The Chapter In The Bible That Appears Twice
larrycheng.com
larrycheng.com
Note that we have sources that commented on duplicates by around the 8th century, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soferim_(Talmud) see the summary comment about Chap viii.
The Talmud describes all kinds of things that you might think are "modern" - ironing clothes (albeit by a different method), rain gutters, complicated financial arrangements (e.g. a contract with a managing partner and a silent partner, the silent partner putting up all the money, but half as a loan to the other partner and half as an investment), fertilizer, complicated property rights (e.g. when have I established a right to prevent someone from blocking my light or building a structure that lets them overlook my private property), methods of fraud detection in written contracts, and so on.
People knew about these duplicates since ancient times and weren't troubled by them. They have had explanations that aren't particularly far-fetched, e.g. that Ps. xviii. and II Sam. xxii are duplicates because one's a historical record of what King David said, and the other is the version he later edited for Psalms. Perhaps modern readers have different explanations, but the mere modernity doesn't automatically make them any better.
While I agree that there's a lot to be learned from our ancestors, there's some question about how the average intelligence may have changed over historical times. The Flynn effect suggests that rather large changes can take place across entire populations.
Aside from the fact that cranial capacity has been pretty stable, it's just impossible to believe that intelligence is substantially different if you spend time studying the Talmud, or for that matter Greek philosophers. The Greek philosophers throw people off, because everyone remembers all the science they got wrong.
For instance, in the Talmud, in that kind of transaction I mentioned - the half-loan half-investment deal, where one guy puts up the money and one guy puts up the work, the Talmud notes that the guy doing the work a) received a loan, and b) is working to manage the other guy's investment. Putting two and two together, he's working for the other guy for free, just because he got a loan. I.e., he's paying interest, and therefore this is forbidden under the prohibition against usury unless the investor pays the worker for his time. You can't begin to wrap your head around that kind of stuff unless you have more or less modern intelligence.
I don't really disagree, mainly because the idea that our ancestors were mostly very unintelligent compared to today's average seems absurd given their known accomplishments. However, I do wonder from time to time if that could be explained almost entirely by selection effects. The short timescale of the Flynn effect could possibly be attributed to the lack of reliable tests for g prior to the 20th century, for example...
That would upset a lot of holy applecarts.
I'm assuming there's a website where you can retrieve this ...
I took the text from here:
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_14.html http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_53.html
and split it (more or less) into one word per line.
You'll notice that, in some cases, even when lines or sections are technically different (characters do not exactly match), there is a similarity of words (same roots).
Of course, then we'd have comments fields, and someone would have tagged Psalm 51 as "Dupe"... probably Adam, who would also be responsible for writing "FIrST!!" on every Genesis update.
I don't know how this works, given that anyone can pick up a Bible and find the ten commandments. Maybe the Catholics print their own modified version of the Bible?
Atheist myself, I got married in a orthodox church to make my family happy (grandmothers especially). I carry my wedding ring on the right hand (orthodox rules).
But, I wonder what's the point? Such simple differences, and off course others were the cause of wars (real, and cold) between the sects (to be objective, they are all sects) of the christian church.
Ok, so some fights might've been okay - for example our Bulgarian church (orthodox) "fought" against the Greek (also orthodox) to have the sermons told in bulgarian, not greek, because... people did not understood greek. Or to have the bible written in bulgarian.
But now the bulgarian church is fighting within itself, for stupid things like - whether the black monks (I think those are strict monastic monks), can get married vs. the one carrying white. Again, not going to bother checkin the wikipedia on this one. It's just stupid :) Allow them to get married, and continue...
In Jewish interpretation the second commandment starts with "do not make an image...", in Catholic and Lutheran interpretation this is part of the first commandment, giving it less emphasis. The numbering of the rest of the commandments are then one off, until the ninth/tenth, which is two separate commandments in the Catholic interpretation.
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them"
(Admittedly some modern evangelical Bibles make this "God had formed every beast". But this seems to be motivated by a desire to harmonize rather than honest translating.)
Not sure what good it does to try to interpret the English version.
Well then. Does Genesis 2 put the creation of animals after Adam, or what?
Not sure what good it does to try to interpret the English version.
First you tell people to read the passages, then you tell them not to.
Of course, you should read it. But that's a double edged sword, because to truly 'read' it you'd have to learn Hebrew.
Also, the order doesn't matter, as the first section is 'foreshadowing' or a 'condensed explanation' as long as the result is the same.
Also, there is an accompanying book to Genesis called the book of Enoch. (also Job was the first book NOT Genesis.)
There is a backstory, even before the creation, you should read it.
How can a condensed explanation put things in a different order? The very least I expect of a condensed history is to get things in order.
Also, I'm not sure how you can call a paragraph(s) a story. Considering they're in the same chapter of the same book.
(Actual chapters were added later, the chapter is genesis and the book is the old testament.)
Complete non-sense.
As if writing things in the wrong order made more sense thousands of years ago.
they're in the same chapter of the same book
So what?
It's entirely possible that Genesis 1 and 2 were written by different people, and later placed together.
The "foreshadowing"-explanation is a religious explanation. The historic/scientific explanation is that the two versions are from two different oral traditions that have been merged into the same book. Both kind of explanation are interesting, but they are also largely incompatible, and I think it always should be made very clear which perspective one is arguing from.
Note that the primary difference between the two psalms when seen in the diff view, is that one uses "God" one uses "The Lord". Hence they are probably the same original song filtered through two different traditions. When the Bible were assembled, the editors took pains to include all traditions, even when the content was overlapping.
II Kings 19: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...;
Isaiah 36-38: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...;
I don't know why it was left out of the translation, but 53 starts: For the conductor, on the machalath [a kind of music instrument].
And 14 starts with just: For the conductor.
I've read that Torah scrolls have the same kind of transcription errors "inherited" from one copy to the next so the origin of a scroll can be traced back.
Hand-copying text is error-prone, and copies are often made from copies, so there's the chance to reconstruct a "family tree" even after knowledge of what copied from what is lost.
See, for example, this: http://ahds.ac.uk/archaeology/creating/case-studies/canterbu...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_Hypothesis
Also, I'm not quite sure what kind of transcription errors are permitted in Torah scrolls. They do throw out the entire scroll if there's a significant error. I can't imagine someone duplicating an entire psalm. At most, a letter might be missing from the text.
Thus it should not come as any surprise that a given psalm appears twice with some differences--it was recorded as it was known in two different regions.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...;
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...;
I don't know if it is true or not, but I think it should be taken into account that such things might happen.
It is pretty impressive though that Jews have a 3000? year history - which is pretty unique. My people were still clobbering Romans over the head with blunt instruments 1500 years back.
Also pretty impressive that they have a history that is 3000 years old - yet I can't seem to find 12 year old Geocity pages...
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Forty Days, Forty Nights. A white bird (dove), a black bird (raven), two of each animal. ect. ect. Two stories- combined into one. At least a theory