Biblical Hebrew Forum

[furuli AT online.no]

Dear Peter and Liz,

There is no evidence in the Tanach that its writers believed that
dead persons were alive in a spiritual or literal body. And
similarly, there is no such evidence in the Christian Greek
Scriptures. The writers of the Tanach believed in the existence of
$DYM  (Deut 32:17; Ps 136:36,37) - spirit creatures that were enemies
of YHWH. When the people sacrificed to idols, in reality they
sacrificed to living gods, the SDYM. Exactly the same view is found
in 1 Corinthians 10:19,20, where the Greek word corresponding to $DYM
is DAIMWN.

When we interpret a text we should, from the point of view of the
writer, differentiate between two situations:

1. Visions. (Matt 17: 1-9. Moses and Elijah were not present in
person with Jesus, it was a *vision*, v. 9)

2. Spiritistic séances. The situation with the medium in En-dor.

A question to consider is: Why should the things or persons a
spiritistic medium sees be more real than what is seen in a vision?
And if not, is it at all meaningful to discuss whether the medium saw
a literal body or a spirit?


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo



> Liz, where in the gospel of John or elsewhere in the NT do you find the
> concept of a disembodied spirit or disembodied god? I ask because I wonder
> if there is really a difference here between Jewish and early Christian
> beliefs. The only reference I can think of is to the "unclean spirits" in
> the gospels, but 1) these are earlier than the gospel of John 2) while they
> could be expelled from one body, they had to immediately find another body
> as they could not exist apart from a body. I won't go into more detail only
> because this tends to go off topic.
>
> Peter Kirk
> peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
> http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/