Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
... Formal religions, with priests, temples, liturgies and the like often resulted in structures of power. The God of the Bible warns about this: "the altar will not be morally ruined by tools". Meaning, keep it as simple as possible. The citation is sloppy on purpose. Christ says to Peter You are stone and on this stone you will build my Church, both a quote of the ancient word of God and and exortation to keep it simple. The results were and are under the eyes of everyone....
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You threw me for a minute, as I could not immediately recall the words "the altar will not be morally ruined by tools" as being in the Bible; then I realized you were speaking of the un-hewn stones of Exodus chapter 20.
Exodus 20:22 (Tanakh [1985], Jewish Publication Society): And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them.
Three comments:
(1) This un-hewn stone altar was used by Moses in the wilderness. The Temple altar, whose method of construction was much more elaborate and also dictated by divine fiat, could hardly be considered un-hewn.
(2) We often speak of THE god of the Bible, but such language is imprecise. Many are the names of God in the Bible, and it isn't at all apparent that originally they were referring to the same deity. El was the principal deity of a Canaanite pantheon of deities. Yahweh seems to have begun as the cultic worship of a minor deity who in time became associated with El in the minds of the early Israelites. Even the attributes and feats of his rival Baal seem to have been transferred over time to Yahweh.
One of the most fascinating of all verses in the Hebrew Bible retains some of the polytheistic relics of these early Israelite beliefs:
Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (New Revised Standard): When the Most High [El]
apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; the LORD's [Yahweh's]
own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.
(3) To profane something is not the same as committing an immoral act. To profane a holy object is to commit a transgression against a ritual commandment. That in itself may be considered to be an immoral act, but the distinction is important to note.