Do some Old Testament authors scapegoat God with their own prejudices?

Well, I'm back, so I'll give this topic some love again; I have unfinished business here ^^

I just wanted to take a separate post for Psalm 137. You should be aware of the prohpecies of Isaiah, especially chapter 13 verse 16. The psalmist actually says here that whoever God will use to fullfill that prophecy is blessed; it's a plea for God to fullfill his promise. John Calvin said about this that the only time you can pray for such a thing, is if God promised to make it happen in advance.

There's a general remark I want to add to this. You more or less asked in the topic title if some old testament writers changed some things in hindsight. While believing so is certainly bad, it is not bad to genuinely ask this, as you are doing. The same goes for biblical passages that seem weird to us; me and others have been trying to show you that they are not as weird as they may seem to us, people of our own time.

Here's the thing: don't lose you own cultural biases out of sight, especially when dealing with laws from the Torah. God wanted to create a possibility for us to be saved from death (just look at the beginning of Genesis, were God says that when Adam and Eve will eat from the tree of knowledge, on that day they will die; but they didn't, because God wanted to save them and us). God chose the following way to make this salvation reality: He created a people from which His Son would be born more than 1000 years later. And for this people to function as a state all these centuries, there were certain rules to be followed. A lot of those rules were to last from around 1200 BC until Jesus' death, so they haven't been relevant anymore for 2000 years. But as I said, they were rules for God's people so that they could be a holy people. I absolutely believe that every little rule from the mosaic law served the purpose of (at least ceremonial) holiness. But I'm afraid that in order to see that, you have to go through (admittedly) fairly boring pages of the Bible sometimes. It's a plan for a lifetime to pursue this, so why wait?   I started with it a few years ago; I simply wanted to understand the book of Hebrews, and I decided that I couln't understand it without reading the entire Old Testament. And guess what, now I want to study it even more. Maybe it helps that I'm a law student.
So maybe you could start with that: read the book of Hebrews (as I did not do in advance), and then follow a plan to read the entire Bible, or at least start with the first five books.

By the way, about the beginning of God's people, Israel (and Jesus' family tree, for that matter): it's filled with people who have done deeds that you wouldn't be proud of. Both Abraham and Isaac have failed to trust the Lord on multiple occasions, and Jacob was initially a calculating egoist; not exactly flattering facts for the Israelites. You'd think that if some OT writers were to edit things in the Torah, they'd have bigger fish to fry than a few obscure rules

I recently brought this up to my Bible teacher, we have a lot of interesting Theological discussion, I feel like he has imparted quite a lot of knowledge to me, from scripture that I had never realized before.


On this topic, something I had never thought about before is that, at the time all the Levitical law was given, that God was setting his people apart from the culture at the time. They had been in bondage under a people that did as they pleased and worshiped whatever, so God chose laws that may seem ridiculous now, to show the people he loved, that they were His.

I also realize now that when Jesus "fulfilled" the law, (I have heard this term many times before), that He really cleared up and gave us all that we now need to live by, he really sums up all 10 Commandments, in love God first, and love your neighbors as yourself, and then the Apostle Paul cleared up what other laws really still applied

Im not saying that the New Testament has to mention it for an OT law to be applicable, but almost all important ones that effect us are covered and re-affirmed in the NT

Andreas89 wrote:There's a general remark I want to add to this. You more or less asked in the topic title if some old testament writers changed some things in hindsight. While believing so is certainly bad, it is not bad to genuinely ask this, as you are doing. The same goes for biblical passages that seem weird to us; me and others have been trying to show you that they are not as weird as they may seem to us, people of our own time.

Here's the thing: don't lose you own cultural biases out of sight, especially when dealing with laws from the Torah. God wanted to create a possibility for us to be saved from death (just look at the beginning of Genesis, were God says that when Adam and Eve will eat from the tree of knowledge, on that day they will die; but they didn't, because God wanted to save them and us). God chose the following way to make this salvation reality: He created a people from which His Son would be born more than 1000 years later. And for this people to function as a state all these centuries, there were certain rules to be followed. A lot of those rules were to last from around 1200 BC until Jesus' death, so they haven't been relevant anymore for 2000 years. But as I said, they were rules for God's people so that they could be a holy people. I absolutely believe that every little rule from the mosaic law served the purpose of (at least ceremonial) holiness. But I'm afraid that in order to see that, you have to go through (admittedly) fairly boring pages of the Bible sometimes. It's a plan for a lifetime to pursue this, so why wait?   I started with it a few years ago; I simply wanted to understand the book of Hebrews, and I decided that I couln't understand it without reading the entire Old Testament. And guess what, now I want to study it even more. Maybe it helps that I'm a law student.
So maybe you could start with that: read the book of Hebrews (as I did not do in advance), and then follow a plan to read the entire Bible, or at least start with the first five books.

By the way, about the beginning of God's people, Israel (and Jesus' family tree, for that matter): it's filled with people who have done deeds that you wouldn't be proud of. Both Abraham and Isaac have failed to trust the Lord on multiple occasions, and Jacob was initially a calculating egoist; not exactly flattering facts for the Israelites. You'd think that if some OT writers were to edit things in the Torah, they'd have bigger fish to fry than a few obscure rules

Yeah, i think that the Bible revealing so much weakness in it's hero characters is part of it's nature that reveals real events vs. fiction. God seems to utilize the least likely (from our perspectives) to accomplish his tasks, and that is something that I think continues today in many cases. I didn't mean to imply that biblical authors intentionally changed rules or laws, but to rather investigate the possibility of the sub-conscience cultural norms of the times influencing certain things, especially particularly difficult (seemingly absurd) laws like some mentioned above, just like my cultural influence may very well be what makes some of this so difficult. I can certainly see where there is the strong possibility of a cultural disconnect and ethnocentrism at play when a culture 2000+ years removed is examining another.