HTCG 02f

Posted on September 18, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2 continues.

Section D: The Impression of God

Part 1: The Israelite Image of God

Boman starts off introducing the term “theriomorphic” — having the form of a beast. He talks about the Old Testament representation of Jehovah paganized in the Golden Calf. Apparently he never understood the common Mesopotamian concept of an invisible deity seated upon said calf, bullock or whatever. The various Semitic nations never worshiped the cow itself. The image was used in worship of various manifestations of Baal and other major figures in Semitic mythology. The symbolism is not obvious to an outsider.

For the Greeks, that would be confusing; their images are meant to portray the deity in a more literal sense. But Boman at least recognizes that Jehovah was never captured in the Scripture’s rhetoric of animals or man. Those were merely expressions used to indicate something about how He acts in this world. Still, he believes that Jeroboam’s shrines called for worship of gold-plated bull sculptures themselves, not as the beast upon which “Jehovah” rode. He also correctly notes that the Scripture referring to these idols as “calves” instead of mature bulls (the image actually used) is mocking their impotence.

Reviewing the imagery of Psalm 18, he notes that you cannot build a coherent image of God from the description, nor are you meant to visualize from it. Rather, it’s all about piling up symbols of power. Then he points out God riding on a cherub and upon the wind, and how that cannot be easily reconciled in concrete terms; rather, you are supposed to recognize that God moves faster than we can imagine.

After stumbling around a bit trying to distinguish the comparative ages of Bible passages (Documentary Hypothesis again), he notes correctly that none of the anthropomorphic of theriomorphic images were descriptions of what the prophets actually saw in their visions. Rather, the prophets themselves were choosing symbolic language to convey the impression they received of ineffable things.

Thus, when God’s nostrils are mentioned, it portrays wrath. The right arm or hand portrays purpose and power. Various hand motions portray invitation, joy, etc. The eyes symbolize perception and clarity. The ear represents paying attention to someone or something. The Hebrew shem is often translated as “name” or “appearance” — probably better as “reputation” or “title” in some contexts. This is the whole point of all these anthropomorphisms: We must pay careful attention to God’s reputation, His glory and recognition.

Thus, when Moses on the mountain asks to see God’s glory, what he gets is a declaration of His kindness and His sovereign will. Boman gets lost here because he doesn’t recognize the Ancient Near Eastern notion that heart is a separate faculty from the conscious mind. He talks about how Jehovah will not show His face lest Moses die, but then gets tangled up in the five senses, and seems wholly unaware that the ANE folks believed that your heart could perceive things directly by itself in moral terms.

Moral perception is what the Scripture is referring to, not some hybrid sensory perception. The Scripture uses symbolic language to tell us God was going to let Moses receive a direct impression in his heart. That is inherent in the ANE outlook on things; the Hebrew terminology in the passage would have been recognized that way by anyone in that region. They would not have expected a pictorial visualization of the event.

He does get right the idea that “face” (Hebrew panim) is more a verb used in place of a noun, referring specifically to dynamic action of being turned to gaze upon something or someone. When used referring to the “face of the earth” it’s the part you encounter directly, the part that is turned toward you. For Greeks, the concept is more static — the earth is not alive; it’s “face” is the part merely seen passively.

Boman never quite gets around to telling us that for Moses to be someone who conferred with God face to face signifies a shocking level of privilege. ANE people entered the presence of any mere human ruler with their eyes averted, looking down and not daring to see his face. This language of God speaking to Moses face-to-face is a symbol of Moses being treated as a personal friend, something precious few humans ever experienced even with human rulers.

In his summary, Boman again tried to indicate that the Hebrews moved from a primitive to a more developed understanding of God, but his idea of “more developed” is more like the Greek, of course. He fails to see that at least some of that greater sophistication was actually moving farther from the truth of divine revelation. I’m not suggesting that change is inherently wrong, and that there was no improvement in the Hebrews’ theology, but that improvement was mixed with adulterations that Jesus condemned. Boman seems blind to that. He fails to see that the latter convergence of Hebrew scholars into Hellenism was precisely the thing Jesus condemned.

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HTCG 02e

Posted on September 17, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2 continues.

Section C: The Impression of Things

Part 4: Personification in the Old Testament

Boman insists that the Hebrews did not literally personify the forces of nature, but that it was simply a figure of speech. It seems he was totally unaware of the broad ANE assumptions about the world and our communion through the sensory heart. While the modern science about this arose long after he published the original version of this book, the notion that our hearts can perceive the natural world directly was well established by studies in ANE literature going back centuries.

Once again, Boman brings his cultural bias into the picture. He plows through a substantial mix of passages from the Old Testament that insist the natural world rejoices at the demonstration of God’s power. For him, it’s just metaphor. Nature itself fought for Israel plenty of times, but he says it’s just lyrical drama. To deny it is a western bias, and arises from a lack of belief in miracles.

Boman cites modern poetry (Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of Norway) that is loaded with similar imagery, but it’s from a pagan background. It reflects the superstitions of pagan Germanic peoples, so it’s not quite the same thing as the Hebrew Scriptures. In this, Boman almost trivializes the whole question. He waxes lyrical about how this still somehow gets at the truth, referring to a mystical and unexplainable unity in Creation that somehow reflects the divine nature, but his affirmation of the Scripture still gravely misses the point. This is the common western approach of spookifying something the Hebrews clearly understood.

Then again, I didn’t expect much better.

When Jesus rebuked the storm and the sea, it obeyed. This was no mere poetic metaphor. Every time He made a demand of the natural or spiritual world, it was the exact same thing. He treated nature as if it were literally alive and capable of responding to Him personally. It was His domain; that’s the Hebrew outlook.

It bears only a superficial resemblance to the superstitious outlook of the pagan Germanic and Scandinavian countries who feared the forces of nature. When Christian religion came to those northern lands, they did not fully absorb the Hebrew outlook, but a very paganized Christian understanding. The Bjørnson mentioned in the book, while a major literary giant in Norway, was a socialist materialist, using the old superstitions to sell poetry.

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Not Today

Posted on September 16, 2024 by ehurst

Break today. The Lord is at work and there are things that take priority over the scheduled message. Tune in tomorrow for more on Bomans’ book.

For now, there’s this message: The greatest miracle is when the Lord changes what’s in your soul. All the other blessings regrading things physical in or around your body are just window dressing. The mountain that must be moved is within us. Build an expectation that the Lord will interrupt your plans, because if He told what was up, you would spoil it.

We need the power to face tribulation with grace, to keep our eyes focused on His glory. We are in for some really nasty stuff, and the one thing people need to see is our resolute commitment to Christ. We need to lead His children out of bondage to the lies of mere humans.

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HTCG 02d

Posted on September 15, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2 continues.

Section C: The Impression of Things

Part 3: Comparison with Plato’s Symposium

Recall that the previous post left off mentioning the Hebrew outlook on human sexual union.

What Boman only hints at in this part would require you read at least a summary of the Symposium. The Greeks had an entirely paganized attitude toward human sexuality that would shock any western church folks. The Hebrews were not shocked, just repulsed at the Greek acceptance of sex between men as normal. Need we mention God condemned it as a sin justifying stoning for covenant folks and slaughter of Gentiles?

Still, let’s be honest about what the Symposium tries to say. It’s a drunken party attended by several famous speakers who each gave a speech in praise of Eros, the Greek god of love. It’s not solely base on sexual lust, because it doesn’t include rape or molesting little children. It’s all about ostensible adults voluntarily exchanging sexual favors with some kind of high regard for each other. The speech by Aristophanes consists of a theory that humans were long ago joined together as doubles united back-to-back. His whole point is that all of us suffer from at least a vague sense of isolation and separation from other humans because a couple of gods were angry and split the double humans apart.

Boman doesn’t tell you: Hebrews were aware of that sense of isolation, but regarded it quite differently, with no such mythology. It wasn’t a basic human need, just something we endured as part of the Fall, which God may or may not choose to mitigate for you. If we do not unite in spirit with God, no amount of human union will help.

Still, the Greeks considered it a serious human necessity, and it justified their sexual depravity, with the claim that there’s something higher than just lust involved. It’s mankind’s quest to restore a one-to-one unity to escape feeling so lonely. I think it’s patently silly that Boman wants to suggest that there is any connection between this story and the Hebrew outlook on anything when he can’t be bothered to share with us the contrasting attitude of the Hebrews.

At the same time, I might note in passing the western churchman’s sense of repulsion at human sexual depravity is quite overwrought. If a queer “hitting on” you feels like an insult and makes you angry, there is something quite wrong inside of you.

We’ll end this post here because Boman’s Part 4 justifies a whole post.

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NT Doctrine — Hebrews 6

Posted on September 14, 2024 by ehurst

This chapter is one of those Bible passages that suffers a lot from translation in English. It was bad enough translating Hebrew thoughts into Greek. It’s easy to miss what the writer is telling the Hebrew Christians in Rome.

The rise of the rabbinical Talmudic teaching had robbed the common Hebrew people of their deep cultural heritage. The previous chapter ends with the author warning that they had forgotten too much of the Old Testament oral lore, and should have by that time reawakened it and become instructors. Why must we wade back through the basic meaning of Messiah, leaving behind the Talmud in favor of personal submission to God? Do we need to rehash the symbolism of baptism (a ritual of allegiance to Christ), why we lay hands on each other in prayer (that’s how God works through us), that He promised to retrieve us from the grave when He returns, and all the promises regarding the Final Judgment?

The nature of a Christian is to grow, but the way his readers were talking, it would seem they were ready to back up and rehash, not just the teachings the way rabbis do, but to walk backward through the giddy first experience of the miraculous powers of the Holy Spirit. If you’ve actually tasted those divine powers, how can you back out now? Would you expect to someday, when the persecution dies down, to pick up where you left off?

The writer warns them that if their spiritual rebirth was genuine, to bail out on Christ’s domain means He bled and died for nothing. It’s a denial of the New Covenant. And if you could leave it behind, there’s no way in God’s Creation you could ever come back. To enforce that, he points to the parable of the soil that is sown. Once God rains on it, if that soil sprouts nothing but weeds, the whole pasture gets set ablaze at harvest time. It is defiled ground that is never sown again.

Surely the Hebrew Christians in Rome are better than that! He cites the example of Abraham. God’s promises did not fail, despite Abraham’s failures. Rather, God carried Abraham through those bad times, and faith remained alive. Abraham laid claim to promises he never saw come true; it was his feudal grant from God. The persecuted believers in Rome were going through tough times, no doubt, but if all they cared about was this world as it now is, they’ll never see the promises waiting for them in Heaven.

There is no higher authority by which God can make such a promise except Himself. The author quotes from the passage where Abraham was commanded to offer his son, Isaac. In that pagan world (including the Roman Empire), humans often swore on the names of deities to solemnify an oath. It was supposed to indicate they took the matter seriously, because atheism was unheard of. They might escape human detection, but gods were expected to punish those who blasphemed by lying in the name of the gods; they really believed that. But there’s no one above Jehovah on whose name He could swear. Indeed, if He gives His Word, reality will change to match it. That’s the power of His Word.

Our hope in Him is an eternal anchor that outlives our human existence. Our hope reaches into Eternity, to the very presence of God Himself, as symbolized by the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies on Atonement Day. Except, Christ is a priest of a far higher order, and He is the reality on which the ritual symbol is based. When He cried out that it was finished, the Temple veil was torn open forever.

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HTCG 02c

Posted on September 13, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2 continues.

Section C: The Impression of Things

When a Hebrew text does address any sensory experience of smell, taste or color, we can usually pick up on the meaning. If we can make adjustments inside our minds about the moral meaning of various symbols, we are in a better position to estimate how such descriptions impacted the Hebrew reader.

Part 1: Images of Weakness, Transitoriness and of Reliability

Some are more obvious: flesh symbolizes weakness and flowers are ephemeral. Stone features of the landscape are somewhat more variable. For the Sumerians it typically symbolized a deity, but other cultures of the ANE were not so consistent. For Hebrews, mountains could be easily crushed by God, but quite often, a solid prominence of stone symbolized the safety and reliability of God.

Part 2: The Image-bearing Quality of Things in the J Narrative of Creation

I’m going to ignore Boman’s blather about the Documentary Hypothesis and stay with the main point.

It’s quite very easy for translators to forget that a great many natural features were mentioned symbolically in the narrative, and we often find a reading that seems odd because it was translated literally. Specific phrases “dust and ashes” or “dust of the earth” signify human mortality and insignificance against heavenly affairs. This was commonly understood across the ANE.

The difference between creation by word and creation by making, for example, as a potter, is of no consequence in Hebrew as it would be in Greek. For the Hebrew, and much of the ANE, the deity is the maker and the product is not of the same quality as He. The whole point is the purpose of the thing made, not some abstract idea regarding its form. Boman takes us back to the disagreement between Greek and Hebrew thinking on this issue. To the Greeks, a cooking pot is the basic idea, the material is a separate matter. To the Hebrew, the material defines how the cooking pot can be used, so that each pot of different materials is a different idea. There is no abstract concept of cooking pot; they need to know what the material was or it has no useful meaning.

Coming back to the Creation narrative, it’s not so simple as the Egyptian deity Chnum making man like pottery (it’s not likely literal for Egyptians, either). For the Hebrew, it’s rarely stated that way. It’s not so much that man and animals were made from dirt, but that dirt is where they belong. They are part of the same underlying fabric as the rest of the earth.

However, in the case of the woman, the material is critical to the image. She still participates in the fabric of mortality, but being made from part of the man indicates a relationship with him that is altogether different from how either of them relates to the rest of the world. Our problem is that the writer’s choice of the rib clearly holds special meaning that isn’t obvious to everyone. (I take the position that it relates to how the Hebrew word for “rib” is also a beam in a house. She is an essential member of his life as a whole.)

Boman does note that when the man names all the creatures, it signifies that they belong under his authority. They are in his domain, as is the woman. Instead of commenting further on that implication, he spends some words protesting the common western cultural vibe about sex as one thing, but marriage another. In Hebrew, the only way they could be separate is to violate the moral fabric of Creation.

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HTCG 02b

Posted on September 12, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2 continues.

Section B: The Impression of Men

Part 3: The Idea of Beauty

Boman starts off here with a word-salad. Any attempt to discuss beauty is very challenging. We all know what it is when we see it, but it’s very difficult to describe what it is in the abstract. You can assess any visual presentation as beautiful, but the moment you start to point out elements, you lose the focus of the whole. As he notes, the individual elements themselves aren’t necessarily beautiful. He also notes that the viewer must be able to comprehend something of the presentation in order to its beauty to be recognized.

Therein lies at least one key: It must trigger a sense of what is good in those who behold beauty. Those who don’t like something will not see its beauty. For Greeks, it was anything that spoke to their sense of harmony, tranquility and order. As one begins to experience beauty on one level, it sharpens the appreciation of beauty by types, not just one example. If they continue in developing an appetite for beauty in the world around them, it carries them to a sense of universal appreciation for the beauty in reality itself. Plato treated this as progress in self-development.

Thus, Boman starts trying to pull the Hebrew world into this by equating blessings from above as equivalent to the goodness Greek men see in the material world. Again, he sometimes tries so hard to blend the Hebrew and Greek that he slips away too far from one or the other, almost making it unrecognizable. Equating mental and spiritual is, I think, going a bit too far.

He does try to distinguish them again, by pointing out that the Greek sense of beauty would point to the Hebrew sense of beauty as somewhat barbaric and lacking a high development. In the Song of Solomon, the sense of what is beautiful is that which is as it should be in terms of moral valuation. Greeks believed one should discover what beauty was or could be, while the Hebrew came with preconceived notions, with the definitions already established by revelation.

But Boman doesn’t say it like that. Hebrew culture is revealed from Heaven, not built by men. It is drawn from a God who is entirely unlike us, and yet paradoxically familiar to us if we seek Him. Greek culture is just the opposite, making their gods nothing more than supermen who aren’t radically different in their behavior and value system than fairly ordinary Greek people. These are pretty basic statements about the differences that you might learn in classical studies programs going back centuries, but Boman skips past that.

One thing that we would struggle to grasp beyond it being a mere intellectual recognition: It appears that an ancient Hebrew would have no appreciation for the kind of thing that so enraptures our western minds in something like well-staged photography of natural wonders. We are seized by such things, and Hebrew people would have probably not have given it much thought unless it was some place they knew, some place in which they had blessed experiences of God’s favor. Their appreciation would be on entirely different grounds, entirely different terms. Boman struggles to tell us that.

He does note that Hebrews seemed to have an obsession with both red and white colors. Further, they didn’t seem to distinguish much between red shading into brown and gold. Part of that is because they didn’t have our color-wheel and the analytical structure that was possible only with artificially produced colors. For Israelis, red dye was very expensive, as was the process of getting anything close to true white. Of course, gold was also quite expensive. The point would be just how unobtainable those colors were when valued against any blessing God chose to do for them.

I’m frankly disappointed that Boman’s work lacks basic comparative civilizations studies.

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HTCG 02a

Posted on September 11, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 2: Impression and Appearance — This is where Boman examines the comparisons between Hebrew and Greek thinking when it comes to portraying someone or something.

Section A: The Impression of Buildings

The western mind is generally obsessed with reproducing a visual impression of things. When Greeks described a subject, the intention was to convey as closely as possible what your eyes would see. Boman correctly warns that, when reading the Old Testament, the Hebrew people never once had any concern for describing in the sense of photography. Their whole thrust was to offer a dramatic impact leading to a moral impression.

In a footnote he makes the critical distinction that Daniel 2 does not even tell us whether the statue was of a human figure or something else entirely. The whole description is consumed with the materials and what those represented.

The narrative of God commanding Noah to build the ark offers nothing of its appearance, only it’s construction. Not a single word of the Tabernacle’s design could give you a distinct impression of how it would appear to someone. The same tone continues through the furnishings — no visual detail. The details of Aaron’s and his sons’ garments don’t offer a clue to their appearance.

We know that Moses was “shown” a model of the Tabernacle, and David seems to have presented drawings to Solomon for the Temple, but nothing of the appearance slips into the narrative. It never occurred to the Hebrew mind to consider such a thing. No Hebrew cared much about the visual symmetry or beauty, only how it was made and how it was used.

Section B: The Impression of Men

Part 1: The Beauty of Renowned Persons

Hebrew standards of physical charisma are wholly unknown. We cannot guess what “beauty” meant in that sense. Rather, we are offered in just a few instances the passing remark that some people did have charisma, but we get the impression it had more to to with their demeanor and the impression they gave to others of having something divine in them.

Chasing a tangent here: The Men’s Red Pill community noticed some time ago that plenty of western men who didn’t appear especially striking visually could still project charisma by how they spoke and carried themselves. However, a western man’s impression of femininity is still dominated by a woman’s visual spectacle, which can be only slightly enhanced by charming feminine movements.

Part 2: The Descriptive Lyrics in the Song of Solomon

Even in the Song of Solomon we are forced to confront the Hebrew lack of interest in actual visual impression. The descriptions are all metaphors pointing to moral qualities. If taken as visuals, some of them would portray what we might take as deformities.

For example, the Hebrew talpiyyoth is typically translated “tower, fortress”. It does not offer a visual description, but the sense that the thing is strong and trustworthy, a good place of refuge in trouble. It’s not meant to be admired like scenery, but to provide security. Of course, the poetic thrust here is taking refuge in the lady’s charms from the ugliness of the world outside the bedroom.

Boman also notes that these features withstood the assaults of others (virginity), but is freely opened to her beloved. He makes much of how it represents a refined lady aloof from the rabble of the unworthy men. He goes on at length about this and similar images. A dove represents purity and innocence. Cool spring waters are the most highly desired refreshment in a place like the Middle East.

In the midst of more chapter-length footnotes in this section, Boman points out something that should have been in the main text: The Hebrews were quite candid and matter-of-fact in talking about sex organs where appropriate, but we get no visual effects from it. Indeed, in Hebrew society, nudity, live or represented in art, would have been utterly shameful. The Greeks would have been candid visually, boldly displaying a fine nude body in public, but would have been offended by the verbal bluntness of the Hebrews.

The whole thing with flowers is not their fragile visuals, but the heady fragrance. It’s similar to the mention of fruits, in terms of taste sensation. Keep in mind: Ancient Near Eastern societies knew nothing of candy and pastry, and our sugar didn’t exist for them. Thus, fruit was about the sweetest extravagance they tasted. To enter a private garden to eat fruit represents an invitation to come into the bedroom. Again, it’s the privileged openness to the heroic husband, and no other. Furthermore, fruitfulness is all about having children.

The lady’s attraction to the man is in terms of his power and social prominence, along with his virtue as a protector and provider.

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HTCG 01g

Posted on September 10, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 1 continues.

Section E: Collective Concepts and Ideas

Part 2: Platonic Parallels

First, a brief reminder here. I learned from linguistic experts that Greek, as with other western languages, tends to see language as a conveyance of content. Words have pools of meaning. Hebrew sees their language as signposts to a land or persons worthy of acquaintance. There’s a whole lot more than can be put into words. Boman never got this message.

Instead, he offers an explanation that is only half-correct. Quoting someone else, he lays out that Hebrew language is composed almost entirely of nouns and verbs. Thus, it is things and people who act, and their actions. Virtually all verbs are active, portraying something you cannot miss. By contrast, Plato’s ideas leave us with a language that is more passive, though solid enough. He expends a lot of words portraying the action of a magnet “passively” drawing things to itself as a metaphor for the Greek language.

Boman then says a lot in trying to convince readers that Plato and Greek language don’t actually portray man on his own power seeking the Good (equating it with God). This he says, referring to a culture that was notorious for being inherently man-centric. Man was the measure of all things in Greece, and Plato was partly responsible for that. This time, instead of pulling Hebrew toward the Greek philosophy, Boman drags Plato closer to the Hebrew.

The one thing he fails to address head-on so far is that Greek aims to make ideas and language impersonal and objective. The Ideal, the Good, is static and unchanging, while the Hebrew God was most emphatically a living person.

The chapter ends there.

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HTCG 01f

Posted on September 9, 2024 by ehurst

Chapter 1 continues.

Section D: The Word

Part 2: The Word in Greek Thought

Boman avoids the bigger question of “word” in Greek thought and restricts his explanation to what he considers the correlations with Hebrew. Thus, the only Greek word that matters here is logos. It’s based on lego “to speak”. That leg- root suggests pulling things together in an orderly fashion. Thus, logos points to “speak, reckon and think.” Boman offers a brief history of how the term became so heavily used after some time among the Greeks. It came to signify the rational order of ideas that one could enunciate about something.

He boils it down to this: Just as dabhar is characteristically Hebrew, so logos is characteristically Greek. He sees them as the pinnacle of cultural identity for each. He works hard at trying to converge them with a little chart portraying two intersecting thrusts of meaning. Our English term “word” is, he believes, an appropriate intersecting point.

He closes the section with a quick review of his thesis about “word”.

Section E: Collective Concepts and Ideas

Part 1: The Hebrew Collective Concepts

Here Boman chases his tail again trying to pull Hebrew thought out of the mystical realm where it belongs, but only half-way, as it were. He invests a Hebrew mind with a wealth of intellectual concretion that most experts say was not there. Still, he avoids nakedly equating it with Greek thinking.

Then he moves on to the Hebrew sense of generalities about people, referring to this as Hebrew collectives. He sort of misses the point that the Hebrew reckoning arises from moral recognition of the various tribes of mankind. They are what they are because people choose a role in the divine drama being told; they present a loyalty to something (i.e., faith). Instead, Boman makes it a very simple collectivism that mostly ignores individuals, contrasting it against western individualism. I’ve often said that this is a false characterization of Hebrew thinking.

He goes on striving like this for a couple of pages, trying to define Hebrew thinking in terms that simply don’t match the established scholarship. Things and people and natural forces are all recognized by who they are, not what. The subject is known by how it fits in the moral frame of reference. He comes close to saying something simplistic like, “Hebrew is deductive and Greek in inductive.” That’s merely one’s first impression of Hebrew thinking when all you’ve ever known is western thinking.

Hebrew labels are contextual; you cannot reduce it down to a formula. It’s not something inherent in the thing. Ruth was born Moabite; she embraced the Israeli identity. The only reason the Bible text keeps referring to her as “Moabite” is because it’s critical to the story. The people in Naomi’s hometown would have soon stopped referring to her background until it mattered. She became an Israeli in their minds. The Israeli writers would be very proud of how she found it worthwhile to change her national identity by embracing the Covenant of Moses.

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