Give me time to digest the entirety of your response before I fully respond to it. Until then, allow me to clarify what I said previously.
First and foremost, these are just my thoughts on this. I do not mean I know any of this.
By “Symbolic” I did not mean that the event did not literally happen. I do not know if it did or did not happen.
I meant the gesture itself is a message, meant to convey truth or understanding through the action taken. An example of this is when Ezekiel is told to bake bread over dung to symbolize something. And how Hosea’s marriage to an adulterer also symbolized something. And the story of David and Absolom potentially symbolized something- the whole story is a message. As well as Joseph decieving his brothers to decipher the state of their hearts, as did Solomon when he offered to split a child in half to discover the true mother.
God/ and or the Scribes/ and or the Prophets used physical actions and actual relationships to symbolize greater truths. As above, so below. The Patterns between the greater and the lesser are connected.
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One way to understand the Bible is to study the creative ways in which the scribes communicated their message. Just as we have styles for writing, so did they. This is a part of context. You may ask a modern Rabbi the various ways in which they interpret their Scriptures, but you would still need to pay attention to understandings from a past perspective. How did ancient Rabbis read the text?
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Through out history, as time passes, ideas and understandings change. The mind of man has been evolving since conception. It’s capacity, capability, philosophies, mythologies have all been in flux. For instance, the concept of Satan/Lucifer/the devil etc. This idea has changed over time.. As have the idea of “good” and “evil”
Zoroastrianism introduced the concept of children of light/ children of darkness. Before this religion, good and evil referred to the nature of a given action, not the inherent essense of a given person as Zoroastrianism teaches.
(while a study of psychology would suggest we have the capacity of both good and evil, light and darkness though most people follow authority regardless of its nature while a few can become self actualized and think for themselves, as discovered through years of testing, trials…perveying for themselves what is good and what is not.
And a study of biology and brain scans coupled with psychological testing has shown that the few people who behave with no capacity of empathy, ethics, and morality tend to have different brain structures/ activity/ capacity etc. There is a diagnosiible difference…though the nature or nurture of such things I do not know. They do not care what good or evil are… only self preservation.).
But if you never knew any of this, your interpretation of the past would lack understanding. Depth. The story of the devil/Satan/and Lucifer has alao been in flux. For example, the shepherd god of the greeks is the physical form identtified as the devil. But that did not occur for several hundred years after the first pope. The idea evolved. All ideas have evolved. All in flux, morphing intoo something else over time.
I have been adding to this post over time. If you first read it an hour ago, you would have missed what I have added. An example of what time does to what we think we know. And if you are just now reading this, then you don’t know exactly what I wrote before. And what I didn’t. Except for this passage which implies the reality of it.
- Many of the scribes in various points of history were under duress. Emporers invaded lands, took captives, destroyed whole histories. Or rewrote them all together. To a tribal culture, the fall of a people meant the gods over them also fell to the opposing gods.
Many of the old gods look like other gods.
Roman Gods for instance are a spin on Greek gods- similar, but not exact. And if you study a given list of old saints, angels, and demons you may find they were actually old gods from old cultures, rewritten, covered in plaster and white washed. This was done for a reason.
Because of this, the scribes themselves had to walk a fine line. They had to please the one in power just enough that they could convey the truth but hide its significance. Retain history by sticking it in the cracks.
The truth is there, because the scribes cared enough about the message. But it could not be obvious. They had to use Subterfuge.
Look to Jeremiah 8
8“ ‘How can you say, “We are wise,
for we have the law of the Lord,”
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?
9The wise will be put to shame;
they will be dismayed and trapped.
Since they have rejected the word of the Lord
We read this passage looking backward. Something happened, something took place, something that called the Law of God into question. Jeremiah is speaking to an ignorant people who think they are correct in their standing with God but don’t know any better. They have something that is being called, the Law of God. But it is somehow false.
God sends prophet after prophet to lead the people back to truth, but they will not listen.
Why did the scribes lie?
Can we trust the history that we think we know?
How did the Prophets know better?
When did this happen?
Was the truth ever clarified?
Do we still have the false text?
Did this happen again? Did the pattern repeat?
And this is why it is so important to not follow blindly. Because it was the deception surrounding the Law that caused Israel to fall. Those who thought they were wise were not listening to God’s correction because they thought they had the Word at their grasp. But they didn’t.
An enemy went into a field and sowed lies when the farmer was sleeping. The farmer knew what the enemy had done. The fruit of lies and the fruit of truth sprouted together, because the farmer allowed this. And together, all things will be sorted during harvest.
Another question is- what is the Harvest? What does this event look like? How does God sort out the truths from the lies that are so enmeshed together? Or, how does God sort out the children of lies (those whose lives bare the fruit of following the lies that have been sown) and the children of God (whose lives bare the fruit of listening to God and following His instruction)?
