Museums the new way to make money?

by raymond frantz in

the organisation is now creating museums in 35 countries, is that their new way of making money?

nowhere does the bible say that christians should engage to such activity but is it possible the watchtower is now making it a priority for :.

a. look like they have something to offer to the community.

Details of Noah’s Ark

by enigma1863 in

jw magazines have claimed the flood story has so much detail that it couldn’t be just a made up story.. is it detailed?

name one person outside of noah’s family.

name one nephilim.

"Gopher" wood and all the subsequent attempts to identify the wood are the result of a scribal corruption. Beyond reasonable doubt the phrase was "pitched wood". The very next line repeats the direction to pitch the wood inside and out. It's an example of rivers of 'scholarly' ink spent on nothing.

1613 [e]
ḡō·p̄er,
גֹ֔פֶר
gopher

3724 [e]

bak·kō·p̄er.
בַּכֹּֽפֶר׃
with pitch

27

deep thoughts

by lancelink in

this afternoon i drove by an old hall i attended ( barrington illinois) and noticed that it had been sold, it is now an adventist .

church !

now here is my drive-home thinking.. back in the 80's when i attended i was newly married, and had a young child.

peacefulpete

I do believe selling to another church was forbidden at one point in the 70's. They used an OT passage about giving aid to the Canaanites. I guess in time it was reversed as a result of the nondiscrimination laws regarding real estate sales.

16

The Lost Qos

by peacefulpete in

the names of the gods of palestine and surrounding regions are known to most of us only through the condemnations of the ot writers.

baal peor, hadad, chemosh, molech/milkom dagon, etc.

it is therefore surprising that the main deity of the sister nation to the south, edom is never mentioned.

peacefulpete

Qos...The name recurs in the Nabataean language in an inscription at Khirbet et-Tannur,where he is represented flanked by bulls, seated on a throne while wielding in his left hand a multi-pronged thunderbolt, suggestive of a function as a weather god. (Wiki.)

An old friend from this forum who went by Narkissos gave me some sage reminders that the inscrutably complex way local cult and culture develop has to be acknowledged. While we crave certainty, it's just not possible when studying ancient history. He pointed out that a particular deity name like Yahweh or El, often have very different dimensions and theogeny in the very next valley, much more so when dealing with centuries and nations of separation.

Still, it's fun to try.

16

The Lost Qos

by peacefulpete in

the names of the gods of palestine and surrounding regions are known to most of us only through the condemnations of the ot writers.

baal peor, hadad, chemosh, molech/milkom dagon, etc.

it is therefore surprising that the main deity of the sister nation to the south, edom is never mentioned.

peacefulpete

I added a line in the above post that agrees with you. The arrows are lightning.

For example:

“The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound (thunder): thine arrows also went abroad.”—Psalms 77:17

“And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them.”—2 Samuel 22:15

“I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon them.”—Deuteronomy 32:23

“I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.”—Genesis 9:13 (he stopped the flood storm by hanging up his bow)

Psalm 7:11-13 God...will bend and string his bow.

13 He has prepared his deadly weapons;
he makes ready his flaming arrows

16

The Lost Qos

by peacefulpete in

the names of the gods of palestine and surrounding regions are known to most of us only through the condemnations of the ot writers.

baal peor, hadad, chemosh, molech/milkom dagon, etc.

it is therefore surprising that the main deity of the sister nation to the south, edom is never mentioned.

peacefulpete

The suggestion is that Quos was an epithet of Yah in the south of Judah or perhaps an associated name. Qos seems to be connected with the word 'bow' as in the weapon, so it's possible Yah/Yahwh was depicted as a warrior or maker of arrows (if the metallurgy connection is also correct)?? Yahweh is said to draw a bow and arrows in many passages in the OT. In many of those, the arrows are clearly lightning bolts. This might also connect him with the storm god elements. Sadly while a connection seems probable the details haven't yet been uncovered.

34

Stress of Going to a Summer Convention

by LostintheFog1999 in

spotted this picture on a friend's page, he was highlighting the mental health issue.

however,we thought the magazine on stress was deliberately placed in the summer months because for any jw going to a convention, paying high season hotel rates for themselves or their whole family to stay near the convention centre, fighting coworkers and managers to get the time off work, travelling expenses, buying their own meals for the family, buying new shiny suits and dresses to impress (particularly if you have teenage girls who are looking for their prince), and more.... by the time they come home again and straight away back to work, their nerves will be so frazzled that their stress levels will have sky rocketed!.

as brother elder says to them, "don't worry.

peacefulpete

Summer conventions...memories. I recall travelling for days to Winnepeg Canada and like many Jws camping rather than expensive hotels. The truck spraying mosquito fog was a highlight. It was so thick we kids ran around in the fog unable to see each other till I was hit in the head by a friend wielding a badminton racket and cried as the blood poured down. Then the tornado went by and most everyone's tents were blown down and everything was soaking wet. Then on the way home our traveling companions' car broke down. Good memories.

27

deep thoughts

by lancelink in

this afternoon i drove by an old hall i attended ( barrington illinois) and noticed that it had been sold, it is now an adventist .

church !

now here is my drive-home thinking.. back in the 80's when i attended i was newly married, and had a young child.

peacefulpete

I immediately thought your handle should be Jack Handey.
Deep Thoughts: Mankind - Saturday Night Live - Bing video

Deep Thoughts: Aliens - Saturday Night Live - Bing video

16

The Lost Qos

by peacefulpete in

the names of the gods of palestine and surrounding regions are known to most of us only through the condemnations of the ot writers.

baal peor, hadad, chemosh, molech/milkom dagon, etc.

it is therefore surprising that the main deity of the sister nation to the south, edom is never mentioned.

peacefulpete

EdenOne..What you described pretty well sums up the classic position. One of the slight refinements proposed are that worshippers of YH/YHWH might have from earliest times been regarded as somewhat exclusivist, as was apparently the case among metallurgists in neighboring cultures. This might explain the trend toward monolatry as well as the profuse copper associations. As the cult was introduced to a wider audience through commerce, naturally local forms evolved. Hence in time "Yahweh of Samaria" and "Yahweh of Teman" and Qos became separate yet homologous identities.

Amzallag goes so far as to link the metallurgist deity to those of other bronze age cultures such as Egypt and Elam to explain passages like (Jer. 49.37-39) which promises to restore Elam (whose chief god Napir was a metallurgist) after a period of punishment and (Isa. 19.22 and Ezek. 29.13-14) that says the same about Egypt (specifically Noph which was founded by metal crafter Ptah). IOW in the minds of some Yahwists, these people all worshipped the same god known by different names.(Napir and Ptah) and therefore Yahweh had vested interests in the fate of those people as well.

No doubt the work of syncretism and substitution resulted in conflation of Yahweh with indigenous Canaanite deities like El and Baal, but the supposition that Yahweh was regarded a son of El in earliest times is being challenged. Often Deut 32 is cited as support for this, however according to the most recent proposals, Deut 32 is a preYahwist model of El (as Father of the gods) being utilized to account for the Yahwist's monolatrous worship of an imported deity. He is "slipped in" as one of the gods under El and assigned to Israel. It is a snapshot in time, a very short time, when he was explained as one of the gods of the Canaanite pantheon of El, but at the same time the only designated deity of Israel. Yahweh's absence from Ugarit deity lists belies this however. It was an artificial attempt to domesticate Yahweh. In reality, his existence requires we look outside Canaan, and the evidence points south.

llubrevlis2000....Well, you have a point that the demons and angels of later (second temple) Judaism were in fact the gods of the earlier polytheistic times of Canaan. This is a conscious result of monotheistic reforms. The second temple keepers of the Yahwist cult recast the one-time rival gods into subordinate spirits, angels (messengers) and demons (ironically 'daimon' Greek for lesser deity).

It is also ironic that the reverse began to happen in late antiquity with 'arch'angels becoming more godlike nearly returning to a polytheism of sorts. Corollary to this was the hypostatic conceptions of a 'son of God", 'son of Man' and 'Wisdom' character that substantially equated God with a second figure that eventuated in Christianity.

16

The Lost Qos

by peacefulpete in

the names of the gods of palestine and surrounding regions are known to most of us only through the condemnations of the ot writers.

baal peor, hadad, chemosh, molech/milkom dagon, etc.

it is therefore surprising that the main deity of the sister nation to the south, edom is never mentioned.

peacefulpete

Wonderful, glad someone read it.

EdenOne,,I'm cautious of assuming any of the Moses narrative is historical but like you said it contains elements that may be. While a number of historical persons have been proposed to have inspired the Egyptian Moses character and name (unsurprising given the Egyptian hegemony over Palestine), his function in Exodus seems to be to tie together a number of narrative traditions. Some of those traditions were that YHWH was from the south. Recall the Abraham stories locate him to the north of Israel and he only knows El Shaddai. It's a complicated process of merging traditions, some of which occurred when Israel's priests fled the Assyrians but most of this blending took place during the Persian period.

I find the article connecting Yah/Yahweh with the copper guilds to be pretty intriguing. While some of the author's arguments are not as conclusive as he suggests, the sheer number of clues becomes persuasive. I know there is a paywall without a university connection, but if someone wants I can share some of it. I just thought it was a bit wide of the Qos discussion.

peacefulpete

Posts by peacefulpete

Psalm 7:11-13 God...will bend and string his bow.