Posted: May 09, 2016 6:34 am
Zwaarddijk wrote:Agrippina wrote:Agrippina wrote:5) The 10 plagues are improbable. How did the animals reanimate after they were killed in every plague. Also read the plagues critically: Moses supposedly struck every drinking vessel with his stick to cause the water to turn into blood. So how did he do this? Did he walk from house to house, and stream to stream, and well to well, to strike them, has anyone with believes this actually looked at the size of Egypt?
With regards to Moses striking 'every drinking vessel', you're really coming up with stuff out of thin air. Sure, this miracle didn't occur, but the text doesn't really say what you want it to say, unless you rely on some idea that Hebrew "al-" signifies physical touch. I am inclined to think that "-עַֽל" signifies some ritualistic/magic sense there - simply put, it means Moses was meant to perform a thing that has its effect on all of them, not that he was supposed to touch all of them.
Exodus 7:19 19Then the LORD said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, 'Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their reservoirs of water, that they may become blood; and there will be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.'"
Sounds to me like, take your stick and beat every vessel in Egypt.Other than that minor detail, you've got some very solid arguments there - you don't need to inflate your good arguments with ones that rely on a flawed understanding of what the text says.
Not flawed. If the text says "put your stick over every container of water" then it means "take a hike through Egypt and touch every vessel of water". Of course I'm being a little ridiculous, but then the claim is ridiculous. How did Moses know if someone had a cup of water on a table in an obscure house on the fringes of society. The whole thing is ridiculous, and anyone who believes that Moses just struck the water of the Nile, and every single cup and teaspoon of water in Egypt turned to blood is being ridiculous.
Care to notice how you're relying on the meaning of English prepositions here? Hebrew had way fewer prepositions than English has, and for this reason they're all way more vague. You'll find that that preposition is translated as a multitude of different English prepositions throughout the Bible if you looked. Nor does it say 'every container' in the Hebrew - Hebrew of that time did not have ways of distinguishing "every" from "all". As I mentioned, this rather seems to be a ritualistic formulation - essentially a spell; in the narrative he is supposed to reach out his hands for all the waters to turn into blood, and the translator's just done a hack job.
The people I talk to do not speak Hebrew, nor do they read the text in the original Hebrew. They tell me Moses waved his Harry Potter wand over the Nile, and voila, every glass of water in the entire Egypt turned to blood.
I rely on translations found online because I haven't learnt Hebrew and Greek, for which I don't have enough lifetime, or brain power left, and the translation on "mechon-mamre" says the same thing:
19 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Say unto Aaron: Take thy rod, and stretch out thy hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their ponds of water, that they may become blood; and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.'
If that doesn't mean that every single container in Egypt turned to blood, then I don't know what you're talking about. It says "stretch out your hand over pools, ponds, so they become blood. Does this mean he stood in Memphis next to the river, waved his wand, and then walked off, or does it mean what it says. If it means what it says, then he took a long walk around Egypt.
Yes, the whole thing is ridiculous - but only because magic doesn't exist. The scenario you describe, however, makes your ability to grasp the fact that this was written in a different language where prepositions were vaguer than in English seem ridiculously weak and ridiculous.
Yeah, you go tell that to the translators on mechon-mamre. There's a good chap!
