Toto

Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned? - essay on the Huffington Post by John J. Collins, Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation, Yale University and the author of 'The Dead Sea Scrolls. A Biography (or via: amazon.co.uk)

The comments on the article are appalling.

tanya

Thank you Toto for this link.

Thank you professor Collins, for your comment. "small number" is neither instructive, nor adequate, when juxtaposed to the precision you provide regarding hebrew docs. How many of that "small number" were badly damaged? Ten good quality, complete manuscripts is far more useful than a thousand badly damaged documents with numerous lacunae, and entire sections missing (e.g. P45.)

Is it possible that the documents which survived were constructed of superior materials, whereas, those that had been written on papyrus disintegrated over time? If so, then, perhaps the quantity of manuscripts inserted into the caves at Qumran, written in Greek, may have, once upon a time, represented a majority. As I understand, perhaps in error, the debate regarding Qumran as STORAGE facility, versus SCRIPTORIUM, has been settled, with the latter hypothesis vindicated by archaeological evidence, including living quarters, ink depots, and, most importantly, in that desert, water, carried by aqueducts.

Wow, what a huge quantity of faculty in the Yale Divinity School!!

Amazing. 38 people. By contrast, there are only 18 faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering at Yale.

I wonder what the ratio of Divinity scholars to Electrical engineers may be at BeiJing DaXue, or Tokyo University, two universities roughly comparable in prestige to Yale?

No, I really don't wonder at all. I am quite certain I know the answer. Zero, for both universities, compared with scores of engineering faculty in both cities.

But, getting back to the OP, what I have learned in the past year, about DSS, is that, at least one document from the caves, in Deuteronomy, did clearly reveal, even to me, YHWH, not Adonai, as may have been anticipated, from reading our currently extant copies of LXX. Deuteronomy 1:6 Hebrew:
YHVH 'aLHYNV DBUr 'aLYNV BChUrB L'aMUr UrB-LKM ShBTh BHUr HZH
LXX:
(κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν ἐλάλησεν ἡμῖν ἐν χωρηβ λέγων ἱκανούσθω ὑμῖν κατοικεῖν ἐν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ), Deuteronomy 4: 24 (ὅτι κύριος ὁ θεός σου πῦρ καταναλίσκον ἐστίν θεὸς ζηλωτήςso.

I am persuaded, even if my opinion contradicts that of professor Collins, that the Christians did interfere with the original Hebrew text, in removing reference to YHWH in the LXX, replacing the Hebrew god's name with "kurios", to conform to Christian traditions, as the scribes created new copies to replace the older, increasingly fragile papyrus, dating from just a century after Alexander's death.

Though the Huffington Post is a popular newspaper, not a scholarly publication, I was nevertheless disappointed that professor Collins failed to furnish us with a link to an online repository of Qumran texts, nor with a link to his source for the summary regarding the number of texts recovered.

Yes, Toto, the comments were less than substantial, as you had indicated, however, Collin's text itself left a fair amount to be desired. I find it decidedly inferior to one of spin's many, thoughtful comments on DSS, submitted to this forum. Here's hoping the Yale professor may decide to join the forum, and offer a rejoinder to my opinion--"basic facts" are documented, not simply asserted, without reference.

Zwaarddijk

tanya,

why is YHWH vs. kyrios such an important issue to you?

BTW, the 750 Hebrew, 150 Aramaic and handful of greek seems like a reasonable thing, provided he's using two significant digits, that is 750ish, 150ish, 930ish. ~30 Greek manuscripts clearly is a significantly lower number, not far from the magnitude of the potential error of the sum of the rounded numbers of H and A scrolls. Of course, the exact number can be difficult to know.

Also, your claim that the number of greek scrolls probably has been higher is entirely unsubstantiated and seems entirely to be based in wishful thinking. Maybe it was so, maybe it wasn't - you don't provide any actual reason to think it was so. Think about it - the burden of evidence is squarely on you in this question.

tanya

a. YHWH is the single most important concept of Judaism. Nothing trumps it, with regard to singularity.
b. YHWH disappears with Christianity, replaced by Kurios, referring typically, to Jesus, (one imagines, from the synoptic gospels), the son of YHWH, though John implies that Jesus = YHWH, without writing it, in black and white.
c. Why should an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, supernatural being require progeny?
d. The foundation of Christianity rests on the notion that the human Jesus, a demigod, with paternal DNA of supernatural origin, and human, maternal DNA, was unjustly executed for imaginary "crimes", during passover, but then returned to the land of the living, two or three days later, while still in possession of his lifeless, human corpus, no longer bleeding, heart no longer beating, a phantom, transporting a non-living human body, i.e. a zombie, in the vernacular. This is how Christianity portrays "kurios", the replacement of YHWH........

Are we to imagine, then, that the General Motors factory in ShangHai does not know precisely how many automobiles it has produced?

Yes, I do criticise anyone (especially a professor at Yale!!!) who claims to be an authority on subject abc, but then fails to elaborate an answer to the simplest question regarding that topic. How many manuscripts survived? Exactly how many? Not an approximation. Precisely how many manuscripts represent the DSS? Collins' presentation is sloppy, as is your own.

The heavy strand of maternal, mitochondrial DNA, encodes 28 genes, the light strand 9 genes. So, you would prefer that one writes, "about 40 genes total"? It is precision, that results in improvement in technology, not carelessness, and inattention to detail.

I would write, that the burden of proof, demonstrating to anyone's satisfaction, that you have accurately represented my response to Collins' note in the Huffington Post, rests squarely on your shoulders.

:constern02:

Vorkosigan

delet

Zwaarddijk

Tanya,
why is the exact number of any interest whatsoever?

Secondarily, the Oxford University Press' Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2000 gives no more conclusive a number:
"Qumran Scrolls
The most extensive collection is that of Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Here, in caves associated with the ruins of a nearby settlement, from 1947 on, remnants of more than eight hundred texts have been unearthed, for the most part by bedouin." [viii, Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls]

The absolute, overwhelming majority of the texts were not intact scrolls!
"SCROLL RECONSTRUCTION. Among the more than eight hundred manuscripts found at Qumran, there are only nine that are more or less well preserved: Isaiah (1QIsa); Isaiah (1Q8); Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen); Rule of the Community (1QS) with Rule of the Congregation (1Q28a); and Rule of the Blessing (1Q28b); War Scroll (1QM); Hodayot (1QH); and Temple Scroll (11Q19); plus a single sheet of leather, Testimonia (4Q175), the completely preserved Copper Scroll (3Q15) (see Stegemann, 1996, p. 17) and very probably the small square "card" 4QList of False Prophets (4Q339). All the other so-called scrolls exist only in fragmentary form, often in tiny pieces." (EoDSS, pp. 842-843). Further in the entry on reconstruction, there are details about how deteriorated some of the scrolls were - rats had nested in some, etc.

Given these facts, is it surprising that the exact number is not given? Better an approximate number that is in the right ballpark than feigned certainty and error. This is also something scientists recognize - don't say you're sure about a number if you aren't. Head for the right ballpark first. Of course, developing methods for figuring out the exact number of scrolls in Qumran won't really help in many fields outside figuring out the exact number of scrolls in Qumran (and maybe a few other places), so it's not like you have a whole industry of investors waiting to reap the technological advances such an endeavor would provide.

This is quite unlike the number of cars that have rolled out of a factory - this is like figuring out the number of jars that have been smashed in a potter's back yard in 500BCE.

Ok, maybe - just maybe - CIA or someone has methods to reconstruct shredded letters - but those methods probably don't work that well on stuff that's been worn down by 2000 years of rats, looters, just general decay and so on. Especially when some of the bits probably have turned to dust, and are hand-written in old varieties of Hebrew and paleo-Hebrew script.

spin

How many Greek texts? No-one can say. Here's an inventory:

[hr=1]100[/hr]

4Q119 4QLXXLeviticusa", mainly big strip of 28 lines, 20 letters at widest

4Q120 "4QLXXLeviticusb", biggest piece of ~15 lines with max 8 letters width

Series of at least 97 miniscule fragments under the category "Unidentified fragments"

4Q121 "4QLXXNumbers", one fragment with 14 letters at max width, plus tiny frags

4Q122 "4QLXXDeuteronomy", a few fragments that indicate phrases, but mainly numerous frags with few letters

4Q126 "4QUnidentified Text gr", 8 frags

4Q127 "4QpapExodus gr", 86 fragments, many with only a few letters

4Q350 "4QAccount gr"

7Q1-19 various tiny unclassified fragments, so small that the same ones have been claimed to be both fragments of Mark and of Enoch

tanya

Thanks, spin, that's a useful perspective.

One wonders if all of these fragments represent papyrus, or if some of them had been made from animal hide?

One cannot help but wonder if the rules regarding animal hides (not allowed inside the temple) represented an incentive for the card carrying Jews, to rely primarily on papyrus, which then must have been copied by scribes with a less zealous, attitude towards Jewish law, onto the animal hides, the same hides which we possess today.

The Greeks, of course, would have had no such impediment. This makes me suspect that the non-papyrus documents should represent a very late addition, perhaps thrown into the caves at the last possible moment, shortly before the Roman troops arrived. Contradicting that notion is the fact that most of the caves had rows and rows of jars containing the hides, only a couple of caves had the documents hurled about helter skelter, as if thrown, in a moment of frenzied departure.

Bingo the Clown-O

Christians aren’t the first group to dump Yahweh.

Psalm 14:2 v. Psalm 53:2 is proof of that.

Diogenes the Cynic

The Language changed. YHWH is Hebrew. Kurios is Greek. The Hebrew Adonai ("Lord") is a circumlocution for the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew. Kurios is the Greek for Adonai, and it was used as such in the Greek Septuagint long before the Christian era.

YHWH did not disappear from Judaism and did not change into Kurios. Adonai changed into Kurios because Greek was the language of Pauline Christianity.