The location of the Tree of Life

in tha qabala of course. two of the other rivers mentioned are the tigris and the euphrates.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 06-07-2005 11:04 PM

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אָרַח

not neccessarily. people make all sort of requests on a purely self-centered basis, and this frequently is one of them. people tend to only operate within their own time frame.but god is not people.

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אָרַח

yeah, but they make up explanation about the flood and changing geography. which kind of ruins the story.the myth itself is about the explusion of a garden into the desert. it establishes eden as a very real place, whether or not they intend the story to be factual (that's another debate.)similarly, the OTHER source of the hebrew people, abraham, comes from babylon, which would be between those two rivers, and wanders off into a desert. same theme, really, slightly different message.

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אָרַח

precisely.although, where cain's wife (among others) came from has been a question since the compilation of genesis. one apocryphal text addresses the question by proposing that the earlier authors just didn't record daughters (unless they were important). and so cain's wife was one of adam and eve's daughters, who got away and moved elsewhere before cain followed her.i find this explanation a little ad hoc. the only other alternative is the one you're arguing against (which makes calling eve "the mother of all mankind" wrong, as well).

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אָרַח

you a parent by any chance?do you let your kids look at porn? how about when they turn 18? or 21?not the greatest analogy, but it fits. not everything is for children. and our society fervently protects children from the things it deems not appropriate. adam and eve were children, in a sense.what boggles my mind is the assertion that we've grown up.

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אָרַח

one of the key qualities of good bible study is be able to tell what it's saying about god.the god of genesis is very different than the from exodus-joshua, who is very different than the god of samuel and kings, who is very different from the god of isaiah etc.there's a couple possibilites:

1. they're all different gods
2. they're all facets of the same god
3. all but one is fake
4. god changed
5. the people writing about god changed

personally, i think some combination of 2 and 5 is probably the best explanation. but simple fact remains: the perception of god in genesis is decidedly more human than any other. he is petty, jealous, angry, and generally not very god-like. he is given a number of qualities similar to us: appearance, a physical body, and emotions. the god of genesis makes mistakes, and feels bad when he does.

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אָרַח

modern usages vs. olde tyme ufagef.ever tried reading shakespeare's folios?in modern english, when we bring an -im or -ym ending word into english from hebrew, it is inherently plural, since -im or -ym is the pluralization in hebrew. the other acceptable way would be to remove the -im or -ym and replace with the english -s or -es.so "cherubim" would become "cherubs" or "cherubim" but not "cherubims." it's not that the KJV is WRONG, it's just that language has changed in the last 400 years.

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אָרַח

no, that's the part that confuses me.people assert that we do, and that tree is christ. which is indirectly asserting that we've somehow grown up. which i strongly doubt.god says, in genesis 3, that there are two components to godhood: knowledge, and life. this suggests if we given the tree of life, we would be gods. [assuming the tree of knowledge is hereditary, which christian propose]

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אָרַח

well, i think the argument is actually the reverse: in genesis, we've created HIM in OUR image. specifically? no. but at least three sources. the latest of which dates to probably just after 600 bc. wasn't around then. these are stories about events that, according to the traditional mythology, happened in the past. genesis is a collection of that traditional mythology.it's sort of like asking how the iliad and the odyssey survived the trojan war. these stories weren't written until AFTER the events. not during. no, it's just simply a book, that contains a collection of books, which are themselves a collections of other things. for instance, take the book of psalms. we have it as PART of our one big book, but it's really it's own book. within that book, there's actually five separate books of psalms. and within those, each psalm is a work in an of itself.it's just a little less obvious with the other books. but most of them work that way. throw a long and complicated history on to it, and you've got a big confusing mess. but i think it's our duty as christians to try to figure out how to make sense of what's there. acknowledging it for what it is, how and when it was written, instead of just worshipping it in bibolatry. agreed. usually. sometimes i'm not so sure. for instance, what's the moral of the story about dinah's rape? i think the further extrapolated moral is that one day we will be.

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אָרַח

nah, i've read a lot of stuff that can be taken very many ways. they say all good art is somewhat vague, so that each viewer, reader, or listener can take it to mean something different.one of my favourite bands, actually, has a lot of debate over the meaning to their lyrics. there was a thread way back about the morality of genesis. it never got off the ground.

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אָרַח

at least in genesis. thus the title of this particular sub-thread.

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אָרַח

not exactly. "in the day" is a hebrew idiom that means "when." so the statement is cause and effect: when adam eats of the tree of life, he will die.god makes sure to emphasize death by repeating it (rendered in english as "surely die" in most translation). basically, he's telling adam that fruit is posionous. or maybe threatening to kill adam himself. but god most certainly meant physical death. no other kind is mentioned. i'm thinking now it was more of an exagerated thread. like we tell our kids. "don't do that, or i'll kill you." when our parents told us things that were similar, we didn't usually expect to actually die as a result.and that's what the serpent tell eve. "oh, god's not ACTUALLY going to kill you." eve seems to agree with that assessment.

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אָרַח

i've sort of noticed this. but i think it's not so much a progress of GOD, but of man. the bible is essentially a story of people who become more and more civilized, and it basically starts in the dark ages.genesis is the earliest set of myths (although one of the last written, probably). what they were doing was recording earlier traditions. and i think they recorded their past views of god with it. because the stories wouldn't make sense any other way. you can't have the flood, for instance, if god doesn't feel sorry about his creation. even though the later tradition says god does not repent, he has to in genesis 6.this view can be seen from either perspective, really, the athiest and the christian. but i also have a thought that god is mostly leaving us alone recently, and so part of the perception of distance might come from that.

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funny, i never pegged riverrat as a depeche mode fan. (or johnny cash, or especially not marilyn manson)

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"spiritual death" may or may not be the opposite of the tree of life, and the discussion is questioning its location which implies an abscence. therefore, spiritual death is entirely on-topic.

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אָרַח