe or people or (as in the case of the Bible) language.

The “Adam and Eve” story is the second act of the first world created. It is likely not literal in detail, though some Jews believe that the persons were. “Adam and Eve” are merely set into the Mesopotamian cosmology paradigm, but the drama has Jewish theology lessons centering around the need for Torah observance. Instead of the trees representing actual forms of botany or an act of “original sin” being described, Jews see the story as merely telling us that humans tend to act independent of their Creator. The “serpent” is not “Satan the Devil,” just a serpent that “speaks” as part of the lesson (much like the animals in Aesop’s tales speak in those moral lessons).

The world that results from Adam and Eve is made to fit into the Mesopotamian cosmology in which it was believed that the deities grew angry with the world and wiped it out by releasing the cosmological waters upon society in order to create the current world. It grows darker and darker until the Noachin flood wipes away all things (not because of the “serpent” but because Adam and Eve’s children are immoral), and the Hebrew “history” can thus be made to fit the accepted “science model” of the universe and its origins. Lastly the current world gets divided into nations by language (a dramatic device, far from being a true historical, direct action of God).

The story ends in chapter 11 with a genealogy that leads to the history of Jewish patriarch, Abraham. The setting is that God is responsible for all peoples having their unique language, cultures, and countries, and no less the Jews--whose story gets told from this point onward.

Jehovah’s Witnesses (and most literalist Christians) read the stories as separate events in history while in reality they are just one, “the” story of “how the universe (which back then was just the world) came to be” according to the accepted cosmology of the day. The Jews merely pasted their own characters and religious lessons onto the paradigm, but the complete story is Genesis 1-11:9. This make demands upon the story that do not allow for the Jehovah’s Witness interpretation of a “fall from grace” that occurred in a literal garden due to a conversation with a snake over which tree to eat from. Who wouldn’t want to eat from God’s tree, anyway? It would be better for you that any other? (And really, does God really need a tree to eat its fruit?) It’s too silly even from a pure mythological reading to allow the narrative to be reduced to Watchtower literalism.

This doesn’t mean that “Satan” is a mere Christian invention, even though the serpent in the Garden of Eden is not identified with the Devil (nor is “the satan” of Job--which in that book is merely an angel raising issues for the sake of argument). But as time passed, Judaism came to suspect that humanity was not without some challenger that it could not simply ignore.

While today some Jews see “the Devil” to be nothing more than the imperfection or dark side within each of us which we naturally attempt to overcome, Second Temple era Judaism already acknowledged a “Satan the Devil” of sorts, a “fiery hell” and even Purgatory (this Catholic notion actually comes directly and mostly unfiltered from Judaism). The Tanakh is only a static picture of past theological concepts, absent of the actual Torah influence or tradition (often called the “Oral Torah”) which was the mainstay of Jewish religion. Without this, all reading of the Tanakh is greatly incomplete.

Later redacted into the Mishnah and expanded via the Talmud, the concept of evil was sometimes personalized into dark spirits and demons not unlike those embraced by Christianity. By the time of Jesus, the idea of a “chief” or “leader” of the demons was already in place. The term “Satan” is merely a label borrowed from Hebrew as this being (if he exists) does not actually have the name given to him by humanity.

43

Why Is YHWH Used Regularly In OT and NEVER in NT?

by minimus in

jw
friends

and if the name jehovah is that important why is it that jesus christ never use that name in a record of scriptures?.

David_Jay

You're asking this question because JWs have been taught to look at Scripture through the lens of the Watchtower.

For those of us who are Jewish, we do not see the "regularity" you mention. For instance, there are enormous spaces in Torah where God never gets addressed with or connected to the Tetragrammaton. Add to this the fact that Jews have always seen the words EL, SHADDAI, ADONAI and other similar terms as equal names of God. The JW claim that these words are but "titles" is simply false. Like the Eskimo people who have a number of different names for "snow," these so-called "titles" and even substitute words like "Heaven" are SHEM or Names of God.

The odd preoccupation the Witnesses have with the Tetragrammaton cannot be more far removed for Jewish language and culture. It is a Gentile invention as the use of the name of deities was a common heathen and pagan practice. The heathen petitioner believed the attention of their deities could be granted by utterance of their divine names, and that the same could withhold answering prayers if their names were not used or pronounced correctly.

The Tetragrammaton is, on the other hand, a self-designation that defies being labled. The Name is a circular definition: "I am what I am" or more specifically "I am defined by what I am and the fact that I define all." Whereas the Hebrew word for "name" (SHEM) means "handle," referring to a means of grasping and controlling the one named, the circular reasoning or meaning behind The Self-Designation is meant to defy being labled or handled or controlled, as if to suggest that nothing we can utter can rightly be something to call God.

While the name may appear some 6000 times in the Hebrew text, it does not do so consistently. The Psalms, the official liturgical prayers and hymnal of Judaism, often dispenses with the Divine Name completely. Numerous Psalms never use it, beginning with Psalm 40. The famous Psalm 45 used by Christians as prophetic of Christ is totally lacking it.

The book of Esther doesn't even mention the word "God" throughout, not to mention the Tetragrammaton, whereas recently discovered extant Hebrew manuscripts of Sirach or Ben Sira (so called apocryphal by the JWs) contain it. And while the second generation of LXX manuscripts demonstrate that Jewish scribes were experimenting with ways of incorporating YHWH into the Greek text, the oldest Septuagint texts have spaces with dots and the latest used KYRIOS as the finalized manner chosen by Jews to represent the Name.

The consistency is imaginary among the JWs who seem far too bothered to do any real and sufficient critical study into Jewish uses of names, both divine and mundane. So on the one hand, if the New Testament was supposed to be some "addition" to the Jewish sacred texts, the striking absence of the Name, now written some time after the LXX finalized substitution as the best invention for Greek transmission does not seem surprising being that the New Testament is a product that grew out of the Second Temple era where such a practice was considered respectful and honoring.

But the fact remains that the New Testament was never seen or intended as an additional volume to the Tanakh. I'm fact, except for the Torah, Judaism differed widely in what it cherished as Scripture. Remember, for Jews the Bible is the PRODUCT of a true religion, not its basis. The Scriptures did not validate or support the Jewish religion and its claim to God. On the contrary, it's claim to being started by God at Sinai outweigh the texts Judaism produced and the importance these acquired.

And the same goes for the Christian New Testament. Had it not been for the issues raised by the heretic bishop Marcion, there may have never been a set of Christian scriptures. It was Marcion who invented and introduced a Canon of Scripture and introduced the idea of proof-texting into Christianity from Gnosticism. Christianity knew no Scriptures but the Jewish writings, and even then there was no settled canon. Judaism had yet to see the Tanakh as a single volume at the time, and the Christian books would not be canonized until the 4th century. Judaism and Christianity had not remained static, so how could a collection of their texts spanning generations be expected to?

Expecting the New Testament writers to have revived the practice of employing the Hebrew Tetragrammaton for the Divine Name (long after the translators of the LXX had decided on using substitutes) among scattered writings never originally intended to be one collection is the invention of the etymologically ignorant.

240

Introduction - Any Believers?

by Believer in

i’ve been reading it for a few of years off and on, but have been a little too ... maybe ... timid to join.

i left the watchtower organization almost 20 years ago but never abandoned my faith and belief in god.

i knew the gb/organization didn’t represent god, so when i lost my faith in them, i managed to keep my faith in an all wise benevolent creator.

David_Jay

Several years ago a man with a metal baseball bat ran into a store selling Judaica and began swinging at some of the people inside, Jews making purchases for the upcoming Passover.

The man belonged to some Fundamentalist group, I would later be told because I was one of the victims. He swung the bat and hit hard at the side of my head after yelling out an insult to the Jews.

Today I have to go to physical therapy twice a week every week due to the brain damage I suffer. My breathing has been left impaired, and everything from walking to speech has become challenging. I still have my mental faculties intact, but my motor skills are what the man damaged in his horrible rampage.

The phrase this religious zealot used before he started swinging? "Jews are monsters because their God is a monster. Jews are savages."

I can't say I remember all the words used, but I do remember these. He kept repeating other statements too on how we messed up the world by our lies. Some of it is still clear, some of it had to be told to me because part of the attack I don't remember, like what happened after the first strike. I had forgotten the "monster" comment until I read Simon's words.

You are all entitled to your views, but for my own personal reasons after reading Simon's post and those of a few others, I must bow out.

Some of your words against those who believe in God are too similar to the man who ran into that little shop. I'm not quick to judge, and so I won't say that there is any more of a comparison whatsoever because I don't know anymore than that.

I am not like some of you. I am not angry at the JWs or the man who did this to me and left me for dead. But I don't understand how logical and intelligent people can curse at someone because of their beliefs and call them ignorant and otherwise insult them and at the same time claim they are more enlightened than those they treat this way.

Many of you may have left the JW religion but you may not have left the part that taught us to think we were right and should hate others were who had a different belief system. That last part is just a much a lie as 1914, and apparently some are not merely believing it, they're still practicing it.

Leaving suddenly, exactly as I left the JWs so many years ago, I say good-bye.

77

New commentary on revelation coming up?

by EdenOne in

i heard through the grapevine about a forthcoming book:.

together through the great tribulation - come to jehovah's mountain.

still awaiting solid confirmation though.

David_Jay

Doug (who can jump in with his own thoughts) may be referring to the fact that the Revelation to John is an apocalypse of the Jewish genre, and the individuals addressed by Christ are called "Jews" in contrast with their enemies who also go by the same term. (Revelation 3.9) While there is a bit of evidence that some Gentile Christians also wanted to go by the term "Jew," the metaphors, symbolism, and terminology are very Jewish. Many scholars see this as an argument in favor of a Jewish apocalypse composed by Jewish Christians.

If that is the case, "Babylon the Great" is unfaithful Jerusalem that rejected Jesus of Nazareth instead of "Rome," the other favored interpretation by those who see this as a Gentile Christian composition. The author, in this case, is making a "prophecy" of its assured rejection. This hermeneutic view makes Revelation highly anti-Semitic which could explain its late introduction into the canon. The Apocalypse of Peter instead was widely read in Christian Liturgy until the 4th century, and John's apocalypse remained challenged until the Council of Trent.

There is a third view that it is a mixture of Jewish and Gentile authorship, heavily influenced by Jewish Christian thought and written as a Jewish apocalypse, with both Jerusalem and Rome being spoken of in its judgments.

Jewish authorship, however, would not have necessarily meant the authors were from St. James' congregation. It appears that most of not all the Jewish Christians who engaged in writing were of the Diaspora or not in Jerusalem during composition, except for maybe the epistle of James.

240

Introduction - Any Believers?

by Believer in

i’ve been reading it for a few of years off and on, but have been a little too ... maybe ... timid to join.

i left the watchtower organization almost 20 years ago but never abandoned my faith and belief in god.

i knew the gb/organization didn’t represent god, so when i lost my faith in them, i managed to keep my faith in an all wise benevolent creator.

David_Jay

Outsiderlookingin,

As a Jew I can testify that, though your admiration for defending the Hebrew text is not in question by me, I must side with Cofty and others due if nothing but from the Jewish explanation of the texts you are arguing about.

Without going into detail about each separate comment, there is a rule of thumb to all of it that you are missing. It is likely because you don’t know how Jews view Torah, and that is to be expected. But as Cofty and others demonstrate, one can merely apply logic, even logic separate from a belief in God, and see that your conclusions are questionable.

The rule of thumb is simple: The Mosaic Law did not introduce new ways to treat others and ways to live. The Mosaic Law introduced a new way to govern the way the Jews already lived.

The culture of the Jews did not fall down from the sky with the clouds and fire of the Great Theophany. The way the Jewish culture treated women and slaves and viewed national enemies as described in the Bible was not inspired by Torah or any part of the Hebrew Bible. My people lived very much like their neighbors around them, viewing women and slaves and enemies the way most other ancient cultures did. We held the same limited view of the nature of the universe and medicine and even the “right” way to worship our God as other cultures who were heathen.

The only difference is that Torah, the Law of Moses, introduced a demarcation, changing us from a people once ruled by the whims of taskmasters in Egypt to law from Heaven that governed the way freemen should live. Much of our culture did change, but a lot of it just got rules limiting how we did things that ancient peoples without Torah, Gentiles, did similarly.

To illustrate: God did not demand the Jews to take the women of enemies we conquered for ourselves. Neither did God demand we keep any of the spoil for ourselves. This is what people did. The only thing introduced by Torah were set limits on what we already did.

Jews may not have invented a lot of the things Christians give us credit for. Our sacrificial system was based on the way other cultures did things, and it served a practical need to slaughter food correctly, humanely, and with thanks all at the same time. The Jews didn’t get a new culture, new dress code, new way of doing things with Torah. We merely got a Law governing the way we and cultures already lived. The Law taught us no remarkable scientific truths, made us no different from those around us unless we learned the meaning of the Law: we are not free to enjoy life if we use our freedom to rob our neighbor of the same freedom.

So much of what you are saying, though you may have admirable aims, isn’t truly representative of Jewish Mosaic Law or the views we have held through generations. Viewing the way you explain it makes it look like God wanted us to commit genocide, to treat women as lesser beings than men, to rape, to strip others of their rights.

Now I have no need to convert you to Judaism or any other religion. Jews don’t convert. We are not in the business of trying to get you to adopt our views and make them your truths. I don’t have any interest in having you join me at my local synagogue or even accepting a theist view.

But what I am saying is that these other posters are closer than you are in what they are saying, verifying that your views warp something you are convinced you know better of. Some might be challenging your belief, but I think even then what they are really challenging is your logic.

You are chopping the tree branch you are sitting on. Stop it. If you don’t it will eventually fall, and you with it. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen. And you will have only yourself to blame because you ignored not just the voice of reason being offered you by these other posters but a Jew who just might know a thing or two you are failing to consider.

David_Jay

Posts by David_Jay