re: #343 LudwigVanQuixote

No shooting I promise! I don’t doubt that they believe this. I was more or less making an academic point which is that Torah has some very difficult to understand passages, and that there is an entire 3000 year old Oral Tradition to come and explain the language.

These people do not have that Oral Tradition and they do not believe in it. So, they are honestly making a lot of stuff up as to what the Hebrew “really” means.

An example: The words for milk and fat are separated by a vowel. Torah Hebrew has no vowels. So if you come across a phrase like do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk, it could just as easily have been fat, with no context in the text to tell the difference. There would have been entirely different laws of kashrut if taken the other way. However, the oral tradition makes the meaning plain.

This is what bothers me. I do not mind that anyone believes in their own religion. I mind that sometimes they claim to know what mine says without actually looking into it. In this case, her speaker’s interpretation of Yom is way off.

Christianity has its own tradition of Biblical interpretation. I had recourse to Saint Jerome recently (on Matthew 20). I’d like to know if any of this is translated into English; it would make the process easier.

I note that when I look into Protestant commentaries on the Bible, they do refer to Jewish tradition on the OT, but they start from scratch with the NT. I didn’t see Protestants citing Jerome, Irenaeus etc on Matthew 20, despite that these worthies had much of interest to say on it.

You can take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt (I am Catholic) but I think this is a shame; since Jerome and other Church fathers, particularly when they are showing interest in the Bible’s words, are not the enemies of Protestantism. Don’t forget that Jerome’s Vulgate was taken straight off the Masoretic Text; it was the King James Bible of its day…