Jason Hare wrote: ↑Sun Nov 07, 2021 5:08 am Kenneth,
I remember when B-Hebrew had heated arguments about the time and place of the composition of the various biblical books. I can imagine that you would turn that into a “religious versus non-religious” debate. Not everything is squared away in this way. It’s problematic for me that you would suggest that people who take a less rigid interpretation of the Bible are not religious—that only strict fundamentalist readings of the text can be termed “religious” and anything else is “non-religious” or even “anti-religious.”
Maybe I misunderstood you. Do you mean that Ezekiel was saying what God said to say or he was making a new rule on his own?Jason Hare wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 12:52 pm Ezekiel saw himself as changing the way things had been up until then. I imagine that prophets felt that they had that authority, to bring in new revelations and new commandments from God (or ways to relate to God).
If you are saying he made a new rule on his own, then you would be changing what the Hebrew Bible says, which I guess could be considered a religious interpretation, although not fundamentalist strict interpretation. I guess I didn't phrase it right. I think that any person, who discusses the prophet's motive no matter what their religious belief is, is starting a religious debate. Maybe it should not be called a "religious debate" also, because it assumes that only religious people debate this topic.
If scholars debate in a non-religious unbiased way who Isaiah 53 is about, then that should be allowed here too. Just because a person says it is about the Messiah or Israel or whoever does not make it a "religious debate" because scholars discuss it too. I suppose this discussion forum's rules about religious arguments discriminates against certain topics as being "religious" when in reality scholars debate those topics too. How do you define topics that are religiously controversial and off-limits here because scholars can argue about these topics in a scholarly way, so why can't people here argue about Isaiah 7:14 being about a certain person or not? Why would that be "religious" and not "scholarly"?