by Believer 240 Replies latest jw experiences
Furthermore, the high priest was holy to God--he couldn't marry non-Israelites or even widows or divorced women (Leviticus 21:10-15; Ezekiel 44:22). But all of a sudden God allows him to have 32 foreign sex slaves? Hmmm.
Considering god ORDERED Hosea to marry a hooker I find that eminently possible...
Jephthahs daughter was sacrificed to god...
Bible is a mass of contridictions
Diogenesister: Considering god ORDERED Hosea to marry a hooker
Yes, that's true, but Hosea wasn't a priest; he was a prophet. Priests could only come from the Levites and the high priest could only come from Aaron's line. Only the priests were subject to these limitations. Other men could marry whomever they wanted. Priests and prophets had different roles--priests bring the people to God (presenting their sacrifices) and prophets bring God (His message) to the people. Hosea and his wife is an allegory of Israel's repeated unfaithfulness to God.
Re Jephthah's daughter, that is one popular interpretation. His vow was to sacrifice whatever came to meet him as a burnt offering. And that perhaps with the surrounding pagan influences, he didn't see anything wrong with it. It's clear he didn't think he would see his only child there. I've thought about this before (maybe too much #nerd lol) and also consider that God was opposed to human sacrifice, that the girl went away for two months with her friends and that the text twice mentions that she would never marry, not that she was killed. When Hannah dedicated Samuel to the Lord, it didn't mean she would kill him--only that he would be in God's service all the days of his life. So as soon as he was weaned, he went into the house of the Lord. It's definitely something to think about, though. Thanks.
How about the BIGGEST contradiction of them all? Child sacrifice is wrong, unless its Jehovah's idea.
A month is a long time to hold off on rape......OutsiderLookingIn
Tell the Judge..
You Waited a Whole Damn Month,Before You Raped Those Women..
THAT SHOULD HELP!......................................................
Is it reasonable to conclude rape and sex slaves if God required a month before marrying the person? A month is a long time to hold off on rape.
Wow. Just wow.
A month is a long time to hold off on rape - OLI
I am so looking forward to having time to respond to you later OLI but I just wanted to say that you have reached a new low in the history of christian apologetics.
I have often said the best way to expose the immorality of theism is to get christians talking about the OT. I love being right about that.
Outsider, your reasoning that Midianite girls and women weren't raped because they married their captors is appalling and abhorrent. Those women were FORCED into those 'marriages' against their will. That meets my definition of rape. Would you want that fate for your own sister, daughter, niece?
Outsiderlookingin,
As a Jew I can testify that, though your admiration for defending the Hebrew text is not in question by me, I must side with Cofty and others due if nothing but from the Jewish explanation of the texts you are arguing about.
Without going into detail about each separate comment, there is a rule of thumb to all of it that you are missing. It is likely because you don’t know how Jews view Torah, and that is to be expected. But as Cofty and others demonstrate, one can merely apply logic, even logic separate from a belief in God, and see that your conclusions are questionable.
The rule of thumb is simple: The Mosaic Law did not introduce new ways to treat others and ways to live. The Mosaic Law introduced a new way to govern the way the Jews already lived.
The culture of the Jews did not fall down from the sky with the clouds and fire of the Great Theophany. The way the Jewish culture treated women and slaves and viewed national enemies as described in the Bible was not inspired by Torah or any part of the Hebrew Bible. My people lived very much like their neighbors around them, viewing women and slaves and enemies the way most other ancient cultures did. We held the same limited view of the nature of the universe and medicine and even the “right” way to worship our God as other cultures who were heathen.
The only difference is that Torah, the Law of Moses, introduced a demarcation, changing us from a people once ruled by the whims of taskmasters in Egypt to law from Heaven that governed the way freemen should live. Much of our culture did change, but a lot of it just got rules limiting how we did things that ancient peoples without Torah, Gentiles, did similarly.
To illustrate: God did not demand the Jews to take the women of enemies we conquered for ourselves. Neither did God demand we keep any of the spoil for ourselves. This is what people did. The only thing introduced by Torah were set limits on what we already did.
Jews may not have invented a lot of the things Christians give us credit for. Our sacrificial system was based on the way other cultures did things, and it served a practical need to slaughter food correctly, humanely, and with thanks all at the same time. The Jews didn’t get a new culture, new dress code, new way of doing things with Torah. We merely got a Law governing the way we and cultures already lived. The Law taught us no remarkable scientific truths, made us no different from those around us unless we learned the meaning of the Law: we are not free to enjoy life if we use our freedom to rob our neighbor of the same freedom.
So much of what you are saying, though you may have admirable aims, isn’t truly representative of Jewish Mosaic Law or the views we have held through generations. Viewing the way you explain it makes it look like God wanted us to commit genocide, to treat women as lesser beings than men, to rape, to strip others of their rights.
Now I have no need to convert you to Judaism or any other religion. Jews don’t convert. We are not in the business of trying to get you to adopt our views and make them your truths. I don’t have any interest in having you join me at my local synagogue or even accepting a theist view.
But what I am saying is that these other posters are closer than you are in what they are saying, verifying that your views warp something you are convinced you know better of. Some might be challenging your belief, but I think even then what they are really challenging is your logic.
You are chopping the tree branch you are sitting on. Stop it. If you don’t it will eventually fall, and you with it. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen. And you will have only yourself to blame because you ignored not just the voice of reason being offered you by these other posters but a Jew who just might know a thing or two you are failing to consider.
Re:
OutsiderLookingIn: What
I’m wondering is does the chicken come before the egg or vice versa?
From Google Scholar:
Intelligence, Volume 39, Issue 6, November–December 2011, Pages 468–472
The relationship between intelligence and multiple domains of religious belief: Evidence from a large adult US sample - Gary J. Lewis, Stuart J. Ritchie, Timothy C. Bates - Highlights - Lower intelligence was significantly associated with higher levels of faith. Lower intelligence was most strongly associated with increased fundamentalism.
