It was at the Pyle Center and I don't think I've been in a room with so many Semitic folks since I worked at The Towers. Madison has a small Jewish community and there are precious few events around town which recognize or celebrate Jewish heritage and culture. I arrived a bit early and got a seat up front. This was a good move on my part as the room filled up and we had a packed house. A little boy was running around for a bit before his mother got him planted in his seat. At one point, I looked up and found him looking over my shoulder. A man behind me began talking to the boy and asked, "Do you remember me? You drew a picture of Moses for me." As I looked around the room, I got the impression that, in the audience at least, I was the only atheist. A kindly old woman sat down next to me. She described how she almost didn't make as she had earlier been entranced by the programming on the History Channel. Perhaps there were more plain old history lovers like myself in attendance than just myself.
The first speaker was Prof. Ulrich, pictured above, and the title of his lecture was "The Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Our Bible". He began with a short introduction which explained what the Dead Sea Scrolls are and how they came into the possession of modern scholars. The scrolls are a series of manuscripts discovered between 1947 and 1956 in various caves that adorn the cliffs on the coast of the Dead Sea.
It is thought that they were hidden way in the caves during the period of around 66-70 C.E. as the Romans were cracking down on Jewish revolts. The scrolls contain version of Biblical books as well as prayers, hymns, etc. written on parchment (except for one copper scroll) in Hebrew, Aramaic, and a bit of Greek.
While some of the scrolls were found more or less intact, there were copious amounts of fragments.
These discoveries gave a wealth material for scholars to sift through at The Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. Having given the historical background, Ulrich then spoke about how the texts of the Scrolls have changed and complemented our view of the Bible. The first thing he mentioned was how amazing it was that comparatively newer Biblical texts are remarkably faithful to the ancient sources. This is quite a testament to the great work that scribes have done throughout the ages. Ulrich had a slideshow for the audience and several of the slides illustrated the different sources for various Biblical passages. At the top of the slide would be a picture of a fragment of parchment found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Beneath it would be the passage laid out more clearly along with the same bit from the Masoretic text plus another source. And of course there were English translations. You could see how the sources differed from one another. Often times it was a sentence here or a sentence there. However, there was a whole paragraph that was discovered on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls which was missing from the Bible. Unfortunately, I cannot recall which book he was referring to. But he showed that the passage was included in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. By this, I mean it was in the text and not referenced as a footnote as it was in the Revised Standard Version. Another example he gave of how scholars deal with multiple sources concerned a Biblical character whose name I cannot recall. This person was commanded to build an altar at a particular spot. In the Bible prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the location was said to be X. There were other sources indicating Y, however. Then the DSS come along and they also indicate Y. Scholars realized that Y made more sense as X was deep in the hear of enemy territory.
Since I had read some material about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their relation to the Bible, I felt comfortable listening to Prof. Ulrich. The material made sense. However, with Prof. VanderKam, I was way out of my depth. His lecture was entitled "The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism". Considering that I had little to no background on the topic and his speaking style was very dry, I found myself getting lost rather easily. Having said that, there was still much to be gleaned.
He began by giving us a very brief summary of the Semitic peoples who inhabited the area around the Dead Sea when the Scrolls were written. Prof. VanderKam referred often to Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century C.E. who recorded that there were three groups of Semitic peoples in the area at the time: Sadducees, Pharisees, and the Essenes. The Essenes seem the most likely candidates for the authors of the Biblical texts. VanderKam described at length how the texts show that the Pharisees were not well-liked. The Dead Sea Scrolls refer to "seekers of smooth things" and it was explained how scholars "decoded" the DSS to arrive at the conclusion that these seekers were the Pharisees. Unfortunately, that's about all I can remember from VanderKam's lecture.
I found the lectures to be quite interesting and was a bit disappointed that I couldn't attend the reception afterwards as I'm sure I would have been able to learn quite a bit more. During the Q&A session, a woman behind me asked about the veracity of The Da Vinci Code and Professor VanderKam explicitly said that it was bullshit, although he phrased his answer in a much more polite way. For my part, I enjoyed how the lectures put a human face on the Bible. It is the product of human beings and, not only that, it is the product of people from a certain place & time. Yet here we are millennia later trying to understand it. We as a society struggle with it everyday. For me as an atheist, the Bible isn't a tract by a supernatural deity, it is but one of a great variety of ways in which we human beings grapple with the perplexities of life, death, and existence.
Professor Ulrich touched on how the various translations of the Bible differ from one another and I was reminded of an article in the last issue of Free Inquiry magazine called "Twisting Scripture". It was written by Hector Avalos, the Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. In it, Avalos shows how various English versions of the Bible were translated less from an attempt to be accurate and more to push an agenda. For instance, there's the Today's New International Version which he describes as being "gender inclusive". And so, when the text reads "brothers", the translation is "brothers and sisters". He also cites less well-intentioned examples such as this:
Consider the following passage from the Book of Deuteronomy in the New American Bible, a American Catholic translation:
32:8 When the Most High assigned the nations their heritage, when he parceled ou the descendants of Adam, He set up the boundaries of the people after the number of the sons of God;
32:9 While the LORD's own portion was Jacob, his hereditary share was Israel.
Most readers will miss the fact that "the Most High" and "the LORD" are two different gods – and only two among the many other gods. The term translated as "Most High" is actually the name of a god, pronounced "Elyon," and the term translated as "the LORD" corresponds to the Hebrew name we pronounce as Yahweh, the principal deity of ancient Israel.
The polytheistic nature of this passage became better understood in light of the monumental discoveries of texts at a city called Ras Shamra, in modern Syria, beginning in 1929. Ras Shamra actually contained the remains of an ancient city called Ugarit, which flourished in the fourteenth century B.C.E. Ugarity yielded a mountain of texts in Ugaritic, a language related to Hebrew but until that time unknown to scholars.
Ugaritic texts revealed that some of the names for Israel's deities were probably derived from pre-Israelite cultures. In Ugaritic mythology, the father of the gods was named Elyon, meaning "Most High". Some scholars soon realized that the phrase "the Most High" in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is probably also a reference to Elyon, who is represented as a god superior to, and separate from, Yahweh; Yahweh appears to be Elyon's son. Elyon divides up the earth, and Elyon's son, Yahweh (the LORD), receives that portion of the earth that came to be known as Israel.
The New Revised Standard Version (NSRV), an American multi-denominational translation, has adopted a more original polytheistic expression, "according to the number of the gods," reflecting what appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, other modern translations still do not fully reflect the polytheism of the passage.
I fully admit that I'm out of my depth on this subject as I fix computers for a living and am no Biblical scholar. But my UW professors would be proud of me as I continue to sift and winnow.
For more info on these topics, I'd suggest that the speakers' books would be a good place to start. Here are some links:
Professor VanderKam's An Introduction to Early Judaism
Professor Ulrich's The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible
Also along these lines is a book that I enjoyed greatly, God's Secretaries. It is an account of the creation of the King James Bible.
And my religious studies continue later this month when Karen Armstrong comes to town to give a lecture on the 22nd.
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