Masoretes and their lack of knowledge?

[kwrandolph]

Karl

With this being the case, I don’t see how you can doubt that in this document, כארו ends with a waw, making it a verb.

yes I agree here when looking at this one, unfortunately I also saw this one at the same time http://rakovskii.livejournal.com/5832.html but I posted the above instead. the trouble is with all these images they are on a computer where photoshop has been used to improve the image, enhance the letters and so on.

Photoshop is not the only thing, special filters were used when taking the picture as well.

However, on the Rakovskii image, there is evidence that someone took the brush tool and went over the letters on one line to make them clearer and in using the brush tool, how much did he change the shape of the letters? On the image you posted above that is not so obvious, if done at all. Comparing the letters on all lines brings that out.

The hook at the top of this vav has the same hook as the yod and if you look at the next previous vav you see a straight line. Comparing the vavs and yods in the first image it is easy to see how two of the yods look like vavs anyway.

Which ones do you mean?

But listen, all this is conjecture, I am looking at an image on a computer. Would be great to see the real thing. After all they had for 40 years and no one noticed this before?

Are you sure that no one noticed it before? It’s been a couple of decades that people have been talking about it.

Strange since psalm 22 is known as the big controversy!

And could this be the reason that certain people want to suppress knowledge of it?

I would have thought this scrap of paper would have seen the light of day before 1997?

Not necessarily. The original team of scholars who were in charge of the scrolls were very secretive about what was on the scrolls, and didn’t let anyone not in their small circle to see the raw data, or any data that they had not published themselves. After the 1967 war, Israeli scholars were added to the group, but were still secretive. After decades of people not part of that small group complaining about the secrecy, a person in the U.S. who had access to some of the data (he didn’t have the photographs) published it to the web. The shroud of secrecy was finally broken. Finally everyone had a chance to study what is on the scrolls. Only after that were the photographs also published. If I remember correctly, that was in the mid 1990s.

Yet even now, the official photograph published on the scrolls’ site is very poor, not using even fairly simple ways of photographically enhancing the letters that have been known for a long time.

The arab website appears to be questioning the authenticity of the vav, by its images it looks like a scribe might well have written a yod and then his colleague disagreed, they chatted over coffee and decided to lengthen the yud to a vav after the ink was dry?

Kind regards
chris

On the green and red letters overlaying the image, the green letters are those from the MT consonantal text, the red ones the waws and yods from the MT, with the exception of כארו. Looking at the image, there is at least one other place where the MT has a waw, but the image has a yod. The red and green overlay letters has a waw following the MT.

Like you, I’d like to examine the original document, but I doubt I’ll ever have that chance.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Galena]

Galena wrote:
The hook at the top of this vav has the same hook as the yod and if you look at the next previous vav you see a straight line. Comparing the vavs and yods in the first image it is easy to see how two of the yods look like vavs anyway.


Karl asked: Which ones do you mean?

Here, and don't you think that by the shapes of the letters as a whole that this particular parchment looks more like a scribbled note to a colleague rather than a professionally written document? There is a lack of consistency in identical letters. As a whole, on first looking, and with being reasonable I would conclude that this is a vav. But closer inspection of all the available letters leads me to doubt its source, its trustworthiness, its competence.

A brief survey of other DSS I can't but help be impressed with the neatness, or to put into a practical reality context, the patience and care that some scribes took in writing things down.
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schecht ... index.html
http://www.digitaljournal.com/image/53700
http://www.digitaljournal.com/image/53697
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schecht ... index.html

[kwrandolph]

Galena wrote:
The hook at the top of this vav has the same hook as the yod and if you look at the next previous vav you see a straight line. Comparing the vavs and yods in the first image it is easy to see how two of the yods look like vavs anyway.


Karl asked: Which ones do you mean?

Here, and don't you think that by the shapes of the letters as a whole that this particular parchment looks more like a scribbled note to a colleague rather than a professionally written document? There is a lack of consistency in identical letters. As a whole, on first looking, and with being reasonable I would conclude that this is a vav. But closer inspection of all the available letters leads me to doubt its source, its trustworthiness, its competence.

Again, this latest image, someone took the brush tool and went over the words of one line. Did he add the hook at the top of the waw when he did that? This is not a clean image.

The image from the Arab site didn’t have the obvious someone taking the brush tool and going over the letters.

Not everyone could afford Biblical scrolls done by the top scribes, many had to make do with secondary scribes. Some even on tertiary scribes who wrote on papyrus. This guy was not bad.

What I notice is that this scribe wrote his yods sort of like the Greek Λ but with the left leg a little shorter than the right, and neither reaching the bottom line of the rest of the letters. The waws sort of like the modern waws with the bottom even with the bottom of other letters. The tops have faded and smudged into a blob on most of them in this example. The final letter of כארו is clearly a waw.

Write out a page of something on unruled paper, you’ll probably have greater variation in your letters than did this scribe.

Secondly, in looking at the image, the ink has faded and smudged irregularly—there are gaps in some of the letters, which makes up part of the irregularities, other places a blob of ink.

What you need are images where the only enhancements are photographic, first with special filters and lighting in the studio, then only maybe a little further photographic enhancement with Photoshop or GIMP. These last two images you’ve posted have obvious hand-drawn interpretation by some artist of the letters of one line of text, and in hand-drawing, could have added his own interpretation as to how he thinks the letters should have looked like.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Isaac Fried]

Chris,

Still, I detect no constraint in
כִּי סְבָבוּנִי כְּלָבִים, עֲדַת מְרֵעִים, הִקִּיפוּנִי כָּאֲרִי, יָדַי וְרַגְלָי
and would not melodramatize it unnecessarily by putting in for the Hebrew overly alarming or suggestive English words. The verse is typical and very clear:
"Dogs run around me, a band of evil doers, as the lion does they run in circles around me, my hands and my feet."

הִקִּיפוּנִי = היא-קיף-הוּא-אני where the first היא, 'he', refers to a dog, where the last הוּא informs us of actually many dogs, and where the closing אני, 'I', is for the narrator.

סבב is a variant of ספף (post-biblical Hebrew צפף),'huddle', as in Ps. 84:11(10)
בָּחַרְתִּי הִסְתּוֹפֵף בְּבֵית אֱלֹהַי מִדּוּר בְּאָהֳלֵי רֶשַׁע

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Isaac Fried]

See here
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/12/us/new-yo ... index.html
two vicious dogs going after a man's hands and legs.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Kenneth Greifer]

Karl,

You said Amos 8:8 has the verb kaf alef resh, but I think it is the word "like a river" without the yud like in Amos 9:5 which is a similar quote.

Amos 8:8 is missing the ayin in the verb "sink" and the yud in the word "river."

Kenneth Greifer

[kwrandolph]

Karl,

You said Amos 8:8 has the verb kaf alef resh, but I think it is the word "like a river" without the yud like in Amos 9:5 which is a similar quote.

Amos 8:8 is missing the ayin in the verb "sink" and the yud in the word "river."

Kenneth Greifer

OK, I read your posting about the worm, it’s gone whoooshshsh over my head. I’ll have to admit I don’t understand it.

Concerning the Amos verses, neither are found in the DSS, so all we have is the MT.

You are assuming that Amos 8:8 has been corrupted, but has it? Or was it 9:5? Or is the text correct in both cases, with deliberately different meanings? LXX seems to indicate that 8:8 was corrupted. Did the translators of the LXX have a different text, or did they misread it?

So much speculation. So little evidence. Unless there’s evidence from other texts, I’ll stick with what we have.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Kenneth Greifer]

Karl,
How do you translate the word in Amos 8:8 without the ayin which is translated as a form of "to sink"?
I am sorry about my Psalm 22 "worm" idea.
I have to look at it to see if I can explain it better.
Kenneth Greifer

[Galena]

Referring to verse 16 in particular (heb 17) are there any comments about this remark in particular? It appears extremely important. I know who and what the references are but not what they mean.

(Note: Hupfeld suspects this Masoretic remark (קמצין בתרי לישׁני כּארי ב) as a Christian interpolation, but it occurs in the alphabetical Masoreth register ותרויהון בתרי לישׁני ב ב. Even Elias Levita speaks of it with astonishment (in his מסרת המסרת [ed. Ginsburg, p. 253]) without doubting its genuineness, which must therefore have been confirmed, to his mind, by MS authority. Heidenheim also cites it in his edition of the Pentateuch, `ynym m'wr, on Numbers 24:9; and down to the present time no suspicion has been expressed on the part of Jewish critics, although all kinds of unsatisfactory attempts have been made to explain this Masoretic remark (e.g., in the periodical Biccure ha-'Ittim).)

Regards

[Isaac Fried]

Kenneth,

You are right, they are closely related. אוֹר, or אוּר, 'light', is the rare emanation issuing from an incandescent source. יאוֹר=היא-אוֹר is the, never ceasing, flow of water from an emitting source.
It is related to ערה ARAH, 'pour', as in Isaiah 32:15
עַד יֵעָרֶה עָלֵינוּ רוּחַ מִמָּרוֹם
KJV: "Until the spirit be poured upon us from on high"
Also ריר RIYR, 'saliva, juice, fluid', as in 1Sam. 21:14(13)
וַיּוֹרֶד רִירוֹ אֶל זְקָנוֹ
NIV: "and letting saliva run down his beard"
and the act רר RAR, 'flow, trickle, run',as in Lev. 15:3
רָר בְּשָׂרוֹ אֶת זוֹבוֹ
KJV: "whether his flesh run with his issue"

Isaac Fried, Boston University