Priests When There Were No Priests

From *The Skeptical Review*:

By Farrell Till 

When the Israelites were camped in the wilderness of Sinai, Moses "went up unto God" (Exodus 19:3), which was no big deal in those days. People were always going up to God or God was coming down to them. Anyway, Moses went up to God and Yahweh called to Moses out of the mountain and said that he would make a "holy nation" out of the children of Israel (vs:5-6).

Where Did They Get All The Wood?

Farrell Till shows that the Israelites would not have had access to enough wood (among other major problems) during their alleged 40 years of wandering in the Sinai 
desert. From the Errancy Discussion list, April 27, 1997:

Till 
As noted in an earlier posting, the fire on the altar at 
the door of the tabernacle was a permanent fire that 
never went out: "And the fire upon the altar shall be 
kept burning thereon; it shall not go out, and the 
priestshall burn wood on it every morning; and he 
shall lay the burnt-offering in order upon it, and shall 
burn thereon the fat of the peace-offerings. Fire
shall be kept burning upon the altar continually; 
it shall not go out" (Lev. 6:12-13). Even if this 
statement were not in the sacred word, we 
would have to conclude that the fire on the altar 
had to burn continuously, because the daily 
sacrificial rituals, officiated by only three priests 
(four after Aaron's grandson Phinehas was 
ordained), would have had to burn continuously. 

Sins Of The Fathers (3)

Farrell Till continues his rebuttal of David Ariel's evasions:

The lengthy section that Ariel skipped over has been snipped.

ARIEL First I maintain that when David made his speech "I alone  sinned" it was David's opinion and plea which any righteous  monarch would use before his God.

TILL

YOU maintain this, but in this forum we like to see arguments 

to support what one maintains. Such arguments are 

conspicuously absent in your replies. Please understand that 

argumentation by asserting, question begging, and special 

pleading is frowned upon in this forum.

Is it your contention that David was wrong when he said that 

he ALONE had sinned? Furthermore, David asked a question: 

"What have these sheep done?" If David was not the only one 

who had sinned, then state specifically what the "sheep" had 

done and support your answer with textual evidence.

By the way, I hope you will study this posting to take notice 

of how a serious debater will take his opponent's material 

and reply to it point by point.

Sins Of The Fathers (2)

Farrell Till answers David Ariel's reply to Till's first post: ARIEL  MY answer to Mr. Till's question: A) Exodus 30:11-13 states: "God spoke to Moses saying:  When you  take a census of the Children of Israel, according  to their numbers,  every man shall give God an atonement  for his soul when counting  them so that there will not be a  plague among them when counting  them. This shall they  give, everyone who passes through the census, a half-shekel (coin)..." It is Jewish tradition that counting the people will cause a  plague because it expresses a symptom of haughtiness and  general lack of realizing that one must always work on spiritual  growth.

TILL
This may be a Jewish tradition, but you won't find any basis 
for it in  the text you quoted above. The text is stating that the 
"plague" would  come if the census tax of a half shekel of silver 
was not paid by those  who were counted. In other words, the 
census wouldn't have caused  the plague but failing to pay the 
tax would have, so are you suggesting  that if everyone who 
was counted in David's census had paid a half  shekel of silver, 
there would have been no plague? If so, quote the  language 
in the text of 2 Samuel 24 or 1 Chronicles 21 that justifies 
this conclusion?

Sins Of The Fathers (1)

On the old II Errancy discussion list Farrell Till had a debate with David Ariel in which Ariel defended the inerrancy of the Old Testament. Till began the discussion with the following post, May 3, 2002. More of the debate will follow in the coming days:

TILL

David Ariel has agreed to engage in a debate in which he will be defending the inerrancy of the Old Testament (Tanakh). I will begin the discussion by posting what I consider to be an example of biblical discrepancy, which he will then respond to.

In the debate on biblical inerrancy that Mr. Ariel has agreed to engage in, I will not be confronting him with examples like the discrepancies about the number of horses Solomon had or the age of Ahaziah when he began to reign, because these are the kinds of discrepancies that biblicists will pass off as copyist errors. Instead, I will be showing that the Bible contradicts itself on fundamental points of doctrine. In other words, the Bible will claim one doctrinal point here but a contradictory doctrine elsewhere, or the Bible will teach a doctrinal point that important biblical characters, including even Yahweh himself, ignored or disobeyed. These are discrepancies that cannot be dismissed on the grounds that the "original autographs" may not have contained these or that scribes miscopied or such like. They are discrepancies that require sensible explanations, and I will be interested to see how Mr. Ariel fares in giving us those sensible explanations.

In this posting, I am going to recycle an argument that I posted when Joe Carter was on the Errancy list trying to defend biblical inerrancy. It should be interesting to compare what Mr. Ariel says with the "explanation" that Carter posted to a discrepancy in the Old Testament concerning vicarious punishment. The Old Testament very plainly teaches that descendants were not to be punished for the crimes of their ancestors. My purpose in this first posting will be to explicate relevant passages to show that this doctrine was clearly taught in the OT. Then later I will explicate examples that show this doctrine was flagrantly violated with not just Yahweh's approval but sometimes as a result of his own decrees.

Scientific Boo-Boos In The Bible

From *The Skeptical Review*, January/February 1991 issue:

By Farrell Till

Bibliolaters claim that the Bible is inerrant in every detail, in matters of history, science, geography, chronology, etc., as well as faith and practice. It is a claim that has won wide acceptance among fundamentalist Christians, but, as is true of most zealotic tributes that have been paid to the Bible, it has no basis in fact. As past articles in TSR have clearly shown to anyone who really wants to know the truth, the Bible is riddled with mistakes. Many of those mistakes were scientific ones.

The creation account in Genesis divided time into days and the days into evening and morning for three days before the sun was even created (1:1-19). "There was evening and there was morning," we are told, "one day... a second day... a third day," but as any astronomer knows, evening (night) and morning (daylight) result from the earth's rotation with respect to the sun. With no sun, there would have certainly been evening or night, but there could have been no morning.

On the fourth day when God created the "two great lights" (the sun and the moon), he created the stars too. This creation of the rest of the universe was treated by the Genesis writer(s) as if it were little more than an afterthought: "he made the stars also" (v:16). To the prescientific mind that wrote this, it probably made sense. To him (her), the earth was undoubtedly the center of the universe, but today we know better. The solar system of which earth is only a tiny part is itself an infinitesimal speck in the universe. Surely, then, the creation of the stars would not have occurred so quickly and suddenly if six days were needed to create the world. Scientists now know that the creation of stars is an evolutionary process that is still ongoing. Matter coalesces; stars ignite, shine, and eventually burn out or explode. From the existence of heavy elements in our solar system, astronomers generally agree that it formed from debris left over from a supernova that occurred billions of years ago. The prescientific Genesis writer knew none of this, however, and that is why he viewed the creation of the universe as an Elohistic afterthought. No modern, scientifically-educated writer would have made that mistake.

Two Goliaths?

More nonsense from desperate biblical inerrantists. From the Errancy Discussion List, Nov. 14, 1995:

RH 

All right, I think inerrancy is a good test to use because the Bible is alleged to be the word of God and to be so, it must not contain any errors. If the Bible contains errors, or is errant, it cannot be the word of God. Inerrancy is one test that I think we should use to determine if the Bible is the word of God. What else is needed?

TILL

I don't think we are communicating on this point, Roger. I'm trying to find out how one can go about "testing for inerrancy." I can't really see that fundamentalists "test" inerrancy. When confronted with a text whose face-value meaning contradicts the face-value meaning of another text, they just arbitrarily assign a figurative or possible-but-unlikely meaning to one of the texts. I can't see that this is a valid way to test inerrancy. As I have offered to do in past postings, if you or anyone will send me an example of contradiction or inconsistency in a nonbiblical historical document, I will use inerrantist methods to show that the contradiction or inconsistency doesn't exist when my "explanation" is accepted. However, I can't see that such an explanation would constitute a valid test for inerrancy in the document, because it lacks corroborative proof and fails to recognize the possibility that errancy might actually exist in the text.

Let me give an example of what I think would constitute a valid inerrancy test. The Bible says that David killed a Philistine warrior named Goliath who had a spear whose !"staff was like a weaver's beam" (1 Samuel 17:7), but 2 Samuel 21:19 says that the Philistine Goliath "whose spear was like a weaver's beam" was killed by Elhanan. Errantists consider this a "doublet" that found its way into the Bible by writers who incorporated two separate versions of a legend into 1 Samuel. In one legend, David killed Goliath; in the other Elhanan killed Goliath. Inerrantists, however, argue that this is not a doublet, but separate incidents. In other words, there were two Goliaths "whose spear was like a weaver's beam." David killed one of the Goliaths; Elhanan killed the other. Period, end of the discussion! The discrepancy is resolved, and the Bible has passed the "test" of inerrancy.

Inerrantists, however, fail to realize that just because the postulation of two Goliaths conveniently resolves the problem, it in no way proves that there really were two Goliaths. However, the problem could be satisfactorily resolved if archaeologists should discover extrabiblical records left by the Philistines that clearly and unequivocally refer to the existence of two giants named Goliath. We would also need some kind of archaeological evidence that David existed, because many scholars consider him to be sort of the "King Arthur" of Hebrew folklore. To date, archaeologists have discovered only two very questionable references to David in nonbiblical references. Archaeologists have discovered nonbiblical references to Ahab, Omri, and several other Israelite kings less prominent than David but no indisputable references to David, the most famous king of them all, and this seems strange indeed in view of the prominence that he was given in biblical documents. So if confirmation of David's existence and the existence of two Goliaths could be obtained through extrabiblical records, this would be a reasonable confirmation of the Bible's accuracy in its references to two Goliaths. In the absence of such evidence, however, the two-Goliaths explanation of the inerrantists is pure speculation that proves nothing at all about the Bible's accuracy in this matter.

F. Till

More Inerrantist Desperation

From the Errancy Discussion List, July 31, 1995:

Nanson
...(the)...prophecy from Isaiah, which says that he'd [Jesus] be dead for 3 days and 3 nights.

TILL

Isaiah made no such prophecy; in fact, there is no prophecy ANYWHERE in the OT that the Messiah would rise from the dead on the third day. Yet Jesus allegedly said in Luke 24:46 that it had been "written" that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead the third day, and the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:4 that Christ had risen again the third day "according to the scriptures," so here are two NT passages that allege that the OT had spoken of a resurrection of the Messiah on the third day. I have made the challenge enough in both public and written debates to know that no one can produce any such OT reference. It is my contention, in fact, that there is NO prophecy anywhere of the Messiah's resurrection, period, although both Peter and Paul (according to Luke) claimed that Psalm 16:8 had prophesied of the resurrection (Acts 2:25-30; 13:35). Anyone can read that scripture in context and clearly see that it is straining imagination to the limits to make it a reference to the resurrection of Jesus.

Here is Paul Nanson's chance to make me eat dirt, because I am sending him a cc of this posting. To really show me up, all that he needs to do is produce an OT prophecy of the resurrection of the Messiah on the 3rd day. He can't do it. No one can do it.

Vain attempts have been made to cite Hosea 6:2 as a prophecy of the Messiah's resurrection on the third day, but just look at what it says: "Come, and let us return to Yahweh; for He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up. After two days He will revive us; On he third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight."

Notice the plural objects of the raising up: "He will revive US; on the third day He will raise US up." Taken in context, the reader will see that this was a prophecy that referred to the nation of Israel. To try to make it a reference to the resurrection of Jesus is... well, typical inerrantist desperation.

We will now wait patiently for Nanson or some like-minded inerrantist to cite the OT scripture that said the Christ would rise again on the 3rd day.

Farrell Till