Essays discussion

Nor is [the Hebrew Bible] in any common sense a “Jewish” book. Only in the last centuries before the Common Era was there a religious culture that could sensibly be called Jewish. Before much of the earlier Israelite population was effectually removed from its homeland in the eighth century b.c.e. by the Assyrians (think “the ten lost tribes”), the nation was “Israel,” and following the Babylonian invasion of the remaining territory of the tribe of Judah in the sixth century b.c.e., it was mostly a province of one foreign empire after another. In any case, “Jew” means a member of the tribe of Judah

source: Genesis 1–11 Tales of the Earliest World A New Translation and Essays by Edwin M. Good

On the troubles with literally translating “the Lord”

the constant use of the term “Lord” for both the deity and Christ has come to us from cultures immersed in structures of kingship and aristocracy, where what “Lords” were, or even “lords,” was well known. We are not bound in such structures anymore, and the metaphor of a “Lord” or “King” is an anachronism.

The English habit, ever since the King James Version of 1611, of representing Yahweh, the Israelite god’s proper introduction name, as “the LORD” (and in 1611 the English translators knew quite intimately what a “lord” or a “Lord” was) descends from the relatively early Jewish sense that the name of the deity was too holy to pronounce.

Elohîm vs Yahweh

These two words, Elohîm and Yahweh, later occur in patterns that suggest they represent varying strands of the traditional tales they are being used to tell.

Elohîm is the only term for the deity used in chapter 1 of Genesis
Yahweh Elohîm is the only one used in chapter 2 from verse 4 on.

The two interwoven Flood stories:
Flood 1 → Yahweh
Flood 2 → Elohîm

... two narrative strands probably represent somewhat differing viewpoints as well as differing times in Israel’s history when they took their current forms.

The repetitive style reminds me of Homer and Ovid.

The plurality of the Hebrew God:

There is a peculiarity about Elohîm, this designation of the deity: it is a masculine plural noun, the singular of which was probably Eloah, which occurs often in the Book of Job, or perhaps more familiarly El, which is found often elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in some surrounding cultures.

But this plural noun regularly takes, here and elsewhere, singular verbs, unusual for Hebrew, which usually matches plural verbs to plural nouns. Some thinkers believe that the plural form expresses the idea that this god is the final and perfect deity, though I do not find other instances of the use of a plural to denote perfection. There is no way to be certain of the idea or of its reality. This deity was clearly the only one to whom the Israelites were supposed to pay attention. But there are a couple of places later that look as if the storytellers may have been thinking of plural Elohîm.

Turns out the Greeks weren’t the only ones to struggle with the one and many!

It’s so strange to me that speech always, repetitively preceeds deeds. He says so, and so it was.

Whom would Elohim talk to before creation? Why would he develop speech, *if* he was alone before creation?

Though, this isn’t from nothing to something type creatio ex nihilo, this is simply from chaos to order, so at least he wasn’t talking to “nothing.”

In the Hebrew beginning — modifying the vowels: bara vs bero:

The first Hebrew word, usually translated “in the beginning,” poses a somewhat esoteric and difficult problem of grammar. The way the word is written, it says not “in the beginning” but “in beginning of,” the natural continuation of which would be “Elohîm’s creating.” That requires modifying the traditional written form of the verb “create,” which for those who know Hebrew is in a perfect tense, the masculine singular bara’. Along with a number of others, I have translated it as, “When Elohîm began to create,” a more English way of saying, “In the beginning of Elohîm’s creating,” making the verb “create” by a change of vowels into an infinitive form, b e rō’. If that seems a radical thing to do, the fact is that the Hebrew of the Bible, until the Middle Ages, was written entirely in consonants, and one was supposed to figure out what word and form a given collection of consonants would likely come out to. In our case, bara’ and b e rō’ would have looked exactly the same, as their consonants, br’, are the same.

Moreover, one had learned in the synagogue school what the words were considered to be through memorizing them. Languages change over time, as do the understandings of texts. Vowel signs were added to the biblical text in the Middle Ages, and they represent the way the words were pronounced in the synagogue services. To modify the vowels that were added in the Middle Ages is not at all a radical thing to do

Wind or Spirit? (I know what Joyce thinks!)

the creator was not working with preexisting stuff. But in this story, something was there—the empty, shapeless “earth,” darkness, the “abyss,” the wind across waters. The latter is, by the way, I’m convinced, really wind, Elohîm’s wind. Most Christian translations turn the word into “spirit,” often capitalized. That strikes me as deciding on the basis of Christian Trinitarian theology a translation of what the biblical text—the basis of Christian theology, if theologians are to be believed—says and means.

Lia wrote: "Nor is [the Hebrew Bible] in any common sense a “Jewish” book. Only in the last centuries before the Common Era was there a religious culture that could sensibly be called Jewish. Before much of th..."

I'm not sure what Good's point is, beyond a fine semantic distinction, unless he is distinguishing Rabbinic Judaism from the religion of the First and Second Temples, in which case I hope he says so explicitly.

Otherwise, his "any common sense" sounds very much like the old Christian claim that the Bible now belongs to them, as "the True Israel," and not to the Jews. Which doesn't seem to be what he actually has in mind......

Otherwise, it is hard to see what contents, beyond the Five Books of Moses, a "non-Jewish" Bible (like that of the Samaritans, which is so restricted) would contain.

Yes, the Torah (Five Books of Moses), and "Joshua" and "Judges," can be claimed to be pan-Israelite in orientation, and *partly* so in origin. Part of "Joshua" features a Judahite hero, Caleb, in what look like an intrusion in the text, and "Judges" pretty much ignores Judah, although some of it reads like pro-Davidic propaganda.

(Martin Buber, who among other things did a remarkable German translation of the Hebrew Bible, argued that "Judges" was really two short books, one showing that there was no need for a king, so long as God continued to send heroic redeemers, the other taking exactly the opposite position, and both signaled by the repeated information that "in those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right" or "... what was right *in his own eyes.*")

A mixture of probably Northern (Israel/Samaria) and certainly Southern (Judah/Jerusalem) material appears in the Psalms.

Pretty much the whole of the "historical books" -- "Ruth," "Samuel," "Kings," "Chronicles," (especially), and "Ezra" and "Nehemiah" -- are explicitly on the side of Judah's Davidic dynasty and of the Jerusalem Temple, and Judahite in much of their historical material. (And a lot of what concerns the Northern Kingdom of Israel in "Kings" is opposed to its rulers in general and in specific, including the long cycle of legends of the prophets Elijah and Elisha.)

One of the twelve minor (shorter) "writing Prophets," Hosea, is from the Northern Kingdom, and so is the model for the character of Jonah. Amos preaches in the North, but is explicitly a Judahite, as are the rest of the minor writing prophets, so far as anyone can tell, as are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

Much of the other literature -- the "Psalms" as a collection (or set of collections), "Proverbs," "Song of Solomon," and "Ecclesiastes" -- are attributed to David or his son.

"Daniel" (which is very late) is set in the Babylonian exile of Judah. In the Hebrew Bible it is not grouped with the Prophets, but with the eclectic "Writings." So is "Lamentations" -- over the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple -- which is placed with Jeremiah in the Christian Old Testament ordering of the books.

(The location of these suggests they came to be regarded as canonical some time after the Torah and Prophets of the Hebrew Bible, regardless of their actual date. This arrangement also includes "Ruth," "Ezra" and "Nehemiah," and "Chronicles.)

There is a view that "Job" is of Northern provenance, which would account for some of the peculiarities of its language. However, this implies an implausibly early (but not impossible) date. Some of its oddities can be readily explained as (a) conscious attempts at sounding archaic, (b) the influence of neighboring languages, mainly Aramaic, and (c) the fact that it includes references to topics not covered in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, so that there is a lot of strange-looking vocabulary.

Of the remainder, "Esther" (also part of the Writings) does make some gestures in the direction of pan-Israelite sentiment (the protagonists are Benjaminites, ultimately related to the family of the first king, Saul).

In fact the collection as a whole -- including the Five Books of Moses as a group -- seems to show every sign of being assembled in the Exilic and post-Exilic periods, i.e., by in Babylonia by Judaeans, and later in Judah.

Welcome back, Ian! (Not that you were gone for a lone time or anything!)

I see I’m getting into troubles for sharing clippings without context. Thanks for questioning that.

He’s explaining the reasons behind the choices he made as a translator:

my effort here is to assist your entry into an ancient culture to see how it did what it did with some of its tales and its lore.

He just spent a few pages explaining why he’s against using spellings that are modern and familiar to us (Chavah vs Eve, Hebel vs Abel, Qayin vs Cain etc,) or concepts that are too Christianized (Elohim vs “God[s]” or “the Lord,” wind vs “Spirit.”), because the book is not written for “us,” it’s supposed to sound Hebrew, foreign, and strange, and the explicit goal is to preserve that “Hebrewness,” and antiquity setting.

In the middle of that, he clarifies the point is to highlight its setting in a culture very different from ours, it’s unhelpful to think of it the first part of a two volume written-for-Christian book, but it’s also not helpful to think of it as a “Jewish book” in what we commonly think of as “Jew” today — the point being, I think, the book (at least the portion he’s translating, Gen 1-11) was written for a people/culture more ancient and foreign than that.

I don’t know if this is a controversial bias, and if it is, I’m not defending it. I’m just clarifying his emphasis that this is categorically not a book that belongs to or was written for the Christian, but he didn’t want to make it sound like it was written specifically for the group we call Jews today either.

All of this interests me very much.

However, I don't have the bandwidth to read and study this the way you guys have. This worries me that I won't get nearly enough out of the group discussion, or I will be lost in it. Is there any one book you would recommend alongside reading the bible?

Question open to everyone.

Hey Xan, it took me a while but I got used to running behind Encyclopedic-Ian, and stand ready to be corrected, or at least read up on additional materials he shares. He’s one of the main reasons why I continue share clippings — if there’s something iffy or controversial or misleading, I can almost always count on him to contextualize, to explain, to recommend additional readings.

Other than that, I’m probably the most “behind” in that group — I seem to be the only one without much knowledge about the Bible there. That’s why I’m opting for translations with translator’s commentaries.

Lia wrote: "Welcome back, Ian! (Not that you were gone for a lone time or anything!)

I see I’m getting into troubles for sharing clippings without context. Thanks for questioning that.

He’s explaining the re..."

Yes, modern (i.e., in recent centuries) Jewish culture doesn't have much overt resemblance to anything in the Iron Age, and this needs to be communicated. I recall one well-meaning portrait of Samson with his uncut hair, which made him look like an Hasidic rabbi, complete with prayer shawl and tefilin (phylacteries) on his forehead.

So long as he is just emphasizing the antiquity -- and strangeness -- of the material, I have no objections to that point of view. It is useful to be reminded, especially for those who grew up hearing or reading stories from the Bible, that its context is radically different from our own experiences, and that the interpretations we were given or assumed may not match those of the earliest readers.

And, yes, rabbinic Judaism also tended to imagine Biblical Israel rather in its own image, with, e.g., King David having courtiers learned in Torah to consult on ritual questions. But I'm a bit "allergic" to attempts to radically sever post-Second-Temple Judaism (i.e., after 70 CE/AD) from its biblical roots, an idea which has influenced Biblical interpretation for some hundreds of years, sometimes for clear theological reasons, sometimes unconsciously -- and sometimes out of overt malice toward contemporary Jews.

This is particularly ironic since Reformation biblical scholarship depended heavily on the studies of the Hebrew language, and detailed Biblical commentaries, of medieval Jewish scholars. (And Catholic scholars of the time joined in as well, although their Church's official preference for St. Jerome's Vulgate over the Hebrew and Greek sometimes hampered their expression of what they were learning.)

Sounds like the creation of Adam → Animals → Eve was an entirely different event, a second start (again, reminds me of Ovid), that is completely different in method:

So the entire creating process is different in this story from what it is in the first. Here there is no “let there be,” only actions: “forming” the human from dust and “breathing” life into him (2.7), “planting” the garden (2.8), “placing” the man in the garden (2.15), “building” the rib into a woman (2.22). This story describes a deity who gets his hands dirty in the creating process.

Interesting that they were all vegetarians:

Elohîm defines what is to serve as food; it is all vegetable. All the beasts, birds, fish, and humans are to be vegetarians. That appears to be the natural order. So the subjugation of the Earth at this point in the larger story does not include the killing of any living thing for food. The Israelites did not think of plants as living things, though we do. There is no indication that the animals might kill and eat each other. So the whole creation has no carnivores. Later on, after the Flood, the range of foods is enlarged, and meat is permitted. But that is after several things seem to have gone wrong.

So the whole “what did the lions on Noah’s ark eat?” pontification is moot.

This is a little unexpected. Turns out “adam” is just the Hebrew word for “human-species” (though saying that feels kind of anachronistic, did they think of ourselves in terms of “species,” as though they were trained scientists and biologists with an ontic world view?)

The first creative action is the formation of the human (the Hebrew word is ’adam, which you may recognize as what later becomes the name of the first male human, Adam). For now the word is simply a designation, and its basic meaning is “humanity” or, in the case of an individual, “human.”

The budding Nietzschean in me shuddered. Some comments on “pairs” like Good & Evil (RE why prohibit eating from the tree of knowledge)

Pairs of terms like “good and evil” turn up often in the Hebrew Bible, and they are often not contrasting pairs but inclusive ones. “High and low,” for instance, may signify everything in between. “Light and dark” may cover all the shades from one extreme to another. Such a pair has been given the technical term “hendiadys,” derived from the Greek meaning “one through two,” that is, a single subject understood through its two extremes. One thing about such pairs in Hebrew is that they almost never emphasize one of the terms over the other. In this context, I think that “knowing good and evil” really means “knowing everything,” perhaps more strictly “knowing everything knowable”...

Brother K on the problem of having light before light-source!

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky had his characters wonder about that, how it could be that light was created first and only on the fourth day were the sources of light created.

Good’s answer to that:

that is a problem if we take our perception and understanding of the source of light as the only way to think about it. Obviously these storytellers did not think of it that way. They were thinking about abstracts and concretes, about “light” (’ôr) and “lightgiver” (ma’ôr).

Modern-me finds that not very satisfying. I suppose you can also say that “time” and/or “logic” had not been ‘created’ yet ... No human existence, no problem with logic, time, or causality ...

Sounds to me like the second creation itself is already a kind of “fall”:

First vs Second creation:

1: There the humans were put in command of the animals and Earth, and the power over Earth included a very strong term (“subdue.”) This verb is sometimes used for serious abuse and even for rape.

2: The human is put in the garden, as verse 15 has it, “to serve it and keep it.” That sounds like the opposite of the first story, where humans were to “subdue and dominate” everything.

The strong side of “serve” is to “be slave to.” The noun cognate to the verb usually means “slave,” sometimes merely “servant.” Israelites were perfectly familiar with slaves and were not prevented from having them. To “keep” is something like guarding the garden.

We will see the notion of the human as “servant” of the soil several times more. There are places where it means on the surface to “cultivate” or be a farmer. But underneath is that dimension of servitude.

Thus the triumphalism of the first tale about the human function in Earth is completely different in the second.

Whoa, omnipotent/ omniscient creator [ostensibly] came from Plato, not Hebrew creation tale

This deity does not know everything, has not thought through everything, and sometimes incorrectly predicts what will happen. He was not prepared for the human’s loneliness; his first effort to solve it by making animals failed, and only on his third try was the problem solved. We’ll see some of this again later. But it is perhaps important to point out that ideas like omniscience and omnipotence (possessing all power) do not come to us from our Hebrew background. They come from Greek philosophy (Plato’s “the One”), and we have been so imbued with those philosophical ideas that realizing they are not present in our culture’s traditionally sacred book can be something of a shock. Actually, the Hebrew Bible comes closer to knowing an omnipotent deity than an omniscient one. But the philosophically pure idea of the totality is not, in my opinion, part of the Hebrew mentality.

Thanks, Lia. Very interesting and useful.

YW Xan. And thanks for dropping in.

Commenting alone, alone, all, all alone gets lonely in here. Even Elohim got spooked when Adam had too much time on his hands. I wish I could find out what kind of pranks Adam pulled when he was alone, with no smartphones, no books to read ...

Why do you call it Essays? Meaning your essays?

Oh hell no. I’m no good at writing at all, even posting book-reviews makes me self-conscious.

I started using Goodreads as a book cataloguing “app,” — I didn’t know there were discussions and social activities! But I mostly read essays, typically from journals, but also from anthologies, that don’t show up in the Goodreads database, (or I don’t get to claim I “finished” because I only read 7 essays out of 12 in an anthology...), I just thought it would be easier to have a “group” for me to take notes, save clippings, make comments, on the essays I read. (Also no quote-length restriction.)

I know clippings in this thread (so far) are all from a book, but the author calls his translation comments ‘essays’, so ... fair game!

Lia wrote: "Whoa, omnipotent/ omniscient creator [ostensibly] came from Plato, not Hebrew creation tale

This deity does not know everything, has not thought through everything, and sometimes incorrectly predi..."

On this theme, you might want to look at Jon D. Levenson's Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence, which takes a close look at the difference between "incomparably more powerful than anything else" and a philosophically defined "omnipotence." Levenson does agree that explicit omnipotence eventually showed up under Greek influence, and demonstrates that the older view still surfaced in the Talmud and early Midrash (expository and narrative comments on the Bible). (The revised edition of the book is available from Kindle and Kobo, so you may be able to find it through a library.)

He also points out that the Biblical text doesn't concern itself with the distinction between "Creation out of Nothing" (creatio ex nihilo), and "Creation out of Chaos," two possible positions which were later to become of considerable importance, with the former becoming the orthodox stance for both Christianity and, somewhat later, for Judaism.

There is a good, rather dense, two-page article on the topic of Creation in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, and what I find a more simplistic one in HarperCollins Bible Dictionary - Revised Updated

Creation out of Nothing as a dogma seems to have arisen in part to to shore up the idea of resurrection, unfamiliar to Greek and Roman thought, by postulating from the start that God was free to do anything he wanted. But that is a whole other story. It was also invoked against the Gnostics, who postulated a pre-existent defective universe.

Maimonides, much later, insisted on the idea as a necessary belief, in explicit contradiction to Aristotle's idea that the universe was eternal, without beginning or end. This was a position which he perceived as a flashpoint for Jews being exposed to philosophy for the first time.

As far as omniscience goes, it is probably worth pointing out that a lot of God's questions early in Genesis can be considered Socratic in nature, designed to elicit a response, rather than to gain information. This may also show up in, e.g., some of his conversations with Abraham.

See Xan? I knew I could count on Ian to supplement!

The author promises to discuss this omniscience issue again later on, but at this point (still in the garden), I think he’s trying to contrast the two different modes of creation, and to point out the second creation is more improvisational (vs decisive and immediately perfect in the first), i.e. Elohim doesn’t know how things will turn out until he tried, he tries to solve problems but his solutions sometimes fail. So this is not necessarily about his rhetorics.

BTW, I just finished another book (Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity) that mentioned the “problem” of non-omniscient God in Genesis — so I was ready to assume this is “common knowledge” (though the author of the Gospel of Judas seems to be some kind of Platonist...)

Thanks for the recommendations, it’s good to know there are nuanced debates about this. I’m pretty keen to find out more.

Ian wrote: "Creation out of Nothing as a dogma seems to have arisen in part to to shore up the idea of resurrection, unfamiliar to Greek and Roman thought, by postulating from the start that God was free to do anything he wanted. But that is a whole other story. It was also invoked against the Gnostics, who postulated a pre-existent defective universe..."


Since I don’t have those dictionaries ... can I just confirm with you: the two “creations” in Genesis are both about imposing forms to formless, but not creating something out of nothing, right? Good’s translation is pretty clear that they’re NOT ex nihilo, is that the general consensus? Or are there debates on this?

If not ex nihilo, I think you have the problem of where the something else came from. Can God be omnipotent if the something else out of which he creates the world is already there? Who created it?

Now this may not have been the view at the time of the creation stories, but I think it became the view.

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "All of this interests me very much.

However, I don't have the bandwidth to read and study this the way you guys have. This worries me that I won't get nearly enough out of the group discussion, or..."

You presumably already saw my several comments at https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Unfortunately for the present purpose, I spent a lot of time there on net resources, which isn't what you are looking for. Also unfortunately, hard-copy resources can be expensive, unless you are fortunate enough to find a used copy.

That being said, I also mentioned there (or maybe elsewhere) some Study/Annotated Bibles, which sometimes amount to a useful companion to the text (and sometimes aren't worth the time it takes to read the mainly dogmatic notes, unless you are a member of that specific religion/denomination). This can save on finding a second book to read alongside it.

I singled out as recent, and pretty reliable on outside information it cites, The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Although I am not particularly fond of the New Revised Standard Translation it is based on, I find it acceptable.) The edition I linked to contains the Apocrypha as well as the Old and New Testaments, and is described as "Ecumenical", i.e., for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox readers as well as Protestants.

Also based on that translation is The HarperCollins Study Bible: Fully Revised & Updated. Both are relatively secular in tone. I tend to favor the HarperCollins notes myself.

If you are willing to start with the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and pick up the New Testament (and maybe the Apocrypha) later on, an alternative would be The Jewish Study Bible (the Goodreads link takes you to the first edition: the Amazon link has the second, considerably revised, edition).

The other disadvantage (besides the more limited contents) is that you will miss a lot of interpretation that is central to Christianity, and so to western civilization as a whole.

As for a general introduction, but strictly for the Hebrew Bible, my current preference is How to Read the Jewish Bible. It is by Marc Zvi Brettler, one of the editors of the Jewish Study Bible (above), and is quite good on how to recognize biblical genres, and extract meaning from them in an appropriate manner (which isn't always the case).

The first, hardcover, edition appeared as "How to Read the Bible," but the publisher got a lot of complaints that it left out the New Testament, so they decided to specify for the paperback. You may have access to a copy of the older version, and they are nearly identical.

Thanks, Ian. Now I remember why I didn't buy the one I really wanted, the Oxford Annotated Bible: the price. Perhaps HarperCollins.

Any opinion on Eerdmans New Bible Commentary as a kind of general book of background?

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "If not ex nihilo, I think you have the problem of where the something else came from. Can God be omnipotent if the something else out of which he creates the world is already there? Who created it?..."

I was hoping Ian would respond to that, because I don’t know :p

I’m not sure if noting-to-something caused by God is a satisfactory answer to that problem either. If there must be a first cause, identifying that to be this specific Hebrew God is not more satisfactory to me than saying I don’t know. (And then of course there’s the problem of who or what caused Elohim...)

Again, I know very little about Christian doctrines or theology or history, but if I understand this correctly, Augustine made some kind of arguments for interpreting the Genesis as ex nihilo in order to defend Christian theology from competing philosophy.

As mentioned earlier, I just finished reading a book on “the Gospel of Judas,” the unknown author seems to be some kind of Platonist, and the main message of that Gospel seems to be that this material world we dwell in is in fact not real, only the spiritual realm is, we only suffer because we’re like Plato’s cave-dwelling prisoners who attach ourselves to this material world while being ignorant of what’s really real (i.e. the higher realm, the ideal.)

I’m not saying I buy that, but that’s another possible twist on this knot — what if it’s not nothing to something? But rather, nothing that stayed nothing? Everything is an illusion, you don’t exist and neither do “I,” nor my ipad which I imagine I’m thumbing this message on. “I” imagined all that. I carried that perception within “me,” so nothing was ever created — there “is” only consciousness...

Metaphysics is such a strange subject!

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "Thanks, Ian. Now I remember why I didn't buy the one I really wanted, the Oxford Annotated Bible: the price. Perhaps HarperCollins."

Are you thinking about the print or the digital one?

I’m *considering.* But I can’t even decide which format I want ...

Lia wrote: "Good’s translation is pretty clear that they’re NOT ex nihilo, is that the general consensus? Or are there debates on this? ..."

Yes. There are lots of debates on this, some traditional, some current. It doesn't seem to be a really hot topic just now -- except possibly among some Fundamentalist circles -- but scholarly articles on the problem come out fairly frequently.

As Levenson points out, the issue goes back at least as far as early rabbinic discussions of whether it was polite to mention that anything was created before "Let there be light," what was there to be illuminated apparently being a confused mass (*Tohu va-Bohu*), the making of which might be considered undignified for God. (The early rabbis had a habit of injecting little lessons in good manners and proper conduct into discussions of almost any topic.)

I think that a fuller exposition of the problem (and I could go on at considerable length just about interesting positions I don't agree with) should wait for February 1st.

However, I can't let go without mentioning that there is also the position that in debating the point at all we are asking the wrong question of the text, which had other priorities.

Lia wrote: "Are you thinking about the print or t..."

Print. I figure I'll be shuffling pages back and forth all over the book, and I don't like digital for that.

Having said that, the digital price is inviting. Also, I see there is a new edition at half the price of the previous one. Still a lot, but not what I thought it was.

Let me know your user experience if you get it! I like the idea of keyword-searchable digital dictionary, but book as physical object I interact with has its appeal ... unless they’re so heavy they hurt my wrist (or my back carrying them.)

Thanks Ian, I’ll wait to see your Feb post on this.

Lia wrote: "Let me know your user experience if you get it! I like the idea of keyword-searchable digital dictionary, but book as physical object I interact with has its appeal ... unless they’re so heavy they..."

You have a point. The hardcover edition is about 2500 pages. I'll probably get digital.

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "Print. I figure I'll be shuffling pages back and forth all over the book, and I don't like digital for that.

Having said that, the digital pr..."

The hard copies of the Oxford Annotated Bible and the HarperCollins and Jewish Study Bibles, like most of their kind, have same-page notes (sometimes continued to the next page), not end-notes, or chapter-end-notes. They also usually have introductory headnotes to each specific book of the Bible, as well as general introductions to the whole, and sometimes to the main sections (Histories, Prophets, etc.).

So the only shuffling back and forth you would be doing is looking up cross-references (which usually isn't necessary), and consulting a section of maps. A section of appended essays can usually be read separately (as they are not directly tied to any particular passage).

I assume that the digital versions of these all have hyperlinked notes, which IS a problem with anything so densely annotated.

(As it happens, I'm reading the HarperCollins notes in digital format, but as a stand-alone file from OliveTree, so I don't know how well a full edition of it would work.)

On another alternative (with which I am not really satisfied), which I've described before:

This is the complete ("with Full Notes") edition of the NET (New English Translation / Internet) Bible, in hardcopy or digital form. It is supposed to be relatively inexpensive, as it is not backed by a traditional publisher which expects a profit on the whole enterprise (and is aimed instead at "promoting Ministry"). Several software developers have issued it slightly different versions (e.g., whether the notes are given numbers or letters).

The first edition has almost 60,000 notes, and one would think that it covered a whole lot of relevant subjects, but there isn't nearly as much of that sort of useful external information as one would expect.

I've recently been reading a digital version of the NET (New English Translation / Internet) Bible straight through, rather than consulting its notes for specific passages, and I've found that there is a whole lot of unneeded repetition compared to solid data, which is frustrating. This is supposed to be fixed to some extent in the Second Edition, but I haven't seen what they did.

In the several of the digital formats I've used for it, it is hard to just browse the notes, so I didn't notice this sort of thing before.

More annoyingly, a lot of the notes give literal translations which are as clear, or clearer, than the paraphrase adopted in the main text. For example, it seems that it finally abandoned "begat" (or "begot") in the long patrilineal genealogical passages in Genesis, replacing it with the more transparent "fathered," which is the contemporary equivalent. But then someone decided that this was too hard for readers, and replaced the word with "had." This required notes that the intended reading was "fathered," presumably so the unwary would not understand it as "gave birth to."

As this may suggest, it seems to be devoted to what the literary critic / Bible translator Robert Alter calls "the Heresy of Explanation," glossing sentences to help the reader, instead of letting the work speak for itself, and dealing with any really difficult material in notes or a formal commentary.

Indeed, while in some places it seems to be a rather basic-English version, other passages are likely to confuse readers without a large English vocabulary, at whom the translation is partly aimed. For example, in Judges 15:20, it has "during the days of Philistine prominence," for what the note admits is just "in the days of the Philistines."

So I can't recommend it as a stand-alone reading translation. Which is a pity.

However, some of the notes on passages difficult to translate, or whose meaning is controversial, are really good, and set out the options pretty fairly -- although they probably make more sense if one knows a little about Hebrew grammar. I've mostly consulted it on those topics, and it sometimes is very helpful.

By the way, the only digital version of it that seems to work well for me, with (usually) reliable hypertext links between the text and the notes, is the Kindle Book. Which is no longer carried by Amazon.......

Thanks, Ian. No, I don't think an ebook would work if the notes are not inline (same page). I hadn't thought of that. Hyperlinking back and forth between text and notes when there are a lot of notes is very intrusive and annoy me.

FWIW, I played with Nelson's NKJV Study Bible on someone’s iphone, which comes up to 69,918 pages (on the iphone small screen), but the hyperlink works smoothly with no problem. With one click of the blue number, you can jump to the note; with another click (“back to page ___” on the lower left corner,) you return to the passage you’re reading. It works smoothly while I played with it, but text search takes a long time, presumably because it has to comb through some 70k pages of text.

So hyperlinking might not be that bad (assuming you’re using a fast enough device.)

Speaking of, the Nelson Study Bible seems questionable to me. In the “Author and Background” snippet, he claims the Book of Genesis was “written and compiled by Moses in the Wilderness of Sinai. Biblical and extrabiblical evidence points to this fact.” As discussed before, we haven’t even established that Moses factually, actually existed or was real. It worries me when a “study guide” makes this kind of claims. Admittedly I don’t know anything about the Nelson group, maybe I’m just not its intended audience.

More snippet that seemed significant if “true,” this “back story” would certainly influence how one interprets Genesis ... with authorial intentions and all (not that I believe their claims.)

it is clear that Moses wrote and compiled Genesis to encourage the early Israelites while they were preparing to enter the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. The content of Genesis would have been especially significant to them. It explains why their ancestors went to Egypt in the first place, why their nation was destined for another Promised Land, and why God had revealed Himself so dramatically to them in the wilderness.