Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Whale
Basically, it’s a question of translation: in the case of Jonah specifically, many English translations use the word ‘whale’ when Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah in St Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 12: 40), because the Greek word used there sometimes means whale. It also, however, refers to any large fish or sea-monster, and thus was used by the Greek translators of the Old Testament to refer to the ‘great fish’ of which the Hebrew speaks in the book of Jonah (2: 1). This highlights the care that must be taken in the interpretation of the Bible, because if we only knew the English version, we might think Jesus mistakenly thought a whale was a large fish, whereas in fact, if it’s anyone’s mistake, it’s the translators’.
Indeed, the difficulty of identifying the meaning of words referring to the fauna of the Bible has been a recurring theme in our series on Biblical Beasts. It reminds us that the Scriptures are written in the words of human beings, and present us with all the ordinary challenges that language presents: that is why a ‘scientific’ study of Scripture is useful and important. However, we must never allow such study to distract us from the fact that Scripture is the Word of God, and points beyond the human realities its words usually describe to the divine realities that it reveals: in the end, the importance of the sign of Jonah is not to be found in the question of whether it was a whale or some other sea creature, but in the death and resurrection of Christ, of which Jonah’s re-emergence from the creature is a type.
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posted by Gregory Pearson OP at 1:00 am 1 Comments
Monday, October 03, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Vulture
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posted by Andrew Brookes OP at 12:00 am 0 Comments
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Unicorn
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posted by Mark Davoren at 1:00 am 0 Comments
Friday, September 30, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Snake
Despite all this, the snake also offers a metaphor for solution. Snakes shed their skin by rubbing against rough surfaces, often rocks. We too can "shed our skins" of sins by going to the True Rock, that is Christ. Through him we are made new and freed from the tyranny of sin and death .
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posted by Mark Davoren at 8:15 pm 1 Comments
Monday, September 19, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Raven
The raven has a rather sinister reputation. Throughout history it has been used as a symbol of the macabre. One has to only think of Poe's poem The Raven, Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta and more recently the Omen trilogy. This association is not limited to the West. In the Koran it is the raven that teaches Cain how to bury his murdered brother Abel and amongst the Inuit people this scavenger is viewed as a 'trickster-god'.
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posted by Mark Davoren at 1:45 pm 0 Comments
Monday, September 12, 2011
Biblical Beasts: Tortoise
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posted by Students@EnglishOP at 12:01 am 1 Comments
Friday, September 09, 2011
Quail
We find two references to Quail in the Old Testament: first, in Exodus chapter 15, and then again in Numbers chapter 11. In both instances God provides the people of Israel with meat in the form of these birds in response to their grumblings and complaints about the hardships of the desert. Yet the two accounts are subtly and interestingly different.
In Numbers Chapter 11, however, the context is slightly different. Here the people have already received the gift of the Manna, they have already received the bread from heaven, the food for the journey - and they are sick of it. They are bored of this food and once more long for the variety of their diet in Egypt. The sacrifices of freedom are too high. The consolations of slavery much too alluring. Once again God provides responds to the complaints of his people by providing meat in the form of Quail, but this time he promises Israel that they will grow tired of this meat too. He tells Israel: ' You will eat it [meat]....for a month until it comes out of your nostrils and sickens you' (Numbers 11: 20).
Here the Quail represent all the sensual, intellectual and emotional consolations that we turn to in order to avoid the cross of Christ, in order to avoid the sacrifices that love of God and love of neighbour demand. Eventually these consolations become revolting and we must search for another 'fix'. As Augustine puts it, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This is the hard lesson that the Israelites learnt by enduring the privations of the desert for forty years. It is a lesson that we too must learn if we are to fully embrace our freedom as children of God and finally dispel all thoughts of returning to the slavery of sin.
Labels: biblical beasts
posted by Nicholas Crowe OP at 10:16 am 1 Comments