The translation and exegesis of the Hebrew Bible , have led to many versions of stories that we thought we knew, especially the book of Genesis and the first fall story . Hebrew words such as adam, and other significant words in Hebrew language will be the main focus on in this paper. These words can have very different meanings according to the exegetes and also of a person's belief system that is translating them. Thorough critical analysis of postexilic writings will cast doubt into believers of their faith that indeed, what they have been taught about the stories of the Bible are just one interpretation. These are only interpretations between Hebrew words translated into Greek, and the end product being the English version of the bible.
The interpretation of the Adam-and-Eve story that I've grown up with is what many Christians believe today. The story begins with God creating Adam from dirt, making Eve from Adam's rib, the two living in the Garden of Eden, Eve being tempted by the serpent to eat apple from the tree of knowledge, eating the apple, and being expelled from Eden. This version comes from the King James Bible. Popular belief is that the King James version is as close to the Hebrew version as possible. While researching the first fall account, I had noticed that not only are the English versions inconsistent with each other but inconsistent with the Hebrew Bible, which I would believe to be a more accurate version of what the original authors and intended the Bible to reenact stories and philosophize. Armed with the knowledge that the Bible is not written to be concentric like today's modern writing, I will attempt to critically analyze as thoroughly as possible a neophyte can the many interpretations, interpolations, and extrapolations that can be made from these few verses of the Bible.
"And the woman said to the serpent, from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat. That from the fruit of the tree is in middle of the garden, Elohim said you shall not eat from it, nor shall you touch it, lest should die" (Genesis 3:2-3)- NRSV. In the revised standards of today's Bibles, it is obvious that the words used to originally translate the Bible are either considered archaic words, or words not used in today's society. Therefore, the use of the word woman instead of 'adam, isha, or groundling is evidence of either mistranslation or interpretation to make the Bible easier and more user-friendly to read.
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
From the very beginning of time we have Adam and Eve from the Christian bible. The story has been told in many different ways, including in plays, and sometimes teaches more than just about god. Eve is made from one of Adam’s ribs. Once the two eat from the tree of knowledge, they are to be punished from eating the forbidden apples that introduced sin into the world. God puts the curse of bearing children on Eve, because she was the first to bite and then tempted Adam. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and
After the creation of Adam, God takes a piece of Adam’s rib and makes a women, “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:23).” “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living (Genesis 2:20).” Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden with God and live in tranquility, in a sinless world.
The two books attempt to establish an understanding of Eve as a being inferior to Adam as she is made in his image. Milton does this by pointing out how Eve "resemble[s] less/ His image who made both" (man and woman) (8.543-4) and allows Adam to call her "best image of myself" (5.95). Adam believes this as God says to him before creating Eve, "What next I bring shall please thee, be assured, / Thy likeness" (8.449-50). As it goes, in the biblical story of Genesis, man is recognized as one who has been created in the image of God, whereas woman is created from the man. In this story, God created man in his likeness and created woman from a rib of man. The book says God recognizes "it is not good for man to be alone" and decides to ."..make him a helper and partner" (Genesis 2.18). Later in the scripture man recognizes God's newest creature as "woman." In verse 23 of chapter 2, man says,
The most highly referenced and revered as sacred are The King James Version, considered a masterpiece of English literature, The Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, The Aprocrypha, the books believed left out of some bibles, The Vulgate, the Latin Bible used for centuries by the Roman Catholic religion, and The Septuagint, the first ancient Greek translation of the Tanakh (Geisler and Nix 15, McCallum 4). The Bible is considered a sacred text by three major world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Many believers consider it to be the literal truth. Others treat it with great respect, but believe that it was written by human beings and, thus is often contradictory in its tenets.
The Old Testament and the Bible itself has been studied extensively for centuries. Archeologists and Scholars have labored and pondered over texts trying to decipher its clues. It does not matter how many times the Old Testament has been studied there will always be something new to learn about it or the history surrounding it. In the book Reading the Old Testament: an Introduction, the author Lawrence Boadt presents us with a few different authors of the Old Testament that used different names for God and had a unique insight into the texts. These four sources are titled P for priests, E for Elohim, J for Jehovah, and Y for Yahweh (95). These four unique sources help us realize that there is more than one author of the Pentateuch. These authors took the text and adapted for their culture. This independent source is used by scholars to help gain insight into what was behind the texts of the bible so we are not left with an incomplete picture of what went into the creation of the bible. Julius Wellhausen used these four sources to publish a book to able us to better understand the sources and to give it credibility with the Protestant scholars at the time (Boadt 94). These sources that is independent of the bible as in the DVD Who Wrote the Bible? and the Nova website aide in shedding light on the history that surrounded the writers who wrote the text and what inspired them to write it in the first place. The DVD shows the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the extensive history of the texts and all its sources in an effort to try to find exactly who wrote the bible (Who Wrote). These scrolls have aided scholars immensely by giving us some of the oldest known manuscripts of the bible in the world today. It shows that the bible w...
In the bible, Adam and Eve are seen as more equal beings, though Eve is tempted, she is not necessarily seen as any worse than Adam, and Adam seems to have no real recognition that what Eve is doing is wrong. In Paradise Lost Eve is the gullible, rash, and selfish one, whereas Adam is intelligent, discerning, and selfless. Eve can almost be fully faulted as the culprit in this endeavor, and Adam is just along for the ride due to his undying love for her. The serpent recognizes Eve as the weak one by saying “behold alone/ The woman, opportune to all attempts” (Milton, 480-481). Furthermore, it is Adam who recognizes the depravity and depths of what Eve has done and he recognizes it immediately “soon as he heard/ The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed, / Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill/ Ran through his veins” (Milton, 889-891). He chooses to eat the fruit due to his love for her and his inability to fathom being apart from her, not because of ignorance. The result of them eating the fruit does not immediately open their eyes to the knowledge of good and evil, instead they have sex and revel in their actions. It is not until later on that they are hit with what has really been done and the implications it will have for them. The conversation held between Adam and Eve ends on a sour note for Eve as Adam says “Him who to worth in women
The Exodus of the Hebrew people out of Egypt as depicted in the Holy Bible is controversial. A literal, Biblical reading depicts inexplicable supernatural events suggesting the influence of the God of the Hebrews. There are three main theories about the Exodus Event. The first is that the event occurred exactly as accounted in the Bible, miraculous events included. Secondly, that the Exodus did occur, just not as the Bible describes. The last is that the event never occurred. The explanation of these theories will be presented in this paper.
Following the creation story of the book of Genesis is the book of Exodus. In Genesis, God promised Abraham a “great nation from which all nations of the earth will be blessed (Gen 12:1-3)” and in Exodus God completes this promise through the creation of the holy nation, Israel. Exodus tells the story of the God who rescued his people out of Egypt because of the promise he had made to Abraham. God calls to Moses to complete his promise. God’s call to Moses is not only important because he liberates the Israelites but also because God reveals His name(s) along with His true Nature. God calls upon Moses and tells him that He’s back to help the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and that Moses is to lead them. God then gives him full instructions on what to tell the Pharaoh and, more importantly, the Israelites, who are promised, land “flowing with milk and honey”.
We cannot over simplify human behavior and the power of belief. Belief being the structure humans have created to understand one’s existence. Equally important, beliefs reassure a sense of balance and control in a world where we may feel powerless or helpless despite scientific developments. Nevertheless, science is the reality tested. Bultmann, points out blind acceptance of the New Testament’s written word would be irrational, and “a sacrifice of the intellect which could have only one result – a curious form of schizophrenia and insincerity” . Nevertheless, there remains a confusion that pervades modern ideas of the universe and our existence. Bultmann did acknowledge the truths a shallow enlightenment had failed to perceive are later rediscovered in ancient myths. Therefore, the task of dissecting the written words and structure of the New Testament is important for clarification and
From the very beginning of the book, Fee and Stuart seek to explain the importance of proper biblical interpretation. The authors provide hermeneutical approaches for the study of the different ...
N.T Wright (2008) stated that “When we read the scriptures as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation” (p.281). In this statement, the author reveals a paradigm of scriptural interpretation that exists for him as a Christian, theologian, and profession and Bishop. When one surveys the entirety of modern Christendom, one finds a variety of methods and perspectives on biblical interpretation, and indeed on the how one defines the meaning in the parables of Jesus. Capon (2002) and Snodgrass (2008) offer differing perspectives on how one should approach the scriptures and how the true sense of meaning should be extracted. This paper will serve as a brief examination of the methodologies presented by these two authors. Let us begin, with an
The Hebrew Bible, better known as the Old Testament, is a collection of tomes that form part of the Biblical canon. Many scholars around the world do not think that a single author wrote the books contained in the Hebrew Bible, but rather that it represents centuries of stories frequently compiled after the events they describe . The stories were created with visions for the future, in order to allow audiences insight into communities and beliefs that were common thought during their era. The stories responded to the issues and problems of their time, but also addressed contemporary climates. While the stories themselves may not be true, they convey truth without needing literal readings. For example, the creation stories in Genesis, portray God as creating the universe, and while this is considered as not ‘literally true’; the stories communicate theological truths about mankind’s relationship with God through the eyes of Hebrew writers .
In this paper I am trying to find out what true Biblical exegesis means. By finding that truth then I and the person reading this paper can leave with an understand-ing on how to comprehend the content of exegesis. Through out my paper you will see noted some of my sources. I have carefully read these books and have selected the best ones to fit the purpose of this document. I will be exploring many areas of exegesis and will be giving you a brief overview of these and then explaining different uses for exegesis.
While the Hebrews and Egyptians creation theories bear resemblances and differences, the study and comparison of both the Egyptian myths and the biblical account allow us to comprehend the religious views of ancient civilizations in a better light. One may come to the conclusion that the Hebrews were influenced by the cultures of Egyptians by creating similarities in their own beliefs, or by drawing a line of defense of what is in their terms true, by separating from the mass ideals of the Egyptians and establishing distinct