The Upper Room

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Luke Hill

1:52 AM

@Matthew hey yo can I throw an objection at you to see how you answer it? I haven’t seen an answer to this before.

First I need an answer to the question: is all of genesis literal in the most layman sense of the word literal?

12 hours later…

Matthew

1:56 PM

@LukeHill I would be cautious about making that claim. Say, rather, it should be plainly read; things that aren't overtly poetic or allegorical should be taken at face value, as "historical". So, things like Creation is six (24-hour) days (Genesis 1) are literal. Things like "all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered" (Genesis 7:19) are literal; the Flood was global. Things like "the windows of the heavens were opened*... might be literal in ways we don't understand.

Elisha and his Brethren

Q: Why did the 4 miracles of the Temple stop 40 years before the destruction of the Temple?

According to the Sefaria translation of Yoma 39b: The Sages taught: During the tenure of Shimon HaTzaddik, the lot for God always arose in the High Priest’s right hand; after his death, it occurred only occasionally; but during the forty years prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, the l...

Matthew

Without carefully re-reading all of Genesis, however, I'd be cautious about saying that all of it is 100% literal.

Okay, here's actually a good example. Genesis 7:19, "The waters [...] increased greatly on the earth". A strictly literal interpretation might imply that the number of H₂O molecules in Earth's gravity well "increased greatly". I doubt that is true; rather, I would surmise this merely means the surface water became much deeper. (The source of said water may have already existed within Earth's gravity well.)

This would match a plain reading in much the way "the sun rises in the East" does. Pedantically speaking, the sun does not, in fact, move, but we speak of it relative to our perceptions. Same with the water 'increasing'; Genesis is not speaking the the strict, pedantic sense, but in the sense relative to Noah's perceptions.

2 hours later…

Luke Hill

3:47 PM

Hmmm

Okay so I guess my question has changed

Why can you interpret some passages as less than literal, but not others?

1 hour later…

Matthew

5:09 PM

Why do you assume my answer is to be taken seriously and not as some sort of allegory? (I'm being serious. If you think about it, its the same answer.)

Consider: "the sky is made of crystal" vs. "the sky is like a crystal bowl". If you assume I am speaking plainly and neither intending to deceive you nor use tricky language, the two phrases have very different meanings.

Matthew

6:09 PM

The usual way I see it explained is, try to envision yourself as having no outside information besides an understanding of language and literature; what conclusions would you draw under those conditions? Most likely you would conclude that God Created in six 24-hour days, the Flood was a real and global event, etc. The claims of Evolutionism and Uniformitarianism are not found in the Bible.

Luke Hill

6:29 PM

@Matthew sure! But you need to include ALL the background data.

Matthew

6:40 PM

@LukeHill Er... no? That's exactly the point. If you just look at the Bible, you don't get abiogenesis, common descent, or billions of years. All of those claims are ultimately of materialist origin. If you start with only what the Bible teaches and examine the available evidence without an a priori materialist bias, you still don't get abiogenesis or common descent.

You sort of get long time periods, but on closer inspection, there are problems, and the evidence is equally consistent with ~6ky.

If you assume that processes continuously in operation today are the only processes that have ever occurred, and that conditions have not changed, then various lines of evidence suggest older ages. But we know both of those assumptions are incorrect, and the picture they paint has inconsistencies. If we instead assume that the Bible's testimony is reliable (which as Christians, we ought to do), we can come up with a ~6ky explanation that is imperfect, but similarly plausible.

Elisha and his Brethren

7:16 PM

Q: What is the most acceptable translation of the Tanakh in the English language that is published and commonly used by Christians?

It goes without saying that when reading the Tanakh in translation, any Gd-fearing Jew and Noahide would choose a translation published by an established and respectable Jewish publisher. Just out of curiosity: which translation by Christian publishers comes closest to a Jewish translation so to ...

torah-study hebrew tanach translation christianity

Luke Hill

7:35 PM

@Matthew it just seems to me that you are accusing me of reading science into the Bible to make it metaphorical, while I would turn it around and say that you are reading a literal interpretation into science!

2 hours later…

Matthew

9:19 PM

@LukeHill Are you sure you aren't? If you ignore everything "science" tells you and just read Genesis, what conclusion do you think you'd arrive at? (Feel free to accuse me of reading the Bible into science all you want! Yes, I do; I believe God did not intend to deceive us, and that if the Bible seems to be plainly saying something — "all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered", for example — then what it seems to be saying is probably true.)

(It helps, of course, that I believe science is more consistent with such a Biblical reading than it is with Uniformitarianism and Evolutionism, but I would nevertheless be very skeptical if science appears to contradict the Bible. Is it possible that I misunderstand the Bible? Sure. But I would consider it at least as likely that I'm misinterpreting the scientific evidence.)

2 hours later…

Luke Hill

10:52 PM

@Matthew at the end of the day, it seems like we should just allow for either reading of the text and not make such a fuss about it. As I’ve shown, regardless of what you make of the historicity of the text, you can still draw strong theological themes from it.

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