Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] amateur textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 07:34:37 -0800
Kenneth:
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 5:30 AM, kenneth greifer <greifer AT hotmail.com>wrote:
>
> Experts are people who know everything that is known about a subject,
Not true. They just know more than non-experts.
> …
>
> I have heard some scholars and scholarly types say that they only believe
> what the "data" in the Hebrew Bible shows,
Unfortunately, anything outside of data is mere speculation. Data include
the surviving texts, early translations, knowledge of the language, etc.
As for the text (by which I mean the unpointed text), the data show that it
has been remarkably well preserved as it passed from pen to pen over the
centuries, that the human copyists entered very few errors. No, it is not
perfect, but it is good enough that you need some pretty strong arguments to
say that any particular passage is wrongly understood.