My reply to Robert Turkel's claim that "commentators of all stripes" agreed with his position on the meaning of Hosea 1:4 was originally posted on the old alt.bible.errancy forum and then posted by Joseph Joson on the Tecktonics.Org:Exposed site as "Robert Turkel and His 'Commentators of All Stripes.'" Turkel, being Turkel, posted a typically sarcastic reply to it under the title linked to in the headers above. Joson introduced my article with his own introduction, which Turkel included in his reply, so Joson is the "Mojo Jojo" in Turkel's reply. Whenever Turkel resorts to this kind of antic in his articles, I reply in kind, so I will be referring to him as "Bobby," a diminutive of his real name, which he is known not to like. As I have said before, if Bobby ever decides to debate civilly, I will be happy to reciprocate, but until then, I will respond to him in kind.
To assist readers in following who has said what, I will use the header Till to identify the material in my original article and Turkel to identify Bobby's comments on my original material and on the information in Joson's introduction. Joson will identify comments that he made in the introduction, and Till will identify my replies to Bobby's jabs at Joson and his comments on my original article.
Turkel:
The statement McTill refers to here ["commentators of all stripes"] was
actually removed from
my re-editing [sic] and compiliation [sic] of this debate
several years ago,
which is now found
here,
and which McTill
has ignored for years after scuttling back to the safety of his Errancy
List. In the meantime,
interestingly, McTill has been flummoxed by one of his own Skeptical
readers coming out in
defense of there being no contradiction between 2 Kings and Hosea.
Quite interesting.
Till:
Flummoxed? This word means "baffled" or "perplexed," so what makes
Bobby think that I was
baffled by having a skeptic disagree with me? Skeptics often disagree,
and anyone who has
followed the Errancy list, which,
unlike Bobby, I will
link readers to so that they will have access to the internet forum
that has put so many burrs
under his saddle, know that disagreement among skeptics is commonplace.
Readers of Bobby's
website will find in-house
disagreements unusual, because
they will find no open opposition in his domain, where he exercises
tight controls over what they will see. I suspect that Bobby didn't
mean to say that I was baffled or perplexed by the
opposition of another skeptic but that I had experienced another
emotion, such as dismay or
distress, because if I had been truly baffled, I wouldn't have been
able to rebut the
skeptic's proposed solution to the Jehu problem, which, as I will show
later, I was certainly
able to do. The humor in Bobby's apparent misuse of flummoxed
is that he sees himself
as a linguistic expert, who can see "nuances" in Hebrew that escape
even those knowledgeable
enough in the language to participate in the compiling of English
translations of the Bible,
yet he so often can't even see nuances in his own native language.
In saying that the opposition of another skeptic on the Jehu issue had "flummoxed" me, Bobby "No Links" Turkel, of course, didn't bother to link his readers to the article written by that skeptic and my reply to it. Both were published in the January/February 2001 issue of The Skeptical Review. When Tim Simmons, the skeptic Bobby was referring to, let me know that he had retracted a position he had taken in an earlier article in which he too had said that 2 Kings 10:30-31 and Hosea 1:4 were irreconcilably inconsistent, I told him that I would publish any article he wanted to submit in defense of his new position. This was in keeping with my "open-door" policy--which I maintained through the 12 years that this journal was published and which I still maintain in this forum--that allowed dissenting positions to receive a hearing. (I also maintain a feedback section in this forum, where dissenting views may be posted, a policy that is completely foreign to Bobby, who maintains a closed-door forum, where readers won't have the opportunity to hear both sides of issues that he writes on.) On the date referred to above, I published "The Jehu Solution" by Simmons and my reply to it. Bobby "No Links" didn't let his readers know where they could access these two articles, because his policy is to keep his readers in the dark as much as possible on what opponents of his positions have published. Those who take the time to read the two articles just linked to will see that Simmons presented his case and that I replied to it point by point. Simmons did not submit a rebuttal article, so I assumed that he could see that his "solution" to the Jehu problem, like so many other attempts to solve this problem, was untenable.
Bobby failed to mention that Simmons pointed out in his article that he had found Glenn Miller's solution, which Turkel lauded and appropriated in his exchanges with me on this issue, indefensible and had rejected it in favor of the solution that he submitted. Those who read his article linked to above and my reply to it will see that Simmon's theory, like so many others that have been proposed to eliminate this inconsistency, turned out to be unsatisfactory. The fact that so many contradictory solutions of this problem have been proposed should be sufficient within itself to show that that this inconsistency doesn't exist just in the minds of skeptics trying desperately to find discrepancies in the Bible. It is a real problem, which has required inerrantists to lean over backwards to try to find some way to explain it.
Over the years, I have had many solutions to this problem presented to me. One of the most innovative ones that I encountered was presented by a Christian in Sri Lanka, who came up with the idea that the "son of the prophets" who anointed Jehu to be king didn't command him to go destroy the house of Ahab but had merely prophesied that he would. This apologetic theory claimed that the belief that 1 Kings 10:30-31 and Hosea 1:4 presented conflicting opinions of the massacre at Jezreel has resulted from having mistaken a prophecy spoken by the "son of the prophets" (2 Kings 9:6-10) for a mandate or a command. The Sri Lankan Christian and I debated this theory at length on the old alt.bible.errancy forum until he apparently saw that his interpretation was indefensible and dropped out. It has been posted on this website under the title "Jehu Again" so that readers can see the extremes that biblical inerrantists will go to in order to defend their misguided belief in the inerrancy of documents written in prescientific, superstitious times.
As for Bobby's claim that I "ignored" his "compilation of the debate" for years, I didn't bother to reply to it, because it was just another typical example of his "debating" style in which he (1) substitutes insults and sarcasms for argumentation, (2) selectively replies by skipping rebuttals he can't answer satisfactorily, (3) cites writers who agree with him without bothering to include enough context from his "sources" for readers to evaluate the strength of their positions, and (4) deletes from the original exchanges materials that prove embarrassing to him. In my own three-part compilation of the debate, I have inserted red-print addenda to reply to the new materials that Bobby included and to point out where the four evasive features of his compilation, identified above, occurred in his editing of the original debate. Those who read it will find that it is detailed and documented so that, unlike Bobby's unlinked tirades, sources referred to can be conveniently accessed. I link frequently to Bobby's "articles," because I want discriminating readers to see just how shallow his logic is. He doesn't link to mine because... well, I will just let readers decide why he won't link to them. This reply should give them a clue to how much time and detail I put into my rebuttal articles.
So why am I just now posting these replies to Bobby's editing of the original debate? Well, with other projects that needed my attention, I honestly couldn't see spending time writing a detailed reply to something that Bobby would treat in his usual fashion and that most of his readers would never see anyway because of his refusal to link them to the material of skeptics that he is "answering." Earlier this year, however, I received a personal message from a skeptic who claimed that he has encountered biblical inerrantists who think that I didn't reply to Bobby because I couldn't. I suppose that I am just vain enough to want to show these inerrantists that they are wrong, so this article, my three-part series linked to above, my exposure of Bobby's "commentators of all stripes" as just a couple of inerrantists trying to find a new way to explain the Jehu problem, and the debate with the Sri Lankan Bible believer are my way of showing Bobby's sycophants that they are very wrong if they think that his position in the Jehu matter is unimpeachable.
Turkel:
At any rate, this [apparently "commentators of all stripes"] is another
one of those comments
that McTill hopped on with his own interpretation, never getting the
point that was actually
behind it. We'll see in a moment. First, some words from Mojo Jojo.
Till:
Turkel's original article has been retrieved from internet archives and
posted on this
site, so readers
can go here
and
here
and here
to judge
for themselves whether I have misrepresented what Turkel said about the
approval of his
position on Hosea 1:4 by "commentators of all stripes."
Joson:
In the first Farrell Till/Robert Turkel Debate,
accessible
here,
Turkel had tried to defend his position by quoting from commentaries
that agreed with his
stance.
Turkel:
Translation: by quoting commentaries that gave solid, documented
reasons for their stance,
which McTill couldn't answer.
Till:
An incorrect link was given to the original Jehu debate, so I have
corrected it so that
readers who want to see the original debate can do so with just a mouse
click. In my
three-part series, which began
here,
readers will find the original debate (which Bobby has removed from his
website) imbedded between the red sections,
which contain my replies to Bobby's attempts to rebut my
counterarguments.
In his "translation" of Joson's claim that Bobby has tried to defend his position by quoting commentaries that agreed with his position, Bobby said that these were commentaries that gave "solid, documented reasons for their stance," but I urge everyone interested in this subject to read the entire original debate, linked to above, to see that no such "solid, documented" evidence was given. All through his so-called "reply," Bobby simply inserted bracketed references like these:
I have quoted here, in their entireties, all of the sources that Bobby cited in Part One of our debate. If anyone can find anything here that even remotely resembles "solid, documented reasons" for the stances that these "sources" took please point it out to me, because I honestly cannot see anything here but crass assertion. Bobby quoted nothing that gave any "solid, dicumented" reasons why these authors had taken the positions he was appealing to.
Now let's look at the "solid, documented reasons" in all of the sources that Bobby cited in Part Two of the original debate.
I have momentarily skipped two long quotations where Bobby "gave the floor" to McComiskey and Stuart. I will quote these sections in their entireties after we have looked at Bobby's citations in Part Three, but for now I just want everyone to look at the citations above to see if there are any "solid, documented reasons" given in support of whatever Hobbs or Andersen and Freedman et al said in the truncated citations from their books. Any honest person will have to admit that no such "solid, documented reasons" were given by any of them. Their comments were nothing more than personal beliefs that they were asserting. If Bobby really believes that he quoted sources that had given "solid, documented reasons" for the "stances" they took, he desperately needs to take a course in elementary logic.
We will go now to Part Three to see what "solid, documented reasons" were contained in the sources that Bobby cited, and then I will return to the quotations from McComiskey and Stuart that I momentarily skipped.
With the exception of the two longer quotations from McComiskey and Stuart, which I will return to shortly, these are all of the citations that Bobby entered into our original debate. (If I skipped any, the oversight was unintentional.) No reasonable person can read these citations, which I quoted in their entireties, and honestly say that they contained "solid, documented reasons" why Bobby's cited "sources" took the stances that they did in the Jehu issue. They contain nothing more than the asserted beliefs of Jones, Craigie, Morris et al, and we could well imagine how unimpressed Bobby would be if I filled my articles with references to what Robert Price thinks or what Dan Barker believes.
I will go back now to the section in Part Two where Bobby "gave the floor" to McComiskey. I will quote everything that Bobby quoted from this source, but I will interrupt from time to time to point out that the quotations contain few if any "solid, documented reasons" for what McComiskey was saying.
(Paqad) is difficult to define. It frequently describes an action that precedes the bestowal of blessing (Gen. 21:1, 50:24-5, Exod. 3:16) or the execution of judgment (Ex. 32:34, 1 Sam. 15:2, Is. 23:7) on the part of God. Since the word may precede an act of blessing, it cannot denote the sole idea of punishment. It is best to understand it as attending to or giving heed to a person, object or situation before responding.
Does anyone see any "solid, documented" reason here why paqad could not have conveyed the sense of punishment in Hosea 1:4? A major point that Bobby argued in the debate was that this word had a variety of applications in the Old Testament, so just because McComiskey found some places where it meant the "bestowal of blessing," which at times it certainly did, does not mean that the word was not being used in Hosea 1:4 to convey the idea of a bestowal of punishment. I quoted 36 English translations that so rendered the verse and found none that supported McComiskey's view, so it looks as if Bobby's source has been trumped on this point.
This concept of mental apprehension is apparent in the frequent association of the word with (remember, see, e.g., Jer. 14:10). There are many other nuances, but in contexts of judgment it describes an action in which God attends to the wrong he observes by intervening with appropriate action. There are many other nuances, but in contexts of judgment it describes an action in which God attends to the wrong he observes by intervening with appropriate action.
Yes, it did convey this concept, but I pointed out in this section of Part Two that the concept of "remembering" conveyed by paqad could be negative or punitive as well as positive and that context always determined which sense it was conveying. Just a click of the mouse button will take readers there, so I don't need to rehash that section here. I'll just ask Bobby to tell us where the "solid, documented reasons" for McComiskey's "stance" can be found in the quotations above. Bobby apparently can't tell the difference in solid evidence and mere assertions.
When (paqad) is collocated with (upon) as well as a direct object and an indirect object (as it is here) in statements of judgment, the direct object is viewed as attending the indirect object. That is, the direct object is brought into the experience of the indirect object.
Did anyone see any "solid, documented" evidence here to support McComiskey's claim? Any reasonable person can see that he was simply asserting an opinion. At any rate, as I also point out below, I showed in this section of Part 2 that the "collocation" McComiskey is quibbling about here was used in a punitive sense several times in the Old Testament.
The collocation (visit upon) cannot denote punishment "for" in this context. The nation will not be punished "for" these destroyers, but "by" them. The direct object (the four destroyers) is to come into the experience of the indirect object (the nation as the object of the preposition upon).
And the "solid, documented" evidence to support this is where? Anyone can see that McComiskey simply made assertions here. Bobby prefaced this quotation from McComiskey with a comment about Jeremiah 15:3, which said that Yahweh would "send" [paqad] three destroyers against Jerusalem: "the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy." The claim here was that the verse didn't mention a reason for sending these destroyers, and so the "collocation" couldn't denote "punishment for" in this particular context. I demolished this quibble in this section of Part Two by showing that an analysis of the broader context of this verse will show that in the verses preceding the one that McComiskey cited, Jeremiah clearly stated that Yahweh would "remember their sins and punish their iniquities," so the reason for sending the three "destroyers" was very clearly stated, and the context clearly showed the punitive meaning of paqad.
This sense of the idiom is exists [sic] in every context where (visited upon) has two objects. On the other hand, the translation "punish for" does not apply in every context. We must not assign that sense to the collocation uncritically
In this section of Part Two, I dismantled McComiskey's claim here by analyzing other biblical texts to show that the same collocation was used to convey an obvious sense of "punish for," so in the entire lengthy quotation from McComiskey, there was exactly nothing that could reasonably be construed as "solid, documented" evidence to support his "stance" on the meaning of Hosea 1:4. He did nothing but assert throughout.
So now, we can go through the long quotation from Stuart to see that he too failed to give any "solid, documented" evidence to support his view.
It should be noted that the present oracle does not per se condemn Jehu's coup at Jezreel, called for by Elisha. (Dam yizre'el) could mean "bloodguilt of Jezreel" in the sense of a great, decisive slaughter. The former connotation, "bloodguilt," is found is found [sic] for (dam) in Lev. 20:9, Duet.[sic] 19:10, 2 Sam. 21:1, etc.
Does anyone see any "solid, documented" evidence here to support Stuart's claim that "the present oracle [Hosea] does not per se condemn Jehu's coup at Jezreel"? So far, all he said was that dam yizre'el could have meant "a great, decisive slaughter." Well, I certainly agree. It could well have meant that--and I think that it did mean that--but how does this remove the fact that Hosea said that Yahweh would visit that great, massive slaughter [the blood of Jezreel] upon the house of Jehu? How does this remove the fact that 36 translations rendered this statement in a way that conveyed the idea that Yahweh was going to punish the house of Jehu for that "great, massive slaughter" [the blood of Jezreel]?
Readers can go to this section of Part Two to see a more detailed rebuttal of Stuart's comment quoted above.
But the connotation "killing" or "bloodshed" is also well-attested as in (dam) "bloodshed-of-battle" (1 Kgs. 2:5) or (dam) "unnecessary bloodshed" (1 Kgs. 2:31), etc. Recognition of the use of (dam) in the context, so often associated with requital of justice in the Old Testament, should not lead to the conclusion that Hosea is condemning Jehu for fulfilling God's command.
Any "solid, documented reasons" here? If so, I don't see them. Giving a mere scripture citation isn't "solid, documented" evidence of anything. Those who wish to see a detailed rebuttal of this quotation from Stuart can go to the section of Part Two linked to above.
Instead, Yahweh now announces that he will turn the tables on the house of Jehu because of the real issue, i.e., what has happened in the meantime.
Anyone can see that this statement is nothing but an assertion of Stuart's opinion of what paqad meant in Hosea 1:4, but "solid, documented" reasons for believing the assertion? They just aren't there, and the continuation of Stuart's assertion immediately below also failed to give any "solid, documented reasons" for his "stance." If Bobby thinks that the assertion quoted here is true, I defy him to show us where Hosea said anywhere that the blood of Jezreel was going to be visited onto the house of Jehu, not because of the original massacre but because of what had happened in the meantime.
In the same way that Jehu in 842 had annihilated a dynasty feared for its long history of oppression and apostasy, so Yahweh himself will now put an end to the Jehu dynasty because it, in turn, has grown hopelessly corrupt. (emphasis in original)
Where is the "solid, documented reasons" for Stuart's "stance" asserted here? All I can see is an asserted interpretation of the verse, maybe Bobby can point out to us the "solid reasons" that Stuart gave for his interpretation.
And maybe pigs will fly someday too.
This is all of the quotation from Stuart that Bobby used in his so-called "rebuttal" of my argument, and as I pointed out several times while going through it, there is nothing at all in the entire quotation that can be construed as "solid, documented reasons" for the "stance" that Stuart took on the meaning of Hosea 1:4. Bobby has grabbed for a straw and missed.
Joson:
In the debate he had stated, “We point out that our solution from Hosea
is reckoned by
‘commentators of all stripes.’” The reference to “we” and “our,” of
course, only meant
Turkel.
Turkel:
Yep, McTill and his fans just don't like that plural self-reference I
like. Too bad. I don't
like their haircuts or their writing style.
Till:
Well, I don't know about my fans, but I have the background in English
composition standards
to know that using we, our and us in a singular sense
is an affected style of
writing, which was once popular, but is now considered outmoded by
modern textbooks. It now
ranks alongside the stilted style of some newspaper writers who will
say, "In the opinion of
this writer..." instead of just directly saying, "I think," or, "In my
opinion." This usage,
which is so popular with Bobby, had its origin in the days of royalty,
when kings and queens
used the first person plural to refer to themselves. A problem with the
use of "the royal we"
in writing, however, is that it can result in confusion, because when
someone who uses this
affected style comes to a place where we should be used in its
strictest sense of first
person plural, readers may think that the writer is just referring to
himself. At any rate, I
think that the origin of the usage of the "royal we" and its popularity
with Bobby speaks
volumes about his obviously narcissistic personality. An anecdote
attributed to Admiral Hyman
Rickover claims that he once said to a subordinate who habitually used
the royal we, "Three
groups are permitted that usage: pregnant women, royalty, and
schizophrenics. Which
one are you?"
Bobby doesn't need to answer that question, because most of us know the answer. His habitual use of we when he means himself may very well be symptomatic of a personality disorder. I recently encountered a similar opinion in an article that was commenting on Bobby's views on evolution. The author replying to him referred to Bobby by his phony name "Holding."
I want you to note another of Mr. Holding’s tendencies. In his writing he frequently refers to himself in the first-person plural, “we.” No one, to my knowledge, assists Mr. Holding with his writing or his website (at least he doesn’t credit anyone with such assistance if indeed he is receiving help). Therefore, his use of “we” is somewhat odd when you realize that the word is in reference to himself. I’m not sure what he is trying to do or say when he does this but it makes reading his articles a bit awkward. It is as if you are listening to a person speak who has multiple personalities and that a “dominate” one is doing the speaking for the rest...."
I don't know whether Bobby has multiple personalities, but one can easily see illusions of grandeur in his writing. On the home page of his website, for example, he depicts himself as Superman and the Terminator, and he shamelessly boasts in an article entitled, with typical sarcasm, "Ebonic Plague" that he and Glenn Miller might be modern prophets.
Demanding "more recent prophets" is a demand of laziness and also begs the question that I am not myself (along with others like Glenn Miller) in some sense fulfilling that function for Ebon and others.
There is no conceit in Bobby's family, because he got it all and left none for other relatives.
Joson:
His mention of “commentators of all stripes” was meant to impress his
readership that he had
actually consulted a number of differing commentaries and they all
remarkably agreed with his
point of view.
Turkel:
Um, no. That would be Mojo's paranoia talking. The mention of
"commentators of all stripes"
was meant to forestall McTill's inevitable canard that the answer was
only held by
"fundamentalist" commentators.
Till:
Yeah, right! Early
on, Bobby rushed to tell his readers that he was defending a view
of Hosea 1:4 that is
accepted by "commentators of all stripes."
Many commentators of all stripes have suggested, based on structure and parallelism, that Hosea 1:4 is better read to express the idea that the bloodshed of Jezreel will be visited on the house of Jehu--which is to say, the verse should read, not "punished for the blood of Jezreel," but "punished by"--the reference is to the mode of punishment, rather than the cause of it (emphasis added).
This is a ploy used by inerrantists to make their readers think that what they are defending is recognized by scholars of all kinds, from conservative to liberal. Bobby didn't make his commentators-of-all-stripes remark just to "forestall" any claim that I might make about his position being a fundamentalist one, because he ran the claim by his readers again.
For now, a word about these sources we will be using. We point out that our solution from Hosea is reckoned by "commentators of all stripes" (emphasis added.
He quickly went on to say in the same context.
Of course, regarding those of "all stripes" who do seek to resolve the issue--if Till wishes to assert some harmonic conspiracy at work, that is his prerogative.
Bobby may deny it all that he wants to, but I will never believe that he was just trying to "forestall" an objection from me. I have seen too many inerrantists use this scholars-of-all-kinds ploy too much to believe otherwise.
Turkel:
Since then I have learned that this, as stated, is pointless to note in
discussions with
McTill, since if you quote a moderate or liberal with the same view,
McTill will just say
they are "thinking like an inerrantist". [sic] In other words,
darned if you do,
darned if you don't.
Till:
Turkel apparently did learn a lesson here, because in his
reworking
of his original part
of the debate, he left out references to his "commentators of all
stripes," but that was
no doubt due to my
follow-up
article
in which I showed that his "commentators of all stripes" were just two
primary
sources, both of whom were fundamental inerrantists, and the others
were secondary sources,
who were referred to in McComiskey's and Stuart's books. Some of these
secondary sources
proved to be believers in the very view of Hosea 1:4 that I was
defending. These exposures
no doubt proved too embarrassing for Bobby to repeat his claim that
"commentators of all
stripes" agreed with his position. True to form, then, he deleted
something that he had said
that was later shown to be incorrect.
In addition to eliminating his commentators-of-all-stripes claim from his "reworked" version of the original debate, Bobby removed other embarrassments, such as his claim that he would not reply to anything else that I might write, because I just wasn't worth his time, and his linguistic boo-boo of using the word transliterate where translate was needed. That error, by the way, appeared in a section where he was claiming the ability to recognize Hebrew "nuances" that had eluded me, and he later repeated the same mistake in this same section.
Turkel:
Which is much easier for McTill then getting his sorry hiney out and
doing some digging.
Till:
Yeah, I guess I should "dig" the way Bobby did when he flipped through
two "sources,"
McComiskey and Stuart, and then tried to pass off the secondary
references in their books as
scholars whom he had consulted in his research. At the end of his
"reworked"
version of the
original debate, Bobby listed 17 "sources" whom he had presumably
consulted, but anyone who
knows how to evaluate writing can easily see through his kind of
"research." I spent 30 years
reading and evaluating writing that was supposed to show a
college-level of research skills,
and about 50% of it was the kind that we see in Bobby's articles. The
following excerpt from
Part One
of his "reworking"
of the original debate to eliminate embarrassments gives an idea of
just how superficial his
"research" is.
Some [scholars] of the liberal bent suggest a type of progressive revelation, in which God has set higher standards of action in Hosea's time than were set in Jehu's time, in response to the human need for growth. [see AndFree.Hos, 178; Crai.12P, 12; for reply, see Irv.ThrJez, 499]. Others remain content with seeing contradiction (but seldom offer any detailed work on the subject - see Wolf.Hos, 17-18; May.Hos, 28; Jone.12K, 273). Irvine [Irv.ThrJez, 503] suggests that our 2 Kings passage (10:30-1) is a piece of imperial propaganda that was being refuted by Hosea, which would raise the question of interpolation in 2 Kings or its sources.
We see here that, within a context containing fewer than 100 words, Bobby squeezed in seven "citations" from his 17 sources, and in so doing he gave his readers no in-depth analyses of the issues that we were supposed to be debating. Like so many of my former college students, he thinks that if throws in some bracketed references like those above, his readers will swoon in admiration, but if those bracketed references don't say anything that supports the view being advocated, what good do they do? Anybody can inject [see Smith 321] or [see Jackson 79] into a paper that says nothing as far as real supporting evidence is concerned. I saw this kind of "research" so many times in my teaching career that I finally declared war on it and gave the students who handed in such shoddy work the huge F it deserved.
That's the grade I would give to Bobby if he had handed in a paper as shoddily researched as his part of our debate on the Jehu issue. I showed above that none of the references like those that I just cited said anything at all that could be construed as "solid, documented" evidence, and my analysis of the longer quotations from McComiskey and Stuart showed that they too did nothing but make unsupported assertions about what they thought Hosea 1:4 meant. In "Commentators of All Stripes," I also analyzed Bobby's claim that his "sources" ran the spectrum from liberal to conservative and showed that they didn't. Bobby's commentators of all stripes were for all intents and purposes two evangelical fundamentalists trying to defend their biblical inerrancy views.
Bobby did in the Jehu debate what he has done over and over again in his "apologetic" attempts. He cites writers, usually biblical inerrantists, who agree with him and tries to pass that off as "in-depth scholarship." He tried this ploy in “Evidence of Jericho” by citing fundamentalist "archaeologists" like Bryant Wood to try to prove that archaeological discoveries support the historicity of the account of Jericho's destruction as recorded in the book of Joshua, but in "The Walls of Jericho," a detailed and carefully researched reply, Brett Palmer showed that Bobby's sources were held in low esteem by reputable archaeologists and were entirely too biased to be considered reliable. Readers should go to this article to see Palmer hand Bobby's head to him on a platter.
As frosting on the cake, I will also mention that just as I showed Bobby's ignorance of basic biblical content in "Restroom Visits in Biblical Times" by pointing out how wrong he was in saying that no one in the Bible was ever "recorded as actually using a restroom" so Palmer exposed here more of Bobby's biblical ignorance by showing that he was wrong in saying that the destruction of Jericho had happened during or right after the harvest season. Palmer showed that, if the Bible is inerrant, the conquest of Jericho had happened during the month of Abib, which overlapped March and April.
We will have to wait to see how Bobby tries to wiggle out of this one. And he will try, of course.
Joson:
In fact, in the debate, he stated, “my ‘commentators’ run the spectrum
from conservative to
moderate to liberal.” In the following article, published after the
debate only on the
alt.bible.errancy newgroup (in November of 1998) and unseen by many,
Farrell Till takes a
look at these “commentators of all stripes” to see just how far up and
down the theological
spectrum they actually ran.
Turkel:
Broadly enough, actually. But McTill has his own paranoia to sell; it's
easier to avoid
admitting you have no actual answer that way.
Till:
In the original debate, which is embedded in its entirety in the three
parts of the Jehu
debate, which begins
here,
I answered
Bobby point by point, but he "answered" me only selectively. That is a
matter of record
that anyone can verify by reading the original exchanges. Bobby uses
selective quoting as
a way of trying to avoid admitting that he can't answer the rebuttals
that he skips.
Furthermore, the sections in red print that I
have inserted into
the articles just linked to above clearly show that Bobby has said
nothing in this debate
that I can't easily answer.
It appears time to renew a challenge. If Bobby will post specific points of his, which he thinks I have avoided, I will reply to all of them at once, if he will agree to reply to all points of mine that I think he has skipped and if he will post all of our exchanges on these points on his website and agree to keep them there. Needless to say, I won't hesitate a moment to agree to post them in this forum.
Turkel:
An "open forum" like a public website... compared to the confined
Errancy List with only 150
members...
Till:
Bobby "No Links" Turkel, of course, didn't link his readers to the
Errancy list, so I have
inserted a link so that those who wish to do so will know where to find
this list.
As for the membership of the Errancy list, almost all members are skeptics or atheists, so is Bobby saying that he doesn't want the opportunity to present his case to those who don't believe the Bible? Is he saying that he prefers to preach to those who already agree with him, which is basically what he is doing when he posts articles on his website?
Turkel:
yep...face it, folks: it's all a smokescreen McTill uses to fool the
gullible like Mojo who
hang on his every word. For them, McTill is the Word of God. Bind him
in black covers with
inscribed gold letters and leave him on the shelf.
Till:
This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, because no one will
find a forum that
tries harder to fool the gullible than Bobby does on his
website, and one has only to read
the
sycophantic references to him in Christian forums like
the Theology Web to see that
the biblically
ignorant think that he created the world in six days and rested on the
seventh.
Joson:
You will also notice that halfway through the article, Till repeats
himself as if recapping
what he had said previously. This is because in the original format,
his responses came in
two different posts that were not connected as they are here.
Turkel:
No, this is because McTill thinks endlessly repeating himself is a way
to distract readers
into thinking he is saying more than he actually is.
Till:
Joson had it right. Anyone who wants to take the time to read the
original 28 posts as they
were sent to alt.bible.errancy can read the version posted on
the
secular web,
where the entire debate was published in e-mail form as it appeared in
the alt.bible.errancy
forum, or even better, go to
the
beginning post of this debate in the alt.bible.errancy archives.
This link will take the readers
to "Reply to Turkel (1)," and then by typing "Reply to Turkel (2)" into
the search window, the
second post can be accessed, then "Reply to Turkel (3)," will access
the third, and so on. If
all 28 posts are read, anyone can see that I ended and began posts with
brief summations for
those who may have not followed the debate from its beginning.
For Bobby to accuse me of "endlessly repeating" myself is again like the pot calling the kettle black. Those who go to the land promise debate and have the fortitude to read through all of the exchanges will see Bobby endlessly repeating sentences and entire paragraphs that he cut and pasted over and over and over and over and over obviously to distract his readers into thinking that he was saying more than he actually was. Bobby's performance in that debate was the most farcical example of evasion that I have encountered in a debating opponent, and I have debated my share of biblical inerrantists.
Turkel:
Do beg pardon, but we will edit that extra trash out.
Till:
Since Bobby routinely edits out arguments and rebuttals that he can't
answer, I would hardly
expect him to do otherwise, but as we will see, he edited out more than
just the summations at
the ends and beginnings of my original posts. I refer to him as Bobby
"No links" Turkel, but
maybe I should call him Bobby "Edits Out" Turkel. Bobby "Skippy" Turkel
sounds
appropriate.
Joson:
I try to maintain that sense of posting by placing a bar between the
first portion Till had
written and the second installment. From this, you will note that my
only involvement with
this article is the formatting I gave it for presentation here.
Turkel:
Other than, uh, the note he adds in the top middle. Yeesh, doesn't Mojo
edit his articles
for consistency?
Till:
The pot calls the kettle black again. In
this
section of
Part One of my compilation of the Jehu debate, I showed how Bobby
brayed that my quoting of
some 30 English translations of Hosea 1:4 was shallow scholarship after
he had in another
article quoted the NIV--just one translation--to try to resolve an
inconsistency between
Genesis 10 and Genesis 11. At the end of that section, I pointed out
that inconsistency is
about the only consistency in Bobby's articles. Then in
this
section
of Part Two of the same series, I caught him appealing again to the NIV
to try to support his
position on the meaning of the Hebrew word paqad in Hosea 1:4.
I again reminded
readers of Bobby's inconsistency and said that consistency doesn't seem
to be one of his
virtues.
Yeesh, doesn't Bobby edit his articles for consistency?
Joson:
In his "rebuttal" of the apparent discrepancy in 2 Kings 10:30 and
Hosea 1:4 concerning
Jehu's massacre at Jezreel, Turkel, who writes under the pseudonym
"James Patrick Holding,"
argued that credence should be given to his resolution of the problem,
because it represented
the thinking of "commentators of all stripes." In other words, he was
claiming that his
resolution represented the views of "commentators" who were liberal and
moderate as well as
conservative.
Turkel:
No, actually, I didn't. I was claiming that this forestalls McTill's
bananas-in-his-ears
attempt to say it's just a solution used by conservatives.
Till:
Readers can scroll up and see where I addressed this denial of his
intentions when he appealed
to "commentators of all stripes." His removal of this expression from
his "reworked" version
of the original debate speaks volumes about what he was trying to do by
his appeals in the
original debate to "commentators of all stripes." If his intentions
were what he is now
claiming that they were, why did he remove this expression from his
"revision." I'll tell
you why he did. My article
"Commentators
of All
Stripes" exposed his duplicity in trying to claim that commentators
of all kinds, from
conservative to moderate to liberal, shared the interpretation of
Hosea 1:4
that he was trying to
dupe his gullible choir members into believing, and after I had shown
that this claim was
clearly not true, his references to "commentators of all stripes"
suddenly disappeared from
his version of the original debate.
He asked above if Joson ever edits his articles for consistency, a question that I showed was another case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I have to wonder if Bobby ever edits his articles for honesty. Apparently he doesn't.
Turkel:
As noted, I now know that McTill doesn't care about this, and will lump
any liberal into
the "inerrantist" category by proxy if necessary.
Till:
No, I don't lump "any liberal into the 'inerrantist' category," because
I know that most
liberal commentators are not inerrantists. What Bobby can't seem to
realize, however, is
that even liberal commentators believe that the Bible is in some sense
a revelation of God's
dealings with men. Hence, they will generally treat the Bible as
favorably as they can.
Samuel Driver, for example, was about as liberal as biblical
commentators can be. He
recognized and admitted that the Book of Daniel was written by a
second-century BC author
rather than a 6th-century BC Jewish official in the Babylonian
government, and he recognized
that in all likelihood "Darius the Mede"
(Dan. 5:31)
was not an actual
historical character, yet when he encountered problem passages in the
Bible, he would
sometimes try to explain them away by using how-it-could-have-been
scenarios that were just
as improbable as those postulated by dyed-in-the-wool inerrantists. In
his commentary,
The Book of Daniel, Driver tried the "approximation" angle to
try to resolve the
chronological discrepancy between
Daniel
1:3-20, which says that Daniel and three of his friends were put
into a three-year training program at the end of which,
they were presented to Nebuchadnezzar, who was so impressed with them
that
he made them members of his court, and
Daniel 2,
which says that
Nebuchadnezzar made Daniel and his friends members of his court during
the second year
of his reign. Driver argued that the time frame in Daniel 1 was only an
approximation, and
so there was no discrepancy.
My point is that even the most liberal of
Bible commentators will as often as not present
views sympathetic to the Bible, but when the commentators are as
flagrantly biased as
we will soon see that McComiskey was, quoting or citing them in support
of an inerrantist
view of the Bible is an obviously ineffective way for an "apologist"
like Bobby to try to
defend his position. If he can't see that, he has more mental problems
than I previously
thought. Maybe I should call him Booby instead of Bobby. He claims that
he is going to
Till:
I replied to this argument in my 28-part response, so there is no need
to show again that
this argument proves nothing for the simple reason that there are many
biblical views that
are shared by liberal, moderate, and conservative Christians. That the
Bible contains errors,
for example, is an opinion that is shared by many liberal and moderate
Christians, as well as
even some conservatives, but I'm sure that Turkel would not see this as
a reason to change
his belief in biblical inerrancy.
Turkel:
No, I wouldn't. And it wasn't a reason given to change a belief about
whether 2 Kings and
Hosea contradict, either. McTill just assumed it was the reason, and
stuck his foot in his
mouth promptly, yea, eagerly saying so.
Till:
As usual, Bobby talks in abstractions that are meaningless to those who
are not mind readers.
He referred to a "reason" why the belief by many liberals, moderates,
and conservatives that
the Bible is not inerrant would not change his mind about inerrancy,
but he gave no explanation
at all of what that reason is but blabbered about how I had stuck my
foot into my mouth by
assuming what his "reason" was. If anyone can make any sense of Bobby's
nonsensical ramblings
like this, please pass it along to me. Obviously what we have in his
statement above is
something that I saw time and time again in student papers while I was
teaching college
writing. Bobby realized that he needed to say something here, but he
didn't know what to
say, so he just threw something together unaware of the writing adage
that says that there is
a difference in having something to say and in having to say something.
Bobby knew that he
had to say something, but he didn't have anything to say, so the
incoherent
nonsense above was
what came out.
Till:
To see just how accurate Turkel's claim is that his view of Hosea 1:4
represents the
theological opinion of "commentators of all stripes," I have been
tracking down the sources
that he cited in the article I replied to, and so I will be taking
these sources one at a
time to see just what kind of "stripes" they are. Turkel relied heavily
on the opinion of
Thomas Edward McComiskey as presented in two works: (1) The Minor
Prophets, vol. 1,
Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1992, and (2) "Prophetic Irony in
Hosea 1.4: A Study of
the Collocation [PQD AL] and Its Implications for the Fall of Jehu's
Dynasty," Journal
for the Study of the Old Testament, 58, 1993, pp. 93-101.
I call attention first to the fact that McComiskey's commentary was published by Baker Book House of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, needless to say, this is not a publisher that is noted for objective biblical scholarship.
Turkel:
"I call attention first to the fact that McTill's material was
published by Prometheus Books
of Buffalo, New York, and, needless to say, this is not a publisher who
is noted for
objective biblical scholarship."
Till:
Uh, where did I quote or cite material that was published by Prometheus
books? I very rarely
quote or cite "sources" in my rebuttal arguments for the very reason
that Bobby can't seem to
understand. I write primarily on biblical issues, and any branch of
religion will have
competing doctrinal views that have been written about and rewritten
about and rewritten about.
I understand that whatever one's doctrinal belief is, he can always
find books, articles, and
commentaries that express that same belief. If one wants to write about
original sin, he can
always find writers who think that the Bible teaches this doctrine, but
if he wants to oppose
the doctrine of original sin, he can also find writers who have opposed
it too. Is preterism
your bag, as it is for Bobby? You can find writers who also believe it.
Are you a full
preterist? You can find writers whom you can quote or cite in support
of this brand of
preterism, which Bobby calls a "heresy." Are you only a partial
preterist, as Bobby is? You
can find writers to quote in support of this view too. There is no
doctrine that one cannot
find advocated or opposed in books and articles. Why can't Booby see
this?
I realize that Bobby was trying to be funny in what he said above, but in his failed attempt at humor, he inadvertently made my point for me. I don't quote or cite as support for my position any materials published by Prometheus books or the American Atheist, because I know that even the most dimwitted of Bible believers will dismiss them as just the opinions of unobjective skeptics or atheists, yet he expects us to swoon when he quotes or cites flagrantly biased fundamentalists like McComiskey.
Yes, I do think that I should call him Booby.
Turkel:
See how easy it is?
Till:
Yes, I do, and that is why I try to delineate my own arguments and
rebuttals rather than
filling my articles with bracketed citations like those that
characterize Bobby's. In my
writing classes, I always emphasized to my students that the quality
of one's sources
is far more important than the quantity. I urged them not to
cite or quote publications
like The National Enquirer or other tabloids or The NRA
Journal, because their
unobjectivity is too widely known. If I were still teaching today, I
would warn them to shy
away from the "fair and balanced" reporting of Fox News. Instructors
must not have taught
this quality-not-quantity principle at Florida State University, or
else Bobby was sleeping
in class when it was presented. If he had ever heard it, he would know
that one—just
one—logical argument is worth a dozen citations from biased
sources.
Turkel:
Much easier than answering McComiskey's arguments,
Till:
Uh, what "arguments" were these? Readers can scroll up and see again
that I took them
through every "source" that Bobby cited in the original debate and
especially through the
long quotation from McComiskey's works to show that he presented no
arguments; he simply
asserted. If Bobby doesn't know that argumentation by assertion is a
logical fallacy, he
should take down his apologetic shingle until he learns a bit more
about how to debate.
I guess it is time to present another proposal to Bobby. If he will identify real arguments in what he quoted or cited from McComiskey in the original debate, I will reply to them at once, if he will agree to (1) answer my rebuttals point by point, and (2) post both my reply and my rebuttal of his rebuttal on his website and keep them there. Needless to say, I will gladly post everything on my website, including any counterrebuttal he might care to write.
Bobby isn't about to accept this proposal, so this will end the matter.
Turkel:
which McTill also did by asking why translations published before
McComiskey's study
didn't agree with him.
Till:
Here Bobby begged the question of whether McComiskey's "study" reached
correct conclusions.
Bobby assumed that it did and that, therefore, any translation of the
Bible made before then
would have incorrectly rendered Hosea 1:4, but I won't let him argue by
assumption. Let him
show us clear evidence that McComiskey's "study" was correct. He hasn't
done that yet. He
has simply cited or quoted where McComiskey said that paqad
in Hosea 1:4 didn't
mean what others have long thought that it did.
On this point, Bobby's claim seems to be that there was a meaning in Hosea 1:4 that had been hidden from all Bible scholars and translators until, voilà, along came McComiskey and removed the veil that had shrouded the meaning of this verse for almost 3,000 years. Of course, the fact that McComiskey, who was employed by a radically fundamentalist institution flagrantly dedicated to biblical inerrancy, as we will soon see, in making this "discovery," just happened to "solve" a discrepancy in the Bible shouldn't be taken into consideration in evaluating the soundness of his "discovery," should it?
At any rate, I showed in this section of the compilation of the original Jehu debate that McComiskey's "collocation" quibble, on which he based his assertion that Hosea 1:4 didn't covey the idea of punishment, was untenable, because McComiskey's claim of a special meaning of paqad here was not supported by comparisons with other texts where the same "collocation" was used, so I have rebutted McComiskey's nonargument. Let's see now if Bobby will answer my rebuttal.
Till:
All that one needs to do to check me on this is visit several
"Christian" book stores and
examine the materials on their shelves.
Turkel:
Ta da, just beg the question of their objectivity.
Till:
No, I am not begging the question of their objectivity. Anyone who
examines such books as
these will see that they always take the position that the Bible is
"God's word" to man, and
I have yet to find one that says, yes, there are indeed errors in the
Bible. As long as this
situation exists, I am not begging the question of the objectivity of
those who write such
books.
The problem in such books as these is parallel to what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about paid preachers in his essay “Self-Reliance.”
If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side–-the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.
That is exactly why Bobby's sources like McComiskey are logically flawed. As I will show below, McComiskey is by virtue of his place of employment a "retained attorney," who must defend an inerrant view of the Bible. Hence, anything that he might say on the subject must be viewed with suspicion from the beginning.
Turkel:
"All you have to do is open a Prometheus catalog..."
Till:
Yes, indeed, if you thumb through a Prometheus
catalog, you will find
books that are openly
hostile to the view that the Bible is "God's word," and that is exactly
why I don't quote or
cite them in my rebuttals of inerrantist articles. I appreciate Bobby's
making my point for
me.
My thesis in "Commentators of All Stripes" was that although Bobby claims that commentators from liberal to moderate to conservative agree with his spin on Hosea 1:4, an examination of his "sources" shows that this just isn't true. In the first place, many of his "sources" were only secondary citations that he had found in the books of McComiskey and Stuart, his primary sources, and, secondly, these were obviously fundamentalists trying to support an inerrantist view of the Bible. I assume that everyone has noticed that Bobby is making no effort at all to deny this. He, in effect, is simply resorting to the tu quoque fallacy. This is a Latin term that meant you too, and this fallacy is committed when a debater accuses his opponent of doing the same thing that he has been accused of. In his comments above, for example, Bobby has basically said, "Well, yes, my sources were biased, but sources obtained from Prometheus Books are also biased." Be that as it may, the fact still remains that I have not relied on any sources from Prometheus to support my position. I have not relied on any other sources either. I have formulated my own rebuttal arguments and used those to reply to Bobby and his sources.
Bobby would like very much to paint me with the same brush that I have used to paint him as an unobjective, biased defender of biblical inerrancy, but, unfortunately, the facts do not support that attempt. In the first place, I was once a biblical inerrantist who is now a biblical skeptic, but I doubt that Bobby was ever a biblical skeptic who is now a biblical inerrantist. In other words, I have been on both sides of this issue, and so my background clearly indicates that I have the objectivity to admit when my views of the Bible are wrong. Furthermore, the record I have left will show that I often take issue with skeptics who try to find discrepancies in the Bible where none exist. If Bobby doubts this, he can go here to the Errancy archives, and use the search window to type "McKinsey" + "Red Sea" to go to where a disagreement with Dennis McKinsey, begun earlier before the archive was set up, continued on the Errancy list back in November 2000. The posts identified will show that I, along with other skeptics on the list, firmly disagreed with McKinsey's claim that a geographical error was made in 1 Kings 9:26, which located Ezion Geber on the Red Sea. This is just one example of many in the Errancy and alt.bible.errancy archives that will show that I have disagreed with biblical skeptics who I thought were claiming biblical discrepancies where none really exist.
Now just when has Bobby ever disagreed with biblical inerrantists and said he believes that some of what inerrantists call "alleged discrepancies" are actually real discrepancies? If he can show us such cases, let him do it. If he can't, he should realize that he has no room to accuse skeptics of being unobjective.
Till:
Besides being generally trite, much of it [materials in Christian book
stores] is published
by the evangelical and fundamentalist publishing companies in Grand
Rapids.
Turkel:
Besides being generally boring and beyond my ability to comprehend or
refute, much of it is
published by the atheist and agnostic publishing company in Buffalo.
Till:
I appreciate Bobby's honesty. It wouldn't take too much depth for a
book to be beyond his
ability to comprehend, and I too think that much of what is published
by Prometheus in
Buffalo would be beyond Bobby's ability to refute. Although he
showed again just how
deficient his writing skills are, I understand what he meant, so I will
reply on the basis
of what he meant and not what he actually said. I occasionally cited
such books some years
ago, but for the very reason that Bobby meant, I would not use in a
debate now books or
articles that were published by atheistic companies, because I know
that they would not be
effective in convincing believers to accept my position on the Bible.
The more he resorts to
this tu quoque fallacy to falsely accuse me of using the same
methods that he uses,
the more Bobby shows that he has no sensible reply to my claim that
citing biased sources
is an effective way to debate.
Till:
This, of course, is not intended to mean that McComiskey's view must be
considered wrong by
virtue of what company published it, but....
Turkel:
"I will harp and harp on it anyway like a two-faced hypocrite"
Till:
No, this is just a simple recognition of the logical fact that the
truth or falsity of
propositions is always independent of their source. This logical
principle, however, doesn't
remove the fact that a debater makes a strategic bobble if he relies
only on recognizably
biased sources to support his proposition. After all, what good is it
going to do to cite or
quote sources that may be right if they are going to be viewed
with too much suspicion
to have any appreciable effect on those in the audience whose views are
different from those
of the sources cited?
Between the lines of his tu quoque comments, I can see that Bobby knows that I am right. It no doubt galls him to know that I am right and that he can say nothing logical to defend his cite-several-sources method of debating.
Till:
it does give reason to suspect that the scholarship represented in it
may not be objectively
impartial or as profound as Turkel would have us think.
Turkel:
As objective as, say, uh, an issue of TSR. Of course.
Till:
I do at times link readers to articles that I published in The
Skeptical Review, if
they present the same argument needed to rebut whatever I am answering,
but those articles
are never the cite-an-author-who-agrees-with-me kind. They are articles
in which I delineated
and developed my own arguments. They are not articles that say, "Dan
Barker thinks," or,
"Robert Price believes," or "David Matson suggests," because I realize
that this Robert
Turkel/Everette Hatcher/David Conklin debating method will not impress
those who oppose my
position on whatever proposition is being debated.
As for the objectivity of The Skeptical Review, I would never say that it is in any sense a bastion of objectivity. However, I do think that it is somewhat more objective than, say, Bobby's website and other inerrantist sites and publications. As I pointed out above, I was once a biblical inerrantist--of the dyed-in-the wool kind--but I rejected that position when I could no longer ignore evidence that it was an untenable belief. What can Bobby point to in his life to indicate that he has a comparable objectivity?
Till:
Just as one would hardly expect to find objective scholarship in The
National Enquirer
or the NRA Journal, so one would expect that in all probability
evangelical or
fundamentalist views of the Bible will be found in materials published
in Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
Turkel:
Uh, yeah, apples and oranges.
Till:
Hmm, an "argument" by assertion. What did Bobby--er Booby--say here
that disproves my claim
that "in all probability" fundamentalist views of the Bible will be
found in materials
published in Grand Rapids, Michigan? Is this a false statement? If so,
let Bobby show us
that it is. Why didn't he quote Book X, which was published in Grand
Rapids but nevertheless
presented an errantist view of the Bible? That would have been a far
more effective
argument than just muttering, "Uh, yeah, apples and oranges."
Turkel:
Stuff in the Enquirer and the NRA mag aren't written by people who are
scholars with Ph. D's
in their field like McComiskey has.
Till:
My, my, can Booby really be this simplistically naive? Just how does a
Ph. D. in one's field
guarantee that he is a "scholar" who will objectively follow the
evidence wherever it leads?
I spent 30 years in academia, so I know that a Ph. D. degree is no
guarantee of scholarship.
Bobby often refers to Harding University, my alma mater, as
Bam Bam Bible
College, but if
he will check the website
of its
department of Bible and Religion, he will find that 15 of its faculty
members have their Ph.
D. degrees and two their Th. D. degrees from institutions such as
Virginia Tech, the
University of Nebraska, Boston College, University of St. Andrews,
Baylor, Duke, Hebrew Union
College, University of Arizona, Emory, University of Illinois--long
recognized as one of the
nation's finest--and, believe it or not, even Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School.
Besides these, there are several others with doctor's degrees in
ministry and education. With
an impressive array of Ph. D. professors like these on its religion
staff, I guess Bobby will
now speak about Bam Bam Bible College with a little more respect. I
suppose too that he will
no longer ridicule the Church of Christ and will begin to teach that
baptism is essential for
salvation, instrumental music in worship is unscriptural, loss of
salvation after conversion
is very possible, that preterism and premillennialism are heresies, and
that the Church of
Christ is... well. the church of Christ, because all of these views
have been published in
articles by Harding professors who have Ph. D. degrees.
I found something else on another page of Harding's website that I just can't resist passing along to Bobby. I had noticed before that Bam Bam Bible College was often rated by U. S. News and World Report among the top universities in the South, but I had no idea of just how many consecutive years, it had received that honor.
SEARCY, Ark. - For the 11th consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report magazine has ranked Harding University as one of the South’s best universities. The rankings are in the magazine’s 18th annual America’s Best Colleges issue, which hits newsstands Aug. 23.
The report also named Harding one of the “best values” among universities in the South.
Harding was ranked in the top 25 among regional universities of the South, behind such notable schools as the University of Richmond, James Madison University, Stetson University, Loyola University and The Citadel. This year the University ranked 22nd - compared to 26th last year.
This kind of recognition doesn't surprise me at all, because I have often said that except for the screwball religious ideas that it teaches, Harding was the academically best of the 10 colleges and universities that I attended with the exception of two European universities. I wonder how many years Florida State University has received the kind of recognition that Harding can boast about. At any rate, the fact that a university that Bobby openly ridicules is loaded with faculty members with their Ph. D. degrees, one of whom even received his from McComiskey's school of divinity, clearly obligates him to admit that a Ph. D. degree is no guarantee that one's position in religion is right. One can find professors with Ph. D. degrees in Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Seven-Day Adventist, Mormon, and all other kinds of religious institutions, so what does having a Ph. D. degree have to do with whether one's doctrinal beliefs are correct?
Turkel:
By the way, McTill passes right over an evaluation of where McComiskey
published his thesis
in JSOT. This is a peer-reviewed academic journal that can hardly be
called "fundamentalist"
or "evangelical". It accepts quality work regardless of the source. An
inerrantist position
on the Bible would be one of those views.
Till:
What is Booby trying to argue here? Is he claiming that if McComiskey
published an article
in a peer-reviewed academic journal, that means that what he said in
the article must be true?
If so, that is a position more idiotic than I would expect even Booby
to take. If someone
with a Ph. D. published an article in this peer-reviewed journal that
took the position that
archaeological evidence indicates that
Jericho
had already been
destroyed by the time that the Bible attributed its destruction to
Joshua, would Booby accept
this as evidence that his defense of the biblical account in
"Evidence of Jericho"
was wrong? If
someone with a Ph. D. published an article in this journal in which he
took the position that
there had never been a worldwide flood, would Booby accept this as
proof that the biblical
record of Noah's flood is at best an exaggeration? If someone with a
Ph. D.... well, my point
should be obvious by now. If someone with a Ph. D. publishes an article
in a peer-reviewed
journal that takes the position that the pastoral epistles were not
written by the apostle
Paul, will Booby fall in line and abandon his claim that they are
authentic epistles of Paul?
If someone with a Ph. D. degree publishes an article in a peer-reviewed
journal that takes
the position that 2 Peter was written in the second century after Peter
was dead, will
Booby abandon his claim that the third chapter of this epistle was
referring to events that
would happen in AD 70? Will pigs fly someday?
My point is that there are peer-reviewed biblical journals all over this and other countries that publish articles by Ph. D. holders that Booby would never agree with. There are peer-reviewed journals in which writers with Ph. D. degrees blast the doctrine of preterism from here to kingdom come, but that doesn't faze Booby in the least. There are also peer-reviewed scientific journals around the world that publish articles by people with advanced degrees and impeccable scientific credentials and lifetime experience in evolutionary biology, who defend the theory of evolution, but does Booby accept what these articles say? No, he doesn't. He prefers to accept instead the "scientific" opinions of someone at Answers in Genesis who has a Ph. D. degree.
As the scientific aspects of Creation and Flood our [sic] outside Tekton's purview, I've asked a Ph.D. scientist from Answers in Genesis for comment. So if any SAB has any complaints on those particulars, take it [sic] up with them!
The longer Booby writes, the more he exposes his incredible ignorance.
Turkel:
"An errantist position..." Get it?
Till:
No, really I don't get it. This sounds like something that was written
by Booby in one of
those moments when he knew that he had to say something but didn't have
anything to
say.
Turkel:
McTill is toast.
Till:
I think that readers will have no difficulty seeing just who is being
toasted, only I think
that roasted would be a better term. Jimmy Pee Holdingtank is
now being flushed down
the drain.
Turkel:
Now Mojo has a few words to bark:
Joson:
I would like to comment here before Till’s article continues. In the
time since this
examination of Turkel’s sources was published, Turkel has written that
this line of argument
is fallacious.
Turkel:
Not sure where this is,
Till:
Oh, really? Well let me refresh Booby's memory. He has apparently
forgotten that he actually
opposed this line of argumentation before the Jehu debate when he sent
a post to the now
defunct CCBE internet list in response to a reference I had made on the
"The brother of Moses, by the divine command, smote with his rod upon the river, and immediately, throughout its whole course, from Ethiopia down to the sea, it is changed into blood and simultaneously with its change, all the lakes, and ditches, and fountains, and wells, and springs, and every particle of water in all Egypt, was changed into blood, so that, for want of drink, they digged round about the banks of the river, but the streams that came up were like veins of the body in a hemorrhage, and spurted up channels of blood like springs, no transparent water being seen anywhere" (The Complete Works of Philo, Hendrickson: Peabody, MA, 1993, p. 468, emphasis added).
It turned out that Booby sent the CCBE list a response to this in which he said the following:
That's nice, but Philo is simply reading into the text what is not there. So if I find a Jewish commentator of equal worth that says the opposite, is it a draw? If I find two, do I win? Remember that Philo is trying to promote Moses and Aaron here and would maximize their feat to the greatest extent possible.
Booby clearly indicated here a recognition that (1) a writer with a biased opinion is an ineffective source to quote in support of a position and (2) writers with opposite views are readily available to quote. He has now spent years trying to backpedal on this comment, because he wants so badly to continue his practice of citing "sources" as proof of whatever doctrine du jour he is trying to peddle.
Oh, yes, I just have to say here that the fellow who set up the CCBE (Christians Combating Biblical Errancy) list specifically to enlist the help of other Bible believers in answering examples of biblical discrepancy being posted on the Errancy list and the old alt.bible.errancy forum has since come to admit that there are errors in the Bible. He shifted to the errant-but-still-the-word-of-God position, but he did at least abandon the untenable belief that the Bible is inerrant. Booby, on the other hand, has shown that he is a slow learner. Of course, there is no money in educating people to the truth about the origins of the Bible. Who is going to click PayPal and send a contribution to someone who shows that there are errors in the Bible? Booby seems to be very familiar with the old adage about knowing the side on which one's bread is buttered.
Turkel:
but I agree that what McTill thought I said is fallacious.
Till:
This isn't a matter of "thinking" what Booby said. The quotation above
is verifiable. If
Booby denies that he said it, I will present the evidence that he did.
I didn't just make up
this quotation.
I also recall seeing Booby admit that citing sources is not a sound way of supporting a position, but I don't remember where he said this. If I can find time to search for it, I will, but its relevance isn't worth the investment of more than a few minutes.
Joson:
He claims that simply because an author is published by a certain
publishing house, that
should not affect his scholarship. While true, I wonder how he would
feel if a skeptic quoted in
refutation of his material authors published by Prometheus or Shambala?
Turkel:
I wouldn't care one bit. I did make fun of Acharya S for publishing
with a company that also
does books on Atlantis, but that highlighted the uncritical nature of
her publisher, not
her.
Till:
Booby can say that he "wouldn't care one bit" if an opponent quoted
authors published by
Prometheus or Shambala, but not caring is different from viewing them
with any degree of
respect. Booby has already indicated in his ridiculing of Prometheus
Books above that he
would consider any references to them in a serious article to be devoid
of all
credibility.
Joson:
And does he really think that his own self-financed venture–-Tektonic
Plates—-is an unbiased
source for material related to biblical inerrancy? I thought not.
Turkel:
It would be right to think not, since T. Plates hasn't done a book on
Biblical inerrancy. The
one on Mormonism is "it" and that book doesn't say a word about
inerrancy. As for Mormonism,
is it an unbiased source on that subject? So far, the vasy [sic]
majority of my Mormon
contacts think so. They do not agree with my arguments, of course, but
their best apologists
have seen it, and "bias" isn't one of their accusations -- not that I
have yet to hear, and
not even in the negative review I refer to here. In fact my own former
"worst enemy" in the
Mormon camp, Kevin Graham, was so pleased by my objectivity and
fairness that he offered to
pass out copies of the book at the main Mormon apologetics conference.
Seems that the LDS are
a lot more mature as a whole than the Skeppies are.
Till:
I am aware that Jimmy Pee Holdingtank published a book on Mormonism,
but I have never read it
or even had it available to browse through, so I can't comment on its
objectivity. If Booby's
description of it is anywhere close to being accurate, I commend him
and suggest that he would
do well to try a little bit more of that civility and objectivity in
his website articles. As
I have said before, if he ever decides to use a civil approach in his
articles about me and
other skeptics, he will find me ready to reciprocate, but if he
continues to give us just more
of the same, I will continue to reply to him in kind.
Turkel:
Even with the reviewer noted, they know better than to use stupid
arguments like, "It was
published in Grand Rapids!" and we don't use stupid arguments back
like, "It was published
in Salt Lake City"!
Till:
Booby seems to forget that I have said before that the truth or falsity
of propositions is
always independent of their sources. The fact that a book was published
in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, or Salt Lake City in no way proves that the premises defended
in the book are
false. However, that does not negate the fact that the source of
propositions do affect
their credibility. If Booby sees a book--or more probably a
booklet--published by
The Watchtower, his initial reaction to it is not going to be,
"Ah, I should read this,
because this publisher puts out some good, objective, unbiased,
impartial materials." I also
doubt that he would expect to encounter an unbiased view of Mormonism
in a book written by a
Ph. D. professor at Brigham Young University. He knows that I am right
about this, so
nothing more needs to be said about it.
Turkel:
It's even more amazing that Paranoia McTill and Mojo think they can
justify such a stupid
tactic by saying, "Yeah, well, you'd do it too!"
Till:
Hmm, I believe that I showed above that Booby is the one who tried to
answer my comments
with the tu quoque [you too] fallacy. I have long known that he
can't remember from
one article to another what position he has taken on issues, but he
seems to have trouble
remembering even from one paragraph to another what he has said.
Till:
An examination of McComiskey's commentary increases suspicion that this
just may not be an
objective biblical reference work, because it turns out that McComiskey
is a "professor of
Old Testament Exegesis and Biblical Theology" at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School in
Deerfield, Illinois.
Turkel:
Which of course entirely annuls any argument he makes.
Till:
As I pointed out above, his employment by a fundamentalist institution
dedicated to furthering
the doctrine of biblical inerrancy makes it very unlikely that he would
ever publish anything
that is contrary to the inerrantist position. My report below of what
Trinity's website says
in its "statement of faith" and its "mission statement" provides
additional support for my
suspicion of McComiskey's "objectivity." If Booby continues to claim
that he can't see my
point, I will have to believe that in addition to his own lack of
intellectual honesty, he
is also a liar.
Till:
For those who may not know, this is the same "divinity school" where
Gleason Archer teaches.
Archer, as many reading this will recognize, is probably the chief guru
of biblical inerrancy,
and is known primarily for his book Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties, a work that is
heavily relied on by biblical fundamentalists looking for "solutions"
to Bible discrepancies.
Turkel:
Psst, and McTill once shook hands with Al Sharpton. Pass it on!
Till:
Well, I never have met Al Sharpton, but I would like to. I find his
political humor to be
a refreshing change from the pseudoseriousness of most politicians. I
still remember a short
comment that he made in the presidential debates: "If Bush didn't know
he was lying [about
WMDs in Iraq], that's even worse." Anyway, Booby's attempt at humor
here speaks volumes about
his "Christian attitude" towards a minority group. I noticed in another
article of his
that he found humor in the
tragic
breakup of the Columbia space shuttle over Texas. He also used
children with
muscular dystrophy
as a source of
"humor." In a word, he has a strange concept of humor.
His comment above about Al Sharpton did absolutely nothing to gainsay my claim that McComiskey's employment by Trinity University Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, casts tons of suspicion on his biblical objectivity. I have long known about this institution through my personal correspondence with Gleason Archer, the guru of biblical inerrancy, who taught there and was probably an associate of McComiskey. I took the time to examine Trinity's website to see if it would give any indication of biblical objectivity and impartiality. I found this Statement of Faith on it.
This "statement of faith" clearly presents a fundamentalist view of the Bible. Furthermore, item 11 presents an undeniable view of the second coming of Jesus that is in dire conflict with Bobby's preterist belief, so I would venture to say that McComiskey does not share Bobby's belief in preterism. Since McComiskey has a Ph. D. degree, however, and has published in a peer-reviewed biblical journal, wouldn't Bobby by the line of reasoning that he tries to peddle in his cite-the-scholars articles be obligated to renounce his belief in preterism?
On another page of the website, I also found this Mission Statement of Trinity University.
Trinity's calling is to glorify the Triune God as a learning community “entrusted with the gospel.” The university serves the church by preparing students to fulfill their divine calling through the study of his Word and his world. Trinity is committed to the Christian vision that laid the foundations of the great Western universities: that all knowledge is unified in Jesus Christ, since it was through him that all things were made. Trinity's schools, each with distinct educational missions, are united by their commitment to this vision for the Christian university:
A Christ-centered community. Jesus Christ is the center of our learning and our common life as we enable men and women to serve God in their families, the church, their respective callings, and their culture.
The authority of God's inerrant Word, Holy Scripture. His Word is our final authority in all matters—his own nature, and the world he has made—and therefore the authority for all human understanding and inquiry.
Now how likely is it that someone employed by an institution like this is going to take any position about the Bible that would even suggest that it may have discrepancies in it? I recall the firing of an international relations instructor--who had a Ph. D.--at Harding College while I was a student there for saying in his class that in a war God is on the side that has the most guns. Bobby may think what he wants to about the "objectivity" of writers like McComiskey, but anyone who has had actual educational experience at fundamentalist colleges like Trinity know that deviation from the strict view of the Bible is not going to be tolerated.
Till:
In the introduction to this work, Archer gave the following advice to
his readers who
encounter problem passages in the Bible:
Be fully persuaded in your own mind that an adequate explanation exists, even though you have not yet found it.
Turkel:
Sounds like the sort of advice a history professor might give to a
student stumped by a
difficulty in Tacitus... anyway...
Till:
Hardly! I doubt that any history professor who knows diddly about
historiography would tell
his/her students to accept on faith the accuracy of a passage in
Tacitus that openly
conflicted with other passages or with historical facts known from
other sources. Historical
inerrancy just isn't an educational doctrine that is taught in colleges
and universities.
Maybe the history professors at Florida State University teach this, so
that may account
for Booby's confusion here.
Till [still
quoting Archer]:
In other words, Archer's advice to his readers is that they approach the Bible with the assumption that it is inerrant,
Turkel:
"The professor's advice is to approach Tacitus with the assumption that
he deserves the
benefit of the doubt..."
Till:
But do these history professors tell their students to continue giving
Tacitus the benefit
of the doubt after every consideration of doubt given to him still
leaves them with textual
conflicts that defy rational explanation? Do they tell them that no
matter how perplexing
inconsistencies in Tacitus may be, they must still consider his work
historically inerrant,
because he is, after all, Tacitus?
Till [still
quoting Archer]:
and even when they can see no explanation to an apparent discrepancy, they should still assume inerrancy.
Turkel:
"...and even when they see no solution to the problem, to assume that
Tacitus, because he was
actually there, knew what he was talking about, whereas we were not
there and cannot simply
assume it." Common textual courtesy.
Till:
Hmm, why would a history professor with any semblance of historiography
at all tell his/her
students a thing like this? Tacitus obviously was not "there" when
everything that he wrote
about was happening. Has Booby ever bothered to read Tacitus? Tacitus
was born in AD
ca. 56 and wrote from around 98 to 138, yet in his Annals,
he wrote about the
founding of Rome in 753 BC, the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius
(Caligula), and
Claudius, who all lived and reigned before Tacitus was born. Anyone who
reads his works will
see that he obviously wrote about things that happened when he wasn't
"there," so what history
professor who knows anything at all about historiography would tell
his/her students to give
Tacitus the benefit of the doubt because "he was actually there"?
Booby's purpose in saying this was to beg the question of firsthand knowledge that biblical authors had about what they wrote in their books. "They were there," these inerrantists say, "so they knew what they were talking about." This is such an asinine argument that it hardly deserves comment. "Moses" [snicker, snicker] wrote about the creation, the flood, the adventures of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others, but he certainly wasn't "there," so he had no firsthand knowledge of what he was writing about in telling these tales, and the same was true of other biblical writers.
Till:
Now it may be that McComiskey does not share Archer's view of the
Bible, but I suspect that
he does, because it would be unlikely that he would be on the staff of
Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School unless he did accept the premise of biblical inerrancy.
Turkel:
And it would also be hard for McTill to argue guilt by assoication [sic]
fallaciously
to stack on top of that fallacious argument by ad hominem.
Till:
I am not arguing guilt by association. I am simply stating the obvious.
Someone who
teaches at a religious institution that declares its strict adherence
to belief in the
inerrancy as the Bible--as the "statement of faith" and "mission
statement" that I quoted
above from Trinity's own website--is not going to publish books and
articles that disagree
with those statements. The issue here is as simple as what Brett Palmer
pointed out to
Booby in this
section
of "The Walls of Jericho," where he showed the absurdity of Booby's
acceptance of the
archaeological opinions of the avowed inerrantist Bryant Wood on the
dating of the destruction
of Jericho. An inerrantist is an inerrantist, and I know from personal
experience with them,
when I was also one of their cohorts, that they will twist themselves
into verbal pretzels to
try to make the Bible inerrant.
I will just ask Booby to answer a simple question. If I can find commentators with Ph. D. degrees who say that Hosea 1:4 was declaring that the house of Jehu would be punished for Jehu's massacre at Jezreel, will he then say, "Well, I guess that settles it; I was wrong"? Of course, he won't do this, but he expects everyone else to fall in line and swoon over whatever "sources" he cites in support of his positions.
Turkel:
All of which is much easier than finding out about the nuances of
Hebrew.
Till:
This comment has become too idiotic to deserve further comment, so I
will just remind Booby
of the challenge that I have issued to him several times. Will he
submit to a test administered
by an expert in Hebrew to determine just how much he knows about
Hebrew? This guy obviously
is ignorant of many of the nuances in English, such as the difference
in on and
onto, in and into, transliterate and translate,
cannot
and can not, cite and citation, datum
and data,
remand and refer, it's and its, women's
and womens'
[which isn't even a word], signatories and signators
[which is also not a word],
which and who, complimentary and complementary,
and too many
others to list. He also doesn't understand that English prefixes like re-,
non-,
post-, are inseparably added to root words without hyphenation,
and... well, it would
take an entire article to identify what Booby doesn't know about his
own native language, so
how likely is it that he knows as much about Hebrew "nuances" as he
pretends?
Till:
In examining his commentary, I saw no suggestion at all that he is not
a biblical inerrantist.
Indeed, everything seemed to be written on the premise that he was
commenting on a book that
contained God's dealings with his chosen people.
Turkel:
"In his newsletter, I saw no suggestion that McTill is not a Biblical
errantist..."
Till:
Here is Booby's tu quoque fallacy again. No, Booby won't find
in The Skeptical
Review any indication that I am not a biblical errantist, but if he
examines my work
carefully enough, he will find that I have often opposed overzealous
attempts to find
discrepancies in the Bible. Can Booby show us where he has taken the
position that at least
some so-called "alleged" discrepancies are indeed real discrepancies?
Doesn't this guy ever tire of making a fool of himself?
Till:
At this stage of my investigation into Turkel's "commentators of all
stripes," it appears
very likely that he used only two or three primary sources, even though
his endnotes
contained 17 listings.
Turkel:
Pooh, yah. Watch this:
Till:
I assume everyone noticed that Booby made no attempt at all to deny
what I said above. I
said that he had used only two or three primary sources, and he didn't
even try to deny
it.
Till:
Although I won't know until I have been able to look through all of the
books that Turkel
cited,
Turkel:
Which will be in about, oh, 745 years
Till:
Nah, I did it much sooner than that. Where is Booby's denial? I caught
him in sloppy,
high-schoolish "scholarship," and he is unable to deny it.
Till:
I suspect that he pulled a ploy that was very familiar to me from my
days of teaching
college writing.
Turkel:
I suspect McTill peddles pornography in his spare time. There, now,
wasn't that
authoritative?
Till:
I have presented evidence that Booby used only a couple of primary
"sources" and then tried to
pawn off the secondary citations in those "sources" as works that he
had consulted. Where is
his denial?
Till:
It was quite common for students to find two or three primary
references that contained
within them quotations or references to other works and then try to
present the secondary
references as works that they had consulted in researching their
papers. In such cases, a
bibliography of 20 entries may represent only two or three books that
were consulted during
"research."
Turkel:
Sure. Every one of my 17 sources for that work was at the Reformed
Theological Seminary
library in Orlando, except for a couple I found at the Long's Christian
bookstore in
Orlando.
Till:
Well, at least Booby finally made a denial, but what he says here
doesn't agree with my
own research. He had mentioned some time ago that he uses the Reformed
Theological Seminary
Library in Orlando, so when I was trying to locate his "sources" to
check their content,
I used interlibrary loan at the college where I used to teach. Its
system lists all
locations of where books requested can be borrowed, and I specifically
asked the operator
of the computer to check for availability in Orlando, Florida. Some of
Booby's "sources"
were not listed there. Anyway, Booby needs to be careful about what he
claims, because the
electronic age makes it too easy to check claims. There is a
website
where all books in the catalogs of the RTS Libraries in Orlando,
Charlotte (NC), and Jackson
(MS) are listed. That search has shown that none of the libraries have
Mordecai Coogan's
book 2 Kings, but I guess that this was one of the "couple"
that Booby bought at
Long's Christian bookstore. None of the articles in journals like Catholic
Biblical
Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Journal for the
Study of the Old
Testament were available in these libraries. Two articles from The
Journal of
Biblical Literature were inventoried, but neither of them was
Mullen's article cited by
Booby. Of course, he was probably able to run down to Long's and grab
these off the shelf
too. All three of these journals in the issues needed just happened to
be on sale. This
website search revealed another interesting thing. In addition to being
an expert in Hebrew,
Booby must also be able to read German, because he cited the commentary
on Hosea by
Hans Walter Wolff, and it was available only in the original German
version. How was he
able to cite a book written in German? Well, that is easy to do. If
McComiskey or Stuart
cited it, Booby could cite it too and pass it off in his endnotes as a
primary source.
Despite Booby's denial, I continue to believe that he fudged on his sources, because I saw in his article too many of the "tricks" that college students try to pull on their instructors to make them think that they broke their asses researching their papers. When such papers were checked, they invariably had "sources" not available in any regional library, but they could be found cited in some of the books and periodicals that were available locally. I suspect that Booby bluffed his way through Florida State and now continues to use the same amateurish "research" methods to fool the gullible.
Citations from periodials in student papers would immediately set off an alarm in my head, because a popular student ploy was to cite in their papers titles of periodical articles that they had found cited in books they had consulted. The books would usually be in the library, but, as often as not, the periodicals weren't in the library's inventory. I didn't have to be a genius to figure out what had been done, because—and I will admit it—I had done the same thing when I was a college student. The fact that I had done it, however, didn't make it proper research. Booby listed among his "sources" articles from three different journals, none of which were listed in any of the RTS Library catalogs, so what probably happened? He saw them cited in some of the books that he actually checked out and then put them into his article as primary sources. It is an old student try-to-fool-the-instructor ploy, but it is poor research in an article that is claiming to speak with authority on a subject like Booby's spin on Hosea 1:4
Turkel:
McTill is just hauling a cheap bale of slander because he can't answer
the actual argument.
Till:
Uh, what argument is that? Saying over and over again that McComiskey
thinks and Stuart
sees and Hobbs suggests, etc., etc., etc. is not argumentation. It is
bald assertion.
All readers have to do is scroll up to where I quoted in their
entireties every reference
that Booby made to his 17 "sources" and begin reading again. They will
see that I analyzed
all of these citations and showed that there isn't a speck of
argumentation in them
anywhere. Is Booby really so dense that he just can't see the
difference in delineating
arguments and in just quoting or citing unsupported assertions? He must
be.
If Booby really thinks that I evaded any kind of arguments that his sources presented, I will renew my standard proposal. If he will post the arguments he thinks I have evaded, I will gladly reply to them again, if he will agree to reply to them point by point and post all of our exchanges on his website.
Once again, this will end the matter, because Booby isn't about to post on his site or link his readers to anything that will let them see that his so-called arguments are indeed being answered in detail.
Till:
McComiskey, for example, referred to the opinions of Francis Andersen
and David Noel
Freedman, and so in Turkel's "rebuttal" of my article, he mentioned the
same opinions of
Andersen and Freedman that McComiskey had cited, and then Andersen and
Freedman were listed
in Turkel's endnotes.
Turkel:
Um, yeah. A and F's commentary is on the same shelf as McComiskey's,
actually. Close
enough for McTill to hit them with slander.
Till:
Un, huh, I'll bet that this shelf is right next to the periodical file,
where copies of
The Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, The Catholic
Biblical Quarterly, and
The Journal of Biblical Literature are kept. Booby should trot
down and tell them
that they need to update their website.
Till:
McComiskey cited these two, along with James Luther Mays, Hans Walter
Wolff, and Leon K.
Wood, as "modern commentators" who have views on Hosea 1:4 that were
different from his, and
this was done in a short paragraph of only eight lines. All of these
names, however, turned
up in Turkel's endnotes as works that he had consulted.
Turkel:
Mays and Wolff's commentaries and Wood's work are also on the same
shelf area -- duh ah,
does that make sense to McTill?
Till:
Right beside Wolff's comentaries in German, I suspect, and I'll bet
that Booby is proficient
enough in this language to breeze right through them.
Till:
Did Turkel actually consult all of these works, or did he just kill six
birds with one
stone by consulting McComiskey's commentary and then listing
McComiskey's five secondary
sources as works that he had also consulted?
Turkel:
I killed one big bird, full of baloney, named McTill.
Till:
I suspect that those who read all of our
original
debate, my
follow-up
article,
"Commentators of All Stripes," and now this reply to Booby's farcical
attempt to answer my
follow-up article will have a different idea about which bird got
slaughtered.
Till:
He may have consulted them all,
Turkel:
"Just in case, let me cover my butt"
Till:
No, this was just a simple, honest recognition that I could be wrong.
Based on my 30 years
experience in dealing with students who tried to pull some of the
"research" shenanigans that
I believe I found in Booby's article, I don't think that I am wrong,
but I learned from my
experience of having once been a dyed-in-the-wool biblical inerrantist
whose intellectual
integrity forced him to suffer the embarrassment of having to admit
that what he had preached
for 12 years was wrong, I learned that it isn't too smart ever to take
an
I-just-couldn't-be-wrong position. I don't think that Booby has ever
learned that
lesson.
Till:
but I will be better able to make a judgment about this after I have
seen all of their
works too.
Turkel:
in the year 2150.
Till:
Nah, it didn't take that long. If Booby would ever recognize that good
writing takes time,
he might spare himself the embarrassments of having his feet shoved
down his throat.
Till:
For now, it seems at least possible that these six listings represent
only one source that
Turkel actually consulted in the writing of his article.
Till:
Booby has made his denial of having tried to pass off secondary
references as primary
"sources" that he consulted, but I have showed above good reasons to
see this as just another
one of his lies. I will leave it to readers to decide if they think
that Booby went to
the Seminary library and came back home with 17 books and periodicals
piled up in his arms.
Meanwhile, I will ask him some direct questions: Did you obtain and read all sections in your 17 "sources" that you cited in your article? Did you lift a cited [secondary] reference from any of these books or periodicals and present it as a primary reference?
I'll let Booby decide how to answer these questions, if he answers them at all. If he lies, he will have to live with having violated a cardinal principle of his religion.
Uh, no, I forgot; he can always lie and then pray for forgiveness, can't he?
Turkel:
"For now, leaving a slanderous accusation in your mind, gullible
reader, will be
sufficient."
Till:
Booby has the gall to talk about slanderous accusations? The king of
venom, insults, and
sarcasm is complaining about the "slander" of someone else? Is this guy
for real? Anyway,
let's wait to see how Booby answers the questions above. For his
benefit, I will say that I
did not use all in the biblical sense, where so many times
inerrantists will claim
that all didn't mean all. When I ask if all 17 of his
citations were primary
sources, I was asking if all of his sources were primary.
Till:
At any rate, it was misleading of Turkel to claim that his view of
Hosea 1:4 represented
the opinion of "commentators of all stripes," because of the six listed
above, only
McComiskey agreed with Turkel (or to be more accurate, only Turkel
agreed with McComiskey).
McComiskey specifically cited Andersen, Freedman, Mays, Wolff, and Wood
as "modern
commentators" with views that disagreed with his, so that would hardly
constitute a consensus
of "commentators of all stripes."
Turkel:
Sorry, but actually, Andersen and Freedman do agree, though for
different reasons -- they
come at the answer from a different perspective, but agree with
McComiskey's view. They are
liberal-to-moderate, so there are your stripes.
Till:
We are not at all interested in what kind of verbal contortions
Andersen and Freedman
twisted themselves into to make Hosea 1:4 not mean what it clearly
says. If they thought
that paqad was used here in a punitive sense, then they do not
agree with McComiskey's
spin on the verse, so McComiskey's view would not be one that
"commentators of all stripes"
agree on as Booby claimed in his article. I don't need Booby to tell me
that the Andersens
and Freedmans and Hobbses and Provans of the biblical world lean over
backwards to make the
Bible not mean what it plainly says in so-called "difficult" passages,
because I know that
they do this. If Booby is counting on his side just any biblical
commentator who argues that
there is no inconsistency in Hosea 1:4 and 2 kings 10:30, then,
certainly, there are
"commentators of all stripes" who don't think that there is any
inconsistency here, but that
wasn't what he was trying to make his readers believe. He wanted them
to think that within
the past 5-7 years, research has discovered a previously hidden meaning
in Hosea 1:4, and
that new meaning is now accepted by commentator of all stripes. One of
the curious things
about biblical inerrantists is the way that they will all agree that
there is no discrepancy
in any given biblical text but will disagree on what the text means.
One will say that a
text like Hosea 1:4 means something that makes it consistent with 1
Kings 10:30, another one
will say that the same text means something entirely different, which
is also not inconsistent
with 1 Kings 10:30, and still another one will use an entirely
different spin to explain away
the inconsistency, and so on ad infinitum.
I'll ask Booby to read my lips: I know that biblical inerrantists resort to these verbal gymnastics to try to explain biblical discrepancies. If, however, Andersen, Freedman, Mays, Wolff, and Wood thought that paqad conveyed a punitive meaning in Hosea 1:4, then they did not agree with McComiskey's spin on it. The truth is that of all of Booby's sources, the only two I could find who had this opinion were McComiskey and Stuart, so why did Booby try to make his readers believe that theirs was a view that was shared by commentators of all leanings from conservative to moderate to liberal? This was a deliberate effort on his part to mislead his readers.
Till:
In McComiskey's article in Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament,
Turkel:
Which McTill doesn't want to tell you is a peer-reviewed journal
Till:
What does this have to do with the truth or falsity of McComiskey's
proposition? I showed
above that all sorts of religious doctrines can be found in
peer-reviewed journals. As I
asked above, if I found an article in a peer-reviewed journal written
by someone with a
Ph. D. degree who presented a dispensationalist view of biblical
passages about the return
of Jesus, would Booby say, "Well, my preterist beliefs must be wrong"?
Of course, he wouldn't,
but he seems to think that every "source" that he cites in his articles
should suffice to
settle the issues involved.
Booby seems to be a bit logically challenged. Maybe he is having an identity crisis and can't decide whether he wants to be Booby Turkey or Jimmy Pee Holdingtank. A rumor going around says that Booby's identity was stolen and then given back when the identity thief found out who he is.
Till:
McComiskey even noted that Andersen and Freedman said on page 175 of
their commentary that
"(c)learly [pqd dam 'al] means to punish the house of Jehu for
murder," so certainly the
"stripes" of these two commentators can't be considered in agreement
with Turkel's
(McComiskey's) spin on Hosea 1:4.
Turkel:
Unless they come at the matter a different way, which they did:
Till:
Booby seems to have reading comprehension problems. In what I quoted
above, Andersen and
Freedman said that pqd dam 'al clearly meant "to punish
the house of Jehu for
murder," but McComiskey said that it did not mean this. Hence,
we have a P and ~P
situation here. McComiskey's position on this verse flatly contradicted
the position stated
by Andersen and Freedman, so there is no way that Booby can claim that
Andersen's and
Freedman's interpretation of Hosea 1:4 complemented McComiskey's. The
only way they were
alike is that both views resorted to verbal contortions to try to make
Hosea 1:4 consistent
with 1 Kings 10:30. Booby deceptively used Andersen and Freedman to
make his readers think
that they were part of the "commentators of all stripes" who shared
McComiskey's discovery
of a hidden meaning in Hosea 1:4.
Here is exactly what Booby said in the original debate (with emphasis added).
Many commentators of all stripes have suggested, based on structure and parallelism, that Hosea 1:4 is better read to express the idea that the bloodshed of Jezreel will be visited on the house of Jehu--which is to say, the verse should read, not "punished for the blood of Jezreel," but "punished by"--the reference is to the mode of punishment, rather than the cause of it.
After my article "Commentators of All Stripes" was posted in response to Booby's claim that all kinds of commentators agree with his view of Hosea 1:4, he "reworked" the original debate and removed his references to "commentators of all stripes," but his claims about this are preserved in my unedited version of the original parts of the debate. After saying what I just quoted above, he came back and repeated his "commentators of all stripes" claim.
For now, a word about these sources we will be using. We point out that our solution from Hosea is reckoned by "commentators of all stripes."
Now that is clear enough, isn't it? Booby plainly said that "our solution"--the affected first person plural usage meaning his solution, of course--"is reckoned by 'commentators of all stripes.'" He didn't say that commentators of all stripes "came at the matter a different way" and reached the conclusion that there is no discrepancy here. He said that his solution was "reckoned by commentators of all stripes," and I have clearly shown that they didn't reckon his "solution" to be the right one. Booby intentionally misled his readers.
Till here throws a few useful polemics in [sic] the ring. 1) He asks how it is that this nuance I have pointed out managed to "escape the hundreds of linguistic scholars who were involved" in the translations he quotes. We will give some reasons for this shortly; for now, let only this be said: Aside from the fact that this argument presumes a host of motives and directions upon teams of scholars about whom neither we nor Till knows a single thing, it should be recognized that commentaries as a rule provide much more in-depth information than mere translations, and are the products of a generally higher rank of scholarship and of much more in-depth study and analysis than the translations are. If it comes down to a battle royale between the two, commentaries should assuredly be given preference.
In this section of Part 2 of my reposting of the original debate, I inserted an addendum from a former member of the Errancy list, who effectively demolished Booby's claim that commentaries were more reliable than Bible translations. I quoted Booby's comments here to show that he clearly took the position that his view of Hosea 1:4 was shared by "commentators of all stripes" and then removed all references to this claim after my rebuttal had stung him in the butt.
Turkel:
As I noted, "Andersen and Freedman acknowledge the viability of the
'visit' translation and
accept the same explanation of the issue as we have, as noted below.
However, they stick with
'punish' and reject a 'visit' translation because 'its vacuity misses
the juridical
connotations of the idiom.' In other words, they use 'punish' because
of problems with the
vacuity of our language - not because of the Hebrew!"
Till:
Turkel has cut and pasted here a section from his part of the original
debate. Since I gave
a detailed
reply to it in Part 2 of my reposting of the original debate, I
won't quote or rehash my
answer here. Readers can click the link and see that Booby was making
the mistake of
assuming that the substance of homographs in Hebrew could not be
accurately translated into
English. For him or anyone to speak of the "vacuity" of the English
language compared to
Hebrew is linguistic ignorance gone to seed. Hebrew had fewer than
9,000 words in it whereas
modern English has 750,000
words in its vocabulary and one million if scientific words are
considered. Even Old
English had some 50,000 words in it, which would have been over five
times more than
Hebrew had. English is arguably the "richest" language in the world as
far as vocabulary is
concerned. German has only about 185,000 words and French fewer than
100,000, which includes
Franglais terms like le baby-sitting, le hamburger, le
snack-bar, and many
others assimilated from English [our payback for the intrusion of so
many French words into
our vocabulary following the Norman conquest of England in 1066].
From having lived in France for five years, I learned the language well enough to know that there are some words in French that do not have exact equivalents in English. I have no reason to think that the same would not be true of German, Spanish, Russian, and, yes, Hebrew too. However, I know also that with the richness of the English vocabulary, the meanings of such words can be accurately conveyed in translations. It may be necessary to use an expression of more than one word to translate the meaning of a single word, but it can be done. I have previously used chez as an example of a French word that has no exact equivalent in English but which can nevertheless be accurately translated to convey what it means in French. For Booby to argue that paqad in Hosea 1:4 was translated to convey the sense of punishment because of the "vacuity" in a language with a vocabulary 83 times as large as Hebrew's is the height of ignorance. When he argues such nonsense as this, we can be assured that the only linguistic vacuity is between his ears.
Till:
At this point, it is obvious that the view of Hosea 1:4 that Turkel
presented in his
article was the opinion of only one commentator of a very inerrantist
stripe, and that was
Thomas Edward McComiskey.
Turkel:
At this point, McTill decided he could sit his sorry tuckus back in the
easy chair. This was
so much easier than actually proving McComoiskey [sic] wrong!
Till:
He who asserts must prove. I realize that Booby is logically
challenged, but that is a
long-standing logical principle that even he should know. I have no
obligation to prove that
McComiskey's assertion is false; he--or Booby, if Booby is going to
appropriate it--must prove
that it is true, and Booby has not done that. I quoted above everything
from McComiskey that
Booby quoted in the original debate and showed that it consisted only
of assertions and not
argumentation. Furthermore, even though I had no obligation to disprove
McComiskey's assertion
of a new, previously hidden meaning, in Hosea 1:4, I did take the time
in
this
section of
Part 2 of my reposting of the original debate to show that McComiskey's
assertion had no
biblical support.
I will repeat my earlier proposal here. If Booby will post what he thinks is an argument in the quotation from McComiskey, which I did not answer, I will answer it again, if he will agree to reply to it point by point and post all of our exchanges on his website and leave them there. He won't agree to this, of course, and so that will end the matter.
Till:
On the matter of what paqad meant in Hebrew, Turkel simply
parroted McComiskey's view
back to his readers, and praised himself for in-depth scholarship.
Turkel:
And McTill simply pretended that calling it a "parroted" view was an
actual answer, as he
usually does when he doesn't have the intellectual cajones to give an
actual answer.
Till:
Did Booby mean that I don't have the intellectual balls to give an
actual answer? If so,
why didn't he just say so? Oh, I forgot; he doesn't use "bad words" in
his articles, does
he?
Now with that said, let Booby show us where he presented any substantial substance of his own pertaining to the new, hidden meaning in Hosea 1:4, which he didn't just cite or quote from McComiskey or Stuart. He did dust off his concordance and try to find passages to prove his claim that raya and yada conveyed different kinds of friendship, but at this particular point, I was referring to McComiskey's claim of finding a previously hidden meaning in Hosea 1:4, and all that Booby did here was parrot McComiskey's assertions.
If I am wrong, let Booby show us I am wrong.
Till:
As I continue to receive the books that Turkel cited, I will post
further evaluations of
his "commentators of all stripes."
Turkel:
"It will take about 500 years, and my opinion is solid gold, since I
have the authority
and competence to judge scholars."
Till:
Nah, here we are just seven years after the original debate, which
began
on
August 24, 1998, and
the
archives of alt.bible.errancy show that I posted my reply to
Booby's
"commentators-of-all-stripes" claim back on October 19, 1998. (Booby is
a little prone to
exaggeration, isn't he?) As we are now seeing, all he could do in
response to it was remove
his original claim from his website and then hurl sarcasms and insults
at my exposure of his
deception.
As for the comment above that the quotations marks indicate was sarcastically attributed to me, I think that Jimmy Pee Holdingtank is trying to impute his Superman/Terminator delusion of grandeur to me, because he is obviously the one who thinks that he has "the authority and competence to judge scholars"! Why else would he constantly write articles that string together unsupported citations and then stamp his feet and scream, "Why won't you accept what my scholars say?"
This is a good time to remind Booby of an earlier offer. If he wants to engage in hurling insults and sarcasms, I will continue to reply to him in kind, but if he should ever decide to debate issues civilly, I will gladly reciprocate. The ball is in his court.
Till:
In doing so, I intend to keep readers reminded of a gross inconsistency
in Turkel's view
on the value of quoting commentators. In his article that I answered,
he repeatedly paraded
before his readers that his view represented the thinking of
"commentators of all stripes,"
and so that somehow gave more credibility to his view.
Turkel:
As noted, wrong interpretation.
Till:
As noted several times--the last time just a few paragraphs above--I
did not misinterpret
Booby's claim that "commentators of all stripes" shared the view of
Hosea 1:4 that he was
defending. Just out of spite, I am going to quote again two of the
places where he clearly
said this (with emphasis added again).
Many commentators of all stripes have suggested, based on structure and parallelism, that Hosea 1:4 is better read to express the idea that the bloodshed of Jezreel will be visited on the house of Jehu--which is to say, the verse should read, not "punished for the blood of Jezreel," but "punished by"--the reference is to the mode of punishment, rather than the cause of it.
For now, a word about these sources we will be using. We point out that our solution from Hosea is reckoned by "commentators of all stripes."
So let Booby tell us just how I misinterpreted what he was claiming.
Till:
On another internet list, however, Turkel completely ridiculed the
notion that quoting
sources gives support to one's views.
Turkel:
As noted here, another
Till-billy yeehaw interpretation. We'll skip the drivel where McTill
rehashes all of this and applies it to the current issue; you can read
about it at the link.
Till:
Booby's link to "here" doesn't work. [Webmaster's
note: I corrected this link on March 28, 2006.] Clicking it will
bring up his
message about a revision
of his website, which conveniently killed all links to his articles
that had been inserted
into replies to him on other websites, including mine. In this case,
Booby's link in his
own article won't work, so I have no way to tell what "here" is
supposed to link to.
Now, why don't we look at the "drivel" that Booby skipped here? I think everyone will see immediately why he wanted to skip this kind of "drivel." I will quote it in green except for a paragraph where I was quoting Booby's ridiculing of an ancient source I had quoted, which I will put in blue.
On another internet list, however, Turkel completely ridiculed the notion that quoting sources gives support to one's views. An inerrantist member of my Errancy list founded a list of his own, which he called CCBE (Christians Combating Biblical Errancy), for the avowed purpose of forming a closed forum where biblical inerrantists could consider in secrecy the arguments of Dennis McKinsey and me and then post collective replies. The list was closed to all who did not profess to be Christians, and the owner of the list became very upset when some of his members forwarded to me some materials that had been posted on CCBE. It so happened that one of the postings forwarded to me had been submitted by Turkel.
The issue concerned the claim in Exodus that after Aaron and Moses had changed all of the water throughout all the land of Egypt into blood, pharaoh's magicians did "so" or "in like manner" with their enchantments. Inerrantists were asked to explain how the magicians could have changed all of the water in Egypt into blood after Aaron and Moses had already changed all of the water in Egypt into blood. The collective response of the CCBE was that "all didn't mean all" and that the magicians had dug along the bank of the Nile, found water, filled some pots, and changed this into blood. This quibble was based on the claim in Exodus 7:24 that the Egyptians did dig along the river for water to drink, and so the CCBE reasoned that this was how the magicians obtained water with which to do "likewise with their enchantments."
In responding to this "rebuttal," I noted that the text refers to digging for water to drink after it says that he magicians had done likewise with their enchantments, and I also quoted Philo Judaeus, a first-century contemporary of Jesus, who claimed that "every particle of water in Egypt" had been changed into blood and that when the Egyptians tried to dig for water, they found that it too was blood. This was where Turkel came to the rescue of the struggling CCBE members with the following statement:
That's nice, but Philo is simply reading into the text what is not there. So if I find a Jewish commentator of equal worth that says the opposite, is it a draw? If I find two, do I win? Remember that Philo is trying to promote Moses and Aaron here and would maximize their feat to the greatest extent possible.
Here Turkel took the position that quoting commentators proves nothing, so if I applied his line of reasoning to his reliance on the opinion of McComiskey concerning the meaning of "paqad" in Hosea 1:4, all I would have to do is quote another commentator who disagreed with McComiskey, and then we would have a draw rather than the overwhelming victory that Turkel claimed throughout his article on the grounds that his view represented "commentators of all stripes." To find a commentator whom I could quote would be simple, because McComiskey did that himself in noting that Andersen and Freedman say that Hosea 1:4 clearly meant that the house of Jehu would be punished for murder. However, since Andersen and Freedman would be two commentators, that means that by Turkel's own logic, I win two to one. Furthermore, since McComiskey identified three other commentators (Mays, Wolff, and Wood) who have different views, then it becomes five commentators against one, so I really have won (according to Turkel's logic).
This "drivel" speaks for itself and confirms what not just I but many skeptics have said about Booby. He will selectively quote his opponents and leave out the material that he cannot give sensible replies to. Back in 1997, he was pooh-poohing the idea that anything could be supported by citing or quoting a source, but since then he has become the champion cite-the-sources apologist, although Everette Hatcher and David Conklin aren't far behind him.
Till:
The next one I expect to receive is Douglas Stuart's commentary on
Hosea and Jonah. I
noticed in Turkel's endnotes that it was printed by "Word" publishers
in Waco, Texas, so I'm
betting in advance that this will turn out to be another fundamentalist
publishing
company. We'll just have to wait to see.
Turkel:
The Word series is a mix. Stuart seems to be in the middle, but I'm not
sure.
Till:
I was glad to see that Turkel is capable of civility. He should try it
more often. In
checking to see if Word Books really is the "Mix" that Turkel claimed,
I saw indications of
a conservative slant. It seems not to have its own website, but Word
Books could be found
here and there on Google. I spotted two of its books that had been
written by Church-of-Christ
preachers, and I am sure that Turkel would not think that they are "in
the middle." I did
find this introduction to Word Biblical Commentary.
Intended for pastors and scholars, this serious commentary series offers readers an intense and current understanding of Scripture. Each volume begins with an extensive introduction discussing the issues of authorship, date, and purpose; each commentary presents a thorough examination of the text using the most recent critical textual scholarship as well as current findings in archaeology and discussions in theology.
This doesn't tell us much, because no publisher of biblical works would say that its commentaries are not serious and do not offer current scholarship. I checked Google for information on some of the authors of the different volumes in this set of commentaries and found them to be consistently of, to borrow an expression from Turkel, a "conservative bent." John I. Durham, the author of the Word volume on Exodus, for example, is on the editorial board of Broadman Press in Nashville, Tennessee, which has solid ties to Southern Baptist Churches. T. R. Hobbs, who wrote the volume on 2 Kings, also wrote A Time for War, which reviews that I was able to access seemed to indicate is a defense of Yahwistic atrocities in the Old Testament. I found Peter C. Craigie, author of the volume on Psalms 1-50 and The Minor Prophets, which was one of Turkel's sources, cited in an article that was trying to explain that there was no conflict between the Genesis flood story and earlier flood myths, because they just complemented--or, as Booby would say, "complimented"--each other. John J. Goldingay, the author of the volume on Daniel, is, of course, the darling of those like Everette Hatcher, David Conklin, and Turkel, who are determined to die screaming that this book was written by a 6th-century BC Jewish official in the Babylonian government. I checked other authors too, a couple of whom I will mention later, but I found none who seemed to have even moderate leanings. These are apparently authors bent on defending the traditional view that the Bible is the inspired "word of God," so I am still looking for Booby's many "commentators of all stripes" who "reckon [his] solution" to the discrepancy in Hosea 1:4 and 2 Kings 10:30 to be the right one.
Till:
I will remind readers too that I have challenged Turkel to debate this
issue on an open
internet forum that will allow readers to see everything that
both of us post on the
subject.
Turkel:
Ahhh....there's that everything stricture McTill denies ever
making....thanks, Mojo.
Till:
So Booby is still chanting that mantra, is he? I want everyone to
notice what I said above.
I challenged Booby to an internet debate that would allow all readers
to see--see, see,
SEE--everything that both of us post on the subject. I did not
challenge
him to a debate in which he would have to quote everything I wrote, but
he has tried to
distort the challenge into meaning that. He tried it first in our land
promise debate, which
begins here.
His
distortion of my challenge into a demand that he actually quote
everything that I wrote in
our exchanges turned this debate into a farce that was obviously
intended to distract the
readers' attention from his inability to refute my proposition that
Yahweh's land promise to
the Israelites had failed.
In my first exchange with him on the land-promise issue, I set Booby straight on what my challenge had actually meant.
Turkel apparently has yet to learn that in a written debate, neither opponent has the right to decide what should and should not be left in the published text for readers to see. If a participant sees no argument or relevance to a statement made by his opponent, he can simply cut to the chase and respond to what he thinks is relevant. Readers who see everything that both participants wrote can then judge whether a participant who skips over something is evading it, and the opponent can point out what argument or relevance is in the part that was skipped over and then ask that it be answered. A debating manual or textbook would be a useful addition to Turkel's library.
Despite having set Booby straight on what my challenge entailed, he continues to distort it into meaning something that I really never said. He is either too dumb to understand plain English or else he is deliberately deceptive. Guess which one I think hits the nail on the head.
Turkel:
"Selective quoting" which McTill has yet to prove had any effect on his
argument, other
than making it less boring.
Till:
Well, I just showed one example of Booby's selective quoting to hide
from his readers material
that will show his inconsistency or in some other way embarrass him,
and I will be showing
another example below, where he gutted my quotation from Wolff's
commentary, which clearly
contradicted Booby's claim that Jehu had exceeded his "mandate."
Obviously, such "selective
quoting" has an "effect" on my arguments, because it prevents his choir
members from seeing
my complete arguments, and, in the case of his omission of most of the
quotation from
Wolff's comentary, the deletion kept his readers from seeing that he
was patently wrong in
saying that "many commentators of all stripes" have "reckoned" his
"solution" to the Hosea
1:4 problem to be correct. I would say that omissions like these in his
selective quoting
definitely affect his opponents' arguments.
He has to know this, and that is why I don't hesitate to call him a liar.
I reinserted above what Booby deleted in order to show that he had once ridiculed quoting or citing sources, as in the case of my quotation from Philo Judaeus. When he posted this, he thought that quoting sources didn't prove anything, but since then he has repeatedly relied on... what? That's right, citing "sources" that agree with his position and ridiculing anyone who refuses to accept them as definitive settlements of whatever issues were involved. Booby can't seem to remember what he writes from one article to the next.
I have found that calling Booby's bluff is the easiest way to shut him up, so here is another challenge. I will gladly post several of my arguments and rebuttals that Booby has evaded, if he will agree to reply point by point to every one of them and then post everything, including my counterrebuttal on his website and leave them there.
End of the matter, of course, because Booby "Chicken" Turkel isn't about to agree to this. Heck, he won't even link his readers to the articles of skeptics that he claims he is "answering."
Till:
When readers see everything that both sides have to say, they
can better evaluate
the respective positions. Turkel has declined this challenge.
Turkel:
Mustard with that crow, McTill?
Till:
What crow? I just showed how Booby distorted my challenge to debate in
a format where readers
could see everything that we both write on the issues being
debated. He is just
showing his deliberate dishonesty by continually distorting what I
said, but, of course, he
has had a lot of practice distorting. He distorts biblical passages in
practically every
article he writes.
Turkel:
He's sorry now that he's had to sit on that everything cactus
for a few weeks... in
the next section McTill re-re-re-peats his findings above; we go right
to:
Till:
Why should I be sorry for repeating a challenge that Booby is too much
of a coward to accept.
I will issue it here again. I challenge him to debate the Jehu issue or
any issue related to
biblical inerrancy in a forum that will allow our readers to see—see,
see,
SEE—everything that we both write on the issues.
Now sit and watch Booby run from this challenge.
Till:
In addition to McComiskey, Turkel quoted at length Douglas Stuart on
the meaning of
"paqad" in Hosea 1:4, so I turned next to investigating Stuart's
theological leanings.
Turkel:
Which of course, was much easier than investigating Stuart's
arguments...
Till:
I have to ask again, "What arguments?" I also quoted above--and
analyzed--everything
that Booby quoted from Stuart's commentary and showed that he presented
only assertions but
no arguments. I will repeat my challenge again. If Booby will post
Stuart's arguments that
he thinks I have evaded, I will answer them point by point, if he
will agree to reply
point by point to my rebuttals and post everything, including my
counterrebuttals, on his
website and keep them there.
Say goodbye to Booby, because he isn't about to accept this challenge.
Till:
From his commentary, World Biblical Commentary: Hosea-Jonah,
volume 31,
Turkel:
World! Try "Word". [sic]
Till:
Yes, this was a mistake that I made. I misread the title. This is why I
cited above a list
of word misusages that often occur in Booby's articles. Just for spite,
I will requote them
here.
This guy obviously is ignorant of many of the nuances in English, such as the difference in on and onto, in and into, transliterate and translate, cannot and can not, cite and citation, datum and data, remand and refer, it's and its, women's and womens' [which isn't even a word], signatories and signators [which is also not a word], which and who, complimentary and complementary, and too many others to list.
I didn't link to these, because if I did, Booby would just rush to correct them, and in some cases, I would have to link to several articles to identify all of the times that some of these mistakes have been made in his sloppily written articles. Everyone will make mistakes in writing, but a person who has pride in his writing will proofread and edit enough to minimize the mistakes. Booby wouldn't believe me if I told him how much time I have spent reading this article, so I won't bother to tell him.
So, Booby, never write womens', because there is no such word; the possessive of women is always women's. And don't speak about "complimentary accounts" when you mean "complementary accounts," unless, of course, you are talking about accounts whose writers are singing the praises of each other. And I really don't think that Booby wants to get into a pissing contest with me over mistakes that occur in our writing, because the number that gets by him is far greater than what I miss.
Anyway, I no longer lay any claim to inerrancy. I gave that up in the early 60s when I finally found the intellectual integrity to admit that I had been sold a crock of you-know-what when I was growing up. I will leave it to Booby to claim infallibility. This is why I don't mind at all saying that I erred in putting World Book for Word Book.
Turkel:
If McTill can't get the title right, how can we trust him, blah blah
blah blah...
Till:
Booby doesn't understand basic punctuation rules either, does he?
Till:
I learned that Douglas Stuart received his Ph. D. from Harvard
University and is a professor
of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Turkel:
Oops. Darn. Means we can't say he learned at a fundamentalist Bible
college like Bam
Bam....
Till:
In response to this, I refer Booby to the quotation above from U.
S. News & World
Report, which for the 11th consecutive year has ranked Bam Bam in
the top universities
in the South.
Turkel:
maybe he has some other bad habits like burping in public...
Till:
Well, he does have a really bad habit that reflects on his probable
lack of objectivity in
biblical matters. He is a Congregational minister in addition to
teaching at Gordon-Conwell.
His biographical
profile lists
books he has published at Baker House, Zondervan, Eerdmans, Westminster
Press, and Word
Books, of course. This information about him doesn't strike me as the
description of a
flaming liberal.
Oh, yes, his biography says that he has made an appearance on Mysteries of the Bible, which is about as unobjective a series as you could expect to find on TV, but if that appearance gives him any special qualifications to speak with authority about the Bible, Booby will have to put me into the same category with him, because I also made an appearance in this series back in 1994. I had let myself be duped into thinking that the producers would allow a dissenter to appear without having his comments about biblical errancy censored. Needless to say, I was wrong. Anyway, I think we can pretty well see that Stuart is probably not "in the middle," as Booby claimed.
Till:
The World Biblical Commentary series was published by "Word Publishers"
in Waco, Texas.
Turkel:
Duh ah! And from this McTill didn't get the clue that it wasn't the
WORLD Bilical Commentary
series...now how unobservant can you get?!
Till:
Well, apparently not as unobservant as Booby, who lets glaring mistakes
like those catalogued
above get by him routinely, and that was only a partial list. If Booby
is nice to me, I will
tell him where he used our for are. It is right in the
first sentence of an
article that he obviously hacked together, and it has been there for
months.
As I said above, Booby doesn't want to get into a pissing contest with me over mistakes in our articles.
Turkel:
I know, I know! Ask me to pay for 90% of your website!
Till:
Ah, yes, the old 90% straw man that Booby kicks
around when he finds
himself really on the spot, where he knows that he has to say something
but doesn't have
anything to say. I addressed that issue
here
and admitted
that after Booby had explained an ambiguously written paragraph in an
article
that--surprise, surprise--he has since removed from his site, I was
able to understand what
he had meant. I suppose that his writing instructors at Florida
State--if he had any--never
told him a principle that should be emphasized to all students trying
to learn how to
write effectively: Never assume that because you know what you mean,
your readers will
also understand what you mean. Readers will understand only if the
language clearly
states the ideas in the text. Those who click the link above will see
Booby's 90% statement
as it was originally written to someone, who at the time was a complete
internet novice who
barely knew how to send and receive e-mail. Another basic writing
principle is that the
writer should keep his readers in mind at all times and communicate on
a level that will be
understandable to them. A professor at a Medical School, for example,
should not write as
if his audience consists of other doctors when he knows that his paper
will be read primarily
by medical laymen. Booby doesn't seem to keep any of these principles
in mind. His 90%
comment was written to me as if I were an old hand at website
maintenance rather than the
rank novice that I was at the time. When Booby writes, his objective
seems to be to crank
the article out as quickly as possible so that he can get onto the next
one and then
boast of how much he has written.
At any rate, I misunderstood an ambiguously written paragraph in one of Booby's articles. What does that have to do with whether the position on Hosea 1:4 that he is trying to peddle is actually shared by "commentators of all stripes"? His reasoning seems to go like this: "Till says that many of the commentators that I cited in the matter of Hosea 1:4 don't really share the view that I claimed that they did; however, he misunderstood the 90% offer that I presented in another post some time ago, so he must be wrong about the commentators of all stripes."
That, folks, is an example of how Jimmy Pee Holdingtank reasons.
Till:
The publisher's very name implies a belief in the fundamentalist view
of the Bible,
Turkel:
The name "Prometheus Books" implies what, now?
Till:
Well, in Grecian mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who climbed Mount
Olympus and stole fire
to give it back to the earth after the gods had decided to punish
earthlings by taking fire
away from them, but I doubt that most people, even those familiar with
the myth, would
recognize in this name that Prometheus Books publishes mainly skeptical
and freethought
materials. As I have said, however, I think that a skeptic or atheist
debating a Bible
believer would make a serious tactical error if he did nothing but cite
or quote books
published by Prometheus and similar publishers.
So Booby's point is what?
Till:
but if there is any doubt about whether this is a fair conclusion, the
"Editorial Preface"
removed it.
Turkel:
And removed all validity to their arguments, too! Pfft!
Till:
Well, I have repeatedly shown above that there are really no
"arguments" in the materials that
Booby cited, but, nevertheless, I still took the time to go through everything
that he
cited and respond to it in detail. I wish he would do the same
to my rebuttals, but I
have no hope that he ever will. In the first place, he doesn't have the
patience or the
know-how to do it. If he actually took the time to reply point by point
to my rebuttals, he
wouldn't be able to crank out his usual hackword and then crow, "Wooo
hooo, look at me; I
have written fifteen hundred articles."
Till:
Speaking about their purpose in publishing the World Biblical
Commentary,
Turkel:
Which wasn't what they published. Nah, it was the Word Book
Encyclopedia!
Till:
The Word Book Encyclopedia? That's strange. All
references I find to it say
Word Book Commentary. Type this into Google and then restrict it
with "Waco" and
see how many hits you get that list it as Word Book Commentary.
Google indicates that
Word Book Encyclopedia is a secular work. Anyway, what
difference does it make? This
is just another straw man that Booby has set up to distract attention
from his inability to
show that his view of Hosea 1:4 really was shared by the "commentators
of all stripes" that
he cited in his part of the original debate.
As I mentioned, however, the references to "commentators of all stripes" have been edited out of Booby's website in an apparent attempt to hide a patently false claim that he had made. Shades of George Orwell!
Till:
the editors said, "First, we have tried to cast a wide net to include
as contributors a
number of scholars from around the world who not only share our aims,
Turkel:
Yep, they need to go out and find people who violently disagree with
'em for McTill to be
happy.
Till:
If the publishers cast their wide net for the purpose of finding
"scholars" who shared their
aims, then they intentionally tried to find "scholars" who were biased
in their views of the
Bible and would probably respect the traditional view. That is so
obvious that nothing more
needs to be said about it. I am sure that it must be painful for Booby
to stand by and watch
the bias of his "commentators of all stripes" be exposed, but he will
just have to live with
it.
Till:
but are in the main engaged in the ministry of teaching in university,
college, and seminary.
They represent a rich diversity of denominational allegiance. The
broad stance of our
contributors can rightly be called evangelical, and this term is to be
understood in its
positive, historic sense of a commitment to scripture as divine
revelation, and to the truth
and power of the Christian gospel" (second paragraph in the
Editorial Preface). In other
words, the editors of the World Biblical Commentary
Turkel:
Word! Word!
Till:
Notice that Booby said nothing at all--not one word--about the flagrant
admission of the
Word Book publishers that they had gathered contributors to the
commentary who would have
a "positive, historic sense of a commitment to scripture as divine
revelation." He obviously
has no way to explain how any of the writers selected by this company
could write anything
in their commentaries that did not reflect a belief that the Bible is a
"divine revelation,"
so he didn't even try. He skipped this entirely--without having any
effect on my argument,
of course--so that he could keep kicking a straw man he had set up. My
answer to his straw
man is immediately below.
(OK, it says Saul went to relieve himself, but does it say he succeeded?)
He couldn't just say, "Boy, I really goofed here." No, that might reflect badly on his Superman/Terminator image he has been trying to create, so he went back to his article and, in effect, said that the Bible does have at least one example of restroom usage, "But it doesn't say that Saul succeeded." What a clown!
Those who want to see many more examples of restroom usage in the Bible than the one that Booby belatedly found out was there can read the entire article linked to above.
Oh, by the way, Booby, don't say, "(T)he document in question has it's credibility threatened," or, "(W)hatever it's location." It would be much better to learn the diffeence in it's and its.
I will leave it to Booby to decide if he wants to stop cranking on his hackwork long enough to search his site to locate these mistakes, but I will give him a hint: Don't stop when you find these two, because the same mistake has been made several times on your site. They make using world for word look rather insignificant.
I will advise Booby again not to get into a pissing contest with me about overlooked mistakes on my website.
Turkel:
Yeah, he sure read the Preface close, but forget the heck everything
else, including what's
inside, which to McTill is about as complex as nuclear physics!
Till:
Well, as everyone can see from the repeated reminders and links above,
I didn't "forget the
heck everything else." I went through all of the citations and
quotations from
Booby's "commentators of all stripes" and showed that they presented
only assertions and no
arguments. I did this in my compilations of the original debate
exchanges, which begin
here,
and then I ran
them by Booby again (above).
Till:
[In other words, the editors of the World Biblical Commentary]
volumes frankly
admitted that they had selected writers who had a preconceived notion
that the Bible is a
divine revelation.
Turkel:
Which of course makes all of their arguments invalid. Case closed? If
not, why does McTill
even need to mention it or write pages and pages about it?
Till:
I wrote "pages and pages about it"? That's odd, because Booby kept
complaining above that I
didn't "investigat[e] Stuart's arguments" or that I "sit [sic]
[my] sorry tuckus back
in the easy chair" instead of "answering" McComiskey. I'll ask readers
to keep an eye out for
similar remarks below, so from one corner of his mouth, Booby complains
that I don't answer
the arguments of his "sources" and from the other corner, he complains
that I "write pages
and pages about it." I said above that Jimmy Pee Holdingtank can't
remember from one article
to the next what he writes, but his memory loss seems even worse than
that. He can't
remember what he writes from one paragraph to the next.
Oh, by the way, Jimmy Pee, you should take the time to learn the difference in sit and set. Hint: one is transitive and the other is intransitive. You can consult a dictionary to find out what these grammatical terms mean.
Till:
In the "Author's Preface," Stuart himself implied the same bias:
Turkel:
Bias! And McTill is 100% bias free, which means this is all he needs to
do to refute every
word Stuart says...
Till:
No, it's not all I had to do. That is why I patiently and
deliberately went through
everything that Booby quoted from Stuart and showed that it consisted
mainly of assertions
and very little argumentation. When there was argumentation, I replied
to it in detail.
Booby can go to
this
section of
the second part of my compilation of the original debate and review--or
more likely view for
the first time--where I took readers through everything that
Booby had quoted from
Stuart.
Till:
[In the "Author's Preface," Stuart himself implied the same bias:] "I
have kept in mind that
preachers are the single biggest group of commentary buyers and users,
and that they are best
served by commentaries that emphasize lasting theological concerns in
proper balance with
people's immediate, practical, personal or corporate questions." Prior
to this, he had said
that "the only firm justification" for the existence of a commentary is
that it must
"constantly and carefully help its readers know what God has said and
what they are supposed
to do about it." Hence, it is evident from Stuart's own words that he
is a believer in the
traditional view that what the Bible says is in reality "what God has
said," and he made it
his aim to write a commentary that would simultaneously reflect this
view and appeal to
preachers, who are the biggest users of commentaries.
Turkel:
Duh, yeah, they usually don't get many buyers from the Butchers'
Union... "Hosea-Jonah for
Meatcutters"
Till:
Well, I suspect that some meatcutters do read the Bible and related
books. Those bookstores
like Long's, where Booby was able to walk in and buy the editions of
some rather rare biblical
journals that were unavailable at the seminary library, wouldn't be in
business long if
preachers were their only customers. The important thing that we see
here, however, is Booby's
evasion. I pointed out that Stuart begged the question of whether what
the Bible says is what
God says, and Booby didn't even try to address this. In admitting that
he approached the
writing of his commentary from the assumption that what it said was
what God had said, Stuart
revealed a lack of objectivity. Would Booby think the author of a book
published by
Prometheus was objective if he put a similar statement in his preface?
The only firm justification for the existence of a commentary on biblical discrepancies is that it must constantly and carefully help its readers know that what the Bible says is not at all what God has said.
To ask the question is to answer it, so nothing else needs to be said about Booby's comment above, which appears to be another example of his knowing that he had to say something but not having anything to say.
Till:
So much for the objectivity of this author.
Turkel:
So much for McTill actually addressing a word this author says. So much
for the ashes of
that straw man.
Till:
Hmm, after saying above that I didn't reply to McComiskey's arguments,
Jimmy Pee then complained
that I had written "page after page about it," and now he is back
complaining that I didn't
"actually address a word this author [Stuart] said." I have shown
repeatedly—and provided
readers with links—where I did reply in detail to every one of
Booby's citations and
quotations. I think it would be a good idea if he would actually read
my articles before he
tries to reply to them.
Till:
In his preface, Stuart informed readers that he would not follow in
this commentary the
usual practice of "giv[ing] ample space to summaries of the views of
other major
commentaries," because "such dialogue is terribly difficult to carry on
fairly and
consistently without short-changing others' arguments." Hence, he
warned that he had
"consciously restricted [his] summaries of other commentators' views"
so that he could
"maximize productive use of the space allotted to [him] by dwelling
directly on explaining
for the reader what [he] think[s] the biblical text is saying." In
reading the commentary,
one will find that this was indeed the case. He rarely quoted other
commentators, although I
couldn't help noticing that he would sometimes follow very closely the
content found in Hans
Walter Wolff's commentary on Hosea.
Turkel:
Sometimes? How often?
Till:
Well, I examined the commentaries about seven years ago, so I can't say
now how often Stuart
followed Wolff's content. However, if I said that Stuart did this, I
have enough confidence
in my intellectual integrity to stand by it. I will make a proposal to
Booby. I will gladly
send for both of these commentaries again and after reviewing them
write an article in which
I show similarities in their content, if Booby will agree to post
the article on his
website and leave it there.
The matter ends here, doesn't it?
At any rate, I am surprised that Booby wouldn't know how often Stuart had relied on Wolff's content. These were both "sources" in his "commentators of all stripes," so is he telling us now that he didn't really look at these books closely enough to notice that Stuart had relied on Wolff's content? The longer he rants, the more Booby gives us reason to suspect that I was right in saying that his examination of his "commentators of all stripes" was superficial at best. If that isn't so, then why wasn't Booby able to say, "Well, Till isn't accurately representing Stuart [McComiskey, Wolff], because he said here and here and here this and that and that, which show that Till is distorting his position"? I suspect that he said nothing like this because he wasn't familiar enough with the material to comment on it.
Turkel:
And why is this an issue?
Till:
Why is this an issue? Booby's theme song has been that the works of
McComiskey and Stuart
are revolutionary, because they uncovered just five to seven years ago
new information about
the meaning of paqad that had not been previously known, but if
Stuart relied heavily
on Wolff's commentary, which had been written before McComiskey's and
Stuart's "revolutionary"
work, that would indicate that their work wasn't as revolutionary as
Booby seems to think it
is.
Keep this in mind as we continue, because Booby says below that what Wolff may have said was unimportant, because he wrote his commentary before Stuart wrote his. (I'll call this to everyone's attention when we get there.) As I have said, Booby just can't seem to remember what he writes from one paragraph to the next, and as I pointed out in my three-part compilation of the original debate, about the only consistency in Booby's articles is his inconsistency.
Turkel:
Does McTill think Stuart would regard Wolff as 100% wrong?
Till:
No, McTill wouldn't think that. Why does Booby think that I would think
that? This seems to
be another case of Booby's knowing that he had to say something but not
having anything to
say.
Turkel:
If the subject is the same, isn't some "following" inevitable?
Till:
But Booby's thesis is that McComiskey's and Stuart's work was
revolutionary. If that is true,
why would the latter have relied on Wolff's commentary so often?
Another problem I saw is
that Stuart expressed a debt of gratitude to Wolff and then "followed"
many of his ideas
without actually quoting him--as far as I noticed--in his commentary.
That seemed a bit
intellectually dishonest to me.
Turkel:
McTill uses this excuse to avoid answering arguments also.
Till:
Well, I'll be darn. And I thought that I was writing "page after page
about it."
Those who want to see that I did answer the few "arguments" that were in Booby's quotations from Stuart can scroll up to my links above. I won't repeat them here.
Till:
Wolff, by the way, was one of the commentators of "many stripes" that
Turkel referred to in
his article, and Wolff was also cited by McComiskey in his commentary
on Hosea. As noted
above, however, McComiskey referred to Wolff as a scholar who thought
that Hosea 1:4 meant
that the house of Jehu would be punished for the blood that Jehu had
shed at Jezreel. In
looking through Stuart's commentary, I didn't see any quotations from
Wolff; however, Stuart
did say in his preface that he was indebted to the "work of Mays, as
well as that of Wolff,
Freedman, and Andersen," all of whom were writers that both McComiskey
and Turkel cited.
Turkel:
Wheeee, yeah. And this proves, what about the meaning of paqad in Hos.
1:4?
Till:
Nothing, but the paqad issue was addressed and addressed and
addressed in the original
debate, and Booby was shown that the spin that McComiskey and Stuart
tried to put onto it
was full of holes.
I guess it is time to repeat my challenge. If Booby really thinks that I didn't address Stuart's claims about the meaning of paqad, I'll gladly compile the sections of the debate where I did address them, if he will agree to post the compilation on his website and keep it there.
This ends the matter, doesn't it?
Till:
Since Stuart paid special tribute to Wolff and since McComiskey quoted
him as a scholar
whose opinion was worthy of consideration, let's see what Wolff said
about Hosea 1:4. In
Hosea, by Hans Walter Wolff, translated by Gary Stansell, Fortress
Press, pp. 17-18, Wolff
said the following, which I am quoting at length so that I can't be
accused of quoting him
out of context.
Turkel:
In other words, McTill is afraid of being pinned maliciously and
without basis for the
same thing he pins others for maliciously and without basis.
Till:
What the you-know-what is Booby even saying here? What exactly do I
"maliciously and without
basis" pin others for that Booby thinks I am afraid of being pinned
for? This can't be
anything but another case of where Booby knew he had to say something
but had nothing to
say.
Turkel:
Guilty conscience, McTill?
Till:
If Booby is referring to my quoting a full and complete context, nah,
there wasn't any guilt
at all involved in that. If Booby will actually examine the articles in
my website
without just skimming over them to pick a phrase here and a phrase
there to "answer," he
will see that my practice is to quote enough of the context of biblical
passages or whatever
else I may be quoting for readers to see that I didn't quote out of
context. Booby might want
to try that sometime. If he had habitually done this, he wouldn't have
made the mistake of
quoting just one
verse out
of context to try to prove that Abiathar had physically carried the
ark of the covenant.
To save readers the bother of clicking the link, I will quote below the one out-of-context verse that Booby quoted and then quote after it the broader context, which clearly shows that Abiathar had Levites with him, who had done the actual carrying of the ark.
2 Samuel 15:29 So Zadok and Abiathar carried the ark of God back to Jerusalem, and they remained there.
Now here is the broader context that I quoted in the article linked to above.
2 Samuel 15:24 Abiathar came up, and Zadok also, with all the Levites, carrying the ark of the covenant of God. They set down the ark of God, until the people had all passed out of the city. 25 Then the king said to Zadok, "Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favor in the eyes of Yahweh, he will bring me back and let me see both it and the place where it stays. 26 But if he says, 'I take no pleasure in you,' here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him." 27 The king also said to the priest Zadok, "Look, go back to the city in peace, you and Abiathar, with your two sons, Ahimaaz your son, and Jonathan son of Abiathar. 28 See, I will wait at the fords of the wilderness until word comes from you to inform me." 29 So Zadok and Abiathar carried the ark of God back to Jerusalem, and they remained there.
Those who want to see how Booby was hung out to dry for this quoting-out-of-context ploy can click the link above and read the entire section linked to. Booby was again in a situation where he knew he had to say something but had nothing to say. I quoted the full context of Wolff's statement so that readers could conveniently evaluate it, and Booby gutted it because he didn't want his readers to see just how badly he had misrepresented his "commentators of all stripes." He guts the articles he is "answering" and doesn't link his readers to them, and that is how he deludes his choir members into believing that he is the "king shit" of apologetics.
Turkel:
Most of Wolff's quote has nothing to do with the issue at hand; here is
the part where we get
to it:
Till:
Well, why don't I just insert here the part that Booby cut out to let
our readers decide if
it has any relevance to this debate? Surely, Booby isn't saying that
something said by one
of his "commentators of all stripes" is unimportant to this issue.
In this verse the narrative makes its first main point. In the preceding verses, only passing reference is made to biographical details. But now, as though it were the intention from the outset, the narrative enlarges upon the naming of the first child. This took place immediately after his birth. "Call his name [Jezreel]." Although the mother usually gives the child its name, here the father does this at God's command. The unusual name "Jezreel," otherwise used for a place or region, must have caused lively public discussion. With such a provocative riddle Hosea's prophet ministry began, which was in the year 750 at the latest. It is not surprising that the misgivings elicited by the growing boy named Jezreel later on evoked new responses from Hosea regarding the meaning of the name. According to the narrator, Yahweh's commission to name the child included at the same time the name's first interpretation (v 4b). Since the name Jezreel, which is used as a catch word in Hosea's preaching, is inseparably linked with a person, the shadow of the incarnatio verbi is projected into the future: umbra futurorum.
"In a short time," emphasized by its position in the sentence, sets a time limit for the fulfillment of judgment. The prophetic word assaults the "now" of its hearers. There are, at least four years left before Jehu's dynasty comes to an end....
If Hosea's ministry covered 750 BC, then he had condemned Jehu's massacre at least a century and a half before the writer of 2 Kings praised Jehu for having done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in Yahweh's heart (2 Kings 10:30). Why wouldn't the "inspired" writer of 2 Kings have known what the "inspired" writer of Hosea had said 150 years earlier?
At this point, Booby included a part of my quotation from Wolff's commentary where the quotation above left off.
Till
[quoting Wolff:]
'To punish' is the meaning of PQD in this context, as the parallel 'punish' // 'put an end to' indicates and G[reek] confirms [ekdikseso 'avenge'). It is close in meaning to the word 'to revenge' [GPM], which G[reek] translates by the same word.
Turkel:
That's it. No word study of paqad,
Till:
Well, I had already done that in the regular part of the debate. If
Booby missed it in his
spot reading, which seems to be the way he reads his opponents'
rebuttals, he can go
here
and
review--assuming that he has yet "viewed" it at all--where I replied in
detail to his
attempt to peddle McComiskey's spin on paqad, in which reply I
did the "word study"
that Booby seems to think that I have not done. That study included an
analysis of every
verse in Hosea where this word was used.
Does that refresh your memory, Booby?
When Booby puts his foot into his mouth, I can't resist shoving it in further, so I'll just dump his indignation back into his lap by quoting [in full] some of the quotations from his sources, analyzed above, to see what kind of "word study of paqad they did.
That's It? No word study of paqad? Let's carry it a little bit further? What is this "stylized nature of the phrase that makes it difficult to define"? Jeeesh, no word study at all. Is that any way for a "commentator of all stripes" to write?
What! No word study? No analysis of sample passages of the writer's "dry and disconnected style" to show that this was an accurate description of his style?
What? No concrete, specific examples of these differences. How do we know what we need "to take into account when considering the Old and New Testaments"?
Now let's look at an entire paragraph, which I quoted above, where Booby just strung together several bracketed citations from his "commentators of all stripes.
Some [scholars] of the liberal bent suggest a type of progressive revelation, in which God has set higher standards of action in Hosea's time than were set in Jehu's time, in response to the human need for growth. [see AndFree.Hos, 178; Crai.12P, 12; for reply, see Irv.ThrJez, 499].
That's it! No word study or specific, concrete examples on which this idea of progressive revelation is based?
Others remain content with seeing contradiction (but seldom offer any detailed work on the subject - see Wolf.Hos, 17-18; May.Hos, 28; Jone.12K, 273).
That's it! We're supposed to form a judgment about this on nothing more than [see Wolf.Hos, 17-18; May.Hos, 28; Jone.12K, 273]?
Irvine [Irv.ThrJez, 503] suggests that our 2 Kings passage (10:30-1) is a piece of imperial propaganda that was being refuted by Hosea, which would raise the question of interpolation in 2 Kings or its sources.
That's it! We're supposed to take what Irvine said without giving any specifics to support it? I doubt that Booby meant that we should take what Irvine said here, because I suspect that Booby would consider "the question of interpolation" to be anathama. What we probably have here is just a comment from Irvine that Booby encountered while thumbing through one of his "commentators of all stripes," and he thought it would look impressive to throw it into his article, but as these examples show, Booby is the last person on earth who has any right to complain, "That's it! No word study?" because his articles have about as much depth as a bird bath.
Turkel:
and no consideration of the alternative meaning.
Till:
If Booby will click
here,
he can
"review"--or, more likely, view for the first time--where I replied
point by point to his
lengthy quotation from McComiskey, which consisted only of assertions
strung together--and
also demolished McComiskey's attempt to make
Jeremiah
15:3 a proof text
for the "hidden meaning" of paqad that he thinks he has found.
I showed that Mac
was wrong in saying that no reason for Yahweh's "visit" [paqad]
was given in this text,
because the broader context of the verse reveals that earlier in the
passage Yahweh had
said that "sins and iniquities" of the people
(14:10)
were the reason why
he would "visit" them with three destroyers. Booby's problem is that he
just doesn't read
what his opponents say. That may fly with his sycophant choir members,
but discerning readers
will notice the evasion.
Anyway, I will present another proposal to Booby. If he really thinks that I have given no "consideration [to] the alternative meaning," if he will post it and support it with argumentation, I will gladly reply to it, point by point, if he will agree to.... Well, everyone knows by now what comes next, so I will spare Booby the repetition that seems to annoy him, but if he would just reply to my rebuttal points, there wouldn't be any need for repetition.
As I have said before, this will end the matter, because Booby isn't about to let his readers see that his opponents really are answering his "arguments."
Turkel:
Not that we expect Wolff to discuss it; he wrote years before
McComiskey.
Till:
Ah, yes, I forgot; the hidden meaning of paqad that lay
undiscovered for centuries
until McComiskey, a biblical inerrantist who teaches at a seminary
dedicated to defending
the inerrancy of Bible, came along and "discovered" it. Well, if Booby
will click the links
immediately above, he will see that McComiskey's hidden meaning was too
full of lead to
get off the ground.
This, by the way, is Booby's comment that I said I would alert readers to notice. He argued above that Stuart's reliance on Wolff was irrelevant, even though Wolff's commentary was written before Stuart's revolutionary work, but here he seems to be saying that what Wolff said is unimportant because he "wrote years before McComiskey." As I have said before, about the only consistency in Booby's articles is his inconsistency.
Now let's take a look at another part of the quotation from Wolff that Booby, er, Skippy Turkel cut out of my article that he was supposed to be "answering." This picks up where the last green section above left off. I will add emphasis to some parts to show their relevance to the issue that Booby obviously wants to sweep under the rug.
What act of punishment is meant by the words "blood of Jezreel"? The name Jezreel, "God sows," denotes primarily the fruitful plain between the highlands of Samaria and Galilee. The ancient city of the same name, known today as Zer'in, is situated on the highland's eastern border at the entrance of the broad valley of the Nahar Jalud leading to the Jordan. There the dynasty of Omri established a second capital, probably intended especially for the governing of the tribes of Israel, in the same way Samaria primarily governed the Canaanite populace. Here "Jezreel" refers to this capital.... "Bloodguilt of Jezreel" does not imply the execution of Naboth (1 Kings 21), since for that the Omrides were responsible (2 Kings 9:7). It refers to the bloodthirsty extermination of the house of Omri in 845-4 by Jehu, one of the military officers. Many of the members of the royal families met their death including Joram, the dynasty's last representative (2 Kings 9:24), old, guiltladen Queen Jezebel (v33), and King Ahaziah of Judah (v 27).
Notice that Wolff, one of Booby's "commentators of all stripes," clearly said here that the "bloodguilt of Jezreel" referred to Jehu's massacre of the house of Omri [Ahab], but if this is what Wolff thinks, why did Booby cite him and count him among the "commentators of all stripes," who, according to Booby, reckoned "our solution" [our to Booby means my] to be the right one?
No wonder Booby gutted the quotation from Wolff! He doesn't want his sycophant choir members to see that he actually didn't have "commentators of all stripes" on his side.
Well, let's continue the Wolff quotation that Booby stripped down to nothing.
Is Jehu merely accused here of doing more than he had been commanded?
Well, as the record of the original debate will show, that is what Booby claimed, right here, so let's see if Wolff's stripes match Booby's
Or is his dynasty's reign principally accused of illegitimacy, as that of his successors was? Did Hosea know of the prophetic designation of Jehu (2 Kings 9:1ff) and his "zeal" for Yahweh (2 Kings 10:16)?
Now we can understand what questions Wolff was referring to in the truncated part of the quotation where Booby picked it up immediately below. As the quotation continues below, in the few lines that Booby selected to quote in his "reply," we can see that readers will not know what "questions" are being referred to unless they have access to the section I reinserted above
Till
[still quoting Wolff]:
With respect to these questions, only two things seem at once to be
clear: (1) The
bloodguilt resulting from this political struggle for power provokes
Yahweh's judgment; (2)
according to v 4, Hosea assesses Jehu's revolution otherwise than
did the prophetic circles
gathered around Elijah and Elisha (2 Kings 10:30)".
Turkel:
And that's it. Just a summary. No answer to the detailed data provided
by my sources.
Till:
Notice that Booby completely evaded the last statement in Wolff's
quotation above: Hosea
assesses Jehu's revolution otherwise
than did the prophetic
circles gathered around Elijah and Elisha. That is completely
contrary to Booby's
claim that his "commentators of all stripes" agreed with his
"solution," even though some of
them went different routes to arrive at the same meaning. Wolff, one of
Booby's
"commentators of all stripes," plainly said that Hosea assessed Jehu's
revolution entirely
differently from the prophets in Elijah's and Elisha's circle. How,
then, can Booby claim
with a straight face that Wolff is one of the "commentators of all all
stripes" who agreed
with his take on Hosea 1:4? Well, that is an easy question to answer.
He can just lie to
his choir members, knowing that most of them will click the PayPal icon
on his website and
never bother to investigate his claim.
Booby challenged me above to show that his selective quoting of my articles has ever affected my arguments in any way. I have given some examples above of how his omissions of my material clearly affected my arguments, and now here is another one.
As for Booby's reference above to "detailed data provided by [his] sources," I have to ask once again, "What detailed data"? I have analyzed and reanalyzed and replied and replied to and written page after page about Booby's citations from "commentators of all stripes" to show that they mainly asserted but offered no "detailed data" to support their assertions. Whenever there was an attempt at argumentation, I replied to it, as I did here when Booby "gave the floor" to McComiskey. His "data," what little was given, have been answered and answered and reanswered and reanswered.If Booby thinks otherwise, I refer him to the challenge that I have stated and restated above. He can consider it restated here too.
Till:
Wolff tried to minimize the obvious problem that his conclusion poses
to the traditional
view that the books of the Bible were "inspired of God," for he went on
to say that "(w)e
probably should not conclude, however, that this represents a conscious
opposition to them
[the prophetic circles gathered around Elijah and Elisha]."
Turkel:
Oh, sure! Wolff was in on a conspiracy to make McTill's life harder....
Till:
No, Wolff was just a bit more honest than someone I know in Ocoee,
Florida, but still he had
to mince his words to keep from leaving the impression that he thought
that there was a
[gasp!] discrepancy in the Bible. Someone in the business of writing
biblical commentators
just can't afford to do that.
I have almost finished my reply to every comment that Booby made in "reply" to my article, and I keep wondering why I am bothering to go on. His hide has already been nailed to the wall.
Till:
He explained that this was probably what happened because "(i)n Hosea's
earliest period,
there was yet no connection with the prophetic traditions of the ninth
century." In other
words, Wolff seemed to be saying that Hosea was clearly in disagreement
with the assessment
of Jehu's actions in 2 Kings 10:30, but he should not be faulted for
this because he didn't
know that "the prophetic circles gathered around Elijah and Elisha" had
approved of Jehu's
massacre at Jezreel. I find Wolff's belief that Hosea was unaware of
the praise that
prophets had earlier heaped on Jehu to be very likely, because more
than a century separated
Jehu and Hosea, and the distribution of writings in that period was
certainly not what it is
today, not even to mention that 2 Kings was written well after the time
of Hosea.
Turkel:
It doesn't matter to me whether they knew of one another or not.
Till:
Well, okay, it doesn't matter, but I wonder if it matters to Booby that
I have exposed his
"commentators-of-all-stripes" claim to be a lie. The spin on Hosea 1:4
that he has tried to
peddle was not shared by all of the "sources" he cited. As I have
shown, only a couple of
them did, and they were both biblical inerrantists, who would be
expected to look for some
way to "explain" this problem.
Till:
Hence, it is very likely that Hosea didn't know that another biblical
writer would later
indicate that earlier prophets had approved of Jehu's massacre, but
that is really beside
the point.
Turkel:
Yes it is, but he brought it up anyway.
Till:
And Booby is galled by the obvious fact that he cannot sustain his
claim that Hosea and the
author of 1 Kings agreed on the morality involved in Jehu's massacre.
Till:
McDowell's claim in ETDAV was that the Bible is unique in that it is
perfectly harmonious in
its themes, but this is patently not so. Wolff, one of Turkel's
"commentators of all
stripes," has clearly expressed his view that prophetic circles before
Hosea had assessed
Jehu's actions entirely differently from Hosea's opinion of them.
Turkel:
Which fails to answer a single point against my argument.
Till:
Uh, what argument? If Booby will post an argument that he thinks I have
not answered, I will
post a reply to it, if he will agree to reply to it point by point,
post both on his
website, post my counterrebuttal [and his too if he has one], and leave
everything
there.
This ends the matter, of course, because Booby who won't even name his opponents or link his readers to anything that will let them see how evasive and inept he is at replying to opposition arguments isn't about to accept a challenge like this.
Till:
That hardly constitutes perfect harmony, and it certainly shows that
Turkel was very
deceptive in trying to make his readers think that all of the
commentators that he mentioned
in his article agreed that there is no conflict between 2 Kings 10:30
and Hosea 1:4. This
was obviously not so.
Turkel:
After this McTill again describes in detail his abuse of the CCBE
quote, then:
Till:
Notice that Booby didn't even try to deny the statement that I made
above, undoubtedly
because he knew that I had clearly established that the "commentators
of all stripes," whom
he had boasted about, did not agree on the question of whether there is
conflict between
Hosea 1:4 and 2 Kings 10:30.
Summary: So far, I have found in checking Turkel's sources that of the seven I have checked so far, only two of them thought that Hosea 1:4 was not pronouncing judgment on the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel. The other five thought that the prophet's intention was to say that the house of Jehu would be punished and brought to an end because of the blood that its founder had shed at Jezreel.
And that summation just about says it all. Booby deceptively tried to make his readers think that his "solution" to the Hosea/Jehu problem was held by "commentators of all stripes," but an examination of the "sources" he cited showed that this was not true. I may as well call a spade here and just come right out and say that Jimmy Pee Holdingtank deliberately lied to his readers.
Just for the heck of it, I think I will reinsert his CCBE comment that he has been trying hard to forget. It will keep readers reminded of his inconsistency.
Thus, it is appropriate for me to remind readers again of what Turkel said on a secretive Christian list about my reference to what Philo Judaeus had said about the first Egyptian plague. (For the background of this quotation from an internet posting by Turkel, readers should check my first posting "Commentators of All Stripes.")
To save time, readers who want to review the background of this quotation can scroll about two thirds of the way to the top of this article and find where I requoted both the background and the quotation itself to refresh Booby's memory, who couldn't seem to recall when he had ever said that quoting sources wasn't an effective way to prove a point. This is what he said eight years ago about citing or quoting sources.
That's nice, but Philo is simply reading into the text what is not there. So if I find a Jewish commentator of equal worth that says the opposite, is it a draw? If I find two, do I win? Remember that Philo is trying to promote Moses and Aaron here and would maximize their feat to the greatest extent possible.
Yes, Booby, the king of cite-the-scholars apologetics, did say this back in 1997, and he has been trying to sweep it under the rug ever since. He calls my references to it "abuse of [his] CCBE comment," but just how have I abused it? Did he say it, or didn't he? The records show that he did.
I have a final word about Booby's comment above. Notice that he said that "Philo [was] reading into the text what is not there" and that he was "trying to promote Moses and Aaron here." I wonder if Booby would say that McComiskey and Stuart did not try to read into Hosea 1:4 what was not there or that they were not trying to "promote" the Bible.
Till:
So once again we find Turkel speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
Turkel:
Once again we find McTill listening with neither side of his head.
Till:
It must be downright frustrating when Jimmy Pee "Superman/Terminator"
Holdingtank has no
way to respond logically to an argument and can only react with sarcasm.
Till:
When he quotes writers, he thinks that this should carry weight, but if
an opponent quotes
writers who disagree with his view, Turkel claims that it doesn't prove
anything.
Turkel:
Again, this is based on McTill's miapprehension [sic] of what
the CCBE quote was all
about.
Till:
Did Jimmy Pee mean misapprehension here? If so, he needs
to explain just how I
misunderstood his statement. Did everyone notice that he made no
attempt at all to explain
just how I had misunderstood his statement? Why didn't he walk us
through it and explain
that he didn't really mean that if he could find a Jewish commentator
of "equal worth" to
Philo, who believed the opposite, we would have a draw? Then why didn't
he explain to us
that he didn't mean that if he could find two, he would win? No, that
wasn't at all what he
meant, was it? He was just throwing out some exploratory questions,
wasn't he?
Till:
Furthermore, I have taken his own sources and shown that they disagree
with him 5 to 2 on
the meaning of Hosea 1:4.
Turkel:
No, actually, Andersen and Freedman agree with me in the final analysis,
Till:
In the final analysis? Who's talking about "the final analysis"? As we
noted above, Booby's
claim was that "our [meaning his] solution" was "reckoned" by
"commentators of all stripes."
He didn't say that "in the final analysis," his commentators of all
stripes agreed that there
was no discrepancy in Hosea 1:4. He said that his "commentators of all
stripes" shared his
"solution" to the problem. I have shown that this is not so, and the
evidence is so
overwhelming that Booby has removed this comment, which was made more
than once in the
original debate, from his website.
Let's just tell it like it is. Booby lied to his readers.
Turkel:
so it is 4 to 3, my favor.
Till:
I have shown that Andersen and Freedman only thought that there was no
discrepancy in Hosea
1:4, but that is not at all the same as saying that they "reckoned" the
same "solution" that
Booby was trying to peddle. Commentators who don't think that
discrepancies are in
the Bible are a dime a dozen, so what would be so unusual about the
fact that Andersen and
Freedman "in the final analysis" agreed with Booby?
Jimmy Pee, however, obviously needs all the help he can get, so for the sake of argument, let's just give him Andersen and Freedman. Is a 4-to-3 count in his favor any consolation? His boast was that commentators of all stripes "reckoned" his "solution" to the problem, but if we go through these commentators and find them almost split down the middle, 4 to 3, that hardly gives him room to celebrate.
Booby just dug his own grave here and admitted himself that his "commentators of all stripes" favor his position by only a 4 to 3 margin. Even he has admitted that his "commentators of all stripes" are almost split down the middle about what paqad meant in Hosea 1:4, and to get that almost-even split, we had to stretch imagination like a rubber band to give him Andersen and Freedman, who didn't actually agree with Booby's take on Hosea 1:4. Maybe Booby should celebrate his victory with a trip to Disney World, where he might get a chance to shake hands with Goofy.
Till:
Thus, by his own logic, I have "won" by showing that of his own
"scholars" more of them
disagree than agree with him.
Turkel:
Nope, he lost by a smaller margin.
Till:
I love it! Even Booby is having to admit that he greatly overstated his
case.
Turkel:
And we didn't even get to see him actually confront the linguistic
arguments.
Till:
We didn't? We didn't see all the links above--which I
won't insert again,
because 50 times is enough--and didn't read the sections in the
original debate where I
did a detailed "word study" of paqad and even shot down
McComiskey's distortion of
Jeremiah
15:3? These are
all linked to above, in this article, so Booby should scroll up and
give them a peek, but
here is a warning: If he takes the time actually to read all of them,
he won't be able to
meet his hackwork quota of 75 articles per day.
Till:
This is in addition to the fact that Turkel misled his readers by
leaving the impression
that he was quoting "commentators of all stripes" who thought that
Hosea 1:4 did not
pronounce vengeance or judgment on the house of Jehu. An examination of
his sources shows
that this was not true.
Turkel:
An examination of McTill's head shows that it is empty.
Till:
When Booby can't refute an opponent's argument, all is not lost; he can
still turn to sarcasm
and insults.
Turkel:
No, I have the liberal-moderates Andersen and Freedman. All stripes
present and accounted
for.
Till:
As I showed above, Jimmy Pee does not have Andersen and Freedman,
because his claim was that
his "commentators of all Stripes" reckoned his "solution" to be
the right one. I have
shown that Andersen and Freedman, as well as most of the others, with
the exceptions of
McComiskey and Stuart, did not "reckon" Booby's "solution" to be the
right one.
Booby just never could admit to being wrong, could he?
Till:
I will remind readers that I have proposed to Turkel that the two of us
engage in an on-line
written point-by-point debate that will allow readers on both sides of
this controversy to
see everything that both of us post. I'm confident enough in my
position and my
ability to sustain it to make this proposal, but Turkel refuses to
accept the challenge.
Turkel:
Until recently.
Till:
The record will show that Booby did agree to an acceptance but then
quickly reneged on the
conditions agreed upon. For an accounting of that acceptance and
Booby's almost
immediate reneging on it, readers can go to
"Where Are the Links?"
to see everything explained. Some people's word is as good as gold;
Booby's is good for
nothing.
Turkel:
And now McTill is saddle-sore from that everything demand and
wishing he hadn't
opened his mouth.
Till:
Hmm, that is what you would call a mixed metaphor, isn't it? Anyway, I
suppose that
Booby thinks that a wish that I had never opened my mouth is the reason
why I keep repeating
and repeating and repeating and repeating the challenge for an on-line,
open, point-by-point
debate, where everything we both write on the issues will be posted on
both websites and kept
there for everyone to see.
Turkel:
Arguing about where a book is published will only take you so far in an
argument, but that's
the road as far as McTill can drive on it.
Till:
Booby's statement above reminded me that he also doesn't know where to
put the word
only when he uses it. I wonder if he can tell the difference in
"X will only take
you so far" and "X will take you only so far." I doubt it.
As for the rest of his comment, anyone who doesn't realize that, even though the truth or falsity of propositions is always independent of their sources, disreputable sources can nevertheless affect the credibility of the propositions, should be careful about telling someone else that his head is "empty."
This is where we stand. Jimmy Pee Holdingtank boasted that he had a "solution" to the Hosea 1:4/2 Kings 10:30 problem that "commentators of all stripes" had reckoned to be the right one, but an examination of the stripes of those commentators has shown that they do not share Jimmy Pee's opinion on this. My exposure of his lie in this matter has been so embarrassing that he removed all references to the "commentators of all stripes" from his website, and, true to fashion, has ever since tried to deny that he meant that these commentators agreed with him, just as he has tried to deny that his CCBE statement, quoted twice above, meant what it plainly says. He has spent his time zigzagging here and zigzagging there to try to cover his butt in this matter, but he wound up zigging when he should have sagged, and so everyone reading this will now know that he is wearing the zigzagging stripes of a liar.
