Best 118 quotes in «old testament quotes» category

To begin with, there is an almost compulsive promiscuity associated with homosexual behavior. 75% of homosexual men have more than 100 sexual partners during their lifetime. More than half of these partners are strangers. Only 8% of homosexual men and 7% of homosexual women ever have relationships lasting more than three years. Nobody knows the reason for this strange, obsessive promiscuity. It may be that homosexuals are trying to satisfy a deep psychological need by sexual encounters, and it just is not fulfilling. Male homosexuals average over 20 partners a year. According to Dr. Schmidt, The number of homosexual men who experience anything like lifelong fidelity becomes, statistically speaking, almost meaningless. Promiscuity among homosexual men is not a mere stereotype, and it is not merely the majority experience—it is virtually the only experience. Lifelong faithfulness is almost non-existent in the homosexual experience. Associated with this compulsive promiscuity is widespread drug use by homosexuals to heighten their sexual experiences. Homosexuals in general are three times as likely to be problem drinkers as the general population. Studies show that 47% of male homosexuals have a history of alcohol abuse and 51% have a history of drug abuse. There is a direct correlation between the number of partners and the amount of drugs consumed. Moreover, according to Schmidt, “There is overwhelming evidence that certain mental disorders occur with much higher frequency among homosexuals.” For example, 40% of homosexual men have a history of major depression. That compares with only 3% for men in general. Similarly 37% of female homosexuals have a history of depression. This leads in turn to heightened suicide rates. Homosexuals are three times as likely to contemplate suicide as the general population. In fact homosexual men have an attempted suicide rate six times that of heterosexual men, and homosexual women attempt suicide twice as often as heterosexual women. Nor are depression and suicide the only problems. Studies show that homosexuals are much more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexual men. Whatever the causes of these disorders, the fact remains that anyone contemplating a homosexual lifestyle should have no illusions about what he is getting into. Another well-kept secret is how physically dangerous homosexual behavior is.

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

Too often scholars have thought and even suggested that what happened during and after Constantine was that the church sought to replace the pagan temples, priests, and sacrifices with their own. This is at best a half truth. If this had been primarily what was going on, we would have expected to find priestesses showing up in the mainstream church in and after the time of Constantine, since there were certainly priestesses in the pagan temples. But this we do not find in the historical record. This is because the church of that period was not merely trying to supplant pagan religion with Christian religion, though some of that was going on. More to the point, there was a rising tide of anti-Judaism, and one of its manifestations was this Old Testament hermeneutic. The Torah had been claimed as the church’s book, Jews were being ostracized and then later ghettoized, and a hermeneutic of ministry was being adopted which co-opted the Old Testament for church use when it came to priests, temples, and sacrifices, and indeed sacraments in general. Thus ironically enough while the structure of the ecclesial church was becoming more Old Testamental, the church hierarchy was not only becoming less tolerant of Jews, it was forgetting altogether the Jewish character of Jesus’ ministry and his modifications of the Passover that led to the Lord’s Supper celebration of the early church in the first place.

Torah is not merely a collection of prohibitions, rigid strictures and boring observances. Rather, it is a narrative of the blessings and promises of God initially offered to one person and family, but through which the whole world will ultimately be blessed.

Watu wa zamani katika Agano la Kale walikuwa wakiabudu miungu iliyotengenezwa kwa mawe na vinyago. Miungu hiyo haikuwa na chochote ndani mbali na kutengenezwa kwa akili na fikira za kibinadamu. Hii ilikuwa ni kinyume cha ukweli wa Kibiblia kwamba Mungu alimuumba mtu kwa mfano wake, lakini si mtu aliyejaa dhambi kumtengeneza Mungu kwa mfano wake. Kuabudu miungu mingine ni dhambi kubwa. Tii Amri Kumi za Mungu; hasa ya kwanza, ya pili na ya tatu.

Try to imagine this formless, liquid abyss of many waters and surfaces. With and within this awesome, abysmal substance, God Mother creates universes. We are made from this stuff, literally! And we literally live, move, and have our being in this fathomless, multi-dimensional matrix.

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

What first gave rise to the hypothesis [of Yahweh's Midianite origin] in the first place was a historical-critical interpretation of those biblical texts which narrate how Moses, son of Levitical parents (Exod. 2.1-2), married a Midianite woman, and lived long enough in Midian to have two sons with her (Exod. 2.11-22). During this time he was in service with his father-in-law, a priest (perhaps the priest) of Midian, named both Reuel (Exod. 2.18) and Jethro (Exod. 2.1; 4.18). At a sacred spot, a 'mountain of God', situated beyond the normal pasturage of the Midianites but frequented by Midianites and no doubt other tribes, Moses received a revelation from a deity previously known to him only notionally if at all (Exod. 3.13), presumably a deity worshipped by Midianites, whose named was revealed to be Yahweh. (pp. 133-134) (from 'The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah', JSOT 33.2 (2008): 131-153)

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825}

As to women, the Islamic faith has given women rights that are equal to or more than the rights given them in the Old Testament and the Bible.

...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

When he heard his father call out for Abel and he saw his borther go forth, it made him feel like he was nothing. He couldn’t even say that he felt like Cain anymore. One could not feel like Cain because it had no flavor. Cain was the absence of flavor. Cain was like saliva or a Wednesday.

Which God is the forgiving one, exactly? Old Testament, where He got His rocks off by smiting? Or New Testament, once Our Heavenly Father got Prozac?

Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.

If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.

Had it been in the Old Testament Harry Potter would have been put to death.

I regard Abraham as my ancestor. Some of the greatest inspiration I have got has come from what we call the Old Testament prophets and what Jews would say "our prophets.

I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.

In the Old Testament, it says that if you have the power to do something good, then you have to do it. You're not to avoid helping somebody in their time of need.

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

Jesus existed only as an image in the heart of God, until such time as the prophets of the Old Testament could positively confess Jesus into existence through their constant prophecies

Maybe this Watergate is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe were going to benefit from it.

Nature is God's Old Testament.

That the women of the Old Testament were dressed with oriental richness there is no doubt, nor are they censured for so arraying themselves.

The idea that there is only one way to be reconciled with God has its origins in the Old Testament.

The Ecclesiastes of the Old Testament says there is no new thing under the sun. We can also say there is no new thing above the sun!

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy.

Throughout the Old Testament, God warns his chosen people about the perils of assimilation, shiksappeal and false gods.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

We find Christ in all the Scriptures. In the Old Testament He is predicted, in the Gospels He is revealed, in Acts He is preached, in the epistles He is explained, and in Revelation He is expected.

When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.

You know, the New Testament is pretty old. I think they should call them the Old Testament and the Most Recent Testament.

Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.

And our Divine Parents have been molding God Child’s soul from stardust. And They have been breathing life-breath into its nose, and God Child’s soul has been existing as a Soul of Life.

‎A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. The idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world. Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds

A lack of public use of the name of the metallurgic deities is well known and relates to the initiatory dimension of the cults related to metallurgy. [...] Even though the Israelite cult of Yahweh was public, it seems that the 'use' of his name was submitted to severe restrictions (see, e.g., Exod. 20.7 and Deut. 5.11). (p. 392n23

According to the books of Kings, a bronze serpent called Nehushtan was worshipped at Jerusalem until the reign of Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18.4). Since this cult of a bronze serpent is not explicitly condemned as idolatry by the author of the book of Kings, it is likely that it was related to the (former) cult of Yahweh. Furthermore, it is claimed in the book of Numbers that this bronze serpent was made by Moses 'in the name of Yahweh' (Num. 21.-8-9). (p. 399) (from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404)

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

An essential link between Yahweh and copper is suggested in the book of Zechariah, where the dwelling of the God of Israel is symbolized by two mountains of copper (Zech. 6.1-6). In his prophecies, Ezekiel describes a divine being as 'a man was there, whose appearance shone like copper' (Ezek. 40.3), and in another part of this book, Yahweh is even explicitly mentioned as being a smelter (Ezek. 22.20). A similar association is encountered in the book of Zechariah (Zech. 13.9). It is interesting to notice that these visions are not simple popular metaphors. Both Ezekiel and Zechariah described processes of metal purification (fractionation through melting for Ezekiel and cupellation for Zechariah), suggesting that the authors of these two books had a deep knowledge not only of Yahwistic traditions, but also of metallurgy. (p. 394) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase "Spare the rod and spoil the child." No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.

as one utilizes the findings of modern scholarship, one renews an essential characteristic of Jewish learning. Biblical exegesis in rabbinic and medieval Judaism has always focused on debate and variety….[T]he post-modern Jew revels in the diverse voices and counter-voices [discovered by critical Bible scholarship] so reminiscent of Talmudic and contemporary dialectic. (from "The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, Or Why Jews Don't Read Books," in Society of Biblical Literature 1996 Seminar Papers)

As I look hard at the Bible, however, and at the two thousand years of church history since the Bible's completion, it seems evident that God has accommodated himself over and over to the weakness and even the sin of human beings. He also has called his faithful ones to a similar accommodation. The 'already but not yet' tension is clear not only with the coming of Christ but also throughout the Old Testament story of redemption. God chooses a people as a vehicle for global salvation and then works with them in a convoluted trajectory of obedience and blessing, disobedience and punishment, first this way and then that way. God puts up with a compromised plan for the conquest of Canaan, blesses a monarchy he did not want, forestalls the prophesied judgment on both northern and southern kingdoms for generations, and even then preserves a remnant and reestablishes it in Jerusalem. God works not only through Israel but also through the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. God works not only through prophets and saints but also through Joseph's brothers, Balaam and his donkey, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, Caiaphas and Pilate.

[Concerning the 'over-extended domain' of Yahweh:] It is very interesting to observe that, in the Bible, Yahweh is not exclusively linked to Israel. This point is clearly stressed in the book of Amos, where it is claimed: 'On that day...they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name, says the LORD who does this' (Amos 9.11-12). Indeed, it appears from many biblical sources that Yahweh also 'protects' the Canaanite alliances of Edom, Moab and Amon, sometimes against the political interest of the Israelite Alliance. [61] Even more intriguing is the special attention, in the book of Jeremiah, devoted to the far country of Elam: I [Yahweh] will terrify Elam before their enemies, and before those who seek their life; I will bring disaster upon them, my fierce anger, says the LORD. I will send the sword after them, until I have consumed them; and I will set my throne in Elam, and destroy their king and officials, says the LORD. But in the latter days I will restore the fortunes of Elam, says the LORD (Jer. 49.37-39). This oracle is amazingly similar to those devoted to Judah and Israel. Such a commitment concerning Elam suggests that the Elamites were also regarded here as a 'people of Yahweh'. In this case, however, one has to assume a homology (if not an identity) between Yahweh and Napir ('the great god'), the main deity of Elam, who was also the god of metallurgy. (pp. 401-402) (from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404) [61] It is especially mentioned that the Israelites cannot conquer the lands of Edom, Moab and Ammon, since Yahweh has given them forever to the sons of Esau (Deut. 2.5) and Lot (Deut. 2.9, 19). In Jer. 9.24-25, Edom, Moab and Ammon are considered together with Judah as the circumcised, the peoples of Yahweh. The Amos oracles against Amon, Moab, Damas or Edom (Amos 1 and 2) not only mention their 'cimres' against Judah and Israel, but also all the 'crimes' perpetrated between and among them in regard to Yahweh.

By analysis of biblical texts, some scholars have assumed for a long time that Yahweh was formerly worshipped in the south of Canaan (especially Edom and/or by the Kenites). The claim that 'Yahweh comes from Seir' [Judges 5.4] has been strengthened by the discovery of Canaanite inscriptions evoking 'Yahweh of Teman', but also Egyptian writings mentioning Negeb and northern Sinai as 'the land of Ywh [sic]'. (p. 389) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

Ele agora receberia o troco na mesma moeda. Aliás, a Bíblia também falava disso, não falava? 'Olho por olho, dente por dente'? O quê? Ah, sim! Sua professora explicou que isso era só no Antigo Testamento, certo? Sei como é. Dizem que agora o certo é oferecer a outra face, não é isso? Pois é. A questão é que eles já me haviam socado nessa face também.