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Genesis 17:17: Mind's Retroactive Conception.

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
I'm generalizing the Masoretic Text as representative of the Masoretes who devised it.
But the differences between the Masoretes was in pronunciation of words. What would that have to do with interpreting the word ויצחק?
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
. . . A type oh say like the Freudian slip of the mohel's wrist since a chet ח is closed on both sides and the top such that sinner descend to mostly to hell unless the mohel cuts a space where they can ascend to paradise ה.

Which is a fancy way of saying יעחק wasn't really born as the circumcision, that's Abraham. Isaac must have cut opening him up so that he can roll in the heh with his wife without fearing birthing goyim.


John
The world awaits the Ben-Brey masoretic text.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
But the differences between the Masoretes was in pronunciation of words. What would that have to do with interpreting the word ויצחק?

. . . It's much more than that since to pronounce a word you must know what word is being pronounced. The Masoretic Text uses one particular tradition for where consonant breaks break the consonants down into words. But there are numerous ways to break the consonants down. There are many ways to legitimately interpret the Hebrew text.

The Masoretic Text, in placing the Massorah on the page, crucifies the fact that the sacred text, even the synagogue text, is forbidden to be silenced or made to speak only what the authorities and their "authorized" reading make the text say.

What the Pharisees did to Jesus when he offered up a new and novel reading of the Torah-text the Masoretes did to the text itself: nailed down one particular reading with sharp pointy addendum so that it ceased to speak a living word against the calcified, dried, static, orthodoxy.

God told Moses what Jesus told his followers: I have other sheep, from another sheep pen. I'll give them a new Massorah with which to re-read the Torah.

Moses asked which one is right? God said, the one one is given; I have servants/guardians; and I have sons. . . Moses said how will each know which they are? God said those who get their law and rules from the text will think they're sons because I give them my life-giving scroll. The others will cut and bleed the scroll and drink the blood they inherently knew was there. Their inheritance is as sons.

. . . the “sacred” is always hidden behind the mask of the “profane” realities or actions . . . religious experience consists of “tearing off the veil” and of ripping off the mask.

Mircea Eliade, Journal III 136.​

There will be blood. How you read it, what you think it is, what you do with it, determines who and what you are. Hint: woe betides those who wrap the blood in a wimple or seal it in formaldehyde or a black leather box, a coffin-of-the-covenant, rather than bringing it into the living temple by reason of a warning they found in a dead-letter version of the scroll that's set against the red-letter edition of God's living word.



John
 
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Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
C. M. Cioran said that professor of religion Mircea Eliade "stands in the periphery of every religion by profession as well as by conviction." No religion gets it all right. They're all taking a stab at Jesus on the cross whether they're doing it to kill him, or to see what he's made of, or perhaps like blind men just trying to stake a claim to something in order to anchor their existence.


John
not sue what your point is.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
C. M. Cioran said that professor of religion Mircea Eliade "stands in the periphery of every religion by profession as well as by conviction." No religion gets it all right. They're all taking a stab at Jesus on the cross whether they're doing it to kill him, or to see what he's made of, or perhaps like blind men just trying to stake a claim to something in order to anchor their existence.​

not sue what your point is.

Orthodoxy is strong enough, stiff enough, to hang Jesus upon. But it's not sharp enough to pierce into him to see what he's made of or what's hidden inside.

As we've to break some eggs to make an omelet, we likewise have to break the shell of the scroll (perhaps even the back of orthodoxy) before we can legitimately perform metzitzah.

There will be blood. And it's what you do with it after the final stage of the ritual of the covenant that determines who and what you are. If you spit it out, you're one thing, and if you drink it that's a whole other thing.

What's the Gatorade commercial say: Is It In You?



John
 

Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
Orthodoxy is strong enough, stiff enough, to hang Jesus upon. But it's not sharp enough to pierce into him to see what he's made of or what's hidden inside. As we've to break some eggs to make an omelet, we likewise have to break the shell of the scroll before we can perform metzitzah.

There will be blood. And it's what you do with it after the final stage of the ritual of the covenant that determines who and what you are. If you spit it out, you're one thing, and if you drink it that's a whole other thing.



John
this makes no sense whatsoever. Your analogies don't seem to connect to what you are trying to say.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
The world awaits the Ben-Brey masoretic text.

. . . As it awaits the revelation of the sons of ha-adam who were already in her womb prior to the desecration of her body in Genesis 2:21. They are the true fruit of the Tree of Souls, the Tree of Life, beneath the fore skene of law and knowledge and beneath the fruit of the written word.

The world awaits the revelation of the sons of God scattered, throughout the rotten fruit, as though it matters not which is which and who is who.

But as surely as Horton Hears a Who, God keeps a running tally of who's who, and what's what; of who's a shell, who's a nut, and who has any inkling of the kernel of truth I learned from Col. R.B., Thieme, Jr. in the Quonset hut.



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Your analogies don't seem to connect to what you are trying to say.

. . . That's kinda the point. Orthodoxy doesn't make the necessary connections to see that all religions are throwing spears at the same target: the body hanging on the cross.

Any religion, any at all, that hits the target and then swallows the prey, will receive their just enlightenment. It's just the orthodox versions of each and every faith that with mendacity and tenacity preach to the flock that they and they alone are the chosen ones.

Only if a person swallows when they inhale the spirit will they be high born sons of God. If they wear their religion on their sleeve, or on their forehead and hand, then they're not servants of the most high and are probably just getting high on the doctrines of the antiChrist.



John
 
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Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
. . . That's kinda the point. Orthodoxy doesn't make the necessary connections to see that all religions are throwing spears at the same target: the body hanging on the cross.

Any religion, any at all, that hits the target and then swallows the prey, will receive their just enlightenment. It's just the orthodox versions of each and every faith that with mendacity and tenacity preach to the flock that they and they alone are the chosen ones.

Only if a person swallows when they inhale the spirit will they be high born sons of God. If they wear their religion on their sleeve, or on their forehead and hand, then they're not servants of the most high and are probably just getting high on the doctrines of the antiChrist.



John
scriptural support please
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
The Masoretic Text, in placing the Massorah on the page, crucifies the fact that the sacred text, even the synagogue text, is forbidden to be silenced or made to speak only what the authorities and their "authorized" reading make the text say.

What the Pharisees did to Jesus when he offered up a new and novel reading of the Torah-text the Masoretes did to the text itself: nailed down one particular reading with sharp pointy addendum so that it ceased to speak a living word against the calcified, dried, static, orthodoxy.
I stand by what I said earlier: You're conflating the Masoretes, the guys who preserved the technical aspects of the texts simply by being expert copyist scribes, and Jewish rabbinical commentators, who explain the meaning of the text. You argue that Jesus knew the true meaning of the text, not that he had a different version of what words were actually written. I see no reason, therefore, to blame the Masoretes. Join many other Christians who blame the Pharisees and later Jewish authorities.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
I stand by what I said earlier: You're conflating the Masoretes, the guys who preserved the technical aspects of the texts simply by being expert copyist scribes, and Jewish rabbinical commentators, who explain the meaning of the text. You argue that Jesus knew the true meaning of the text, not that he had a different version of what words were actually written. I see no reason, therefore, to blame the Masoretes. Join many other Christians who blame the Pharisees and later Jewish authorities.

. . . I'm not conflating the Masoretes with the Massorah, or the traditional manner of reading the Hebrew text, except in that the Masoretes codified the traditional cantillation/tradition of reading the text in a manner such that it could be placed right on the text itself as though it were part and parcel of the revelation. Elias Levita said that the purpose was to shut down multiple traditions of reading the text, and that placing the points and addendum on the text was against the law according the Chazal.

That Christians are so ignorant that they read the "Old Testament" as it's rendered by the Jewish tradition that got Jesus in trouble is beyond belief.

I'm not implying the Masoretes are the source for the reading they codify and place on the text. I'm merely speaking of the Masoretes and the Masoretic Text as a people and process that attempts to nail down the living word of God as that tradition nailed down Jesus (with the help of dumb goyim).

Secondly, I don't argue that Jesus knew the true meaning of the text as though it has only one true meaning. It's the Jews who, by allowing the traditional reading to be placed on the text, imply that that's the true meaning of the text.

The unbroken string of consonants that was the original Torah-text was a cipher that functioned almost like the spoken word since various interpretive strategies or eisegetical traditions/epistemologies, allowed the same string of consonants to deliver up multiple legitimate interpretations.

Just yesterday I read a brilliant essay by Rabbi Daniel Boyarin about what Jesus represents in Christian hermeneutics. He compares and contrasts the Christian hermeneutic with a Jewish one showing some remarkable things that justify the legitimate idea that Jesus presented a completely legitimate and earth-shattering challenged to not only Jewish hermeneutics, but to the nature of interpretation across the board:

Daniel Boyarin, “The Word and Allegory; Or, Origen on the Jewish Question,” in Ulla Haselstein, ed., Allegorie: DFG-Symposion 2014 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 31-66



John
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
I gotta ask: why do you open every post with three dots?
. . . I'm not conflating the Masoretes with the Massorah, or the traditional manner of reading the Hebrew text, except in that the Masoretes codified the traditional cantillation/tradition of reading the text in a manner such that it could be placed right on the text itself as though it were part and parcel of the revelation. Elias Levita said that the purpose was to shut down multiple traditions of reading the text, and that placing the points and addendum on the text was against the law according the Chazal.

That Christians are so ignorant that they read the "Old Testament" as it's rendered by the Jewish tradition that got Jesus in trouble is beyond belief.

I'm not implying the Masoretes are the source for the reading they codify and place on the text. I'm merely speaking of the Masoretes and the Masoretic Text as a people and process that attempts to nail down the living word of God as that tradition nailed down Jesus (with the help of dumb goyim).

Secondly, I don't argue that Jesus knew the true meaning of the text as though it has only one true meaning. It's the Jews who, by allowing the traditional reading to be placed on the text, imply that that's the true meaning of the text.

The unbroken string of consonants that was the original Torah-text was a cipher that functioned almost like the spoken word since various interpretive strategies or eisegetical traditions/epistemologies, allowed the same string of consonants to deliver up multiple legitimate interpretations.
How then do you think the text should be read? Spell out in English how the Hebrew should be pronounced, because I', not following what bothers you.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
scriptural support please

. . . The written word is a form of orthodoxy. Jesus only wrote one sentence in the entire written writ. And even that sentence is invisible so that it not become Jesus' original sin: birthing live thought with what a pen-is in thought reproduction.



John
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
I gotta ask: why do you open every post with three dots?

. . . I don't open every post with three dots. But I do a lot. I'm trying to signify that my opening statement is a direct continuation of the statement of the person I'm addressing rather than a free standing statement.

If it doesn't work that way I'm happy to stop.


John
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
How then do you think the text should be read? Spell out in English how the Hebrew should be pronounced, because I'[m], not following what bothers you.

The Pentateuch was delivered as a long string of consonants with no punctuation or sentence break. A text like that is what we call a "cipher." It's one part of a two-part means of communicating information. Jewish Sages even claim the long string of consonants is, in one of its many manifestations, Hashem: the Name of God.

It's impossible to decipher a cipher without a key. The key to the written text of the Torah is an (rather than the) oral Torah. The point of delivering a cipher rather than a standard, readable, text, is one, to hide the meaning from anyone without a key, and two, so far as the Torah text goes, so that multiple readings can be read out of the same string of consonants depending on the key used to decipher the text.

There are currently two extant keys to interpreting the Torah text. The first is a song used to cantillate, or chantillate, the text. The dynamics of the song determine the punctuation of the text such that to this day chanting the Torah is a fundamental practice in the synagogue.

The chant used to decipher the written text into the Jewish translation and interpretation of the text is, sadly, a funeral dirge. The song of Moses given in Deuteronomy 32 is the chant used to present the current Jewish interpretation of the text.

That funeral dirge curses the text, as it curse Israel, enslaving them to the law and the angelic lawyer until such a time as a new way to decipher the text comes on the scene. That new song is the Good News; the Gospel. It provides a new way to interpret the original Torah text.

Just like the song of Moses, the Gospel is a way to apply suppositions to the undeciphered text in order to order the text, exegete the text, according to some eisegetical means of retroactive imposition on the original, and unchanging, string of consonants.

If we take into consideration that in ancient times the scroll of the Torah was written with consecutive letters not separated into words---a fact that allows modern scholars of the Bible plenty of room for exegetical imagination---the later Torah, as it has come down to us, is based on a separation between the words. Thus the ancient manner of writing the text created allowed [sic] numerous readings of the same sequence of letters.

Professor Moshe Idel, Hebrew University, Absorbing Perfection, p. 365.​



John
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
If we take into consideration that in ancient times the scroll of the Torah was written with consecutive letters not separated into words---a fact that allows modern scholars of the Bible plenty of room for exegetical imagination---the later Torah, as it has come down to us, is based on a separation between the words. Thus the ancient manner of writing the text created allowed [sic] numerous readings of the same sequence of letters.
What is the evidence for this?

And that still doesn't answer my question: how would you have broken up the verse/pronounced the word/whatever really bothers you about this portion?
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
And that still doesn't answer my question: how would you have broken up the verse/pronounced the word/whatever really bothers you about this portion?

The literal text of the Hebrew doesn't say that a hundred year old is going to birth a son. It says a hundred year old is going to be born. It's interpretive license to make it say what the Jewish tradition makes it say. We can see this kind of exegetical license throughout the Tanakh.

In a thread in this forum a while back I showed a similar transgressive license by the Jewish traditional interpretation in Psalms 2:6. The literal text is forced to say what it has to be saying to support Jewish tradition when to make it say that departs from the literal meaning of the Hebrew text, which, departing from the literal meaning of the text, is what Jews accuse the Christian interpretation of doing.



John
 

Harel13

Am Yisrael Chai
Staff member
Premium Member
The literal text of the Hebrew doesn't say that a hundred year old is going to birth a son. It says a hundred year old is going to be born. It's interpretive license to make it say what the Jewish tradition makes it say. We can see this kind of exegetical license throughout the Tanakh.
I would appreciate if you actually showed how this can be understood from the words - if you want to reinterpret the spacing of the string of letters, that's fine by me, but I need to see in the text itself how you reached your conclusion.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
The literal text of the Hebrew doesn't say that a hundred year old is going to birth a son. It says a hundred year old is going to be born. It's interpretive license to make it say what the Jewish tradition makes it say. We can see this kind of exegetical license throughout the Tanakh.​

I would appreciate if you actually showed how this can be understood from the words - if you want to reinterpret the spacing of the string of letters, that's fine by me, but I need to see in the text itself how you reached your conclusion.

הלבן מאה–שנה יולד

Shall a child yet be born to [a man who is] a hundred years old, or shall Sarah, who is ninety years old give birth?​

This is how the English translation exists in The Hirsch Chumash. The bracketed statement [a man who is] is bracketed in the text of The Hirsch Chumash. Remove the bracketed comment (since the bracket means it's not really in the Hebrew text being translated), and you get: "Shall a child yet be born a hundred years old." The "to" is part of the interpretation of the preposition ל in הלבן. And since the preposition ל is interpreted "after," many times throughout the Tanakh, the text literally reads: Shall a son be born after one hundred years.

As fate would have it, "Shall a son be born after one hundred years," is found in a New Testament context that justifies the Jewish interpreter's powerful desire to read the grammar against the literal text since the reading above parallels perfectly with Nicodemus' question to God in John 3:4-6.

I remember a legal story about a gangster who was being tried for laundering money. The prosecution wasn't going too well until they brought up a witness who said he was in the room when the money was being counted in one of those money counting machines. Improvisationally the witness recounted that there was a large moose head mounted above the desk the money was being counted on. The witness said the gangster looked up and laughed saying, "If that moose could speak we'd all end up in jail."

When the witness recounted that improvisational story the members of the jury peered at one another. It seems the moose could talk, so to say, since the spontaneous power of the story lent incredible weight to the prosecution.

This is like that. For Jesus to tell Nicodemus that a Jew must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, and for Nicodemus, a latter-day son of Abraham, to say in his heart, "What's he supposed to do, climb into his wife's womb and get born again," lends great weight to the correct interpretation of God telling Abram that to enter the covenant he must be born again, and Abram saying, in his heart, "You ****ting me! What do you want me to do, climb into a 99 year old woman's womb and be born again"?

The eighth day [the day of circumcision], the octave of birth, as it were, repeats the day of birth, but as a day of higher, spiritual birth for his Jewish mission and his Jewish destiny.

Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch.

The commentators strain to interpret ויצחק as an expression of joy, but the meaning of יצחק throughout תנ׳ך does not allow such an interpretation here. . . צחק is always ironic laughter, laughter that denies and condemns the thing that triggers it . . . צחוק is triggered only by noticing something ridiculous or absurd . . ..

The Hirsch Chumash 17:17.

What was so mysterious about what God said that Abraham had to "throw himself on his face" (v. 17)? . . . What sense does it make for Abraham to wonder, "Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old"? He had not even reached two-thirds of his eventual life span, and he will "fill his quiver" with even more sons (as Ps. 127:5 puts it) in 25:1-4.

Abarbanel.

We do find a number of men in the Bible fathering children beyond the age of 90, and in Abraham's day lives were longer than in subsequent generations. . . "He Said to himself." Literally, he "said in his heart." But it is the wicked who speak "in" their hearts, as we see (e.g.) with Esau (27:41) and Haman (Esther 6:6); the righteous speak "on" or "to" their hearts, as did Daniel (Daniel 1:8) and David (1 Sam. 27:1). The text is hinting to us that Abraham doubted what God had said (Hizkuni).

Ibn Ezra.​



John
 
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