TILL 12/4
Certainly, Deuteronomy 7:1-4 had to have been mentioned several times in our
many exchanges, and I'm glad that you did state that we swapped this many
postings on this one verse alone. Perhaps that will convince Matthew that I
didn't run from you. However, if you don't remember the specific posting
that I was referring to, then you have suffered a convenient loss of memory.
I no longer have this in my saved files, because I experienced a garbled
mailbox yesterday, and it was necessary for me to erase over a thousand (can
you believe it!) postings from errancy that I had saved. I'm going to
restate the problem briefly. First here is Deuteronomy 7:1-3 again:
"When Yahweh your God shall bring you into the land where you go to
possess it and shall cast out many nations before you, the Hittite, the
Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the
Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when Yahweh your
God shall deliver THEM, up before you and you shall smit THEM, then you
shall utterly destroy THEM. You shall make no covenant with THEM nor show
mercy to them. Neither shall you make marriages with THEM."
My argument, if Baker is able to remember, was that the antecedent of the
pronouns "they" and "them" had to have been the seven nations that were
greater and mightier than Israel. In any text, the antecedent of a pronoun
can be substituted without affecting the meaning of the text, so if we do
this in this passage, we have the following:
" When Yahweh your God shall bring you into the land where you go to
possess it and shall cast out many nations before you, the Hittite, the
Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the
Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when Yahweh your
God shall deliver THE SEVEN NATIONS, up before you and you shall smit THE
SEVEN NATIONS, then you shall utterly destroy THE SEVEN NATIONS. You shall
make no covenant with THE SEVEN NATIONS nor show mercy to them. Neither
shall you make marriages with THE SEVEN NATIONS."
Now if "Moses" was just talking about lions, wolves, dinosaurs, ground
squirrels, etc. in this passage, then we have the following absurdities in
the text: (1) Yahweh was warning the Israelites not to make any covenants
with lions, wolves, dinosaurs, etc. (2) Yahweh was warning the Israelites
not to intermarry with lions, wolves, dinosaurs, etc. To believe that this
is what the text means is so utterly ridiculous that it hardly deserves comment.
The reason why Yahweh ordered the Israelites not to intermarry with these
seven nations was that they would be led away to serve other gods (v:4).
Hence, Baker's interpretation requires us to think that lions, wolves,
dinosaurs, etc. had gods that they would influence the Israelites to follow
if intermarriages took place.
Now don't you remember, Baker, that you wouldn't comment on this analysis of
Deuteronomy 7:1-3 on the grounds that you were not a linguistic expert?
Even though we pointed out to you that your not being a linguistic expert
had never deterred you from arbitrarily declaring such things as horses and
chariots were really caged birds and that the OT had been extensively
mistranslated, you still wouldn't address the pronoun-antecedent argument
stated above. If you don't remember this, perhaps you can search your files
a little more carefully and find those postings.
By the way, I don't intend to renew this discussion, Baker. With over 200
messages backed up in my mailbox, I have no time to take up a "theory" that
in my opinion you didn't even come close to proving back when it dominated
the list.
I would, however, appreciate your not misrepresenting to new subscribers
like Matthew my participation in discussions that occurred before they came
onto the list.
Farrell Till
Skepticism, Inc.
jftill@midwest.net