Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.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.
> 
I stand corrected.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Don't let your mind wander.  
It's too little to be left alone."