Anonymous #1 5w

the moral is don’t make fun of elish’s bald head

6

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

elisha’s*

1

Anonymous #2 5w

Ahhh, I see 🧐

1

Anonymous #2 5w

this is the most accurate and up to date translation of the bible, the word na'arim can mean young men or adolescents but it has the adjective qatanim meaning small or little modifying it

3

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

Okay little man (Note this is just a joke, but also makes a point)

1

Anonymous #2 5w

ok went back and double checked and yeah it’s mostly agreed that “little boys” is the meaning. it’s really only an issue if ur a biblical literalist, a more favorable (yet still accurate to the text) interpretation is it’s more of a boogeyman story telling children not to make fun of the prophets

5

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

that said the bible has little issue with the mass killing of kids as a punishment

4

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

I dont know anyone who believes in a literal interpretation of the bible, as in each phrase means strictly what the dictionary definition of a word translation is. Jesus is “the gate by which the sheep enter”, but I see no one (hopefully) arguing that Jesus is a hinged fence that the species Ovis Aries walk through.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

i think the literalism issue is more with things that are stated as a historical story that’s loaded with metaphor being taken as fact (jesus and the fig tree would be another example)

3

Anonymous #2 5w

The story is about succession. Elijah after defeating the prophets of Baal passes on his mantle to Elisha. As Elisha is traveling he meets a gang of pagans who mock him, and tell him to go worship at the pagan altar. They are then attacked by the forces of nature im parallel to that, and as testimony that Elisha has been accepted by God as Elijah’s successor. The fact that someone in a culture 2500+ years ago chose to use a particular wording in a story is getting caught up in minutiae.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

one could argue they were challenging elisha as elijah’s proper successor (hence the go away or go up) and were punished for challenging the line of succession. the fact that they were children could 1) be a warning to children specifically not to do it even as a joke or 2) a statement saying that no one gets away with doing this

1

Anonymous #2 5w

unrelated but gods beef with baal through the old testament is always so funny to me, yahweh and baal were just too similar for them to not have constant issues

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

I would disagree based on the cultural context where children werent taught scripture in the Sunday School way we have now. With how expensive writing was to keep and preserve, and how sacred there were held, it wouldnt make sense for this to be a bedtime story. Its also in the middle of a longer narrative, there were no chapters or verses. To me that seems like saying the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey were written to be a dietary warning.

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

From the perspective of Baal being a demon, it makes sense he would present himself with characteristics of the true God, and but with changes that cause harm to his followers. A good lie is 90% truth, ya know?

1

Anonymous #2 5w

ur right in that they didn’t have sunday school or chapter and verse, many stories in the bible began as oral tradition passed down over and over again. and im not saying it was a literal bedtime story, more of a parable woven into a larger narrative

1

Anonymous #2 5w

for me it's more that other canaanite deities (like el) got mushed into the cosmology pretty easily where baal and yahweh couldn't bc of their similarities and had to duke it out for the next few centuries

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

Fair enough, no real way to prove one way or the other. Im just glad we were able to move away from arguing about a scribes word choice, and looked at the actual story and narrative.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

of course! these things are always set in a broader history and cultural context so looking at it from one angle isn’t fair to the text. also i just like talking about the bible bc it’s interesting

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

As for the “duke it out” to me it seems like that is a reflection of what is going on in the hearts of the people of the region. At least in the bible there is never really a struggle between them like we see in many pagan myths. In the stories YHWH is never struggling against them, He just wins. The Egyptian gods just get judged, Baal’s altar just doesnt get lit, Jericho’s walls just fall

1

Anonymous #2 5w

there was a very political reason for that. for baal, a similar and more popular deity of the region, to be thrown out he’d have to be completely beaten (again el merged with yahweh and other deities became a part of the divine council). the closest struggle we see is actually in the next ch 2 Kings 3 where israel fails against the moabites making elisha’s prophesy untrue. a scholarly interpretation is the king mesha sacrifices his son to chemosh which resulted in the israelites falling back

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

If a total and pure victory is needed for propoganda, why do the vast majority of myths about one god beating another involve a struggle? I would disagree on the prophecy not being true, they destroy the entire region except one keep, defeat the 700 swordsmen sent against them, and the king kills his own heir. Thats pretty solidly “delivered into their hands”. When they retreat it doesnt say Chemosh’ wrath, it just says wrath. God also doesnt tell them to retreat, they just decide to.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

While one could interpret that as Chemosh’ wrath overcoming YHWH, to me it seems more consistent to see that as Israel losing heart and retreating “we did well enough, that guy just sacrificed his heir and man did that rile the people up, lets get out of here just in case.” Israel losing faith and therefore a battle is a consistent theme in scripture. The alternative is to assume that in 100’s of generations of stoy telling about YHWH’s power, no one caught that slip up.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

Which, if you do take that route, discredits the idea that the stories were doctored to make YHWH look better, and supports that the stories were passed down as received, even when they didn’t say what people would have wanted.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

basically it’s a consequence of becoming monotheistic. to have a singular supreme god is to have no peers, anything that challenges that isn’t allowed. becoming monotheistic isn’t an immediate process and the idea that there could have been challengers remains. the word used for “wrath” in 2 kings 3 indicates a divine wrath, the context of it being chemosh comes from a parallel writing on the mesha stele

1

Anonymous #2 5w

the scholarly idea currently is that there were multiple writers/editors with multiple goals in the old testament, some want to emphasize yahweh, some el, some are really into laws, and some things may have been cut out to align with the narrative

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

there’s some interesting research being done on how the narratives have been changed to make the text more consistent. one interesting variant is the idea that isaac was actually killed by abraham and was changed once the laws of human sacrifice were changed

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

If theyre cutting things out to fit with the narrative they did a REALLY bad job it would seem, given they had 1000’s of years to do it. These texts had to be copied by hand, so that would mean over and over people kept letting those same verses of their most holy works just slip by unnoticed. Also I dont really give much weight to what scholars as a generic body think, because they live in a culture vastly removed from when the texts were written. Its like when Fox News brings on a meme expert

1

Anonymous #2 5w

That is the general 21st century scholastic opinion on ancient culture and religion. Scholasticism has its place, I dont think trying to understand the mindset of ancient people is it.

1

Anonymous #2 5w

that’s kind of the point. what we see *is* the edited text that would have been understood from a very specific perspective and written in a specific time. oral histories become written and then those writings become codified into a single religious document. it was a slow back and forth negotiation. to go back to the example of isaac, the cut wasn’t in the binding of isaac but in the sacrifice itself to better align with the idea that human sacrifice is bad now. some things are kept bc it -

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

doesn’t do much detriment to the story. also the whole point of scholastic interpretation is to better situate the text within the context of the time using historic, cultural, and archaeological evidence. they’re very much trying to view it outside of their own lens

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

Considering that the earliest Hebrew OT we have is from the 900’s and the earliest Greek is from 250CE it just seems like pure speculation to say where cuts are. It seems circular “we know they went from poly to monotheistic (really monothelitistic) because we can see where the poorly done edits are, and while we dont have actual manuscripts showing this, we know the text is changed because they went from poly to monotheistic because of point #1”

1

Anonymous #2 5w

While we do have pagan artifacts from the period, the biblical narrative that they were supposed to be mono but kept falling to poly is also a viable explanation for the existence of the artifacts. The lack of mono artifacts is also explained by the instructions to only have one tabernacle and no idols

1

Anonymous #2 5w

that’s not the only explanation of poly to monotheistic, one of the biggest ones is again that el and yahweh were once separate deities that eventually got combined. el was the original head god and yahweh coexisted with him for a time (also had a consort asherah) and a bunch of other minor deities that eventually got syncretized into one god. el’s predominance over the region can be seen in the name itself “isra*el*” and many other theophoric examples (the yahweh equivalent would be “-jah”)

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

the worship of yahweh alone doesn’t come until around the 9th century bce with, funnily enough, elijah, a name that literally means “El is Yahweh”

1

Anonymous #2 5w

here’s a good breakdown on how yahweh became the main god: https://youtu.be/lGCqv37O2Dg?si=93Db5H_RHUmL2Y5V

1

Anonymous gods_favorite_heckler 5w

My app doesnt let me click links, can you send the thing to search?

1

Anonymous #2 5w

yeah np!

1