Karado, there are an enormous number of problems with this guy’s work. Methodologically, not one interpretive move he makes is defensible. Here are some examples…
- 5:04 - As linguists have understood for more than a century, the meaning of a Hebrew word has nothing to do with the word’s root. When you say someone is “nice,” are you intentionally calling them an “idiot?” That’s what the root of the word nice “means.” The meaning of a word is determined by its usage in context, not by its roots. That’s an extremely outdated and misleading way of understanding Hebrew and Greek words to begin with.
But this guy goes even further - (A) he assumes that one can assess the meaning of a noun (etz or “tree”) from the verb it is etymologically related to; (B) he fails to distinguish between literal senses of that verb’s root (“to be firm”) and metaphorical usages (“to close”); (C) then he reads that metaphorical usage of the verb back into the noun etz (“tree”), as etz really means “something closed, like a door!” This is absolutely backwards and illogical. Even though, once again, you cannot determine the meaning of a word in context based on its etymology, there is reason why etz and atsah have the same root - because the root denotes “firmness,” and this was how ancient Israelites characterized a tree (i.e., as something firm). The verb atsah can mean “to close” because the notion of firmness is intrinsic to the idea of closure.
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5:21 - False - the Hebrew word for tree (etz) is not similar AT ALL to the word for generation (dor), and the reason why we TODAY (NOT in ancient Israel!) talk about “family trees” is because of the image of multiple branches arising from a common source. Consequently, I have no idea why he claims that the trees could be suggesting “openings to another dimension;” there’s nothing in the text to support that notion at all.
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6:31 - Once again, he is trying to determine a word’s meaning based on its root. More importantly, the LXX translators and the NT writers all understood this word as referring to a snake, not something “like a snake,” and certainly not an extraterrestrial. So aside from the sheer fact that it is completely historically unlikely that the LXX translators and NT authors didn’t know what nahash really meant, the fact remains that authoritative Scripture (NT) says unambiguously that it was a serpent, so if “pastor” Jim were correct, that would mean that NT authors were wrong. That’s a huge problem…
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7:17 - SO many things wrong here. (1) He completely mispronounces the Hebrew (its actually al gehoneka telek); (2) it is NOT rendered anywhere as “upon the belly and life,” as telek is the qal imperfect second masculine singular of the verb halak, and thus it means “you will go, move, walk.” It also has the meaning, “to live,” but that is a metaphorical extension of the verb’s main sense; (3) the preposition al (“upon, over, above”) CANNOT mean “from above,” because in order to mean that, it would need the preposition min (“from, out of”) attached to it; (4) the noun gahon CANNOT refer either to “a fetus” or even to a “womb;” the word for “womb” in Hebrew is COMPLETELY different (beten), and gahon ONLY occurs twice in the OT and BOTH times refers to creepy-crawly type animals (like SNAKES!); (5) this ridiculous reading also ignores the poetic nature of Yahweh’s condemnation - in Hebrew poetry, the first line puts forth an idea and the second reiterates that idea with different words or expands upon it. In this case, the phrase “dust you will eat” is an idiomatic way of saying, “you will crawl on your belly” (i.e., your face will always be in the dust). The second line makes NO sense if the first line is a reference to alien cloners!
That’s all I have time for right now. Maybe more later. This should be enough to show you that this guy doesn’t even know how to handle his sources.
