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2:28 AM

@Davïd @Susan Gen 7:21 feels odd to me not just because of the repetition but also because of the variant clauses conjoined. If I were to say something like "Everyone was in church today, the preacher, the choir, the ushers, the parishioners that were praying, and the clergy" there wouldn't be anything redundant, but one would still wonder why I combined several simple noun phrases with one complex one...

I don't know enough about Hebrew to know if such a combination would be "odd" to the ear 3000 years ago, but if it would be then I would think there would be a reason for doing constructing the phrase - either to make the language flow better or to emphasize.

The "etomologizing" hypothesis could explain the presence of the phase, I suppose.

2 hours later…

Susan

4:44 AM

@ThaddeusB I see what you mean. My impression (and it’s only that!) is that for certain roots (really just a handful), these are something like “set phrases” that get frequently recycled instead of the noun alone. In rough numbers...7/9 of the “absolute” uses of the noun šereṣ (=swarmer) in the HB include a modifier of this sort. See Lev 11:29, 41, 42, 43 for exact parallels.

It’s less clunky in Hebrew compared to English since it only requires the article to join them - “the swarmer the swarming”.

(This is not really concordant with the “etymologizing” idea, which I’m not sure I understand. The root rmś (=creep) is used even more commonly in that exact construction with “on the earth" (e.g. Gen 1:26), and clearly not even a superficial resemblance there, so...?)

Anyway, I’m trying to learn more about this construction, which is just curious to me from a grammar perspective (though I agree with you probably exegetically irrelevant here) and has provided some interesting challenges for writing search strings in Accordance - will get back to you if I uncover everything.

2 hours later…

Susan

6:38 AM

Q: Is Satan in the Old Testament the same as Satan in the New Testament?

In the Old Testament, Satan seems to be one of God's employee, or even one of his children. In Job, God's children congregate and Satan is one of them accusing Job. The Jews think that Satan is still on payroll. Satan persuaded David to perform a census. In some other verses, God persuaded Davi...

satan

Surely we’ve been through this?

James Shewey

7:36 AM

We have - " Is the reference to "that ancient serpent" an allusion to the snake of Genesis 2" from

A: Was there precedent for John to link the satan and the serpent?

Mark Edward did a fantastic job of covering the Biblical link between the serpent and Satan, so I will not re-hash that, but I would like to directly address the second part of the OPs question: was John the first to link these two figures together? Or had the two already been connected in Je...