Easter Questions

[ksst]

Original sin- was eating the apple after God said leave it alone. Or sex. You know, apples and sex sometimes get confused. There was temptation, and the snake, being very phallic and all, tempted Eve. Before the apple, they were naked and happy in the garden. After the apple, which Eve shared with Adam, thus tempting him as well, they were naked and ashamed, and were kicked out of the garden. Of course, there were no apples in biblical times in those lands, so really it was some other fruit...

It does get kind of kooky, apologies to devout Christians, but really....

[Thorne]

Original sin- was eating the apple after God said leave it alone. Or sex.

No, the sin was in fashioning coverings from fig leaves to hide their genitalia. Because God just LOVES him some good genitalia!

[denuseri]

Original sin- was eating the apple after God said leave it alone. Or sex. You know, apples and sex sometimes get confused. There was temptation, and the snake, being very phallic and all, tempted Eve. Before the apple, they were naked and happy in the garden. After the apple, which Eve shared with Adam, thus tempting him as well, they were naked and ashamed, and were kicked out of the garden. Of course, there were no apples in biblical times in those lands, so really it was some other fruit...

It does get kind of kooky, apologies to devout Christians, but really....

You can thank the western medieval artists for the apple bit ... all the early Bibles reference is a "fruit". Some theologians theorize that because fig leafs are mentioned it may have been a fig, others believe it was perhaps grapes.

All in all as far as mythological stories go I personally don't see it as any more or less "kooky" than any other cultures creation stories.

[thir]

You can thank the western medieval artists for the apple bit ... all the early Bibles reference is a "fruit". Some theologians theorize that because fig leafs are mentioned it may have been a fig, others believe it was perhaps grapes.

Apples seem to have magical or mythical meanings, so maybe natural that it was chosen. I personally do not think the details are important.

All in all as far as mythological stories go I personally don't see it as any more or less "kooky" than any other cultures creation stories.

Is it a creation story? Many cultures have creation stories, naturally enough, but this one is an original sin story, not the same things IMO.

[IAN 2411]

Original sin- was eating the apple after God said leave it alone. Or sex. You know, apples and sex sometimes get confused. There was temptation, and the snake, being very phallic and all, tempted Eve. Before the apple, they were naked and happy in the garden. After the apple, which Eve shared with Adam, thus tempting him as well, they were naked and ashamed, and were kicked out of the garden. Of course, there were no apples in biblical times in those lands, so really it was some other fruit...

It does get kind of kooky, apologies to devout Christians, but really....

If this is to be believed please tell me who remembered the beginning of man that is referred to as Adam and Eve, Cain and Able etc. Once again this is all hear say and those that know the beginning are dead and most probably couldn’t write. This has to be just a very good story written by a person unknown. I find it very hard to believe that people in the 21st century still don’t believe in evolution. Or do they only believe in evolution when circumstances need them to, just as they only believe in the bible when there is a real need to call on GOD.

Ksst...I have never been confused between apples and sex, I’m just not that kinky.

Be well IAN 2411

[ksst]

I personally love a good story, and bible stories are certainly some of the best. I mean, take the story of Solomon and the two women claiming the same baby. Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, tells an excellent version of that story. Thanks to Samuel Clemons/Mark Twain, another of the world's great story tellers.

And the story of the birth of the baby Jesus. Belief or no, I find it a powerful and moving story. I told it to my kids, the little heathens.

As far as literally believing the bible, this was not what I was taught even in Sunday school. I went to a fairly liberal Methodist church for a while, as a kid, and they have a more loose than strict interpretation. Some of the sects that are very literal just confuse me as there are so many contradictions in the bible how do you even know which one to take seriously? Not to mention that is has been retranslated and handed down over the intervening years, and must be something like the old game of telephone in some spots.

[Thorne]

I personally love a good story, and bible stories are certainly some of the best.

I agree, there are some good stories. Just like Mother Goose, or the Brothers Grimm. They're sometimes interesting moral tales. But they're not gospel!

there are so many contradictions in the bible how do you even know which one to take seriously? Not to mention that is has been retranslated and handed down over the intervening years, and must be something like the old game of telephone in some spots.

This is one of the major bones of contention in the atheist community. How are you supposed to know which parts of the Bible are literally true, which parts have to be interpreted properly and which parts are basic garbage? With thousands of different sects having their own ideas of this, how can anyone claim they know exactly what God wants from us? We have to rely on men and women who claim that they are "instruments of the Lord". Yeah, right! As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between Pat Robertson claiming that God tells him what to say and some bum on the street saying the same thing, is that the bum on the street winds up in an asylum. Ol' Pat winds up with a couple of million of other peoples' hard-earned dollars.

[ksst]

Yeah really. There is this big thing going on now about hunting cranes in Wisconsin and it clearly states in the bible that we should not eat cranes. They don't make great head mounts either. What gives?

[IAN 2411]

I read a story not long ago about the parting of the Red Sea, and apparently it has taken place on many occasions throughout history. Near one of the shores, if the moon is in the correct position and there are strong winds coming from a certain direction. The water pushes with the force of the wind in one direction leaving a large lake one side and the sea on the other. It leaves a shallow causeway to walk over.

If you remember the story that we were all told it states; the winds came and the sea parted. It is only our imagination and the exaggeration of the writer that allows us to believe it was parted in the middle. The story of Moses parting the sea could be true, but it could have been someone else running away from slavery with a few others. I would find it hard to believe that the pharaohs would allow so many just to walk off.

Be well IAN 2411

[denuseri]

Hebrew: or if you will: עברים or עברייםʿor Iḇrîm, ʿIḇriyyîm or ʿIvrim, ʿIvriyyim or ʕibrim, ʕibriyim is an ethnonym used in the Jewish Bible to describe the Jews.

It is only one word of many used by the Jewish people and others for them throughout the ages.

It isn't until the establishment of their monarchy that they actually wrote anything down themselves. Until then only oral records were kept. Hence the earliest written account of what came later to be referred too as the Bible wasn't until the times of David and Solomon.

Before then they were often considered Habiru (which is a lawless type of bandit or nomadic invader) especially by the Philistines who wrote too both the Hittites and the Egyptians asking for help against them at various times.

Where the ancient Egyptians referred to them as Habiru themselves on occassion (at least during times of strife with them as in the case of the "Exodus" ) it was more common to refer to them more directly as Shasu (a type of nomadic herder); more specifically Sashu of Yhw. Which btw is a well documented hieroglyphic rendering that corresponds very precisely to the well documented Hebrew tetragrammaton for YHWH.

Often times people get confused when studying Jewish history when it comes to sorting through the myths presented in the Bible and the archeological evidence.

It is very helpful however to understand that even though the Bible may sound to layman as if the Jews were all one contiguous group of people who traveled around together in a single ethnic and cultural gathering that they were in actuality often separated (sometimes for decades even centuries) into smaller groupings as were all such nomadic peoples of those times.

Biblical history reaserchers have shown bia a cross disiplinary approach that the Bible shows cultural bias of two distinctive groups...IE the old testament is a blending of two seperate and distinctive cultures oral histories into one set of "books".

How can both groups be Jews then you may ask?

At the time of the Exodus story there were in fact two settled and distinct groups of Hebrews who were out there with markedly different customs. Though both originally in so far as we know could have came from one commonly accepted point of origin many centuries before this epoch (The city of Ur): One group split from the other to settle in Egypt during a time of drought...and the other stayed in the vicinity of Canaan and were later driven into the hill country by the arrival of the Philistines.

Then years later they decided to start writing things down.

[Thorne]

Then years later they decided to start writing things down.

Which means that everything that came before was little more than a monstrous game of Telephone. And it was more like centuries later, not just years.

Nice post, denuseri. Pretty much agrees that what's written in the Bible cannot necessarily be taken literally. Even in the US, right now, despite all of the written and archeological evidence, groups in power are trying to rewrite history to suit their political and/or religious agendas. How much easier would that have been when all of your history was oral, and saying anything against the rulers was a death wish?