Understanding the Bible - OT

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Hello CAF. God does not speak to us like human beings do, but how about in the Old Testament? Basically, when we read/hear obviously passages in the OT, we see there like “God said to Jonah, ‘Go into the city’”. How can God speak mostly in the OT like a human being? Can someone enlighten me? It would be better if you will quote the answer from Trent Horn’s ‘Hard Sayings’.
 
Just because you here a voice telling you to do something don’t mean its God. The Old Testament prophets had the gift to tell if anything was from God. The Catholic Church calls this gift the Discernment of Spirits.

God can use anything to speak to us.

I haven’t read Trent Horn’s book so I can’t judge how good it is.
 
So,

And using the OT as a guide, GOD can speak to us in many ways. HE can for example use dreams to convey HIS wishes to us. Or HE can speak from a “burning bush” like HE did to Moses. It appears that for the first humans GOD would be heard by the human counterparts, in the New Testament we have an example of this in the “Baptism of Jesus” event. This is called a “locution” by the way. So multiple means of communications for GOD to whom nothing is “impossible”.
 
Hello CAF. God does not speak to us like human beings do,
Says who?
but how about in the Old Testament? Basically, when we read/hear obviously passages in the OT, we see there like “God said to Jonah, ‘Go into the city’”. How can God speak mostly in the OT like a human being? Can someone enlighten me?
I don’t know what you mean by that? Do you think that God appeared in human form to Jonah and then spoke?
It would be better if you will quote the answer from Trent Horn’s ‘Hard Sayings’.
Huh? Why?
 
Being Jewish, I can add something that I know from my study of the New American Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees with Church teachings and will help answer your question. Sorry that it has no references to Trent Horn’s work, however.

The Old Testament or Jewish Scriptures often rely heavily upon the anthropomorphism of God. This refers to attributing traits, emotions, and sometimes physical aspects of human beings to the Divine.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God, in reality, transcends these traits. However, we often find in Old Testament Scripture examples of God acting quite human, sometimes being spoken of as having regret for feelings or actions, as having arms and hands, even having “face-to-face” communication with prophets–especially Moses.

Instead of debating whether or not God literally spoke from the heavens with each and every prophet (because God can obviously do whatever God wishes), the question to ask is: “Did God speak to each and every prophet as written in Scripture?” Especially in the case of texts like Jonah where the narrative is clearly meant to be read more as a parable with a moral than a historical text, what are we to think?

If a prophet wrote in a genre of lore to teach a religious lesson, a composition with little or no historicity, did God ever really speak as written in the text? How are we to know? It is clear that when a Biblical writer says that God has hands that God clearly has no real physical hands, right? How then do we know when God spoke aloud historically?

Judeo-Christian tradition is of the general opinion that outside of Moses (and of course Jesus for Christians), God did not literally communicate with anyone as it is specifically written in Scripture texts. There are, of course, short times in Old Testament history and examples in the New Testament where it may be said God is communicating directly, but for the most part, Scripture writers are being inspired to write the best way humans can understand what we believe God is saying in certain situations. It is again an anthropomorphic device.

This is what scholars, both Christian and Jewish, often teach about God’s “words” in the Jewish Bible. Even when the Prophets are speaking and saying things like, “thus saith the Lord,” the prophet is moved by inspiration to say what they understand from a human perspective what God wants. There was likely no voice from heaven in any of these cases, though the narrative device is written as a dialogue between God and mortals.

To reiterate, Jews generally believe that Moses is the only person to have spoken directly with God, and Christians believe that both Moses and Jesus of Nazareth have had such a dialogue. All other times, the communication was by inspiration, whether written or live as when prophets were speaking and delivering messages to the nations of Israel and Judah.
 
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I, too, am puzzled by how you have narrowed the answer you want to Trent Horn’s book. I have the book and read it some time back. Nothing ‘pops’ to mind about your question.

Any such revelation of God directly to a person is what is called a theophany, which is some manner of direct encounter with God.

Obviously the Old Testament relies heavily on theophanies, for example, the encounter of Moses with God at the burning bush.
 
God didn’t speak to every single person in the OT, he spoke only to certain individual/s who were then to relay His message to the people. And, when you consider the number of years covered by the OT, it did not occur very often.

God has continued to relay His words to certain individuals in a supernatural manner throughout NT times - probably more frequently than in OT times. Scripture records some: Jesus appearance and words to the apostles after His resurrection; St. Paul;
You might also want to read some of the mystic saints. Eg. St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Faustina, Padre Pio, …

In addition, there have been Marian apparitions where, through the appearance and words of the Blessed Virgin, God’s message has been communicated to us by supernatural means.
 
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Hello CAF.
Hello, Arnold!
God does not speak to us like human beings do, but how about in the Old Testament?
Well… He does !!!

If you think about it, the OT stretches thousands of years … and yet, we only see a few dozen times that God speaks to people. So… it’s not that “God doesn’t speak to humans like He did in the OT”; I think that it’s more reasonable to say “God speaks infrequently to humans.”
How can God speak mostly in the OT like a human being?
I’m not sure that the question is really “how?”, so much that it is “why?”

And, as we see in the Bible, God speaks audibly to human beings when it’s important to His plan in salvation history. Now that Jesus has come, and provided the means for us to attain to heaven… the need for God to speak audibly seems to have largely passed.
It would be better if you will quote the answer from Trent Horn’s ‘Hard Sayings’.
Sorry… haven’t read it.
 
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