Re: I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG

At 09:26 AM 27/12/2003 -0500, wallyshoes wrote:

And I don't quote his posting, since it is only in one respect relevant to
the young earth discussion.

My uncle, also J.de Koning, but not Jan, was a pastor in a reformed church
and as far as we know slated to become a teacher of Old Testament at a
university before he died in a German concentration camp in1944. He wrote
and proved in his book (in Dutch) "De El-Amarna tabletten en he Oude
Testament'" (published in 1940) that the way numbers are treated in the
O.T. cannot be true. That was not only the first chapters of Genesis, but
all the early books of the O.T.. In the book his main example was the
number of Israelites that went around Jericho. Indeed, the walls that came
tumbling down are found there, but it is humanly impossible, that the
number of people that walked around Jericho is as high as our (translated)
bible says. The size of Jericho was simply too small.

Generally speaking, though, as with any translation, we have to be
carefully to draw conclusions from the (translated) Bible which have little
or nothing to do with our salvation through the death on the cross of our
Saviour. From the lectures I heard at the Christian University I went to:
there are words that clearly translated according to the world view of
translators. "Nephesh" in Gen.1 was "living being" for animals, but in
Gen.2 "soul" for man. That was also clear in Gen.1:1 where "ruach" appears
to be (translated) according to translators sometimes "wind" sometimes
"spirit", sometimes "breath". In general translating is much more that
replacing Hebrew words by English (or other modern) ones. The first
listeners of the original thought of the world as being flat.

Acting as if the modern translation in English, specifically from the parts
written 3,000 years ago, is factually true in any other sense than that we
know from it that God created, that men sinned and thought higher of
himself than was justified, and that then he thought to be able to live
without God. Translating is much more difficult than that. It was already
for me in the army, when as a Dutchman I was reprimanded by a Scittish
sergeant in the British army. To this day I have no idea what I did
wrong. Now in my multilingual family it is even visible every now and again.

Jan de Koning
Received on Sat Dec 27 13:48:07 2003