GENESIS: The Dissensus Bible Group.

craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Corpsey said:
I wondered if that story was supposed to show the Jewish God's distinction from false idols that do demand human sacrifice, carried through. Essentially, this God demands faith and obedience, but is also merciful (and is opposed to human-on-human bloodshed, hence the mark of Caine, the post-flood covenant). But I have no knowledge of if such other religions existed at the time.

It could also just be a variation on the 'honor thy father' principle - which after all is an important one for the maintenance of social order (and still presumably figures in many modern stories).

Hopefully going to reume my Bible studies this week, just had a heavy weekend and feeling appropriately guilty. Not read up to Abraham and Isaac.
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That's similar to the way that the horrific Levite & Concubine story is "supposed" to be read and it's where theological exegesis can shed light on these otherwise baffling texts.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
poetix said:
There's a long sequence of adjustments from "burnt sacrifices are good, obviously" through "but not children! Sheesh!" to "burnt sacrifices without keeping the Law are hypocritical and bad, actually", to "you know what, just forget about the burnt sacrifices"
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Also the way Leviticus is treated by later Judaism and Christianity.

(The way Leviticus is treated by Craner was just to skip the whole thing.)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I'm up to Abrahams servant going back to the ancestral homeland to scoop up a wife for Issac.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I'm not struggling at all. I'm really enjoying it. Although if you are in the pub there is a point at which your attention starts wandering. I found it was already drifting halfway through the second pint.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
to be fair, i've tried listening to the bible and the quran a couple of times and they're much more boring than you'd think. all the magic and wars and rape and all that obscured behind torrents of family trees being spelled out or repeating the same thing over and over and over again.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Derrida talks about the whole Abraham/Isaac sacrificial scenario at length in The Gift of Death. I don't remember what exactly he says about it, though. The gist may have been that the "gift" has to lie outside of all game-theoretic calculation - if Abraham undertakes to kill Isaac on the expectation that God doesn't really mean it, in anticipation of being rewarded for his show of faithfulness, then of course the gesture is hollow. The last-minute reprieve has to be entirely unpredictable (by Abraham, at least) for the story to work. But for any reader of the story, it's kind of a predictable outcome, because we know how this sort of divine gambit is supposed to work. So there's a split between Abraham's diegetic (lack of) understanding of what's going on, and our exegetic understanding that this is a certain kind of story and is going to go a certain sort of way.
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Isn't that just a fancy way of saying dramatic irony? Or do I mean romantic irony... no dramatic.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
sadmanbarty said:
to be fair, i've tried listening to the bible and the quran a couple of times and they're much more boring than you'd think. all the magic and wars and rape and all that obscured behind torrents of family trees being spelled out or repeating the same thing over and over and over again.
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Haven't read enough to agree with this but it does seem like the Bible is full of great stories, badly told.

What writers and artists have done with these stories (e.g. that caravaggio painting) is often more compelling than the urtext.

Although it SEEMS - I'm so far off - that the story of Jesus is a good story, and as a symbol it's so profound you can see why people were so enthused by it.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I don't think they are badly told. I love the economy of it. Babel gets wrapped in up like, one paragraph.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
11 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
That's amazing. Just the word Shinar is so potent. I love that passage. I love the writing.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Babel is a good explanation for why different languages exist (in the absence of a modern understanding of this), but of course it seems at odds with our modern liberal notions of how we would all get alonnnng maaan if we spoke the same language.

Nowadays a more appealing myth might be that God created separate languages because that makes things more interesting.
 
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