Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Sujata <shevaroys AT yahoo.com>]

Yigal, Yitzhak and others,
May I request you to please indulge my religious
sensitivities when I refer to verses from the Bible as
God's word. You may call it human words, either way we
are refering to the same verses, so it should not
matter for any discussion, what you or I call it as
long as the text exists. Also, to the non-believing
scholars it should carry no more or less weight in a
discussion whether God spoke it or someone else said
it since it is all human authored text to them.

So let's look at the verses:

Gen 35:4
So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and
the rings in their ears, and Jacob buried them under
the oak at Shechem.

----It is obvious these gods were physical things that
can be given - i.e., idols

Ex 20:23
Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make
for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold.

---these gods are handmade, of metals

Ex 23:24
Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or
follow their practices. You must demolish them and
break their sacred stones to pieces.

---these gods could be broken to pieces

It is obvious then that these other gods referred to
in Gen and Ex are idols and man-made stuff.

Best wishes,
Sujata

QUOTE
Anything and everything is possible regardless. But if
we don't assume a priori that the Torah is divine, or
any specific belief about the Torah, then our only
method is what can be told by the text itself,.......
Also, I don't see Sujata or you cite any specific
verses that say "when I refer to other gods, I mean
handmade objects."  Yitzhak Sapir 

Critical scholars have no way of evaluating whether
the text of the Bible is "really" "God's word". That's
a question of faith. To the critical scholar, the
texts were composed by human authors, over a long
time, and then went through a long proccess of
editing. That's what the evidence, as interpreted by
out human logic, seems to poin to. And so to the
critical scholar, the question below is NOT valid. It
should, rather, be, why do the author(s) of these
passages of Genesis and Exodus seem to recognize the
existance of other gods, while the author(s) of other
passages do not? 
Yigal 
END QUOTE



                
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