Originally posted by josephw
Well, if an act or behavior is unclean or impure it's a sin. One doesn't have to be a genius to figure that out.
It appears, to me, that all you're doing is making the simple truth sound complicated in order to justify evil behavior.
Some other references to
toevah in Leviticus—
NRS Leviticus 11:13 These you shall regard as detestable among the birds. They shall not be eaten; they are an abomination: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey,
NRS Leviticus 19:7 If it [the sacrifice of well-being] is eaten at all on the third day, it is an abomination; it will not be acceptable.
NRS Leviticus 20:25 You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean.
The KJV also translates
sheqetz as abomination, treating the terms as synonymous, though the NRSV renders it as detestable. Sometimes “abomination” also refers to an idol.
When you read through all the usages, the long and the short of it is: wickedness is abomination, but abomination is not necessarily wickedness.
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The English word abominable comes from a Latin root: ab (away from) + omen, apparently meaning to “shun as an evil omen” (John Ayto,
Dictionary of Word Origins).
Ayto also addresses the word “evil”—
“
Evil has got distinctly worse over the millennia. Originally it seems to have signified nothing more sinister that ‘uppity,’ and in the Old and Middle English period it simply meant ‘bad’; it is only in modern English that it connotations of ‘extreme moral wickedness’ came to the fore.”
In other words, one could speak of having eaten an “evil” meal without meaning anything other than that it was bad-tasting. The Hebrew word generally translated as “evil” (
ra) also has the broad meaning of “bad,” not exclusively morally bad. The Greek word so translated,
poneros, is similar—it comes from a root meaning toil, and carries such meanings as toilsome, grievous, useless, worthless, distressed, ill, dangerous; it can also mean knavish or malicious.
Context, of course, matters. The thing is not to read
into the texts from our own moral sensibilities—or, for that matter, to read into any texts a single meaning where many are possible—but to read
out of the texts. Or, at least, if we are reading
into the text (which I do not think is always invalid; midrashists openly do it all the time), to keep clear about what we’re doing and why.
Comebacks
21 Mar '07 15:59
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