re: President Trump “turns on the water” in California

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We’ll have to start with the 4000/5000

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Ok so what do you think? It’ll take you 2 minutes to read them both. Let me know what you think.

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You claim the two events are poor mis-tellings of the same event

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The two water from the rock myths are both variations of the same source myth.

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The author(s) was/were too dumb to realize significant differences in geography and time markers, major character changes, surrounding events, etc

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No, I think the two authors were proud of their versions of the story and probably considered them holy. So the redactor felt the need to keep both versions and was tasked with being creative to stick them both into the Torah somewhere.

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So, despite what the text actually says, what the known culture was of the author and audience, how it makes theological and practical statements- because the same people do the same thing twice, it must be the same event. Is that about right?

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And they ask the same question - We have no water… Why’d you bring us out of Egypt into this awful place just to get us and our cattle killed? A question they should already know the answer to “the second time” in Numbers. And the waters in both myths are called the water of Meribah. So yeah it’s the same myth (fictional event).

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Scholars believed that Pilate was a fictional character until 1961.

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I don’t think that is true, but they did find some great physical evidence of Pilate that year.

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Fish and loaves is easy. It was two events. Moving on

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I don’t even think you really believe that.

ETA: If you’d like to move on from the 5000/4000, what about Goliath of Gath, complete with the armor of Achilles plus a greek javelin (a throwing spear with a section of leather wrapped around the shaft such that when thrown, the thrower pulls that leather cord with causes the spear to begin spiraling for better accuracy) that the Jewish writers were unfamiliar with so they called it a spear whose shaft was like a weaver’s beam. Were there two identical Goliaths? One killed by David as a young boy, and another killed by one of David’s henchman ElHanan when David was old and decrepit?

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I highlighted the important part- speculation. You’re just imposing your own biased interpretation (garnered by cherry picking critical scholars to support your presupposed conclusion) as a substitute for what the text actually says

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If you agreed with what the text literally says, you’d have to agree that when El Elyon divided the nations he gave each of his son’s authority over them, assigning his son Yahweh to Israel.

But no, I’m not merely speculating. I actually have very good logical reasons to think what I think, and it will well established prior probability. Sometimes multiple versions of a story are in different books (like the gospels especially the Synoptics) and like pretty much all of Chronicles compared to Samuel and Kings. Sometimes the two stories are side by side like the 5000/4000 and the 4 different ways David meets Saul for the first time and the descendants of Noah spreading out to form different languages and then everyone spoke the same language again and had to be spread out again in the next chapter. Heck sometimes the two versions are split apart and woven together like the Noah’s flood story… was it 2 of each animal or 7? 40 days or 150 days of water? Did the water come from windows in the heavens or the fountains of the Tehom?

We have multiple versions of the killing of Goliath, multiple quail from heaven stories, 3 stories of Abraham and Isaac passing off their wives as their sister in a foreign land to trick the king into taking her as a concubine and then Yahweh gets pissed and rewards them with all kinds of loot, two or three stories of Baalam blessing or cursing the Israelites, etc. etc. etc.

Was it Satan who made David take the census or what it Yahweh? How many times did Yahweh kill all the Egyptian livestock? 4 times? These are all just multiple versions of the same stories all preserved and then redacted.

So… if there’s an established high prior probability of many variant copies of the same story, and you come across a set of stories that look like variants of the same story, even before doing any research there is a high probability of it being the same story but just a variant.

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And what’s obvious (to me), is that you have to make a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions about the intentions of the author(s), in order to make your case.

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Guilty as charged I guess. But you guys don’t make any assumptions right? No such thing as apologetics, eh?

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You’re discounting the dual meaning of Meribah/Massah as describing not only a location; but more importantly, the murmuring tradition of the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness.

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We agree Meribah is describing a place. Can the same place be in two places?

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We rewired a bunch of apt buildings in north BR

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How do you feel about those fat AFCI and combo AFCI/GFCI breakers?

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It used to be all black, but now it’s almost all Hispanic. One of my guys started calling it “the rio grande.”

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So you’re going with both places in the two stories being called Meribah? Awfully coincidental wouldn’t you say. Like taking a road trip and seeing a monkey fricking a football in Springfield LA and then again the next day in Springfield AL you see an identical monkey fricking an identical football. Anything is possible if you want it to be and can rationalize it.

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15He split the rocks in the wilderness And gave them abundant drink like the ocean depths. 16He brought forth streams also from the rock And caused waters to run down like rivers.

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FIFY

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This is referring specifically to the two events described in Exidus and Numbers

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I don’t think we will ever agree on this until you have a light bulb moment.

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Like how the Gospel of John was believed to have been written around 160-170

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That’s about right, I’ve seen from 140-200CE.

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until P-53 was discovered and pushed the date back into the first century- around 90 AD.

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You are talking about Papyrus 52, which no scholars date to the first century at all. It is mid 2nd century at best to mid 3rd century.

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The feeding of the 4,000 is important because of where it took place. The feeding of the 5,000 took place near Bethsaida, close to the Sea of Galilee. In contrast, the feeding of the 4,000 took place in the region of the Gerasenes, in the region around the Decapolis.

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Do you think it is logical for Jesus to pull off a miracle in front of the disciples, and then a short time later (days?) the exact same circumstance presents itself (in a different place of course) and the disciples are shitting themselves asking what are we doing to do and how can we feed everyone? We have the same several loaves and dried fish? Like WTF can we possibly do? We have no idea!

Do you think it is possible for a variant of a story to be set in a different place? Maybe that’s just one detail that makes it a variant?

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Makes sense to me.

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Ignorance is bliss.

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Guilty as charged I guess. But you guys don’t make any assumptions right?

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Of course I do. That’s the point. I know that I’m acting on faith. I know that we’re both acting on faith.

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No such thing as apologetics, eh?

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Of course. We’re both doing it right now.

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We agree Meribah is describing a place. Can the same place be in two places?

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No, but two different places can be called the same thing. Did you know there’s a Baton Rouge, South Carolina?
It, too was named in reference to a red pole/stick marking it. Same name, but two locations and two different times.

The “Waters of Meribah” passage in Numbers 20:1-22 starts and ends in Kadesh. The only time Meribah is mentioned is in verse 13:

13Those were the waters of Meribah, because the sons of Israel contended with the Lord, and He proved Himself holy among them.

Nowhere in Numbers 20 does Moses name the place “Meribah.” He refers to the waters of Meribah, because it was the same situation that occurred at Massah, and God had performed the same act. The very next verse, 20:14 says:

14From Kadesh Moses then sent messengers to the king of Edom: “Thus your brother Israel has said, ‘You know all the hardship that has befallen us;

The “Waters of Meribah” is a description of the repeated event- not the name of the location in Kadesh.

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How do you feel about those fat AFCI and combo AFCI/GFCI breakers?

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Mixed bag. I can appreciate the idea, and the technology is getting better, but I’m not convinced that the juice is worth the squeeze. They add significant cost to every job, reliability is mediocre at best, and electricity still finds a way to burn houses down. There’s no substitute for quality craftsmanship!


ETA: Let’s move on. We can keep going in circles on your supposed Bible contradictions (which, so far, have consisted solely of various critical-scholarly opinions on the imagined intentions of the author, coupled with a complete dismissal of the context in which the intended audience would have understood these passages). I’m going to start a thread on the value of Christianity. I think that is a much more important conversation to be had, don’t you? I’ll see you there.

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Eurocat

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Everything is optics with him. You literally can’t believe a word he says.