mendy
Inactive Member
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ON scribal errors
I would like to point out a few things about Jewish [Masoretic] canon: As far as i know, although there were some words for which the exact formulation was lost, the vast majority of the original hebrew version is one the Masoretic we find today: Proof: There 3 laws Jews have [1] No Torah book may be written without another authorized copy present in front of the scribe - in other words, you cant write based on memory or some second hand book [2] If a Torah scroll was found to contain even ONE letter off -it was immediatly removed from public usage and ciculation until it is fixed . [So any book with a mistake would immdeiatly be taken out!] [3] Any book that was old, smudged, burned, torn etc that was unusable or that major mistakes had been made [copied same sentence twice, skipped a line etc] had to be placed in "geniza" -buried so as to not be available for mistakes Many rabbis were called [sofrim] which means 'the counters' because they literally counted the letters in the scrolls and kept ledgers of special words or phrases -so that the version would be exact. For these reasons you will find that Torah scrolls worldwide are almost identical [i think there are maybe 6 variant letters] in Torah scrolls found anywhere in the world, from the west to the far east. I suggest that this can be extrapolated backwards to biblical times and that the accuracy of the hebrew scrolls is very high. This would make sense since theb Jews believed that their script was divine and that every word and letter counted [see Talmud, where, in hebrew, very word and even single letters can be used to learn new laws] and so were VERY careful about keeping the books exact. BTW, the talmud states [ ithin i read it once] that before he died, Moses himself wrote 13 officla copies of the Torah [this is if you accept one author writing etc] and gave one to each tribe - and one resided next to the ark in the Temple [or Tabernacle]. These were used as official references when needed and that the scroll that Ezra wrote was base don one of these. These were hannded down, more or les, to the masoretes who formalized it.
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mendy
Inactive Member
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Re: ON scribal errors
i think that it is fair to say that they had at least a double purpose: One to fix with certainty the text, as youve said due to some differences floating around. But, i think the primary goal, was to nail down the correct version of those texts already floating around from previous eras. So, while its true they tried to produce an authoritative text -but they werent living in a vacuum -as religious jews, they used an existing text day in and day out - their attempt was simply to preserve the majority of the transmission of the text they already had and to make clear the minority of text for which there was confusion. Think about it? where di they get their texts from? Previous editions they had didnt just disappear....everything they did was ultimatly based on previous works. So, i am disagreeing with what you all have said. I didnt see any proof from anyone, just assertions
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