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Thread:

Bible Languages and Theology News - General

 

News items relating to aspects of Bible Languages and including up-dates, revisions and site links.

As example:

Codex Sinaiticus

The Book of Nehemiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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Cracking the Code: The Decipherment of Linear B 60 Years On

—Dr Torsten Meissner

October 13, 2012

"A conference in Cambridge this weekend will mark the 60th anniversary of the decipherment by Michael Ventris of Linear B, a script used for an early form of ancient Greek. His stunning achievement pushed back the frontiers of knowledge about the ancient world.

When during the early 20th century archaeologists excavated some of the most famous sites of Ancient Greece – notably Knossos on the island of Crete and Mycenae and Pylos on the mainland – they found large numbers of clay tablets inscribed with a type of script that baffled them. It was significantly different to any other script known at the time. Moreover, it was immediately clear that there were at least two variants of this type of writing.

These scripts – characterised by about 90 different characters, and on the clay tablets interspersed with signs for numerals as well as the depiction of every-day objects and commodities such as pots, cloth and grain – acquired the name ‘Linear’. Linear because they were more abstract and characterised by a more linear style than the earlier hieroglyphic type of writing, also found on Crete. The two variants were given the names Linear A and B. It was clear that Linear A was the earlier type, much rarer and restricted to the island of Crete. The younger type B was found in significantly larger numbers and found at Knossos, Mycenae and Pylos. Since the original excavations evidence for the same type of writing has come to light at other places, including Thebes and Tiryns on the Greek mainland and Chania on Crete."

Continued

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22 October 2012 Last updated at 18:28 GMT

Breakthrough in World's Oldest Undeciphered Writing

By Sean Coughlan

BBC News education correspondent

The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics.

"This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level.

"I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.

Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before.

In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.

This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.

It's being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.

And the Oxford team think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world."

Continued

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How to Save a Dying Language

Geoffrey Khan is racing to document Aramaic, the language of Jesus, before its native speakers vanish

By Ariel Sabar

Smithsonian magazine, February 2013

"It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.

The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language—once the tongue of empires—follows its last speakers to the grave.

The tax preparer, Elias Bet-shmuel, a thickset man with a shiny pate, was a local Assyrian who had offered to be our sherpa. When he burst into the lobby of Khan’s hotel that morning, he announced the stops on our two-day trek in the confidential tone of a smuggler inventorying the contents of a shipment."

Continued

H/t: PaleoJudaica.com

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New Analysis of Genesis Reveals 'Death Sandwich' Literary Theme

Feb. 20, 2013 — An online tool has, for the first time, revealed a common literary technique in the Book of Genesis that has remained hidden in the text for millennia.

"Researchers at Keele University, UK, and Amridge University, USA, have discovered that Genesis uses an early example of a technique known as 'bracketing', which sandwiches one theme between two mentions of another theme. The technique is commonly used today, such as when bad news is sandwiched between two bits of good news. The new analysis of Genesis reveals a striking pattern between the two key themes of 'life' and 'death'. The opening and closing verses of the book contain frequent mentions of life, whereas mentions of death are only found in clusters in the middle."

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Who Wrote the Federalist Papers and the Letter to the Hebrews? New Findings On Debated Authorship

Feb. 20, 2013 — "University of Adelaide researchers have provided new evidence on the long-debated authorship of two famous texts -- the US Federalist Papers and the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.

The results of a 10-year project led by Professor Derek Abbott, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

The team has developed an automatic authorship detection system, using advanced software techniques to analyse author style based on commonly used words.

"We applied our new authorship detection technique to two hotly debated texts, the Federalist Papers and the Letter to the Hebrews," says Professor Abbott.

The Federalist Papers are a collection of 85 influential political essays written in the late 1700s in the lead up to the US Constitution. Their authorship was originally a guarded secret but scholars now accept that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay are the authors. Hamilton and Madison eventually provided a list of what they wrote, but 12 of the essays were claimed by both as sole authorship. Some studies have suggested a 13th essay, normally attributed to Jay, is written by Madison."

Continued

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The Eternal Disputes of the Dead Sea Scrolls

In the beginning, there was a fierce fight over ownership. More than five decades later, controversies endure.

By John J. Collins

March 10, 2013

 

"In June 1954, a small advertisement ran in the Wall Street Journal: "Biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC are for sale." The commercial offering was the start of a long and controversial path for the Dead Sea Scrolls, a cache of fragmentary writings in Hebrew and Aramaic (with a few in Greek) that were found in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956.

The ancient documents include early copies of almost every book of the Hebrew Bible and have been called, justifiably, the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. But that is one of the few things scholars have agreed on.

The first controversy followed fast on the scrolls' discovery in the late 1940s, in what is now known as the West Bank. The region was in turmoil in the wake of the United Nations vote establishing a partition plan to create independent Jewish and Palestinian states."

Continued

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1,200-year-old Egyptian Text Describes a Shape-Shifting Jesus

By Owen Jarus

LiveScience

March 12, 2013

"A newly deciphered Egyptian text, dating back almost 1,200 years, tells part of the crucifixion story of Jesus with apocryphal plot twists, some of which have never been seen before.

Written in the Coptic language, the ancient text tells of Pontius Pilate, the judge who authorized Jesus' crucifixion, having dinner with Jesus before his crucifixion and offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus. It also explains why Judas used a kiss, specifically, to betray Jesus — because Jesus had the ability to change shape, according to the text  — and it puts the day of the arrest of Jesus on Tuesday evening rather than Thursday evening, something that contravenes the Easter timeline.

The discovery of the text doesn't mean these events happened, but rather that some people living at the time appear to have believed in them, said Roelof van den Broek of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who published the translation in the book "Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ" (Brill, 2013)."

Continued

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Nebuchadnezzar’s Destruction of Jerusalem, The Cyrus Cylinder, and the Building of the Second Temple

27 March 2013

Christopher A. Rollston, Visiting Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures,George Washington University

"Cyrus the Great of Persia is called “Meshiah” (that is, “Anointed One,” “Messiah”) in the Hebrew text of Isaiah 45:1 and Yahweh’s “Shepherd” in Isaiah 44:28. This sort of grandiose language may seem striking to some. It should, as it is striking. But the backstory provides the basic rationale for this lofty verbiage. Namely, several decades before Second Isaiah referred to Cyrus as “Meshiah“ and “Shepherd,” Judah had suffered mightily at the hands of the Babylonians. It all began in ca. 597 BCE. The gold and silver of the Jerusalem Temple and Royal Palace had been plundered, but both buildings still stood. King Nebuchadnezzar the Great of Babylon was marching victoriously back to Babylon, not only with these precious metals but also with several thousand Judean prisoners of war. Among them were King Jehoiachin and much of the Judean royal family (2 Kings 24). Things were bad, but they would get worse, as Nebuchadnezzar would return to Jerusalem some ten years later to avenge and to destroy. Nebuchadnezzar’s rationale was this: Zedekiah had become king of Judah after Jehoiachin was exiled but he had not been the loyal vassal for whom Nebuchadnezzar had hoped. Nebuchadnezzar was angry, he came to Jerusalem and besieged it for some eighteen to twenty months, beginning around 587 BCE (2 Kings 25)."

Continued

H/t: PaleoJudaica.com

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Article:

Before Babel? Ancient Mother Tongue Reconstructed

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 06 May 2013 Time: 03:00 PM ET

"The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as "mother," "to pull" and "man," which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucusus. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

"We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age," said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom."

Continued

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Cracking the Ugaritic Code

Hebrew and Sister Tongue Grew From Ancient Semitic Language

By Philologos

Published August 18, 2013, issue of August 23, 2013.

"Forward reader Raffi Bilek has some questions about Ugaritic, the ancient Semitic language, closely related to biblical Hebrew, that was unearthed in archaeological excavations begun in the late 1920s at the ancient site of Ugarit, along the Syrian coast north of Latakia. Mr. Bilek asks:

“How do we know that Ugaritic is so similar to Hebrew? How do we know that it predates it? How is it even possible to understand a previously unknown language when it is written in an unfamiliar alphabet?”

Let’s start with the last question. The Ugaritic alphabet was indeed an unfamiliar one. The texts, more than 1,000, excavated at Ugarit, were written in cuneiform characters incised with a stylus on wet and subsequently baked clay tablets of the kind commonly used for writing in the ancient Middle East, particularly by the Babylonians — whose language, Akkadian, was for a long time the scribal lingua franca of the region."

 

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Interview with Martin G. Abegg on Electronic Dead Sea Scrolls

One person stands behind all electronic versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Martin G. Abegg, professor and co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University.

His name and infamous Mac computer are mentioned in almost every history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but we wanted to give him the opportunity to tell a little of his story in his own words.

Ken Penner: When did you first start creating a database of Dead Sea Scrolls texts?

Continued

H/t: PaleoJudaica

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Smithsonian.com

 

November 25, 2013

The Man Who Viewed the Bible as Art

"It’s not the place you would expect to find the world’s third-oldest manuscript of the gospels. The jade-like walls of the Freer Gallery’s Peacock Room are beautifully rendered in rich detail work. Delicate spirals rim the panels and gold-painted shelves line the walls, housing dozens of works of Asian ceramics. On one end, a woman immortalized in portrait, robe falling from her shoulders, watches over the room. To her left, a row of closed shutters block the room’s access to the sunlight. Golden peacocks, their feathers and tails painted in intricate detail, cover the shutters. On the far wall, two more peacocks are poised in an angry standoff. One is dripping with golden coins. The creature is a caricature of the Peacock Room’s original owner, the wealthy Englishman Frederick R. Leyland. The other peacock represents the struggling, underpaid artist—James McNeill Whistler. Whistler, who fought with Leyland, his patron, dubbed the piece “Art and Money; or, the Story of the Room.”

The parchment pages of the late 4th to 6th century biblical manuscripts, recently placed on view in the middle of the room, were originally intended to be handled and turned gently, most likely, as a part of the liturgy, by the monks that owned and read them. In the seventh century, wooden covers painted with the figures of the four Evangelists were added, binding the manuscript tightly and making the pages much harder to turn. At that time, the bound books probably made the transition to a venerated object—but yet not a work of art."
 

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Video Link (National Geographic)

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Fate of Ark of the Covenant Revealed in Hebrew Text

By Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor | January 07, 2014 09:07pm ET

"A newly translated Hebrew text claims to reveal where treasures from King Solomon's temple were hidden and discusses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant itself.

But unlike the Indiana Jones movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the text leaves the exact location of the Ark unclear and states that it, and the other treasures, "shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David …" putting it out of reach of any would-be treasure seeker.

King Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was plundered and torched by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C., according to the Hebrew Bible. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that, when originally built, was said to have held tablets containing the 10 commandments. It was housed in Solomon's Temple, a place that contained many different treasures."

Continued

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SCHOLARS DISCOVER EARLY ASTRONOMICAL DRAWINGS

 

Undergraduate Students with Green Scholars Initiative Find 1,500-Year-Old Drawings of Constellations Hidden in Ancient Biblical Manuscript

 

OKLAHOMA CITY, Sept. 19, 2014—

 

"Museum of the Bible announced today that undergraduate students with its Green Scholars Initiative have discovered what may be among the earliest-known classical drawings of celestial constellations hidden under a layer of Greek text in a 1,500-year-old biblical manuscript. Additionally, the student-scholars at Tyndale House, an institution associated with the University of Cambridge, found the earliest manuscript attributed to Eratosthenes in the same document. The Greek mathematician, geographer and astronomer was the first to calculate the Earth’s circumference, the tilt of its axis and the inventor of geography.

 

The research, conducted in 2012 and 2013 at Cambridge, also uncovered the earliest copy of the opening of a work by Aratus, a Greek poet who was one of the first to write about constellations and other celestial phenomena."

 

Continued

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Aramaic, the English of the Levant in Antiquity

 

A holistic approach to Aramaic can uncover a shared backdrop of distinct cultural and religious traditions, help to trace their origins in the absence of other historical or archeological information, and enable one to appreciate the rich texture of certain words and expressions in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

 

By Holger Gzella

Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic

Leiden University

January 2015

 

1. Introduction

 

"Between the mid-first millennium B.C.E. and the spread of Islam more than a thousand years later, Aramaic was the international language of communication in the Ancient Near East, and as such by far the most important language in the region. During this period, which still forms the basis of much of modern Middle Eastern culture, it connected a vast area ranging from Egypt in the West to Afghanistan in the South, and from Anatolia in the North to Arabia in the South. It entered the Biblical books of Ezra and Daniel: the Aramaic parts of the latter in particular contain several of the most famous stories, such as the Colossus on Clay Feet, the Young Men in the Fiery Furnace, or the Writing on the Wall. Aramaic also provides a large amount of the much-debated “Semitic background” of the New Testament. Finally, it became the literary language of the living religious traditions of Jews, Christians, and others, among whom it has been studied – or even spoken – ever since. Even when overhearing speakers of Aramaic in public in some American, European, or Australian city, the trained ear can still pick up words and constructions that already occur in ancient Aramaic inscriptions or in parts of the Bible."

 

Continued

H/t: PaleoJudaica

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British Library: More Manuscripts Online

 

FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2015

 

Posted by Peter M. Head at 9:00 am  

 

"The British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog reports that seventy-five more manuscripts are on-line. These seem to be the last group in the current project (hopefully they will get more funding to keep up the good progress). In this batch are a mountain of patristic and ecclesiastical manuscripts including homilies and such, and the following biblical ones. I’ll copy in excerpts here:"

Continued

 

Evangelical Textual Criticism

 

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PRESS RELEASE

 

International Digital Library of Hebrew Manuscripts

 

Thu 23 Jul 2015 

 

The British Library partners with the National Library of Israel

 

"As part of the International Digital Library of Hebrew Manuscripts, an initiative of the National Library of Israel in cooperation with the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society, the National Library of Israel (Jerusalem) and the British Library (London) are pleased to announce the signing of a partnership agreement providing for the digitization of at least 860 Hebrew manuscripts from the British Library’s collection, in addition to 1,250 already being digitized and made available through an earlier project funded by The Polonsky Foundation. Through these two projects, all 3,200 manuscripts in the British Library’s collection will be fully catalogued and digitized images of at least 2,110 made available online via NLI’s International Digital Library of Hebrew Manuscripts and the British Library’s website."

 

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The Aleppo Codex

 

Author: Yosef Ofer

 

"The Aleppo Codex, the most splendid, old, and accurate manuscript of the Bible, is presented here for the first time in full color photograph, permitting the reader to examine the handiwork of the greatest of the Masoretes, who were active in Tiberias in the tenth century, Aharon Ben Moshe Ben Asher, and to gain an impression of the way the Masoretes worked to preserve the accurate text of the Bible and the reading tradition."

 

Website

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Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction

 

Edited by: Alessandro Bausi (General editor), Pier Giorgio Borbone, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, Paola Buzi, Jost Gippert, Caroline Macé, Marilena Maniaci, Zisis Melissakis, Laura E. Parodi, Witold Witakowski

 

Project editor: Eugenia Sokolinski

 

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