Ah...though that may also be a cultural issue. Especially as to us the specifics of the mark seem important, yet part of the hermeneutical task to me seems that it would begin with the question of whether knowing specifics about the mark is truly an important question or not.Ok. I agree...but @misput was asking us to describe 'how' we who use hermeneutics work through our process to identify and understand (or do the exegesis for) "the Mark of Cain."
I was trying to keep it simple.
While the importance of the question isn't entirely text dependent(as historical arguments can make things that are unimportant to the text important to the interpreter), I am somewhat folding in some of the issues you were getting at by examining the scope of the text's answers to the question. A question may very well be an important question in itself, yet to the text it may be irrelevant and answering it based on what is in the text may be an over-reach. One of the tasks I like to establish early on is to identify what the text appears to be trying to address so that the questions being asked of the text are important both in a general sense and to the scope of the text. And a lot of this comes down to cultural differences, especially when we have context rich indirect cultures and low-context direct cultures coming into contact as we have when a Westerner reads the Hebrew portions of the Bible.
I know about the process but I am not always skillful in the use of it. Just hoping someone could lead me through it so I might learn.Alright, misput. Then you can acknowledge that, along with the rest of us, you're already a hermeneuticist yourself as well.
So, at this point, since you're a fellow Christian hermeneuticist and you know that we need to ask questions of the texts as we read them, what would you think step 3 might be? Should we ask of our reading of Genesis chapter 4 if there is enough information there in that chapter alone to answer your pertinent question about the mark Cain? If it doesn't, what should we look for next?
In the verses we are looking at Cain is said to have become very angery and The Lord says vengeance will be taken on anyone who kills Cain seven fold and later Cains descendant says if Cain gets seven fold vengeance he will take seventy seven fold. Could this be a lead to what the mark was?Ok. Keep in mind, I'm attempting to keep this simple. For a more formal engagement, there are a lot of books or sources online that will explore and spell out this process with much fuller detail. If we look hard enough, we can often find someone in most major Christian denominations who have written about Hermeneutics and Exegesis, and there's likely one out there who belongs to your own slice of the Christian church.
Anyway, 'step 3.' We move to the next context layer and look for any comments made by Moses in any other thing he is reported to have written. Do you know of any? (Honestly, I'm not seeing others, but if you know of some, let me know since the Hermeneutical process for a Christian is a community process and not primarily an individual one----it's not all about what I, 2PhiloVoid, think about what I'm reading or finding all by myself).
If we don't make headway there, we might move to step 4, and expand our search to another context level: looking for relevant info about Cain and his mark among the writings of other authors in the O.T. and the N.T.
Once we find these, we can gather our data (if possible).
Do you think it could be a spiritual mark instead of a bodily mark?I could be wrong, but I tend not to think that the "seven fold vengeance" statement indicates or implies what the mark itself looked like or how it was signified. All we can know is that it was somehow present with, or on the body of, Cain.
If you think of any other biblical texts that may apply, feel free to bring them up for discussion.
A lot of this comes to most people not understanding what context means, as it is both the most common interpretive error as well as an attempted catch-all in debate/discussion. Which is in part because most people don't seem to understand how context changes meaning, nor even how meaning is derived in the first place. And unfortunately the indexing on most Bibles gives an impression that it's simply a matter of pulling out verses to build a system of neatly packaged doctrine. Individual verses do not "speak for themselves" because they are informed by a context, whether that context be the surrounding text and historical circumstances or the context of the interpreter's biases and presuppositions.
No, you're simply reducing what I'm saying to an absurd level. It is true I am saying that an individual cannot simply pick up a Bible knowing absolutely nothing about its history and read it from cover to cover and understand what it is saying, and will in fact create meanings that are not intended if they do not work to understand the context. There are cultural issues, language transfer issues, literary issues, intertexuality, and all sorts of issues going on in the Bible that require years of study to begin being able to accurately represent what it is saying. I may be able to make sense of your statement, but someone from the igbo tribe may need contextual reference to understand the unspoken issues like the unusual usage of the word "make" in that sentence that makes it an abstract concept of addition instead of building something. As an interpreter we bring all sorts of unspoken understandings to the text and part of the task of recovering meaning requires that we recognize our assumptions and put ourselves as much into the shoes of the original author/audience as possible. There is no "plain meaning" to ancient texts written to entirely different cultures with entirely different norms, philosophies, and concepts.
"Out of context" is only absurd if it is being used as if it were some sort of magic spell. Failing to resolve the context is always an error.
No, I'm not a nuda scripturist. I embrace sola scriptura, and most of the work of recovering the context comes from studying the Bible itself, since it is the best source for information about the relevant histories. It's simply that it's not a matter of pulling individual tidbits out.
It's more of a process of argumentation than "holding all the keys." Any reader can resolve the context, it's simply a matter of putting in the work and treating the document as a whole rather than breaking it into unnatural parts.
Your test is decent, as simply declaring something to be out of context isn't an argument in and of itself. One of the most frequent examples I can think of is a common abuse of Romans 8-9 where God's declaration "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy" is treated as if God is limiting His mercy and excluding individuals from it, when the context of these passages is to explain how God remains just in expanding His mercy beyond national Israel. The different contexts give entirely opposite meanings to the same sentence.
