Why the Bible? (Religion)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 09:36 (5706 days ago) @ Carl

A question though, is when the Jews studied the Torah, was the Rabi and others able to read, or had they memorized passages. - From my readings, and I am not an expert, the Rabbi guarded the Torah and often carried it to the meetings for services. Guarded because the Torahs were handwritten on goat or sheepskin by scribes and contained the complete five books. Thus they were very valuable. It appears that the scribes were very accurate as shown by the complete scroll of Isaiah found at Qumran by the Dead Sea,age first century. It is almost 100% the same as the Masoretic Text developed from a number of scrolls a few hundred years later, the basis for Jewish Bibles now. The Rabbis could read. The 1.5-3% literacy figures suggest that only Rabbis, priests, and some government officials could read. Scrolls when worn out were ceremonally buried and replaced by another copy. This ancient Hebrew is written in shorthand, consonents only, with accent marks, and as I have mentioned in other threads contained close to 3,000 base words with about 10,000 meanings available when prefixes or suffixes were added. A very limited vocabulary, which is the language Israel started with when Hebrew was revived as the language of the State of Israel. And this is why the KJV was poorly translated. Words had to have several meanings in order to express what the writer desired to convey. Context of the sentence implied meaning to a word.
In fact the meanings are still open to interpretation. There is a recent book," In the Beginning of", by Judah Landa, 2004, which retranslates the first 11 chapter of Genesis to show that it fits current science, that is, quantum theory, cosmology, etc. His purpose was to allow fundamentalist Christians and Jews to continue to accept the Bible as the Word of God and not in conflict with current accepted science.