RE: The "Cultural Context" Excuse
August 6, 2016 at 7:58 pm
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2016 at 8:00 pm by Huggy Bear.)
(August 6, 2016 at 7:18 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:*emphasis mine*
And why can it not have been metaphorical? After all, the famed "son of God" remark actually started off as an expression that had been applied to others as a metaphor.
For instance:
- Psalm 2 is built around the 'King of Israel as Son of God' motif, and Psalm 82 calls the Judges of old "sons of the Most High", and Psalm 89:26-8 has the psalmist (presumably King David) called God's son.
- In Jeremiah 31, God calls himself the father of Israel, with Ephraim as his firstborn son.
- Going into the apocrypha, Sirach 4:10 says: "Be as a father unto the fatherless, and instead of an husband unto their mother: so shalt thou be as the son of the most High, and he shall love thee more than thy mother doth." (And, yes, the people behind the King James Bible actually translated the Apocrypha)
- It should also be noted that this epithet was actually applied to certain rabbis in the Talmud.
And that's not even pointing out the many non-Hebrew instances in history of powerful people being termed sons of god, more or less as metaphor, dating back to at least around a millennium before Christ.
With all this in mind, Huggy Bear, why is it not possible that my interpretation of it as a metaphor (meaning roughly what was bracketed in the Amplified version I posted) is more plausible than a Eve having sex with a reptile, having a child with it, the Bible never bringing it up in anything more than obliquely worded phrases (especially considering that, from my readings, if a Biblical set of siblings has a different father, they tend to bring that up up front, especially with a conclusion as dramatic) that are ultimately still consistent with Cain and Abel being full siblings?
First of all, get the idea of the serpent being a reptile out of your head, it was humanoid. The serpent was cursed to crawl on his belly as punishment for what he had done, that tells you right there that is had a completely different form than it currently does.