I think he’s treating the LXX as though it should take precedence over the Masoretic Text (MT), @Bruce_Leiter.
Deu 32:8 When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.
Deu 32:8 When [divided into parts the highest nations], as he disseminated the sons of Adam, he set the borders of nations according to the number of the angels of God;
J.
This does get at another tangent of this conversation which is that in the Christian purity culture in which many of my generation (millennials) were raised, having premarital sex was (is) so frowned upon that many women (and probably men, too) stayed in relationships and got married that probably would have been better off not doing so because they felt they had no choice and it was better to marry the person they had premarital sex with than to live with the shame of your future spouse not being your first sexual partner. I think this shows the danger in emphasizing any sin as “extra bad” and shameful.
That aside, though, I think of marriage (and I believe the Bible presents marriage) as more of a gift to humans rather than an institution they are forced into in order to avoid sin. I think one of the reasons God instituted marriage is so that the level of mental and emotional commitment and vulnerability would be more likely to match the level of physical commitment that a couple shares.
The change from sons of god to the later sons of Israel, if this was not such a uncomfortable piece, why did they feel the need to change it?
Scribes didn’t make accidental typos that introduced a polytheistic pantheon. Textual critics look for the harder reading. Scribes in later monotheistic periods were deeply uncomfortable with a text implying Yahweh was a subordinate son of El inheriting a single nation. To fix this theological problem, they swapped “God” for “Israel”—preserving the number 70 (Jacob’s family size) while erasing the other gods. Also there are whole sentences added to some parts of the bible that is not even in the oldest texts.
Quoting 2 Peter to prove inspiration is circular logic. The fact that scribes altered the text to fit changing theology shows it is a human-constructed process. Real morality isn’t valid because an ancient tribal scribe wrote it down; it is valid when it promotes objective human flourishing. If your definitions of sin rely on a text that editors actively altered to clean up their own theological history, your moral foundation rests on shifting human edits, not divine absolutes.
We often talk about the variations in the Septuagint (LXX), but the real debate is how they measure up against the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). Because the DSS are the oldest and best-preserved Hebrew manuscripts we have, any deviation from them sparks intense scholarly debate over which text is closer to the original. So stating that I am taking only a viewpoint out of LXX is an assumption on your part.
Apologies for my assumptions then @anon21586045
J.
You’ve raised a deeply empathetic and highly accurate point about the real-world damage of “purity culture.” The psychological fallout of framing sexuality through the lens of terror and shame—rather than wisdom and maturity—has left a generation of millennials carrying profound relational scars.
Your desire to rescue marriage from being a cold “sin-prevention trap” and reframe it as a gift of emotional and physical alignment is beautiful.
The view of marriage you are describing—where physical intimacy, emotional vulnerability, and mutual commitment beautifully align—is a wonderful, healthy, and modern ideal. But it is largely a product of the Enlightenment and the 18th-century Romantic movement, not ancient biblical theology.
By projecting this modern, egalitarian, romantic framework back onto the ancient scriptures, you are actually doing something great: you are prioritizing human empathy and psychological health over ancient, rigid dogmas.
But we have to be honest. The reason purity culture caused so much damage is because it took the literal, high-stakes, black-and-white moral warnings of the scriptures seriously. If we want to build a healthier view of intimacy, we have to admit that we are outgrowing the ancient frameworks, rather than pretending those frameworks always shared our modern values.
Your grammatical critique is clever, but it relies on a false dilemma.In the phrase ὅτι ψεύστης ἐστὶν καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ (“for he is a liar and the father of αὐτοῦ”), you argue that if αὐτοῦ is masculine (referring to “the devil”), it yields the bizarre rendering: “he [the devil] is a liar, and [the devil] is the father of the liar [the devil]?” To escape this, you claim the 2nd-century Gnostic Heracleon had the most natural reading of the opening clause (ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστέ): “You are of the father of the devil.” This Gnostic reading created a cosmic hierarchy where the Old Testament Creator God (the Demiurge) was a lesser, ignorant deity, the “father of the devil.”
We will leave out the obvious Herasy for a second.
“But Jesus knew their thoughts, and said to them: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”
In John 8:44, τοῦ πατρὸς and τοῦ διαβόλου are in apposition. This is a standard Greek construction where two nouns in the same case refer to the same entity (e.g., “Paul, the apostle” / Παῦλος ὁ ἀπόστολος). The phrase translates naturally as “you are of your father, the devil.” The Meaning of αὐτοῦ. The masculine/neuter pronoun αὐτοῦ at the end of the verse doesn’t force us to choose between “the devil’s father” or “the father of the liar.” First, αὐτοῦ can be neuter, referring back to the abstract concept of lying implied by the noun ψεῦδος (the lie) earlier in the clause: “whenever he speaks a lie (ψεῦδος, neuter), he speaks from his own resources, because he is a liar, and the father of it [lying/falsehood].”
This is the standard rendering, and it leaves nothing "orphaned."Second, if αὐτοῦ is masculine, it is an idiomatic Hebrew/Semitic expression (common in John’s heavily Semitic Greek) meaning “the father of him, the liar,” not implying the devil has a father, but establishing the devil as the prototypical archetype of all liars.
Heracleon’s reading wasn’t rejected because of “Nicene bias.” It was rejected because the rest of John’s Gospel is fiercely monotheistic (John 1:1-3, 17:3). To read a multi-tiered Gnostic cosmic hierarchy into John 8:44 violently contradicts John’s own prologue, which asserts that the Logos created everything that exists. Leaving no room for a secondary, evil Demiurge who fathered the devil.
You point out an apparent contradiction: if God had the legislative power to enforce capital punishment for picking up sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15), why couldn’t He just command absolute forgiveness instead of Lex Talionis (an eye for an eye)? This argument misunderstands the social function of law. Lex Talionis was not a license for personal vengeance; it was a limit on the escalation of tribal violence. In the Ancient Near East, if a member of Tribe A killed a member of Tribe B, Tribe B would retaliate by slaughtering all of Tribe A. Lex Talionis restricted justice to proportional parity: only one eye for an eye, only one life for a life. It was a massive civilizational step forward, a curb on unchecked blood feuds.
To draw a hard, stark boundary between the sacred and the profane, teaching a primitive nation the absolute holiness of God.To preserve social order and prevent total tribal self-annihilation in an anarchic, lawless wilderness.
God met them in their sociological reality to pull them slowly toward a higher ethical horizon. Absolute forgiveness is a spiritual reality that requires the transformation of the human heart through the indwelling Holy Spirit; a civil law code cannot legislate a regenerated heart, but it can restrict physical violence.
You argue that Adam and Eve were “cognitively colorblind,” unable to understand deception or betrayal, making the tree of knowledge a cruel setup. This assumes that “relational trust” requires an advanced academic understanding of evil. It does not. Trust is not a cognitive calculation game; it is a relational posture. A toddler does not need to understand pharmacology, toxicology, or death to know they should not eat the colorful pills their parent told them to avoid. They only need to know who loves them and who feeds them.
God did not give them a complex, confusing moral puzzle. He gave them one simple, highly visible boundary marker. If there is no physical option to choose anything other than God, then “relationship” is a programmed simulation. The presence of the Tree was not an ambush; it was the only space in Eden where love could actually be chosen, because it was the only space where saying “no” to God was physically possible.
You argue that if God chose to actualize a universe where Timeline A occurs (Jones commits a crime) instead of Timeline B, Jones’s free will is a mathematical fiction. This objection relies on compatibilism and a misunderstanding of how God’s primary causality interacts with secondary human causality. Think of Shakespeare writing Macbeth. Shakespeare is the primary cause of everything in the play. He “actualized” the timeline where Macbeth murders Duncan. Yet, within the logic of the play, Macbeth’s choices are driven by his own ambition, fear, and decisions. Shakespeare did not “force” Macbeth; Shakespeare wrote a world in which Macbeth freely chose.
Continued
To say “Jones cannot choose otherwise” confuses certainty with necessity. Necessity means Jones is being forced against his will (like a man pushed off a cliff). Certainty simply means the action will happen. God’s foreknowledge of Jones’s choice does not cause the choice any more than a weather satellite’s observation of a storm causes the rain. Because God exists in the Eternal Present, He observes Jones choosing in Jones’s own present moment. Jones is entirely free to choose Timeline B; if he did, God would have eternally foreseen Timeline B.
You ask: Who authored the cosmic framework dictating that the only currency capable of mending a moral fracture is the violent shedding of blood? This is a critique of a caricature of the atonement. Specifically, a crude version of Penal Substitutionary atonement where an angry Father needs to kill someone to feel better. But the biblical view of atonement is far deeper: Life is in the Blood. In Hebrew thought, blood represents life (Leviticus 17:11). The “shedding of blood” is not God demanding a violent pagan sacrifice to appease His anger. It is the symbolic and literal pouring out of life.
Sin is a turning away from the Source of Life (God), which naturally results in death. God did not trap Himself in a violent system of His own making. On the cross, God did not punish a third party to satisfy His wrath; God substituted Himself. In Christ, God took the natural cosmic consequence of human rebellion, death, and separation into His own divine being.
To offer “unconditional, bloodless grace” without addressing the real, structural wreckage of sin would be to declare that evil doesn’t actually matter. If a judge “forgives” a murderer without requiring justice, he hasn’t shown love; he has shown apathy toward the victim. God’s justice is His refusal to call evil “good.” The cross is where His absolute love and His absolute refusal to tolerate evil meet.
Oh, and Macbeth has no soul, no actual consciousness, and no ability to cry out for mercy outside of Shakespeare’s ink. Human beings are real, living image-bearers of God. Hell is not a divine torture chamber where God actively tortures people who desperately want to love Him. As C.S. Lewis famously noted, the doors of Hell are locked from the inside. It is the final, tragic preservation of human free will. If a soul spends its entire earthly existence saying to God, “Leave me alone,” God eventually respects that boundary.
Peter
You are looking at the ancient Near Eastern cultural context and assuming that because Israel shared a language and geographical imagery with Ugarit, they must have shared the exact same polytheistic theology.
But the text shows the exact opposite: the biblical writers borrowed the poetic imagery of their neighbors precisely to subvert it. They took the titles of the Canaanite pantheon and declared: ‘The qualities you attribute to El and Baal actually belong to Yahweh alone.’ It isn’t a messy, compromised evolutionary merger; it is a deliberate, revolutionary, cosmic takeover.
Peter
Peter, your defenses are slipping into semantic hand-waving and catastrophic logical failures.
You claim that τοῦ πατρὸς and τοῦ διαβόλου are in simple apposition, like “Paul, the apostle.” But you are flatly ignoring standard Greek mechanics. In Greek, when nouns are in apposition, they share a single structure. Here, John explicitly repeats the article-noun structure linked by a genitive (ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου). The most natural, unforced reading of this exact grammatical construction is "of the father of the devil.
Then, you claim αὐτοῦ at the end means the devil is the father of “it” (the lie). Brilliant—you just conceded my point. If αὐτοῦ refers back to the lie, your previous argument that my reading “orphaned” the word completely collapses.
Finally, your panic over “heresy” is a historical anachronism. You claim John’s prologue rules out Gnosticism. You forget that 2nd-century Gnostics loved the Gospel of John and used its Prologue to build their cosmic systems. John wasn’t writing with a copy of the Nicene Creed on his desk. By trying to protect John from looking “Gnostic,” you are forcing a later theological orthodoxy onto an early first-century text.
Your defense of Lex Talionis as a mere “social restriction” utterly backfires on your theology. You argue that absolute forgiveness couldn’t be legislated because it requires "the transformation of the human heart through the Holy Spirit.
Think about the staggering limitation you are placing on your own deity:
1. You claim God was powerful enough to split the Red Sea, rain down plagues, and dictate 613 laws down to the thread count of priestly garments.
2.Yet, God was allegedly too weak to write: "If someone strikes you, do not strike back; forgive them.
If God has to wait for the Holy Spirit to arrive in the New Testament before He can command basic non-violence, then God’s timeless moral law is entirely contingent on human sociological readiness. You have inadvertently admitted that God is not a sovereign, immutable lawgiver, but a pragmatic politician who modifies His moral principles based on what the local barbarians are willing to accept.
You try to rescue the Eden setup by arguing a toddler doesn’t need to understand pharmacology to know they shouldn’t eat colorful pills—they just need to trust the parent.
This analogy completely destroys your own argument. If a toddler eats toxic pills left on the kitchen counter by a parent, who goes to jail? The parent. It is called criminal negligence.
If a human parent left a lethal poison in a toddler’s playroom, allowed a manipulative, hyper-intelligent stranger in to convince the child to drink it, and then punished that child’s descendants with disease, trauma, and hell for generations, we would call that parent a monster. If Adam and Eve had zero cognitive category for deception, they were cognitively colorblind. Punishing them for being outmaneuvered by a cosmic predator isn’t a “test of love”; it’s a structural ambush.
Your attempt to use Shakespeare and Macbeth to save free will is perhaps your most catastrophic logical error. You argue that Shakespeare authored the world where Macbeth murders Duncan, but within the play, Macbeth “freely chose.”
Peter, you completely missed the devastating flaw in your own analogy: Macbeth is a fictional character with zero actual agency.
Macbeth cannot wake up in Act 3 and decide not to kill Duncan. Why? Because Shakespeare already inked the page. Macbeth’s “ambition, fear, and decisions” are completely puppeted by the primary author.
If our relationship to God is the same as Macbeth’s relationship to Shakespeare, then human free will is an absolute illusion. Every choice, every sin, and every cry of agony was written into the cosmic script by the Primary Cause before creation. If God wrote the script where Jones commits a crime, Jones has the exact same amount of freedom as ink on a page—none.
You have portrayed a God who writes a script where human puppets are locked into their sins, places lethal traps in their room while leaving them cognitively unable to understand deception, and then claims He has to compromise His own moral standards because the puppets are too violent to handle real justice. You aren’t defending a perfect, sovereign Creator; you are defending a clumsy author trying to fix his own plot holes.
Peter, you are attempting to soften the harsh edges of your theology by retreating into poetic metaphors, C.S. Lewis quotes, and a romanticized view of Hell. But when we strip away the comforting language, your logic still collapses. Let’s look at the machinery of your arguments.
Your weather satellite analogy is a textbook category mistake. A weather satellite is a passive observer of a system it did not create.
God is not a satellite. He is the Creator.
You say, “If Jones chose Timeline B, God would have eternally foreseen Timeline B.” This completely ignores the act of creation. Before anything existed, God had to choose which universe to actualize.
If God deliberately actualized the specific universe where Jones commits the crime, Jones cannot choose Option B, because Option B does not exist. For Jones to choose Option B, he would have to possess the power to retroactively alter God’s eternal, unchangeable choice of which universe to build. Jones is a passenger on a track God laid down.
You attempt to rescue the Atonement from the “angry Father” caricature by arguing that “blood represents life,” not a demand for violent appeasement. But this organic view of the cross creates a massive self-contradiction.
If sin is a “natural turning away from the source of life that results in death,” who designed that natural law? God did. If God is the author of the cosmic physics where sin equals death, He is still the one who established the rules of the system.
Furthermore, if blood simply represents “life,” why does it have to be shed?
Why must the “pouring out of life” require a Roman crucifixion, agonizing suffocation, and a spear through the side? If God wanted to infuse His divine life back into broken humanity, He could have done so through a peaceful incarnation, a loving touch, or a bloodless resurrection.
Instead, you have portrayed a God who is trapped by a cosmic law of gravity where spiritual restoration requires physical torture. And if God “substituted Himself” to pay His own debt, the transaction is logically hollow. If I owe you a million dollars, and you pull a million dollars out of your left pocket and put it in your right pocket to “satisfy the debt,” you haven’t actually satisfied anything—you’ve just performed a theatrical loop.
You dismiss the Macbeth analogy by stating that Macbeth has no soul, while humans are real image-bearers. But you completely missed the point of the comparison, which is about causality, not consciousness.
Even if you give Macbeth a soul, a conscious mind, and the ability to feel pain, as long as Shakespeare is the primary cause writing his choices, Macbeth still has zero free will.
If God wrote the script of reality and chose to instantiate the timeline where Jones sins, Jones’s “soul” is just a conscious mechanism programmed to do exactly what God predetermined it would do. Giving a puppet a soul doesn’t make it free; it just means the puppet can feel the strings pulling it.
Finally, you retreat to C.S. Lewis’s famous quote that “the doors of Hell are locked from the inside” to argue that Hell is just God respecting human free will. This is a beautiful sentiment, but it is both biblically inaccurate and morally bankrupt.
First, the biblical text does not describe Hell as a passive self-isolation. It describes people being thrown into a furnace of fire (Matthew 13:42), where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Teeth-gnashing in the ancient world is an expression of agony and rage, not a quiet desire to be left alone.
Second, your “respecting boundaries” defense is a horrific definition of love.
If a severely depressed, traumatized, or cognitively impaired person tries to jump off a bridge, a loving parent doesn’t stand by and say, “I respect your boundary, go ahead.” They grab them.
If God is an omnipotent, loving Father, and He allows His cognitively blind, deceived children to walk into eternal torment because they said “leave me alone” in a state of profound ignorance, that is not “respecting free will.” That is cosmic abandonment and criminal negligence.
Your defense ultimately leaves you with a God who is either too weak to save His creations without violence, or too cold to rescue them from a trap He deliberately built.
Peter, the “literary subversion” argument is a highly popular modern apologetic shield, but it completely falls apart when confronted with actual textual history and archaeology. You are claiming this was a clean, “deliberate, revolutionary cosmic takeover” from day one.
If that were true, your theory cannot explain the historical crime scene left behind in the manuscripts.
If the author of Deuteronomy 32 was merely borrowing Canaanite imagery to “subvert” it and claim Yahweh’s supreme dominance, why did later monotheistic Jewish scribes feel the absolute, panicked need to alter the text?
If “Sons of God” (bney ha-Elohim) was just a brilliant rhetorical subversion, why did scribes of the Masoretic tradition actively erase it and rewrite it as “Sons of Israel” (bney Yisrael)?
The answer is obvious: they didn’t see it as a clever subversion. They saw it for what it was—a glaring, embarrassing survival of an earlier polytheistic theology where Yahweh was subordinate to Elyon. Scribes don’t censor and alter texts that successfully support their theology; they censor texts that contradict it. The very existence of this textual corruption proves the evolution was messy, compromised, and resisted by later editors.
You claim the writers took the titles of the Canaanite pantheon to say they belong to Yahweh alone. But in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, Yahweh is not the supreme coordinator; He is a passive recipient.
Elyon (The Most High) acts as the active agent: He establishes the boundaries of the nations.
Yahweh is the passive beneficiary: He receives His portion (hebel—literally a measured plot of land) from Elyon’s distribution.
If this were a “revolutionary takeover” designed to show Yahweh’s absolute supremacy over the Canaanite pantheon, it is the worst-written coup in history. It portrays Yahweh exactly as the Ugaritic tablets portray the minor sons of El—waiting in line to receive his assigned inheritance from the high deity.
True theological subversion looks like the later prophets (e.g., Deutero-Isaiah) who explicitly declare, “I am the Lord, and there is no other.” Deuteronomy 32:8-9, by contrast, is a fossil of the old system before the takeover happened.
Your argument relies on the assumption that ancient Israelites were pristine, theoretical theologians who only “borrowed” pagan ideas as literary metaphors. Archaeology has thoroughly shattered this romanticized view.
The inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom (dating to the 8th century BCE) do not contain highly polished, abstract monotheistic poetry. They contain everyday, popular blessings:
"I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah.
The archaeological record proves that the average Israelite was not playing “subversive literary games” with Canaanite religion—they were literally practicing it. Yahweh was worshipped alongside Asherah (El’s consort) because, in the minds of early Israelites, Yahweh had merged with El and inherited El’s wife.
You are trying to paint a picture of a sudden, perfect, divine revelation that instantly hijacked Canaanite culture. But the textual changes in Deuteronomy, the courtroom execution of the gods in Psalm 82, and the physical inscriptions in the dirt all tell a far more human story.
It was not a clean “revolutionary takeover.” It was a slow, centuries-long, highly contested evolution where a local southern storm god (Yahweh) slowly absorbed the traits of the Canaanite high god (El), killed off the rest of the pantheon, and had His editors clean up the paperwork afterward to make it look like He was the only one there from the beginning. Your theology is defending the edited paperwork; history reveals the actual construction site.
@anon21586045, you’ve thrown a lot of complex arguments at me, but when you look closely at the theology and the history, they don’t hold up. You claim that the phrase ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου must mean “of the father of the devil”; however, it is you who are ignoring “standard Greek mechanics.” You are the one ignoring standard Johannine style and Koine Greek flexibility.
The “Father of the Devil” absurdity: If John 8:44 means “you are of the father of the devil,” it implies the devil has a father (a bizarre Gnostic dualism). But nowhere else in the entire New Testament, let alone the Gospel of John, is there any mention of a “father of the devil.”
In Koine Greek, repeating the article (τοῦ… τοῦ…) is a highly common way to introduce attributed apposition or a clarifying title, particularly to distinguish which father is being spoken of. It functions as: “You are of your father—[namely], the devil.”
You claimed I “conceded the point” because αὐτοῦ refers to the lie. Not at all. In Greek, ψεύστης (liar) and ψεῦδος (lie) are closely linked. If the devil is a liar and the father of it (the lie/lying), it perfectly fits the traditional reading: the devil is the source of falsehood. It does not require fabricating a cosmic “father of the devil.” Which is completely ridiculous.
You argue that if God is all-powerful, He shouldn’t have had to “wait” for the New Testament to command absolute non-violence; thus, God is just a “pragmatic politician” accommodating barbarians. This statement is starting to betray your cloak. This argument entirely misunderstands the biblical concept of Progressive Revelation and pedagogy (teaching). God is not a weak politician; He is a master educator.
God did not give the Mosaic Law as His final, ultimate cosmic ideal. The Apostle Paul explicitly states that the Law was a paidagōgos (a temporary guardian or tutor) until Christ came Galatians 3:24.
“So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.”
Jesus Himself validates this “pedagogical step” approach. When asked about divorce laws in Deuteronomy, Jesus says:
“He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Matthew 19:8.
I think I covered this; however, Lex Talionis (“eye for an eye”) was not a command to seek vengeance; it was a limitation on vengeance. No escalation. It was the necessary first step of restraint before teaching the higher law of self-sacrificial love in Christ.
You argue that if a parent leaves poison (the Tree) near a toddler (Adam/Eve) and a predator (the Serpent) gets in, the parent is criminally negligent. This analogy fails because Adam and Eve were not mindless toddlers, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was not “toxic pills.”
A toddler lacks the cognitive capacity to understand a command. Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, had full linguistic, cognitive, and moral capacity. They knew the command, and they understood the concept of death (separation from God/the source of life).
The tree wasn’t “poison.” The tree represented the boundary of human autonomy. Eating of it was a choice to decide for themselves what is “good and evil” independent of God. God did not “abandon” them. He warned them, gave them an abundance of every other tree in the garden, and walked with them. Love, by definition, requires the possibility of rejection. If there is no tree, there is no choice. If there is no choice, human beings are just biological robots.
Continued…
You argue that if God is the “Author” of reality, then, like Shakespeare writing Macbeth’s actions, we have zero actual agency and are just puppets. This is a classic category mistake where the critic treats the Creator-creature relationship as a physical, mechanical puppet-string relationship.
Truth is, the Bible distinguishes between God as the Primary Cause (sustaining all of existence and time) and humans as Secondary Causes (acting according to their own real desires and wills). God creates a 4D reality and endows His creations with actual, living consciousness and will. God’s sovereign decree does not force Jones to sin against his will; rather, God’s decree ensures that Jones freely chooses to do what he wants to do. God sustains the existence of the player, but the player plays the hand.
Then you argue that if God designed the “natural law” where sin equals death, and then dies to satisfy His own debt, it is a hollow “theatrical loop.” This objection treats God as a third-party judge who is bound by an external set of cosmic rules, rather than recognizing that God’s laws are an expression of His own unchanging character.
Why does sin equal death? God is the source of life. Sin, by definition, is turning away from God. Therefore, sin resulting in death is not an arbitrary rule God “designed” like a computer program; it is an inevitable ontological reality. If you unplug a lamp from the outlet, it goes dark. God didn’t “invent” a rule that unplugged lamps go dark; darkness is simply the natural state of being separated from the power source.
On the cross, God does not just “transfer money from his left pocket to his right.” In covenants, the parties are bound. God, out of incomprehensible love, steps into the covenant-breaker’s place to bear the natural consequences of the rupture (death) so that we can be re-plugged into the Source of Life. It is the ultimate expression of justice and mercy, meeting Psalm 85:10.
"Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;
righteousness and peace kiss each other."
Then you argue that if God allows people to walk into Hell, He is like a parent standing by letting a depressed person jump off a bridge. This argument presumes that those in Hell are “cognitively blind, deceived children” who desperately want to be saved but are being abandoned. The Bible paints a very different picture.
The “weeping and gnashing of teeth” in Matthew 13:42 is indeed agony, but in the ancient world, “gnashing of teeth” is also a sign of defiant rage Acts 7:54, where the mob gnashes their teeth at Stephen before stoning him. Those in Hell do not want God; they hate Him. They want His blessings without His presence.
If a parent grabs a depressed person jumping off a bridge, they do so to give them time to heal. But what if, after 10,000 years of intervention, that person still screams, “I hate you, let me go”? To force someone to spend eternity in the intimate presence of a God they utterly despise would itself be a form of torture. Hell, in a profound sense, is God finally saying to the rebellious creature: “Thy will be done.”
Where to next? Oh, here, you claim Deuteronomy 32:8-9 proves Yahweh was originally a minor son of “Elyon” who inherited Israel, and that scribes later altered “Sons of God” to “Sons of Israel” to hide this polytheistic past. Again, your cloak is slipping. This is a highly biased, selective reading of historical-critical scholarship (such as Thomas Römer or Mark S. Smith) that ignores the actual literary structure of Hebrew poetry.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (LXX) indeed read " according to the number of the sons of God/divine beings" (bney Elohim), while the Masoretic Text reads “sons of Israel.” But this is not a “panicked cover-up” of polytheism. The ancient Israelites absolutely used the language of their neighbors, but they used it to dethrone those foreign gods. In Deuteronomy 32, Elyon and Yahweh are used synonymously throughout the chapter as the same God.
The true reading of Deuteronomy 32:8-9:
"When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
** He fixed the borders of the peoples**
** According to the number of the sons of God.**But the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."
When the Most High (Yahweh) divided the nations, He assigned the pagan nations to the governance of lesser spiritual beings (the “sons of God,” who later rebelled and became the pagan deities). But Yahweh chose Israel as His own direct inheritance. Far from being a “minor son waiting in line,” Yahweh is portrayed as the Supreme Sovereign who delegates the nations to subordinates, while keeping Israel for Himself. Psalm 82 then shows Yahweh judging these subordinate “gods” for their injustice and stripping them of their immortality.
The archaeological finds showing syncretism (worshipping Yahweh alongside Asherah) do not prove “original polytheism” of the biblical writers; they prove the exact cycle of rebellion that the Old Testament itself constantly complains about!
The entire Old Testament narrative is a history of Israel constantly slipping into Canaanite paganism and God sending prophets to rebuke them for it. Finding paganized Israelite inscriptions in the dirt doesn’t disprove the Bible; it confirms the Biblical diagnosis of human stubbornness.
Continued…
Like I said. We are seeing the you that you may be trying to hide. Some examples?
“Your defense of Lex Talionis… utterly backfires on your theology.” You seem to view theology not as universal truth, but as a system that I’m personally trying to protect.
“Think about the staggering limitation you are placing on your own deity…” Calling God “your own deity” is one of the clearest signs of your non-belief.
“…soften the harsh edges of your theology…” “Your defense ultimately leaves you with a God…” Again, you treat God as the end product of mine and others’ logical defense, rather than a living being.
“Yet, God was allegedly too weak to write…”, “You have inadvertently admitted that God is not a sovereign, immutable lawgiver, but a pragmatic politician…” Using the word “allegedly” is classic skeptical distancing, treating biblical history as an unproven claim.
“You have portrayed a God who writes a script where human puppets are locked into their sins…” You use “You have portrayed a God” to suggest God only exists in the way I describe or imagine Him.
Instead of engaging with biblical arguments as spiritual truths, you categorize them as psychological coping mechanisms or historical accidents.
“Peter, you are attempting to soften the harsh edges of your theology by retreating into poetic metaphors…” “The ‘literary subversion’ argument is a highly popular modern apologetic shield…” You view my arguments not as truth, but as “shields,” or tactical maneuvers used to deflect hard questions. In his last argument, you completely strip away any divine origin of the biblical text, treating God (Yahweh) purely as a historical, human-made concept.
“…a local southern storm god (Yahweh) slowly absorbed the traits of the Canaanite high god (El)…” By defining Yahweh as a “local southern storm god” who “killed off the rest of the pantheon,” you explicitly show you view the God of the Bible as a mythological composite created by human evolution, not the self-revealing Creator.
If you are here to truly seek God, believe His Word, and accept Jesus, Great! Welcome. If all you are doing is attempting to cause disruption, then may I suggest you move on. You will not accomplish your goal here.
Peter
I’ll admit, I too have issues with the way many conservative, fundamentalist, complementarian Christians view marriage today (which they think is the biblical way to view it). I also agree that there needs to be a greater emphasis on human empathy, psychological health, and I would add good counseling and therapists as well.
I think purity culture misinterprets Scripture, though. God created Eve because he wanted humans to enjoy the joy of partnership and companionship. Of course, sin created all kinds of problems in relationships and marriages. Do you think the original mention of the marriage covenant in Genesis 2 is a rigid dogma?
You’re assuming your interpretation of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 rather than demonstrating it. Even if one adopts the reading “sons of God” (בְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים), the text nowhere says Yahweh is a passive recipient or a lesser deity. Verse 8 simply describes the Most High (עֶלְיוֹן) assigning the nations, while verse 9 identifies Yahweh’s allotted portion as Jacob. Throughout Deuteronomy, “Most High” (עֶלְיוֹן) is a title repeatedly applied to Yahweh Himself (cf. Deut. 26:19; 28:1), not to a deity above Him. Your conclusion depends on importing the Ugaritic pantheon into the passage, but the text itself never identifies Elyon as someone other than Yahweh. In biblical theology, the titles “Most High,” “Creator,” and “Possessor of heaven and earth” belong to Yahweh alone.
If Moses intended to teach that Elyon and Yahweh are two distinct deities, why does the rest of Deuteronomy repeatedly identify Yahweh as ‘the Most High’ (עֶלְיוֹן)? That would be an extraordinary contradiction for the same author to make without any explanation.
And I must say, I take exceptional umbrage at your statement, “Yahweh is not the supreme coordinator; He is a passive recipient.” That is an extraordinarily serious claim.
I’m beginning to feel that this discussion is becoming circular and isn’t really leading anywhere. More importantly, I’m not sure it’s serving the edification of the ekklesia, which should remain our aim as brothers in Christ.
That’s IF we are brothers in union with Messiah.
J.
Peter, you are retreating into the classic theological fallback of labeling difficult textual realities as “absurdities” or “heresy” rather than dealing with the raw data. Let’s address your defenses with actual textual and logical precision.
You claim that repeating the article (τοῦ… τοῦ…) is a common way to introduce clarifying apposition, translating to: “You are of your father—[namely], the devil.”
While apposition exists in Koine Greek, John’s specific construction here is highly irregular for simple apposition. In standard Greek, if John wanted to say “your father, the devil,” he would typically write τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ διαβόλου (placing the personal pronoun “your” in the middle) or use loose apposition. Instead, he wrote:
ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστέ/ Literally: “You are of the father of the devil.”
You argue this is “bizarre Gnostic dualism” and “nowhere else in the NT.” Exactly! That is the entire point. You are using circular canonical logic. You argue John couldn’t have written it because it doesn’t match the rest of the canon—forgetting that the canon was curated centuries later specifically to exclude and suppress these early, complex cosmological views.
Regarding αὐτοῦ (“of him/it”) at the end of the verse: you claim it refers to the lie (ψεῦδος), meaning the devil is the “father of the lie.” But if αὐτοῦ is neuter and refers to the lie, then the Greek reads: “for he is a liar and the father of it.”
If “he” is the devil, then who is “the father” at the beginning of the verse? You have the devil being the son of “the father” in the first clause, but then being the “father of the lie” in the last clause. The Greek is notoriously contorted, which is why native-speaking scholars have fought over it for two millennia. Dismissing it as “completely ridiculous” is not a grammatical argument; it is theological panic.
You invoke Galatians and Matthew to argue that God is a “master educator” using the Law as a temporary guardian (paidagōgos) to accommodate human “hardness of heart.”
This “pedagogical step” defense completely implodes when you compare God’s absolute demands on ritual purity with His “accommodations” on moral behavior:
1.The Ritual Standard (Absolute): God has no problem demanding absolute, zero-tolerance compliance on food laws, Sabbath-keeping (stoning a man for gathering sticks), and complex tabernacle fabrics. No “accommodation” was made for tribal “hardness of heart” there.
2.The Ethical Standard (Compromised): Yet, when it comes to slavery, selling daughters into marriage, and proportional physical mutilation (Lex Talionis), God suddenly becomes a pragmatist who has to compromise because “the culture isn’t ready.”
If God possessed the sovereign authority to enforce capital punishment for ritual pedantry, He certainly had the authority to command, “Do not keep human beings as property” or “Do not gouge out eyes.” Your defense portrays a God who cares more about dietary compliance than basic human rights, compromising His eternal moral character because ancient humans were too “stubborn” to stop beating each other.
You reject the toddler analogy, claiming Adam and Eve had “full cognitive and moral capacity.” But you completely ignore the core mechanism of the Fall: deception.
To evaluate a lie, you must have a cognitive concept of falsehood. In a pristine, pre-Fall world:
Adam and Eve had never encountered a lie. They had never witnessed death or decay. They had never experienced malice or betrayal.
Even if they understood the dictionary definition of the word “death” as a concept, they were empirically and psychologically colorblind to deceit.
If a sheltered child is told by their loving parent, “Do not touch this,” and a brilliant, highly sophisticated, talking creature (the Serpent) says, “Actually, your parent is lying to keep you small,” the child has zero moral architecture to evaluate who is telling the truth.
Testing a completely innocent, un-deceived mind against a cosmic, ancient master of deception is not a “test of love.” It is a structural ambush. If a parent leaves a toddler in a room with a professional con artist and a loaded gun, and the con artist convinces the child to pull the trigger, we do not blame the child’s “free will.” We blame the parent who set up the room.
Peter, your systematic theology is a series of patches on a collapsing fabric:
1,You must force John’s irregular Greek into a later theological mold to avoid early Christian diversity.
2.You must portray God as a weak legislator who compromises on ethical violence while remaining an absolute tyrant on ritual rules.
3.You must frame a calculated cosmic setup in Eden as a “fair test of love.”
You aren’t defending a flawless divine script; you are defending an ancient, highly human, evolving literature by projecting modern, sanitized concepts back onto it.
Brother, claiming Elyon and Yahweh are the same because ‘Most High’ is used in later texts is historically circular.
Your defense completely collapses when confronted with the Sefire Inscriptions (8th century BCE). In these ancient Aramaic treaty tablets, El and Elyon (אל ועליין) are explicitly listed as two separate, distinct deities joined by a conjunction, not one god with two names. Furthermore, the Phoenician history of Philo of Byblos confirms that Elyon (Elioun) was historically considered the grandfather of El, demonstrating they were separate entities in West Semitic pantheons.
You are projecting late, 5th-century monotheism backward onto an ancient 10th-century poetic text. In the original historical context of Deuteronomy 32:8–9:
However, if you look at the oldest surviving translations of this exact verse, the word Yahweh (the LORD) is not there:
1.The Septuagint (LXX) (3rd Century BCE Greek translation) reads: “I will stretch out my hand to God the Most High (ton theon ton hypsiston)…” (No “Yahweh”).
2.he Samaritan Pentateuch (another ancient Hebrew textual tradition) reads: “I have lifted my hand to God [Elohim], Most High…” (No “Yahweh”).
3.The early Syriac (Peshitta) and the writings of the ancient Christian translator Symmachus also lack the name “Yahweh” in this verse.
Originally, Abraham just swore an oath to Melchizedek’s deity, El Elyon. Later monotheistic Jewish scribes, deeply uncomfortable with the father of their nation swearing an oath to a Canaanite deity, physically inserted the name “Yahweh” into the verse to retroactively make it look like Abraham was talking about Yahweh all along.
So please enlighten me if it was referring to the same deity, why, oh why did the scholars feel the need to place in the name yahweh? Did they not see it clearly like you do that its the same deity? oh most high Johann?
Peter, you accuse me of “disruption,” but what you really fear is exposure. I bring historical, textual, and grammatical knowledge; you offer blind compliance to edited paperwork. You demand I stop questioning, yet the Bible itself praises the exact intellectual scrutiny you are trying to silence.
The Bereans in Acts 17:11 were called “noble” precisely because they didn’t take religious claims on blind faith; they examined the scriptures daily to see if those claims were true. Proverbs 18:17 warns that “the first to state his case seems right, until another comes and cross-examines him.” By shutting down debate, you admit your case cannot handle the cross-examination.
Furthermore, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 commands us to “test everything; hold fast what is good.” I am testing your theology against the raw data of history, manuscript evidence, and logic. If your faith shatters under an objective test, it is a fragile idol, not the truth. Don’t blame the mirror for showing you the cracks.