Of what value is retribution against humankind to God? - Love your enemies?

[Wick Stick]

Poetic license, and I don't see any compelling reason to interpret it literally.

Not even the multiple verses that come directly afterward that talk about him being in hell, and the one that says he was resurrected?

 

[Anchorite]

The text also states, "Out of the belly of hell cried I," which suggests that he was not alive at the time.

This conversation is about taking the text literally. That was what amigo and I were talking about. That doesn't leave room for a metaphorical interpretation.

There's going to have to be a LOT of poetic language to explain away all of the following:

• The waters compassed me about, [even] to the soul:
• Tehowm* closed me round about
• The weeds were wrapped about my head.
• I went down to the bottoms of the mountains;
• The earth with her bars [was] about me for ever:
• Thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.

Jonah 2

1 Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly,

2 And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.

NOTE: Death is not called an affliction. There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals crying out or praying to God.

3 For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

4 Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.

NOTE: There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals looking toward anything.

5 The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.

6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.

NOTE: Corruption refers not to death, but to the foul belly of the fish, where digestive fluids were being secreted.

7 When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

NOTE: There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals’ souls fainting, remembering anything, or praying.

8 They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.

10 And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

NOTE: The fish vomited out Jonah, who was still alive, for there is no mention of God resurrecting Jonah from the dead.

 

[Wick Stick]

NOTE: There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals crying out or praying to God.

NOTE: There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals looking toward anything.

Yes, there are. The Rich Man cries out and wants a drop of water for his tongue, and also to warn his brothers. Able's blood calls out from the ground for vengeance. The souls of the martyrs under the throne in Revelation look forward to God's vengeance on their murderers.

NOTE: Corruption refers not to death, but to the foul belly of the fish, where digestive fluids were being secreted.

Look the word up. I'll do it for you, even:

1. pit, destruction, grave
   1. pit (for catching lions)
   2. pit (of Hell)

The KJV translates Strong's H7845 in the following manner: corruption (4x), pit (14x), destruction (2x), ditch (2x), grave (1x).

There's nothing of digestive juices here.

7 When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

NOTE: There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals’ souls fainting,

Faint is just a synonym for dying. All the dead have "fainted."

NOTE: The fish vomited out Jonah, who was still alive, for there is no mention of God resurrecting Jonah from the dead.

Yes there is. I just finished quoting it. Here, I'll do it again, but this time in Hebrew:

ותּעל משּׁחת חיּי יהוה אלהי

 

[Anchorite]

Yes, there are. The Rich Man cries out and wants a drop of water for his tongue, and also to warn his brothers. Able's blood calls out from the ground for vengeance. The souls of the martyrs under the throne in Revelation look forward to God's vengeance on their murderers.

Look the word up. I'll do it for you, even:

1. pit, destruction, grave
   1. pit (for catching lions)
   2. pit (of Hell)

The KJV translates Strong's H7845 in the following manner: corruption (4x), pit (14x), destruction (2x), ditch (2x), grave (1x).

There's nothing of digestive juices here.

Faint is just a synonym for dying. All the dead have "fainted."

Yes there is. I just finished quoting it. Here, I'll do it again, but this time in Hebrew:

ותּעל משּׁחת חיּי יהוה אלהי

The rich man calls out to Abraham, not God.

Abel’s blood crying out is a poetic figure. Blood has no mouth.

Souls of martyrs under the throne in Revelation are not praying.

Fainting is never used in the Bible as a synonym for dying, it refers to being weak, losing strength.

Digestive juices are produced in a fish belly as a simple matter of fact.

You are imposing your own hermeneutics on verses that most scholars consider to not be referring to death or resurrection.

 

[Wick Stick]

The rich man calls out to Abraham, not God.

You said there's no record of the dead crying out. I proved otherwise. Why are you moving the goalposts?

Abel’s blood crying out is a poetic figure. Blood has no mouth.

Hebrews 11:4 By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.

Souls of martyrs under the throne in Revelation are not praying.

You said there's no record of the dead looking forward to anything. I proved otherwise. Why are you moving the goalposts?

Revelvation 6:9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: 10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

Fainting is never used in the Bible as a synonym for dying, it refers to being weak, losing strength.

Death definitely is a case of losing strength.

Digestive juices are produced in a fish belly as a simple matter of fact.

That's not in dispute. I showed you what the word corruption meant within the verse and how it is translated throughout the Bible. That definition cannot mean anything to do with digestive juices. Stop trying to justify bad arguments by re-framing them.

You are imposing your own hermeneutics on verses that most scholars consider to not be referring to death or resurrection.

I'm taking a minority position, yes. My argument has been based on the text and some pretty standard hermeneutics. Yours has been based on making assertions which I have repeatedly proven to be erroneous.

If it's so straightforward, why don't you just copy-paste the obviously-true-argument here to show it? It's because it's not that straighforward.

 

[Anchorite]

I'm taking a minority position, yes. My argument has been based on the text and some pretty standard hermeneutics. Yours has been based on making assertions which I have repeatedly proven to be erroneous.

If it's so straightforward, why don't you just copy-paste the obviously-true-argument here to show it? It's because it's not that straighforward.

It is a minority position because it is not supported by scripture.

Your arguments are not based on the text, but on your misguided imagination.

You have proven nothing.

You have misquoted my statement as “looking forward to anything”:

There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals looking toward anything.

In the sign of Jonah, Jesus has already told us what he and the prophet have in common: They both spend three days in something. We can’t infer from this that they both literally died and resurrected.

In fact, Jesus has warned us that there are things that he and Jonah don’t have in common, for he said, “Behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Literally dying and rising is one of the ways in which Jesus has historically been understood to be greater than Jonah.

The fundamental problem with interpreting the above as indicating that Jonah literally died is that Jonah’s prayer is a poem, as you can see even in English since it is composed of couplets in parallel with each other.

Specifically, it’s what’s known as a psalm of thanksgiving, and biblical poems and psalms regularly use non-literal expressions. Often, these take the form of hyperbole, which is deliberate exaggeration used to heighten the emotional impact of the text or to make a point.

For example, when the Psalmist says, “Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn!” (Ps. 108:2), it doesn’t mean that harps, lyres, or the dawn are conscious beings that fall asleep and can then be woken up. This is a poetic way of saying that the psalmist is so excited about God that he’s going to stay up all night praising him with harp and lyre (and even that length of time may be hyperbole).

In the same way, referring to the realm of the dead in a poetic context does not mean that the person literally died. All it need mean is that the person was in danger of death or almost died.

Nor do descriptions in poetry of being rescued from Sheol mean that the person literally died and was resurrected. In Psalm 30, we read,

I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and have not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit (Ps. 30:1-3).

This is a psalm for the dedication of the Temple, and it is attributed to David. “You have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” does not mean that David literally died and was resurrected.

These are hyperbolic, poetic expressions used to give thanksgiving for deliverance from a serious illness (“you have healed me”), with the result that God has not “let my foes rejoice over me.”

In light of the non-literal language used in poetry, we can’t use the references in Jonah’s psalm of thanksgiving as proof he literally died—only that he was in danger of dying and God rescued him.

I wish you better success in understanding scripture in the future.

 

[Lambano]

Not even the multiple verses that come directly afterward that talk about him being in hell, and the one that says he was resurrected?

First of all, I object to translating "Sheol" as "Hell". The OT concept of Sheol is not the same as the NT concept of Gehenna or the "lake of fire".

Second, Jonah chapter 2 is written in couplets, which is a recognizable Hebrew poetic form used in the Psalms, Proverbs, and elsewhere in the OT. It is formatted as such in NIV, NASB, NKJV, et. al. If you concede it's poetry, you have to allow for the possibility of a little poetic exaggeration.

I suppose if I wanted to make a compelling case for Jonah's death and resurrection, I'd play it this way:

1. Despite modern cases of human's surviving being swallowed and regurgitated by whales (see James Hartley and Adrián Simancas), it is highly unlikely a human could survive an extended period of time in the belly of a fish.

2. Jesus Himself compared His own death and resurrection to Jonah's experience in the belly of the fish (see Matthew 12:39-40), so it's reasonable to conclude Jonah's case was also a case of death and resurrection.

 

[Wick Stick]

First of all, I object to translating "Sheol" as "Hell". The OT concept of Sheol is not the same as the NT concept of Gehenna or the "lake of fire".

How about תְּהוֹם, and שַׁחַת ? Those are both synonyms for Sheol and they're both in Jonah 2.

I agree Sheol isn't Gehenna. It's Hades.

Second, Jonah chapter 2 is written in couplets, which is a recognizable Hebrew poetic form used in the Psalms, Proverbs, and elsewhere in the OT. It is formatted as such in NIV, NASB, NKJV, et. al. If you concede it's poetry, you have to allow for the possibility of a little poetic exaggeration.

Jonah 2 is written in parallelisms, which are pairs of lines whose meanings match. Parallelisms exist to clarify meaning, rather than for artistic expression.

Semitic languages can be ambiguous (no spaces, punctuation, capitalization, implied vowel sounds). Making two statements that have to equal each other removes that ambiguity. That's precisely the opposite of poetic license.

I suppose if I wanted to make a compelling case for Jonah's death and resurrection, I'd play it this way:

1. Despite modern cases of human surviving being swallowed and regurgitated by whales (see James Hartley and Adrián Simancas), it is highly unlikely a human could survive an extended period of time in the belly of a fish.

2. Jesus Himself compared His own death and resurrection to Jonah's experience in the belly of the fish (see Matthew 12:39-40), so it's reasonable to conclude Jonah's case was also a case of death and resurrection.

Those are reasonable arguments, but I prefer

3. The text itself makes repeated references to drowning, the afterlife, and one to resurrection.

I'm honestly dumbfounded that nobody else in this thread is willing/able to read the literal meaning of the passage.

 

[Lambano]

I'm honestly dumbfounded that nobody else in this thread is willing/able to read the literal meaning of the passage.

As I am astonished that you don't see the poetic nature of Jonah 2.

 

[Wick Stick]

Your arguments are not based on the text, but on your misguided imagination.

I've repeated quoted both the text and other verses. Scroll up. They're in blue. They're easy to find.

You have proven nothing.

You have misquoted my statement as “looking forward to anything”:

There is no record in the Bible of dead individuals looking toward anything.

Off by a letter. You know what? I still proved that assertion wrong. If you scroll up, you're find the verses in blue that disprove it.

In the sign of Jonah, Jesus has already told us what he and the prophet have in common: They both spend three days in something. We can’t infer from this that they both literally died and resurrected.

I didn't infer that. That wasn't my argument. This is either a strawman, or you didn't understand me.

In fact, Jesus has warned us that there are things that he and Jonah don’t have in common, for he said, “Behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Literally dying and rising is one of the ways in which Jesus has historically been understood to be greater than Jonah.

The fundamental problem with interpreting the above as indicating that Jonah literally died is that Jonah’s prayer is a poem, as you can see even in English since it is composed of couplets in parallel with each other.

Specifically, it’s what’s known as a psalm of thanksgiving, and biblical poems and psalms regularly use non-literal expressions. Often, these take the form of hyperbole, which is deliberate exaggeration used to heighten the emotional impact of the text or to make a point.

For example, when the Psalmist says, “Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn!” (Ps. 108:2), it doesn’t mean that harps, lyres, or the dawn are conscious beings that fall asleep and can then be woken up. This is a poetic way of saying that the psalmist is so excited about God that he’s going to stay up all night praising him with harp and lyre (and even that length of time may be hyperbole).

In the same way, referring to the realm of the dead in a poetic context does not mean that the person literally died. All it need mean is that the person was in danger of death or almost died.

Nor do descriptions in poetry of being rescued from Sheol mean that the person literally died and was resurrected. In Psalm 30, we read,

This is a psalm for the dedication of the Temple, and it is attributed to David. “You have brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit” does not mean that David literally died and was resurrected.

These are hyperbolic, poetic expressions used to give thanksgiving for deliverance from a serious illness (“you have healed me”), with the result that God has not “let my foes rejoice over me.”

In light of the non-literal language used in poetry, we can’t use the references in Jonah’s psalm of thanksgiving as proof he literally died—only that he was in danger of dying and God rescued him.

Finally, a cogent argument.

You've misunderstood the purpose for parallelism. I'd encourage you to read my last post to Lambano, which addresses that, rather than repeating myself.

I wish you better success in understanding scripture in the future.

And the same to you, sir.

 

[Wick Stick]

As I am astonished that you don't see the poetic nature of Jonah 2.

Jonah is a prophet. I read him as a prophet.

Our modern notion of poetry - choosing words artfully for the beauty of the combination of sounds - doesn't apply here. Parallelism is used functionally. Part of the purpose is to disambiguate what is being said; not to make it sound pretty.

 

[Lambano]

Jonah is a prophet. I read him as a prophet.

Jonah may be prophet, but I cannot read Jonah 2 as belonging to the genre of prophecy, i.e. being a mouthpiece for God. Jonah 3:4, maybe.

 

[Wick Stick]

Jonah may be prophet, but I cannot read Jonah 2 as belonging to the genre of prophecy, i.e. being a mouthpiece for God. Jonah 3:4, maybe.

Yes, the book spells out when God is speaking, and when Jonah is speaking, and this chapter is Jonah speaking.

That doesn't mean we should dismiss Jonah when he uses 3 different words for the afterlife and tells us he was there, or when he tells us that he drowned, or when he says that he was resurrected. If Jonah is using a metaphor, he's really overextending it.

 

[Lambano]

Yes, the book spells out when God is speaking, and when Jonah is speaking, and this chapter is Jonah speaking.

That doesn't mean we should dismiss Jonah when he uses 3 different words for the afterlife and tells us he was there, or when he tells us that he drowned, or when he says that he was resurrected. If Jonah is using a metaphor, he's really overextending it.

Not metaphor. Poetry. Poetry functions differently. Look at how verses 2-9 function: This is Jonah's personal expression (or psalm, if you will) of praise and thanksgiving to God for rescuing him.

 

[Lambano]

Our modern notion of poetry - choosing words artfully for the beauty of the combination of sounds - doesn't apply here. Parallelism is used functionally. Part of the purpose is to disambiguate what is being said; not to make it sound pretty.

English poetry relies on rhyme schemes and scansion, which does not translate well to other languages. Japanese Haiku relies on syllable/symbol/word count, which also does not translate well. Hebrew poetry uses parallelism with either confirmation or contrast, which is translatable. And it still sounds pretty after translation.

Which tells me that God is a poet, and that the Bible was designed to be disseminated to the whole world.

 

[Wick Stick]

Not metaphor. Poetry. Poetry functions differently. Look at how verses 2-9 function: This is Jonah's personal expression (or psalm, if you will) of praise and thanksgiving to God for rescuing him.

If not metaphor, then what is the device that negates Jonah saying he died? The other fellow suggested hyperbole. So...

"I literally died, bruv! Drowned, seaweed all wrapped up round my 'ead! Went right on down to Davy Jones. They locked me up in Hades, but God wasn't havin it, wuz 'ee? Scooped me right out the bad place, big ol fish retched me up on solid ground. He sez to me, he sez, 'you still gots to gets to Nineveh, bloke.'"

Is that what you're reading here?

 

[Lambano]

Is that what you're reading here?

Maybe with a second pint of beer and with more of a gravelly Israeli accent. I haven't decided if that one is from Kilkenny, Liverpool, or Mel-bunn.

 

[Brakelite]

SteVen
Retribution? My friend, that one single thought sums up why you have so many questions and challenges regarding who God is. Your statement thinking God's judgement is a form of retribution or revenge reveals a very stark and obvious ignorance regarding the character of God. You need to rethink who you believe God is, and what He's like.

 

[St. SteVen]

SteVen
Retribution? My friend, that one single thought sums up why you have so many questions and challenges regarding who God is. Your statement thinking God's judgement is a form of retribution or revenge reveals a very stark and obvious ignorance regarding the character of God. You need to rethink who you believe God is, and what He's like.

Thanks for your concerns.
I use the word "retribution" as the obvious position of the church of God against humankind.
I believe in ultimate redemption.

 

[Bruce-Leiter]

Of what value is retribution against humankind to God? - Love your enemies?​

No matter what your view is on the final judgement/evaluation
of humankind,what would be the value of retribution against humankind?
What does it accomplish?

Three views of the final judgment:
- Damnationism (eternal punishment)
- Annihilationism (destruction of the wicked)
- Universalism (ultimate redemption)

Jesus taught us to love our enemies.
What should He do with His own?

The Bible is clear in teaching that God is our just Judge and that unbelievers who remain unrepentant during their whole lives bring on themselves eternal punishment because of the guilty verdict that they deserve. It's sad that God must give that verdict because he cannot live with unforgiven sin in heaven and on the future new earth, @St. SteVen. Jesus clearly describes his future, final judgment:

Mat 25:30 And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Mat 25:31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.
Mat 25:32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
Mat 25:33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.
Mat 25:34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world....
Mat 25:41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels....
Mat 25:46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Notice in the other verses that unbelievers "earned" their punishment by failing to do good deeds for Jesus but that the "sheep" receive God's blessing, his gracious gifts, to have eternal life, from which come their good works (verse 34). Believers' salvation is fully to God's credit, but people's sad punishment is fully because of their failure to serve God. It is God's perfect justice, not at all his revenge or retribution.