| Meaning
& Message of the Old Testament • Description LESSONS • The
Bible (no links yet! still under "construction") CALENDAR July 2002
* 8-13 Prelims Week August 2002
* 26 National Heroes Day September 2002
October 2002
* 7-11 Finals Week
Dear Students, Kindly take time to visit this site regularly as notes, readings, illustrations and pointers to exams and quizzes will be placed here soon. Thanks! - Callum Tabada |
(The following
articles will be discussed on July 8 [Monday] and 10
[Wednesday]. Get a copy of this article from the
Religious Studies Program Office at the Katipunan Hall at
P5.00 each). 5. Is the Bible the World's Oldest Book? No. At one time, biblical scholars believed that the Bible was only significant literary production of the ancient Near East. During the past century, however, archeologists have found remains of other ancient libraries, such as that of the Assyrian Emperor Ashurbanipal IV (668-627 B.C.E.), in the ruins of whose palace at Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, were discovered hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with a wedge-shaped writing known as cuneiform. Ashurbanipal's tablets were in Akkadian, a Semitic language used by Assyrians and Babylonians, but they seem to have included translations from the much older literature of Sumer, the first known high civilization of the ancient Near East. The Sumerians, later invaded by Akkadian-speaking peoples, were a non-semitic group that built city-states along the southern Euphrates River near the head of the Persian Gulf in what is now Iraq. For Bible scholars, perhaps themost important finds were eleven tablets recounting the adventures of Gilgamesh, a legendary king of Uruk, a leading Sumerian city. The Epic of Gilgamesh includes a vivid account of a great flood, which only a single man, Gilgamesh's ancestor Utanapishtim, survived. Directed by Ea, the god of wisdom, Utnapishtim built an ark (a box-shaped boat) on which he, his family, servants, and various animals were preserved. In numerous details, including the sending out of birds to find dry land and the offering of sacrifice after the flood waters receded,t he Gilgamesh flood story remarkably parallels that in Genesis. Scholar Alexander Heidel believes that both the Sumero-Babylonian and biblical accounts go back to a single source, although the Gilgamesh version is clearly the older of the two. Mesopotamia, as the greeks called Sumero-Babylonian area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, produced other counterparts to familiar Bible stories. The Mesopotamian creation account known as the Enuma Elish (meaning "when above") is sometimes called the Babylonian Genesis. Old Testament laws and legal practices are also paralleled in Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions, the most famous of which occurs on a black stone monument called the Stele of Hammurabi. Ruler of the short-lived Old Babylonian Empire, Hammurabi revised the codified preexisting laws about 1690 B.C.E. Carved in stone for public view, Hammurabi's code is reflected in several Mosaic laws of the Pentateuch. Like Moses, Hammurabi claimed to have received his ordinances from a god, in his case the Babylonian sun deity Shamash. Although Sumero-Babylonian literature si polytheistic (presenting a world with many gods), workds like the Enuma Elish and Epic of Gilgamesh did have an impact on the authors who composed the Bible. The common Mesopotamian belief in the divine creation of life and the gods' control of earthly events influenced the development of Israel's religious thought. According to Genesis and Joshua, Israel's ancestors had worshipped Mesopotamian gods. At a later period, the Israelite captives in Babylon (587-538 B.C.E.) absorbed considerable Mesopotamian myth and folklore, some of which, refined by Hebrew monotheism, later appreared in scriputure. The priestly account of creation in Genesis 1 may have been a response to witnessing the splended publivc performance of the Enuma Elish at the Babylonian New Year Festival. Besides Mesopotamian influences, which were particularly intense during the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian hegemony of the eight through sixth centuries B.C.E., Egyptian and Canaanite ideals also affected Israelite religious thought. Among other Egyptian borrowings, Proverbs 22:17-23:11 contains what is virtually a Hebrew translation of passages written or compiled by Amenemope (Amenemophis), one of Egypt's leading wise men, while Canaanite motifs permeate almost the entire Old Testament. After the Hebrews settled in Palestine (Canaan) in the thirteenth century B.C.E., they not only took over many older Canaanite shrines and urban sanctuaries, such as those at Bethel, Shechem, and Jerusalem, but they also adopted Canaanite hymns, poems, and religious titles to apply to Yahweh's worship. Prayers and epic poems celebrating Baal, the Canaanite fertility god, and El, father of all gods, such as those found at Ugarit (Ras Shamra), supplied many of the terms and images that Bible writers characteristically use to describe yahweh (Psa 82; 50:2-3; Gen. 21:33; Ezek. 16:3; Judg. 5:4-5). Genesis 14:18-24 includes a brief narrative that shows how Abraham identified Yahweh with El Elyon ("God Most High") of the Canaanite city of Salem. 6. In what language was the Bible originally written? Most of the Old Testament was written in classical Hebrew, the Semitic tongue spoken by the Israelites. Certain later books were composed in Aramaic, an Aramen (Syrian) dialect closely related to Hebrew and probably alsot he language spoken by Jesus. The entire New Testament is in koine Greek, the international language of the first-century workaday world, a tongue derived from the fusion of classical Greek with the commercial vernacular of Near Eastern peoples conquered by the armies of Alexander of Macedonia. The blending of Oriental and Greek elements produced a cosmopolitan culture known as Hellenistic, arbitrarily dates as beginning with the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E. Hellenistic ideas exerted considerable influnce on the thinking of late Old Testament authors and early Christian theologians. Merely phrasing age-old religious ides in Greek, a language in which even the commonest terms were loaded with philosophical implications, subtly changed their religious meaning. 7. For Study Purposes, How Do Scholars Recommend That We Read the Bible? People read the Bible for many reason, ranging from curiosity about documents that have exerted such enourmous influence on Western civilization to a desire to hear "the voice of God" speaking from its pages. Some readers approach the biblical text uncritically, accepting each statement at face value. The fundamentalist position argues that the Bible is inerrant, free of any human error or bias. Some lieteralist interpreters insist that it is a book of science, arbitrarily pitting it against the discoveries of modern physics, geology and astronomy and forcing people to make an unnecessary choice between rational science and biblical authority. In many respects, the American fundamentalist view is also the position that most Islamic believers adopt toward their sacred book, the Qu'ran (Koran), which they believe God dictated directly to his prophet Mohammed. Aware that the discourse of religious thought is commonly metaphric-that it uses images, parables, and figures of speech to convey its messages-scholars of world religions suggest that we avoid undue literalism when reading the Bible. During the last century and a half, American and European scholars have analyzed the biblical text extensively, discovering that its authors freely used ancient myth, legends, and folktales to tell their story. The biblical writers' primary goal was not to record mere fact but to interpret a story's theological meaning. When narrating historical events, such as Babylon's demolition of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., biblical authors were not concerned with preserving a comprehensive and objective account of the disaster but were trying to understand God's purpose in allowing the triumph of a pagan empire over his chosen people. When they adopted traditions about creation inherited from the older civilizations of Mesopotamia, the writers exploited these origin myths to celebrate their God's creative majesty. Some biblical writers apparently understood, as many modern readers do not, that myths are not deceptions or untruths but vehicles, in a pre-scientific age, for expressing universal insights into the nature of the world and human society. When used in this way, myths express values that transcend the accidents of history. Modern scholars urge readers to view a given biblical book in its original culture and historical context, over mindful of the long historical process-sometimes involving centuries of composition, revision, and editing-by which individual books assumed their present form. Comparing biblical documents with other ancient literary texts heightens readers' awareness of both the similarities and differences between Israel's Scripture and the literature produced by other nations. Innumerable parallels to individual myths, beliefs, and traditions exist between the Bible and other texts of antiquity, but these are generally in form of analogous ideas and motifs. No ancient Near Eastern nation besides Israel created documents resembling the incomparable narrative-extending from the world's beginnings to the fall of Judah-encompassed in Genesis through 2 Kings. Other cultures produced many prophetic oracles and provocative wisdom literature but nothing to match the work of Israel's greatest prophets, such as Isaiah, Hosea, or Ezekiel, or the brilliant wisdom books of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus Ben Sirach. Avoiding the artificial dilemma that misleadingly distinguishes between "work of man" and "works of God," students of biblical literature can appreciate that the worth or significance of a religious text does not rest on its relation to concrete fact but on its continuing relevance to the human spirit. Whatever the mysterious force called inspiration may be, it operates independently of factual accuracy or error, transcending the limitations of an individual writer's inadequacies to reveal concepts of reality beyond the reach of ordinary experience. Manuscripts and Translations 8. When Was the Bible First Translated? The first translation of the Hebrew Bible begun in Alexandria, Egypt, in the mid-thrid century before Christ, when leaders of the Jewish colony there found that the younger generation of Jews no longer understood classical Hebrew. According to legend, seventy scholars were appointed to translate the Scriptures into koine Greek, and after laboring for seventy days, they produced seventy identical versions. According to historical fact, however, this landmark translation, known as the Septuagint abbreviated LXX (after the seventy or seventy-two elders who supposedly produced it), took more than two centuries to complete. The Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) was translated first, followed gradually by the prophetic books and the Writings (poetic and wisdom literature), and eventually by works that later became known as the Apocrypha. A Hellenistic Jewish work, the Letter of Aristeas, gives a popular version of the Septuagint's origin. The Septuagint was extremely influential among Jews living outside Palestine and was the Bible adopted by the early Greek-speaking Christians. Most of the Old Testament passages cited in the New Testament are either direct quotations or paraphrases of the Septuagint Bible. Indeed, so completely did Christians take over this Jewish translation that the Jews were forced to produce another version for their own use. The next great step in making the Bible available to a wider audience was St. Jerome's production of the Latin Vulgate. Commissioned by the bishop of Rome to render the Scriptures into the common toungue for the Latin-speaking Western church, Jerome, between 385 and 405 C.E., produced what became the official Bible of Roman Catholicism. Following the general decline in literacy after the fall of Rome in the late fifth century, no other major translation of the Bible was published for nearly 1000 years. Pre-Reformation translators at first merely rendered Jerome's Latin into the languages of modern Europe. Not until William Tyndale in the 1500's were translations again made from the Bible's original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. 9. In What Forms Has the Bible's Text Been Preserved? No original copy of any biblical book has survived. The oldest extant forms of Scripture are manuscript (handwritten) copies on papyrus (paper-like sheets made from the papyrus plant) and parchment (dried and treated animal skins). Countless ancient copies of the Old Testament, or parts thereof, were undoubtedly lost during the repeated destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, such as those by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. and by the Romans in 70 C.E. Wars, persecutions, and mob violence also account for the loss of many Hebrew manuscripts kept in synagogues (Jewish meeting places for instruction and worship) throughout the Greco-Roman world. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 (see question 16 and Part 6, "Pseudepigrapha"), the oldest complete copies of the Hebrew Bible were those made in the ninth and tenth centuries. These manuscripts were largely the work of the masoretes (from an Aramaic word meaning "tradition"), medieval Jewish scribes who added vowel symbols to the consonantal Hebrew script. The Masoretic Text (MT) is the standard form of the Hebrew Bible today. Although only the scroll of Isaiah was found complete, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls produced at least fragments of every Hebrew canonical book (except Esther), some of which date from as early as about 150 B.C.E. and represent the most ancient surviving texts. Although there is no complete New Testament text earlier than the fourth century C.E., the oldest manuscript fragments date from the second century and include version preserved in Greek, Syriac, Latin, Ethiopic, and other languages. Among the many New Testament manuscripts occur an estimated 400,000 textual variations, though the essential meaning of the text seems relatively clear in most cases. Of the thousands of surviving Old and New Testament manuscripts or fragments, no two are precisely alike which presents the textual critic or translator with a formidable challenge. He or she must compare variations among these thousands and try to determine which one, or combination of several, appears closest to the supposed original. Because all manuscripts differe from one another to some degree, a given text's relationship and fidelity the (forever lost) original is virtually impossible to determine. The scholar's taks of sorting out new manuscript finds and comparing them with previously known versions, thus to enhance the quality and reliability of the biblical text, is a continuously ongoing process known as lower (textual) criticism. Click here to continue
reading >>1. What is the Bible? Manuscripts and
Translations The Old Testament Canon |
SILLIMAN
UNIVERSITY, DUMAGUETE CITY, PHILIPPINES • FIRST SEMESTER,
SCHOOL YEAR 2002-2003
Email me in case of any questions or clarifications: callumtabada@yahoo.com
or you can ask me directly in class during class hours :)
Last updated: Thursday, July 4, 2002
