KJV:
Gen 19:24 Then the
LORD rained upon
Sodom and upon
Gomorrah brimstone and
fire from the
LORD out of
heaven;
Jonathon Targum:
And the Word of the Lord had caused showers of favour to descend upon Sedom and Amorah, to the intent that they might work repentance, but they did it not: so that they said, Wickedness is not manifest before the Lord. Behold, then, there are now sent down upon them sulphur and fire from before the Word of the Lord from Heaven.
Orthodox Jewish Bible Bershis 19:24 Then Hashem rained upon Sodom and upon Amora gofrit and eish from Hashem out of Shomayim;
It would appear that there are two of which the Jonathon Targum called the second - The Word.
Maybe it wasn't so strange for Jewish John to say:
ESV John 1: 18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
God, who is at the Father's side made God known.
Of course, some may disagree... but it makes me go.. "hmmm."
A Jewish author Segal talked about the "Two Powers in Heaven" = He admits to that the Jews believed it in times past.
Hi
@KenS. I'd like to point out a few things. First, as
@RabbiO rightly noted, "the Orthodox Jewish Bible" has little to actually do with Orthodox Judaism or Judaism in general. It was made by a Messianic Jew named Philip Goble, and like other pieces of Messianic literature, is an attempt to disguise Christianity within a Jewishy framework in order to convince Jews to convert.
The second point is that as you might have noticed, the Targum Jonathan on the Pentateuch is filled with added midrashic interpretations, which are generally not to be taken at face value. Even academic scholars agree that its author or authors are not to be identified with the author of the much, much older Targum Jonathan on the Prophets. Hence, it is typically called "Pseudo-Jonathan" because there was a time in which it was attributed to the original Jonathan ben Uziel (author of the targum on the Prophets), though that has long not been the case.
Another important thing to note is that oftentimes, when the language of the Tanach used expressions that seemed to add a physical dimension to God, the various classic Targums (Onkelus, Jonathan, Pseudo-Jonathan, Neofiti and Yerushalmi) preferred to ditch literal translations and instead incorporated phrases that made the reader understand that the God was not a physical entity.
This is exactly what is going on here: The verse appears to suggest that God hurtled fire and brimstone down at Sodom and Gomorrah, making it seem as though God has hands. This is of course simply how the Hebrew language works, however there are some people who might get the wrong idea nonetheless. The Targum comes to dispel that notion by saying that it was "the word of the LORD" that did this. What is this word? In other places, the phrase "על פי ה'" (by the mouth of the LORD) is also translated as "by the word of the LORD". From here we understand that what happened to Sodom and the rest was simply due to a vocal command of God.
Then the Targum continues with a midrashic interpretation for the rest of the verse. When it says, later on, "Wickedness is not manifest before the Lord", there is no need to use the alternative "the word of the LORD" because wickedness is an abstract concept, so no physical images come to mind.
The last point I want to make is that Alan Segal was probably not a religious Jew. According to Wikipedia, he had described himself as a "humanist", so I have currently no reason to believe he was a theist in any form (yes, despite him also describing himself as a "believing Jew". I do not know how one can be both a believer, a Jew and a humanist. They don't all go together). I have not read his book "Two Powers in Heaven", but he is by no means the only Jewish person who has attempted to push theories on ancient Judaism having been polytheistic in some such form or shape. Typically I have found the arguments to be based on a load of assumptions and not fully substantiated. You are, of course, free to accept his theories, though I personally would not use the phrase "He
admits to that the Jews believed it in times past" as though he had revealed some big secret that Jews have kept hidden from the world for thousands of years. He, and others, have not. They present theories, some better-developed and some less-so, but theories nonetheless.
Edit: Undoubtedly, there were gnostic Jews in ancient times who held polytheistic views about divinity. But they were the small minority. The "big cheese" exponent of the view in the Talmudic era seems to have been the heretic Elisha ben Avoyah, a former rabbi who went astray (OTD as we modern Jews call it) after studying deep Jewish mysticism when he was not spiritually prepared for it. His deeper studies culminated in a conclusion similar to Marcionism: Two divine entities, one having created the other. Human interactions with the divine have always been with the latter. I won't get into the story too much. I just think it's interesting that at the time, nobody who maintained the mainstream Jewish lifestyle and worldview could also be an exponent of any form of multi-tarianism. The small Jewish sects that had this view were not what we would call Orthodox, and Elisha ben Abuya became a Hellenist (desecrated Shabbat, etc). Some might conclude that this was due to the strong arm of "the rabbis". I, on the other hand, conclude that the two are simply incompatible, and that this has always been the case.
