TTF "Read Da Book": The Christian Bible

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 9 text

Highlights

 - Plagues 5-7, Death of Livestock, Boils, Hail. Still Pharaoh says no.

Summary

 - Plague 5 - Egyptian livestock dies by hand of God (Israeli livestock doesn't)
 - "No"
 - Plague 6 - Everyone in Egypt gets boils from a handful of soot thrown in the air by Moses
 - "No"
 - Plague 7 - Very heavy hail
 - On being threatened with it: "No"
 - On receiving it: "Oh, go on then"
 - On the plague ceasing: "Hah, didn't mean it, I'm keeping you"

Questions and Observations

1) Doesn't say whether the Israelites get boils too. We can probably assume that they would have been let off - I mean, God would need to have taken individual soot particles and directed them to fly all over Egypt to seek out all the people; not a problem to differentiate, presumably.
2) As Martin said, these are getting more damaging as they go on. Skin diseases and damage to property are a greater irritant than the first four plagues.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 10 text

Highlights

 - Plagues 8-9, Locusts, Darkness. Still Pharaoh says no.

Summary

 - God tells Moses he has made Pharaoh more resolute against them, and tells him to get on with...
 - Plague 8 - a swarm of locusts
 - Pharaoh is nearly persuaded by his servants, but in the end decides "No".
 - Plague 9 - 3 days of darkness that does not affect the Israeli area
 - "No". And further, Pharaoh to Moses: "I will kill you if I see you again".

Questions and Observations

1) We are just running through these one after the other by now. The formula is set: Moses threatens something worse than what went before, Pharaoh says "No", something worse that what went before happens, Pharaoh still says "No".
2) It is made clear in this chapter how Pharaoh and the Egyptians are being toyed with by God. The chapter opens: Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and of your grandson how I have dealt harshly with the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them, that you may know that I am the Lord”. This, to my mind, is pretty barbaric - if the narrative is read at face value, he is forcing them to submit to ingenious tortures of his own devising - while also forcing Moses to administer them. This reminds of a schoolyard bully - "Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?".
3) Hypothesised naturalistic explanations for these events rely on several independent disasters (usually three - a warming that caused blood algae in the Nile, triggering plagues 1-6 in sequence, a volcanic eruption that triggered plagues 7-9, and a grain fungus that triggered plague 10). I think it's clear that if all these happened this way, they wouldn't have happened in handy sequence - we'd be at the very least talking about elapsed years between first plague and last.
4) I've been somewhat free with my summary of Pharaoh's words above. He doesn't explicitly say that he will kill Moses if he sees him again, he says “Get away from me; take care never to see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die”. I think that's pretty clearly a poetic way of saying the same.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 11, 2015, 03:06AM2) It is made clear in this chapter how Pharaoh and the Egyptians are being toyed with by God. The chapter opens:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants,

that I may show these signs of mine among them, 2 and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and of your

grandson how I have dealt harshly with the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them, that you may know that

I am the Lord”. This, to my mind, is pretty barbaric - if the narrative is read at face value, he is forcing

them to submit to ingenious tortures of his own devising - while also forcing Moses to administer them. This

reminds of a schoolyard bully - "Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?".

A few things:
- It would be convenient if God was nice and domesticated like we think he should be, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild".  But he's doesn't fit into that box.  As beaver says about Aslan, He's wild you know, not like a tame lion.

- One theme of Exodus is about getting to know God: it seems important that people know how powerful he is and that he is in control. 
- Remember, the Egyptians had been enslaving and killing Hebrews, I think genocide is an appropriate description for attempting to kill all their male children. They are the bullies in the story.  God said to Moses in chapter 3 that he was going to deliver the Israelites from the Egyptian's oppression.  What we're reading now is is how he is doing it. 

So yes God has his wild side, maybe barbaric in comparison to how our civilised society thinks we should act towards each other, but if you read the whole story at face value we don't see that he's a bully tormenting a weakling because he loves cruelty, we see a strong rescuer and punisher.

His purpose are to:
- to rescue his people from the hands of a bully who has been enslaved them and killed their babies,
- punishing the bully
- showing the world what he is powerful and in control.

Quote3) Hypothesised naturalistic explanations for these events rely on several independent disasters (usually three - a

warming that caused blood algae in the Nile, triggering plagues 1-6 in sequence, a volcanic eruption that triggered

plagues 7-9, and a grain fungus that triggered plague 10). I think it's clear that if all these happened this way,

they wouldn't have happened in handy sequence - we'd be at the very least talking about elapsed years between first

plague and last.

Just goes to show how unrealistic naturalistic explanations can be sometimes.

[ttf_Baron von Bone]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 12:49PMJust goes to show how unrealistic naturalistic explanations can be sometimes.
As long as you keep Hume out of it anyway ...

[ttf_drizabone]

Hi Byron,

Nice to see you over here.

you picked up my subtle reference well

Martin

[ttf_drizabone]

Exodus 10 text

Highlights

 - One more Plague - then freedom

Summary

 - God tells Moses that he has one more plague for the Egyptians and then they will let his people go
 - The Israelites are to ask their neighbours for their silver and gold jewelry as they would be favourable to them
 - Plague 10 - every firstborn will die
 - Moses tells Pharaoh and leaves in anger because he said No.
 - God explains to Moses that Pharaoh doesn't listen so that Gods wonders can be multiplied in Egypt
 - Moses and Aron did all of these wonders before Pharaoh and God hardened Pharaoh's heart so that he didn't let Israel go.

Questions and Observations

1) Same again : We are just running through these one after the other by now. The formula is set: Moses threatens something worse than what went before, Pharaoh says "No, something worse than what went before happens, Pharaoh still says "No".
2) But there are a couple of differences :
 - this is going to be the last plague and then they will be able to leave
 - the Egyptians are going to give the Israelites all their jewellry
 - v 9 and 10 I think summarises the whole plague section
3) God killing the Egyptian first born is a like for like punishment for the Egyptians killing the Israelite first born - so yes, its cruel and mabe even barbaric, but fair.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 12:49PM- It would be convenient if God was nice and domesticated like we think he should be, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild".  But he's doesn't fit into that box.  As beaver says about Aslan, He's wild you know, not like a tame lion.
I do still enjoy the Narnia stories. I know some find the allegory in them a bit hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-crowbar in its application, but it's never bothered me. Perhaps because I first read some of them at a young enough age (must have been 6 or 7) that it wasn't originally obvious to me.

This does touch on an interesting point, and one at which the Christian narrative feels emotionally vulnerable. As you hinted, and Byron explicitly referenced, it's important to avoid asserting that "God ought" to have particular properties. Happily, I don't think we've trodden over that boundary in this particular corner of the thread yet?
Btw, you guys are almost certainly better read on general philosophy than me. I haven't read Hume, but the little snippets of his I have run across, I have always found in close accord with my lines of thought (which is reassuring!).

To return to the point of the possible vulnerability of faith that one might expect in the face of this angle, as Byron's noted on quite a number of occasions, people tend to come to religion for broadly emotional reasons; it is rare indeed to find someone who argued themselves into it using cold logic that is completely independent from any emotional motivations.
Naively, I would expect people who come to faith 'emotionally' to be at least shaken in that faith by something like this - the supreme being whose concept they've bought into, and who is definitionally able to control every aspect of their lives turns out to be a sadist who treats his creations like a child playing with toy soldiers in a sandpit (a harsh way of putting it, but fair). They make the observation "Ouch. God isn't interested in playing fair by everyone, is he?", and get the response "God is not tame, he doesn't take any notice of what you or I think is fair". To be satisfied by that, one has to double back rather - "Hey, this isn't the straightforwardly pleasing thing that I thought it was". And then it's quite natural to ask oneself "So why did I buy into this again?" and review the evidence anew. At which point I would expect many to walk away from their faith, particularly now that our society has decided that penalising people for differing views of faith is a Mediaeval way of running a society.

But does my little chain there correspond to what happens in reality?

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 12:49PM- Remember, the Egyptians had been enslaving and killing Hebrews, I think genocide is an appropriate description for attempting to kill all their male children. They are the bullies in the story. 
No. Pharaoh and his operatives are the bullies. The majority of ordinary Egyptians would have led lives of dull oppression under him similar to the lives of the Israelites. But still their first-born children are murdered by God. God answers the crime of one man and his support with a genocide of his own.
We have seen innumerable times over the years that this spreading of the motivation for hatred is how truly appalling local conditions get started. It's what terrorists aim to do - with 9/11, Osama bin Laden's aim was to shake the American people out of their comfort, where the actions of their politicians overseas never impacted at home.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 12:49PMSo yes God has his wild side, maybe barbaric in comparison to how our civilised society thinks we should act towards each other, but if you read the whole story at face value we don't see that he's a bully tormenting a weakling because he loves cruelty, we see a strong rescuer and punisher.

His purpose are to:
- to rescue his people from the hands of a bully who has been enslaved them and killed their babies,
- punishing the bully
- showing the world what he is powerful and in control.
An appropriate punishment would be to inflict retribution on Pharaoh and those that supported him in what he was doing to the Israelites - which would be a fair sized set of people, but a very long way short of the whole Egyptian population.

Murdering lots of children that had nothing to do with it, and belonged to families that had nothing to do with it. That's terrorism.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 12:49PMJust goes to show how unrealistic naturalistic explanations can be sometimes.

Totally fair. I think it's far from a compelling demonstration too, as it stands - too much coincidence required. Which is not to say that some aspects of it may not delve quite accurately towards the truth of how the stories got started. But tbh, we'll never be able to join the dots satisfactorily - it's just too hard a problem when this much time has passed.

For the record, the line I take on the whole plagues thing is that what is described violates our understanding of reality time and time again, supplying an explanation ("God did it") that in fact explains nothing ("So what did God? And how come we've never been able to document God in action?") and can be easily constructed to be a motivated product of the 'behaviour control' of the society of the time (not many police forces back then). And so I shrug and say, "Well, the motivated behaviour policing people wrote something down to impress people with, to awe them into line. Let's move on to stuff that sounds less obviously fiddled with."

[ttf_John the Theologian]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 03:41AMI do still enjoy the Narnia stories. I know some find the allegory in them a bit hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-crowbar in its application, but it's never bothered me. Perhaps because I first read some of them at a young enough age (must have been 6 or 7) that it wasn't originally obvious to me.

This does touch on an interesting point, and one at which the Christian narrative feels emotionally vulnerable. As you hinted, and Byron explicitly referenced, it's important to avoid asserting that "God ought" to have particular properties. Happily, I don't think we've trodden over that boundary in this particular corner of the thread yet?
Btw, you guys are almost certainly better read on general philosophy than me. I haven't read Hume, but the little snippets of his I have run across, I have always found in close accord with my lines of thought (which is reassuring!).

To return to the point of the possible vulnerability of faith that one might expect in the face of this angle, as Byron's noted on quite a number of occasions, people tend to come to religion for broadly emotional reasons; it is rare indeed to find someone who argued themselves into it using cold logic that is completely independent from any emotional motivations.
Naively, I would expect people who come to faith 'emotionally' to be at least shaken in that faith by something like this - the supreme being whose concept they've bought into, and who is definitionally able to control every aspect of their lives turns out to be a sadist who treats his creations like a child playing with toy soldiers in a sandpit (a harsh way of putting it, but fair). They make the observation "Ouch. God isn't interested in playing fair by everyone, is he?", and get the response "God is not tame, he doesn't take any notice of what you or I think is fair". To be satisfied by that, one has to double back rather - "Hey, this isn't the straightforwardly pleasing thing that I thought it was". And then it's quite natural to ask oneself "So why did I buy into this again?" and review the evidence anew. At which point I would expect many to walk away from their faith, particularly now that our society has decided that penalising people for differing views of faith is a Mediaeval way of running a society.

But does my little chain there correspond to what happens in reality?

No. Pharaoh and his operatives are the bullies. The majority of ordinary Egyptians would have led lives of dull oppression under him similar to the lives of the Israelites. But still their first-born children are murdered by God. God answers the crime of one man and his support with a genocide of his own.
We have seen innumerable times over the years that this spreading of the motivation for hatred is how truly appalling local conditions get started. It's what terrorists aim to do - with 9/11, Osama bin Laden's aim was to shake the American people out of their comfort, where the actions of their politicians overseas never impacted at home.

An appropriate punishment would be to inflict retribution on Pharaoh and those that supported him in what he was doing to the Israelites - which would be a fair sized set of people, but a very long way short of the whole Egyptian population.

Murdering lots of children that had nothing to do with it, and belonged to families that had nothing to do with it. That's terrorism.

Totally fair. I think it's far from a compelling demonstration too, as it stands - too much coincidence required. Which is not to say that some aspects of it may not delve quite accurately towards the truth of how the stories got started. But tbh, we'll never be able to join the dots satisfactorily - it's just too hard a problem when this much time has passed.

For the record, the line I take on the whole plagues thing is that what is described violates our understanding of reality time and time again, supplying an explanation ("God did it") that in fact explains nothing ("So what did God? And how come we've never been able to document God in action?") and can be easily constructed to be a motivated product of the 'behaviour control' of the society of the time (not many police forces back then). And so I shrug and say, "Well, the motivated behaviour policing people wrote something down to impress people with, to awe them into line. Let's move on to stuff that sounds less obviously fiddled with."

Dave, as an orthodox Reformed Christian, the only proper response is that of Jesus in John 6 when he discoursed on the doctrines of sovereign election-- a doctrine that even many orthodox Christians find very hard to swallow.  Let me put the whole passage in, but the key response is that of Peter-- "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."

Here's the whole passage to get the context;

"60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” 70 Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the Twelve, was going to betray him."

[ttf_MoominDave]

Thanks for the context John.

In other words: If you doubt, just remember that you've already bought in, and stick with it.

Did I summarise that unfairly? Peter's response shows a need to follow someone which I would argue is not at all necessary.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 12, 2015, 01:30PMExodus 11 text

Highlights

 - One more Plague - then freedom

Summary

 - God tells Moses that he has one more plague for the Egyptians and then they will let his people go
 - The Israelites are to ask their neighbours for their silver and gold jewelry as they would be favourable to them
 - Plague 10 - every firstborn will die
 - Moses tells Pharaoh and leaves in anger because he said No.
 - God explains to Moses that Pharaoh doesn't listen so that Gods wonders can be multiplied in Egypt
 - Moses and Aron did all of these wonders before Pharaoh and God hardened Pharaoh's heart so that he didn't let Israel go.

Questions and Observations

1) Same again : We are just running through these one after the other by now. The formula is set: Moses threatens something worse than what went before, Pharaoh says "No", something worse than what went before happens, Pharaoh still says "No".
2) But there are a couple of differences :
 - this is going to be the last plague and then they will be able to leave
 - the Egyptians are going to give the Israelites all their jewellry
 - v 9 and 10 I think summarises the whole plague section
3) God killing the Egyptian first born is a like for like punishment for the Egyptians killing the Israelite first born - so yes, its cruel and mabe even barbaric, but fair.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this isn't like-for-like. Pharaoh and his operatives killed the Israelite first-born, not the average Joe Egyptian man-in-the-street, whose life would have been hard and unencumbered by political responsibility. Then made an awful lot harder by God's actions as recounted here.

I wonder also what line God would have taken with interbreeding... Two populations living side by side - some Egyptian-Israelite interbreeding would have been inevitable. One Egyptian parent, one Israelite parent - what's the diagnosis? Life or death if you're a firstborn?

There's also a seeming contradiction here - in Exodus 10:28, Pharaoh apparently promised Moses that he would kill him if he saw him again. But here, in the very next chapter, he is supplicating Pharaoh in person once again. This is the kind of narrative confusion which makes it very clear to me that the hypothesis that the work here is the writing of Moses, passed down unaltered, is immediately untenable. A first-hand account would be so much clearer.

Getting through the detailed exposition given by Genesis of the plagues, we start to look again at Jubilees (which we have nearly finished with by this point, only a couple of chapters to go); we are still in chapter 48.
I notice that I missed something regarding an earlier piece of puzzlement - the story of God attempting to kill Moses when he was travelling back to Egypt. Jubilees 48:3 instead attributes the attempt to kill Moses to Mastema (which Wikipedia tells me is basically another name for the devil-figure in this canon). Just thought that was worth noting - evidently the Jewish religious scholars of 2,000 years ago were as puzzled by that line as I was, and simply rewrote it to mean something else that made more sense.
Mastema is invoked a second time in this chapter (Jubilees 48:9-11), where he is named as the agency by which Pharaoh's sorcerors were able to replicate the divinely-powered demonstrations that Moses and Aaron took to Pharaoh as indication of the worthiness of their cause. Again, I appreciate this demonstration that scholars at the time of Jesus were taking an active interest in reconciling and smoothing out the lumps and bumps in the text.
The rest of Jubilees 48 seems to be an out-of-sequence general overview of the flight from Egypt, before Jubilees 49 deals with the Passover.

[ttf_timothy42b]

Quote from: John the Theologian on Dec 14, 2015, 08:35AMDave, as an orthodox Reformed Christian, the only proper response is that
In religion there is often a perception of only one response but this is rarely acccurate.

What I think we are seeing is cognitive dissonance:  as Dave has been pointing out, the textual evidence (to the extent that one trusts the text) is that of an angry vengeful God, quite at odds with the Christian mantra "God is love." 

There are a number of directions to go resolving that.  The most common is simply to disregard any parts of the text that conflict with our predetermined image of a Deity.  Another is to choose not to believe at all, as if only a beneficent God could exist.  I can think of several more without trying hard.  But my point is that many of the attributes we ascribe to God are simply generic parts of the dictionary definition or those supported by a shared and constantly reinforced community message, rather than supported by evidence. 

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: timothy42b on Dec 14, 2015, 09:24AMWhat I think we are seeing is cognitive dissonance:  as Dave has been pointing out, the textual evidence (to the extent that one trusts the text) is that of an angry vengeful God, quite at odds with the Christian mantra "God is love." 

Yes, exactly. My response to someone asking me to insist on two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously is to say "Now, hold on a moment..." rather than "Well, I'm sure you know what you're doing".

One thing I'm learning from this is how little all of this ancient Jewish stuff seems to actually bear on practical Christianity - which makes literalism make even less sense to me. I'm not even really clear why it's in the Bible in the first place - it's just inherited from the religious environment that Paul stepped away from in creating the Christian franchise.

[ttf_John the Theologian]

Quote from: timothy42b on Dec 14, 2015, 09:24AMIn religion there is often a perception of only one response but this is rarely acccurate.

What I think we are seeing is cognitive dissonance:  as Dave has been pointing out, the textual evidence (to the extent that one trusts the text) is that of an angry vengeful God, quite at odds with the Christian mantra "God is love." 

There are a number of directions to go resolving that.  The most common is simply to disregard any parts of the text that conflict with our predetermined image of a Deity.  Another is to choose not to believe at all, as if only a beneficent God could exist.  I can think of several more without trying hard.  But my point is that many of the attributes we ascribe to God are simply generic parts of the dictionary definition or those supported by a shared and constantly reinforced community message, rather than supported by evidence. 

Tim, those in the historic Reformation tradition would argue that the "cognitive dissonance" you speak of is caused by a one sided view of God with which some approach the text-- i.e. the idea that God is love precludes certain other aspects of his character.  Those who hold to classic Reformation theology would argue that the love of God, wrath of God, sovereign freedom of God and any other attributes not only can be, but are reconciled in a full-orbed biblical point of view.  This doesn't eliminate some hard edges, but rather, as the quote of the gospel of John above shows, it finds its ultimate solution in trust in what God has revealed rather than rationalistic explaining away of the hard edges.  I would argue that the classic approach is a responsible reading of the text for what is says.  Whether one believes it or not has more to do with presuppositions than what the texts say.

[ttf_timothy42b]

Quote from: John the Theologian on Dec 14, 2015, 10:48AM  Those who hold to classic Reformation theology would argue that the love of God, wrath of God, sovereign freedom of God and any other attributes not only can be, but are reconciled in a full-orbed biblical point of view. 
I do not see how any intelligent person who has read the text can hold that position.

QuoteWhether one believes it or not has more to do with presuppositions than what the texts say.
Agree 100%. 

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 12 text

cf. Jubilees 49 (Passover), Jubilees 48:13-19 (Exodus)

Highlights

 - God instructs Moses and Aaron as to how the Israelites should identify their houses to avoid having their first born killed and defines the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew).
 - Plague 10 - Death of Firstborn - expulsion of the Israelites

Summary

 - Moses and Aaron are told that each Israelite house should have lamb's blood daubed on the gatepost so that God can tell which house is which, and "pass over" Israelite families.
 - The lamb is to be cooked and eaten in a particular way.
 - Only unleavened bread may be eaten for the next week.
 - These strictures are to be observed annually from this point.
 - The final plague occurs at midnight, the death of the firstborn children.
 - In response, Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron, and tells them to leave with all the Israelites.
 - The Israelites leave in haste, reaching Succoth.
 - God instructs the Israelites not to share the Passover festival with anyone who will not be circumcised.

Questions and Observations

1) God will "execute judgements" "on all the gods of Egypt" (v12). What does this mean?
2) Why does God need blood daubed on gateposts to notify him who lives where? He was able to identify Israelite from Egyptian to his satisfaction during e.g. the plague of boils that required dust particles to become Egyptian-seeking missiles. And, of course, he's all-knowing.
3) What if the message didn't get to someone it should have? Is a lack of blood on the door the final judgement on them? Or is there some wiggle-room here?
4) What if Israelites and Egyptians shared a house?
5) The Wiki article on Passover is interesting. In particular, it asserts that the consensus scholarly view is that the festival predates the period being discussed here, and has its origins in older displays of religiosity. The origin theories discussed are intriguing and plausible. It seems that, much as with Christianity's appropriation of Easter and Yule, the arising Judaism made use of existing festivals for its own new ends.
6) We are told that the party of the Israelites was 600,000 strong. This seems a huge number, particularly when compared to the sizes of populations reported in the times of Abraham through to Joseph (tens of people). Either i) This is a huge exaggeration or ii) Far more people were associated with the sojourn than the 70 reported in Jacob's party. I'm inclined to think it would have been (i); the total population of Egypt at this time was only 1-2 million.
7) We are told that the sojourn lasted 430 years. Again, this seems an exaggeration if the genealogy given earlier in Exodus is accurate - Moses is the great-grandson of Levi. Yes, the text gives big age numbers (~130 years) for lifespans of these people, but even then, the numbers don't add up to enough years. Maybe 50-70 years seems reasonable, for 3 elapsed generations.
8) Succoth is a location still within Egypt.
9) Jubilees is pretty similar on the Passover details.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 03:41AMI do still enjoy the Narnia stories. I know some find the allegory in them a bit hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-crowbar in its application, but it's never bothered me. Perhaps because I first read some of them at a young enough age (must have been 6 or 7) that it wasn't originally obvious to me.

This does touch on an interesting point, and one at which the Christian narrative feels emotionally vulnerable. As you hinted, and Byron explicitly referenced, it's important to avoid asserting that "God ought" to have particular properties. Happily, I don't think we've trodden over that boundary in this particular corner of the thread yet?
Btw, you guys are almost certainly better read on general philosophy than me. I haven't read Hume, but the little snippets of his I have run across, I have always found in close accord with my lines of thought (which is reassuring!).

To return to the point of the possible vulnerability of faith that one might expect in the face of this angle, as Byron's noted on quite a number of occasions, people tend to come to religion for broadly emotional reasons; it is rare indeed to find someone who argued themselves into it using cold logic that is completely independent from any emotional motivations.
Naively, I would expect people who come to faith 'emotionally' to be at least shaken in that faith by something like this - the supreme being whose concept they've bought into, and who is definitionally able to control every aspect of their lives turns out to be a sadist who treats his creations like a child playing with toy soldiers in a sandpit (a harsh way of putting it, but fair). They make the observation "Ouch. God isn't interested in playing fair by everyone, is he?", and get the response "God is not tame, he doesn't take any notice of what you or I think is fair". To be satisfied by that, one has to double back rather - "Hey, this isn't the straightforwardly pleasing thing that I thought it was". And then it's quite natural to ask oneself "So why did I buy into this again?" and review the evidence anew. At which point I would expect many to walk away from their faith, particularly now that our society has decided that penalising people for differing views of faith is a Mediaeval way of running a society.

I knew you'd pick up the Narnia reference.

I've been to churches where appeals to emotion was the norm and I really disliked it.  It was a waste of time for me to have to sit through as far as I was concerned and I resented them trying to manipulate me through them.

I've found a church that treats christianity as a matter of truth that is to be discussed and understood on an intellectual level, and that that should drive your beliefs, emotions and behaviour. I'm as happy as a pig in mud

I think that many people that are christians for emotional reasons tend to privilege their emotional experience over facts and ignore the difficult parts of the bible.  (I'm generalising here I know) For me and others like me, means we value what the bible says about God and what he is over what we feel he should be like.

John quotes John quoting Peter : "To whom else should we turn : You have the words of eternal life". We follow Jesus because he has the gift of life, not because he plays fair, or conforms to our expectations and doesn't do things that we find uncomfortable.

QuoteBut does my little chain there correspond to what happens in reality?

No. Pharaoh and his operatives are the bullies. The majority of ordinary Egyptians would have led lives of dull oppression under him similar to the lives of the Israelites. But still their first-born children are murdered by God. God answers the crime of one man and his support with a genocide of his own.
We have seen innumerable times over the years that this spreading of the motivation for hatred is how truly appalling local conditions get started. It's what terrorists aim to do - with 9/11, Osama bin Laden's aim was to shake the American people out of their comfort, where the actions of their politicians overseas never impacted at home.

An appropriate punishment would be to inflict retribution on Pharaoh and those that supported him in what he was doing to the Israelites - which would be a fair sized set of people, but a very long way short of the whole Egyptian population.

Murdering lots of children that had nothing to do with it, and belonged to families that had nothing to do with it. That's terrorism.

So given that I follow Jesus and trust him, I'm going to be looking for reasons that justify his actions.  For that we have to go to Paul and his explanation that Jesus is a righteous judge, that we are all sinners and that the penalty for sin is death. That's not emotionally satisfying, straightforward or pleasing, I tend to think that's because I naturally side with my fellow humans, but that's Jesus: and who else has the words of life that we should follow?
 

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 09:08AMAs I mentioned in my previous post, this isn't like-for-like. Pharaoh and his operatives killed the Israelite first-born, not the average Joe Egyptian man-in-the-street, whose life would have been hard and unencumbered by political responsibility. Then made an awful lot harder by God's actions as recounted here.

point taken and already discussed.

QuoteI wonder also what line God would have taken with interbreeding... Two populations living side by side - some Egyptian-Israelite interbreeding would have been inevitable. One Egyptian parent, one Israelite parent - what's the diagnosis? Life or death if you're a firstborn?

I have read that the Israelites determine nationality based on whether your Mum was Jewish or not.  I'm not sure whether this was the case here or not.  I think it was just whether you had to blood on your door frame or not.

QuoteThere's also a seeming contradiction here - in Exodus 10:28, Pharaoh apparently promised Moses that he would kill him if he saw him again. But here, in the very next chapter, he is supplicating Pharaoh in person once again. This is the kind of narrative confusion which makes it very clear to me that the hypothesis that the work here is the writing of Moses, passed down unaltered, is immediately untenable. A first-hand account would be so much clearer.

Its not necessarily a problem with the text : it may have reported what was said and what happened accurately, and it was Pharaoh that was inconsistent.  I tend to think that the writer would have picked up something as glaring as that and not included it, unless there was a rason. A possible reason is that it shows that Pharaoh was not the one with the power to follow through on threats, it was Moses and God.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 14, 2015, 12:51PMI've been to churches where appeals to emotion was the norm and I really disliked it.  It was a waste of time for me to have to sit through as far as I was concerned and I resented them trying to manipulate me through them.

I've found a church that treats christianity as a matter of truth that is to be discussed and understood on an intellectual level, and that that should drive your beliefs, emotions and behaviour. I'm as happy as a pig in mud
I can imagine! Not many believers that I've met are as willing as you to delve into the nitty-gritty of their faith experience.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 14, 2015, 12:51PMJohn quotes John quoting Peter : "To whom else should we turn : You have the words of eternal life". We follow Jesus because he has the gift of life, not because he plays fair, or conforms to our expectations and doesn't do things that we find uncomfortable.

So given that I follow Jesus and trust him, I'm going to be looking for reasons that justify his actions.  For that we have to go to Paul and his explanation that Jesus is a righteous judge, that we are all sinners and that the penalty for sin is death. That's not emotionally satisfying, straightforward or pleasing, I tend to think that's because I naturally side with my fellow humans, but that's Jesus: and who else has the words of life that we should follow?

This is the essence of a lot of personal justifications of faith that I've seen, here and elsewhere. The logical trouble is that it is circular. If you trust your faith then you trust your faith. If position A then position A. Like when (many pages back) Dusty was referring us to Bible references when he wanted to demonstrate that the Bible is reliable. If you trust the set of concepts that's been sold to you looking pleasing, then why not trust them when they look rather uglier... I'd turn it round, and ask "Why not question the basis when it implies something that doesn't look right?".

Regarding the (possibly rhetorical) question "who else has the words of life that we should follow?", Mr Atheist here says: Life isn't that neat and simple; no-one has what you want - including Christianity, though thinking that it does can certainly make life feel more palatable. We all just have to make it through as we see best fit, and, actually - that isn't so bad when you give it a try.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 01:17PMThis is the essence of a lot of personal justifications of faith that I've seen, here and elsewhere. The logical trouble is that it is circular. If you trust your faith then you trust your faith. If position A then position A. Like when (many pages back) Dusty was referring us to Bible references when he wanted to demonstrate that the Bible is reliable. If you trust the set of concepts that's been sold to you looking pleasing, then why not trust them when they look rather uglier... I'd turn it round, and ask "Why not question the basis when it implies something that doesn't look right?".

Regarding the (possibly rhetorical) question "who else has the words of life that we should follow?", Mr Atheist here says: Life isn't that neat and simple; no-one has what you want - including Christianity, though thinking that it does can certainly make life feel more palatable. We all just have to make it through as we see best fit, and, actually - that isn't so bad when you give it a try.

Christian faith isn't that simple either Mr Atheist

How I think I work is:
- I read the gospel and used that as data for a hypothesis.  ( I've been reading bible stories for as long as I can remember so this isn't a historical description, but over time I've introduced this pseudo scientific approach as my understanding has developed)
- It offers a diagnosis for me and the world that seems accurate.
- It also offers a solution that sounds good.
- So I give it a basic approval and check it out more. 
- I recognise that I'm approaching it with a positive bias, but I see that operating the same way you would a person you're getting to know.  If the demonstrate reliability then you keep interacting with them, accepting what they say, commensurate with the level of trust that they have earned but developing more or less trust as you get to know them more and they prove themselves reliable or not.
- There are parts of the bible that I don't understand or can't fit into my understanding of the way the world works (eg how God created in Genesis; how did God get life to where it is now; early population issues; was Adam the first homo sapiens or the first man in God's image; are we literally descended from him, or is he representative of us all in some way).  These tend not to be more peripheral to my concerns and experience so I tend to leave them as they don't really change the parts of my working hypothesis that I consider significant. 

- Or another analogy would be the way a scientist develops a hypothesis. 
  - He takes some initial data and forms a hypothesis. 
  - He gets some more data and tests it. 
  - As the hypothesis explains more data you trust it more, and make inferences and test them ...
  - a hypothesis that has survived a lot of tests starts to become trusted so that data that doesn't fit it, is sometimes considered to be at fault.  Am I right?  (I was watching a show on TV last night on the formation of the solar system.  Apparently there was some data that showed that planets have changed orbits.  This was rejected as wrong data because planets couldn't change orbits.  But recently we have discovered Hot Giant planets like Jupiter in close orbit around their star.  They couldn't have formed there so they must have migrated.  Ooops.  Lets go and fix up the hypothesis.  And they did, and it worked. )

So yes there is some circularity in the experience but I think of it as part of my experimental method and valid rather than a circular argument.  I've got a God Hypothesis that I test and change as I learn more about him.  My hypothesis has changed quite a bit over the years as I've learnt more, but its still surviving.

One thing that I haven't defined yet is how I think biblical facts relate to natural evidence.  I think they constrain each other but can't really articulate rules for how.  That's something I need to work on.  I know you don't have that problem.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 14, 2015, 05:16PMChristian faith isn't that simple either Mr Atheist
As we stand here >400 posts into a discussion of the Christian holy book that has so far covered roughly 5% of the whole text, that seems a pretty safe observation!

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 14, 2015, 05:16PMHow I think I work is:
- I read the gospel and used that as data for a hypothesis.  ( I've been reading bible stories for as long as I can remember so this isn't a historical description, but over time I've introduced this pseudo scientific approach as my understanding has developed)
- It offers a diagnosis for me and the world that seems accurate.
- It also offers a solution that sounds good.
- So I give it a basic approval and check it out more. 
- I recognise that I'm approaching it with a positive bias, but I see that operating the same way you would a person you're getting to know.  If the demonstrate reliability then you keep interacting with them, accepting what they say, commensurate with the level of trust that they have earned but developing more or less trust as you get to know them more and they prove themselves reliable or not.
- There are parts of the bible that I don't understand or can't fit into my understanding of the way the world works (eg how God created in Genesis; how did God get life to where it is now; early population issues; was Adam the first homo sapiens or the first man in God's image; are we literally descended from him, or is he representative of us all in some way).  These tend not to be more peripheral to my concerns and experience so I tend to leave them as they don't really change the parts of my working hypothesis that I consider significant. 

- Or another analogy would be the way a scientist develops a hypothesis. 
  - He takes some initial data and forms a hypothesis. 
  - He gets some more data and tests it. 
  - As the hypothesis explains more data you trust it more, and make inferences and test them ...
  - a hypothesis that has survived a lot of tests starts to become trusted so that data that doesn't fit it, is sometimes considered to be at fault.  Am I right?  (I was watching a show on TV last night on the formation of the solar system.  Apparently there was some data that showed that planets have changed orbits.  This was rejected as wrong data because planets couldn't change orbits.  But recently we have discovered Hot Giant planets like Jupiter in close orbit around their star.  They couldn't have formed there so they must have migrated.  Ooops.  Lets go and fix up the hypothesis.  And they did, and it worked. )
Martin, I would be 100% thrilled if every religious individual in the world worked the way you do. You're Byron's classic 'good neighbour'; someone who would have their head screwed on the right way round whatever spiritual ideas you were signed up to. Despite our differences of viewpoint, I feel that I can talk with you frankly on the subject without risking offence, and I hope you feel likewise. That's a really nice thing (for me at least).

Regarding scientific theories becoming so thoroughly accepted in all details through the passing of large numbers of statistical tests that new data that doesn't fit them looks questionable - sure, yes, this is common. If somebody measures acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface to be 9.78 m/s/s rather than 9.81 m/s/s, then our first reaction is to look askance, and to think of ways in which the experiment may have been conducted carelessly (Were the dimensions measured accurately? How accurate was your stopwatch? Did you perform the experiment in a vacuum? etc. etc.).
This is a probabilistic way of thinking - the previous testing situation has left some degree of certainty in the accuracy of the application of the idea, a very high degree indeed if we are talking about that big an error in calculating a gravitational acceleration. 100% certainty is a theoretical construct philosophically, but it can be approached arbitrarily closely by the conducting of arbitrarily large numbers of tests.

In fact, it is often possible in the early stages of putting together a small theory to put a number on the amount of certainty your testing regime has generated in it. This quantified approach to knowledge accumulation is known as the Bayesian approach, after Thomas Bayes, who formulated a key mathematical theorem that underpins it. It might interest to note that Bayes was a Presbyterian minister by profession, a member of a long tradition in combining strong interests in religion and mathematics.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 14, 2015, 05:16PMSo yes there is some circularity in the experience but I think of it as part of my experimental method and valid rather than a circular argument.  I've got a God Hypothesis that I test and change as I learn more about him.  My hypothesis has changed quite a bit over the years as I've learnt more, but its still surviving.

One thing that I haven't defined yet is how I think biblical facts relate to natural evidence.  I think they constrain each other but can't really articulate rules for how.  That's something I need to work on.  I know you don't have that problem.

Starting from the God Hypothesis seemed reasonable to you. It didn't to me. That is, I think, the essence of the difference in our positions.

We both have get-out-of-jail-free cards regarding apparent conflicts between what the Christian Bible says and what the evidence we can gather says. I can point out that the Bible was written down long after the events by people with a slanting interest, while you can point out that assuming that God is all-powerful means that he can make things appears how he likes. Neither position can really be countered - though I would maintain that only one proceeds from a reasonable basis. However, I daresay you would take a different position...

[ttf_John the Theologian]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 15, 2015, 03:17AMAs we stand here >400 posts into a discussion of the Christian holy book that has so far covered roughly 5% of the whole text, that seems a pretty safe observation!

Martin, I would be 100% thrilled if every religious individual in the world worked the way you do. You're Byron's classic 'good neighbour'; someone who would have their head screwed on the right way round whatever spiritual ideas you were signed up to. Despite our differences of viewpoint, I feel that I can talk with you frankly on the subject without risking offence, and I hope you feel likewise. That's a really nice thing (for me at least).

Regarding scientific theories becoming so thoroughly accepted in all details through the passing of large numbers of statistical tests that new data that doesn't fit them looks questionable - sure, yes, this is common. If somebody measures acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface to be 9.78 m/s/s rather than 9.81 m/s/s, then our first reaction is to look askance, and to think of ways in which the experiment may have been conducted carelessly (Were the dimensions measured accurately? How accurate was your stopwatch? Did you perform the experiment in a vacuum? etc. etc.).
This is a probabilistic way of thinking - the previous testing situation has left some degree of certainty in the accuracy of the application of the idea, a very high degree indeed if we are talking about that big an error in calculating a gravitational acceleration. 100% certainty is a theoretical construct philosophically, but it can be approached arbitrarily closely by the conducting of arbitrarily large numbers of tests.

In fact, it is often possible in the early stages of putting together a small theory to put a number on the amount of certainty your testing regime has generated in it. This quantified approach to knowledge accumulation is known as the Bayesian approach, after Thomas Bayes, who formulated a key mathematical theorem that underpins it. It might interest to note that Bayes was a Presbyterian minister by profession, a member of a long tradition in combining strong interests in religion and mathematics.

Starting from the God Hypothesis seemed reasonable to you. It didn't to me. That is, I think, the essence of the difference in our positions.

We both have get-out-of-jail-free cards regarding apparent conflicts between what the Christian Bible says and what the evidence we can gather says. I can point out that the Bible was written down long after the events by people with a slanting interest, while you can point out that assuming that God is all-powerful means that he can make things appears how he likes. Neither position can really be countered - though I would maintain that only one proceeds from a reasonable basis. However, I daresay you would take a different position...

Dave, Martin has done a fine job of outlining how a presuppositonal apologetic works in practical terms.  Might I just add that those who work from it would argue that it is the only world view that is ultimately consistent to live by.  We would claim that unbelievers live off of "borrowed capital" from the Christian theistic world view all the time.  In other words unbelievers assume things to be true that ultimately only make sense in a Christian theistic world view and not in a world view in which the ultimate reality is nothing more than time, space and blind chance.

We had a lot of this discussion on the old thread.  I haven't brought much of it up here, but we can certainly pursue more of it it some of you would like to do so, but perhaps it's better to discuss it as we've been doing along the way.

[ttf_timothy42b]

Quote from: John the Theologian on Dec 15, 2015, 04:57AMDave, Martin has done a fine job of outlining how a presuppositonal apologetic works in practical terms.  Might I just add that those who work from it would argue that it is the only world view that is ultimately consistent to live by. 

QuoteLift off, and nuke them from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.  (Ripley speaking, in Aliens)

Yes, presupposition is the only way to be sure.

That perceived certainty is illusory.  The universe - reality - does not owe us certainty. 

[ttf_Baron von Bone]

Quote from: timothy42b on Dec 15, 2015, 06:20AMYes, presupposition is the only way to be sure.
 
That perceived certainty is illusory.  The universe - reality - does not owe us certainty.
Very nicely put.
 
It always seems presuppositionalism amounts to the MAD nuclear option--we all have no idea of what's real and true, we only have our own assumptions (and those of us who are clever can also presuppose a model with only one solution if we feel such a need--not terribly compelling to anyone who's not playing the same presupposed game by the same presupposed rules).
 
Personally I prefer to test my "assumptions" to see if they don't actually match reality so I can change them and then test those "assumptions" ... etc. Whether or not we're confidently (presumptuously) settled on our presuppositions is irrelevant to what's real and true. Whether or not we can ever really, truly figure it out is also irrelevant. And whether or not we feel good or comfortable or satisfied about it is certainly irrelevant to what really is. The key is whether you modify your model to accommodate your presuppositions or to accommodate what reality tells you. As you said, reality is under no obligation to appease our sensibilities.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 15, 2015, 03:17AMMartin, I would be 100% thrilled if every religious individual in the world worked the way you do. You're Byron's classic 'good neighbour'; someone who would have their head screwed on the right way round whatever spiritual ideas you were signed up to. Despite our differences of viewpoint, I feel that I can talk with you frankly on the subject without risking offence, and I hope you feel likewise. That's a really nice thing (for me at least).

I do and its great.

QuoteRegarding scientific theories becoming so thoroughly accepted in all details through the passing of large numbers of statistical tests that new data that doesn't fit them looks questionable - sure, yes, this is common. If somebody measures acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface to be 9.78 m/s/s rather than 9.81 m/s/s, then our first reaction is to look askance, and to think of ways in which the experiment may have been conducted carelessly (Were the dimensions measured accurately? How accurate was your stopwatch? Did you perform the experiment in a vacuum? etc. etc.).
This is a probabilistic way of thinking - the previous testing situation has left some degree of certainty in the accuracy of the application of the idea, a very high degree indeed if we are talking about that big an error in calculating a gravitational acceleration. 100% certainty is a theoretical construct philosophically, but it can be approached arbitrarily closely by the conducting of arbitrarily large numbers of tests.

In fact, it is often possible in the early stages of putting together a small theory to put a number on the amount of certainty your testing regime has generated in it. This quantified approach to knowledge accumulation is known as the Bayesian approach, after Thomas Bayes, who formulated a key mathematical theorem that underpins it. It might interest to note that Bayes was a Presbyterian minister by profession, a member of a long tradition in combining strong interests in religion and mathematics.

Starting from the God Hypothesis seemed reasonable to you. It didn't to me. That is, I think, the essence of the difference in our positions.

We both have get-out-of-jail-free cards regarding apparent conflicts between what the Christian Bible says and what the evidence we can gather says. I can point out that the Bible was written down long after the events by people with a slanting interest, while you can point out that assuming that God is all-powerful means that he can make things appears how he likes. Neither position can really be countered - though I would maintain that only one proceeds from a reasonable basis. However, I daresay you would take a different position...

I know Bayes, he did Statistics and Probability 101 with me at uni. Interesting guy.   And as you say there have been many scientists who were clergy, especially in the early days before science was professionalised.

Different positions make the world go round and conversations interesting and enjoyable.

[ttf_drizabone]

Back to our normal programming...

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 12:50PMExodus 12 text

cf. Jubilees 49 (Passover), Jubilees 48:13-19 (Exodus)

Highlights

 - God instructs Moses and Aaron as to how the Israelites should identify their houses to avoid having their first born killed and defines the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew).
 - Plague 10 - Death of Firstborn - expulsion of the Israelites

Highlight: This chapter has huge significance for Christians as its a picture of what happened when Jesus died for us as our Passover Lamb.

[/quote]
Summary

 - Moses and Aaron are told that each Israelite house should have lamb's blood daubed on the gatepost so that God can tell which house is which, and "pass over" Israelite families.
 - The lamb is to be cooked and eaten in a particular way.
 - Only unleavened bread may be eaten for the next week.
 - These strictures are to be observed annually from this point.
 - The final plague occurs at midnight, the death of the firstborn children.
 - In response, Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron, and tells them to leave with all the Israelites.
 - The Israelites leave in haste, reaching Succoth.
 - God instructs the Israelites not to share the Passover festival with anyone who will not be circumcised.

Questions and Observations

1) God will "execute judgements" "on all the gods of Egypt" (v12). What does this mean?
Quote
I think that its a reference to God showing that he has it all over the gods that the Egyptians worshipped.

2) Why does God need blood daubed on gateposts to notify him who lives where? He was able to identify Israelite from Egyptian to his satisfaction during e.g. the plague of boils that required dust particles to become Egyptian-seeking missiles. And, of course, he's all-knowing.
Quote
I think that God can tell who are Israelites and who aren't so I would say that the daubed blood is symobolic for the Israelites and for future believers of the future Passover where we are saved/redeemed because we are "covered" by the blood of the Jesus who is the Lamb who died for us.  (Sorry for all the christian symbolism here, but its what I know, there is a lot more we can talk about if you like, but I was going to wait until the New Testament)

3) What if the message didn't get to someone it should have? Is a lack of blood on the door the final judgement on them? Or is there some wiggle-room here?
Quote
dunno for sure, but I expect that the message did get to everyone it should have

4) What if Israelites and Egyptians shared a house?
Quote
Maybe the Egyptians would have been saved too.

5) The Wiki article on Passover is interesting. In particular, it asserts that the consensus scholarly view is that the festival predates the period being discussed here, and has its origins in older displays of religiosity. The origin theories discussed are intriguing and plausible. It seems that, much as with Christianity's appropriation of Easter and Yule, the arising Judaism made use of existing festivals for its own new ends.
Quote
I'll have a look at that

6) We are told that the party of the Israelites was 600,000 strong. This seems a huge number, particularly when compared to the sizes of populations reported in the times of Abraham through to Joseph (tens of people). Either i) This is a huge exaggeration or ii) Far more people were associated with the sojourn than the 70 reported in Jacob's party. I'm inclined to think it would have been (i); the total population of Egypt at this time was only 1-2 million.
Quote
possibly, although I've read articles that show how the number can be reached with assumptions like every family having 12 sons.

7) We are told that the sojourn lasted 430 years. Again, this seems an exaggeration if the genealogy given earlier in Exodus is accurate - Moses is the great-grandson of Levi. Yes, the text gives big age numbers (~130 years) for lifespans of these people, but even then, the numbers don't add up to enough years. Maybe 50-70 years seems reasonable, for 3 elapsed generations.
Quote
I'll get back to you on this one too.

8) Succoth is a location still within Egypt.
Quote
ok, but that was just a comfort stop, not their destination

edited : oops, messed my quoting up, but you can work it out

[ttf_MoominDave]

The inverted quoting makes that post a difficult one to quote! Some hand-formatting later...

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 15, 2015, 12:58PMQuote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 12:50PM1) God will "execute judgements" "on all the gods of Egypt" (v12). What does this mean?I think that its a reference to God showing that he has it all over the gods that the Egyptians worshipped.

I'd go for the same explanation. Just a weird way of phrasing it.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 15, 2015, 12:58PMQuote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 12:50PM2) Why does God need blood daubed on gateposts to notify him who lives where? He was able to identify Israelite from Egyptian to his satisfaction during e.g. the plague of boils that required dust particles to become Egyptian-seeking missiles. And, of course, he's all-knowing.I think that God can tell who are Israelites and who aren't so I would say that the daubed blood is symobolic for the Israelites and for future believers of the future Passover where we are saved/redeemed because we are "covered" by the blood of the Jesus who is the Lamb who died for us.  (Sorry for all the christian symbolism here, but its what I know, there is a lot more we can talk about if you like, but I was going to wait until the New Testament)
But the text does phrase it in terms of it being for God's benefit. However, your explanation is the way I think the writers wanted to put it to us. It's kind of unsatisfying - presumably because they were rationalising an older non-Christian ritual that had been adopted.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 15, 2015, 12:58PMQuote from: MoominDave on Dec 14, 2015, 12:50PM6) We are told that the party of the Israelites was 600,000 strong. This seems a huge number, particularly when compared to the sizes of populations reported in the times of Abraham through to Joseph (tens of people). Either i) This is a huge exaggeration or ii) Far more people were associated with the sojourn than the 70 reported in Jacob's party. I'm inclined to think it would have been (i); the total population of Egypt at this time was only 1-2 million.possibly, although I've read articles that show how the number can be reached with assumptions like every family having 12 sons.
So if everyone has 12 surviving children, then numbers indeed grow fast, but not fast enough. 70 people with Jacob - call it 35 couples, more or less. 35*12 = 420 potential grandchildren of Jacob, 240 couples. 35*(12/2)*12 = 2,520 potential great-grandchildren of Jacob, 1,260 couples. 35*(12/2)^2*12 = 15,120 potential great-great-grandchildren of Jacob, the generation of Moses. But this is still not enough, by a factor of 40; each couple would have to raise 41 surviving children to reach this number in this few generations, a truly impossible number.

Against this, we are told that the sojourn lasted 430 years, an amount of time that could cause a population to balloon on this scale if a typical number of generations for that time-span are included (3.4 surviving children per couple over 17 generations would do it) - but still the fact that the total population of Egypt was only twice the quoted 600,000 people makes it seem outlandish.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 13 text

At this point, we have effectively finished with Jubilees. The final chapter (50) deals with the calendar that the author was trying to sell. We will return to it briefly when Moses receives the stone tablets, as this is recounted in Jubilees 1, setting the scene for the book. It has I hope been a generally informative text to contrast with, even if I caught onto its coverage of Genesis material much later than I ought to have. Has anyone else felt that comparisons were of benefit?

Highlights

 - God instructs Moses to "consecrate" all Israelite firstborn to him
 - The Passover feast instructions are repeated
 - God leads the Israelites as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night

Summary

 - God instructs Moses to "consecrate" all Israelite firstborn to him
 - The Passover feast instructions are repeated - seven days no leavened bread
 - The "consecration" instructions are elaborated on
 - God leads the Israelites as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night

Questions and Observations

1) What exactly does "consecrate" mean here? Is it saying that all firstborn children must become priests? Or that they are to be sacrificed? Or something else? Despite the elaboration, this seems to remain obscure.
2) The journey avoids the land of the Philistines (modern-day Israeli territory), due to war. It isn't clear which war - anyone know?

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 16, 2015, 02:48PMExodus 13 text

At this point, we have effectively finished with Jubilees. The final chapter (50) deals with the calendar that the author was trying to sell. We will return to it briefly when Moses receives the stone tablets, as this is recounted in Jubilees 1, setting the scene for the book. It has I hope been a generally informative text to contrast with, even if I caught onto its coverage of Genesis material much later than I ought to have. Has anyone else felt that comparisons were of benefit?

I haven't given them much weight actually.  They've been interesting to see how a later priest uses them to sell his own ideas so it must have been accepted understanding at the time though.

QuoteHighlights

 - God instructs Moses to "consecrate" all Israelite firstborn to him
 - The Passover feast instructions are repeated
 - God leads the Israelites as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night

Summary

 - God instructs Moses to "consecrate" all Israelite firstborn to him
 - The Passover feast instructions are repeated - seven days no leavened bread
 - The "consecration" instructions are elaborated on
 - God leads the Israelites as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night

Questions and Observations

1) What exactly does "consecrate" mean here? Is it saying that all firstborn children must become priests? Or that they are to be sacrificed? Or something else? Despite the elaboration, this seems to remain obscure.

I take it you understand the symbolism: that God is using the comparison of the deaths of Egyptians firstborn to the consecration of the Hebrew firstborn to remind them of how God rescued them.

Consecrate means sanctify, make holy, dedicate, to set apart.  In v15 the firstborn sons could be redeemed (ie bought back by paying money to the temple).  This was the normal practice, but on occasion some sons were left at the temple to be priests. eg Samuel.

Quote2) The journey avoids the land of the Philistines (modern-day Israeli territory), due to war. It isn't clear which war - anyone know?

I'm not sure whether the Philistines were currently fighting the Canaanites or whether they would have fought the Hebrews as they passed through.  It could have been both.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 16, 2015, 04:59PMI haven't given them much weight actually.  They've been interesting to see how a later priest uses them to sell his own ideas so it must have been accepted understanding at the time though.
Yeah, this is what I've been getting from them too. Interesting to see how many points that I found obscure were also found obscure enough back then that they were elaborated on - and not always in the way that the modern eye might expect.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 16, 2015, 04:59PMI take it you understand the symbolism: that God is using the comparison of the deaths of Egyptians firstborn to the consecration of the Hebrew firstborn to remind them of how God rescued them.
Yes

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 16, 2015, 04:59PMConsecrate means sanctify, make holy, dedicate, to set apart.  In v15 the firstborn sons could be redeemed (ie bought back by paying money to the temple).  This was the normal practice, but on occasion some sons were left at the temple to be priests. eg Samuel.
Oh, I see. So Moses is cementing his power base going forward...

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 14 text

Highlights

 - Pharaoh's army chases the Israelites
 - Parting of the Red Sea

Summary

 - God tells Moses that he will make Pharaoh pursue the Israelites.
 - Pharaoh does.
 - He catches up, and the Israelites are afeared.
 - God gives Moses the power to part the sea.
 - He does, the Israelites escape...
 - ...The Egyptian chariots become bogged down, the water comes back, they all drown.

Questions and Observations

1) Once again, this is a lot of bother to punish Pharaoh. God has the power to just snuff him out, but instead he forces him to pursue the Israelites and then drowns him, his army, and all the innocent army horses in a grand set piece.
1b) In fact, why didn't God just "soften" Pharaoh's heart way back when he was first thinking of oppressing the Israelites? The only possible conclusion, if we allow him the powers ascribed to him in the text, is that he wanted the Israelites to suffer, including the original Pharaoh-ordered infanticides that brought us Moses. If that is how the "chosen people" are treated by the chooser, then if I were one of them, I would absent myself very swiftly from their ranks for fear of whatever vile iniquity might next be decided to be in my best interests...
2) It's interesting that the Israelites, seeing the pursuing Egyptians, berate Moses for all he has done. (Paraphrasing) "We didn't want to do this, it was your idea", they cry, and we can see their point of view easily. Strange that this is the first we've heard of it though.
3) It's also interesting that the Hebrew phrase that's been traditionally understood as "Red Sea" here (Yam Suph) is more accurately rendered as "Sea of Reeds", in which case it would make more sense to be read as referring to one of a possible series of shallow candidate lakes in NE Egypt. This makes the story feel better grounded in a possible reality - one can easily imagine Israelites on foot (not the 600,000 listed, some more realistic number - maybe 600 or 6,000...) escaping across marshy ground that then entrapped the heavy Egyptian chariots. In contrast, the cross-section of the Red Sea is such, with steeply sloping sides, that one cannot imagine a population on foot escaping across a drained version of it, much less chariots pursuing them across it.
4) But given that the Moses story is already replete with obviously unrealistic substories, I tend to just roll my eyes once more at yet another piece of fantastical storytelling that we're expected to use as the basis for our adoption of his worldview... I am not alone in this view...

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 17, 2015, 02:24AM
Oh, I see. So Moses is cementing his power base going forward...

I'm not sure if the priests were part of Moses' "power base" - although he was Aarons brother, who was the high priest I think he acted independently of them - Korah thought so at least.  But I've never really thought of the group dynamics of the situation in political terms so we'll see if you concur as we go.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 17, 2015, 03:03AMExodus 14 text

Questions and Observations

1) Once again, this is a lot of bother to punish Pharaoh. God has the power to just snuff him out, but instead he forces him to pursue the Israelites and then drowns him, his army, and all the innocent army horses in a grand set piece.
1b) In fact, why didn't God just "soften" Pharaoh's heart way back when he was first thinking of oppressing the Israelites? The only possible conclusion, if we allow him the powers ascribed to him in the text, is that he wanted the Israelites to suffer, including the original Pharaoh-ordered infanticides that brought us Moses. If that is how the "chosen people" are treated by the chooser, then if I were one of them, I would absent myself very swiftly from their ranks for fear of whatever vile iniquity might next be decided to be in my best interests...
2) It's interesting that the Israelites, seeing the pursuing Egyptians, berate Moses for all he has done. (Paraphrasing) "We didn't want to do this, it was your idea", they cry, and we can see their point of view easily. Strange that this is the first we've heard of it though.
3) It's also interesting that the Hebrew phrase that's been traditionally understood as "Red Sea" here (Yam Suph) is more accurately rendered as "Sea of Reeds", in which case it would make more sense to be read as referring to one of a possible series of shallow candidate lakes in NE Egypt. This makes the story feel better grounded in a possible reality - one can easily imagine Israelites on foot (not the 600,000 listed, some more realistic number - maybe 600 or 6,000...) escaping across marshy ground that then entrapped the heavy Egyptian chariots. In contrast, the cross-section of the Red Sea is such, with steeply sloping sides, that one cannot imagine a population on foot escaping across a drained version of it, much less chariots pursuing them across it.
4) But given that the Moses story is already replete with obviously unrealistic substories, I tend to just roll my eyes once more at yet another piece of fantastical storytelling that we're expected to use as the basis for our adoption of his worldview... I am not alone in this view...

But it was really like this.  (Just kidding) It looks a lot more dramatic than slogging through a swamp though. And what about a line of 2 million people with animals going across.  Occasionally the Sydney Harbour Bridge is closed to traffic so people can walk across.  They typically get 80,000 people, say at least 50 abreast, and that is a huge line that takes hours to get everyone across.  But 2 million people 10 abreast with a metre between each would be a line 200km long.  Squash them in to a half metre gap in the same width and you've still got a 50 km long line.  So the picture can't be right.  And it does stretch credibility.  That's one event I would really want to have been able to see.

The other issue you raise is that you wouldn't want to be associated with a God like that.  The conclusion that the writer presents is that the Hebrews believe in God and feared him because of the power he had demonstrated.  As you say he's not presented as an attractive God that people would believe in because the like the idea of believing in a nice God that looks after them.  Given that the Hebrews obedience to God was pretty limited, and that God would know this, so it seems that winning their long term obedience and trust wasn't his purpose.  Think on this I will.     

[ttf_drizabone]

Exodus 15 text

Highlights

- The Hebrews sing their praise of God
- Then they grumble as soon as something doesn't work out for them

Summary

 - God has beaten the Egyptians, so the Moses makes up a song about it for them to sing.
- They leave the Sea and head inland where they were without water for 3 days. 
- The first water they find is bitter, so they grizzle about it.
- God showed Moses how to turn it into sweet water.
- God says he will test the People.  If they keep his rules he will keep them free of the diseases that he put on the Egyptians.
- then they found a really nice oasis where they camped.


Questions and Observations

1. It reminds me of a football match where the supporters of the winning team sing about how great their team is.

2. It doesn't take much for these Hebrews to change their tune and start grizzling as soon as things get a bit difficult.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 17, 2015, 12:55PMBut it was really like this.  (Just kidding) It looks a lot more dramatic than slogging through a swamp though. And what about a line of 2 million people with animals going across.  Occasionally the Sydney Harbour Bridge is closed to traffic so people can walk across.  They typically get 80,000 people, say at least 50 abreast, and that is a huge line that takes hours to get everyone across.  But 2 million people 10 abreast with a metre between each would be a line 200km long.  Squash them in to a half metre gap in the same width and you've still got a 50 km long line.  So the picture can't be right.  And it does stretch credibility.
Wasn't it 600,000 Israelites, not 2m? 1-2m total population of Egypt at that time. But the numbers still strain credulity just as much, even divided by 3.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 17, 2015, 12:55PMThat's one event I would really want to have been able to see.
Every so often, I have a recurring fantasy of being someone who happened to be born with an infinitely long lifespan, a one-off, the only one such, a mystery to the biologists... And then of living in a time where backwards time travel (but not forwards) becomes possible... Then the call comes in from the historians - "There are so many events in the past that are poorly understood... We've made a prioritised list, the better understanding of which we feel will benefit the overall harmony of the human race - if we send you back a few thousand years, can you watch them as they go past and record them properly for us?". Sure, why not...

I entertain myself from time to time thinking about where I would go. I suspect that, at least on the first pass round through history, I'd spend a great deal of it hanging around in the Middle East, getting the origins and growths of the Abrahamic religions really properly straight.

I keep thinking that this would make a great basis for a series of novels... Maybe when I retire! That said, someone's probably already done it - it's a fairly obvious conceit.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 17, 2015, 12:55PMThe other issue you raise is that you wouldn't want to be associated with a God like that.  The conclusion that the writer presents is that the Hebrews believe in God and feared him because of the power he had demonstrated.  As you say he's not presented as an attractive God that people would believe in because the like the idea of believing in a nice God that looks after them.  Given that the Hebrews obedience to God was pretty limited, and that God would know this, so it seems that winning their long term obedience and trust wasn't his purpose.  Think on this I will.     

Now the thing that it reminds me of... And I'm aware that I'm probably treading on a few people's sensibilities here, so I'll apologise in advance... is spousal abuse. "I'm hurting you because I love you"; "Why do you make me do this to you?" - these are the standard cliches of a domestic abuser, one who feels compelled to control their partner. "Why don't you leave?", the friends of the abused cry, over and over again - and there never is a very satisfactory answer - the abused one is low on self-esteem and confidence, basically doesn't believe that they are able to escape (somehow imagining the alternative as worse than the current), and both parties probably still have some important portions of their original devotion to each other.

It matches up to the situation with the Israelites and the forces controlling them here pretty well, whether you take the line that those forces are due to divine powers, or whether you think it more credible that the priests are cynical master manipulators who don't get instructions from God, but do know exactly what line to spin to the people to keep them in hand.

Of course, as related in this text, the Israelites had got themselves into a pretty abused situation within Pharaoh's power structure, so Moses can at least put up some kind of a moral defence...

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 17, 2015, 07:41PMExodus 15 text

Highlights

- The Hebrews sing their praise of God
- Then they grumble as soon as something doesn't work out for them

Summary

 - God has beaten the Egyptians, so the Moses makes up a song about it for them to sing.
- They leave the Sea and head inland where they were without water for 3 days. 
- The first water they find is bitter, so they grizzle about it.
- God showed Moses how to turn it into sweet water.
- God says he will test the People.  If they keep his rules he will keep them free of the diseases that he put on the Egyptians.
- then they found a really nice oasis where they camped.


Questions and Observations

1. It reminds me of a football match where the supporters of the winning team sing about how great their team is.

2. It doesn't take much for these Hebrews to change their tune and start grizzling as soon as things get a bit difficult.

I have some curiosity as to how we'll find ourselves approaching the Psalms when we get there. Maybe 10 at a time to get through them all!

To be fair to the Hebrews, one gets pretty damn thirsty after 3 days of limited water in the desert. It's a big deal when an oasis that you're depending on doesn't contain drinkable water.

[ttf_timothy42b]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 18, 2015, 03:27AM

I keep thinking that this would make a great basis for a series of novels... Maybe when I retire! That said, someone's probably already done it - it's a fairly obvious conceit.


I suspect there are a number of series like your idea.  One I can think of off hand is the series of historical vampire novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.  Her hero is long lived, naturally, and survives through a number of world history events.  When I lived in FondduLac or maybe Oshkosh Wisconsin there was some kind of family relationship with one of the public library staff, a niece or something, and the local library had whatever in the series had been written currently. 

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 16 text

Highlights

 - "Manna from Heaven"

Summary

 - The Israelites come to the "Wilderness of Sin" in their travels.
 - There is insufficient food, and they grow hungry and grumbly.
 - God provides them alternately with "manna" and bread.
 - On the 6th day, twice as much is provided, so that they need not work on the 7th.
 - Some slow learners go out to collect on the 7th day, and God tuts at Moses over them.
 - The Israelites eat manna for the next 40 years, until they reach Canaan.

Questions and Observations

1) "Manna" is not a translated word; its etymology is obscure. The above link notes that some scholars question whether it is related to the Egyptian word "mennu", which means simply "food". This seems pretty plausible to me, at least as a conjecture.
2) The Wilderness of Sin - the Wiki link notes that Sin is likely a local moon god.
3) The final detail about 40 years seems out of sequence in the story?

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 18, 2015, 03:27AMWasn't it 600,000 Israelites, not 2m? 1-2m total population of Egypt at that time. But the numbers still strain credulity just as much, even divided by 3.

600,000 I think refers to the men, so you get 2 millionish by assuming that there was roughly the same number of women and kids and then rounding up.

I was talking to a guy at church about this, this morning.  He says that Herodutus in the 5th C BC was credited with being the first to think accuracy in reporting numbers was important.  He thought that the numbers were more indicative of a lot of people, rather than an reliable approximation.

Quote
Now the thing that it reminds me of... And I'm aware that I'm probably treading on a few people's sensibilities here, so I'll apologise in advance... is spousal abuse. "I'm hurting you because I love you"; "Why do you make me do this to you?" - these are the standard cliches of a domestic abuser, one who feels compelled to control their partner. "Why don't you leave?", the friends of the abused cry, over and over again - and there never is a very satisfactory answer - the abused one is low on self-esteem and confidence, basically doesn't believe that they are able to escape (somehow imagining the alternative as worse than the current), and both parties probably still have some important portions of their original devotion to each other.

It matches up to the situation with the Israelites and the forces controlling them here pretty well, whether you take the line that those forces are due to divine powers, or whether you think it more credible that the priests are cynical master manipulators who don't get instructions from God, but do know exactly what line to spin to the people to keep them in hand.

Of course, as related in this text, the Israelites had got themselves into a pretty abused situation within Pharaoh's power structure, so Moses can at least put up some kind of a moral defence...

You've mentioned this sort of reaction to the text before too.  Its interesting to me to see how you perceive whats being said about God, as an 'outsider' and reading your perspective has been useful for me to help me understand what I think and why and is helping me to learn new stuff too as we go through the text in a more neutral way, rather than as a bible study.  But your negative reaction doesn't concern me because I think that you can't understand God properly unless you see him through Jesus, and that's why you don't get him.  So I'll await your reactions when we finally get to the NT.

There are some other factors too:
1. our understanding of how God's sovereignty aka control over us, intersects with our control over ourselves and how we make decisions.  For example the bible says that everything that happens in within the will of God, but we don't feel controlled by  an external power. 
2. our understanding of how evil happens in a world that God controls. 

These aren't easy topics but I've managed to find a reasonably robust working hypothesis that helps me understand these sorts of events. Most of the time anyway.  It will be interesting to see how close I am.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 18, 2015, 03:42AMI have some curiosity as to how we'll find ourselves approaching the Psalms when we get there. Maybe 10 at a time to get through them all!

That was a bit random.  You been reading ahead, being organised.  But yeah, there are 150 of them - 3 times as many chapters as Genesis.  But lots of them are interesting.  Some of them are interesting because of what they say in their own right - eg the ones that have a particularly vigorous attitude toward the enemy.  Others are interesting because the shed light on OT passages, eg David confessing his guilt over Bathsheba, and others because they allegedly shed light on NT passages, mainly about Jesus.

It might be useful to use other summaries eg shmoop to help us get through them faster.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 18, 2015, 05:37AMExodus 16 text

Highlights

 - "Manna from Heaven"

Summary

 - The Israelites come to the "Wilderness of Sin" in their travels.
 - There is insufficient food, and they grow hungry and grumbly.
 - God provides them alternately with "manna" and bread.
 - On the 6th day, twice as much is provided, so that they need not work on the 7th.
 - Some slow learners go out to collect on the 7th day, and God tuts at Moses over them.
 - The Israelites eat manna for the next 40 years, until they reach Canaan.

Questions and Observations

1) "Manna" is not a translated word; its etymology is obscure. The above link notes that some scholars question whether it is related to the Egyptian word "mennu", which means simply "food". This seems pretty plausible to me, at least as a conjecture.

So that's where we get menu from?

Providing just enough for their daily needs and having it rot at the end of the day except for Friday seems like it was designed to get the Hebrews to trust God each day.  "Is he going to give us food tomorrow?"  Either that or he's playing with their minds again.
Quote3) The final detail about 40 years seems out of sequence in the story?

A little note from the narrator (maybe Moses) after they had finished wandering around in the wilderness, that God had proven trustworthy and did provide enough food for them for the whole 40 years

[ttf_robcat2075]

QuoteA little note from the narrator (maybe Moses) after they had finished wandering around in the wilderness, that God had proven trustworthy and did provide enough food for them for the whole 40 years

Forty years of free food falling from the sky? God must be trying to destroy their work ethic.

I remember when just giving away some surplus cheese back in the 80s was supposed to make people addicted to government handouts.

[ttf_Baron von Bone]

Quote from: robcat2075 on Dec 19, 2015, 11:31PMForty years of free food falling from the sky? God must be trying to destroy their work ethic.
 
I remember when just giving away some surplus cheese back in the 80s was supposed to make people addicted to government handouts.
Clearly that's because the cheese wasn't air dropped.

[ttf_drizabone]

Exodus 17 text

Highlights

 - The Hebrews fail another water test
 - Israel defeats Amalek

Summary

 - The Israelites move on to Rephidim where there is no water.
 - They grizzle about this saying that Moses is just going to let them die out in the wilderness
 - God tells Moses to strike a particular rosk with his staff and it will produce water.
 - And it was so.
 - Then the Amalakites attacked Israel
 - Moses picked Joshua to lead some men to defend them.
 - Joshua's team prevailed while Moses' hands were held high, but the Amalakites prevailed otherwise.
 - So Aaron and Hur held Moses hands up and Joshua defeated the Amalakites.
 - God declared war on the Amalakites.

Questions and Observations

1) God has just solved Israels food problems and given them water, but as soon as they are short of water again, do they trust that he will look after them?

2) So did the Amalakites have 600,000 troops to challenge the Israeli 600,000? or was the 600,000 a bit of an exaggeration? or had the Israeli's got fat and weak because they didn't have to go out and work for their cheese, or did Moses only pick a small force to give the Amalakites a fighting chance so that he could do his hands in the air trick?  Or something else?  I think the narrator is just showing us that not only was God providing for their food and water, but he was also protecting them against hostile forces.

3) In the 'bible world' are we to expect that extraordinary things are magically done by the actor eg Moses using his staff of power or done supernaturally by God?

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 20, 2015, 02:16PM - Moses picked Joshua to lead some men to defend them.
This is the first time we've met Joshua, a character of importance.

That said, I see that he is more thoroughly introduced in Numbers - which I think recovers some of this same ground? It's been long enough since I read through this stuff (and yes, I did make it further than Psalms on that occasion) that I can't recall precisely.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 20, 2015, 02:16PM1) God has just solved Israels food problems and given them water, but as soon as they are short of water again, do they trust that he will look after them?
It's as if they think that it's Moses, not God, that's providing for them.

Boring Dave suspects some kind of benevolent later rewrite that inflated an existing story into 40 years of manna. As he already has raised the same suspicion regarding the plagues segment, both of which presumably came under the oversight of the same editor.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 20, 2015, 02:16PM3) In the 'bible world' are we to expect that extraordinary things are magically done by the actor eg Moses using his staff of power or done supernaturally by God?

Interesting question within the narrative's paradigm. Intuitively, it feels that the story we are being asked to believe has God make Moses perform actions, and then God does the behind-the-scenes jobs that produce the fancy stuff to make it look as if the motions that Moses is making are causing things to occur.

But now you mention it, I don't think I've seen that made explicit anywhere, and I could be easily persuaded that God invests the power in the artefacts, which Moses then operates. Are there other texts that touch on this?

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 20, 2015, 02:16PMAmalekites
Verse 14: 'Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."'

Writing a passage about it in a book that you then pass down for ever and ever seems like an odd way to "utterly blot out the memory of Amalek"!

[ttf_MoominDave]

Exodus 18 text

Highlights

 - Moses's family-in-exile rejoin him
 - Moses institutes a legal structure

Summary

 - Jethro, Moses's father-in-law joins the Israelites, along with Moses's wife Zipporah and their sons Gershom and Eliezer.
 - Moses fills them in on events since he left them to go to Egypt (must have been a dramatic conversation!).
 - Moses undergoes his habitual judging session - the people come to him with disputes and he resolves them.
 - Jethro advises him that this is an inefficient way to operate, and tells him to appoint subjudiciaries under his overall command.
 - Moses adopts this, with difficult cases only being brought to him.

Questions and Observations

1) Moses's division-of-labour judicial system is a natural and obvious one, in essence the same one employed everywhere even today. It's such an obviously good idea that I'm slightly surprised that the text doesn't attribute it to God.
2) I suppose that the laws that this system was using are broadly those that we'll go through in Deuteronomy?

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 21, 2015, 03:32AMExodus 18 text


Questions and Observations

1) Moses's division-of-labour judicial system is a natural and obvious one, in essence the same one employed everywhere even today. It's such an obviously good idea that I'm slightly surprised that the text doesn't attribute it to God.

And if the text is supposed to be written by people spinning the story to make their faction look good, then which faction gets kudos by having a foreigner come up with the good idea?

And I wonder also why its included. The editor is normally pretty selective in what he inludes in the narrative, but I can't see how telling us about this helps us with the story. Maybe it introduces the idea of Judges as leaders that we have after Joshua?

2) I suppose that the laws that this system was using are broadly those that we'll go through in Deuteronomy?

[/quote]

I don't know.  Do you think this event is a bit anachronistic, in that we have people administering the law before the Law is given?  Obviously they wouldn't have been without law before the 10 commandments etc were handed down, so they would be administering those laws if the event did happen before Sinai, but it seems a bit strange to me to include the story here, it makes me wonder what the editors purpose was in placing this story here, just before Moses climbs Sinai to receive the Law. 

Maybe all will become clearer after I have my morning cup of coffee.

[ttf_drizabone]

Quote from: MoominDave on Dec 21, 2015, 03:07AMBoring Dave suspects some kind of benevolent later rewrite that inflated an existing story into 40 years of manna. As he already has raised the same suspicion regarding the plagues segment, both of which presumably came under the oversight of the same editor.

You're not boring and you're allowed to write about yourself in the 1st person here, we're not using academic standards.  Fortunately for me.

QuoteVerse 14: 'Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."'

Writing a passage about it in a book that you then pass down for ever and ever seems like an odd way to "utterly blot out the memory of Amalek"!

I didn't notice that.  Maybe God does have a sense of humor, or at least irony.  I'll have to keep my eye out for any "Dad jokes".

[ttf_ddickerson]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 21, 2015, 12:30PM it makes me wonder what the editors purpose was in placing this story here,
You guys don't even consider the fact that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and wasn't part of a publishing, editing process. You will never get close to the real meaning pursuing this that way.

Oh well, back to your story telling.....

[ttf_MoominDave]

I don't see how I could get out of it what you get out of it without doing some fairly fundamental things to my thought processes - but then, that doesn't bother me unduly - and I suspect that doing so would prevent me from getting out of it a lot of the satisfaction I currently am. If you want to bring another perspective to bear on it, we're all ears! Making good summarising progress at the moment, but there's always a welcome for another hand at the tiller...

It's a fascinating text with a rich history, whether you bring more preconceptions than are forced on you to the reading of it or not. We all have that in common - a great respect for the process that brought it here, and an interest in seeing what it says, and in seeing how others with differing viewpoints perceive that differently. To imagine how it feels to me, imagine that we are instead analysing the Koran or some other book that you don't have an over-ruling spiritual interest in - I look at it as I would any other ancient text - I consider how ancient texts of these dimensions and importance typically came to be put together, and consider the partisan interests of those that had charge of it over the ages. It doesn't need to be imbued with a spiritual aura to be a book of culturally vast importance to us.

[ttf_MoominDave]

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 21, 2015, 12:30PMAnd if the text is supposed to be written by people spinning the story to make their faction look good, then which faction gets kudos by having a foreigner come up with the good idea?
Was Jethro a foreigner? The Bible's demographic attributions think the Midianites were descended from Abraham.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 21, 2015, 12:30PMAnd I wonder also why its included. The editor is normally pretty selective in what he inludes in the narrative, but I can't see how telling us about this helps us with the story. Maybe it introduces the idea of Judges as leaders that we have after Joshua?
Sounds eminently plausible to me. Given how important sitting in legal judgement later became to not just Israelite society but to general Middle Eastern societies (cf. qadis in Islam), it seems reasonable that it would be both emphasised and early-arising.

Quote from: drizabone on Dec 21, 2015, 12:30PM2) I suppose that the laws that this system was using are broadly those that we'll go through in Deuteronomy?

I don't know.  Do you think this event is a bit anachronistic, in that we have people administering the law before the Law is given?  Obviously they wouldn't have been without law before the 10 commandments etc were handed down, so they would be administering those laws if the event did happen before Sinai, but it seems a bit strange to me to include the story here, it makes me wonder what the editors purpose was in placing this story here, just before Moses climbs Sinai to receive the Law. 
Yes, for sure they would have had laws prior to the codification given in this story. And they would have broadly been the same before as after - no society as grumbly as this one would accept a sudden strong shift in legal basis. I think that what this is saying is that Moses had at this point a strong notion of what laws were and what they were for. An excellent qualification in a later law-giver.