You read the Quran, or any other book besides the “uninspired Holy Writ?”
Or do you read the Torah? Or Hadiths? Rashi?
J.
I work with the core of the fundamental principle all of these come down to. It all points to the same deity and same concepts (Most of them). It is all just different branches of beliefs that stemmed from one universal source. Implying where I get knowledge from is irrelevant as some if these scriptures are of no concern to learning.
So I take it your beliefs are radically different than orthodox Judaism, you had to start somewhere in your research for truth, am I correct?
J.
Starting point was Christianity, Judaism and Islamic is just the same principle that branched of to other beliefs due to cultural differences. So the God>Adam and Eve>Jesus>End of times narrative to put it simply.
So where did you land up? Christianity, Judaism and Islam a definite no go zone?
J.
So where did you ultimately land? Have you concluded that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all definite no-go zones?
J.
As far as logic and research goes it has leaded me to the conclusion that blind faith is not a way to live and as there is no substantial evidence to prove that any of these stories are true, I am left to believe that the truth has been obscured, twisted, and materialized in a way that humans try to figure out the meaning of existence, each power at play pushing their own agenda and ultimately leading to a effect of control, extortion or using this to either gain wealth or status in this world. Religion has caused much harm in history.
You clearly enjoy following a line of logic. Have you ever applied that same discipline to studying the Scriptures in the original languages, Hebrew, Koine Greek, the Septuagint (LXX), and even Latin, giving careful attention to the grammar, morphology, and syntax?
It is an exhilarating experience.
J.
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(Sigh) Sorry. None of this is true to any actual point. As historical linguistics and textual criticism have proved, this premise is factually incorrect. We don’t guess what the original texts said based on a chain of translations; we translate modern Bibles directly from thousands of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source manuscripts.
Before 1947, our oldest complete Hebrew Old Testament manuscript was the Masoretic Text, dating to around 900 AD. Critics made the same claim you are making. Those 2,000 years of copying must have corrupted the text. But when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, containing texts from roughly 200 BC, we were able to compare them. The result? The texts were virtually identical.
For instance, the Book of Isaiah was 95% identical word-for-word, with the remaining 5% consisting purely of minor spelling variations (like formatting or grammar), changing zero theological meaning.
There are over 5,800 ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, with some fragments dating within decades of the original authors. When you include Latin, Syriac, and Coptic translations, the number jumps to over 20,000. No other document of antiquity comes close to this level of manuscript verification.
You assert that words and sentences were changed to such an extent that the meaning completely changed. You simply misunderstand what textual variants actually are. Scholars categorize the variations found across those thousands of ancient manuscripts into four distinct buckets. When analyzed, it becomes clear that they do not alter Christian doctrine.
Variant Category Description & Impact on Meaning Spelling & Style (~99%) Minor spelling differences (e.g., how a name is spelled) or alternative word orders in Greek that do not change the sentence’s meaning.Non-Meaning Differences: Minor word insertions like “the Lord Jesus” versus “Jesus,” which clarify context but leave the core message intact.
A copyist error unique to a single late manuscript that is easily identified and dismissed by comparing it to older copies. Meaningful & Viable (<1%)Variations that actually affect the text’s meaning and are well-supported by old manuscripts.
Crucially, no core Christian doctrine or historical event rests on any of these minor variants.3. The “Immoral Laws,” and the Progression of Scripture You argue that because ancient biblical laws don’t align with modern Western cultural values, the Bible is either an outdated human invention or needs a “sequel.” This entirely misses the point of progressive revelation and the specific function of the Old Testament law. Remember,
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Matthew 5:17
The Law was Educational, Not Eternal: The New Testament explicitly states that the civil and ceremonial laws given to ancient Israel were a temporary tutor (Galatians 3:24) meant to set a specific nomadic nation apart in the ancient Near East. As for a “Sequel,” well, that already happened. This is exactly what the New Testament is. Christ’s arrival fulfilled the old covenant and instituted a new covenant based on internal transformation rather than national civil codes
To claim the Bible is irrelevant because we no longer follow the civil laws of ancient Israel is like claiming a country’s founding constitution is invalid because citizens no longer use horse-and-buggy traffic laws.
Peter
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Your arguments are old and sadly easily dismissed. However, we are learning much about you. You claim that Jesus was preaching about “another father and not Yahweh” because His teachings seemed to contradict the Old Testament is a repackaging of Marcionism, a heresy from 140 AD that was thoroughly rejected by the early Church.
This argument falls apart when you look at how Jesus actually interacted with the Old Testament: Jesus explicitly stated that the Old Testament scriptures testified about Him. He told the religious leaders,
“For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” John 5:46
If Jesus were serving a different God, He wouldn’t point to Moses as His primary witness. In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you,” He isn’t contradicting Yahweh’s law; He is stripping away the human traditions that had distorted it. He explicitly prefaced that entire sermon by saying,
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Matthew 5:17
Jesus repeatedly identifies His Father as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is Yahweh. In John 8:54, Jesus says,
“Jesus answered, 'If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.”
Now, to your flaw in the “Fire in the Playpen” analogy, your analogy about putting a fire in a baby’s playpen is a classic “strawman” argument. It completely misrepresents the biblical narrative of creation, free will, and human maturity.
God did not create infantile, helpless robots. He created fully conscious, mature moral agents in His own image (Imago Dei), capable of reason, love, and choice. God didn’t put a destructive fire in a trap. He placed a choice (the Tree) in the Garden. Real love requires a choice; if there is no option to choose something else, love and obedience are meaningless.
The cross was not an angry God taking out His rage on a helpless third party. Jesus is God manifest in the flesh. God didn’t demand someone else’s blood; He stepped out of the judgment seat, walked into the courtroom, and paid the penalty Himself.
You mock the idea that God knew we would sin and went ahead with creation anyway. But Scripture frames this not as a mistake or a “sad tale,” but as the ultimate manifestation of God’s grace. The Bible doesn’t hide the fact that God knew the cost before He spoke the universe into existence. Revelation 13:8 calls Jesus “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” God deemed that a universe containing free creatures who could genuinely love Him, choose Him, and experience redemption was worth the immense, agonizing cost of the Cross, a cost God Himself bore.
As I said, this tells us more about you than you discrediting The Bible, Jesus, or God.
Peter
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So the Masoretic text at some point in time must of came from some previous scripture. You claimed that textual variants don’t alter core doctrines. But you are looking at the text through a modern lens. Scribes didn’t just tweak spelling: they actively and knowingly altered texts to shift Israel’s entire belief system from polytheism to monotheism. Deutronomy 32:8 is a prime example where a pantheon of gods was described. the chief God assigning nations to the number of the sons of God, not angels or human kings, the nation of Israel did not even exist in those days. Later translations changed the scripture to read children of Israel, that is not a spelling mistake, that is a massive theological shift from polytheism to monotheism.
Although its true that the Isaiah scroll is 95% identical to the Masoretic text other books found at Qumran. like Samuel or Jeremiah compared to the Dead sea Scrolls revealed significant different versions of the text. The textual history is actually much messier than you claim. Look at 2 Samuel 24:1 for example with the census it says God incited David to take the census of Israel, in 1 Chronicles 21:1 (telling the exact same story), it says Satan incited David. Now that is Hebrew is spelled very differently and not just a matter of spelling error. Why then are newer versions of the bible, like the ESV, NASB, and NIV, now forced to make the proper changes or reference in the footnote of what the Dead sea scrolls shows if there was no issue with the original translations?
Even if the text was preserved perfectly, it still reflects the evolving, localized perspective of ancient humans, not a immutable divine decree. As the text breaks its own rules by not adding or removing certain verses? Not pointing to spelling or grammar mistakes but to versus they were not comfortable with as it would lead to other beliefs for example the pantheon of gods to a singular entity.
You state the Law was Educational not eternal? If the law was just “temporary education from a Tutor” is should point toward basic human decency, yet instead it contains explicit instructions on how to treat fellow human beings as property, beating of slaves with a rod to the point of temporary paralysis just because you own them. If owning another human being as property is morally wrong in 2026, it was morally wrong in 1200BC. To claim God had to accommodate slavery because humans weren’t ready for freedom makes God a hostage to ancient Human culture, not the author of absolute morality. You state that the New testament instituted a new covenant basod on internal transformation, fulfilling the old, but it actually creates a massive theological problem. What you are stating then is that God’s character changed? Calling the new testament a “sequel” is just a polite way of saying God completely rebranded his entire personality and moral compass because the first version didn’t work.
I see your points and a lot of them make sense. I think the problem arises because often, if you don’t have a documented commitment of marriage (as in a wedding ceremony), it’s too easy for one or both partners to leave the “marriage” if the feelings of love and commitment go away (and as anyone who has been in a longterm relationship knows, these feelings fluctuate and they will at times go away). So, while it’s easy to say “What’s the big deal about premarital sex if the couple gets married later anyway?”, the fact is that feelings change, people learn and grow and change, and if you don’t have wedding vows to anchor you and haven’t had the courage to promise your life to someone in a marriage ceremony in front of witnesses, then that level of intimacy is always a bit of a gamble in my opinion.
1 Like
Peter, now now calm down. dropping the label ‘Marcionism’ doesn’t magically make the problem disappear but I do like the standard orthodox Christian apologetic move you pulled with this one, Its always my favorites. So lets begin to look at Exodus 21:24 from the Torah, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, this wasn’t a “human tradition” it was a direct civil law given by yahweh to moses (this also touches on my previous post, tutoring laws that are morally questionable, giving laws that do not promote love but violence)
Funny you should use John 8, lets refer to John 8:41–44 "if God were your father, you would love me. but you belong to your father of the devil Greek original from the oldest manuscript: ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστὲ… ὅτι ψεύστης ἐστὶν καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ, and before you do try to point out in a orthodox apologetic way as the church thoroughly rejected, not disproved, just rejected it. Literal text proves that John uses two consecutive definite articles and nouns in the genitive case, where elsewhere he writes clear Greek. Look at the word also at the end of that verse καὶ ὁ πατὴר αὐτοῦ (If autou means “of it” (referring to the lie), it is incredibly awkward because the Greek word for lie/liar used right before it is pseustēs (a masculine noun meaning “a liar”, a person). You cannot naturally be the father of a “person who lies” as an abstract concept. If it refers to the abstract noun for “falsehood” (pseudos), that word appears earlier in the sentence, making the pronoun jump backward awkwardly. So the church just came to a reformed decision that they are not going to approve but can also not disprove this.
On a side note (Generally quoting text from the scriptures in the first place does not prove any points from your side because the main debate here is that is comes down to it was written by man to promote their way of belief, the scriptures basically justify itself because it was written to, and is not sufficient as evidence for YOUR claims. I merely quote the scriptures to point out the structuring of it)
Now as for the Fire in the playpen analogy lets continue with this. The flaw of your point there is if you dont know what good and evil means, you are, by definition, morally infantile. You cannot make a “mature moral choice” without moral comprehension. Genesis 3 explicitly states they did not possess the knowledge of good and evil until AFTER they ate the fruit. Placing a lethal test in front of two beings who literally lack a moral framework, while a masterpiece manipulator (the serpent) is allowed into the room to trick them, is the definition of a setup. Using Revelation 13:8 to prove God knew the cost and decided it was worth it? If god knew they would fall before he built the world, the “fall” was not a tragic surprise of free will, it was a hardcoded guarantee.Think about the heavy logical implications of what you just said. If the Cross was plan A from ‘the foundation of the world,’ then human sin was not an unexpected byproduct of free will—it was a mandatory plot point.
Your courtroom analogy sounds noble, but look at who controls the courtroom. God is the one who defined what sin is, God is the one who decreed that the penalty for sin must be blood and eternal torment, and God is the judge. If a judge creates a law, sentences a guilty party to death, and then steps down to take the execution instead, the judge is ultimately just satisfying his own rigid, arbitrary rule. Why does an omnipotent God need blood to forgive? If you offend me, I can choose to forgive you simply out of grace. Why is God’s capacity for forgiveness weaker than a human’s.
Peter, let’s look deeply at what you are actually admitting here. You argue that God knew the exact cost before speaking the universe into existence, citing Revelation 13:8 to prove that the Cross was plan A from the very beginning. You claim God looked at this blueprint and deemed that a universe of free creatures was 'worth the immense, agonizing cost. Think about the staggering, terrifying implications of that logic.
If God has absolute, infallible foreknowledge, then before He said ‘Let there be light,’ He didn’t just see a generalized ‘cost.’ He saw the specific faces, names, and lives of every single human being who would ever exist. He knew with 100% absolute certainty every child who would be abused, every soul that would endure horrific suffering on Earth, and the billions of human beings who would ultimately fail His test and burn in Hell forever.
And your defense is that He looked at all that eternal agony and decided it was a price He was willing to pay? He bore the cross for a weekend, the “unredeemed” bores it for eternity. By arguing that God knew the exact script, went ahead with it anyway, and then gets angry at the creations for acting out the exact timeline He foreknew, you aren’t describing a loving Father. You are describing a cosmic playwright who authored a tragedy, cast us in it without our consent, and demands we praise Him for the script.
And this tells me more about who you are as a person. Asking hard questions about justice, suffering, and responsibility doesn’t reveal a “flaw” in me it reveals a commitment to honest logic over blind conformity but that is a classic deflection attempt, lets not make this personal and keep to facts please, instead of questioning my motives, look at the arguments I’ve actually put on the table, if they are so ‘easily dismissed,’ then answer them logically without resorting to personal deflections.
You make a great point that a formal wedding ceremony represents a deep level of courage and public commitment. But from another angle, some would argue that relying on a legal or religious document to force people to stay together when the feelings go away can sometimes create a false sense of security. Now I do not disapprove for the need of a wedding, I see it as a beautiful ceremony but that it beeing a necessity to be allowed to express your love in an intimate way is another thing just because a higher deity commands it?
@anon21586045, please don’t argue from the Bible’s silence, which is an extremely weak basis for your statement.
Again, you say that it was never applied to “a loving, committed, exclusive couple.” That doesn’t mean that such a couple is correct to have sex without making a marital commitment.
Contrary to your interpretations, porneia refers to sex outside of the marital commitment, according to its biblical meaning:
Lexical Summary
porneia: immorality, fornication, fornications
Original Word: πορνεία
Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine
Transliteration: porneia
Pronunciation: por-NAY-ah
Phonetic Spelling: (por-ni’-ah)
KJV: fornication
NASB: immorality, fornication, fornications, immoralities, sexual immorality, unchastity
Word Origin: [from G4203 (πορνεύω - committed immorality)]
- prostitution (including adultery, incest, and porn)
- (by extension) unwedded stimulation or fulfillment of sexual desire
- (figuratively) idolatry
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
fornication.
From porneuo; harlotry (including adultery and incest); figuratively, idolatry – fornication.
see GREEK porneuo
HELPS Word-studies
4202 porneía (the root of the English terms “pornography, pornographic”; cf. 4205 /pórnos) which is derived from pernaō, “to sell off”) – properly, a selling off (surrendering) of sexual purity; promiscuity of any (every) type.
Thus, Paul commands us to run away from it in the context of your quote of verse 16:
1Co_6:13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
1Co_6:18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
2 Likes
Hello @anon21586045. You are throwing a lot of dense arguments at me, but they rely on half-truths. Here is a robust, systematic, and biblically sound response you can use to dismantle his points.
You claim Scribes changed “sons of God” to “sons of Israel” in Deuteronomy 32:8 to hide an original Israelite polytheism where a chief God assigns nations to lesser gods. However, what you have stumbled into is a well-known textual variant, but you have completely misread the theology behind it. Indeed, the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) and the Greek Septuagint (LXX) read “according to the number of the sons of God (or angels of God),” while the later Masoretic Text reads “sons of Israel.” Modern translations like the ESV actually use the Dead Sea Scrolls reading here.
But this does not prove polytheism; it reflects what biblical scholars call “Divine Council” theology, explicitly detailed in places like Psalm 82 and Job 1. In the ancient biblical worldview, Yahweh is the supreme, uncreated Creator. He created a heavenly host of lesser spiritual beings, angels, principalities, and powers.
Because humanity rebelled, God disinherited the nations and handed them over to the administration of these lesser spiritual beings, while keeping Israel as His personal, direct inheritance. Deuteronomy 32:9.
The rest of Deuteronomy is fiercely monotheistic. Deuteronomy 4:39 states: “The Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.” Recognizing that God created lesser spiritual entities is not polytheism. It’s just biblical theology. The scribes didn’t invent monotheism; they were preserving the unique supremacy of Yahweh.
You claim: 2 Samuel says God incited David to take a census, while 1 Chronicles says Satan did. This proves the text is a messy contradiction. This isn’t a text-corruption issue; it’s a classic lesson in primary vs. secondary causation, a concept seen throughout the entire Bible, most famously in the book of Job.
2 Samuel 24 looks at the event from a supreme theological lens. God, in His sovereignty, permitted the census to bring a long-overdue judgment upon Israel. 1 Chronicles 21, which was written centuries later, post-exile, pulls back the curtain to show the immediate, secondary agent used to execute it: Satan, who provoked David’s pride.
In the Hebrew mindset, God is frequently described as “doing” what He sovereignly permits to happen. God allowed Satan to test David, just as God allowed Satan to strike Job. There is no contradiction here, just two different authors highlighting two different angles of the same spiritual reality.
Your claim that since the ESV, NASB, and NIV use footnotes to reference the Dead Sea Scrolls proves the text is corrupted? You’re turning the greatest proof of textual integrity into an accusation. The reason modern Bibles have footnotes is transparency.
Because of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have manuscripts that are 1,000 years older than what medieval scribes had. Christian scholars don’t hide this; they celebrate it. When we compare them, we find that across thousands of years of copying, not a single core Christian doctrine or historical narrative is altered by these variants. The footnotes prove that textual criticism is an open, honest science, not a secret conspiracy.
Your claim that God’s accommodating slavery makes Him a hostage to ancient culture ignores the concept of divine accommodation. A principle Jesus explicitly laid out. In Matthew 19:8, when asked about Moses’ laws on divorce, Jesus said: “Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”
God did not invent slavery; it was the universal, brutal economic reality of the ancient world. If you were impoverished or in debt, you became a bondservant to survive. God did not instantly implement a 21st-century economic utopia because ancient human civilization lacked the infrastructure to support it. Instead, God put restrictive parameters around a broken human institution to actively mitigate its cruelty. Ancient Near Eastern slavery under Torah law was radically different from the horrific, race-based chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade:
Kidnapping or selling a human being was a capital offense punishable by death. Exodus 21:16. If a slave escaped their master, Israel was commanded by law to harbor them, protect them, and not return them Deuteronomy 23:15-16. This is the exact opposite of modern history’s fugitive slave laws.
You should read about striking a servant in Exodus 21:20-21 again. It actually established a shocking ancient precedent: if a master permanently injured a servant (even just knocking out a tooth), the servant was legally granted total freedom Exodus 21:26-27.
The Torah took a brutal, lawless world and pointed it toward human dignity, serving as a civil tutor until Christ arrived to reveal the ultimate ideal:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28.
Calling the New Testament a fulfillment of the Old is just a polite way of saying God completely rebranded His personality because the first version failed. God’s character never changed; the covenant changed, exactly as God planned from the very beginning.
In the Old Covenant, God was dealing with a specific, geopolitical nation (Israel) under a civic and ceremonial code. In the New Covenant, through Christ, God opened salvation to every tribe, tongue, and nation on earth.
The judgment of God against sin is just as fierce in the New Testament (read Revelation or Jesus’ warnings on hell) as it is in the Old. Conversely, the mercy, grace, and love of God are just as prominent in the Old Testament, Exodus 34:6: “The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” as they are in the New.
Peter
Calm as can be. Let’s look directly at the facts, the text, and the logic without any personal deflections. Your argument regarding ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστὲ and καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ is a well-known textual argument originally raised by early Gnostic groups, but it relies on isolating grammar while ignoring standard rules of Greek syntax.
In Koine Greek, when two nouns in the same case (here, the genitive patros and diabolou) sit side-by-side with definite articles, they function in apposition. The second noun identifies or defines the first. It translates naturally into standard Greek syntax as: “You are of your father, [namely] the devil.”
At the end of the verse, the word for “lie” used immediately preceding the phrase is ψεῦδος (pseudos), which is a neuter abstract noun. The phrase καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ translates perfectly as " he is a liar and the father of it (falsehood)."
To claim John is teaching that the devil has a father completely breaks the internal consistency of his own Gospel. Just verses earlier, Jesus explicitly tells the same audience: “I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father” (John 8:38). He is contrasting two spiritual family trees, not introducing a multi-tiered Gnostic pantheon. John 1:3 explicitly states that Jesus created all things, and nothing exists that He did not make.
To claim Lex Talionis (an eye for an eye) promotes violence completely misunderstands its historical and legal function in the Ancient Near East. It was not a mandate for bloodlust; it was a radical limitation on vengeance.
In the ancient tribal world, if a member of Tribe A knocked out a tooth of a member of Tribe B, Tribe B’s typical response was to slaughter Tribe A’s entire family. Human nature naturally seeks disproportionate revenge. Yahweh’s civil law stepped into this violent culture and established a legal ceiling: Maximum punishment must strictly equal, and never exceed, the crime. Furthermore, in ancient Jewish judicial practice, this was seldom executed literally; it was the formula used to determine precise financial restitution for loss of livelihood. It moved humanity away from unchecked blood feuds toward proportionate, judicial equity.
Your argument that Adam and Eve were “morally infantile” relies on a misunderstanding of how the word “knowledge” (da’at) functions in the Hebrew text. Adam and Eve were not morally blank toddlers. They completely understood a clear, authoritative command: “You may eat of every tree… but of this tree you shall not eat, for you will die” (Gen 2:16-17). They fully comprehended the concept of obedience and the reality of consequences.
In the Hebrew mindset, “to know” (yada) means experiential knowledge, not just intellectual recognition. Before the Fall, they knew good perfectly because they lived in it. They did not “know” evil because they had not yet experienced it. By eating the fruit, they chose to become the independent judges of what is right and wrong for themselves, grasping for divine autonomy. They didn’t gain a moral compass; they broke the one they had by choosing to experience rebellion firsthand.
The heaviest philosophical objection you raise is that foreknowledge equals a hard-coded, deterministic decree. Logically, it does not. If you watch a recording of a football game and know with 100% certainty that the quarterback will throw an interception in the third quarter, your knowledge did not force his hand. He made a free choice; you simply observe it from a position outside his timeline. Because God exists outside of linear time, His sight of our choices happens because we make them; our choices do not happen because He sees them.
The core of Christian theology is that genuine love, intimacy, and holiness cannot exist without free will. A universe of pre-programmed robots who are physically incapable of choosing anything but God cannot experience genuine love. Finally, you ask why an omnipotent God needs blood to forgive, arguing that a human can forgive simply out of grace.
Human forgiveness can often cost nothing because we do not have to uphold the cosmic moral order of the universe. If a human judge simply “winks” at abuse, murder, and rape in his courtroom and calls it “grace,” he is not loving; he is corrupt. God cannot bypass justice to show mercy without ceasing to be a just God.
This is why your playwright analogy breaks down. In human history, when a tyrant writes a tragic script, the tyrant forces others to suffer while he sits safely on a throne. The God of the Bible does the exact opposite. Knowing the precise, agonizing cost of human rebellion before creation, He did not shield Himself from the fallout. He chose to step down from the judgment seat, enter the timeline, and take the infinite weight of that legal penalty upon Himself on the Cross. The Cross is the exact moment where flawless justice (sin must be paid for) and radical love (I will pay for it myself) meet.
Peter
Hello @PeterC you are using ‘Divine Council’ theology as a academic smoke screen to hide what the Hebrew text actually says. You claim Yahweh is the supreme ruler who handed out the nations to lesser spirits and kept Israel for Himself. But grammatically, the text says the exact opposite.
Let’s look at the actual structure of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 in the oldest manuscripts:
1. The Giver**:** Elyon (The Most High) divides the nations and sets their borders according to the number of the ‘sons of God’ (bney Elohim).
The reciever**:** Verse 9 begins with ‘For’ (Ki)—explaining the result of that division: ‘For Yahweh’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.’
If Yahweh were the supreme distributor, He wouldn’t be listed as receiving an ‘allotted portion’ or an ‘inheritance.’ In ancient Near Eastern grammar, the person receiving the inheritance is subordinate to the one giving it. The text explicitly portrays Elyon as the high chief deity assigning real estate, and Yahweh as one of the divine sons receiving His specific tribal slice of the pie (Israel).
You brought up Psalm 82 to defend this, but Psalm 82 actually backfires on you. It says, ‘God takes his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.’ It literally uses the plural word for gods (elohim).
When Deuteronomy 32:8 states that Elyon divided the nations according to the number of the “sons of God,” it perfectly explains why Moab belonged to Chemosh.
- In this ancient worldview, Elyon was the cosmic landlord.
- Elyon handed Israel to his son Yahweh.
- Elyon handed Moab to his son Chemosh.
- The Bible explicitly calls the people of Moab “the people of Chemosh” in Numbers and Jeremiah 48:46, matching the exact phrasing used for Israel being the "people of Yahweh. So your argument that the divine council is pointing to angels or lesser deities does not hold up here.
Now lets look at the story in 2 Kings 3:26–27: In the ancient Near East, this text acknowledges that King Mesha’s sacrifice successfully invoked the power of Chemosh. The power of Chemosh was enough to manifest “great wrath” and force Yahweh’s armies to retreat. This was not an angel assigned the other nation and before you try to defend this with the Israelites were disgusted by the scene of it, these are the same people that slit infants throats.
Archaeological and textual discoveries have provided definitive proof that yahweh was originally worshipped as a warrior storm god from the southern sesert, while El was worshipped as a seperate, elder creator deity of the northern Canaanite tradition.
How can one singular entity simultaniously originate as a peaceful, sedentary grandfater god in the northern mountains of Syria/Canaan, and as a fiery, nomadic war god in the southern deserts of Saudi Arabia/Sinai? These are two entirely diffrent regional deities from two diffrent cultures that only merged when the southern nomands migrated north.
(Religious Syncretism) This is the academic term for when two cultures collide and merge their gods (just as the Greeks and Romans did with Zeus and Jupiter). Israel did the exact same thing with El and Yahweh. Its easy to call it a textual variant but you forget the distinct logical and scriptural proof found in history separating these two entities.
As for my second claim: your explanation of ‘primary vs. secondary causation’ is a clever philosophical patch, but it completely rewrites the actual text.
Let’s look at the actual Hebrew mechanics of these two passages. The text of 2 Samuel 24:1 does not say Yahweh ‘permitted’ a secondary agent to act. It explicitly says: ‘The anger of Yahweh burned against Israel, and he incited David against them.’ The text uses the active Hebrew verb wayyāseṯ (‘and he enticed/incited’). Yahweh is the direct, active agent of temptation out of pure rage.
In 1 Chronicles 21:1, the exact same active verb wayyāseṯ is used, but the subject is replaced: ‘Satan stood up against Israel and incited David.’ This isn’t two angles of the same event; it is a flat contradiction regarding who actively planted the thought in David’s head.
You actually exposed the real reason for this when you admitted that Chronicles was written centuries later**, post-exile**.
Historically, early Israelite theology had no concept of a cosmic, evil devil. Yahweh was believed to be the source of both good and evil, a theology explicitly stated in Isaiah 45:7 (‘I form light and create darkness… I am Yahweh, who does all these things’). It was only after the Babylonian exile—where the Jews were heavily influenced by the dualism of Persian Zoroastrianism—that a personal ‘Satan’ figure entered Jewish theology.
The author of Chronicles, writing centuries later with this new, evolved theology, found the ancient story of Yahweh acting as a deceptive tempter morally repulsive. So, he did what any later editor does: he retconned the story, substituting ‘Yahweh’ with ‘Satan’ to protect God’s moral reputation. It’s not a deep lesson in causation, Peter; it’s a clear, historical paper trail of how a religion’s view of God evolved over time.
You are building logical loops to protect the text from its own plain words.
First, your appeal to the ‘Hebrew idiom of permission’ completely backfires when you compare it to the Book of Job. In Job, the text explicitly names ‘the satan’ (ha-satan) as a separate entity who acts as the secondary cause, while God grants permission. The Hebrew mindset was perfectly capable of drawing a clear line between God allowing something and a malicious entity doing it.
The author of 2 Samuel 24 makes no such distinction. It flatly attributes the active temptation to Yahweh’s personal anger. The only reason you have to invent an ‘idiom of permission’ here is because 1 Chronicles 21 completely rewrote the story centuries later to blame Satan. If 2 Samuel originally meant ‘God permitted Satan,’ the author of Chronicles wouldn’t have needed to alter the text at all.
Second, you are confusing modern scholarly transparency with ancient textual integrity. I agree that modern translators are being honest by including footnotes about the Dead Sea Scrolls. But you are missing the entire point: why do those footnotes need to exist?
They exist because ancient scribes intentionally altered the wording to patch up theological problems. Changing ‘sons of God’ to ‘sons of Israel’ in Deuteronomy 32:8 wasn’t an innocent copying typo; it was a deliberate edit to scrub away an inconveniently polytheistic phrase. When humans actively modify written records over centuries to make a deity’s character align with later theology, that is the exact definition of textual manipulation and corruption. Your modern footnotes are simply documenting the historical paper trail of that manipulation.
Peter, you are leaning on standard, regurgitated apologetic phrases that completely unravel the moment you look at the actual history and text.
First, your claim that ‘not a single core doctrine or historical narrative is altered’ by textual variants is demonstrably false. The Deuteronomy 32:8 variant we just debated directly alters the core doctrine of monotheism by preserving a time when Yahweh was a subordinate deity among other gods.
Furthermore, if we look at the New Testament, textual criticism proves that some of the most famous narratives were completely fabricated by later scribes. The beloved story of Jesus forgiving the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) and the entire resurrection appearance ending of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 16:9–20) are entirely missing from the oldest, most reliable manuscripts. Scribes didn’t just fix typos; they actively invented events and inserted them into the mouth of Jesus centuries later to shape doctrine.
Second, your use of ‘divine accommodation’ to excuse slavery is a massive logical self-sabotage. You quote Matthew 19:8, where Jesus notes that Moses allowed divorce due to hard hearts, but adds: ‘from the beginning it was not so.’ Jesus explicitly points back to a pristine, original creation standard where divorce was not the ideal.
If slavery was just a temporary ‘accommodation’ due to hard hearts, where is the matching scripture where Yahweh says, ‘From the beginning it was not so, I do not want you owning humans’? Nowhere. Instead, Yahweh explicitly gives them permission to buy foreign human beings, keep them as permanent property, and pass them down to their children as an inheritance in Leviticus 25:44-46.
Look at the terrifying double standard you are defending. Your God is powerful enough to instantly wipe out the entire planet in a global flood because of human wickedness. He is holy enough to instantly incinerate people for touching the Ark of the Covenant or gathering sticks on a Saturday. But when it comes to the brutal, hereditary, chattel enslavement of human beings as pieces of property, your almighty Creator suddenly becomes helpless, steps back, and says, ‘Well, I guess I just have to accommodate their ancient infrastructure.’
By your own logic, God possesses the absolute power to violently enforce ceremonial rituals, but lacks the moral resolve to enforce basic human rights?
You are pulling off a textbook bait-and-switch. You are describing the rules for Hebrew debt-servants and pretending those were the rules for everyone. You are intentionally hiding the dark, tribal reality of the Torah’s two-tier system.
Let’s stop playing defense with selective verses and look at the exact text you are desperately avoiding: Leviticus 25:44-46.
In this passage, Yahweh explicitly splits humanity into two categories. He notes that fellow Israelites cannot be treated ruthlessly, but then commands: ‘You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you… and they may become your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever.’
Read those words carefully, Peter. Property. Inherit. Forever. That is not ‘temporary economic debt relief.’ That is the exact, textbook definition of permanent, hereditary chattel