@JonEricson and @MonicaCellio Thank you for your feedback. When I get a chance I'll try to edit my question to address / clarify some of the things you've mentioned.

@JonEricson I have clarified my answer.

@Jas3.1 Thank you. That argument depends much less on the analogy with Abimelech, so the counter-examples are less critical.

I looked through the comments and deleted many of them, but I think Monica's main point that Dan et al inherited equally strongly suggests that Ishmael being born of a concubine is a sort of red herring or not as simple as your answer makes out. Seems to me that you could remove that argument without losing anything major.

@JonEricson I will agree to disagree on that one. I think Monica's logic was flawed... all that her example shows is that they were the same in some sense... not in every sense. But I'll leave it alone.

@JonEricson Thanks.

@Jas3.1 No problem. ;-)

@JonEricson The feedback was helpful, it's just hard sometimes not to take it like someone telling you your baby is ugly, you know? :p

@Jas3.1 How would I know? My babies are the very picture of beauty! ;-) But yeah, I know the feeling.

@Jas3.1 the revised answer is much better, thanks. But it still looks like you're making an argument based on who the mother is, and if so Yaakov's concubines are a relevant counter-example. I left a comment before coming here to chat; it looks like you're pretty frustrated and if my comment makes that worse, sorry and I can try to rephrase if that would help.

I also realized that my answer was entangling two possibilities together, so I've edited to pull that apart more clearly. I also realized there's another way to read the talmudic story that bears on this, so I added that.

.

It's starting to look like the question that pushes the "are we a doctrinal site or not?" issue hardest is going to be the Is 53 question. Huh; I would have assumed it would be Is 7:14. Whee; just how we wanted to start the week...

@MonicaCellio unpinning this because the owner deleted it.

Hi @JackDouglas - welcome back!

^^^ I found this in the reopen queue. It was closed as off-topic in 2011, but it doesn't seem OT to me by our current guidelines. (But it's not a very good question, not bringing any examples of "different".) Should this be closed or reopened?

@MonicaCellio I still think it's OT because to answer it well really will involve church history, which is more for C.SE not here. No one here agrees on a canon to my knowledge, so we'd have to argue for it on the basis of textual features alone to keep it OT - which I don't think is possible IMHO

@Dan that makes sense. But I am confused by the existence of our canonicity tag.

@MonicaCellio me too

BH.SE has already defined its acceptable 'canon,' i.e. all books within that are on topic - then again, it appears there is no clear consensus and the former leader is no longer the top answer

In fact, as it stands, all books may indeed be on topic

@Dan huh, did the top two trade places? (I haven't been tracking that closely.) But that's a discussion of what's on-topic, while, independently of that (Revelation is, or we have a lot of questions to kill), this question asks about how the book got into the common (Christian) canon. That does sound like church history for C.SE, but we have this tag... hence my bringing it up here. :-)

@MonicaCellio yes indeed. Are questions about Christian ecclesiastic history on topic here, though? I would think BH.SE would be indifferent to canonicity. This is more a place for questions about the text itself. That question is more along the lines of: "should we accept the text in the Christian canon?" which I would think should be for C.SE

If it was more along the lines of, "What evidence exists that John wrote Revelation since the writing style appears to be different from John's other works?" - that would be more on topic I would think

but questions of "is it in or out" have to do with specific traditions within Christianity, not even Christianity as a whole agrees on a biblical canon

@Dan ok, that all makes sense. I'll vote to keep closed.

@MonicaCellio also think we should revisit the canonicity tag

Because the wiki description seems to indicate that question is on topic: "The study of how a text came to be placed in a Canon of Scripture. Questions about whether a text should be included in the canon are off-topic here."

I'm thinking even asking how it came to be in a canon is off topic

because that is actually a question about a specific religious tradition's history and decisions, not about the text itself

@Dan I believe @JonEricson wrote that wiki recently in response to another question's confusing use of the tag. That doesn't mean he advocated keeping the tag (we didn't discuss that, I don't think), but that if we did have a tag it should have a wiki consistent with the so-tagged questions. I think. That was last week -- ages ago. :-)

@MonicaCellio haha, yes - ages ago

@MonicaCellio I addressed this on meta

@Dan great, thanks!

I'll post it big in here:

oops haha

@Dan patience... :-)

@MonicaCellio yeah I forgot it posts meta stuff automatically

@Dan if you care I can delete one of them for you, but I don't think it's a big deal.

no no please do

@Dan ok, there you go. I decided that Stack Exchange gets to keep its post and deleted yours. :-)

sounds like the best decision ;)

@Dan it's like responding to flags from Community -- do you really want to tell Community it's not helpful? :-)

@MonicaCellio indeed

Low quality forum-type answer that references an unlinked blog. Author never came back to edit.

@Soldarnal I've pinned that for you. Can you explain what's unkind about it? I'm guessing that relies on references I'm not familiar with.

@MonicaCellio it doesn't appear that anything is unkind, it just is VLQ and the OP never updated it as requested. Probably a VTC is in order

@MonicaCellio although the poster seems to actually know what he is saying, he just has no citations whatsoever. Do we have a custom message for that?

@Dan you mean an annotation? There's one for "cites no sources". But it sounds like what he most needs is a comment -- or, would if he'd been seen on the site since the day he posted.

@MonicaCellio yeah @JackDouglas commented the day it was posted so I suppose it could be left alone to be DV'd or ignored or whatnot

@Dan if it doesn't answer the question at all, I vote to delete (or flag if I think it could stand as a comment instead). I added my VtD (there was one there already) since the poster here doesn't seem likely to update the answer. When there's a chance that the poster will fix a problem, I hold off on voting to give him a chance to do so (which has gotten easier since we started pinning these sorts of answers for later review).

@MonicaCellio k cool

@Dan I'm acting in accordance with what I understand of the guidance we've received (here and on meta, over months), but of course each person should make his own decisions and my understanding isn't perfect anyway.

@MonicaCellio 10-4

@MonicaCellio Yeah, like Dan says, I don't see anything unkind about the post; it's just VLQ. I wish the user had come back and filled in their answer more or at least linked to their own blog, but as it is the answer is an unsupported statement and a couple musings.

Thanks for pinning it

@Soldarnal hmm, I'm not sure why I thought you said "unkind" before. Sorry, you didn't! Trying to stay current in too many tabs, I suspect. :-(