The Sunday Mail
Before the advent of the printing press in 1450, most forms of media (written texts) were produced on scrolls and parchments.
The scrolls consisted of strips of parchment, written on one side, which were sewn together with threads made from the sinews of animals.
Every strip of parchment contained several columns.
“Lines were traced for each column, and the letters were written beneath the lines.” (“The Bible and its Transmission — Scrolls, Manuscripts, Printings” by Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem).
The Septuagint is a third to second century BCE Koine Greek text and considered the oldest record of the complete text of the Hebrew Scriptures, whose source has not been identified yet.
Of all religious texts, we are told, the Septuagint is a “translation” of the Hebrew Scriptures.
There are no known scripts, scrolls, parchments, writings or texts that one can call “Hebrew Scriptures” before the third century BCE.
A thorough comparative study of the Hebrew Judaic Scriptures in relation with the available religious records of ancient Egypt, India, Sumer, Canaan and Chaldea, has shown a similarity and discernable adoption of the laws, teachings and historical figures by the Hebrew scribe-copyists.
“We do not possess the original manuscripts of the (Hebrew Judaic) Scriptures (before the Greek Septuagint).
“What we have today are copies of the copies of the copies of the autographs. As careful as copyists may be, when something is copied by hand over a few thousand years, mistakes (and changes) are bound to happen.”
The most authoritative canonical books of the Judaic Hebrew Scriptures has remained the 10th century Tanakh (Masoretic Text or Miqra) and it was primarily copied, edited and distributed by Masoretes, groups of Hebrew scribe-copyists who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries CE.
The source materials used for the Masoretic Text were the Aleppo Codex (c920 CE) written by Masorete, Aharon Ben Asher and Leningrad Codex (c1008 CE assumed to have been written in Cairo), considered the oldest and most complete Hebrew language manuscripts.
This is a complete Hebrew Scriptures, which was written in Egypt in 1008 by Shmuel Ben Ya’aqov. (YosefOfer, Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Jerusalem)
The original Paleo-Hebrew pictographic alphabet is said to have been developed around the third century BCE using the Aramaic alphabet, itself a seventh century BCE evolution out of the Canaanite (Phoenician) script.
This means there could not have been a written scriptural manuscript in Hebrew before the alphabet of the language had been developed.
The Canaanite (Phoenician) alphabet is directly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics from around 11th century BCE.
It is then intellectually possible that there is enough outside evidence to show that the so-called Hebrew Scriptures used to produce the second century BCE Septuagint were actually fragments and a “collection of legends, hero stories, myths and folk tales” drawn from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian folk traditions, woven together into a pseudo-historical narrative.
So the big questions remain.
If the Aleppo Codex (10th century CE) is the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts, what was the source text or literary ancestor of the third to second centuries BCE Greek Septuagint, recalling that the Poleo-Hebrew pictographic alphabet was only developed in the third century BCE?
What and where are the Hebrew scattered sources used to produce Greek Septuagint, if ever they were?
Why is there a rigorous theological stonewalling against a possibility and a deliberate historical distortion that there is none?
Why is there a ceaseless effort to cover-up that Hebrews adopted other people’s calendar, names and pictographic alphabet, developed a language from others and learnt a lot of religious traditions from others of earlier civilisations?
To remove debris and superfluous material on a knowledge system is to re-examine long-held assumptions to conquer ignorance, superstition and fatalism.
This is not for the theologically faint-hearted.
It’s an expedition of discovery and exploration to conquer theological ignorance because, according to Rabbi Alan Lurie (New York), Scriptures are too profound to be rejected or to be read literally and historically.
He said the Scriptures are containers of perennial or eternal truths (“sophiaperennis”) about the Divine, nature and humanity.
Send your feedback to [email protected] and read more of his writings on www.shingaindoro.blogspot.com
