David and Jonathan : more than just holding hands? 1 Sam 20:30 contains sexual verbs and nouns

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
Homosexual love is Eros, Phileo is platonic, this isn't that hard to figure out.

It is if you have an agenda. some people don't even know that a fetus that has only human DNA and is alive is a human life. or even one that is wiggling kicking and sucking its thumb. or yawning. or even one that could survive outside the womb. ideology and perceptual filters obscures truth. It is the same thing with this gay thing going on now. a while back they were trying to promote the idea that all the founders were gay and notable figures such as Lincoln was gay their horses were also gay, their dogs and cats were all gay, if they happened to have chickens they too were gay; their ducks certainly were.

a reply to: Deaf Alien

That's because if you study the Hebrew too, you discover similarly to English, elements of the expression are context based as well. Greek makes it very clear without context.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I respect your post very much, but if you think I am trying to promote "that" agenda your not following very carefully.
And that's all I am going to say about that.

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

I guess you won't explain more in depth. That's ok. I was just curious. Maybe someone else will explain.

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
Homosexual love is Eros, Phileo is platonic, this isn't that hard to figure out.

Yes, but these books weren't written in Greek, but Hebrew. Can you please refer to the Hebrew? LXX isn't really valid as a first hand witness.

originally posted by: Utnapisjtim

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
Homosexual love is Eros, Phileo is platonic, this isn't that hard to figure out.

Yes, but these books weren't written in Greek, but Hebrew. Can you please refer to the Hebrew? LXX isn't really valid as a first hand witness.

well it is true that the OT was originally written in Hebrew, Chaldee and Aramaic or Syriac but there was also a Greek translation at the time of Christ and the apostles. Can you guess which They quoted? They quoted the Greek Septuagint. Which means that the apostles went to the trouble of finding and studying the Greek because though the Greek was available it was not widely available at the time. It also means They concurred with the Greek translation OT or else they would have avoided it. Christ certainly would have. And i am pretty sure Christ was a Subject Matter Expert given : in the beginning was the Word and The Word was with God and the Word was God.

Christ and company quoting the Septuagint is quite apart from the fact that most of the NT was in Greek. The later does not lead to Them using the Septuagint because Christ spoke Aramaic natively. It was not a matter of them living in an Hellenized society. if they felt that the Septuagint had it wrong they would have specifically cited the older Hebrew Chaldee and aramaic/Syriac.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I don't think you understand exactly how the NT corpus came about and how it ended up as streamlined and doctored as it did. The reason behind why LXX is quoted extensively in NT has to do with the Church and their standards and doctrines. Jesus didn't quote the LXX. The editors who published these books and letters did. Their motivation was anything but honesty.

The stories of David and Jonathan was written in Hebrew. Then hundreds of years later, the Romans ordered the LXX to be produced. And they did so in Greek, since it is much closer to Latin than Hebrew. The Hebrew OT was controversial, so almost no copy of any Hebrew biblical book exists prior to around 1000 AD when the Hebrew was also standardised to fit with the Greek and the Latin.

David and Jonathan is a Hebrew story, written in Hebrew for a Hebrew speaking audience of the Hebrew nation. I don't normally ask Greeks for advice when it comes to sex and love anyway, knowing about them is enough. They invented the lesbians for heavens sake.

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

You wrote: "The stories of David and Jonathan was written in Hebrew. Then hundreds of years later, the Romans ordered the LXX to be produced. And they did so in Greek, since it is much closer to Latin than Hebrew. The Hebrew OT was controversial, so almost no copy of any Hebrew biblical book exists prior to around 1000 AD when the Hebrew was also standardised to fit with the Greek and the Latin."

I think you're getting a little confused here. The Dead Sea Scrolls (BCE 300 to 68 CE) for example in Caves 1-11 contain readings of the Torah and Prophets and Psalms in Hebrew and Aramaic which sometimes follows the LXX Hebrew ur-text underlay (i.e. the Hebrew consonantal text from which the LXX was translated c. 200 BCE) sometimes the Dead Sea Scrolls follow the Babylonian un-pointed/un-vowelled MT (Masoretic text which had vowel markings added in c. 1000 CE ) for example the Great Isaiah Scroll which follows the MT c. 100 BCE - see the Leningrad Codex from AD 1000) and sometimes follows the Hebrew underlay used by other Greek translations for example, some Dead Sea Scrolls follow the ur-text Hebrew Undwerlay of of Aquila, sometimes Theodotion's and sometimes Symmachus' Hebrew underlay - as well as some readings of their own. There were two versions of Isaiah (one matched the MT fairly well, the other seemed to line up with Theodotion's Hebrew underlay of his Greek text).

The Catholic Church uses the LXX Septuaginta readings, Protestants and most Jewish sects use the MT for the Old Testament. It is clear that the Hebrew underlay to the LXX (found among the Dead Sea Scrolls) is much older and often more reliable than the MT (scho9lars such as Emmanuel Tov have shown this to be true). The Greek Gospel 'according to Matthew'' interestingly quotes Old Testament Verses that are only 50 % of the time from the LXX; for the other 50 % of the time the writer seems to be quoting either the Aramaic targum of the OT or at times he quotes from Aquila or Symmachus or Theodotion's versions of the Greek (when quoting out his fulfillment sections) - 'this was done to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet so and so...)

Any translation of say 1 Sam 20:30 has to go back to the both the MT and Hebrew underlays from which ALL the Greek translations were made (e.g. LXX, Aquuila, Symmachus and Theodotion) NB: these Greek translations are a valuable witness to what people in antiquity took these verses to mean...and you can include the Vulgate (in Latin) in that pile as well...

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
a reply to: stormbringer1701

I respect your post very much, but if you think I am trying to promote "that" agenda your not following very carefully.
And that's all I am going to say about that.

I didn't mean to imply anything of the sort.

a reply to: Sigismundus

Indeed. I didn't mention the DSS on purpose, but you are quite right. We do have fragments of Hebrew texts earlier than 1000 AD, but these manuscripts are severely damaged and fragmented and only now starting to become available to the public. And we have torah-fragments dating back to the days after the return from Babylon. But the Romans were thorough and nearly managed to sweep the the world of anything Jewish or Christian. Save for their own versions that is. And if anyone managed to stack some away, they are likely to be but dust today.

People forget that they didn't have paper, they wrote on papyrus and tablets inlayed with clay, until parchment was invented by the Greeks following an Egyptian embargo on papyrus export. A book written on fine vellum would cost fortunes and would occupy a bunch of professionals for a long time just making it and writing it, it wasn't just 'press print'. And still you couldn't expect it would last more than say 1000 years if it was to be handled and used a few times over that millennium, and if you were lucky to have it stored somewhere safe. People forget that oxygen is a compound in nearly all acids and that it eats up everything and turns it into dirt and rust.

PS: If you have the opportunity, please drop by my thread here, I am trying to collect links to biblical manuscripts online, and, please, if you know of any others, do supply them. There are quite a few, and finally internet is proving to be what it can be ==> www.abovetopsecret.com...

Good thread, OP.
It's funny how the Conservatives like to ignore this story. They seem to think that homosexuality is the greatest sin of the free world. They like to pervert the Sodam and Gomorrah story to make this point, whilst all along missing the big bleeding elephant in the room of incest and rape. The sin of Sodam was not homosexuality, you can interpret scripture by scripture to see the real sin was their hostility to strangers.

Why is homosexuality so abhorrent in the Abrahamic religeons? It's because they are bloodline cults which considers sperm to be sacred. They have no understanding of basic biology and the need for an egg, ie female zygot to be fertilised by the male zygot to produce offspring. They consider semen to be self contained "babies" which of course it isn't.

Any union which didn't produce offspring was considered illegal, even marriage to a eunuch or a barren woman. Marriage to someone of the same sex in this culture, would be unthinkable. Getting drunk and screwing your own daughters to spread your semen, yeah, go ahead and do it with God's blessing.

Indeed, Jonathan’s initial falling-in-love with David is described in a very circumspect way: “When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul [nephesh] of Jonathan was bound [qashar] to the soul [nephesh] of David, and Jonathan [ahab] loved him as his own soul” (1 Sam 18:1, NRSV)—which the Revised English Bible renders more clearly as “Jonathan had given his heart to David and had grown to love him as himself.” Then “Jonathan made a covenant [berit] with David, because he loved him as his own soul” (18:3, NRSV), or “each loved the other as dearly as himself” (REV). Joel Green (2006) notes that nephesh (H5315) refers to the “whole person as the seat of desire and emotion,” to the “entirety of one’s being,” and not to a divine, immortal soul (psychē, G5590), separate from the body, as later conceived by Plato (Phaedo 62b).14 John Goldingay (2006) explains further that a “covenant” (berit, H1285) was “a formal commitment made by one party to another party, or by two parties to one another,” and its seriousness was “normally undergirded by an oath” taken “before God and/or before other people.”15 The formal pact which Jonathan made with David here was clearly one made of love; and although the prince took the initiative, it was viewed by both him and David as being a “sacred covenant” made between them before the Lord (20:8). Now Zehnder writes that while qashar (H7194, Strong: ‘to tie, to bind, or to conspire’) may point here to a strong emotional attachment, there is “simply no hint of a homosexual or homoerotic connotation,” but rather “what is underlined is the political connotation.” Zehnder seeks support for this from 1 Sam 22:8 where, after David fled, Saul complained that all of his servants had “conspired” (qashar) not to tell him that Jonathan had “made a league” (karat, H3772, literally “cut [a covenant]”) with David (1 Sam 22:8, KJV; cf. J. Green).16 Yet, as Steven McKenzie (2000) notes, it is hard to believe that Jonathan would give up his kingdom to someone he had just met and also join with him in a conspiracy against his father.17 Zehnder also argues that Jonathan’s being “bound” to David in the first covenant (18:1) really meant on a deeper level that the prince was bound to God’s plan to transfer Israel’s ruling house from Saul to David18—although this does not explain the spontaneous intensity of Jonathan’s feelings for David, which appear like “a [lightning] bolt out of the blue” (Schroer and Staubli19), nor our being told repeatedly how Jonathan “loved” David (1 Sam 18:1, 3; 20:17) and ‘delighted’ in him (19:1), nor why Saul’s later outburst is so “extremely sexually charged” (Ackerman).20