Sensual History

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
And your thinking is shaped by the document in your living room whose remote you haven't quite mastered yet. My dog, what a genius.

At least finally you show a glimmer of understanding. Shame about the lazy comeback.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
[b]Umm… Actually, it [b]doesn’t say that—at least not in the creation account in Genesis. There is nothing (except God) in the Genesis account before tohu v’bohu: “shapeless and formless” in Richard Elliot Friedman’s translation of the Torah—and by “nothing”, I do not mean some kind of “nothingness”.[/b]
The account doesn't say it, but you ju ...[text shortened]... holds to be the Triune nature of Him reflected in the initial creation of man.[/b]

Just a few comments:


(1) How exactly to translate b’reisheet bara elohim has been, and is, an unsettled question. It can be rendered in any of the following ways:


—In the beginning created God…

—With beginning created… (Also: By means of beginning&hellip😉

—When God began to create... (This is the Jewish Publication Society [JPS] translation, which follows Rashi.)

According to Burton Visotzky in his Reading the Book: “The first word of the Bible has an error of grammar.” If the intended rendering is “In the beginning created God”, it should be baresheet bara; if the intended rendering is “When God began to create”, it should be b’reisheet bro. Visotzky notes that the words as they occur in the Hebrew text—b’reisheet bara— should be translated “literally as some hybrid of the two possibilities, such as ‘When the beginning God created’….”

Visotzky continues: “Obviously such a translation will never do, for while it captures faithfully the dilemma of the Hebrew grammar, it makes no sense.” [My italics.]

“Obviously”?! It “makes no sense”?! Here I beg to differ! (Even with a recognized scholar: Visotzky is a professor of Midrash at the Jewish Theological Seminary.)

Here Visotzky seems to me to succumb to assuming a priori what “making sense” must be—which I do not think is an uncommon error that unnecessarily limits our seeing valid textual possibilities, even at the level of p’shat (the “plain” reading). And, in this case, it would support a midrashic reading that Visotzky himself brings up—that the first “thing” that Gods created was: beginning!

That is, it could be rendered: “When the beginning God created, the earth was…”.

This is really just a more “poetic” rendering than “With beginning God created…”

(2) It is my suggestion that verse two happened an undetermined amount of time following verse one. By that, I mean that God created heaven and earth and at some point later, whatever was initially created became chaos, vacancy and darkness. From that point, the re-creation that follows from the latter part of verse two onward.

Midrashically, I have no problem with this suggestion. It is essentially what I meant by the possibility of sequential multiple creations—or, as you term it, re-creation—or stages of creation. Some of the rabbis made an analogous move.

(3) Since descriptive verse two follows verse one, there is nothing (ha-ha) to suggest anything other than Him creating out of nothing.

Here we touch on the crux of our difference. There are, in fact, at least three possibilities that have enjoyed theological currency within Judaism:

(a) Creatio ex nihilo; whatever that nihilo is supposed to be?

(b) Straightforward non-dualism: God is not a being, but the ground-of-being (called Ein Sof), from which, in which, and of which all multiplicity is manifest. This is pretty much the same as non-dualistic views in, say, Advaita Vedanta or Taoism.

—And this is where you and I stand on opposites sides of “the great divide” in religious philosophy: non-dualism versus monotheist dualism. As I noted in the other thread, I don’t think this divide is passable, and so leads to simple impasse.

(c) God himself created a “space” of nihil from within Godself, in which to manifest forms. This is the complex view of tzimtzum in Isaac Luria’s theology—which may be the mainstream in Judaism today; at least it is a very large stream. I am trying to simplify here (which is difficult): The infinite One (Ein Sof) generates, as it were, the very conditions of dualism out of the non-dual ground.

Your “ha-ha” humorously captures the difficulty in talking about this “nothing”. Either there is “God plus some kind of nothingess”, or there is “just God”. Dualism cannot, to my mind, cannot avoid taking the “God plus nothingess” route; nondualism takes the “just God” route.

__________________________________________________


Good stuff. Again, my only argument is with the notion that the text allows only one valid reading. That really is anathema from a rabbinical point of view (and has been since before the time of Christ). On the other hand, I would violate my own exegetical principles (drawn from the rabbinical tradition), if I were to claim—other than for the sake of argument! 🙂 —that you’re reading is not also textually possible.

My own theological/philosophical bias about what “makes sense” comes out of the non-dualism that I bring to the text (a non-dualism which I find—without denying the counter possibility—in the Torah itself).

Again: Good stuff! Reminds me of old times… 🙂

Originally posted by Palynka
I'm not being contrarian for the sake of it, I would be very surprised if you weren't right, but I'm still not understanding how that proves that it is impossible that a bottleneck like the Biblical flood happened 5000 years ago. (or even what is the estimated age of the mtEve)

I'll try reading it again later.

Here it is as i understand it.

First of all i'm followong the accepted scientific model that homo sapiens originated in East Africa and then spread out across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula and so on and so on. Then according to scripture 5,000yrs ago God unleashed his almighty flood and killed everyone except Noah, his three sons and all their wives. There's no mtDNA or Y-Chromosone evidence to suggest we magically appeared from Adam & Eve 6,000yrs, so i'm not going to entertain the idea.

The earliest human mtDNA haplogroup, haplogroup defined as - a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation. Courtesy of the oracle -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

is named L0, which then branched into L1, L2 and L3, along with many other subgoups. L3 is the lineage which is believed to have crossed the Red Sea and into the Arabian Peninsula and then splitting into groups M and N, which then split itnto other groups building up lot of mutations. So by the time Noah was alive 5,000yrs ago there would have been a lot of mtDNA variation that had been built up during the preceding years.

If we are to believe that all of mankind was wiped out apart from the aforementioned 8 people, they would have alot of mtDNA variation which was then passed onto the rest of the population that followed them.

The 'smoking gun' is that many tribes in east Africa only contain mtDNA from the L haplogroups, the !Kong tribe from Botswana has 100% L0 mtDNA. This isn't possible if they were descended from people from the Middle East.

This journal has the data for mtDNA from click-speaking tribes in Africa.

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/24/10/2180

This has global Y-Chromosone and mtDNA haplogroup maps.

http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/WorldHaplogroupsMaps.pdf

Originally posted by Palynka
At least finally you show a glimmer of understanding. Shame about the lazy comeback.

Tough crowd.

Originally posted by vistesd
Just a few comments:


(1) How exactly to translate b’reisheet bara elohim has been, and is, an unsettled question. It can be rendered in any of the following ways:


—In the beginning created God…

—With beginning created… (Also: By means of beginning&hellip😉

—When God began to create... (This is the Jewish Publication Society [JPS] transla ...[text shortened]... he counter possibility—in the Torah itself).

Again: Good stuff! Reminds me of old times… 🙂

Let me mull a spell...

Originally posted by vistesd
Just a few comments:


(1) How exactly to translate b’reisheet bara elohim has been, and is, an unsettled question. It can be rendered in any of the following ways:


—In the beginning created God…

—With beginning created… (Also: By means of beginning&hellip😉

—When God began to create... (This is the Jewish Publication Society [JPS] transla ...[text shortened]... he counter possibility—in the Torah itself).

Again: Good stuff! Reminds me of old times… 🙂

(1) How exactly to translate b’reisheet bara elohim has been, and is, an unsettled question. It can be rendered in any of the following ways...
I agree with your assessment of Hebrew's malleability--- after all, when the Lord Jesus Christ Himself 'quoted' Scripture, it was often heavily paraphrased.
However, I have b.rashith transliterated as "in.beginning" and defined as:

"the first, in place, time order or rank (specifically a firstfruit); beginning, chief(-est), first(-fruits, part, time), principal thing."

... used just once in all of Scripture and all of which denote a (or, better, the) starting point--- although a case could be made for the 'rank' or 'principal' aspects, which could be taken to emphasize nothing more than overall importance without speaking to a timely order.

That being said:

"...Rabbi Michael Munk from his book, The Wisdom In the Hebrew Alphabet, teaches us that,
The definite article is expressed in Hebrew by prefixing the letter (hey) to a word. Often, for extra
emphasis, the word (aleph-tav) is employed in addition to the prefix. Comprising the
first and last letter of the Aleph Be(t), (/aleph tav) alludes to completion and perfection. Thus the
Torah uses the emphatic article in describing the beginning of Creation:
B’reisheet bara Elohim et (aleph-tav) ha-shemayim v’et (aleph-tav) ha-eretz [transliteration added]
In the beginning of (Elohim’s) creating the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).
This alludes to the fact that the universe was created in complete perfection, “from aleph to tav.” (p. 34)

(c) God himself created a “space” of nihil from within Godself, in which to manifest forms. This is the complex view of tzimtzum in Isaac Luria’s theology—which may be the mainstream in Judaism today; at least it is a very large stream. I am trying to simplify here (which is difficult): The infinite One (Ein Sof) generates, as it were, the very conditions of dualism out of the non-dual ground.
Logically, humanly speaking, this one seems to make the most sense. Although seemingly straight-forward, it's a brain-twisting mind tax to get our minds around these supposedly simple ideas. If it was 'just God,' in what 'space' was space created? I guess we can't get too upset at our own limitations in understanding such riddles: even with time established and up-and-running, we have such difficulty in explaining what 'instant' means!

As you said, as scientific as we are prone to be, every time we think we've finally whacked the mole, it appears from another hole. That's why I prefer to use all of Scripture to inform my perspective on the issues. The whole of Scripture congruently affirms a beginning point for time and existence which bolsters my confidence in the take on Genesis 1:1 from the definite article perspective.

Again: Good stuff! Reminds me of old times… 🙂
Indeed.

Originally posted by Proper Knob
Here it is as i understand it.

First of all i'm followong the accepted scientific model that homo sapiens originated in East Africa and then spread out across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula and so on and so on. Then according to scripture 5,000yrs ago God unleashed his almighty flood and killed everyone except Noah, his three sons and all thei e and mtDNA haplogroup maps.

http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/WorldHaplogroupsMaps.pdf

First of all i'm followong the accepted scientific model that homo sapiens originated in East Africa and then spread out across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula and so on and so on.
So you're also following the accepted scientific model which--- through studies done on global patterns of linkage disequilibrium at the CD4 locus and modern human origins--- states that man as we understand him appeared on the planet no more than 102,000 years ago, but more likely within the last 50,000 years?

If we are to believe that all of mankind was wiped out apart from the aforementioned 8 people, they would have alot of mtDNA variation which was then passed onto the rest of the population that followed them.
Actually, just the opposite. The males on that ark were all genetically similar, in that they were all directly related. Such a small pool would necessarily lead to less diversity.

The females on that ark were genetically diverse, thus leading to greater diversity from them.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
[b](1) How exactly to translate b’reisheet bara elohim has been, and is, an unsettled question. It can be rendered in any of the following ways...
I agree with your assessment of Hebrew's malleability--- after all, when the Lord Jesus Christ Himself 'quoted' Scripture, it was often heavily paraphrased.
However, I have b.rashith tra ...[text shortened]... ctive.

Again: Good stuff! Reminds me of old times… 🙂
Indeed.[/b]

Ah: et! Now a “modernist” translator like Friedman will likely (I haven’t checked him on this) just say that et is an undefined particle that introduces a direct object in the sentence (and I think that’s how it’s used in everyday modern Hebrew). But the rabbis (like Rabbi Munk) were/are not satisfied with such a mundane view! 🙂 Good find!

You're certainly right about the brain-twisting aspect of tzimtzum; that's why it's not amenable to a brief explanation (or, at least, the attempts that I've seen never seem to do it justice).

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
First of all i'm followong the accepted scientific model that homo sapiens originated in East Africa and then spread out across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula and so on and so on.
So you're also following the accepted scientific model which--- through studies done on global patterns of linkage disequilibrium at the CD4 locus and modern human o ...[text shortened]... The females on that ark were genetically diverse, thus leading to greater diversity from them.[/b]

Hmmm.... ?

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
Hmmm.... ?

I'm still here, although busy since you posted.

I'm also not much of a geneticist so i want to make sure what i post is correct.

Here's the scientific model i was refering to, with a nice video.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

Originally posted by Proper Knob
I'm still here, although busy since you posted.

I'm also not much of a geneticist so i want to make sure what i post is correct.

Here's the scientific model i was refering to, with a nice video.

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

It's interesting speculating about what might have happened or what possible series of events may have caused certain other possible events... as long as one is clearly aware of the speculative nature of the venture.

Drawing conclusions from such limited information is nowhere near definitive, and should always be couched in terms denoting those restrictions. That being said, nothing within the presentation (timelines notwithstanding) offered anything contradictory to what we know occurred--- genetically speaking, of course.