Category: Old Testament
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Julian Green on Manna
Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941: The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing…
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Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?
Substack latest.
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“Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”
Honor your parents for what was honorable in them. As for the rest, forgive and forget, or at least forgive. Honor the honorable; forgive the rest.
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Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden
An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic. There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic. And there never were any such cave-dwellers or goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story. And…
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A Rule for Reading the Bible
What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy,…
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The Psalms
I find in the Psalms too much praising of a tribal god and not enough seeking of the hidden God. But both are there.
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Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?
Of course not. If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true. Now the sentence 'There is no God' occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1) So if everything in the Bible is…
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A Note on Vox Clamantis in Deserto
This just over the transom from London Ed: Pedantic, but I think you will secretly enjoy it. Matt. 3:3 quoting Isaiah 40:3. The Vulgate has Vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini. [Right, I checked both quotations in my Biblia Vulgata.] There has always been a question about the parsing of this. Is it A…
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Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden
This is a revised entry from over five years ago. I re-post it to solicit the comments of the Opponent and anyone else who can provide some enlightenment. I am not a theologian, but theology is far too important to be left to professional theologians. …………….. An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site…
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The Old Testament is a Cipher
Le Vieux Testament est un chifre. (Pascal) Surely that is right? A cipher is a coded message that needs to be deciphered. The Astute Opponent seems not to agree. Related articles Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers Tongue and Pen
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Leviticus 19:15: The Lord versus Hillary
“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice." Alternate translations here. In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court nominations. "And the kind of people…
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Comments on “Divine Fluidity”
By Edward Buckner, here, at Dale Tuggy's place. Ed's text is indented; my comments are not. I thank Ed for the stimulating discussion. He begins: I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The…
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Whether ‘Image and Likeness’ Supports God’s Having a Body
If man is made in God's image and likeness, does it follow that God is essentially embodied? Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . . Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God…
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Abraham, Isaac, and Trumping ‘From Above’: A Partial Retraction
I say on my Welcome page: I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not. Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization. Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something. I admit mistakes if…
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God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality
When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus. They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it. But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality.…