Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament: Samson and Delilah
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:20:43 GMT
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Viewed:
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1724 times
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I’ll reply to Felix here just so it goes into ot-debate instead of .build.
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Outstanding, as usual. I like the philistine minifigs. It seems like every
time you do a new story I think you’ll be out of ways to portray different
cultures. But you always do it great.
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First of all, thanks. I love the challenge of coming up a new look for each of
the many and various peoples mentioned in the Bible. And it’s really a tribute
to the LEGO minifig that I’ve been able to come up with so many distinct
variations. And to think that the minifig hasn’t really changed much at all in
structure since the late 70s. It’s pretty mindblowing.
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Anyway, I was reading through some of the other stories, and I wonder if you
can answer this question. This is more a question of the actual bible... why
is it that sometimes bible stories seem to have absolutley arbitrary points
thrown in?
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I don’t have a general answer to that question. I’m as baffled by many of those
seemingly arbitrary points as you are. The Bible is not exactly concise in
its storytelling. With The Brick Testament, I do aim to be concise (to hold
people’s interest, and not burden them with too much text to read), but at the
same time I want it to be an accurate portrayal how the stories are presented in
the Bible. As a compromise, all the text that you see in The Brick Testament is
pulled directly from the scriptures, but I do tend to skip over phrases,
sentences, paragraphs, or even whole subplots of stories for the sake of
presenting more concise versions of the stories than the originals.
But sometimes those seemingly arbitrary details are what make the story
interesting to me, so I’ll go ahead and illustrate them.
It’s hard to give one reason as to why I think those arbitrary details and
stories are in there. But it’s always possible that the original reasons for
their inclusion made perfect sense at the time, but have been lost to us through
time. For instance, after a while of reading a lot of seemingly bizarre and
pointless stories, I realized that a lot of them were in there to give an
explanation for particular place-names throughout Palestine. Others offer
explanations for particular geological features. Folklore explanations for city
names that haven’t been inhabited for thousands of years is perhaps not the most
relevant info for the modern reader, but at the time the Bible was written,
presumably people were quite interested in knowing the origins of the names
for the places around them.
But there are still many stories and many details within stories that leave me
scratching my head.
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For example “Abdon had forty sons and thirty grandsons who rode on seventy
donkeys.” I can see that counting the sons and grandsons shows his virility.
And I guess the donkeys shows his wealth... but why would they have said it
that way? Why wouldn’t they have just said, “He was rich” if that was the
case? Even if there is a large difference between our languages and cultures,
and if things got lost in translation, that seems an odd thing to put into
holy text.
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Why not just say “he was rich”? I don’t know. There are all sorts of strange
ways of wording things in the Bible that could get the same idea across to
modern readers much more easily if they had been phrased more simply.
But I am guessing that the person who wrote this description of Abdon did not
envision that his text would get read by billions of people around the world for
thousands of years after his own death. He wrote in a manner that would be
understood and appreciated by the people of his time, and if that’s how people
measured wealth and power in those days, and he didn’t think anyone would have
trouble understanding his meaning, then why not use the colorful and poetic
phrasing rather than the simply “he was rich”?
If there are other particular instances of odd details you want to point out, I
can take my best guess at why they’re in there, but in many cases I may not have
any better idea than you.
-Brendan
P.S. Loved the Dapper
Dan and Polly Anne MOC I saw linked to at Golden Shpleem!
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