/lit/ - Literature

Just imagine them as the hooknosed semites they were.

>>19088556
how come plato be so nice and easy to read and the bible reads like shit.

I think you're caught up on trying to see the Bible as a sort of repository for good morals rather than for the deeply pan-literary vision it really offers. Read Northrop Frye's book "The Great Code"-- It's not particularly interested in doing weird apologetics for the characters but rather understanding the patterns and kaleidoscopic typology of the christian bible. This is a great path to a deeper reading of the text.

>>19088556
One of the themes through Genesis is the constant disruption to the practice of primogeniture, i.e., Abraham passes Ishmael for Issac, Jacob steals the birthright of Esau and switches the birthrights of Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph comes out on top of his older brothers, and so on. Maybe one way to understand it is that the customs that man begets aren't necessarily defended or defensible always by god, who tries to enphasize his own power in human life by baffling man's attempts to order life?

>>19088576
Thanks for the recommendation, anon, I appreciate it. I will definitely check this out. I am particularly interested in the typology and have decided to read through it after reading most of the NT already. For example the parallels between Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac and Jesus were really interesting to me.

>>19088592
No problem, Frye also had a biblical lecture series which was recorded in the early 80s which has been uploaded to youtube which is very good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbTIAto5PrQ&list=PLYQV14il9XALl_lTZbgbBdrFWdcLOwKBs

>>19088622
Thanks!
>>19088588
Hmm that is definitely a theme now that you point it out. Interesting, I will have to reread a bit and think about this.

We are definitely being astroturf-shilled by discord christians

>>19088674
Funny how mad the most benign mention of Christianity can make you

>>19088713
Bold to assume I am mad, merely wary at a trend I've been noticing.

The standard secular answer is that a lot of these are drawn from wider Mesopotamian myths that had been circulating for centuries if not a millennium by the time they were incorporated and retroactively Hebraised by the writers of the Torah.

Behind the synthesis that appears in the Pentateuch there was probably a free-floating mixture of standard legendary history and re-history known to virtually everybody in the region, like the stories of Sumer and Akkad with their ziggurats and other dimly remembered things, Hebrew folk stories and legends, which were themselves shared with the Canaanite stock from which the Elohist/Yahwist Hebrews diverged culturally, and then more specific and more recent, specifically Yahwist traditions like that of Moses (who may have been a real figure revised successively for different purposes throughout the history of the region). Ancient knowledge of the Bronze Age past was spotty, remember the slightly later Greeks and Romans had barely any clue about the kingdoms and political developments of the Near East prior to Persia, neo-Assyria, and neo-Babylon. Etiological myths of many overlapping civilisations, successively interpreted and recontextualised by subsequent ones, were one of the main lines of continuity with the distant past.

The biblical editors were consciously taking up all these elements and trying to produce a consistent narrative, through several stages of redaction, and with many many different kinds of texts and oral traditions to work from. Note how later books keep mentioning lost books and chronicles of the conquest of Canaan as if we're supposed to know what they are. Note also how they will sometimes include a very ancient fragment of poetry or a song, like the Song of Deborah, and then elaborate and contextualise it in prose. The actual fragment is often clearly of much more ancient Hebrew than the surrounding text. For the editors it's a prestige piece, "look at this fragment of great antiquity we have preserved, and which you may have heard sung before; now we will explain it for you, how it fits into your history and thus how you fit into your larger history, in a definitive and authoritative way."

This can also help to explain things that may seem like total non sequiturs, like Nimrod. Our instinct is to ask why Nimrod, apparently so important and impressive, shows up for all of two seconds, just as a mention. But if you read the text right, what is happening is that the biblical editors are saying "you know Nimrod, right? Here's where he fits in the true Yahwist narrative of the world." It's a way of exercising authority and establishing primacy as the correct interpretation of the past. All the rumours and myths and stories you've grown up soaking up from a thousand different sources, from both neighbouring peoples and the distant past of the shared region, and from your own Hebrew culture, are here integrated into a seamless framework.

>>19088768
It's fairly likely that the earliest history in the Bible, the pre-Mosaic history of the Patriarchs in Genesis (note the caesura between Joseph and his family sojourning in Egypt and the resumption of the story with Moses, it's not a logical narrative development but a chronological leap), was actually added to the historical narrative (and legal-ritual texts) of the Moses-Joshua-Kings period later, hence the caesura. That is, the core narrative of the historical writings was Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and Joshua leading them into the Promised Land, and probably some or much of the "royal" history of Israel and Judah that follows, and the Genesis account was later added to bring the beginning of the narrative back to the beginning of God's creation of the world, casting the story of the Yahwist interpretation of history and the cosmos backward to the beginnings instead of having it begin in medias res with the reforming prophet Moses. To do this required melding what was known of pre-Mosaic history, and likely also distant Canaanite historical narratives and myths that would be known to many non-Hebrew Canaanites too (like Nimrod), with wider Mesopotamian myth/legend and also the cosmogonic tradition.

Thus God, who originally was known as revealing himself through the prophet Moses, possibly as simple the tutelary deity of the Hebrews but either tinged with henotheism/monotheism from the start or later acquiring henotheistic/monotheistic associations, becomes known also as the God who, in the familiar and venerable Mesopotamian style, creates the cosmos (ordered reality) out of "void" (chaos). Thus there is a "spirit over the waters." Thus there is the supposed dual creation of humanity in Genesis 1 and 2. Thus there is God talking to.. who exactly?.. about how He fears mankind may become "like us," that is immortal, if they eat from the tree. And many other things that would inspire and bedevil theologians for thousands of years who tried to see a single systematic logic in them, like the paradox of how mankind could have known the sin of disobedience or hubris if they had not yet eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Most likely because these stories were originally more ambivalent and nakedly mythical than strictly narrative, as they have to become in the Bible.

>>19088775
The further difficulty of this approach is that you are also, to a great extent, respecting the source material, because the entire reason for including that source material is that everyone is familiar with it, and it legitimises you and frames the generally known history of mankind and the world in Hebrew perspective. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Abraham and Isaac and so on weren't invented from thin air, just like Nimrod wasn't, these were clearly stories people knew and told, and some (perhaps most) of these stories were simply old Mesopotamian parables and myths with no necessary moral content. But these stories, like the paradoxes of earliest Genesis, may have initially been far move ambivalent, even originating in traditions that saw the gods and fate itself as aloof and amoral.

For example Jacob being cruel to Esau may have initially been a story of an amoral "trickster" (a very common trope in ancient mythology) getting the best of every situation through his wiles. "Many-wiled" Odysseus isn't exactly a nice guy either when he sneaks into the Trojan camp and slits all the Thracians' throats with Diomedes. But then, Odysseus isn't meant to be a pivotal moral patriarch of the Greek people, he is meant to be an ambivalent and elemental warrior hero, living entirely by his thumos, kleos, and time, none of which are "moral" from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Odysseus would kill Thersites in a heartbeat, not for being evil but for being too weak to enforce his desires, and he hanged all his maids for disrespecting him in his absence. But imagine a moral religion a thousand years or more after Homer trying to reconcile the fragmentary legends of Odysseus' wily deeds with his "new" role as forefather of the moral religion.

This is the most prosaic and disappointing explanation for two of the most-noted paradoxes of the Bible, the book of Job and the incident with Abraham and Isaac. You may think that thousands of years of theology would have smoothed over and found clever excuses for Abraham's behaviour or God's behaviour toward Job, but no, what you will find is a multiplicity of interpretations, themselves coloured by the time and setting in which they were conceived. For example a medieval or Calvinist mind is a lot more intuitively willing to entertain the notion that God's will is absolutely paramount, and that Abraham did nothing wrong by obeying, and God did nothing wrong to Job, because God doing wrong would be a contradiction in terms. If that unsettles you, then you cleave closer to a platonist, or simply a modern moral person, who simply can't conceive of an immoral or amoral God. (But then, the paradox of "is the good good because God wills it, or is God good because he always wills in accordance with the good?," the so-called Euthyphro paradox after the platonic dialogue of that name in which it's first thematised, has never been solved.)

>>19088775
>>19088768
*tips*

>>19088781
So don't expect there to be one authoritative reading that fixes everything (although people will often present theirs this way with shocking confidence, naturally). Again one of the simplest but most disappointing readings of Job is that it's simply a composite narrative, written at various stages, possibly adapted from another source, with various editors and rewriters trying to answer to the problem of evil (why does Job suffer despite not deserving it?), in ways that subsequent writers found unsatisfying. Apparently someone found it satisfying so long as Job gets a happy ending, even if his family and animals are all dead. That doesn't really do it for us today.

That's the irreligious answer anyway. You don't have to accept it completely. Revelation may take many forms, for example dispensationalist revelation in which different esoteric levels of the text reveal themselves or are developed from the text in accordance with God's plan for mankind. Origen helped inaugurate the symbolic and esoteric reading of the Bible as against the literalist interpretation.

Perhaps you're right and God really had to roll up his sleeves and slowly reform the Bronze Age world from within the almost completely corrupted material it presented itself in. Perhaps the flood wasn't a cruel act against a defenceless humanity but the sole remaining memory of an entire antediluvian, Lemurian/Atlantean epoch in which God and His angels actually lost a cataclysmic battle against evil (the Nephilim?) and had to wipe the slate clean. Thousands of years of antediluvian history are glossed over very quickly.

It helps a lot if you value free will, which some Christians (Calvinists) and some Jews don't. If you value free will, then you have to take seriously that God gave man the ability to choose Him, but also to choose wrongly and be lost. If this is true, the bumpiness of the Bible becomes a brutal, almost embarrassingly real story of man's fuck-ups, rather than a confusing story of God not just making everything perfect the first time around. There are schools of theology which argue that God specifically restricted His will from determining creation. For example some argue that the angels are what we would be, perfect but unchanging and practically inert, if we weren't human. God made us, free and fallible, and not just the angels or more angels, for a reason.

>Am I just to understand them as fallen imperfect men?
Boy, wait till you get to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. All the familiar names are assholes who commit at least one or two inexcusable acts each. The Jews constantly fall into polytheism, human sacrifice, and moral degeneracy of every kind. It gets weirder, not less weird, from here on out, at least if you're expecting a kind of fairy tale narrative of "Hebrews good, why you should become Hebrew."

But again, think of the peculiarity of a moral people chastising itself and even cataloguing its failures to be better than its surroundings.

>>19088674
>>19088728
>fruitful and (sofar) purely academic discussion of the most significant work of literature in the English language
>Oh my god... The FUCKING CHRISTIANS ARE HERE!!!!
Stop being 15 and stop shitting up every discussion on this board that so much as mentions Christianity in passing

>>19088556
jacob makes more sense if you see him as a trickster

>>19088768
>The standard secular answer is that a lot of these are drawn from wider Mesopotamian myths that had been circulating for centuries if not a millennium by the time they were incorporated and retroactively Hebraised by the writers of the Torah.
>Behind the synthesis that appears in the Pentateuch there was probably a free-floating mixture of standard legendary history and re-history known to virtually everybody in the region, like the stories of Sumer and Akkad with their ziggurats and other dimly remembered things, Hebrew folk stories and legends, which were themselves shared with the Canaanite stock from which the Elohist/Yahwist Hebrews diverged culturally, and then more specific and more recent, specifically Yahwist traditions like that of Moses (who may have been a real figure revised successively for different purposes throughout the history of the region). Ancient knowledge of the Bronze Age past was spotty, remember the slightly later Greeks and Romans had barely any clue about the kingdoms and political developments of the Near East prior to Persia, neo-Assyria, and neo-Babylon. Etiological myths of many overlapping civilisations, successively interpreted and recontextualised by subsequent ones, were one of the main lines of continuity with the distant past.
>The biblical editors were consciously taking up all these elements and trying to produce a consistent narrative, through several stages of redaction, and with many many different kinds of texts and oral traditions to work from. Note how later books keep mentioning lost books and chronicles of the conquest of Canaan as if we're supposed to know what they are. Note also how they will sometimes include a very ancient fragment of poetry or a song, like the Song of Deborah, and then elaborate and contextualise it in prose. The actual fragment is often clearly of much more ancient Hebrew than the surrounding text. For the editors it's a prestige piece, "look at this fragment of great antiquity we have preserved, and which you may have heard sung before; now we will explain it for you, how it fits into your history and thus how you fit into your larger history, in a definitive and authoritative way."
>This can also help to explain things that may seem like total non sequiturs, like Nimrod. Our instinct is to ask why Nimrod, apparently so important and impressive, shows up for all of two seconds, just as a mention. But if you read the text right, what is happening is that the biblical editors are saying "you know Nimrod, right? Here's where he fits in the true Yahwist narrative of the world." It's a way of exercising authority and establishing primacy as the correct interpretation of the past. All the rumours and myths and stories you've grown up soaking up from a thousand different sources, from both neighbouring peoples and the distant past of the shared region, and from your own Hebrew culture, are here integrated into a seamless framework.

>>19088775
>It's fairly likely that the earliest history in the Bible, the pre-Mosaic history of the Patriarchs in Genesis (note the caesura between Joseph and his family sojourning in Egypt and the resumption of the story with Moses, it's not a logical narrative development but a chronological leap), was actually added to the historical narrative (and legal-ritual texts) of the Moses-Joshua-Kings period later, hence the caesura. That is, the core narrative of the historical writings was Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and Joshua leading them into the Promised Land, and probably some or much of the "royal" history of Israel and Judah that follows, and the Genesis account was later added to bring the beginning of the narrative back to the beginning of God's creation of the world, casting the story of the Yahwist interpretation of history and the cosmos backward to the beginnings instead of having it begin in medias res with the reforming prophet Moses. To do this required melding what was known of pre-Mosaic history, and likely also distant Canaanite historical narratives and myths that would be known to many non-Hebrew Canaanites too (like Nimrod), with wider Mesopotamian myth/legend and also the cosmogonic tradition.
>Thus God, who originally was known as revealing himself through the prophet Moses, possibly as simple the tutelary deity of the Hebrews but either tinged with henotheism/monotheism from the start or later acquiring henotheistic/monotheistic associations, becomes known also as the God who, in the familiar and venerable Mesopotamian style, creates the cosmos (ordered reality) out of "void" (chaos). Thus there is a "spirit over the waters." Thus there is the supposed dual creation of humanity in Genesis 1 and 2. Thus there is God talking to.. who exactly?.. about how He fears mankind may become "like us," that is immortal, if they eat from the tree. And many other things that would inspire and bedevil theologians for thousands of years who tried to see a single systematic logic in them, like the paradox of how mankind could have known the sin of disobedience or hubris if they had not yet eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Most likely because these stories were originally more ambivalent and nakedly mythical than strictly narrative, as they have to become in the Bible.

>>19088781
>The further difficulty of this approach is that you are also, to a great extent, respecting the source material, because the entire reason for including that source material is that everyone is familiar with it, and it legitimises you and frames the generally known history of mankind and the world in Hebrew perspective. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Abraham and Isaac and so on weren't invented from thin air, just like Nimrod wasn't, these were clearly stories people knew and told, and some (perhaps most) of these stories were simply old Mesopotamian parables and myths with no necessary moral content. But these stories, like the paradoxes of earliest Genesis, may have initially been far move ambivalent, even originating in traditions that saw the gods and fate itself as aloof and amoral.
>For example Jacob being cruel to Esau may have initially been a story of an amoral "trickster" (a very common trope in ancient mythology) getting the best of every situation through his wiles. "Many-wiled" Odysseus isn't exactly a nice guy either when he sneaks into the Trojan camp and slits all the Thracians' throats with Diomedes. But then, Odysseus isn't meant to be a pivotal moral patriarch of the Greek people, he is meant to be an ambivalent and elemental warrior hero, living entirely by his thumos, kleos, and time, none of which are "moral" from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Odysseus would kill Thersites in a heartbeat, not for being evil but for being too weak to enforce his desires, and he hanged all his maids for disrespecting him in his absence. But imagine a moral religion a thousand years or more after Homer trying to reconcile the fragmentary legends of Odysseus' wily deeds with his "new" role as forefather of the moral religion.
>This is the most prosaic and disappointing explanation for two of the most-noted paradoxes of the Bible, the book of Job and the incident with Abraham and Isaac. You may think that thousands of years of theology would have smoothed over and found clever excuses for Abraham's behaviour or God's behaviour toward Job, but no, what you will find is a multiplicity of interpretations, themselves coloured by the time and setting in which they were conceived. For example a medieval or Calvinist mind is a lot more intuitively willing to entertain the notion that God's will is absolutely paramount, and that Abraham did nothing wrong by obeying, and God did nothing wrong to Job, because God doing wrong would be a contradiction in terms. If that unsettles you, then you cleave closer to a platonist, or simply a modern moral person, who simply can't conceive of an immoral or amoral God. (But then, the paradox of "is the good good because God wills it, or is God good because he always wills in accordance with the good?," the so-called Euthyphro paradox after the platonic dialogue of that name in which it's first thematised, has never been solved.)

>>19088788
holy fucking based

>>19088788
>So don't expect there to be one authoritative reading that fixes everything (although people will often present theirs this way with shocking confidence, naturally). Again one of the simplest but most disappointing readings of Job is that it's simply a composite narrative, written at various stages, possibly adapted from another source, with various editors and rewriters trying to answer to the problem of evil (why does Job suffer despite not deserving it?), in ways that subsequent writers found unsatisfying. Apparently someone found it satisfying so long as Job gets a happy ending, even if his family and animals are all dead. That doesn't really do it for us today.
>That's the irreligious answer anyway. You don't have to accept it completely. Revelation may take many forms, for example dispensationalist revelation in which different esoteric levels of the text reveal themselves or are developed from the text in accordance with God's plan for mankind. Origen helped inaugurate the symbolic and esoteric reading of the Bible as against the literalist interpretation.
>Perhaps you're right and God really had to roll up his sleeves and slowly reform the Bronze Age world from within the almost completely corrupted material it presented itself in. Perhaps the flood wasn't a cruel act against a defenceless humanity but the sole remaining memory of an entire antediluvian, Lemurian/Atlantean epoch in which God and His angels actually lost a cataclysmic battle against evil (the Nephilim?) and had to wipe the slate clean. Thousands of years of antediluvian history are glossed over very quickly.
>It helps a lot if you value free will, which some Christians (Calvinists) and some Jews don't. If you value free will, then you have to take seriously that God gave man the ability to choose Him, but also to choose wrongly and be lost. If this is true, the bumpiness of the Bible becomes a brutal, almost embarrassingly real story of man's fuck-ups, rather than a confusing story of God not just making everything perfect the first time around. There are schools of theology which argue that God specifically restricted His will from determining creation. For example some argue that the angels are what we would be, perfect but unchanging and practically inert, if we weren't human. God made us, free and fallible, and not just the angels or more angels, for a reason.
>Am I just to understand them as fallen imperfect men?
>Boy, wait till you get to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. All the familiar names are assholes who commit at least one or two inexcusable acts each. The Jews constantly fall into polytheism, human sacrifice, and moral degeneracy of every kind. It gets weirder, not less weird, from here on out, at least if you're expecting a kind of fairy tale narrative of "Hebrews good, why you should become Hebrew."
>But again, think of the peculiarity of a moral people chastising itself and even cataloguing its failures to be better than its surroundings.

>>19088781
>But then, the paradox of "is the good good because God wills it, or is God good because he always wills in accordance with the good?,
False dichotomy. Good is not a creation and thus does not proceed from the will of God, and neither is God's eternal property of goodness determined by his willing it, since He possesses Good by nature and not just will.

@19088775
>To do this required melding what was known of pre-Mosaic history, and likely also distant Canaanite historical narratives and myths that would be known to many non-Hebrew Canaanites too (like Nimrod), with wider Mesopotamian myth/legend and also the cosmogonic tradition
Absolute tired and debunked cringe. Do people unironically still believe in this?

>>19088813
It's pretty clear that they are here considering the similarity of the threads and the obvious fact that both the OPs and the immediate responders are not from here. I'm not just kvetching emptily here, anon, I've spent enough time on here to notice outsiders and forced trends. It's all in the images they use, the unimaginative argumentation, the organization; where else could they be from, if not discord?

Indeed, it is scholarly, because it is trying to promote certain books and ideas. I'm only shitting up your threads because you're shitting up my board

>>19088930
Are you saying god has no free will and is forced to do good as an innate property?

>>19088930
That's the whole point, to get you thinking in terms of "where," metaphysically, moral good resides. It's not metaphysically self-evident that God should have properties for example, or that He is primally or subdivides into a "nature" or a "will." To ontologize God like this is a theological decision you have to make to respond to the paradox adequately. The paradox itself is a logical problem, not an attack on divinity.

It's Plato formulating it so he's not exactly frivolously attacking the divine, he's actually implicitly suggesting that making a distinction between the source/ground of the Good and the divine will (or several divine wills if you're polytheistic) is paradoxical. The point is that the very way we talk and think about goodness would necessarily imply its sovereignty over the gods (because they conform to it, not it to them), or conversely, it would self-annihilate and no longer be the Good if it were only good because arbitrarily willing goods willed it.

A similar paradox occurs with necessity, another theological problem. If we talk of all things about God proceeding logically and necessarily, we are in a sense subordinating God to logical necessity. Does God do what He has to because it is necessary, or is what is necessary necessary because God wills it? But how can He will something arbitrary? Etc. Schopenhauer talks about this in critiquing Fichte in the Fourfold Root essay. The answer is obviously that we are misconceiving God if we are subordinating Him to the sovereignty of a higher (but he is the most high?) principle, so our very way of posing the problem must be muddled.

There are no definitive single answers to such problems, although some might say their favourite answer is. This sort of thing is what drove Nicholas of Cusa to "learned ignorance" and the doctrine of the admittedly ineffable "coincidence of opposites."

>>19088989
I'm >>19088996 and didn't see your post before posting mine, but exactly, you picked up on the same paradoxes that I'm talking about.

>>19089000
What is good then? If there's no will and it's an innate property, then it just is. There is no good or evil, just apathy.

>>19088962
And why can’t I ask for book recommendations on Genesis on a literature board?

>>19088563
> t. pure Aryan iranic nigger

>>19089057
You can, but you or may not be an organized shill. Usually this wouldn't be a problem, but with something this concerted, there should be a foot put down. You could easily be dissimulating right now.

>>19088989
Being forced implies having a disposition towards something else and being made to choose another. There is no dialectical drive in God to deliberate and choose to do one or the other thing, He always wills freely whatever He wants and His divine will is not separated from Good. Any divine action carries in itself the fullness of the divine attributes, so any willful action of God is good by nature.

>>19088996
>subdivides into a "nature" or a "will
You're following the false pagan doctrine of God as absolutely simple monad. Christianity refutes this idea by admitting multiplicity in God without subdivision or splitting. Good is an eternal divine operation, like the divine will, which all proceed from the same ineffable divine nature of the Father and shared by the Son, as eternally begotten, and the Holy Spirit, as eternally proceeding from the Father.
>logical
God is not subordinates to logic, because human logic is only an analogue of an uncreated property of the Logos. God is prior to logic and the source of it, so he cannot be subordinated to it ontologically.
>>19089028
Good and divine will are both divine eternal attributes shared in all of Gods actions. They are never separated in any action of God and don't ontologically subordinate each other in a causal sense.
>There is no good
The logos of goodness is really present in any action of God, so it has a real existence and we humans can participate in it.

>>19089112
>>19089149
So why would any holy text be against "sins" or "evils" since those only exist by the actions of god and are therefore good?

>>19089195
Sins or evils do not exist as subsistence (they were never created and do not abide in anything by nature), but rather sinfulness is a mode of being of human will which tends the human towards (unreachable) non-existence.
Holy Scripture is against sin because it makes you unable to participate in God's grace and thus makes your experience of being resurrected at the Last Judgement an extremely miserable one. Only one who loves Christ can experience eternal well-being, because goodness is proper to Christ alone and there is no goodness to be found outside of Him, where the sinner's will is oriented towards.

Use your talents for the Lord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exYzffvTV3Q

>>19089249
You don't think animals are capable of gluttony, sloth, or wrath?

>>19089339
Animals aren't images of the Logos so they cannot participate in grace in the same way. For them there is no choice, they just follow the natural inclinations of their corrupted postlapsarian natures.

>>19089578
Natural inclinations are not nature?

>>19088556
Its best to read it as allegory.
Jacob and Esau being twins is important, Jacob is meant to represent the spiritual aspect of man (smooth skinned, tent dweller) and Esau is meant to represent the fleshly or physical aspect (man of the field, hairy).
The meaning of the story is that Jacob (the spirit) wants to steal the life-energy from Esau (the body) and use it for heavenly purposes rather than earthly. Notice that God favors Jacob, not Esau.
The story of the taking of the birthright is meant to show the shortsightedness of the flesh ("What good is my birthright to me if I die?") Esau literally trades it away for some food. Consider Jesus's complete inversion of this mindset when he says "And what will it profit a man if he gains the entire world, but loses his only soul?"
Jacob also does show the Jewish spirit. He's cunning, his name literally means "one who walks crookedly". When he encounters God's angel he wrestles with him and is touched upon the thigh, from that day forward he walks haltingly on his leg.

>>19088556
>>19088576
>>19088588
>>19088768
>>19088775
>>19088781
>>19088788
>>19089602
You are all reading it outside its proper context. Christianity has no metaphysics.

>>19089828
>t. never read St. Maximos the Confessor

>>19089590
I mean the natural inclination their of corrupted nature.

>>19090035
Christianity has no metaphysics. Thats a pagan greek inovation from Philo of allegorizing scripture relativizing the word of God taken from Plato

Metaphysics is what killed Christianity from its very inception. Jesus have mercy on us.

>>19090035
This. Reading St. Maximus makes you impervious to most if not all delusions.

>>19090280
>Indulges in pagan superstitious make belief similar to Athanasius

>impervious to delusions

Pick 1

>>19088768
>>19088775
>>19088781
>>19088788
good effortposts, thanks anon

>>19090472
secular hogwash

>>19088565
>bible reads like shit.
Ur translation matters, anon

>>19088911
Thanks for the read, anon

I think Matthieu Pageau's "The Language of Creation" is a great deep-dive into the fractal structure of the Bible, especially focusing on Genesis, where everything can be viewed as a logical conclusion of the dichotomy between heaven and earth (meaning and matter) - almost like the stories themselves (although I do believe they contain actual biographical narratives of real persons) are structured in such a way as to present insights derived from that fundamental axiom, namely, the duality of heaven and earth. Concepts like "inhabiting/working the homeland" (also known as order, or the familiar and stable space) are tied to meeting the precepts of the covenants (eg. when meaning and matter, heaven and earth, are hierarchically ordered in a proper manner) are contrasted with the frequent descent into "wandering in exile" (also known as chaos, or the unfamiliar and cyclical time), which is tied to transgressing against the covenant between heaven and earth (eg. when meaning and matter do not line up).

This brief introduction I link below might be illuminating. I also recommend Jonathan Pageau's Youtube channel, especially his talks with Matthieu, where you can get a preliminary understanding of this fractal structure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3vqXCLhJLE

You also might want to read St. Irenaeus' "Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching", which will give you a brief outline of the typological parallels and Trinitarian theology hidden within the OT, which is fulfilled in the new. Happy to answer any more questions.

I think Matthieu Pageau's "The Language of Creation" is a great deep-dive into the fractal structure of the Bible, especially focusing on Genesis, where everything can be viewed as a logical conclusion derived from the first verse - the dichotomy between heaven and earth (meaning and matter).

It can be said that the stories themselves (although I do believe they contain actual biographical narratives of real persons) are structured in such a way as to present insights derived from that fundamental duality. This dichotomy is further explored in motifs like "inhabiting/working the homeland" (also known as order, or the familiar and stable space), which is tied to meeting the precepts of the covenant (when meaning and matter, heaven and earth, are hierarchically ordered in a proper manner) - which is naturally contrasted with the frequent descent into "wandering in exile" (also known as chaos, or the unfamiliar and cyclical time), tied to transgressing against the covenant between heaven and earth (when meaning and matter do not line up). As you know, the story of the OT is almost entirely summarized as "the story of Israel's descent into transgression against its covenants with God", which culminates in the final dissolution of the covenants by Jesus Christ, and the formation of the new and eternal covenant which is open to every human.

This brief introduction I link below might be illuminating. I also recommend Jonathan Pageau's Youtube channel, especially his talks with Matthieu, where you can get a preliminary understanding of this fractal structure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3vqXCLhJLE [Embed]

You also might want to read St. Irenaeus' "Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching", which will give you a brief outline of the typological parallels and Trinitarian theology hidden within the OT, which is fulfilled in the new. Happy to answer any more questions.

>>19089828
We're not speaking of Christianity, but Judaism.

Israelite "DuckTales".

>>19088768
>>19088775
>>19088781
All that pseud drivel and no mention of the character of Abraham is a self-insert of Abraham himself

>>19089828
Lol how is pointing out basic themes evident on the surface of Genesis treating it through a metaphysical lens, nigga you crack me up

>>19092689
>Judaism
No such thing exists in that time frame. Judaism is a heretical christian off shoot which popped into existence cca 200 AD

>>19094802
The boring-posts above try to disseminate genesis by assuming its a secular metaphysical work which is not its proper context

>>19088556
Super nintendo, sega genesis
What is there to not understand?

>>19088556
you can't properly understand the bible if you are not saved. watch this gospel video if you are not 100% sure of going to heaven and read a KJV bible without any footnotes or commentaries. it's easy to be saved /lit/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dqw_fJeBD0&t=9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dqw_fJeBD0&t=9s