IN> Buying The Stairway To Heaven...

[Perrin Rynning]

> From: earlwajenberg at comcast.net
> To: in-nomine-list at sjgames.com
> Subject: RE: IN> Buying The Stairway To Heaven...
> Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:22:13 +0000
> 
> From: "John Dallman" <jgd at cix.co.uk> 
> > Any cosmology with 144,000 being "select" and everyone else doomed seems 
> > to me to be flat black, no contrast, or more likely, Backwards. 
> 
> The 144,000 saints in Revelation are depicted more as "crack troops" or some sort of elite within the Blessed. They are described not that far away from "a great crowd that no man could number," who are apparently the whole population of the blessed.
> 


Me, I'm more inclined to chalk this one up to 'semantic drift'. The Hebrew language at one point only had words for numeric concepts up to 10,000, and some historians believe that they couldn't even conceptualize any greater quantities. It's how the old 'ten thousand times ten thousand' thing came up; it's the equivalent of 'to infinity and beyond'. 

It's a lot like how the sentence "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is a deliberately garbled translation. The original phrase included a specific reference that, depending on who you ask, referred either to evil magic or poison, but definitely wasn't so broad as the modern word is. It also took into account the moral orientation of the one casting the spells, as well as the intent of the spell itself. The culture from which the prohibition sprang was at least as familiar with magic as our culture is with electricity, and could clearly distinguish between a good person casting a potentially harmful spell for a morally defensible purpose, and an evil person casting a potentially helpful spell for selfish reasons. Good ol' King James put out his translation with the word 'witch' in this sentence because he had a phobia about them, and things have gone downhill from there.

 - Perrin

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