Our oldest fragment of the Bible and what it
tells us about Hebrew
The Shabbat of the portion Naso- Numbers
The blessing of the priests, which we use in
the Cantor’s repetition of the Amidah and also by parents for children is in
this portion.
Beautiful structure pyramid style 3 words 5
words and seven words
|
כד יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה,
וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ. {ס} |
|
כה יָאֵר יְהוָה פָּנָיו
אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ. {ס} |
|
כו יִשָּׂא יְהוָה
פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם. {ס} |
Repetitive rhythm. If any of you have had the
chance to watch the Cohanim reenact the Dukhanan service, and it's done well, it
can be very inspiring.
It's especially instructive because it comes
right after a very disturbing elements for us, which is the portion of the
jealous husband. It follows a listing of specific families among the Levites , their
jobs, and then shifts to the law of
lepers, and then it goes to the question
of trespasses of human beings one against the other in business , so see a flow
from issues of ritual impurity, to impurity of crimes between fellow and fellow,
and then to the impurity that is caused when there's a crime between a husband
and wife , when the husband is jealous of the wife.
The name of God is written on a scroll, is
stirred into water the wife drinks, and if she is innocent, nothing happens to
her and they live happily. If she is guilty, then her body is bloated and
distended, and woe to her—she is cursed
but note, she is not killed or beaten to death,
as is done in the middle east even into modern times.
The units goes one to deal with a man or woman who takes a vow to abstain from wine
in particular, the Nazir. Again, a discussion of defilement, as the Nazir may
not be in contact with the dead—again , an impurity that upsets or creates a
barrier.
In all of these, then, the proper order of the
world is upset, and it must be cleansed away. Therefore, the placing of the
blessing of the priests, to provide blessing and peace, undoing the rupture
that can take place between the Israelite and fellow human, male female, or
human to God.
Now, it takes me to my main point—about the
blessing of the priests and the antiquity or origins of ourselves, as Jews. And
then, some surprising asides.
*******************
How far back can we really trace ourselves? How
far back can we really find evidence of the Bible ?
We don't have any complete existing manuscripts
of the Bible, with the full punctuation of the Masoretic scholars, that go back more than about 1000 years. There
is the Leningrad Codex , on which most printed versions are based,and another
one the Aleppo . Then in Bologna, Italy, researchers discovered the oldest
complete Torah scroll, matching our texts. Before that, we have fragments or
partial scrolls of different Bible texts, as in the Cairo Genizah, perhaps as
far back as 1500 years ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls, that can go back about 2000 years ago.
Keep in mind, that it doesn’t mean that old
manuscripts didn’t exist- it is rather, that the earliest manuscripts
disappeared with the ravages of time, and the texts were then copied anew by
scribes, or, perhaps going further back, committed to memory.
Of course, we also have evidence from outside,
such as Septuagint, the translation into Greek commissioned by the Ptolemies of
Egypt, not long after the time of
Alexander. Here too, are fragments, in Greek, that are older that the Hebrew
texts, but they serve as proof that the Hebrew original had been very well
known and authoritative, long ago, albeit with some significant variations.
For all
our gripes about the historic Christian Church and theological anti-Judaism, we
owe it to the early Church founders for preserving, at least in various
translations, our Bible texts, as well as many other texts that we ignored,
such as the Macabbees.
So let's look at what we have going back to my
opening.
That's why this blessing of the priest is so
beautiful for us because of the Torah text this is exactly the oldest one that
we have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketef_Hinnom_scrolls
Ketef Hinnom scrolls
The two silver scrolls were uncovered in 1979 at Ketef Hinnom, an archaeological site southwest of
the Old City of
Jerusalem, and were found
to contain a variation of the Priestly Blessing, found in Numbers 6:24–26. The
scrolls were dated paleographically to the late 7th or early 6th century BCE,
placing them in the First Temple period.[5]
Discovered by a
13 year old volunteer!
It's ironic that this is found in what is
called Ketef Hinnom, Corner of Hinnom.
That is because Hinnom becomes the basis for
the word Gehenna, taken from “ Gei Ben Hinnom”, the valley of the Hinnom family
, the Jewish hell. To make a long story short, it seems to have been the place
where children were sacrificed, a practice common among the Phoenicians/Canaanites
and their colonies across North Africa. Hence,
it is appropriate that in a place associated in the Bible with the worst human
evil, in this same place, we have the oldest
piece of the Torah, a piece this
is now tells a story of love in the form of God's blessing.
·
1. -h/hu. May be blessed h/sh-
2. -[e] by YHW[H,]
3. the warrior/helper and
4. the rebuker of
5.
[E]vil: May bless
you,
6.
YHWH,
7.
keep you.
8.
Make shine, YH-
9.
-[W]H, His face
10. [upon]
you and g-
11. -rant
you p-
12. -[ea]ce.
Scroll KH1
The scroll KH1 measures 27 by 97 millimetres (1.06 in
× 3.82 in).
·
[Top line(s) broken]
1. ...] YHWH ...
2. [...]
3. the grea[t ... who keeps]
4. the covenant and
5. [G]raciousness towards those who love
[him] and (alt: [hi]m;)
6. those who keep [his commandments ...
7. ...].
8. the Eternal? [...].
9. [the?] blessing more than any
10. [sna]re and more than Evil.
11. For redemption is in him.
12. For YHWH
13. is our restorer [and]
14. rock. May YHWH bles[s]
15. you
and
16. [may
he] keep you.
17. [May]
YHWH make
18. [his
face] shine ...
·
[Bottom line(s) broken.]
Of course, these
scrolls are almost impossible to read!
1)
Severely torn and fragmented, as you can see,
so there is much of “ creative reading”
2)
The script is ancient, or paleo-Hebrew, not at
all looking like our print, though there may be a semblance to our script
Hebrew.
**********************
Which leads me
to my third direction- from whence our Hebrew? How come the Torah text doesn’t
look at all like the text here?
So, for this, we
have to go to the Sinai desert, where we discover the very first writings in
what can be called the first experiment in creating an alphabet== or an
alef-bet. In other words, a system in which symbols represent individual sounds
that make up words, rather than pictures to indicate words and sounds that are
then combined to create more or newer words. The Egyptian Heiroglyphs- about
1000 signs, Mesopotamian Cuneiform- also about 1000 signs, Chinese, as many as
10,000 or more. This means that only the highly educated could master and
utilize it. So-
We get to the
Sinai, where the people working the mines there were tired of trying to master
all these signs just to tell the boss they needed another shovel. So we get:
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze
Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments
from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula,
as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt.[2][3][4][5] Together
with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions,[6] it
is also known as Early Alphabetic,[7] i.e.
the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and
the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and
the Phoenician alphabet,[8] which
led to many modern alphabets including the Greek
alphabet.[9] According
to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who
spoke a Canaanite language[10] repurposed
Egyptian hieroglyphs to
construct a different script.[11]
PS Where it
mentions “ South Arabian”= that is not an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet—that
arose almost 2000 years later, after the formation of the Hebrew alphabet and Aramaic
alphabets.
So who is
scribbling away in those caves?
Many of the workers and officials were
from the Nile
Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites
(i.e. speakers of an early form of Northwest Semitic ancestral to the Canaanite languages of the Late Bronze Age) who had been allowed to settle
the eastern Delta.[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
Who are those “ Northwest semitic
speakers”? Ancestors of the Hebrews and other related tribes that had been
going back and forth Canaan to Egypt, as we have in the descriptions of Abraham
and Jacobs son going down to Egypt.
They took what had been developing in Egypt to add specific
sounds, and threw out the pictographs
and the words and syllables that went with them. 24 consonants, no vowels needed, and anyone
could learn to read and write!
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19299-revisiting-proto-sinaitic.pdf.
We
start with the image for OX, which still looks like an ox head, simplify it ,
then give it a value as place holder for sounds,name the sound for the image,
alef, for the head of cattle. By the time it gets to Phoenicia, hundreds of
miles to the north, it is made clean and simple,an ox head,lying on its side.The
ancient Greeks flipped it upside down—A. Ashkenazi Hebrew script kept it in its
side,but moved the horns over, away from the head.
From this to Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, to
Greek and Latin, hence to all European languages, and Aramaic and hence, Arabic, and even Sanskrit
of India. The scribbles of the mine workers has become the alphabet of note
of the entire world.
*********
So, we ask the question- how come we can’t read
it?
The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts
Paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician script was used before
Aramaic script was introduced by Jews returning from Babylonia.
Until the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. the
paleo-Hebrew script was the only alphabet used by the Israelites. After the
Babylonian destruction, Judean leaders and the important people of the country
were deported to Babylon. Fifty years later, Cyrus, King of Persia, who fell
heir to the Babylonian empire, declared that the Judean exiles could return to
their land and rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. According to the Bible,
42,000 Judeans chose to return (Nehemiah 7:66).
They brought back with them a new language—Aramaic—and a new script—the
square Aramaic script—both of which were in common use in the Persian Empire.
Ultimately, the Aramaic script replaced the older paleo-Hebrew script, but for
hundreds of years the two scripts were used simultaneously by the Jews.
The square Aramaic script
which the Jews brought back with them from the Babylonian exile also derives
from the original proto-Canaanite alphabet, but via an entirely different
route, which accounts both for the similarities and the marked differences.
Initially, the Aramaic
language and script were reserved for official correspondence with the Persian
government. …
Thus, by Alexander the
Great’s time, we find two languages (Hebrew and Aramaic) and two scripts
(paleo-Hebrew and square) being used simultaneously by the Jews.
But by the first century
A.D. the Aramaic script had become predominant.
Mixed script, our Aramaic “ Ktav Ashuri”, Assyrian, with God’s name in
the original Hebrew script.
The final triumph of the
square Aramaic script occurred after the Bar Kochba or Second Jewish Revolt
(132–135 A.D.).
Jews adopted the new square
script, especially for our Torah scrolls, while our cousins to the north, the
Samaritans, retained the older Hebrew script for their scrolls.
A Samaritan Torah scroll
A Polish scroll,
Ashkenazic script, 20 th century, in our ark.
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