Can you really rely on the Bible?

[Viva_Daddy]

The problem with the Old Testament is that it was written in Hebrew, which uses no vowels. When the Jews were in Babylonian captivity, they stopped speaking Hebrew and began to speak Aramaic. When they “translated” the Old Testament into Greek (the Septuagint) in about the 2nd Century BC, they no longer understood the older Hebrew and many mistakes were made. When the Old Testament received its “final translation” by the Masoretic Rabbis in the Middle Ages, they mistakenly inserted Arabic vowels into the Hebrew words and, as a result, this lead to many, many mistakes.

[EdwardBernays]

1. and that's

just the tip of the iceberg...

[merrily]

2. Rely on it for what?

[2naSalit]

4. That's my question too........nt

[Warren Stupidity]

3. I rely on its being in hotel rooms for no good reason.

I rely on craven politicians across both parties pretending they believe in the nonsense within.

By the way the idiocy in the NT doesn't have this problem. It's brand of idiocy cannot fall back on mistranslation across ancient languages as a defense, all the books were written in greek (odd, as the main characters would have been speaking in aramaic, but never mind that) and we managed to keep a handle on greek down to the current era.

But back to the torah, it being passover season again, even with massive mistranslation, that story still is mind boggling nonsense. I will soon once again sit at a table with otherwise reasonable people casually celebrating the genocide of little children and prattling on about how a bunch of goat herders taught the already ancient civ of Egypt the secrets of grain storage. That ain't a vowel problem.

[Major Nikon]

8. There's also some translation errors in the NT

Some of the errors are in the earliest forms of the gospels and some are from English translations. None of the canonical gospels were written by those in which they are attributed.

[Silent3]

5. Even if there were no translation or transcription errors...

...I still wouldn't rely on Biblical text as anything other than an historic record of stories people used to tell and human-authored rules of conduct. There's no good reason to assume that the original words would be any more insightful or divine than subsequent corruptions and mutations of those words.

[Iggo]

6. Yes.

As a doorstop, it almost never fails.

[trotsky]

7. Also very dependable as a monitor stand. n/t