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Re: questions i combined (no otr)

JMH wrote:
> How does that gell with the old testament ideas of the word of god?  anyone
> studied that?

I haven't tackled the Hebrew Bible much yet at all.  Not on a linguistic level.
I've got a Tanakh, but only in English.  Still, I am pretty sure that when 2
Chronicles says that "the word of God came to Nathan" (or Shemaiah), it didn't
mean that a scroll showed up on the doorstep.  Jeremaiah (ch. 23) clearly uses
the phrase with respect to a vivid personal experience, in contrast to false
prophets who simply speak their own opinions.

It is, of course, quite possible that there isn't one single consistent usage
of the phrase.  Sometimes the word of the LORD is spoken through a prophet.
Sometimes, like in the psalms, the phrase just shows up, without qualification:
"the word of the LORD is perfect", or something like that.  What does the
author mean by that?  The bulk of the Bible wouldn't be written or redacted for
centuries.  Was the Law of God the same as the Word of God, or were they
complementary?  When Isaiah 2 says (and Micah echoes) "The law will go out from
Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem", does that refer to two separate
events or does the second clause echo and qualify the first?  What about the
Oral law that the pharisees claimed also had authority?  I noticed that that in
the Greek, the words "rhema" and "logos" (both translated "word"; I don't know
enough Greek to understand the differences between them) always seem to be used
in conjunction with *spoken* words rather than written words (or sometimes
spoken words that had been written down), but I don't know if a similar
distinction exists in Hebrew.

It's complicated, but that's why it makes me nervous when people seem to simply
assume that "word of God" == "bible as we know it today".

Yours,
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Some people dream of fortunes, while other people dream of cookies."
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