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Originally Posted by Timotheist
Aahhh, WL very likely grew up with this translation, and thus his POV. Thanks for researching.
Also, it suggests that dwelling on this particular topic is a waste of time, unless one of us is an expert in Hebrew.
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Not necessarily a waste of time, but it’s certainly dangerous to build an entire branch of your theology on such a debatable interpretation.
So what I’m struggling with is the conflation of “in the midst” with “at the center”. I’m no Hebrew expert, but if you compare across many translations, you’ll find many/most use “in the midst” and some use “middle”. The Hebrew word is תָּ֫וֶךְ (tāwḵ 8432), which my interlinear Bible translates as “midst, whether of a space or place, a number of people or things, or of a line”, noting “oft. = an emph. in, in the very heart and midst of”, but “of a number of persons = among (not necess. of the actual middle”. Both Lee and Recovery Unchained assume this word means that TOL was at the center of the garden, and we have seen there is debate about whether TOKOGAE is included in the “midst” description (I think it is). But I think there’s an equally valid argument to say that the tree or trees being “in the midst” mostly means they’re not at the edges or on the periphery but doesn't imply anything about the center. That is- they're among the other trees, not too hard to find, maybe prominent, and definitely not -outside- the garden. They were specially named because they were important, but if you build a case around their geometric arrangement based on a phrase like “in the midst” and claim that means they were the center of the universe, I think you have gone too far.
If you’ll pardon the pun, I think given the ambiguity we could also judge the tree by its fruit in the spirit of Matt 7:15-20. So the fruit of Lee’s teaching on the Two Trees is statements like those given at the Crystallization Study of Job (the last such event I attended before leaving): “It’s deceptive to call it the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and “Good is somewhat worse than evil, because it’s deceptive”, and later on things like this “God doesn’t want you to be a good man, He wants you to be a God man” and “God doesn’t want you to try to be a good husband”, which I heard interpreted among the saints as “I’m so glad God doesn’t want me to be a good husband, because I just can’t.”
When you take a teaching and use it to claim that God doesn’t want you to try to be a good husband or father, or that God doesn’t care about good and evil (because they’re on the wrong tree), or that good is actually somewhat worse than evil, or that God (or Moses) is being deceptive in calling it the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then I think it’s clear you have a “diseased tree producing bad fruits” that should be “thrown into the fire.”