Duggar Family Values: Sexual Abuse & Castration

[Dave (imported)]

I had to stand in a Sacristy (yes, i was an altar boy) and tolerate an assistant pastor trying to get me to leer and drool and make nasty comments about women. When I wouldn't he told my father I was gay. Cause all sorts of trouble for me and all sorts of grief.

So I'd rather not say much more about this type of so-called pious and reverential person other than - may they burn in hell for creating evil where none was.

That's all this type of treatment is.

Making some kid feel guilty and subservient and giving some comfort to the abuser.

I have to stop there.

[Kangan2008 (imported)]

I'm with Jesus on this one.... Beyond creepy.... YIKE!

I have to check up on Daniel - didn't know that he was an eunuch.

[Kangan2008 (imported)]

Point #7 uses the example of Daniel. He suffered extreme abuse by being castrated, but was rewarded by God with wisdom and understanding and he became a counselor to four kings.

Where in the Bible does it say this? I have read the entirety of the Book of Daniel and there is no mention of him being castrated...?

Are these people rewriting the Word? This is more seeming more like a sect than true religion....

[Dave (imported)]

According to Talmud scholars:

According to rabbinical tradition Daniel was of royal descent; and his fate, together with that of his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, was foretold by the prophet Isaiah to King Hezekiah in these words, "and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon".Isaiah 39:7 (Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 93b; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer lii).[1]

According to this view, Daniel and his friends were eunuchs, and were consequently able to prove the groundlessness of charges of immorality brought against them, which had almost caused their death at the hands of the king. It was said of Daniel, "If he were in one scale of the balance and all the wise men of the heathens in the other, he would outweigh them all" (see Yoma 77a).[1]

Nebuchadnezzar admired Daniel greatly, although the latter refused the proffered divine honors, thus distinguishing himself favorably from his contemporary Hiram (the "prince of Tyre" Ezekiel 28), who demanded honor as a god (Genesis Rabba xcvi.).[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_in_ ... literature

Daniel was a major prophet in the old tradition and when the Talmud was written down, the scholars of the time refused to write all the oral tradition about Daniel onto papyrus (or whatever passed for paper). Angels are not mentioned or named in the Book of Danil in the Talmud but they are in the Christian texts. So the two accounts differ.

The "Eunuch" idea comes into the texts in chapter one - -

3 partial: Then the king said to Ashpenaz, his chief officer, to bring from the Children of Israel, from the royal seed, and from the nobles.

4: Youths in whom there is no blemish, of handsome appearance, who understand all wisdom, [who are] erudite in knowledge, who understand how to express their thoughts, and who have strength to stand in the king's palace, and to teach them the script and the language of the Chaldeans.

5: The king allotted them a daily portion of the king's food and of the wine that he drank, and to train them for three years, and at the end thereof, they would stand before the king.

6: Now there were among them, from the Judahites, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo ... pter-1.htm

And in the KJV, the names are Daniel, Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego.

Ashpenaz is King Nebuchadnezzar's chief of staff (my words) and a Eunuch. So It is assumed that all the "boys" were made Eunuchs.

That to me is pretty thin evidence. I'm not Jewish. If someone else can read the Talmud and the Rabbinical commentaries for more information, please do.

[Hash (imported)]

I don't think there's any clear cut evidence as to whether Daniel was a eunuch or not in any Biblical text, the Talmud, or Rabbinical commentary. What we know from history is that when young princes were captured by another nation, they were most often castrated. Here is a good resource to read:

http://epistle.us/hbarticles/eunuchs1.html

http://epistle.us/hbarticles/eunuchs2.html

http://epistle.us/hbarticles/eunuchs4.html

[Kangan2008 (imported)]

Thanks be to Jesus (both of them)! Very interesting thread. I have always wondered if Jesus (the biblical one) crushed his testicles. It would explain Matt 5:29 etc.

[Dave (imported)]

I hit the 1am Eunuch Archive backup slowdowns and weirdness that the EA server goes through. So here's two more thoughts.

As I said: This is awfully thin evidence on which to base that the Prophet Daniel was a Eunuch.

The major think wrong with that is that the Book of Daniel might not be written about a real person. It might be a rousing story (theLion's Den, the Fiery Furnace - and a ton of prophecies) written after that era to encourage the Jews to resist Hellenism or Greek-ification. That would be why it contains the stories of Daniel in the Lion's Den, the Fiery Furnace - and a ton of prophecies. One of those prophecies predicts a number of days, weeks, or years to a Messiah (or maybe the apocalypse, it depends on who is interpreting what and why).

In the sources of the Talmud from which the Christian Bible is taken for books this old - - the Book of Daniel is written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Much of the Christian Gospels and Old Testament are written in Greek. I hope we all know what apocrypha means to the various Holy Book Compilations - - someone didn't want something in it because they had another POV.

Now I'll go back and read some intervening posts.

[Dave (imported)]

Thanks be to Jesus (both of them)! Very interesting thread. I have always wondered if Jesus (the biblical one) crushed his testicles. It would explain Matt 5:29 etc.

I think that would be a poor interpretation and quite possible a wrong interpretation of the words from the Sermon on the Mount. As i understand the verse and as I can produce scholarship to back myself up, "If thy eye offendeth thee, pluck it out" (Aside from being a bad paraphrase) is hyperbole. There is no other proscription that extreme or violent in the Sermon. It was a rhetorical punctuation point.

In the Hebrew or Aramaic of the time, Jesus more accurately said -- If your EYE causes you to STUMBLE, pluck it out. That's a play on words that is lost in translation. His audience wouldn't take that phrase as literal but symbolic.

[Riverwind (imported)]

Oh yes we forget that those people of the bible did in fact NOT speak English and the bible has be translated by MEN so its no wonder that we wonder what really happened or if it happened at all.

Note what I just said is what my minister talked about yesterday in Church.

I think when we take the bible as a history book and we read it and take away the general idea and leave the specifics out, were much better off. It is a good book written by MEN, for MEN. Remember women were property in those days, in many parts of that part of the world its still that way today. Forget the clobber passages in the bible and remember the one thing Jesus said, (not our Jesus the other one), Love one another as you love yourself.

River

[Dave (imported)]

The original Hebrew and Aramaic of the first writing of the Book of Daniel is more like Old English and Early Modern English is to what we speak today.

THere's a great article on English here: http://theweek.com/articles/545166/what ... unded-like

One of the oddities of Shakespearean English is that WE lack the colloquial meanings of it.

Most notable the wordplay of "noting" and "nothing" that plays a part in the humor of Much Ado About Nothing.

So part of what happened with the Book of Daniel is that even scholars from the time of the Roman Empire (the times of Jesus) are separated by 400 plus years from the texts. That's comparable to our readings of Shakespeare and the earlier Old English and Beowulf.

To bring this back to the Book of Daniel - - Rabbinical Scholars have arguments over the letters and the manner that "MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN" was written. Belshazzar's Feast is in the Book of Daniel. A mysterious hand wrote the words on the wall and only Daniel (a spiritual man or prophet of the time) could translate. Belshazzar certainly had Babylonian scholars who could read Hebrew but the words were written in a way to be obscure and seemingly misspelled. Daniel the Prophet was the only one who could "divine" the meaning of the words. The rabbinical scholars suggest that the words were written in even older Hebrew and vertically and without spacing so that the meaning was deliberately obscured.

SO any understanding of the uses of the more unique words of the Bible (Eunuch does not occur often in the Old Testament or the Talmud and is considered harder to translate and understand) requires understanding more than simply the word as understood in the 21st century.