Originally posted by checkbaiter
http://www.truthortradition.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=347
This is the best I can do for now....will get back as soon as I can..
Below are the relevant sections from the site you referenced:
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What about the Old Testament? Why is there basically no mention of the Devil? That is an excellent question, and we do our best to answer it in our book,
Don't Blame God! The handful of references to Satan in the Old Testament, such as in Genesis 3, Job 1 & 2, Isaiah 28, and Ezekiel 14 were not understood by the people of that time as referring to the being who Jesus revealed in the New Testament. Looking back in light of the New Testament, we understand these as referring to him, but they were sufficiently cryptic so as to veil his existence from people in the Old Testament. They recognized the existence of a spirit realm, but had no idea of the two kingdoms at war with one another.
The basic reason why God did not reveal the Devil to people in Old Testament times is that prior to the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1ff), there were, of course, no Christians, and therefore only a few select people had the gift of holy spirit (which inherently gives one spiritual power—Luke 10:19; John 7:39; Acts 1:8; etc.), something that each and every Christian now has. They were not spiritually prepared to combat the Enemy as we are. Had they been told of a mortal enemy who was committed to destroy them, that he was an invisible spirit being with incredible power, and that the vast majority of them had no spiritual weapons and no access to the spirit realm, it would have really ruined their day.
So God just “took the rap,” as it were, for evil by saying that if His people obeyed, He would bless them, and if they did not obey, He would afflict them. The latter is figurative language that is explained in
Don’t Blame God! It is absolutely critical that Christians understand the Old Testament in light of the New. God is love, and He cannot do harm to His people.
Neither can He work at cross purposes with Himself. For example, God sent Moses to tell the Egyptian pharaoh to let His people go. Then why does Scripture say that “God hardened pharaoh’s heart” so that he refused to do so? Is God schizophrenic? No. It was the Devil who actually influenced pharaoh to harden his heart, but God could not reveal the Devil to His people then, so He used a figure of speech,
Prophetic Metonymy, which is explained in detail in
Don’t Blame God! Those who fail to recognize this are forced into the unenviable position of having to explain how a loving and righteous God can be guilty of causing a man to sin and then punishing him for it.
http://www.truthortradition.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=347
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Now, I think this definitely comes under the heading of “making it up” and reading into the text, in order to answer a question raised by a certain “absence.” I have no problem with that, as long as everyone knows that is what is going on, and it is done with a certain “freedom.”
Compare this description of how midrash “reads into” the text:
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The Rabbis provided Abraham with a full life as a monotheist. He not only served as an opponent of polytheism in their legends about him, Abraham also actively spread the good news of One God throughout the ancient Near East. Now there is little explicit material in Scripture which shows us how Abraham went about seeking converts. For that matter, there is virtually nothing in the Bible that would even lead one to assume he did seek converts. While we're at it, I am hard pressed to think of a verse or verses from the Abraham story that even demand him to have been a monotheist (though the Rabbis presume that like any good Jew he observed the commandments, so he must have been one).
But what may not be explicit may certainly be implicit. The Rabbis are not beyond
eisegesis when their ideology calls for it. (Eisegesis is the opposite of exegesis—the latter means literally "bringing out" or inferring something from the text, while the former means "bringing in" or introducing something to the text which is not already there.)
The sages of the Midrash find an opening early on in the Abraham narrative. Genesis 12:1 is the real beginning of the cycle, for it is there God commands Abraham, "Get up and leave your land, your birthplace, your father's house and go to the land I will show you." Abraham so dutifully follows God's orders that four verses later we are informed, "Abraham took Sarah his wife and Lot his nephew and all of the property they had amassed and the souls they had made in Kharan and they went forth to go to Canaan .... " It is here the exegetes drive their proselytizing wedge. The third-century rabbi Yose ben Zimra notes:
“If you gathered all of the creatures in the world to try to create a mosquito, they still couldn't fling a soul into it. And you tell me Scripture says of Abraham and company, "the souls they made in Kharan"? So who are these souls? These are the converts they made. If so, then why doesn't the text say "converted"? What's the point of "made"? It teaches that anyone who makes a convert out of an idolater is as though he had created him anew. So, why does it say "they made" and not "he made"? Rav Huna explained: Abraham would convert the men while Sarah would convert the women.”
Now that we've found some scriptural evidence for Abraham's proselytizing, we will watch his character be developed by the Rabbis with a sensitivity to his status as a desert dweller. Though the Rabbis tended to be urban, they lived in a time and place where the wanderings of the Bedouin were yet well known. The fierce rule of Semitic hospitality was assumed of Abraham, particularly since the Bible itself gives evidence. Genesis 18 tells the story of Abraham's visitation by three angels and his elaborate hospitality to them. We'll return to that story at the end of the chapter, but for now let us watch how second-century sages read that hospitality into other aspects of Abraham's life:
"Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba ... " (Genesis 21:33). Rabbi Yehuda interpreted this verse to mean that Abraham planted an entire oasis so that anything a traveler might ask for would be found there for him: dates, figs, even pomegranates. Rabbi Nehemiah disagreed and said that Abraham opened an inn so that anything a traveler might wish for would be there for him: cold cuts, wine or eggs.”
—From Burton L. Visotzky,
Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text; Visotzky is a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary.
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There is no requirement to accept these stories by the rabbis as in any way doctrinally (or even hermeneutically) correct. They are stories, they are playing with the Torah, and the door is not closed to me to continue, coming up with new midrashic spins, possibilities, meanings...
NOTE: To equate Lucifer with Satan not only requires this kind of
eisegesis, but also a whole "midrashic" re-interpretation of the Isaiah text, going beyond the "plain meaning" (
p'shat) into allegorical meanings (
d'rash); that is what midrash does.
lets talk about lucifer...
15 Feb '06 00:08
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