Hey um by the way the devil gave you free will, not God.

like it’s part of the Bible. In Genesis (the first creation story specifically) the devil (a title which here means “evil trickster demon” but recently has become synonymous with Lucifer or Satan) told Eve that she would not die if she ate the fruit (true) and that she would be like God (sorta true, humans gained self awareness, free will, the ability to create, etc.)

when she ate the fruit she gained the capacity to choose right from wrong because it was essentially the first time a human, not God, created evil.

without the devil we would not have free will.

thank him, not God.

.... If humans didn't have free will before the Fall, how were humans able to deliberately choose to eat the fruit that God told them not to eat? Because Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit sure sounds like they were capable of making free choices before they ate of the fruit.

So I'm choosing to engage with OP (and by extension @apenitentialprayer) on their basic Garden of Eden hermeneutic, which is very much one I don't agree with, but for the sake of argument...

Prior to eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve had free will in the sense of being able to make volitional choices, but not in the sense of understanding the moral weight of their choices. When God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree, he doesn't say not to do so because that would be disobeying him, but for a very practical reason: "for in the day you eat of it you will die" (2:17)

But the Serpent has a counter: "no, you will not die" (Gen 3:4). And he's right. Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree and do not die. And God feels threatened. "Now that humankind has become like any of us, knowing good and bad, what if one should stretch out a hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!" (3:22).

Death is not the natural result of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (and due to some Hebrew grammar shit it should definitely not simply be called the Tree of Knowledge), but a protective measure and punishment taken by God to a) protect God (or in the Hebrew "us") from being like him, being made in the likeness of God, having access to the same type of information as God, and immortal and b) to punish Adam and Eve for a volitional choice they had no concept of a reason to disobey other than a consequence that is very much not the actual immediate consequence of eating from the Tree.

God is grossly unfair to punish Adam and Eve for this, but his choice to keep them from immortality still makes sense in terms of a desire to protect his unique status.

Idk I think Job's wife really went off when she told him to curse God and die. It's interesting how there's no oxygen for her suffering in the narrative. She lost her children too. She lost her home too. Her health was taken from her too. Everything she had was stripped away by God. And yet there's no compassion for her. Not in the narrative nor in the commentaries or the sermons. She isn't even named.

So in the Hebrew it doesn't read "curse God and die"; it reads "bless God and die." The traditional explanation is that "curse God and die" was meant, but it was seen as inappropriate to put "curse" and "God" so close together. But I think it reads better if you stick to what the text actually says.

y'know i've been thinking, what if the fruit of the tree of knowledge was symbolic for puberty?

so, when adam and eve eat the fruit, they become aware of the fact that they are naked, and seek to cover themselves up, now knowing nudity to be a sinful thing.

young children dont look at nudity in the same way developed children and adults do, they see a body as a body, pure and untainted. however, when they go through puberty, they come into their own, becoming aware of sexuality and lust. a child going through puberty might seek to cover themselves up, now seeing what was once simply a body in a whole new light. (ofc others may choose to put themselves on display, which is an equally valid expression of sexuality)

children are thought to be pure, free of sin. whether this is true or not, is none of my concern. i find this angle, to view a child as the most sacred thing, absolutely fascinating.

children are messy, smelly, and down-right rude at times. they are demanding, relying on you to sacrifice friends, hobbies, to keep them alive and happy. and yet, after all this, we view them as sacred in a way not much else is.

i feel, that to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge is to grow up.

to learn all that is good and evil, is to come into your own.

adults are always chasing a feeling of childhood wonder, to belong once again to a time that never was.

i am not an adult, not yet, but i am no toddler either. i stand at the gate of the garden of eden, god's fury lapping at my back, between the purity of childhood, and the sinful knowledge of adult hood.

i look back, at my peers, all those scared children. i know that in due time they will join me.

no-one can live their life like that forever.

i am not asking them to come, for it is not my place. to join me is to abandon everything one's ever known in exchange for a future one cannot even know they want.

so i leave them as they prance, blissfully ignorant of the times to come, through the garden of eden.

That’s roughly how my Old Testament/Hebrew Bible professor in undergrad understood the story. Gaining knowledge of good and evil is also used as a metaphor for maturing in Isaiah 7:15-16.

Anyone know why my psalms in my Bible are different from Fr Schmitz Bible in a year podcast?

Are you using an English translation based on the Vulgate text, or the Masoretic text? Both of these text-types have distinct orderings of the Psalms, and that may be contributing to it.

He’s using I believe the RSV standard and I’m using my doay rhimes Latin vulgate bilingual edition

I knew some words would be different but I had assumed the numbers would be the same! Apparently not :(

Yeah, the Masoretic and the Septuagint (on which the Vulgate numbering is based) texts not only have different wordings on occasion, but different perceptions on what constitutes each Psalm; one sometimes splits a psalm that the other sees as a single poem, and vice versa. There are parts that are the same, and others where the numbering is off (usually just by a single chapter, though). Neither seems to be the 'correct' readings of the original collection (the Septuagint preserves a few verses that obviously belong in the Hebrew but were lost by the time the Masoretic text was canonized, and the Masoretic text combine two Psalms that are obviously meant to be part of the same poem yet nonetheless remain distinct Psalms in the Greek and thus Latin); both represent alternative traditions of transmission.

Catholic Bibles in general split up the Psalms differently from Protestant Bibles. In addition, every now and then Catholic and Protestant Bibles will vary where they articulate chapter and verse. Jewish publications of the Tanakh also will occasionally vary from both the Catholic and Protestant divisions. This is all very annoying and I do not approve of it at all.

Super basic and shallow theological question but I'm working in this Catholic school and they're playing this cartoon about Adam and Eve, a story we all know.

Anyway. How the fuck is it fair to punish Adam and Eve for disobeying God when they literally have no concept of evil. They don't understand deception-- that anything would lie for the sake of hurting them. The snake/devil/whatever acted upon them with willful evil intent, and they genuinely lack the ability to recognize that as a motivation. What the fuck.

Well, the basic answer, I think, is that even if Adam and Eve didn't know the snake was trying to hurt them, they did know that God told them not to eat of the fruit (Genesis 2:16-17). Adam and Eve could have trusted in God's wisdom and followed what He said, or they could have opted to disregard God in favor of the possibility of appropriating His wisdom on their own terms (Genesis 3:4-6). And they chose the latter. It was in the act of this disobedience that they learned the nature of evil; they felt shame. In that initial rift in the relationship between human being and God, the human beings realized their vulnerability, and they hid from Him. Fulton Sheen once said that "since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, 'God is hard to find,'" and that's kind of the tragedy of the whole thing. The tragedy of the Fall is that we tried to seize God's power for ourselves and failed, when God would have gladly given all of Himself to us freely. We tried to get the benefit of God without valuing our relationship with God. And so began humanity's alienation from Him.

So if I understand OP’s critique (and the similar critiques others have made), they’re reading “knowledge of good and evil” very literally. Obedience to God is, in your standard Christian framework, good; disobedience, evil. So, if Adam and Eve lacked knowledge of good and evil they couldn’t have known that obedience was good or even expected of them; they might have even lacked a concept of obedience and disobedience since obedience is a virtue.

Now, my reading of the text is that the expulsion from the Garden was less of a punishment than a consequence. The Genesis 3 myth posits that gods are gods by dint of two characteristics: their knowledge of good and evil* and their immortality. In the Garden Adam and Eve were immortal, but lacked knowledge. Once obtained, if they remained immortal they would have become like god, immortal and knowing good and evil. God doesn’t want humans to be like him, and so expelled them from Eden to deny them immortality.

Although both our (I’m Jewish and @apenitentialprayer​ is Christian) there’s a sense that God ultimately desires our return to Eden, there’s no indication in the myth itself that a return to Eden is something God desires; in the myth God is willing to allow humans immortality or knowledge of good and evil, but emphatically not both.

*There’s a case to be made that “knowledge of good and evil” is a euphemism for puberty, in which case the characteristic is the ability to create new life rather than knowledge.

Discussed Judges 19 with my brother (who is a theologian) since I thought it shows a disregard for women, but I’d like to hear more opinions.

Judges 19 (NIV) takes place when the people or Israel were ignoring God and His teachings. It begins by explaining how a Levite’s concubine had been “unfaithful to him,” and then runs out on him to hide with her family. When the Levite tracks her down, the concubine’s family treats him warmly:

The family are gracious hosts and care for their guests well. After this delay, the Levite does not want to stay another night (despite the father's protests again) and takes the concubine with him to travel back to his home.

After being on the road, it becomes night and they need a place to stay. No one is willing to give them a space besides an old man, who treats them well in his house. While he seems to be the ideal host, it quickly changes when “some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house.”

The wicked men made their intentions clear:

The old man decides to dissuade the men, but his methods are worthy of criticism:

My brother brought to my attention this is echoing what was taught from the story of Lot (Genesis 19: 1–38), but is worthy of a separate post by itself.

Comparing the old man as a host with the concubine’s family as a host shows a significant difference, as one was the ideal host while the other is willing to sacrifice their daughter and one of their guests.

However, the old man does not sacrifice his daughter, instead it is the Levite that makes the call:

The woman then dies due to the horrific abuse, and is left for dead by the wicked men. The Levite’s reaction is not described besides when he “said to her, ‘Get up; let’s go,’” and, upon the realization she’s dead, he simply “put her on his donkey” and left.

This alone is a bad enough tale: men prioritizing their own safety from rape because the rape of men is unnatural and (in their eyes) worse than the rape of a woman. They do not protect the woman and sacrifices her like chum.

However it takes a worse, more graphic turn:

I understand this story is meant to show how the Israelites were without God’s guidance: men wanted to rape outsiders and hosts abandoned their guests. But it’s obvious to me how the sanctity of men are prioritized, but not just because they’re men. As a concubine, that woman was property. As an unfaithful concubine, she was corrupt.

The Levite is the one to toss her out the door, not the old man. He does not seem to grieve the loss of a person, but a belonging. She does not receive a proper burial, she is made into a message. He does not find her attackers, he moves on.

Can I have thoughts on how others view this story, whether it be by Christian scholars or those simply interested in feminist theory?

Judges 19 is definitely a parallel story to Lot and his daughters; my assumption is that one of the stories is based on the others but I don’t have the biblical studies cred to speculate which (although imo the smart money’s on Judges 19 being the original).

The concubine in Judges 19 is treated abysmally by the text. She’s unnamed (as is the Levite) and her only act of agency (leaving the Levite to return to her father) is overridden by men (the Levite and her father) without any concern for her wishes. In life her choices are made irrelevant. In death her body is a tool for war propaganda (it’s very important to read Judges 19 in the context of Judges 20-21, when the tribes of Israel very nearly commit genocide against the tribe of Benjamin*).

*The resolution to the near-genocide of the Benjaminites also involves women’s agency being overridden by men. The last chapters of Judges are fucked-up even by the standard of the Book of Judges

Not to be all “it gets worse,” but the text doesn’t actually say the Benjaminites rape the concubine to death. The Hebrew in 19:27 describes her as nefelet petah ha-bayit v’yadeha al-hasof (lying [at the] entrance [of] the house and her hands on the threshold). In v. 28 the Levite tells her to get up but v’ein oneh (but no reply). The Septuagint clarifies that she was dead (kai oun apekrithi oti ein nekra), but that’s an interpolation into the Hebrew; not part of the original. It’s entirely plausible to read the concubine as unconscious or dazed and her death not occurring until the Levite cuts her up.

Is there a biblical basis for the idea that God is outside of time?

@farminforlife

What’s the biblical basis for God having created time, space, and matter? Creatio ex nihilo is on fairly tenuous grounds biblically speaking. The Genesis 1 creation myth definitely presupposes the existence of the waters of the void (and thus of the void itself) prior to creation although I’m not sure that’s the case with the John 1 creation myth or some of the minor ones in Job and the Psalms. But even in those I’d argue that it’s less that they advocate creatio ex nihilo than that they don’t actively advocate against it.

I’m also not entirely convinced that creatio ex nihilo places God outside creation. If I build a house I can enter it, board up the doors and windows, and be unable to leave (at least without destroying the house).

if I could ask God anything and get the real, genuine answer, I'd ask him why He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He knew He was going to stop him. He knew that He'd never truly ask him to do it. He knew that if he went through with it then His promise would be frustrated.

The thing is... the story has led parents to think it's okay to sacrifice their children, metaphorically and sometimes literally, for a false sense of moral superiority. How many LGBT+ children have been sacrificed in the supposed name of Christianity? How many autistic children? How many orphaned children? How many abused children?

Maybe it was the right lesson for Abraham, especially about how it paralleled Christ's atonement. But it's not a story that has translated well into modern times.

do you want the Jewish answer? It was to challenge him to think critically about commandments from g-d (and translating to religion as an institution, rulings from religious leaders and scripture), and it's a challenge he failed. He was supposed to, theoretically, fight g-d and say "no, by no means am I going to do this. I don't care that you created everything, that is my child and my world, and I'm not going to do it just because you said so."

Instead, Abraham royally screws up, traumatises his son, and in doing so, loses his son, loses g-d's will and favor, and in the Tanakh we never really hear from Abraham again after this point, because he failed.

It's a story about someone blindly following in faith, and losing the most important things to them because they never stopped to think "Wait, did I hear this right? And if I did hear this right, am I so sure that this is something I want to follow?"

Isaac was Abraham's only son at the time, and the child he had fought so hard to have. Him following an order blindly without thinking of the consequences is not supposed to be a good thing (It just kind of benefits the feudal society that eventually embraced Christianity, which is why the understanding was changed in Christian worldviews.)

While that’s a Jewish answer, I’d caution on calling it the Jewish answer. Jews have wrestled with this story (called the Akedah or “Binding”) for over two thousand years (in some synagogues it’s a daily reading). And yes, one conclusion that some Jews have come to is that Abraham failed the test. The Koren Sacks siddur calls it “the supreme trial of faith in which Abraham demonstrated his love of God above all other loves” and that interpretation (and variations on it) are also very much Jewish responses to the Akedah.

Saying you know all about the Tanakh because you read the "Old Testament" is like saying you know all about Twilight because you read 50 Shades of Grey.

so I see this line and ones like it quite a bit and I’m never sure what it means. I’ve read Jewish and Christian translations of the collection of Hebrew, Aramaic, and (if you’re Catholic or Orthodox) Greek texts commonly called the Tanakh by Jews and the Old Testament by Christians, and while Jews and Christians order them differently (and again Catholic and Orthodox editions include some additional texts not found in Jewish or Protestant editions), the translations generally don’t differ all that much, especially in more recent translations as both Jews and Christians increasingly rely on secular academic scholarship to inform their translations.

It’s certainly true that reading the Old Testament won’t give you much on an insight into the rabbinic commentary to the Tanakh, but my JPS Tanakh doesn’t give me any insight into the rabbinic commentary either. Similarly a Tanakh won’t give you insight into a lot of the really different interpretations Christians pull on the Old Testament (there’s a handful of translation conventions, but most of those were present in the Septuagint which was translated by Jews), but most Bibles don’t give you much insight into those interpretations either (or if they do it’s in the cross-references found in the back after the New Testament).

You admit that Christians re-ordered the Tanakh and yet you don't see how that changes things.

The Christian Old Testement intentionally mistranslated certain books and texts, especially Yishiyahu (Isaiah), to conform to their Messianic beliefs in Jesus's divinity.

The "Old Testement" is not the Tanakh. It is not a translation of the Tanakh, it is an intentional mistranslation.

Additionally, the Septuagint was intentionally changed by the Jewish sages "translating" it because they know that gentiles would come and misinterpret certain sections.

We see this in the very beginning of the Tanakh:

All 72 sages that were forced to translate the Tanakh individually changed the order from "Bereishit Barah Elokim" (In the beginning, G-d created) to "Elokim Barah Bereishit" (G-d created in the beginning) because they knew people in the future might come and misinterpet it as saying that anything came before G-d.

[Talmud: Megillah 9a 11 - 9b 3]

So yeah. The "Old Testement" is not at all like the Tanakh.

To expand on what @magnetothemagnificent said, with the "intentional mistranslations to support Jesus' claims to divinity", @entanglingbriars, take a look at this:

Rav Singer goes into detail on one of the more egregious edits done to one of the Psalms, and this is just one example of many.

Intentional mistranslations like this are the literal foundation of Christian texts, and what is built upon that foundation is going to be affected by it.

So I’m not arguing that there are no differences in how Christians translate the Hebrew Scriptures versus how Jews do, or that the Christian translations are as justified as the Jewish ones (although in many cases the errors in translation were introduced in the Septuagint and so aren’t the result of deliberate Christian mistranslation. My Greek is nonexistent so I can’t evaluate whether that’s the case in Ps 22).

I’m arguing that the differences in translation and book ordering are not so significant that reading a Christian translation rather than a Jewish one results in having knowledge of a fundamentally different text. The analogy of Twilight:50 Shades::Tanakh:Old Testament massively overstates the extent of the differences.

All translation is inherently also interpretation, but there is a significant difference between reading a bad translation of a book and reading a fanfic based on that book.

Saying you know all about the Tanakh because you read the "Old Testament" is like saying you know all about Twilight because you read 50 Shades of Grey.

so I see this line and ones like it quite a bit and I’m never sure what it means. I’ve read Jewish and Christian translations of the collection of Hebrew, Aramaic, and (if you’re Catholic or Orthodox) Greek texts commonly called the Tanakh by Jews and the Old Testament by Christians, and while Jews and Christians order them differently (and again Catholic and Orthodox editions include some additional texts not found in Jewish or Protestant editions), the translations generally don’t differ all that much, especially in more recent translations as both Jews and Christians increasingly rely on secular academic scholarship to inform their translations.

It’s certainly true that reading the Old Testament won’t give you much on an insight into the rabbinic commentary to the Tanakh, but my JPS Tanakh doesn’t give me any insight into the rabbinic commentary either. Similarly a Tanakh won’t give you insight into a lot of the really different interpretations Christians pull on the Old Testament (there’s a handful of translation conventions, but most of those were present in the Septuagint which was translated by Jews), but most Bibles don’t give you much insight into those interpretations either (or if they do it’s in the cross-references found in the back after the New Testament).

This was my undergraduate OT prof’s interpretation as well. He sees that part of II Samuel as a work of revisionist history to justify Solomon’s usurpation of Adonijah.

To those who believe God or God’s created the world we live in, what are your thoughts on parasites? Why were they made? What is their purpose? Are they good, bad, or neither? I started think about this after watching a video on youtube (I unfortunately remember neither the title nor the creator, but it was some athiest youtuber discussing some African eye worm that lives in drinking water and takes a great deal of time and patience to spool out of peoples limbs) that got me thinking about what parasites mean in reference to the question of religion. I have also watched a lot of videos about parasite conservation from channels like scishow which gave science based answers to not only why they exist but how important they can be so I really wanted to see religious opinions about parasites.

I try not to make any moral judgments on nature. They’re not good or bad; they’re just doing what they do. I don’t know what they would have been doing in an unfallen world, but as it is, we live in a world marred in sin. I can think of two quotes that kind of get the idea across;

- Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, pages 245-246. Bolded emphases added, italics original.

- C.S. Lewis (Miracles, pages 195, 196). Emphases added.

The point being made in both of these passages is that we’re experiencing a fallen world, both through the lens of our own fallenness and the resulting depravity that has also been inflicted on our environment due to our fall. Genesis 1:34 says that God saw His creation and that it was very good, But, as good as our world still is, it isn’t quite the same as it was when God initially made it; “for creation was made subject to futility,” but that it will one day “be set free from the slavery of corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:20, 21). But in the meantime, I gotta remember that this world is an imperfect world, marred by death and stained by sin, and that “all Creation is groaning in labor pains” (Romans 8:22) even as she awaits the fullness of her redemption. So, what good could disease and parasites have brought? I don’t know. But they’re just a fact of life now.

So my problem with this sort of explanation is that they don’t give proper attention to the full depth of what the Fall needs to entail if we want to take science seriously. If evolution is the origin of species, then death is not a sickness that has crept into the system but a fundamentally necessary component without which speciation could not occur. It is death that selects against certain traits and for others. Changes to an environment, and consequent changes in likely causes of death, can divide a formerly homogeneous population because one portion of it is being killed (and thus selected against) by a factor that does not exist for the other.

But it gets worse. Once you have intelligence, you have pain and suffering. Pain and suffering, and the desire to avoid them, are part of how evolution has built animals to survive. Without pain and suffering the selection process to produce intelligence would either not exist or have far less power in promoting intelligence. The fact that animals can suffer is part of why they have continued to exist.

 If the Fall is the explanation for death, then its effects are so total, so comprehensive, that it becomes an event outside of time and history that reached back into antediluvian history (as it were) and changed the reason that the diversity of species we now observe exists. Not just the fact of the diversity, but the cause of it. Or, alternatively, speciation is the result of the Fall and humanity is therefore extant only because the world has Fallen; in the Garden of Eden there were only single-celled organisms reproducing endlessly.

The tragedy of our existence, as Edward Farley says, is that the very same things that give us the capacity for intelligence, love, virtue, and beauty are also the things that cause pain, death, suffering, cruelty, and sin. These cannot be seen as sicknesses when it is they themselves that permit, allow, and even create those elements of Creation we would unequivocally, and I think correctly, call good.

(Note that this is in no way an argument for atheism or against a good deity. It is simply an argument that sin, suffering, and death are, to all appearances, not external factors but fundamental components of what God–if such a Being exist–has made.)

#the challenge evolution poses to christianity#is not that it contradicts genesis 1

You’re absolutely correct (and I needed to share those tags, because you’re absolutely correct there too).

And you may have outed me as a kinda-maybe-sorta heretic? Because I know that the Fall is kind of essential to the Christian narrative, but I don’t know how to square that up with evolution. I have seen at least guy on YouTube make the argument that death actually was always the case from the beginning (he argues that the covenant made between God and Noah isn’t actually different from the one made between God and Adam, but a reiteration of it and that simply elaborates further on the primordial covenant).

All I know for sure is that I have a mytho-history that sits in pretty uneasy tension with the physical evidence. So, I have a bit of a bind; do I banish Adam and Eve to the realm of ahistorical (well, pre-temporal) foundational event that determined the unfolding of the universe? Do I flatly reject evolution? Do I try to make an awkward peace between the two? I’m going to leave that to my betters to decide, and (as I suspect most believers in the Fall do) simply code-switch between naturalistic and theological causes for whatever is appropriate to the situation.

My undergraduate advisor (who was/is a Catholic theologian) thought that there must be a way to reconcile the two, but she didn’t know what it was and was hopeful that the next generation of theologians, being more educated in the natural sciences, would be able to solve the problem. My suspicion is that it can’t be solved and honestly the whole thing is Paul’s fault for drawing such a strong parallel between Adam and Jesus: the Fall as the origin of death and suffering is not required by the text of Genesis 3 (which is an etiological myth for puberty and/or sin), and by becoming scriptural Paul set up the Church for an eventual collision with reality (which, to be fair, Paul didn’t expect his Epistles to be preserved for over a millennium as scripture and would probably have taken a very different approach in writing them if he had).

Unsurprisingly, I’m going to side with the more hopeful view of your advisor. :P

But Genesis 3 as etiology for puberty! Now, that’s interesting. So, question for you, because I don’t know anyone outside of Irenaeus who even so much as implies that Adam and Eve weren’t fully grown adults; is that an idea that can be found in Rabbinic commentaries?

So this is a reading that comes from my undergrad OT professor. He draws a parallel between the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:17 and the use of knowledge of good and evil as a metaphor for aging in Isaiah 7:15-16 and argues that just as the use in Isaiah refers to maturing both mentally and physically, we should read the maturation/consequences of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the same light.

There’s more to the argument than that, he also points to the concern with nakedness and to the consequence of work and toil that come from eating the fruit (among other things, I don’t have his paper to hand) to support the reading. It’s not based in the rabbinic literature, as far as I know (he’s a rabbi so it could be, but he’s also heterodox even by Reform standards), but I find it fairly compelling, and think there are hints of it in both Judaism and Christianity; both have literature suggesting a sexual subtext to Genesis 3.

So the story of Sodom (Genesis 19) should be read parallel to the story of a certain Levite (Judges 19). Both feature roughly the same events, but I especially want to compare Genesis 19:6-8

with Judges 19:23-24

In both passages the host implores the townspeople not to perform a wicked act, but in Judges it’s made abundantly clear why the act is wicked: “this man is [his] guest.” Hospitality was taken seriously in the Ancient Near East, hence both hosts are willing to sacrifice their daughters (and in the Judges story the Levite’s concubine) to the mob to keep harm from their guests. Now, it’s entirely possible that the fact that the men of Sodom and the Benjamine town wanted to rape a man added to the depravity, but the fundamental issue is protection of guests.

Compare also Ezekiel 16:49-50′s explanation of why Sodom was destroyed:

If you want to add a New Testament perspective, the Epistle of Jude is probably your best biblical basis for the sin of Sodom being homosexual sex rather than violating hospitality

Were humans originally not intended to eat the meat of the animals around them?

In the garden of Eden when God is showing Adam and Eve everything he has given them, there is a section where he discusses that all of the trees and plants (except for the tree of knowledge obviously) were given to them for nourishment.

Animals were not mentioned here. However, after the flood, he mentions that the animals also were available for their nourishment.

As a first time Bible reader (and a vegetarian) I am curious about these two sections and looking for an explanation if there is one. Why is it that before the flood the animals were not given as food, and after they were? Thanks in advance everyone, I’m just looking to better understand what I am reading.

Nineteenth century Catholic commentator George Leo Haydock wrote:

Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the late fourth century, wrote:

Giovanni Menochio, a sixteenth century Jesuit, wrote:

In all three cases, there is an understanding that in their original state, human beings were meant to be vegetarians; that the allowance for meat was a concession, the result of a weakened human condition and a weakened vitality within Creation itself. There are some, like myself, who see vegetarianism as what is known as an “eschatological sign” - a way of living on this earth in a way that is not mandatory for all believers, but who nonetheless see it as a way of more closely resembling what we will be like in heaven. There are others who wouldn’t grant it such an exalted status. There are other opinions, though. For example, the Rabbi David Kimhi (or RaDaK, as he is sometimes called), was an eleventh century Jewish scholar who instead suggested:

Hezekiah ben Manoah, from the thirteenth century, uses similar reasoning:

The eighteenth century Chaim ibn Attar agrees with his coreligionists above in that he also believed that meat-eating was a reward for Noah’s faithful stewardship, whereas the nineteenth century commentator known as the Malbim actually mixed both reasonings:

So among both Jewish and Christian scholars, there is a wide variety of opinions on the matter; meat-eating can be something we’re just putting up with because of the sinful state of the world, or it can be a reward for maintaining the world. I personally think that the first option is more likely, but Christians are free to believe either.