You were up early, got the papers and put the front end of the car in the garage so Carol wouldn’t get wet from the morning soaker. She left but forgot her phone. Lots of traffic and the rain brings potential Monday rush hour problems. Today you need to download the month’s blog posting for your own record. We can also work on scene three. A little switch of pace. Ezekiel will be thinking about the Holy Scriptures to that point in time. You’ll have to find some references as to how far back they go. – Amorella.
This is odd, it is as if scriptures can pertain to the Dead as well as the Living.
Do your research before you make any assumptions. – Amorella.
**
(From Wikipedia)
How the Bible is Dated
There are numerous ways in which the various copies of the books of the Bible are dated:
Manuscripts
Manuscripts can be dated from their archaeological context (i.e., pottery and other datable objects found with them), their script (handwriting changes over time and styles can be dated fairly accurately), and other means. The oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew bible/Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been dated to the two centuries before the time of Christ, although a fragment from the Book of Numbers has been found which dates from the early 6th century BCE.
Language
Scholars believe that they can date the Hebrew of the bible fairly accurately by comparing it with the grammar and vocabulary from inscriptions found in archaeological sites. For example, the Documentary Hypothesis dating is largely based on internal linguistic differences within the text which date different sections to different eras, while P. J. Wisem hypothesizes that books may date to the 2nd millennium BC based partly on similarity to other ancient narrative structures.
External references
Much of the Hebrew bible has a historical setting which can be compared with non-biblical sources and with the archaeological record (for example, references to the kingdoms of Moab, which existed in the 13th century BCE, is consistent with traditional dating of the Book of Numbers).
**
Torah
Main article: Documentary hypothesis
The traditional religious view on the origin of the Torah is that it was written by Moses between 1446 BC and 1406 BC. While this view is still held by conservative Christians and Jews, modern scholars argue that the whole of the Torah was composed in the mid-1st millennium BC as a “prequel” to the prophetic books (books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings).
**
Isaiah 1-39 "Historical Isaiah" with multiple layers of editing, 8th century BC // Also composed in eighth century: Amos; Nahum; with Zephaniah in the seventh century.
Sixth century: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, and Habakkuk
**
Oldest manuscripts
The oldest known preserved fragment of a Torah text is a good luck charm inscribed with a text close to, although not identical with, the Priestly Blessing found in Num 6:24–27, dated to approximately 600 BC. The oldest complete or nearly complete texts are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls from the middle of the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD. The collections contain all the books of the Tanakh except for the Book of Esther, although not all are complete. . . .
From: all above from Wikipedia (some undocumented)
**
The above is general background for our fiction but what we will use here are lines from Isaiah. - Amorella
Continuing with Wikipedia as a common source I find:
**
Structure
The following is from Margaret Barker's commentary on Isaiah in Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible
▪ Ch.1: various poems, possibly compiled as an introduction to the final form of the book
▪ Ch.2-12: oracles about Judah and Jerusalem reflecting the late 8th century expansion of Assyria into Syria-Palestine
▪ Ch.13-23: oracles against the nations
▪ Ch.24-27: the "Isaiah apocalypse"
▪ Ch.28-31: more oracles about the 8th century crisis
▪ Ch.32-33: oracles about kingship
▪ Ch.34: oracles against Edom (a kingdom bordering Judah to the south)
▪ Ch.35: oracle of salvation for Israel
▪ Ch.36-39: stories about Isaiah during the Assyrian crisis
From: Wikipedia: Book of Isaiah
**
Let’s focus on the specifics of chapter thirty-five. You may use your own New English Bible for translation. – Amorella.
Below is from pages 854-855 of The New English Bible with the Aprocrypha, bought 5 June 1972. “This edition was recommended to us (Carol and myself) by the good monks of Mosteiro de Sao Bento, Estado de Sao Paulo, Brasil and by friend [and colleague, the French professor at Escola Graduada,] Roger Allain.” [Written in the inside cover.]
**
Book of Isaiah, Chapter Thirty-five.
Let the wilderness and the thirsty land be glad,
let the desert rejoice and burst into flower.
Let it flower with fields of asphodel,
let it rejoice and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon, is given to it,
the splendour too of Carmel and Sharon;
these shall see the glory of the LORD, the splendour of our God.
Strengthen the feeble arms,
steady the tottering knees;
say to the anxious, Be strong and fear not.
See, your God comes with vengeance,
with dread retribution he comes to save you.
Then shall blind men’s eyes be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then shall the lame man leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the dumb shout aloud;
for water springs up in the wilderness,
and torrents flow in dry land.
The mirage becomes a pool,
the thirsty land bubbling springs;
instead of reeds and rushes, grass shall grow
in the rough land where wolves now lurk.
And there shall be a causeway there
which shall be called the Way of Holiness,
and the unclean shall not pass along it;
it shall become a pilgrim’s way,
no fool shall trespass on it.
No lion shall come there,
no savage beast climb on to it;
not one shall be found there.
By it those he has ransomed shall return
and the LORD’s redeemed come home;
they shall enter Zion with shouts of triumph,
crowned with everlasting gladness.
Gladness and joy shall be their escort,
and suffering and weariness shall flee away.
From: The New English Bible, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1971. Pages 854-855.
**
I am a little apprehensive finding a use for such a passage in a fiction even though I feel The Bible, though real and considered Holy by many, is written by people inspired but not to the point of their being angelic-like and/or God-like in the sense their words were transcribed without error in their original and without error in translation. I see the work as poetry at best and the use of poetic devices throughout the books.
Then why even a little apprehensive?
My mother instilled in me at an early age to have a great respect for the book itself, in that I should not pile other books on top of it in my room when I was in fifth through eighth grade. It was not good to treat the book impolitely, that was the message as I remember it. Even as an adult agnostic I find myself caught in my mother’s words.
As it is a rainy, cloudy day, you and Carol are going to lunch at Smash Burgers at noon and the Regal Cinema to see a fast paced movie thriller titled, Drive. Post, and later, dude. – Amorella.
Drive is an interesting character building film that in some ways reminded me of a classic film (and before that a book), The Quiet Man. Bloodier and more violent than I would have expected. The main characters grow on you though: B+/A- in my book. The last Potter film is an A for comparison.
You ran a couple errands after the film then stopped for a late afternoon walk at Pine Hill Park. This time, as Carol did her longer walk, you trudged over and across the earthen dam and down the hill to the north then across the bottomed land and up the steps to the car and found this took more energy than walking over to the second lake and sitting on the bench a spell before returning to the parking lot. No sitting, no stopping on this short north trek. Your blood tests are normal but you have to stop taking Simvastatin for a month starting today. Tomorrow morning you find out your lower back X-Ray results. Nothing on the MRI tests as of yet. Time for the news and perhaps a recent show or two you have copied.
Another week of new shows then we can decide which of the new ones we want to keep watching. CSI’, ‘CSI-NY’, the ‘Mentalist’ and ‘Blue Bloods’ are the best of the police/detective shows on the regular channels. The only comedy we really like so far is ‘Broke Girls’. I am curious about where Ezekiel and Isaiah: 35 are going to go. The two lines that catch my soul are:
“See, your God comes with vengeance,
with dread retribution he comes to save you.”
You soul quivered when you saw the words earlier because of two words not two lines: “vengeance” and “retribution”. Why, because you have an ‘intuitive’ imagination of what some call “The Old Testament” God.
It seems fitting, after all we are not talking Christianity or Islam here. Ezekiel would see aspects of the Torah as understood and perhaps written in Ezekiel’s lifetime . . . “these shall see the glory of the LORD, the splendour of our God.”
Three hours later and it is difficult getting back into form. I do not know what Ezekiel would have thought of these lines of the Torah. I can imagine he would have memorized them in life, but I do not see how they are relevant to this book and this chapter.
You are not Ezekiel, my boy. Your focus on lines are not what Ezekiel would appreciate as he sees G---D (in this story) as a bridge maker not a destroyer of bridges. As such these are the important Biblical lines in scene three:
“And there shall be a causeway there
which shall be called the Way of Holiness,”
This will tie in with the women going to the bridge-building in the previous scene.
It will. Post. – Amorella
I am amazed how much this posting shows my cultural bias.
You have to become the characters. It was easier in the earlier books, but you cannot easily see yourself in the same light with Ezekiel the Prophet even in your imagination you steer away because, to you, to do so, to even pretend to be a Biblical hero would be a form of blasphemy. You have an honest reverence for the concept of Holy Words, not the words themselves. This goes back to Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane, a book you lectured from in the third or fourth quarter Mythology class for juniors and/or seniors at Indian Hill in the seventies and/or eighties. Reverence is seen as a conceptual form of politeness and respect. This does not disagree with your agnostic beliefs. You have built your own bridge between the spiritual and the profane I am drawing from it, orndorff. – Amorella.
No comments:
Post a Comment