He didn't go about avoiding problems very successfully then.
See also my #102 with the quotation from Philo
He was finally removed from his post following acts of violence against Samaritan pilgrims.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate
If a person's heart melts away it means that the person dies, either literally or metaphorically. And it repeatedly gives other inferences of the person having died, like dust of death, being poured out while surrounded by enemies, etc. So it's an allegory of the person's death.
Yes, that is the literal implication of the way the Bible presents it. Whether it was actually written by a real king David is of course more disputable. But we are just looking for meaning at this point.
The idea of life after death can be found several times in the Old Testament, as in Isaiah 26. The Talmud (pharisees' book) uses that chapter as proof. But anyway, it also talks about in the Torah the idea of going to Abraham's bosom after death.
This could be a good point. But it doesn't say that the enemies failed to do so, since earlier in the chapter it metaphorically described him as being pulled out of the pit (being in the pit is a metaphor for death many times in the Psalms). And besides, Psalm 22 runs the same way- the Psalmist cries out for salvation, talks about enemies' attacks, about the process of having died, and then goes to talk about being saved nonetheless.
Oh, now it's an "allegory" of the person's death. I deny that. It's a clear description of misfortunes suffered by a living person.
In what Torah passage please? The only reference to the bosom of Abraham I can find in the Torah is Genesis 16;5 where Sarah consigns her slave Hagar to Abram's bosom as a concubine. It is not a metaphor about the afterlife but an account of sexual activity here below. But I may have missed a reference. Please direct me to it. Isaiah 26:19 does describe the resuscitation of dead bodies buried in the earth. Yes, but of course that is not in the Torah. Daniel contains this idea too. But in Jesus' day many Jews, including the Sadducees, regarded only the Torah as finally authoritative.
These psalms don't talk about being dead. The description of suffering is just that - the suffering of living people - not a metaphor for death.
The description used in this case was a description of a person dying, like having their heart melt, being in the dust of death, and having 0 physical strength. When those things happen, a person is dead. Even if this is a metaphorical description of misfortunes suffered by a living person, nonetheless, the metaphor itself is one of a person dying. So in the passage there is an allegory of a person dying. Or, perhaps a prediction of a person dying. But either way it's a poem that includes this description of death.
You are right about the bosom issue. Sorry for my mistaken memory. Abraham's bosom is Jesus' way of talking about the spirit in the afterlife.
In any case, the metaphor itself is one of people dying, since the Psalms repeatedly take the pit to mean that.
No. You're reading into it a Christian prejudice that these things were all written as prophecies of Jesus. It is not so, and the words of the psalm contain no ideas whatever about David or a messiah in the later post exilic, or original Davidic, sense.
That's twice you've done that. Last time was misrepresenting the Ps 30 text. Check your memory against an online bible. It's easy.
Where does a candle flame "go" when it expires?
Because they were dead, forever, and now he/she was too.
You can see the first expression of the Torah principle right away, in Genesis. Adam is first created, then condemned to death
He didn't acquire a soul from somewhere. By coming to life he became a "soul". God is saying, you were nothing before I brought you to life, and you will return to nothing when you die.
The idea that the Psalms are about the Messiah son of David is not necessarily Christian, since Jewish tradition like the Talmud also treats the Psalms this way.
This would not literally apply to David who only ruled Palestine. But it would apply to Messiah figure who in Jewish tradition would rule the world. Further, since the Psalms are considered inspired by God (ie. David says elsewhere that God's spirit was on his tongue), the Psalms could also be considered to work like visions where one image can symbolize something else. The image of David in the Psalm can symbolize the Messiah of David.
In Psalm 22, the text is about God saving the person. The Psalm ends by saying that all the earth will remember this event. In the Jewish prophecies like those of Isaiah it's the work of the Messiah to bring the nations of the earth to God.
One would not use the expression "breathed out" for a candle. In English nowadays it's an everyday expression like when milk expires. But in the Bible the expression is based on the idea of God breathing in life to people and when the people die them breathing life out. So it's a good question where the spirit went in ancient thought.
I think this verse is another good proof. Why does the spirit go upward? Why should it "go" anyplace instead of just disappearing like a candle flame? In Jewish thought it was depicted as God was in the heavens. That was where the spirit was going.
But it doesn't say that they were dead forever. What would be the point of saying he went to them if he didn't actually go anyplace at all?
Exactly.
Yes. The Hindus, Zoroastrians, Egyptians, and Sumerians all believed in the afterlife. It's only natural that the Hebrews who came from the Arameans thought this way too. It's true that they didn't worship other gods, but they believed in spirits and godlike beings in Genesis.
Nonetheless the evidence is not there, and counter evidence abounds. I've cited the Sadducees, who drew their philosophy from the Torah alone. It is noted by the writers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire. Here's Gibbon, Decline etc Ch 15.
Yes, but in Ecclesiastes as you said, the soul goals upward. So this must mean that the person does return to dust, but his soul also goes upward.
He wasn't nothing before he was alive. His dust and his life existed before he did. He was dust and he returns to that. But it doesn't specify where the life goes. God breathed it into man and man breathed it out, but where did it go after that?
No, it means that people can't rejuvenate themselves with the herb of life like snakes can. The Babylonians and the earlier Sumerians believed in afterlife.
Your quote from Ecclesiastes was not tortured. If man only returned to dust, why did his soul go up away from earthly dust when he died?
Enoch was close to God. So when God took him away, it wasn't a punishment. It doesn't specify that God killed him, just that he was no more. So where did he go away to?
I think the authors frequently left a lot of questions unanswered, unfortunately. In the Torah, the "righteous king" (Mechi-zedek) "priest of God Most High" shows up and gives Abraham wine and bread. I mean, who exactly was that? And then in Psalms David puts in a little mention about God telling him: "Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek."
Or else they, like the author of the story of Saul and Samuel's ghost, were expanding on ideas that were widespread and had been handed down to them along with the Torah. Let's say the Torah was finished around 1250 BC and Saul lived about 200 years later, it's not too much of a time gap for the same most basic religious ideas like an afterlife to get handed down and expressed more clearly.
You have just tortured it! You misunderstand it. The words cited are "Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth?" (Ecc. 3:19-21 NKJV) It's a rhetorical question. Nobody knows any such thing, that's who. Read the text, including the adjoining verses
It is agreed, I think I can show, that that passage means Enoch didn't die at all, but God took him up to heaven bodily. It's a strong argument against the idea of an immortal soul, separable from the body. I'll read the rest of your interesting post and respond later.
The question therefore of the survival of his soul after death doesn't arise.
Yes. If "breathing out" is nothing more than the modern figurative expression "expired" (like milk expiring), then there would be no point in Genesis 35:29 saying: "Then he breathed out and died".
Only two people are mentioned as having buried him. So are two sons enough to be his people? In that case, when Jacob died and his sons surrounded him, there was no point in saying that he was gathered to his people, since they were already there.
I don't think that this means that Moses' people were buried there on that mountain. Probably they were buried back in Egypt. So the process of being gathered to one's people is neither the same as being buried, nor is it the same as just having your tribe around you. Moses' and Aaron's "people" are distinguished above, so it isn't talking about Moses being gathered to the contemporary Israelite people to whom both belonged. Nor is it the same as being gathered to one's sons because the sons were already around Jacob.
I don't see how that bunch of stuff creates a contradiction of logic to the breathing out being the breathing out of his life, since the KJV phrases it this way:
You are right there is a rhetorical aspect. But it doesn't say who knows if the spirit goes upward. It says who knows the spirit. To know someone or something isn't the same as knowing where it goes. It really means who understands and knows all about a person's soul? Life and the mind are curious from a purely materialistic point of view, although it's not unobservable the direction in which life flows. You can see life in an animal moving or guiding the animal. But the life itself is curious.
The previous verse said: “God shall judge the righteous and the wicked,
Sure, Enoch did not experience death. It sounds like his body vanished and his soul vanished too. But then, did his body physically show up in another physical realm? If not, then did he have a soul there without a body?
Not in my online Bible link, it doesn't. The preceding verses to the one I cited are
Unfortunately I listed vv 19-21 but only cited the text of 21 as it summed the idea up. Clearly I should have put them all in, and I apologise. But you can see the point now. It is agreed that beasts don't have a future life. Well, neither do people.
