"First, you actually cite Atlantic Monthly as a source of Biblical scholarship?? The expert you highlighted is from University of Maryland and follows liberal ideas about the Bible. We don’t allow liberals around here. It stinks up the place."
So because you don't want to deal with the facts?
You talk about the oldest which means nothing if is is not the oringinal text!
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They even added accents and cantillation symbols toguarantee the proper chanting of biblical passages in worship services. The resultant text, known today as the Masoretic text, exhibits only the most minute, semantically inconsequential variations from one manuscript to another. The oldest extant manuscripts of theMasoretic text, upon which all modern editions of the Hebrew Bible are based, date from the ninth to the eleventh century A.D. --more than a thousand years after the latest book of the Old Testament was written.
As a rule, ancient and medieval scribes felt obliged to copy the received text asaccurately as possible, without making any changes or adjustments.
Yet virtually every scribe who ever copied a biblical manuscript perpetuated the errors of others and introduced a few of his own.
Imagine this process being repeated for one to two thousand years, and you have some idea of the vicissitudes that the Hebrew biblical text has endured.
Compounding the problem was the occasional scribe who made a conscious alteration in the text, either for ideological reasons or because he sincerely thought he was correcting someone else's mistake.
Until 1947 the only direct evidence for the pre-Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament was a lone papyrus leaf dating from about 100 B.C.; this preserves the text of the Ten Commandments.
But in 1947 the study of the Old Testament text was suddenly revolutionized by the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in a cave at Qumran, near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade another ten caves in the immediate area yielded additional manuscript treasures.
Among the finds (which also included an assortment of nonbiblical texts) were a complete Hebrew scroll of the book of Isaiah, a verse- by-verse commentary incorporating most of the Hebrew text of chapters one and two of Habakkuk, and leather and papyrus fragments of the Hebrew text of every other Old Testament book, with the sole exception of Esther.
Although the age of the manuscripts was initially in question, scholars now generally agree that they date from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D.;a few may go back to the third century B.C.
When the high antiquity of the scrolls was realized, some scholars anticipated that the biblical text preserved in them would differ substantially from the medieval Masoretic text, thereby demonstrating that the OldTestament's journey through the hands of generations of Jewish copyists had left its text in a most imperfect state.
However, although the scrolls furnish numerous readings at variance with the Masoretic tradition, the Dead Sea and Masoretic textsof the Old Testament are strikingly alike.
The most important ancient version of the Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, originally produced for Greek- speaking Jews in Egypt. Parts of it date from as early as the third and second centuries B.C. As a translation, it is uneven in quality.
In some cases where the Septuagint and the Masoretic text disagree, the Septuagint passage is clearly a bad translation of an underlying Hebrew text that was identical to the version of the passage found in Masoretic manuscripts. But in other instances th discrepancies are too marked to have been caused by poor translation.
Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars had guessed that in cases where the ancient translator did not appear to be at fault, the Greek text actually reflected a Hebrew original appreciably different from what survives in the Masoretic text.
Um, I had no problem reading and understanding what you posted in # 414, and I’m not sure why you reposted the long quote from your source again. I don’t disagree with the passgae or a majority of the article as found at Atlantic Monthly (which I also read through). Would you like to offer something from your mind for a change?
res,
you are not helping yourself in this conversation. I did read your entire article. If you would look around a bit, you will find that most of the textual criticism in the article has been refuted. That is my only point. I went down that road in seminary back in the early 80s. It’s been more than 20 years ago and it was refuted back then.
ampu