Re: Very old response


Subject: Re: Very old response
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 01:25:37 EDT


I wrote and sent a response to this topic late on the third. My mailer
sputtered, coughed, and failed utterly to deliver the message. Much to my
horror, it also failed utterly to save a copy in my Sent folder. So my
message was, and is, simply gone.

I dug through many bizarre files and within one of them I found the mangled
and gory remains of my message. It was just a bit of text, probably
amounting to 1/4 or 1/5 of my message, mercilessly broken and garbled,
interspersed with ostensibly random strings of nonsensical characters. I
found some free utilities on the internet meant to recover messages lost by
my mailer, but try as they might, even with the little indicator bars and
boxes displaying percentages and pass numbers flashing and spinning away,
they could not revive my lost message. So I copied and pasted what I could,
removing erroneous characters, and now am about to attempt to write around
the recovered text something approximating what was lost. It will, no
doubt, be far inferior to the original in style and substance.

A Shel Silverstein poem seems appropriate to the occasion.

BLAME

I wrote such a beautiful book for you
'Bout rainbows and sunshine
And dreams that come true.
But the goat went and ate it
(You knew that he would),
So I wrote you another one
Fast as I could.
Of course it could never be
Nearly as great
As that beautiful book
That the silly goat ate.
So if you don't like
This new book I just wrote--
Blame the goat.

Jim said:
<< Nice overview of the Septuagint -- its importance to the NT writers
makes
it that much more important in Western Lit, no? >>

I think that it does. Christianity grew out of the culture of the Jews, so
the Hebrew Bible was clearly important the New Testament writers; and as a
version of the Hebrew Bible, I think that the Septuagint was particularly
influential and important. I still think, though, that its importance to
the West came only with the importance of Christianity to the West, without
which it would have -- I suspect -- remained obscure.

Then:
<< Don't forget about the
Dead Sea Scrolls, though. Yes, until the DSS the Masoretic texts were all
we had, and they were about 10th century AD, but the DSS date from the time
of Christ and have full texts of Isaiah and Deuteronomy and, really, most
of the rest of the Protestant Christian OT with a couple exceptions...

from what I understand, the DSS are pretty consistent with the MT (which
had vowel points where the former texts did not, of course), so it looks
like the documents were pretty well preserved. >>

When I referred to the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible, I was referring to
the oldest complete and canonized text, which is the Masoretic. The Qumran
scrolls (or Dead Sea Scrolls) are much older, and are a different story
entirely. Fragments of nearly all parts of the Tanakh ARE represented in
the Qumran scrolls, and there's also a whole holy hell of a lot of other
stuff represented in the Qumran scrolls. After only fifty years or
thereabout, the publication project with Oxford University Press was finally
completed late last year and spans nearly forty volumes, most of them
costing around $100 a pop. One result of this is that I have only negligible
first-hand knowledge of them excluding popular paperbacks with excerpts of
important bits, which I have regrettably only seen in translation. The
scrolls include fragments of every book in the Tanakh except Esther. But
most of these, as I understand it, are fragments. I do not know how many of
the books are complete, but I am sure that it is not all, and I do not know
if it is most.

In any case, it is true what you said that the scrolls are pretty consistent
with the Masoretic text if you meant SOME of the scrolls. Because the
scrolls are not consistent with each other. Some of the books (I think this
includes both of those you mentioned, Isaiah and Deuteronomy) are
represented by a dozen or more separate manuscripts, fragmentary or
otherwise, that often show extensive and significant variation between them.
What came to be The Bible apparently had at that time no standardized
edition, and hardly even indications of something like the status of a
canon. The Qumran scrolls include texts that agree with the Masoretic text,
and texts that agree with the Septuagint (which sometimes differs from the
Masoretic significantly -- the book of Job, for instance, is about 1/4
shorter in the Greek), and texts that agree with neither. Sometimes texts
of all three of these species exist within the Qumran collection for a
single book.

The Qumran scrolls HAVE somewhat vindicated the process by which the
received texts were transmitted, though. One particularly striking example
is that of the baffling shifts between Hebrew and Aramaic that occur in our
texts of the Book of Daniel. Quite amazingly, these shift are found in
precisely the same places in some of the Qumran fragments (although not all
of them, I understand -- variants exist within the Qumran collection). So
whenever and whyever the hell those weird bits got in there, they've been
preserved very exactly in at least one "strain" of the book for over 2,000
years. How and why certain strains were weeded out to be rediscovered
thousands of years later we do not know -- but it is certain that there were
many strains of individual books all existing side by side, and nothing like
a canon.

The discovery of the scrolls created both hopes and fears that their
contents would either vindicate or annihilate traditional beliefs about the
Bible and the state all those years ago of the religions associated with it.
Neither quite happened, though. On the one hand, the scrolls demonstrated
that a book can be accurately transmitted by scribes over several millennia;
on the other, they've been shown to have the potential for minor scandal,
since books taken to be apocryphal by most Christians and Jews today were
apparently considered by the ancients to be no less authoritative than
certain other books that today are widely considered of divine inspiration.
Most of the modern canon is not too hard to swallow, with exceptions only
for parts that are usually taken to be very metaphorical or are too obscure
and briefly mentioned to make much sense out of. These OTHER books, though,
are a bit rougher around the edges. Bizarre stories that receive quick and
oblique intimations in Genesis are spelled out explicitly, like messengers
of God (or little gods) having sex with human women who then give birth to
races of giants, for instance. There would today be some reluctance to
admit this into the canon, but there was apparently no disputing it in
Qumran. It simply was. As sure as God saying "Let there be light."

The immediate lesson of the Qumran scrolls is that our idea of books,
especially religious ones, is very different today. To the keepers of the
scrolls, books were not absolutely static entities with copyright dates in
the front pages; they were something more dynamic than that, and perhaps
even something evolving.

-robbie

P.S. Your specific mention of the Protestant Christian Old Testament
compels me to mention, to avoid confusion, that I think this is essentially
the same books as the Jewish Tanakh, traditionally divided differently and
presented in a different order. The Tanakh (TNK) consists of Torah
("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and Kethuvim ("Writings"). After
dividing Shemu'el (or Shmuel, Samuel 1 & 2), Melakhim (Kings 1 & 2),
'Ezra/Nechemyah (Ezra & Nehemiah), and Divre HaYamim ("Words of the Days,"
Chronicles 1 & 2), into two books each, and the twelve minor prophets
(usually treated as one book within Judaism) into twelve books, I count
thirty-nine books in the Tanakh. The number is the same in the Old
Testament of the King James on my shelf. And a quick reading of the names
reveals what appears to be the same stuff, albeit Romanized/Anglicized on
the one hand. I think there are some few differences in the content of a
few books, usually reflecting a difference between the Masoretic text and
the Septuagint (or Vulgate, an early Latin translation). The breaking of
chapter and verse is sometimes different also: the verse made famous by
Magnolia, Exodus 8:2, is Shemoth (or Exodus) 7:27 in many Hebrew Bibles.
The extra books contained in some Christian Bibles -- the Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha -- are taken to be later than the rest of the Tanakh and are
not written in Hebrew (most are Greek), and thus are not included in the
Jewish canon.
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