Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Shoshanna Walker <rosewalk AT concentric.net>]

We all come into this field with a certain amount of faith in
something.  For Shoshanna it's faith in her religious heritage, for a
certain other whom I won't name it's faith in denying everything he
possibly can, for others of us it's faith in the Christian framework
with its attendant views about the Hebrew Scriptures, for still others
it's faith in science or archaeology or whatever.  Granted that we're
(officially) supposed to keep faith-based arguments out of it and be
as cross-cultural as possible, none of us ever fully achieves it.  As
soon as one says "this is legend" or "obviously a miraculous
element has been injected into this" or such, one is making a faith
statement.  When Shoshanna says that the Jewish greats of the
past were led by God in their interpretations,



That's not what I said.

I said that they put into writing, a body of knowledge that was 
handed down orally, that originally came from G-d, along with the 
written Torah, and that therefore they understood the written Torah 
much better than Biblical scholars who look for meaning by dissecting 
words and letters, divorced from this tradition of knowledge.

Once we were dispersed, it had to be written down.

Shoshanna




 she's making a faith
statement.  The only difference is that the latter is easier to
recognize than the former by the wider audience.