Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament: Tumors and Death
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.build.ancient
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Date:
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Mon, 6 Nov 2006 00:56:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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9927 times
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In lugnet.build.ancient, Stephane Simard wrote:
Thanks, Stephane.
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About those tumors: was the bible explicit that it was cancerous tumors just
like you illustrated them?
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No, the Bible is not explicit about what exactly God afflicts the Philistines
with. In fact, “tumors” is just one possible interpretation of a Hebrew word
that has been variously translated into English as “tumors”, “hemorrhoids”,
“sores”, “boils”, or “growths on their skin”.
I simply went with “tumors” since it seemed plausible and would be easier to
graphically depict in LEGO than, say, hemorrhoids.
Interestingly, some ancient Bible manuscripts (the Septuagint and Latin
Vulgate) have an extra verse after the first mention of the “tumors” which
states “and rats multiplied in their land, and the terror of death was
throughout the entire city.” And this, in turn, has caused some to speculate
that God afflicted the Philistines with the bubonic plague!
The extra verse about the rats would better explain why the Philistines send the
ark back with golden tumors and golden rats (inasmuch as there can be said to
be any logic in that at all). But my understanding is that scholars tend to
favor the manuscripts which lack this verse as being more reliable. Without a
great knowledge in this matter, I would speculate that there likely was some
mention of rats in the original story at some point, but that it was somehow
dropped (probably accidentally as copies of copies were made), and that later
scribes noticed this strange missing introduction to the rat theme and inserted
their own.
I have to say, I am sometimes quite tempted myself to try to force certain Bible
stories to “make more sense” by a liberal use of paraphrase in cases where you
can tell what the Bible author was trying to get across, but it’s worded very
poorly (or translates into English extremely awkwardly) or by adding in some
piece of information that would make the story much easier for the reader to
follow.
But I have resisted such temptations in the interest of presenting the stories
“as the Bible tells them”. In certain cases, I will go so far as to rearrange
the order of verses in a story if I think it will make the story easier to
follow for the reader than how the Bible tells it. It’s not an attempt to
change the meaning of the story or any significant details of it, just to make
the storytelling a little less jumbled or needlessly confusing.
Of course, when it comes to something like The Gospels, I (and anyone else
attempting to present some sort of harmonization of them) take a fair amount of
liberty in mixing and matching bits from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order
to tell “the story of Jesus”. And in upcoming stories, I will likely mix in
bits from Chronicles in with the books of Samuel and Kings since they report
differently on the same subjects.
What was the question? Oh, right! Tumors! Yeah, that’s just a possible
translation. And certainly no mention of cancer. They could have been
marshmallow tumors.
-Brendan
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