Can God create a snail so iron-filled that he himself cannot affect it?
Can God create a snail so iron-filled that he himself cannot affect it?
Referencing Judges 1:19 - “And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.”
And Chrysomallon squamiferum, “the only known extant animal that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton (into both its sclerites and into its shell as an exoskeleton)”.
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Good grammar matters. “He” could be referring to God, or Judah. I would imagine any Bible Thumper would suggest that it refers to Judah, because there is no way that the Bible would suggest that God has limitations.
https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.1.19?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en is another translation of it which makes it seem like the team of the two of them couldn't do it. I don't know biblical hebrew to be able to say if that grammar is any better.
because there is no way that the Bible would suggest that God has limitations.
Hebrews 6:18 "it is impossible for God to lie"
What gets really interesting when you try and work out whether or not God is supposed to have created "truth" itself
Hebrews 6:18 "it is impossible for God to lie"
You have to consider the source for statements like that. I’ve always asked the question — and of course never got a real answer — that if we all agree that man is fallible (regardless of how pious you are or aren’t), and man wrote the Bible, then how could we ever trust the Bible to be correct?
To put it another way, if the Bible is “the word of god”, and the Bible was written by sinful men, then it would be akin to listening to your favorite music through a piezoelectric speaker. A lot would get lost in translation; and probably the gaps would get filled in based on the level of intelligence and desires of the writers.
Devils advocate answer - not my view
It reduces to whether or not one has faith that there is a (Jewish/Christian) god that wants to make their views known. If one believes that, it's reasonable to believe such a god preserved the act of inspiring writers in such a way that their message is intelligible and trustworthy, man's sinfulness notwithstanding. Else why would god entrust the spreading of the gospel to faulty mankind at all? He might as well broadcast it from the sky and sidestep sinful mankind altogether. But the whole point of the gospel is that god partners with mankind and makes what they do good and holy through the holy spirit. Writing gods "truths" in the bible writings falls into this category.
This was the view of the early (second century) church. They maintained that they were passed the knowledge of Christ mouth to mouth from first witnesses and that god helped them preserve that knowledge through writings that make up the new testament.
I did consider that. Using standard notation, the lowercase “he” as opposed to a capital “He” would mean that Judah is the subject, not God. Nevertheless, the first sentence implies that even with God, Judah was incapable to affect those with iron chariots.