Word: hebrew
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...those foundations. As U.S. Old Testament Scholar Frank Cross of McCormick Theological Seminary puts it: the writers of the scrolls and of the New Testament "draw on common resources of language, theological themes, and concepts . . . The strange world of the New Testament becomes less baffling, less exotic." Says Hebrew Scholar Theodor Caster of Dropsie College: "They recover for us ... the backdrop of the stage on which the first act of the Christian drama was performed...
...oral tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic underlying the Greek of the written Gospels made it necessary to use rough and often clumsy Greek equivalents for Semitic concepts. Hence, the treasury of scroll literature is enabling scholars to achieve new insight into the meaning of many passages. For example, the question of what the angels sang in their well-known announcement of Jesus' birth has long bothered Biblical scholars. "And on earth peace, good will toward men," says the King James version, and the Catholic Douay Bible has it "peace to men of good will." Now in the scrolls...
...contents under lock and key, but scholars have been permitted a preliminary peek. On the basis of this examination, they tentatively identified the Cave II scrolls as the Biblical 'Psalms and Leviticus, an apocalyptic description of the New Jerusalem, and a targum (i.e., a translation of a Hebrew text into Aramaic, the colloquial language of Christ's time) of the Book of Job. In all probability this is the targum that disappeared when it was suppressed (for still-obscure theological reasons) by Rabbi Gamaliel I, teacher of Saul the Pharisee, who later rode down the road to Damascus...
Time-Defying Leap. Next, the fragments are sorted according to script and (if possible) scribe. The mutations of Hebrew and Aramaic letters are classifiable by date-this science of paleography is, in fact, the most exact way of dating the scrolls. Each scribe, too, had his own characteristic handwriting ("ductus"), and a shred of personality makes a time-defying leap across the centuries when a scroll scholar recognizes the mannerisms of an Essene scribe who worked at a long table not unlike his own, 20 miles away and 2,000 years ago. In addition to matching up the script...
...from masora, tradition) developed in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries A.D. by the schools of Babylonia and Palestine. Older than the Masoretic Bible is the Septuagint, a pre-Christian Greek translation which has been thought to be less authoritative than the Masoretic because of the difficulties of translating Hebrew terms into Greek. The Biblical manuscripts from Cave 4, yielding some texts far earlier than either, have considerably raised the prestige of the Septuagint...