God materialized before Abraham and ate with Him. The NWT says it was Jehovah. And there are 3 persons that Abraham sees. Interesting.
Who in the hell ate Abraham,s food, Angels or God?
by jam 30 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Leolaia
There is a similar story in Canaanite myth of the god Kothar-wa-Hasis visiting the formerly childless sage Danel (likely the same figure from antiquity mentioned in Ezekiel 14:14, 20, 28:3) to present his young son Aqhat (= Actaeon from Boeotian myth) with a bow, and Danel and his wife Dantiy slaughtered a lamb and prepared a feast for their divine guest (KTU 1.17). Later on, Aqhat's bow was coveted by the huntress Anat who ended him killing him by sending animal henchmen to murder him and retrieve the bow. Ovid preserved a pair of stories from Greek mythology with strong similarities to ch. 18-19 of Genesis. First the three gods Zeus, Hermes (son of Zeus, the "messenger"), and Poseidon (brother of Zeus), disguised as men, visited an elderly childless Boeotian named Hyrieus who welcomes them with hospitality and gives them a feast. After the meal, the three gods told him that he would became father to a son, and nine months later the giant Orion was born to him from the ground ( Fasti 5.493; cf. Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 25, Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 195 , Astronomica 2.34). Then on another occasion Zeus and Hermes, again disguised as ordinary men, visit a town in Tyana seeking a place to sleep for the night, and they found "all the doors bolted and no word of kindness given, so wicked were the people of that land"; finally they found shelter at the home of Philemon and Baucis, who paid them hospitality while not realizing they were gods. Then the gods told the couple that they must flee, for they had come to destroy the town, and they instructed the couple to flee to the nearby mountains and not look back until they reached the top, and they then destroyed the city with a flood (Metamorphoses, 611-724). The story is also alluded to in the NT; the people of Lycaonia identified Paul and Barnabas as Zeus and Hermes, declaring: "The gods have come down to us in human form" (Acts 14:11-13).
The parallels imo are strong enough to suggest the possibility that the Hebrew stories drew on similar folklore, in this case localized in Hebron concerning the traditional ancestor of the Israelite and Edomite peoples (Hebron had an Edomite and Judean population), and there are further possible links. The town of Hebron, with its Abraham-linked sites of Mamre and Machpelah, was an longstanding sacred center in pre-Israelite/Canaanite times (going back to the third millennium BC) with a cult centered on the ancient terebinths, associated also with the Abraham tradition (Genesis 13:18, 14:13, 18:1, 23:1). Even as late as Byzantine times, Hebron was the site of an annual summer festival called Terebinthus that venerated the tree, Abraham, and the three visitors (Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.4-54). Hermes and Dionysius were two of the gods (syncretized to native Semitic gods) worshipped by the Edomites of Hebron during this period (Hebron was the center of the viticulture industry of district). The terebinth veneration likely stemmed from the pre-exilic Asherah cult, considering that the Hebrew word for terebinth, 'elah, is identical to the word for "goddess" and was a common epithet for Asherah. According to Josephus, the terebinth at Mamre was considered the most ancient tree in the world and its name was Ogyges (Antiquitates 1.186, Bellum Judaicae 4.533). Curiously, this is the same name of the founder of Boeotia in Greek mythology (who survived the Flood with his wife Thebes), and it is generally recognized that the name is of West Semitic origin (from 'agag "to burn, flame", which was used as a common Amalekite name in the OT). Michael Astour found a very high concentration of West Semitic (Phoenician?) names associated with cities, rivers, and mythological figures of Boeotia, suggesting historical links with the Levant. The connection is explicit in Boeotian legend: the mythical Cadmus (< qedmosh "east"), who founded the Boeotian city of Thebes (< tebah "ark", named after the wife of Ogyges) after slaying the dragon whose blood formed the river Ismenos (< the Phoenician god Eshmun) a.k.a. Ladon (= the name of the dragon slain by Heracles < the dragon Lotan/Leviathan), was a Phoenician who settled in Greece and introduced the Phoenician alphabet. There was certainly contact between Mycenaean Greeks and West Semitic peoples in the period following the LBA collapse when the Sea Peoples settled in the Levant including the Peleshet (= Philistines), the Ekwesh (= the Achaeans), and the Danuna (= the Danaeans, cf. the tribe of Dan adjecent to Philistia). This increases the possibility that the Boeotian legend about the visit of Zeus, Hermes, and Poseidon to Hyrieus is not just coincidentally similar to the Hebron tradition but in fact has a West Semitic origin (or....was the influence in the other direction?). Is it also coincidental that Hermes was venerated in Roman-era Hebron, Hermes was a messenger god, and the biblical story concerned three divine mal'akîm "messengers"? Possibly, though the Boeotian story about Hyrieus is a good parallel to the Abraham story of the divine visitors.
The Boeotian myth of the giant Orion (possibly derived from 'or "light" and cf. the Ugaritic name Aryn), the son of Hyrieus of Boeotia, also has a possible similarity with the story of Danel and Aqhat (which also probably inspired the myth of Actaeon); Orion became a hunter who hunted with the goddess Artemis (= Anat) and she later killed him either by arrows from her own bow or by sending a scorpion to kill him. This bears some resemblence to the story about Actaeon (whose name may have a philological connection with Aqhat), son of the priestly herdsman Aristaeus and Autonoe in Boeotia, who was a hunter but was murdered by Artemis after seeing her naked, who transforms him into a stag whereupon he was torn apart by hounds. The birth of Orion from the ground bears at least a superficial similarity with the metaphor in Isaiah 51:1-2 of the offspring of Abraham and Sarah being hewn from rock, and it is interesting that the other sacred site at Hebron, the cave of Machpelah, was also associated with the Abraham tradition. And there was a robust tradition of the three giants of Hebron, attested in Joshua 15:14 and elsewhere. So even though there was no clear connection between any of these various motifs (e.g. the Ogyges of Boeotia probably had no connection with the Ogyges of Hebron other than sharing the same name), taken together there may be enough to suggest that behind the text there possibly lies a rich traditional background to the Abraham stories set in Hebron.
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jam
Christ Alone: Love to know your thought regarding this.
You have to admit a spiritual being eating solid food is
hard to swallow.
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Christ Alone
Why, Jam? Jesus came and ate with his disciples after his resurrection. It's not the only time that this has been spoken of in the Bible.
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jam
Forgive me CA, but why would a spiritual being have a
need to eat food? Sorry don,t understand. And thanks for
bring that up, Jesus eating solid food. They are spirits, not
of this world. No digestive system. Maybe I,am being picky
but it don,t make sense.
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Christ Alone
Why is eating food only for for nourishment? How do you know that they don't have digestive systems? They have physical bodies. Who ever said that spirits do not eat of drink? Looks like you have a number of assumptions that were never spoken of in the Bible.
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breakfast of champions
The idea of spirit creatures eating makes about as much sense as them wanting to have sex with women. The reason men and animals desire sex and food is because our brains are wired for it. That's it.
Although if I were god, I wouldn't mind some Humboldt Fog on a slice of French baguette.
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Christ Alone
The idea of spirit creatures eating makes about as much sense as them wanting to have sex with women.
And where do these ideas come from? Why is a spiritual body any different from a physical one?
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jam
CA; not to be argumentative, but is not true that Angels
are supposedly to be pure spirits , without a body
and their intellectual operations of understanding and
willing depend in no way at all upon material substance.
The point is, they did not need the food but maybe they
accepted his hospitality. The same, they did not need rest
they are pure spirits, pure energy. Stories like this makes it
hard to believe in the Bible.
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elderelite
Sucks to be created an angel, with a sprit body, desire sex and have no one to get you off for all eternity.....