Talk:Old Testament oddities

Not to sound like I'm defending the fundies here, but there are somewhat reasonable explanations of some things on this list. Like any piece of literature, the Bible contains stories that can be viewed from various angles, some of which invoke deeper meanings than the first-glance "that's weird" reaction. For instance, when God asks Cain where his brother is, it isn't necessarily because God doesn't know what happened--it might be because he's giving Cain the chance to own up. Compare it to what a parent might do when the cookie jar is empty and the five-year-old kid has crumbs on his face--"Junior, what happened to the cookies?" Not saying that's absolutely what the author meant--maybe he had a brain fart and forgot that God is supposed to be omniscient--but it's a pretty plausible interpretation. Some other items here could fall into a similar category or are at least debatable--the "why did God put that tree there?" question comes to mind as well.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have articles like this. I'm just saying that any serious refutation of particular aspects of it (if that's what this article develops into) should take into account the historical/literary contexts. A lot of weird stuff appears in the Bible; personally, I think the authors, writing in their time and place, wrote it in a way that made sense to them, and not in a way that necessarily makes sense in the 21st century. For me, Shakespeare is difficult enough to figure out without a guide--and he wrote his stuff "only" a few hundred years ago. What seems like nutball ravings to us at first glance might be a pretty cool literary device to a dude a few millennia ago.--Bayes^update 15:21, 27 November 2007 (EST)

Concur. Thanks Bayes. Lurker 15:40, 27 November 2007 (EST)

I suppose the Cain and Abel thing may have a point, but for God to ask him this it's odd. God could have asked Adam to ask Cain where Abel was. Also, why did God talk to people then and not now? User:Mectrixctic 23:17, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

The truth of the matter is that there is a very simple explanation for all of the oddities and contradictions: the Old Testament was written by fallible human beings who were speaking in poetic and mystical terms rather than in literal terms. Of course, anybody who would be willing to accept that explanation isn't a fundie in the first place. Perceptron (talk) 04:58, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Mount Sinai

Honest, if people were so easy to convince to start worshipping an idol that Moses had to keep a 24/7 watch on them so that it didn't happen, maybe the golden bull was the real god, and Moses' god wasn't god...

Cain and Able

IS that really an oddity; my understanding of the entire thing was god knew what happened, he was going to cain to have him confess/something along those lines, not actually asking where he was. --il'Dictator Mikal 06:31, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

"Thou shalt not kill"

A pet peeve of mine -- "thou shalt not kill" is not an entirely accurate translation of the Hebrew לֹא תִּרְצָח. (The Hebrew has connotations of unjustified killing, not all killing.) Relying on the English translation can here produce contradictions that weren't present in the original text. Aristos achaion (talk) 04:35, 1 June 2014 (UTC)