Overreach? You believe Moses had encounters with God before this famous one? How so? In the Book of Mormon there is the Book of Moses which records earlier encounters with God. But I’m not a Mormon and I don’t accept the BoM as scripture.
Moses had an Egyptian upbringing. The Law wasn’t given yet, but it included the prohibition against foreign wives. See Deuteronomy 3. It wasn’t something Nehemiah dreamed up. Besides, Nehemiah wasn’t around in the time of Moses; he lived much later. The Bible isn’t consistent on the matter of foreign wives.
We don’t know
Interesting, but we don’t use the Samaritan Pentateuch for translations. I have no problem with this woman being a Cushite. btw, have you ever seen a performance of Verdi’s Aida? I highly recommend it.
Not after you read things into them that aren’t there. (eisegesis)
The stories have been edited but you don’t get meaning from editing.
No, He confirmed that the Temple in Jerusalem was the proper place to worship, not Mount Gerizim.
According to Luke 24, After the ascension the disciples were “continually in the temple, blessing God.”
Blessing God. That is, worshipping God. In the Temple. Big changes would be on the way. The temple would be destroyed. Today the only thing left of the Temple is the Western Wall, which Jews and Christians still visit.
" However, they did not cease to be Israelites, worshipping Yahweh with an integrity that matched that of their southern cousins, the Judahites." Um, yes, with a lack of integrity in both places.
To be more precise:
Although the southern kingdom was dominated by Judah, with appreciable contribution from Benjamin and Levi, and the remaining tribes dominated the northern kingdom, there was mixing. At several points, the Bible records people from the north moving south (e.g., under Josiah, after Assyria, as well as all the way back to the beginning of the divided monarchy as those unhappy with Jeroboam I’s changes went south). So some descendants of all tribes would have ended up in various places, as indicated somewhat by Luke’s note that Anna was from Asher.
Both the northern and southern kingdom tended to compromise theologically, taking up other deities or changing ways of worship in various versions of syncretism. There was ongoing genetic and theological mixing with non-Israelite neighbors throughout the history of Israel, whether theologically sanctioned cases of other people converting to worship of YHWH, or unorthodox compromise with unbelievers.
When Assyria deported the influential people form the north and brought in deportees from elsewhere, no doubt the majority of the population was still of Israelite ancestry. Likewise, the deportees may have either mixed in with those around or maintained their Israelite identity to varying degrees. Similar variation occurred with the Babylonian exile. Although Babylon did not specifically put other people there, neighboring peoples did take advantage of the opportunity to move in. So the lost tribes themselves were largely not lost, but proof of identity and/or commitment to YHWH often could be lost over time.
I’ll look up details, but the “if I can’t be priest in Jerusalem, I’ll be priest in Samaria” incident is from around (not right at but in the rough ballpark of) the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.
In the past, Americans believed that the Native Americans descended from the “10 Lost Tribes” of Israel. The LDS church takes it a bit further: the Book of Mormon describes how after the fall of Jerusalem, some Jews escaped and sailed to the Americas, becoming the ancestors of the Native Americans. The BoM describes steel bows, coins, horses, etc. Finding evidence for this in the new world is a problem.
There are lots of fanciful fantasies from the fringe. Remember we are looking at what science can tell us about the Samaritans. Science, with respect to DNA, shows us that the Samaritans were and are the remnant of the northern Israelites who avoided the Assyrian deportations and prospered as a people.
Next, we must look at the literature scientifically. That is, we must look at the literature as historians, not as those who approach the literature as faithful adherents of some theological doctrine.
I read it as God permitted Solomon to build a temple – God never asked for one.
And Jesus’ response to the woman puts “this mountain” and “Jerusalem” on a par.
It’s a bit of a pattern: God didn’t aim to give Israel a king; they insisted on having one, so He allowed it.
God didn’t ask for a special city; David decided to take one and God went along with it.
God didn’t ask for a temple, David decided he wanted one, and God permitted it but not from David.
At each step, the Israelites and their leaders were trying to be like the nations around them; they weren’t asking God what He wanted, they were making decisions and God went along.
We should ask, what were they blessing God for? The resurrection! And what else were they doing in the Temple? Teaching, performing miracles and preaching Jesus as the Messiah. It is quite clear that when the apostles went to the Temple, they went on a mission. And it eventually got them thrown out.
Now they could have gone into a field and blessed God, but they went to the Temple on a mission. Their mission was to be witnesses to Jesus Christ,
in Jerusalem,
and in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth.
If you are on a religious mission to Jerusalem, where would be the best place to start? The answer is the Temple.
But there is more. One of the principles of modern exegesis is to step back and look at the overarching theological themes of the author, and then see how individual pericopes fit into these themes. In Luke-Acts, one of the dominant characteristics shows how Paul always goes first to the Jews, and only when he receives rejection, goes to the Gentiles. There is a point in Luke’s account in Acts where Paul is so fed up with rejection by Jews, he announces that he will henceforth go only to the Gentiles. Only the next thing we know from Luke’s account is that Paul goes again to the Jews! The impression we get from Luke-Acts is that if the Jews by and large reject the Gospel, it is not for the lack of trying by those who preach Jesus.
This theme of the mission to the Jews pervades Luke-Acts, and the presence of the apostles in the Temple is part of it. The apostles appear in the Temple blessing God that Jesus has been raised from the dead. On the Temple grounds they are found teaching about Jesus and performing miracles in his name, until they are thrown out of the Temple. This challenge, but rejection, is also anticipated in Luke’s Gospel. In a greatly enlarged (compared to the other Synoptic Gospels) journey to Jerusalem by Jesus. Jesus comes as the “visitation of God”. He is rejected, and according to Luke, this is why the Temple and the city will be levelled. (See Luke 19: 41-44)
In brief, one cannot take the fact that the apostles were in the Temple and attempt to interpret it atomistically . It is part of a larger literary whole.
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
But apparently we’re not supposed to consider what the Bible actually says.
I checked and the story of a priest getting kicked out of Jerusalem and setting up in Samaria instead is from Josephus. He may be confused about the dates; unhelpfully, there were many repetitions of names in the same families and culturally popular names through this period. Josephus’ story is that a priest got expelled from Jerusalem and married the daughter of Sanballat, governor of Samaria. Sanballat set him up with a temple of his own. He dates the incident to the time of Alexander, about a century post-Ezra and Nehemiah. Nehemiah records kicking out a priest for being son-in-law to Sanballat, governor of Samaria. Josephus, of course, has his own opinion of Samaritans influencing his writing.
For Ezra and Nehemiah, the surrounding peoples were generally more powerful and better connected - they are not the elite dismissing the general populace, but a minority afraid of absorption.
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
God ordered a tabernacle to be built and now he wants a temple. Jesus comes from the Davidic line. Are you saying God is just going along with this?
This shows my point: God never asked for a temple; that was David’s idea and God went along except fr not letting David actually do it. And He doesn’t say it’s exclusive, either, so the Samaritans had as reasonable a claim as David did, once the Jerusalem folks refused to consider them part of God’s people.
God agreed to a temple, He didn’t order one – that’s right in the text!
And yes, God is going along with it, just as He went along with Israel wanting a king, and David wanting a capital city, and then David wanting a temple. It’s a piece of the message of grace: God will come down to us in ways we grasp.
The temple is a permanent tabernacle, What exactly is wrong with that? The glory of God filled the temple, indicating God’s approval. God wasn’t being manipulated. God knows how to indicate his disapproval; look what happened when unsavory things went on in the temple. And what is wrong with a capital city? You complain about Jerusalem, but forgot to complain about Shiloh, where the tabernacle was placed for a good while.
Come to think of it, God never ordered synagogues. Or church buildings, for that matter. So God is just putting up with your church building, but never really wanted it.
And he didn’t order a canon of scripture or Bible translations. He just puts up with it all.
I didn’t say anything was wrong and I didn’t complain about anything – I just pointed out a pattern where God accomodates to human needs.
I suggest you try reading those scriptures again, where it says that He inspired them.
Exactly – it’s part of the overall pattern of grace: God meets us where we are and used even our foibles. It’s a pattern recognized by theologians already by the second century. Jesus even points to it as why some things are in the Law.