Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Here's my analysis on Psalm 22:
http://rakovskii.livejournal.com/5832.html#cutid1

JoeWallack wrote: Focusing on the related Nahal Hever fragment. For those not familiar with the Nahal Hever issue, Christians who use a (mis)translation of "pierced" for 22:17 claim the Nahal Hever fragment is a key piece of support (due to age). This fragment is badly faded so it's uncertain what the final letter of the offending word is.

The Letter is clearly shown.

rakovsky wrote:The Letter is clearly shown.

Just like in the line directly below. You can see a YOD-RESH-ALEF-WAW BE-YOD. (WAW directly below the disputed letter.)

Oh, wait, but the WAW is shorter than either YOD...

Or two lines further down, [LAMED-AYIN-ZAYIN]-RESH-TAW-YOD HE-WAW-SHIN-[HE]. Again the YOD is slightly bigger than the WAW.

Looking back at the line with כארי there was some imperfection that made the scribe write the following letters all small. The DALET is very shortand placed above the line, so comparison of the letters in that part of the line is not significant.

The rest of the document doesn't allow an easy distinction of WAW/YOD.

spin wrote:

rakovsky wrote:The Letter is clearly shown.

Just like in the line directly below. You can see a YOD-RESH-ALEF-WAW BE-YOD. (WAW directly below the disputed letter.)

Oh, wait, but the WAW is shorter than either YOD...

Hello, and thank you for your response.

First, I drew one possible length of Yod Waw Yod in the line you are referring to in purple. Isn't the scribe putting the bottom left end of the aleph with the bottom of the Waw in question?



Second, in the line of verse 17, "pierced/gouged my hands and feet", the yods and waws are drawn consistently and to their correct length, with the only one that is disputed by anyone is the waw of Karu, which, if read in agreement with the rest of the yods and waws next to it, shows itself to be longer than the yods.

A waw is a drawn like a yod with a longer bottom end. The letter in question looks like a yod with a longer bottom end twice the end of its top and also twice as long as the yods next to it.

That is, (A) when taken in its own proportions, it is a long hook, not a short hook.
And (B) taken in relation to the yods on the same line, it is also a long hook waw, not a short hook.

spin wrote: Or two lines further down, [LAMED-AYIN-ZAYIN]-RESH-TAW-YOD HE-WAW-SHIN-[HE]. Again the YOD is slightly bigger than the WAW.

Can you please do me a favor and draw the length in purple that you are referring to like I did in the last example above?

Is your argument that the scribe in question sometimes was drawing Yods longer than or as long as Waws, so that in "Karu", the long waw was really intended to be a yod?
Your argument then is implying an admission that taken independent of the other lines, the letter in question does look like a waw, not a yod.

---

I understand that the document doesn't have the same clarity and precision as a typed modern document, and that proportions of lines can be off, but based on the lines of yod in the words next to it, the waw of Karu is shown to be in its proper longer length.

I could consider it just an aberration if (A) K'ari (like a lion) was grammatically correct, or if (B) the Masoretic texts themselves were unanimous in saying K'ari, or if (C) the LXX said "like a lion". Instead, the Nahal Hever finding is one more important piece of evidence that pierced/gouged is the literal reading.

I welcome you to see my essay on this question:
http://rakovskii.livejournal.com/5832.html#cutid1

rakovsky wrote:First, I drew one possible length of Yod Waw Yod in the line you are referring to in purple.[/b] Isn't the scribe putting the bottom left end of the aleph with the bottom of the Waw in question?

This is simply bogus. The arm of the ALEF is crossed by your fallacious purple line. Be serious. Here your original touched up image again, this time retuched by me:


At the moment I can't find a copy of this fragment online that hasn't been crapped on by people desperate to force the text into reading "dug" so they can pretend it actually means "pierced" for some strange reason. I had a copy once, but that was an earlier iteration of this issue.

So my retouch-up...

1. Note the purple lines. They show the differing heights of letters on the line. Something made the scribe scrunch the letters upwards. The second YOD of YDY has been wrongly touched up, now too short, perhaps the first as well. Whatever the case all the letters on the left have been shortened and are of no easy significance to the discussion.

2. Look at the sample ALEP on the bottom right. It shows the normal shape of the letter, which has been misrepresented by the touch-up, as its last arm is totally wrong and the RESH is too long as a consequence. This leads us to the ALEP half circled below the touch-up line. I indicate the last arm of the ALEP in red. It cuts off the possibility of length of the following WAW, such that it is shrter than the two YODs.

3. Further down you can see a WAW and a YOD marked and the YOD is slightly longer.

4. On the right is a rather long YOD (cut off by the foot of the TAW), but is still longer than any WAW.

The confessional source for the touched up image is not to be trusted. The YOD/WAW length confusion issue is a general problem in the DSS.

Good work rakovsky. I sometimes wonder why good religious people come to forums to discuss utter trivia.

The Judaism of Moses is nothing like the Judaism of today. The Masoretic text was compiled around 700 A.D. and it is a heavily edited text.


https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2 ... al-hebrew/

iskander wrote:The Masoretic text was compiled around 700 A.D. and it is a heavily edited text.

It's as though the DSS were not yet discovered.

iskander wrote:Good work rakovsky. I sometimes wonder why good religious people come to forums to discuss utter trivia.

The Judaism of Moses is nothing like the Judaism of today. The Masoretic text was compiled around 700 A.D. and it is a heavily edited text.


https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2 ... al-hebrew/

Thanks Iskander.
For me some years ago it was a real question whether the old testament predicted whether the idea of a Messiah who was killed and resurrected, because it was a stage in my life where I wanted to verify religious claims. Psalm 22 is one of the places that discusses this prediction.

The issue with v. 17 about "like a lion" Vs "pierced/gouged" is that pierced /gouged bears an uncanny resemblance to Christ's killing. That is, it tells us to look to a Messiah whose hands and feet were gouged.

Spin, in his writing above, is saying that when looked at alone, the word in question looks like it is written as dug, ie. karu, but that the u in karu is not certain because he says that in other lines the y are drawn long and look like u. But this claim that the y elsewhere are drawn long still does not look clear to me or deal with the fact that the y in the same line are not drawn long. I invite him to vis it my webpage where I discuss Psalm 22.

rakovsky wrote:

iskander wrote:Good work rakovsky. I sometimes wonder why good religious people come to forums to discuss utter trivia.

The Judaism of Moses is nothing like the Judaism of today. The Masoretic text was compiled around 700 A.D. and it is a heavily edited text.


https://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2 ... al-hebrew/

Thanks Iskander.
For me some years ago it was a real question whether the old testament predicted whether the idea of a Messiah who was killed and resurrected, because it was a stage in my life where I wanted to verify religious claims. Psalm 22 is one of the places that discusses this prediction.

The issue with v. 17 about "like a lion" Vs "pierced/gouged" is that pierced /gouged bears an uncanny resemblance to Christ's killing. That is, it tells us to look to a Messiah whose hands and feet were gouged.

Spin, in his writing above, is saying that when looked at alone, the word in question looks like it is written as dug, ie. karu, but that the u in karu is not certain because he says that in other lines the y are drawn long and look like u. But this claim that the y elsewhere are drawn long still does not look clear to me or deal with the fact that the y in the same line are not drawn long. I invite him to vis it my webpage where I discuss Psalm 22.

It is of no importance whether or not the OT predicted the coming of the Messiah as he was understood then by the locals. Moses lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the people.
The OT was used by Jewish sectarians in an effort to persuade other religious Jews to join them . Christianity is a different religion from Judaism . Islam says that Moses was a Muslim !


Is God to be bound by the OT as in the binding of Isaac?