This week's reading

craner

Beast of Burden
They were a stiff-necked people.

I have to say, it took me a while to recover from the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges. It is one of the most horrendous things I've ever read.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
They were a stiff-necked people.
I have to say, it took me a while to recover from the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges. It is one of the most horrendous things I've ever read.
Remind me?
What the fuck is the moral of Job supposed to be? Even if you're the most righteous man in the world God will still be a massive cunt to you to prove a point...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah, goes all the way up to Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat!
I remember the line that goes "She (maybe Pharaoh's wife) was chapter 39 of Genesis" cos we did it at primary school.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Remind me?
What the fuck is the moral of Job supposed to be? Even if you're the most righteous man in the world God will still be a massive cunt to you to prove a point...

Luka can correct me here probably but isn't this where Gnosticism comes from - the idea that the old testament god is a trickster god, and evil, and the New testament is really about the toppling of the fake god by Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the real, humane, merciful God?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I would like to read the Bible but I wonder if it's as interesting as what it inspired (admittedly a fuckload).

But I guess if I don't read it I'll never know.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Just absolutely extraordinary to imagine believing in this stuff as literal truth, I'm actually quite jealous it must be like having a child's imagination for your whole life. No Blake could exist without that sort of belief.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I often lament the loss of the imagination that allowed me to believe in father Christmas, no questions asked.

OFC I realise belief isn't always like this and I don't mean to do the patronising "you might as well believe in the tooth fairy!" Dawkins thing.
 

luka

Well-known member
My dads parents did pretty much. He was told dinosaurs never existed and the bones were a test of faith. No tv or radio cos the waves travel through the air and satan is the prince of air and etc etc
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Milton addressing Paradise Lost to God and *actually believing he was addressing God*. You can know that and not understand it.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I have a soft spot for the "dinosaur bones were put there to test your faith" line. I love it when people say that, it's magical!
 

version

Well-known member
Craner, hard at work on his fascism essay, hurling his inkwell at luka, the tormentor.

dsc00808.jpg
 
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woops

is not like other people
I have a soft spot for the "dinosaur bones were put there to test your faith" line. I love it when people say that, it's magical!

Edmund Gosse's dad, who is probably related to luka somehow, reckoned he'd cracked this one. I thinkhis explanation goes that just as God made Adam and Eve with navels, all those millions of years of dinosaur bone were a similar feature of creation. I'll try and look it up when I get home.
 

other_life

bioconfused
Do the Bible with me. I'm only on Samuel, you'll both catch up in no time.
my jps hebrew-english has a printing error so it reads 1 S MUEL. shmuel.
i'm studying putnam's bib. hebrew grammar so i can follow along w this stuff and not rely on others' interpretations.
I have to say, it took me a while to recover from the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges. It is one of the most horrendous things I've ever read.
'in those days no king reigned in israel, everyone did what was right in their own eyes.'
i kind of wonder if sefer shoftim doesn't contain earlier strata than genesis, ie the stuff in there is really the foundational history of these folks? that story feels like a tell compared to sodom and gomorrah, as does possibly "ba'al berit" in one verse and "el berit" in another...
Luka can correct me here probably but isn't this where Gnosticism comes from - the idea that the old testament god is a trickster god, and evil, and the New testament is really about the toppling of the fake god by Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the real, humane, merciful God?
this is one kind of gnosis, yes. marcion. the mandaeans, etc. there is a mainline-rabbinic-jewish gnosis, though, which relies heavily on
Ironically, Genesis is so sparsely, thinly imagined in the Bible, it creates vacuums for interpretation and imagination to expand into. It's gnomic, in that sense.
precisely these kinds of qualities in the narrative voices of the tanakh, its textual inconsistency as well, subtle things taken to be signals of something profound. the idea is that it's gnomic to leave room for the teachers to breathe, to explicate, to fill in. from this viewpoint haShem's never *split* between [pub banter rehearsed] OLD TESTAMENT GOD and NEW TESTAMENT GOD... just strange. multivalent, polymorphic, many-faceted.
one house many mansions
dissensus let's read the bible
 
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