Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Ancient Jewish Lore 127
First time accepted submitter aravenwood writes "The New York Times and the Times of Israel report today that artificial intelligence and a network of 100 computers in a basement in Tel Aviv University are being used to match 320,000 fragments of documents dating as far back as the 9th century in an attempt to reassemble the original documents. Since the trove of documents from the Jewish community of Cairo was discovered in 1896 only about 4000 of them have been pieced together, and the hope is that the new technique, which involves taking photographs of the fragments and using image recognition and other algorithms to match the language, spacing, and handwriting style of the text along with the shape of the fragment to other fragments could revolutionize not only the study of this trove documents, which has been split up into 67 different collections around the world since its discovery, but also how humanities disciplines study documents like these. They expect to make 12 billion comparisons of different fragments before the project is completed — they have already performed 2.8 billion. Among the documents, some dating from 950, was the discovery of letters by Moses Maimonides and that Cairene Jews were involved in the import of flax, linen, and sheep cheese from Sicily."
Re:discovery of God's true name.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:YHWH: the name above all [other] names (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for the information. My understanding is that devout Jews will not say the name YHWH as they see it as being sacred and it is profane to use it. Hence they use terms like "Ha Shem" == The Name, Adonai == Lord, Melek Ha Olam == King of the World etc. Sorry, my Hebrew is very poor. The take-away is that the ancient Hebrews would use substitutes instead of invoking the personal name of God. In contrast, Islam uses the word "Allah", which comes from "il illah", "The (One) God", which is a title and not a personal name.
Also note that despite the claims of the Muslims that Allah is the God of Abraham, this claim must be false when scriptures are compared. See the following for such a comparison, which concludes based on Islamic sources that Allah and YHWH cannot be be same (in fact, Allah has the *opposite* attributes of YHWH, read into that what you will): http://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/god.htm [answering-islam.org]
Similarly, when scripture is compared the Islamic "Mehdi" pretty much has the characteristics given of a Christian Anti-Christ (there is more than one, this one just happens to be the one most detailed in Revelations). I'm an atheist so "have no skin in the game", I'm just giving a comparison of mythologies since that comparison is not known even to most religious and educated people.
Re:YHWH: the name above all [other] names (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a few points:
Except that they both use the same original scriptures. Islam just adds on the words of their prophet similar to what Christianity does.
Except that the concept of "anti-Christ" does not exist in the original scriptures. Only in the addendum of the Christians.
The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.
From your link:
Are you obligated to consider MY fan-fiction to be canonical? Am I obligated to consider YOUR fan-fiction to be canonical? Particularly when the ORIGINAL material was a "shared-world" effort with lots of individual contributors who dealt with a lot of allegories and parables and such.
When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly.
Whomever wrote the link that you linked to has a religious point-of-view.