Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Saturday, May 11, 2019
HOW IT ALL BEGAN: GENESIS part 2 go to previous post for the first part
NOTE I have made the links more useable and corrected an error in copying he shall bruise your heel should have been He shall crush your head eye jumped a line. sorry.
The curse on Eve according to a Hebrew interlinear with English text says that her conception as well as pain would be increased, so she was probably not fertile more than once a year like most other mammals, but unlike most, affection and playfulness and companionate sharing of themselves with each other would have resulted in sex fairly often.
And Eve did't rebel against Adam's authority because he didn't have any over her no roles no nothing, just freely being themselves with each other, even the curse on her that she would become dependent on him and he would rule over her was not a cretion of roles and authority just a situation which then morphed into an artificial status like that, which Paul later addressed in terms of making the otherwise abusive pagan patriarchal head of family be the nurturer, and the woman not expendable nurturer as before, because now the man was to be if boss over the woman was to be like Christ to the Church and likewise slave masters were to remember they have a Master in heaven Who is not a respecter of persons, i,.e., your social, employment, family, ownership whatever role does not validate abuse.
Eve rebelled against God. Frankly a more serious matter.
What was the talking snake? a posessed actual snake the fallen angel then became bound to, to live a degraded life in the dirt at least for the lifetime of the snake? or some reptillian intelligent kind of life like the wild stories of humans who are disguised alien reptiles or reptoids imply? Or just a seraph, flying fiery serpentine form? But the devil was a cherub, so that is out. (the cloven hoof angle on the devil is because of the cherub origin likely, since these were like powerful bulls with human heads.)
The snake started by asking "yea, has not God said" and then
phrased it a bit off. Eve corrected it, that indeed all trees were edible but not that one only. But she added a hedge (you
shall not touch it) though perhaps that had been added by God
at some point.
Since Genesis chapter 5 says that God called THEIR name Adam in they day He made them, and He walked with Adam in the cool of the evening, Eve heard from God directly also, it was not vectored through Adam. Indeed, if it had been, some denigration of his accuracy in telling what God said might have been thrown in.
The devil then persuaded Eve that she would not die, but her eyes would be opened and she would be like YHWH Himself, and would know good and evil - not know right from wrong but experientially know good and evil, standing above both like the Nietzschean overman, beyond good and evil. not a good idea.
She bought the idea, and gave the forbidden fruit also to Adam who was with her (she was not alone when this happened, but Adam says PAul was not deceived but ate knowing this was wrong. Why? well, he saw she didn't drop dead immediately, so instead of being persuaded by another (aka "deceived, persuaded to your disadvantage" per Strong's Concordance ) he saw for himself, but misunderstood what he saw. Death can be said to be as good as accomplished once an irreversible poison process has begun. But they DID die in the day they ate, one day is a thousand years in God's sight, and no one lived that long except Enoch and Elijah which were miraculous exceptions by divine intervention, and not on their own.
Would they have aged and died without doing this anyway? The Tree of Life gives immortality. symbolically you can say that Jesus Christ and His Body and Blood are the Tree of Life and relate this also to The Cross, but literally it was a plant that would keep them alive. And they were removed from the Garden and it was put under angelic guard, to prevent them living forever by eating it.
The Orthodox Church position is that they were inherently immortal. This would mean the Tree of Life was irrelevant, which it obviously wasn't But perhaps The Holy Spirit restrained thecompilers of dogma from too extreme an error. Let's say they were inherently immortal, but would age. But never get totally decrepit and never die. The Tree of Life then would give youth. But in the absence of their inherent immortality, stripped from them by the action of the plant or the curse of God for eating the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or by both, the Tree of Life would have prevented their deaths, thereby they would have lived forever if they kept access to it. This is a position that remains ORthodox and Biblically consistent.
When you eat something, it becomes or part of it usually becomes, a part of you. An ontological change took place, and their eyes were opened and for the first time they felt shame about their nakedness (and eroticism and whatever else). Why? probably because this was a rebuke to their altered state of consciousness delusion of godlikeness, not godliness which means godlikeness in the sense of virtues, which they originally had, but the false claim of divinity itself by nature not by adoption and not by comparison and similarity compared to other creatures or by any kind of role to other creatures.
ORIGINAL SIN. This is sometimes misunderstood as each of us having personal guilt for Adam's sin. Actually, it is a cotamination, a kind of mutation, but not a simple matter of some one or several genes that could be identified and clipped out. the whole system was contaminated body and soul and spirit. To limit it to the body only, especially if it is a gene, would be pelagianism because if you can identity and
snip that gene out, you would have eliminated original sin. A diffusing thoughout the whole protoplasm is more like it, and uneradicable, as if the entire body were composed of nothing but cancer cells.
How is this passed on? This contamination is a warp, predisposing us to going bad. It manifests at some point in each person in different ways and to different degrees. Obviously some sin was possible in Adam and Eve before the Fall, and insofar as Eve believed the lie about God that He was holding out on them and lying to them, and insofar as she started to reach for the fruit, picked it, brought it to her mouth, she sinned before she ate, but these were correctable. The one thing not correctable was actually eating it, and this created a
worse situation than before. Now they were predisposed to sin
and this condition was inheritable.
How so?
in the west (i.e., the Roman church which gradually drew away from the Eastern unidivided church until the great Schism of AD 1054) the idea gained ground that souls/spirits were separately created by God at some point, either conception or later when the embryo or fetus was "ensouled" and finally this became formal Roman Catholic doctrine, which Protestantism retained.
Traducianism however was held formally by some early fathers. Tertullian is said to have originated it, but that is not the case, he merely expounded it.
because it is taken for granted in Hebrews, where Paul explais why Jesus' Mechizedec priesthood is superior to that of Aaron and Levi.
They were still in Abraham's loins when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedec, therefore Levi tithed to Melchizedec in effect, and the inferior pays tithe to the superios.
Traducianism holds that the soul material, for lack of a better word, is inherited along with the physical material from the parents. Being more fluid or malleable the soul can change more than the body can, and if you add epigenetics into the mix it gets iteresting. So while one may be limited a great deal to whatever genetic physical material your parents provided, you are not so limited by the characteristics of the soul/spirit material they provided, and can make more changes in that.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa points out, the flesh is either alive and the soul gives life to the body, or it is dead and cannot become a baby. The gamete is half a cell, its soul material is half a soul copy of the parent's soul, at least as it was at the time the gamete formed.
And not only is the physical genetic material fallen, but the soul/spirit material is fallen also.
With separate creation of the soul each time, aka "creationism" which is not about creationism vs. evolution in original creation in this context, you either have an unfallen soul, the material being the sole basis for evil and its transmission, which is gnostic nonsense, and gives rise to or compatible with several heresies, or you have God creating fallen souls. Both are unaccpetable.
Traducianism however provides a mechanism of transmission that is inevitable in its operation, absent divine intervention to block that transmission.
It is also a bulwark against reincarnation, making it (other than in the form of possession of an embryo or fetus by a dead person, or some kind of cowalking, which is not the same thing at all) and against abortion, since the personhood begins at conception. There is never a time the preborn is not "ensouled."
So however you interpret the bit in Exodus, about a miscarriage from an injury, this single matter of Cain and Abel and Seth beginning their personal histories when Adam knew his wife (or shortly after, in that general time frame when the egg and sperm actually met), is anti abortion and compatible with traducianism. (Someone onine linked anti abortion to Apollinarianism heresy, but traducianism is irrelevant to
that.)
So Tertullian was early enough that he was merely expounding a recognition of the obvious, and Biblically expounded in Hebrews, and not inventing anything. As time passed, and more pagan philosophy snuck into Christian thought, traducianism was undermined. It is too material, too grossly physical, exactly the reason some student of Origen rejected the idea of a physical rule on earth by Christ.
But Chiliasm that was rejected by the Church early on was not the literal physical rule by Christ on earth in itself, only its limit to a thousand years. That rule is forever once He comes back, Revelation shows the 1,000 years is the first segmet of it, not the entirety.
This is misunderstood by ORthodox and Roman Catholics who reject the millenialism of protestant eschatologists, but the Creed says "He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead AND OF HIS KINGDOM THERE SHALL BE NO END," not a mere thousand years (which "chiliasm" refers to) but without end. the pre mil amil and post mil disputes have nothing to do with the pre trib, mid trib and post trib
rapture disputes, which are alien to Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
The rapture is not our blessed hope, it is a mere blip in church history and will not happen at all if no believers are left alive when Christ comes back. It merely catches us up to meet Him getting us out of the way of the wrath of God, which gets poured out on the antichrist and on those who gave in to him and worshipped him and/or took his mark. the wrath of God is not the great tribulation, but comes after to avenge it, Jesus' Second Coming destroys the antichrist, and puts a permanent stop to the persecution by the antichrst.
the egg and sperm are free floating in the womb or fallopian tube when they join, and a bit later the zygote imnplants in the womb wall. the child begins separate from the mother, attaches like a parasite, and then is cut loose. The child is always distinct from both parents, and is supposed to move ahead not be bound up by its parents their toy and slave and tool of joining to other families. OF course the child should be respectful and helpful and should learn from parents and others, and the parents should raise it to be a decent member of society, a decent person and a servant of YHWH. As an adult, the grown child should make the parents' survival needs a priority, Jesus drew a distinction between "honoring" and "obeying." In the honor your father and mother commandment, He discussed those whose false tradition evades God's law, those who when their father is in need say they dedicate everything to the Temple so they can't help him. But this isn't about obedience but about caretakeing or helping a physical survival need like food or clothing. Obeying was dealt with elsewhere, where Jesus spoke of a man with two sons, he tells them to go work in his field and one says he will but doesn't and the other says he won't but relents and works for him. Which obeyed, the one who said he would or the one who actually worked in the field? the latter, of course.
honor your father and mother is combined with a promise, that you live long in the land YHWH your God will give you. But obviously you won't if you become ungodly enough. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. This commandment presupposes godly parents who don't teach you to worship false gods or engage in immoral stuff or support evil family members against their victims who complain.
Though obeying can be a form of honoring, it is a distinct matter. the classic obedience is phyhsical labor, clean youir work, work the field, set the table. do your laundry. it does not include disobeying God and following your parents in evil if they are evil.
Helping even evil parents with food and clothing they need would be honoring them as parents, without obeying them in some matter or taking them into your home to destroy your life and family.
REspectful refusal instead of disrespectful (unless necessary) would be a case in point also.
Genesis says a man shall LEAVE his parents, cling to his ishah (woman feminine dimnutive of ish, man) and they two tight partners eventually become one flesh. This process can operate when men and women are partners in some work that puts them together a lot, like police teams and other things where you have a single pair of partners. This is a danger if one or both are already betrothed or married or one flesh by sex with a claimed partner they being each other's man and woman. This is a risk of adultery. The process that was to bond a pair and move to physical intimacy that makes the two one flesh, in the fallen human and the resulting dubious social contexts produced by fallen humans, can cause the original process to go against its purpose. To be duplicated among co workers outside of an existing marriage (legal or companionate).
Polonium isotope decay halos in granitic rocks show that the rocks were solidified in a matter of seconds or minutes. (One objection is that these are not primordial rocks because of their content, but that doesn't matter, the rocks at issue solidified in a VERY short time. "Every question regarding the validity or implications of this polonium-halo evidence has been systematically dealt with, in our published reports and in various discussions with those holding differing views." http://www.halos.com/ )
radiometric dating has seriouis problems: Carbon 14 is useless beyond several thousand years, and like all such systems produces a range of results that are averaged out. yet it has been found in fossils that supposedly are millions of years old. There are two main forms of rock dating, aside from assuming their age from the fossils in them, which then are the reason for assuming their age in the first place. These two systems in each one is consistent with itself, rocks tested by either one give the same date range in the system used. But when the same rocks are tested by both systems, the results are in total contradiction to each other. details can be found at creationist sites online.
This is important regarding evolution, for it supposedly goes so slowly it needs millions and millions of years to be accomplished. Eliminate these, and you are thrown back on "intelligent design" i.e., fast creation by a Creator, possibly with some remodeling by smart humans later, but not Darwinian evolution, and no macroevolution, changes from reptile into mammal for instance. The possibility of genetic engineering of course requires an origin for the genetic engineers, so is not a solution to the issue of origins, only to manipulation later.
Meanwhile, the pagan philosophers were arguing for a kind of evolution. And modern Eastern Orthodox especially in Europe and the USA have been influenced by worldly thinking and theology to some extent, even some things have crept in that would have been unthinkable 200 years ago anywhere in the Orthodox world, through worldly and western deviant theological speculations of Met. Anthony Krapovitsky on the one hand, who plagiarized western Abelard’s idea of "moral redemption," whether Abelard called it that or not, while condemning Anselm as western, and Kalomiros on the other. These claim they represent the Fathers, but they don’t, not on the disputed issues anyway, not without yanking stuff out of context.
I recommend Vladimir Moss’ writings on all this, the arguments and history and patristic citations stand on their own merit, and there is nothing of his schismatic issues in The Mystery of Redemption or The New Soteriology, available free online. (And some research showed me more things in the Fathers than he addressed that support his positions.)
St. Symeon who held the baby Jesus in his arms in the Temple, having been foretold by God that he would not die until he saw YHWH’s Messiah (Anointed One in Hebrew, Christos is Greek for Anointed One), is said by some church historian to have been part of the LXX translation team, and to have been very old. What is most likely, is that he was part of those that translated the Writings and the Prophets, this work being done later than the original LXX which was the Torah only. LXX refers to the seventy scholars who did this work, and while Aristeas’ version might be a bit unlikely in details, it is possible that either seventy scholars did work on this, or seventy people were involved in the process (incl. those encouraging the king to get the translation done and the king himself and the priest who supplied the Hebrew text and those who asked for and received and transported it), or seventy altogether over the years at different times, and mostly not known to each other, if you count those who translated the Torah and those who translated the rest of it. This latter is my own speculation. I run scenarios in my mind when presented with a problem.
Supporting all this, is the Prologue to Wisdom of Sirach, complaining that it is hard to translate with full meaning words from Hebrew to Greek and that there are problems as a result. I am indebted to Brenton’s article cited above, for this information, which I then went and read in Sirach for myself. This remark itself may have been one of the motives of Jerome in seeking to bypass the LXX and draw from Hebrew texts instead. However, there is a problem. By Jerome’s time the Hebrew text was the Masoretic, which the rabbis said was from a partly corrupt text to begin with, their famous measures to prevent accidental alterations preventing more errors. The article sites a midrash. https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/masoretic-text-vs-original-hebrew
Jerome may have had an agenda at times, affecting his translation. The KJV and others drawing on the Masoretic text, as he did, translates Gen. 3:15 as "He shall crush your head," and so does the LXX. Jerome in translating Hebrew into Latin rendered it "SHE shall crush your head," which error the Douay-Rheims follows, and is the basis for the erroneous statues of The Virgin Mary with her foot on the head of a snake. Jerome was perhaps excessively devoted to Mary, and may have done this on purpose, or perhaps his bias caused some slight visual hallucination, or allowed him to accept one unchecked, and he wrote "she" instead of "he." This has laid the groundwork for the plethora of marian visions that all or mostly depict the Virgin Mary as holding back the wrath of Jesus Christ, and being the mainstay against the devil. Which is unbiblical and not consistent with early fathers’ writings, or the views of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The later visions in Roman Catholicism have promoted increasingly the idea of her as co redeemer (or co redemptrix) which some in the church hierarchy are pushing for. If this were to be proclaimed as dogma, RC would be full on heretical. Of course her agreement to be the Mother of God made her a player in the whole situation, and contributed to the Redemption or Atonement by providing the flesh it was done in. But that is not the same thing as the "co Redemptrix" blasphemy. Even now, some over the top fan of hers has recently stated that she is a fourth person in the Holy Trinity. This is not formal RC dogma of course. (The devil does seem to be afraid of her, she is probably a great exorcist, but that is not the same thing.)
(The Virgin Mary is called Theotokos, or Mother of God, because God Incarnate came out of her womb, but not that she is the origin of God The Second Person only the supplier of His flesh to His Incarnation, but this term Mother of God emphasizes that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and always was so from His conception, and not a man who became God, or acquired a divine co walker or something like that). More accurately translated, Theotokos would mean Birthgiver of God.
The error in the Douay-Rheims is not to be blamed on the LXX which it includes, though there is a slight difference in the Deuterocanonical (aka Old Testament Apocrypha) books RC and EO have in their LXX. These books were NOT "added to the Bible" but rather taken away from the Bible, first by the Reformers, who separated its books from the rest of the Bible in their own place, but kept them. All protestant Bibles including the KJV had these, until in the USA in the early 1800s publishers left them out to save space and cost. Luther was not happy with Maccabbees because it shows prayer for the dead, and was used by RC to support purgatory, though the object of the prayer was to obtain mercy on the Day of Judgement for the dead sinners, not release from purgatory. Purgatory is a Roman addition, and more likely it is a misunderstanding of some situations like the tollhouse teaching in Orthodoxy shows, that one laden by unrepented of sin can be grabbed by demons. St. Perpetua the martyr’s actions, in praying for her dead brother who died an unbeliever and who she feared was in hell tell us two things. That the early church prayed for the dead, or didn’t teach against it, as she obviously received no authoritative teaching to not pray for the dead; and that prayer for the unbelieving dead was either done or not taught against, contrary to later EO and RC practice and ideas.
The deuterocanonicals were retained by the Reformers as useful but not inspired. Luther however wanted to kick James and even Revelation out of the Bible.
After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, Aquila at the behest of Rabbi Akiva made another Greek translation, to compete with the Septuagint, because he and Akiva were dead set against Christianity, and wanted to eliminate much that was in use by Christians to witness to Jews. I guess Akiva was still smarting from having bet wrong on Bar Kochba being The Messiah and lost, and wasn’t about to reconsider he might have been wrong in rejecting Jesus as The Messiah. (Messiah means Anointed One in Hebrew, Christos means Anointed One in Greek.) This only survives in fragments, but apparently in an effort to make word for word translation exactness, the result was the opposite of exact in some places, grammar and even sense of the words were compromised. The latter however might have been deliberate.
A modern Jew opined that the LXX was a terrible translation, because that bit about a virgin giving birth was what made accepting Jesus possible, but there is a lot more than that in the LXX and in modern translations from the Masoretic, and the word in HEBREW is a lot more telling than mere "betulah," hymen intacta, type virgin. Such a woman could give birth without any miracle, just have been engaging in orgasmic activities with a man without penetration. A semen spill on the vulva could result in those tadpoles swimming to meet an egg, which is why the Kikuyu, who used to practice premarital sex by rubbing between the thighs, would have a leather apron between the woman’s legs to prevent this. A pre Christian traditional activity of teenagers before marriage, not necessarily just between betrothed either.
The Hebrew word is "almah," which though translatable as "young woman" has implications of veiled, isolated, etc., and there is a male version of this word regarding a male student, who would be expected to be celibate since not married yet and concentrating on his studies, according to Strong’s. This physical isolation, a very proper and even veiled young woman, means no heavy petting, no nothing. Such a woman could not give birth without a miracle. Since Jesus is male, as the reference to His circumcision makes clear, this was not some natural parthenogenesis, which in mammals always results in a female, not a male. And you can’t blame it on alien abduction and say He is a hybrid, or some mad scientist’s experiment on her because either of these would eliminate the hymen and eliminate the non contact situation.
Origen, whose doctrinal vagueries that developed later and got him anathematized post mortem, was a brilliant scholar and at one point noticed the problems in the LXX and attempted to correct this. This is considered a negative point by LXX rejecters, who argue that we don’t know which version produced by who is the present LXX since he put together something with various translations into Greek in columns with notes as to what had been added or left out in translating the LXX from the Hebrew. However, his Hexapla isn’t what is going around now:
"There were two other early attempts to revise the Septuagint besides that of Origen. In the beginning of the fourth century, Lucian, a presbyter on Antioch, and Hesychius, an Egyptian bishop, undertook similar labours of the same kind. These two recensions (which they were in the proper sense of the term) were much used in the Eastern Churches. " – Brenton.
So the LXX now, is the result of this work and is probably more accurate than whatever original work Aristeas refers to. However, that original work is what The Apostles used, mostly. The Eastern Orthodox Church tends to consider the LXX inspired, somewhat like KJBO think the KJV is I guess, but whether it is or not, we have Apostolic validation for the original, and the settled version now is an EO production anyway.
It is argued that if there is the slightest error in Scripture then we can’t trust anything in it. The entire faith is out the window. I am not arguing for evolution or theistic evolution in this matter, but when it comes to chronological issues and even some versions including a name in the genealogical records that another leaves out, this is not the problem it appears to be. Because with the days of Abraham and Moses and thereafter you have a clear written record, which sometimes cites popular sources of the time that are no longer extant, having retained in the cite all that was NECESSARY not necessarily all that existed.
And people with means and motive to preserve the record. By the time of the New Testament, we are looking at eyewitness testimony, of a more recent date so less room for error to creep in that has any impact of importance. The OT material is mostly eyewitness testimony also. The New Testament eyewitness testimony refers back to the Old Testament repeatedly. Jesus refers to The Flood, and does not stipulate when it happened merely that it did happen. This was heard by His listeners (and He undoubtedly said many things more than once) and remembered and recorded.
In compiling this I have benefitted from many sources, including conversations mostly if not all online, which resulted in some link to an article being posted that was of use.
2. "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
There are those who argue that God didn’t make the world an empty formless waste, tohu, since, as per Isaiah 45:18, "He did not create it a waste" and that therefore the earth "became" to be without form and empty. The actual quote is, "For thus saith the LORD that Created the heaven; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am YHWH; and there is none else."
Two points about this. First, the intent, the message, God didn’t make the earth for no reason, with life, human and otherwise, as an accident or afterthought. God made the earth to be inhabited, for that purpose, and not just for everything on it to be allowed to run down into chaos and so forth, and though this happens since sin entered the world, God does not allow it to go on forever. Sometimes He brings a chaos and carnage on the sinners, to discipline or remove them, because what they considered order and goodness was in fact chaos and evil from God’s perspective, as well as that of their victims, because it violated His standards and opposed His goodness. But the goal is improvement. The overall context and message of Isa. 45:18 sentence fragment they like to use, is not about the details of creation itself, but about its purpose. As for details, you could also read this as that God did not create the earth a void, in the sense of what His finished creation was, and that this Isaiah cite is not about what He started it out as, but how it was when He finished it and declared it "very good."
Second, the word tohu, which is in the phrase "without form and void," means "formlessness, confusion, unreality, emptiness," which is exactly the picture of potter’s clay at the start, before the potter has formed it. Also, Hebrew is as someone phrased it, a highly context driven language. A word can have several meanings depending on context. Though the core meaning and the implications of the root word it comes from would be the main driver, its exact meaning would depend on the rest of the sentence and the subject matter.
The word "became" chosen as translation doesn’t support this view, of a primal initial perfect at the start creation, that then was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Because it can just as well mean "came into being," just like the blobby mess a potter throws on the wheel before he shapes it. Apparently the Scofield Reference Bible supports the Gap Theory. There are a lot of problems with Scofield, which I won’t get into here. Scofield and Darby also had a lot of help from rather strange sources.
Genesis chapter one shows a process of development of things.
Hippolytus notes "On the first day God made what He made out of nothing. But on the other days He did not make out of nothing, but out of what He had made on the first day, by moulding it according to His pleasure." http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-exegetical.html this site, by the way, is problematic in that it lumps all kinds of heretical and problematic stuff together under the label "early Christian writings," but it’s a good quick source.
3-5. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." God then divided light from dark and called light Day and darkness Night.
Now some quibble that the sun and moon are created (or at least positioned) later so how can this be? But there are two ways. First, the canopy of vapor could have been so thick that their disks were not visible, and that this creation account is a series of visions given, displaying things from the perspective of one viewing it on the ground, and the writer simply records what he sees and some things God says.
This would have the sun and moon already existing, but not visible themselves, only the effect of the sun during the day, but the moon obscured at night.
Creationists argue for a canopy from which came the waters of the Flood and the canopy cleared up after, since all its water was lost to The Flood. But that is not necessary and likely would have left the sun disk barely visible during the day, and the moon always invisible, until after the Flood. Even present day heavy clouds will do this. Which means that there could have been initial heavy clouds, but not the canopy the Creationists usually posit these days, and which evaporated early on.
The main reason for the canopy idea, is to explain where all the Flood water came from, and to explain the shortening of human life after The Flood, due to more ultraviolet light exposure. But the Bible says that waters from the deep broke to the surface as well as rain, and the whole thing was a supernatural event, so you don’t need to scramble around looking for explanations that much. There can be other reasons for shortening of life. And the four main Old Testament sources don’t all agree on some ages given. This is a problem of copyist error not the inerrancy doctrine, which applies to the original texts only. But the ages given are great enough before and notably shorter after The Flood that something changed, or else some conflation of people with similar names happened.
The other explanation, of light before the sun and moon were visible from the earth’s surfrace, is that the earth was much farther from the sun, and the solar system was put in order during these days. Also, that light came from other sources no longer present, perhaps the sun was not fully ignited, that the earth was originally near a glowing nebula and the earth was moved elsewhere or the nebula became the sun or was moved elsewhere. A creationist site suggests sonoluminescence.
Of course it might be a pervading light, which God used to make other things with.
"And the evening and the morning were the first day."
Because of inheriting the Roman calendar, we generally treat the day as ending and beginning at midnight. This was also true of several other ancient cultures, which went sundown to sundown, and one of them was the Jewish culture. This likely tracks back to earliest times, to ancestors before the Hebrews. It is a logical thing. I remember as a child being puzzled by the day ending at midnight because it ends, day being daylight, when the day is over (as it is in fact said) at sundown. Probably this was the original way with everyone, before complicated notions involving sun worship and what not came into play. So the first day began in the evening, when it was still dark, and continued after God made light.
Hippolytus of Rome AD 170 – 235 observed that "On the first day God made what He made out of nothing. But on the other days He did not make out of nothing, but out of what He had made on the first day, by moulding it according to His pleasure." http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-exegetical.html
6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8. "And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. "
Some argue this is superstitious ignorance that the sky is an inverted solid bowl, and the sun and moon and stars travel across it. But the word firmament can be translated "expanse." Raqia, an extended surface, expanse per Strong’s Concordance. Though this has usability as a "surface," it is a surface appearing thing, but it is an expanse. The lower heaven with the clouds in it, is indeed a bowl, held by gravity, when you look at it from above the earth.
9. "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10. "And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Now it gets interesting. Geologists have come up with the idea, that long ago all the continents were one landmass, and indeed they do fit roughly together, as if they had been torn (or drifted, the usual idea of scientists) from each other. They call this "pangea." Creationists and evolutionary scientists don’t disagree much on what happened, the disagreement is about how and when it happened. (I don’t think it is only 6,000 or so years old, neither do I buy the millions of years story. Probably more like 12,000 years old. )
Someone looking for contradictions in the Bible, may quibble that somewhere it speaks of the waters retreating from the land instead of the land rising up out of the waters, but why not both at once? The effect would be the same. When The Bible was written, there wasn’t that much space to write on, even so God is very terse compared even with ancient pagan writings. He is an expert at conveying maximum information in minimal space, you just have to unpack it.
11. "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12. "And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13. "And the evening and the morning were the third day."
14. " And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years;
15. "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also.
17. "And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18. "And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19. "And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."
Now, it is protested by some detractors, that plants could not grow without sunlight on the previous day. But if these were literal days, they only had to go one day without sunlight, and they already had the cloudy light anyway, which is enough for most plants.
Astrologers like to point to this "signs and seasons" as supporting their "art." But in fact it doesn’t. While ‘signs" can mean "banners, omens, pledge, sign, signs, standards, witness, wondrous." (Strong’s) it is from a root meaning a sign or mark like a descriptor. In other words, navigation, and perhaps some supernatural modifications or arranging of them to say something. Mostly navigation in this context. Some unusual change or addition or subtraction might be an indicator of something, a sign from God. Astrology was condemned in the Old Testament and by Christian writers along with the general idea of fate, predestination which was a common feature in pagan thought. Free will (not in the Pelagian sense that one can be sinless and not need a Savior) was always the rule, as opposed to later notions brought in by Calvin and to some extent by Luther. In this, they took some points of Augustine and ran with them, Augustine having thrown a focus on this in an overreaction to Pelagius.
This does create a major problem with the canopy pre Flood atmosphere theory, because according to this, especially those who argue that the earth’s axis was upright, and only tilted during the Flood and remained that way, there would be no seasons everything would always be summer. Or late spring. But Genesis says that from the start, the stars were to designate seasons. While these are mostly times for meeting, for festivals, the latter are geared seasonally. Paganism especially does this, but you notice that there are seasonal festivals in the Mosaic Law, to give thanks to YHWH.
In Genesis 8:22, God says to Noah, "while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." Why would God say this to Noah, if there were no seasons before The Flood? Noah would not know what God was talking about, and there is no explanation of them as if they were anything new in themselves.
20. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. "And the evening and the morning were the fifth day."
Now it really gets interesting. As I said, creationists and evolutionists differ less on what happened than how and when it happened. Both agree that animal life began in water, and found its way onto dry land. Or, according to Genesis, the fowl began in water and filled the earth.
But if you look closely at this, the water living creatures include the great monsters of the sea incl. whales, that evolutionists think started on land and went back to the sea. Maybe like The Bible says, they started in the sea.
It also means, that very likely any land animal that spends as much time as possible in water, is probably one of these fifth day creatures. Hippos, for instance. But not rhinos. Elephants likely, since they will not only swim, but travel under water with their trunks up snorkeling, and frankly the trunk looks like it was designed exactly for that. The otters, the whales, and probably the large dinosaurs like brontosaurus which would do better in a swamp, someone speculated, for help supporting its huge body. Perhaps the giraffe was originally a swimmer, with that long neck, keeping the head or at least nostrils out of water, and got trapped on land later.
How do you define "fowl?" Leviticus 11:13-22 lists as "fowl" anything that flies, including the bat, and flying insects. So bats and maybe glider type mammals and reptiles and all the flying insects (incl. grasshoppers and mantids, which you don’t see fly much, but have wings) were fifth day creatures. Sounds like God classifies things more on the basis of what they do than of what their genetic or structural similarities might be.
24. " And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his king: and God saw that it was good."
Lest someone complain that "cattle" and "beast of the earth" is a redundancy, it would seem that the animals that were domesticated later, were designed with a view to domesticability.
26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Notice He says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let THEM have dominion…." so BOTH sexes are included in "man" being in the image and likeness of God, because He immediately follows this with granting them, plural, dominion over earth and its contents. This is made very clear in Genesis 5:2 which BOTH were called "Adam." Apparently God had His own name for some things such as humans. Adam was naming things and already thought of himself as ish, man as individual, and named the woman ishah, small economy sized female man. But to God, both were adam, taken from adamah, the reddish earth.
27. "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
28. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
Firstly, "Be fruitful and multiply is not a command to be followed, but an empowering statement creating the ability to be fruitful and multiply, just like "Let there be light" creates light, so with this statement "Be fruitful and multiply," God creates their reproductive fertility.
This is therefore NOT A BASIS FOR REJECTION OF CONTRACEPTION, SO LONG AS IT IS NOT A TYPE THAT HAS ANY ABORTIFACIANT POTENTIAL. The Church canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils never attack contraception, rather abortifacient potions. The sole apparent exception is just a reiteration of a known standard of morality, else it would have specified barrier contraception and coitus interruptus which it didn’t, because these would be an addition to a known target, abortifacient potions.
Secondly, The Gap Theory people, who argue that there was a previous creation that had been semi destroyed by the rebellious angels, like that word "replenish" which now means to RE fill. But Strong’s shows that the Hebrew word means merely to fill.
And in 1611, it did not mean refill but only fill in English. http://www.sirbacon.org/links/BaconEnglishLanguage.htm says that, inspired by the example of seven scholars who took the mishmash that then existed in France, and created the French language as we know it now, he decided to overhaul the English language. To systematize it more, given the chaos it still is he didn’t do that good of a job. A video said that caused "replenish" to mean "refill," and whether that is correct or not the same video showed a shot of an early 1800s dictionary, which gave the primary definition of "replenish" as merely "to fill" and the secondary meaning as "refill." So clearly replenish doesn’t mean what Gap Theorists think it did in 1611.
As for what it means to fill the earth, obviously this was a generalization because literal filling would leave nothing but standing room and no room for animals or land to grow food on. In ancient times, it was thought the world was pretty well populated, and someone arguing with an early churchman who promoted virginity and monasticism said this would eliminate the human race, but the churchman said that the world was already filled enough anyway. So this is rather subjective. This blessing is also an empowerment, a making fertile and granting a capability to them.
Having dominion obviously wasn’t supposed to be destructive, but more like ordering things. In the second chapter we will see Adam being told to "tend the garden and keep it" so the normal role of the human is like a cross between a farmer or gardener and a forest ranger.
Which also means that the agrarian and nomadic lifestyles were not that separate originally. Indeed, we will later see agrarian Cain and herdsman (so semi nomadic) Abel as contemporaries. And some anthropologists and archaeologists are arguing the same, that instead of one deriving from the other, they developed simultaneously as different modes deriving from the hunter gatherer predecessor. (Adam in the garden would be doing a kind of agrarian thing, so you could argue that herding developed later, as indeed a few anthropologists have argued.) Of course this also means, that you can take the whole thing literally and be on track with what is known, that Adam was a model of gatherer but also maintainer, as some hunter gatherers are known to have planted seeds to gain from later, for instance, the oaks in California were apparently so extensive because Indians were deliberately planting the acorns they didn’t eat to get more later. Or, you can take the whole thing as telescoped human history over thousands of years, and you are still on track with the Bible and anthropology. However, the more literal interpretation I think is better. But even so, you don’t have to throw out belief in and obedience to YHWH and YHWH The Holy Trinity’s Second Person Incarnate Jesus Christ/Messiah just because you think that some things in Genesis are more metaphor than literal historical reality.
The recent discovery of Gobekli Tepe, and its sister sites, Karahan Tepe and Nevali Cori, are a great puzzle to archaeologists who figure that the more agrarian and city building Neolithic came after a nomadic period in human life which came after a hunter gatherer time. Evolution is assumed to be the rule, and of uniform stages of development, in human societies, even as it is assumed to be the rule in nature. But the problem is that these Neolithic type sites are not part of an agrarian society, and look like they were built by hunter gatherers or perhaps nomads. This does not fit the presuppositions. It does fit the reality of the coexistence of agrarian and nomadic systems from the start, as shown with Cain and Abel. These were of course built long after that time. I suspect Gobekli Tepe is pre Flood, because of the otherwise puzzling burial of it in sand and dirt, which seems deliberately done. But if these are Flood residues, then it makes sense. It would represent unrighteous people.
29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."
In Elizabethan English, "meat" means food. Apparently it did so in several languages. Meat in the modern sense is referred to in a lot of Orthodox writing as "flesh meat." Modern humans are a lot more carnivorous apparently than earlier times, and take flesh meat for granted as a daily thing.
30. "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so."
I notice the sea life is not mentioned in this unless they are by implication included with fowl, which were created on the same day as fish and whales. But if that were the case, why are beasts of the earth and creeping things mentioned also, either one of them would do to refer to 6th day creations? Perhaps sea life were the original omnivores, eating the clams and some fish and the plankton (larvae of many sea creatures) and even perhaps adults.
This brings up the problem of death before the Fall. One Orthodox writer online suggested that perhaps death was present outside the garden of Eden but not inside. That being the case, the garden and its order and immortality was to be increased throughout nature, and The Fall brought in death. Another idea is that death was limited to non human life forms. Of course Adam and Eve could feed some of the Tree of Life to pets and keep them going.
31. "And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
An important point about all this was made by the late Fr. Seraphim Rose in Genesis Creation and Early Man. "…no scientific theory can tell us about those Six Days. Science tries to explain (sometimes with more and sometimes with less success) the changes of this world, based on projections of natural processes which can be observed today. But the Six Days of Creation are not a natural process; they are what came before all the world's natural processes began to work. They are God's work; by very definition they are miraculous and do not fit into the natural laws which govern the world we see now."
An important thing also is that all life and plant forms were created in their adult condition. This will be more obvious in chapter two but equally obviously those plants would have to have their seeds and fruit that were to be eaten, ready for the creatures that needed them. So the plants would have been created adult, or made to mature overnight.
2. "And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.
3. "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made."
Here we get to the sabbath dispute. Paul says that sabbaths are not to be kept any more, because they are part of the Law which is a shadow of things to come, Col. 2:17; Heb. 10:1 (read the entire context which is Hebrews chapters 7 through 10) but Christ has come and fulfilled and therefore changed the ritual Law. (the moral code was not changed, if anything made stricter, more of a focus on the mind as well as actions, but the ritual code you had to keep to be in covenant with God was eliminated. External actions like food laws and circumcision were removed.) But he also says in Romans 14:5-10 not to argue about whether a day is to be viewed as special and observed or not, so apparently this was about those who paid attention to commemorative days or not, and kept sabbath on the basis that it was not just Mosaic but also from the beginning. And indeed, having one day’s rest a week, whichever day, is a good thing, and also an admission that you are not omnipotent and do need rest. An admission of your creatureliness.
Sabbath keepers argue that it is only the other Mosaic holy days that are rescinded, but Paul lists both holy days and Sabbath in the same breath, so both are involved. Sabbath keeping, since you could argue it dates to creation, is not as severe an attack on the New Covenant as other Mosaic things, but it can be a gateway into this. The less severe dangers of Sabbath keeping are probably why Paul says in Romans to not be upset with each other over whether you keep a day as above another or whether you treat them all as equal, because both are either honoring a day or ignoring it "to the Lord."
Sunday is not a sabbath never was, despite the statement of an early west European synod. Saturday was always the seventh day, whether you kept it as sabbath or not, and Sunday is the first day of the week, it is kept holy for worship as it is the day on which Christ rose from the dead. A mini Easter or Pascha each week. Constantine apparently ordered that the first half of Sunday be free of work so civil servants and so forth who were Christian could attend church services more easily. But that was not making the whole day a work free day and was not about the sabbath, so it was not a changing of the sabbath day. That was done by Paul and the Apostolic Synod in Acts 15:17-20 who eliminated it, along with everything else the Mosaic Law required as an external action needed to be in covenant with God, excepting only to not fornicate, not murder, not eat things sacrificed to idols, and not eat "things strangled." The latter would be animals killed without any exsanguination, for instance, poultry whose necks had been wrung, instead of head cut off. A shot (bullet or arrow) to the heart or gut would cause bleed out into the body cavity, which is then lost when the belly is gut open to remove the guts. Or so it would seem. Ideally the animal should have its throat slit. I had some misgivings about a bird shot while flying, if through the head. This would blow the head clean off possibly. However, a falling bird would lose some blood through the neck on impact with the ground, from the shock and the heart might keep beating reflexively a little right after losing its head. Chickens with heads cut off have been known to keep some activity and a clean cut of the neck also stops brain signal to the body, so a shot to the head of a bird in flight might not be an issue. However, there is the chicken with its head cut off that keeps moving. This reflex action would probably involve continued heart action briefly, enough to pump some blood out when the head is shot. If the head was not blown off but the brain hit by a pellet or two, one could argue how much exsanguination occurred, is this so little it is the same as "things strangled" or is the little blood loss enough? Deliberate retention of blood or adding it back in to improve flavor is explicitly denounced in the canons.
There is another thing about this. If God created using evolution at all, whether punctuated equilibrium or saltation most likely, He finished creating, and is not doing it now, so the evolutionary processes are no longer at work. This would explain why you don’t see any indications of them, if you are a theistic evolutionist. But there are far more serious problems with evolution than that. The changes within species observable now cannot result in shifts as drastic as Darwin presupposed. If God created strictly by immediate command (fiat in Latin), He is not doing so now. Possibly He at times secretly resurrects some extinct creatures to restore them, certainly maintenance of the creation incl. the birth of new stars might indicate that after His rest, He does create a bit now and then, but it is not like what went on during the 6 days of Creation.
Chapter two continues with the second creation account. This is a matter of dispute with many, because it appears to contradict the first chapter’s creation account. The order in which things are made is almost reversed for the last several days of creation.
One solution to this, would be that the first chapter is an overview and the second goes into detail, regarding the creation of mankind, but this doesn’t resolve the issue of the contradiction of order of creation.
There are two solutions. One, that this is a teaching parable, that the contents of the second and third chapter are only partly historical, and the conflict between the two creation accounts is a hint, that this is now no longer history, but a story that tells important facts to understand, and to learn from it you must read it as if it is in fact historical fact to the last detail. That whatever happened in the Fall was more complicated, and/or is invariably repeated at some point in every human individual’s life no exception except Jesus Christ Himself. This idea is called in Protestantism, if I recall correctly, "neo orthodoxy." I am not entirely happy with it, and though it leaves room for more people than Adam and Eve and a longer time of development of things, it also leaves room for speculation about some surviving lineage free from sin, which would be an elitist neo gnostic kind of thing with genetics thrown in. I don’t like it, and though I entertained this idea I don’t think it is the solution. (There is also the idea of the Gap people, that this was the recreation done after the massive destruction they propose happened between the initial creation, and the earth "became without form and void.")
Two, that this is as correct as the first account, and as literal. That the situation described is not that of all the earth, since the word haaretz can mean the whole earth or a segment of it, the land of Israel for instance, but instead is the situation in a local place. That God created Adam, after creating all those other creatures, and then made the garden and planted it and created more of same creatures He’d already made, and placed them there for Adam.
Why would God do this?
While the modern reader gets to see how things would look, to a hypothetical observer on the surface of the earth during the process of creation itself, Adam did not have such a view. God could have done a smaller local creation to show Adam that YHWH Elohim indeed is the Creator and all powerful and the author of all good. God also gave Adam a model of farming, that you need to prepare the land before you put the plants in.
4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and heavens,"
Notice the words "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens," the usage of this in this context may support the day-age theory, because otherwise you have a contradiction inherent, because everything was not made in one day but seven days, and you have the reference to one day being equal potentially to a thousand years in God’s sight. (2 Peter 3:8 quoting Psalm 90:4.) But you can’t argue for 6,000 years of creation on this basis, because in this passage it says God created these things incl. Adam in the DAY that He created the heavens and the earth, so the entirety of creation was done, incl. Adam, within a thousand years.
When the KJV shows the word Lord done all capital letters, but the ORD shorter, this is where the Masoretic text says YHWH. In future I am going to write YHWH where this is present. I am not a promoter of Hebrew Roots or anything like that incl. Jehovah’s Witnessism. That is all heresy, the former of the Judaizing sort Paul struggled against, which would restore the obsolete Mosaic Covenant external forms. (It also has at least two founders that had paranormal events, incl. a so called angel that handed one fellow a tract arguing for Sabbath keeping after which the rest of Judaizing and compromising the finished work of Christ on the Cross, with works of the Mosaic Law, developed in the teaching.) The latter is a rehash of almost all the early heresies with a heavy Arian bent.
5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for YHWH God had not caused a rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."
This is a good support for my theory (maybe someone else has had the same idea) that "the earth" in this chapter refers to local earth not all the earth. After all, you don’t need human tilling to get all those plants and trees throughout the world. So this has to be a local semi barren condition, with good soil, that God is going to use to show Adam that God is the Creator.
6. "But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground."
This is used by some of my fellow Creationists, to argue that no rain came on earth in general, until the Flood. But this kind of situation still exists locally in many places.
7. "And YHWH Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; AND MAN BECAME A LIVING SOUL."
This is very important, and that is why I write it all in capital letters. We are used to thinking of body and soul as radically distinct, the soul as something added to the body. But this is incorrect and a holdover from pagan and gnostic philosophy, which esteemed matter inferior and that the soul was totally distinct from the body. What the Scriptures tell us here, is that the entire being is the soul, and that the body is part of the soul. A denser part of a spectrum, body soul and spirit, which at death drops off, and the being goes on in a truncated or reduced condition. But it is the personality and consciousness. At no point from conception does the body exist without the soul, neither is the soul added to it, but it comes with the body.
The term soul, nephesh, can be used to refer to the entire being, including the body, or even the body alone, thus "the soul that sinneth, it shall die" Ezekiel 18:20, referring to physical death, and it can be used to refer to the immortal part, or to the life of the being, the aliveness, the status as "living," which is still something of a mystery in itself to scientists. Soul therefore is ambiguous, and spirit is harder to pin down having many meanings and applications, from the core identity of the being, to an attitude, to the Spirit of God to various creatures that are spirits either discarnate or never incarnate at all.
The soul material, then, is what animates even the cell. And even as cells divide and multiply, so does the soul material with them. There are two forms of cell division, meitosis, which produces two genetically identical daughter cells from the split of a single cell, each with all 46 chromosomes; and meiosis, where germ cells fission and produce gametes, each with only half the normal chromosome count, and which must join with gametes of the opposite sex of the same kind of creature, in order to produce a zygote, a cell with all the chromosomes, which goes on to divide in the meitosis style and differentiate until it is old enough to survive outside of the womb or egg depending on what kind of creature we are talking about, then continues to divide and differentiate until it is an adult. Division continues after that as maintenance.
And when this happens, each cell has a copy of the parent cell’s soul material, either the entire soul material in meitosis, or half of it in meiosis. When an egg is fertilized, the physical material which is half of a normal cell, and the soul material in that cell, half of the normal soul material, also join. The resulting child is half and half of its parents physically, and half and half of its parents’ soul material. But it is also a totally separate being, from the moment of conception, when two halves join, it is not even attached to the mother, but free floating, and divides several times before implanting in the womb wall, and grows until birth when it fully separates from the mother, and goes on to live its own life.
It is not the creation of its parents, but the continuation of the creation of God.
This is traducianism, a concept that some early Church Fathers held, but which gradually became eclipsed by what is called creationism, not regarding the creation of heaven and earth, but regarding the creation of the soul, notions of the soul being joined to the body at some point, as a separate creation for the occasion by God. Traducianism I think has been officially rejected by the Roman Catholic Church, but has never been officially rejected by any Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction. I don’t know about the monophysite and miaphysite and nestorian sects, but the arguments for monophysitism of any category include the union of the Two Natures as comparable to the union of body and soul to make a person, which presupposes creationism of the soul, and evidences a basic Greco pagan gnostic foundation.
While a pro abortion youtube video lecture, tried to associate recognition of life from conception with traducianism and equated that with the apollinarian heresy, traducianism has nothing to do with apollinarianism. It might be that this heresy tried to exploit traducianism in arguing for its position, which may have caused some reaction against traducianism, but the two have nothing inherently to do with each other. Traducianism is of course a very solid ground for opposing abortion at any stage, but you don’t need it. Most who oppose abortion do so on either
scientific grounds, the sort of evidence you see in medical books about the development of the child from fertilized egg through blastocyst, embryo and fetal stages to birth. (The term "fetus" is Latin for child, and referred to the last few months before birth to a few years old), or from
religious grounds that are separate soul creationist anyway. These argue that you cannot know when God implants the soul, and that it is probably at the moment of conception, since the child is obviously physically alive from conception on. If the gametes, one or both, were not alive, they could not join and make a new cell; and if at any stage of development to birth, the developing creature was not alive, it would be miscarried or reabsorbed, and there would be no birth. Traducianism is not necessary for an anti abortion argument.
St. Paul in Hebrews chapter 7, not only teaches traducianism, but seems to take it for granted as self evident, not going into explanations or defenses of it. Hebrews 7:1-10, Levi receives tithes "though they [levites] come out of the loins of Abraham: But he [Melchizedec] whose descent is not counted from them received tithes of Abraham, and blessed him that had the promises. And without all contradiction, the less is blessed of the better….And as I may so say, LEVI ALSO, WHO RECEIVETH TITHES, PAYED TITHES IN ABRAHAM. FOR HE WAS YET IN THE LOINS OF HIS FATHER, WHEN MELCHISEDEC MET HIM."
A brief excursus on tithing. We are called to give, to the poor and to the church. But the New Testament does not once mention tithing, which is 10% of your income. Deureronomy 12:17-21 and 26:12-15 show that the tithe was to be used for worship by the tither, rejoicing before YHWH where He put His Name unless way too far to go, you and your servants and the Levites. The second Deut. reference shows that on the third year tithe, you were not to use any of it, BUT IT WAS TO GO TO THE POOR. And the Levites.
And note this, there was nothing voluntary about this giving to the poor. The person who was tithing had to publicly make accounting that he had in fact done so. This was important, and the threat of God’s wrath for disobedience on major issues incl. mercy to the poor, was hardly anything you could call up to your personal choice.
Though we are not to tithe we are to give to the poor, or such organizations as don’t spend a large or even noteworthy amount on salaries and so forth. This is mandatory, not personal choice, if you are able to do so, since James’ Epistle makes a VERY big deal about this, even pointing out that fait h that doesn’t produce action is dead faith not living faith and can’t save you. Care for the poor is a manifestation of living faith.
A big myth in the conservative scene is that welfare and Supplemental Security Income and such like are bankrupting the country. This is false. the real drain is in other sectors.
Traducianism is also the best explanation for the passing on of original or ancestral sin, a warped condition of soul and body and spirit, as well as a legal condition of inheriting as heirs of Adam the status of Adam – fallen status, outside of the relationship with God that the first ancestors had before The Fall. This is not a matter of personal guilt for Adam and Eve’s sin, but inheriting the result, which aside from death processes in the body and death itself, and the morally and spiritually corrupting influences around us, often embedded in law, custom, family traditions and baggage brought into interpretations of Christianity, is also the strong inclination to go bad one way or another, that all of us manifest at some point. It could be argued, that in that manifestation of the sin nature, we are agreeing with Adam’s sin, and therefore could be viewed as accessories after the fact, legally.
It is totally wrong, however, to say that sin comes from fear of death. Though some sins do so, and those who fear death can sin more easily, and those who don’t fear death are more difficult to get to sin. Hebrews 2:15 says that Jesus came to "deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." many sins have nothing whatsoever to do with this. Some sins may even come from a love of death. Proverbs 8:36 has wisdom say, "…all they that hate me love death."
The relationship of soul to body is one in which soul affects body, but body also affects soul. This is too complicated to discuss. I am not talking about New Age Movement gurus, who essentially take a very few true things, and hijack them to the service of a body of lies.
8. "And YHWH Elohim planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed.
9. "And out of the ground made YHWH Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
The Tree of Knowledge is not something that teaches morality. It is rather something that gives an experiential and define-for-yourself knowledge, similar to Nietzschean "beyond good and evil." It is a false mockup of God’s standing as determiner of good and evil, because first it usurps God’s rightful role as Creator and therefore King, an overlord Who is not a figurehead; and secondly because God is good, and his standard of goodness partakes of His nature of goodness which is justice and mercy combined with a bias towards mercy. But the Nietszchean overman kind of knowledge of good and evil, puts the would be god player in a quasi transcendent position over both and beyond both and accountable to none, being his own god (and in conflict with all other "gods") and having no inherent goodness to use as a standard.
Those who would play God, come to the table with two handicaps they cannot overcome. They have not the right, and they have not the competence (incl. power beyond what they wreck within reach) which is implied in the mess that Frankenstein made in trying to make a superior human being. There is a line in some horror story somewhere, which speaks of someone trying to rise above humanity, and thereby falling below it.
The Hebrew word for knowledge (there are several) used here is da’ath, according to Strong’s. It means knowledge, premeditation, skill. To have premeditation and skill regarding good and evil would be to stand outside of it, judging and defining it, something only God should be doing. It would mean also that one’s programming so to speak, from God, is being overridden, and potentially rewritten. Conscience, and what one wouldn’t even think of, being changed.
A notion developed in some Orthodox Church Fathers’ speculation, that Adam and Eve were too young for this knowledge, and that later God would have given them permission to eat of this tree. This is not doctrine, merely a speculation. Personally I think this is wrong, partly because the first I ever heard of it was not from an Orthodox source but a New Age or similar occult philosophy source, and secondly because this assumes they were mere children to start with. There is nothing in the Scripture to imply this, and the general picture is one of creation of adults. Since it also says, " And out of the ground made YHWH Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food" one could argue that God caused this growth in front of Adam. The usual time frame for such growth is several years, and while it might have been much shorter, time elapsed letting Adam see the process, so let’s assume a few years added to Adam being created as a grown man. Even if a child, he had to be an old enough child that he could learn from this to start with, and the process needed to be long enough for him to get the idea that this won’t happen overnight when he plants something. So by the time they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were 20 years old or the physical and mental equivalent. Eve may have been formed as an age approximate to Adam and not gone through any processes of maturing, or not much, before she was introduced to Adam.
10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
11. "The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
12. "And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
13. "And the name of second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia."
Gihon evidently would be the Nile. A quick look at all these would raise severe doubts about all this in modern maps and geography. The Nile doesn’t even flow in the same direction as the next two rivers, nor begin anywhere near either of them. But this was before The Flood and any other cataclysms that separated the land masses, changed directions of river flows, and raised mountain ranges that weren’t likely there to begin with.
However, there is an alternate explanation for these, which I will deal when I get to the Tower of Babel.
14. "And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that is which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates."
Hiddekel is most likely the Tigris. That this mentions Assyria would red flag this to some as written much later for those who dispute the antiquity of Genesis as being from origins. But you don’t have to assume the creation account itself in its entirety is from Adam. Likely it was a vision given to Moses, and Assyria was named after its core city state, Asshur, which, according to Wikipedia, dates from 2600 BC. I read once somewhere, that the Mesopotamian city states had various creation accounts, crediting their respective top "gods," and varied. Perhaps the real accounts were kept in fragments in Abraham’s family from Noah’s time, himself drawing on records back to Adam. These might have been pictographs with a tradition of interpretation. This is of course speculation. Probably some kind of writing was in play in Noah’s time. But keeping stuff on clay tablets would mean a small amount of space to work with. So a lot of detail would be lost. Some of this may have been supplemented to Moses by God.
A note on the JPED theory of "higher criticism." Aside from any dubious personal history or social connections of the inventors of this, it is silly on the face of it. Part of it depends on the idea that an author always has only one style, but I could make different styles myself just to do it. The limitations on available writing material also would play a role in word selection and phrasing. Even so, the general tone whether poetry like psalms, or long revelations or short ones or history is different than the pagan productions of the times. With the same limitations, the pagan productions are more chatty, longwinded and silly. There is a kind of stark sanity pervading The Bible that you don’t find elsewhere. There is a lot of information conveyed in short statements, that be unpacked (as I’m doing here) by an exegesist or by the reader, especially if the latter generates mental pictures from the words and relates it to known things.
JPED argues that the whole of the Pentateuch, was cobbled together from different writers, with different agendas, at different times, and completed in Nehemiah and Ezra’s time, perhaps by Ezra himself. J stands for Jehovistic, referring to wherever YHWH is named. P is for Priestly, which would be the Leviticus and related materials, presumably concocted long after Moses. E stands for Elohistic, where Elohim is the name used for God. As you can see, both appear together a lot of the time. D is Deuteronomic, if I recall this nonsense right it would refer to a final redaction (don’t you love those fancy words that sound so authoritative on the one hand, and so dismissive of the Mosaic corpus as a whole piece) which produced Deuteronomy and all this, of course, long after the time of Moses, assuming (you can figure they are thinking) he ever existed in the first place.
A bit of internal evidence against this, is 2 Chronicles 25:4 "But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin." Refers to Deut. 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." This shows that the Torah some think was cobbled together during the Babylonian captivity was being observed before that.
The Talmudists however yanked a sentence out of context, and said not to take oaths in a criminal case from near kin because "The father shall not be put to death for the children," taking this as referring to put to death because of the word of the children. This would of course make unenforceable the laws against incest. Also not to take an oath from women, which is again not even hinted at in Torah. Though the Torah usually addresses men, are we to assume then that women were free to worship false gods, sacrifice to demons, eat meat with blood in it, or engage in anything prohibited to men, simply because they are mentioned mostly only when something specific to them and not to men, like menstrual blood, is being discussed? Obviously they were under the same laws. Since it is not prohibited in the Torah, for women to give testimony it was wrong to deny this to them. Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible, quoting (p) Misn. Shebuot, c. 4. sect. 1.((q) Bartenora in ib. at http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/24-16.htm When in fact the CONTEXT says "every man shall be put to death for his own sin," so this is not about being put to death on account of testimony but because of his own sin. These are rules for humans, this does not limit God or promise what He will or will not do. There is no conflict between this rule on humans, and God sometimes taking action on the children of the evil doers, as in the case of David’s child of adultery with Bathsheba, or the warning that God would visit His wrath on the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him, which is in context of a larger statement promising mercy and forgiveness to those who repent, so the second, third or fourth cursed generation that repents instead of agreeing with their evil doing ancestor, would be forgiven and not struck.
15. "And YHWH Elohim took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
16. "And YHWH Elohim commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17. "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18. "And YHWH Elohim said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him."
Here is where it is often argued, that woman as servant to man was inherent to the created order. Often this is incorrectly called "helpmeet," but that is not Elizabethan English. Two separate words, a helper who is meet, Elizabethan English for fit or suitable or proper. The Septuagint in English renders this as "a helper comparable to him."
A thought crossed my mind that the punishment on Eve was greater than that on Adam. Why? well for one thing she led the charge into sin. The follower is responsible to not follow into sin, but the leader, the one who introduces the idea and corrupts the person, tempting him (or her) to sin is the one who made the whole mess possible. The serpent, or the demon taking the form of one, was condemned to keep that form for "all the days of your life." Was this how the snake lost its legs and all descend from this individual? or was this a condemnation upon the snake shape taking spirit that it trapped in that body form as long as the animal would live which would in those days be a very long time? there is often a vaguely or overtly reptilian quality to demons, which betrays their heartless ways however they hide it, and also is a limiter on them, the reptilian mind being less flexible. Demons are often very smart yet can be very stupid in an odd way. Or was this a condemnation upon a spirit that had somehow possessed a snake, and would then be stuck with it living its unpleasant life for many centuries? Perhaps it had killed the snake, and during a moment of the snake leaving its body, when its autonomic nervous system was still functional the evil spirit took that nervous system over. This scenario would leave the snake innocent of having cooperated with the evil spirit. This would have been a more horrific situation, because continual, for a creature used to sailing through air and space than the occasional dreadful suffering of childbirth for a woman. So the initiator of a situation bears the brunt of the blame and punishment. This is evident also in the Law of moses, where the man who seduces a woman has to marry her. The murderer must die. The rapist must die. the thief must pay back and add a fifth to it (20% nuisance fee I call it).
Strong’s Exhaustive Hebrew Greek English Concordance of The Bible is online at biblehub.com, with a very easy search and comparison format regarding different Bible translations. Help is ezer. There are other words for helper, but this one is more like a partner, even someone operating from a superior position of ability or position, such as one who pulls another out of a ditch, and who is themselves not in the ditch, therefore in a better situation. Meet is neged. This is a word that has face to face connotations, that can be either friendly like man to man, or hostile in opposition. The issue is, that the woman is a fit partner type helper, co manager, because like unto him.
What kind of a woman would that be? A tomboy (girl who likes to play ball and other "boy’s games" and climb trees, an athlete), also when more combative called an amazon after the woman warriors of ancient legend, and frequent report. Many tribes had woman warriors, burials have been found, some burials reexamined and determined by the pelvic bones to be female, that had been assumed to be male because of weapons that were buried with her. The ancient Persians had female cavalry and archers and at least one female admiral.
Apparently some of this went on among Israelites, because Josephus wrote in Antiquities of The Jews Chapter 8 par. 43, "Take care, especially in your battles, that no woman use the habit of a man, nor man the garment of a woman." Now, the clothing of the sexes was the same in the sense that they both wore dresses, as we would view it, but the style was different for the sexes. Why would this be an issue in battles, unless women were participating also? And a man might disguise himself as a woman to be viewed as less threatening and get closer or more likely to be ignored while running away.
Josephus, in relating the Laws of Moses, paraphrases some and changes some. For instance, he says that wool and linen are not to be worn mixed because only the priests can wear this, but there is no such caveat or explanation in Deuteronomy, and nothing in the description of the priests’ clothing that mentions wool. Possibly this is an example of what Jesus referred to as "traditions of men" that make Moses’ Law of none account.
In Deuteronomy it is stated that there should be no transvestism, but it doesn’t say anything about war. So Josephus throws into the recitation of The Torah, those things that were priestly and scribal interpretations and additions.
But the point is, there is no reason to drag in warfare in relating to women wearing men’s clothing, unless women were participating in war also.
Nehemiah 3:10-12 mentions that Shallum’s daughters worked with him repairing the city wall, and Neh. 4:17, 18 says that while the workers had armed guards, ALL the workers on the wall also had swords girt on them. So Shallum’s daughters were also armed.
Of course, war is part of the evils that developed after the Fall. But the active participation of women in war, i.e., in combat, also in the hunt, are the ultimate refutation of sexism. One otherwise worthwhile and wise priest or monk I forget which, complained of women wearing pants because it results in them striding freely like men, taking on more of a man’s nature. But in fact that is the shared nature of both sexes, that culturation cheats women of.
And one more thing of interest. 2 Sam. 20:3 " And David came to his house at Jerusalem; and the king took the ten women [his] concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood."
When Absalom rebelled and David had left Jerusalem, Absalom followed someone’s advice to lie publicly with David’s concubines on the roof of his house or something like that. There is no indication these women were forced, and certainly had the option of refusing and dying or killing themselves. This was a political action designed to get David to look weak to his supporters, and to lure him to where he could be attacked, because his anger might override his cunning.
What is of interest is this: David had left them "to keep the house." According to Strong’s Concordance, the word here is H8104, shamar. To keep, watch, preserve. It is also the same word used in Jer. 51:12, for the watchmen or sentries. There is another word used elsewhere that is translated guards but means runners, like an honor guard or outriders so the person who has them is obviously important, and of course would be armed. But this word has many applications depending on context, and includes guards, guardsmen, gatekeepers and watchmen. So apparently these women were an armed amazon guard, which has been found at times in many lands and times as the close guard of a king, and you will note they were ten in number, which also sounds like a military contingent.
19. "And out of the ground YHWH Elohim formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Notice that in Genesis 1, at God’s direction all the fowl and fish and water creatures were brought forth by the waters, and the animals were brought forth by the earth, but here is a special second creation of these things for Adam’s benefit. so he can see the power and goodness of God.
20. "And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
21. "And YHWH Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22. "and the rib, which YHWH Elohim had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man."
Now there are some silly ideas that a man has or should have one less rib on one side, and the occasional deformation like this is seen as proof of this event. The important thing here, is that, as one writer said, woman was not made from Adam’s head to rule him, or from his feet to be ruled by him, but from his side, to be loved by him.
Adam’s name means ruddy, and while white racists argue this means ruddy like a pale skinned man with red cheeks from the sunshine, and/or "blood in the milk" look of red cheeks and white skin, it is more likely referring to the red earth, in which case Adam was bronze colored. It makes sense that the original ancestor of all races, would have some features of all of them, which after they ran separately after Babel, would have differentiated without breeding back to the original type. The ancestor of white and black must have himself been of an intermediate type.
Adam had been running alone for a while, got to know and appreciate animals, but also realized that he needed more from a companion than an animal can give, even those who can manage some few words can’t do a conversation, and the help any can give they need to be trained in and is limited, since ideas can’t be easily shared, neither can they usually provide solutions to problems or brainstorm to help formulate ideas. Also, they would not be sexually attractive.
Eve was not there when Adam woke up. Instead, she was brought to him. This is not from right across a small yard or large room, because then it would be that Adam saw her when he woke up. No, she was brought to him from a distance. So that she also had experienced the world around her, met the animals, understood God as Creator, and had become lonely for someone like herself.
23. "And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
Man in Hebrew is ish, and woman is ishah, diminutive of man. The similarity is emphasized not the difference.
Eve was cloned out of Adam, with a tweak to one of the chromosomes to make her a female. Eve was basically Adam’s twin sister, and had his physical and soul material. There is a silly notion that the spirit is passed on the male line, and not the female, and that original sin also is passed on the male line, not the female, which is supposedly the only way Jesus could be free of original sin. This is a mechanization of God’s work, ignoring the miraculous almost denying it. And if original sin passes only on the male line, then the female does not have it, because it must be on the Y chromosome. Anything she has, she can pass along. And if she can’t pass it, then she doesn’t have it.
Original sin is a warp deeper than any chromosome and not to be found on any of them.
The Hebrew word translated "beget" is the same as for a woman producing a child, but these are translated differently due to the patriarchal in the sense of male supremacist bias of the translators. This is another reason to reject the notion, that the spirit of a being is inherited from its father. Part of the argument includes patrilineal naming as some instinctive recognition of this, but patrilineal names are not uniform throughout the world, and did not develop in all places, and were instead patronymics, so and so son of someone. The name would change each generation. But a larger patrilineal kind of retention of one of the string of names did develop. In some places, the string of names includes those of female ancestors. The middle name of a man might be his mother’s surname.
But before all this and still in some places, you find matrilineal naming. Patrilineal inheritance usually involves patrilineal naming or patrilineal tribal or family identity. Matrilineal naming sometimes has patrilineal inheritance, sometimes bilateral, sometimes matrilineal inheritance. Many peoples had legends of past times when women had more power, abused it, and lost it, and that once everything ran on the female side and it changed to patrilineal.
Customs that are not universal, and in some places only a few hundred years old, can’t be viewed as proof of a notion of inheritance of the spirit or of the soul being on the male side only. Patrilineal naming didn’t even exist in Bible times, there was no surname, you were so and so son of someone else, and your son was somebody son of so and so and additional identifiers like of such a city or tribe or clan would be thrown in. Adoption was consider legitimate descent, and this could involve any bloodline.
Is there anything in the Bible that supports this wild story of the existence of matrilineal identity in ancient times? well yes, there is. Two places, one of which I will get to later. The other, since it is in Daniel, I will deal with now.
Daniel 11:17b (b means it is in the second half more or less of the verse)
"And he shall give him the daughter of women, corrupting her: but she shall not stand on his side, neither be for him."
A lot of people don’t know, that the prophecies about the kings of the north and south, were mostly though not all fulfilled in the days the books of Maccabbees talks about. Josephus describes all this. Some events will play out again, apparently, and some remarks fit the antichrist too well to be only referring to Antiochus IV Epiphanes . The early church writers considered Antiochus IV Epiphanes a prototype of the antichrist.
So who is the daughter of women? To make it brief, I will quote the notes to this in the Orthodox Study Bible p. 1258. "In an effort to ally himself with Egypt, Antiochus III married off his child daughter, Cleopatra, to seven-year-old Ptolemy V Epiphanes, but in the end, they did not remain with him. "
Wesley’s Explanatory Notes online says she was called "the daughter of women" because of her beauty but that is ridiculous.
Who was this woman? Cleopatra I Syra, Queen of Egypt. Who was the woman she was the daughter of ? Laodice III who Wikipedia says "was a Princess of Pontus and a Seleucid Queen." Parents King Mithridates II of Pontus and Laodice. This Laodice "was a Greek Princess of the Seleucid Empire…of Greek Macedonian and Persian descent." Parents were Seleucid rulers Antiochus II Theos and Laodice I "According to Eusebius of Caesarea (1.251), she was a daughter of Achaeus by an unnamed Greek mother. Her father Achaeus was a wealthy nobleman who owned estates in Anatolia.. Her family had power in Anatolia with strong royal connections"
Notice a matrilineality in the naming of these women, as if a two track system were running, patrilineal for boys and matrilineal for girls, not invariably of course, but there is something noteworthy here. Laodice is a combination of the word for "the people," from which comes the term "laity" for non clergy members of a church, and justice, the exact meaning however is obscure. Justice of or for or over or from the people, or some mix of all this.
Now those who know about the Amazons and other woman warriors, will recognize some of these locations as their old stomping grounds. Pontus, the Black Sea coast of Anatolia now called Turkey, Thrace and Macedonia were all matrilineal. Amazon queen Marpesia made an incursion into Thrace, and there is a village in Greece that to recent times, possibly to this day, has an odd custom. One day a year the men stay home and cook and clean, and any found outdoors are beaten. The women hang around the town and gossip and drink like men and kill a rooster and eat it. This is in honor of the village having been founded by Amazons who, having lost when they attacked Athens, were too ashamed to go home to Pontus/Paphlygonia. And they were by no means unusual as women warriors, only in their sex separatism were they unusual What is NOT well known to most people, even to researchers of the Amazons, is that the Persians had women warriors aplenty. Female archers, female cavalry, female commanders and at least one female admiral. Also in Anatolia were the Mysians, whose cavalry was female. The Lydians apparently had woman warriors also, and Lycians and Carians. In Anatolia aka Turkey, were several cities founded by Amazon queens or generals at least. None of these could be expected to have amazon burials and culture artifacts there, because their whole style was to kick butt, take tribute, and sometimes build a city to someone’s honor, by the use of slave labor of displaced populations. The culture archaeology would find, therefore, would be that of the builders not of the Amazons. In other words, no real occupation. Why? To understand this you have to look at the preislamic notion of "baraka" or blessing, more like power as a mystical force. This notion still could be found in northwest Africa to a late time. The royal progress was when a king would take his whole court and army and go honor some place in his domain with his presence, eating up a lot of their resources in the process and weakening them. This was a display of his mystical power, on which his political power was based, something like a more down to earth version of the Chinese political concept of The Mandate of Heaven. Of course, displaying his power to act by engaging in action had very pragmatic consequences.
A proof that a king had this mystical power, was his ability to control banditry, so a challenge to his power would involve banditry, see what you can get away with. For most people this is a very pragmatic thing without mystical implications. But in preislamic and Islamic countries that had this kind of mystical political theory, a successful raid was not merely showing the king lacked military effectiveness, but that this lack was proof he lacked the mystical power which was the basis of his legitimacy in the first place.
Since this is preislamic in origin, it would have existed in Myrine’s time. So essentially what the Amazon queen did, was to do a royal progress across the known world, accept tribute and move on. which is why you don’t find historical references except the vague gleanings that Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus presented in their histories.
The Libyan (meaning anything west of Egypt) and Thermodontine (northern Anatolian along the Thermodon River) Amazons were in fact the same people. Amazon is most likely a warp of Imazagh, the name of the Berbers meaning of noble origin. Tuaregs alone retain matriliny and oddly the men go veiled and the women don’t. It is not an amazonarchy, however. The Berber resistance to the Arab invasion did include some warrior queen.
In Anatolia, and scattered here and there, would be two features by Paul’s time. an entrenched male supremacist sexist system, enforced by Athenian and Roman type law. But a memory of an earlier way. Women who longed for the older system, or for at least the legend that women once were freer and could get wealthy easier and so on, but too lazy to fight for it and not inclined to be worthy of it, as women in those more ancient times would have had to be, would have played all kinds of power and manipulation games, on men and on each other. The modern "difference feminists" who eschew anything reeking of manliness and demand all the equality and power feminism wanted, but not to be better human beings, to have the manly virtues, as the original feminists who got us the vote wanted, would have been right at home. And it was this mess that Paul had to address. Ever note he addresses Priscilla ahead of her husband Aquila instead of vice versa, the more usual way, as often as the usual way? And he refers to the church in THEIR house. Clearly Priscilla was not the sort of woman the difference feminists of today would like, neither was she like the unworthy women who wanted power they were not worthy of, but merely served the vices of pride and vanity and had some degree of aggression about it because of the warrior woman history on some cities like Ephesus, and were inclined to the licentious and "ecstatic" religious style of some of the cults they grew up in. But, were also inclined to be patriarchally "feminine" about all this, so as one person said about women’s libbers, when they gave up being ladies they forgot to become gentlemen.
The famous passage about not usurping authority over a man was "authentein," a word for authority used only that one time in the New Testament, and which has violent and sometimes obscene connotations. Keeping silent in the churches and if they want to know anything ask their husbands at home, may indicate a kind of heckling was going on, that took the form of asking questions without even waiting for an answer, and then using the excuse they just wanted to learn. I have had this done to me once so I know how it would work. Paul’s recommendations about the qualifications for a bishop, elder or deacon were ideals that were open to modification for the worthy, since he did not adhere to them himself when he appointed the young man Timothy bishop of Ephesus and he told him not to let anyone despise his youth. Clearly not a man who had raised respectable children to adulthood (granted that would be mid to late teens in those days). The Council of Laodicea AFTER Nicea I forbade presbytides, or female presidents. Interpreters fall all over themselves with explanations for this, which are based on the assumption that a woman was never, ever, a priest in an Orthodox Church only in some heretical ones. But Justin Martyr c. AD 150 refers to the priest as the president of the assembly, the one who does the Eucharistic prayers after which the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (yes, a man taught by an aged man whose life would have overlapped that of the Apostle John said that the church in his day believed in transformation of the bread and wine which was later called transubstantiation and said this was the general belief of all the churches, which were themselves taught by elders who were only a few removes at most from an Apostle. In looking at such things, you don’t count generations by 20 or 40 years, you look at old people who transmitted what they had from those who were old when they were young and learning from them. St. Irenaeus c. AD 180 was taught by Polycarp who was taught by the Apostle John, and said the same thing.)
So the female president was in fact a priest. The usual arcaheological finds pointed to by feminists wanting female ordination are mostly not that supportive. The term presbytera does not mean female priest, but wife of the priest. One writer argued that if that was all it meant the term would be used today, but it IS used today in the Greek Orthodox Church. One burial does seem strange in how it is phrased, as if perhaps both were priests, the woman and her husband.
Roman Bishop Pope Gelasius I complained of women being ordained in Sicily and maybe elsewhere for lack of suitable men. In those days, the Roman jurisdiction did not include southern Italy and Sicily, so all he could do was complain. Early reports of arguments noted that the supporters of female ordination in the first 800 years argued the no male or female but all one in Christ Jesus statement by Paul, while the contrary argument was church traditional practice and the natural order of things and human law and custom. But the idea of what the natural order of things is had been warped by human law and custom. The idea of the priest as icon of Christ, and has therefore to be male, was not stated. Exactly when this idea got established I don’t know. In the Orthodox Church in America at least in the diocese I was rebaptized and chrismated in, the priest told me that it is the HANDS of the priest that are the hands of Christ during the words of institution. Two contrary ideas were in competition in early centuries, the west favoring priest as icon of Christ and through him Christ reinacts the first Eucharist, and this idea developed later after The Great Schism of AD 1054. The epiklesis, or invocation of The Holy Spirit to make the transformation of the bread and wine into The Body and Blood of Christ done after the words of institution, was effectively eliminated. All they have now is an epiklesis that asks The Holy Spirit to bless the bread and wine so that they may become The Body and Blood of Christ, which is done before the words of institution, ("This is My Body….This is My Blood") but this is asking for it to be rendered something transformable, it is not asking for the transformation to be made. Thus the Roman Church relies on the power of the priest, received in his ordination, and the Orthodox relies on the epiklesis without denying the charism of the ordination, but not relying on it. Roman Catholic influence on Orthodoxy has gone on at times, so this notion of priest as icon of Christ turns up on the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate’s web page.
This idea of the priest as icon of Christ or living image of Christ, Who is The Living Image of God, has a lot of potential wrong implications. Such as, that the priest is ipso facto closer to God than the holiest of the laity. And seducers among the priesthood have used this kind of thinking to their advantage, and some who like to seduce priests may have this as a motive. Regarding sexual abuse of minors, clerical authority is not just rank but the mystique of his being closer to God. WITHOUT A PRIESTHOOD THE EXACT SAME ATTITUDE APPEARS IN THESE SITUATIONS IN PROTESTANTISM WHEN A MINISTER OR PASTOR HAS DONE SUCH THINGS.
So the present "icon of Christ has to be male" argument did not exist originally it seems, the concept even of the priest as icon of Christ outside of the Eucharist ceremony itself, or even at all, seems to have developed centuries later. Paul’s big argument was that women were more deceivable than men, which may well be the case when they are mostly raised to not have the virtues of men. Elsewhere he references "the law" as grounds for them being subordinate to men, but this is not specified in the Torah except as a CURSE, which operates by their default, but is specific in pagan laws and customs. It would seem then, that Paul was saying that if a woman insists on being like Eve in her flaws, she can keep Eve’s curse. Paul also speaks of woman made for man and not man for woman, but modifies that by pointing out that now the man is from the woman being born from women. So this is not an absolute. And it is certainly NOT relevant to roles outside the Church organization and public meetings. The male headship as like Christ being head of the Church also runs into a problem. In this scenario, Paul pulls the fangs of the patriarchal system of the pagan society, and reverses the usual roles, since the man is the nurturer of a non expendable woman, while the usual law and custom made the expendable and replaceable woman the nurturer of the man. Paul also said to love your wives as yourselves, the same phrasing Jesus uses regarding men being compassionate to fellow men. It would seem then, that the only way to deal with ALL Scripture on all this, and not put The Bible in the position of self contradiction, but retain inerrancy, is to view this as a way of recalculating how men should view their legally subordinate and often actually inferior wives. Also we are told by Paul the Church should grow up into its Head, Who is Christ. We are to become more like Jesus Christ, but since He is also God and not only a man, we can never be exactly like Him nor not be His subordinates, but this is not the case as regards man as head of woman.
The Persian standard for men, and you can be sure for such women as aspired to manly activities, was to ride horseback well, shoot straight (arrows, and at full gallop) and TELL THE TRUTH. This is not the picture you get of the "feminine" woman.
Obviously I can make a biblical and historical case for female ordination. But women who are bad are more difficult to get rid of or oppose than men who are bad. The bishops from various cities who attended the Synod of Laodicea had had a gutfull apparently and wanted no more. When Jesus Christ addressed a church in the early chapters of Revelation, He did not denounce them for having a prophetess teaching them, but for what she taught and that they allowed this teaching.
Elsewhere He denounced the teachings of some men such as the Nicolaitains who according to near contemporaries were licentious and favored eating things contaminated by being sacrificed to idols. The later protestant historian who argued that it had to do with a hierarchy in the church looking at Nico as conqueror and laitan as about laity, conqueror of the laity, was totally wrong.
In the Panarion of Epiphanius, Bk I section 2, subject 25 et. seq, Nicolaus is described as one of the seven deacons appointed in Acts, a proselyte (convert to Judaism from among the pagans) who then converted to Christianity, and was from Antioch. At some point he got the ridiculous idea, that he would be more holy to not have sex with his wife, but couldn’t keep this going, so switched to arguing that you have to have sex every day if you are going to get into the Kingdom of heaven, going, as Epiphanius put it, from one pretense to the opposite. Neither position is Christian. Obviously he was infected with the kind of pagan philosophy that became Gnostic when it took on Christian pretensions, which despised the physical as inferior and evil in itself. This philosophy of course, did not only produce ascetics, but also libertines, since it held that the soul and body were absolutely distinct and of no effect on each other. Nicolaus trod both paths. And noticing how beautiful his wife was and how excessively lustful himself was decided everyone wanted her to, so started getting paranoiacaly jealous and slandering and accusing her. Apparently at one point he offered her to the other deacons and/or Apostles according to another story about him, which was probably the point where he got kicked out of the congregation membership of believers. (I think at this point he’d flip flopped again, moved from celibacy to lust to jealousy to that perversion of selflessness and love which "shares all" including that which one should not share.)
Later protestant writers of the closet bogomil mentality (a classic example is Alexander Hislop) argue that since Nicolaus is a mix of victory and the people it means victory over the people or rule over the laity and nicolaitaines were those who introduced clerical hierarchy and priesthood and so forth. This of course is a desperate guess based solely on a name, and obviously in total ignorance of the history of the times. Such argue that the word nicolaitan does not refer to a man but to a movement of this sort. (And one could as easily argue that Nicolaus means victory of or by the people in the sense of rebellion.)
Personally I am opposed to female ordination for the reason given, and because unless too old to menstruate there would be an issue of periodic uncleanness, which is one thing for someone to be in when receiving communion, but another thing for the one doing the ceremony. This would mean offering etherically contaminated bread and wine to God, Who does the transformation and sure He can clean it but isn’t this disrespectful? ALL CULTURES INCL. THOSE CLOSE TO PRE PATRIARCHAL CONDITIONS ESTEEMED MENSTRUAL BLOOD UNCLEAN, in varying degrees. This is not a patriarchal thing. And there would be the disablement that sometimes occurs with this, psychologically and physically with pain, and that of pregnancy. Such a church would need TWO priests to have a fallback ready if a female priest were to be disabled by either situation.
The argument as to whether or not menstruation rendered a woman unfit to receive communion raged on through Orthodox and Romanist churches to the present time, occasionally cropping up in Protestant churches. The argument for allowing this was that Christ’s Blood cleanses all including the uncleanness of menstruation, which is not a deliberate sin. The contrary argument was that it was bringing an unclean presence and the sin would be in doing this. A superstition developed in the Slavic Orthodox Churches that you can’t have ANY trace of a blood flow, a scratch, a nosebleed, anything if you are serving in the altar and I think also to receive Holy Communion. The idea is that the Blood of Christ having entered you would be lost with the blood flow. But this is too mechanistic a notion and ignores the overall spiritual effect. Besides which, wouldn’t the Body and Blood be lost to urine, later bleeds of any kind, and defecation?
Not all of ancient Greece was reliably male supremacist, and the Amazons had been through there before the Trojan War, and were among the defenders of Troy. The Medes are a bit of a question mark, but their association with the Persians would make it reasonable they were inclined to field women warriors also. The Kurds, descended in part from them, fell into abusive and restrictive male supremacy under islam, but even so the women almost never went veiled, according to travelers and photos in the 1800s, only a chador or scarf almost never the niqab and never the burka, went about more freely than other moslem women, and sometimes rode astride. They have seven tribes and in past centuries once in a while a female was the ruler of a tribe. Another Persian tribe the Qashqai may be amazon descended, because of a peculiarity about the name but don’t seem to have their habits. Their name seems similar to Gasga or Kaska or Kashka, an enigmatic people to the north of the Hittites in Anatolia who were often at war with them. The reason for the unique sex separatism may lie in their origin – that they were descended from the female army of Myrina, who came from a hill city in what is now Tunisia, and now lost in the Schott el Djerid and attacked various cities, took tribute and went her way across north Africa and into Anatolia, then a cataclysm opened the narrow land between the marsh Tritonis, and created the inland sea Tritonis, which is now the intermittently dry salt lake Schott el Djerid. The army was stranded, and could only continue life the way they were, having no home to return to and apparently no one to release them from their military oaths they probably took.
So it would look like at some point in this family of Cleopatra, not the later one of Antony and Cleopatra fame, a line existed to an amazon or to a notable woman of some other matrilineal people. A lot of armed female burials have been found. The Medes had an alliance at once point with the Scythians, many of those tribes had woman warriors.
Getting back to Daniel To call Cleopatra I Syra "the daughter of women" instead of the daughter of Mithridates II of Pontus, or just "his daughter" would point to something significant. And it may be that since the antichrist is said to not regard the desire of women, that there will be a viable nation in the Middle East when he arrives, who will be either amazonarchy throwback or at least will be egalitarian and field women warriors routinely, and he will endeavor to quash this and all other women’s rights efforts. Or at least ignore their concerns if there is a clash of interests. A people that may initially support him, but turn against him once he starts his demands and persecutions. The antichrist will likely make a big deal about proper roles of the sexes, restricting women perhaps not unlike the Islamic extreme system. This doesn’t mean he will be a moslem, necessarily. After all he’s described as not regarding the god of his fathers, whoever that is, because he will exalt himself as god instead of anything called god. Thus he could be a Jew or Christian or Moslem in origin, or even be from an overtly pagan family background, maybe even Hindu, of the sort that is not upanishadic Brahman blur impersonal absolute that is supposedly what the individual core atman is a bit of, but of the more specific and personal false gods of India.
Some argue idiotically that the desire of women means to bear children, or that it refers to some false god desired by women, or that he will be a homosexual, and not interested in the sexual desire of women for him (power as aphrodisiac), but this is likely a more generalized disregard for women’s feelings and wishes. Bear in mind that this prophecy is about the end of the last days, and given the rise of sex equality demands, or even just improved status and condition and freedom for women, this will probably continue to that time. This is a worldwide phenomenon, involving demands for women that the most hardcore conservative American Christian right winger takes for granted as okay for women, but is not okay in many Islamic countries and backwaters even in some pagan places in Africa and in much of India. Education for women is a fairly new thing in those countries, outside of the educated rich, some of whom started educating their women.
Getting back to Genesis:
24. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Note the sequence: leave family, cling to one’s partner, and they progress from social to psychological to physical intimacy. St. Paul in I Cor. 6:16, in denouncing fornication, warns that a man is one body with a prostitute he has sex with. In other words, "one flesh" is NOT something created by a marriage vow, or by a sacramental ceremony. It is created by one thing and one thing only, sexual intercourse. The implications of "thou shalt not commit adultery" go beyond mere cheating on your husband or with another man’s wife (if polygamy has created a limited double standard) or cheating on your wife. Adultery in English is related to the word to adulterate, still used to refer to cheating customers by adding water or other things to a product, to make it seem like they are getting what they paid for, instead of less. Sex with multiple partners dilutes you by creating many soul ties of sorts. But also, because they are one flesh because of sex, if these lovers then separate and take other lovers, or if they eventually marry others, they commit adultery.
Fornication, then, is essentially sex without marriage and without marriage equivalent. It is like a marriage with the intent of divorcing as quickly as possible and remarrying, intended ahead of time intended to be ended quickly. I.e., no commitment, "no strings." It is sex divorced from emotion and from commitment. It is the ultimate hypocrisy, a physical act implying something that is not meant by the persons doing it. Arranged marriages between strangers of course helps this corruption. Not unlike shaking hands on a deal that is a fraud. A physical act that should mean something, but in the mind and heart of at least one of the parties, doesn’t mean a thing.
Written contracts were developed to be able to prove that an agreement had in fact been made, so it could be enforced in a civil suit about a business deal. Verbal contracts are enforceable, but with more difficulty in doing so. A pattern of behavior prior to the breach, which would indicate a contract had been entered into and followed for a while, is evidence. So would be the word of witnesses to the verbal deal. Likewise, formal marriage was likely developed to rein in cavalier exploitation and mood swing based change of mind.
Polygamy is obviously a form of adultery, why would God allow it? Probably because it still involves some emotion and commitment with the sex. And it is less disruptive overall especially when kids are involved, than divorce and remarriage. Why would God allow divorce and remarriage? Probably because of the same thing, it still mimics the original model. But casual sex and intended as such temporary marriages and so forth, and weeklong or summer flings not intended as permanent, are abominable warpings of the original model, and prostitution is especially an abominable warp of the model.
Sex with your servants or slaves would also be fornication, because Exodus 21:7-11 says that a woman acquired to be a concubine was not to be released on the seventh year as the menservants were, Deut. 15:12 stipulates release on the seventh year for both sexes of slaves, since this was given after Exodus, it was probably a formalization of something already in play. And if her master who has bought her from her father as a maidservant is not pleased with her, he must let her be bought back and cannot sell her to a strange nation, "If she please not her master, who has betrothed her to himself, …." so this is not saying just any female servant is lawful to have sex with. Notice the word "betrothed." concubinage was some kind of more permanent marriage like thing, but with the concubine having not the status of the wife whatever that adds up to. Since the concubine might be a slave, the possibility is that the legal wife had a greater equality to her husband, limited only by his ownership (if it wasn’t co owned) of where they lived, than is allowed by modern pro patriarchalist Bible interpreters. That means that the status they deem proper for a wife, her role and behavior, was in fact more like that of the concubine than of the wife.
This kind of law flies in the face of the muslim and pagan concepts that allow any slave to be a sex object and to be handed off to others on loan or whatever, for such purposes, and to be kicked out at will. "then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, SEEING HE HATH DEALT DECEITFULLY WITH HER." So this was not something arranged against her will by her father, but rather, it would have involved her consent and desire, since it is written "he hath dealt deceitfully with HER." How would a slave be redeemed? Such a person could be bought back by a relative, or even by himself or herself if somehow money or animals of value came to be theirs. Begging would be one way. Gleaning and selling the results another. Saving of some allowance for personal needs another. Also one could just be set free.
"And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters."
"If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money."
In other words, she could divorce him without paying back her purchase price, clearly if a lower status semi wife could do this, which means she could do so at will if the price was paid back, then a regular wife could also do the same, leave without repaying the bride price, which was limited by law in amount. It was only in later rabbinic Talmudic times that divorce was allowed to be initiated only by a man, and the woman could only bring her husband to the rabbinic court and try to persuade them to order him to divorce her.
What is purpose of marriage? Children aren’t even mentioned. Of course they are going to happen if people have sex. The focus is always on the relationship needs of the individual. And the preservation of this as a means to ensure the children are godly, instead of corrupted easily after being warped by family breakups, is stated in Malachi. (the context was also about the godliness or lack thereof of the new wives, for which the older wives had been put away, and who were not Israelite and not converts, and didn’t even speak the Hebrew language right, if this is the same situation Ezra observed.) But what is the wife called? The companion of the man’s youth. That word for companion is like that of cattle grazing together, friends, equals, or approximate equals (there is usually some pecking order in any group), best friends forever, not the word used for companions of a king, where there is a clear rank difference between them.
In the Pentateuch, Five Books of Moses, in referring to relatives by marriage one was not to have sex with or marry, the statement is made that the wife (or widow or ex wife) of an uncle or your father (your stepmother) or your brother was her husband’s nakedness. This is another way of saying this. Some relatives by marriage, not blood relatives at all, are included in this, because they having become one flesh with the blood relative who is the link to this person, are now in the same relationship to you as the blood relative, making sex (or marriage, which includes sex) with such a form of incest. I guess you could call it "constructive incest."
In British law a few hundred years ago, a man who had had sex with one of two sisters, could not then marry the other sister, because he being one flesh with the first sister, was now brother to the second sister. The one flesh situation of course makes a couple effectively brother and sister, but this is obscured by the eventual prohibition on brother sister marriage. There are good reasons for this. After the Fall, everything deteriorated including genetics. But also behavior. There needs to be a model for people, of a male female relationship that is not sexual, and a category of people that, because they are prohibited for sex (and therefore prohibited for marriage) one is safe around.
This model in fact encourages exogamy, or marriage outside of the circle of close relatives. Because Adam is presented with Eve who is a stranger, who has come wandering into his garden.
Adam and Eve did not have a marriage ceremony. They were like a monogamous pair bonded couple, like wolves and some birds. Going with others if they were available, would have been unthinkable, this was too much a something just for each other. Their whole lives were wrapped up in each other, no room for "the guys" and "the girls" because everything a man would need from a male companion Adam had from Eve, and everything she would need from a female companion, she had from Adam.
Also this model does not allow for homosexual marriage. It was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.
And this model is lifetime monogamous. It wasn’t Adam and Eve and Betty either. (But at least polygamy is heterosexual, so is less a violation of the natural order than homosexual acts are.)
But notice the other thing about this model. The man leaves his family and moves in with his wife. This is called gynalocal marriage. (Also matrilocal, if she is living with her mother. The Song of Solomon depicts the girl wanting to move her shepherd lover into her mother’s home with her. Song of Solom 8:2. The aversion to physicality and rejection of being in love at all because of seeing or experiencing the depredations of the emotions unhindered by the mind and the mood swings and mutual sense of betrayal when they find they are not the living fantasies they thought each other to be, or one sees through the deliberate fraud of the other, resulted in a discomfort with the love poem, and a spiritualizing of it to absurd extremes. Yes you can relate some of it to The Church as Bride of Christ and Christ, but do so overmuch and you get a blatant foreplay and sex literal model. No one speculated Christ is going to have sex with The Church but to avoid this idiocy you have to ignore a lot and spiritualize away other things, especially aided by not reading Hebrew. Some of it is applicable to life issues like, instead of fantasizing get going after the reality, when she won’t get up and open the door when her boyfriend visits, and then it gets ludicrous when she chases after him after he gave up, and runs afoul of city guards who slapped her around and sent her home disheveled for being out after curfew. Song of Solomon 5:5-7. There is also a strong story of either the same or another girl being loyal to her chosen mate, though given by her parents to Solomon, but despite his wooing and the urging of the harem women, she keeps refusing him and eventually escapes to the one she already chose. And, a note regarding ability to resist temptation and to not betray one’s betrothed, or fall to temptation and betray Christ, this girl is a wild shepherd woman, sunburnt dark and used to rough living, not easy living, she can handle stress and seduction efforts, and not cave in and the wealthy easy life of the king’s harem probably seemed confined and boring to her.) Historically, under persecution the rich often denied Christ to avoid loss of comfort.
The model also allows for her moving in with her husband as we are used to, however, because she came to Adam who was already managing the garden. So both models are okay.
Back to Genesis chapter two.
25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
An idea got going in the early church writers, that Adam and Eve were created as children. But the pattern shown in the rest of the creation history is one of creating things in an adult, or at least young adult, form. If they were started as children, they grew up miraculously in a few days or weeks, before meeting. "And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin (for in Paradise "they were both naked, and were not ashamed," inasmuch as they, having been created a short time previously, had no understanding of the procreation of children: for it was necessary that they should first come to adult age." Irenaeus Against Heresies, Book 3 Chapter 22 paragraph 4. In Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, Irenaeus says "And Adam and Eve (for this is the name of the woman) were naked and were not ashamed, for their thoughts were innocent and childlike, and they had no conception or imagination of the sort that is engendered in the soul by evil through concupiscence, and by lust. For they were then in their integrity, preserving their natural state, for what had been breathed into their frame was the spirit of life; now, so long as the spirit still remains in proper order and vigour, it is without imagination or conception of what is shameful. For this reason they were not ashamed, as they kissed each other and embraced with the innocence of childhood (Proof, 14)."
Here he makes the mistake of equating sexuality per se with the fallen form of sexuality which can be exploitive. Also he assumes that shame would come with knowledge of sex, but he is reading this into the text, which clearly said that shame about nakedness came from the sin of eating the Tree of Knowledge, and if this no sex before the Fall theory is correct, shame had nothing to do with sex, and would not have come from it, or from the stirrings of erotic feeling, which are not predatory and selfish by nature. Indeed, some species of bird and animals, both of whose sexes are isolative and territorial and will attack and drive each other away at the borders, loose the territoriality and border defense attitude when in heat. In most other species, hostility decreases or disappears during breeding season even though outside of that time the sexes may be hostile to each other. This line of thought pursued far enough by some resulted in absurdities like thinking Eve, if they had not fallen, would have given birth through her side or belly button, and some other mode of reproduction than sex would have occurred. The problem unexamined premise here, was equating sexuality with "what is shameful."
There is no need of a concept of sexual activity for it to start. Fondness, playfulness and exploring sensations will sooner or later lead to this.
Kissing and embracing out of fondness does not have to lead to sex in each embrace, and sex once done does not have to remove fondness and create an absurd and warped genital only focus. All we know is that children were not born until after The Fall, and given the comparative lack of fertility which probably changed slowly instead of all at once, and both being tired from hard work in the field, it is likely sex didn’t happen often, so you could expect Cain and Abel and Seth weren’t conceived for a long time. Since the sentence of death was not carried out at once, it is likely all the curses set in slowly, including that of increased fertility of the woman.
2. "And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden;
3. "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."
Someone once said that that was Eve’s first mistake, talking with the snake. That she should not have gotten into a conversation with him, just told him to get lost.
Notice also, as someone pointed out, first the serpent tried to restate what God had said, into something He had not said, that they should not eat of any tree of the garden. The reaction of Eve is odd, in that she says that God said they should not only not eat it, but not touch it, lest they die. The record is that He only said to not eat it, but as a precaution He may have later said don’t even touch it, or the record may be a telescoped version of what He said, not to eat or even touch it, because if they eat they will die and if they touch they might eat. Or they two might have constructed this don’t touch it second rule on their own, maybe with God’s approval, as a preventive measure. One view was that they had opened themselves to trouble by rewriting God’s orders, adding to them what He didn’t say.
4. "And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat."
How cultural baggage and unbiblical presuppositions blind people! Many argue over why the woman was approached instead of the man, or that she was caught alone without the man’s leadership to guide her, BUT WHAT DOES THE SCRIPTURE SAY? THAT SHE "GAVE ALSO UNTO HER HUSBAND WITH HER."
Read that again. "HER HUSBAND WITH HER." Adam was there when this happened. St. Paul says she was deceived, but that Adam was NOT deceived but willfully went along with it knowing what he was doing was wrong. I don’t think it was because he wanted to join her in death, rather, he could have stopped her from doing it. I think that Adam didn’t entirely believe the snake, but thought that what the tree offered was worth the price of death. And that maybe it could be hidden from God somehow.
In what way was she deceived? That she wouldn’t die and that she would be godlike. How was Adam not deceived? It is possible that this was a speculation by Paul, who on one occasion, writing more calmly, specified that he didn’t have a word from God but gave something as his judgement about things, and then specified after that that not just himself but God also said the other statement, perhaps this remark he made was speculation where he didn’t say it was speculation.
But Adam could have been deceived in this, that he thought he would die, but die with an advantage, that might even cause him to figure out how to not die after all, that being like God he would be able to prevent the judgement from taking effect. Eve on the other hand, believed the serpent.
In what sense was she deceived? The Hebrew word in Strong’s online, has the meaning of lending at interest, and to beguile, to deceive. To persuade to one’s disadvantage. Also she looked at the tree and saw it was nice to look at while before she had carefully ignored it.
Temptation can begin with the eyes.
So how was Adam different? Perhaps he wasn’t in an eager state but level headed. Perhaps he saw she didn’t die at once, and figured it would take a while, but he could benefit during that time, because she ate first, and lived.
Problem was, the time frame for their death was the day, not immediately. And Adam did not live to a thousand years old, no one did. So they indeed all died in one day. Another angle on prophetic time is where a day represents a year. If Adam was at all savvy to this, he might have figured he’d have either a day, or a year to live.
Eve thought she wasn’t going to die at all. Adam might not have thought he’d be fully like God, but Eve probably did.
When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the devil, He was tempted in all the ways Adam and Eve was, food (to turn stones into bread), pride of presumption and experiment that would have been putting God to the test to see what He could get away with (i.e., jump off the highest point of The Temple because of God’s promise of protection), and the lust for power and glory (being offered all the kingdoms of this world if He would worship the devil, at which point Jesus told the devil to begone, "for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Luke 4:8 quoting Deuteronomy 6:13 and Exodus 34:14, and probably other places. And the devil gave up. Jesus answered the temptations with Scripture, whether the temptations were framed with a Scripture quote out of context, or as a direct appeal. Jesus was tempted with all these and refused them all, and conquered, where Adam and Eve failed.
7. "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."
8. "And they heard the voice of YHWH Elohim walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of YHWH Elohim amongst the trees of the garden.
9. "And YHWH Elohim called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10. "And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.
11. "And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12. "And the man said, The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat."
Notice Adam tries to shift the blame to God, implying that He gave Adam the woman and she got Adam to do this, so its God’s fault. Of course God wasn’t buying any of that, as we see when He reminds Adam that he, Adam, had listened to her bad advice.
13. "And YHWH Elohim said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14. "And YHWH God said unto the serpent, Because thou has done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life;
15. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
Notice something here. The serpent would bruise the woman’s seed’s heel, which would imply a poisonous snake bite. Constrictors don’t bite much except as a grab or when angry, the whole idea of a snake biting is a word picture that means poison. So the woman’s seed would die. But he would also bruise the head of the serpent. If the sequence were reversed, you would have a clear picture of a death and resurrection, and perhaps this detail was to be hidden for a time.
And perhaps Abraham did understand this as a promise involving resurrection, because when he went to sacrifice (as he thought) Isaac, he told his servants they both would return.
Now, there is nothing unusual in matriliny for some one to be the seed of a woman. So this custom had to pass away and be replaced with patriliny first. The man who would bruise the serpent’s head once and for all, would then be either a bastard, OR A VIRGIN BIRTH.
Roman Catholics are used to reading that it is HER heel who will bruise the serpent’s head, which is why you see those statues or paintings with the Virgin Mary standing on the snake’s head. But Jerome, in translating the Masoretic into the Vulgate, mistranslated this. The LXX does not read like this, and neither does the Masoretic. Jerome compared many Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, and had to have done this deliberately, because "her" appears twice, it is not a slip of the pen. "she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." Jerome
According to Jeremy James, Satan in Satin: Overwhelming Proof that the Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are Demonic Deceptions ""He" in the original Hebrew is masculine. It can also mean "it." In the LXX it was rendered autos, "he," indicating that the passage should be understood as a Messianic prophecy about Jesus Christ alone crushing the head of the serpent. However, Jerome (342-430 AD) in his Latin Vulgate translation made a major error, changing "it" or "he" into "she" by using the feminine pronoun ipsa in the Latin." Roman Catholic scholars who accepted the Latin Vulgate then translated Genesis 3:15 in their Douay-Rheims Bible as: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." And who is "she" for the Roman Catholics? Mary, of course, the "second Eve". Just as the first Eve was deceived by the serpent and in consequence brought sin and corruption into the world, the second Eve, they claim, will bring salvation by crushing the head of the serpent." http://www.zephaniah.eu/Satan%20in%20Satin%20Apparitions%20of%20Mary.pdf
Jeremy James’ position is shared from a rather different perspective, by the Orthodox writer Miriam Lambouras The Marian Apparitions: Divine Intervention or Delusion? at http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/marian_apparitions.aspx
Jerome and Ambrose were very big on Mary and laid the groundwork for the later mariolatry and immaculate conception nonsense. Eastern Orthodoxy reveres Mary but the Roman Catholic Church goes way overboard.
Apparently some modern RC translations correct this, since a writer of a question complains about these translations. http://www.ewtn.com/vexperts/showmessage.asp?number=563958 question and answer points out that this Vulgate translation is the basis for the entire idea of Mary crushing the serpent, citing the "longstanding Catholic tradition that toward the End of Time the Blessed Virgin Mary will crush the head of Satan, after her devotees have promoted her honor and devotion and directed countless prayers for her intercession during a long period of that time…" and complains that the modern translations risk the loss of this tradition. The writer cites Pope Pius IX who essentially argues that because of the close bond between Jesus and Mary His mother, she effectively crushed the serpent’s head when Jesus crushed the serpent’s head.
However, this line of argument would also put The Virgin Mary in the situation of effectively dying on the Cross with Jesus and coming back to life with Jesus. This is way too extreme, but may be part of the thinking of those who want her declared co-redemptrix and essentially a fourth person in The Holy Trinity.
Colin B. Donovan answering on this question on this URL, blames ambiguity in Hebrew regarding who the pronouns refer to in the subject before it in the sentence, and there being "two subject, the woman and her seed. ‘It’ takes a neutral path (‘seed’ is grammatically neutral)." So those who translate "she" assume "it" refers to the woman, and those who translate "he" assume it refers to Jesus Christ, her seed.
"Jerome, perhaps based on the Septuagint, or theological considerations, we don’t know, chose to translate it is as ‘she.’"
It is impossible that the Septuagint can be blamed, because it doesn’t say "she" but "he." Theological considerations is more likely. Because Jerome was overly devoted to the Theotokos as the Eastern Orthodox call the Virgin Mary.
Is there some way to resolve this? yes there is. Firstly Abraham when he took Isaac to sacrifice him told his servants that he AND the boy would return. Since God had made such a big deal that the seed of promise had to be not only of his own loins, not an adopted son his servant Eliezar of Damascus, and had to be of Sarah, not of her maid servant Hagar, Abraham might well have concluded that this Isaac was "the seed of the woman." This would point to the prophecy being known in Abraham’s time, especially since it is not cited even indirectly, but rather his words to his servants in this context point to his knowing this. Probably the original order of the statement was "you shall bruise his heel and he shall bruise your head" and by the time of later scribes it got reversed. Hinted at in the present form, and explicit in the hypothetical original form I suggest might have existed, is Resurrection. Abraham expected to kill Isaac who would then be resurrected. But while a similar scenario WAS going to happen, it was not for that time but for Jesus Christ’s time, when He would die and come back physically to life.
In this scenario, it is definitely not the woman who is going to die and resurrect but her seed.
Secondly, The Septuagint draws on a somewhat different textual tradition of transmission than the Masoretic does. And it says it is the woman’s seed who will crush the serpent’s head. A speaker of Greek or Latin as his first language might make a mistake, even a speaker of English as his first language, in translation. Are those whose first language is Hebrew and the related Aramaic going to make such a mistake when translating into Greek?
Thirdly, the Samaritan Pentateuch also says it will be the woman’s seed who will crush the serpent’s head. http://tanakh.info/gn3-15 Jerome had compared Masoretic, Septuagint, and Samaritan yet translated this as it being the woman who would crush the serpent’s head.
"Jerome notes some omissions in the Massoretic Text and supplies them from the Samaritan Text."http://www.internationalstandardbible.com/P/pentateuch-the-samaritan.html J. E. Thompson this mentions also that the disagreement between Genesis and Paul on the time spent by the Israelites in Egypt is because Paul agrees with the Samaritan on this point.
Clearly, Jerome saw Masoretic, LXX and Samaritan say one thing, and he on his own authority (or lack thereof) chose to say another. This can only be because of his devotion to Mary.
"When Jerome undertook a new translation, he was condemned almost unreservedly; even Augustine grew timid in his defense; and Jerome, in his replies to the bitter denunciations, flung at his accusers such epithets as "fools," "stupids," and "biped asses.""http://shomron0.tripod.com/articles/bartonpentateuch.pdf The Samaritan Pentateuch William E. Barton. Jerome was fond of Origen and made the excuse when accused of being an Origenist, that he could ignore the bad and was fond of much in Origen that was good. I would ask, why keep Origen at all surely there were other authors just as worthy on the same subjects? Jerome’s style of expression was rather aggressive when angered. The person opposing him on this was partly right and partly wrong on other issues they fought over. Perhaps Jerome was a bit slippery here, and arrogant and inclined to feel he was wise enough to rewrite Scripture if it suited a bias of his.
This means the entire Roman Catholic tradition of Mary trampling the serpent and the attendant notions and excessive veneration of her is based on a deliberate mistranslation – a lie.
Which means this entire tradition incl. an age of Mary preceding the Second Coming of Christ and all visions that this is based on can be thrown in the trash.
Additionally, although as we shall see the person who is tempted is responsible to resist the temptation, the person who tries to seduce the other person to do or choose evil is also responsible for the ideas suggested. While you cannot blame the devil for what you choose to do under his influence, you can indeed blame him for providing the influence. So though the devil didn’t MAKE you do it, he did push and cajole and encourage you to do it. Or your peer group did. Or your cult leader. ALL INVOLVED SHARE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ROLE WHATEVER THAT IS. James warns us in his epistle that teachers will be judged more severely so we should not strive to be teachers. This ambition puts you in a dangerous position.
16. "Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Here is the first clear indication of female subordination to the male. And it operates by her default, she caves into desires for approval. The Septuagint says "recourse" instead of desire which is not about mere sexual desire, that was there built into the situation anyway. If this was sexual desire, why is it not also said to Adam? Clearly he has sexual desire for her. No, this is another kind of desire, which results in ruling by the desired over the desirer. It also may mean "recourse" that she would tend to rely more and more on the man socially and economically, and for advice, and would tend to turn to him for all solutions to all problems. This same term is used about Abel regarding Cain in the LXX version of those events, so this is clearly not about anything sexual.
Notice "multiply…thy conception." There is an old custom of calling menstruation "the curse," somehow this is connected with the curse on Eve in some minds. If her conception was multiplied, and the Hebrew as per Jay P. Green’s interlinear Hebrew English Bible DOES say "conception" then her fertility was increased. Probably like most other animal females, she originally ovulated once or twice a year. Now she would ovulate monthly. And the child’s head would be bigger when born.
Which raises an interesting question. If they had not fallen, would the original plan for the infants have been that their heads would be much smaller at birth, and increase later? Or did the curse take effect over time, not all at once, and the heads of infants became much bigger?
Is Homo Erectus the original human kind from that time and shortly after? Or Homo Habilis, smaller brain case, but very modern in many ways?
17. "And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife,"
Adam had tried to blame God for all this, because Eve was "the woman whom Thou gavest to be with me" so God, not putting up with that, points out he should not have listened to her. "wife" is woman, ishah, "thy woman." The issue of course, was not that Adam should not have listened to Eve under any circumstance since he was (by this interpretation) the boss, but that he should not have listened to her when she was wrong, and she was clearly wrong because God had forbidden them to eat of that tree.
18. "And hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;"
These two words thorns and thistles, one in Hebrew means thorns and one is dardir, meaning a fast growing plant, so here we have not a redundancy but weeds and probably toxic plants (mutations). Also Adam is to eat the herb of the field, which is not marijuana the sloppy exegesis of some hippy that its biblical to smoke dope. Nope, that is more likely the fast growing plant thing. What is wrong with a fast growing plant? It must be something undesirable for its rapid growth to be undesirable. Mutations would have happened causing toxicity that wasn’t there. Adam was already supposed to eat herbs, veggies, etc., but now it would be hard work to get them.
Whatever tilling or gardening work he was doing before, pruning fruit trees and maybe facilitating pollination by copying bees, would now require a lot more work to get the same or less effect.
19. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living."
This would be a fast forward to later, as they had no children then. The story goes back to the then current situation. Notice that instead of being called "woman," "ishah," she is now given a name that defines her by only one of her many capabilities, that of giving birth. Of course it may have been an honoring in intent at that time, that all would look up to her as their great great grandmother (and still probably producing more children), but it facilitated a shift in focus.
21. "Unto Adam also and to his wife did YHWH Elohim make coats of skins, and clothed them."
Here some very silly things have been believed, started by Origen, that originally we had etheric or less dense bodies, and the coats of skins are the densely physical bodies we have now. This notion was denounced as foolish by Epiphanius in The Panarion, so it was certainly NOT Orthodox thinking in the first few centuries. More likely, these coats of skins were the hides from the first sin offering sacrifices that were made, God probably showed them how to do this and designed the hides, showing them how to cut, clean, cure and stitch using needles made of bone and thread made of sinew or very thin strip hide. Origen was a favorite of many Church Fathers, he and they being dead before he was anathematized. And he was not anathematized merely for believing in pre existence of souls, or for self castration to avoid temptation to fornicate, but for a laundry list of weird ideas, one of them almost identical to this, but regarding the heavenly bodies, which supposedly were once ethereal, but acquired their present dense materiality when they stopped contemplating God. If this doesn’t fly regarding heavenly bodies, then it doesn’t fly regarding human bodies.
As a result of his fame as a defender of The Trinity and The Incarnation, many of his speculations were accepted without question. Thus St Gregory of Nyssa taught apokatastasis, or universal salvation of everyone, and his Philokalia of Origen contains almost all of Origen’s later anathematized notions.
As a result of Origen’s influence, we find The Holy Fathers arguing that in the new heavens and new earth, it will not be a material sensual existence but a spiritual immaterial one. But how can that be? that would be merely death. How can God, Who called the material sensual world "very good" dissolve it and recreate it merely a diaphanous similitude of what it once was, a reduction from material life to the same general condition that the dead have, the dense end of the soul-body-spirit spectrum gone and the rest going on in a reduced condition? Such thinking would never be possible in Orthodox writers past or present, were it not for the reputation of Origen, head of the Alexandria Seminary (to use a modern phrase) successor of Clement of Alexandria who began the allegorizing but didn’t go as far as Origen did. Origen wandered into "spiritualizing" everything.
Now in Orthodoxy, there is a lot of using some things that are physical historical things, to make points about spiritual things, psychological things you might call it, and analogies to teach theology. St. Paul does this A VERY LITTLE. But Orthodoxy does not treat the historical things of the Bible as being only spiritual and allegorical, but starts with their reality as written, on the face of it, as totally correct. This is not rejected but rather conclusions are drawn from it beyond the incidents themselves. Origen however preferred to ditch the reality altogether and go for the imaginary "deeper meaning."
This of course was done by other heretics, when they bothered to use the Scriptures at all, but they rejected key points of Christology and theology and were often either immoral or denounced marriage as fornication and practiced extreme asceticism. Origen did none of these things, so was not immediately recognized as a problem. And his reputation in teaching sound theology and defending proper Christology and the Trinity shielded his errors from immediate view.
This means of course that by the time he was being recognized as a problem, and finally condemned some time after that, the damage was done, his teachings were to found under other names than his, people who were already esteemed saints. Evagrius Ponticus is another case in point. Ponticus did a great systems analysis type workup of virtue and vice, and created the first list of deadly sins that were eventually reworked into the seven deadly sins many centuries later. But he also had some Gnostic leanings that got him anathematized along with Origen. But not before he shaped monasticism as much as Origen shaped regular Orthodoxy. Which was probably why a canon had to be given that condemned anyone who became a monk out of hatred of the married state in and of itself. The dispute as to whether monastics are higher than married laity or not is a result. St. Paul said he wished all could be as he was, single and celibate, but the issue he raised was not some mystique of celibacy as an end in itself but that marriage is a distraction from single minded devotion to pleasing God. The whole family life thing, constantly thinking how to please one’s wife or husband, is just another form of worry how to please people in general. the problem is not sin or heresy but the priority of what one orients around.
St. Athanasius warned to keep guard over one’s sons as much as one’s daughters to preserve their chastity and said something to the effect that keeping a virgin in the household apparently from the phrasing could be anyone from a relative to anyone you acquired off the street who was a virgin, male or female, would bring blessing from God. Sort of like a good luck charm. This however didn’t go so far as to denounce the married state as sin, and a "virgin" was probably not just someone who hadn’t had sex, but a devoted virgin pledged to celibacy and prayer.
Evagrius’ influence was probably to blame for the tendency for monastics to side with monophysitism. This varies from a focus on Jesus Christ as one entire being Who is both divine and human, and when you pick it to pieces clearly they admit two natures that is, that HE is fully divine and fully human without alteration of either His divinity or His humanity, yet the phrasing is such as makes those who understand it as it appears to be without caveats a potentially convert to docetic Gnosticism, to the eutychian form probably not to be found anymore and which was rejected early on by the monophysites themselves.
Since they recognize a plurality in the Person Jesus they prefer to be called miaphysites, mia being a plurality that is one while mono is a singular one without plurality. They see duophysite chalcedonian Christology as crypto Nestorianism. Both sides claim St. Cyril of Alexandria.
22. "And YHWH Elohim said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil:"
A little sarcasm here? Or does the "as" mean "similar but not really like in the sense of same as? That they are able to take a godlike overview of things, but without the right to do so and without the inherent goodness, the justice and mercy combined, let alone the omniscience required, to do so rightly? "Playing God" just isn’t what we were designed for, it is wrong in terms of rebellion, and we do not have the competence for it and never did and never could and never will.
" and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23. Therefore YHWH Elohim sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."
The consensus of opinion in the Orthodox Church, came to be that Adam and Eve were created immortal and incorruptible physically. That the Fall created death directly. While it might be that they would have lived forever but aged and become weaker and less pretty, but remained aged and immortal, without eating the tree of life, the Scripture clearly links physical immortality to this tree. Whether one eating alone would be enough to ensure immortality, or it would require periodic eating every several decades is not clear. Perhaps the curse that Adam would return to dust, removed a kind of immortality from him, that could be corrected by taking of the tree of life. Or maybe he was not inherently immortal and the tradition of generation of interpreters got it wrong and Adam’s immortality depended on access to the tree of life. That access, however, was assured as long as he did not sin, so that he was as good as immortal because he had access to the tree of life. And once the access was cut off, he was as good as dead no matter how many years it took to actually die.
"1. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from YHWH."
Here we see Cain’s origin tracked back to the fertilization of the egg, Cain’s history begins with the sex act – or somewhat after when the egg and sperm met – that conceived him. Conception is not implantation of the fertilized egg in the womb wall, as some pro abortion people now say. It is the fertilization of the egg, before it ever gets to the womb wall. This you will find in any medical documentary or book.
There is a notion, that first cropped up among heretics, that Eve was seduced by satan in a physical as well as spiritual sense. That she had sex with him, and produced Cain, the original bad seed. Modern supporters of this (maybe also earlier ones) argue that she said "I have gotten a man from the Lord," and then go on to say that baal means lord, so she was saying she got a man from baal. But the Hebrew text says neither baal (Canaanite) nor adonai (Hebrew) but YHWH. That she had gotten a man from YHWH.
This is important for another reason. The credit is not given to the child’s father, or to its mother, but to YHWH, Who is the owner of all produced by His creations, rather than children being owned by parents. When this is forgotten, and the gut attitude is one of having "created" ones children and owning them, lip service may be given to God but the reality of the attitude is otherwise, as shown by actions and the cultural development of selling children into marriages or slavery as useful to the family, or killing them if they look too weak and sickly to be useful members of society. Modern theonomists like Rushdooney argue for parental (especially paternal) ownership of children (especially daughters) because of this attitude, ignoring that this developed over time, and that God put limits on all this, and that the original model of marriage was not arranged to family advantage, but for the couple themselves.
The idea exists in Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, that sex did not occur before The Fall. This might or might not be the case. Some even argue that some other mode of reproduction would have been developed if they had not fallen. This is absurd. The origin of this idea is probably Irenaeus, who assumes they were created as children, but there is nothing in Scripture to indicate this. And while he was close to the traditions from The Apostles, he does not say that this was said by them, he merely assumes this. All we know is that they did not have children until after The Fall, when Eve was much more fertile. Origen made everything much worse. I don’t know if we can blame this on Origen or his later disciples who augmented some of his errors. I haven’t read all that was written in those days.
2. "And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3. "And in the process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto YHWH.
4. "And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock of the fat thereof. And YHWH had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5. "But unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
6. "And YHWH said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?
7. "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."
This has been a great difficulty to interpreters. Some think Cain was rejected, because he brought veggies instead of animals. The Scripture as given by the Masoretic scribes shows that something about Cain’s behavior, not his sacrifice in itself, was the issue. This was not a sin offering, this was like a firstfruits or a peace offering, the former definitely including vegetables in the Mosaic Code. Though this was pre Moses, the same general rules probably applied then.
The Septuagint, drawing on an earlier text version than the Masoretic scribes did, gives some insight here.
LXX Gen. 4:7 "Did you not sin, even though you brought it rightly? But did not divide it rightly? Be still; his [Abel’s] recourse shall be to you; and you shall rule over him."
Apparently Cain’s sin was not what he brought but how he divided it (either in presentation or with the fellow worshippers). Why such a radical difference? It may be that an alteration was made in one text lineage, the one the Masoretes received, or by them, because this word translated "recourse" is the same word stated about Eve her desire being to her husband, and he would rule over her. Here, Abel’s recourse is or will be to Cain because Cain is his older brother. And therefore altering the text to eliminate these words might have been deliberate. Rabbi Akiva, who ran the Jamnia School sometimes called the Jamnia Council, c. AD 90, had great reputation. If he had told copyists that the text they were using had an error, that he could correct from memory of another text that was destroyed in AD 70, he would have credibility in himself, and the possible excuse would be credible in itself. To use the same phrasing regarding Abel and Eve, would be to show that Eve’s subordination to Adam, and that only after a curse, was comparable to that between older and younger brothers, not the sort viewed as appropriate between men and women. A younger brother is far higher in status than a woman.
Rabbi Akiva did order alterations, when he ordered a new Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, to compete with the Septuagint. The LXX named after 70 scholars who had translated the Pentateuch for an Egyptian king’s library, the rest of the OT was translated later, had been the official translation in use by Greek speaking Jews including the Apostles, until AD 90. At that point, Rabbi Akiva, still smarting from his bad move of backing Bar Kochba as Messiah, and dead set against Christianity, ordered some changes made in some Psalms and probably other writings, in order to make them useless for proselytizing by Christians to Jews.
Also, the ages at which patriarchs produced their first sons, was changed from the LXX to the Masoretic version, making them appear younger. This would play to the desire to get Jews to not delay having children, but to marry and reproduce as young as possible.
If he would change these, why not change other things he was personally uncomfortable with?
So now, instead of Abel’s yearning or desire or tendency to turn first to an older brother and defer to him, it is "sin" that has a tendency to defer to Cain, and he can rule it if he will. This is at least useful in teaching people that they can overrule sin and conquer it, but it is strange since it makes sin out to be a separate person from the sinner. So it is probably not the original phrasing.
8. "And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him."
Here is something to ponder. No matter how nice they act, don’t go off alone with someone who has been angry with you. Anything from lies about what you said or did or tried to do, up to murder or rape may be done or attempted.
9. "And YHWH said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And Cain said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
10. "And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground."
Notice something here. Whenever The Bible depicts God as asking a question, it is not that He doesn’t know the answer already. He is apparently after an honest response. Here it clearly shows, that when He asked Cain where Abel was, God already knew Abel was dead, and that Cain had killed him and how and why.
11. "And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;
12 "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth."
Cain complains that this is more than he can bear, and that anyone who finds him will kill him. This of course is used by some to speculate as to who there was to kill him, if not pre adamites? But there is no clear timeframe on any of this. Aside from the obvious, that Cain is speculating regarding the future when there would be more people, this is probably after Adam has already produced sons and daughters who are producing children themselves. Seth was born after this, but Cain knew others would be born and know of this murder of their brother they never got to know. So God had mercy on Cain, and put a mark on him, warning that anyone who killed him would be struck seven times in vengeance for this. There is no indication this is inheritable, it applies only to Cain. So this has no relevance to skin color, or any birthmarks or other oddities on anyone since.
Does this mercy invalidate the death penalty? I don’t think so, though it might validate other measures instead of that. But for one thing, Cain was needed to produce more children. And for another, he would be an object lesson to everyone.
Notice also that Cain answers God, as if God doesn’t know all and see all. As if He can be effectively lied to. (By effective I mean deceived.) Obviously people can try to lie to God, can make false statements to God, but God is not deceived by them, even if they are deceived by themselves, but the point is God already knows the answer to His question, He wants Cain to admit to all this and gives him a chance. While Adam hid from God, Cain kids himself that God can’t see if Cain doesn’t want Him to see, or if not showing His presence in some way at the altar of sacrifice, or is being addressed. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Psalms 14:1 "He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it." Psalms 10:11. Thus Cain apparently thought. Adam seemed to have gotten a similar bit of stupidity mislabeled wisdom, when he tried to hide from God after he ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
16. "And Cain went out from the presence of YHWH, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden."
Nod means to wander, to move to and fro, flutter, show grief.
"And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch."
Cain’s lineage seemed to be city builders early on, though the others may have done so, but Cain was probably trying to duck the curse on him. Notice he build the city, but named it after his son not himself. Sounds like he was trying to make a kind of home, and have his son take care of him. How big a "city" would be at that time is anybody’s guess. These people were living a long time so time to breed a lot of kids, and the kids to breed kids.
Somewhere recently I read an opinion, that Cain was trying to evade the curse of vagabondage by building a city. The big developments seem to be in Cain’s lineage, was this part of some unrighteousness or just part of what human created ability was supposed to do, though likely with unrighteous twists thrown in? It is an uncomfortable thought that the great achievements of mankind in civilization have their first predecessors in the questionable family of Cain, but God is going to provide us a heavenly city The New Jerusalem someday on earth. Perhaps city building is not that bad of a thing in itself. however, war has usually been the big jumpstarter for technology and definitely the cause of building city walls. From a mud and stone ridge to a nuclear resistant blast door on a bunker, the purpose and origins are the same.
Everything was still monogamous for a few generations, and then we meet Lamech, Cain’s great-great-great-grandson. This character has two wives, who bore him Jabal "the father of all such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle." Clearly this is father in the sense of either first to do this, or the one who taught others. The other son Jubal "was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ". This is not the organ in churches, invented a few hundred years ago, it is a Hebrew word translated with this English word, itself archaic and referring to pipes, flutes, any wind instrument, according to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. So this means Jubal invented use of stringed and wind music instruments.
The other wife bore Tubalcain, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah." (vss. 20-22.)
Lamech got mad and killed a young man, and announced to his wives, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold." (vss. 23, 24.) Again, the LXX gives some insight. While the Masoretic based KJV says "I have slain a young man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt," the LXX says "I killed a young man for wounding and a young man for hurting me." Gen. 4:23. Apparently Lamech killed two young men, or else did kind of doubling description of one to make a rhyme or verse, for some minor injury to him. Arrogant, violent and pretentious, and he is the first to have more than one wife. Both his personality and his marriage habits show lack of self control.
25. "And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
Notice again, it is the woman who names the child, even if it is a boy. This is true in Jacob’s time, and down to John the Baptist, whose father was only inquired of about this because no relative had the name John. If it had been a name in the family, he would not have been inquired of. Naming something is argued by some as having or showing authority over it, ergo since Adam named Eve first "ishah," feminine form of "ish," male as individual, later named her "Eve," "mother of all living," that this showed he had authority over her from the start. But if this were so, he would be naming his sons instead of Eve naming them, particularly after the shift in power to men curse was in play. Perhaps he, being older, was more developed in speech than she was. And she having had no one but herself for a while, exploring the world around her, had no human to compare herself to. These two points, plus the fact that she would recognize him as like herself but larger and different meant she would readily concur in the name.
26. "And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of YHWH."
Firstly, you will note that the Bible jumps around in time listing Cain’s descendants then getting back to Adam and Eve, and Seth. Not everything is sequential, and you can’t assume a timeline in terms of years in Genesis, unless years are given. And as I will show later, you might not always be able to be certain of those year counts either.
Eve again credits God for Seth. And she names the boy. Who named Cain is not stated, but she names Seth. But Seth names his son. In this you can see a kind of general equality, that is eroded later. Perhaps it is worked on. If the husband is the boss you’d expect him to name (or give the final decision on naming) the child, but Eve names Seth and you see this again in Genesis and elsewhere. And Seth’s history, like that of Cain, begins at his conception. Therefore the individual person begins at conception.
Secondly, YHWH’s Name is known to Seth and his people. YHWH is a mysterious name, someone suggested it is from a pre Hebrew language. And very likely the last remaining word from that language, carried into the present time. There are grammatical and other peculiarities about it. An approximate meaning is "The Self Existing Eternal Creator."
But here we get to a big inherent contradiction in the Bible: When YHWH (Jehovah) was known to the Hebrews by this Name. Exodus. 6:3 says that YHWH was not known by His Name YHWH to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, yet Genesis shows them addressing Him and/or referring to Him by this Name. E.g., Gen. 15:8. Obviously one of these statements is wrong. God doesn’t lie or make errors, so which one of them was made or dictated or directed to be written by Him? Well, if a scribe is going to change things, by error or on purpose, which is more likely, that he add an entire sentence? Or two letters?
Northwest Semitic Ya is presented in The Bible as the short form of YHWH or Yahweh, i.e., Yah or in the KJV, which writes YHWH as Jehovah, Jah. This is Who Rastafarians refer to when saying Jah Jah. In Abraham’s time, Ebla had eponymous (deity honoring) names, some of which were El (general term for God and could be used to refer to the True God or to any false god) prefixed or suffixed, while others had the Ya prefix or suffix. This was of course hotly disputed, but the reluctant finder of this, Pettinato, was called in by Ebla finder Matthei, as the only one capable of handling such ancient Semitic writings, and he quote Pettinato at least 12 times in his book.
So if Ya is the name in the original documents, and scribes decided this sounded too reminiscent of some Mesopotamian false gods, and were concerned that there be no confusion between YHWH and the false gods, a little addition of two letters, WH, might have been done. This strikes me as a better explanation. That the statement in Exodus is correct, and the contrary evidence is the result of scribal activity. When this took place is not clear. But I would guess in the times of the Babylonian Captivity, because one of the Mesopotamian "gods" was Ea, who warned Utnapishtim to build the ark. Ea was probably a vague memory of YHWH, but had been demoted to being a descendant of the alleged creators and so lied about that the deity called Ea no longer even remotely resembled YHWH, except for telling Utnapishim (Noah) to build the ark. To let stand something that sounded like Ea was to risk confusion on the part of hearers and encourage or at least risk syncretism, precisely what had got them dragged out of the land of Israel in the first place. This was not some alteration of the sacred text in any way that changed the information content or intent, it merely clarified it, but accidentally created a problem later. (Nonetheless, the short form YH is used at times.) I figure that this alteration happened in Babylonia or during the return, because the LXX uses the word kyrios, Lord, wherever YHWH is named, so it is possible either that this alteration had already occurred, or that the Greek choice of word would fit either YHWH or the short form YH anyway.
Is YH then the short form of YHWH, or the original? If YH is more about "Self Existent" and implies eternity, while WH brings in the issue of creation, YH might have been the original. Because initially there would be no doubt who the Creator is, it is The Self Existent One." But when rival claimants to creator status were presented, then God would add that point about Himself, since it was no longer taken for granted by all who heard His Name. I am of course SPECULATING. I do not have any information granted to me by YHWH except what is in His revealed word.
1. "This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2."Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created."
Notice something: while the writer refers to them as man and woman, or Adam and women, and finally Adam and Eve, originally BOTH are called "Adam," ruddy. Another nail in the coffin of hierarchy or radical differences between them as part of the created order, and of there being any inherent masculine and feminine character and quality. And since God blessed THEM, the whole dominion over the earth and its contents is as much directly given to the woman as to the man. Granted the animals would in theory have been cooperative with humans before The Fall, but still, for a woman to be having dominion over the animals brings to mind something like a bronco rider or steer wrassling cowgirl. (Another reason to suspect, that the original human type was the more robust neanderthalish homo erectus and/or homo habilis, whose skull is remarkably modern for his alleged time. The increase in skull size might have been part of the working out of the curse of more difficult childbirth on Eve and her daughters, aside from the possibility that the original child skull was smaller and grew more later than it does now.)
And now a brief word on dominionist thinking. This posits that man had dominion before The Fall, and lost it afterwards. But this dominion was over the physical realm, not some political thing, and as one critic of dominionism put it, this dominion has always continued.
Here follow a bunch of "begats" as some call them. The ages at which each one begat his son, and the total number of years of his life, differ between the Septuagint, the Masoretic and the Samaritan versions. If these were once kept on clay tablets, it is not impossible for a tablet to be lost along the way, so some generations may be missing, and the Septuagint includes one man that the Masoretic leaves out.
Of the three most ancient complete LXX texts we have, ONE gives an age for Methuselah that would have him survive the Flood, and this is sometimes quoted as proof against the LXX, but this is only ONE copy that says this, so is obviously a scribal error.
I think it is also possible, that each generation could be treated as a dynasty with several having the same name. Thus, the founder of a dynasty is given the age at which he begat that son whose descendants would take over after the last of the dynasty was gone, and the age at the founder’s death, which might be in fact two men not one. Or, it might be that the age at death is of one man, but the ages at death should be added sequentially, ignoring ages at which the sons were born, because these "sons" were actually ancestors of those who took over later.
It is possible, therefore, for more time to have elapsed from Adam to the Flood than any version of the Old Testament we have now allows. The point is made by someone, that there are ten patriarchs listed in Genesis before The Flood, and ten kings of outrageous lifespans listed by the Mesopotamian legend also before The Flood.
Seth’s lineage, father to son, is given. Some names are similar to those in Cain’s line.
By the time you get to Noah (or Abraham, later) you have an important specific, that when it says Lamech lived such and such a time and begot Noah, you are talking about one man and one son. Perhaps also for Enoch, who, like Elijah later, never died, but was taken up alive to heaven, one of the lower heavens not the highest heaven the Throne of God. Because at this point, there are details given about these individuals.
Chapter six. "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair’ and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And YHWH said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years."
The LXX says, "My Spirit shall not remain with these people forever, for they are flesh. So their days shall be one hundred and twenty years."
This has given rise to speculation, that human normal lifespan should be 120 years. But it is more likely that this is the length of time God gave people to repent, before He brought the Flood.
The sons of God were considered by Jewish early writers and early Church writers to be angels, who fell because of lust, but another idea took hold, that these were the sons of Seth, who fell for the daughters of Cain, and fell into their evil ways. While a good case is made by Fr. Seraphim Rose, that Seth’s descendants were called sons of God, because they were on God’s side in the good vs. evil dispute developing, and were living closer to the Garden of Eden than Cain’s descendants did, perhaps also a higher elevation so closer to God so to speak, a problem is created by the term daughters of men. Because this implies that the "sons of God" are not sons of men. Unless there was some hostility and avoidance between "sons of God" in a figurative sense, and sons and daughters of men in the sense of supporting men as "gods" rival to God, which is possible, it does look like some other kind of creature was involved here.
Some make out that taking these women means they were kidnapped and raped, but that is not necessarily implied. The theorists think men wouldn’t give "their" women to these strangers, but if this ownership by parents and men in general was not established to where they could sell their daughters and sisters (to be raped in marriage if it was against their desires), or if they were persuaded to give them by offered advantages, then this argument doesn’t hold. More likely the women were ambitious and lustful and glad for the attention of "superior" beings who could get inside their nervous systems and give them super orgasms. Unless they were just mentally enslaved and never mind the usual seductions. In either case, though the curse on Eve was developing in its forms, I don’t think at this early age men had that much say over who their daughters or sisters married.
Some argue these were space aliens, some other species of creature of the made in the image and likeness of God for superintending their world. And pretty genetically compatible with us if they produced hybrid children, especially if these children were fertile.
Another problem with all this, is that angels are assumed to be "bodiless powers." Well yeah, sort of, not the same kind of bodies we have. Spirits, yeah, but they can get pretty solid when they want to and can affect matter.
Female angels are never shown in the Bible. Jesus says they neither marry nor are given in marriage, which also means they don’t have sex. So these are asexual beings, probably either non reproducing, a fixed population from the beginning, or they reproduce by budding like a yeast. More likely the foregoing.
They are big and strong, and so we cue on them as male when we see them, but they are not in fact male, and not androgynous like a mix, they are just neither.
But if some such noticed the beauty of the women, and the pleasure men had in sex, event tapped into their minds to experience it a bit, they might decide to get some in reality not just by telepathy. Since they can get solid they can change shape. That means they can make male sexual equipment…..but no sperm or DNA.
That means that the children the women bore to them, were not their real children but putative children.
The Book of Enoch reads like something cobbled together from many legends, some fooling around with demons, and maybe some legitimate materials from Enoch. It was considered legitimate at one point by some Jews and some Christians but eventually was dumped from the list of books accepted as authoritative, retained only in the Ethiopic Church (monophysite) as legitimate today.
Jude quotes from Enoch, one sentence. There might well be material in it that is correct, but not inspired but God told Jude to cite what was right, out of something that was highly popular among his readers in those days.
Enoch lists things the angels taught their wives, much of it either evil or at best dual purpose skills and knowledge, a lot to do with witchcraft and seduction. Genesis shows there was an increase of knowledge over a few hundred years.
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
Now you need to re read that again. While some argue that there were two angel hybridization events, before and after The Flood, this doesn’t even hint at that.
"There were giants in the earth IN THOSE DAYS; AND ALSO AFTER THAT, when the sons of God" etc. etc.
There were already anomalous large people, and when the sons of God got involved, there were a lot more of them.
Political and military leaders would want such as super soldiers, and the more the merrier. Technology may have advanced to where genetic manipulation was possible, and selective breeding of humans may have been going on. Here come the angels into this mix, and they want women and power and influence and status among men (and women) who were leaders. What do such humans want? Super soldiers and maybe some other things. So the angels gave them what they wanted. Not being likely monogamous, they had taught the women skills of seduction and probably sent them off to seduce powerful men and powerful perverted women. This built a social network for the angels. And they made offers. At least, this is what I think happened.
To existing genetic engineering was added a lot more knowledge, including the angels’ ability to see more than humans could and see how to warp or when the planned altered human embryo was developing as planned, or not, before anyone else could.
The angels’ wives were likely the mothers of the first generation of these, the zygotes being implanted in their wombs.
And this is why whenever anomalous beings are DNA tested, they come back as mtDNA human, from the mother’s side, but the rest of the genome is screwy. There is an exception, the elongated skulls come back as odd in the mtDNA as well as the rest of the genome, so apparently in some cases the mitochondria was modified as well as the rest of the genome.
In addition to size would be possible many other features, something the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on now, to add animal DNA to humans to get supersoldiers.
There are two ways to do this: do genetic surgery and raise the child from scratch, or develop an injection that will replicate and attach to DNA throughout the body and alter an existing, already trained, adult warrior. My guess is both approaches were done before the Flood, and that both are being worked on now.
The newfangled idea of made to order workers and warriors, in pre Flood times, included using nonhuman DNA. The results however weird looking, however non human in biology and mentality, were essentially humans with a difference.
Something is ignored in all this speculation. What does "and also after that" mean? did the angels do this before or after The Flood, is "after that" forward looking? That it says that these "sons" of the angels were "mighty men which were of old, men of renown" might point to some time after the Flood, since it sounds like something that generations closer to the writer would know about. After all, everything even history and legend except for whatever writing was on the Ark, was wiped out in the Flood. Only the knowledge the 8 survivors had would remain. Was this event entirely post Flood? all the pagan legends of divine human hybrids like Hercules and so forth relate to far more recent times.
Numbers 13:33 may give a clue. When Moses sent spies to look over Canaan, all but two gave a bad report, focusing on the giants there, the sons of Anak and the word is nefeel rendered nephilim in Genesis 6:4 and some translations in Numbers 13:33. So did this whole event happen before or after the Flood? Genesis 6:1, 2 clearly speaks of an event before The Flood. But if giants in Numbers were sasquatchy things, brought to earth by returning "aliens" or produced by a redo of some genetic engineering by a handful of people who were given or recovered the knowledge, then you don’t need one of them surviving the Flood by hanging onto the Ark as some Talmudic story has it.
The repeated emphasis in Genesis speaking about The Flood that all on land died, might be a hint that not only did creatures in the sea live, but that perhaps some survived in bunkers underground, under the land. And not in some parallel universe sort of thing. This would required air recycling technology and if genetic engineering could be done, so could that. Would God have allowed it? maybe. Maybe not. The spacefaring option seems better.
But another possibility would be that those surviving in the sea included some engineered to live in water, like mermaids, who might well have the genes for other kinds of modified human, and that these coming on land after the Flood might have been ancestors to these. Just how human would they be? generations of breeding to their kind would make a reshuffling. In regular mixed breeding within a species of several subtypes, you will have some that approximate pure bred to one source ancestry, some to another, and some of various degrees between. It is possible that something still human enough to breed with land humans, but mostly nonhuman in genetics and personality, might have survived. These breeding with each other might have eventually produced some that were throwback to human, and could not live in the sea.
Whatever the truth is on that, the results of this were not angel hybrids, but reengineered humans some with human genes altered some with non human, but not angel, genes added. the peculiar animal monsters and human animal mixes reported in Greek legend just might not have been fabrications. Somehow the idea of a centaur being a misinterpretation of a horse rider seems a bit strange. the tellers of these stories knew of horses and at least of their use to pull carts and chariots. It would be nothing unusual for people to playfully climb on a horse’s back, while hitched to a cart, though they never got the idea of horsemanship. The Aztec who thought the mounted warriors were some man beast monster had no horses or experience with such to draw on. But this is not the case for Greeks and Anatolians.
"And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented YHWH that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. And YHWH said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth Me that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of YHWH.
These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."
At this point, some argue that "perfect in his generations" means of pure human blood. Such theorists bypass the Fall and put the blame for all human evil on Nephilim or giant (angel hybrid) DNA, and think a second incursion and hybridization happened after The Flood to account for any present now. This and the idea of Cain as a hybrid himself, often plays to white supremacist ideas. Now that this notion is cropping up again, this is not socially acceptable, so it is not phrased usually as a racial thing. But it reduces man’s salvation and relationship with God to a genetic thing.
And it is false on the face of it, because only Noah is mentioned as perfect in his generations, and in Genesis 7:1 it says, "And YHWH said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation." Again, only Noah is mentioned, not his sons. It doesn’t say "for thee and thy sons have I seen righteous in this generation," it says "for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation." That means that if the issue was genetics, then ONLY NOAH WAS FREE OF NEPHILIM (ANGEL HYBRID) DNA, AND WE ALL GOT IT THROUGH HIS WIFE AND SONS OR AT LEAST THEIR WIVES AND SONS. If the issue was behavior, then clearly at least one of his sons was not perfect and his grandson likely even worse.
The argument is made, that the whole purpose of this angelic hybridizing, was to corrupt the human seedline, "the human DNA." (Harped on as a phrase in a way reminiscent of Gen. Jack D. Ripper and his concerns about "our precious bodily fluids" in the movie Dr. Strangelove.) Why? Because supposedly Jesus could only redeem us if He were our "kinsman redeemer," an almost irrelevant concept from Mosaic Laws about redeeming your relatives from slavery they sold themselves into because of poverty, a near relative had this responsibility if he could do so. But this is totally false. Because Romans shows all creation is waiting the Second Coming, ALL creatures are included in the Redemption. The whole creation is to be renewed and rebuilt Rev.
Jesus would not have to go through several incarnations and deaths and resurrections as various creatures, for them to be included. Origen (wrongly called by some online a "church father" when in fact he was anathematized) did have such a notion, one of those he was anathematized for long after his death, when research on some of his writings and opinions of some of his followers which were logically derived from his system, began to eclipse his earlier reputation as a defender of The Trinity on the one hand, and able to persuade pagans with a philosophical bent to Christianity on the other hand.
But this narrow, mechanistic notion appeals to some people, so you will run into it.
Noah’s perfection in his generations more likely means that in all the generations born in his life time, he was perfect. And apparently the only one perfect. After all, his son Ham and grandson Canaan were definitely not perfect and the other two probably not, but not nearly as problematic.
"And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth."
Another translation says that all flesh had become corrupted. NOTICE THAT BIT ABOUT THE EARTH BEING FILLED WITH VIOLENCE. And remember my speculation earlier about people wanting supersoldiers. This is the context I am talking about.
Now, in the Mesopotamian Flood stories, it is claimed that the "gods" were disturbed, their sleep interrupted, by too much noise by the humans, so they decided to kill them all, but Ea warned Utnapishtim to make the Ark, which is described I think as a cube. In the Bible we are told God was disturbed, all right, but not by being woke up every night by too much noise downstairs, but by the nature of what was going on.
A certain similarity exists between the two stories, but a great dissimilarity. And given the misbehavior of the Mesopotamians, they could hardly afford to allow the original history to get around much, because it rebuked their behavior and false gods and cultic practices. So the real history would have been suppressed, except among those who kept it, and the alternate story which reduces the reason for the Flood to men being too noisy, was presented.
God tells Noah to build the Ark, and it is a rectangle, not a cube. Someone once estimated it had a carrying capacity of 350 boxcars, in three layers.
Now, in this chapter it is only reported that God told Noah to take two of each kind into the Ark "every living thing of all flesh," but clearly whales and fish weren’t brought on board, so what is referred to is land animals and most birds, which are specified later as what died. But in the next chapter the order is more detailed.
"And YHWH said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation. Of very clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female."
Wait a minute. Didn’t the food laws about clean and unclean animals only come with Moses? What is this clean and unclean about? And didn’t God tell Noah that he can eat anything plant or animals, no food restrictions except that the blood must be poured out? Before we answer that question, let us look at details of The Flood, certain particular details.
Firstly, the timing on this is precise, not like the Mesopotamian story.
"And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredthyear of Noah’s life, in the secondmonth, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heavenwere opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights….And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and was lift up above the earth.
And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered."
This is one of the issues detractors of the Flood have, and those who argue it was local; that the high hills and mountains were covered. But if the mountains weren’t that high, but only became so later because of cataclysms after the Flood, then this is not as serious as it seems. Fossils of sea creatures have been found in the Himalayas, what are they doing there?
Another angle on this, is the slosh effect, especially if there was an axis tilt, from the present tilt to upright during the Flood to back to normal that we have now. The waters pouring, and coming from below the ground, and running off land at first and storms billowing the waves, and the tides still operating making it worse, and probably some well timed volcanos and earthquakes in the sea floor, you can have tsunamis covering all the land and the mountains. Not all would have to cover all land at once, it could have rolled over it.
What is this about the waters below? Huge aquifers. This is what burst forth, and receded.
"And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died."
Now you recall that when God breathed the breath of life into Adam, Adam BECAME A LIVING SOUL. We don’t have souls we ARE souls. And the same is true of animals. Do animals have souls people ask? Yes in the same sense that we do, they ARE souls, they are just different kinds of souls.
Because you will see listed here, all these creatures, including man, as having the breath of life, and not just a clumping together of life forms, but limited "breath of life" to man, because after saying "and every man" it says "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, OF ALL THAT WAS IN THE DRY LAND, DIED." So "all in whose nostrils was the breath of life," does not refer to man alone, but to "all that was in the dry land."
Another point, is that it is reiterated that all life on earth died, and "ALL THAT WAS IN THE DRY LAND."
Haaretz can mean the whole world oceans included, or dry land only or local land only. On this basis the local Floodites argue that it needn’t mean the whole earth.
But it is specified also "all that was in the dry land." What of things that were not in the dry land? Obviously they lived, except for those washed up and beached. Albatrosses can coast on winds at sea and may live at sea for several years at a time, never going on land. Horrendous storms that rip up trees and plants can form floating barges, which in the violent storms likely in The Flood were probably also upended or torn apart, and fierce winds might take such birds down in a downdraft, but the possibility is that they being such not really land animals may have survived, some of them. Perhaps a few other things did also that were capable of life at sea for over 40 days of storming and 150 water prevailing and more time to abate and dry out. But the point is, that there are two emphases here, things that had the breath of life in them, were not a category limited to human beings. And it was those things on land that died.
What if some people, genetically modified to breath with gills survived, and are the basis of the mermaid legend, they no longer being creatures of the dry land? Well, no one has caught one of these but its possible. Might not have happened though.
What if some people believed Noah preaching about the Flood (elsewhere in the Bible he is called "a preacher of righteousness" so that 120 years was probably spent not only building the ark but explaining why) but didn’t want to repent? And tunneled underground with appropriate supplies and desalination and air recycling capability? If such people existed, they would probably have been crushed in some cataclysm aimed at them. But maybe this did happen and gave rise to legends of dubious sorts living underground. Or more likely this happened long after The Flood and has nothing to do with it.
What of those who might, if that was a high tech society, gone off world? Mars has a horrendous gash across its face. If it was populated to some extent, it was probably swung in closer to earth causing cataclysms on both worlds. We got a flood, they got drought, maybe some of our water originally came from Mars. Maybe not. This is speculation of course. It would explain some things I am not going to deal with here, I already did that in another book, A Possible History of Life on Mars.
The most important thing to take away from all this, is that we ARE souls and so are animals.
Now notice that the animals were given over to us, we could kill and eat them, but God leveled the playing field, by making them afraid of us. And we were forbidden to eat meat with blood in it.
Animals are then not soulless objects with no feelings and no standing before God and no rights. The animal rights people would put them on an even category with us, which is not biblical. But that doesn’t mean they have no rights.
We were not given them to do anything but work them, milk them, use their hair shed or cut off, ride them, and eat them, no torture, no unnecessary experiments, no sexual abuse even if they are willing, and no abuse in general. Killing for mere sport is kinda edgy. Probably not. Killing because of population control issues I suppose would be management, the meat could be fed to pets or eaten if the kill involved major loss of blood.
The animals were originally killed as sacrifice to YHWH, their blood being poured out to Him.
Now note this regarding killing them:
Leviticus 17:3-7 "What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto YHWH before the tabernacle of YHWH; BLOOD SHALL BE IMPUTED UNTO THAT MAN; HE HATH SHED BLOOD; AND THAT MAN SHALL BE CUT OFF FROM AMONG HIS PEOPLE;"
Now the death sentence was already given for sacrifice to false gods, and the purpose of this law is also stated as a preventive measure to avoid sneak behavior of this sort, in the wilderness:
"To the end that the children of Israel may bring their sacrifice, which they offer in the open field, even that they may bring them unto YHWH, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest, and offer them for peace offerings unto YHWH. And the priest shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar of YHWH at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and burn the fat for a sweet savour unto YHWH
And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring…."
But what is interesting here, is that God says "blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood;" the same sort of phrasing that is normally used about a human being getting killed. The punishment of cutting off either death or ostracism, is stated, why this additional statement unless God considers that animals are of value and they do have a relationship with Him, and our use of them is limited and conditional? I don’t think He is too happy with people who kill animals just to kill, when they are not killed for food or because a disease outbreak must be stopped, or because they are dangerous. Torturous experiments on them would also not be pleasing, beyond whatever limited amount is needed to ensure safety of products to humans or other animals.
"Verse 20 And Noah builded an altar unto YHWH; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar."
That is what the differentiation, between clean and unclean, was about, what was fit for sacrifice to YHWH. Under Moses, the Israelites to impress on them their separation to YHWH from the rest of the world, the call to be holy to YHWH, could only eat those animals that were clean for sacrifice.
My guess is, that this standard goes back to Adam and Eve and God’s post fall revelation to them, and that possibly the eating of meat was entirely limited to a sacrificial context. There would be sin offerings, and there would be peace offerings, but outside of this no meat eating. This would be something maybe once a year. If a sin offering it would have to be an animal or bird, if a peace offering could be plant or animal or bird.
As time went on, people started eating meat whenever they felt like it. And eating the blood in it.
"And YHWH smelled a sweet savour; and YHWH said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."
Clearly, the seasons were already normal experiences for everyone, there was no axis tilt from upright to 23 degrees as some speculate.
"And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea’ into your hand are they delivered.
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat."
This is reiterated several times in the Mosaic code, also fat that from inside the body was not to be eaten, they were reserved to YHWH. Those who ate blood deliberately were to be cut off from the people, probably means death or at least it was an option, might mean ostracism expulsion into the wilderness.
Lev. 17:10-16 "And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.
Therefore I said unto the children Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood.
And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust.
For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whoever eateth it shall be cut off.
And every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean. But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh; then he shall bear his iniquity."
Apparently there is some slack cut at times about this, perhaps in the interest of a starvation or other problematic situation. But it defiled the eater, and the procedure is the same as for one who touched anything a menstruating woman touched, or semen had gone forth from him, whether in spontaneous ejaculation or in sexual intercourse.
The context is always apparently the blood of an animal or bird that has been killed. Caught fish don’t seem to be an issue, you can catch and then kill them by separate chopping of each head, but you don’t see this specified since normally you would catch a lot and it would die of suffocation in the boat or on land. No mention is made of snapping off heads of locusts before eating them. Yet these creatures have blood, but though the blood of fish is often red, for some reason this doesn’t seem to be an issue.
So the problem is, what about those tribal people in part of north east Africa, who sometimes prick the jugular vein of a cow, draw off blood, press and hold till it seals, and drink this blood (usually in a drought) and the animal is not killed? Interesting question. Is blood from that which was alive when it was drawn not in the category of forbidden?
If so, the prohibition on blood transfusion that Jehovah’s Witnesses and possibly some other sects have is baseless. Because the stored blood came from people who were alive when it was drawn.
The primary thing is that the animal or bird, must die in a way that involves blood loss. The normal means is slitting the throat. Jewish kosher slaughter does this with one deep cut, and the animal loses consciousness quickly though it keeps moving for a bit but its over in a couple of minutes. The secular kind of slaughter involves a stun bolt shot to the head, then hoisting by the heels on chains, and cutting the throat, which probably gets more blood out than is done in kosher slaughter.
Kosher meat processing includes washing, rubbing with salt to draw out more blood and washing again, nit picking over it. Secular slaughter does not, and no amount of work will get all blood out.
An animal killed by a shot to the head dies of brain trauma which causes the heart to stop beating, so can hardly be considered exsanguinated. My own opinion, is that a shot (bullet or arrow) to the heart or gut will cause bleeding out into the body cavity, which being cut open then lands on the ground. This would be considerable exsanguinations.
Some people wring a fowl’s neck, and consider the blood retained in the meat makes it taste better. (McDonald’s is rumored to add blood into its burger meat for this purpose, so I won’t eat them.) But only cutting the head off is acceptable. Or a shot through the body that would cause some bleeding to the surface a lot to the body cavity and the blood lost when the body cut open.
This prohibition dates to Noah. And in Acts, when Paul was arguing for not having the Gentiles keep the Torah in order to become Christians, the Apostles decided in their council as follows;
Acts 15:29 "…abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and fornication: …"
Meats offered to idols were spiritually polluted. "Blood" would mean bloodshed or murder, "things strangled" was meat from animals killed by strangulation, which was done as a flavor enhancer. Meat from an animal killed with ZERO exsanguinations. That they phrase it this way makes me think that the issue is less one of total exsanguinations but of at least some, though more much more than a few drops. Most of the meat we eat is killed by head chopping (birds) or throat cutting anyway so it not an issue. Meat sold in a store not from some traditional type thing which in some cultures is neck wringing, you can assume was bled out. This is generally considered healthier but that was NOT the reason God gave food laws. People who think it was health and not a holiness issue are out of their minds, they explain pork prohibition as a matter of trichinosis, ignoring the multitude of other animals and birds that were not to be eaten. And shellfish.
The key to being clean for sacrifice was that the animal chew the cud and split the hoof. If it did only one of these, that was not enough. And if it did neither that was not clean either. This became the standard for clean to eat, under the Mosaic Covenant.
So what is implied in this? When you are like the animal that chews the cud, you don’t just incorporate ideas into your world view without examining them, and you drag them back out and re examine them. The splitting of the hoof gives stability on rough or rocky ground, because there is flexibility, instead of both toes pointing in one direction only, they can flex in different directions, and keep balance, without changing the direction of travel.
In the Orthodox Church this would be called economia, as distinct from akrivia or strictness.
At least two canons of the Orthodox Church prohibited eating meat with blood in it, and prohibited adding blood to any dish. So this still applies to all Christians to this day.
I repeat, I am not a Jehovah’s Witness. Blood transfusion doesn’t go through the mouth, which all the rules about blood are dealing with, and such an interpretation is insanity. But a lot of Christians don’t seem to get any teaching on holiness and good works because Calvinism wrongly teaches once saved always saved and you don’t have to obey Jesus to keep what He gave you for free. And most "bible reading" and "bible teaching" doesn’t seem to dwell on some issues like purity and holiness. And certainly not this blood in meat issue, among the protestants.
The Roman Catholics seem to have let it slide altogether centuries ago, and some people argue that this rule was just a transition period to avoid offending Jews. That is absurd for two reasons. Jews would be a lot more or at least as much offended, by the rejection of circumcision and of the rest of the food laws, and the non keeping of Sabbath. And if this is a temporary rule then so is no murder and no fornication and don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols.
This is a permanent rule. It has no relevance to Messianic prophecy, it is not a foreshadowing of Christ, so it is not set aside. Eating Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist (yes this was the view of it c. AD 150 according to Justin Martyr) is not a violation of this, because this is from One Who is living, not from someone dead.
Getting back to Genesis and God’s covenant with Noah and the other living things,
"And surely the blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man."
There’s the validity of the death penalty. It isn’t about prevention it’s about justice. The blessing to fill the earth is given again. Then,
"And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; AND WITH EVERY LIVING CREATURE THAT IS WITH YOU, OF THE FOWL, OF THE CATTLE, AND OF EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH WITH YOU; FROM ALL THAT GO OUT OF THE ARK, TO EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH.
And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood’ neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between Me and you AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE THAT IS WITH YOU, FOR PERPETUAL GENERATOINS:"
That’s right, God has a covenant with the animals and birds and fish and bugs and so forth as well as with us.
"I do set My bow in the cloud,and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth, And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
And the bow shall be in the cloud’ and I will look upon it, that I remember the everlasting covenant between God AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH THAT IS UPON THE EARTH."
It is argued that the rainbow must have existed before this, so this is a pretty fable. But we are talking about YHWH Almighty Himself here, and it may be that the laws of nature were tweaked a bit, at this point in time, so that the prism effect could happen, or could happen regarding water droplets in a cloud. Or, He may have pointed out something that existed already, and said that from then on, it was to be a memorial of this covenant.
Noah made a vineyard, and wine, and got drunk.
"And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him
And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be YHWH God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant."
Let’s look at this. First off, why was Canaan cursed instead of Ham? Maybe so that an entire descent line would not be cursed, only part of it. That Ham is mentioned as father of Canaan in this context, as if he weren’t father of many others also, might indicate that he saw that his son Canaan had stolen Noah’s clothes to leave him naked as a prank, "his younger son" could apply as well to a son as a grandson. In which case the curse was targeted exactly.
White racists have tried to twist this into a curse on Ham, though it explicitly was not on him, but on his son Canaan. According to these people, this curse was darkening of the skin, and the whole thing (though only targeting Canaan) validated or mandated even enslavement of Africans. But this is absurd.
Secondly, this like the "don’t judge" concept, in both cases yanked out of context, is heavily misused in some quarters especially the Orthodox in some jurisdictions, to prevent denunciation and punishment of evil. "don’t display your father’s nakedness" is the motto. But what else is shown here? Did not Shem and Japheth tell Noah what happened, and expose their brother’s and nephew’s nakedness, i.e., sin? Of course they did. Was this denounced as sin? No. Did Noah also curse either of them for "snitching" on Ham and Canaan? Of course not. On the contrary, Noah blessed them for exposing the evil and letting him know who was not really his friend. And this being prophetic was from God, or else God made this blessing come to pass, so He approved of Noah’s handling of this.
"God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant."
This was fulfilled to some extent in ancient Israel’s time, and is fulfilled now, because the Ashkenazic Jews of Israel have some Turkic blood in them, obviously by the looks of many. Jews were never reliably pure especially after the last diaspora, and there was conversion and intermarriage all along. A mixed multitude came out of Egypt with them, and the rules on counting the results of intermarriage as Israelite only caused a few generations delay in the case of a few people, not on every non Israelite. Adoption would also erase the legal taint of blood from any category, which we see happen in the last few verses of Ruth, where Naomi, by a ritual act of nursing Ruth’s infant, adopts it as her own son, and to her own lineage. Without this, David could not have been counted as an Israelite, or been legal to be king, Deuteronomy 23:3; 17:5. Therefore the entire Khazar story, if true, is irrelevant, because they married into Judaism in eastern Europe, and were likely adopted into the tribe of the rabbis who performed the conversion as reported in one lengthy book on alleged lost tribes of Israel and Jewish missionary efforts before they were forbidden by Christian governments to do this.
While one investigation of this story claims evidence for it is nil, the Jewish Encyclopedia gives a lot of sources validating it. The Khazar rulers were rather opportunistic religiously, and there are slightly conflicting versions of the reason the one who chose Judaism did so. Presently Khazars are Christian, muslim and some animist. Maybe a few Jews.
People who make a big deal about Ashkenazic Jews not being "real" Jews because of mixed blood are biblically ignorant, Deuteronomy 23:4-9 specifies only Moabites and those born of a mixed marriage them as ineligible to be in the assembly of Israel until ten generations, and this because of behavior not some racial difference. Egyptians, who were more likely to have black in them, were only excluded to three generations. No restrictions on any other people. Isaiah 56:6 blesses those foreigners who joined themselves to the covenant. Clearly, bloodline purity is not the definition of a Hebrew of any tribe, all of whom are now categorized as "Jews" because adhering to the throne of David, ergo effectively of Judah.
A bunch of begats, leading up to Abraham. Here I begin to have a problem. It is always easy to account for the population now from only 4 women, but having enough people to populate the various lands and have cities and wars and so forth in that short a time, from The Flood to Abraham, is another matter. Don’t forget the far flung civilizations like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa and whoever else is yet to be dug up. This is increased when you consider that they were not using a solar year of 365 days, but a lunisolar year of 360 days, and may even have been using a lunar calendar of 354 days. If all these names were recorded on clay tablets the possibility of loss of some exists. If done by memory the possibility is greater. LXX shows greater age before birth of the first son on the post Flood patriarchs, while Akiva’s Masoretic text shows less, it has been speculated that this was deliberately changed, to encourage Jews to reproduce sooner and more often.
The LXX and Masoretic agree that there were 10 patriarchs incl. Adam and Noah until The Flood. Sumerian legend also says there were 10 kings before the Flood, each of them living at least 100,000 years. We can assume these ages are false, but it does show a kind of congruence of the history, though the Mesopotamian version went through hands devoted to false religion and all sorts of political agendas.
The similarity between Mesopotamian and Biblical accounts of the Flood was used by some to argue that the Hebrews copied from Mesopotamia. But the monotheistic attitude was too unique. This did not merely posit a top deity for a tribe or city, nothing unusual in itself, but prohibited worship of all other "deities." THAT was unusual.
What is far more likely, is that both traditions come from the same event, but the Mesopotamian ones were corrupted, just as their religion was corrupted. Both accounts claim The Flood came from angered deities, the Hebrew says because of one deity, the Mesopotamian says because of many. Both agree on a divine origin for the Flood. The motive in both cases is similar, anger at human behavior. in The Bible, YHWH is angered and saddened by all the sin, and that even the animals had become corrupted. Mesopotamian lore claims that the humans were overpopulating and making too much noise and keeping the "gods" from getting enough sleep. While these stories are radically contradictory on the face of it, they agree that human behavior was what caused the anger that caused the Flood. So the stories, if you strip out Mesopotamian features, are the same.
Both also claim that one man was approached by a deity to warn him and tell him to build an Ark to save himself, his family and the animals. Mesopotamian lore includes a couple of servants with the man and his family, Bible says only Noah, his wife, and three sons and their wives, no one else. Mesopotamian lore has the Ark being a big cube, The Bible says it was a rectangle. Both agree on something interesting: The Bible says YHWH warned Noah because he alone was righteous. Mesopotamian lore says Ea warned Utnapishtim. Ea is depicted as being a few generations down from the original creator deities, but a poem about seven categories of demons says they are all friends with and/or work for the deities of Mesopotamia except for one: the are afraid of Ea. http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/seven.htm"...Hostile to Ea.
Throne-bearers of the gods are they...."https://therealsamizdat.com/category/seven-harmful-spirits/
NOTE THAT JESUS THREW SEVEN DEVILS OUT OF MARY MAGDALENE. Sounds like kind of this was sending a message, a big hint to those who still held to the mesopotamian paganism. (Mary Magdalene was confused with ex nymphomaniac and ex sometimes professional prostitute St. Mary of Egypt, and in the west became known as a repentant prostitute, but the original legend about her was that she was a virgin, who though inhabited by these demons who tried to persuade her to be immoral refused to cooperate.)
The Eastern Orthodox Church preserves the early church practices and pronunciations with some embellishment over time, which themselves derive from the synagogue and Temple Jewish liturgy. A Jewish lady brought to an EO service by someone commented to him that we stole their liturgy. The structural and some behavioral similarities are extreme. The parading of the Gospels in one book, which is kissed, for one thing, is like the parading of the Torah Scroll and kissing it. Crowns are used in the wedding service for a first marriage in Orthodoxy, and used in Jewish weddings. And so forth.
And two things got my attention. The Hebrew pronunciation of "amen" is not AH mehn but AH meen. This is how EO pronounces it Greek and Slavonic, though in American churches in English serves it often becomes the pronunciation English speakers are used to. And when we say hallelujah, we don’t say hal ley loo yah, we say al ley loo ee ah. Again, where anglicization is common the pronunciation often becomes hal ley loo yah.
"The pronunciation Yahweh is indicated by transliteration of the name into Greek in early Christian literature, in the form iaoue (Clement of Alexandria) or iabe (Theodoret; by this time Gk. b had the pronunciation of v)…Strictly speaking, Yahweh is the only ‘name’ of God. In Genesis wherever the word sem (‘name’) is associated with the divine being that name is Yahweh" (Eerdman’s Bible Dictionary, 1979 p. 478).
"Such a conclusion, giving ‘Yahweh’ as the pronunciation of the name, is confirmed by the testimony of the Fathers and gentile writers, where the forms IAO, Yaho, Yaou, Yahouai, and Yahoue appear. Especially important is the statement of Theodoret in relation to Ex. lvi, when he says: ‘the Samaritans call it [the tetragrammaton] ‘Yabe,’ the Jews call it ‘Aia’…" (The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia, "Yahweh," p. 471)
The following from https://heavennet.net/forums/topic/how-do-you-pronounce-yhwh/
The 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 12, p. 995, makes the following comment under the heading "Jehovah":
"The pronunciation ‘Jehovah’ is an error resulting among Christians from combining the consonants Yhwh (Jhvh) with the vowels of ‘adhonay, ‘Lord,’ which the Jews in reading the Scriptures substituted for the sacred name, commonly called the tetragrammaton as containing four consonants…The Rabbinic tradition that after the death of Simeon the Just (fl.290 B.C.) It was no longer pronounced even on these occasions, is contradicted by the well-attested statement that in the last generation before the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70) it was uttered so low that the sounds were lost in the chant of the priest. After that event the liturgical use of the name ceased, but the tradition was perpetuated in the Rabbinic schools; it continued also to be employed by healers, exorcists and magicians, and is found on many magical papyri. It is asserted by Philo that only priests might pronounce it and by Josephus that those who knew it were forbidden to divulge it. Finally the Samaritans shared the scruples of the Jews, except that they used it in judicial oaths….The early Christian scholars therefore easily learnt the true pronunciation."
That means in all likelihood, the lost pronunciation of YHWH is Ee ah weh. Starting to look familiar? Because hallelujah mean all praise Jah, or Yah, the short form of YHWH.
Ya, the northwest semitic form of Yahweh, would have been pronounced…..Ea.
Delitzsch discovered this similarity of Ea and the Mesopotamian deity, and postulated that there was a connection, that YHWH was known before Moses. This was upsetting to German protestants, who somehow thought YHWHism and monotheism was a unique product of the Hebrew genius or something like that, which is man centered thinking on steroids. that the Hebrews or Moses invented Him!
Supporting Delitzsch however are the discoveries at Ebla, where eponymous (deity honoring) names are el and ya prefixes or suffixes. This was a very old and hard to read dialect, so Matthiae who dug the place up got the one man who could handle this to translate, Pettinato. Pettinato reluctantly concluded that there was a Ya (or YHWH) cultus operating in Ebla, which Matthiae and others couldn't stomach so quickly denied it. But there it is. Indeed, the Bible itself references a midianite presence of YHWHism, though not universal among them, in Moses' youth.
The big question then, in determining Who among the pagan pantheons might be a memory of the true God, is, who was the god of Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah?
The answer is Ea.
An old friend of mine now deceased once observed that people do what works, keep doing it, until it doesn't work anymore, and then they find something else to do. When the Gnostic heresies developed, they bumped the Creator down a notch or more, called Him the demiurge, and blamed material (bad) creation on him, or sometimes on some effort by sophia without permission of The Most High, who is not to blame (they said) for material existence. Likewise in the old days, as paganism and the worship of false gods, ranging from visible heavenly bodies to deified heroes and kings, Ea wasn't that easy to get rid of so they argued he was actually some top deity's great great grandson or something like that.
YHWH means something like Self Existent Eternal Being the Creator of All, and there is a grammatical peculiarity about it, which, together with loss of correct pronunciation due to fear of pronouncing it at all, a late development in Judaism and no part of the Biblical record of Torah and Prophets which constantly uses The Name, makes The Name all the more peculiar. Likely it is the last surviving word from a lost language ancestral to Hebrew.
So now we have a VERY strong congruence between the Hebraic and Mesopotamian versions of The Flood, with an agreement on the Name of the God of Noah. Mesopotamia of course demoted Ya, but despite the lies and heresies about Him, His Name was still powerful against the demons. Why? Because unlike the other "gods" Ya or Yahweh as we pronounce it a lot now, aka Jehovah, is the real God!
Putting all these pieces of the puzzle together makes the Mesopotamian lore confirm The Bible. Yahweh let His cultus die out a lot, then grabbed Abraham and restarted the whole thing! Glory to YHWH!
The possibility exists, that in those patriarchs and for a time after the Flood, what we have are not actual individuals only, but dynasties, and that the son born after such and such a length of time is not the same individual who took up after his father’s death, but rather the father or grandfather of the one who led them after the last of his father’s dynasty died out. This would greatly expand the time, and allow for a larger population, both before the Flood, and earlier after The Flood.
Inerrancy applies to the originals. Divine protection of the documents is more about what we need to know for salvation from sin and from God’s wrath and to live right. As we get into the time when things were written on paper and skins and more information could be kept and the information was now holy and to be preserved carefully, you can expect greater accuracy on details with the occasional scribal slip. Nothing however that affects core doctrine.
In the LXX Genesis 10:2, you have a list of sons of Japheth, which include one Elisa, who is not in the KJV which draws its OT from the Masoretic. In Genesis 10:22, Shem’s sons include one Cainan, not listed in the Masoretic. Again, vs. 24, Arphaxad begot Cainan who begot Salah who begot Eber, while in the Masoretic Arphaxad begot Salah who begot Eber.
So is Cainan introduced twice by accident, or does this refer to some shift over in genealogy of one man because of some adoption, or was there an additional Cainan, left out by the Masoretes because they thought the same name twice was an error?
If you recall, things were written originally on clay tablets. it would be easy to lose a whole tablet, or if there was a space available problem when it came to transcribing onto skins and information had to be prioritized, the possibility of a lot of names being dropped exists.
If names represented the founder of a dynasty, which had the same name as the founder, who lived several hundred years and each one did also, and the son born to the founder is in fact that son one of whose descendants using his name replaced the previous dynasty, and so forth, and if you do this both sides of the Flood, excepting only when an individual with a personal history and his father perhaps are mentioned, you get a lot more time to build population.
A typical list of how using only the information available you could get to present population, does two things. It doesn’t provide enough people early enough for the civilizations scattered here and there (which were not even as large as a typical American suburb) and it presupposes that the women were bearing 10 children each. Given the length of time before the first or at least inheriting of status son is born in almost all cases, it is obvious that people didn’t just run out and marry in haste and breed like rabbits.
The problem, to my way of thinking, is not accounting for the population now from 8 people, but for the population by the time of, for instance, Nimrod, Peleg and anyone else before Abraham and in Abraham’s time.
Another solution would be, that some people heard the warnings from Noah, and didn’t want to change their ways but didn’t want to die either, and were space faring capable and got out of Dodge so to speak to Mars. It is interesting that Mars shows signs of a cataclysm and missing water. We seem to have too much. It might be that the Flood involved a sister cataclysm on Mars, to take down the evil civilization there, perhaps God swung Mars in close enough for tidal gravitational influence to tear up the surface, and caused some of its water to leave and land on earth.
These hypothetical people then would include many who were not as culpable as the others, did at least give credence to YHWH’s warning through Noah, and were not wiped out, but suffered a lot. Centuries later some came back and would add to the population here.
Another possibility of course, is that all the begats are correct as stated, but that peculiar scientific stuff was rediscovered or preserved, including cloning and artificial wombs, and the population increase was done by these means. This would account for the population needed to leave ruins and vague reports of wars and trade everywhere.
The Flood would have presumably scoured everything off the surface or buried it, so that any sunken civilizations we see are post Flood as are all ruins. Gobekli Tepe included. This is a very strange place, with two sister sites we don’t hear about that much. What is odd about Gobekli Tepe, is that it appears to have been filled in and covered with sand, as if on purpose. Since the theorists on this aren’t biblical for the most part, The Flood as the cause of this is not suggested. Another possibility is that it is pre Flood, and was covered by schemers hoping to preserve it for later dig out and reuse when they came back from Mars, and were among those who died there. Whether the sister sites are also buried in this way I don’t know. A great book of fiction that incorporates lots of facts, works on the assumption that it was done deliberately, because the people who did it were horrified and ashamed of what used to go on there. That of course is also possible, even in a pre Flood setting. Some might have repented at some point, but died before the Flood so were not on Noah’s Ark. Some might have repented at Enoch’s preaching, for instance.
Genesis 10:25 "And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan."
Presumably this was the timeframe of the confusion of tongues at Babel. This word is a pun on a word for confusion that is similar to the word Babylon. The earliest settlement here might have gotten its name from someone who remembered the events and still spoke a semitic language.
It is possible that a cataclysm also occurred, separating the continents, or this might have happened during the Flood.
Various people in the alternative research media are referring to this as the Tower of Babel moment and opining that every time "humanity" almost has its act together, something happens. One notable theorist observes that in all the other times YHWH intervenes, there is a specific sin at issue, but this time no sin is mentioned. I suspect he has, despite his soft spokenness, a problem of pride, and this blinds him to what the sin in this incident self evidently is.
The sin was pride. they wanted to make a name for themselves, they didn’t want to be scattered on the earth (contrary to YHWH’s order to fill the earth), and God said that now, because apparently of this tower somehow, or because of the imperial and labor dividing and organizing system they had, nothing would be impossible to them.
This sounds like an extreme statement to make about a bunch of yokels barely out of the Neolithic. perhaps we are reading our own issues back into the past too much, perhaps it should be interpreted in terms of the context, not as an absolute statement. And then again, maybe it was an absolute or nearly so statement. Iraqi pagan centering in Haran, survived into the muslim period, and included very organized concepts of astrology and magic and categorizing of the universe. perhaps some kind of either paranormal technology or regular technology or a mix thereof was involved, and what remained later was just a barely functional knock off.
Michael Sanders, looking at NASA photos saw that four rivers are in the tigris-euphrates headwaters. While it is argued that the Flood destroyed everything, that doesn’t mean that the original springs that fed the river system were destroyed. Genesis does name two of the four rivers with names we know now, and this was written AFTER the Flood. Tigris and Euphrates. "Under that theory, the Tigris would match up with the Bible's Hiddekel River, the
Karun River in Iran would correspond to the Pison and the Gihon River would be
the Wadi al-Batin river system that once drained the central part of the Arabian
peninsula. " Chicago Sun Times, "Garden of Eden said to be in Turkey" Jan. 12, AD 2001 Peter Goodspeed.
Now, Genesis says they travelled east, but the Hebrew says FROM the East.http://www.biblemysteries.com/lectures/babel.htm If the survivors of the Flood landed on the mountains (plural) of Ararat (Armenia) and from there went east, they would come to the northern edge of Turkey or Pontus. Sanders, writing in 1998, said he found someone in Turkey who could locate a place called "gate of God" the meaning of Babel. Apparently there was more than one "Shinar," or rather, like people named places in America after places in Europe, when they found a plain in northern Turkey and they came originally from the (later Sumerian) plain of Shinar, they named it Shinar.
"Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan provides a clue in which he quotes [in The livingTorah] from Targum Yonathan. (A Targum is an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible. Surprisingly and seemingly inexplicably it locates Shinar in Pontus which is situated at the North East of Anatolia, South East of the Black Sea." same URL.
It might also be, that the land of Shinar we know now, is named after the initial post Flood Shinar, which was an original name and not named after an original Shinar elsewhere. But the ziqqurats we are used to are a legacy of an earlier attempt at something, and the earliest of them is not the one Genesis calls Babel. Also, while Genesis connects Babel to Nimrod, the other cities are more in the plain of Shinar we know now, so again this Babel of Nimrod may have been founded on the run from the chaos, and named after the place that was to be a gate of God but also could be punned in Semitic as meaning confusion. The writer of Genesis had to deal with records on clay tablets, not all of them intact, because the information wasn’t that important to our necessary knowledge, or in trying to compact them had to leave some things out. A later scribe gets into trouble. Finally Abraham inherits all this, and then Moses’ family inherits them. Thus the first Babel is in modern Turkey in Pontus, while the Babylon we know was named after it, both locations being under Nimrod’s rule.
A CERTAIN SAD FACT BECOMES EVIDENT AS WE LOOK AT THE BEGATS AND WHO DID WHAT.
Before The Flood, the people who made any noteworthy accomplishments, whether of technology (incl. musical instruments) or building cities were of Cain’s lineage. There is no denunciation of this as sin, just it is noted they seemed to lead the charge. There is no indication that the Shem lineage crowd didn’t learn from them or didn’t independently invent some things, but it just isn’t mentioned. Someone being called the father of those who use a technology may mean all learned from him, and later ones learned from them, or it may just mean he was the first to do this. After the Flood, though knowledge from the earlier world came with Noah’s sons and their wives, again it is the dubious Nimrod who seems to lead the charge in city building and must have had something to do with Babel, though ALL the people were involved.
I like technology, which doesn’t mean they are good, maybe I just like something wrong. But there is a Bible verse "I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions." Proverbs 8:12 And nowhere is alleviation of the curse of hard work on Adam called sin. The New Jerusalem is a great city. So these things are not wrong in themselves. They can and do become idols. Travel is not bad in itself but a weird wander lust may be a trap unless you are legitimately fleeing something or seeking something good.
But the plain fact of history is, that war has always been the main jumpstarter for technology. The idea expressed by many that a superior technology means superior spirituality is blatantly false on the face of it. This idea presupposes evolution is a. physical (the only form that has any case to be made for it) and that this is always in a useful to the species direction (it isn’t) and that it is real (serious problem there beyond mere variation within a genera or next level up of categorization), and b. psycho/spiritual/mental (of which there is no evidence, except for mere smarts getting better, which says nothing about how they are used) and c. that technological development is "evolution" in action also and runs parallel with the rest.
These ideas somehow got mixed with a view of Christianity as the product of spiritual evolution, so this was palatable to Americans and Europeans, and so when WW I showed things were not so evolving many lost faith having been taught lies rather than what Christianity teaches – which is that humanity is NOT something to have faith in but is fallen and even church leaders and teachers are unreliable there will be false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing, that we will get persecuted now and then and must be faithful unto death, that the world will get a lot worse before it gets better and nothing man does but only what the God-man Jesus does when He comes back will solve things and the antichrist comes first and must be destroyed by the real Christ at His Second Coming, and we must be in the world but not of the world.
But raised on "inspirational" pablum and romantic crap and silly winged babies as angels type art and proto new age heresy of course presented with reality at its worst people turned to spiritualism and other lies.
The fact is, as one person pointed out, the most technologically advanced civilization on earth in the 1930s and 1940s was Nazi Germany.
Why would aliens come all this way to make war with us or conquer us? for the same reason any empire has traveled far on earth to do this same thing. Surely if they are so advanced technically they are advanced spiritually? Re read the last paragraph.
and just what kind of spiritual advancement are you talking about? theosophy, with its proto nazi racism considers itself spiritually advanced. peace? there is plenty of peace and quiet among the dead lying in heaps at the end of a war on a battlefield. define your terms. why would they be interested in caring for or serving us? isn’t that a deplorable egotism on our part, a vanity custom made to exploit to take us over?
That’s assuming aliens are physical beings in the first place. if they aren’t it gets worse. And they might be a mix of both.
Back to Peleg and the earth being divided.
There are two theories regarding the meaning of this. That this was when Babel was built and God overthrew it and scattered the peoples, and that this was when the earth's continents were split into their present configurations, which oddly fit.
As I said before, scientists already figure that the earth's land masses were once a single landmass they call pangea. Of course they assume that this split was gradual over millions of years. I don't think so.
A very interesting angle on this is http://setterfield.org/Dodwell/Dodwell_Manuscript_1.html in this the deviations between ancient observation and calculation of the earth's obliquity, and more recent observations and calculations, usually dismissed as error, are treated as accurate, and plotted on a sine curve (which is what appeared when they were all plotted) and the whole averaged out. This is assuming SOME degree of error existed in ancient times.
"The date of verticality of the curve, 2345 B.C...coincided with an "irregularity," this being a large and sudden change in the inclination of the earth's axis; and the date of "insensibility" or of equilibrium in the horizontal time scale of the curve, was 1850 A.D.
"It was absolutely certain that every point on the mean observational curve in Figure 3 is precisely a point on a logarithmic sine curve. The curve is therefore a certain and sure mathematical demonstration that in the year 2345 B.C., the earth's axis was suddenly displaced by a major impact; and the curve shown in Figure 3 is a curve of the partial recovery of the earth to a state of equilibrium, at its normal inclination and conditions, as reach in 1850 A.D."
Now, if you assume that some of the observations he plotted on his scale were in error, and the averaging is to correct for this, but more in error in one direction or another than is effectively averaged out this way, and that some were exactly correct after all, so that doing this averaging puts the picture off, it might have been earlier than 2345 B.C. Going by the years of ages in the LXX, two possiblities exist, either as written is correct, in which case the impact date is around 2258 B.C.; or, you assume error in scribes and that the entire ages of the patriarchs prior to Nahor or perhaps prior to Serug, age at birth of relevant son plus age to death after that should be treated as a lump sum, and you get an impact date of around 2674 B.C.
Both dates could be accomodated by assuming that assumptions about error needing correcting are wrong, but you can't tell WHICH observations were wrong and WHICH were correct, but that there is enough to skew the results off 2345 B.C. Or, that that date is correct in which case you need to downsize some patriarch's lives.
The difference of a few hundred years in either direction isn't fatal to any theory. Especially since we don't know how much of a jolt and how much of a displacement occurred.
This timing would point to the second interpretation of Genesis being correct, since precisely such an impact would start or speed or create outright the separation of continents we have now. The observed plate tectonics and so forth are a result not a cause.
In fact, the date selected by Dobson assumes the event occurred then, but more likely it occurred a few hundred years earlier, because it would take a while for people to recover from the shock of such an event and start making observations. So applying the psychology issue, you could have 2345 B.C. As the date of civilization's recovery or of some elements of it, and the event itself anything from a few decades to a few centuries prior.
The curse on Eve according to a Hebrew interlinear with English text says that her conception as well as pain would be increased, so she was probably not fertile more than once a year like most other mammals, but unlike most, affection and playfulness and companionate sharing of themselves with each other would have resulted in sex fairly often.
And Eve did't rebel against Adam's authority because he didn't have any over her no roles no nothing, just freely being themselves with each other, even the curse on her that she would become dependent on him and he would rule over her was not a cretion of roles and authority just a situation which then morphed into an artificial status like that, which Paul later addressed in terms of making the otherwise abusive pagan patriarchal head of family be the nurturer, and the woman not expendable nurturer as before, because now the man was to be if boss over the woman was to be like Christ to the Church and likewise slave masters were to remember they have a Master in heaven Who is not a respecter of persons, i,.e., your social, employment, family, ownership whatever role does not validate abuse.
Eve rebelled against God. Frankly a more serious matter.
What was the talking snake? a posessed actual snake the fallen angel then became bound to, to live a degraded life in the dirt at least for the lifetime of the snake? or some reptillian intelligent kind of life like the wild stories of humans who are disguised alien reptiles or reptoids imply? Or just a seraph, flying fiery serpentine form? But the devil was a cherub, so that is out. (the cloven hoof angle on the devil is because of the cherub origin likely, since these were like powerful bulls with human heads.)
The snake started by asking "yea, has not God said" and then
phrased it a bit off. Eve corrected it, that indeed all trees were edible but not that one only. But she added a hedge (you
shall not touch it) though perhaps that had been added by God
at some point.
Since Genesis chapter 5 says that God called THEIR name Adam in they day He made them, and He walked with Adam in the cool of the evening, Eve heard from God directly also, it was not vectored through Adam. Indeed, if it had been, some denigration of his accuracy in telling what God said might have been thrown in.
The devil then persuaded Eve that she would not die, but her eyes would be opened and she would be like YHWH Himself, and would know good and evil - not know right from wrong but experientially know good and evil, standing above both like the Nietzschean overman, beyond good and evil. not a good idea.
She bought the idea, and gave the forbidden fruit also to Adam who was with her (she was not alone when this happened, but Adam says PAul was not deceived but ate knowing this was wrong. Why? well, he saw she didn't drop dead immediately, so instead of being persuaded by another (aka "deceived, persuaded to your disadvantage" per Strong's Concordance ) he saw for himself, but misunderstood what he saw. Death can be said to be as good as accomplished once an irreversible poison process has begun. But they DID die in the day they ate, one day is a thousand years in God's sight, and no one lived that long except Enoch and Elijah which were miraculous exceptions by divine intervention, and not on their own.
Would they have aged and died without doing this anyway? The Tree of Life gives immortality. symbolically you can say that Jesus Christ and His Body and Blood are the Tree of Life and relate this also to The Cross, but literally it was a plant that would keep them alive. And they were removed from the Garden and it was put under angelic guard, to prevent them living forever by eating it.
The Orthodox Church position is that they were inherently immortal. This would mean the Tree of Life was irrelevant, which it obviously wasn't But perhaps The Holy Spirit restrained thecompilers of dogma from too extreme an error. Let's say they were inherently immortal, but would age. But never get totally decrepit and never die. The Tree of Life then would give youth. But in the absence of their inherent immortality, stripped from them by the action of the plant or the curse of God for eating the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or by both, the Tree of Life would have prevented their deaths, thereby they would have lived forever if they kept access to it. This is a position that remains ORthodox and Biblically consistent.
When you eat something, it becomes or part of it usually becomes, a part of you. An ontological change took place, and their eyes were opened and for the first time they felt shame about their nakedness (and eroticism and whatever else). Why? probably because this was a rebuke to their altered state of consciousness delusion of godlikeness, not godliness which means godlikeness in the sense of virtues, which they originally had, but the false claim of divinity itself by nature not by adoption and not by comparison and similarity compared to other creatures or by any kind of role to other creatures.
ORIGINAL SIN. This is sometimes misunderstood as each of us having personal guilt for Adam's sin. Actually, it is a cotamination, a kind of mutation, but not a simple matter of some one or several genes that could be identified and clipped out. the whole system was contaminated body and soul and spirit. To limit it to the body only, especially if it is a gene, would be pelagianism because if you can identity and
snip that gene out, you would have eliminated original sin. A diffusing thoughout the whole protoplasm is more like it, and uneradicable, as if the entire body were composed of nothing but cancer cells.
How is this passed on? This contamination is a warp, predisposing us to going bad. It manifests at some point in each person in different ways and to different degrees. Obviously some sin was possible in Adam and Eve before the Fall, and insofar as Eve believed the lie about God that He was holding out on them and lying to them, and insofar as she started to reach for the fruit, picked it, brought it to her mouth, she sinned before she ate, but these were correctable. The one thing not correctable was actually eating it, and this created a
worse situation than before. Now they were predisposed to sin
and this condition was inheritable.
How so?
in the west (i.e., the Roman church which gradually drew away from the Eastern unidivided church until the great Schism of AD 1054) the idea gained ground that souls/spirits were separately created by God at some point, either conception or later when the embryo or fetus was "ensouled" and finally this became formal Roman Catholic doctrine, which Protestantism retained.
Traducianism however was held formally by some early fathers. Tertullian is said to have originated it, but that is not the case, he merely expounded it.
because it is taken for granted in Hebrews, where Paul explais why Jesus' Mechizedec priesthood is superior to that of Aaron and Levi.
They were still in Abraham's loins when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedec, therefore Levi tithed to Melchizedec in effect, and the inferior pays tithe to the superios.
Traducianism holds that the soul material, for lack of a better word, is inherited along with the physical material from the parents. Being more fluid or malleable the soul can change more than the body can, and if you add epigenetics into the mix it gets iteresting. So while one may be limited a great deal to whatever genetic physical material your parents provided, you are not so limited by the characteristics of the soul/spirit material they provided, and can make more changes in that.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa points out, the flesh is either alive and the soul gives life to the body, or it is dead and cannot become a baby. The gamete is half a cell, its soul material is half a soul copy of the parent's soul, at least as it was at the time the gamete formed.
And not only is the physical genetic material fallen, but the soul/spirit material is fallen also.
With separate creation of the soul each time, aka "creationism" which is not about creationism vs. evolution in original creation in this context, you either have an unfallen soul, the material being the sole basis for evil and its transmission, which is gnostic nonsense, and gives rise to or compatible with several heresies, or you have God creating fallen souls. Both are unaccpetable.
Traducianism however provides a mechanism of transmission that is inevitable in its operation, absent divine intervention to block that transmission.
It is also a bulwark against reincarnation, making it (other than in the form of possession of an embryo or fetus by a dead person, or some kind of cowalking, which is not the same thing at all) and against abortion, since the personhood begins at conception. There is never a time the preborn is not "ensouled."
So however you interpret the bit in Exodus, about a miscarriage from an injury, this single matter of Cain and Abel and Seth beginning their personal histories when Adam knew his wife (or shortly after, in that general time frame when the egg and sperm actually met), is anti abortion and compatible with traducianism. (Someone onine linked anti abortion to Apollinarianism heresy, but traducianism is irrelevant to
that.)
So Tertullian was early enough that he was merely expounding a recognition of the obvious, and Biblically expounded in Hebrews, and not inventing anything. As time passed, and more pagan philosophy snuck into Christian thought, traducianism was undermined. It is too material, too grossly physical, exactly the reason some student of Origen rejected the idea of a physical rule on earth by Christ.
But Chiliasm that was rejected by the Church early on was not the literal physical rule by Christ on earth in itself, only its limit to a thousand years. That rule is forever once He comes back, Revelation shows the 1,000 years is the first segmet of it, not the entirety.
This is misunderstood by ORthodox and Roman Catholics who reject the millenialism of protestant eschatologists, but the Creed says "He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead AND OF HIS KINGDOM THERE SHALL BE NO END," not a mere thousand years (which "chiliasm" refers to) but without end. the pre mil amil and post mil disputes have nothing to do with the pre trib, mid trib and post trib
rapture disputes, which are alien to Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
The rapture is not our blessed hope, it is a mere blip in church history and will not happen at all if no believers are left alive when Christ comes back. It merely catches us up to meet Him getting us out of the way of the wrath of God, which gets poured out on the antichrist and on those who gave in to him and worshipped him and/or took his mark. the wrath of God is not the great tribulation, but comes after to avenge it, Jesus' Second Coming destroys the antichrist, and puts a permanent stop to the persecution by the antichrst.
the egg and sperm are free floating in the womb or fallopian tube when they join, and a bit later the zygote imnplants in the womb wall. the child begins separate from the mother, attaches like a parasite, and then is cut loose. The child is always distinct from both parents, and is supposed to move ahead not be bound up by its parents their toy and slave and tool of joining to other families. OF course the child should be respectful and helpful and should learn from parents and others, and the parents should raise it to be a decent member of society, a decent person and a servant of YHWH. As an adult, the grown child should make the parents' survival needs a priority, Jesus drew a distinction between "honoring" and "obeying." In the honor your father and mother commandment, He discussed those whose false tradition evades God's law, those who when their father is in need say they dedicate everything to the Temple so they can't help him. But this isn't about obedience but about caretakeing or helping a physical survival need like food or clothing. Obeying was dealt with elsewhere, where Jesus spoke of a man with two sons, he tells them to go work in his field and one says he will but doesn't and the other says he won't but relents and works for him. Which obeyed, the one who said he would or the one who actually worked in the field? the latter, of course.
honor your father and mother is combined with a promise, that you live long in the land YHWH your God will give you. But obviously you won't if you become ungodly enough. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. This commandment presupposes godly parents who don't teach you to worship false gods or engage in immoral stuff or support evil family members against their victims who complain.
Though obeying can be a form of honoring, it is a distinct matter. the classic obedience is phyhsical labor, clean youir work, work the field, set the table. do your laundry. it does not include disobeying God and following your parents in evil if they are evil.
Helping even evil parents with food and clothing they need would be honoring them as parents, without obeying them in some matter or taking them into your home to destroy your life and family.
REspectful refusal instead of disrespectful (unless necessary) would be a case in point also.
Genesis says a man shall LEAVE his parents, cling to his ishah (woman feminine dimnutive of ish, man) and they two tight partners eventually become one flesh. This process can operate when men and women are partners in some work that puts them together a lot, like police teams and other things where you have a single pair of partners. This is a danger if one or both are already betrothed or married or one flesh by sex with a claimed partner they being each other's man and woman. This is a risk of adultery. The process that was to bond a pair and move to physical intimacy that makes the two one flesh, in the fallen human and the resulting dubious social contexts produced by fallen humans, can cause the original process to go against its purpose. To be duplicated among co workers outside of an existing marriage (legal or companionate).
Polonium isotope decay halos in granitic rocks show that the rocks were solidified in a matter of seconds or minutes. (One objection is that these are not primordial rocks because of their content, but that doesn't matter, the rocks at issue solidified in a VERY short time. "Every question regarding the validity or implications of this polonium-halo evidence has been systematically dealt with, in our published reports and in various discussions with those holding differing views." http://www.halos.com/ )
radiometric dating has seriouis problems: Carbon 14 is useless beyond several thousand years, and like all such systems produces a range of results that are averaged out. yet it has been found in fossils that supposedly are millions of years old. There are two main forms of rock dating, aside from assuming their age from the fossils in them, which then are the reason for assuming their age in the first place. These two systems in each one is consistent with itself, rocks tested by either one give the same date range in the system used. But when the same rocks are tested by both systems, the results are in total contradiction to each other. details can be found at creationist sites online.
This is important regarding evolution, for it supposedly goes so slowly it needs millions and millions of years to be accomplished. Eliminate these, and you are thrown back on "intelligent design" i.e., fast creation by a Creator, possibly with some remodeling by smart humans later, but not Darwinian evolution, and no macroevolution, changes from reptile into mammal for instance. The possibility of genetic engineering of course requires an origin for the genetic engineers, so is not a solution to the issue of origins, only to manipulation later.
Meanwhile, the pagan philosophers were arguing for a kind of evolution. And modern Eastern Orthodox especially in Europe and the USA have been influenced by worldly thinking and theology to some extent, even some things have crept in that would have been unthinkable 200 years ago anywhere in the Orthodox world, through worldly and western deviant theological speculations of Met. Anthony Krapovitsky on the one hand, who plagiarized western Abelard’s idea of "moral redemption," whether Abelard called it that or not, while condemning Anselm as western, and Kalomiros on the other. These claim they represent the Fathers, but they don’t, not on the disputed issues anyway, not without yanking stuff out of context.
I recommend Vladimir Moss’ writings on all this, the arguments and history and patristic citations stand on their own merit, and there is nothing of his schismatic issues in The Mystery of Redemption or The New Soteriology, available free online. (And some research showed me more things in the Fathers than he addressed that support his positions.)
Septuagint Legitimacy
The LXX is dismissed by some on the grounds that the Letter of Aristeas is a fantasy, but Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton in 1851, in An Historical Account of the Septuagint Version, which you can read online at http://ecmarsh.com/lxx/lxx_account.html , notes that at the time the LXX was done there was not that much use for a Greek version among the Jews of the time, and that there are more Alexandrian than Babylonian terms or something like that, and that therefore, even if we dismiss Aristeas, the most likely thing is that the LXX was translated for an Egyptian king’s library collection, and subsequently was copied from by Jews and others wanting to read the Jewish Scriptures in Greek, as this became increasingly the common tongue of all in the lands that had been put under Greek rule, and Hebrew increasingly fell out of use. Aramaic had already replaced Hebrew in common speech. It is very similar to Hebrew, and apparently provided the backbone for the square style Hebrew letters we are used to now. By the time of Jesus Christ almost everyone spoke Greek as a second language.St. Symeon who held the baby Jesus in his arms in the Temple, having been foretold by God that he would not die until he saw YHWH’s Messiah (Anointed One in Hebrew, Christos is Greek for Anointed One), is said by some church historian to have been part of the LXX translation team, and to have been very old. What is most likely, is that he was part of those that translated the Writings and the Prophets, this work being done later than the original LXX which was the Torah only. LXX refers to the seventy scholars who did this work, and while Aristeas’ version might be a bit unlikely in details, it is possible that either seventy scholars did work on this, or seventy people were involved in the process (incl. those encouraging the king to get the translation done and the king himself and the priest who supplied the Hebrew text and those who asked for and received and transported it), or seventy altogether over the years at different times, and mostly not known to each other, if you count those who translated the Torah and those who translated the rest of it. This latter is my own speculation. I run scenarios in my mind when presented with a problem.
Supporting all this, is the Prologue to Wisdom of Sirach, complaining that it is hard to translate with full meaning words from Hebrew to Greek and that there are problems as a result. I am indebted to Brenton’s article cited above, for this information, which I then went and read in Sirach for myself. This remark itself may have been one of the motives of Jerome in seeking to bypass the LXX and draw from Hebrew texts instead. However, there is a problem. By Jerome’s time the Hebrew text was the Masoretic, which the rabbis said was from a partly corrupt text to begin with, their famous measures to prevent accidental alterations preventing more errors. The article sites a midrash. https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/masoretic-text-vs-original-hebrew
Jerome may have had an agenda at times, affecting his translation. The KJV and others drawing on the Masoretic text, as he did, translates Gen. 3:15 as "He shall crush your head," and so does the LXX. Jerome in translating Hebrew into Latin rendered it "SHE shall crush your head," which error the Douay-Rheims follows, and is the basis for the erroneous statues of The Virgin Mary with her foot on the head of a snake. Jerome was perhaps excessively devoted to Mary, and may have done this on purpose, or perhaps his bias caused some slight visual hallucination, or allowed him to accept one unchecked, and he wrote "she" instead of "he." This has laid the groundwork for the plethora of marian visions that all or mostly depict the Virgin Mary as holding back the wrath of Jesus Christ, and being the mainstay against the devil. Which is unbiblical and not consistent with early fathers’ writings, or the views of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The later visions in Roman Catholicism have promoted increasingly the idea of her as co redeemer (or co redemptrix) which some in the church hierarchy are pushing for. If this were to be proclaimed as dogma, RC would be full on heretical. Of course her agreement to be the Mother of God made her a player in the whole situation, and contributed to the Redemption or Atonement by providing the flesh it was done in. But that is not the same thing as the "co Redemptrix" blasphemy. Even now, some over the top fan of hers has recently stated that she is a fourth person in the Holy Trinity. This is not formal RC dogma of course. (The devil does seem to be afraid of her, she is probably a great exorcist, but that is not the same thing.)
(The Virgin Mary is called Theotokos, or Mother of God, because God Incarnate came out of her womb, but not that she is the origin of God The Second Person only the supplier of His flesh to His Incarnation, but this term Mother of God emphasizes that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and always was so from His conception, and not a man who became God, or acquired a divine co walker or something like that). More accurately translated, Theotokos would mean Birthgiver of God.
The error in the Douay-Rheims is not to be blamed on the LXX which it includes, though there is a slight difference in the Deuterocanonical (aka Old Testament Apocrypha) books RC and EO have in their LXX. These books were NOT "added to the Bible" but rather taken away from the Bible, first by the Reformers, who separated its books from the rest of the Bible in their own place, but kept them. All protestant Bibles including the KJV had these, until in the USA in the early 1800s publishers left them out to save space and cost. Luther was not happy with Maccabbees because it shows prayer for the dead, and was used by RC to support purgatory, though the object of the prayer was to obtain mercy on the Day of Judgement for the dead sinners, not release from purgatory. Purgatory is a Roman addition, and more likely it is a misunderstanding of some situations like the tollhouse teaching in Orthodoxy shows, that one laden by unrepented of sin can be grabbed by demons. St. Perpetua the martyr’s actions, in praying for her dead brother who died an unbeliever and who she feared was in hell tell us two things. That the early church prayed for the dead, or didn’t teach against it, as she obviously received no authoritative teaching to not pray for the dead; and that prayer for the unbelieving dead was either done or not taught against, contrary to later EO and RC practice and ideas.
The deuterocanonicals were retained by the Reformers as useful but not inspired. Luther however wanted to kick James and even Revelation out of the Bible.
After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, Aquila at the behest of Rabbi Akiva made another Greek translation, to compete with the Septuagint, because he and Akiva were dead set against Christianity, and wanted to eliminate much that was in use by Christians to witness to Jews. I guess Akiva was still smarting from having bet wrong on Bar Kochba being The Messiah and lost, and wasn’t about to reconsider he might have been wrong in rejecting Jesus as The Messiah. (Messiah means Anointed One in Hebrew, Christos means Anointed One in Greek.) This only survives in fragments, but apparently in an effort to make word for word translation exactness, the result was the opposite of exact in some places, grammar and even sense of the words were compromised. The latter however might have been deliberate.
A modern Jew opined that the LXX was a terrible translation, because that bit about a virgin giving birth was what made accepting Jesus possible, but there is a lot more than that in the LXX and in modern translations from the Masoretic, and the word in HEBREW is a lot more telling than mere "betulah," hymen intacta, type virgin. Such a woman could give birth without any miracle, just have been engaging in orgasmic activities with a man without penetration. A semen spill on the vulva could result in those tadpoles swimming to meet an egg, which is why the Kikuyu, who used to practice premarital sex by rubbing between the thighs, would have a leather apron between the woman’s legs to prevent this. A pre Christian traditional activity of teenagers before marriage, not necessarily just between betrothed either.
The Hebrew word is "almah," which though translatable as "young woman" has implications of veiled, isolated, etc., and there is a male version of this word regarding a male student, who would be expected to be celibate since not married yet and concentrating on his studies, according to Strong’s. This physical isolation, a very proper and even veiled young woman, means no heavy petting, no nothing. Such a woman could not give birth without a miracle. Since Jesus is male, as the reference to His circumcision makes clear, this was not some natural parthenogenesis, which in mammals always results in a female, not a male. And you can’t blame it on alien abduction and say He is a hybrid, or some mad scientist’s experiment on her because either of these would eliminate the hymen and eliminate the non contact situation.
Origen, whose doctrinal vagueries that developed later and got him anathematized post mortem, was a brilliant scholar and at one point noticed the problems in the LXX and attempted to correct this. This is considered a negative point by LXX rejecters, who argue that we don’t know which version produced by who is the present LXX since he put together something with various translations into Greek in columns with notes as to what had been added or left out in translating the LXX from the Hebrew. However, his Hexapla isn’t what is going around now:
"There were two other early attempts to revise the Septuagint besides that of Origen. In the beginning of the fourth century, Lucian, a presbyter on Antioch, and Hesychius, an Egyptian bishop, undertook similar labours of the same kind. These two recensions (which they were in the proper sense of the term) were much used in the Eastern Churches. " – Brenton.
So the LXX now, is the result of this work and is probably more accurate than whatever original work Aristeas refers to. However, that original work is what The Apostles used, mostly. The Eastern Orthodox Church tends to consider the LXX inspired, somewhat like KJBO think the KJV is I guess, but whether it is or not, we have Apostolic validation for the original, and the settled version now is an EO production anyway.
It is argued that if there is the slightest error in Scripture then we can’t trust anything in it. The entire faith is out the window. I am not arguing for evolution or theistic evolution in this matter, but when it comes to chronological issues and even some versions including a name in the genealogical records that another leaves out, this is not the problem it appears to be. Because with the days of Abraham and Moses and thereafter you have a clear written record, which sometimes cites popular sources of the time that are no longer extant, having retained in the cite all that was NECESSARY not necessarily all that existed.
And people with means and motive to preserve the record. By the time of the New Testament, we are looking at eyewitness testimony, of a more recent date so less room for error to creep in that has any impact of importance. The OT material is mostly eyewitness testimony also. The New Testament eyewitness testimony refers back to the Old Testament repeatedly. Jesus refers to The Flood, and does not stipulate when it happened merely that it did happen. This was heard by His listeners (and He undoubtedly said many things more than once) and remembered and recorded.
In compiling this I have benefitted from many sources, including conversations mostly if not all online, which resulted in some link to an article being posted that was of use.
Chapter one
1. "In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. 2. "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
There are those who argue that God didn’t make the world an empty formless waste, tohu, since, as per Isaiah 45:18, "He did not create it a waste" and that therefore the earth "became" to be without form and empty. The actual quote is, "For thus saith the LORD that Created the heaven; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am YHWH; and there is none else."
Two points about this. First, the intent, the message, God didn’t make the earth for no reason, with life, human and otherwise, as an accident or afterthought. God made the earth to be inhabited, for that purpose, and not just for everything on it to be allowed to run down into chaos and so forth, and though this happens since sin entered the world, God does not allow it to go on forever. Sometimes He brings a chaos and carnage on the sinners, to discipline or remove them, because what they considered order and goodness was in fact chaos and evil from God’s perspective, as well as that of their victims, because it violated His standards and opposed His goodness. But the goal is improvement. The overall context and message of Isa. 45:18 sentence fragment they like to use, is not about the details of creation itself, but about its purpose. As for details, you could also read this as that God did not create the earth a void, in the sense of what His finished creation was, and that this Isaiah cite is not about what He started it out as, but how it was when He finished it and declared it "very good."
Second, the word tohu, which is in the phrase "without form and void," means "formlessness, confusion, unreality, emptiness," which is exactly the picture of potter’s clay at the start, before the potter has formed it. Also, Hebrew is as someone phrased it, a highly context driven language. A word can have several meanings depending on context. Though the core meaning and the implications of the root word it comes from would be the main driver, its exact meaning would depend on the rest of the sentence and the subject matter.
The word "became" chosen as translation doesn’t support this view, of a primal initial perfect at the start creation, that then was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Because it can just as well mean "came into being," just like the blobby mess a potter throws on the wheel before he shapes it. Apparently the Scofield Reference Bible supports the Gap Theory. There are a lot of problems with Scofield, which I won’t get into here. Scofield and Darby also had a lot of help from rather strange sources.
Genesis chapter one shows a process of development of things.
Hippolytus notes "On the first day God made what He made out of nothing. But on the other days He did not make out of nothing, but out of what He had made on the first day, by moulding it according to His pleasure." http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-exegetical.html this site, by the way, is problematic in that it lumps all kinds of heretical and problematic stuff together under the label "early Christian writings," but it’s a good quick source.
3-5. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." God then divided light from dark and called light Day and darkness Night.
Now some quibble that the sun and moon are created (or at least positioned) later so how can this be? But there are two ways. First, the canopy of vapor could have been so thick that their disks were not visible, and that this creation account is a series of visions given, displaying things from the perspective of one viewing it on the ground, and the writer simply records what he sees and some things God says.
This would have the sun and moon already existing, but not visible themselves, only the effect of the sun during the day, but the moon obscured at night.
Creationists argue for a canopy from which came the waters of the Flood and the canopy cleared up after, since all its water was lost to The Flood. But that is not necessary and likely would have left the sun disk barely visible during the day, and the moon always invisible, until after the Flood. Even present day heavy clouds will do this. Which means that there could have been initial heavy clouds, but not the canopy the Creationists usually posit these days, and which evaporated early on.
The main reason for the canopy idea, is to explain where all the Flood water came from, and to explain the shortening of human life after The Flood, due to more ultraviolet light exposure. But the Bible says that waters from the deep broke to the surface as well as rain, and the whole thing was a supernatural event, so you don’t need to scramble around looking for explanations that much. There can be other reasons for shortening of life. And the four main Old Testament sources don’t all agree on some ages given. This is a problem of copyist error not the inerrancy doctrine, which applies to the original texts only. But the ages given are great enough before and notably shorter after The Flood that something changed, or else some conflation of people with similar names happened.
The other explanation, of light before the sun and moon were visible from the earth’s surfrace, is that the earth was much farther from the sun, and the solar system was put in order during these days. Also, that light came from other sources no longer present, perhaps the sun was not fully ignited, that the earth was originally near a glowing nebula and the earth was moved elsewhere or the nebula became the sun or was moved elsewhere. A creationist site suggests sonoluminescence.
Of course it might be a pervading light, which God used to make other things with.
"And the evening and the morning were the first day."
Because of inheriting the Roman calendar, we generally treat the day as ending and beginning at midnight. This was also true of several other ancient cultures, which went sundown to sundown, and one of them was the Jewish culture. This likely tracks back to earliest times, to ancestors before the Hebrews. It is a logical thing. I remember as a child being puzzled by the day ending at midnight because it ends, day being daylight, when the day is over (as it is in fact said) at sundown. Probably this was the original way with everyone, before complicated notions involving sun worship and what not came into play. So the first day began in the evening, when it was still dark, and continued after God made light.
Hippolytus of Rome AD 170 – 235 observed that "On the first day God made what He made out of nothing. But on the other days He did not make out of nothing, but out of what He had made on the first day, by moulding it according to His pleasure." http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-exegetical.html
6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8. "And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. "
Some argue this is superstitious ignorance that the sky is an inverted solid bowl, and the sun and moon and stars travel across it. But the word firmament can be translated "expanse." Raqia, an extended surface, expanse per Strong’s Concordance. Though this has usability as a "surface," it is a surface appearing thing, but it is an expanse. The lower heaven with the clouds in it, is indeed a bowl, held by gravity, when you look at it from above the earth.
9. "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10. "And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Now it gets interesting. Geologists have come up with the idea, that long ago all the continents were one landmass, and indeed they do fit roughly together, as if they had been torn (or drifted, the usual idea of scientists) from each other. They call this "pangea." Creationists and evolutionary scientists don’t disagree much on what happened, the disagreement is about how and when it happened. (I don’t think it is only 6,000 or so years old, neither do I buy the millions of years story. Probably more like 12,000 years old. )
Someone looking for contradictions in the Bible, may quibble that somewhere it speaks of the waters retreating from the land instead of the land rising up out of the waters, but why not both at once? The effect would be the same. When The Bible was written, there wasn’t that much space to write on, even so God is very terse compared even with ancient pagan writings. He is an expert at conveying maximum information in minimal space, you just have to unpack it.
11. "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12. "And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13. "And the evening and the morning were the third day."
14. " And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years;
15. "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also.
17. "And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18. "And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19. "And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."
Now, it is protested by some detractors, that plants could not grow without sunlight on the previous day. But if these were literal days, they only had to go one day without sunlight, and they already had the cloudy light anyway, which is enough for most plants.
Astrologers like to point to this "signs and seasons" as supporting their "art." But in fact it doesn’t. While ‘signs" can mean "banners, omens, pledge, sign, signs, standards, witness, wondrous." (Strong’s) it is from a root meaning a sign or mark like a descriptor. In other words, navigation, and perhaps some supernatural modifications or arranging of them to say something. Mostly navigation in this context. Some unusual change or addition or subtraction might be an indicator of something, a sign from God. Astrology was condemned in the Old Testament and by Christian writers along with the general idea of fate, predestination which was a common feature in pagan thought. Free will (not in the Pelagian sense that one can be sinless and not need a Savior) was always the rule, as opposed to later notions brought in by Calvin and to some extent by Luther. In this, they took some points of Augustine and ran with them, Augustine having thrown a focus on this in an overreaction to Pelagius.
This does create a major problem with the canopy pre Flood atmosphere theory, because according to this, especially those who argue that the earth’s axis was upright, and only tilted during the Flood and remained that way, there would be no seasons everything would always be summer. Or late spring. But Genesis says that from the start, the stars were to designate seasons. While these are mostly times for meeting, for festivals, the latter are geared seasonally. Paganism especially does this, but you notice that there are seasonal festivals in the Mosaic Law, to give thanks to YHWH.
In Genesis 8:22, God says to Noah, "while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." Why would God say this to Noah, if there were no seasons before The Flood? Noah would not know what God was talking about, and there is no explanation of them as if they were anything new in themselves.
20. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. "And the evening and the morning were the fifth day."
Now it really gets interesting. As I said, creationists and evolutionists differ less on what happened than how and when it happened. Both agree that animal life began in water, and found its way onto dry land. Or, according to Genesis, the fowl began in water and filled the earth.
But if you look closely at this, the water living creatures include the great monsters of the sea incl. whales, that evolutionists think started on land and went back to the sea. Maybe like The Bible says, they started in the sea.
It also means, that very likely any land animal that spends as much time as possible in water, is probably one of these fifth day creatures. Hippos, for instance. But not rhinos. Elephants likely, since they will not only swim, but travel under water with their trunks up snorkeling, and frankly the trunk looks like it was designed exactly for that. The otters, the whales, and probably the large dinosaurs like brontosaurus which would do better in a swamp, someone speculated, for help supporting its huge body. Perhaps the giraffe was originally a swimmer, with that long neck, keeping the head or at least nostrils out of water, and got trapped on land later.
How do you define "fowl?" Leviticus 11:13-22 lists as "fowl" anything that flies, including the bat, and flying insects. So bats and maybe glider type mammals and reptiles and all the flying insects (incl. grasshoppers and mantids, which you don’t see fly much, but have wings) were fifth day creatures. Sounds like God classifies things more on the basis of what they do than of what their genetic or structural similarities might be.
24. " And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his king: and God saw that it was good."
Lest someone complain that "cattle" and "beast of the earth" is a redundancy, it would seem that the animals that were domesticated later, were designed with a view to domesticability.
26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Notice He says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let THEM have dominion…." so BOTH sexes are included in "man" being in the image and likeness of God, because He immediately follows this with granting them, plural, dominion over earth and its contents. This is made very clear in Genesis 5:2 which BOTH were called "Adam." Apparently God had His own name for some things such as humans. Adam was naming things and already thought of himself as ish, man as individual, and named the woman ishah, small economy sized female man. But to God, both were adam, taken from adamah, the reddish earth.
27. "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
28. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
Firstly, "Be fruitful and multiply is not a command to be followed, but an empowering statement creating the ability to be fruitful and multiply, just like "Let there be light" creates light, so with this statement "Be fruitful and multiply," God creates their reproductive fertility.
This is therefore NOT A BASIS FOR REJECTION OF CONTRACEPTION, SO LONG AS IT IS NOT A TYPE THAT HAS ANY ABORTIFACIANT POTENTIAL. The Church canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils never attack contraception, rather abortifacient potions. The sole apparent exception is just a reiteration of a known standard of morality, else it would have specified barrier contraception and coitus interruptus which it didn’t, because these would be an addition to a known target, abortifacient potions.
Secondly, The Gap Theory people, who argue that there was a previous creation that had been semi destroyed by the rebellious angels, like that word "replenish" which now means to RE fill. But Strong’s shows that the Hebrew word means merely to fill.
And in 1611, it did not mean refill but only fill in English. http://www.sirbacon.org/links/BaconEnglishLanguage.htm says that, inspired by the example of seven scholars who took the mishmash that then existed in France, and created the French language as we know it now, he decided to overhaul the English language. To systematize it more, given the chaos it still is he didn’t do that good of a job. A video said that caused "replenish" to mean "refill," and whether that is correct or not the same video showed a shot of an early 1800s dictionary, which gave the primary definition of "replenish" as merely "to fill" and the secondary meaning as "refill." So clearly replenish doesn’t mean what Gap Theorists think it did in 1611.
As for what it means to fill the earth, obviously this was a generalization because literal filling would leave nothing but standing room and no room for animals or land to grow food on. In ancient times, it was thought the world was pretty well populated, and someone arguing with an early churchman who promoted virginity and monasticism said this would eliminate the human race, but the churchman said that the world was already filled enough anyway. So this is rather subjective. This blessing is also an empowerment, a making fertile and granting a capability to them.
Having dominion obviously wasn’t supposed to be destructive, but more like ordering things. In the second chapter we will see Adam being told to "tend the garden and keep it" so the normal role of the human is like a cross between a farmer or gardener and a forest ranger.
Which also means that the agrarian and nomadic lifestyles were not that separate originally. Indeed, we will later see agrarian Cain and herdsman (so semi nomadic) Abel as contemporaries. And some anthropologists and archaeologists are arguing the same, that instead of one deriving from the other, they developed simultaneously as different modes deriving from the hunter gatherer predecessor. (Adam in the garden would be doing a kind of agrarian thing, so you could argue that herding developed later, as indeed a few anthropologists have argued.) Of course this also means, that you can take the whole thing literally and be on track with what is known, that Adam was a model of gatherer but also maintainer, as some hunter gatherers are known to have planted seeds to gain from later, for instance, the oaks in California were apparently so extensive because Indians were deliberately planting the acorns they didn’t eat to get more later. Or, you can take the whole thing as telescoped human history over thousands of years, and you are still on track with the Bible and anthropology. However, the more literal interpretation I think is better. But even so, you don’t have to throw out belief in and obedience to YHWH and YHWH The Holy Trinity’s Second Person Incarnate Jesus Christ/Messiah just because you think that some things in Genesis are more metaphor than literal historical reality.
The recent discovery of Gobekli Tepe, and its sister sites, Karahan Tepe and Nevali Cori, are a great puzzle to archaeologists who figure that the more agrarian and city building Neolithic came after a nomadic period in human life which came after a hunter gatherer time. Evolution is assumed to be the rule, and of uniform stages of development, in human societies, even as it is assumed to be the rule in nature. But the problem is that these Neolithic type sites are not part of an agrarian society, and look like they were built by hunter gatherers or perhaps nomads. This does not fit the presuppositions. It does fit the reality of the coexistence of agrarian and nomadic systems from the start, as shown with Cain and Abel. These were of course built long after that time. I suspect Gobekli Tepe is pre Flood, because of the otherwise puzzling burial of it in sand and dirt, which seems deliberately done. But if these are Flood residues, then it makes sense. It would represent unrighteous people.
29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."
In Elizabethan English, "meat" means food. Apparently it did so in several languages. Meat in the modern sense is referred to in a lot of Orthodox writing as "flesh meat." Modern humans are a lot more carnivorous apparently than earlier times, and take flesh meat for granted as a daily thing.
30. "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so."
I notice the sea life is not mentioned in this unless they are by implication included with fowl, which were created on the same day as fish and whales. But if that were the case, why are beasts of the earth and creeping things mentioned also, either one of them would do to refer to 6th day creations? Perhaps sea life were the original omnivores, eating the clams and some fish and the plankton (larvae of many sea creatures) and even perhaps adults.
This brings up the problem of death before the Fall. One Orthodox writer online suggested that perhaps death was present outside the garden of Eden but not inside. That being the case, the garden and its order and immortality was to be increased throughout nature, and The Fall brought in death. Another idea is that death was limited to non human life forms. Of course Adam and Eve could feed some of the Tree of Life to pets and keep them going.
31. "And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
An important point about all this was made by the late Fr. Seraphim Rose in Genesis Creation and Early Man. "…no scientific theory can tell us about those Six Days. Science tries to explain (sometimes with more and sometimes with less success) the changes of this world, based on projections of natural processes which can be observed today. But the Six Days of Creation are not a natural process; they are what came before all the world's natural processes began to work. They are God's work; by very definition they are miraculous and do not fit into the natural laws which govern the world we see now."
An important thing also is that all life and plant forms were created in their adult condition. This will be more obvious in chapter two but equally obviously those plants would have to have their seeds and fruit that were to be eaten, ready for the creatures that needed them. So the plants would have been created adult, or made to mature overnight.
Chapter two
1. "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2. "And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.
3. "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made."
Here we get to the sabbath dispute. Paul says that sabbaths are not to be kept any more, because they are part of the Law which is a shadow of things to come, Col. 2:17; Heb. 10:1 (read the entire context which is Hebrews chapters 7 through 10) but Christ has come and fulfilled and therefore changed the ritual Law. (the moral code was not changed, if anything made stricter, more of a focus on the mind as well as actions, but the ritual code you had to keep to be in covenant with God was eliminated. External actions like food laws and circumcision were removed.) But he also says in Romans 14:5-10 not to argue about whether a day is to be viewed as special and observed or not, so apparently this was about those who paid attention to commemorative days or not, and kept sabbath on the basis that it was not just Mosaic but also from the beginning. And indeed, having one day’s rest a week, whichever day, is a good thing, and also an admission that you are not omnipotent and do need rest. An admission of your creatureliness.
Sabbath keepers argue that it is only the other Mosaic holy days that are rescinded, but Paul lists both holy days and Sabbath in the same breath, so both are involved. Sabbath keeping, since you could argue it dates to creation, is not as severe an attack on the New Covenant as other Mosaic things, but it can be a gateway into this. The less severe dangers of Sabbath keeping are probably why Paul says in Romans to not be upset with each other over whether you keep a day as above another or whether you treat them all as equal, because both are either honoring a day or ignoring it "to the Lord."
Sunday is not a sabbath never was, despite the statement of an early west European synod. Saturday was always the seventh day, whether you kept it as sabbath or not, and Sunday is the first day of the week, it is kept holy for worship as it is the day on which Christ rose from the dead. A mini Easter or Pascha each week. Constantine apparently ordered that the first half of Sunday be free of work so civil servants and so forth who were Christian could attend church services more easily. But that was not making the whole day a work free day and was not about the sabbath, so it was not a changing of the sabbath day. That was done by Paul and the Apostolic Synod in Acts 15:17-20 who eliminated it, along with everything else the Mosaic Law required as an external action needed to be in covenant with God, excepting only to not fornicate, not murder, not eat things sacrificed to idols, and not eat "things strangled." The latter would be animals killed without any exsanguination, for instance, poultry whose necks had been wrung, instead of head cut off. A shot (bullet or arrow) to the heart or gut would cause bleed out into the body cavity, which is then lost when the belly is gut open to remove the guts. Or so it would seem. Ideally the animal should have its throat slit. I had some misgivings about a bird shot while flying, if through the head. This would blow the head clean off possibly. However, a falling bird would lose some blood through the neck on impact with the ground, from the shock and the heart might keep beating reflexively a little right after losing its head. Chickens with heads cut off have been known to keep some activity and a clean cut of the neck also stops brain signal to the body, so a shot to the head of a bird in flight might not be an issue. However, there is the chicken with its head cut off that keeps moving. This reflex action would probably involve continued heart action briefly, enough to pump some blood out when the head is shot. If the head was not blown off but the brain hit by a pellet or two, one could argue how much exsanguination occurred, is this so little it is the same as "things strangled" or is the little blood loss enough? Deliberate retention of blood or adding it back in to improve flavor is explicitly denounced in the canons.
There is another thing about this. If God created using evolution at all, whether punctuated equilibrium or saltation most likely, He finished creating, and is not doing it now, so the evolutionary processes are no longer at work. This would explain why you don’t see any indications of them, if you are a theistic evolutionist. But there are far more serious problems with evolution than that. The changes within species observable now cannot result in shifts as drastic as Darwin presupposed. If God created strictly by immediate command (fiat in Latin), He is not doing so now. Possibly He at times secretly resurrects some extinct creatures to restore them, certainly maintenance of the creation incl. the birth of new stars might indicate that after His rest, He does create a bit now and then, but it is not like what went on during the 6 days of Creation.
Chapter two continues with the second creation account. This is a matter of dispute with many, because it appears to contradict the first chapter’s creation account. The order in which things are made is almost reversed for the last several days of creation.
One solution to this, would be that the first chapter is an overview and the second goes into detail, regarding the creation of mankind, but this doesn’t resolve the issue of the contradiction of order of creation.
There are two solutions. One, that this is a teaching parable, that the contents of the second and third chapter are only partly historical, and the conflict between the two creation accounts is a hint, that this is now no longer history, but a story that tells important facts to understand, and to learn from it you must read it as if it is in fact historical fact to the last detail. That whatever happened in the Fall was more complicated, and/or is invariably repeated at some point in every human individual’s life no exception except Jesus Christ Himself. This idea is called in Protestantism, if I recall correctly, "neo orthodoxy." I am not entirely happy with it, and though it leaves room for more people than Adam and Eve and a longer time of development of things, it also leaves room for speculation about some surviving lineage free from sin, which would be an elitist neo gnostic kind of thing with genetics thrown in. I don’t like it, and though I entertained this idea I don’t think it is the solution. (There is also the idea of the Gap people, that this was the recreation done after the massive destruction they propose happened between the initial creation, and the earth "became without form and void.")
Two, that this is as correct as the first account, and as literal. That the situation described is not that of all the earth, since the word haaretz can mean the whole earth or a segment of it, the land of Israel for instance, but instead is the situation in a local place. That God created Adam, after creating all those other creatures, and then made the garden and planted it and created more of same creatures He’d already made, and placed them there for Adam.
Why would God do this?
While the modern reader gets to see how things would look, to a hypothetical observer on the surface of the earth during the process of creation itself, Adam did not have such a view. God could have done a smaller local creation to show Adam that YHWH Elohim indeed is the Creator and all powerful and the author of all good. God also gave Adam a model of farming, that you need to prepare the land before you put the plants in.
4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and heavens,"
Notice the words "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens," the usage of this in this context may support the day-age theory, because otherwise you have a contradiction inherent, because everything was not made in one day but seven days, and you have the reference to one day being equal potentially to a thousand years in God’s sight. (2 Peter 3:8 quoting Psalm 90:4.) But you can’t argue for 6,000 years of creation on this basis, because in this passage it says God created these things incl. Adam in the DAY that He created the heavens and the earth, so the entirety of creation was done, incl. Adam, within a thousand years.
When the KJV shows the word Lord done all capital letters, but the ORD shorter, this is where the Masoretic text says YHWH. In future I am going to write YHWH where this is present. I am not a promoter of Hebrew Roots or anything like that incl. Jehovah’s Witnessism. That is all heresy, the former of the Judaizing sort Paul struggled against, which would restore the obsolete Mosaic Covenant external forms. (It also has at least two founders that had paranormal events, incl. a so called angel that handed one fellow a tract arguing for Sabbath keeping after which the rest of Judaizing and compromising the finished work of Christ on the Cross, with works of the Mosaic Law, developed in the teaching.) The latter is a rehash of almost all the early heresies with a heavy Arian bent.
5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for YHWH God had not caused a rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."
This is a good support for my theory (maybe someone else has had the same idea) that "the earth" in this chapter refers to local earth not all the earth. After all, you don’t need human tilling to get all those plants and trees throughout the world. So this has to be a local semi barren condition, with good soil, that God is going to use to show Adam that God is the Creator.
6. "But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground."
This is used by some of my fellow Creationists, to argue that no rain came on earth in general, until the Flood. But this kind of situation still exists locally in many places.
7. "And YHWH Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; AND MAN BECAME A LIVING SOUL."
This is very important, and that is why I write it all in capital letters. We are used to thinking of body and soul as radically distinct, the soul as something added to the body. But this is incorrect and a holdover from pagan and gnostic philosophy, which esteemed matter inferior and that the soul was totally distinct from the body. What the Scriptures tell us here, is that the entire being is the soul, and that the body is part of the soul. A denser part of a spectrum, body soul and spirit, which at death drops off, and the being goes on in a truncated or reduced condition. But it is the personality and consciousness. At no point from conception does the body exist without the soul, neither is the soul added to it, but it comes with the body.
The term soul, nephesh, can be used to refer to the entire being, including the body, or even the body alone, thus "the soul that sinneth, it shall die" Ezekiel 18:20, referring to physical death, and it can be used to refer to the immortal part, or to the life of the being, the aliveness, the status as "living," which is still something of a mystery in itself to scientists. Soul therefore is ambiguous, and spirit is harder to pin down having many meanings and applications, from the core identity of the being, to an attitude, to the Spirit of God to various creatures that are spirits either discarnate or never incarnate at all.
The soul material, then, is what animates even the cell. And even as cells divide and multiply, so does the soul material with them. There are two forms of cell division, meitosis, which produces two genetically identical daughter cells from the split of a single cell, each with all 46 chromosomes; and meiosis, where germ cells fission and produce gametes, each with only half the normal chromosome count, and which must join with gametes of the opposite sex of the same kind of creature, in order to produce a zygote, a cell with all the chromosomes, which goes on to divide in the meitosis style and differentiate until it is old enough to survive outside of the womb or egg depending on what kind of creature we are talking about, then continues to divide and differentiate until it is an adult. Division continues after that as maintenance.
And when this happens, each cell has a copy of the parent cell’s soul material, either the entire soul material in meitosis, or half of it in meiosis. When an egg is fertilized, the physical material which is half of a normal cell, and the soul material in that cell, half of the normal soul material, also join. The resulting child is half and half of its parents physically, and half and half of its parents’ soul material. But it is also a totally separate being, from the moment of conception, when two halves join, it is not even attached to the mother, but free floating, and divides several times before implanting in the womb wall, and grows until birth when it fully separates from the mother, and goes on to live its own life.
It is not the creation of its parents, but the continuation of the creation of God.
This is traducianism, a concept that some early Church Fathers held, but which gradually became eclipsed by what is called creationism, not regarding the creation of heaven and earth, but regarding the creation of the soul, notions of the soul being joined to the body at some point, as a separate creation for the occasion by God. Traducianism I think has been officially rejected by the Roman Catholic Church, but has never been officially rejected by any Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction. I don’t know about the monophysite and miaphysite and nestorian sects, but the arguments for monophysitism of any category include the union of the Two Natures as comparable to the union of body and soul to make a person, which presupposes creationism of the soul, and evidences a basic Greco pagan gnostic foundation.
While a pro abortion youtube video lecture, tried to associate recognition of life from conception with traducianism and equated that with the apollinarian heresy, traducianism has nothing to do with apollinarianism. It might be that this heresy tried to exploit traducianism in arguing for its position, which may have caused some reaction against traducianism, but the two have nothing inherently to do with each other. Traducianism is of course a very solid ground for opposing abortion at any stage, but you don’t need it. Most who oppose abortion do so on either
scientific grounds, the sort of evidence you see in medical books about the development of the child from fertilized egg through blastocyst, embryo and fetal stages to birth. (The term "fetus" is Latin for child, and referred to the last few months before birth to a few years old), or from
religious grounds that are separate soul creationist anyway. These argue that you cannot know when God implants the soul, and that it is probably at the moment of conception, since the child is obviously physically alive from conception on. If the gametes, one or both, were not alive, they could not join and make a new cell; and if at any stage of development to birth, the developing creature was not alive, it would be miscarried or reabsorbed, and there would be no birth. Traducianism is not necessary for an anti abortion argument.
St. Paul in Hebrews chapter 7, not only teaches traducianism, but seems to take it for granted as self evident, not going into explanations or defenses of it. Hebrews 7:1-10, Levi receives tithes "though they [levites] come out of the loins of Abraham: But he [Melchizedec] whose descent is not counted from them received tithes of Abraham, and blessed him that had the promises. And without all contradiction, the less is blessed of the better….And as I may so say, LEVI ALSO, WHO RECEIVETH TITHES, PAYED TITHES IN ABRAHAM. FOR HE WAS YET IN THE LOINS OF HIS FATHER, WHEN MELCHISEDEC MET HIM."
A brief excursus on tithing. We are called to give, to the poor and to the church. But the New Testament does not once mention tithing, which is 10% of your income. Deureronomy 12:17-21 and 26:12-15 show that the tithe was to be used for worship by the tither, rejoicing before YHWH where He put His Name unless way too far to go, you and your servants and the Levites. The second Deut. reference shows that on the third year tithe, you were not to use any of it, BUT IT WAS TO GO TO THE POOR. And the Levites.
And note this, there was nothing voluntary about this giving to the poor. The person who was tithing had to publicly make accounting that he had in fact done so. This was important, and the threat of God’s wrath for disobedience on major issues incl. mercy to the poor, was hardly anything you could call up to your personal choice.
Though we are not to tithe we are to give to the poor, or such organizations as don’t spend a large or even noteworthy amount on salaries and so forth. This is mandatory, not personal choice, if you are able to do so, since James’ Epistle makes a VERY big deal about this, even pointing out that fait h that doesn’t produce action is dead faith not living faith and can’t save you. Care for the poor is a manifestation of living faith.
A big myth in the conservative scene is that welfare and Supplemental Security Income and such like are bankrupting the country. This is false. the real drain is in other sectors.
Traducianism is also the best explanation for the passing on of original or ancestral sin, a warped condition of soul and body and spirit, as well as a legal condition of inheriting as heirs of Adam the status of Adam – fallen status, outside of the relationship with God that the first ancestors had before The Fall. This is not a matter of personal guilt for Adam and Eve’s sin, but inheriting the result, which aside from death processes in the body and death itself, and the morally and spiritually corrupting influences around us, often embedded in law, custom, family traditions and baggage brought into interpretations of Christianity, is also the strong inclination to go bad one way or another, that all of us manifest at some point. It could be argued, that in that manifestation of the sin nature, we are agreeing with Adam’s sin, and therefore could be viewed as accessories after the fact, legally.
It is totally wrong, however, to say that sin comes from fear of death. Though some sins do so, and those who fear death can sin more easily, and those who don’t fear death are more difficult to get to sin. Hebrews 2:15 says that Jesus came to "deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." many sins have nothing whatsoever to do with this. Some sins may even come from a love of death. Proverbs 8:36 has wisdom say, "…all they that hate me love death."
The relationship of soul to body is one in which soul affects body, but body also affects soul. This is too complicated to discuss. I am not talking about New Age Movement gurus, who essentially take a very few true things, and hijack them to the service of a body of lies.
8. "And YHWH Elohim planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed.
9. "And out of the ground made YHWH Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
The Tree of Knowledge is not something that teaches morality. It is rather something that gives an experiential and define-for-yourself knowledge, similar to Nietzschean "beyond good and evil." It is a false mockup of God’s standing as determiner of good and evil, because first it usurps God’s rightful role as Creator and therefore King, an overlord Who is not a figurehead; and secondly because God is good, and his standard of goodness partakes of His nature of goodness which is justice and mercy combined with a bias towards mercy. But the Nietszchean overman kind of knowledge of good and evil, puts the would be god player in a quasi transcendent position over both and beyond both and accountable to none, being his own god (and in conflict with all other "gods") and having no inherent goodness to use as a standard.
Those who would play God, come to the table with two handicaps they cannot overcome. They have not the right, and they have not the competence (incl. power beyond what they wreck within reach) which is implied in the mess that Frankenstein made in trying to make a superior human being. There is a line in some horror story somewhere, which speaks of someone trying to rise above humanity, and thereby falling below it.
The Hebrew word for knowledge (there are several) used here is da’ath, according to Strong’s. It means knowledge, premeditation, skill. To have premeditation and skill regarding good and evil would be to stand outside of it, judging and defining it, something only God should be doing. It would mean also that one’s programming so to speak, from God, is being overridden, and potentially rewritten. Conscience, and what one wouldn’t even think of, being changed.
A notion developed in some Orthodox Church Fathers’ speculation, that Adam and Eve were too young for this knowledge, and that later God would have given them permission to eat of this tree. This is not doctrine, merely a speculation. Personally I think this is wrong, partly because the first I ever heard of it was not from an Orthodox source but a New Age or similar occult philosophy source, and secondly because this assumes they were mere children to start with. There is nothing in the Scripture to imply this, and the general picture is one of creation of adults. Since it also says, " And out of the ground made YHWH Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food" one could argue that God caused this growth in front of Adam. The usual time frame for such growth is several years, and while it might have been much shorter, time elapsed letting Adam see the process, so let’s assume a few years added to Adam being created as a grown man. Even if a child, he had to be an old enough child that he could learn from this to start with, and the process needed to be long enough for him to get the idea that this won’t happen overnight when he plants something. So by the time they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were 20 years old or the physical and mental equivalent. Eve may have been formed as an age approximate to Adam and not gone through any processes of maturing, or not much, before she was introduced to Adam.
10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
11. "The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
12. "And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
13. "And the name of second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia."
Gihon evidently would be the Nile. A quick look at all these would raise severe doubts about all this in modern maps and geography. The Nile doesn’t even flow in the same direction as the next two rivers, nor begin anywhere near either of them. But this was before The Flood and any other cataclysms that separated the land masses, changed directions of river flows, and raised mountain ranges that weren’t likely there to begin with.
However, there is an alternate explanation for these, which I will deal when I get to the Tower of Babel.
14. "And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that is which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates."
Hiddekel is most likely the Tigris. That this mentions Assyria would red flag this to some as written much later for those who dispute the antiquity of Genesis as being from origins. But you don’t have to assume the creation account itself in its entirety is from Adam. Likely it was a vision given to Moses, and Assyria was named after its core city state, Asshur, which, according to Wikipedia, dates from 2600 BC. I read once somewhere, that the Mesopotamian city states had various creation accounts, crediting their respective top "gods," and varied. Perhaps the real accounts were kept in fragments in Abraham’s family from Noah’s time, himself drawing on records back to Adam. These might have been pictographs with a tradition of interpretation. This is of course speculation. Probably some kind of writing was in play in Noah’s time. But keeping stuff on clay tablets would mean a small amount of space to work with. So a lot of detail would be lost. Some of this may have been supplemented to Moses by God.
A note on the JPED theory of "higher criticism." Aside from any dubious personal history or social connections of the inventors of this, it is silly on the face of it. Part of it depends on the idea that an author always has only one style, but I could make different styles myself just to do it. The limitations on available writing material also would play a role in word selection and phrasing. Even so, the general tone whether poetry like psalms, or long revelations or short ones or history is different than the pagan productions of the times. With the same limitations, the pagan productions are more chatty, longwinded and silly. There is a kind of stark sanity pervading The Bible that you don’t find elsewhere. There is a lot of information conveyed in short statements, that be unpacked (as I’m doing here) by an exegesist or by the reader, especially if the latter generates mental pictures from the words and relates it to known things.
JPED argues that the whole of the Pentateuch, was cobbled together from different writers, with different agendas, at different times, and completed in Nehemiah and Ezra’s time, perhaps by Ezra himself. J stands for Jehovistic, referring to wherever YHWH is named. P is for Priestly, which would be the Leviticus and related materials, presumably concocted long after Moses. E stands for Elohistic, where Elohim is the name used for God. As you can see, both appear together a lot of the time. D is Deuteronomic, if I recall this nonsense right it would refer to a final redaction (don’t you love those fancy words that sound so authoritative on the one hand, and so dismissive of the Mosaic corpus as a whole piece) which produced Deuteronomy and all this, of course, long after the time of Moses, assuming (you can figure they are thinking) he ever existed in the first place.
A bit of internal evidence against this, is 2 Chronicles 25:4 "But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin." Refers to Deut. 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." This shows that the Torah some think was cobbled together during the Babylonian captivity was being observed before that.
The Talmudists however yanked a sentence out of context, and said not to take oaths in a criminal case from near kin because "The father shall not be put to death for the children," taking this as referring to put to death because of the word of the children. This would of course make unenforceable the laws against incest. Also not to take an oath from women, which is again not even hinted at in Torah. Though the Torah usually addresses men, are we to assume then that women were free to worship false gods, sacrifice to demons, eat meat with blood in it, or engage in anything prohibited to men, simply because they are mentioned mostly only when something specific to them and not to men, like menstrual blood, is being discussed? Obviously they were under the same laws. Since it is not prohibited in the Torah, for women to give testimony it was wrong to deny this to them. Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible, quoting (p) Misn. Shebuot, c. 4. sect. 1.((q) Bartenora in ib. at http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/24-16.htm When in fact the CONTEXT says "every man shall be put to death for his own sin," so this is not about being put to death on account of testimony but because of his own sin. These are rules for humans, this does not limit God or promise what He will or will not do. There is no conflict between this rule on humans, and God sometimes taking action on the children of the evil doers, as in the case of David’s child of adultery with Bathsheba, or the warning that God would visit His wrath on the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him, which is in context of a larger statement promising mercy and forgiveness to those who repent, so the second, third or fourth cursed generation that repents instead of agreeing with their evil doing ancestor, would be forgiven and not struck.
15. "And YHWH Elohim took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
16. "And YHWH Elohim commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17. "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18. "And YHWH Elohim said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him."
Here is where it is often argued, that woman as servant to man was inherent to the created order. Often this is incorrectly called "helpmeet," but that is not Elizabethan English. Two separate words, a helper who is meet, Elizabethan English for fit or suitable or proper. The Septuagint in English renders this as "a helper comparable to him."
A thought crossed my mind that the punishment on Eve was greater than that on Adam. Why? well for one thing she led the charge into sin. The follower is responsible to not follow into sin, but the leader, the one who introduces the idea and corrupts the person, tempting him (or her) to sin is the one who made the whole mess possible. The serpent, or the demon taking the form of one, was condemned to keep that form for "all the days of your life." Was this how the snake lost its legs and all descend from this individual? or was this a condemnation upon the snake shape taking spirit that it trapped in that body form as long as the animal would live which would in those days be a very long time? there is often a vaguely or overtly reptilian quality to demons, which betrays their heartless ways however they hide it, and also is a limiter on them, the reptilian mind being less flexible. Demons are often very smart yet can be very stupid in an odd way. Or was this a condemnation upon a spirit that had somehow possessed a snake, and would then be stuck with it living its unpleasant life for many centuries? Perhaps it had killed the snake, and during a moment of the snake leaving its body, when its autonomic nervous system was still functional the evil spirit took that nervous system over. This scenario would leave the snake innocent of having cooperated with the evil spirit. This would have been a more horrific situation, because continual, for a creature used to sailing through air and space than the occasional dreadful suffering of childbirth for a woman. So the initiator of a situation bears the brunt of the blame and punishment. This is evident also in the Law of moses, where the man who seduces a woman has to marry her. The murderer must die. The rapist must die. the thief must pay back and add a fifth to it (20% nuisance fee I call it).
Strong’s Exhaustive Hebrew Greek English Concordance of The Bible is online at biblehub.com, with a very easy search and comparison format regarding different Bible translations. Help is ezer. There are other words for helper, but this one is more like a partner, even someone operating from a superior position of ability or position, such as one who pulls another out of a ditch, and who is themselves not in the ditch, therefore in a better situation. Meet is neged. This is a word that has face to face connotations, that can be either friendly like man to man, or hostile in opposition. The issue is, that the woman is a fit partner type helper, co manager, because like unto him.
What kind of a woman would that be? A tomboy (girl who likes to play ball and other "boy’s games" and climb trees, an athlete), also when more combative called an amazon after the woman warriors of ancient legend, and frequent report. Many tribes had woman warriors, burials have been found, some burials reexamined and determined by the pelvic bones to be female, that had been assumed to be male because of weapons that were buried with her. The ancient Persians had female cavalry and archers and at least one female admiral.
Apparently some of this went on among Israelites, because Josephus wrote in Antiquities of The Jews Chapter 8 par. 43, "Take care, especially in your battles, that no woman use the habit of a man, nor man the garment of a woman." Now, the clothing of the sexes was the same in the sense that they both wore dresses, as we would view it, but the style was different for the sexes. Why would this be an issue in battles, unless women were participating also? And a man might disguise himself as a woman to be viewed as less threatening and get closer or more likely to be ignored while running away.
Josephus, in relating the Laws of Moses, paraphrases some and changes some. For instance, he says that wool and linen are not to be worn mixed because only the priests can wear this, but there is no such caveat or explanation in Deuteronomy, and nothing in the description of the priests’ clothing that mentions wool. Possibly this is an example of what Jesus referred to as "traditions of men" that make Moses’ Law of none account.
In Deuteronomy it is stated that there should be no transvestism, but it doesn’t say anything about war. So Josephus throws into the recitation of The Torah, those things that were priestly and scribal interpretations and additions.
But the point is, there is no reason to drag in warfare in relating to women wearing men’s clothing, unless women were participating in war also.
Nehemiah 3:10-12 mentions that Shallum’s daughters worked with him repairing the city wall, and Neh. 4:17, 18 says that while the workers had armed guards, ALL the workers on the wall also had swords girt on them. So Shallum’s daughters were also armed.
Of course, war is part of the evils that developed after the Fall. But the active participation of women in war, i.e., in combat, also in the hunt, are the ultimate refutation of sexism. One otherwise worthwhile and wise priest or monk I forget which, complained of women wearing pants because it results in them striding freely like men, taking on more of a man’s nature. But in fact that is the shared nature of both sexes, that culturation cheats women of.
And one more thing of interest. 2 Sam. 20:3 " And David came to his house at Jerusalem; and the king took the ten women [his] concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood."
When Absalom rebelled and David had left Jerusalem, Absalom followed someone’s advice to lie publicly with David’s concubines on the roof of his house or something like that. There is no indication these women were forced, and certainly had the option of refusing and dying or killing themselves. This was a political action designed to get David to look weak to his supporters, and to lure him to where he could be attacked, because his anger might override his cunning.
What is of interest is this: David had left them "to keep the house." According to Strong’s Concordance, the word here is H8104, shamar. To keep, watch, preserve. It is also the same word used in Jer. 51:12, for the watchmen or sentries. There is another word used elsewhere that is translated guards but means runners, like an honor guard or outriders so the person who has them is obviously important, and of course would be armed. But this word has many applications depending on context, and includes guards, guardsmen, gatekeepers and watchmen. So apparently these women were an armed amazon guard, which has been found at times in many lands and times as the close guard of a king, and you will note they were ten in number, which also sounds like a military contingent.
19. "And out of the ground YHWH Elohim formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Notice that in Genesis 1, at God’s direction all the fowl and fish and water creatures were brought forth by the waters, and the animals were brought forth by the earth, but here is a special second creation of these things for Adam’s benefit. so he can see the power and goodness of God.
20. "And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
21. "And YHWH Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22. "and the rib, which YHWH Elohim had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man."
Now there are some silly ideas that a man has or should have one less rib on one side, and the occasional deformation like this is seen as proof of this event. The important thing here, is that, as one writer said, woman was not made from Adam’s head to rule him, or from his feet to be ruled by him, but from his side, to be loved by him.
Adam’s name means ruddy, and while white racists argue this means ruddy like a pale skinned man with red cheeks from the sunshine, and/or "blood in the milk" look of red cheeks and white skin, it is more likely referring to the red earth, in which case Adam was bronze colored. It makes sense that the original ancestor of all races, would have some features of all of them, which after they ran separately after Babel, would have differentiated without breeding back to the original type. The ancestor of white and black must have himself been of an intermediate type.
Adam had been running alone for a while, got to know and appreciate animals, but also realized that he needed more from a companion than an animal can give, even those who can manage some few words can’t do a conversation, and the help any can give they need to be trained in and is limited, since ideas can’t be easily shared, neither can they usually provide solutions to problems or brainstorm to help formulate ideas. Also, they would not be sexually attractive.
Eve was not there when Adam woke up. Instead, she was brought to him. This is not from right across a small yard or large room, because then it would be that Adam saw her when he woke up. No, she was brought to him from a distance. So that she also had experienced the world around her, met the animals, understood God as Creator, and had become lonely for someone like herself.
23. "And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
Man in Hebrew is ish, and woman is ishah, diminutive of man. The similarity is emphasized not the difference.
Eve was cloned out of Adam, with a tweak to one of the chromosomes to make her a female. Eve was basically Adam’s twin sister, and had his physical and soul material. There is a silly notion that the spirit is passed on the male line, and not the female, and that original sin also is passed on the male line, not the female, which is supposedly the only way Jesus could be free of original sin. This is a mechanization of God’s work, ignoring the miraculous almost denying it. And if original sin passes only on the male line, then the female does not have it, because it must be on the Y chromosome. Anything she has, she can pass along. And if she can’t pass it, then she doesn’t have it.
Original sin is a warp deeper than any chromosome and not to be found on any of them.
The Hebrew word translated "beget" is the same as for a woman producing a child, but these are translated differently due to the patriarchal in the sense of male supremacist bias of the translators. This is another reason to reject the notion, that the spirit of a being is inherited from its father. Part of the argument includes patrilineal naming as some instinctive recognition of this, but patrilineal names are not uniform throughout the world, and did not develop in all places, and were instead patronymics, so and so son of someone. The name would change each generation. But a larger patrilineal kind of retention of one of the string of names did develop. In some places, the string of names includes those of female ancestors. The middle name of a man might be his mother’s surname.
But before all this and still in some places, you find matrilineal naming. Patrilineal inheritance usually involves patrilineal naming or patrilineal tribal or family identity. Matrilineal naming sometimes has patrilineal inheritance, sometimes bilateral, sometimes matrilineal inheritance. Many peoples had legends of past times when women had more power, abused it, and lost it, and that once everything ran on the female side and it changed to patrilineal.
Customs that are not universal, and in some places only a few hundred years old, can’t be viewed as proof of a notion of inheritance of the spirit or of the soul being on the male side only. Patrilineal naming didn’t even exist in Bible times, there was no surname, you were so and so son of someone else, and your son was somebody son of so and so and additional identifiers like of such a city or tribe or clan would be thrown in. Adoption was consider legitimate descent, and this could involve any bloodline.
Is there anything in the Bible that supports this wild story of the existence of matrilineal identity in ancient times? well yes, there is. Two places, one of which I will get to later. The other, since it is in Daniel, I will deal with now.
Daniel 11:17b (b means it is in the second half more or less of the verse)
"And he shall give him the daughter of women, corrupting her: but she shall not stand on his side, neither be for him."
A lot of people don’t know, that the prophecies about the kings of the north and south, were mostly though not all fulfilled in the days the books of Maccabbees talks about. Josephus describes all this. Some events will play out again, apparently, and some remarks fit the antichrist too well to be only referring to Antiochus IV Epiphanes . The early church writers considered Antiochus IV Epiphanes a prototype of the antichrist.
So who is the daughter of women? To make it brief, I will quote the notes to this in the Orthodox Study Bible p. 1258. "In an effort to ally himself with Egypt, Antiochus III married off his child daughter, Cleopatra, to seven-year-old Ptolemy V Epiphanes, but in the end, they did not remain with him. "
Wesley’s Explanatory Notes online says she was called "the daughter of women" because of her beauty but that is ridiculous.
Who was this woman? Cleopatra I Syra, Queen of Egypt. Who was the woman she was the daughter of ? Laodice III who Wikipedia says "was a Princess of Pontus and a Seleucid Queen." Parents King Mithridates II of Pontus and Laodice. This Laodice "was a Greek Princess of the Seleucid Empire…of Greek Macedonian and Persian descent." Parents were Seleucid rulers Antiochus II Theos and Laodice I "According to Eusebius of Caesarea (1.251), she was a daughter of Achaeus by an unnamed Greek mother. Her father Achaeus was a wealthy nobleman who owned estates in Anatolia.. Her family had power in Anatolia with strong royal connections"
Notice a matrilineality in the naming of these women, as if a two track system were running, patrilineal for boys and matrilineal for girls, not invariably of course, but there is something noteworthy here. Laodice is a combination of the word for "the people," from which comes the term "laity" for non clergy members of a church, and justice, the exact meaning however is obscure. Justice of or for or over or from the people, or some mix of all this.
Now those who know about the Amazons and other woman warriors, will recognize some of these locations as their old stomping grounds. Pontus, the Black Sea coast of Anatolia now called Turkey, Thrace and Macedonia were all matrilineal. Amazon queen Marpesia made an incursion into Thrace, and there is a village in Greece that to recent times, possibly to this day, has an odd custom. One day a year the men stay home and cook and clean, and any found outdoors are beaten. The women hang around the town and gossip and drink like men and kill a rooster and eat it. This is in honor of the village having been founded by Amazons who, having lost when they attacked Athens, were too ashamed to go home to Pontus/Paphlygonia. And they were by no means unusual as women warriors, only in their sex separatism were they unusual What is NOT well known to most people, even to researchers of the Amazons, is that the Persians had women warriors aplenty. Female archers, female cavalry, female commanders and at least one female admiral. Also in Anatolia were the Mysians, whose cavalry was female. The Lydians apparently had woman warriors also, and Lycians and Carians. In Anatolia aka Turkey, were several cities founded by Amazon queens or generals at least. None of these could be expected to have amazon burials and culture artifacts there, because their whole style was to kick butt, take tribute, and sometimes build a city to someone’s honor, by the use of slave labor of displaced populations. The culture archaeology would find, therefore, would be that of the builders not of the Amazons. In other words, no real occupation. Why? To understand this you have to look at the preislamic notion of "baraka" or blessing, more like power as a mystical force. This notion still could be found in northwest Africa to a late time. The royal progress was when a king would take his whole court and army and go honor some place in his domain with his presence, eating up a lot of their resources in the process and weakening them. This was a display of his mystical power, on which his political power was based, something like a more down to earth version of the Chinese political concept of The Mandate of Heaven. Of course, displaying his power to act by engaging in action had very pragmatic consequences.
A proof that a king had this mystical power, was his ability to control banditry, so a challenge to his power would involve banditry, see what you can get away with. For most people this is a very pragmatic thing without mystical implications. But in preislamic and Islamic countries that had this kind of mystical political theory, a successful raid was not merely showing the king lacked military effectiveness, but that this lack was proof he lacked the mystical power which was the basis of his legitimacy in the first place.
Since this is preislamic in origin, it would have existed in Myrine’s time. So essentially what the Amazon queen did, was to do a royal progress across the known world, accept tribute and move on. which is why you don’t find historical references except the vague gleanings that Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus presented in their histories.
The Libyan (meaning anything west of Egypt) and Thermodontine (northern Anatolian along the Thermodon River) Amazons were in fact the same people. Amazon is most likely a warp of Imazagh, the name of the Berbers meaning of noble origin. Tuaregs alone retain matriliny and oddly the men go veiled and the women don’t. It is not an amazonarchy, however. The Berber resistance to the Arab invasion did include some warrior queen.
In Anatolia, and scattered here and there, would be two features by Paul’s time. an entrenched male supremacist sexist system, enforced by Athenian and Roman type law. But a memory of an earlier way. Women who longed for the older system, or for at least the legend that women once were freer and could get wealthy easier and so on, but too lazy to fight for it and not inclined to be worthy of it, as women in those more ancient times would have had to be, would have played all kinds of power and manipulation games, on men and on each other. The modern "difference feminists" who eschew anything reeking of manliness and demand all the equality and power feminism wanted, but not to be better human beings, to have the manly virtues, as the original feminists who got us the vote wanted, would have been right at home. And it was this mess that Paul had to address. Ever note he addresses Priscilla ahead of her husband Aquila instead of vice versa, the more usual way, as often as the usual way? And he refers to the church in THEIR house. Clearly Priscilla was not the sort of woman the difference feminists of today would like, neither was she like the unworthy women who wanted power they were not worthy of, but merely served the vices of pride and vanity and had some degree of aggression about it because of the warrior woman history on some cities like Ephesus, and were inclined to the licentious and "ecstatic" religious style of some of the cults they grew up in. But, were also inclined to be patriarchally "feminine" about all this, so as one person said about women’s libbers, when they gave up being ladies they forgot to become gentlemen.
The famous passage about not usurping authority over a man was "authentein," a word for authority used only that one time in the New Testament, and which has violent and sometimes obscene connotations. Keeping silent in the churches and if they want to know anything ask their husbands at home, may indicate a kind of heckling was going on, that took the form of asking questions without even waiting for an answer, and then using the excuse they just wanted to learn. I have had this done to me once so I know how it would work. Paul’s recommendations about the qualifications for a bishop, elder or deacon were ideals that were open to modification for the worthy, since he did not adhere to them himself when he appointed the young man Timothy bishop of Ephesus and he told him not to let anyone despise his youth. Clearly not a man who had raised respectable children to adulthood (granted that would be mid to late teens in those days). The Council of Laodicea AFTER Nicea I forbade presbytides, or female presidents. Interpreters fall all over themselves with explanations for this, which are based on the assumption that a woman was never, ever, a priest in an Orthodox Church only in some heretical ones. But Justin Martyr c. AD 150 refers to the priest as the president of the assembly, the one who does the Eucharistic prayers after which the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (yes, a man taught by an aged man whose life would have overlapped that of the Apostle John said that the church in his day believed in transformation of the bread and wine which was later called transubstantiation and said this was the general belief of all the churches, which were themselves taught by elders who were only a few removes at most from an Apostle. In looking at such things, you don’t count generations by 20 or 40 years, you look at old people who transmitted what they had from those who were old when they were young and learning from them. St. Irenaeus c. AD 180 was taught by Polycarp who was taught by the Apostle John, and said the same thing.)
So the female president was in fact a priest. The usual arcaheological finds pointed to by feminists wanting female ordination are mostly not that supportive. The term presbytera does not mean female priest, but wife of the priest. One writer argued that if that was all it meant the term would be used today, but it IS used today in the Greek Orthodox Church. One burial does seem strange in how it is phrased, as if perhaps both were priests, the woman and her husband.
Roman Bishop Pope Gelasius I complained of women being ordained in Sicily and maybe elsewhere for lack of suitable men. In those days, the Roman jurisdiction did not include southern Italy and Sicily, so all he could do was complain. Early reports of arguments noted that the supporters of female ordination in the first 800 years argued the no male or female but all one in Christ Jesus statement by Paul, while the contrary argument was church traditional practice and the natural order of things and human law and custom. But the idea of what the natural order of things is had been warped by human law and custom. The idea of the priest as icon of Christ, and has therefore to be male, was not stated. Exactly when this idea got established I don’t know. In the Orthodox Church in America at least in the diocese I was rebaptized and chrismated in, the priest told me that it is the HANDS of the priest that are the hands of Christ during the words of institution. Two contrary ideas were in competition in early centuries, the west favoring priest as icon of Christ and through him Christ reinacts the first Eucharist, and this idea developed later after The Great Schism of AD 1054. The epiklesis, or invocation of The Holy Spirit to make the transformation of the bread and wine into The Body and Blood of Christ done after the words of institution, was effectively eliminated. All they have now is an epiklesis that asks The Holy Spirit to bless the bread and wine so that they may become The Body and Blood of Christ, which is done before the words of institution, ("This is My Body….This is My Blood") but this is asking for it to be rendered something transformable, it is not asking for the transformation to be made. Thus the Roman Church relies on the power of the priest, received in his ordination, and the Orthodox relies on the epiklesis without denying the charism of the ordination, but not relying on it. Roman Catholic influence on Orthodoxy has gone on at times, so this notion of priest as icon of Christ turns up on the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate’s web page.
This idea of the priest as icon of Christ or living image of Christ, Who is The Living Image of God, has a lot of potential wrong implications. Such as, that the priest is ipso facto closer to God than the holiest of the laity. And seducers among the priesthood have used this kind of thinking to their advantage, and some who like to seduce priests may have this as a motive. Regarding sexual abuse of minors, clerical authority is not just rank but the mystique of his being closer to God. WITHOUT A PRIESTHOOD THE EXACT SAME ATTITUDE APPEARS IN THESE SITUATIONS IN PROTESTANTISM WHEN A MINISTER OR PASTOR HAS DONE SUCH THINGS.
So the present "icon of Christ has to be male" argument did not exist originally it seems, the concept even of the priest as icon of Christ outside of the Eucharist ceremony itself, or even at all, seems to have developed centuries later. Paul’s big argument was that women were more deceivable than men, which may well be the case when they are mostly raised to not have the virtues of men. Elsewhere he references "the law" as grounds for them being subordinate to men, but this is not specified in the Torah except as a CURSE, which operates by their default, but is specific in pagan laws and customs. It would seem then, that Paul was saying that if a woman insists on being like Eve in her flaws, she can keep Eve’s curse. Paul also speaks of woman made for man and not man for woman, but modifies that by pointing out that now the man is from the woman being born from women. So this is not an absolute. And it is certainly NOT relevant to roles outside the Church organization and public meetings. The male headship as like Christ being head of the Church also runs into a problem. In this scenario, Paul pulls the fangs of the patriarchal system of the pagan society, and reverses the usual roles, since the man is the nurturer of a non expendable woman, while the usual law and custom made the expendable and replaceable woman the nurturer of the man. Paul also said to love your wives as yourselves, the same phrasing Jesus uses regarding men being compassionate to fellow men. It would seem then, that the only way to deal with ALL Scripture on all this, and not put The Bible in the position of self contradiction, but retain inerrancy, is to view this as a way of recalculating how men should view their legally subordinate and often actually inferior wives. Also we are told by Paul the Church should grow up into its Head, Who is Christ. We are to become more like Jesus Christ, but since He is also God and not only a man, we can never be exactly like Him nor not be His subordinates, but this is not the case as regards man as head of woman.
The Persian standard for men, and you can be sure for such women as aspired to manly activities, was to ride horseback well, shoot straight (arrows, and at full gallop) and TELL THE TRUTH. This is not the picture you get of the "feminine" woman.
Obviously I can make a biblical and historical case for female ordination. But women who are bad are more difficult to get rid of or oppose than men who are bad. The bishops from various cities who attended the Synod of Laodicea had had a gutfull apparently and wanted no more. When Jesus Christ addressed a church in the early chapters of Revelation, He did not denounce them for having a prophetess teaching them, but for what she taught and that they allowed this teaching.
Elsewhere He denounced the teachings of some men such as the Nicolaitains who according to near contemporaries were licentious and favored eating things contaminated by being sacrificed to idols. The later protestant historian who argued that it had to do with a hierarchy in the church looking at Nico as conqueror and laitan as about laity, conqueror of the laity, was totally wrong.
In the Panarion of Epiphanius, Bk I section 2, subject 25 et. seq, Nicolaus is described as one of the seven deacons appointed in Acts, a proselyte (convert to Judaism from among the pagans) who then converted to Christianity, and was from Antioch. At some point he got the ridiculous idea, that he would be more holy to not have sex with his wife, but couldn’t keep this going, so switched to arguing that you have to have sex every day if you are going to get into the Kingdom of heaven, going, as Epiphanius put it, from one pretense to the opposite. Neither position is Christian. Obviously he was infected with the kind of pagan philosophy that became Gnostic when it took on Christian pretensions, which despised the physical as inferior and evil in itself. This philosophy of course, did not only produce ascetics, but also libertines, since it held that the soul and body were absolutely distinct and of no effect on each other. Nicolaus trod both paths. And noticing how beautiful his wife was and how excessively lustful himself was decided everyone wanted her to, so started getting paranoiacaly jealous and slandering and accusing her. Apparently at one point he offered her to the other deacons and/or Apostles according to another story about him, which was probably the point where he got kicked out of the congregation membership of believers. (I think at this point he’d flip flopped again, moved from celibacy to lust to jealousy to that perversion of selflessness and love which "shares all" including that which one should not share.)
Later protestant writers of the closet bogomil mentality (a classic example is Alexander Hislop) argue that since Nicolaus is a mix of victory and the people it means victory over the people or rule over the laity and nicolaitaines were those who introduced clerical hierarchy and priesthood and so forth. This of course is a desperate guess based solely on a name, and obviously in total ignorance of the history of the times. Such argue that the word nicolaitan does not refer to a man but to a movement of this sort. (And one could as easily argue that Nicolaus means victory of or by the people in the sense of rebellion.)
Personally I am opposed to female ordination for the reason given, and because unless too old to menstruate there would be an issue of periodic uncleanness, which is one thing for someone to be in when receiving communion, but another thing for the one doing the ceremony. This would mean offering etherically contaminated bread and wine to God, Who does the transformation and sure He can clean it but isn’t this disrespectful? ALL CULTURES INCL. THOSE CLOSE TO PRE PATRIARCHAL CONDITIONS ESTEEMED MENSTRUAL BLOOD UNCLEAN, in varying degrees. This is not a patriarchal thing. And there would be the disablement that sometimes occurs with this, psychologically and physically with pain, and that of pregnancy. Such a church would need TWO priests to have a fallback ready if a female priest were to be disabled by either situation.
The argument as to whether or not menstruation rendered a woman unfit to receive communion raged on through Orthodox and Romanist churches to the present time, occasionally cropping up in Protestant churches. The argument for allowing this was that Christ’s Blood cleanses all including the uncleanness of menstruation, which is not a deliberate sin. The contrary argument was that it was bringing an unclean presence and the sin would be in doing this. A superstition developed in the Slavic Orthodox Churches that you can’t have ANY trace of a blood flow, a scratch, a nosebleed, anything if you are serving in the altar and I think also to receive Holy Communion. The idea is that the Blood of Christ having entered you would be lost with the blood flow. But this is too mechanistic a notion and ignores the overall spiritual effect. Besides which, wouldn’t the Body and Blood be lost to urine, later bleeds of any kind, and defecation?
Not all of ancient Greece was reliably male supremacist, and the Amazons had been through there before the Trojan War, and were among the defenders of Troy. The Medes are a bit of a question mark, but their association with the Persians would make it reasonable they were inclined to field women warriors also. The Kurds, descended in part from them, fell into abusive and restrictive male supremacy under islam, but even so the women almost never went veiled, according to travelers and photos in the 1800s, only a chador or scarf almost never the niqab and never the burka, went about more freely than other moslem women, and sometimes rode astride. They have seven tribes and in past centuries once in a while a female was the ruler of a tribe. Another Persian tribe the Qashqai may be amazon descended, because of a peculiarity about the name but don’t seem to have their habits. Their name seems similar to Gasga or Kaska or Kashka, an enigmatic people to the north of the Hittites in Anatolia who were often at war with them. The reason for the unique sex separatism may lie in their origin – that they were descended from the female army of Myrina, who came from a hill city in what is now Tunisia, and now lost in the Schott el Djerid and attacked various cities, took tribute and went her way across north Africa and into Anatolia, then a cataclysm opened the narrow land between the marsh Tritonis, and created the inland sea Tritonis, which is now the intermittently dry salt lake Schott el Djerid. The army was stranded, and could only continue life the way they were, having no home to return to and apparently no one to release them from their military oaths they probably took.
So it would look like at some point in this family of Cleopatra, not the later one of Antony and Cleopatra fame, a line existed to an amazon or to a notable woman of some other matrilineal people. A lot of armed female burials have been found. The Medes had an alliance at once point with the Scythians, many of those tribes had woman warriors.
Getting back to Daniel To call Cleopatra I Syra "the daughter of women" instead of the daughter of Mithridates II of Pontus, or just "his daughter" would point to something significant. And it may be that since the antichrist is said to not regard the desire of women, that there will be a viable nation in the Middle East when he arrives, who will be either amazonarchy throwback or at least will be egalitarian and field women warriors routinely, and he will endeavor to quash this and all other women’s rights efforts. Or at least ignore their concerns if there is a clash of interests. A people that may initially support him, but turn against him once he starts his demands and persecutions. The antichrist will likely make a big deal about proper roles of the sexes, restricting women perhaps not unlike the Islamic extreme system. This doesn’t mean he will be a moslem, necessarily. After all he’s described as not regarding the god of his fathers, whoever that is, because he will exalt himself as god instead of anything called god. Thus he could be a Jew or Christian or Moslem in origin, or even be from an overtly pagan family background, maybe even Hindu, of the sort that is not upanishadic Brahman blur impersonal absolute that is supposedly what the individual core atman is a bit of, but of the more specific and personal false gods of India.
Some argue idiotically that the desire of women means to bear children, or that it refers to some false god desired by women, or that he will be a homosexual, and not interested in the sexual desire of women for him (power as aphrodisiac), but this is likely a more generalized disregard for women’s feelings and wishes. Bear in mind that this prophecy is about the end of the last days, and given the rise of sex equality demands, or even just improved status and condition and freedom for women, this will probably continue to that time. This is a worldwide phenomenon, involving demands for women that the most hardcore conservative American Christian right winger takes for granted as okay for women, but is not okay in many Islamic countries and backwaters even in some pagan places in Africa and in much of India. Education for women is a fairly new thing in those countries, outside of the educated rich, some of whom started educating their women.
Getting back to Genesis:
24. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Note the sequence: leave family, cling to one’s partner, and they progress from social to psychological to physical intimacy. St. Paul in I Cor. 6:16, in denouncing fornication, warns that a man is one body with a prostitute he has sex with. In other words, "one flesh" is NOT something created by a marriage vow, or by a sacramental ceremony. It is created by one thing and one thing only, sexual intercourse. The implications of "thou shalt not commit adultery" go beyond mere cheating on your husband or with another man’s wife (if polygamy has created a limited double standard) or cheating on your wife. Adultery in English is related to the word to adulterate, still used to refer to cheating customers by adding water or other things to a product, to make it seem like they are getting what they paid for, instead of less. Sex with multiple partners dilutes you by creating many soul ties of sorts. But also, because they are one flesh because of sex, if these lovers then separate and take other lovers, or if they eventually marry others, they commit adultery.
Fornication, then, is essentially sex without marriage and without marriage equivalent. It is like a marriage with the intent of divorcing as quickly as possible and remarrying, intended ahead of time intended to be ended quickly. I.e., no commitment, "no strings." It is sex divorced from emotion and from commitment. It is the ultimate hypocrisy, a physical act implying something that is not meant by the persons doing it. Arranged marriages between strangers of course helps this corruption. Not unlike shaking hands on a deal that is a fraud. A physical act that should mean something, but in the mind and heart of at least one of the parties, doesn’t mean a thing.
Written contracts were developed to be able to prove that an agreement had in fact been made, so it could be enforced in a civil suit about a business deal. Verbal contracts are enforceable, but with more difficulty in doing so. A pattern of behavior prior to the breach, which would indicate a contract had been entered into and followed for a while, is evidence. So would be the word of witnesses to the verbal deal. Likewise, formal marriage was likely developed to rein in cavalier exploitation and mood swing based change of mind.
Polygamy is obviously a form of adultery, why would God allow it? Probably because it still involves some emotion and commitment with the sex. And it is less disruptive overall especially when kids are involved, than divorce and remarriage. Why would God allow divorce and remarriage? Probably because of the same thing, it still mimics the original model. But casual sex and intended as such temporary marriages and so forth, and weeklong or summer flings not intended as permanent, are abominable warpings of the original model, and prostitution is especially an abominable warp of the model.
Sex with your servants or slaves would also be fornication, because Exodus 21:7-11 says that a woman acquired to be a concubine was not to be released on the seventh year as the menservants were, Deut. 15:12 stipulates release on the seventh year for both sexes of slaves, since this was given after Exodus, it was probably a formalization of something already in play. And if her master who has bought her from her father as a maidservant is not pleased with her, he must let her be bought back and cannot sell her to a strange nation, "If she please not her master, who has betrothed her to himself, …." so this is not saying just any female servant is lawful to have sex with. Notice the word "betrothed." concubinage was some kind of more permanent marriage like thing, but with the concubine having not the status of the wife whatever that adds up to. Since the concubine might be a slave, the possibility is that the legal wife had a greater equality to her husband, limited only by his ownership (if it wasn’t co owned) of where they lived, than is allowed by modern pro patriarchalist Bible interpreters. That means that the status they deem proper for a wife, her role and behavior, was in fact more like that of the concubine than of the wife.
This kind of law flies in the face of the muslim and pagan concepts that allow any slave to be a sex object and to be handed off to others on loan or whatever, for such purposes, and to be kicked out at will. "then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, SEEING HE HATH DEALT DECEITFULLY WITH HER." So this was not something arranged against her will by her father, but rather, it would have involved her consent and desire, since it is written "he hath dealt deceitfully with HER." How would a slave be redeemed? Such a person could be bought back by a relative, or even by himself or herself if somehow money or animals of value came to be theirs. Begging would be one way. Gleaning and selling the results another. Saving of some allowance for personal needs another. Also one could just be set free.
"And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters."
"If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money."
In other words, she could divorce him without paying back her purchase price, clearly if a lower status semi wife could do this, which means she could do so at will if the price was paid back, then a regular wife could also do the same, leave without repaying the bride price, which was limited by law in amount. It was only in later rabbinic Talmudic times that divorce was allowed to be initiated only by a man, and the woman could only bring her husband to the rabbinic court and try to persuade them to order him to divorce her.
What is purpose of marriage? Children aren’t even mentioned. Of course they are going to happen if people have sex. The focus is always on the relationship needs of the individual. And the preservation of this as a means to ensure the children are godly, instead of corrupted easily after being warped by family breakups, is stated in Malachi. (the context was also about the godliness or lack thereof of the new wives, for which the older wives had been put away, and who were not Israelite and not converts, and didn’t even speak the Hebrew language right, if this is the same situation Ezra observed.) But what is the wife called? The companion of the man’s youth. That word for companion is like that of cattle grazing together, friends, equals, or approximate equals (there is usually some pecking order in any group), best friends forever, not the word used for companions of a king, where there is a clear rank difference between them.
In the Pentateuch, Five Books of Moses, in referring to relatives by marriage one was not to have sex with or marry, the statement is made that the wife (or widow or ex wife) of an uncle or your father (your stepmother) or your brother was her husband’s nakedness. This is another way of saying this. Some relatives by marriage, not blood relatives at all, are included in this, because they having become one flesh with the blood relative who is the link to this person, are now in the same relationship to you as the blood relative, making sex (or marriage, which includes sex) with such a form of incest. I guess you could call it "constructive incest."
In British law a few hundred years ago, a man who had had sex with one of two sisters, could not then marry the other sister, because he being one flesh with the first sister, was now brother to the second sister. The one flesh situation of course makes a couple effectively brother and sister, but this is obscured by the eventual prohibition on brother sister marriage. There are good reasons for this. After the Fall, everything deteriorated including genetics. But also behavior. There needs to be a model for people, of a male female relationship that is not sexual, and a category of people that, because they are prohibited for sex (and therefore prohibited for marriage) one is safe around.
This model in fact encourages exogamy, or marriage outside of the circle of close relatives. Because Adam is presented with Eve who is a stranger, who has come wandering into his garden.
Adam and Eve did not have a marriage ceremony. They were like a monogamous pair bonded couple, like wolves and some birds. Going with others if they were available, would have been unthinkable, this was too much a something just for each other. Their whole lives were wrapped up in each other, no room for "the guys" and "the girls" because everything a man would need from a male companion Adam had from Eve, and everything she would need from a female companion, she had from Adam.
Also this model does not allow for homosexual marriage. It was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.
And this model is lifetime monogamous. It wasn’t Adam and Eve and Betty either. (But at least polygamy is heterosexual, so is less a violation of the natural order than homosexual acts are.)
But notice the other thing about this model. The man leaves his family and moves in with his wife. This is called gynalocal marriage. (Also matrilocal, if she is living with her mother. The Song of Solomon depicts the girl wanting to move her shepherd lover into her mother’s home with her. Song of Solom 8:2. The aversion to physicality and rejection of being in love at all because of seeing or experiencing the depredations of the emotions unhindered by the mind and the mood swings and mutual sense of betrayal when they find they are not the living fantasies they thought each other to be, or one sees through the deliberate fraud of the other, resulted in a discomfort with the love poem, and a spiritualizing of it to absurd extremes. Yes you can relate some of it to The Church as Bride of Christ and Christ, but do so overmuch and you get a blatant foreplay and sex literal model. No one speculated Christ is going to have sex with The Church but to avoid this idiocy you have to ignore a lot and spiritualize away other things, especially aided by not reading Hebrew. Some of it is applicable to life issues like, instead of fantasizing get going after the reality, when she won’t get up and open the door when her boyfriend visits, and then it gets ludicrous when she chases after him after he gave up, and runs afoul of city guards who slapped her around and sent her home disheveled for being out after curfew. Song of Solomon 5:5-7. There is also a strong story of either the same or another girl being loyal to her chosen mate, though given by her parents to Solomon, but despite his wooing and the urging of the harem women, she keeps refusing him and eventually escapes to the one she already chose. And, a note regarding ability to resist temptation and to not betray one’s betrothed, or fall to temptation and betray Christ, this girl is a wild shepherd woman, sunburnt dark and used to rough living, not easy living, she can handle stress and seduction efforts, and not cave in and the wealthy easy life of the king’s harem probably seemed confined and boring to her.) Historically, under persecution the rich often denied Christ to avoid loss of comfort.
The model also allows for her moving in with her husband as we are used to, however, because she came to Adam who was already managing the garden. So both models are okay.
Back to Genesis chapter two.
25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
An idea got going in the early church writers, that Adam and Eve were created as children. But the pattern shown in the rest of the creation history is one of creating things in an adult, or at least young adult, form. If they were started as children, they grew up miraculously in a few days or weeks, before meeting. "And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin (for in Paradise "they were both naked, and were not ashamed," inasmuch as they, having been created a short time previously, had no understanding of the procreation of children: for it was necessary that they should first come to adult age." Irenaeus Against Heresies, Book 3 Chapter 22 paragraph 4. In Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, Irenaeus says "And Adam and Eve (for this is the name of the woman) were naked and were not ashamed, for their thoughts were innocent and childlike, and they had no conception or imagination of the sort that is engendered in the soul by evil through concupiscence, and by lust. For they were then in their integrity, preserving their natural state, for what had been breathed into their frame was the spirit of life; now, so long as the spirit still remains in proper order and vigour, it is without imagination or conception of what is shameful. For this reason they were not ashamed, as they kissed each other and embraced with the innocence of childhood (Proof, 14)."
Here he makes the mistake of equating sexuality per se with the fallen form of sexuality which can be exploitive. Also he assumes that shame would come with knowledge of sex, but he is reading this into the text, which clearly said that shame about nakedness came from the sin of eating the Tree of Knowledge, and if this no sex before the Fall theory is correct, shame had nothing to do with sex, and would not have come from it, or from the stirrings of erotic feeling, which are not predatory and selfish by nature. Indeed, some species of bird and animals, both of whose sexes are isolative and territorial and will attack and drive each other away at the borders, loose the territoriality and border defense attitude when in heat. In most other species, hostility decreases or disappears during breeding season even though outside of that time the sexes may be hostile to each other. This line of thought pursued far enough by some resulted in absurdities like thinking Eve, if they had not fallen, would have given birth through her side or belly button, and some other mode of reproduction than sex would have occurred. The problem unexamined premise here, was equating sexuality with "what is shameful."
There is no need of a concept of sexual activity for it to start. Fondness, playfulness and exploring sensations will sooner or later lead to this.
Kissing and embracing out of fondness does not have to lead to sex in each embrace, and sex once done does not have to remove fondness and create an absurd and warped genital only focus. All we know is that children were not born until after The Fall, and given the comparative lack of fertility which probably changed slowly instead of all at once, and both being tired from hard work in the field, it is likely sex didn’t happen often, so you could expect Cain and Abel and Seth weren’t conceived for a long time. Since the sentence of death was not carried out at once, it is likely all the curses set in slowly, including that of increased fertility of the woman.
Chapter 3
1. "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which YHWH Elohim had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? 2. "And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden;
3. "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."
Someone once said that that was Eve’s first mistake, talking with the snake. That she should not have gotten into a conversation with him, just told him to get lost.
Notice also, as someone pointed out, first the serpent tried to restate what God had said, into something He had not said, that they should not eat of any tree of the garden. The reaction of Eve is odd, in that she says that God said they should not only not eat it, but not touch it, lest they die. The record is that He only said to not eat it, but as a precaution He may have later said don’t even touch it, or the record may be a telescoped version of what He said, not to eat or even touch it, because if they eat they will die and if they touch they might eat. Or they two might have constructed this don’t touch it second rule on their own, maybe with God’s approval, as a preventive measure. One view was that they had opened themselves to trouble by rewriting God’s orders, adding to them what He didn’t say.
4. "And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat."
How cultural baggage and unbiblical presuppositions blind people! Many argue over why the woman was approached instead of the man, or that she was caught alone without the man’s leadership to guide her, BUT WHAT DOES THE SCRIPTURE SAY? THAT SHE "GAVE ALSO UNTO HER HUSBAND WITH HER."
Read that again. "HER HUSBAND WITH HER." Adam was there when this happened. St. Paul says she was deceived, but that Adam was NOT deceived but willfully went along with it knowing what he was doing was wrong. I don’t think it was because he wanted to join her in death, rather, he could have stopped her from doing it. I think that Adam didn’t entirely believe the snake, but thought that what the tree offered was worth the price of death. And that maybe it could be hidden from God somehow.
In what way was she deceived? That she wouldn’t die and that she would be godlike. How was Adam not deceived? It is possible that this was a speculation by Paul, who on one occasion, writing more calmly, specified that he didn’t have a word from God but gave something as his judgement about things, and then specified after that that not just himself but God also said the other statement, perhaps this remark he made was speculation where he didn’t say it was speculation.
But Adam could have been deceived in this, that he thought he would die, but die with an advantage, that might even cause him to figure out how to not die after all, that being like God he would be able to prevent the judgement from taking effect. Eve on the other hand, believed the serpent.
In what sense was she deceived? The Hebrew word in Strong’s online, has the meaning of lending at interest, and to beguile, to deceive. To persuade to one’s disadvantage. Also she looked at the tree and saw it was nice to look at while before she had carefully ignored it.
Temptation can begin with the eyes.
So how was Adam different? Perhaps he wasn’t in an eager state but level headed. Perhaps he saw she didn’t die at once, and figured it would take a while, but he could benefit during that time, because she ate first, and lived.
Problem was, the time frame for their death was the day, not immediately. And Adam did not live to a thousand years old, no one did. So they indeed all died in one day. Another angle on prophetic time is where a day represents a year. If Adam was at all savvy to this, he might have figured he’d have either a day, or a year to live.
Eve thought she wasn’t going to die at all. Adam might not have thought he’d be fully like God, but Eve probably did.
When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the devil, He was tempted in all the ways Adam and Eve was, food (to turn stones into bread), pride of presumption and experiment that would have been putting God to the test to see what He could get away with (i.e., jump off the highest point of The Temple because of God’s promise of protection), and the lust for power and glory (being offered all the kingdoms of this world if He would worship the devil, at which point Jesus told the devil to begone, "for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Luke 4:8 quoting Deuteronomy 6:13 and Exodus 34:14, and probably other places. And the devil gave up. Jesus answered the temptations with Scripture, whether the temptations were framed with a Scripture quote out of context, or as a direct appeal. Jesus was tempted with all these and refused them all, and conquered, where Adam and Eve failed.
7. "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."
8. "And they heard the voice of YHWH Elohim walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of YHWH Elohim amongst the trees of the garden.
9. "And YHWH Elohim called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10. "And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.
11. "And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12. "And the man said, The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat."
Notice Adam tries to shift the blame to God, implying that He gave Adam the woman and she got Adam to do this, so its God’s fault. Of course God wasn’t buying any of that, as we see when He reminds Adam that he, Adam, had listened to her bad advice.
13. "And YHWH Elohim said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14. "And YHWH God said unto the serpent, Because thou has done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life;
15. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
Notice something here. The serpent would bruise the woman’s seed’s heel, which would imply a poisonous snake bite. Constrictors don’t bite much except as a grab or when angry, the whole idea of a snake biting is a word picture that means poison. So the woman’s seed would die. But he would also bruise the head of the serpent. If the sequence were reversed, you would have a clear picture of a death and resurrection, and perhaps this detail was to be hidden for a time.
And perhaps Abraham did understand this as a promise involving resurrection, because when he went to sacrifice (as he thought) Isaac, he told his servants they both would return.
Now, there is nothing unusual in matriliny for some one to be the seed of a woman. So this custom had to pass away and be replaced with patriliny first. The man who would bruise the serpent’s head once and for all, would then be either a bastard, OR A VIRGIN BIRTH.
Roman Catholics are used to reading that it is HER heel who will bruise the serpent’s head, which is why you see those statues or paintings with the Virgin Mary standing on the snake’s head. But Jerome, in translating the Masoretic into the Vulgate, mistranslated this. The LXX does not read like this, and neither does the Masoretic. Jerome compared many Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, and had to have done this deliberately, because "her" appears twice, it is not a slip of the pen. "she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." Jerome
According to Jeremy James, Satan in Satin: Overwhelming Proof that the Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are Demonic Deceptions ""He" in the original Hebrew is masculine. It can also mean "it." In the LXX it was rendered autos, "he," indicating that the passage should be understood as a Messianic prophecy about Jesus Christ alone crushing the head of the serpent. However, Jerome (342-430 AD) in his Latin Vulgate translation made a major error, changing "it" or "he" into "she" by using the feminine pronoun ipsa in the Latin." Roman Catholic scholars who accepted the Latin Vulgate then translated Genesis 3:15 in their Douay-Rheims Bible as: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." And who is "she" for the Roman Catholics? Mary, of course, the "second Eve". Just as the first Eve was deceived by the serpent and in consequence brought sin and corruption into the world, the second Eve, they claim, will bring salvation by crushing the head of the serpent." http://www.zephaniah.eu/Satan%20in%20Satin%20Apparitions%20of%20Mary.pdf
Jeremy James’ position is shared from a rather different perspective, by the Orthodox writer Miriam Lambouras The Marian Apparitions: Divine Intervention or Delusion? at http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/marian_apparitions.aspx
Jerome and Ambrose were very big on Mary and laid the groundwork for the later mariolatry and immaculate conception nonsense. Eastern Orthodoxy reveres Mary but the Roman Catholic Church goes way overboard.
Apparently some modern RC translations correct this, since a writer of a question complains about these translations. http://www.ewtn.com/vexperts/showmessage.asp?number=563958 question and answer points out that this Vulgate translation is the basis for the entire idea of Mary crushing the serpent, citing the "longstanding Catholic tradition that toward the End of Time the Blessed Virgin Mary will crush the head of Satan, after her devotees have promoted her honor and devotion and directed countless prayers for her intercession during a long period of that time…" and complains that the modern translations risk the loss of this tradition. The writer cites Pope Pius IX who essentially argues that because of the close bond between Jesus and Mary His mother, she effectively crushed the serpent’s head when Jesus crushed the serpent’s head.
However, this line of argument would also put The Virgin Mary in the situation of effectively dying on the Cross with Jesus and coming back to life with Jesus. This is way too extreme, but may be part of the thinking of those who want her declared co-redemptrix and essentially a fourth person in The Holy Trinity.
Colin B. Donovan answering on this question on this URL, blames ambiguity in Hebrew regarding who the pronouns refer to in the subject before it in the sentence, and there being "two subject, the woman and her seed. ‘It’ takes a neutral path (‘seed’ is grammatically neutral)." So those who translate "she" assume "it" refers to the woman, and those who translate "he" assume it refers to Jesus Christ, her seed.
"Jerome, perhaps based on the Septuagint, or theological considerations, we don’t know, chose to translate it is as ‘she.’"
It is impossible that the Septuagint can be blamed, because it doesn’t say "she" but "he." Theological considerations is more likely. Because Jerome was overly devoted to the Theotokos as the Eastern Orthodox call the Virgin Mary.
Is there some way to resolve this? yes there is. Firstly Abraham when he took Isaac to sacrifice him told his servants that he AND the boy would return. Since God had made such a big deal that the seed of promise had to be not only of his own loins, not an adopted son his servant Eliezar of Damascus, and had to be of Sarah, not of her maid servant Hagar, Abraham might well have concluded that this Isaac was "the seed of the woman." This would point to the prophecy being known in Abraham’s time, especially since it is not cited even indirectly, but rather his words to his servants in this context point to his knowing this. Probably the original order of the statement was "you shall bruise his heel and he shall bruise your head" and by the time of later scribes it got reversed. Hinted at in the present form, and explicit in the hypothetical original form I suggest might have existed, is Resurrection. Abraham expected to kill Isaac who would then be resurrected. But while a similar scenario WAS going to happen, it was not for that time but for Jesus Christ’s time, when He would die and come back physically to life.
In this scenario, it is definitely not the woman who is going to die and resurrect but her seed.
Secondly, The Septuagint draws on a somewhat different textual tradition of transmission than the Masoretic does. And it says it is the woman’s seed who will crush the serpent’s head. A speaker of Greek or Latin as his first language might make a mistake, even a speaker of English as his first language, in translation. Are those whose first language is Hebrew and the related Aramaic going to make such a mistake when translating into Greek?
Thirdly, the Samaritan Pentateuch also says it will be the woman’s seed who will crush the serpent’s head. http://tanakh.info/gn3-15 Jerome had compared Masoretic, Septuagint, and Samaritan yet translated this as it being the woman who would crush the serpent’s head.
"Jerome notes some omissions in the Massoretic Text and supplies them from the Samaritan Text."http://www.internationalstandardbible.com/P/pentateuch-the-samaritan.html J. E. Thompson this mentions also that the disagreement between Genesis and Paul on the time spent by the Israelites in Egypt is because Paul agrees with the Samaritan on this point.
Clearly, Jerome saw Masoretic, LXX and Samaritan say one thing, and he on his own authority (or lack thereof) chose to say another. This can only be because of his devotion to Mary.
"When Jerome undertook a new translation, he was condemned almost unreservedly; even Augustine grew timid in his defense; and Jerome, in his replies to the bitter denunciations, flung at his accusers such epithets as "fools," "stupids," and "biped asses.""http://shomron0.tripod.com/articles/bartonpentateuch.pdf The Samaritan Pentateuch William E. Barton. Jerome was fond of Origen and made the excuse when accused of being an Origenist, that he could ignore the bad and was fond of much in Origen that was good. I would ask, why keep Origen at all surely there were other authors just as worthy on the same subjects? Jerome’s style of expression was rather aggressive when angered. The person opposing him on this was partly right and partly wrong on other issues they fought over. Perhaps Jerome was a bit slippery here, and arrogant and inclined to feel he was wise enough to rewrite Scripture if it suited a bias of his.
This means the entire Roman Catholic tradition of Mary trampling the serpent and the attendant notions and excessive veneration of her is based on a deliberate mistranslation – a lie.
Which means this entire tradition incl. an age of Mary preceding the Second Coming of Christ and all visions that this is based on can be thrown in the trash.
Additionally, although as we shall see the person who is tempted is responsible to resist the temptation, the person who tries to seduce the other person to do or choose evil is also responsible for the ideas suggested. While you cannot blame the devil for what you choose to do under his influence, you can indeed blame him for providing the influence. So though the devil didn’t MAKE you do it, he did push and cajole and encourage you to do it. Or your peer group did. Or your cult leader. ALL INVOLVED SHARE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ROLE WHATEVER THAT IS. James warns us in his epistle that teachers will be judged more severely so we should not strive to be teachers. This ambition puts you in a dangerous position.
16. "Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Here is the first clear indication of female subordination to the male. And it operates by her default, she caves into desires for approval. The Septuagint says "recourse" instead of desire which is not about mere sexual desire, that was there built into the situation anyway. If this was sexual desire, why is it not also said to Adam? Clearly he has sexual desire for her. No, this is another kind of desire, which results in ruling by the desired over the desirer. It also may mean "recourse" that she would tend to rely more and more on the man socially and economically, and for advice, and would tend to turn to him for all solutions to all problems. This same term is used about Abel regarding Cain in the LXX version of those events, so this is clearly not about anything sexual.
Notice "multiply…thy conception." There is an old custom of calling menstruation "the curse," somehow this is connected with the curse on Eve in some minds. If her conception was multiplied, and the Hebrew as per Jay P. Green’s interlinear Hebrew English Bible DOES say "conception" then her fertility was increased. Probably like most other animal females, she originally ovulated once or twice a year. Now she would ovulate monthly. And the child’s head would be bigger when born.
Which raises an interesting question. If they had not fallen, would the original plan for the infants have been that their heads would be much smaller at birth, and increase later? Or did the curse take effect over time, not all at once, and the heads of infants became much bigger?
Is Homo Erectus the original human kind from that time and shortly after? Or Homo Habilis, smaller brain case, but very modern in many ways?
17. "And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife,"
Adam had tried to blame God for all this, because Eve was "the woman whom Thou gavest to be with me" so God, not putting up with that, points out he should not have listened to her. "wife" is woman, ishah, "thy woman." The issue of course, was not that Adam should not have listened to Eve under any circumstance since he was (by this interpretation) the boss, but that he should not have listened to her when she was wrong, and she was clearly wrong because God had forbidden them to eat of that tree.
18. "And hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;"
These two words thorns and thistles, one in Hebrew means thorns and one is dardir, meaning a fast growing plant, so here we have not a redundancy but weeds and probably toxic plants (mutations). Also Adam is to eat the herb of the field, which is not marijuana the sloppy exegesis of some hippy that its biblical to smoke dope. Nope, that is more likely the fast growing plant thing. What is wrong with a fast growing plant? It must be something undesirable for its rapid growth to be undesirable. Mutations would have happened causing toxicity that wasn’t there. Adam was already supposed to eat herbs, veggies, etc., but now it would be hard work to get them.
Whatever tilling or gardening work he was doing before, pruning fruit trees and maybe facilitating pollination by copying bees, would now require a lot more work to get the same or less effect.
19. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living."
This would be a fast forward to later, as they had no children then. The story goes back to the then current situation. Notice that instead of being called "woman," "ishah," she is now given a name that defines her by only one of her many capabilities, that of giving birth. Of course it may have been an honoring in intent at that time, that all would look up to her as their great great grandmother (and still probably producing more children), but it facilitated a shift in focus.
21. "Unto Adam also and to his wife did YHWH Elohim make coats of skins, and clothed them."
Here some very silly things have been believed, started by Origen, that originally we had etheric or less dense bodies, and the coats of skins are the densely physical bodies we have now. This notion was denounced as foolish by Epiphanius in The Panarion, so it was certainly NOT Orthodox thinking in the first few centuries. More likely, these coats of skins were the hides from the first sin offering sacrifices that were made, God probably showed them how to do this and designed the hides, showing them how to cut, clean, cure and stitch using needles made of bone and thread made of sinew or very thin strip hide. Origen was a favorite of many Church Fathers, he and they being dead before he was anathematized. And he was not anathematized merely for believing in pre existence of souls, or for self castration to avoid temptation to fornicate, but for a laundry list of weird ideas, one of them almost identical to this, but regarding the heavenly bodies, which supposedly were once ethereal, but acquired their present dense materiality when they stopped contemplating God. If this doesn’t fly regarding heavenly bodies, then it doesn’t fly regarding human bodies.
As a result of his fame as a defender of The Trinity and The Incarnation, many of his speculations were accepted without question. Thus St Gregory of Nyssa taught apokatastasis, or universal salvation of everyone, and his Philokalia of Origen contains almost all of Origen’s later anathematized notions.
As a result of Origen’s influence, we find The Holy Fathers arguing that in the new heavens and new earth, it will not be a material sensual existence but a spiritual immaterial one. But how can that be? that would be merely death. How can God, Who called the material sensual world "very good" dissolve it and recreate it merely a diaphanous similitude of what it once was, a reduction from material life to the same general condition that the dead have, the dense end of the soul-body-spirit spectrum gone and the rest going on in a reduced condition? Such thinking would never be possible in Orthodox writers past or present, were it not for the reputation of Origen, head of the Alexandria Seminary (to use a modern phrase) successor of Clement of Alexandria who began the allegorizing but didn’t go as far as Origen did. Origen wandered into "spiritualizing" everything.
Now in Orthodoxy, there is a lot of using some things that are physical historical things, to make points about spiritual things, psychological things you might call it, and analogies to teach theology. St. Paul does this A VERY LITTLE. But Orthodoxy does not treat the historical things of the Bible as being only spiritual and allegorical, but starts with their reality as written, on the face of it, as totally correct. This is not rejected but rather conclusions are drawn from it beyond the incidents themselves. Origen however preferred to ditch the reality altogether and go for the imaginary "deeper meaning."
This of course was done by other heretics, when they bothered to use the Scriptures at all, but they rejected key points of Christology and theology and were often either immoral or denounced marriage as fornication and practiced extreme asceticism. Origen did none of these things, so was not immediately recognized as a problem. And his reputation in teaching sound theology and defending proper Christology and the Trinity shielded his errors from immediate view.
This means of course that by the time he was being recognized as a problem, and finally condemned some time after that, the damage was done, his teachings were to found under other names than his, people who were already esteemed saints. Evagrius Ponticus is another case in point. Ponticus did a great systems analysis type workup of virtue and vice, and created the first list of deadly sins that were eventually reworked into the seven deadly sins many centuries later. But he also had some Gnostic leanings that got him anathematized along with Origen. But not before he shaped monasticism as much as Origen shaped regular Orthodoxy. Which was probably why a canon had to be given that condemned anyone who became a monk out of hatred of the married state in and of itself. The dispute as to whether monastics are higher than married laity or not is a result. St. Paul said he wished all could be as he was, single and celibate, but the issue he raised was not some mystique of celibacy as an end in itself but that marriage is a distraction from single minded devotion to pleasing God. The whole family life thing, constantly thinking how to please one’s wife or husband, is just another form of worry how to please people in general. the problem is not sin or heresy but the priority of what one orients around.
St. Athanasius warned to keep guard over one’s sons as much as one’s daughters to preserve their chastity and said something to the effect that keeping a virgin in the household apparently from the phrasing could be anyone from a relative to anyone you acquired off the street who was a virgin, male or female, would bring blessing from God. Sort of like a good luck charm. This however didn’t go so far as to denounce the married state as sin, and a "virgin" was probably not just someone who hadn’t had sex, but a devoted virgin pledged to celibacy and prayer.
Evagrius’ influence was probably to blame for the tendency for monastics to side with monophysitism. This varies from a focus on Jesus Christ as one entire being Who is both divine and human, and when you pick it to pieces clearly they admit two natures that is, that HE is fully divine and fully human without alteration of either His divinity or His humanity, yet the phrasing is such as makes those who understand it as it appears to be without caveats a potentially convert to docetic Gnosticism, to the eutychian form probably not to be found anymore and which was rejected early on by the monophysites themselves.
Since they recognize a plurality in the Person Jesus they prefer to be called miaphysites, mia being a plurality that is one while mono is a singular one without plurality. They see duophysite chalcedonian Christology as crypto Nestorianism. Both sides claim St. Cyril of Alexandria.
22. "And YHWH Elohim said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil:"
A little sarcasm here? Or does the "as" mean "similar but not really like in the sense of same as? That they are able to take a godlike overview of things, but without the right to do so and without the inherent goodness, the justice and mercy combined, let alone the omniscience required, to do so rightly? "Playing God" just isn’t what we were designed for, it is wrong in terms of rebellion, and we do not have the competence for it and never did and never could and never will.
" and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23. Therefore YHWH Elohim sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."
The consensus of opinion in the Orthodox Church, came to be that Adam and Eve were created immortal and incorruptible physically. That the Fall created death directly. While it might be that they would have lived forever but aged and become weaker and less pretty, but remained aged and immortal, without eating the tree of life, the Scripture clearly links physical immortality to this tree. Whether one eating alone would be enough to ensure immortality, or it would require periodic eating every several decades is not clear. Perhaps the curse that Adam would return to dust, removed a kind of immortality from him, that could be corrected by taking of the tree of life. Or maybe he was not inherently immortal and the tradition of generation of interpreters got it wrong and Adam’s immortality depended on access to the tree of life. That access, however, was assured as long as he did not sin, so that he was as good as immortal because he had access to the tree of life. And once the access was cut off, he was as good as dead no matter how many years it took to actually die.
Chapter 4
"1. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from YHWH."
Here we see Cain’s origin tracked back to the fertilization of the egg, Cain’s history begins with the sex act – or somewhat after when the egg and sperm met – that conceived him. Conception is not implantation of the fertilized egg in the womb wall, as some pro abortion people now say. It is the fertilization of the egg, before it ever gets to the womb wall. This you will find in any medical documentary or book.
There is a notion, that first cropped up among heretics, that Eve was seduced by satan in a physical as well as spiritual sense. That she had sex with him, and produced Cain, the original bad seed. Modern supporters of this (maybe also earlier ones) argue that she said "I have gotten a man from the Lord," and then go on to say that baal means lord, so she was saying she got a man from baal. But the Hebrew text says neither baal (Canaanite) nor adonai (Hebrew) but YHWH. That she had gotten a man from YHWH.
This is important for another reason. The credit is not given to the child’s father, or to its mother, but to YHWH, Who is the owner of all produced by His creations, rather than children being owned by parents. When this is forgotten, and the gut attitude is one of having "created" ones children and owning them, lip service may be given to God but the reality of the attitude is otherwise, as shown by actions and the cultural development of selling children into marriages or slavery as useful to the family, or killing them if they look too weak and sickly to be useful members of society. Modern theonomists like Rushdooney argue for parental (especially paternal) ownership of children (especially daughters) because of this attitude, ignoring that this developed over time, and that God put limits on all this, and that the original model of marriage was not arranged to family advantage, but for the couple themselves.
The idea exists in Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, that sex did not occur before The Fall. This might or might not be the case. Some even argue that some other mode of reproduction would have been developed if they had not fallen. This is absurd. The origin of this idea is probably Irenaeus, who assumes they were created as children, but there is nothing in Scripture to indicate this. And while he was close to the traditions from The Apostles, he does not say that this was said by them, he merely assumes this. All we know is that they did not have children until after The Fall, when Eve was much more fertile. Origen made everything much worse. I don’t know if we can blame this on Origen or his later disciples who augmented some of his errors. I haven’t read all that was written in those days.
2. "And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3. "And in the process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto YHWH.
4. "And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock of the fat thereof. And YHWH had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5. "But unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
6. "And YHWH said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?
7. "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."
This has been a great difficulty to interpreters. Some think Cain was rejected, because he brought veggies instead of animals. The Scripture as given by the Masoretic scribes shows that something about Cain’s behavior, not his sacrifice in itself, was the issue. This was not a sin offering, this was like a firstfruits or a peace offering, the former definitely including vegetables in the Mosaic Code. Though this was pre Moses, the same general rules probably applied then.
The Septuagint, drawing on an earlier text version than the Masoretic scribes did, gives some insight here.
LXX Gen. 4:7 "Did you not sin, even though you brought it rightly? But did not divide it rightly? Be still; his [Abel’s] recourse shall be to you; and you shall rule over him."
Apparently Cain’s sin was not what he brought but how he divided it (either in presentation or with the fellow worshippers). Why such a radical difference? It may be that an alteration was made in one text lineage, the one the Masoretes received, or by them, because this word translated "recourse" is the same word stated about Eve her desire being to her husband, and he would rule over her. Here, Abel’s recourse is or will be to Cain because Cain is his older brother. And therefore altering the text to eliminate these words might have been deliberate. Rabbi Akiva, who ran the Jamnia School sometimes called the Jamnia Council, c. AD 90, had great reputation. If he had told copyists that the text they were using had an error, that he could correct from memory of another text that was destroyed in AD 70, he would have credibility in himself, and the possible excuse would be credible in itself. To use the same phrasing regarding Abel and Eve, would be to show that Eve’s subordination to Adam, and that only after a curse, was comparable to that between older and younger brothers, not the sort viewed as appropriate between men and women. A younger brother is far higher in status than a woman.
Rabbi Akiva did order alterations, when he ordered a new Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, to compete with the Septuagint. The LXX named after 70 scholars who had translated the Pentateuch for an Egyptian king’s library, the rest of the OT was translated later, had been the official translation in use by Greek speaking Jews including the Apostles, until AD 90. At that point, Rabbi Akiva, still smarting from his bad move of backing Bar Kochba as Messiah, and dead set against Christianity, ordered some changes made in some Psalms and probably other writings, in order to make them useless for proselytizing by Christians to Jews.
Also, the ages at which patriarchs produced their first sons, was changed from the LXX to the Masoretic version, making them appear younger. This would play to the desire to get Jews to not delay having children, but to marry and reproduce as young as possible.
If he would change these, why not change other things he was personally uncomfortable with?
So now, instead of Abel’s yearning or desire or tendency to turn first to an older brother and defer to him, it is "sin" that has a tendency to defer to Cain, and he can rule it if he will. This is at least useful in teaching people that they can overrule sin and conquer it, but it is strange since it makes sin out to be a separate person from the sinner. So it is probably not the original phrasing.
8. "And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him."
Here is something to ponder. No matter how nice they act, don’t go off alone with someone who has been angry with you. Anything from lies about what you said or did or tried to do, up to murder or rape may be done or attempted.
9. "And YHWH said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And Cain said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
10. "And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground."
Notice something here. Whenever The Bible depicts God as asking a question, it is not that He doesn’t know the answer already. He is apparently after an honest response. Here it clearly shows, that when He asked Cain where Abel was, God already knew Abel was dead, and that Cain had killed him and how and why.
11. "And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;
12 "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth."
Cain complains that this is more than he can bear, and that anyone who finds him will kill him. This of course is used by some to speculate as to who there was to kill him, if not pre adamites? But there is no clear timeframe on any of this. Aside from the obvious, that Cain is speculating regarding the future when there would be more people, this is probably after Adam has already produced sons and daughters who are producing children themselves. Seth was born after this, but Cain knew others would be born and know of this murder of their brother they never got to know. So God had mercy on Cain, and put a mark on him, warning that anyone who killed him would be struck seven times in vengeance for this. There is no indication this is inheritable, it applies only to Cain. So this has no relevance to skin color, or any birthmarks or other oddities on anyone since.
Does this mercy invalidate the death penalty? I don’t think so, though it might validate other measures instead of that. But for one thing, Cain was needed to produce more children. And for another, he would be an object lesson to everyone.
Notice also that Cain answers God, as if God doesn’t know all and see all. As if He can be effectively lied to. (By effective I mean deceived.) Obviously people can try to lie to God, can make false statements to God, but God is not deceived by them, even if they are deceived by themselves, but the point is God already knows the answer to His question, He wants Cain to admit to all this and gives him a chance. While Adam hid from God, Cain kids himself that God can’t see if Cain doesn’t want Him to see, or if not showing His presence in some way at the altar of sacrifice, or is being addressed. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Psalms 14:1 "He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it." Psalms 10:11. Thus Cain apparently thought. Adam seemed to have gotten a similar bit of stupidity mislabeled wisdom, when he tried to hide from God after he ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
16. "And Cain went out from the presence of YHWH, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden."
Nod means to wander, to move to and fro, flutter, show grief.
"And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch."
Cain’s lineage seemed to be city builders early on, though the others may have done so, but Cain was probably trying to duck the curse on him. Notice he build the city, but named it after his son not himself. Sounds like he was trying to make a kind of home, and have his son take care of him. How big a "city" would be at that time is anybody’s guess. These people were living a long time so time to breed a lot of kids, and the kids to breed kids.
Somewhere recently I read an opinion, that Cain was trying to evade the curse of vagabondage by building a city. The big developments seem to be in Cain’s lineage, was this part of some unrighteousness or just part of what human created ability was supposed to do, though likely with unrighteous twists thrown in? It is an uncomfortable thought that the great achievements of mankind in civilization have their first predecessors in the questionable family of Cain, but God is going to provide us a heavenly city The New Jerusalem someday on earth. Perhaps city building is not that bad of a thing in itself. however, war has usually been the big jumpstarter for technology and definitely the cause of building city walls. From a mud and stone ridge to a nuclear resistant blast door on a bunker, the purpose and origins are the same.
Everything was still monogamous for a few generations, and then we meet Lamech, Cain’s great-great-great-grandson. This character has two wives, who bore him Jabal "the father of all such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle." Clearly this is father in the sense of either first to do this, or the one who taught others. The other son Jubal "was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ". This is not the organ in churches, invented a few hundred years ago, it is a Hebrew word translated with this English word, itself archaic and referring to pipes, flutes, any wind instrument, according to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. So this means Jubal invented use of stringed and wind music instruments.
The other wife bore Tubalcain, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah." (vss. 20-22.)
Lamech got mad and killed a young man, and announced to his wives, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold." (vss. 23, 24.) Again, the LXX gives some insight. While the Masoretic based KJV says "I have slain a young man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt," the LXX says "I killed a young man for wounding and a young man for hurting me." Gen. 4:23. Apparently Lamech killed two young men, or else did kind of doubling description of one to make a rhyme or verse, for some minor injury to him. Arrogant, violent and pretentious, and he is the first to have more than one wife. Both his personality and his marriage habits show lack of self control.
25. "And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
Notice again, it is the woman who names the child, even if it is a boy. This is true in Jacob’s time, and down to John the Baptist, whose father was only inquired of about this because no relative had the name John. If it had been a name in the family, he would not have been inquired of. Naming something is argued by some as having or showing authority over it, ergo since Adam named Eve first "ishah," feminine form of "ish," male as individual, later named her "Eve," "mother of all living," that this showed he had authority over her from the start. But if this were so, he would be naming his sons instead of Eve naming them, particularly after the shift in power to men curse was in play. Perhaps he, being older, was more developed in speech than she was. And she having had no one but herself for a while, exploring the world around her, had no human to compare herself to. These two points, plus the fact that she would recognize him as like herself but larger and different meant she would readily concur in the name.
26. "And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of YHWH."
Firstly, you will note that the Bible jumps around in time listing Cain’s descendants then getting back to Adam and Eve, and Seth. Not everything is sequential, and you can’t assume a timeline in terms of years in Genesis, unless years are given. And as I will show later, you might not always be able to be certain of those year counts either.
Eve again credits God for Seth. And she names the boy. Who named Cain is not stated, but she names Seth. But Seth names his son. In this you can see a kind of general equality, that is eroded later. Perhaps it is worked on. If the husband is the boss you’d expect him to name (or give the final decision on naming) the child, but Eve names Seth and you see this again in Genesis and elsewhere. And Seth’s history, like that of Cain, begins at his conception. Therefore the individual person begins at conception.
Secondly, YHWH’s Name is known to Seth and his people. YHWH is a mysterious name, someone suggested it is from a pre Hebrew language. And very likely the last remaining word from that language, carried into the present time. There are grammatical and other peculiarities about it. An approximate meaning is "The Self Existing Eternal Creator."
But here we get to a big inherent contradiction in the Bible: When YHWH (Jehovah) was known to the Hebrews by this Name. Exodus. 6:3 says that YHWH was not known by His Name YHWH to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, yet Genesis shows them addressing Him and/or referring to Him by this Name. E.g., Gen. 15:8. Obviously one of these statements is wrong. God doesn’t lie or make errors, so which one of them was made or dictated or directed to be written by Him? Well, if a scribe is going to change things, by error or on purpose, which is more likely, that he add an entire sentence? Or two letters?
Northwest Semitic Ya is presented in The Bible as the short form of YHWH or Yahweh, i.e., Yah or in the KJV, which writes YHWH as Jehovah, Jah. This is Who Rastafarians refer to when saying Jah Jah. In Abraham’s time, Ebla had eponymous (deity honoring) names, some of which were El (general term for God and could be used to refer to the True God or to any false god) prefixed or suffixed, while others had the Ya prefix or suffix. This was of course hotly disputed, but the reluctant finder of this, Pettinato, was called in by Ebla finder Matthei, as the only one capable of handling such ancient Semitic writings, and he quote Pettinato at least 12 times in his book.
So if Ya is the name in the original documents, and scribes decided this sounded too reminiscent of some Mesopotamian false gods, and were concerned that there be no confusion between YHWH and the false gods, a little addition of two letters, WH, might have been done. This strikes me as a better explanation. That the statement in Exodus is correct, and the contrary evidence is the result of scribal activity. When this took place is not clear. But I would guess in the times of the Babylonian Captivity, because one of the Mesopotamian "gods" was Ea, who warned Utnapishtim to build the ark. Ea was probably a vague memory of YHWH, but had been demoted to being a descendant of the alleged creators and so lied about that the deity called Ea no longer even remotely resembled YHWH, except for telling Utnapishim (Noah) to build the ark. To let stand something that sounded like Ea was to risk confusion on the part of hearers and encourage or at least risk syncretism, precisely what had got them dragged out of the land of Israel in the first place. This was not some alteration of the sacred text in any way that changed the information content or intent, it merely clarified it, but accidentally created a problem later. (Nonetheless, the short form YH is used at times.) I figure that this alteration happened in Babylonia or during the return, because the LXX uses the word kyrios, Lord, wherever YHWH is named, so it is possible either that this alteration had already occurred, or that the Greek choice of word would fit either YHWH or the short form YH anyway.
Is YH then the short form of YHWH, or the original? If YH is more about "Self Existent" and implies eternity, while WH brings in the issue of creation, YH might have been the original. Because initially there would be no doubt who the Creator is, it is The Self Existent One." But when rival claimants to creator status were presented, then God would add that point about Himself, since it was no longer taken for granted by all who heard His Name. I am of course SPECULATING. I do not have any information granted to me by YHWH except what is in His revealed word.
Chapter 5
2."Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created."
Notice something: while the writer refers to them as man and woman, or Adam and women, and finally Adam and Eve, originally BOTH are called "Adam," ruddy. Another nail in the coffin of hierarchy or radical differences between them as part of the created order, and of there being any inherent masculine and feminine character and quality. And since God blessed THEM, the whole dominion over the earth and its contents is as much directly given to the woman as to the man. Granted the animals would in theory have been cooperative with humans before The Fall, but still, for a woman to be having dominion over the animals brings to mind something like a bronco rider or steer wrassling cowgirl. (Another reason to suspect, that the original human type was the more robust neanderthalish homo erectus and/or homo habilis, whose skull is remarkably modern for his alleged time. The increase in skull size might have been part of the working out of the curse of more difficult childbirth on Eve and her daughters, aside from the possibility that the original child skull was smaller and grew more later than it does now.)
And now a brief word on dominionist thinking. This posits that man had dominion before The Fall, and lost it afterwards. But this dominion was over the physical realm, not some political thing, and as one critic of dominionism put it, this dominion has always continued.
Here follow a bunch of "begats" as some call them. The ages at which each one begat his son, and the total number of years of his life, differ between the Septuagint, the Masoretic and the Samaritan versions. If these were once kept on clay tablets, it is not impossible for a tablet to be lost along the way, so some generations may be missing, and the Septuagint includes one man that the Masoretic leaves out.
Of the three most ancient complete LXX texts we have, ONE gives an age for Methuselah that would have him survive the Flood, and this is sometimes quoted as proof against the LXX, but this is only ONE copy that says this, so is obviously a scribal error.
I think it is also possible, that each generation could be treated as a dynasty with several having the same name. Thus, the founder of a dynasty is given the age at which he begat that son whose descendants would take over after the last of the dynasty was gone, and the age at the founder’s death, which might be in fact two men not one. Or, it might be that the age at death is of one man, but the ages at death should be added sequentially, ignoring ages at which the sons were born, because these "sons" were actually ancestors of those who took over later.
It is possible, therefore, for more time to have elapsed from Adam to the Flood than any version of the Old Testament we have now allows. The point is made by someone, that there are ten patriarchs listed in Genesis before The Flood, and ten kings of outrageous lifespans listed by the Mesopotamian legend also before The Flood.
Seth’s lineage, father to son, is given. Some names are similar to those in Cain’s line.
By the time you get to Noah (or Abraham, later) you have an important specific, that when it says Lamech lived such and such a time and begot Noah, you are talking about one man and one son. Perhaps also for Enoch, who, like Elijah later, never died, but was taken up alive to heaven, one of the lower heavens not the highest heaven the Throne of God. Because at this point, there are details given about these individuals.
Chapter six. "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair’ and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And YHWH said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years."
The LXX says, "My Spirit shall not remain with these people forever, for they are flesh. So their days shall be one hundred and twenty years."
This has given rise to speculation, that human normal lifespan should be 120 years. But it is more likely that this is the length of time God gave people to repent, before He brought the Flood.
The sons of God were considered by Jewish early writers and early Church writers to be angels, who fell because of lust, but another idea took hold, that these were the sons of Seth, who fell for the daughters of Cain, and fell into their evil ways. While a good case is made by Fr. Seraphim Rose, that Seth’s descendants were called sons of God, because they were on God’s side in the good vs. evil dispute developing, and were living closer to the Garden of Eden than Cain’s descendants did, perhaps also a higher elevation so closer to God so to speak, a problem is created by the term daughters of men. Because this implies that the "sons of God" are not sons of men. Unless there was some hostility and avoidance between "sons of God" in a figurative sense, and sons and daughters of men in the sense of supporting men as "gods" rival to God, which is possible, it does look like some other kind of creature was involved here.
Some make out that taking these women means they were kidnapped and raped, but that is not necessarily implied. The theorists think men wouldn’t give "their" women to these strangers, but if this ownership by parents and men in general was not established to where they could sell their daughters and sisters (to be raped in marriage if it was against their desires), or if they were persuaded to give them by offered advantages, then this argument doesn’t hold. More likely the women were ambitious and lustful and glad for the attention of "superior" beings who could get inside their nervous systems and give them super orgasms. Unless they were just mentally enslaved and never mind the usual seductions. In either case, though the curse on Eve was developing in its forms, I don’t think at this early age men had that much say over who their daughters or sisters married.
Some argue these were space aliens, some other species of creature of the made in the image and likeness of God for superintending their world. And pretty genetically compatible with us if they produced hybrid children, especially if these children were fertile.
Another problem with all this, is that angels are assumed to be "bodiless powers." Well yeah, sort of, not the same kind of bodies we have. Spirits, yeah, but they can get pretty solid when they want to and can affect matter.
Female angels are never shown in the Bible. Jesus says they neither marry nor are given in marriage, which also means they don’t have sex. So these are asexual beings, probably either non reproducing, a fixed population from the beginning, or they reproduce by budding like a yeast. More likely the foregoing.
They are big and strong, and so we cue on them as male when we see them, but they are not in fact male, and not androgynous like a mix, they are just neither.
But if some such noticed the beauty of the women, and the pleasure men had in sex, event tapped into their minds to experience it a bit, they might decide to get some in reality not just by telepathy. Since they can get solid they can change shape. That means they can make male sexual equipment…..but no sperm or DNA.
That means that the children the women bore to them, were not their real children but putative children.
The Book of Enoch reads like something cobbled together from many legends, some fooling around with demons, and maybe some legitimate materials from Enoch. It was considered legitimate at one point by some Jews and some Christians but eventually was dumped from the list of books accepted as authoritative, retained only in the Ethiopic Church (monophysite) as legitimate today.
Jude quotes from Enoch, one sentence. There might well be material in it that is correct, but not inspired but God told Jude to cite what was right, out of something that was highly popular among his readers in those days.
Enoch lists things the angels taught their wives, much of it either evil or at best dual purpose skills and knowledge, a lot to do with witchcraft and seduction. Genesis shows there was an increase of knowledge over a few hundred years.
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
Now you need to re read that again. While some argue that there were two angel hybridization events, before and after The Flood, this doesn’t even hint at that.
"There were giants in the earth IN THOSE DAYS; AND ALSO AFTER THAT, when the sons of God" etc. etc.
There were already anomalous large people, and when the sons of God got involved, there were a lot more of them.
Political and military leaders would want such as super soldiers, and the more the merrier. Technology may have advanced to where genetic manipulation was possible, and selective breeding of humans may have been going on. Here come the angels into this mix, and they want women and power and influence and status among men (and women) who were leaders. What do such humans want? Super soldiers and maybe some other things. So the angels gave them what they wanted. Not being likely monogamous, they had taught the women skills of seduction and probably sent them off to seduce powerful men and powerful perverted women. This built a social network for the angels. And they made offers. At least, this is what I think happened.
To existing genetic engineering was added a lot more knowledge, including the angels’ ability to see more than humans could and see how to warp or when the planned altered human embryo was developing as planned, or not, before anyone else could.
The angels’ wives were likely the mothers of the first generation of these, the zygotes being implanted in their wombs.
And this is why whenever anomalous beings are DNA tested, they come back as mtDNA human, from the mother’s side, but the rest of the genome is screwy. There is an exception, the elongated skulls come back as odd in the mtDNA as well as the rest of the genome, so apparently in some cases the mitochondria was modified as well as the rest of the genome.
In addition to size would be possible many other features, something the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on now, to add animal DNA to humans to get supersoldiers.
There are two ways to do this: do genetic surgery and raise the child from scratch, or develop an injection that will replicate and attach to DNA throughout the body and alter an existing, already trained, adult warrior. My guess is both approaches were done before the Flood, and that both are being worked on now.
The newfangled idea of made to order workers and warriors, in pre Flood times, included using nonhuman DNA. The results however weird looking, however non human in biology and mentality, were essentially humans with a difference.
Something is ignored in all this speculation. What does "and also after that" mean? did the angels do this before or after The Flood, is "after that" forward looking? That it says that these "sons" of the angels were "mighty men which were of old, men of renown" might point to some time after the Flood, since it sounds like something that generations closer to the writer would know about. After all, everything even history and legend except for whatever writing was on the Ark, was wiped out in the Flood. Only the knowledge the 8 survivors had would remain. Was this event entirely post Flood? all the pagan legends of divine human hybrids like Hercules and so forth relate to far more recent times.
Numbers 13:33 may give a clue. When Moses sent spies to look over Canaan, all but two gave a bad report, focusing on the giants there, the sons of Anak and the word is nefeel rendered nephilim in Genesis 6:4 and some translations in Numbers 13:33. So did this whole event happen before or after the Flood? Genesis 6:1, 2 clearly speaks of an event before The Flood. But if giants in Numbers were sasquatchy things, brought to earth by returning "aliens" or produced by a redo of some genetic engineering by a handful of people who were given or recovered the knowledge, then you don’t need one of them surviving the Flood by hanging onto the Ark as some Talmudic story has it.
The repeated emphasis in Genesis speaking about The Flood that all on land died, might be a hint that not only did creatures in the sea live, but that perhaps some survived in bunkers underground, under the land. And not in some parallel universe sort of thing. This would required air recycling technology and if genetic engineering could be done, so could that. Would God have allowed it? maybe. Maybe not. The spacefaring option seems better.
But another possibility would be that those surviving in the sea included some engineered to live in water, like mermaids, who might well have the genes for other kinds of modified human, and that these coming on land after the Flood might have been ancestors to these. Just how human would they be? generations of breeding to their kind would make a reshuffling. In regular mixed breeding within a species of several subtypes, you will have some that approximate pure bred to one source ancestry, some to another, and some of various degrees between. It is possible that something still human enough to breed with land humans, but mostly nonhuman in genetics and personality, might have survived. These breeding with each other might have eventually produced some that were throwback to human, and could not live in the sea.
Whatever the truth is on that, the results of this were not angel hybrids, but reengineered humans some with human genes altered some with non human, but not angel, genes added. the peculiar animal monsters and human animal mixes reported in Greek legend just might not have been fabrications. Somehow the idea of a centaur being a misinterpretation of a horse rider seems a bit strange. the tellers of these stories knew of horses and at least of their use to pull carts and chariots. It would be nothing unusual for people to playfully climb on a horse’s back, while hitched to a cart, though they never got the idea of horsemanship. The Aztec who thought the mounted warriors were some man beast monster had no horses or experience with such to draw on. But this is not the case for Greeks and Anatolians.
"And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented YHWH that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. And YHWH said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth Me that I have made them.
But Noah found grace in the eyes of YHWH.
These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."
At this point, some argue that "perfect in his generations" means of pure human blood. Such theorists bypass the Fall and put the blame for all human evil on Nephilim or giant (angel hybrid) DNA, and think a second incursion and hybridization happened after The Flood to account for any present now. This and the idea of Cain as a hybrid himself, often plays to white supremacist ideas. Now that this notion is cropping up again, this is not socially acceptable, so it is not phrased usually as a racial thing. But it reduces man’s salvation and relationship with God to a genetic thing.
And it is false on the face of it, because only Noah is mentioned as perfect in his generations, and in Genesis 7:1 it says, "And YHWH said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation." Again, only Noah is mentioned, not his sons. It doesn’t say "for thee and thy sons have I seen righteous in this generation," it says "for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation." That means that if the issue was genetics, then ONLY NOAH WAS FREE OF NEPHILIM (ANGEL HYBRID) DNA, AND WE ALL GOT IT THROUGH HIS WIFE AND SONS OR AT LEAST THEIR WIVES AND SONS. If the issue was behavior, then clearly at least one of his sons was not perfect and his grandson likely even worse.
The argument is made, that the whole purpose of this angelic hybridizing, was to corrupt the human seedline, "the human DNA." (Harped on as a phrase in a way reminiscent of Gen. Jack D. Ripper and his concerns about "our precious bodily fluids" in the movie Dr. Strangelove.) Why? Because supposedly Jesus could only redeem us if He were our "kinsman redeemer," an almost irrelevant concept from Mosaic Laws about redeeming your relatives from slavery they sold themselves into because of poverty, a near relative had this responsibility if he could do so. But this is totally false. Because Romans shows all creation is waiting the Second Coming, ALL creatures are included in the Redemption. The whole creation is to be renewed and rebuilt Rev.
Jesus would not have to go through several incarnations and deaths and resurrections as various creatures, for them to be included. Origen (wrongly called by some online a "church father" when in fact he was anathematized) did have such a notion, one of those he was anathematized for long after his death, when research on some of his writings and opinions of some of his followers which were logically derived from his system, began to eclipse his earlier reputation as a defender of The Trinity on the one hand, and able to persuade pagans with a philosophical bent to Christianity on the other hand.
But this narrow, mechanistic notion appeals to some people, so you will run into it.
Noah’s perfection in his generations more likely means that in all the generations born in his life time, he was perfect. And apparently the only one perfect. After all, his son Ham and grandson Canaan were definitely not perfect and the other two probably not, but not nearly as problematic.
"And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth."
Another translation says that all flesh had become corrupted. NOTICE THAT BIT ABOUT THE EARTH BEING FILLED WITH VIOLENCE. And remember my speculation earlier about people wanting supersoldiers. This is the context I am talking about.
Now, in the Mesopotamian Flood stories, it is claimed that the "gods" were disturbed, their sleep interrupted, by too much noise by the humans, so they decided to kill them all, but Ea warned Utnapishtim to make the Ark, which is described I think as a cube. In the Bible we are told God was disturbed, all right, but not by being woke up every night by too much noise downstairs, but by the nature of what was going on.
A certain similarity exists between the two stories, but a great dissimilarity. And given the misbehavior of the Mesopotamians, they could hardly afford to allow the original history to get around much, because it rebuked their behavior and false gods and cultic practices. So the real history would have been suppressed, except among those who kept it, and the alternate story which reduces the reason for the Flood to men being too noisy, was presented.
God tells Noah to build the Ark, and it is a rectangle, not a cube. Someone once estimated it had a carrying capacity of 350 boxcars, in three layers.
Now, in this chapter it is only reported that God told Noah to take two of each kind into the Ark "every living thing of all flesh," but clearly whales and fish weren’t brought on board, so what is referred to is land animals and most birds, which are specified later as what died. But in the next chapter the order is more detailed.
Chapter 7
Wait a minute. Didn’t the food laws about clean and unclean animals only come with Moses? What is this clean and unclean about? And didn’t God tell Noah that he can eat anything plant or animals, no food restrictions except that the blood must be poured out? Before we answer that question, let us look at details of The Flood, certain particular details.
Firstly, the timing on this is precise, not like the Mesopotamian story.
"And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredthyear of Noah’s life, in the secondmonth, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heavenwere opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights….And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and was lift up above the earth.
And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered."
This is one of the issues detractors of the Flood have, and those who argue it was local; that the high hills and mountains were covered. But if the mountains weren’t that high, but only became so later because of cataclysms after the Flood, then this is not as serious as it seems. Fossils of sea creatures have been found in the Himalayas, what are they doing there?
Another angle on this, is the slosh effect, especially if there was an axis tilt, from the present tilt to upright during the Flood to back to normal that we have now. The waters pouring, and coming from below the ground, and running off land at first and storms billowing the waves, and the tides still operating making it worse, and probably some well timed volcanos and earthquakes in the sea floor, you can have tsunamis covering all the land and the mountains. Not all would have to cover all land at once, it could have rolled over it.
What is this about the waters below? Huge aquifers. This is what burst forth, and receded.
"And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died."
Now you recall that when God breathed the breath of life into Adam, Adam BECAME A LIVING SOUL. We don’t have souls we ARE souls. And the same is true of animals. Do animals have souls people ask? Yes in the same sense that we do, they ARE souls, they are just different kinds of souls.
Because you will see listed here, all these creatures, including man, as having the breath of life, and not just a clumping together of life forms, but limited "breath of life" to man, because after saying "and every man" it says "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, OF ALL THAT WAS IN THE DRY LAND, DIED." So "all in whose nostrils was the breath of life," does not refer to man alone, but to "all that was in the dry land."
Another point, is that it is reiterated that all life on earth died, and "ALL THAT WAS IN THE DRY LAND."
Haaretz can mean the whole world oceans included, or dry land only or local land only. On this basis the local Floodites argue that it needn’t mean the whole earth.
But it is specified also "all that was in the dry land." What of things that were not in the dry land? Obviously they lived, except for those washed up and beached. Albatrosses can coast on winds at sea and may live at sea for several years at a time, never going on land. Horrendous storms that rip up trees and plants can form floating barges, which in the violent storms likely in The Flood were probably also upended or torn apart, and fierce winds might take such birds down in a downdraft, but the possibility is that they being such not really land animals may have survived, some of them. Perhaps a few other things did also that were capable of life at sea for over 40 days of storming and 150 water prevailing and more time to abate and dry out. But the point is, that there are two emphases here, things that had the breath of life in them, were not a category limited to human beings. And it was those things on land that died.
What if some people, genetically modified to breath with gills survived, and are the basis of the mermaid legend, they no longer being creatures of the dry land? Well, no one has caught one of these but its possible. Might not have happened though.
What if some people believed Noah preaching about the Flood (elsewhere in the Bible he is called "a preacher of righteousness" so that 120 years was probably spent not only building the ark but explaining why) but didn’t want to repent? And tunneled underground with appropriate supplies and desalination and air recycling capability? If such people existed, they would probably have been crushed in some cataclysm aimed at them. But maybe this did happen and gave rise to legends of dubious sorts living underground. Or more likely this happened long after The Flood and has nothing to do with it.
What of those who might, if that was a high tech society, gone off world? Mars has a horrendous gash across its face. If it was populated to some extent, it was probably swung in closer to earth causing cataclysms on both worlds. We got a flood, they got drought, maybe some of our water originally came from Mars. Maybe not. This is speculation of course. It would explain some things I am not going to deal with here, I already did that in another book, A Possible History of Life on Mars.
The most important thing to take away from all this, is that we ARE souls and so are animals.
Now notice that the animals were given over to us, we could kill and eat them, but God leveled the playing field, by making them afraid of us. And we were forbidden to eat meat with blood in it.
Animals are then not soulless objects with no feelings and no standing before God and no rights. The animal rights people would put them on an even category with us, which is not biblical. But that doesn’t mean they have no rights.
We were not given them to do anything but work them, milk them, use their hair shed or cut off, ride them, and eat them, no torture, no unnecessary experiments, no sexual abuse even if they are willing, and no abuse in general. Killing for mere sport is kinda edgy. Probably not. Killing because of population control issues I suppose would be management, the meat could be fed to pets or eaten if the kill involved major loss of blood.
The animals were originally killed as sacrifice to YHWH, their blood being poured out to Him.
Now note this regarding killing them:
Leviticus 17:3-7 "What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto YHWH before the tabernacle of YHWH; BLOOD SHALL BE IMPUTED UNTO THAT MAN; HE HATH SHED BLOOD; AND THAT MAN SHALL BE CUT OFF FROM AMONG HIS PEOPLE;"
Now the death sentence was already given for sacrifice to false gods, and the purpose of this law is also stated as a preventive measure to avoid sneak behavior of this sort, in the wilderness:
"To the end that the children of Israel may bring their sacrifice, which they offer in the open field, even that they may bring them unto YHWH, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest, and offer them for peace offerings unto YHWH. And the priest shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar of YHWH at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and burn the fat for a sweet savour unto YHWH
And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring…."
But what is interesting here, is that God says "blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood;" the same sort of phrasing that is normally used about a human being getting killed. The punishment of cutting off either death or ostracism, is stated, why this additional statement unless God considers that animals are of value and they do have a relationship with Him, and our use of them is limited and conditional? I don’t think He is too happy with people who kill animals just to kill, when they are not killed for food or because a disease outbreak must be stopped, or because they are dangerous. Torturous experiments on them would also not be pleasing, beyond whatever limited amount is needed to ensure safety of products to humans or other animals.
Chapter 8
That is what the differentiation, between clean and unclean, was about, what was fit for sacrifice to YHWH. Under Moses, the Israelites to impress on them their separation to YHWH from the rest of the world, the call to be holy to YHWH, could only eat those animals that were clean for sacrifice.
My guess is, that this standard goes back to Adam and Eve and God’s post fall revelation to them, and that possibly the eating of meat was entirely limited to a sacrificial context. There would be sin offerings, and there would be peace offerings, but outside of this no meat eating. This would be something maybe once a year. If a sin offering it would have to be an animal or bird, if a peace offering could be plant or animal or bird.
As time went on, people started eating meat whenever they felt like it. And eating the blood in it.
"And YHWH smelled a sweet savour; and YHWH said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."
Clearly, the seasons were already normal experiences for everyone, there was no axis tilt from upright to 23 degrees as some speculate.
Chapter 9
"And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea’ into your hand are they delivered.
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat."
This is reiterated several times in the Mosaic code, also fat that from inside the body was not to be eaten, they were reserved to YHWH. Those who ate blood deliberately were to be cut off from the people, probably means death or at least it was an option, might mean ostracism expulsion into the wilderness.
Lev. 17:10-16 "And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.
Therefore I said unto the children Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood.
And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust.
For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whoever eateth it shall be cut off.
And every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean. But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh; then he shall bear his iniquity."
Apparently there is some slack cut at times about this, perhaps in the interest of a starvation or other problematic situation. But it defiled the eater, and the procedure is the same as for one who touched anything a menstruating woman touched, or semen had gone forth from him, whether in spontaneous ejaculation or in sexual intercourse.
The context is always apparently the blood of an animal or bird that has been killed. Caught fish don’t seem to be an issue, you can catch and then kill them by separate chopping of each head, but you don’t see this specified since normally you would catch a lot and it would die of suffocation in the boat or on land. No mention is made of snapping off heads of locusts before eating them. Yet these creatures have blood, but though the blood of fish is often red, for some reason this doesn’t seem to be an issue.
So the problem is, what about those tribal people in part of north east Africa, who sometimes prick the jugular vein of a cow, draw off blood, press and hold till it seals, and drink this blood (usually in a drought) and the animal is not killed? Interesting question. Is blood from that which was alive when it was drawn not in the category of forbidden?
If so, the prohibition on blood transfusion that Jehovah’s Witnesses and possibly some other sects have is baseless. Because the stored blood came from people who were alive when it was drawn.
The primary thing is that the animal or bird, must die in a way that involves blood loss. The normal means is slitting the throat. Jewish kosher slaughter does this with one deep cut, and the animal loses consciousness quickly though it keeps moving for a bit but its over in a couple of minutes. The secular kind of slaughter involves a stun bolt shot to the head, then hoisting by the heels on chains, and cutting the throat, which probably gets more blood out than is done in kosher slaughter.
Kosher meat processing includes washing, rubbing with salt to draw out more blood and washing again, nit picking over it. Secular slaughter does not, and no amount of work will get all blood out.
An animal killed by a shot to the head dies of brain trauma which causes the heart to stop beating, so can hardly be considered exsanguinated. My own opinion, is that a shot (bullet or arrow) to the heart or gut will cause bleeding out into the body cavity, which being cut open then lands on the ground. This would be considerable exsanguinations.
Some people wring a fowl’s neck, and consider the blood retained in the meat makes it taste better. (McDonald’s is rumored to add blood into its burger meat for this purpose, so I won’t eat them.) But only cutting the head off is acceptable. Or a shot through the body that would cause some bleeding to the surface a lot to the body cavity and the blood lost when the body cut open.
This prohibition dates to Noah. And in Acts, when Paul was arguing for not having the Gentiles keep the Torah in order to become Christians, the Apostles decided in their council as follows;
Acts 15:29 "…abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and fornication: …"
Meats offered to idols were spiritually polluted. "Blood" would mean bloodshed or murder, "things strangled" was meat from animals killed by strangulation, which was done as a flavor enhancer. Meat from an animal killed with ZERO exsanguinations. That they phrase it this way makes me think that the issue is less one of total exsanguinations but of at least some, though more much more than a few drops. Most of the meat we eat is killed by head chopping (birds) or throat cutting anyway so it not an issue. Meat sold in a store not from some traditional type thing which in some cultures is neck wringing, you can assume was bled out. This is generally considered healthier but that was NOT the reason God gave food laws. People who think it was health and not a holiness issue are out of their minds, they explain pork prohibition as a matter of trichinosis, ignoring the multitude of other animals and birds that were not to be eaten. And shellfish.
The key to being clean for sacrifice was that the animal chew the cud and split the hoof. If it did only one of these, that was not enough. And if it did neither that was not clean either. This became the standard for clean to eat, under the Mosaic Covenant.
So what is implied in this? When you are like the animal that chews the cud, you don’t just incorporate ideas into your world view without examining them, and you drag them back out and re examine them. The splitting of the hoof gives stability on rough or rocky ground, because there is flexibility, instead of both toes pointing in one direction only, they can flex in different directions, and keep balance, without changing the direction of travel.
In the Orthodox Church this would be called economia, as distinct from akrivia or strictness.
At least two canons of the Orthodox Church prohibited eating meat with blood in it, and prohibited adding blood to any dish. So this still applies to all Christians to this day.
I repeat, I am not a Jehovah’s Witness. Blood transfusion doesn’t go through the mouth, which all the rules about blood are dealing with, and such an interpretation is insanity. But a lot of Christians don’t seem to get any teaching on holiness and good works because Calvinism wrongly teaches once saved always saved and you don’t have to obey Jesus to keep what He gave you for free. And most "bible reading" and "bible teaching" doesn’t seem to dwell on some issues like purity and holiness. And certainly not this blood in meat issue, among the protestants.
The Roman Catholics seem to have let it slide altogether centuries ago, and some people argue that this rule was just a transition period to avoid offending Jews. That is absurd for two reasons. Jews would be a lot more or at least as much offended, by the rejection of circumcision and of the rest of the food laws, and the non keeping of Sabbath. And if this is a temporary rule then so is no murder and no fornication and don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols.
This is a permanent rule. It has no relevance to Messianic prophecy, it is not a foreshadowing of Christ, so it is not set aside. Eating Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist (yes this was the view of it c. AD 150 according to Justin Martyr) is not a violation of this, because this is from One Who is living, not from someone dead.
Getting back to Genesis and God’s covenant with Noah and the other living things,
"And surely the blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made He man."
There’s the validity of the death penalty. It isn’t about prevention it’s about justice. The blessing to fill the earth is given again. Then,
"And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; AND WITH EVERY LIVING CREATURE THAT IS WITH YOU, OF THE FOWL, OF THE CATTLE, AND OF EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH WITH YOU; FROM ALL THAT GO OUT OF THE ARK, TO EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH.
And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood’ neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between Me and you AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE THAT IS WITH YOU, FOR PERPETUAL GENERATOINS:"
That’s right, God has a covenant with the animals and birds and fish and bugs and so forth as well as with us.
"I do set My bow in the cloud,and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth, And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
And the bow shall be in the cloud’ and I will look upon it, that I remember the everlasting covenant between God AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE OF ALL FLESH THAT IS UPON THE EARTH."
It is argued that the rainbow must have existed before this, so this is a pretty fable. But we are talking about YHWH Almighty Himself here, and it may be that the laws of nature were tweaked a bit, at this point in time, so that the prism effect could happen, or could happen regarding water droplets in a cloud. Or, He may have pointed out something that existed already, and said that from then on, it was to be a memorial of this covenant.
Noah made a vineyard, and wine, and got drunk.
"And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him
And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be YHWH God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant."
Let’s look at this. First off, why was Canaan cursed instead of Ham? Maybe so that an entire descent line would not be cursed, only part of it. That Ham is mentioned as father of Canaan in this context, as if he weren’t father of many others also, might indicate that he saw that his son Canaan had stolen Noah’s clothes to leave him naked as a prank, "his younger son" could apply as well to a son as a grandson. In which case the curse was targeted exactly.
White racists have tried to twist this into a curse on Ham, though it explicitly was not on him, but on his son Canaan. According to these people, this curse was darkening of the skin, and the whole thing (though only targeting Canaan) validated or mandated even enslavement of Africans. But this is absurd.
Secondly, this like the "don’t judge" concept, in both cases yanked out of context, is heavily misused in some quarters especially the Orthodox in some jurisdictions, to prevent denunciation and punishment of evil. "don’t display your father’s nakedness" is the motto. But what else is shown here? Did not Shem and Japheth tell Noah what happened, and expose their brother’s and nephew’s nakedness, i.e., sin? Of course they did. Was this denounced as sin? No. Did Noah also curse either of them for "snitching" on Ham and Canaan? Of course not. On the contrary, Noah blessed them for exposing the evil and letting him know who was not really his friend. And this being prophetic was from God, or else God made this blessing come to pass, so He approved of Noah’s handling of this.
"God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant."
This was fulfilled to some extent in ancient Israel’s time, and is fulfilled now, because the Ashkenazic Jews of Israel have some Turkic blood in them, obviously by the looks of many. Jews were never reliably pure especially after the last diaspora, and there was conversion and intermarriage all along. A mixed multitude came out of Egypt with them, and the rules on counting the results of intermarriage as Israelite only caused a few generations delay in the case of a few people, not on every non Israelite. Adoption would also erase the legal taint of blood from any category, which we see happen in the last few verses of Ruth, where Naomi, by a ritual act of nursing Ruth’s infant, adopts it as her own son, and to her own lineage. Without this, David could not have been counted as an Israelite, or been legal to be king, Deuteronomy 23:3; 17:5. Therefore the entire Khazar story, if true, is irrelevant, because they married into Judaism in eastern Europe, and were likely adopted into the tribe of the rabbis who performed the conversion as reported in one lengthy book on alleged lost tribes of Israel and Jewish missionary efforts before they were forbidden by Christian governments to do this.
While one investigation of this story claims evidence for it is nil, the Jewish Encyclopedia gives a lot of sources validating it. The Khazar rulers were rather opportunistic religiously, and there are slightly conflicting versions of the reason the one who chose Judaism did so. Presently Khazars are Christian, muslim and some animist. Maybe a few Jews.
People who make a big deal about Ashkenazic Jews not being "real" Jews because of mixed blood are biblically ignorant, Deuteronomy 23:4-9 specifies only Moabites and those born of a mixed marriage them as ineligible to be in the assembly of Israel until ten generations, and this because of behavior not some racial difference. Egyptians, who were more likely to have black in them, were only excluded to three generations. No restrictions on any other people. Isaiah 56:6 blesses those foreigners who joined themselves to the covenant. Clearly, bloodline purity is not the definition of a Hebrew of any tribe, all of whom are now categorized as "Jews" because adhering to the throne of David, ergo effectively of Judah.
Chapter 10
A bunch of begats, leading up to Abraham. Here I begin to have a problem. It is always easy to account for the population now from only 4 women, but having enough people to populate the various lands and have cities and wars and so forth in that short a time, from The Flood to Abraham, is another matter. Don’t forget the far flung civilizations like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa and whoever else is yet to be dug up. This is increased when you consider that they were not using a solar year of 365 days, but a lunisolar year of 360 days, and may even have been using a lunar calendar of 354 days. If all these names were recorded on clay tablets the possibility of loss of some exists. If done by memory the possibility is greater. LXX shows greater age before birth of the first son on the post Flood patriarchs, while Akiva’s Masoretic text shows less, it has been speculated that this was deliberately changed, to encourage Jews to reproduce sooner and more often.
The LXX and Masoretic agree that there were 10 patriarchs incl. Adam and Noah until The Flood. Sumerian legend also says there were 10 kings before the Flood, each of them living at least 100,000 years. We can assume these ages are false, but it does show a kind of congruence of the history, though the Mesopotamian version went through hands devoted to false religion and all sorts of political agendas.
The similarity between Mesopotamian and Biblical accounts of the Flood was used by some to argue that the Hebrews copied from Mesopotamia. But the monotheistic attitude was too unique. This did not merely posit a top deity for a tribe or city, nothing unusual in itself, but prohibited worship of all other "deities." THAT was unusual.
What is far more likely, is that both traditions come from the same event, but the Mesopotamian ones were corrupted, just as their religion was corrupted. Both accounts claim The Flood came from angered deities, the Hebrew says because of one deity, the Mesopotamian says because of many. Both agree on a divine origin for the Flood. The motive in both cases is similar, anger at human behavior. in The Bible, YHWH is angered and saddened by all the sin, and that even the animals had become corrupted. Mesopotamian lore claims that the humans were overpopulating and making too much noise and keeping the "gods" from getting enough sleep. While these stories are radically contradictory on the face of it, they agree that human behavior was what caused the anger that caused the Flood. So the stories, if you strip out Mesopotamian features, are the same.
Both also claim that one man was approached by a deity to warn him and tell him to build an Ark to save himself, his family and the animals. Mesopotamian lore includes a couple of servants with the man and his family, Bible says only Noah, his wife, and three sons and their wives, no one else. Mesopotamian lore has the Ark being a big cube, The Bible says it was a rectangle. Both agree on something interesting: The Bible says YHWH warned Noah because he alone was righteous. Mesopotamian lore says Ea warned Utnapishtim. Ea is depicted as being a few generations down from the original creator deities, but a poem about seven categories of demons says they are all friends with and/or work for the deities of Mesopotamia except for one: the are afraid of Ea. http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/seven.htm"...Hostile to Ea.
Throne-bearers of the gods are they...."https://therealsamizdat.com/category/seven-harmful-spirits/
NOTE THAT JESUS THREW SEVEN DEVILS OUT OF MARY MAGDALENE. Sounds like kind of this was sending a message, a big hint to those who still held to the mesopotamian paganism. (Mary Magdalene was confused with ex nymphomaniac and ex sometimes professional prostitute St. Mary of Egypt, and in the west became known as a repentant prostitute, but the original legend about her was that she was a virgin, who though inhabited by these demons who tried to persuade her to be immoral refused to cooperate.)
The Eastern Orthodox Church preserves the early church practices and pronunciations with some embellishment over time, which themselves derive from the synagogue and Temple Jewish liturgy. A Jewish lady brought to an EO service by someone commented to him that we stole their liturgy. The structural and some behavioral similarities are extreme. The parading of the Gospels in one book, which is kissed, for one thing, is like the parading of the Torah Scroll and kissing it. Crowns are used in the wedding service for a first marriage in Orthodoxy, and used in Jewish weddings. And so forth.
And two things got my attention. The Hebrew pronunciation of "amen" is not AH mehn but AH meen. This is how EO pronounces it Greek and Slavonic, though in American churches in English serves it often becomes the pronunciation English speakers are used to. And when we say hallelujah, we don’t say hal ley loo yah, we say al ley loo ee ah. Again, where anglicization is common the pronunciation often becomes hal ley loo yah.
"The pronunciation Yahweh is indicated by transliteration of the name into Greek in early Christian literature, in the form iaoue (Clement of Alexandria) or iabe (Theodoret; by this time Gk. b had the pronunciation of v)…Strictly speaking, Yahweh is the only ‘name’ of God. In Genesis wherever the word sem (‘name’) is associated with the divine being that name is Yahweh" (Eerdman’s Bible Dictionary, 1979 p. 478).
"Such a conclusion, giving ‘Yahweh’ as the pronunciation of the name, is confirmed by the testimony of the Fathers and gentile writers, where the forms IAO, Yaho, Yaou, Yahouai, and Yahoue appear. Especially important is the statement of Theodoret in relation to Ex. lvi, when he says: ‘the Samaritans call it [the tetragrammaton] ‘Yabe,’ the Jews call it ‘Aia’…" (The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia, "Yahweh," p. 471)
The following from https://heavennet.net/forums/topic/how-do-you-pronounce-yhwh/
The 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 12, p. 995, makes the following comment under the heading "Jehovah":
"The pronunciation ‘Jehovah’ is an error resulting among Christians from combining the consonants Yhwh (Jhvh) with the vowels of ‘adhonay, ‘Lord,’ which the Jews in reading the Scriptures substituted for the sacred name, commonly called the tetragrammaton as containing four consonants…The Rabbinic tradition that after the death of Simeon the Just (fl.290 B.C.) It was no longer pronounced even on these occasions, is contradicted by the well-attested statement that in the last generation before the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70) it was uttered so low that the sounds were lost in the chant of the priest. After that event the liturgical use of the name ceased, but the tradition was perpetuated in the Rabbinic schools; it continued also to be employed by healers, exorcists and magicians, and is found on many magical papyri. It is asserted by Philo that only priests might pronounce it and by Josephus that those who knew it were forbidden to divulge it. Finally the Samaritans shared the scruples of the Jews, except that they used it in judicial oaths….The early Christian scholars therefore easily learnt the true pronunciation."
That means in all likelihood, the lost pronunciation of YHWH is Ee ah weh. Starting to look familiar? Because hallelujah mean all praise Jah, or Yah, the short form of YHWH.
Ya, the northwest semitic form of Yahweh, would have been pronounced…..Ea.
Delitzsch discovered this similarity of Ea and the Mesopotamian deity, and postulated that there was a connection, that YHWH was known before Moses. This was upsetting to German protestants, who somehow thought YHWHism and monotheism was a unique product of the Hebrew genius or something like that, which is man centered thinking on steroids. that the Hebrews or Moses invented Him!
Supporting Delitzsch however are the discoveries at Ebla, where eponymous (deity honoring) names are el and ya prefixes or suffixes. This was a very old and hard to read dialect, so Matthiae who dug the place up got the one man who could handle this to translate, Pettinato. Pettinato reluctantly concluded that there was a Ya (or YHWH) cultus operating in Ebla, which Matthiae and others couldn't stomach so quickly denied it. But there it is. Indeed, the Bible itself references a midianite presence of YHWHism, though not universal among them, in Moses' youth.
The big question then, in determining Who among the pagan pantheons might be a memory of the true God, is, who was the god of Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah?
The answer is Ea.
An old friend of mine now deceased once observed that people do what works, keep doing it, until it doesn't work anymore, and then they find something else to do. When the Gnostic heresies developed, they bumped the Creator down a notch or more, called Him the demiurge, and blamed material (bad) creation on him, or sometimes on some effort by sophia without permission of The Most High, who is not to blame (they said) for material existence. Likewise in the old days, as paganism and the worship of false gods, ranging from visible heavenly bodies to deified heroes and kings, Ea wasn't that easy to get rid of so they argued he was actually some top deity's great great grandson or something like that.
YHWH means something like Self Existent Eternal Being the Creator of All, and there is a grammatical peculiarity about it, which, together with loss of correct pronunciation due to fear of pronouncing it at all, a late development in Judaism and no part of the Biblical record of Torah and Prophets which constantly uses The Name, makes The Name all the more peculiar. Likely it is the last surviving word from a lost language ancestral to Hebrew.
So now we have a VERY strong congruence between the Hebraic and Mesopotamian versions of The Flood, with an agreement on the Name of the God of Noah. Mesopotamia of course demoted Ya, but despite the lies and heresies about Him, His Name was still powerful against the demons. Why? Because unlike the other "gods" Ya or Yahweh as we pronounce it a lot now, aka Jehovah, is the real God!
Putting all these pieces of the puzzle together makes the Mesopotamian lore confirm The Bible. Yahweh let His cultus die out a lot, then grabbed Abraham and restarted the whole thing! Glory to YHWH!
The possibility exists, that in those patriarchs and for a time after the Flood, what we have are not actual individuals only, but dynasties, and that the son born after such and such a length of time is not the same individual who took up after his father’s death, but rather the father or grandfather of the one who led them after the last of his father’s dynasty died out. This would greatly expand the time, and allow for a larger population, both before the Flood, and earlier after The Flood.
Inerrancy applies to the originals. Divine protection of the documents is more about what we need to know for salvation from sin and from God’s wrath and to live right. As we get into the time when things were written on paper and skins and more information could be kept and the information was now holy and to be preserved carefully, you can expect greater accuracy on details with the occasional scribal slip. Nothing however that affects core doctrine.
In the LXX Genesis 10:2, you have a list of sons of Japheth, which include one Elisa, who is not in the KJV which draws its OT from the Masoretic. In Genesis 10:22, Shem’s sons include one Cainan, not listed in the Masoretic. Again, vs. 24, Arphaxad begot Cainan who begot Salah who begot Eber, while in the Masoretic Arphaxad begot Salah who begot Eber.
So is Cainan introduced twice by accident, or does this refer to some shift over in genealogy of one man because of some adoption, or was there an additional Cainan, left out by the Masoretes because they thought the same name twice was an error?
If you recall, things were written originally on clay tablets. it would be easy to lose a whole tablet, or if there was a space available problem when it came to transcribing onto skins and information had to be prioritized, the possibility of a lot of names being dropped exists.
If names represented the founder of a dynasty, which had the same name as the founder, who lived several hundred years and each one did also, and the son born to the founder is in fact that son one of whose descendants using his name replaced the previous dynasty, and so forth, and if you do this both sides of the Flood, excepting only when an individual with a personal history and his father perhaps are mentioned, you get a lot more time to build population.
A typical list of how using only the information available you could get to present population, does two things. It doesn’t provide enough people early enough for the civilizations scattered here and there (which were not even as large as a typical American suburb) and it presupposes that the women were bearing 10 children each. Given the length of time before the first or at least inheriting of status son is born in almost all cases, it is obvious that people didn’t just run out and marry in haste and breed like rabbits.
The problem, to my way of thinking, is not accounting for the population now from 8 people, but for the population by the time of, for instance, Nimrod, Peleg and anyone else before Abraham and in Abraham’s time.
Another solution would be, that some people heard the warnings from Noah, and didn’t want to change their ways but didn’t want to die either, and were space faring capable and got out of Dodge so to speak to Mars. It is interesting that Mars shows signs of a cataclysm and missing water. We seem to have too much. It might be that the Flood involved a sister cataclysm on Mars, to take down the evil civilization there, perhaps God swung Mars in close enough for tidal gravitational influence to tear up the surface, and caused some of its water to leave and land on earth.
These hypothetical people then would include many who were not as culpable as the others, did at least give credence to YHWH’s warning through Noah, and were not wiped out, but suffered a lot. Centuries later some came back and would add to the population here.
Another possibility of course, is that all the begats are correct as stated, but that peculiar scientific stuff was rediscovered or preserved, including cloning and artificial wombs, and the population increase was done by these means. This would account for the population needed to leave ruins and vague reports of wars and trade everywhere.
The Flood would have presumably scoured everything off the surface or buried it, so that any sunken civilizations we see are post Flood as are all ruins. Gobekli Tepe included. This is a very strange place, with two sister sites we don’t hear about that much. What is odd about Gobekli Tepe, is that it appears to have been filled in and covered with sand, as if on purpose. Since the theorists on this aren’t biblical for the most part, The Flood as the cause of this is not suggested. Another possibility is that it is pre Flood, and was covered by schemers hoping to preserve it for later dig out and reuse when they came back from Mars, and were among those who died there. Whether the sister sites are also buried in this way I don’t know. A great book of fiction that incorporates lots of facts, works on the assumption that it was done deliberately, because the people who did it were horrified and ashamed of what used to go on there. That of course is also possible, even in a pre Flood setting. Some might have repented at some point, but died before the Flood so were not on Noah’s Ark. Some might have repented at Enoch’s preaching, for instance.
Genesis 10:25 "And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan."
Presumably this was the timeframe of the confusion of tongues at Babel. This word is a pun on a word for confusion that is similar to the word Babylon. The earliest settlement here might have gotten its name from someone who remembered the events and still spoke a semitic language.
It is possible that a cataclysm also occurred, separating the continents, or this might have happened during the Flood.
Various people in the alternative research media are referring to this as the Tower of Babel moment and opining that every time "humanity" almost has its act together, something happens. One notable theorist observes that in all the other times YHWH intervenes, there is a specific sin at issue, but this time no sin is mentioned. I suspect he has, despite his soft spokenness, a problem of pride, and this blinds him to what the sin in this incident self evidently is.
The sin was pride. they wanted to make a name for themselves, they didn’t want to be scattered on the earth (contrary to YHWH’s order to fill the earth), and God said that now, because apparently of this tower somehow, or because of the imperial and labor dividing and organizing system they had, nothing would be impossible to them.
This sounds like an extreme statement to make about a bunch of yokels barely out of the Neolithic. perhaps we are reading our own issues back into the past too much, perhaps it should be interpreted in terms of the context, not as an absolute statement. And then again, maybe it was an absolute or nearly so statement. Iraqi pagan centering in Haran, survived into the muslim period, and included very organized concepts of astrology and magic and categorizing of the universe. perhaps some kind of either paranormal technology or regular technology or a mix thereof was involved, and what remained later was just a barely functional knock off.
Michael Sanders, looking at NASA photos saw that four rivers are in the tigris-euphrates headwaters. While it is argued that the Flood destroyed everything, that doesn’t mean that the original springs that fed the river system were destroyed. Genesis does name two of the four rivers with names we know now, and this was written AFTER the Flood. Tigris and Euphrates. "Under that theory, the Tigris would match up with the Bible's Hiddekel River, the
Karun River in Iran would correspond to the Pison and the Gihon River would be
the Wadi al-Batin river system that once drained the central part of the Arabian
peninsula. " Chicago Sun Times, "Garden of Eden said to be in Turkey" Jan. 12, AD 2001 Peter Goodspeed.
Now, Genesis says they travelled east, but the Hebrew says FROM the East.http://www.biblemysteries.com/lectures/babel.htm If the survivors of the Flood landed on the mountains (plural) of Ararat (Armenia) and from there went east, they would come to the northern edge of Turkey or Pontus. Sanders, writing in 1998, said he found someone in Turkey who could locate a place called "gate of God" the meaning of Babel. Apparently there was more than one "Shinar," or rather, like people named places in America after places in Europe, when they found a plain in northern Turkey and they came originally from the (later Sumerian) plain of Shinar, they named it Shinar.
"Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan provides a clue in which he quotes [in The livingTorah] from Targum Yonathan. (A Targum is an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible. Surprisingly and seemingly inexplicably it locates Shinar in Pontus which is situated at the North East of Anatolia, South East of the Black Sea." same URL.
It might also be, that the land of Shinar we know now, is named after the initial post Flood Shinar, which was an original name and not named after an original Shinar elsewhere. But the ziqqurats we are used to are a legacy of an earlier attempt at something, and the earliest of them is not the one Genesis calls Babel. Also, while Genesis connects Babel to Nimrod, the other cities are more in the plain of Shinar we know now, so again this Babel of Nimrod may have been founded on the run from the chaos, and named after the place that was to be a gate of God but also could be punned in Semitic as meaning confusion. The writer of Genesis had to deal with records on clay tablets, not all of them intact, because the information wasn’t that important to our necessary knowledge, or in trying to compact them had to leave some things out. A later scribe gets into trouble. Finally Abraham inherits all this, and then Moses’ family inherits them. Thus the first Babel is in modern Turkey in Pontus, while the Babylon we know was named after it, both locations being under Nimrod’s rule.
A CERTAIN SAD FACT BECOMES EVIDENT AS WE LOOK AT THE BEGATS AND WHO DID WHAT.
Before The Flood, the people who made any noteworthy accomplishments, whether of technology (incl. musical instruments) or building cities were of Cain’s lineage. There is no denunciation of this as sin, just it is noted they seemed to lead the charge. There is no indication that the Shem lineage crowd didn’t learn from them or didn’t independently invent some things, but it just isn’t mentioned. Someone being called the father of those who use a technology may mean all learned from him, and later ones learned from them, or it may just mean he was the first to do this. After the Flood, though knowledge from the earlier world came with Noah’s sons and their wives, again it is the dubious Nimrod who seems to lead the charge in city building and must have had something to do with Babel, though ALL the people were involved.
I like technology, which doesn’t mean they are good, maybe I just like something wrong. But there is a Bible verse "I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions." Proverbs 8:12 And nowhere is alleviation of the curse of hard work on Adam called sin. The New Jerusalem is a great city. So these things are not wrong in themselves. They can and do become idols. Travel is not bad in itself but a weird wander lust may be a trap unless you are legitimately fleeing something or seeking something good.
But the plain fact of history is, that war has always been the main jumpstarter for technology. The idea expressed by many that a superior technology means superior spirituality is blatantly false on the face of it. This idea presupposes evolution is a. physical (the only form that has any case to be made for it) and that this is always in a useful to the species direction (it isn’t) and that it is real (serious problem there beyond mere variation within a genera or next level up of categorization), and b. psycho/spiritual/mental (of which there is no evidence, except for mere smarts getting better, which says nothing about how they are used) and c. that technological development is "evolution" in action also and runs parallel with the rest.
These ideas somehow got mixed with a view of Christianity as the product of spiritual evolution, so this was palatable to Americans and Europeans, and so when WW I showed things were not so evolving many lost faith having been taught lies rather than what Christianity teaches – which is that humanity is NOT something to have faith in but is fallen and even church leaders and teachers are unreliable there will be false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing, that we will get persecuted now and then and must be faithful unto death, that the world will get a lot worse before it gets better and nothing man does but only what the God-man Jesus does when He comes back will solve things and the antichrist comes first and must be destroyed by the real Christ at His Second Coming, and we must be in the world but not of the world.
But raised on "inspirational" pablum and romantic crap and silly winged babies as angels type art and proto new age heresy of course presented with reality at its worst people turned to spiritualism and other lies.
The fact is, as one person pointed out, the most technologically advanced civilization on earth in the 1930s and 1940s was Nazi Germany.
Why would aliens come all this way to make war with us or conquer us? for the same reason any empire has traveled far on earth to do this same thing. Surely if they are so advanced technically they are advanced spiritually? Re read the last paragraph.
and just what kind of spiritual advancement are you talking about? theosophy, with its proto nazi racism considers itself spiritually advanced. peace? there is plenty of peace and quiet among the dead lying in heaps at the end of a war on a battlefield. define your terms. why would they be interested in caring for or serving us? isn’t that a deplorable egotism on our part, a vanity custom made to exploit to take us over?
That’s assuming aliens are physical beings in the first place. if they aren’t it gets worse. And they might be a mix of both.
Back to Peleg and the earth being divided.
There are two theories regarding the meaning of this. That this was when Babel was built and God overthrew it and scattered the peoples, and that this was when the earth's continents were split into their present configurations, which oddly fit.
As I said before, scientists already figure that the earth's land masses were once a single landmass they call pangea. Of course they assume that this split was gradual over millions of years. I don't think so.
A very interesting angle on this is http://setterfield.org/Dodwell/Dodwell_Manuscript_1.html in this the deviations between ancient observation and calculation of the earth's obliquity, and more recent observations and calculations, usually dismissed as error, are treated as accurate, and plotted on a sine curve (which is what appeared when they were all plotted) and the whole averaged out. This is assuming SOME degree of error existed in ancient times.
"The date of verticality of the curve, 2345 B.C...coincided with an "irregularity," this being a large and sudden change in the inclination of the earth's axis; and the date of "insensibility" or of equilibrium in the horizontal time scale of the curve, was 1850 A.D.
"It was absolutely certain that every point on the mean observational curve in Figure 3 is precisely a point on a logarithmic sine curve. The curve is therefore a certain and sure mathematical demonstration that in the year 2345 B.C., the earth's axis was suddenly displaced by a major impact; and the curve shown in Figure 3 is a curve of the partial recovery of the earth to a state of equilibrium, at its normal inclination and conditions, as reach in 1850 A.D."
Now, if you assume that some of the observations he plotted on his scale were in error, and the averaging is to correct for this, but more in error in one direction or another than is effectively averaged out this way, and that some were exactly correct after all, so that doing this averaging puts the picture off, it might have been earlier than 2345 B.C. Going by the years of ages in the LXX, two possiblities exist, either as written is correct, in which case the impact date is around 2258 B.C.; or, you assume error in scribes and that the entire ages of the patriarchs prior to Nahor or perhaps prior to Serug, age at birth of relevant son plus age to death after that should be treated as a lump sum, and you get an impact date of around 2674 B.C.
Both dates could be accomodated by assuming that assumptions about error needing correcting are wrong, but you can't tell WHICH observations were wrong and WHICH were correct, but that there is enough to skew the results off 2345 B.C. Or, that that date is correct in which case you need to downsize some patriarch's lives.
The difference of a few hundred years in either direction isn't fatal to any theory. Especially since we don't know how much of a jolt and how much of a displacement occurred.
This timing would point to the second interpretation of Genesis being correct, since precisely such an impact would start or speed or create outright the separation of continents we have now. The observed plate tectonics and so forth are a result not a cause.
In fact, the date selected by Dobson assumes the event occurred then, but more likely it occurred a few hundred years earlier, because it would take a while for people to recover from the shock of such an event and start making observations. So applying the psychology issue, you could have 2345 B.C. As the date of civilization's recovery or of some elements of it, and the event itself anything from a few decades to a few centuries prior.
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