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