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Posts posted by Dan McClellan
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18 hours ago, provoman said:
So lets discuss the topic at hand "tiktok star debunking"
Dan: the Vatican was named after Vatican Hill which is where it is located and the word Vatican just comes from a Latin root that means to prophesy
OR "Vatican" is derived from the name of an Etruscan settlement, Vatica or Vaticum, located in the general area the Romans called Ager Vaticanus, "Vatican territory" ~ Richardson, New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, p. 405OR, "The territory on the right bank of the Tiber between Monte Mario and Gianicolo (Janiculum) was known to antiquity as the Ager Vaticanus, and, owing to its marshy character, the low-lying portion of this district enjoyed an ill repute. The origin of the name Vaticanus is uncertain; some claim that the name comes from a vanished Etruscan town called Vaticum." ~ Catholic Encyclopedia
Can there be only one? Alternatively, is each a learned opinion?Maybe you should quote Richardson accurately regarding the Etruscan roots: "derived perhaps from the name of an Etruscan settlement (possibly Vatica or Vaticum) of which all trace is lost." That's a speculative derivation. I went with one I feel is on surer ground. They can all be learned, but what is definitely wrong is the notion that I was debunking, namely that the name derives from some Etruscan deity. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that points in that direction. Even if the speculation that there was an Etruscan settlement by that name turns out to be accurate, there is nothing at all that points in the direction of any deity going by that name.
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On 12/16/2022 at 12:39 AM, RevTestament said:You won't be getting any scholars on TikTok to challenge you is more like it.
I'm not on TikTok in order to be challenged by scholars. I publish in the field to be challenged by scholars.
QuoteYour evidence for where YHVH came from, and how it is dated? Are you relying partly on Hebrew scripture and poetry for this assertion? By further inland in the Arabian peninsula do you mean Midian and Edom area? The true land of Sinai, where God told Moses the name YHVH? From the local Midianite vernacular/Semitic speech?
That's a question that requires a book-length response. I'd recommend Daniel Fleming's recent book, Israel Before Yahweh, for the best discussion of the data. If you'd like my thoughts on the book, I have a review of that book, as well as Ted Lewis' The Origin and Character of God, and Robert Miller's Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God, coming out in the next issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The biblical text has to play a role in the construction of any theoretical model of the origins of YHWH, but there are inscriptional and other archaeological data to consider.
QuoteMaybe. By the time of Moses it was used generically in the Semitic languages. I am not debating its earlier usage, or how the word came to be.
No, not maybe. You will not find a single scholar of Semitic languages who prefers your position over and against mine.
QuoteYeah, we've been over this before, and I know, scholars are never wrong, and never change their minds.... well except in this case.
Scholars always change their minds when the data demand it, and almost 75 years ago scholars realized there was not adequate data to substantiate the claim that el derived etymologically from a word for "power." This is not still being debated, you're just not familiar with the scholarship but still have strong feelings.
QuoteUm.. except it is seen in mines in the Sinai peninsula, and elsewhere as it began to develop. I agree that the Phoenicians rapidly developed it. Seemingly more rapidly than Israel.
An intermediate form is found in some places in the Sinai. None of it has any connection whatsoever to Hebrew, which wouldn't even develop as a language until after the Phoenicians stabilized the alphabet.
QuoteIt is a word that developed from the semitic El. Spellings may differ. It doesn't matter.
It absolutely indisputably did not develop from the Semitic word el and you have absolutely no data whatsoever that support that notion.
QuoteI realize that the Phoenicians had a developed economy and "state" before the Israelites, which were still largely living a nomadic lifestyle in the hill country of Canaan, and so didn't leave any earlier evidence of their alphabet in the region of present day Israel, which is what you and scholars rely on.
On what evidentiary grounds do you assert Hebrew was a written language long before we have any evidence it was a written language?
QuoteI realize this has been the position of scholars for some decades now.
And what data can you provide that suggests the scholars are wrong?
QuoteScholarly speculation.... much like speculating on whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Not remotely the same thing and not remotely scholarly speculation. We can see the concept being developed within the literature of late antique Judaism. You're just entirely ignorant of the scholarship and so are just asserting assumptions.
QuoteYes, the vav means "peg" as you say, and was typically pictured as a tent stake. That suffices in meaning.
Which is not a nail used in crucifixion.
QuoteIf you want to say that they hadn't invented the "nail" yet, fine. Tent stake will suffice. And yes, the yod began as a pictograph of an arm, and the word yad means "hand." Wow, we agree on something. Yes, basically, all these letters began as a pictograph, and so had a "meaning" or a mind picture associated with them.
The logographic use of the characters disappeared long before they shifted to an acrophonic use, which is what allowed them to be used as an alphabet. Hebrew didn't even enter the picture until after that. This is basic historical linguistics.
QuoteTo say they didn't have a meaning is pretty bold when it is pretty obvious that mind pictures of each letter is how the pictogram system developed. They definitely did have a meaning in mind as they wrote the pictures, and it is even seen in Hebrew words as you so aptly demonstrate. Thank you.
You are bafflingly uninformed about the development of Northwest Semitic scripts.
QuoteNo. Actually Yahweh is an artificial pronunciation created after the Middle Ages by Gesenius.
My comments addressed Yehovah, but Yahweh is a scholarly reconstruction that aligns with Yahwistic theophoric elements in the ancient Hebrew onomastica and has the strongest etymological case. It may not be accurate, but it is the best we can do with the available data and we know for a fact that the name was not pronounced Yehovah.
QuoteYou will not find the Yahweh pronunciation in antiquity nor in ancient Hebrew works. You will find Yehovah spelled exactly like that not only in the most ancient Masoretic texts but also throughout many other ancient Hebrew works.
No, that's just the vocalization from the word adonai that was superimposed upon the Tetragrammaton.
QuoteYes, it is not spelled that way a whole lot in the Masoretic texts because they substituted other vowels to remind the reader not to pronounce it, because these were apparently commissioned works for the general Hebrew community. Sometimes the vowels of elohim were used, but often elohim is used with YHVH in the scriptures because you wouldn't want to remind the reader to say elohim in that instance because they would be forcing elohim elohim to be read. Anyway, we have been over this before as well, and Yahweh is a made up reading which appears nowhere anciently.
This is Nehemia Gordon-level nonsense that you can't even begin to defend with anything other than assertion.
QuoteI will try to get a reference to support that the original Masoretic text was penned by a Karaite. As I recall the family line supported it.
I'm not holding my breath.
QuoteYep. And believing in "yahweh" is complete mythology. LOL.
No, it's the overwhelming scholarly consensus and you can provide nothing but empty rhetoric in response.
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22 hours ago, RevTestament said:McClellan couldn't have picked a worse medium to work on since TikTok is the worst, and he won't be getting me on there to discuss this stuff,
Sounds like I picked the perfect medium, because you don't know what you're talking about.
Quotebut YHWH was not a storm diety from the south.
This is partly correct, because YHWH didn't adopt the storm deity profile until coming into the northern hilly country, like from further inland in the Arabian peninsula.
QuoteEl was not an individual god, but is a generic semitic title, much like the English word "god."
El is both the generic word for "god" and the personal name of the patriarchal high deity in the Northwest Semitic pantheon.
QuoteIt meant something like "the power" and was in many titles and names.
The "power" etymology was rejected by scholars 75 years ago. The only people who still think that's what it means are folks who use the open-access commentaries and lexicons from the 19th century that are freely available on the internet.
QuoteIt predated the Hebrew language which was a form that came out of Israel's isolation and stay in Egypt.
There are no linguistic data that support the notion the Hebrew language developed from or as a result of any group's stay in Egypt. The influence of the Egyptian language on early Hebrew is easily accounted for by the observation that Egyptian hegemony was common in the regions of Canaan.
QuoteAs the Caananites were semitic, you see El used in their word Ba el which appears in the Bible as Bael or Baal.
The name Baal is utterly unrelated, etymologically, to the word El. There is no aleph in its spelling, it's just beth-ayin-lamed, and it is another generic word that can also function as a divine name. It means "lord," "master," or even "husband."
QuoteIn the Bible YHVH is called El Shaddai, El Gibbor, El Elyon or Elyon the Most High Power. These are actually two different beings, which the early Romanized Christianity and perhaps the disciples themselves did not realize. YHVH was not a storm god, but was a name actually born out of the Hebrew language. The letters of the early Hebrew were actually born out of the Egyptian hieroglyph system, and are still represented in our English alphabet today - for instance the letter A, which was the Hebrew aleph, which became the Greek Alpha. The Hebrew beit became the Greek bet. We still use the Greek names in the word Alphabet, but then we go on to teach our kids new names for each letter. We can actually credit the Hebrews for our own alphabet, as God used them to give us a superior writing system.
The alphabet was created by Phoenicians and just borrowed by Hebrew speakers.
QuoteThe invention of the alphabet spread to the Phoenicians and Greeks, and eventually all the Mideast, and then Europe.
The invention of the alphabet started with the Phoenicians. That's simply not up for debate.
QuoteAs I said each of the Hebrew letters had a name and meaning.
Each letter had a name, but assigning a semantic load to each letter is a post-biblical innovation of mystical traditions within Judaism.
QuoteThe letters of YHVH mean Behold/look the hand, behold/look the nail.
They mean absolutely no such thing whatsoever. The he does not mean "behold," it originated in a pictograph of a person with arms uplifted in greeting, based on the word "ho!" a type of greeting. The vav represented a peg or hook, not a nail. The yod began as a pictograph of an arm, and the word yad means "hand."
QuoteThis was not some foreign name adopted by Israel. The name of God is embedded in the very language of Hebrew, and is unique to them in ancient languages - and by the way it is not Yahweh. It is Yehovah.
Yehovah is an artificial pronunciation created in the Middle Ages by the combination of the vowels from the Hebrew word for Lord, adonai (a longtime substitute used in place of the Tetragrammaton), and the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. It has no relationship to the pronunciation of the divine name prior to the Middle Ages.
QuoteThe German spelling was Jehovah because they would pronounce the J with our Y sound. The Hebrew had no hard J sound. There is no ancient Hebrew spelling Yahweh. Once the Hebrews adopted diacritical marks they had developed a custom of not pronouncing the name, but Karaite Jews did not follow that custom, and would often write the name as Yehovah, which even appears in the oldest Masoretic texts penned by Karaites by the way,
Very few scholars agree with the theory that the Masoretes were Karaites, and that vocalization of the divine name is actually just the imposition of the vowels from adonai, sometimes with the holem, but usually without.
Quoteand many other Hebrew works, which is how we ended up with the Jehovah spelling in the German works. Myth busted. Enjoy.
That's a lot of mythmaking on your part, but that's the nature of dogmatism.
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20 hours ago, Peppermint Patty said:Dan McClellan doesn’t strike me as the type that would change his beliefs or behavior for anyone. I just signed up for his upcoming online class. When I signed up it looks like I am the 13,147th person. Registration was $25 to $50 and that means Dan will be making a minimum of $328,000 for his class. This is his second class taught this year. It’s not h unreasonable to assume he is making around 1 million dollars per year from just his online classes.
I wish I was doing those numbers! I have not had anywhere near 13,000 people sign up for my upcoming class. I've had a grand total of about 2,000 people sign up across all three of the online classes that I've offered since July. While registration has a "recommended donation" of $25, the minimum donation is only $1. My average donation is about $12.90. That's still enough money to make the time commitment worth it for me and my family, but I'm not making anywhere near your estimate.
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On 12/8/2022 at 9:11 PM, gav said:
I assume the above is the fruit of critical scholarship?
My position there is the academic consensus, and in that video I even pointed to several publications that support my position. I also pointed out that the renegotiation of the commandment as requiring redemption comes from texts written much later (like Exodus 13). It's also the academic consensus that the Covenant Code is one of the earliest portions of Exodus and one of the earliest pieces of casuistic law in the Bible.
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On 11/14/2022 at 2:26 PM, provoman said:
Ok, in one of your videos you discuss mishkevei ishah" with a parrallel of "mishkav zachur", then, as I recall, you discuss that mishkav zachur referrs to pentration and that the penetrated is blameless.
And it appears you have deleted the video wherein you discuss mishkevei ishah and mishkav zachur.
1) משכבי אשה is indisputably related to משכב זכר, and I shared the scholarship (and I highlighted Olyan excellent paper on the topic) that suggests the most likely understanding of the term refers to the active partner. I pointed out that the text likely originally referred only to the active partner, and that the evidence indicates the one passage that assigns guilt to the passive partner seems to have undergone textual change.
2) I first talked about those phrases in my video #14, which is still up. I'm pretty sure I've never deleted any TikTok video, but I've definitely not deleted any on this topic. I have had one video deleted because folks claimed it violated community guidelines, but I don't remember what it was about.
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20 hours ago, provoman said:
he has on his youtube channel videos on the subject. his premise seems to be that the meaning of "mishkevei ishah" (“after the manner of lying with a woman”-this is not his comment) should be considered in comparison to "mishkav zachur" (**** intercourse). If I understood him correctly he essentially explains that only the top has done anything wrong.
If I understand him correctly, he asserts that because no other societies prohibited homosexuality or that other societies permitted male-male **** intercouse between different social classes, then we should not presume that God prohibited the House of Jacob from engaging in homosexual acts. Again, this is if I understood him correctly.
(I used this https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/resources-ideas/source-sheets/tol-parashot/aharei-mot-k-doshim.pdf for the definitions of the Hebrew terms)
You have not understood me correctly. I have been consistent and clear about my position and about my non-devotional & non-dogmatic methodological approach in my several videos on TikTok.
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Hey, everybody! Some friends here have asked about this in the past, so I'm happy to let y'all know that my new book, YHWH's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, is now available. While hard copies are available for purchase at Amazon and other booksellers, I chose to publish it as an open-access volume, so a PDF of the book is freely available for download at this link:
https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9781628374407.pdf
Here's a brief description of the book:
QuoteIn YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, Daniel O. McClellan addresses the longstanding question of how it is that divine images could be referred to as if they both were and were not the deities they represented. Drawing insights from the fields of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion and applying them to the remains from first-millennium BCE Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Israel, and Judah, McClellan develops a theoretical framework for divine agency and divine images in ancient Southwest Asia that explains this apparent paradox. He then applies that framework to the Hebrew Bible to show that the presence of the God of Israel was similarly manifested through material media devoted to communicating the divine.
If this is a topic that interests you, I hope you enjoy the book, will share it widely, and will let me know what you think!
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In previous iterations of the policy related to miscarriage and stillborn children, it was stated that no revelation has been received regarding when the spirit enters the body, and so the policy seems to be defaulting to treating birth as the threshold, at least for administrative purposes. However, previous Church leaders have expressed the opinion that the spirit enters the body at the "quickening," which has long been understood to be the moment at which the mother perceives the fetus to be moving. Prior to the late 19th century in America, abortions were legal in America up to the time of the "quickening." When white Americans like Horatio Storer grew concerned that immigrants had higher birth rates and that abortions were commonly being sought by white married Protestant women, they began to push to make elective abortion illegal at all stages of pregnancy so that white Americans wouldn't become outnumbered. A good discussion of that campaign is here:
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On 2/23/2022 at 7:03 PM, nuclearfuels said:Who did Jacob wrestle with?
I recently posted a video on TikTok about this question. In short, the story originally told of Jacob's wrestle with God themselves, and this tradition was later altered in Hosea 12:4 (5 in Hebrew) by the textual interpolation of the word מלאך, which means messenger or angel. Without that textual interpolation, the preposition becomes the word El, meaning "God" in Hebrew, meaning verse 4 begins with a perfect etiology for the name Israel: וישר אל, "And he strove with God."
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13 hours ago, Rivers said:Is it possible to truly divorce our politics from our religion?
No. Neither concept exists outside of our discourse about them, and their distinction is a product of the structuring of power and values that began in the Renaissance and really took off during the Reformation and Enlightenment. They are both just socially contingent ways to organize knowledge about that power and those values. We live in a world structured by the Enlightenment, and as long as their categories facilitate the continued structuring of power and values on the part of the privileged and the powerful, we're stuck with them.
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This is a really interesting question, and particularly in light of scholarly approaches to the two independent creation accounts in the first three chapters of Genesis. Instead of thinking of the accounts of Genesis 1 and 2–3 as representing a single view of creation, most scholars now think of their collocation of a function of the archival nature of their textual transmission in antiquity. They were not initially intended to be consumed together, but as liturgies associated with ceremonies or rituals. But scribes put them together within a text in order not to lose either of them and we now treat them as one. Similarly, the creation accounts that developed within early Mormonism in the books of Moses and Abraham and in the temple are products of distinct and independent works of literary and liturgical production that did not exist side-by-side canonically until well after the Prophet's death. What may have originated in efforts to supersede, elaborate on, or somehow fix these accounts were gathered together and are now presented as in some sense univocal and canonical.
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5 minutes ago, Stargazer said:
I have no idea who translated it. Perhaps @Dan McClellan could comment?
I believe Peter Berkhahn was involved in the 2003 revision, but I could be mistaken.
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On 9/12/2021 at 6:11 PM, Freedom said:my understanding is that the definitive article we translate as 'the' shows up as a prefix for a word, transliterated as 'ha'. So if 'ha' is not present, we would use 'a' rather than 'the'.
Someone sent me a youtube video where the poster stated that Genesis 1:1 does not have this prefix which means it should be translated as 'in a beginning'. The Masoretic text of the Leningrad codex does not have the prefix, but the Samaritan Pentateuch does have it. I have a translation where it is rendered 'beginning of when God created' which suggests that 'the' is not required to denote that it is referring to a specific creation. Of course, the text is liturgical and it meant to teach a doctrine rather than history so it is quite irrelevant. But just looking for some insights.
There is no definite article in the Hebrew b'reishit, so the word on its own would be indefinite. However, an indefinite word with the bet prefix is likely in construct with what followings, meaning it is in a genitive relationship with what follows. Normally, what would follow in the second part of a construct would be a noun, but verbal clauses, even those unmarked by relative pronouns, can occur in the second part of a construct phrase. In a construct phrase, the first part does not carry a definite article, but adopts the definiteness of the second part of the phrase. So if the second part is definite, the first part is too, even without the definite article. So, if we interpret b'reishit as indefinite and in construct with "God created the heavens and the earth," the whole verse would be rendered, "In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth . . ." It would then need to be followed by the main clause of the sentence, since this construct phrase does not act as a main clause. This whole construct phrase would also best be interpreted as a temporal clause, which would be more idiomatically rendered in English, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth . . ." Verse 2 could function as the main clause, giving us, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was desolate and barren." Genesis 1:1–2 would thus describe the state of the earth at the beginning of God's creative act. It would not refer to an absolute beginning, but to a relative one: the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth.
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On 7/22/2021 at 9:11 PM, Calm said:
You are supposed to have all the answers, Dan, already. So disappointed.
I am actually quite looking forward to a less set in stone reading of scripture. Happy to be patient for its coming.
I'm looking forward to the same. Things are changing. It's a slow process, and people are fighting against it, but we'll get there.
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5 hours ago, Calm said:
And for those who argue that it is evidence Joseph wasn’t inspired?
(It is a valid belief in my view and should be taught, so no one should assume I want it dropped)
I think we have to find ways to better deal with the reality that the KJV was heavily influential on the way the Prophet articulated the Restoration, with all its errors and shortcomings.
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4 hours ago, Calm said:
How would you suggest teaching the concept given the other scriptures using “precept upon precept”…it seems a common sense idea after all?
I'd suggest teaching it from 2 Nephi and the D&C rather than going back to Isaiah. At least that way the teaching can be consistent from language to language and we don't have to try to skirt around all the languages where Isaiah is translated differently.
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16 hours ago, Calm said:
So is this in reality not related to the original scripture at all?
That's correct. It has nothing to do with what the Hebrew was intended to do. The Bibles that preceded the King James Version tried a variety of ways to make sense of the passage, but the 1560 Geneva Bible seems to be the first to go with "precept upon precept, line unto line." The Bishops' Bible (of which the KJV is a revision) went in another direction, but the KJV seems to have adapted the Geneva Rendering.
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22 hours ago, Stargazer said:The only thing that comes to mind is Isaiah 28:10,13.
In English it reads: "For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:".
Luther has it: "Zawlaza zawlaza, kawlakaw kawlakaw, hier ein wenig, da ein wenig!" with the note that those words cannot be translated and represent the muttering of drunks, in order to mock the speech of the prophets.
Menge has it: "Da heisst’s immer: 'Tu du dies, tu du das! Mach mal dies, mach mal das! Hier ein bisschen, da ein bisschen!'"
Which is really odd! The English speaks of a valuable principle, but the German seems to be going off on a tangent. In either translation. All I can say is, good luck dealing with this, ye translators!
Any thoughts?
So the German versions are much closer to what's really going on in the text. The Hebrew is repetitive and nonsensical precisely because it is supposed to be mimicking unintelligible speech. This is why the very next line is "For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people." Literally, the Hebrew says tsav latsav tsav latsav qav laqav qav laqav. Isaiah is basically saying, "he's gonna say 'blah blah blah blah,' and you won't be able to understand." The translators in the 16th and 17th centuries didn't recognize this rhetorical device and tried hard to make some kind of sense of the words, which required some etymological fudging, but they came up with a plumb line and a word that refers to a precept or principle. The repetition includes the preposition la-, which refers to movement towards or benefit for, which they interpreted as "upon," and thus was born the phrase "precept upon precept, line upon line."
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8 hours ago, Islander said:
Again, I cited Lev 10:1 as an example of God taking issue with a way of worship that was not the prescribed one. The sons of Aaron thought they were in the clear. After all, fire is fire, they thought.
Nope. As I pointed out to you, it was an explicit violation of the law, not an assumption.
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On 6/18/2021 at 7:25 PM, Islander said:
People are free to do what they will and often do. There are many things that are expressly prescribed or prohibited in scripture. But, it is precisely scripture which point to and describes for us the character, atributes, history and promises of God. However, the argument relates to: is such a practice outside of God's revealed truth and thus, in fact, contrary to the will of God? God is not fond of people improvising on what He has decreed.
"Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, “It is what the Lord spoke, saying, ‘By those who come near Me I will be treated as holy, And before all the people I will be honored.’So Aaron, therefore, kept silent.
Lev. 10:1-3
Except this isn't an improvisation, this is a direct and explicit violation of the law. The word translated "strange" in the KJV can refer to something foreign or unrecognizable, but it also means unauthorized or prohibited, and in this case refers to coals from a profane context (rather than a temple context), which is in direct violation of the law.
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On 6/18/2021 at 6:51 PM, Islander said:By the 1st century AD, Judaism has descended into a decadent pit of superstition, empty ritual and a morass of rabbinical traditions that the Savior thoroughly condemned in the Sermon of the Mount.
This is anti-Semitic nonsense, but also a pretty laughable misunderstanding of the history and of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew was a Judaizer.
QuoteThe idolatry of Israel is legendary and every prophet chastised Israel for it. Ezekiel 16 is a scathing rebuke of Israel for her harlotry and abominations with idol worship and going after other gods. My point is that nowhere in scripture God commanded or allowed prayer to or for the dead.
Nor is it prohibited anywhere, but it's a lot more complicated than that. The cult of deceased kin was absolutely normative in early Israel and early Christianity, and food offerings to the dead are even tacitly permitted by the Hebrew Bible. In fact, in Deuteronomy 26:14, all it says in relation to food offered to the dead is not to make any food offerings to YHWH if they come from food that has been offered to the dead. The idea there is to not mix the ritually impure with the tithe. Ritually impure doesn't mean "sin," or "wrong," either.
QuoteThe dead are not part of our religious realm.
The dead have absolutely always been a part of "our religious realm," even as some groups have fought against it for purposes of restricting access to power and resources. The dead and the divine have always been thoroughly interconnected.
QuoteThe temple work avails those to whom God offers the opportunity to achieve redemption beyond the vail. Out part in that ordinance ends there. Anything else is shooting beyond the mark.
Then both Judaism and Christianity have shot beyond the mark since the beginning of their histories. Or maybe you just don't understand the history very well but still have strong feelings.
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1 hour ago, longview said:This topic could closely be associated with the controversy of whether there was an actual violent "insurrection" in DC on January 6 and whether there were "false flag" operators. Comparisons should be made of this event with many violent riotings around the country. Chief among the questions is this - - - was Ashli Babbitt senselessly executed for the purpose of generating a false narrative?
Those aren't controversies, those are just lies, and profoundly idiotic ones, too.
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6 hours ago, Islander said:There is no scriptural support for that practice. The rituals associated with vicarious liturgy comes from historic pagan roman traditions that were incorporated (with many others) into the Roman Church.
In LDS theology the Temple work is available to us; the living, as a work of grace and mercy where we facilitate a temporal ordinance on behalf of those that no longer enjoy a temporal existence but our involvement ends there. It is a commandment received by revelation and not an act of free will (like a prayer). The ordinance plays the role of an affidavit that is presented in absentia and provide legal standing. It is not intercessory. Well-intended as it may be, those prayers you are offering are neither efficacious nor prescribed in revelation, ancient or modern but rather superstitious.
Vicarious liturgy was a part of Christianity from the beginning, and has always been a part of ancient Israelite practice. As early as we can distinguish Judahite and Israelite tombs from those of other societies, we have found mortuary chapels with representations of the dead that included petitions for the wellbeing of the dead as well as petitions to the dead for help. The earliest version of any passage known from the Hebrew Bible is a set of tiny rolled up silver scrolls dating to around 600 BCE that contain a version of the priestly blessing from the book of Numbers that was used as an apotropaic amulet that was buried with a deceased person and meant to protect them in the afterlife. Intercession on behalf of the dead began to invoke angels in the Greco-Roman period, primarily as a result of expanded literary activity and increased interest in the nature of the heavens within Judaism. The dead have always been invoked within Israelite, Jewish, and Christian practice, both to secure for them a better afterlife and to seek aid for the living.
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LDS TikTok star debunks Bible conspiracies, misinformation
in General Discussions
Posted
No, it's a professional opinion from an expert in ancient languages that aligns with the academic consensus versus speculation.