Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

No Fred, your analysis is a little too narrow. The word רע has a very broad 
semantic range. The best word that captures it in English (if you can 
possibly capture it in a single word) is ‘bad’. In some instances it conveys 
the sense of a disaster, misfortune, ugliness, or just plain not nice. Take 
Gen 41.20, for instance. It’s not making a moral statement about cows. It’s 
just saying that the cows were in ‘bad’ shape. On other occasions, however, 
it does appear to involve a moral quality and, as such, could be rendered 
‘evil’ (eg. Gen 6.5).

You seem to be committing the common fallacy of totality transfer: taking one 
meaning within a semantic range and applying it across the board to all 
instances of a particular word.

Isa 45.7 has to be taken within context. Since שׁלום doesn’t always have a 
moral quality to it, I don’t think we must demand that רע (it’s parallel 
opposite) should either. In the context, it is a statement that Yahweh 
controls the forces that affect human life. I don’t think it’s a 
philosophical statement about the origin of evil. I can see how you might 
take it that way, but in my opinion that divorces it from the surrounding 
context and, as the old saying goes, if you take a text out of context, 
you’re left with a con.


GEORGE ATHAS
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
www.moore.edu.au