Quote:
Originally Posted by Digging4Truth
VERY thought provoking.
I have not read all of the posts I have missed over the last few days so you may have already touched on this...
Do you have any thoughts as to who, outside of Moses, may be the writer of Genesis?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mfblume
Pel,
"Unto this day" is a powerful point!
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I think Mike has it here. First of all, my belief: I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe it to be accurate when properly understood but that there are also a lot of literary passages and even figures of speech that we should be careful not to over literalize. Insisting upon an overly rigid fundamentalism causes people to lose faith.
The Bible is clearly a composite work. For example
Judges 4 tells the story of Deborah and Barak. However,
Judges 5, tells the same story but here it is composed as a song that is attributed to Deborah. Most Hebrew linguists agree that the "song" in
Judges 5 is written in a form of Hebrew that is far older than the rest of the book. It's sort of like a modern English student trying to read Beowulf in its original form.
I note that the Bible has carried this seeming anachronism for centuries, even millenia without changing it. This tells me that whoever was involved in putting the Bible together actually wanted the reader (at least the Hebrew readers) to appreciate the fact that the text has a history. There was no "slip up" by scribes trying to hide anything here- the older version of Hebrew in song form was (and is!) an important part of the Bible's story.
There are many other "seams" in which it becomes apparent that different source material was "stiched" together with a contempory narrative. The "Yahweh versus Elohim" passages in Genesis, though difficult to completely seperate, may represent a similar clue that the Bible gives us as to its own "history."
Following the "unto this day" statement from Genesis through the book of Nehemiah would seem to place "this day" sometime during the life of Ezra the Scribe. And again, even though some unbelievers relish finding these passages and saying, "Aha!" I feel that this is in fact an important part of the Bible's message and even a pillar of the polemic arguments that it's trying to make (
Ezra 9:7 and
Nehemiah 9:32).
When the writer said, "...unto this day..." he was obviously making a strong appeal to his audience's sense of history and the customs and monuments that still existed which bore witness to that history. The Bible isn't trying to "hide" anything here, it's actively seeking converts with the "... unto this day..." references.
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