Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Rochelle:

Who said anything about "primitive"? Different does not necessarily
mean that one is advanced and the other primitive, merely that they
are different. Further, you are the one who is making a claim that one
way of looking at documents is "modern" vs. "ancient", whereas I
pointed out the the "modern" attitude is a natural outgrowth of the
way of thinking that is found throughout Tanakh and New Testament,
therefore the "modern" attitude towards document production should be
expected to be found among some ancient copyists as well. However, the
fickleness of nature and the destructive tendencies of man have
conspired to allow only a tiny, tiny fraction of ancient documents to
survive, therefore we don't have enough data to say that "modern"
attitudes were not found among some ancient copyists.

At this point, I think you have overplayed your hand. For one, I
wonder if you have become too rigid, insisting that all peoples had
the same attitudes. Regional differences do not necessarily indicate
political differences. In fact it sounds contradictory to claim that
political parties each had an identifying script as well as a regional
script: do you expect that commercial copy shops would use different
scripts depending on the political identity of the client?

Of course Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are on superior parchment, which is
to be expected if they were "Great Bibles" commanded by the Roman
government to be placed in churches. Furthermore, it would be expected
that they would copy understood official format in accordance to the
Roman decree that caused them to be made. But where did they get the
words put on the parchment? Unless you have evidence to the contrary,
they copied local copies of papyri of uncertain quality. And it is not
sure that those papyri followed Roman or Greek official format, in
fact it is rather doubtful that they did. But how many of those papyri
have survived? Of those that survived, how many followed the
categories that you have set down? Even among the parchment copies,
you give examples of different quality and price ranges for copies,
but how many bottom quality copies were made of top quality works
where the purchaser figured that a low quality copy was better than no
copy because he couldn't afford better, but that he wanted the top
quality content?

What format and size of documents did Moses use when he wrote Torah in
the 15th century BC? What is your evidence? What writing substrate did
he use: leather, papyrus, or what? What is your evidence?

Karl W. Randolph.

On 10/23/06, rochelle altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il> wrote:
> Karl,
>
> You seem to expect ancient Sumerian and Akkadian and Ugaritic and
> Phoenician and Moabite and Hebraic, and Aamaic, etc. as well as Greek and
> Latin and Greco-Latin vcrnacular writing systems to follow modern
> standards.. Is that not to denigrate the ancients as "primitive"??
>
> ....