[GCFL-discuss] Prophecy

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

I thought I would pass along a short excerpt on Biblical prophecy from a
rabbi I asked a few questions of about the prophecies in Daniel and
Isaiah (Yishayahu in the Hebrew -- you can trace the connection if you
look carefully.,... Ish ay ah).

This perspective struck me as something of a Balm of Gilead for the more
trite and arrogant conflicts that sometimes preoccupy Christians, over
what it means that the Bible is The Word of God, or "the complete and
perfect word of God," what its authority is, and how "literally" to
understand it. (It wouldn't be a bad idea if Muslims applied this
perspective to understanding the Qu'ran either). There is more arrogance
than piety to theological debate, but here is a perspective which puts
the divine and human in their proper relationship, or so it seems to me.

Siarlys


The problem lies in expressing sublime, metaphysical concepts in 
(necessarily) human terms.

Nvi, plural nevi'im, is the word generally translated by "prophet"; 
nevu'a is what they undergo in communicating with the DivineNot being a
navi, 
I have no idea what the experience of nevu'a is 
like, save from the descriptions contained in the literature. It sounds 
like an extrememly stressful, painful, and difficult one for most
nevi'im.

They are made to perceive something ineffable and beyond human capacity, 
and then bidden to describe to others (the nevi'im generally refer to
this 
compulsion as a "massa", or "burden"). This attempt to describe the 
indescribable in human terms results in the highyl figurative and 
allegorical language of poetry, which is the most semantically dense mode

of human expression.

If we then take that "massa" and translate it into yet another human 
language, the distortion only gets greater.

The moral of the story is that you can't take literally much that a navi 
says in the throes of nevu'a, and you really can't translate it well.
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