The Mormon Advantage

Why was his soul stirred?

Well, it is still messed up. Let's try one more time, so we will have Young's translation:

We will not settle the issue here, but the following may be of some help in the discussion:

Hebrew Transliterated

Jeremiah 1:5 BTUrM 'aTShVUrK BBTN YD'yThYK VBTUrM ThTSh'a MUrChM HQDShThYK NBY'a LGVYM NThThYK.

Young's Literal Translation

1:5 `Before I form thee in the belly, I have known thee; and before thou comest forth from the womb I have separated thee, a prophet to nations I have made thee.`

While it may be comforting in some faiths (not just Mormon theology) to believe that Jeremiah existed timeless prior to his conception, the text in the language God ordained to converse with humankind does not support that notion ... it also does not contradict that interpretation. But the text gives us a few clues which may also be found in the English nuances.

There is a progression in the message: Yahweh says to Jeremiah that He knew OF (have known, past perfect) him even before He 'form' (present tense) him in his mother's belly ... the Creator is sharing His perspective abilities with us, in that He can 'look down' through time to come, even before it is arrived in our experience. The language verb constructs tell us that. Yahweh positions Himself by the first phrase 'Before I form thee', then positions Jeremiah with 'I have known thee'. Young makes literal translation of the verbs. That is not a mistake, it is a clue as to Yahweh's perspective OF time from a position greater than but including, and Jeremiah is then located 'in time'.

We cannot answer here the notion of what is dimension time as related to the spiritual realm, but it is a fair statement to say that the Creator of time is as at least as much and most likely far more than time. As such, anything created from His perspective and communicated to us will have a temporal 'location' associated to it for our perspective benefit.

Here are the implications of two possibilities:

1) Jeremiah existed in spirit prior to being placed in a body and soul of life force; we have no way of knowing what age or level of maturity that spirit exist prior to incarnation and the scriptural texts give zero description for us to interpret from;

2) Jeremiah and his entire life of prophet to the nations IS seen by Yahweh prior to His creating Jeremiah's spirit, Jeremiahs soul, and Jeremiah's body; Yahweh assures Jeremiah that he will succeed as the prophet to nations because Yahweh has ordained it prior to making Jeremiah.

A fair and uncomplicated reading of the text is supporting the second perspective since that is the message Yahweh gives immediately upon placing Jeremiah in time by Yahweh's perspective.

The poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) said it best I think:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Scripture teaches we have a spirit that will live on for eternity. It does not teach that it has always existed.

***

Well these scriptures testify that our spirit did exist before being brought to earth!

Job 38: 7
7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Prov. 8: 22-31
22 The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
24 When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water.
25 Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:
26 While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:
28 When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:
29 When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:
30 Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;
31 Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.

Eccl. 12: 7
7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Jer. 1: 5
5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Thanks Rest. I had forgotten about the Proverbs reference, that one is powerfully eloquent.

Post #404
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1812842/posts?page=404#404

You asserted that the following verse supports your perspective, but take care in that since you must make clear whom are the 'sons of God who came in to the daughters of men': Job 38:7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Since Satan and a third of Heaven's Angels have been banished from Heaven, they cannot be the ones shouting for Joy ... but the Sons of God come in to the daughters of men and conceive giants????

And with humility and decades of scripture study, may I offer the following notions on the other verses you posted? I'll leave out the Hebrew Transliterated versions, to expedite.

Prov. 8:22 The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. Jesus is the one being spoken of, as in a Messianic prophecy. This is not about you or me, it is about our Savior.

23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. Ibid

24 When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water.

25 Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:Ibid

26 While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.

27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:Ibid

28 When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:

29 When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:

30 Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;

31 Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.Ibid; this is a clear relating of how Messiah rejoiced as He witnessed Yahweh creating! And a beautiful perspective it is!!

Eccl. 12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. It is beyond the material in the verses to imply 'gave it' means it was always existing prior to Yahweh placing your spirit in you. Had Yahweh wanted to communictae that, He would have used some convention similar to that which He used in Jeremiah, in the next verse you offered.

Jer. 1: 5 We've dealt with this one in a previous post

Originally pinged you in #393 and 399, but those posts were so flawed when it registered, I had to do it again in #402.

I agree it is about Christ, it’s beautiful and eloquent, and frankly it’s a shame that the jews do not see it in it’s simplicity.

But I also see the very clear reference here in verse 31. God delighted there with the sons of men.

30Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;
31 Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.

Just for your information, the word translated ‘LORD’ in Psalm 8 does not appear in the Tanach (written in Hebrew, and verified using the oldest texts found in the twentieth century, correcting the Messoretic texts) referring to Yahweh or Messiah, but it does appear referring to Ba’al. LORD is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew, though not meant to confuse or obfuscate by the translators, it is a mistake. You can see what confusion such a simple mistake can make.

Jesus was with God and was God at the foundations of the world, so He would be rejoicing in the creation He was about to step into, don’t you think?

Absolutely.

Why are you such an “Angry Write Mail?”

I am suppose to accept your various books and translations etc but ignore mine! Huh?

Why should yours be anymore credible and I am not saying it isn't! There are four main versions of tanach in existence. My Scriptures are just as validP> ***

Excerpts from; Barry Hoberman, "Translating the Bible"

The next issue that confronts the Bible translator is that of the textual basis for the translation. We have no original text of any biblical book, and some books may have circulated in more than one version almost from the beginning of their existence as written documents. One theory has it that in the case of a number of Old Testament books three distinct texts emerged between the fifth and first centuries B.C., among the Jews of Palestine, Egypt, and Babylonia, respectively. Later, when ancient Jewish and Christian authorities defined the limits of the biblical canon, they did not fix the precise text of each individual book.

The text of the Old Testament is in places the stuff of scholarly nightmares. Whereas the entire New Testament was written within fifty to a hundred years, the books of the Old Testament were composed and edited over a period of about a thousand. The youngest book is Daniel, from the second century B.C.

The oldest portions of the Old Testament (if we limit ourselves to the present form of the literature and exclude from consideration the streams of oral tradition that fed it) are probably a group of poems that appear, on the basis of linguistic features and historical allusions contained in them, to date from roughly the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.

They include the Song of the Sea(Exodus 15:1- 18, 21), the Song of Deborah(Judges 5:2- 31), the Blessing of Jacob(Genesis 49:2- 27), the Blessing of Moses(Deuteronomy 33:2- 29), the Song of Moses(Deuteronomy 32:1-43), Psalm 29, Psalm 68,and a number of other poetic compositions now embedded in longer works.

So the Bible was written over a span of some 1,100 to1,300 (or more) years. (The books of the Apocrypha belong to the period between the Testaments; they, together with a corpus of documents commonly known as the Pseudepigrapha, are often referred to as intertestamental literature.)

The Hebrew text of the Old Testament now in use is a highly standardized text that was consolidated, fine-tuned, and faithfully transmitted by Jewish scholars and scribes of the Middle Ages, called the Masoretes. Using as their guide the oral and written traditions that had been handed down from the ancient rabbis, the Masoretes worked to preserve and safeguard what they believed to be the definitive text of the Hebrew Bible.

The same pious motives led them to suppress all competing textual traditions. In addition to conservation, they were responsible for an exceptionally important innovation.

Up to the time of the Masoretes the Hebrew language had been written with consonants only Hebrew, like Arabic, can be written pretty adequately using only consonants, but on occasion this creates ambiguity.

A passive verb may be misconstrued as active, an attached preposition can be mistaken for part of a verbal root, and so on. The Masoretes, to ensure that the sacred words of Scripture would be understood and also pronounced correctly, employed vowel signs in the form of tiny strokes and dots, and added these to the consonantal text.

They even added accents and cantillation symbols toguarantee the proper chanting of biblical passages in worship services. The resultant text, known today as the Masoretic text, exhibits only the most minute, semantically inconsequential variations from one manuscript to another. The oldest extant manuscripts of theMasoretic text, upon which all modern editions of the Hebrew Bible are based, date from the ninth to the eleventh century A.D. --more than a thousand years after the latest book of the Old Testament was written.

As a rule, ancient and medieval scribes felt obliged to copy the received text asaccurately as possible, without making any changes or adjustments.

Yet virtually every scribe who ever copied a biblical manuscript perpetuated the errors of others and introduced a few of his own.

Imagine this process being repeated for one to two thousand years, and you have some idea of the vicissitudes that the Hebrew biblical text has endured.

Compounding the problem was the occasional scribe who made a conscious alteration in the text, either for ideological reasons or because he sincerely thought he was correcting someone else's mistake.

Until 1947 the only direct evidence for the pre-Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament was a lone papyrus leaf dating from about 100 B.C.; this preserves the text of the Ten Commandments.

But in 1947 the study of the Old Testament text was suddenly revolutionized by the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in a cave at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade another ten caves in the immediate area yielded additional manuscript treasures.

Among the finds (which also included an assortment of nonbiblical texts) were a complete Hebrew scroll of the book of Isaiah, a verse- by-verse commentary incorporating most of the Hebrew text of chapters one and two of Habakkuk, and leather and papyrus fragments of the Hebrew text of every other Old Testament book, with the sole exception of Esther.

Although the age of the manuscripts was initially in question, scholars now generally agree that they date from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D.;a few may go back to the third century B.C.

When the high antiquity of the scrolls was realized, some scholars anticipated that the biblical text preserved in them would differ substantially from the medieval Masoretic text, thereby demonstrating that the OldTestament's journey through the hands of generations of Jewish copyists had left its text in a most imperfect state.

However, although the scrolls furnish numerous readings at variance with the Masoretic tradition, the Dead Sea and Masoretic textsof the Old Testament are strikingly alike.

The most important ancient version of the Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, originally produced for Greek- speaking Jews in Egypt. Parts of it date from as early as the third and second centuries B.C. As a translation, it is uneven in quality.

In some cases where the Septuagint and the Masoretic text disagree, the Septuagint passage is clearly a bad translation of an underlying Hebrew text that was identical to the version of the passage found in Masoretic manuscripts. But in other instances th discrepancies are too marked to have been caused by poor translation.

Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars had guessed that in cases where the ancient translator did not appear to be at fault, the Greek text actually reflected a Hebrew original appreciably different from what survives in the Masoretic text.

My truth will go forward.

Your truth? How about Christ's truth will go forward.

Suit yourself, restornu. I am giving you the most accurate Hebrew text material from the oldest texts and the most accurate English literal version I can find for my work. What you choose to do with what I offer is your choice. The Scriptures are their own best commentary. When a contradiction arises in translation, the best way to resolve the issue is to seek the oldest manuscripts and compare. This is not the forum into which extensive comparisons can be discussed in length. If you want that, there is a religious forum at FR for more extensive discussions. Lest we forget, there are literally more than a hundred-thousand readers coming through these threads daily.

Actually, no they do not. Not a single one. Do you actually read these passages to understand the context? Or do you just find lists of them at an LDS website?

best,
ampu

PS - volume in posting never supersedes quality of the matter, thoughtful reflection and insight based on facts.

oh, restornu...

First, you actually cite Atlantic Monthly as a source of Biblical scholarship?? The expert you highlighted is from University of Maryland and follows liberal ideas about the Bible. We don’t allow liberals around here. It stinks up the place. For every idea he express, you can google a conservative scholar who has addressed and refuted his kind.

Second, the two paragraphs I cited for you only dealt with pointing out the grammatical structure of the Genesis passage. Are you arguing 1) that the passage has a different structure? or 2) that despite the structure that is there, and the Hebrew words (which have meanings), that it means something else? Neither is a good argument.

I fully recognize your sincerity. It is a good thing. But it is not the same thing as a fact.

Are you aware that the passage you quoted does not even address the idea of preexisting spirits?

best,
ampu

BTW, I am the sole author of #402, it was not a cut and paste of someone else's interpretation work, other than the scriptures quoted from their sources and thus not interpretive.

It really doesn’t matter how many authoritative friends you say you have telling you the claptrap, AWM. The fact is, I know it’s wrong, as does every other faithful member of the LDS Church.

It would be like me walking up to you and telling you that I have it on good authority, from roofer friends of mine, that your house has no roof. Oh, no, you say. Look right there, there’s the roof! It’s always been there, ever since the house was built! No, no, I say. Look at the blueprints I found from the original builder. They don’t show any roof, and anyway I know you aren’t a critical thinker, so there must not be any roof. And if you keep on thinking there’s a roof, then you just demonstrate how blind and sadly mislead you really are. I have sources! I have authoritative people! And I tell you, you have no roof! Study the blueprints, ask my people, you will see! The very idea that you have a roof is silly! Yours is not a mainstream house! It is shaped strangely! It can’t have a roof like traditional houses!

And on and on goes the ridiculous argument.

The problem that we have as members is that such pedantic assertions on your part only serve to misinform others and build in them a mistrust and resentment that we have struggled since persecution and extermination orders to rise above. Thankfully, we are beyond the days when our men were murdered and our women and children were herded into the blizzard with bleeding feet like cattle. But we are NOT beyond the days of bigotry.

Which is why we refuse to let your arguments go unanswered. You may continue to expect our staunch response at every turn if you persist in this pointless crusade to slander our most cherished beliefs.