Thus begins the Biblical Old Testament (In the beginning God created). It is amazing how much scientific research has been done to get the most accurate translations for the books that comprise the Bible. One need only search Biblical topics in a library, in a bookstore, or on the Internet to get a feel for the quantity and variety of scientific and scholarly study during the past 2000 years. All this to discern the most accurate intended meaning a Biblical writer had for every single written word.
Mistakes in the texts, of course, could not help but creep into manuscripts considering the number of times that the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek documents have been translated and retranslated, copied and recopied, down through the ages. But I must admit that the overall validity and veracity of the Old Testament has remained remarkably intact.
In 1947 at the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin shepherd uncovered a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were found in caves, some of which are natural to the region, others dug by hand. There were eleven caves in all approximately thirteen miles east of Jerusalem. An interesting fact: The Dead Sea is 1300 feet below sea level.
Scientific scholars who have studied this find have placed it into three main categories of ancient religious literature, one of which contains the oldest known copies of the Old Testament. The Biblical scrolls have been carbon dated to the years: 250-30 B.C. These dates corroborate extremely well with paleographic studies of the actual texts.
After a thorough
comparison of the extant Dead Sea scrolls to writings which have been handed down via posterity as The Old Testament, it becomes clear that the writers of the scrolls wrote down what they believed to be true about their Jewish heritage. If the scrolls are not originals, they were copied down as accurately as humanly possible from even more antiquated but lost scriptures.
Article comments
1 - barbara
Your lack of knowledge is only amplified by your confidence in "researching" the Internet for answers about the "huge" crowd as well as "atrocities" you mention. You need to research by speaking to the authentic Rabbinical Orthodox and learned sources who have studied the subject and sweated to get the REAL answers. Why don't you do your homework?
Your logic as well is flawed. FYI the ancient Egyptians were a very murderous bunch. Just to give you a taste of how life was in those days please do more research. The Bible came to illuminate (and continues for those who try to understand its true message)and change the awareness of humanity about justice and freedom. Today after so many of its messages have sunk into our consciousness it's easy to criticize.
2 - Regis
The REAL answers are right there in the Bible for all to see. Taken IN CONTEXT, the murderous words I mentioned are just a few of many such atrocities approved by the Biblical God. Religious murder and killing does not illuminate. It is responsible for the horrific conditions of the world today. Can you imagine being a child in one of the tribes conquered by God's chosen people who was left alive while her father and mother were slaughtered?
3 - Irene Wagner
Re: fate of orphaned children left alive after parents slain by Jews.
It's a case of damned if they did, damned if they didn't, though, isn't it, Regis? Some of the most shocking biblical passages are the ones recording orders from God (or a not infallible go-between?) to slaughter every man, woman and child in conquered territory.
It’s not always easy, but I’ve tried to interpret passages like this from a broader perspective--an overall picture I have from a preponderance of biblical and personal evidence that God is merciful to those who, in their human weakness, fail to live up to their potential to love and live in harmony with their Creator and his creation"and are sorry about it and try to take Him seriously nonetheless.
What would have been the fate of children if their parents HADN’T been slaughtered? Many of the peoples the Jews conquered worshipped Molech, who required child sacrifices. God didn’t give the Hebrews carte-blanche to slaughter anyone who happened to occupy land they wanted for themselves (though modern Israel sometimes behaves as if that were the case.) The Hebrews were directed to replace societies that had become irredeemably shot through with cruel corruption " and a disrespect for (ironic to say it, I know) the value of life that would have been instilled in even some of its very youngest members.
That brings us to the question of the fate of the orphans left alive.
Presumably, they weren’t left to be eaten by the jackals, but were brought back as servants. In about thirteen years, though, that would cause problems. Imagine the stories passed on to the younger orphans by the oldest of the children allowed to survive"and the plans that would hatch among a group of teenagers discussing the fact that they lived amongst the people they did, only because those people slaughtered their parents.
It was hard to figure out just WHAT to do with them, I imagine.
That’s just one in a class of troubling passages you mentioned, Regis,
I’m not sure you’re looking for answers but I am taking a chance that you’re generous enough to want to understand people whose viewpoints are different from yours, and to attempt to find common ground . (Had the Jews tried that approach before the wholesale slaughter? Good question.) That’s a key responsibility for ALL people who want the spheres they touch to be peaceful spheres, whether they believe in Holy Books or not.
There are more members of organized religions"more than you know about"who have spent a good deal of time thinking about how the HELL certain passages made it into the Bible. You have to try to understand though, Regis. Some people (and not just people who have experienced the miraculous mercy of God through things like medically unexplainable healings or help from angelic beings"because even Bible disbelievers have had those) have reasons to believe in the Bible but they wouldn’t make sense to anyone else but themselves.
It is intellectually impossible for them to give up what they "know that they know that they know" to be true even if there are questions yet unanswered. One typically doesn’t get to that place of confidence before going through a sometimes years long process of mental and spiritual wrestlings with God over the contents of his word, learning to hear his voice through it, tender and amazing "coincidences" many involving confirmation of and by passages of scripture. Did I mention suffering? Explaining it all (even to someone who WANTS to understand) would be like trying to convince a color blind person that yellow and purple set one another off nicely, or trying to show someone learning to count that those squiggles representing "the integral of e to the xth power" in calculus books are more than what they appear to be to one who has not yet gone through the necessary paces.
4 - Ruvy
Regis,
I read the Torah, the first five books of the Tana"kh, regularly, along with the commentaries and the haftarót, the finishing portions originally chosen as allusory readings because the Roman savages forbade the study of the Torah in ancient Yudaia on pain of death.
You whine pitifully about the punishments listed in the Torah. Let's look at some real punishments meted out by real barbarians.
Drawing and quartering, a standard punishment of the English. The person is tied to four different horses, and the horses are slapped to gallop off - in four different directions.... Flogging with a cat-o-nine-tails, a whip with pieces of lead tied into nine lashes attached to a stick. Again, credit the English. Keeling - tying a man under the keel of a boat and dragging him through the water. Full marks to - wait for it - the English! Waterboarding - originally practiced in a dungeon by the Spanish in the Inquisition. Later adapted and modernized (Thoroughly Modern Millie!) for information extraction by the Americans. Add to this putting a piece of sticky cloth into a man's mouth, stuffing him with water, and then pulling out the sticky cloth suddenly, which dragged out the tissue of the throat and immediately below. Let's hear it again for the Spanish!
Now let's go a few centuries back. Rabbi 'Akiva died by having his eyelids first torn off, and then being wrapped in a Torah and burned. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died sagging from crosses, exposed to the elements. Credit all this to the Romans.
I haven't mentioned herding hundreds of people into a "shower" facility, and tossing in a canister of Zyklon B, did I? The people in the "shower" all scream bloody murder as the gas kills them off and leaves them in a pile. And who did all this? Let's all sing it out - "Deutschland, Deutschland, ünter Alles!"
I haven't mentioned how the Cambodians murdered off millions of their own, or even the invention of los campos de concentración invented by the Spanish to put down a rebellion in Cuba, and used by the English in the Boer War, and later the wait for it - Germans!
Are you getting the picture Regis?
It was in this kind of world, filled with this kind of savagery, that G-d led my ancestors, the Hebrews, and told them to kill off ALL the inhabitants of the land - lest their evil contaminate the Hebrews. And guess what? The Hebrews didn't do as they were commanded. So the sickening evil of the savages living in ancient Canaan did infect the Hebrews and they never did develop the holy society they were supposed to.
But they did not use the punishments in the Torah all that much. Instead they sank to the level of the savage Canaanites.
Unfortunately, that is history. That is the tragic tale of the Tana"kh.
To be blunt, it interests me not at all that you dislike the Tana"kh - you won't be the first to bitch and moan about it, and you won't be the last. Thousands have come before you spreading the same evil trash you do - in the same savage world filled with genocide, murder, rape and massacre.
5 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
Ruvy,
First, it's called "Keelhauling" not "Keeling".
Second, "Drawn & Quartered" wasn't just about how they quartered the body but how repulsive & barbarian the entire process was:
"First the prisoner was drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, a type of sledge. (Originally he was merely dragged behind a horse.) Then he was hanged. Cut down while still alive, he was disemboweled and his entrails burned before his eyes. (Some references, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, say this step, and not dragging behind a horse, is what is meant by "drawn," but actual sentences of execution don't support this view.)
Finally the condemned was beheaded and his body cut into quarters, one arm or leg to a quarter. How exactly the quartering was to be accomplished wasn't always specified, but on at least some occasions horses were hitched to each of the victim's limbs and spurred in four directions. An assistant with a sword or cleaver was sometimes assigned to make a starter cut and ease the strain on the animals. The remains were often put on display as a warning to others."
BUT, my point is that I am still quite amazed at how many people still view the bible as accurate historical fact.
So, mark one up for Ruvy because factual history has proven to be far more vicious than the fairy tale that a lot of people get riled up about.
6 - Clavos
Keelhauling, which Ruvy accurately attributes to the British navy, was widely practiced during the 17th and 16th centuries.
It consisted of tying lines ("ropes") to the transgressor's feet and hands, then passing the line attached to his hands under the ship's keel to the other side, then pulling the individual from one side to the other, making sure to keep the lines tight so that he scraped against all the razor-sharp barnacles commonly found on the ships' bottoms. The punishment might be repeated several times, until the back (and sometimes the front, if he twisted around) of the individual was thoroughly lacerated. The intent was not to drown, but occasionally that did happen. Most lived through it, but suffered for weeks afterward and were scarred for life.
7 - Regis
Ruvy tells Rege: You whine pitifully about the punishments listed in the Torah. Let's look at some real punishments meted out by real barbarians.
Let's not. Human barbarians cannot compare to a God who condones barbaric acts instead of intervening in history to prevent them.
8 - roger nowosielski
I buy that, Regis. The Hebrew God is overblown and grossly exaggerated.
9 - Regis
Brian says above: "Factual history has proven to be far more vicious than the fairy tale that a lot of people get riled up about."
Rege says: I've become a believer that what is written in the Old Testament is not a fairy tale; there simply is too much evidence to the contrary uncovered by scientifically examined papyrology and paleographic studies. I don't believed the OT or the NT writings are in any way inspired by God. My God is the great mystery of being rather than nothingness.