could moses have written the first five books of the bible

modern christianity tends to suffer from that opinion of disagreement. i don't get it. it's completely unsupported biblically. jesus was all about questioning established thought.

yes! hear, hear.that's one reason i think it's not valid to say "jewish tradition says _____." because chances are, they've been arguing the point for 1000 years.

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אָרַח

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Well it's important to point out that the JEDP theory divides up Genesis into smaller sources. But this is also the orthodox view. The part that is really in question is the last four books in the Pentateuch. Evangelicals don't dispute multiple source authors' writings being edited and compiled in Genesis. So any divisions there are not terrtibly relevant to the debate, unless there's something unnacceptable about a particular one as far as Evangelical scholars are concerned.

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You seem to be changing your position.In your first post (Message 63) you stated: To me this says you do not agree with the multiple writers presented in the Documentary Hypothesis. But now you state that Evangelicals don't dispute multiple source authors' writings being edited and compiled in Genesis. So any divisions there are not terribly relevant to the debate...But the majority of your first arguments were concerning Genesis.To avoid further confusion and wasted posts, please present your specific arguments against the Documentary Hyposthesis itself with your supporting evidence.

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton

At least. There is a concensus on a number of issues though.There is mainstream thought... and variations of it. For example, you will not find a Jewish source that will claim that "Adam's fall corrupted mankind and caused original sin" and that "man is stained with sin at birth". You might get a lot of variations about what the story teaches, but that is not in the Jewish mindset.

Alright, sorry I've been absent the last few days, but well there was playoffs and then my internet con died for about a day. Very annoying.

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yes, it is. it's not only the same argument you are making, but if there were hebrews in israel/palestine prior to the conquest described in judges, then it casts a lot of doubt on mosaic authorship. if the event didn't happen...

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I agree. It is relevant to the debate, but not to the POINT of the debate, as I very carefully said.

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wow, you really don't understand, do you?

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ok, fine. archaeology testifies to me that the chaldeans were a dynasty of neo-bablyonian kings, who ruled from about 900 until after the hebrew exile. i hold to that view. why would it be in question for my argument to hold water?

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This has nothing to do with Chaldean presence in Mesopotamia in Abraham's time. That is what is in question, not this.

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yes, you see, because unlike the hebrew conquest, we know from archaeology that the chaldean one happened. we know where they came from, when they moved in, and what they took over. the bible actually confirms this -- the point you're REALLY avoiding -- because save for the reference to abraham, the are not present in the bible until the end of kings, when they come through as conquerers and carry the hebrews off to exile.

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This has nothing to do with Chaldean presence in Mesopotamia in Abraham's time. That is what is in question, not this.

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well, that's silly. abraham wasn't a levite either. neither was isaac, or jacob ("israel") or joseph. it's not until joseph's son levi has kids that we get levites. yet all of those generations are hebrew, aren't they?

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OK, then please explain why you think Melchizedek was a Hebrew or a Israelite.

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yes, as joshua is conquering it.

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It was also conquered by David, which indicates that it was not occupied with Joshua's conquest but only subdued and then later it regained independence. Or do you beleive this is also problematic for Biblical honesty?

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ahem. "sons of israel."

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hebrew ≠ israelite. there were no israelites before israel -- jacob -- was born.

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Yes I'm aware of this but this does not change the vailidity of my point. You still have a two interpretations that are not logically compatible. One would logically deduct that therefore at least one of them must be wrong.

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there are lots of problems with your view, you just choose to wave them away with double standards.

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Double standards? First of all, you have nothing that is problematic with my view so far. Secondly, double standard? What are you referring to here?

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it looks to me like god doesn't say much of anything. there's a part where jacob said god said something. but clearly, nobody in the bible ever told a lie.

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Look, it does not logically follow that just because Jacob says God told him something instead of the Bible wording it as God Himself is saying something, that therefore Jacob must be lying. You need additional evidence to demonstrate lying.

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yes. look, if i cheat on my math exam and then attribute all of my right answers to god, did i lie?

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want further proof it's a lie?

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Well this example doesn't do anything to prove his lying or even make it probable.

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And your father hath mocked me, and changed my wages ten times; but God suffered him not to hurt me. If he said thus: The speckled shall be thy wages; then all the flock bore speckled; and if he said thus: The streaked shall be thy wages; then bore all the flock streaked.

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that what he tells his wives. but who made the speckled and spotted agreement?

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Well it seems clear to me that Jacob is talking about Laban changing the terms of the original agreement. I don't see any lying here. Since this would logically be referring to after the original agreement was made, this doesn't cause any logical consistency problems. Why should I not believe Jacob here?

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I will pass through all thy flock to-day, removing from thence every speckled and spotted one, and every dark one among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats; and of such shall be my hire.

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yeah, jacob did. jacob set the wages, not laban. further more, they weren't wages. laban said:

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quote:And he said: 'Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it.'

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jacob has a better idea:

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quote:And he said: 'What shall I give thee?' And Jacob said: 'Thou shalt not give me aught; if thou wilt do this thing for me, I will again feed thy flock and keep it.

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then he sets up the conditions for which sheep and which goats become his. then he does something that makes the sheep and goats meet that condition according to their quality.

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quote: but when the flock were feeble, he put them not in; so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's.

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jacob is clearly ripping laban off. in that whole second half of genesis 30, is god even doing anything at all? or does something that jacob actively does create the conditions het set forth?

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Well in order for Jacob to be ripping Laban off, he would have to be causing the sheep and goats to give birth to speckled, spotted, and brown offspring. But clearly we agree he did not have the capacity to do this. Thus it would have been God who caused this to happen. So he, technically, wasn't ripping Laban off. Do you have any evidence here that Laban did not change the original agreement 10 times as Jacob says he did?

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did laban have it coming? sure. laban was deceptive too. "work for me seven years, you can have my daughter {seven years later} oh you wanted that daughter? another 7, then."

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do two wrongs make a right?

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This passage doesn't teach that two rights make a wrong. Look at Jacob's life later on. It is filled with grief and being humbled.

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yes. dishonesty, and scheming. then he lies about it.

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I still don't see any evidence for lying in this passage.

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well, it certainly doesn't match any known process in genetics.

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Right so therefore Jacob could not have been ripping Laban off. Or is it that you make exception to this in order to sustain your lying theory?

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whoa whoa. where does god show jacob anything? jacob tells people that god told him something. that's not actually part of the events in the story line. he says that god said:

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quote:And he said: Lift up now thine eyes, and see, all the he-goats which leap upon the flock are streaked, speckled, and grizzled; for I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee.

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but that's not true, is it?

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I see no reason why it wouldn't be. Why wouldn't it be true?

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the weaker members of the flock DID get it on. in fact, that "weaker" bit is actually an idiom which literally translates "late-breeders." so it's NOT only the spotted and streaked one that mate.

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IC. Ya I got the part where the weaker were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's.

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jacob is insisting that he had nothing to do with it.

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What part says this?

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he said that he saw in a dream that only the spotted and streaked members of the flock were breeding, and that god confirmed it. but instead, jacob actually controlled which breeding members of the flock produced spotted and streaked young.

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God confirmed it? I think it's more like God caused it, letting Jacob know the real reason why the better sheep and goats gave birth to speckled and spotted.

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but instead, jacob actually controlled which breeding members of the flock produced spotted and streaked young.

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Or so he thought, until God enlightened him.

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jacob told a lie.

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Where? When he said Laban changed the wages 10 times? Check out Genesis 31:41.

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31:41 Thus have I been twenty years in thy house; I served thee fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle: and thou hast changed my wages ten times.

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See he later even tells Laban to his face that he changed his wages 10 times. Yet for some strange reason, Laban doesn't scream out "liar!" Read the following verses. In fact he doesn't disagree with Jacob's claim. This is quite bizarre if Jacob lied. Isn't it?

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do you not believe that characters in the bible can lie?

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Sure I do. But I don't go looking for lying that can't even logically fit and then go around trumpeting my ilogical interpretation to others as proof that the Bible is dishonest or that passages in it are not logical.

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Please show me how that applies to the verses I shared in Message 114

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Genesis 2
By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.

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Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

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This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.

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Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.

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What aspects of God's character do the different names used for God show and how does that fit in with the context of the verse?

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I don't see any problem here. So the passage says Elohim and then later Yahweh, big deal. Isn't this rather a problem for the JEDP theory, which then has to presuppose an ilogical division, in the middle of a passage? Why would a compiler be so sloppy as to use Elohim and than Yahweh in the same passage he's piecing together? Sorry, I view passages like this as problematic for the JEDP theory, not Mosaic authorship.AFAIK, Yahweh is typically used to stress the personalness of God to the Israelites. But I certainly have no problem with Moses using Elohim and Yahweh interchangeably. But alot of the other names for God in the OT, have specific significance, beyond merely this, that applies to the circumstances of the given passage.

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well, that'd be a good place to start.

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And maybe I will read them. But so far I don't see a significant need to.

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wait wait, don't write it off just yet. let's follow this one to it's logical conclusion. you agree then that genesis was edited together from multiple sources?

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This is the SOESV. Grigg also believes this. And yes I do too, as I've already indicated in earlier posts. I doubt much of Genesis, if any of it, is based on oral tradition.

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colleges do not exist to teach students. students exist so professors can have an income while they research in their field.

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Very true, sadly. They exist only in theory to teach students.

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may i remind you that you yourself condemned people for using vague grammar as an excuse. yes, the grammar CAN be vague from time to time. but saying "grammar can be vague at times" doesn't give one the license to misrender something a third-grade native-speaker would find obvious.

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I don't recall saying "vague" about grammer in regards to the Bible. I said ambiguous grammer.

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Definitions of ambiguous on the Web:

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* equivocal: open to two or more interpretations; or of uncertain nature or significance; or (often) intended to mislead; "an equivocal statement"; "the polling had a complex and equivocal (or ambiguous) message for potential female candidates"; "the officer's equivocal behavior increased the victim's uneasiness"; "popularity is an equivocal crown"; "an equivocal response to an embarrassing question"
* having more than one possible meaning; "ambiguous words"; "frustrated by ambiguous instructions, the parents were unable to assemble the toy"
* having no intrinsic or objective meaning; not organized in conventional patterns; "an ambiguous situation with no frame of reference"; "ambiguous inkblots"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

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Read the first definition listed. That is what I meant, not vague.

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It is very likely that many of these "liberal scholars" were raised as Christians, and it is likely that a number of them were raised as evangelicals. They may well have taken your view to be obviously true, and it might have been difficult at first for them to recognize that the evidence suggested otherwise.

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I think it's more like their understanding of the Bible is meager and then they hear proffessors bashing it at length, in things they've been taught little about. And they then don't even realize that Evangelical scholars have answers to these alleged problems with the Bible, because they haven't been aren't exposed to them.

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I'm not sure why you insist on calling them "liberal scholars". It sure looks like labelling. What does "liberal" mean in this context? Have you done research on their politics? Have you done research on their religious views?

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It means they don't hold to an orthodox view of the Bible and disbelieve alot of it. It's a term in common use. "Liberal" doesn't have an explicitly negative connotation anyways.

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that's what undergraduate work is like because kids grow up so mindless that they have to be handheld into a realization of what the world is actually made of. the entire point of academic work is to expand upon or disprove the previous theory. if the previous theory and your professors were really any good, the problems would be solved. in my field, war would be over. but they weren't smart enough, good enough, right enough and so we have to tell them exactly where they were wrong.

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Good point. An even better one would be to point out the falaciious assumption that this won't in turn happen to the current reigning academians and their theories by future generations.

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if previous biblical scholars had really found the answers, the problem would be solved. the results would be so conclusive and so persuasive that everyone would believe (every knee bow every tongue confess). but they don't because they didn't.

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You're missing that the the liberal scholars pay little heed to what Evangelical scholars say. They are totally disjointed, not consecutive. Evangelical academia is actually fairly large in the US, but there is little real dialogue between them and liberal scholars.

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modern christianity tends to suffer from that opinion of disagreement. i don't get it. it's completely unsupported biblically. jesus was all about questioning established thought.

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It's more like He was about correcting established thought, from His point of view.

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You seem to be changing your position.

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To avoid further confusion and wasted posts, please present your specific arguments against the Documentary Hyposthesis itself with your supporting evidence.

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Yes it was to avoid confusion and arguing mutually held positions that I pointed out, early on in this debate, that Genesis was a compilation of various sources. Grigg says this too in the article that I posted a link to. But apparently many of you repeatedly missed me pointing that out.

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Except that Moses is the only person being said to be writing part of the Pentateuch in the Pentateuch.

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No, Moses is being said to write down laws on a scroll. Nothing supports that what he actually wrote is part of the Pentateuch. What supports your theory?

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton

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Instead I find a face value interpretation of the Bible makes plenty of sense already.

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If taken at face value the verses only support that Moses wrote down laws. They don't support writing the narratives.If you feel otherwise, please show me how the verses support more than writing laws.

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton

Apparently you didn't understand my request in Message 168.To avoid further confusion and wasted posts, please present your specific arguments against the Documentary Hyposthesis itself with your supporting evidence.

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton