On Thursday, May 23, 2019 at 6:08:11 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 5/23/2019 3:37 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > > The Torah, Tanach and to a degree as I understand the Christian New > Testament are mythic narratives meant to bring meaning to various aspects > of inner mental space or psychology. > > > I think you impute to much cleverness there. A lot it is, or was, > intended as real history providing both provenance and justification for > whatever ethics was being pushed at the time. > > Brent >
The writers of these narratives were rather clever. These are done in a literary "shape-shifter" fashion so that they can be interpreted in a wide range of ways. The book of Exodus, or Shemot (שְׁמוֹת) in Hebrew Shem = name and Shemot is plural or means the list of names, has the children of Israel leave Egypt (Mitzrayim) in the narrow place (Mezaryim), narrow in one meaning because of the Nile. They are lead to the Red Sea where the water is separated and crash, where red is symbolic of blood. Also remember one of the plagues on Egypt was the Nile turned to blood. This is a birth motif, and certainly one message is this is a metaphor for the birth of Israel. The Torah is packed full of this sort of thing, and it involves a lot of word play. This is not to say there are not literal meanings as well, which in different ages are rather different. The American conservative Protestant idea about Christianity is a peculiar redaction on the whole meaning. I can't say about the Koran and what Islamic scholars think. It is not a subject I have delved into, nor am I ever likely to. Samiya has posted some curious stuff that equates Koranic passages with meaning about atoms and at one time if I recall about the Higgs boson. So the writers there were clever enough to make the narratives and poetry shift metaphors and retranslate meaning into different forms as the world learns and matures. It really is one reason these scriptures have remained so culturally and socially powerful for many centuries. My religious background is Judaism and Catholicism. I ended up choosing Judaism, simply because it is in a way more intellectual, it is more fun, and Catholicism has it perks here and there but it is also rather grave and grey. I generally consider myself quite agnostic about the idea of an infinite disembodied entity that created and controls everything. The idea simply runs into contradictions. I can still go to the minion, where it is the same reason the fiddler stays on the roof (Issac B Singer) --- tradition. If I were Catholic instead I think it would be the same thing. LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/7a7e5caf-76d3-4910-b456-89a18ded0cc4%40googlegroups.com.
