Jubal in the Bible ?

Post Reply New Topic

What's y'alls interpretation of the character of Jubal in the Bible , Genesis , who is " the father of all who handle the harp " , etc. (All-? musicians) ? He is Cain's great-great-great-great grandson .
The Biblehub site was rather down , in their interpretation , on him " and his whole wicked race "/family though that wasn't the interpretation I took from my reading my own KJV - ?

The character of Jubal is, as I recall, briefly mentioned in Genesis in a single one sentence line. Almost nothing is known of this character apart from what you yourself mention here, so I don't know what else actually can be said about him. However, the character of Tubalcain who was apparently the father of all those who work in iron and brass is rather strange, given the fact that iron-working wasn't actually developed by humanity until circa the 10th century B.C., and yet he is placed prior to the Biblical flood.

Not that any of this really matters though, because both characters didn't really exist anyway, and the inconsistency I mention regarding Tubalcain is evidence enough of that.

...Not a literalist , let alone a Young Earth-er > Sacrilidge(Sp)??! !! Eh ? So , you're (Some Christians - I guess not all - would say) taking likely-atheistic , if not Satanic , archaeologists over God's Nonerring Word ?
I mean , I thought I might offend by saying " character " , but I thought " even non-fiction books have ' characters ' " .
I'm throwing the sarcasm , if that's the word , out here - but , I am talking about the " what people interpret from the Bible vs. non-religious science " question , so to speak .


quote="Lintar"]The character of Jubal is, as I recall, briefly mentioned in Genesis in a single one sentence line. Almost nothing is known of this character apart from what you yourself mention here, so I don't know what else actually can be said about him. However, the character of Tubalcain who was apparently the father of all those who work in iron and brass is rather strange, given the fact that iron-working wasn't actually developed by humanity until circa the 10th century B.C., and yet he is placed prior to the Biblical flood.

Not that any of this really matters though, because both characters didn't really exist anyway, and the inconsistency I mention regarding Tubalcain is evidence enough of that.[/quote]

I always assumed father as in pioneer in that field of human endeavour, just as with Tubal Cain the smith. There is ample precedent for meanings for "father" other than literal biological ancestor, let alone immediate male parent. For one thing, while it is possible that the wife of Shem (son of Noah, ancestor of Abraham, lyre strumming and lyric composing King David and in a human sense David's heir the Messiah - Jesus/Yeshua of Nazareth in the opinion of Christians, including my admittedly rather confused but nonetheless not completely heretical, nor altogether ignorant, self; also some non-Christians, although the significance of the title Messiah would be interpreted differently) or indeed the other daughter in laws of Noah, all of whom could be an ancestress at least through intermarriage of any one on Earth in postdiluvian history.

The Biblehub website's statement probably refers to Cain's biological descendants including Jubal, Jabal, Tubal Cain and Cain's fellow murderer Lamech being (presumably) annihilated during the flood, though they do not consider the possibility that not all four wives of patriarch described as surviving

Other than Cain and Lamech being murderers, we are not actually informed of the moral status of the House of Cain as being any worse than the rest of the primaeval antediluvian humans, described with the exceptions of Noah and his wife, three sons and three daughters in law, as being on the whole "violent" as well as having daughters sufficiently alluring to attract the notice of unspecified "sons of God" frequently understood following the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch as fallen angelic beings (demons, more specifically Gregorii/Watchers, the oldest of the Incubi and ancestors of giants called the Nefalim or "Fallen Ones" or possibly "Those who were made;" the Book of Genesis itself describes the offspring as "mighty men of old" and mentions that there were) giants (they are also mentioned on a number of occasions in Biblical accounts

What do you think of tentative identification of Japheth, among whose descendants the "isles of the Gentiles were divided" (KJV, though the Hebrew word translated Gentiles can also mean nations or heathen depending on context; in early times virtually interchangeable; however consider that in archaic times a number of Ham's and Shem's descendants would also be both pagan and of Gentile origin, so the precise signification of the phrase remains unclear, though a tentative identification with the diverse and far flung multiethnic branches of the Indo-European linguistic family is not perhaps completely beyond question; most humans alive today would have more than one of Noah's sons as an ancestor, regardless of which literal historical or mythic metaphorical (but not necessarily simply false) interpretation of these esoteric early verses of the first book of the Pentateuch/Torah) is adopted) with the figure of Iapetos/Iapetus, one of the Titans in the Greek myth (Javan is often cited as the ancestor of the Ionian Greeks). Iapetos was described as the father of Prometheus, Epimetheus and, albeit by a different

The House of Cain, the murdering nomadic fugitive from Eden, but also the founder of Earth's first city (his wife's origin is unspecified; Lilith, often said, both in Judaeo-Christian and Islamic tradition (as well as apparently Narnian tradition, judging by Mr. Beaver's remarks in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the apparent contradiction with the alternative genealogy of Jadis in The Magician's Nephew tradition as Adam's first, though non-human wife, but this appears to have similar status to the slanderous and demonising extra-canonical stories told of the Queen of Sheba, whose very name, sometimes given as Bilqis or Balkis, is not given in I Kings itself; the only disputable occurrence of the name Lilith is in the Hebrew text of Isaiah, where it may simply be the Hebrew word for screech owl, as indeed the KJV has it; still more biblical than the Latin name Lucifer retained in the KJV and others, presumably following the Vulgate - Isaiah of Jerusalem would have had Hebrew and Aramaic and at a stretch Akkadian and at an outside chance Egyptian, but certainly not Latin or even in all probability Greek, not at so early a period, although contact with Greek speaking and by that period, in some sense writing sailors, merchants or others is not completely beyond the bounds of possibility) is specifically stated to include a number of pioneering humans, in a range of endeavours. Make of this all what you will.

The alleged "inconsistency" is a rather odd one given that even in modern English "father" does not invariably mean either literal male parent nor even biological ancestor. None of the Books of the Bible (any canon, whether acceptable to Jewish, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox or generic Protestant theists) was originally written in even archaicised Early Modern English, a language considerably younger than the smelting of iron. Your point about the historical advent of smelting iron would be more persuasive if copper had not been smelted earlier, as with tin to make bronze (the Hebrew rendered brass may refer to copper or bronze also) while meteoritic iron, while prone to rust, had some mystical status and probably some practical use well before the smelting of iron oxide ores to provide iron and later steel artefacts...

Also, for the record, plenty of scholars who are neither Jewish, Christian, nor indeed Muslim (not sure if there is any Qur'anic reference, or indeed one in the Hadith, to Jubal or Tubal Cain, nor on current opinion on the status of this particular verse of the Torah in learned Islamic exegetical consensus) study and analyse the Hebrew Scriptures, which I might point out compare favourably with some contemporary and archaic documents both in terms of not whitewashing horrific events or reducing them to nationalist propaganda, nor indeed mythologising or spiritualising and allegorising them out of all recognition. So please, in future, if you must reduce the debate to simplistic and spurious ridicule, at least do some more ridicule so that you may do so with a degree of authority!

Sorry if I sound a little cross by the way, I hope I did not upset, hurt, offend or annoy you. A bit late for that I suppose. Perhaps I should hesitate before pressing "submit". Ah well, I truly hope that I have not made you angry or sad, that would be neither just nor merciful, nor even kind.

Actually, I partially agree with you, although for different reasons: the precise name of whoever the genius who invented harps and the individual, whether a close kinsman or not, who invented metal working, is really probably not the most pressing issue facing us on Earth today; that is no excuse for ridiculing discussion fo therse brilliant inventors, whatever their name, language, or indeed gender! Plenty of serious students of history and literature discuss figures whose historicity is contested!

Even in English you hear that so and so was "the father of the upholstery industry", or was "the father of naval aviation", or whatever.

But WHY is it that the guy for whom the word "jubilation" is named, and who was "the father of all who play flutes, and harps (ie the father of music)" is also described as the "father" of everyone who seeks fame and wealth at the expense of "wisdom of God"? Sounds like Jubal was the life of the party in the Bible. And yet the Bible vilifies him.

Explain that.

That's easy to explain. Those who like to actually live their life and have fun, as opposed to those who are dour, boring and fanatical, are always castigated by the religious zealots who think we should all be as life-denying as they are. For some reason they don't like it when they see people actually enjoying themselves.

I have no idea how or why you thought I was engaging in ridicule. I was simply pointing out an inconsistency, an error of fact. Yes, I know the original documents were not written in English, but they are now, and there are many people who like to say they take scripture as being literally true and, what's more, that we should base society and all our laws upon their literal reading of these texts. I DO ridicule these people, because they deserve to be.

Anyway, you offered a retraction in the next sentence and, no, I wasn't offended. I don't understand Hebrew, or Greek, or any other language than English, and so when I come across something like the story of Tubalcain in Genesis I kind of impulsively reject it if it I know it can't be true, as stated in the text before me.

I think the main message of Jubal is that we shouldn't mistaken artistic innovation and cultural growth, with moral progress. The arts and cultural progress can enrich the human experience and lead us to a higher conscience, but they shouldn't be mistaken for how good(or not) our society actually is... that there is a distinction there, and one we should never lose sight of. The Bible points out this conflict early on, because it isn't against parties or celebrations or culture or art, but that we shouldn't mistaken cultured civilizations with diverse artistic expression, for ethical or decent ones. It's also placed early on in the bible because a new people will soon be formed, one who won't only borrow a lot from their surrounding neighbors in music and in mythology, but will often sit in envy of those neighbors and their customs, and who may conflate their Babylonian or Assyrian or Egyptian or Greek neighbors, and their architecture and music and art and social norms, for ethical progress, or morally progressed civilizations.

Jubal is described at great length and depth in the revelation Stranger in a Strange Land by the great prophet Robert Anson Heinlein.