Nicola Staff asked 11 months ago
There have been great pains made to maintain accuracy in recording the words of the Torah and handing them down to subsequent generations again and again and again throughout the long history of this body of sacred teachings. So, as much as any group, there has been scrupulous attention to the accuracy in what has been set down and then gifted to subsequent generations, but that does not mean the original stories and all the details recorded happened as the words describe. For one thing, much of the writing is vague and metaphorical. In addition, the language itself can create many vagaries of interpretation, because the Hebrew words sometimes have more than one meaning, so translating the Torah is an exercise in discernment, and educated guesses some of the time as well.
What is ill-considered is that the prehistory of the people described in the Torah, and the world as it began, involves a huge span of time without accurate and detailed recording, because of the inadequate cultural development, to create writing as a symbolic representation of speech and having something of a simple practical nature for recording such symbols. As you know, there are clay tablets going back for thousands of years before the Biblical Era, largely with cuneiform symbols, and so on, but that reflects the difficulty in keeping track of things with accuracy. In addition, there has been much loss of recorded teachings along the way, especially in the era prior to the Torah being formulated. So the Torah itself is a kind of distillation of more ancient history, and then contemporary matters being added over a span of time with somewhat greater accuracy, but not always with a true understanding of what was taking place and why.
Some of the greatest inaccuracy of the Scriptures is the fact that people living in any time and place will have but a meager understanding of their world and why events happen, especially things not in human control like the weather and Earth changes, plagues and pestilence, and so on. There were many interpretations of the nature of divinity and the interconnections with human affairs not accurately understood or recorded. Much was done to obscure useful teachings and leave things of a more vague nature to represent the totality, the sum total of knowledge, when such was not the case. This is why we have said before that the Scriptures are a good starting point but as much a set of clues as a set of accurate descriptions and answers that can hope to offer a complete understanding of things.
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