Do I really have to explain how idioms work?
Think about the English term "face to face." It does not literally mean that my face and your face must be set against one another. It simply means "in person, not removed from one another." We can have a "face to face" conversation with our backs turned to one another; and by the same token, we could hold converse on Skype with each of us seeing the other's face, and yet we would not be "face to face."
I suggest you go over my edit and see that I not only addressed what you say here but I also showed that it cannot mean "presence" in the way you are describing it in that situation. As I said, Moses cannot see "presence" in this case. Moses can only be "in" a presence. Clearly, the word "presence" indicates an actual being, being there. To say that it's metaphor without accounting for the original meaning renders it...pointless. I elaborated on this in the edit.
The words do not have to be literal. The standard usage of the term, in fact, demands that they not be literal. And that's not even poetry. That's just language.
I don't see where I said they HAD to be, but hopefully you can admit that they don't have to be metaphorical either. You accuse me of reading it that way because I want to see actual personification....but are you not reading it that way because you do NOT want to see personification? No matter what, it's a Confirmation bias, and I think my confirmation bias has much more evidence. But I think I've proven very effectively that the "standard usage of the term" says exactly what I'm saying, I challenge anyone else to show me how it doesn't. On a side note, I think I asked what "Full presence" means as opposed to just plain ol' Presence", and if the word "presence" as you are using it has the same word to define God's 'presence" in the Temple and Tabernacle. I don't think the authors knew of any such distinction, the "presence of God" was the same concept in all situations.
I really don't understand why people seem to imagine that, alone among all the written works of human kind, only the Tanach completely ignores and disregards the ways in which people speak and write.
Basically you're saying that the ONLY way to read it is metaphorically while accusing me of saying the only way to read it is literal. As I've shown, my opinion has been shared by many Midrashists that it can and should be read as literal. We simply cannot say one way or another, but I think I've presented a good case. My argument is that the metaphorical perspective developed as a "rationalist" one, much later.
Even the Rabbis specifically noted dibrah Torah ki'l'shon b'nai adam "The Torah speaks after the fashion of human speech." In other words, not everything is stiffly literal. It's narrative poetry: it's not a chemistry paper.
Does your case depend on insisting that I insist ALL the Torah is literal and nothing is metaphorical? There are indeed parts that are "stiffly literal", and this part I am saying should be read as such. I don't believe everything should be read so, but for the specifcs of this case, I believe it should. I'm not sure if I can elaborate further on a discussion thread however.
Is the long section on how to build the Tabernacle just poetry? Memorizing all the construction and materials is like memorizing the periodic table practically. Now to say that it "speaks after Human speech" is arguable, because we don't know just what type of speech they used back in the day. My own study has brought me to the conclusion that they occasionally used metaphors and similes, but for the most part, they meant what they said, and that the evidence against this view is extremely weak, I see much revisionism in the history of Rabbinic thought, and that's a major reason why I rejected Rabbinicism. But for the sake of the OP, I don't see anything that's actually rebutted my point about the use of the word "Likeness" and "image" especially in this context.
There is absolutely no evidence to support that contention. There just isn't.
In that case, you have no evidence for your own that it was either. I'm just saying what I think was the case, and there very well seems to be some early opinion that they believed the "gods" (angels) had human forms. But if we wanted to get technical, we could bring up some of the arguments about Israel's "polytheistic roots" and take it from there.
We have no external sources to provide evidence for any hypothesis of what was the dominant reading of Torah text in Ancient Jewish tradition, or even if there was a dominant reading at all.
Hopefully you can honorably admit that you have no way of showing that my case is WRONG and that YOU have evidence. But I don't want to turn this discussion into a debate. What I've done is take my take on it, and you are presenting the post-Rabbinical take. I just believe the post-Rabbinical take is not at all what the ancients would agree with, and that they were much more literally minded than later authors.
We have the various readings that the text itself will bear, and we have the exegeses ascribed to tradition by later authorities. Anything else is guesswork, and cannot be said to be certainly extant, let alone dominant.
Indeed. Which is why I simply presented my case with evidence and a breakdown on the words, if we want to take this to a debate thread we can elaborate even more on the use of the words to show that this whole metaphor thing was a very recent idea that may have not had much precedence until the post-medieval Rabbis.
Anyways, regardless of all that, I think I have decisively proven that "Likeness" does in fact mean nothing less than "Physical likeness" and that it coincides with the idea that "man was made a little lower than the gods". If anyone other than Levite thinks that I have a flaw in my reasoning, I'd love to hear it.
