Posted on 09/21/2016 6:36:11 PM PDT by DeltaZulu
JERUSALEM (AP) -- The charred lump of a 2,000-year-old scroll sat in an Israeli archaeologist's storeroom for decades, too brittle to open. Now, new imaging technology has revealed what was written inside: the earliest evidence of a biblical text in its standardized form.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
"This is quite amazing for us," he said. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. Previously the oldest known fragments of the modern biblical text dated back to the 8th century.The text discovered in the charred Ein Gedi scroll is "100 percent identical" to the version of the Book of Leviticus that has been in use for centuries, said Dead Sea Scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who participated in the study.
"This is quite amazing for us," he said. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
PING
It is not amazing that the text is 100% identical considering the pains they went through to make sure the scribes went through to ensure accuracy. First, they started with a new scroll and the scribes were told to write one letter. The master scribe would check each scribe’s scroll to ensure they did it correctly. If the scribe made a mistake, the scroll would be destroyed. This wold be repeated for every letter in the scroll. After the scroll was finished, the master scribe would count every letter top to bottom and bottom to top where the numbers must equal a known amount. As a final check, the letters were counted from each end to the center and the count must come out to the same letter. If any of these checks failed, the scroll was destroyed.
Thank you for referencing that article DeltaZulu. Please note that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.
I think that the term “deciphers” in the article’s title is inaccurate. The problem with reading the brittle scroll is that it couldn’t be unscrolled to read without making it fall apart.
So the scanning software “unrolled” inaccessable writing by conceptually using X-rays instead of deciphering an unknown language for example.
Corrections, insights welcome.
Maybe ‘re-visualized’ would be a better term.
God preserved his words.
That is very interesting and impressive. Thank you for that information.
Agreed, that it is not unusual or surprising that the old version of the passage from Leviticus is identical to that which is used today. My brother is a scribe, and he has described in great detail to me the process of writing any kind of document, from the simplest to the most complex. The checking that you described is only a small part of what is done, especially for the Torah itself, but suffice it to say that I would be shocked and surprised to find any differences whatsoever. People have devoted their entire lives to doing one thing and one thing only: transmitting the exact words of the Holy Bible from one generation to another. There is a specific instruction in the Hebrew Bible that one is not permitted to add or subtract or change a single letter. Scribes over the course of thousands of years have striven to adhere to that command, and have succeeded.
An Adrian Monk type person would be a near perfect fit.
The first block chain?
1,700 (what the research paper estimated) and 2,000 (what one researcher seems to have rounded to) is a big difference, historically. 2,000 years ago, Jesus was still a minor. 1,700 years ago, the gospels, interpreting prophecies from a significantly different version of the bible, had swept the Roman world.
My bet is that the handwriting analysis is valid (c. 2nd century), and the scroll dates to some time shortly after the destruction of the 2nd temple; the fire messes radiocarbon data up.
Wow!
Of all the books that liberals would have wished would have been different than the one we have today, you couldn’t pick a better one that Leviticus.
Bkmrk.
bump
Hopefully somebody will use that same technology to read these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri
Bingo!
There are a lot of scrolls from Pompeii and Herculaneum that need this technology.
You think the Septuagint is a "significantly different version of the Bible"? I thought it is simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew OT with some literary adjustments made for Greek idioms etc.
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