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Let me just ask again this simple question: Do you deny or admit as true that the Hebrew in which Psalms was originally written had no vowels, and marks indicating vowel sounds was not added until centuries later--perhaps not even until after the time of Christ?
That being the case, how would it be physically possible for the word for the second Lord in Psalms 110:1 to be any different from the word for Lord in Psalms 97:5 or Zechariah 4:14, which unquestionably were referring to God?
It is on this that you are basing your whole argument, and your evidence cannot be validated.
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quote:What is the spelling of the two words in question, in the original?
According to Lisa:
quote:The second "lord" in Psalms 110:1 is spelled alef-dalet-waw-nun-yud. The Hebrew word for lord in the other two verses you mention is spelled alef-dalet-waw-nun.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: That being the case, how would it be physically possible for the word for the second Lord in Psalms 110:1 to be any different from the word for Lord in Psalms 97:5 or Zechariah 4:14, which unquestionably were referring to God?
Lisa's already addressed this, but if you could read Hebrew, you'd see that you're entirely wrong about this. The word in Psalms 97:5 and Zechariah 4:14 is one letter shorter than the word in Psalms 110:1. It reads "adon," not "adoni." "Adon" unambiguously means "master" or "owner," not "God"; no contrary vocalization is possible. In both of those cases it is part of the larger phrase adon kol ha'aretz, or "master of all the earth." Psalms 110:1 has a different form, "adoni," meaning "my master," and it doesn't have "kol ha'aretz" in it. (And just as well, considering that "adoni kol ha'aretz" would be ungrammatical...)
Lisa's already said all this, so I don't quite know why I'm bothering. You can keep ignoring the facts and reiterating false assertions all you want; it doesn't make them any truer.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Let me just ask again this simple question: Do you deny or admit as true that the Hebrew in which Psalms was originally written had no vowels, and marks indicating vowel sounds was not added until centuries later--perhaps not even until after the time of Christ?
That being the case, how would it be physically possible for the word for the second Lord in Psalms 110:1 to be any different from the word for Lord in Psalms 97:5 or Zechariah 4:14, which unquestionably were referring to God?
It is on this that you are basing your whole argument, and your evidence cannot be validated.
Oh, silly Ron. The letter yod is not a vowel. Vowels are the points. Little dots and what not. There is definitely a consonental difference between the words in the two places. They have the same stem, but it isn't just a difference of vowels.
Really, Ron, you ought to go and learn something about the subject. You'd make less foolish mistakes that way.
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Lisa, anyone, can you show me any other place in Scripture where David referred to Abraham as "lord"? Can you show me any example in Scripture where anyone after Abraham's death referred to him as "lord"?
I would also like to know "which" original Hebrew source you are using, and when it was last updated by uninspired scribes. But perhaps you are not critical enough in your scholarship even to consider this. You accept whatever you receive from your present rabbis, scribes, etc.
I am asking you serious and responsible and valid questions, and you respond by deriding me for making "foolish" mistakes. That kind of thing is not even making an argument.
As you may know by now, I am a strong believer in taking due cognizance of context. So let me point out to you a little context, Psalms 110:1 plus the next three verses:
quote:The Lord says to my Lord: "Sit at My right hand, Until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet." 2 The Lord will stretch forth Thy strong scepter from Zion, [saying], "Rule in the midst of Thine enemies." 3 Thy people will volunteer freely in the day of Thy power; In holy array, from the womb of the dawn, Thy youth are to Thee [as] the dew. 4 The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind, "Thou art a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek." (NASB)
This is copied and pasted from my on-computer copy of the NASB. I have about a dozen English-language versions of the Bible on my computer. I like the NASB because of its scholarly precision.
Please notice what is said in verse 4 about the second "Lord" in verse 1: "Thou art a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek." When was this ever true of Abraham? Abraham paid tithes TO Melchizedek, and was never himself a priest.
If your interpretation of a passage does not make sense in context, then that is a pretty big clue that your interpretation is wrong, and you need to question all your rationalizations for interpreting the passage in question the way that you do.
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Blayne Bradley
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They have already answered you several times over.
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Since you haven't acknowledged you were wrong about there being no difference in the Hebrew consonants between adoni and adonai, I don't think one has to be paying very close attention to know that you are arguing without intellectual honesty.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Lisa, anyone, can you show me any other place in Scripture where David referred to Abraham as "lord"? Can you show me any example in Scripture where anyone after Abraham's death referred to him as "lord"?
And if I were to find one, you'd say, "Can you show me any example in Scripture where anyone after Abraham's death, with red hair and blue eyes and mole just above their right shoulder who speaks with a slight lisp referred to him as 'lord'?"
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: I would also like to know "which" original Hebrew source you are using, and when it was last updated by uninspired scribes. But perhaps you are not critical enough in your scholarship even to consider this. You accept whatever you receive from your present rabbis, scribes, etc.
Now you're really grasping at straws, Ron. I think I'll let this concession post of yours stand on its own (de)merits.
PS: you left out Pharisees, hypocrites, whitened sepulchers, etc...
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I invite you to Yeshiva University's rare book room. We can together look at the the oldest versions of Psalms and Genesis and compare.
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In any case, the unenlightened-scribes bit cuts just as hard against Ron. Who is to say that the prophecies weren't inserted by such after the fact? Or that some other prophecies which can't be forced to fit weren't quietly dropped?
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Since I cannot read Hebrew, I would have to depend upon the assessment of qualified Hebrew scholars, and that does not mean anyone who happens to have attended Hebrew school in their childhood. Has it even occurred to any of you that scribes after the time of Christ may have tampered with Psalms 110:1 to create a situation where they could arbitrarily pretend that the second Lord in that verse could not refer to diety? This is not a far-fetched speculation, because it is admitted that points which indicate presumed vowel sounds were not added until centuries after the original text of Psalms was written. How many more changes were made in a dishonest attempt to counter otherwise unanswerable Christian arguments? To really validate the facts involved, we must see manuscripts that actually date from before the Christian era. How did the Dead Sea Scrolls have Psalms 110:1?
But regardless of any claims about the form of the word used, the argument based on context will still outweigh anything else to me. Psalms 110:1-4 specifies that the second "Lord" is declared to be "a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." Abraham was never any kind of priest, let alone of the order of Melchizedek, to whom he himself paid tithes. Nor was he ever "King of Salem," as is said of Melchizedek in Gen. 14:18. But Jesus Christ we Christians affirm was declared to be a High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, and now officiates as the High Priest for the whole human race in the Sanctuary of God in Heaven.
You Jews gave us Christians and the whole world the whole divine Plan of Salvation in your sanctuary services, and now you let the Plan of Salavation pass you by. Is pride more important than truth?
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Here is a discussion of the very points we've been discussing by someone who who is an expert. It is a lengthy article. I will try keep the excerpts brief.
quote:In their article in The Journal, Sir Anthony Buzzard and Charles Hunting argue that since the Hebrew word in Ps. 110:1 translated "Lord" in reference to Christ was "adoni," Christ couldn't be God. In what may be the single most frequently cited Old Testament Messianic text in the New Testament, David wrote: "The Lord [Yahweh] says to my Lord [Adoni]: 'Sit at my right hand, until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet.'" They reason that Jesus couldn't be God, since "adoni" refers to "in every one of its 195 occurrences, human (and occasionally angelic) superiors." This argument runs into an insufferable weakness, however: The only difference between "adoni" and "adonai" is one of vowel pointing, as Buzzard and Hunting themselves point out. Since Hebrew originally was written only in consonants, the vowel points were added later, probably in the sixth or seventh centuries A.D. Neither Jerome in the fourth century (who translated the Latin Vulgate) nor the Talmud in the fifth century mention them, despite "both at times discuss in detail different vocalization possibilities of Hebrew consonants . . . It is inconceivable that had such signs existed Jerome and the rabbis should have failed to mention them." -- FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT JESUS IS GOD A Reply Against Gary Fakhoury, Anthony Buzzard, and Wade Cox, by Eric V. Snow, p. 36; Link: http://www.forananswer.org/Top_Uni/Snow_Buzzard.pdf
Snow goes on to point out a number of specific cases where it is provable that Jewish scribes did make errors in pointing, some of them in Messianic texts. He then observes:
quote:Consequently, this possibility must be examined: Could have the Jews deliberately inserted the vowel points for "adoni" instead of "adonai" in this key messianic text? After all, since the New Testament gives this text such prominent placement, the traditional oral reading of the Jews by the time the vowel points were created and inserted could have "softened" this text to weaken it as a "Christian prooftext." Despite the Jews' marvelous skill and meticulousness in preserving the Old Testament, there are signs they altered the reading of one or more texts to weaken Christian messianic interpretations of some texts. The most obvious case is the apparent insertion of a semi-colon in the middle of Dan. 9:25, between the 7 and 62 weeks, which pushes back the arrival of the Messiah to just 49 years after the Persian king, Artaxerxes, issued a decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 b.c. Thus the Seventy Weeks Prophecy, one of the best proofs that the Messiah had to arrive by the first century A.D., conveniently disposed of. (Ibid., pp. 36-37)
These are basically the same arguments I have made. Do they sound better coming from a qualified expert, who can show examples that unwarranted and incorrect changes have been made in the Bible text, and can say in many cases when the changes were made?
Can you see now why we Christians do not meekly bow before any attempts to browbeat us on the basis of textual evidence that we have good reason to believe that Jewish scribes have falsified?
Those of you who rely upon your Hebrew School education to make you think you know these issues better than Christians, need to appreciate that the real textual issues involved are not as simple as you think, and it is entirely possible that your teachers in Hebrew school did not teach you things that were entirely correct.
[ March 22, 2009, 07:04 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: But regardless of any claims about the form of the word used, the argument based on context will still outweigh anything else to me. Psalms 110:1-4 specifies that the second "Lord" is declared to be "a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." Abraham was never any kind of priest, let alone of the order of Melchizedek, to whom he himself paid tithes.
Melchizedek was another name of Shem, son of Noah. Abraham learned from Shem and Eber, and he was absolutely a priest of God in the same way that Melchizedek was. He offered sacrifices to God, and the priesthood of true worshippers of God was passed down from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Levi, whose great-grandson Aaron was the progenitor of the Kohanim, the Jewish priestly lineage.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: You Jews gave us Christians and the whole world the whole divine Plan of Salvation in your sanctuary services, and now you let the Plan of Salavation pass you by. Is pride more important than truth?
We don't require salvation, Ron. We aren't born into sin. Sin is not a state of being. That's something that was invented by others. We know how to be good with God. And it doesn't include your incessant blasphemy.
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Lisa, that is just an assertion. You cannot prove that Melchizedek was Shem, though admittedly he was alive at the time that Abraham paid tithes to Mechizedek. When was Abraham ever called a priest? Remember, Abraham did not pay tithes to himself, he paid tithes to Melchizedek.
There was no connection between the Melchizedek priesthood and the Levitical priesthood--which consisted of one tribe (Levi) being dedicated to the Lord by arbitrary selection by God, in place of the first born of every family.
If you are not in Heaven, Lisa, if you still live in a world where you are doomed to die, sooner or later, and are subject to every kind of evil from without, not to mention from within, then you most certainly need to be saved. You cannot speak to God face-to-face. His glory would consume you. Even Moses had to be shielded by a rock. Those animals that were sacrificed were sacrificed only after the people had confessed their sins over their heads. Yet even confessing sins was not enough. The animals had to be killed, and not just killed, their blood was applied to the altar daily, and once a year to the Ark of the Covenant (while it still was in the sanctuary). And throughout all the instructions that set up this system, the application of blood was called "making an atonement." Why don't you believe your own Scriptures? You do need salvation. Look around you if you think you don't!
Blasphemy is calling good evil, and evil good.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Lisa, that is just an assertion. You cannot prove that Melchizedek was Shem, though admittedly he was alive at the time that Abraham paid tithes to Mechizedek. When was Abraham ever called a priest? Remember, Abraham did not pay tithes to himself, he paid tithes to Melchizedek.
The priesthood passed from Shem to Abraham.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: There was no connection between the Melchizedek priesthood and the Levitical priesthood--which consisted of one tribe (Levi) being dedicated to the Lord by arbitrary selection by God, in place of the first born of every family.
Incorrect. It went from Shem to Abraham. It went from Abraham to Isaac, and not Ishmael. It went from Isaac to Jacob, and not Esau. It went from Jacob to Levi, and not to any of his other sons. It went from Levi to Kehat, and not to any of his other sons. It went from Kehat to Amram, not any of his other sons. It went initially from Amram to Aaron, but when God chose Moses, it went to him. Though it was then transferred to Aaron and his four sons when they were in the desert. Lastly, Aaron's grandson Phinehas, who was not included in the priesthood because he had been born prior to his father being granted the priesthood, was granted the priesthood for him and his descendents as well after he killed Kosbi and Zimri.
There's no "order" of Melchizedek priesthood. The verse says "al divrati Malkitzedek". "Al divrati doesn't mean "of the order of". It means "after the manner of":
quote:Tractate Nedarim 32b: R.Zekharya said in the name of R.Yishmael: God wanted the priesthood to descend from Shem, as it is stated, "And he was a priest of the Most High God". But when he preceded Avraham's blessing to God's blessing, He made (the priesthood) descend from Avraham, as it is stated" "And he blessed him and said: Blessed be Avram of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. And blessed be the Most High God". Avraham said to him: Does one bless a servant before his master? He there and then gave it to Avraham, as it is stated (Ps.110:1): "The Lord says to my master: Sit you at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool". This is followed (ibid.ibid.4) by, "The Lord has sworn, and will not change His mind, You shall be a priest for ever, after the manner (lit. because of the speaking) of Malki Tzedek. It is therefore that it is stated: "And he was a priest of the Most High G-d" - he was a priest but not his descendants.
The only real priesthood to God is the priests among the Jewish people, as God swore.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: If you are not in Heaven, Lisa, if you still live in a world where you are doomed to die, sooner or later, and are subject to every kind of evil from without, not to mention from within, then you most certainly need to be saved.
Um... no. What I need to do is what God said I need to do. Not what a bunch of Christian theologians say I need to do. And what God says I need to do is to obey His laws and live according to them. And if I screw up, to do teshuva (repent according to the procedure God gave us). That's all I need to do.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: You cannot speak to God face-to-face. His glory would consume you. Even Moses had to be shielded by a rock. Those animals that were sacrificed were sacrificed only after the people had confessed their sins over their heads.
Right. Part of the teshuva process is bringing the animal sacrifices, when that's possible. But what creates forgiveness isn't the sacrifice. It's the teshuva. The repentence.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Yet even confessing sins was not enough. The animals had to be killed, and not just killed, their blood was applied to the altar daily,
Nope. There were different kinds of sacrifices. The daily sacrifice was an olah, or a sacrifice that was completely consumed by fire. It was not a chatat, or sin offering. You really do know very little about this subject, I see. Quite an ego you have for such thin knowledge.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: and once a year to the Ark of the Covenant (while it still was in the sanctuary). And throughout all the instructions that set up this system, the application of blood was called "making an atonement." Why don't you believe your own Scriptures? You do need salvation. Look around you if you think you don't!
Um... okay. <looks around> You're still wrong.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Blasphemy is calling good evil, and evil good.
Really? Do you have a source for that? Blasphemy is saying that a person can be God, or vice versa. Or that God can get killed (chas v'shalom) and hung up on a stick.
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quote:Has it even occurred to any of you that scribes after the time of Christ may have tampered with Psalms 110:1 to create a situation where they could arbitrarily pretend that the second Lord in that verse could not refer to diety?
Are you suggesting that the text of the Bible has been tampered with and is not divinely inspired, Ron?
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Blayne Bradley
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Just me or i ron going away and away further from "reasoned" argumnents as best and loosely as they can be defined to suit him, and into preaching territory?
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Tom, those two are not mutually exclusive. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, as well as most of the Princeton theologians who came up with the theology, maintain that inerrency applies only to the original manuscripts. That's the position most fundamentalists take. There are a few King James Onlyists out there, but Ron doesn't seem to be one.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Just me or i ron going away and away further from "reasoned" argumnents as best and loosely as they can be defined to suit him, and into preaching territory?
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But that's baffling. If scribes were going to tamper with the Bible to that end, why not tamper with it more?Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Not quite sure what your antecedent is here, Tom, or who you're addressing.
Mainly, the idea that anyone might cite the Bible -- and specifically its prophecies -- as proof of anything Biblical, while also granting the possibility that the text has been edited. Once you grant that it could have been changed after the fact and all record of that change expunged, don't you completely invalidate the strength of any prophetic prediction within it?
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Well, that position seems somewhat hyperbolic. Do you also find troubling, say, the Lincoln Papers Project? Or the temerity of publishers who translate Dostoevsky? I'm hardly an inerrentist of any sort, but I have a hard time understanding why translation or editing renders a document worthless, even taking into consideration your caveat about prophecy. Perhaps it's just that your language - 'completely' - strikes me as somewhat breathless and cynical, and the notion that scripture is primarily "proof" in the empirical sense somewhat limited.
For what it's worth, Article V of the Chicago Statement:
quote:We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
Finally, inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility are three different concepts (the first may, but does not have to, produce the second and third) and even inerrantists acknowledge that the Bible speaks in poetry and metaphor and hyperbole and all the rest, through the distinctive styles of various authors; indeed, you'll find perhaps the most heated arguments about Biblical interpretation among fundamentalists.
The basic notion of inerrancy is that the Bible is authoritative upon those matters it claims authority upon; infallibility means that it is free of falsehood and mistake.
IIIc:
quote: Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.
quote:I have a hard time understanding why translation or editing renders a document worthless, even taking into consideration your caveat about prophecy. Perhaps it's just that your language - 'completely' - strikes me as somewhat breathless and cynical....
Why? If you're saying, as Ron often has, that "the fact that the Bible's description of this event which must have occurred 50 years after this author was writing proves the divine power of this text and thus the authority of the Christian God," it seems to me that acknowledging that people were editing the Bible throughout history in ways that have not always been recognized or recorded boils it down to a giant shrug: "well, yeah, the text either has divine power or somebody stuck it in a bit later."
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Tom, Lisa, the Jewish scribes in the 7th century A.D. did not have the nerve to actually change the text--there were too many copies already in existence in too many places for them to think they could get away with something so blatant. What they did was devise a system of vowel pointing, as sort of marginal notes (but written over the words) indicating how they thought the words should be vocalized, as well as introducing their own punctuation. Here is how Snow commented on this:
"Despite the Jews' marvelous skill and meticulousness in preserving the Old Testament, there are signs they altered the reading of one or more texts to weaken Christian messianic interpretations of some texts."
Thus they had an ulterior motive in the changes they made, and the changes were not actually to the text but to their vowel pointing and punctuation, which they added to the text.
Lisa, I think that after more than 50 years of extensive and serious study of the sanctuary system, I know a whole lot more than you do about its particulars, and certainly about its significance. Sinners were required to confess their sins over the head of their personal sin offerings, before the animals were slain. This was in addition to the morning and evening sacrifices, which were corporate sin offerings for the whole nation.
And finally Lisa, I have to comment on your repeated insistence on calling the Christian faith "blasphemy." Because you keep on doing this, it is only fair that I tell you what blasphemy really is.
Blasphemy was for the rulers of the Jewish nation to go contrary to the will of the majority of the people and have the Roman authorities crucify the Incarnate Word of God on the Cross.
Blasphemy was for Jewish scribes in the seventh century A.D., entrusted with the faithful preservation of Scripture, to crucify the written Word of God by tampering with the text, knowingly adding to it vowel pointings and punctuation that were incorrect, in order to try to downplay those Bible texts that most directly prove that Judaism is wrong to reject Jesus Christ.
Blasphemy is anyone repeating the contrived arguments manufactured by those unfaithful scribes, thus crucifying the Word of God afresh.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made....And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...." (The Gospel of John, chapter one, verses 1-4, 14; NKJV)
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Do we see substantial differences between the Christian and Jewish versions of the Tanakh prior to the 7th century?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Do we see substantial differences between the Christian and Jewish versions of the Tanakh prior to the 7th century?
Other than the order of the books (and one can argue whether or not that is substantial) we don't see substantial differences now.
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Dana, do you know if there are obvious diacritical and "vowel pointing" differences between 7th-century versions of the Tanakh and earlier versions? Especially widespread ones?
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Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found the earliest full manuscript of the Hebrew text still around was 10th century. So talking about widespread differences in 7th century manuscripts or not isn't really possible.
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Ron, where are you getting your information? What sources do you have on the differences between 6th and 7th century Tanakhs?
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