Elements Of Biblical Exegesis Pdf Printer
BIBLICAL EXEGESIS A Beginner’s Handbook REVISED EDITIQN JOHNH.HAYES CARLRHOLLADAY john Knox Press ATLANTA. Unless otherwise indicated Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, copyright, 1946, 1952, and 0 1971, 1973 by the.
Modern Biblical Exegesis of the Creation Accounts This essay will consider modern interpretations of the creation accounts in Scripture. Although modern exegesis differs significantly from a Thomistic approach, it should not be omitted in a consideration of how to understand the creation narratives.
One of the characteristics of modern biblical exegesis is a strong interest in ferreting out original sources. For instance, can we discern the hands of different authors in the Pentateuch? Or do creation accounts in the Bible borrow from older pagan creation myths? One might be concerned that, by establishing that the biblical creation accounts are influenced by older pagan stories, one undermines biblical inspiration.
That is, if the Bible has pagan sources, then it would seem that the text is not original and revealed by God, but cut and pasted from older manmade myths. However, divine inspiration should not be equated with discontinuous originality.
Before God chose his people Israel, making a covenant with Abraham, they were naturally like their neighbors. In revealing himself to his people, God not only gave them an entirely new revelation but also corrected and purified prevailing notions about himself and the universe that the people already had. Thus if Israel’s inspired religious poetry retains vestiges of a polytheistic past, such as “God of gods” (Deu 10:17, Psa 84:7, Psa 136:2, Dan 11:36) we need not be unsettled. Moreover we should not be startled that pagan peoples could make some right judgments about God and the world in their religious poetry. Free Download Hp Laserjet M1005 Mfp Driver For Windows 7. Donwload Game Soccer Manager Untuk Hp Java.
After all, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, one can know by reason alone that God exists and is the cause of all creatures. Furthermore if the faith is true, then it has nothing to fear from any scientific discovery—be it biological, astronomical, archeological, paleological, or philological. El Factor Aladino Pdf Printer.
For, God is the one source of all truth, whether revealed or discovered by reason. Therefore, if similar stories or the same names that we read in the Scriptures are discovered in more ancient pagan literature, there is no cause for concern. Admittedly some modern scholarly approaches to the Bible adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion. That is, they presuppose that the believing author or ecclesial redactor plays with the facts in order to bend our minds to his disingenuous religious agenda.
The task of the interpreter then is to break through the layer of propaganda by getting behind the text so as to extract the pure facts. Yet even where investigation is contaminated with this hostile skepticism, the correct results of historical research into ancient cultures should be accepted. In this essay, we will briefly review a number of themes present in biblical creation accounts that modern Scripture scholarship finds in older pagan sources, namely: a personal creator, the impersonal production of things, creation through the separation of elements, creating by speaking a word, the formation of man out of clay, man’s being made in the image of the maker, and conflict with chaos and dragons or sea monsters. From the examples presented, the reader will be able to judge for himself how close the connections are between the Bible and the more ancient myths. In any case, the evidence should suffice to show that while there was an original and unique revelation made to Israel, the creation accounts do not articulate this revelation in isolation from Israel’s neighbors. Scholars have established that thousands of years before the nation of Israel was constituted, the peoples in that region already had a personal creator god in their mythology. What is unique about the Old Testament is that God is categorically outside of creation; he is uncreated.
Other creation accounts include gods within creation, even if they are the highest or most powerful in the universe. This will be illustrated in the examples below. To situate the chronology, we should note here that the great Babylonian epics like the Gilgamesh story (c. 1200 B.C.) and the Enuma Elish (c. 1700 B.C.) are drawn from older individual Sumerian myths that were later integrated. The oldest sources of the Pentateuch are believed to be from around 900 B.C.