Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [10]
Written in both Hebrew and Aramaic—a Syrian language closely related to Hebrew, and the language spoken by Jesus—more than two hundred biblical documents have been found; some are almost complete, others are in fragments. The scrolls contain at least a portion of every book of the Hebrew Bible, except the book of Esther. Among the scrolls is a complete “book” of Isaiah, composed of seventeen separate pieces of leather stitched together to form a roll nearly twenty-five feet long. Sophisticated dating techniques have proven that some of these scrolls were written nearly three hundred years before Jesus was born. Others came from Jesus’ own lifetime, a turbulent period in ancient Palestine when Rome controlled a contentious, rebellious Jewish people.
Besides these bits and pieces of the Bible, the scrolls also contained other ancient books that are not in our Bibles. There was also a great deal of information about the people who had copied and hidden these scrolls away in these Qumran caves. Known as the “Essenes,” they were part of a Jewish sect, some of whom rejected mainstream Jewish life in Jerusalem for a monklike, celibate existence. A communal group, the Qumran Essenes adhered to strict regulations as they prepared for Judgment Day, like the Jedi Knights of Star Wars, awaiting a final battle between good and evil, the forces of light and dark.
The Dead Sea Scrolls make two facts clear. By the time Jesus was born, an official list, or “canon,” of Hebrew books in the Bible had not yet been set. And while these old books are very similar to the Hebrew scriptures as they are known today, there were slightly different versions of some of these ancient Hebrew texts. While the scrolls from Qumran offer fascinating information about the Hebrew text of the Bible and life in first-century Palestine, they leave another big, tantalizing question unresolved.
Who wrote the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament?
A few years ago in the New York City subway system, there was a poster for a stenography school that read: “If U cn rd ths, u cn get a gd jb.”
This subway advertisement achieved instant legend status in New York. Good for late-night comedians’ laughs, it was also obscenely parodied on numerous T-shirts.
But now try this word puzzle—
“Mgn rdng ths bk wtht vwls. Sn’t tht dffclt t cmprhd? Myb ftr whl y cld fll n sm f th blnks nd fgr t mst f t. Ftr ll, ts smpl nglsh. Bt nw, mgn ts prt f n ncnt lngg tht hs flln nt dss vr svrl cntrs. Tht s hw th Bbl nc pprd.”
Would you like to “buy a vowel” as they say on the popular Wheel of Fortune game show? You might get this:
“Imagine reading this book without vowels. Isn’t that difficult to comprehend? Maybe after a while you could fill in some of the blanks and figure out most of it. After all, it’s simple English. But now, imagine it’s part of an ancient language that has fallen into disuse over several centuries. That is how the Bible once appeared.”
When commencing a new year of classes in Hebrew, a famous university professor was said to tell his students, “Gentlemen, this is the language which God spoke.” The Hebrew alphabet comprises twenty-two letters, all of them consonants, a concept we find difficult to grasp. In fact, Semitic languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic are still generally written without any vowels, although a system of dots and dashes above and below the line of writing has been added in recent times. In other words, readers of classical Hebrew, versed in its oral traditions, had to provide the vowel sounds from memory. The Greeks, who borrowed the basic twenty-two-letter alphabet used in Hebrew and Phoenician, added five new letters at the end of their alphabet—so the Greeks get credit for inventing the vowel system.
Now back to the fill-in-the-blanks