@MonicaCellio I talked to one of my pastors about 137. Turns out he did a paper on it in seminary. I'm working on an answer to it on the basis of my conversation with him.
The following two passages both use the phrase "invoked the LORD by name".
Genesis 4:26 (ESV)
26 To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
Genesis 12:8 (ESV)
8 From there he moved to the hill co...
It does seem to be too close to the other question for both to be left open - the question is which should we close as the duplicate (I don't think it necessarily has to be the more recent one - perhaps the better quality question)
Another possibility would be to actually merge the Qs - which might be possible if all the answers to both are a good fit for one of the questions (possibly with an edit)
@JonEricson or anyone else please chip in with your thoughts if you'd like to?
@JonEricson first close one as a dupe then a mod can merge, but it is usually for pretty much identical questions so we'd have to be sure we were doing the right thing.
Is the older Q in essence a subset of the newer?
> What does it mean to "call on the name of the Lord"?
> What does “invoke the name of the LORD” mean in Genesis?
quotes from each
.
if we don't think so, we can link them together in the comments
Close as dup is usually better. If you want to merge answers, the thing to do is close as dup with the target you want to keep, then merge, then in merge to get the dup question back but leave the answers on it deleted.
@JonEricson The older question asks "what changed", focusing on the text at that place. The newer one asks "what does this phrase mean", and doesn't seem to be as interested in historical context. Some of the answers to the older question wouldn't fit the newer one as asked. But they're too similar to not do something. I'm not sure what to do. Maybe the cross-linking is enough?
I think I'd prefer to see the older question focus on Gen 4 and the newer one on Gen 12, moving/editing answers as necessary, but I'm not sure.
So maybe we should see if we could a) expand the new question to be all uses of the phrase or b) just focus on 12:8 and link the two questions as they are now.
@JonEricson Ok. In that case, maybe we should: (1) keep the focus of the older question on Gen 4 and "what did it mean for that context"), and (b) broaden the newer question for all uses, and (c) have the newer question explicitly point to the older as one case whose analysis isn't broadly applicable.
I haven't actually read through all those cases, but the next several don't look exceptional. I suspect they're all covered by the same answer(s). But "what changed the first time" is a different, highly-related question and can be called out IMO.
@JackDouglas yeah, I was thinking more that if we reframe the questions we can then leave comments asking people to move answers where that makes sense. Or, more likely, edit.
If any answers are downright invalidated, we can edit into the body something like "this answer applied to a previous version of the question".
@JackDouglas well, not all the things, but I learned that partial merges don't work when I proposed it for something over there. So that one I know. :-)
The phrase "call upon the name of the LORD" turns up occasionally in Genesis:
Genesis 12:8 (ESV)
8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon th...
I'm adding this feature request to have high-rep users (15k?) to be able to migrate answers from one question to another, so that questions for duplicate answers can be consolidated.
Of course, there would have to be parameters, and a complete historical record, so that it could be reversed if m...
@JonEricson that looks great! Thanks for the work.
@JonEricson I'm not aware of other questions on this. (I just checked my MSO bookmarks and found nothing. It's the sort of thing I would have bookmarked if I'd seen it, but I miss a lot of MSO questions just due to the sheer quantity.)
A similar request resulted in our sane merge process. That works great if the questions are really duplicates and if all the answers apply. But sometimes the Venn diagram looks more like this:
If one question asks just about A and another comes along and asks about B, it can make sense to re...
@JonEricson I dropped off of Usenet in the mid-90s -- I still read some groups after the Eternal September, relying more and more on filters, until eventually I moved most of my Unix-based work to a new host that didn't have it and I decided that was ok. Mailing lists filled the gap for me for a long time, and still do for the ones where people actually still use email. But now there's a much bigger ecosystem. SE fits very nicely into it for me -- targeted Q&A, but for conversations there's chat.
The following two passages both use the phrase "invoked the LORD by name".
Genesis 4:26 (ESV)
26 To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
Genesis 12:8 (ESV)
8 From there he moved to the hill co...
A similar request resulted in our sane merge process. That works great if the questions are really duplicates and if all the answers apply. But sometimes the Venn diagram looks more like this:
If one question asks just about A and another comes along and asks about B, it can make sense to re...
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