Is a long-dismissed forgery the oldest known Biblical manuscript? | Hacker News Reader

Is a long-dismissed forgery the oldest known Biblical manuscript?

nytimes.com

122 pointsdiodorus72 comments

The original fragments of this text are no longer available after it was denounced as a hoax over 150 years ago. This researcher’s claims are mainly based on the content of the text, which he says are echoed by later texts and have multiple coincidences. The article says that the researchers who focus on Biblical text origins are more convinced and the ones focused on physical details of the documents are less convinced as they “contain all the hallmarks of a modern forgery.” The response is that the transcriptions may not be accurate representations of the actual fragment.

It all seems very difficult to prove and the implications, a version of the Torah with most of the laws removed, just a little too convenient. Seems like healthy skepticism is warranted here.

Too convenient now, but back when it was discovered, it would have been way more convenient if its contents fit the mainstream consensus at that time instead.

So, the mainstream consensus at that time was that the traditional date for deuteronomy should be replaced by a later date , based on historical-critical methods. These same dates and theories enjoy considerable love today. If the shapira fragments are a 9th century BC copy of deuteronomy, modern historical critical thoughts about the composition and dating of the pentateuch are wrong.

Edit: Not a consensus I guess but the documentary hypothesis was emerging in the 1860s and 1870s shortly before these fragments made their debut.

What is the motivation for this:

> Dershowitz’s research, closely guarded until now... Scholars who previewed his findings at a closed-door seminar at Harvard in 2019...

Why the secrecy?

It is mentioned in the article. Dershowitz feared he might be considered a crackpot until he had all the evidence together, organized, and presentable at once. Revealing partial research before he completed everything would make a less persuasive case.

There's also a cloak-and-dagger aspect to scholarship about ancient manuscripts, especially scriptures, which pops up in various stories here from time to time. Lots of intrigue, theft, forgery, factions, and weirdness. Partly this has to do with the overlap with the antiquities markets which are more...colorful.

The transparency and openness we tend to expect from academic research is lacking. Sources are closely guarded, scholars don't get to properly check each other's work, and drama regularly ensues.

Edit: I was trying to dig up an old thread about some such weird controversy involving National Geographic, but my memory has disintegrated into little parchment fragments. Speaking of cloak-and-dagger, though, I did run across this:

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisatio...

When I was a graduate student, one of my advisors tried to steer me away from focusing on periods of history where textual sources are/were more, shall we say, fluid. (In my particular case, this was Warring States China - I ended up pursuing early medieval Chinese literature so it was moot anyways). The point here is that academic careers are made or broken and some research is totally discredited while other research gains more prominence on the back of the vagaries of archaeological finds and determinations of authenticity. Within that the world, the stakes are extremely high.

> I ended up pursuing early medieval Chinese literature

I read https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666302/ (Selections from the Taiping Guangji, by Ditter, Choo, and Allen) and would love to find more books like it. It translates some stories and prefaces each one with introductory and explanatory material covering concepts used in the story ("侠 has referred to different things over the centuries..." / "most animals are depicted as being able to take human or animal form at will, but tigers are an exception, requiring their skins to resume animal form" / "readers would have recognized that the neighborhood the protagonist lives in is, while not especially well-off itself, physically next to an extremely wealthy neighborhood" / "the tiger uses 'inclination toward mountains and forests' literally, and her husband interprets it differently because this is a conventional expression referring to the retirement of an official from public life").

The introductory/explanatory material adds an incredible amount of value for me. Might you be able to recommend anything similar?

One recommendation I have (although I'm not sure if it fits the bill here) is Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature. Owen is a total genius (speaking of the Taiping Guangji, I remember sitting in a seminar with him where he'd ad-lib these incredible translations of similar stories from a slightly earlier collection that I'd struggled with for hours), and it's not often that so magnificent a scholar will write a relatively introductory work. The book is a lot broader than the one you mentioned, so the explanatory material and annotations are necessarily a little bit briefer, but I find that Owen does a good job of putting each of the works in context and pointing out particularly notable points of poetry or prose. If you do have a more specific period interest I'd be happy to provide a more accurate recommendation (although I know very little about scholarship on anything written in the last millennium or so, ha!)

That kind of environment strikes me as really unfortunate and contrary to what I'd want to see out of academic work.

Still, as I read your comment though, something popped into my head: Andrew Wiles's secrecy when working on Fermat's last theorem.

This is an insightful example, thanks!

>“This cave was robbed by Bedouins maybe 40 years ago,” explains Price, an American archaeologist and research professor at Liberty University in Virginia. “Fortunately for us, they didn’t dig very deep. Our hope is that if we keep digging, we hit the mother lode.”

In other words, everyone that came before us were robbers (despite living here). We alone are allowed to profit from historical artifacts (despite living on another continent).

http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=896

It could be real, could be fake. Theirs lots of evidence for it being fake which the new work doesnt adequately deal with.

If they are real, it poses problems for modern critical scholarship because the words for god are not sympathetic with modern theories and establishes a date for deuteronomy far earlier than modern critical scholarship supports.

On the other hand, they're very likely a forgery - the motivation for the forger would be to validate traditional dates for deuteronomy vs modern critical dates that are much earlier.

Here is a link to the open access book that the scholar, Dershowitz, published. His English translation begins on page 156:

https://www.academia.edu/45450947/The_Valediction_of_Moses_A...

So where can I read the manuscripts? Is there an english translation available? Searched for half an hour and didn’t find anything..

Page 37 (PDF numbering) of this 1958 research paper reproduces a version published in an 1883 issue of 'The Athenaeum':

http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1958/...

For anyone clicking through and scrolling to page 37: this is in Hebrew, not English. I don’t see an English translation there.

That’s not Hebrew technically either it uses the Phoenician alphabet or a variation of it.

I can read the Dead Sea scrolls I can’t read what ever this is :(

it is Hebrew, just in a now defunct script. I didn't see anything majorly informative in the transcription, in case you were wondering.

Well it’s not Hebrew, the Hebrew alphabet is based on Aramaic in fact it’s essentially identical to “square” aka western Aramaic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Neo-Aramaic

Before that proto/paleo-Hebrew used the same Canaanite scripts that were common in the region, the closest thing we have to that today is Samaritan.

Even in rabbinic Hebrew, the name for this script is כתב עברי (Hebrew writing), and the name for the script used today is כתב אשורית (Assyrian writing).

i meant that Hebrew has several scripts.

Pre-captivity Hebrew used the Phoenician alphabet, post exile the Chaldean (square) one.

find any transalations into modern hebrew script?

... or English?

They seem to have been lost over a century ago. There was no interest in preserving them, as they were assumed to be forgeries.

Hypothesis: the physical medium was a forgery, but the text was not. In other words: it was a copy of a genuine manuscrit. That would explain why the physical scroll appears to be an obvious forgery containing, retrospectively, a perplexing text.

Why would anyone go through the pains of forgery to create a copy of an original in their possession? Just sell the original if you're in or for quick money, show off your original (and sell clean copies) if you're out for status.

you could sell the thing twice: you sell the original to a collector, and the copy to another collector.

you can sell forgeries every once in a while, and keep original for yourself

If this sort of thing interests you, check out Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar. Interesting story and a great read - just when you think you understand it, a new layer appears.

https://archive.is/ojHPk

"And in a 2018 scholarly article, he used similar approach to advance a startling claim: that an earlier version of Leviticus, rather than forbidding sex between men, had actually permitted it."

I'm a poor scholar of the ancient Jewish faith, but explicit permission of male on male sexual intercourse in the five books seems a bit of a stretch.

While I'd like to judge the merits of this man's claims, this has echos of the whole "Jesus wife" fiasco of seeking attention by being edgy.

Guilt by association does not mean Dershowitz is necessarily being duped.

(Disclaimer: I have no interest in this matter; my interest here is only in the structure of the argument.)

If you follow the link to the 2018 "startling claim" (https://archive.is/QAa5x), what's presented there is not a claim of "explicit permission" as you say, but a reasoning from the principle that "For example, a sign declaring an office to be closed on Sundays suggests that the office is open on all other days of the week". (That is, in that article Idan Dershowitz suggests that an earlier version of Leviticus 18 forbade homosexual incest, which if true would in turn lead to the conclusion that homosexuality wasn't forbidden in general.)

I have also seen it construed the original prohibition was against pedastery as practiced by the Greeks, not homosexuality in general.

Pretty sure that pertains to the New Testament (e.g. Paul), not the Pentateuch. I don't know the exact timeline, but I don't think the ancient Greeks as we know them were a factor when the Old Testament law was written.

There’s some decent evidence that the Philistines were Greek, although they would have been Greeks before the period when Greeks wrote much about pedastery so your point probably is still valid

Ah, that's fascinating. TIL.

I think pederasty was relatively common, I didn't mean to associate it just with Greek influence.

> Dershowitz suggests that an earlier version of Leviticus 18 forbade homosexual incest, which if true would in turn lead to the conclusion that homosexuality wasn't forbidden in general.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it seems unlikely that there would be a specific prohibition on homosexual incest as opposed to incest in general.

So, Leviticus doesn't just say "no incest, please"; it has quite a long list of forbidden combinations. 18:7 and 18:14 refer to both male-male and male-female incest but are weirdly worded; Dershowitz's contention is that after the putative addition of 18:22 (the "no sex with men" one) they were reworded to de-emphasise the male part (as, if there's a general prohibition on male-male sex, they'd seem a bit superfluous.)

Why? In more recent times in America, the New Amsterdam colony prohibited adulterous sex with heathens.

Is there a translation of the text anywhere? Search just brings up alternatives for this news article.

>"But Dershowitz makes an even more dramatic claim. The text, which he has reconstructed from 19th-century transcriptions and drawings, is not a reworking of Deuteronomy, he argues, but a precursor to it, dating to the period of the First Temple, before the Babylonian Exile. That would make it the oldest known biblical manuscript by far, and an unprecedented window into the origins and evolution of the Bible and biblical religion."

That's fine, if that's what it turns out to be - a precursor to the book of Deuteronomy. But let no one be so foolish as to claim it as holy writ - that was settled a long time ago by the apostle John.

Yes, it would obviously be quite foolish to pretend that that specific bit of ancient manuscript is the unchallengable word of god when that would controvert some other bit of ancient manuscript.

How to become (in)famous in any field at any time: Everyone before me was wrong, and I alone know the truth.

First of all: the design meme of “scroll a page full to get one page of text” must die. I’m trying to read an article not play a fucking video game.

I used reader mode and noe of that text was included but I assume it was worthless.

I agree but:

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

C’est pour encourager les autres.. The NYT is somewhat influential, and I hope some HN readers might be able to stop someone else from aping it.

Nonetheless yes, I did violate the guidelines. abashed

https://archive.is/ojHPk

Does Betteridge's law apply here?

Does it apply to your question?

Anyway, such discussions continue until they are forgotten, not because it arrived at a factual conclusion.

> Does it apply to your question?

Since it's it's a law of headlines, and the question in question is not a headline, no.

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I think the meaning of one or two of the words got lost in transalation...

OCR + sentences divided in halves by \n + the usual Google Translate

Pretty sure rabbit cables were a big deal during late bronze age.

"You are in Bach" - Even Mr Google's finest should surely realise this is nonsense or somewhat painful and anachronistic.

"and said Amen> Arr" - Pirates?

I understand that translation is a hard problem but why not put in a post processor that looks for obvious flaws and calls out crap? It would surely not be too hard to get some basics fixed up. That could even feed back into the translation thingie to adjust it in some way. Even if it can't fix the problem the feedback mechanism can simply call out the aberration and mark it up or even delete it and replace with "work in progress" or whatever. It is disingenuous to produce crap. Bear in mind this might be used by those who can't read or understand either the source or the destination languages.

There is no way on earth you can convince me to allow a phrase like: "You are in Bach" to go unchallenged. The initial capitalisation of Bach implies that the translator has decided that it has seen the name Bach, ie the composer. It also attributes another set of squiggles to "You" - again it has bothered to capitalise things properly to account for the start of a sentence. So far so good and all grammatically fine. Then it loses the plot. How on earth can "you" be in "Bach"? This must be basic expert systems stuff.

You could probably start a cult with this if you want.

Assuming the biblical source to be fraudulent because it is Jewish. You could really tie your brain in knots with that one

I don't doubt that anti-Semitism had a role, but Shapiro had been caught selling forgeries before, so it was not suspicion based entirely on him being Jewish.

He was a "convert" to Christianity, so neither Jews nor Christians were likely to trust him.

Like instances of historical Christian anti-semitism. Got some news for you about Jesus...

I dont think the shapira finds can really be said to have been dismissed out of anti semitism, after all his cheif critic was also a jewish person. Sure, the cartoons in the times use jewish stereotypes - but only for one of the two jews in them - and they both are well after the actual event , and so cannot be showing the motivations of those alleging forgery

Its probably a hoax.

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