July 2010

Program Notes: Adultery and Fornication

Many people, myself included, assert that the word adultery in the Old Testament means race-mixing. And while I would still assert that this is true, it is not to be told from the definitions of the word as they are given in Strong's Concordance or in Gesenuis' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon. For that reason, and for the way in which the word is used in some Biblical contexts, it is easy for a scoffer or a doubter to refute the assertion that the word is used to describe race-mixing. So here we shall do a study of this word, and some other words which are necessary to gain an understanding of the difference between adultery and fornication.  

Program Notes – William Finck's July 24th Presentation for the European Fellowship Conference (See the audio & file links at the bottom of the page):

What is the Bible?

Most Christians tend to have a Bible version which they love above all others, and which to them, as they are often taught to believe, represents the inerrant Word of God. But is that a healthy Christian attitude, inasmuch as Christians are urged by scripture in nearly any translation, to prove and to scrutinize all things? We have been raised and taught to love our King James Version, or Luther's version, and much esteem is held for these books among the English or German peoples. These versions contributed so much to Western culture that they even helped build and unify our very languages! But are they really scripture? Should they be blindly accepted as inerrant? The King James version has thousands of known mistranslations. It can clearly be demonstrated that nouns were translated into verbs, verbs into nouns, and even that the grammatical object and subject were reversed in many sentences. Could these errors possibly be by the inspiration of Yahweh? Or rather, do Christians not have an obligation to examine all of these things? Here we will discuss the possible avenues of investigation, since most Christians seem to be ignorant of the sources of their dearest treasure: which is their Bible.

Genealogy, or Geography?

There has long been a tendency among the people of our race to draw their allegiances along geographical lines, often to the detriment of the more natural genetic allegiances. When we move into a land, and multiply and spread ourselves throughout it, we tend to adopt regional names for ourselves. Thus we have Norsemen and Franks, Englishmen and Germans, Yankees and Rednecks, and Buckeyes and Tarheels, and yet they all came from the same place. After years of separation, we then have situations where the aliens in a land, eventually accepted to one degree or another, and for one reason or another, are esteemed to be closer in relationship to us than our own cousins from other lands. And so a crowd of Americans – in spite of their own English descent – may be seen cheering on a negro against an English boxer in a game, simply because the negro is wearing an American insignia. That is just one modern example. More dreadfully, a tribe of Benjamintes would go to war against the surrounding related tribes to defend crimes perpetrated by men of dubious background, and for that the entire tribe was at one time reduced to merely a few hundred, nearly being decimated entirely. 

That is how old this phenomenon truly is: as old as the Book of Judges in the Bible, and probably much older than that. In Judges Chapters 19 and 20, we see related an account where the entire tribe of Benjamin stood up to defend a town, Gibeah, which would not turn some murderers and rapists over to judgement. The criminals were called sons of Belial from the beginning of the account, and it is evident that they were not Benjaminites. The word Belial, as can be proven from an examination of the Hebrew language, refers to the state of being mixed. In 1 Samuel 10:26, much later, we see that these same children of Belial were still in this same town, and they were still causing problems for the Israelites!