Slashdot Mirror
Computers Decipher Burnt Scroll Found In Ancient Holy Ark (nationalgeographic.com)
bsharma writes: Scientists have formally announced their reconstruction of the Ein Gedi Scroll, the most ancient Hebrew scroll since the Dead Sea Scrolls. This was done by CAT scanning the burnt scrolls and virtually reconstructing the layers of scrolls with ink blobs on them. National Geographic reports: "For decades, the Israel Antiquities Authority guarded the document, known as the Ein Gedi Scroll, careful not to open it for fear that the brittle text would shatter to pieces. But last year, scientists announced that they had scanned, virtually unrolled, and translated the scroll's hidden verses -- a feat now formally described in the scientific literature. Based on preliminary scans, [Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, who specialized in digitally reconstructing damaged texts,] and his colleagues announced in 2015 that the Ein Gedi Scroll was a biblical text from the sixth century A.D. containing a column of text from the book of Leviticus. But the full CT scan results, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, tell a deeper story. Further analysis revealed an extra column of text, ultimately fleshing out the first two chapters of Leviticus -- ironically, a book that begins with God's instructions for burnt offerings. What's more, radiocarbon dating of the scroll suggests that it may be between 1,700 and 1,800 years old, at least 200 years older than previously thought. In fact, the scroll's distinctive handwriting hearkens back to the first or second century A.D., some five centuries earlier than the date ascribed to the scroll last year." University of Cambridge lecturer James Aitken told Smithsonian's Devin Powell in 2015: "There's little of surprise in finding a Leviticus scroll. We probably have many more copies of it than any other book, as its Hebrew style is so simple and repetitive that it was used for children's writing exercises."
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Because the older something is, the better it is.
Which frankly is all the faction and outright fairy tales in all religious tomes are really any use for.
ironically, a book that begins with God's instructions for burnt offerings.
It would have been irony if the burnt book contained instructions on fire prevention.
Now it's just coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ... and they'll just fill the space. That's life for ya.
Pound pastrami
can kraut
six bagels - brig home for Emma
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At least among many American Buddhist secular writers, there is Buddha's teachings - mindfulness, Four Noble Truths, Eight Fold Path, things like that.
Then there are the myths - the stories how he met people and taught them, teaching gods lessons, etc .... And quite a few do get that.
At least among the loudest of the religions of Abraham, they have failed to distinguish between the teachings of their religion and the myths and stories that are supposed to illustrate those teachings through metaphor and analogy. And many times with disastrous consequences. The fault of that lies squarely with their clergy - many of whom are using their religion as a method of attaining power over the masses.
You make an assertion that there are "dramatic" changes in the text, but is that true?
Here is an example of analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea scroll find. It dates to 200 B.C., only 500 years after Isaiah wrote the original and over one thousand years older than the previously used manuscript (used in the King James Version of the Bible).
Is that a "dramatic" change the closer you get?
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Says it all really.
Who's reviewing the scrolls? Top men ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."
-> I dislike sigs...
This thread is a perfect example of what's becoming of Slashdot. Instead of comments and insights on the awesome science and tech it took to read an up-to-now unreadable ancient document, almost every comment here is a comment about whether religion is fact or fiction and is *completely* off topic. The science behind this is pretty amazing, and could lead to being able to read other ancient burned documents like those found at Herculaneum from the time of its destruction by Vesuvius. But you people are apparently more interested in bashing religion than celebrating actual science and technical advances.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Seales says he's working on hundreds of scorched scrolls uncovered from Herculaneum. To me that would be a FAR more interesting project. They might discover lost Greek texts or other works of antiquity. Even if its just tax returns, local ordinances or mundane records related to daily life it would still be interesting.
The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of the reddit atheist kiddies who feel the need to shit up every decent discussion with their euphoric fedoras.
The science behind this is pretty amazing, and could lead to being able to read other ancient burned documents like those found at Herculaneum from the time of its destruction by Vesuvius.
Just to note -- the computer techniques for reconstructing text from scrolls here were actually developed within a project for analyzing the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. This biblical scroll application was just another use of this computer analysis technique, showing its power to deal with even very badly burned and less intact fragments.
And you can't even blame it on the un-numbered masses, most of the dogma-trolling is coming from registered users who are doing it to farm karma from other registered dogma-trolls.
This thread is a perfect example of what's becoming of Slashdot.
So, start a subthread on the technology. Seems like a way to get people talking about technology.
Slashdot has a seriously diverse readership. In any given topic, you'll get the usual suspects
The clueless noobs who are still learning.
The trolls
The "Get off my lawn" crowd, who probably are suffering from testosterone deprivation.
People who are actually interested.
Since this tech was introduced in reference to an ancient burnt Middle Eastern scroll, and it turned out to be Leviticus, of all things, its simply going to attract a diverse audience.
Now if we wanted to deal with a less flamebaity version of the same, since the NatGeo article is pretty devoid of the technology, try this: http://www.livescience.com/560...
We can't control others, only ourselves. There in that link is the start of a technology discussion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Have gnu, will travel.
This technology can be used to read truly interesting documents, like e.g. charred scrolls in Pompey. This document in particular, as it turns out to be the case, is of relatively low interest.
There's no such thing in archeology or any other science.
America has a nuclear attack submarine named the USS Corpus Christi, which means "body of Christ". What would Jesus think about that?
I'd like to offer a counter point to your argument. The tech used here to reveal the text locked into the burnt scroll is amazing, but not necessarily new. MRI decoding of documents has been demonstrated before, and while painstakingly tedious no doubt, doesn't represent a "new" breakthrough. The difference in this case, is that we aren't recovering an 8 year old tax return of Joe the Plummer, we're recovering a document that is of historical significance to a significant portion of the population of the world. Since there is no new technology to debate, we're left discussing the significance of the findings, which is pretty much null since we already have the book of Leviticus. Since there's no new tech, and no new findings, I guess we're left with a discussion of "why is it significant to have these writings at all", ie the debate of whether or not religion is necessary or factual in the first place. So while it's easy to classify all things not related to the discovery of room temperature superconductors as redditt fodder, I think you're missing the point of what /. is in the first place, a place for discussion among tech-minded people, about things that more or less relate to tech.
... Atheism is a religion in the same way that NOT playing football is a sport.
The contents of the scrolls, a few chapters of Leviticus, date from the end of the Dead Sea Scroll period, maybe a one or two hundred years after the Dead Sea Scroll, and so are ancient. What's amazing, and no one in the comments really mentions, is that the text exactly matches the same chapters in the modern day leviticus text used by Jews - similar to the Leviticus text in the Dead Sea Scrolls. What this means is that as far as we now know, the modern Torah as used by Jews has not substantially changed in over 2000 years. We'll know more when the rest of the Ein Gedi scrolls are subject to the process.
Because so much of human history revolves around religion until modern times, discovery of proof that the hebrew bible has not changed significantly in the past 2000 years would be immensely important, and not just because Christianity and Islam were founded on the basis of ancient Judaism and wouldn't exist without it. If it's discovered that the modern hebrew bible was the same as in the time of the formation of early Christianity it would be a significant boon to understanding and analyzing early Christianity, not too mention discussion of how the fundamental religious document was preserved almost perfectly over 2000 years, and also may shed new light on the early origins of the hebrew bible as well.
Incidentally, there are alternative viewpoints to the idea that the Dead Sea Scroll and Ein Gedi documents were from a minority sect (Essenes). Some academics believe instead that the Dead Sea Scroll trove in particular was a refuge for documents collected from all over Judea for protection of the books in the wake of the Jewish-Roman wars.
Quoting from http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/scholars-use-x-rays-to-read-ancient-biblical-text-for-the-first-time/:
Once Seales and his team had this visualization, they still weren't sure what they had. None of them read Hebrew, so they waited with some excitement while Shor and her colleagues analyzed the text. It turned out that the scroll contained the first two chapters of Leviticus, which coincidentally deal with burnt offerings. What's incredible about these chapters, according to archaeologist Emanuel Tov, is that they are virtually identical to medieval Masoretic Text, written hundreds of years later. The En-Gedi scroll even duplicates the exact paragraph breaks seen later in the medieval Hebrew. The only difference between the two is that ancient Hebrew had no vowels, so these were added in the Middle Ages.
Tov called it "100 percent identical with the medieval texts, both in its consonants and in its paragraph divisions." He added, "The same central stream of Judaism that used this Levitical scroll in one of the early centuries of our era was to continue using it until the late Middle Ages when printing was invented... the scroll brings the good news that the ancient source of the medieval text did not change for 2,000 years." In other words, the Jewish community managed to retain some of the exact wording in passages from their biblical texts over centuries, despite massive cultural upheavals and changes to their languages.
Archaeologist Michael Segal said the En-Gedi scroll "teaches us that the [biblical] text that we have that is used today as the traditional text is a very ancient text in all of its details." He cautioned that of course only the consonants are the same, and we have yet to read the rest of the En-Gedi scrolls. Still, this scroll provides strong evidence that today's Tanakh "already existed in a standardized form in the first century C.E."
Also, see: http://www.timesofisrael.com/3d-tech-proves-hebrew-bible-unchanged-for-2000-years/
TBH the media leads with this. When Mother Theresa was sainted recently, the lead NPR story mentioned it then a few sentences later launched into the "raging controversy going on in her town" over her, which consisted of an ancient bitchfest by Christopher Hitchens, and a guy who wrote a book six years ago.
You are all cogs instantiating the distribution of memeplexes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There was an article not too long ago about this technique.
In the Neal Stephenson book Reamde, they use a technique where a shredded sprays a book up into the air, where high speed cameras digitize each piece of confetti and then computers reassemble the pieces jigsaw-wise and OCR it.
This technique is even more advanced.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I hadn't noticed how crappy it's really got, you're right.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
1) There are two words for Hell in the greek language (Hades, Tartarus). Jesus never once said either one of them. He sometimes used the valley of Gehenna (which was right on the edge of the city of Jerusalem, and used as the city dump) in his metaphors, but the translators decided to change that to "hell." This isn't a translation..."Gehenna" does not and never did mean "hell" in any language. This is a changing of what he said, which has become codified as the standard in nearly all English translations of the Bible. When you stay true to the text, it is obvious that Jesus is not establishing a doctrine of literal everlasting torture, but is just using the city dump in a metaphor to say something about morality.
2) The greek word used to refer to God's dwelling place means "sky." Just "sky." It has been translated to "heaven" to make it sound more spiritual.
3) The greek word translated as "spirit" and sometimes "ghost" just means "breath." It is a simple word, common use, nothing technical or mysterious about it. It just means breath. Also, it is gender-neutral, and the pronouns used to refer to it are gender neutral. In English the holy breath (rendered "holy spirit") is referred to as "he", but in greek it really says "it." These changes make it sound like a person, but the greek text absolutely does not.
4) The greek word translated as "savior" (and "save") really just means "heal." Every time you see phrases like "Jesus the savior" or "Jesus saves us all" it would be more accurately translated "Jesus the healer" and "Jesus heals us all." But, in order to better fit the doctrines of the roman church, the rendering is slanted.
5) The greek word translated as "believe" really means "trust." It is a very emotional word, and not an intellectual word. All these passages about "those who believe in him" make it sound like one must take a strict intellectual position in order to be part of the kingdom of heaven, but an honest rendering of the text gives one a whole lot more elbow room to interpret what they are talking about.
6) Jesus said, in the Gospel of Luke, that the Kingom of heaven is not here or there, but is within you. Many translations have twisted this verse to say "among" or other variants, to try and obscure the fact that Jesus simply came clean about the fact that the "kingdom of heaven" is just a metaphor for a state of mind.
Christianity is not based on the Bible. The Bible is full of misleading translations to twist it to fit Christian doctrines, most of which were cooked up by utterly corrupt politicians, centuries after Jerusalem was sacked.
I can spell. I just can't type today.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, in other words, if someone is a dipshit and still has a good life, it doesn't mean that God is an asshole that favors dipshits, it means that somewhere down the line of his descendants, one of them will get punished for it.
Yeah.
Right.
In other words, we just have to wait long enough until some random act happens to his son, grandson or whoever, then we can say "see, god is just".
I'd call that bullshit, but I've called stuff that was less harebrained bullshit and hence wouldn't do it justice.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have you ever heard of Martin Luther (the German monk, not the MLK of civil rights), and PROTESTANTS????
I get the impression in discussions like these that most Americans haven't heard of the Eastern Orthodox churches.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});