I'm not participating in the group discussion at Community Bible Study presently because those conflict time-wise with the weekly retreats I'm making down the shore. However I am trying to keep up with the study guide materials. I'm about three lessons behind!
I can ordinarily plow through lessons in an hour or so but I'm really struggling to find any meaning in the study guide questions. Part of my struggle comes from adhering to a different chronology. The study guide author asserts that Deuteronomy was written by Moses. After all, that's what Deuteronomy claims. But the commentaries I've read, including one from the JPS Torah commentary series, say it was written either during the times of King Josiah or King Hezekiah.
So imagine the exercise from yesterday's lesson in which I'm asked to compare passages from Deuteronomy with 2 Kings 23 and 2 Chronicles 30. To my mind, these are from about the same time (but Chronicles is a bit later). So if the texts are similar, it's no wonder. Now, just because they're written about the same time doesn't necessarily mean that there will be commonalities 'cross the texts. The Gospels were written about the same time and look at them! All I'm saying is that time is not the factor in the equation that the study guide author thinks it is. There's no miracle of timelessness in the words. It just isn't there. He'll have to pick on something else to awe me.
I can ordinarily plow through lessons in an hour or so but I'm really struggling to find any meaning in the study guide questions. Part of my struggle comes from adhering to a different chronology. The study guide author asserts that Deuteronomy was written by Moses. After all, that's what Deuteronomy claims. But the commentaries I've read, including one from the JPS Torah commentary series, say it was written either during the times of King Josiah or King Hezekiah.
So imagine the exercise from yesterday's lesson in which I'm asked to compare passages from Deuteronomy with 2 Kings 23 and 2 Chronicles 30. To my mind, these are from about the same time (but Chronicles is a bit later). So if the texts are similar, it's no wonder. Now, just because they're written about the same time doesn't necessarily mean that there will be commonalities 'cross the texts. The Gospels were written about the same time and look at them! All I'm saying is that time is not the factor in the equation that the study guide author thinks it is. There's no miracle of timelessness in the words. It just isn't there. He'll have to pick on something else to awe me.
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