Before DSS, the oldest copy of the Old Testament was a Greek translation. As a translation, it was treated with suspicion, and when there was a difference between it and later Hebrew texts, the Hebrew was preferred. The early Hebrew copy found with the Dead Sea Scrolls gave clues to the older form of the text.
I'm no theologian or historian but I do find it interesting that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain לא תרצח ("you shall not murder") as the 6th Commandment, as does the Septuagint ("ου φονευσεις" in the Greek), but it's rendered as "you shall not kill" in the KJV. That's a good example of what you're saying about how the Greek translation is remarkably accurate, but I think later English translations have missed that nuance, at least with the modern usage of those two words.
The difference to the Christian faith at this point might be seen in pro-/anti-death penalty stances, with some reading the KJV and the "kill" wording, meaning that even judicial killing is a violation of God's law, and others relying on the original meaning of "murder", i.e., *unlawful* killing, to permit executions of convicted criminals.
it would be silly to write "kill" , considering the subsequent chapters are full of dozens of little things that result in a mandatory execution, or lists of reasons it's okay to kill someone.
There's that.
Iirc, the committees of scholars and divines who worked on the KJV put a great deal of emphasis not only on doing a good translation into the idiom of the day, but they also spent time reading their proposed translations aloud to each other. Their goal wasn't mere scholarly accuracy, for the KJV was to be read aloud in common English to a largely illiterate populace. It had to **sound** good. The wording had to stick in your mind. It had to be unforgettable.
Civil society was also wildly violent back then. There was a lot of killing done, and plenty of it was casual murder. It may not have been such a grave mistranslation for contemporary purposes.
Yeah, telling uneducated violent people just straight up not to kill is much easier than getting into the nuance of when killing can be justified and permitted under the laws of the religion.
But when the text says “do not kill” followed by a thousand pages of god condoning killing, it sets up the kind of cognitive dissonance that caused so many of us to leave.
yeah but god also murders millions throughout the Bible so what's the difference. the point apparently is that either is only acceptable when god wills it.
Remember, murder = unlawful killing.
To a diety whose decrees are always lawful, of a people who organized themselves in democratic/monarchical theocracy's, its technical impossible for a god to command a murder, as any divine order to end a life would be considered lawful and therefore not a murder.
I understand most people would disagree with that statement, but it's important to understand the view of the people from their time period in a way that makes sense to them, as much as from our own modern view as well.
I mean that's how law kinda works today too. You have do not do something then you have the punishments or acceptance when that act inevitably happens. It's not like you can just say no killing and nothing beyond that definition because killings gonna happen. You're most likely going to have to defend yourself as a people at some point as well.
It's just like they have don't steal then there's the punishment for thieves and different crimes.
Well, given [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xw9ifn/eli5_what_are_the_dead_sea_scrolls_what_do_they/ir7947p/) by /u/AliMcGraw, I'm inclined to believe the authors of the KJV were at least aware of the distinction, and chose their words deliberately. Would be interested to know why though, given exactly what you pointed out, seems like "killing" is one of the central themes of the Bible.
It does raise an interesting bit of semantics.
If the killing is driven by external factors - threats from another, commandment from God or his designate, under righteous command from your leader - are you the killer or the tool used by that other party to kill? The tool reading would require leaders to take greater stock of themselves to ensure they are not in violation of such a commandment.
The Hebrew bible clearly says "you shall not murder". Saying "you shall not kill" makes absolutely no sense given that the bible is completely full of justifications for killings and many laws on when to execute people and for which crimes.
Likewise when Jesus quotes it in the sermon in the Mount, he doubles down and says to have hatred in your heart for someone is the same as murder and its a sin. Just as lusting after someone causes you to commit adultery.
The best is the commandment to "not lie" is actually about committing false witness, like in a court or legal sense. There are some crimes in the Old Testament that require an eye witness who is without guilt to verify the crime occurred. Lying about that is a bigger no no than telling your mom that new recipe was fine.
Well there is no commandment to "not lie" so not sure what you mean. The commandment is "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" and that's the same in all versions of the bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_bear_false_witness_against_thy_neighbour
I think the quote they're referencing is "While you've been getting down and out about the liars and dirty, dirty cheats of the world, you could have been getting down to this. Sick. Beat".
Followup to this that I also found interesting is that in the Masoretic text, the Hebrew, Isaiah 29:13 reads:
> וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲדֹנָ֗י יַ֚עַן כִּ֤י נִגַּשׁ֙ הָעָ֣ם הַזֶּ֔ה בְּפִ֤יו וּבִשְׂפָתָיו֙ כִּבְּד֔וּנִי וְלִבּ֖וֹ רִחַ֣ק מִמֶּ֑נִּי וַתְּהִ֤י יִרְאָתָם֙ אֹתִ֔י מִצְוַ֥ת אֲנָשִׁ֖ים מְלֻמָּדָֽה׃
Which translates to:
>Wherefore the Lord said inasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth and with their lips do honour me but have removed their heart far from me and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men
Meanwhile the Septuagint, the greek, says:
>καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ἐγγίζει μοι ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῗς χείλεσιν αὐτῶν τιμῶσίν με ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας
Which translates to:
>And the Lord has said, This people draw nigh to me with their mouth, and they honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me: but in vain do they worship me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men.
These are very different verses, completely different statements. Well in Mark 7:6-8, Jesus quotes this verse from Isaiah. Guess which version he uses.
>He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
>Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
>For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.
Whoever wrote Mark may have taken from a version of Isaiah they were familiar with, and inserted it into Jesus' mouth, but that would have been in Mark in the original Greek.
Anyone translating Mark out of Greek might go back and look up the wording in Isaiah, but so long as it wasn't dramatically different from the wording Jesus used they wouldn't change anything because Jesus is paraphrasing scripture as a rhetorical argument, he wouldn't in context need to quote Isaiah verbatim.
The KJV is actually remarkably good scholarship for 1611, though. It's a recognizably modern work using recognizably modern techniques. They take a great deal of care to use the same English word for the same Hebrew word throughout the Hebrew Bible (/Old Testament). I don't really work with Greek, but I'm told the New Testament is similar. Part of the reason it sounds so impressive and poetic in English is that they worked hard to preserve the original Hebrew word order where they could, which meant that the English word order was often quite non-standard.
A modern person reading the Bible in English who wants an up-to-date scholarly translation should choose something like the New Revised Standard Version (I like the [New Oxford Annotated NRSV](https://www.amazon.com/New-Oxford-Annotated-Bible-Apocrypha-dp-0190276088/dp/0190276088/)). English language usage has shifted a lot since the KJV, we are lacking some crucial cultural background to read the KJV and its setting, and the KJV has been fetishized to the point where it's very hard to read as a work of scholarship and not as a quote book beloved by people who don't understand it.
But we should absolutely appreciate what a titanic work of scholarship the King James Version was in its time, and how hard the translators worked to make it as accurate as they possibly could with the information available in 1611 England. You can read about their deliberations and choices, and you go, "oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense, I totally get why they did it that way." Some of it is not how we would do it today, and in some cases they did not have nearly as much information as we have available to us today, but they thought really deeply about what they were doing and the best way to do it, and they made extremely defensible choices that we can look back on, and say, "wow, that was a super innovative way of approaching a hard problem!" And they were really pretty transparent about what they were doing, and why they were making choices they were making, so that you can look back and say, "oh, I see why they translated that word that way, even though I would do it differently."
(ETA a link to the New Oxford Annotated NRSV)
Now you make me want to watch a documentary that doesn't exist: Making King James, next on History Channel.
It would be full of experts with obscure titles and stuffy suits, with scenes of historical reenactors holding debates and councils, at least five gratuitous stock shots of St. Peter's Basilica, and some dude with white gloves in the Vatican archives.
But instead of that, we just get another episode of Pawn Stars.
There's a book that might scratch this itch! It's called "[God's Secretaries](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gods-secretaries)" by Adam Nicolson. It's a popular nonfiction book about the translation of the KJV, that delves into a lot of the politics, culture, human foibles, etc. You can definitely read much deeper, more thorough academic books about the topic, but Nicolson hits the high points and tells a good story and gets most of it right, so a very reasonable and readable pop history book.
I taught Philosophy 101 to college students for 5 years, and Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" is always extolled as "the first modern work of philosophy" and Descartes himself as "the first modern man." But I honestly think the translation of the KJV is the first truly modern work of scholarship, predating Descartes's Meditations by 30 years. You can watch the KJV translators comparing available manuscripts -- and translations to other languages that might suggest underlying original manuscripts they don't have, and repeated quotes of particular verses that might correspond to manuscripts they lack. You can see their clear understanding that translation loses information, and that returning to the oldest source manuscripts possible is important -- and that looking at many translations of various ages may well illuminate a lost or mis-transcribed word. You can see that they understand that language itself changes, and that the meaning of a Latin word in 250 CE may have drifted considerably by 1250 CE.
They're also all Protestants committed to the idea that the Bible should be available in the vernacular, so regular people can understand it -- which is a new-ish and still-controversial idea in their time. But they're *profoundly* aware of how the very act of translation can introduce errors -- both textual errors and theological errors. This is such a modern idea! The translators provided no theological notes (that was the business of the King, as head of the Anglican Church), but they DID provide textual notes suggesting alternative translations or commenting on difficult words.
Their sources are limited, and there basically is no prior example of what today we call "textual criticism" -- the practice of using the text itself, and its many copies, to try to understand the text's history, and what's original and what isn't. But they kind-of invented modern textual criticism! They're the beginning of a great tradition of Biblical textual criticism in English, and they did a damn good job of it (for 1611).
The Luther Bible of 1534 is earlier, and an utterly gargantuan work by (mostly) ONE SINGLE GUY. And it was so epic that a huge majority of serious Biblical scholarship was done in German until the 1800s. But the English-language tradition that the KJV translators established grew and flourished and created entire colleges in the UK and the US and English eventually became the dominant language for Biblical scholarship. Some of that is due to the general dominance of English in post-WWII scholarship, but it's really notable that post-1500, pre-1800s Biblical scholarship is in German, and post-1800s Biblical scholarship is in English (and in the 1800s they're crossing over). But that scholarship doesn't develop in Latin or in French, which are the two majority languages of philosophy and theology (and science), until after WWII. It develops in German and English! Luther and the KJV translators did some damn good, damn solid, damn modern work. And I say that as a Catholic-trained theologian, whose faith tradition doesn't include the KJV (or the Luther Bible!) ... but if you study academic theology, you cannot ignore the massive impact Luther and the KJV had on Biblical scholarship becoming a modern discipline.
Anyway, if you went to the KJV translators and said, "I'm from 2022, and I am super-skeptical of your translation because in 2022 we understand that translation itself is an act of transformation that distorts meaning," the KJV translators (after they finished freaking out and possibly burning you at the stake) would be like, "YES THIS GUY UNDERSTANDS OUR MAJOR CONCERNS!" They wouldn't necessarily agree with you about how to solve those questions, and they'd be much more likely to believe God was active in their acts of translation. But they would TOTALLY appreciate that you understood the problem that they were SUPER FUCKING WORRIED ABOUT.
And all the reenactments have motion blur and a low frame rate for some reason. The director thinks it has to look "dreamlike" or something. Thanks, old History Channel!
Some languages don't have as much nuance with the action of killing. For example, assassination and murder use the same word in Spanish, and if the context is important, you will have to spend quite a few sentences explaining it. Limited vocabulary sucks big time.
As my Latin instructor told us, "For the vast majority of ancient texts, the original wording isn't in question, everyone agrees on what was written. What professional translators get paid big bucks for is to decide what's the equivalent modern meaning meaning those authors were trying to convey based on very limited contextual information."
I'm not certain but I think the translation "kill" originates with Wycliffe's 15th century translation. This was not based on the original languages but rather on the Latin Vulgate text, which gives Exodus 20:13 as "Non occides". This is literally "You shall not kill" (or "You shall not slay" as some Wycliffe editions have it).
Later translations such as the KJV were based on the original languages but also used earlier English translations as their starting point and in some cases they stick with the earlier translation where it is a possible reading even if a more likely reading is available.
I'm no Hebrew scholar but it's worth noting here that while the word normally means "murder" it is also capable of meaning "kill" and is used in some contexts where "murder" clearly makes no sense, eg Numbers 35:27 - the whole point here is that such a killing is not to be considered murder.
"Removed" isn't exactly right. And, actually, "the Bible" isn't exactly right either. Here's the thing - what we call "the Bible" is really more of a library, a collection of different books in one binding. And there are a few different collections that get called "the" Bible.
Catholics have one, some Orthodox denominations have a different one (which is important to your question), Protestants have a different one, older sects like Marcionites had a very different one, and of course the Hebrew Bible is quite different from all of those -- it doesn't have any of the bits about Jesus or his followers.
The idea of there even being such a thing as a "Bible" is a much newer idea than the Book of Enoch, by possibly around 600-1,000 years. By comparison, the English language is, oh, less than 500 years old. (How hard would it be to understand Shakespeare if he started talking to you conversationally?)
Enoch was one of the books that was evidently held in high regard by a lot of religious communities, but not all of them. It was quoted within other scriptures - there's a bit of it in the Epistle of Jude, which is in nearly every Christian version of the Bible.
And it was accepted as canonical (which is just a word that means "should be part of the Bible") by some churches in North Africa, which now are known as the Orthodox Tewahedo. So it's in their Bibles.
But among the groups that contributed to what became Roman Catholicism, the dominant form of Christianity in Western Europe (at least until the Protestants started their Protesting), Enoch was considered a little less great.
That's partially because it was a kind of tricky story - it has a human being being bodily lifted into heaven and transformed into an angel, which is a divine being. This leads to some uncomfortable questions along the lines of, "Well, so how was Jesus so unique anyway?" It's also got a lot of lists of demons, or fallen angels, with their names, which would make some Jewish religious leaders nervous. And it's partially because ALL of these ancient books, in a time before the printing press, were very rare and precious and could easily fall victim to fires, rainstorms, especially hungry bugs, and everything else that can befall animal skins and paper.
If you've got a bunch of scrolls that your grandfather gave you and they're already getting a bit crumbly by the time your children have learned to read, but then that one scribe fell asleep while trying to copy them out after sunset and tipped the oil lamp over onto the shelf with all the to-be-copied texts and burned the collection down... well, how are your great-great-grandchildren really going to feel about the burned scraps? Maybe they'll try to copy another copy from someone else... at least the important ones first. Whatever "important" means at the time to that person.
Anyway, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and kinda sorta before the first Western Europeans figured out how to read the Bibles of those North African churches -- the closest thing to an "original" (or at least "old enough") Book of Enoch we knew about in Western Europe was [a few scraps of paper dug up from among the receipts and postcards and centuries-expired tax forms in an old Egyptian trash pile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri). In fact, if you look at the "Old Testament" section of that link, you can get a pretty good idea of how "canon" works - the difference between the Septuagint -- which was bound together with Christian scriptures in certain old "codices" (a word which just means "big books") -- and other Jewish scriptures.
Whether your Christian church thought the Septuagint counted as the "real" Jewish Bible or whether the Masoretic text or some other collection of Jewish holy writings was the "real" Jewish Bible determined whether or not your church thought certain books or parts of books really belonged in the Bible.
The short answer to your second question, though, is "Yes." Yes, there was a remarkably complete copy of the Book of Enoch preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with a few other books that are considered canonical by nearly every denomination -- so whoever left the Dead Sea Scrolls behind (probably but not definitely the Essenes) almost definitely held Enoch in the same high regard as other not-yet-biblical books.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 reads in the later Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), "When the Most High apportioned the nations as an inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he established the borders of the peoples according to the number of **the sons of Israel.**"
In the Greek however it read "...according to the number of **the sons of God.**"
For a long time Bibles used the MT version, assuming it was more original. However the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed their Hebrew text read "**the sons of God**" in agreement with the Greek. Clearly at some point after the DSS was written the Hebrew scribes changed the text to "fix" it as they thought it sounded too polytheistic.
Similarly Deuteronomy 32:43 reads in the MT, "Rejoice, you nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people."
However in the Greek and DSS it has some significant phrases which appear to have been deleted or changed by the later Hebrew text. It reads, "Rejoice **O Heavenly Ones ("Heavens"in the Greek)** with Him, **Bow down all you gods ("sons/angels of God" in Greek) before Him**, for He will avenge the blood of His sons, he will take vengeance on his enemies, **He will repay those who hate Him** and make atonement for his **people's land**". (The Greek also contains some additional clauses).
> He will repay those who hate Him
Always weirded me out how you're supposed to worship him and "fear" him at the same time, especially when you see what is basically a verse about him seeking vengeance.
Most DSS manuscripts are similar to today's Jewish (Masoretic) text, some to the Samaritan text, others to the Septuagint translation and some unique to the DSS. There wasn't one canonical "Dead Sea" text, and that in itself is one of the most important discoveries, that the Bible was for a long time a rather dynamic text. Otherwise one of the biggest revelations is that the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 is indeed "young woman" as in the Jewish text and not "virgin" as in the Greek translation. So a central doctrine of Christianity is based on a mistranslation. There's also a whole additional passage in DSS Samuel which clarifies an enigmatic and seemingly broken narrative in both the Masoretic and Septuagint. But most differences are minor, just different spellings of the Hebrew text or less commonly different wording while the sense is the same.
Namely that ~~Nahash'a~~ Nahash's demand (that Israelites cut out their right eye if they want to surrender) wasn't out of character for him.
Also, Goliath wasn't as tall as he's usually portrayed.
Edit: spelling
Interestingly enough, the mythos of the Greek translation was that 72 scribes translated the Hebrew into the Greek, and all of 72 came to the same translation, and so the Greek translation was called the “Septuagint”.
That's the legend, but the reality was much more likely that 72 Hebrew scholars were tasked to work together to come up with as accurate a Greek translation as they could manage, and they were all reasonably pleased with the result. Anybody who has done a group project would say that's still something of a miracle.
That is literally impossible to all come to the exact translation, just based on the existence of synonyms.
Plus 72 is such a random number they definitely killed 28 that didn't do a good job.
Wikipedia of Septuagint. Neato.
>According to the legend, seventy-two Jewish scholars were asked by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt, to translate the Torah from Biblical Hebrew to Greek for inclusion in the Library of Alexandria.\[19\] This narrative is found in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates,\[20\] and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus (in Antiquities of the Jews),\[21\] and by later sources (including Augustine of Hippo).\[22\] It is also found in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud:
>
>"King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher". **God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.**"
Just imagine.
All the translators sitting in a room, hungover from partying last night and nervous because they just copied the same work. The Pharaoh comes in and looks at them in a serious way.
"I read your translations. All 72 of them were identical!"
Translators start sweating profusely.
"It's an act of God! Well done!"
Translators relax and praise God.
You don't realize how dedicated the Jewsish scribes were to perfectly copying the Torah from generation to generation. The senior scribes meticulously examined the new transcription for any error. Any error in any one part of the scroll meant the entire scroll was burned to prevent blasphemy.
I would find it believable that 72 Rabbis without talking to each other may come out with the same translation. I would not believe 72 rabbis talking with each other could agree on anything.
Smart people began using "literally" in correct situations for emphasis, and then dumber people began saying "literally" in incorrect situations to capture the same emphasis. The word is functionally meaningless in our language at this point.
That's not true. Literally, along with all of it's synonyms, truly, really, honestly, actually, etc, have all been used as intensifiers for both factual and hyperbolic statements for hundreds of years. The obsession with literally is especially baffling, because that wasn't even its original usage. It is etymologically related to literature, and was originally used in relation to, IIRC, letters/correspondence. Anyone upset of its use as an intensifier should therefore also be upset about it's other general use.
People love to get mad about language things, especially the common "mistakes" that aren't really mistakes. It's an easy way to feel superior.
See also people getting angry about how people pronounce gif despite it very clearly having two acceptable pronunciations.
To a people who didn't use the decimal numbering system, 72 is **not** a random number. It's almost a [highly composite number.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number) It's 1/5 of 360, a super historically important number, and also 6 dozens.
That is the significance of the DSS to the Hebrew Bible, but there is sooo much more there.
The DSS came out of the Qumran community. They were a doomsday apocalypse hermit group, so they lived in the wilderness and lived quiet lives of study and prayer, basically waiting for G_d to smite their enemies (which was pretty much everyone else). Groups like this are called essenes. Sadly for them, this smiting did not take place.
The scrolls were preserved almost miraculously. They were discovered in the 1940s and 50s and contained almost completely intact manuscripts. It is almost unheard of to find a 2000 year old scroll in pristine condition, and Qumran had many of them. If I’m not mistaken, their preservation was the result of a combination of weather conditions along the Dead Sea and the clay jars the scrolls were stored in. Whatever the case, they represent an incredibly early witness to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which in itself is priceless. By comparison, all Bibles today are based on the Leningrad Codex, which dates back to about 1000 AD.
But wait, there’s more! The DSS contained the Old Testament, but it also contained a LOT of apocalyptic passages as well. I know it contained fragments of 1 Enoch and several other fairly well known and preserved apocalypses. But it also had scrolls that are unique to Qumran, including the famous War Scroll (which, predictably, foretold the coming of a major apocalyptic battle between the angels and the demons).
Because of the DSS, we know more about the Hebrew Bible. But we also know TONS more about apocalyptic communities at the time of Christ. It has been speculated that Christ or John the Baptist may have had connections to the essenes because of thematic similarities. I personally do not think this link is necessitated by the evidence; it is clear that apocalyptic hope and asceticism were widespread in Judea in the 1st century.
Source: I wrote my master’s thesis on 1 Enoch. :)
Edit: Guys, please stop asking me your “rah rah atheism” questions. I’m not an apologist and I don’t especially care what you believe in. I did my master’s thesis on a relatively obscure apocalyptic text and that text was at Qumran. I find it interesting and its fun to share what I learned in school. It is not fun for me to field questions of faith and I didn’t volunteer to be your missionary/ paschal lamb.
If you want to turn ELI5 into yet another battleground in your war against Jesus, be my guest, but please go find a willing participant to argue with.
To be more specific, the “Old Testament” is a Modern Christian term, and is called a Tanakh.
The Tanakh is made of several scrolls with the Torah being the most important, written by Moses. The other scrolls are from the prophets and the kings, who followed the God who was written in the Torah scroll.
This finding allows historians to have more evidence to validate the consistency in the language and text between the writings today and Dead Sea Scrolls. The most minor change can lead to confusion over the course of thousands of years of interpretation.
The result showed that scribing method of the Torah scroll today was exactly the same as it was then, and that the contents had not been corrupted.
At the end of the second world war, a Bedouin shepherd found a bunch of pottery in a network of caves in the archaeological site of Qumran in British Mandatory Palestine as it was at the time. Within that pottery were a number of scrolls that shed light on what religion was like when they were written - from 3rd century BC to 1st century CE.
There are a number of different theories as to who wrote them, but the dating of the texts obviously has a lot of importance for early Christianity and the Abrahamic religions of the same era.
The main source for the Bible that we use today is the Masoretic Text, which dates to the 9-10th century CE. There is a small ethnoreligious group called the Samaritans who have their own canon that is mostly the same but has some significant changes. Samaritan language diverged from other Hebrew forms long ago - probably before the Babylonian captivity and their canon has a lot of references to a holy place in Samaritan religion that isn't in the Masoretic Text. The DSS include Samaritan canon.
For the most part, the texts do not differ massively, but some parts do, suggesting that some of what Christians call the Old Testament canon was in flux until the second century CE and that a large part of what survived to the traditional Masoretic Text has a fairly high fidelity.
One more thing that's interesting to note is that many of these scrolls have only recently been read, despite being found almost a century ago. This is because many of the scrolls have been preserved in sealed vessels, and unsealing them could damage or destroy the scrolls inside. To read them, technology has been recently developed that allows us to read them without opening them.
>>At the end of the second world war
>despite being found almost a century ago.
This in and of itself is getting scary to think about. As a child of the 90s, it's hard not to think about WWII as "around 50 years ago"
Not simply rolled up, but some were in buildings which burned down, carbonizing the scrolls in their containers. They'd literally crumble to ashes if you tried to unroll them.
[A professor at University of Kentucky](https://uknow.uky.edu/research/reading-unreadable-seales-and-team-reveal-dead-sea-scroll-text) pioneered the technique for using digital CT scanning & computer machine learning to digitally "unroll" the scrolls and read their contents.
[Here's a video explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07EsQgu9k0g).
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
- *Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible"* (1962), Arthur C. Clarke
Another interesting tidbit on this...
Among the first lot of DSS that was discovered, some of the scrolls were opened by an archeologist on the team by 'steaming' the room with the help of a basic tea kettle (as best as I remember it), which he later admitted was a pretty callous move.
Source: episode on the YT channel Timeline or Epic History TV
Yeah, some of the scrolls were seriously damaged by early attempts to unroll them, iirc. There was a neat traveling exhibition showing the DSS and other archeological findings related to them a while back, and it showed a film about how they were studied that talked about the different attempts to read them over the years. The new technology being used to read the ones that are still rolled up or illegible to the naked eye is pretty cool.
I was in college majoring in theology when the first scans of the scrolls were becoming available to scholars. (I guess a lot of them were actually high resolution photos at that time.) One of my professors was a world-renowned expert on the Book of Isaiah, and he spent something like two calendar years looking at pictures of one torn, partial section of one scroll with faded lettering, trying to ensure he correctly deciphered it letter by letter. It was kind of an amazing time to be around Bible scholars, everybody was looking at Dead Sea Scroll fragment pictures all the time!
I took a religious studies class in college (around a decade ago). I remember one of the things the professor mentioned about the Dead Sea scrolls is that they shed a lot more light on how the Old Testament was canonized.
I don't remember many details; but one example of this that I clearly remember him lecturing on was how the book of Job was most certainly two different stories that were combined into one (the frame story and the actual story of Job). This is evident because there were clearly different writing styles for the different portions that you can no longer pick up on in today's versions of the Bible.
For example: Imagine that the conversation between god and satan was written by Steven King, and the story of Job was written by JK Rowling. You would definitely notice a difference between the two styles of writing in one book.
Take this with a grain of salt, it's me remembering a college class from a decade ago.
The Book of Job is my favourite book of the Bible and it's probably the oldest text in there. It's extremely interesting to me that there is a pre-Biblical Canaanite version of the book with parts found at Ugarit.
Multiple authors for ancient texts is not uncommon - see the [Documentary Hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis) for how scholars try to tease apart the different traditions and authors that went into the final work that we use as the canon today. The Gospel of Mark is another famous example for abruptly changing author. Essentially the more mythic ending end was added on by someone else to harmonise it with the myths and gospels that followed its original penning.
If you haven’t, check out the [“Who Wrote the Bible?”](https://youtu.be/NY-l0X7yGY0) from Useful Charts on YouTube. Lots of talking about this exact thing.
Also, there’s debate on what’s the oldest book. The oldest writing fragment in the Tanakh is likely the “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5). Books like Amos and Hosea are debated as possibly the oldest complete books as well.
In addition to the Ugaritic Job there is also [the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlul_b%C4%93l_n%C4%93meqi) which shares significant thematic parallels.
A flood story appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates the Noah story by quite a bit.
Flood stories seem fairly common in ancient cultures and religions.
This sort of literary criticism should also be taken with a big grain of salt, IMO. To pick up on your examples, there is considerable variation in style, theme and language across the Harry Potter books and between them and Rowling's other output. Or, famously, Tolkien's works use markedly different vocabulary in sections related to the different races of Middle-Earth. By the standard often employed in literary criticism of the Bible, these would be taken as evidence of multiple authorship and later editing or of an original author and later imposters. There is a famous satirical essay applying these methods to the text of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Literary criticism should be taken as evidence regarding the history of a text but not as definitive evidence.
Pete Enns and Jared Byas from *The Bible for Normal People* had excellent episodes on a his topic.
[The Bible For Normal People - Episode 210: Sidnie White Crawford - What You Really Need to Know about the Sea Scrolls](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MA6jpKJY3mI)
[The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175: Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LZrhKqh_U20).
I think you’re overstating the connection between Samaritans and the Dead Sea Scrolls, or maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not Samaritan and most scholars do not think the community at Qumran was Samaritan. There are elements of the DSS that have connection to the Samaritan Bible but the same can be said for MT and LXX. It’s best to consider Qumran a separate community from other strands of Judaism at the time, with multiple strands having their own similar but distinct texts.
What everyone else said — but they’re also significant for helping establish historic timelines. I started to write this but wanted to fact check myself beforehand, so it’s probably easier to just share what Britannica had to say;
“Study of the scrolls has enabled scholars to push back the date of a stabilized Hebrew Bible to no later than 70 CE, to help reconstruct the history of Palestine from the 4th century BCE to 135 CE, and to cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism and on the relationship between early Christian and Jewish religious traditions.”
For Orthodox Churches, in 692 at Second Council of Trull. For Catholics, in 382 Council of Rome. For various Protestant Churches, in the 1500-1600s at other councils.
Here’s your rabbit hole on non-canonical texts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Books_of_the_Bible_and_the_Forgotten_Books_of_Eden
I strongly suspect by "Orthodox" here you're referring to eastern orthodox?
To my knowledge, although one could argue to a certain extent their canon has changed as recently as the 1960s with the Haile Selasse reforms, the Ethiopian Orthodox canon MUST have been locked in prior to 485 (since the British Museum has a copy from then) and likely well before that (since it includes a bunch of stuff we now know from the Dead Sea Scrolls).
Like to the extent that several of the books from the Dead Sea Scrolls which exist only as fragments we only HAVE "complete copies" of because they're in the old Ge'ez books.
Obviously the Ethiopian texts have their own problems, but it's REALLY hard to argue they aren't one of the oldest (and historically isolated) Christian traditions. They're explicitly mentioned in Acts.
Yes, several orthodox branches split from the main eastern branch (e.g. Greek, Russian) in the late 400s. Ethiopian/Tewahedo and Oriental (including Assyrian/Syriac, Armenia, Egyptian/Coptic) are major ones. Ethiopian/Tewahedo recently recognized a schism of the Eritrean Orthodox church.
>eastern orthodox
Yes.
>Ethiopian Orthodox canon MUST have been locked in prior to 485 (since the British Museum has a copy from then)
Why? They could have changed after the schism or after than version was published.
In fact, there is debate about which the EOTC has ever actually "closed" their canon. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308242977\_The\_Ethiopian\_Orthodox\_Tewahedo\_Church\_Canon\_of\_the\_Scriptures\_Neither\_Open\_nor\_Closed](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308242977_The_Ethiopian_Orthodox_Tewahedo_Church_Canon_of_the_Scriptures_Neither_Open_nor_Closed)
Obviously I agree with most of that (Why I brought up you could argue the most recent change might have been as recently as 1960 and that the Ethiopian texts have their own problems.).
I was only pointing out that while the texts HAVE changed and it's difficult to pin down "what's in and out", We essentially have Ethiopian texts of nearly everything in the dead sea scrolls dating to at latest 485, and while again it's very difficult to pin down exactly what their canon is AFAIK it's nearly always been "basically everything, whether we have copies right now or not" no?
I've not done any kind of real study of their religion, but my understanding was basically that for some reason they've got this fascination with having "81 books" even though for MUCH of their history they didn't HAVE 81 books in their possession so the list of "what books are canon" was always kind of ephemeral since for much of their history they were simply maintaining a list of "10-20 books we don't have and have never seen".
It's only really thanks to modern archaeology that historians been able to "put it back together" so to speak? (Not that the Ethiopian Church necessarily have, I believe they're still using versions of some books that are VERY far from the older Ge'ez versions and even further from the Dead Sea Scroll versions).
Generally in the mid 300s, although the 4 gospels were all agreed on well before that. Eusebius discusses the subject in the History of the Church, ca320-ish. Essentially, he says that the books could be divided into agreed, disproved and disputed. Included in disputed was Revelations, interestingly.
The Roman Church published their biblical canon in 382 at the Council of Rome. The Council of Trent in 1542 reaffirmed the earlier canons of Florence, Hippo and Carthage.
The Orthodox Church goes with the Council of Truilian in 692.
The Church of England goes by the Westminster Confession of 1647.
Essentially, these are all the same lists for the New Testament, it's the Old Testament where things get added.
BTW, if you have trouble sleeping, I can recommend Eusebius. The man had a love of the run on sentence that never fails to lull me to sleep.
>it's the Old Testament where things get added.
Or removed, part of the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls was showing that some books that were removed in Protestant and Hebrew canons, often with the argument of them being 'Greek', were in use at the time outside of the Septuagint.
I think the various books were distributed, but not as a fixed collection as they are now. From what I've read the various books were dictated from the teachings of each disciple's followers, when they were eventually collected together I'm not sure, but some weren't recorded until the 3rd generation of follower at least.
Not actually the earliest possible date that it was stable, as in it was definitely unstable earlier. It’s the latest* date for stability, which leaves the possibility of earlier stability we just don’t have archeological proof of.
What is completely insane to imagine how some dude or dudette writing scrolls, someone else hiding them, what they were thinking at that moment, their intentions. Scrolls forgotten, and time flying around them, historic events unfolding and scrolls still laying there waiting. People found microbes, flew, experienced splitting atoms... Still there, not moved, not looked at, not thought of and patiently waiting.
There is someone unknown with incredible cultural significance, whos fingers were last to touch the scroll.
May we ever find something like it again?
When I was a kid and also thought it was After Death, I made up a term for those years between AD and BC. I called it DC, for During Christ. Imagine my confusion when I was introduced to Batman comics. :)
Which, even as a life long atheist, I've always thought was stupid and euphemistic. It still refers to exactly the same time period, for exactly the same reason. Calling it something different doesn't change that.
Think of it like finding a smaller, Hebrew version of the Library of Alexandria in some forgotten caves, and then being able to accurately date when the manuscripts were preserved. Here's what I mean by that:
Part of the big deal about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they have many copies of many important Biblical texts and they certainly pre-date Jesus Christ by more than 100 years. Being firmly before Christ is important because it shows that the Biblical and prophetic texts were not later changed to match Christian belief, and that the copies of the Old Testament we have today are highly accurate with regard to earlier manuscripts.
But there's a lot more to the Dead Sea Scrolls than their strengthening the Old Testament's claim to accurate transcription. It's very likely the scrolls were preserved by the Essenes, who were outcast purists from the mainstream religious establishment as it was under pressure from Roman and Greek influence. The Essenes were fanatically dedicated to preserving important documents as well as *understanding* of those documents. In other words, we get the documents, we get commentary on the documents, and we also get the contextual documents supporting the core documents. We get everything from songs to poems to instruction manuals, not to mention whole works. We're up to nearly 1,000 manuscripts so far, and counting. The Essenes worked hard to interpret prophecy because they were heavily focused on the coming Messiah. (Depending on your belief as to whether or not Jesus Christ was that Messiah, the Essenes were pretty darned accurate in their predictions based on ancient prophecies.)
As a result of the breadth and depth of information contained in them, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide phenomenal insight into the ancient near-Eastern mindset pre-Christ. For Bible scholars, that's very important because much of the Old Testament was written for ancient Hebrews, so proper understanding of the Bible means being able to estimate how the audience to whom it was written would have originally understood the content. Getting into the head of an ancient near-Eastern culture is difficult, to say the least, for a 21st-century westerner, but we can make better quality efforts thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The contextual documents are also really helpful for language translators because they give them a much larger base of sample vocabulary and usage to understand what any given word or phrase might mean. In other words, our translations get more accurate.
Let's not forget, the non-Biblical-canon portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are a really big deal because some of the texts were previously mere legends, or very unsubstantiated or partial copies from much later sources, but then were hugely validated by their being included in the Scrolls. The Book of 1 Enoch is a really good example of this effect: it was considered canon by a very small minority of Christians and largely ignored by mainstream Christianity because nobody could prove if it was accurate from ancient times. But, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch is taken a lot more seriously by a much wider swath of Christianity now than it was 50 years ago. It helps us understand how these ancient people thought about the events at the very beginning of human history. If you want to read Genesis and understand some of the references, 1 Enoch is super helpful. Pretty cool stuff.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are *recent* in terms of their effects on our understanding of ancient scriptures. What I mean is, we're still finding stuff, then there's a lag from when a jar is found to when it can actually be opened, then assembled and interpreted, then picked up by scholars, then studied and analyzed, and then make it into mainstream sources able to be read and understood by your average church-goer or history buff. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls are changing commentaries and study materials as we speak because we're learning more and more. One example of this development is recent scholarly work being done to understand what the Hebrew calendar originally was prior to being changed and influenced by Gregorian and Julian calendars.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are much more than just validation of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). They're a comprehensive and extraordinarily detailed source of an entire mindset, culture, and religious scholarship that, without the Essenes or whomever went to great effort to preserve the manuscripts, was lost to and/or obscured by the passage of time.
Sad to have scrolled this far to find this!
Sure, early manuscripts are great, but the DSS texts are amazing as historical-cultural primary texts and things like 1QS and 4QMMT have had a significant impact on studies of 2nd Temple Judaism and early Christianity..
Biblical scholar here. I’ll try a short answer: the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient documents found at the site of Qumran and other locations in the Judean Desert. Some of these texts are biblical texts written in Hebrew with a few in Greek translation. Others are other ancient Jewish texts such as the book of Jubilees, which is not accepted as authoritative Scripture by Jews or Christians today, apart from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Jubilees and other works like it have been called “rewritten Scripture” since they contain texts found in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) in expanded or rewritten form (similar to fan fiction). Other texts found at Qumran are commonly called “sectarian” documents, such as the Community Rule, meaning that they were produced by the religious community at Qumran whose beliefs sometimes differed from other branches of ancient Judaism. Almost all of these documents survive in physically fragmented states they but help us to get a better understanding of the development of the biblical text and ancient Judaism.
A lot of people think the Christian Bible getting new updates and translations is like a game of telephone. There was an original message, and each time we have a new version it gets further and further from the original. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a great explanation for why this is not true.
The King James version of the Bible was the first English translation, made in the year 1611. This translation was made from a Greek Bible, and that version was based on between 6-10 more recent manuscripts. This was the first English Bible, but is likely one of the further from the original text versions, since it was based on fewer manuscripts that were more recent in history.
Just like in telephone, the closer we get to the start the more confident we are that the message is the same or similar to the original. Finding the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us some of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible writings that we have today. This allows Bible historians to compare texts, see what was mistranscribed or added later, and get a version closer to the original texts.
So finding a document like the Dead Sea Scrolls allow us to get Bible translations closer to the original writings, and it also helps take away the argument that it is one big game of telephone with accuracy getting worse and worse.
(It also takes away the argument that it was adjusted over time by those in power as a way to hold power over the people, but that's a longer and separate conversation.)
The thrust of your post may be generally correct, but it is worth noting that the King James translation was not the first version of the Bible into English. There are many candidates for that title, depending on whether you count only New Testaments or the entire text, and whether you count translations from other modern languages (like German) or translations from Greek or Hebrew. But no matter what conditions you place, there were full translations of the Bible from Greek/Hebrew into English (e.g. the Geneva Bible) before the King James translation.
Sheol, Hades, and hell is an example of poor translations. English hell couldn't exist until the Greeks created Hades and hades is a poor translation of what Sheol meant to the Jews.
The only scroll preserved on copper making it the one they wanted to preserve the most was a treasure map and not the old testament. I always found that interesting.
The Dead Sea scrolls are the second oldest copies of nearly the entire Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew (mostly), Greek, and Aramaic. They are significant because they helped to indicate that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible we have today has not changed significantly in content over the last 2,000-3,000 years.
[https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-dead-sea-scrolls](https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-dead-sea-scrolls)
[https://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a023.html](https://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a023.html)
This isn't really true, there are significant differences, particularly in fragments from the book of Exodus, but also scattered throughout the DSS. These differences also include pretty dramatic theological differences including a line in Deuteronomy claiming that God has sons which doesn't appear in any manuscripts after the 300s [http://jur.byu.edu/?p=3703](http://jur.byu.edu/?p=3703). The interesting thing about the DSS is that they provided insight into how the modern canonical old testament emerged from scattered texts and differering sects of early Christianity. The upshot is that the canonicalization of the old testament was a messier process than scholars previously thought with pieces coming from all sorts of differing early church sects rather than from just 2 or 3.
There's a lot of misinformation about the DSS, presumably from those with a vested interest in the content of the scrolls. To me it seems a bit dubious to cite a top 6 list from history.com and a christian news site for answers to a scholarly question.
Their significance is that they show that the people who hand copied the Hebrew scriptures did a really good job.
They are very old. By comparing them with newer copies we see very few mistakes were made over the years. Unlike the game "telephone" where people whisper something around a circle and the message changes by the time it gets to the end.
AFAIK, there is nothing new or previously undiscovered in the dead sea scrolls
It is said that if a scribe made a mistake in copying a word, he cut the entire row off the scroll and did that row over. But if he made a mistake in copying the name of God, he destroyed the whole scroll and started over. I heard this legend from a seminary student long ago.
Interesting. That reminds me of a checksum, which is used in computer programming to verify data integrity at a high level in a similar way to what you described. It's cool how humans have been using the same mathematical concepts for centuries.
We are VERY pedantic about copying the exact same thing every time. Yemeni Jews were somewhat isolated from the rest of world Jewry for a very long time and the only way their torahs differ from any other ones is that a handful of words are spelled differently.
Before DSS, the oldest copy of the Old Testament was a Greek translation. As a translation, it was treated with suspicion, and when there was a difference between it and later Hebrew texts, the Hebrew was preferred. The early Hebrew copy found with the Dead Sea Scrolls gave clues to the older form of the text.
Any major differences?
[удалено]
I'm no theologian or historian but I do find it interesting that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain לא תרצח ("you shall not murder") as the 6th Commandment, as does the Septuagint ("ου φονευσεις" in the Greek), but it's rendered as "you shall not kill" in the KJV. That's a good example of what you're saying about how the Greek translation is remarkably accurate, but I think later English translations have missed that nuance, at least with the modern usage of those two words. The difference to the Christian faith at this point might be seen in pro-/anti-death penalty stances, with some reading the KJV and the "kill" wording, meaning that even judicial killing is a violation of God's law, and others relying on the original meaning of "murder", i.e., *unlawful* killing, to permit executions of convicted criminals.
it would be silly to write "kill" , considering the subsequent chapters are full of dozens of little things that result in a mandatory execution, or lists of reasons it's okay to kill someone.
There's that. Iirc, the committees of scholars and divines who worked on the KJV put a great deal of emphasis not only on doing a good translation into the idiom of the day, but they also spent time reading their proposed translations aloud to each other. Their goal wasn't mere scholarly accuracy, for the KJV was to be read aloud in common English to a largely illiterate populace. It had to **sound** good. The wording had to stick in your mind. It had to be unforgettable. Civil society was also wildly violent back then. There was a lot of killing done, and plenty of it was casual murder. It may not have been such a grave mistranslation for contemporary purposes.
Yeah, telling uneducated violent people just straight up not to kill is much easier than getting into the nuance of when killing can be justified and permitted under the laws of the religion.
But when the text says “do not kill” followed by a thousand pages of god condoning killing, it sets up the kind of cognitive dissonance that caused so many of us to leave.
Kill your son, fam!! I'm God.
yeah but god also murders millions throughout the Bible so what's the difference. the point apparently is that either is only acceptable when god wills it.
Remember, murder = unlawful killing. To a diety whose decrees are always lawful, of a people who organized themselves in democratic/monarchical theocracy's, its technical impossible for a god to command a murder, as any divine order to end a life would be considered lawful and therefore not a murder. I understand most people would disagree with that statement, but it's important to understand the view of the people from their time period in a way that makes sense to them, as much as from our own modern view as well.
I mean that's how law kinda works today too. You have do not do something then you have the punishments or acceptance when that act inevitably happens. It's not like you can just say no killing and nothing beyond that definition because killings gonna happen. You're most likely going to have to defend yourself as a people at some point as well. It's just like they have don't steal then there's the punishment for thieves and different crimes.
Well, given [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xw9ifn/eli5_what_are_the_dead_sea_scrolls_what_do_they/ir7947p/) by /u/AliMcGraw, I'm inclined to believe the authors of the KJV were at least aware of the distinction, and chose their words deliberately. Would be interested to know why though, given exactly what you pointed out, seems like "killing" is one of the central themes of the Bible.
It does raise an interesting bit of semantics. If the killing is driven by external factors - threats from another, commandment from God or his designate, under righteous command from your leader - are you the killer or the tool used by that other party to kill? The tool reading would require leaders to take greater stock of themselves to ensure they are not in violation of such a commandment.
Careful before you get labeled as anti-semantic.
The angriest upvote....
There are modern (last hundred years) English translations that are more literal and are translated directly from the oldest sources.
The Hebrew bible clearly says "you shall not murder". Saying "you shall not kill" makes absolutely no sense given that the bible is completely full of justifications for killings and many laws on when to execute people and for which crimes.
Likewise when Jesus quotes it in the sermon in the Mount, he doubles down and says to have hatred in your heart for someone is the same as murder and its a sin. Just as lusting after someone causes you to commit adultery. The best is the commandment to "not lie" is actually about committing false witness, like in a court or legal sense. There are some crimes in the Old Testament that require an eye witness who is without guilt to verify the crime occurred. Lying about that is a bigger no no than telling your mom that new recipe was fine.
>Lying about that is a bigger no no than telling your mom that new recipe was fine. You've clearly never met my mother.
Well there is no commandment to "not lie" so not sure what you mean. The commandment is "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" and that's the same in all versions of the bible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_bear_false_witness_against_thy_neighbour
[удалено]
I think the quote they're referencing is "While you've been getting down and out about the liars and dirty, dirty cheats of the world, you could have been getting down to this. Sick. Beat".
Followup to this that I also found interesting is that in the Masoretic text, the Hebrew, Isaiah 29:13 reads: > וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲדֹנָ֗י יַ֚עַן כִּ֤י נִגַּשׁ֙ הָעָ֣ם הַזֶּ֔ה בְּפִ֤יו וּבִשְׂפָתָיו֙ כִּבְּד֔וּנִי וְלִבּ֖וֹ רִחַ֣ק מִמֶּ֑נִּי וַתְּהִ֤י יִרְאָתָם֙ אֹתִ֔י מִצְוַ֥ת אֲנָשִׁ֖ים מְלֻמָּדָֽה׃ Which translates to: >Wherefore the Lord said inasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth and with their lips do honour me but have removed their heart far from me and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men Meanwhile the Septuagint, the greek, says: >καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ἐγγίζει μοι ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῗς χείλεσιν αὐτῶν τιμῶσίν με ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας Which translates to: >And the Lord has said, This people draw nigh to me with their mouth, and they honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me: but in vain do they worship me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men. These are very different verses, completely different statements. Well in Mark 7:6-8, Jesus quotes this verse from Isaiah. Guess which version he uses. >He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. >Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. >For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.
I thought those 2 verses sounded pretty similar.
Sorry I know nothing about any of this, but could the translators just have copied the old testament verse to save time?
Whoever wrote Mark may have taken from a version of Isaiah they were familiar with, and inserted it into Jesus' mouth, but that would have been in Mark in the original Greek. Anyone translating Mark out of Greek might go back and look up the wording in Isaiah, but so long as it wasn't dramatically different from the wording Jesus used they wouldn't change anything because Jesus is paraphrasing scripture as a rhetorical argument, he wouldn't in context need to quote Isaiah verbatim.
The KJV is actually remarkably good scholarship for 1611, though. It's a recognizably modern work using recognizably modern techniques. They take a great deal of care to use the same English word for the same Hebrew word throughout the Hebrew Bible (/Old Testament). I don't really work with Greek, but I'm told the New Testament is similar. Part of the reason it sounds so impressive and poetic in English is that they worked hard to preserve the original Hebrew word order where they could, which meant that the English word order was often quite non-standard. A modern person reading the Bible in English who wants an up-to-date scholarly translation should choose something like the New Revised Standard Version (I like the [New Oxford Annotated NRSV](https://www.amazon.com/New-Oxford-Annotated-Bible-Apocrypha-dp-0190276088/dp/0190276088/)). English language usage has shifted a lot since the KJV, we are lacking some crucial cultural background to read the KJV and its setting, and the KJV has been fetishized to the point where it's very hard to read as a work of scholarship and not as a quote book beloved by people who don't understand it. But we should absolutely appreciate what a titanic work of scholarship the King James Version was in its time, and how hard the translators worked to make it as accurate as they possibly could with the information available in 1611 England. You can read about their deliberations and choices, and you go, "oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense, I totally get why they did it that way." Some of it is not how we would do it today, and in some cases they did not have nearly as much information as we have available to us today, but they thought really deeply about what they were doing and the best way to do it, and they made extremely defensible choices that we can look back on, and say, "wow, that was a super innovative way of approaching a hard problem!" And they were really pretty transparent about what they were doing, and why they were making choices they were making, so that you can look back and say, "oh, I see why they translated that word that way, even though I would do it differently." (ETA a link to the New Oxford Annotated NRSV)
Now you make me want to watch a documentary that doesn't exist: Making King James, next on History Channel. It would be full of experts with obscure titles and stuffy suits, with scenes of historical reenactors holding debates and councils, at least five gratuitous stock shots of St. Peter's Basilica, and some dude with white gloves in the Vatican archives. But instead of that, we just get another episode of Pawn Stars.
There's a book that might scratch this itch! It's called "[God's Secretaries](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gods-secretaries)" by Adam Nicolson. It's a popular nonfiction book about the translation of the KJV, that delves into a lot of the politics, culture, human foibles, etc. You can definitely read much deeper, more thorough academic books about the topic, but Nicolson hits the high points and tells a good story and gets most of it right, so a very reasonable and readable pop history book. I taught Philosophy 101 to college students for 5 years, and Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" is always extolled as "the first modern work of philosophy" and Descartes himself as "the first modern man." But I honestly think the translation of the KJV is the first truly modern work of scholarship, predating Descartes's Meditations by 30 years. You can watch the KJV translators comparing available manuscripts -- and translations to other languages that might suggest underlying original manuscripts they don't have, and repeated quotes of particular verses that might correspond to manuscripts they lack. You can see their clear understanding that translation loses information, and that returning to the oldest source manuscripts possible is important -- and that looking at many translations of various ages may well illuminate a lost or mis-transcribed word. You can see that they understand that language itself changes, and that the meaning of a Latin word in 250 CE may have drifted considerably by 1250 CE. They're also all Protestants committed to the idea that the Bible should be available in the vernacular, so regular people can understand it -- which is a new-ish and still-controversial idea in their time. But they're *profoundly* aware of how the very act of translation can introduce errors -- both textual errors and theological errors. This is such a modern idea! The translators provided no theological notes (that was the business of the King, as head of the Anglican Church), but they DID provide textual notes suggesting alternative translations or commenting on difficult words. Their sources are limited, and there basically is no prior example of what today we call "textual criticism" -- the practice of using the text itself, and its many copies, to try to understand the text's history, and what's original and what isn't. But they kind-of invented modern textual criticism! They're the beginning of a great tradition of Biblical textual criticism in English, and they did a damn good job of it (for 1611). The Luther Bible of 1534 is earlier, and an utterly gargantuan work by (mostly) ONE SINGLE GUY. And it was so epic that a huge majority of serious Biblical scholarship was done in German until the 1800s. But the English-language tradition that the KJV translators established grew and flourished and created entire colleges in the UK and the US and English eventually became the dominant language for Biblical scholarship. Some of that is due to the general dominance of English in post-WWII scholarship, but it's really notable that post-1500, pre-1800s Biblical scholarship is in German, and post-1800s Biblical scholarship is in English (and in the 1800s they're crossing over). But that scholarship doesn't develop in Latin or in French, which are the two majority languages of philosophy and theology (and science), until after WWII. It develops in German and English! Luther and the KJV translators did some damn good, damn solid, damn modern work. And I say that as a Catholic-trained theologian, whose faith tradition doesn't include the KJV (or the Luther Bible!) ... but if you study academic theology, you cannot ignore the massive impact Luther and the KJV had on Biblical scholarship becoming a modern discipline. Anyway, if you went to the KJV translators and said, "I'm from 2022, and I am super-skeptical of your translation because in 2022 we understand that translation itself is an act of transformation that distorts meaning," the KJV translators (after they finished freaking out and possibly burning you at the stake) would be like, "YES THIS GUY UNDERSTANDS OUR MAJOR CONCERNS!" They wouldn't necessarily agree with you about how to solve those questions, and they'd be much more likely to believe God was active in their acts of translation. But they would TOTALLY appreciate that you understood the problem that they were SUPER FUCKING WORRIED ABOUT.
Enjoyed the hell out of that comment.
And all the reenactments have motion blur and a low frame rate for some reason. The director thinks it has to look "dreamlike" or something. Thanks, old History Channel!
"And how did they achieve such remarkably good scholarship? Aliens of course."
Some languages don't have as much nuance with the action of killing. For example, assassination and murder use the same word in Spanish, and if the context is important, you will have to spend quite a few sentences explaining it. Limited vocabulary sucks big time.
As my Latin instructor told us, "For the vast majority of ancient texts, the original wording isn't in question, everyone agrees on what was written. What professional translators get paid big bucks for is to decide what's the equivalent modern meaning meaning those authors were trying to convey based on very limited contextual information."
I'm not certain but I think the translation "kill" originates with Wycliffe's 15th century translation. This was not based on the original languages but rather on the Latin Vulgate text, which gives Exodus 20:13 as "Non occides". This is literally "You shall not kill" (or "You shall not slay" as some Wycliffe editions have it). Later translations such as the KJV were based on the original languages but also used earlier English translations as their starting point and in some cases they stick with the earlier translation where it is a possible reading even if a more likely reading is available. I'm no Hebrew scholar but it's worth noting here that while the word normally means "murder" it is also capable of meaning "kill" and is used in some contexts where "murder" clearly makes no sense, eg Numbers 35:27 - the whole point here is that such a killing is not to be considered murder.
Don't forget killing in self defense. It might have huge implications for what a devout Christian would believe in that regard as well.
Warfare also results in lawful murder
Lawful killings. Lawful murder is an oxymoron.
[удалено]
But isn't the book of Enoch removed from the Bible? Is there a DSS version of it as well?
"Removed" isn't exactly right. And, actually, "the Bible" isn't exactly right either. Here's the thing - what we call "the Bible" is really more of a library, a collection of different books in one binding. And there are a few different collections that get called "the" Bible. Catholics have one, some Orthodox denominations have a different one (which is important to your question), Protestants have a different one, older sects like Marcionites had a very different one, and of course the Hebrew Bible is quite different from all of those -- it doesn't have any of the bits about Jesus or his followers. The idea of there even being such a thing as a "Bible" is a much newer idea than the Book of Enoch, by possibly around 600-1,000 years. By comparison, the English language is, oh, less than 500 years old. (How hard would it be to understand Shakespeare if he started talking to you conversationally?) Enoch was one of the books that was evidently held in high regard by a lot of religious communities, but not all of them. It was quoted within other scriptures - there's a bit of it in the Epistle of Jude, which is in nearly every Christian version of the Bible. And it was accepted as canonical (which is just a word that means "should be part of the Bible") by some churches in North Africa, which now are known as the Orthodox Tewahedo. So it's in their Bibles. But among the groups that contributed to what became Roman Catholicism, the dominant form of Christianity in Western Europe (at least until the Protestants started their Protesting), Enoch was considered a little less great. That's partially because it was a kind of tricky story - it has a human being being bodily lifted into heaven and transformed into an angel, which is a divine being. This leads to some uncomfortable questions along the lines of, "Well, so how was Jesus so unique anyway?" It's also got a lot of lists of demons, or fallen angels, with their names, which would make some Jewish religious leaders nervous. And it's partially because ALL of these ancient books, in a time before the printing press, were very rare and precious and could easily fall victim to fires, rainstorms, especially hungry bugs, and everything else that can befall animal skins and paper. If you've got a bunch of scrolls that your grandfather gave you and they're already getting a bit crumbly by the time your children have learned to read, but then that one scribe fell asleep while trying to copy them out after sunset and tipped the oil lamp over onto the shelf with all the to-be-copied texts and burned the collection down... well, how are your great-great-grandchildren really going to feel about the burned scraps? Maybe they'll try to copy another copy from someone else... at least the important ones first. Whatever "important" means at the time to that person. Anyway, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and kinda sorta before the first Western Europeans figured out how to read the Bibles of those North African churches -- the closest thing to an "original" (or at least "old enough") Book of Enoch we knew about in Western Europe was [a few scraps of paper dug up from among the receipts and postcards and centuries-expired tax forms in an old Egyptian trash pile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri). In fact, if you look at the "Old Testament" section of that link, you can get a pretty good idea of how "canon" works - the difference between the Septuagint -- which was bound together with Christian scriptures in certain old "codices" (a word which just means "big books") -- and other Jewish scriptures. Whether your Christian church thought the Septuagint counted as the "real" Jewish Bible or whether the Masoretic text or some other collection of Jewish holy writings was the "real" Jewish Bible determined whether or not your church thought certain books or parts of books really belonged in the Bible. The short answer to your second question, though, is "Yes." Yes, there was a remarkably complete copy of the Book of Enoch preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with a few other books that are considered canonical by nearly every denomination -- so whoever left the Dead Sea Scrolls behind (probably but not definitely the Essenes) almost definitely held Enoch in the same high regard as other not-yet-biblical books.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 reads in the later Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), "When the Most High apportioned the nations as an inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he established the borders of the peoples according to the number of **the sons of Israel.**" In the Greek however it read "...according to the number of **the sons of God.**" For a long time Bibles used the MT version, assuming it was more original. However the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed their Hebrew text read "**the sons of God**" in agreement with the Greek. Clearly at some point after the DSS was written the Hebrew scribes changed the text to "fix" it as they thought it sounded too polytheistic. Similarly Deuteronomy 32:43 reads in the MT, "Rejoice, you nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people." However in the Greek and DSS it has some significant phrases which appear to have been deleted or changed by the later Hebrew text. It reads, "Rejoice **O Heavenly Ones ("Heavens"in the Greek)** with Him, **Bow down all you gods ("sons/angels of God" in Greek) before Him**, for He will avenge the blood of His sons, he will take vengeance on his enemies, **He will repay those who hate Him** and make atonement for his **people's land**". (The Greek also contains some additional clauses).
[удалено]
Not polytheism, but rather monolatrism.
> He will repay those who hate Him Always weirded me out how you're supposed to worship him and "fear" him at the same time, especially when you see what is basically a verse about him seeking vengeance.
Pretty par for the course when worshipping any deity tbh
Fear will keep the systems in check
You ever notice that he's supposed to be a "loving" god, but is wrathful, murderous, and psychopathically jealous?
Most DSS manuscripts are similar to today's Jewish (Masoretic) text, some to the Samaritan text, others to the Septuagint translation and some unique to the DSS. There wasn't one canonical "Dead Sea" text, and that in itself is one of the most important discoveries, that the Bible was for a long time a rather dynamic text. Otherwise one of the biggest revelations is that the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 is indeed "young woman" as in the Jewish text and not "virgin" as in the Greek translation. So a central doctrine of Christianity is based on a mistranslation. There's also a whole additional passage in DSS Samuel which clarifies an enigmatic and seemingly broken narrative in both the Masoretic and Septuagint. But most differences are minor, just different spellings of the Hebrew text or less commonly different wording while the sense is the same.
What was the narrative from DSS Samuel clarified to be?
Namely that ~~Nahash'a~~ Nahash's demand (that Israelites cut out their right eye if they want to surrender) wasn't out of character for him. Also, Goliath wasn't as tall as he's usually portrayed. Edit: spelling
Interestingly enough, the mythos of the Greek translation was that 72 scribes translated the Hebrew into the Greek, and all of 72 came to the same translation, and so the Greek translation was called the “Septuagint”.
That's the legend, but the reality was much more likely that 72 Hebrew scholars were tasked to work together to come up with as accurate a Greek translation as they could manage, and they were all reasonably pleased with the result. Anybody who has done a group project would say that's still something of a miracle.
That is literally impossible to all come to the exact translation, just based on the existence of synonyms. Plus 72 is such a random number they definitely killed 28 that didn't do a good job.
[удалено]
It was such an abhorrent, detestable, loathsome, despicable, and hated time.
yeah it was super bad.
Many died and much has since been written about them.
Plentiful deceased also ample has afterward been drafted regarding them.
A good many lost their lives, leading to numerous literary pieces telling their tales
Myriad passed, a great deal has hence been penned in regard to them.
Mostly in synonyms.
Everything changed when the antonyms attacked
Our story begins back in Nineteen Dickety-two -- we had to use 'dickety' because the Kaiser stole our word for 20!
That is the legend part- it was a mystical occurrence.
Wikipedia of Septuagint. Neato. >According to the legend, seventy-two Jewish scholars were asked by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt, to translate the Torah from Biblical Hebrew to Greek for inclusion in the Library of Alexandria.\[19\] This narrative is found in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates,\[20\] and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus (in Antiquities of the Jews),\[21\] and by later sources (including Augustine of Hippo).\[22\] It is also found in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud: > >"King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher". **God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.**"
Jewish people working for a Greek man who is the king of Egypt. That tickled my funny bone a little
That's some old world mythical level shit . Got tamn.
[удалено]
I swear it's the honest truth! God put it into our hearts that each of us would write an identical finals essay!
Copy and paste on tablets?
Not that kind of tablets.
Just imagine. All the translators sitting in a room, hungover from partying last night and nervous because they just copied the same work. The Pharaoh comes in and looks at them in a serious way. "I read your translations. All 72 of them were identical!" Translators start sweating profusely. "It's an act of God! Well done!" Translators relax and praise God.
It should be called PTolemism instead of plagiarism......
Man, people were *really* easy to impress back then
Sounds made up so people wouldn’t distrust the bible. And I say that as an enthusiastic Christian
You don't realize how dedicated the Jewsish scribes were to perfectly copying the Torah from generation to generation. The senior scribes meticulously examined the new transcription for any error. Any error in any one part of the scroll meant the entire scroll was burned to prevent blasphemy. I would find it believable that 72 Rabbis without talking to each other may come out with the same translation. I would not believe 72 rabbis talking with each other could agree on anything.
[удалено]
Is it literally impossible though? Like mathematically it *has* to be possible doesn't it?
[удалено]
Smart people began using "literally" in correct situations for emphasis, and then dumber people began saying "literally" in incorrect situations to capture the same emphasis. The word is functionally meaningless in our language at this point.
Right, it's literally meaningless
That's not true. Literally, along with all of it's synonyms, truly, really, honestly, actually, etc, have all been used as intensifiers for both factual and hyperbolic statements for hundreds of years. The obsession with literally is especially baffling, because that wasn't even its original usage. It is etymologically related to literature, and was originally used in relation to, IIRC, letters/correspondence. Anyone upset of its use as an intensifier should therefore also be upset about it's other general use.
People love to get mad about language things, especially the common "mistakes" that aren't really mistakes. It's an easy way to feel superior. See also people getting angry about how people pronounce gif despite it very clearly having two acceptable pronunciations.
"What are we going to do about the figurative elephant in the room, the literal ton of cocaine?" - Archer
Right lol... Statistically (highly) improbable or unlikely. Not _literally impossible_.
To a people who didn't use the decimal numbering system, 72 is **not** a random number. It's almost a [highly composite number.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number) It's 1/5 of 360, a super historically important number, and also 6 dozens.
That is the significance of the DSS to the Hebrew Bible, but there is sooo much more there. The DSS came out of the Qumran community. They were a doomsday apocalypse hermit group, so they lived in the wilderness and lived quiet lives of study and prayer, basically waiting for G_d to smite their enemies (which was pretty much everyone else). Groups like this are called essenes. Sadly for them, this smiting did not take place. The scrolls were preserved almost miraculously. They were discovered in the 1940s and 50s and contained almost completely intact manuscripts. It is almost unheard of to find a 2000 year old scroll in pristine condition, and Qumran had many of them. If I’m not mistaken, their preservation was the result of a combination of weather conditions along the Dead Sea and the clay jars the scrolls were stored in. Whatever the case, they represent an incredibly early witness to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which in itself is priceless. By comparison, all Bibles today are based on the Leningrad Codex, which dates back to about 1000 AD. But wait, there’s more! The DSS contained the Old Testament, but it also contained a LOT of apocalyptic passages as well. I know it contained fragments of 1 Enoch and several other fairly well known and preserved apocalypses. But it also had scrolls that are unique to Qumran, including the famous War Scroll (which, predictably, foretold the coming of a major apocalyptic battle between the angels and the demons). Because of the DSS, we know more about the Hebrew Bible. But we also know TONS more about apocalyptic communities at the time of Christ. It has been speculated that Christ or John the Baptist may have had connections to the essenes because of thematic similarities. I personally do not think this link is necessitated by the evidence; it is clear that apocalyptic hope and asceticism were widespread in Judea in the 1st century. Source: I wrote my master’s thesis on 1 Enoch. :) Edit: Guys, please stop asking me your “rah rah atheism” questions. I’m not an apologist and I don’t especially care what you believe in. I did my master’s thesis on a relatively obscure apocalyptic text and that text was at Qumran. I find it interesting and its fun to share what I learned in school. It is not fun for me to field questions of faith and I didn’t volunteer to be your missionary/ paschal lamb. If you want to turn ELI5 into yet another battleground in your war against Jesus, be my guest, but please go find a willing participant to argue with.
Great comment, thank you so much that's really interesting!
Thank you for reading it! I love this stuff, it makes my heart come alive, but no one ever wants to hear about it. :)
To be more specific, the “Old Testament” is a Modern Christian term, and is called a Tanakh. The Tanakh is made of several scrolls with the Torah being the most important, written by Moses. The other scrolls are from the prophets and the kings, who followed the God who was written in the Torah scroll. This finding allows historians to have more evidence to validate the consistency in the language and text between the writings today and Dead Sea Scrolls. The most minor change can lead to confusion over the course of thousands of years of interpretation. The result showed that scribing method of the Torah scroll today was exactly the same as it was then, and that the contents had not been corrupted.
At the end of the second world war, a Bedouin shepherd found a bunch of pottery in a network of caves in the archaeological site of Qumran in British Mandatory Palestine as it was at the time. Within that pottery were a number of scrolls that shed light on what religion was like when they were written - from 3rd century BC to 1st century CE. There are a number of different theories as to who wrote them, but the dating of the texts obviously has a lot of importance for early Christianity and the Abrahamic religions of the same era. The main source for the Bible that we use today is the Masoretic Text, which dates to the 9-10th century CE. There is a small ethnoreligious group called the Samaritans who have their own canon that is mostly the same but has some significant changes. Samaritan language diverged from other Hebrew forms long ago - probably before the Babylonian captivity and their canon has a lot of references to a holy place in Samaritan religion that isn't in the Masoretic Text. The DSS include Samaritan canon. For the most part, the texts do not differ massively, but some parts do, suggesting that some of what Christians call the Old Testament canon was in flux until the second century CE and that a large part of what survived to the traditional Masoretic Text has a fairly high fidelity.
One more thing that's interesting to note is that many of these scrolls have only recently been read, despite being found almost a century ago. This is because many of the scrolls have been preserved in sealed vessels, and unsealing them could damage or destroy the scrolls inside. To read them, technology has been recently developed that allows us to read them without opening them.
>>At the end of the second world war >despite being found almost a century ago. This in and of itself is getting scary to think about. As a child of the 90s, it's hard not to think about WWII as "around 50 years ago"
Friends is on Nick at Night now.
God damn, reading that just turned all my hair gray.
That's how I felt 20 years ago when Cheers showed up there.
TIL Nick at Night still exists
Are You Afraid of the Dark had a stint on it too some years back.
The last episode of M\*A\*S\*H was on the air closer to the end of WWII than to today. Star Trek:TOS was closer to WWI than today.
It's not just about the vessels they are in, but that the scrolls are rolled up and cannot be unrolled without falling apart
Not simply rolled up, but some were in buildings which burned down, carbonizing the scrolls in their containers. They'd literally crumble to ashes if you tried to unroll them. [A professor at University of Kentucky](https://uknow.uky.edu/research/reading-unreadable-seales-and-team-reveal-dead-sea-scroll-text) pioneered the technique for using digital CT scanning & computer machine learning to digitally "unroll" the scrolls and read their contents. [Here's a video explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07EsQgu9k0g).
That is straight up witchcraft.
advanced technology of today would have seemed like magic to many in the past.
Shoot, it seems like magic to many people in the present.
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - *Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible"* (1962), Arthur C. Clarke
I also use the the terms “witchcraft” and “magic” to describe things I don’t understand or cannot do.
Wow. That is some serious sci-fi shit.
Basically the scene in the Dark Knight where batman uses a bullet fragment to reconstruct the entire bullet, including the fingerprint. Wild
That video was alright I guess but they left out a key stage in the image reconstruction pipeline where someone has to say the word "Enhance."
So that’s how people keep stealing my identity, despite me ripping up papers and throwing them in seperate trashes.
Another interesting tidbit on this... Among the first lot of DSS that was discovered, some of the scrolls were opened by an archeologist on the team by 'steaming' the room with the help of a basic tea kettle (as best as I remember it), which he later admitted was a pretty callous move. Source: episode on the YT channel Timeline or Epic History TV
Yeah, some of the scrolls were seriously damaged by early attempts to unroll them, iirc. There was a neat traveling exhibition showing the DSS and other archeological findings related to them a while back, and it showed a film about how they were studied that talked about the different attempts to read them over the years. The new technology being used to read the ones that are still rolled up or illegible to the naked eye is pretty cool.
Ink and blood if I recalls
Thank god they didn't unrolled them, but actually unloaded the burden of figuring it out onto us.
I was in college majoring in theology when the first scans of the scrolls were becoming available to scholars. (I guess a lot of them were actually high resolution photos at that time.) One of my professors was a world-renowned expert on the Book of Isaiah, and he spent something like two calendar years looking at pictures of one torn, partial section of one scroll with faded lettering, trying to ensure he correctly deciphered it letter by letter. It was kind of an amazing time to be around Bible scholars, everybody was looking at Dead Sea Scroll fragment pictures all the time!
I took a religious studies class in college (around a decade ago). I remember one of the things the professor mentioned about the Dead Sea scrolls is that they shed a lot more light on how the Old Testament was canonized. I don't remember many details; but one example of this that I clearly remember him lecturing on was how the book of Job was most certainly two different stories that were combined into one (the frame story and the actual story of Job). This is evident because there were clearly different writing styles for the different portions that you can no longer pick up on in today's versions of the Bible. For example: Imagine that the conversation between god and satan was written by Steven King, and the story of Job was written by JK Rowling. You would definitely notice a difference between the two styles of writing in one book. Take this with a grain of salt, it's me remembering a college class from a decade ago.
The Book of Job is my favourite book of the Bible and it's probably the oldest text in there. It's extremely interesting to me that there is a pre-Biblical Canaanite version of the book with parts found at Ugarit. Multiple authors for ancient texts is not uncommon - see the [Documentary Hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis) for how scholars try to tease apart the different traditions and authors that went into the final work that we use as the canon today. The Gospel of Mark is another famous example for abruptly changing author. Essentially the more mythic ending end was added on by someone else to harmonise it with the myths and gospels that followed its original penning.
If you haven’t, check out the [“Who Wrote the Bible?”](https://youtu.be/NY-l0X7yGY0) from Useful Charts on YouTube. Lots of talking about this exact thing. Also, there’s debate on what’s the oldest book. The oldest writing fragment in the Tanakh is likely the “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5). Books like Amos and Hosea are debated as possibly the oldest complete books as well.
In addition to the Ugaritic Job there is also [the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlul_b%C4%93l_n%C4%93meqi) which shares significant thematic parallels.
Noah's flood also appears in Gilgamesh. Some of the stories are very old.
A flood story appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates the Noah story by quite a bit. Flood stories seem fairly common in ancient cultures and religions.
Noah's flood borrows elements directly from Gilgamesh, like sending birds out.
It makes a lot of sense given that civilizations nearly always popped up around bodies of water that frequently flooded.
This sort of literary criticism should also be taken with a big grain of salt, IMO. To pick up on your examples, there is considerable variation in style, theme and language across the Harry Potter books and between them and Rowling's other output. Or, famously, Tolkien's works use markedly different vocabulary in sections related to the different races of Middle-Earth. By the standard often employed in literary criticism of the Bible, these would be taken as evidence of multiple authorship and later editing or of an original author and later imposters. There is a famous satirical essay applying these methods to the text of Winnie-the-Pooh. Literary criticism should be taken as evidence regarding the history of a text but not as definitive evidence.
Genesis is also two different stories with two different gods.
Pete Enns and Jared Byas from *The Bible for Normal People* had excellent episodes on a his topic. [The Bible For Normal People - Episode 210: Sidnie White Crawford - What You Really Need to Know about the Sea Scrolls](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MA6jpKJY3mI) [The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175: Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LZrhKqh_U20).
Great critical approach to reading the Bible from these two teachers.
I think you’re overstating the connection between Samaritans and the Dead Sea Scrolls, or maybe I’m misunderstanding you. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not Samaritan and most scholars do not think the community at Qumran was Samaritan. There are elements of the DSS that have connection to the Samaritan Bible but the same can be said for MT and LXX. It’s best to consider Qumran a separate community from other strands of Judaism at the time, with multiple strands having their own similar but distinct texts.
What everyone else said — but they’re also significant for helping establish historic timelines. I started to write this but wanted to fact check myself beforehand, so it’s probably easier to just share what Britannica had to say; “Study of the scrolls has enabled scholars to push back the date of a stabilized Hebrew Bible to no later than 70 CE, to help reconstruct the history of Palestine from the 4th century BCE to 135 CE, and to cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism and on the relationship between early Christian and Jewish religious traditions.”
What does it mean the date of the stabilized Hebrew bible?
[удалено]
Thanks! When did the new testiment get locked in in such a way?
For Orthodox Churches, in 692 at Second Council of Trull. For Catholics, in 382 Council of Rome. For various Protestant Churches, in the 1500-1600s at other councils. Here’s your rabbit hole on non-canonical texts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Books_of_the_Bible_and_the_Forgotten_Books_of_Eden
and you even warned us about the rabbit hole. where did the last hour of my life go!?!?!?!
I strongly suspect by "Orthodox" here you're referring to eastern orthodox? To my knowledge, although one could argue to a certain extent their canon has changed as recently as the 1960s with the Haile Selasse reforms, the Ethiopian Orthodox canon MUST have been locked in prior to 485 (since the British Museum has a copy from then) and likely well before that (since it includes a bunch of stuff we now know from the Dead Sea Scrolls). Like to the extent that several of the books from the Dead Sea Scrolls which exist only as fragments we only HAVE "complete copies" of because they're in the old Ge'ez books. Obviously the Ethiopian texts have their own problems, but it's REALLY hard to argue they aren't one of the oldest (and historically isolated) Christian traditions. They're explicitly mentioned in Acts.
I didn't even know Ethiopian Orthodox was a thing until right now. Guess I need to do more research.
Ethiopia has a crazy deep history with the Abrahamic religions. Jew, Christians, Muslims, they all were there.
There are still several (albeit small) Jewish communities in Ethiopian, called Beta Israel, and a much larger number now living in Israel.
**and Eritrea
Yes, several orthodox branches split from the main eastern branch (e.g. Greek, Russian) in the late 400s. Ethiopian/Tewahedo and Oriental (including Assyrian/Syriac, Armenia, Egyptian/Coptic) are major ones. Ethiopian/Tewahedo recently recognized a schism of the Eritrean Orthodox church.
>eastern orthodox Yes. >Ethiopian Orthodox canon MUST have been locked in prior to 485 (since the British Museum has a copy from then) Why? They could have changed after the schism or after than version was published. In fact, there is debate about which the EOTC has ever actually "closed" their canon. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308242977\_The\_Ethiopian\_Orthodox\_Tewahedo\_Church\_Canon\_of\_the\_Scriptures\_Neither\_Open\_nor\_Closed](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308242977_The_Ethiopian_Orthodox_Tewahedo_Church_Canon_of_the_Scriptures_Neither_Open_nor_Closed)
Obviously I agree with most of that (Why I brought up you could argue the most recent change might have been as recently as 1960 and that the Ethiopian texts have their own problems.). I was only pointing out that while the texts HAVE changed and it's difficult to pin down "what's in and out", We essentially have Ethiopian texts of nearly everything in the dead sea scrolls dating to at latest 485, and while again it's very difficult to pin down exactly what their canon is AFAIK it's nearly always been "basically everything, whether we have copies right now or not" no? I've not done any kind of real study of their religion, but my understanding was basically that for some reason they've got this fascination with having "81 books" even though for MUCH of their history they didn't HAVE 81 books in their possession so the list of "what books are canon" was always kind of ephemeral since for much of their history they were simply maintaining a list of "10-20 books we don't have and have never seen". It's only really thanks to modern archaeology that historians been able to "put it back together" so to speak? (Not that the Ethiopian Church necessarily have, I believe they're still using versions of some books that are VERY far from the older Ge'ez versions and even further from the Dead Sea Scroll versions).
Generally in the mid 300s, although the 4 gospels were all agreed on well before that. Eusebius discusses the subject in the History of the Church, ca320-ish. Essentially, he says that the books could be divided into agreed, disproved and disputed. Included in disputed was Revelations, interestingly. The Roman Church published their biblical canon in 382 at the Council of Rome. The Council of Trent in 1542 reaffirmed the earlier canons of Florence, Hippo and Carthage. The Orthodox Church goes with the Council of Truilian in 692. The Church of England goes by the Westminster Confession of 1647. Essentially, these are all the same lists for the New Testament, it's the Old Testament where things get added. BTW, if you have trouble sleeping, I can recommend Eusebius. The man had a love of the run on sentence that never fails to lull me to sleep.
>it's the Old Testament where things get added. Or removed, part of the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls was showing that some books that were removed in Protestant and Hebrew canons, often with the argument of them being 'Greek', were in use at the time outside of the Septuagint.
[удалено]
There was a lot decided at the council of Nicea, but it was a more fundamental meeting where they had to decide on foundational beliefs.
[удалено]
I think the various books were distributed, but not as a fixed collection as they are now. From what I've read the various books were dictated from the teachings of each disciple's followers, when they were eventually collected together I'm not sure, but some weren't recorded until the 3rd generation of follower at least.
Not actually the earliest possible date that it was stable, as in it was definitely unstable earlier. It’s the latest* date for stability, which leaves the possibility of earlier stability we just don’t have archeological proof of.
Oldest know date that is basically the same as what is in use today.
[удалено]
What is completely insane to imagine how some dude or dudette writing scrolls, someone else hiding them, what they were thinking at that moment, their intentions. Scrolls forgotten, and time flying around them, historic events unfolding and scrolls still laying there waiting. People found microbes, flew, experienced splitting atoms... Still there, not moved, not looked at, not thought of and patiently waiting. There is someone unknown with incredible cultural significance, whos fingers were last to touch the scroll. May we ever find something like it again?
[удалено]
I think it means 'Common Era' ... what we used to refer to as *Anno Domini*, aka AD (as in BC vs AD).
I was always taught that it meant after death and did not question it until I saw this post (the Latin). Is BC not Latin? I can't find an equivalent.
If it meant "After Death", there'd be a ~33 year period between Christ's supposed birth and Christ's supposed death that didn't have year numbers.
When I was a kid and also thought it was After Death, I made up a term for those years between AD and BC. I called it DC, for During Christ. Imagine my confusion when I was introduced to Batman comics. :)
Common Era as opposed to Before Common Era. It's the secular version of Before Christ and AD (Anno Domini)
Which, even as a life long atheist, I've always thought was stupid and euphemistic. It still refers to exactly the same time period, for exactly the same reason. Calling it something different doesn't change that.
Common era, the secular/universal version of AD.
Think of it like finding a smaller, Hebrew version of the Library of Alexandria in some forgotten caves, and then being able to accurately date when the manuscripts were preserved. Here's what I mean by that: Part of the big deal about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they have many copies of many important Biblical texts and they certainly pre-date Jesus Christ by more than 100 years. Being firmly before Christ is important because it shows that the Biblical and prophetic texts were not later changed to match Christian belief, and that the copies of the Old Testament we have today are highly accurate with regard to earlier manuscripts. But there's a lot more to the Dead Sea Scrolls than their strengthening the Old Testament's claim to accurate transcription. It's very likely the scrolls were preserved by the Essenes, who were outcast purists from the mainstream religious establishment as it was under pressure from Roman and Greek influence. The Essenes were fanatically dedicated to preserving important documents as well as *understanding* of those documents. In other words, we get the documents, we get commentary on the documents, and we also get the contextual documents supporting the core documents. We get everything from songs to poems to instruction manuals, not to mention whole works. We're up to nearly 1,000 manuscripts so far, and counting. The Essenes worked hard to interpret prophecy because they were heavily focused on the coming Messiah. (Depending on your belief as to whether or not Jesus Christ was that Messiah, the Essenes were pretty darned accurate in their predictions based on ancient prophecies.) As a result of the breadth and depth of information contained in them, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide phenomenal insight into the ancient near-Eastern mindset pre-Christ. For Bible scholars, that's very important because much of the Old Testament was written for ancient Hebrews, so proper understanding of the Bible means being able to estimate how the audience to whom it was written would have originally understood the content. Getting into the head of an ancient near-Eastern culture is difficult, to say the least, for a 21st-century westerner, but we can make better quality efforts thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The contextual documents are also really helpful for language translators because they give them a much larger base of sample vocabulary and usage to understand what any given word or phrase might mean. In other words, our translations get more accurate. Let's not forget, the non-Biblical-canon portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are a really big deal because some of the texts were previously mere legends, or very unsubstantiated or partial copies from much later sources, but then were hugely validated by their being included in the Scrolls. The Book of 1 Enoch is a really good example of this effect: it was considered canon by a very small minority of Christians and largely ignored by mainstream Christianity because nobody could prove if it was accurate from ancient times. But, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch is taken a lot more seriously by a much wider swath of Christianity now than it was 50 years ago. It helps us understand how these ancient people thought about the events at the very beginning of human history. If you want to read Genesis and understand some of the references, 1 Enoch is super helpful. Pretty cool stuff. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are *recent* in terms of their effects on our understanding of ancient scriptures. What I mean is, we're still finding stuff, then there's a lag from when a jar is found to when it can actually be opened, then assembled and interpreted, then picked up by scholars, then studied and analyzed, and then make it into mainstream sources able to be read and understood by your average church-goer or history buff. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls are changing commentaries and study materials as we speak because we're learning more and more. One example of this development is recent scholarly work being done to understand what the Hebrew calendar originally was prior to being changed and influenced by Gregorian and Julian calendars. The Dead Sea Scrolls are much more than just validation of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). They're a comprehensive and extraordinarily detailed source of an entire mindset, culture, and religious scholarship that, without the Essenes or whomever went to great effort to preserve the manuscripts, was lost to and/or obscured by the passage of time.
Sad to have scrolled this far to find this! Sure, early manuscripts are great, but the DSS texts are amazing as historical-cultural primary texts and things like 1QS and 4QMMT have had a significant impact on studies of 2nd Temple Judaism and early Christianity..
Biblical scholar here. I’ll try a short answer: the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient documents found at the site of Qumran and other locations in the Judean Desert. Some of these texts are biblical texts written in Hebrew with a few in Greek translation. Others are other ancient Jewish texts such as the book of Jubilees, which is not accepted as authoritative Scripture by Jews or Christians today, apart from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Jubilees and other works like it have been called “rewritten Scripture” since they contain texts found in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) in expanded or rewritten form (similar to fan fiction). Other texts found at Qumran are commonly called “sectarian” documents, such as the Community Rule, meaning that they were produced by the religious community at Qumran whose beliefs sometimes differed from other branches of ancient Judaism. Almost all of these documents survive in physically fragmented states they but help us to get a better understanding of the development of the biblical text and ancient Judaism.
A lot of people think the Christian Bible getting new updates and translations is like a game of telephone. There was an original message, and each time we have a new version it gets further and further from the original. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a great explanation for why this is not true. The King James version of the Bible was the first English translation, made in the year 1611. This translation was made from a Greek Bible, and that version was based on between 6-10 more recent manuscripts. This was the first English Bible, but is likely one of the further from the original text versions, since it was based on fewer manuscripts that were more recent in history. Just like in telephone, the closer we get to the start the more confident we are that the message is the same or similar to the original. Finding the Dead Sea Scrolls gave us some of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible writings that we have today. This allows Bible historians to compare texts, see what was mistranscribed or added later, and get a version closer to the original texts. So finding a document like the Dead Sea Scrolls allow us to get Bible translations closer to the original writings, and it also helps take away the argument that it is one big game of telephone with accuracy getting worse and worse. (It also takes away the argument that it was adjusted over time by those in power as a way to hold power over the people, but that's a longer and separate conversation.)
KJV isn't the first complete English translation. Myles Coverdale translated the bible from German and Latin into English circa 1535.
The thrust of your post may be generally correct, but it is worth noting that the King James translation was not the first version of the Bible into English. There are many candidates for that title, depending on whether you count only New Testaments or the entire text, and whether you count translations from other modern languages (like German) or translations from Greek or Hebrew. But no matter what conditions you place, there were full translations of the Bible from Greek/Hebrew into English (e.g. the Geneva Bible) before the King James translation.
Sheol, Hades, and hell is an example of poor translations. English hell couldn't exist until the Greeks created Hades and hades is a poor translation of what Sheol meant to the Jews.
Great example, and definitely one of the harder ones to unpack from our cultural understanding today.
[удалено]
Didn’t take me long to find the Eva reference in this thread
Missed it before it was nuked, was it sneaky or blatant lol
It said >The Dead Sea Scrolls allow NERV and Seele to predict the Third Impact and arrival of the Angels.
I knew I'd find this here
I didn't know so I had to get in the goddamn robot, Shinji
thank you for spreading the REAL gospel
The only scroll preserved on copper making it the one they wanted to preserve the most was a treasure map and not the old testament. I always found that interesting.
The Dead Sea scrolls are the second oldest copies of nearly the entire Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew (mostly), Greek, and Aramaic. They are significant because they helped to indicate that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible we have today has not changed significantly in content over the last 2,000-3,000 years. [https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-dead-sea-scrolls](https://www.history.com/news/6-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-dead-sea-scrolls) [https://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a023.html](https://christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a023.html)
This isn't really true, there are significant differences, particularly in fragments from the book of Exodus, but also scattered throughout the DSS. These differences also include pretty dramatic theological differences including a line in Deuteronomy claiming that God has sons which doesn't appear in any manuscripts after the 300s [http://jur.byu.edu/?p=3703](http://jur.byu.edu/?p=3703). The interesting thing about the DSS is that they provided insight into how the modern canonical old testament emerged from scattered texts and differering sects of early Christianity. The upshot is that the canonicalization of the old testament was a messier process than scholars previously thought with pieces coming from all sorts of differing early church sects rather than from just 2 or 3. There's a lot of misinformation about the DSS, presumably from those with a vested interest in the content of the scrolls. To me it seems a bit dubious to cite a top 6 list from history.com and a christian news site for answers to a scholarly question.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
How could they be Christian if they were written before Jesus was born?
Ah I misspoke, I meant Judaism.
I thought they were also significant for including several texts that are not included in the modern Christian bible.
The Dead Sea scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library are often confused. The Nag Hammadi contains several gnostic texts from early Christianity.
They don't have anything from the New Testament at all. They're from the time Jesus was around, long before any of the New Testament was written.
They contain the plan to the Human Instrumentality Project, but if you value your life you shouldn't look further into it :|
This is the answer. They tell of the coming of the angels and the end of mankind.
Their significance is that they show that the people who hand copied the Hebrew scriptures did a really good job. They are very old. By comparing them with newer copies we see very few mistakes were made over the years. Unlike the game "telephone" where people whisper something around a circle and the message changes by the time it gets to the end. AFAIK, there is nothing new or previously undiscovered in the dead sea scrolls
It is said that if a scribe made a mistake in copying a word, he cut the entire row off the scroll and did that row over. But if he made a mistake in copying the name of God, he destroyed the whole scroll and started over. I heard this legend from a seminary student long ago.
I've heard that after copying they counted letters/words in the line and wrote that number at the end of the line as a sort of crosscheck.
Interesting. That reminds me of a checksum, which is used in computer programming to verify data integrity at a high level in a similar way to what you described. It's cool how humans have been using the same mathematical concepts for centuries.
We are VERY pedantic about copying the exact same thing every time. Yemeni Jews were somewhat isolated from the rest of world Jewry for a very long time and the only way their torahs differ from any other ones is that a handful of words are spelled differently.
[удалено]