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Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Digital On Internet
mernil writes to mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls are headed for the internet. The Israel Antiquities Authority, custodians of the scrolls, plan on digitizing the 900 fragments to make them available to the public via the internet. Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
If they were smart they would have tied this release in with the Evangelion rebuild series.
As a Rational Christian, I am excited about this material being released. Debates will be much more entertaining and edifying, with some good old material to validate certain arguments and invalidate others.
Regardless of your Religious background, the dead sea scrolls are very important and to have them readily available for those who speak the language is exciting for many reasons.
2 Years though, at least this shows you how seriously people take preserving historical documents like this.
My big concern is over the principle that once these are made publicly digitally available, they will be easily tampered with. How are we going to be able to validate the good copies from the publicly tampered ones? From a technical standpoint is there anyway to protect things like this so the average Jo knows which is real and which is not?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was carefully guarded for decades. Think proprietary database formats.
Back in the '80s or '90s, a scholar published a very detailed index. It was so detailed that other scholars were able to reverse-engineer the text of the scrolls, breaking the data monopoly for those scholars who were only interested in the text on the scrolls rather than the scrolls themselves.
Since then, the keepers of the scrolls have been much more, what is the work I'm looking for, open.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, and most of them are made of parchament, which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Religious text is different from fairy tales. fairy tales could be a subset of the text where say a fictional story is used to illustrate a point. However for the most part most of the religious texts are attempts to keep historical records thousands of years ago.
A large meteor hits and destroys your city, that must be God striking down the sinners. As a guy who was just banished from the city survived and saw the destruction, he gets to make the details.
A merchant dealing with livestock builds himself a boat for easier trading with other cities. Luckally enough survived a food that covered the visible landmass. Whiping out thousands of people. It must of been God flooding the entire earth and his livestock and his wife and kids are whats left of the animal population. He survives so he can make the story.
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time. Truth = Beauty Art = Beauty so Artistic alterations have been placed it to make it easier to remember and pass on. Adding a few more lessons here and there... So when reading them many of the facts are right however the moral of the story has been changed.
Fairy tales are ficion just to prove the point. Religious Documents are the best history we have for the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
'The Romans are bad'
'So are any Jews who don't do what we do'
'We don't like women'
'Why is is so hard to get a damn bath around here'
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time.
As for the older stuff that you mentioned (Creation, Flood, Destruction of Sodom, perhaps), I suppose that these stories would indeed either need to be passed by word of mouth or else given by direct inspiration from God.
Most of the later stuff in the Old Testament (really everything except for Genesis and parts of Exodus), though, was written down from the beginning.
Leviticus, for example, is recorded Ceremonial, Religious, Moral, and even Secular Law. This was VERY highly regarded and as such copied extremely carefully. In other words, when a priest or scribe was charged with copying a scroll, he was not allowed to copy line-by-line or word-by-word. Instead, he was required to copy letter-by-letter. All of the other scrolls were held in the same regard--they all either dealt with essentially History, Prophecy, or Law.
The scribes had some VERY strict laws on how to copy, which means that today, of the stuff that remains, there are fewer discrepancies among texts than with copies of any other ancient text.
I saw statistic once that compared Homer's Odyssey with the Old Testament. The OT is significantly longer and has more copies remaining. Statistically, that would mean there is a higher chance of error while copying as well as a higher chance of discrepancies among the surviving texts. This, however, is not the case. Homer's shorter work actually contains many more errors overall--not just per line, but over the course of a shorter book.
How you choose to interpret the Bible is up to you. But at least let it be said that the Bible was properly copied.
A few other interesting tidbits on OT scribes:
*If a scribe made an error while copying, he had to completely start over on that page. He was not allowed to blot out a word and rewrite it.
*When a scribe completed a page, it was checked against his original. Every line was counted to ensure that each line had the same number of characters, and each page the same number of lines.
*When a scribe came across the name of God, the vowel symbols were never written, leaving (a transliterated) YHVH.
*Even though the scribe was writing the full name of God, he was still required to ceremonially wash his hands and break his stylus before continuing.
Pretty cool, huh? :)
Oral traditions are exceedingly reliable historical references. As the clan/tribe/village gathered to hear a story told it would be the same story that they had heard told from birth like their fathers and mothers.
Any error, addition or omission would have been corrected immediately.
If any geek arose to tell the story of Star Wars and claimed that Obi Wan said "Tashi Station, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany" they would be flamed, flogged and their geek card would be confiscated. It was in the writing that things broke down because for most of human history most of the humans couldn't read but they could all talk and listen.
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Oral tradition != telephone game. The telephone game occurs after just a few minutes with a small group of people. Oral tradition is a large group activity over many generations so your initial comparison is wildly off base. As my Star Wars example indicates, someone will fix a mistake in oral tradition.
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