ellauri092.html on line 223: Many people have wondered, are baptist and methodist the same? The answer is no. However, there are some similarities. Both Baptists and Methodist are trinitarian. Both hold that the Bible is the central text in faith and practice (though groups within both the families of denominations would dispute the Bible’s authority). Both Baptists and Methodists have historically affirmed the divinity of Christ, justification by faith alone, and the reality of heaven for those who die in Christ, and eternal torment in hell for those who die unbelieving.
ellauri092.html on line 261: While there are some similarities to those two churches, each on one side of the street, there are many more differences. And that gulf of differences continues to widen as many Baptist churches continue to affirm a high view of Scripture and follow its teaching, while many Methodist congregations – especially in the United States – move away from that view of Scripture and emphasis on the Bible’s teaching.
ellauri094.html on line 354: One should be skeptical of whether this is a Bible contradiction given the Skeptic Annotated Bible’s track record of inaccurately handling the Bible. See the many examples of their error which we have responded to in this post: Collection of Posts Responding to Bible Contradictions. Of course that does not take away the need to respond to this claim of a contradiction, which is what the remainder of this post will do. But this observation should caution us to slow down and look more closely at the passages cited by the Skeptic Annotated Bible to see if they interpreted the passages properly to support their conclusion that it is a Bible contradiction.
ellauri171.html on line 398: The story continues the Bible’s exploration of the origin of evil in a world created by a God who is all goodness. (Remember the old word game: write down ‘God’ and ‘Devil’; then put an extra ‘o’ in the middle of ‘God’ and take the ‘d’ off ‘devil’; what do you have?) Another one: write the words backwards, what do you get? Dog lived. Okay never mind let's move on.
ellauri171.html on line 595: It is over-retaliation, and it prompts the Bible’s command to limit retribution to ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. Only retribution in kind may be taken if an injury has been suffered.
ellauri171.html on line 1040: In recent years, scholars have tried to reclaim the shadowy female figures whose tales are often only partially told in the Bible. Rehabilitating Jezebel’s stained reputation is an arduous task, however, for she is a difficult woman to like. She is not a heroic fighter like Deborah, a devoted sister like Miriam or a cherished wife like Ruth. Jezebel cannot even be compared with the Bible’s other bad girls—Potiphar’s wife and Delilah—for no good comes from Jezebel’s deeds. These other women may be bad, but Jezebel is the worst.
ellauri408.html on line 442: Once you are able to admit that the Bible’s satanic commandments were authored by evil idiots, it’s not a great leap to figure out that others were authored by blatant liars.
ellauri499.html on line 90: However, I argue that this distinctively Judahite portrayal of YHWH and Baal’s relationship is a later partisan construction that makes a normative claim on its ancient audience, prescriptively mandating the worship of YHWH alone. For this reason, the Hebrew Bible’s polemics against Baal cannot simply be taken as an accurate historical depiction of Israel’s religious history, especially for earlier periods.
ellauri499.html on line 96: Adopting this perspective, I conclude that: (1) Baal worship was traditional to ancient Israelite and Judahite religion down to the end of the monarchic period; (2) YHWH’s cult cannot be said to have originated historically in Bronze Age Arabia—as the reigning “Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis” maintains—but is rooted in the central Israelite hill country in the Iron Age (cf. the “Berlin Hy- pothesis”); (3) YHWH cannot clearly be said to have originated as a storm god, as many scholars maintain, but especially appears to have taken on storm-god features under Baal’s infuence in the Iron II period; (4) YHWH became Israel’s representative god under the patronage of Samaria’s ninth-century Omride kings, who seem to have modeled YHWH on the more popular Levantine deity Baal(-šamêm); (5) YHWH’s associations with the deep south are to be connected to political and economic expansion into the Egyptian Sinai during the ninth and eighth centuries; (6) YHWH officially became Judah’s patron god and the primary deity of the Jerusalem temple under the direct infuence of Omride Israel’s YHWistic political-religious reforms; (7) Jerusalemite YHWism further developed distinctive YHWistic traditions that reflect and respond to Judah’s specifc social-political economy and political-religious history; and (8) the Hebrew Bible’s Baal polemics largely derive from limited Judahite scribal circles in the late monarchic and post-monarchic periods that advocated newly invented insidious political-religious ideologies.
ellauri499.html on line 100: This distinctively Judahite narrative provides an origins story for the Hebrew Bible’s people that renders the northern Israelites as originally outsiders to their land, the indigenous peoples of which are imagined as foreign/non-Israelite, as is their worship of Baal and the other gods and goddesses.
ellauri499.html on line 102: Because of the extreme bias of the biblical sources against Baal, I argue that methodologically the historian must start from the non-biblical evidence to determine the nature of YHWH and Baal’s relationship in ancient Israel and Judah, critically using the Hebrew Bible only in a supplementary capacity. For instance, biblical polemics directed against Baal imply that the goddess Asherah was Baal’s consort (e.g., 1 Kgs 18:19; 2 Kgs 23:4). However, this appears to be a case of guilt by association, since Baal and Asherah never appear as spouses in historical sources outside of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible’s implication that Baal and Asherah were paramours may actually serve to conceal that many ancient Israelites and Judahites believed Asherah to be rather YHWH’s companion.
ellauri499.html on line 104: Whatever one’s views on the Hebrew Bible’s ability to preserve early Israelite and Judahite lore, the general down-dating of biblical texts to later periods offers a profound challenge to the scholar interested in using the Hebrew Bible for historical purposes. The Hebrew Bible’s problematic relationship to history appears especially acute for earlier periods, since there may be no biblical writing that dates before the ninth century, when extended literary writing in local Northwest Semitic languages evidently makes its frst appearance in the epigraphic record of the southern Levant. Therefore eeach biblical text must be critically examined on a case-by-case basis to determine its potential utility for historical reconstruction.
ellauri499.html on line 136: Relying heavily upon the Hebrew Bible’s dominant Judahite narrative, scholars have ascribed YHWH’s formal elevation to the position of Israel’s patron deity to Israel’s Mosaic prehistory, the reign of Saul, King David’s rule, or even Jehu’s coup overthrowing Omri’s royal house. However, I contend that this major shift in YHWH’s identity is to be correlated with Israel’s broader political, economic, and cultural transformation under the Omrides.
ellauri499.html on line 138: The notion that the Omrides promoted the worship of YHWH as the “god of Israel” stands in stark contrast to the Hebrew Bible’s claim that Omri’s son Ahab, under the infuence of his Phoenician wife Jezebel, introduced and officially sponsored a Phoenician cult of Baal in Samaria and tried to eliminate the worship of YHWH in Israel (1 Kgs 16:30–32).
ellauri499.html on line 141: However, the Hebrew Bible’s partisan portrayal of Ahab— judged the worst king in Israel’s history by the Judean editors of the books of Kings (1 Kgs 16:30; cf. 1 Kgs 21:25–26)—and his son Ahaziah as unrepentant Baal worshipers cannot be taken at face value, serving as it does late Judahite political and religious interests.
While some scholars argue that the Baal polemics in the Elijah cycle contain traces of early Israelite tradition, the writers who composed and edited the biblical material in the books of Kings about the Omrides’ worship of Baal clearly were Judean scribes active in the post-monarchic period, hundreds of years af- ter the events portrayed.
ellauri499.html on line 143: In short, the Hebrew Bible’s late, tendentious portrait of the Omrides as ardent Baal worshipers cannot be used to reconstruct ninth-century Israelite religion. Rather, I argue that the evidence points toward the Omride royal court in Samaria as the engine of Israel’s political-religious transformation during the Iron Age IIB, including YHWH’s identifcation as the “god of Israel”, via his translation as a storm god modeled on Baal(-šamêm).
ellauri499.html on line 147: Despite the Hebrew Bible’s polemics against Baal—indeed, because of the evidence that such polemics supply—Baal’s worship, whether as a separate god and/or in convergence with YHWH, also appears to have been unproblematic in Judah prior to the second half of the eighth century, both in royal and non-royal circles.
ellauri499.html on line 155: Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible’s surprising memory that Judah’s founding king did not construct YHWH’s temple in Jerusalem has the ring of historical truth to it, especially in light of biblical apologetics that attempt to explain away this anomaly. Late Bronze or early Iron Age Jerusalem, which was evidently a non-Israelite/Judahite city and whose religious identity early on may have been especially linked to El, the Sun god.
ellauri499.html on line 212: Religious competition was real, and different groups backed different cults Ahab and Omri (and earlier Jeroboam-era traditions) are portrayed in Kings as promoting worship associated with the northern court and its contacts. If you strip away the Bible’s moral framing, the most defensible inference is: there were pro-Baal/anti-Yahweh (or at least pro–other-deity) factions or households in at least parts of Israel/Judah at different times.
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