John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
mircophone for birds said:
. . . Right. Even a pointed text is subject to interpretation. ---- But an unpointed text is way more subject to interpretation, almost infinitely more.
Since a string of unpointed (no vowels or spaces) consonants is extremely subject to interpretation it can be understood not merely as a traditional, demotic text, transferring set information, but as a ciper, which requires a key, a way to place vowels (since placing vowels locks a word into a particular reading), that renders one of multiple readings as the one for a given time or place. An unpointed text is a Living-text in the most fundamental sense since it can change its mind if the key used to decipher it is changed.
At the end of Deuteronomy God has Moses place a song, a cipher, with the Torah text. There is no question whatsoever but that this song is the "chantillation" (cantillaltion) that Jewish tradition used to create the Masoretic Text.
And yet God claims, in Deuteronomy, that this song is a curse on Israel. That he knows their heart, that he is going to give them a false-reading of the text, so that when the Subject of the text is born, they will not know him, and will oppose him.
Deuteronomy claims that God, foreknowing Israel's heart, gives the the very reading of the text that will justify their crucifixion of the Subject of the text.
But the story doesn't end there. Isaiah claims, and Ramban points this out, explicitly, that at some point after the crucifixion, Israel will be made to see that the crucifixion was not only prophesied, in a manner that's unbelievable (and Isaiah does it himself), but that at that future date Israel will see that God knew their heart when he gave them the chantillation that led to the death of his son, allowed them to kill his son, based on the very chantillation he gave them, not in order to condemn them, or punish them, but to make them know that knowing their heart, and the baseness of it, he still loved them, gave his son for them, saving them from the baseness of their heart by means of the very death their base heart made the central event in human history.
Israel, the nation, is the corporate narrative that represents the individual reality in every man's heart. The salvation of Israel, is the salvation of every man, woman, and child, who's born after the casting down of the world (Genesis 2:21). The man who hates Israel, the man who hates the Jew, hates his own soul. Anti-semitism is a product of self-hate projected onto the everymanrace that is God's dear people Israel.
In the very near future, Israel is going to be made to see that the MT, and their traditions, were indeed given to them by God, but that they had a meaning and purpose beyond anything Israel could ever imagine. God curses them for being postlapsarian sons of Adam by giving them a text that will legally command them to oppose God's son.
When they oppose him, legally, by a correct reading of an incorrect chantillation, when they see to his death, far from that act condemning them, it saves them not from the crime of the death of God's son, but from their status as postlapsarian humanity, which is the reason God's son must be opposed, and must die (for the casting down of the world). Their greatest sin is their so-great salvation. As is the case with all of us.
John
so as it is written