Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

John2 wrote:Yay, rakovsky's back and stirring things up again with his friendly but no holds barred tone. My favorite religious Russian. I like what you're saying about the Ps. 22 issue, particularly the extra aleph thing (in other words in the OT) and the dug/pierced translations in the LXX and Peshitta. Let's say you are right.

Where do I click the Like button and give you reputation points?

Thanks John.

The Old Testament issue about its Christian prophecies is interesting. I think that the Old Testament did have a prophecy of a Messiah who would get killed, but the image is not laid out in the same clarity, that, say, many historic stories in the Old Testament are. The story of Moses for example is narrated in a matter of fact straightforward way, with all its mythical supernatural events. With the Messianic prophecies on the other hand, it's interesting - there are not even any direct indisputable fully clear narrations of the Messiah in prophecy in the Old Testament. The concept of the Messiah son of David is well known in Jewish tradition from the 1st c. AD. But if you go back into the Old Testament, there is no place where the concept is fully clear. Even the most foundational, the prophecy of Nathan to David about his future "son" having an everlasting dominion, could be seen by some people to just be hyperbole talking about his son Solomon.

It's natural then that any prophecies about this Messiah's death are going to end up being cloudy and debatable poetry too, just like their subject is. So some story about the Messiah getting his hands gouged in Psalm 22 is the kind of thing people can rationally debate about too - like "What does it mean to get one's hands gouged and is this just hyperbole and allegory?"

My own opinion is that the Tanakh at times did talk about the Messiah as a future redeemer, but it did it in this kind of cloudy allegorical way that we associate with prophecy. In a way I think that the style of writing prophecies in the OT is a bit like the kind of oracles that were happening elsewhere in the ancient world, or even the kind of style we associate with Nostradamus. The Oracles might make some cloudy dreamlike prediction with various "signs". We see that too in the predictions made by Joseph about Pharaoh or Daniel about King Nebudchadnezzar. Adherents of Judaism and Christianity would argue back that pagan style "oracles" and divinizations were banned by the Torah. And that's true, but it seems to me that there was a similarity in the way they expressed their predictions using various "signs" and "symbols".

And I think that the Christian community did interpret these "signs" correctly, in seeing them as pointing to the concept of a Messianic redeemer who would get killed and resurrect. The "signs" exist throughout the Old Testament. One of the most foundational aspects of the Torah was the sacrifices, especially at Passover and the Day of Atonement, where the lamb or ram played a climactic role in bearing the people's sins or having its blood serve as a protective sign for the nation. The concept is well laid out in Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. And the concept of the Messiah as redeemer who through his sacrifice bears the people's sins and redeems them fits into this model.

I'm also well aware of rabbinical objections to this understanding of the Messiah. For example, the Old Testament bans Israelites from performing human sacrifice and when Moses asked to serve as an atonement, his request was refused. There are also counterarguments to those objections. Moses was refused as he was not sinless and indeed he never lived in the promised land, because of his faithlessness in God's directly spoken instructions. The rabbinical objections I think do not really address the fact that nevertheless the mentality of the Torah saw redemption and atonement in terms of sacrifice.

As the Orthodox Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin has suggested, I think that in ancient times there really was a mainstream view in the Jewish community about a suffering Messiah - although it may not have been the only view about the Messiah. And I think that what happened was that once Christianity spread, it created a dialectical philosophical dispute that institutional Judaism began to react against. And so in reaction against Christian claims about the Messiah's sacrifice, this once common view became strongly downplayed and sidelined to the point where talk of a suffering Messiah was either seen as "Christian" and heretical, or else talked about only in passing.

Suffering Messiah is a Very Jewish Idea

Daniel Boyarin is a Jewish scholar of some repute. ... In The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ Boyarin argues that the Christian belief in a suffering messiah who atones for our sins was far from some bizarre offence to Jews but in fact was itself an established pre-Christian Jewish interpretation of the books of Isaiah and Daniel.

The idea of the Suffering Messiah has been “part and parcel of Jewish tradition from antiquity to modernity,” writes Boyarin, and therefore the common understanding that such a belief marked a distinct break between Christianity and Judaism is quite mistaken.

Other traditions appear in the Babylonian Talmud from a later period (300 to 600 CE) “but very likely earlier” (p. 153). One of these is from Sanhedrin 98. The question is there asked “What is the Messiah’s name?” Different rabbis offer various answers.

After several views, we find: “And the Rabbis say, ‘the leper’ of the House of Rabbi is his name, for it says, ‘Behold he has borne our disease [the word here means ‘leprosy’], and suffered our pains, and we thought him smitten, beaten by God and tortured’ [Isa. 53:4].”

So here we find Jews interpreting Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of the vicarious sufferings of the Messiah.

Boyarin then mentions that on the previous page in the Talmud is a scene of the Messiah sitting among the diseased and poor at the gates of Rome, and understanding that he has a saving role to perform for these wretched sufferers by identifying with them.

http://vridar.org/2015/08/26/suffering- ... wish-idea/

The article has more information about D.Boyarin.

I remember reading one ancient pagan writer noting that the Jewish community in the 1st c. was earnestly awaiting a Messiah at that point based on an ancient prophecy that he would come at that time. This might have been the prophecy in Daniel 9 that according to Rabbi Maimonides calculated the End Times to occur in the 1st c. AD.

So sure, I understand what you are saying, John, about how after Jesus' death the apostles were looking at images in the Old Testament like the experiences described in Psalm 22, and then linking them to Jesus' own past experiences. I think you are right about that. That is, from their point in time, 33-63 AD, they were looking backwards into the past at Jesus' experiences and matching up images from the Old Testament with his biography, like the crucifixion.

My own main question about the Old Testament prophecies works in the opposite direction, forwards. Supposing that the Old Testament did make these prophecies, does it mean that they would actually occur? If we or the apostles were at a standpoint in time not in 33 AD - 2016 AD, but were back in 20 AD or earlier, should we have concluded that the Messiah would probably get killed in the 1st c. AD?

One initial question is whether Psalm 22 is Messianic. The rabbis had a custom of relating the Psalms not just to David, but to the Messiah. After describing how the narrator got killed and then saved, Psalm 22 says:

All the ends of the world
Shall remember and turn to the Lord,
And all the families of the nations
Shall worship before You.
...
A posterity shall serve Him.
It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation,

In other words, the saving action described in the Psalm would become a monumental action recounted by the whole world for generations. For the whole world to worship God and recount a story gives the Psalm a crucial Messianic aspect, since bringing the nations of the world to God is a key task of the Messiah. And so, supposing that Psalm 22 really is about the Messiah and about his limbs getting gouged and him dying and resurrecting, does this mean that the predicted events would actually occur?

rakovsky wrote:

JoeWallack wrote: I'm only going to consider what you write here.

OK, so you are basically saying that I need to copy and paste the text of my webpage here before you will consider what I have to say?
Let's save the forum the space, by you just clicking the link.

You ask: "So you need to explain why you say the "DSS" has "karu" when it does not."
On the webpage I cited I gave many examples where the Tanakh uses an alternate spelling of a word that repeats a vowel where the original does not. So K'aru in that pattern would be a version of Karu, because it would be repeating the "a".

My main question to you:

Let's say that the mainstream apologists were right in their interpretation of the passages in the Tanakh regarding the Messiah getting killed in the 1st c. AD and resurrecting. Would this affirmative conclusion make it more likely than not that indeed in the 1st century the Messiah was killed and resurrected?

I understand that from your perspective, the verses do not say this. But since from my perspective they do, should my conclusion about the passages require me to accept that the Messiah did come and get killed in the 1st century?

JW:

You ask: "So you need to explain why you say the "DSS" has "karu" when it does not."
On the webpage I cited I gave many examples where the Tanakh uses an alternate spelling of a word that repeats a vowel where the original does not. So K'aru in that pattern would be a version of Karu, because it would be repeating the "a".

JW:

• 1) Adding an aleph would be very rare for the Tanakh. Just divide the times it's done by the number of words.
  2) There is no Masorah that shows the aleph for the offending word as a spelling variation.
  3) There is no instance in this specific fragment or companion fragments of an aleph added to any word.
  4) There is no spelling of the offending word anywhere with an aleph and vav at the end.

So it's [understatement]very unlikely[/understatement] that an aleph was added to the standard spelling for "karu". Compare this to the likelihood that the final letter is a "yod":

• 1) Yods and Waws were known to be ambiguous at the time.
  2) The fragment is badly faded.

From my related article:

Psalm 22:17, Hebrew Text, "Like A Lion". Determining Who's Original And Who's Lion? Nahal Hever Fragment

"First, let's take a look at the exact same word that the Masoretic Text has for Psalm 22:17, "like a lion", at Isaiah 38:13:



This is from the The Great Isaiah Scroll:

"Pieces of the Isaiah Scroll have been carbon-14 dated at least four times, giving calibrated date ranges between 335-324 BC and 202-107 BC; there have also been numerous paleographic and scribal dating studies placing the scroll around 150-100 BC.[2]"

Note that the Hebrew letter yod here, the last letter, is about the same length as the letter before it. Everyone agrees that here the letter is a yod and the meaning of the word here is "like a lion".

Christian translations claim that an important piece of evidence supporting "pierced" as likely original to Psalm 22:17 is that a Hebrew fragment including the offending word of Psalm 22:17 from Nahal Hever has the same letters except for the final letter being a vav instead of a yod, which word these Christian translations than translate as "pierced".

Here is the fragment from Nahal Hever, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXVIII, Plate XXVII Fragment #9 which is the official photograph:



Unfortunately the text of the fragment is as faded as it looks here.

Now here is the word in question from the fragment plus the following word:



Although all letters are difficult to read, everyone would agree on the first three letters, reading Hebrew right to left, kof which looks like a backwards c, aleph which looks like two intersecting diagonal lines and resh which looks like a backwards r.

The fourth letter from the right is the letter in question. Everyone agrees that it is the final letter of the word consisting of it and the three letters to its right. Even though all letters here are badly faded, that fourth letter does looks remarkably similar to the fourth letter above for "like a lion" from The Great Isaiah Scroll (and again, everyone agrees that that word is "like a lion"). In both words this letter is primarily a vertical line which is about the same length as the letter resh to its right. Both letters also tilt some to the left but letters as a whole vary in tilting in these fragments without any apparent intentional design.

These two sources are both ancient with The Great Isaiah Scroll c. 200 BC and Nahal Hever c. 75. Continuing with the best source of evidence, our own eyes, if you are able to read Hebrew you will notice that for the Nahal Hever fragment above, the length of the yod seems to have some relationship to its position in the word. When it is the first letter of a word it tends to be shorter. When it is the last letter it seems to be longer. You can see this in my image above of the offending word and the word that follows. The following word consists of a yod, a daled and a yod. Note that the first yod is relatively short while the final yod appears to be just as long as the final letters of the offending word and what appears to be the exact same word above in Isaiah 38:13 from The Great War Scroll.

It's safe to say then that from an objective Textual Criticism standpoint it is more likely that the final letter is a yod and the offending word should be inventoried as "like a lion". Of course it's possible that the final letter was intended to be a vav, just not likely. If you are constructing an argument then that the NH fragment is evidence for "dug"/karu than you are dealing with Apologetics (the possible) and not Textual Criticism (the likely).

rakovsky, the (mis)use of the modern Hebrew script where yods are vavs are clearly distinguishable to (mis)represent ancient Hebrew script where they were not by your Apologetic sources has mislead you. Even though a Skeptic I can't help thinking of the words of Isaiah here:

For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.

Joseph

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Skeptical Textual Criticism

JW:
You are really taking a beating here so one question:

rakovsky wrote: My main question to you:

Let's say that the mainstream apologists were right in their interpretation of the passages in the Tanakh regarding the Messiah getting killed in the 1st c. AD and resurrecting. Would this affirmative conclusion make it more likely than not that indeed in the 1st century the Messiah was killed and resurrected?

JW:
Would not make any difference. "Messiahs" as you are defining are impossible and of course resurrections are as well.

What you should find interesting is that if you assume that the Tanakh did predict the impossible above it would actually make the claim of fulfillment more likely even though we can be certain that there was no actual impossible fulfillment. You are arguing theology and not science. This isn't the place for it.


Joseph

Skeptical Textual Criticism

Hello, Joe!

I think it's an interesting question, but no matter how successfully you argue, the issue will never go away, because the LXX and a few Masoretic texts say dug and Karu (gouged), respectively. So there will always be some scholar who is going to make a note that there is an alternative reading here.

You write:

JoeWallack wrote: JW:

• 1) Adding an aleph would be very rare for the Tanakh. Just divide the times it's done by the number of words.
  2) There is no Masorah that shows the aleph for the offending word as a spelling variation.
  3) There is no instance in this specific fragment or companion fragments of an aleph added to any word.
  4) There is no spelling of the offending word anywhere with an aleph and vav at the end.

So it's [understatement]very unlikely[/understatement] that an aleph was added to the standard spelling for "karu".

Were you able to click on the link to my website? It would save the forum space. There I wrote:

Sometimes ancient Hebrew an aleph to words as an alternate spelling. Hebrew professor James Price gives examples from Hebrew of other word variants with an added “aleph” (which he writes as ‘ instead of ‘a): "bo'r, bor (pit, cistern) from the verb bur (dig); da'g, dag (fish) from the verb dug (fish for); la't, lat (secrecy) from the verb lut (be secret); m'um, mum (blemish); n'od, nod (skin); q'am, qam (he arose); ra'sh, rash (poor) from the verb rush (be poor);" (James Price, Response to a Skeptic, http://www.messianicart.com/chazak/yesh ... keptic.htm) The scholars Keil and Delitzsch also note that Zechariah 14:10 and Daniel 7:16 have added alephs in the words ra’ama and ka’amaiya. (Keil and Delitzsch, "Commentary on the Old Testament", Volume 5, page 319). ”The long-standing consensus has been that ka'aru is the Hasmonean-era spelling of the Hebrew word karu (כרו), which means "they have dug." At this time in history, spelling was not standardized, and Hebrew was heavily influenced by its sister language Aramaic, which could introduce the letter aleph.” (Ruben Barrett, Bible Q&A: Psalm 22, http://www.hadavar.net/articles/45-bibl ... tions.html).

So one explanation is that the Hebrew originally said “karu”(dug), it later was written in the Hasmonean period as “ka’aru”. Then the Septuagint version found the word “karu”, or interpreted “ka’aru” to mean “karu” (“dug”), and the Peshitta version interpreted “dug” to mean “pierced.”

Compare this to the likelihood that the final letter is a "yod":

• 1) Yods and Waws were known to be ambiguous at the time.

In ancient times were the yods and waws generally treated as indistinct and interchangeable to such an extent that finding one was no indication that it was not the other?

2) The fragment is badly faded.[/list]

Not so faded that we cannot make out the clear thick black dark long line of the Waw in "KARU".

[quote[

From my related article:

Psalm 22:17, Hebrew Text, "Like A Lion". Determining Who's Original And Who's Lion? Nahal Hever Fragment

"First, let's take a look at the exact same word that the Masoretic Text has for Psalm 22:17, "like a lion", at Isaiah 38:13:


Note that the Hebrew letter yod here, the last letter, is about the same length as the letter before it.

I like very much that you copied a snippet from the Isaiah scroll here. Good detective work. I think it tends to support your argument of ambiguity.

Still, I notice that the Yod is shorter than the K that is at the beginning of KARI there. In the Nahal Hever Fragment, the WAW is actually longer than the K in the KARU.

These two sources are both ancient with The Great Isaiah Scroll c. 200 BC and Nahal Hever c. 75. Continuing with the best source of evidence, our own eyes, if you are able to read Hebrew you will notice that for the Nahal Hever fragment above, the length of the yod seems to have some relationship to its position in the word. When it is the first letter of a word it tends to be shorter. When it is the last letter it seems to be longer. You can see this in my image above of the offending word and the word that follows. The following word consists of a yod, a daled and a yod. Note that the first yod is relatively short while the final yod appears to be just as long as the final letters of the offending word.

Interesting observation, Joe. It would be helpful if you could show more, clearer examples of this from the Nahal Hever fragment. Because to me that second yod looks like it is probably drawn long, but the long part looks to me like it could be a smudge. The colored image of highlighting earlier in the thread that I posted highlighted that second yod to make it look short. So in order to make a stronger case, I would want to see more examples from the Nahal Hever Fragment where the yods are drawn longer than any other letter in the words they stand in. Because the U in KARU looks like the longest letter in KARU in the NH fragment.

It's safe to say then that from an objective Textual Criticism standpoint it is more likely that the final letter is a yod

First, I would like more information on how interchangeable the yods and waws were, because as I understand it, a long l is a waw, while a ' is a yod.
I understand that you found KARI drawn with a long l at the end. But I would still like more information about exactly how interchangeable the two were. Was it so interchangeable that if we found a l randomly on a page at the end of an uncertain word we would have no idea whether it referred to a yod or a waw?

Second, if you want to be objective, you also have to contend with the fact that the ancient Hebrew translators of the Greek LXX interpreted the word in question to mean gouged/dug, not "like a lion", and that there were Masoretes who wrote KRU (gouged) here. And so you have to ask why they would think that? Why did their actually objective Textual Criticism lead them to the opposite result from what you consider "objective"?

Even though a Skeptic I can't help thinking of the words of Isaiah here:

For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.

Please explain.

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

"Ambrose Bierce"

I think that this is a poor definition. If I told you it was raining unicorns in my city but gave you no evidence and asked you to believe me, I would be asking you to have "faith" in my unparalleled claim. Yet even though I spoke with knowledge of the truth of the matter, what I asked you to have would still qualify as faith. That is, whether the speaker has knowledge or not is irrelevant to whether the belief would count as faith.

JoeWallack wrote:JW:
You are really taking a beating here so one question:

rakovsky wrote: My main question to you:

Let's say that the mainstream apologists were right in their interpretation of the passages in the Tanakh regarding the Messiah getting killed in the 1st c. AD and resurrecting. Would this affirmative conclusion make it more likely than not that indeed in the 1st century the Messiah was killed and resurrected?

JW:
Would not make any difference. "Messiahs" as you are defining are impossible and of course resurrections are as well.

Thank you for replying. Do you or Spin believe in God or that God has inspired people to speak?
Do you think that dreams can serve as a basis for predictions or that some people have an ability to tell the future without simple rationalistic processes?

For example, as I understand it, the Tanakh presents the idea that some people like Joseph and Daniel had a special ability to interpret dreams to tell the future. It also portrays some people as having an ability to predict the future and calls them prophets, like Isaiah and Zechariah.

Rakovsky,

What it boils down to for me is who "they" are (if it is a waw/karu and not a yod/kari), and I think it would refer to the preceding "dogs"/"company of evil doers" who were figuratively tormenting the psalmist (and maybe they "pierced" his hands and feet by biting them).

"For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet."

It doesn't matter to me that this was understood by anyone to be about the Messiah, but at the same time I don't have any issue with the idea of a suffering Messiah being based on verses like this in ancient Judaism. But I think we have a fundamental difference regarding prophecy. As I mentioned on another thread, whether I believed in the OT or not, and regardless of what the OT may say elsewhere or how people have understood the nature of prophecy, to me Dt. 18:20-22 suggests that a prophet cannot prophesize about the distant future, because otherwise they couldn't be put to death if they said something false.

"But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.” You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed."

And Dt. 18:19 says, "I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name," and I don't see how can that can happen either if the prophecy is about the distant future, and I don't see any way around this even if I was a believer.

John,
I understand what you are saying - A "prophet" who makes predictions about events 1000 years from his time would not have a way of being judged by his audience as reliable. So he could theoretically make up anything without any worry that he will be found out as a fake.

I understand that this is a major weakness in claiming that these kinds of prophecies are reliable. One way that the Tanakh writers might address this weakness is by claiming that their good prophets were borne out by predictions fulfilled in the prophets' lifetimes. So if Jeremiah or Isaiah said that the Assyrians or Babylonians would conquer them and then rule them for 70 years, then after the predicted Assyrian or Babylonian victory, the audience will think that Jeremiah or Isaiah was a truly inspired prophet. And then they would start counting down the 70 years, waiting for the second prophecy to be filled.

Or to give another example, Daniel's book opens by talking about his prediction to Nebudchadnezzar about his defeat. And the audience knows that this prediction was fulfilled. And then the audience becomes trusting when Daniel next talks about the end times happening in the 1st c. BC or 1st c. AD, with the destruction of the Second Temple, which occurred in 70 AD.

John2 wrote: And Dt. 18:19 says, "I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name," and I don't see how can that can happen either if the prophecy is about the distant future, and I don't see any way around this even if I was a believer.

Prophets were considered not only predicters of the future, but people who gave God's inspired words and teachings in the present. So Isaiah was a prophet who made predictions, and so was Moses. But they also gave teachings to their own generations. And so Dt. 18:19 is telling the audience to listen to, ie. treat with respect, the words of those prophets. It doesn't matter for purposes of the author of DT 18:19 that the audience living in the prophet's own time might not live to see whether all the words and predictions are fulfilled. The author only demands that the audience listen to and respect the inspired words ("prophecies"). So for example the author of the Torah wants his audience to listen to his prophecy that Abraham will be the father of "many nations", even though this prophecy could be fullfilled in what is for the author the distant future.

One of the first obstacles is deciphering the author's intent. First of all, unlike the Christian writings in the NT, which often repeat different versions of the same events and are written by people in the same close knit group, we just have separate prophecies by single authors in the Old Testament. The closest analogy we get to the retellings done in the NT is writers like Amos intentionally sharing stories with other prophets like Zechariah and Ezekiel, who may have lived in distant locations or lived centuries apart. We can guess that Isaiah 52-53 interpreted the temple sacrifice as Messianic and predictive of the world's Redemption, but we don't know that Moses understood the Temple sacrifices that way himself.
Second, we have numerous commentaries by Christian writers from the 2nd to 4th centuries on the NT writings of the 1st century AD. The Didache and 1 Clement already in the 1st century shed light on the intent and meaning of NT writings. But the nearest non-Christian commentaries we have on the Old Testament were written maybe 700 to 1500 years later, depending on the OT passage in question.
Third, even if we could interview the OT authors and ask them what they meant, maybe some of them would just reply that it's a divine prophecy and not some thing that they deliberately reasoned out, thoughtfully composed, and can explain. So if you asked Daniel what he meant in chapter 9, he might just claim that it was something an angel told him and that he is not inside the angel's mind. (Daniel 9 about the Messiah claims to be an end times prediction made by an angel to Daniel.)

We can guess that Isaiah 52-53 interpreted the temple sacrifice as Messianic and predictive of the world's Redemption, but we don't know that Moses understood the Temple sacrifices that way himself

who ,except christian evangelists, believe that isaiah 52-53's author thought that yhwh was going to be seen as levitical animal sacrifice and asham definitely means a sacrifice of a god for guilt ?


https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... aiah_5310/

וַיהֹוָה חָפֵץ דַּכְּאוֹ - And God desired to crush him הֶחֱלִי - make him sick. אִם תָּשִׂים אָשָׁם - if you give a guilt offering נַפְשׁוֹ - his soul יִרְאֶה זֶרַע יַאֲרִיךְ יָמִים - he will see seed (children/etc), his days will be made long (long life) וְחֵפֶץ יְהֹוָה בְּיָדוֹ יִצְלָח - And with the will of God in hand, he will prosper


אשם can mean guilt or can refer to a guilt offering. It does not refer to making an offering of a person and very importantly does not have a connector between אשם and נפשו.

The sentence is, in effect, calling for repentance which, by extension, heals the suffering servant - granting him long life and children - rather than him continuing to be in pain due to the problems of society.

You know it it demonstrates a low intellect to see the world in exclusively binary terms i.e. 'true readings' and 'false readings.' I get it that a lot of people at the forum hate Christians for this or that reason. Fine. But the idea of Christianity being 'wrong' because of a minority reading or contradicted by a reading found at Qumran is a lot to swallow. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the Qumran community shared the Samaritan understanding of Gerizim being the appointed place in Deut 27:4b—6. So by Joe's logic then the sanctity of Jerusalem then is based on a similarly 'false' understanding of true scripture. I am sure he doesn't apply his binary worldview and the precedence of Qumran readings in this case so why the other? The fact is that most scriptural exegesis is based on the 'garbage in/garbage out' model not just the Christian exegesis of scripture. We should all learn to be tolerant of traditions we don't adhere to. These crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated by Christians were for the most part carried out over a century ago. Lots of evil was perpetrated by all people. We should learn to live and let live and move on to try to figure how and why beliefs developed rather than carry out our studies for the sole purpose of historical 'revenge' against people and traditions that no longer exist.