Q&A: Do You Have a Consistent Approach to Understanding the Bible
Do You Have a Consistent Approach to Understanding the Bible
Question
According to your approach, it is impossible to seriously understand what is being told in the Bible. But you do criticize those who try to give rational explanations for the miracles of Egypt—for example, tides in the Red Sea or a solar eclipse for the plague of darkness. No explanation is acceptable to you, and all the fantastical stories are to be understood literally. On the other hand, when the Bible tells of more than a million Hebrews leaving Egypt, you argue that there is no need to accept that, even though a million and a half Hebrews leaving Egypt is actually not all that fantastical (even if it is less convincing than other approaches).
So what is your bottom line—can one understand what the Bible is saying or not?
And also, when you try to construct some sort of approach for your understanding, how can anything be built on it with the two examples brought above? In my opinion, דווקא the less rational explanations are the ones you accept (the miracle), whereas where maybe one can hold on to a bit of rationality (the number of those who left), according to your approach it is fine to compromise?
Answer
The events and descriptions themselves can be interpreted non-literally if there is a difficulty with them. But regarding miracles, the Bible itself relates to those events as miracles.
The question is not what is more fantastical, but whether there are contrary facts or evidence.
Discussion on Answer
You are insisting for no reason. The Bible not only mentions the event, it also refers to it in several places as a miracle. I do not see any other possible explanation for a miracle.
By contrast, the number could be typological, especially if there are facts against it (and not merely an absence of facts in its favor).
To focus it:
2 million leaving—there are facts against that, according to you.
Hundreds of thousands dying in the plague of the firstborn—there are no facts against that, according to you.
What kind of facts are there against 2 million leaving, but not against hundreds of thousands dying in the plague of the firstborn?
It makes sense that the number 600,000 is typological. It also makes sense that the story of the Red Sea and all the plagues is metaphorical.
The fact that the Torah / Hebrew Bible mentions the miracles multiple times is not strong enough to claim that it is unreasonable to say this is metaphor.
I did not write that there are facts against it, nor that the number is incorrect.
I wrote that if there are facts against it (and people claim that there are), I have no problem interpreting it differently.
All right, I’ve exhausted this.
A typological number? One made up of many smaller tribal numbers, with the number of firstborn set against the number of Levites? (True, the number of firstborn is proportionally very large, but still.)
I still cannot understand why, regarding the miracles, you do not accept other explanations.
Beyond saying that "the Torah repeats this several times as a miracle," I did not find in your words even the slightest shred of an explanation for why one should not accept rational explanations for the miracles.
By the way, as the commenter above me wrote, the Torah also repeats the huge number of those who left, including at the censuses, and even gives fairly respectable detail—more than once. That lowers the probability that this is a typological number.
So then, as I see it, one should make an analogy between the miracles and the number of those who left:
if the miracles are not reasonably interpreted in a clever non-literal way, then the number of those who left is likewise not reasonably interpreted as a typological number.
I did not manage to understand why to split between the two.
All the best
The Bible relates to the event of crossing the sea as a clear miracle, quite explicitly.
But it also writes quite explicitly that 600,000 men left.
I agree that the question may not be what is more fantastical.
But if there are no facts in favor of 600,000, what facts are there in favor of the crossing of the Red Sea or of the enormous number of firstborn who died—whereas those latter things you tend to accept literally, if from the Bible's standpoint everything is told in the same way—as plain fact?