@MonicaCellio oh and bad news, I probably won't be able to make it to Hebrew school now due to an unforeseen life/schedule shift (a family member moving in after a bad car accident)
The letter gimel has the meaning of a 'rich man chasing after a poor man' (1) and camel is gamal, an obvious pun.
The rich young ruler had just chased after Jesus (a poor man) and played a game of threading the needle. This is where the law is defined by the individual so that he finds himsel...
and my upvote only came after the assertion was sourced in the comments. Nevertheless I think it is an example of blurred lines: there also doesn't seem to be a defined line between exegesis and history questions which is interesting (I had thought there would be)
@JackDouglas he sourced the word-play, but not its applicability to the situation. I hope he answers my question about how Hebrew word-play bears on a Greek manuscript recording a conversation that was presumably in Aramaic. (One answer would be if this word-play works in Aramaic too, which I don't know.)
It should be noted that the numbers given in the census at the beginning of Numbers are also disputed (which would affect the numbers available for Midian's army here).
The most probable solution at this point is to understand that the
numbers given here are mixtures. Since the Hebrew word ...
@swasheck yes I allude to that in the beginning of my response. I think the numbers have to be off
@swasheck I guess I didn't spell it out, I just focused on the census. But how many Israelites were available for the census would affect this of course
@DanO'Day I think you did a great job with that answer. The one thing I'm wondering is howthe notion of "thousand means group, not 1000" that works well for militia applies to virgins.
@DanO'Day I question the numbers too (2M+ out of Egypt? does that work?); I just want them to be consistent. :-)
@swasheck wow, talk about things spiraling out of control. I sympathize with the server (the underpay-and-assume-tips scheme really sucks), but revealing information about both the customer and the restaurant was a mistake. If she'd cropped it to just the note (no company ID, no signature), that would have been different. Sigh.
Does anyone feel up to helping the poster to improve this answer to be more hermeneutic and less vague/personal/doctrinal? I don't even understand it all, though I started having trouble at "most everyone accepts" and that may be getting in my way.
Please cite your sources. "Most everyone" is quite broad and such unsubstantiated claims erode credibility. Additionally, you're falling into at least one fallacy with your "no purpose" statement in the third paragraph. As this is a site for hermeneutics and not just prophetic interpretation of historical events with reckless disregard for the significance of their historical and literary placement. — swasheck7 secs ago
@JackDouglas I was hoping he could point to a hermeneutic, a school, or any source to support the messianic interpretation. (For bonus points he would address how this ties into the other blessings given then; were they also for all time, if we say this one was? If so did that work out, and if not what's the difference? I can probably comment on that part myself, now that I think about it more.)
Please cite your sources. "Most everyone" is quite broad and such unsubstantiated claims erode credibility. Additionally, you're falling into at least one fallacy with your "no purpose" statement in the third paragraph. As this is a site for hermeneutics and not just prophetic interpretation of historical events with reckless disregard for the significance of their historical and literary placement. — swasheck1 min ago
@JackDouglas noticed that. i see my role on here as more like what i was describing about peer-review. it's nothing personal, it's just the process. hopefully we're all better people and the answers are better quality for it.
@swasheck If someone takes one of your comments personally, that's not your fault, but I think at that point it is best not to pursue it further, do you agree?
@MonicaCellio Yes, I think there are lots of folk who are much more amenable to 'fitting in' once they feel wanted :)
@JackDouglas i get your point. however, one of my greatest personality flaws is that i care that people have an accurate perception of me. i may be inclined to retort with something that attempts to clarify my point. but on the whole i think i'd agree with you.
@JackDouglas Over my years on the net I've found my English usage becoming more of a hodge-podge of US/Brit, presumably because of the wonderful variety of people I interact with. And for some odd reason I've always written "theatre", but "center". It's good that the terms where this happens don't come up much in technical writing. :-)
@JackDouglas and I can never remember -- I think AmEng tolerates "dialogue" but expects "analog", and that usually ends up confusing me.
@swasheck I think I'm similar. My concern (and, reading into your comments, yours -- correct me if I'm wrong) is the accuracy aspect. They can think badly of me if I'm being bad; that's totally cool. But I want their perception of me to be "correct", neither attributing good to my bad or bad to my good, if you know what I mean.
@MonicaCellio well, i want them to know that i'm not just launching into some tirade against them. it's not that i'm a hateful, grumpy, angry person (even though i've said that i am), it's just that i want to see good thought, and i see it as coaching.
@swasheck as you probably know, once someone starts to think they are being attacked, they start to see everything said through that lens. This is where communication can break down I think, especially cross-cultural (which is pretty much the only kind on the internet I reckon)
@swasheck yes, same here. I think both of us are, the overwhelming majority of the time, trying to be helpful and constructive. (I said "believe" because I obviously can't read minds. :-) ) I sometimes find myself reaching for "snark" out of the toolbox, and if that ever makes it past the "delete" filter and out into public, I hope people will call me on it. Err, tangent. Anyway, your comments are written carefully and constructively, so I hope they have the desired effect.
Beta Q&A site for professors, theologians, and those interested in exegetical analysis of biblical texts.
Currently in public beta.
I am honestly amazed we are getting so much traffic
Obviously only a fraction of it is from 'experts', but that has a positive side too: how much academic research remains forever gathering dust in academia? We are very accessible to the Google masses :)
@JackDouglas this is great! I know you can't share specifics, but is it the case then that a significant amount is coming from Google rather than our own users?
@MonicaCellio We get a lot of traffic from search engines, but we are some way off the "Eventually, 90% of a site's traffic should come from search engines" standard of maturity so far :)
there's part of me that also suffers from a tremendous inferiority complex. i'm too embarrassed to direct my peers to BH.SE out of fear that they'd see my contributions and ask, "did you actually learn anything while in seminary??"
@JackDouglas That question turns out to have been well answered from several different angles. It's full of surprises. Even Ron came through with an interpretation that was well enough argued.
The answers in voting order are: appeal to authority, check of context, speculation of a meaning that might have existed in Hebrew, speculation of a meaning that might have existed in Aramaic. The answers that clearly fit my criteria are run-away winners.
Also, given enough time for votes to accumulate, the cream does rise to the top. Maybe the approach we should take is to write a meta-post that explains why some answers are voted up more often than others. Rather than tell people how to post (or vote), we could describe voting patterns we already see.
@MonicaCellio I haven't time to read it right now (lunch date with my wife), but I'm questioning the wisdom of having questions that are prefaced with "Under Christian exegesis..." For one thing, it's not really a meaningful category. For another, it seems to drag in doctrine where it might not be needed. (But I've not really read the question or answer yet.)
@JonEricson I wondered about that too. Initially my reaction was "well, we would accept a question like 'under the historical-grammatical hermeneutic how do we understand..." so we should accept that one too, but maybe "Christian exegesis" is too broad. On the third hand (always pack a spare :-) ) I remember a question about "the Jewish understanding" of something. Hmm.
The letter gimel has the meaning of a 'rich man chasing after a poor man' (1) and camel is gamal, an obvious pun.
The rich young ruler had just chased after Jesus (a poor man) and played a game of threading the needle. This is where the law is defined by the individual so that he finds himsel...
It should be noted that the numbers given in the census at the beginning of Numbers are also disputed (which would affect the numbers available for Midian's army here).
The most probable solution at this point is to understand that the
numbers given here are mixtures. Since the Hebrew word ...
