Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Walther <krooger AT debian.org>]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 03:48:19PM -0800, Peter Kirk wrote:
> Jonathan, I think you should apologise to the Jewish members of this 
> list for posting a link to this kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory 
> material.

As a pure-blooded Israelite tracing my lineage back to King David, I
find such a comment offensive.  Conspiracies take many faces, and have
many participants.  To hold one group of people as immune from
participating in conspiracies is to dehumanize and patronize them.  It
also invalidates the entire New Testament.

> From the first page I looked at, 
> http://www.christianseparatist.org/ast/hist/ot.htm:
>
> > Jews begin to deceive Catholics into accepting Hebrew through Jerome.
>
> ... and worse.

I am interested in whether there is any truth to the allegation, not in
whether the allegation is politically incorrect.  Pastor Herrell spent
quite a bit of time developing the thesis you just dismissed.  Now, you
may be perfectly correct, and Pastor Herrell absolutely wrong.  As a
non-scholarly outsider though, you haven't given me enough information
to make a judgement.

I appreciate that everyone has busy lives, and I have no right to expect
an answer; a proper debunking might take several hours.  Instead of a
"just trust me", it might sound more reasonable to say "I disagree, but
it would take a while to show you why".

> I think the following (from 
> http://www.christianseparatist.org/ast/hist/qumran.htm) illustrates 
> clearly how valueless the book is:
>
> > First of all, the Israeli government has kept the documents from the 
> > general public, so an exhaustive study of their textual content is 
> > unavailable. The reason that the Jews have kept a hold on the 
> > documents is clear from what documents and statistics have been 
> > released. They even fought the Six Day War to gain control of the 
> > documents. The Qumran Scrolls of the Old Testament agree with the 
> > Septuagint version of the Old Testament to a far greater degree than 
> > they agree with the Masoretic Text. Thus, from a statistical point of 
> > view, the Dead Sea Scrolls are dangerous to the Jews. At the same 
> > time, however, for the most part, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not agree 
> > with either the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint, but preserve another 
> > type of reading altogether.
>
>
> This is simply full of factual errors with a clearly tendentious intention.

Tendentious or not, I am not familiar enough with the facts for it to be
obvious that any of the above statements are errors.  You pasted a
summary of many points that Pastor Harrell spent some time establishing
a basis for in the rest of his book.

I seek truth, no matter how mucky or dirty it may get.

Jonathan

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