Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Dear List,

First, thank you George, Yigal and Kirk for permission to bring this to the
list.

The following article is for information ONLY and I have given permission to
send this to this for Information Only; although I would like your comments
offlist.

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III

Ancient Bible Fragments Reveal a Forgotten History
News from Cambridge University:

    Ancient Bible fragments reveal a forgotten history
    New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the 
Bible,
offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture.

    The study by Cambridge University researchers suggests that, contrary to
long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in
synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the
practice continued almost until living memory.

    The key to the new discovery lay in manuscripts, some of them mere
fragments, discovered in an old synagogue in Egypt and brought to Cambridge at
the end of the 19th century. The so-called Cairo Genizah manuscripts have been
housed ever since in Cambridge University Library.

    Now, a fully searchable online corpus (http://www.gbbj.org) has gathered
these manuscripts together, making the texts and analysis of them available to
other scholars for the first time.

    "The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st
centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish
civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and 
as
successfully as it did," explained Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and
Jewish Studies in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, who led the three-year study to re-evaluate the story of the Greek
Bible fragments.

    "It was thought that the Jews, for some reason, gave up using Greek
translations and chose to use the original Hebrew for public reading in
synagogue and for private study, until modern times when pressure to use the
vernacular led to its introduction in many synagogues."

    Close study of the Cairo Genizah fragments by Professor de Lange led to 
the
discovery that some contained passages from the Bible in Greek written in 
Hebrew
letters. Others contained parts of a lost Greek translation made by a convert 
to
Judaism named Akylas in the 2nd century CE. Remarkably, the fragments date 
from
1,000 years after the original translation into Greek, showing use of the 
Greek
text was still alive in Greek-speaking synagogues in the Byzantine Empire and
elsewhere.


Read the whole story here. http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2010122002

Access the database "Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism" here.
[The link for the database did not work].

See also this earlier report on the digitization of the Cairo Genizah 
fragments
by Christian Askeland, one of our men in Cambridge.
http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2010/04/digitization-of-cairo-genizah-fragments.html