Re: Babel 'translation'...
| From: | J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 7, 2004, 20:09 |
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In a message dated 2004:04:07 03:42:02 AM, andjo@FREE.FR writes:
YES!!! THat is a fun lil bit. I find it intriguing that it may imply some
knowledge of the eastward migrations of the PIE peoples... and the hilarious,
entirely anthropomorphic Brick Testament image of YWH is something to be seen
to be believed ;)
>I notice it has God addressing the line 'Come, let us go down there and
>confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other's speech'
>to a couple of angels.
Many of the world's Tricksters also mess with language, are "involved in
the origins of linguistic multiplicity" * - Coyote, Legba, Hermes, etc..
Hyde states that "the Bella Coola believe that 'the creator thought that
one language would be enough, but Raven thought differently, and made many.'"
* Lewis Hyde, _Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art_,
1998. ISBN 0-374-27928-4.
> I guess I've always thought of it as 1st sg imperative,
>the pl form being merely a pluralis majestatis, but of course God in other
>texts refer to Himself as 'I'. Anyone Hebraically competent feel like
>clarifying whether the original suggests He is indeed addressing someone
>beside Himself?
In a message dated 2004:04:07 04:51:50 AM, markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:
>I'm not Hebraically competent (sample demonstration: "uhm, the backwards
>C with a dot inside it is a K, right?"), but have read somewhat on the
>history of the stories that comprise the Bible. In the original
>versions of the stories that were eventually written down to form the
>Torah, YHWH was not the only god, but one of many, and this is one of
>several places where that plurality is still evident in the modern
>forms. There are others; for instance, the "no other gods before me"
>commandment was originally literal, not metaphorical, and the "idols"
>worshipped by Avraham's contemporaries (and also those later worshipped
>by Aaron in the desert) were actually other gods. There are several
>stories in which God's people were victorious over an opposing force
>despite the latter's fervent prayers to their own "false" god;
>originally these were meant as evidence of YHWH's superiority over these
>other gods, not of the latter's nonexistence. I believe, although I'm
>not sure, that this also applies to Moses vs. the Pharaoh's priests -
>that is, it's not that the latter were doing parlor tricks while Moses
>had real power, but rather that YHWH was more powerful than their gods.
In a message dated 2004:04:07 10:54:03 AM, cowan@CCIL.ORG writes:
> [...] the Hebrews moved from
>henotheism ("your god is real, but my god can beat your god") to
>monotheism ("your so-called gods do not exist").
Yep that is what AFAIK is the latest textual interpretation based on the
earliest written corpus yet found.
So mayhaps the earliest incarnation of YWH was a Trickster. Might explain
the wonderfully inventive plague of pranks YWH played out on Egypt...
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
"Life is all a great joke, but only the brave ever get the point."
- Kenneth Rexroth
<= thee prIs ov eXistenZ iz aetern'l warfaer 'N' kreativ playf'llnizz... =>
-|-|--|---|-----|--------|-------------|
Hanuman Zhang, heeding the Call(ing) to Divine Chaos & Creation
_te dices loquere Domine quia audit servus tuus_
<= thee prIs ov eXistenZ iz aetern'l warfaer 'N' kreativ playf'llnizz... =>
<A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A>
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
_NADA BRAHMA_ < Sanskrit > "sound = Godhead"
_LILA_ < Sanskrit >
1. the Universe is what happens when God wants to play: Divine Play - the
Play of the Divine in its Cosmic Dance, Whimsy - like a child playing alone,
God the Cosmic Dancer has a Whim-wham, too - whose routine is all creatures
and all worlds - the Cosmos flows - tireless unending resistless stream of
God's energy...that _is_ Lila
2. joyous Yin-Yangin' exercise of spontaneity involved in the
giddy-in-the-moment Art of Creation/Destruction... this is also Lila
"...divine chaos ...rumors of chaos have been known to enhance the
...vision.... for the godhead manifests no more of its reality than the limited
grammar of each person's imagination and conceptual system can handle. A second
advantage is suggested by...the possibilty of many gods, ... each one of us
experiencing a unique... revelation. An orderly monistic and monotheistic
system... might succumb to a craving for logical coherence, and trim away some of the
mystery, rich indeterminancy, and tragic ambiguity in a complete numinous e
xperience. For some temperaments, the ambivalent gentleness and savagery of fate
can be imagined effectively in a godhead split into personified attributes,
sometimes at war, sometimes in shifting alliance." - Vernon Ruland, _Eight
Sacred Horizons: The Religious Imagination East and West_
"You ride the brilliance, You are light, You are the construct,
You defy dimension tenn0!, You are what you are, eternal, absolute,
You are imperial, sovereign yeah tenn0, tenn0!
You breathe redemption, motive, power, You're elemental, super-collider
yeah tenn0!, You are air and earth, fire and ocean, You are Word, You are
tenn0 tenn0!" - from the song "tenn0" by mortal
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