Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jim West <jwest AT Highland.Net>]

At 08:30 AM 6/16/99 -0400, you wrote:

>  PROVERBS 25
>  2) It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but
>      the honour of kings is to search out a matter.
>
>Sometimes, smart men are not as smart as they think they are.
>
>In Hope and Love.
>Keep the Faith, brethren.
>Tsadowq 

First, it is only polite to use your actual name when you post.  Your
cryptic self designation only tells us that you are hiding.
Second, this is an academic list and not a newsgroup where various idiotic
theories unsubstantiated by fact can be bantered around by folk who know
less about the subject then your fictionalized auto mechanic.
Third, your supposition that the codes are legitimate and that gematria can
really tell us something about the text is simply wrong.  Period.  There is
truth and error- and you are on the side of error on this issue.  Gematria
says more about the expositor than it does about the text.  In fact, it says
everything about the expositor and nothing about the text.  Nothing at all.
And neither do the so called "codes".
Finally, all such efforts to find some hidden meaning in the text are merely
gnostic attempts to glean heavenly secrets from mundane facts.  Did you know
that your efforts were gnostic?  Well they are.

About my tone.  The genteel of the list appear to have a little trouble with
straightforward answers.  I have never understood that.  But in this age of
political correctness its much easier to kill an answer by the death of a
thousand qualifications than it is to merely say yes or no.  I say no to the
gnosticizing tendencies of the half learned.  "A little knoweldge is a
dangerous thing" says the old proverb.  Indeed.  In light of that there is
simply a lot of danger in internet discussion lists because there are
clearly a lot of folk who have not a clue as to what they are talking about.
Small wonder that the theologians of the middle ages discussed things in
Latin so that the unlearned hordes would not be confused more than they
already were.

Elitist?  Probably.  But elitism is a good thing when it protects the search
for truth from pure stupidity.

Best,

Jim

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
email- jwest AT highland.net
web page-  http://web.infoave.net/~jwest