mark9950

King sargon or moses?

The epic of gilgamish or the bible?

malookiemaloo

No idea.


m

keyser_soze

You're kidding right? Not really hard to get the numbers for those two separate items...The bible is an infant in the sense of written literature. My favourite thing is to compare legal documents that predate the bible by several hundred, if not thousand years and show that the bible is poorly written, not because the people were incapable of logical and rational thought...of decent writing skills; but rather because it was written by a bunch of low IQ goatherders with nothing better to do at the time. On average, which is going to be better, the book written by the college graduate or the one written by the guy who mops the floor at the local high school. Of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking, it's a fairly easy decision to make. That

Marduk

“King sargon or moses?

The epic of gilgamish or the bible?”


King Sargon or Sargon the Great was an actual historical figure, led the Akkadians to conquer Sumeria in 2270 BCE, there is no real historical evidence for Moses.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has many hard clay copies dating to 700 BCE or earlier, the oldest Bible hardcopy is the Dead Sea Scrolls ca. 200 BCE.
Which is older as oral tradition is anyone's guess but my money would be on old Gilgamesh since the Sumerians who wrote the original predate the Hebrews AFAIK.

keyser_soze

\

I thought that the only book that had much in common with the dead sea scrolls was isaiah?, and that the rest showed a wide divergence from the current iteration of the bible. It seems that while theologians and neo-apologists are happy to claim the one book because it is pretty close to the current iteration, they dont' mention the rest of the books that vary widely. So can we really say that the first hard copy of the bible is as old as the scrolls, or would it be more accurate to state that the oldest PART of the bible is a book found amongst the scrolls?

DrJim

As I understand teh situation with the DSS biblical texts, there is a great diversity of textual traditions evidenced among them. The great Isaiah scroll, which is nearly complete is very very close to the (now-) traditional Jewish Masoretic Text (MT). There are a number of other biblical book found at Qumran that are also very close to MT versions. On the other hand, there are a variety of other biblical books (less well preserved) which diverge considerably from the MT, and appear to be closer to what the Septuagint translators were working with. Some Pentateuch scrolls seem to have some of the unique readings of the Samaritan Pentateuch. The three, MT, LXX and SP were, of course, well known before the discovery of Qumran. Some scholars have tried to fit all the Qumran biblical scrolls into these three main text types. Other scholars have thought that one could also see a far more divergent set of versions of the biblical books at Qumran.

DrJim

I pressed the wrong button before I finished...

One thing the Qumran scrolls did demonstrate was that the MT versions are quite ancient (previously, our oldest complete MT copies were ca 1000 CE), but cannot be proved to be older than the others. At the time of Qumran, multiple versions existed. I'm not sure if anyone has produced an argument to say that MT was the most important of the versions. Since the Qumran scrolls could well be the library of a sectarian group, it is hard to say what books or versions thereof groups like the Pharisees and Sadducees would have considered 'scriptural'. Even for the Qumran librarians this is diffficult too, since they had far more copies of some Pseudepigraphical books like Enoch and Jubilees than they did of 'biblical' ones! What was 'scripture' to them?
I think PR Davies is right in characterizing the canon not as a book ("the Bible"), but as a table of contents that was a relatively changeable thing for centuries. Canons existed as lists of different scrolls, one could have all the scrolls one considered scriptural, or only a few or none of them, and one's neighbour may well have disagreed as to the status of some of those writings!

If I remember correctly, some later textual finds dating to the second Jewish rebellion seem to indicate that the MT had, by that time, become the more or less standard form of the Jewish Bible, at least for some groups of Jews. Claims that the MT can be demonstrated to be the 'original' or most ancient Hebrew Bible version should be taken with a hugh grain of salt. If anything, Qumran proved the exact opposite, that text critical issues are MORE complex the further back you go, not less!

ALthough everyone uses the word 'Bible' for a particular set of writings in bce Judah/Judaism, it is essentially anachronistic.
Although tradition may 'fix' a canon and read it into the past, for non-devotional historical perspectives, 'THE Bible' is a pretty wobbly concept.

Jim