Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Digital On Internet 324
mernil writes to mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls are headed for the internet. The Israel Antiquities Authority, custodians of the scrolls, plan on digitizing the 900 fragments to make them available to the public via the internet. Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Re:Edifying (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't paper (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, [wikipedia.org] and most of them are made of parchament, [wikipedia.org] which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
Re:Edifying (Score:5, Informative)
So what? You're talking about a religion that has had its primary texts re-written countless times over the centuries, already. Nobody today can point at any kind of original "Bible". Whether or not these are "accurate" is pretty irrelevant, even if you're somebody who is Christian/Jewish.
Perhaps you should read up on textual criticism.
Re:Edifying (Score:5, Informative)
My big concern is over the principle that once these are made publicly digitally available, they will be easily tampered with.
Digital watermarking, digital signatures, heck, even a CRC checksum will go a long way to preventing forgeries. And if I'm not mistaken, these things will be on an "official" website somewhere, so if fakes start circulating it will be easy to point to the original.
And I quite agree as to the importance--as a non-Christian who studies ANE culture, this is an exciting and important step.
Re:Edifying (Score:3, Informative)
So to summarize, Dead Sea Scrolls != New Testament. Thanks for coming out.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
Re:Edifying (Score:3, Informative)
I do not find it reasonable that God would hate all homosexuals, again as a single example.
I don't find that particular concept anywhere in the Bible, but I'm sure you know that homosexuality as a sin was definitely not invented by Paul. It's mentioned several times explicitly in the Mosaic law. Again it's mentioned in 1 Co. 6:9-11. You'll notice in verse 11 it speaks of those who WERE practicers of such things such as homosexuality. So clearly there's no special hatred reserved for homosexuals, it's simply a sin such as any other. When someone accuses the Bible of being anti-homosexual I usually point out that it's equally against heterosexual fornicators and that neither sin is worse than the other.
Perhaps you were only stating that Bible thumpers claim God hates homosexuals and not that you thought it was an actual Bible teaching that was in error.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time.
As for the older stuff that you mentioned (Creation, Flood, Destruction of Sodom, perhaps), I suppose that these stories would indeed either need to be passed by word of mouth or else given by direct inspiration from God.
Most of the later stuff in the Old Testament (really everything except for Genesis and parts of Exodus), though, was written down from the beginning.
Leviticus, for example, is recorded Ceremonial, Religious, Moral, and even Secular Law. This was VERY highly regarded and as such copied extremely carefully. In other words, when a priest or scribe was charged with copying a scroll, he was not allowed to copy line-by-line or word-by-word. Instead, he was required to copy letter-by-letter. All of the other scrolls were held in the same regard--they all either dealt with essentially History, Prophecy, or Law.
The scribes had some VERY strict laws on how to copy, which means that today, of the stuff that remains, there are fewer discrepancies among texts than with copies of any other ancient text.
I saw statistic once that compared Homer's Odyssey with the Old Testament. The OT is significantly longer and has more copies remaining. Statistically, that would mean there is a higher chance of error while copying as well as a higher chance of discrepancies among the surviving texts. This, however, is not the case. Homer's shorter work actually contains many more errors overall--not just per line, but over the course of a shorter book.
How you choose to interpret the Bible is up to you. But at least let it be said that the Bible was properly copied.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
A few other interesting tidbits on OT scribes:
*If a scribe made an error while copying, he had to completely start over on that page. He was not allowed to blot out a word and rewrite it.
*When a scribe completed a page, it was checked against his original. Every line was counted to ensure that each line had the same number of characters, and each page the same number of lines.
*When a scribe came across the name of God, the vowel symbols were never written, leaving (a transliterated) YHVH.
*Even though the scribe was writing the full name of God, he was still required to ceremonially wash his hands and break his stylus before continuing.
Pretty cool, huh? :)
Re:Edifying (Score:0, Informative)
I find it fascinating that there is no physical evidence that Yeshua/Jesus even existed. Yet we have these scrolls, and we have artifacts from older times, and bones and teeth and imprints of tissue from animals centuries before the Roman Occupation of Judea.
People will believe whatever they want to believe, including ghosts, martians and tantric sex.
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Informative)
Blotting out ink on sheepskin parchment really doesn't work. The Torah scrolls are works of art, having messy blots all over would rather ruin that.
All words in the Torah are written without vowels. Hebrew pretty much never uses vowels, except for teaching children. The "name of god" is also written as Yid Yid and "Hashem" (The Name) in various texts, though the Torah mostly uses Yid Hay Vav Hay.
Re:Edifying (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, aren't these, like, some of, if not THE, oldest writings in the world?
Not even close. You could spend your entire life reading Greek and Chinese documents 1,000 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. The oldest writing comes from the Chinese, followed by the Sumerians and Babylonians.
Re:Edifying (Score:3, Informative)
But, one of the things they have a very good track record on is maintaining the integrity of their key books.
Which religions are you thinking of? The only really good example is the Book of Mormon. Most other religious have periodically revised their religious texts.
But to just say that religions have had their primary texts re-written many times? Well that is just wrong.
Some religions, sure. Judaism in particular. The Torah was re-written around 500BC to remove polytheistic references (as the Jews converted to monotheism) and to either re-wrote Genesis and Exodus to make Egyptians the bad guys (due to recent wars with them), or just made the story up at that time.
The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew and Luke) were revised, most scholars believe they were based on an earlier document called "Q". John is in many ways a revision of the narrative in Mark. Now, that's not "many times", but they were revised.