A newly unveiled statue of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk was vandalized at the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.
The statue was found with red spray-paint. A nearby poster memorial in front of the statue was vandalized with red paint as well.
But are there any remaining in the classical ancient Hebrew from before the Babylonian captivity? You know, the language that the Jewish survivors of the second temple period had to reconstruct nearly from whole cloth, because their own language had evolved orally, and the entire written language was purely contextual to determine which vowels were being used? My question is whether the bot up above was in the habit of reading a language so thoroughly dead that it might as well be fucking Minoan. When even the Jews of the second temple period had to just trust that the Septuagint was a faithful translation, that begs questions of accuracy in translation from “the word of god”.
You have a lot of misconceptions about Hebrew continuity. Also misunderstanding of when the Bible was written.
Try reading Robert Alter. Very respectable scholar, but also fairly accessible.
I am genuinely interested in the topic, and will gladly look into the scholarship! Thanks for the reference! I’m fairly certain, however, that the biblical Hebrew was no longer in use by the time of the second temple period, instead being replaced among the populace with Aramaic, and all pronunciations and vowel renderings were, therefore, purely guesswork on the part of the scholars (hence the three or four different pronunciation interpetations), the most common of which wasn’t even invented until the middle ages. It’s the same deal with so-called “Church Latin”, except that Latin isn’t an abjad, so there wasn’t any guessing at context clues for spelling.
As far as the original comment was concerned, my point was that any translation is a change, and meaning is often lost. The modern christian bible has gone through at least 4 translations, no matter which route it took from the hand of bloody moses to the Christian fundies. This, in addition to things such as the Second Temple Period changes to which books would be selected for the accepted canonical Hebrew bible, or the Council of Nicea, completely destroy any idea of some pure word of god, unadulterated by human reinterpretation, as the bot was suggesting. The bot was clearly claiming that it was a Christian reading the modern bible, and that it somehow was the word straight out of the mouth of YHWH himself. That’s fucking idiotic.
Well, there are some people who have an interest in exaggerating uncertainty and inconsistency in the biblical text.
Many diasporic Jewish communities of the ancient world were not familiar enough with Hebrew and required the Septuagint (Greek), or the Targum (several Aramaic translations). However, there were rabbis in the first and second centuries CE discussing the correct intonation and punctuation of the text for homiletical purposes. That suggests that they where both very familiar with the language of the text, and shared a “correct” intonation. Worth noting that these discussions were happening in Hebrew.
It’s true that early 20th Century scholars debated that the ancient Hebrew script was lost to Jews after the Babylon exile. We have since found examples of the Ancient Hebrew script and Assyrian script (used in Hebrew from the Babylon time until today) side by side in the same documents.
Your point about translation is right on the money, although some ancient translations do provide additional context about what the original text meant to the people of the day.
Yeah, I just find that the voices I hear talking about it instead have an interest in downplaying uncertainty and inconsistency by, for instance, claiming that the modern Christian bible is the direct word of god, translated by divine inspiration, and that there has only ever been one, consistent version, in order to justify unconscionable beliefs, many of which even members of the original culture to develop the mythology and belief systems might have found abhorrent. So I’m just here calling out the fundie on the fact that they have no basis for the claim that their pet version of the document which, above all others in human history, has undergone the most reinterpretation, excision, addition, and translation, is completely free of human conceit. That original context is, as you point out, lost in translation. The things we could learn if we had a window to the Canaan of 3500 years ago…
Yep, that too.