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  • From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Is.45:7 God created evil?
  • Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:04:57 -0500

Dear Chris,

In the quotation below and the longer text of your post, you are making theological claims, not exegetical or linguistic ones. I don't in any way wish to be insulting, and I ask that this next statement not be taken as either agreeing or disagreeing with your theological views, but your theological views (and the same goes for mine or anyone else) about what God is or is not capable of do not illuminate the Chronicler's use of language, _unless_ you (or I or whoever) can
_demonstrate_ that the Chronicler shared those views.

HH: We cannot know in detail all the things that the Chronicler believed. That does not prevent us from making interpretative decisions about what he wrote. If there are only two interpretative schemes about a biblical passage (and I have heard the theory you raise before, or one like it), I feel a responsibility to choose the one that makes the most sense to me. There are a lot of decisions we make in life without being able to or needing to prove all the details about it.

HH: We know that the Chronicler accepted the authority of the materials in 1 & 2 Samuel because he reproduced them. So he had to reckon with what was stated in 2 Samuel. We cannot verify all the theological beliefs of every OT writer, but we assume that they are consonant with the OT in general. The Bible teaches that God hates sin, He does not tempt people to sin, and He does not want people to sin. So He would not directly command people to sin. The sin was numbering the people. David knew it was a sin when he succumbed to the temptation. God agreed with David that it was a sin, and Joab had warned that it was a bad thing to do. God saw a need to judge Israel for its sin, of which David's census was one expression. So He allowed Satan to tempt David.

HH: 2 Samuel 24:1 says that it was the anger of the Lord that incited David. One can understand that it was the anger of the Lord that incited him, saying . . . . So the Lord's anger had a force acting like a message to David, a command. But the Chronicler clarifies that it was really a temptation: "Go, number Israel and Judah." Satan incited David, evidently through the permission granted by the Lord's anger. The Chronicler clarifies that the direct speaker was Satan. David could have resisted the idea but did not. God knew he wouldn't and used the occasion to judge the sinful nation.

HH: A lot of reading is interpretative. All the facts are not given, and you make sense on the basis of the data provided, which are assumed to be sufficient. You can't always demand that people be able to substantiate each claim that they make for an interpretation if they have good general grounds for making it. Context makes some conclusions the most likely. We have the whole OT or the whole Bible to provide a framework for interpretation. That framework applies to individual passages. In fact, it is a standard rule of interpretation that one be guided by the analogy of the rest of Scripture. Not every interpretative issue is grammatical and lexical.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





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