Re: Babel 'translation'...

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 12:41:35PM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> 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. 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?
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.

-Mark

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