spin

This is a parenthesis for Sauron...
What makes you sure the canon was settled? I don't think Chronicles were even written when the DSS were deposited. (And I know of the claim that one tiny piece of 2 Chr is claimed, but there is not enough to say that this variant fragment comes from Chronicles or from a variant of Kings.) The Torah was established by the time of the DSS. but I see no indication that the rest of the Hebrew bible texts were so stabilized.

What have the Essenes got to do with the DSS? Were they sons of Zadoq or sons of Aaron (as were the leaders of the DSS community)??


spin

spin

Academics who depend on religious money for their positions in universities have to spout this crap. It is a mantra. It is totally unsupported, but it is a mantra, a mantra which will keep them in good standing in the religious academic community.

Riddle me this: if there were over thirty copies of Deuteronomy at Qumran and there were say 30 people living there -- if you read the academic literature, you'd know that there is no real way for the site to support more -- and that there was a literacy rate of less than 5% of the adult population, why were there so many copies of Deuteronomy? or Psalms for that matter another 30 odd texts.

Understand that you have been had about this Essene stuff. The texts were not produced at Qumran, but imported to the area, most obviously from Jerusalem. The vast majority of texts tested for C14 come in to prior to the first century. You would expect that if the scrolls were deposited at the time of the Jewish war, most of the texts dated by C14 would date to the time of the Jewish War and not at least half a century before.

As the vast majority are before the first century, the fact about the Alexandrian translation is far from transparent. That translation dated due to a facile reading of the Letter of Aristeas should be quite a bit later, because Aristeas is pseudonymous and makes historical errors. Yet, it only talks about translation of the books of the law, ie the Torah, so there is no real way to know when the rest of the books were translated. In fact Josephus claims to have translated a lot of his material himself.

As I said in another post, DSS feature LXX readings in Hebrew in places, so there was a Hebrew Vorlage for the LXX, a tradition which differed from the MT.


spin

rlogan

So God exists because people can copy things. Such a pity he's been reduced to this.

At least a couple of millenia ago people could point to things they did not understand like plagues and storms to "prove" God exists.

The old man was leveling armies and shattering the earth with his powers.


Poor old God. We'll be seeing him in an alley sucking on a cheap bottle of gin in a brown paper wrapper muttering "I used to be great."

nogods4me

I would like to ask mdd344 why he thinks the Dead Sea Scrolls are as old as he has told us they are?
What methods were used to date them?
Are these methods reliable?
Who did the dating?
Are they trustworthy? Why?

Is it possible that those who dated them made mistakes and they are actually more recent than you believe?

S.C.Carlson

Actually, the Hebrew Bible canon wasn't settled by the Jews until the second century CE. See the work of, e.g., Albert C. Sundberg, Jr.

Stephen

Omegasevx

The book is comprehensible as long as you treat it like what it is: fiction. Once you start treating it like fact, or as a guidebook for your life (which to me is frightening and sad) it becomes incomprehensible. You should be able to figure this out in the very first chapter for crying out loud!

There's nothing comprehensible about the plan of salvation...it's ludicrous! When Christians say Jesus is going to come flying out of the clouds soon(presumably from the vaccuum of outer space), I can't help but snicker. You've got to be kidding, right? Nope, they are dead serious. That scares the bejesus out of me sometimes.

It is glaringly obvious, MDD344, from the gargantuan mountain of evidence that is freely available to you that what the bible says about creation, for starters, is wrong! You have the capacity and the access to the information you need to verify the age of the earth, the age of distant stars in the sky, and even a good guess at the age of the entire universe... but you've decided to read a book, and believe what it says contrary to it all. I could never do that.

And so far your only defense of the absurdities in the bible is that those absurdities have been faithfully copied over the years with little variation. Again, my response is: So what? Who cares? Walking on water is not possible because a book tells a story about a guy who did it once. That's something you learn in kindergarten.

I hope that helps explain what I meant.

Huon

I suggest that the evidence will show that the Qur'an should be man’s objective standard for life because of its consistent transmission and preservation, because of verifiable prophecy fulfilled, because of its uncanny unity, because of its scientific accuracy, and because of its agreement with archaeology, all of which together show that the Qur'an does not have its source from man, but from the One God of which it speaks.

Sauron

We don't know what the original installment of scrolls was. The site had been plundered by bedouins several times, and scrolls had been cut up, sold, and even used as kindling for starting fires.

And using a general literacy rate percentage is fine, when talking about broad populations of people. However, if you're talking about a religious community, I'd suspect the literacy rate to be much higher than that. It's the difference between an average statistic and a segmentation of the total selection pool.

I don't think the claim is that the Essenes necesssarily produced the material at that site, while they were inhabiting it. The fact that they might have been carrying scrolls from Jerusalem (or other Essene monastic communities) doesn't seem to be a problem. It isn't necessary for the age of the scrolls to be the same as the age of the settlement. I have several things in my house that are far older than I am, and far older than the house itself is. I don't think that mainstream scholarship has a problem with that, either. Britannica:

The Dead Sea Scrolls come from various sites and date from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD. The term usually refers more specifically to manuscripts found in 11 caves near the ruins of Qumrān, which most scholars think was the home of the community that owned the scrolls. The relevant period of occupation of this site runs from c. 100 BC to c. AD 68, and the scrolls themselves nearly all date from the 3rd to the 1st century BC. The 15,000 fragments (most of which are tiny) represent the remains of 800 to 900 original manuscripts. They are conventionally labeled by cave number and the first letter (or letters) of the Hebrew title—e.g., 1QM = Cave 1, Qumrān, Milḥamah (the Hebrew word for “war”); or 4QTest = Cave 4, Qumrān, Testimonia (i.e., a collection of proof-texts). Each manuscript has also been given an individual number.

The documents were recovered in the Judaean wilderness from five principal sites: Khirbat Qumrān, Wadi Al-Murabbaʿāt, Naḥal Ḥever (Wadi Khabrah) and Naḥal Ẓeʾelim (Wadi Seiyal), Wadi Daliyeh, and Masada. The first manuscripts, accidentally discovered in 1947 by a shepherd boy in a cave at Khirbat Qumrān on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, were almost immediately labeled Dead Sea Scrolls. Later (especially from the 1950s to the mid-1960s) finds in neighbouring areas were similarly designated.

Thomas II

The Bible is a group of books written by some men who said that whatever they were writing about was direct instruction from a superior being, God...

This is a being that nobody has EVER seen and whose existence has not been veryfied by ANY means...

In addition the character that comes across in these writings has all the flaws and shortcomings of any cantankerous, vengeful, murderous, arrogant, twisted old patriarchal asshole.

Maybe such character made sense to the people who lived in the times these books were written, but it doesn't make any sense now, and to state that his knowledge is universal and it's quality eternal, is preposterous, idiotic and insane.

Doug Shaver

Do you actually consider that a significant datum?

Actually, none of them made such a claim. But let's disregard that for a moment.

Suppose I'm reading two documents, A and B. Document A purports to inform me about the nature of God and what I should do to please him, but the author says nothing about where he got his ideas. Document B also purports to inform me about the nature of God and what I should do to please him, and the author of that document claims that God directed him in his writing.

Question: Should I be more skeptical about document A than about document B? If not, then what is the relevance of any biblical author's claim to have been divinely directed?