Bible Quiz—it's fun and challenging

[xpastor]

Question 2 misrepresents the Bible for not mentioning Exodus 31:14-15: "You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death." It's not as if God decided to put the man to death then and there (for the crime of profaning the Sabbath), it was already given as a commandment.

No misrepresentation at all. The quiz does not suggest that the man was put to death apart from this law. It says "For the chilling application of this law, see Numbers 15:32-36." Actually it is too generous. The account in Numbers certainly reads as if there was no law to be cited at the time.

32 Once, while the Israelites were still in the wilderness, a man was found gathering firewood on the Sabbath. 33 He was taken to Moses, Aaron, and the whole community, 34 and was put under guard, because it was not clear what should be done with him. 35 Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must be put to death; the whole community is to stone him to death outside the camp.” 36 So the whole community took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the Lord had commanded.

Anyway it doesn't much matter. Whether it was a regularly codified law or a capricious decision, the punishment does not accord with our modern ideas of religious freedom or proportionate punishment.

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Well first off it's not the only place where the bible uses the phrase "ten commandments":

Deuteronomy 10:1-5
“At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to me on the mountain and make an ark of wood. And I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets that you broke, and you shall put them in the ark.’ So I made an ark of acacia wood, and cut two tablets of stone like the first, and went up the mountain with the two tablets in my hand. And he wrote on the tablets, in the same writing as before, the Ten Commandments that the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them to me. Then I turned and came down from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark that I had made. And there they are, as the Lord commanded me.”

Deuteronomy 4:13
And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone.

That one appears before the Ten Commandments given in Deuteronomy 5.

OK, you won that round, although it remains true that the Ritual Decalogue is also referred to as the Ten Commandments.

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• 'The name "Jehovah" is a Christian mistake. It was forbidden to pronounce the name "YHWH" (Yahweh), and readers of the Hebrew scriptures were supposed to say "Adonai" in its place. "In written texts the vowels of Adonai were combined with the consonants YHWH to remind readers to pronounce Adonai instead of Yahweh. The incorrect hybrid, 'Jehovah,' arose from Christian misunderstanding in the late Middle Ages."(Harper's Bible Dictionary)'

Well, no, that's total rubbish. A second ago they were claiming that Ex34 is the 10 commandments in defiance of modern scholarship, and now they're claiming that the Tetragrammaton has the vowels from "Adonai"??

Um, 1. the vowels do NOT match Adonai, here's the proof:



And 2. the vowels match YHDWH perfectly, as proven above. So whatever, but YHDWH is transliterated into Greek: Ἰούδας and I'm sick of hearing the same bullshit repeated over and over and over, it's the closest name in the Bible to YHWH and it has exactly the same vowels, as you can see. The view that the vowels are borrowed from any other word is conjecture.

Most of your hyperbolic phrases (e.g. "no serious scholar") amount to saying "in my opinion."

The theory that Adonai was substituted for the Tetragrammaton is still supported by a large number of scholars, including Catholic Answers and Wikipedia which states:

The consensus among scholars is that the historical vocalization of the Tetragrammaton at the time of the redaction of the Torah (6th century BCE) is most likely Yahweh, however there is disagreement. The historical vocalization was lost because in Second Temple Judaism, during the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE, the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided, being substituted with Adonai ("my Lord"). ... the vowel points used when YHWH is intended to be pronounced as Adonai are slightly different to those used in Adonai itself.

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Q4. How should parents treat a stubborn and rebellious son?

In context it is obvious this law relates to adult children, not adolescents.

Do you want to provide the context? I suspect it is all in your mind. The idea of stoning a young child is horrific to us, but remember these are the barbarians who thought it was great to bash out a baby's brains on the rocks if it happened to belong to an enemy nation. See Psalm 137:9.

Q5. Premarital sex is a sin. But what the quiz fails to recognize is the fact that women had far more rights and recognition under the ancient Israelites than in other cultures:

• And yet this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days.

No other contemporary culture afforded these rights to women!

Umm.. this looks a lot like having to marry your rapist. Terrific example of women's rights.

While it is true that the OT contained the marry-your-rapist clause, this one is slightly different. It says to a woman, "You are stuck for life with a husband who tried to dump you with a lie that you were a slut before marriage."
Anyway the claim about the OT laws being the pinnacle of feminism for their time is, in a word, bullshit.

I immediately thought of Ancient Egypt and when I checked in Wikipedia my hunch was confirmed.

Women in Ancient Egypt had a status that may seem surprisingly modern when compared to the status women occupied in the majority of contemporary societies....
Current knowledge of Ancient Egypt indicates that Egyptian women were the equals of men under the law (unlike Greco-Roman or Mesopotamian women during the same period). Thus, they could own land, manage their own property and represent themselves in court cases. They could sit on juries and testify in trials. At the same time, they were also subject to the same legal penalties as men. She could divorce, initiate a lawsuit to recover the assets of the household and win the case....
Certainly, things did not always proceed in an ideal fashion and divorce existed. It began on the initiative of one or the other spouse. If the initiative came from the husband, it had to cede part of his goods to his wife; if the women took the initiative, she was held to the same obligation but to a lesser degree. ...
Few ancient civilizations enabled women to achieve important social positions. In Ancient Egypt, there are not only examples indicating women high officials were not so rare, but more surprising (for its time), there are women in the highest office, that of Pharaoh. More than a kind of feminism, this is a sign of the importance of theocracy in Egyptian society....
Noblewomen could be members of the priesthood connected to either a god or goddess. Women could even be at the head of a business as, for example, the lady Nenofer of the New Kingdom, and could also be a doctor, like the lady Peseshet a during the Fourth dynasty of Egypt....
The goddess represented the era's regard for women, because it was crucial to maintain the spirit in her image, it was this idea of eternal life and of maturity that Isis reflected, venerated as the Celestial Mother. It was in this role that Isis was arguably made the most important deity of Egyptian mythology. Her influence even extended to religions of different civilizations, where she would become identified under different names and where her cult grew, particularly in the Roman Empire.

Maybe there was something to be said for polytheism.