Interpretation of Texts (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 18:12 (5174 days ago) @ dhw

Under "The Far East", Balance_Maintained and Matt are discussing the geological implications of Noah's Flood and the Exodus from Egypt. I'm certainly not going to dip my toes in the geological waters, but can't help pointing out that many scholars dispute the historicity even of Exodus and the whole background that led to it. One would have expected the Egyptians to have kept some historical record of those events, and I have found an interesting article by Rabbi David Wolpe, who actually accepts that it's all a myth:-www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Judaism/2004/12/Did-The-Exodus-Really-Happen.aspx-It once more raises the whole question of how we interpret texts. What is to be taken literally and what is to be regarded as fact? Who decides? If these allegedly historical sections of the Bible are mere myths, what basis is there for the religions built on them: Passover and Exodus for the Jews; virgin birth, miracles and resurrection for the Christians? Even if we allow for the possibility that Moses was involved in the writing of Exodus (also disputed by many scholars), how reliable was he? If Exodus never happened, what agenda lay behind the fiction? -As for the Word of God, who says that's what it is? The Flood is a third person narrative told by what we call an omniscient narrator (it even includes verbatim dialogues between God and humans), but how did the narrator know all this? Was he God's private secretary? How else would he have known? At least Mohammed and Joseph Smith had the decency to inform us that they had direct contact with the divine. (So too, we are told, did George W and Tony B. Not to mention the Pope.) -I know you're both agnostics and share my scepticism to varying degrees (emphatically so, I think, in Matt's case), but your posts seem to me to be leaving certain things unsaid, so I'm saying them!