by Carl E. McNair

In Daniel Jeremy Silver's book on writing, (p. 24-25) he cites the example of Abraham’s treatment of Hagar, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan as examples of inconsistencies with the character of God, of the New Testament, he says "... bitter and intemperate condemnation of Jewish leaders as decides, hypocrites, liars, and whited sepulchers are not only baseless charges but have caused centuries of suffering." "Every scripture contains misstatements, false statements, and contradictions--a notion so commonplace that George Gershwin used it in his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess: "The things that you're a liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so."

Where Rabbi Daniel J. Silver is coming from is best seen from the Prologue:

"I was drawn to the study of scripture by the resurgence of scriptural innocence in our times." "The revival of fundamentalist scriptural religion is one of the surprises of the late twentieth century."  "Those of us who received a liberal education in the mid-century believed that fundamentalism was a relic of the past." "The literal understanding of scripture is very much alive."

"Paul denies (according to Rabbi Silver) the continuing authority of the Mosaic Law; Jesus does not. In Jesus’ eyes, the law will remain binding at least until the End of Time: ‘Not an iota or a dot of the law would pass away until all will be accomplished" (Matt. 5:18).

"The Hebrew scripture includes not only factually suspect history but teachings that seem unworthy of humans, much less of God."

"Rabbinical Judaism describes the Sefer Torah, the Five Books of Moses, as spoken and written down by Moses at God’s dictation without change or addition. Maimonides’ medieval formulation sums up the rabbinical position: ‘The Torah has been revealed from heaven. This implies our belief that the whole of this Torah found in our hands this day is the Rotah handed down by Moses, and that it is all of divine origin. By this I mean that the whole of the Torah came with him from before God in a manner that is metaphysically called "speaking"--but the real nature of that communication is unknown to anybody except to Moses to whom it came. In handing down the Torah, Moses like a scribe writing down dictation the whole of it--its chronicles, its narratives, and its precepts.’ (Commentary on Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin, ch. 10)"

7And thou shalt roast (bashal, baw-shal', Hebrew 1310; a primitive root; properly to boil up; hence to be done in cooking; figurative to ripen :- bake, boil, bring forth, roast, seethe, sod (be sodden) tsaliy, tsaw-lee', Hebrew 6748; passive participle of Hebrew 6740 (tsalah); roasted :- roast. and eat it in the place which the Lord thy God shall choose: and thou shalt turn in the morning, and go unto thy tents. Deut. 16:7

Explanation: Lange’s Commentary: "Roast, cook, with reference to the Passover-lamb, not in water, but over the fire 2 Chron 35:13 -- [Our version is here rather an interpretation than a translation. But every Jew would understand at once how it was to be cooked.--A.G.]"

Writing [early forms] was not sophisticated. Without a working knowledge of the language (Sumerian, Hebrew, Syrian...) it is not always clear what the symbols are intended to convey.

A second alleged contradiction is:

"But the problem is not simply exuberance. Scriptures contain contradictions. In Numbers, God consecrates the family of Aaron as priests; in Ezekiel, the family of Zadok."

Nu 3:10 And thou shalt appoint Aaron and his sons, and they shall wait on their priest's office: and the stranger that cometh near shall be put to death.

Eze 44:15 But the priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from me, they shall come near to me to minister to me, and they shall stand before me to offer to me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord GOD:

Eze 48:11 It shall be for the priests that are sanctified of the sons of Zadok; who have kept my charge, who went not astray when the children of Israel went astray, as the Levites went astray.

Zadok, the priest (2 Sam. 8:17) was faithful during the revolt of Absalom, son of David -- a faithful son of Aaron (a priest) is selected to continue the line of Aaronic Priests. How does this contradict?

"The Gospels assume the Jewish calendar, but the Church soon introduced its own". "While each scriptural religion affirmed its Book as God’s Book and treated it with reverence, each interpretation became not only a sacred discipline but a battlefield as believers fought to make scripture say what they wanted and needed it to say" p. 4. Very true--and therein lies the problem!

Satan infused apostates into the Church--in the Old Testament age as well as in the New, in an attempt to subvert the TRUTHS of God’s Word.

The Problem: "Whereas the original scripture tends to be effective, dramatic, and compelling as literature, the second scripture--the Talmud, canon law, and the Shariyah--tends to be prosaic, not at all the kind of book you would pick up to calm distress or anxiety or find encouragement in sorrow. These second scriptures are academic and scholastic documents, written in dry, legal style. Scholastics and theologians turn to their second scripture for definitive answers on issues of obligation and structure" p. 7.

"The human mind being extraordinarily imaginative, commentators have always been able to manipulate texts to give them acceptable meanings. But what of the obvious contextual meaning that is patently illogical or unacceptable? The Bible speaks of a six-day creation. The New Testament describes Jesus as the son of God.... In earlier times, rationalist interpreters explained these texts as allegories or metaphors.... The plain sense of Genesis is that Adam was created separately and specially...."

His assumption: "If you do not assume that a scripture is fully revealed by God, these issues can be easily reconciled; but if God is the author, then every part of scripture must be without error."

His assumption: "Judaism existed a thousand years or so without an authorized scripture and, during that era, enjoyed perhaps its most creative period. Its religious leaders--such as Moses and the other prophets, all of them probably illiterate--emphasized a living tradition rather than a text" p. 14.

His assumption: "Just as eight centuries passed before the Jews wrote down the stories of the patriarchs and Moses, so for several centuries the early Christian Church had texts but no scripture--Gospels were composed not as scripture but as a life of an exemplary man-God. Several centuries passed before there was general agreement on the contents of the Christian scripture" p. 26.

His assumptions are UNTRUE on all counts! God had the ability to write! Moses, educated in the house of Pharaoh, was literate; in the New Testament period, Paul, Peter, James, John, and Luke all wrote under inspiration of the Holy Spirit for the express purpose of establishing Church directives and a factual account of the life and teachings of Christ.

Luke’s Gospel explicitly states:

Luke 11 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, 2 Even as they delivered them to us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; 3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, 4 That thou mayest know the certainty of those things, in which thou hast been instructed.

An alphabet (from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet), is a "set of written symbols, each representing a given sound or sounds, which can be variously combined to form all the words of a language.

An alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate symbol, although this end is seldom attained, except in the Korean alphabet (the most perfect phonetic system known) and, to a lesser degree, in the Japanese syllabaries. Alphabets are distinguished from syllabaries and from pictographic and ideographic systems. A syllabary represents each separate syllable (usually a sequence of from one to four spoken sounds pronounced as an uninterrupted unit) by a single symbol. Japanese, for example, has two complete syllabaries -- the hiragana and the katakana -- devised to supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese. A pictographic system represents picturable objects, for example, a drawing of the sun stands for the spoken word sun. An ideograph system combines various pictographs for the purpose of indicating nonpicturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs for sun and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east".

"Early systems of writing were of the pictographic-ideographic variety; among them are the cuneiform of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the written symbols still used by the Chinese and Japanese"

What converts such a system into an alphabet or syllabary is the use of a pictograph or ideograph to represent a sound rather than an object or an idea.

Concerning the "North Semitic alphabet," "The general supposition is that the first known alphabet developed along the eastern Mediterranean littoral between 1700 and 1500 BC. This alphabet, known as North Semitic, evolved from a combination of cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols; some symbols might have been taken from kindred systems, such as the Cretan and Hittite. The North Semitic alphabet consisted exclusively of consonants. The vowel sounds of a word had to be supplied by the speaker or reader. The present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of consonantal letters only, the former having 22 and the latter 28. Some of these, however, may be used to represent long vowels, and vowels may also be indicated in writing by optional vowel points and dashes placed below, above, or to the side of the consonant. Writing is from the right to the left. ."

"Many scholars believe that about 1000 BC four branches developed from the original Semitic alphabet: South Semitic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Greek. (Other scholars, however, believe that South Semitic developed independently from North Semitic or that both developed from a common ancestor.) The South Semitic branch was the ancestor of the alphabets of extinct languages used in the Arabian Peninsula and in the modern languages of Ethiopia."

"The Greeks adapted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, expanding its 22 consonant symbols to 24 (even more in some dialects), and setting apart some of the original consonant symbols to serve exclusively as vowels." (Mario Pei, David Marshall Lang "Alphabet," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.)

The ancient Chinese alphabet (dating from 2350 B.C.) was contained many symbols which derived from events which are described in the creation story of Genesis, Hebrew Bible -- see The Discovery of Genesis, by C. H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson, c. Concordia Publishing House, Saint Louis, MO.)  Many of the "ideaograms" are contained in current Chinese and Japanese writing symbols today!