The problem with a lot of Biblical scholarship is that it presumes the principle of synonymous parallelism in the Hebrew language too often. It is assumed that to witness something parallel in a text is to witness the synonymous supposedly. While in some contexts this may in fact be very true, I think it has been over applied to texts that actually are not trying to present a synonymous pair, but instead a set of two or three that are based on the distinctions between greater, lesser, and greatest.
My favorite example of this error is the idea that righteous and just are the same thing. Sometimes the greatest enemy to knowledge is not ignorance, but presumed knowledge. It is a laughable error, because no contemporary carpenter would argue that plumb and level are the same. The most novice carpenter quickly learns the obvious lesson that plumb and level are not the same thing. In Isaiah, the level of the carpenter is the illustration for the principle of justice. Likewise, the plumb line is used to illustrate the principle of righteous.
Maybe we need to bring carpenters into seminaries and lecture the Biblical scholars rather than the reverse. What do you think? In the early 80s, the idea that righteous and just are not synonymous, was expressed by one lone scholar of Hebrew. Now we can use one concrete example drawn from carpentry and publicized by the Bible to overturn what is not very good scholarship.
In Scripture, there is a set of principles that clear up some of the confusion both in determining the meaning of righteousness, etc. and also in determining the meaning of holy.
[This piece will be continued tomorrow. Sorry for the slight delay. Please stop back late tomorrow.]
In Christ,
Jon
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