I've been reading Thomas Costain's series about the Plantagenet kings of England on Internet Archive. I'm part of the way into the fourth book and suddenly came across information showing why KJV is absolutely the worst possible source for Documentary Hypothesis to rely on. WikiSource, LISTEN UP.
It seems that King James I did exactly what the forged Aristeas letter claims Ptolemy did to produce the Septuagint: divide the Jewish Bible into sections, assign them out to groups of scholars who supposedly knew Hebrew and Greek (which they didn't, as you know if you read my threads on Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek) and put them to work. Each "translator" produced his own work and then they agreed on what to use out of each man's translation. According to the Aristeas forgery the Septuagint scholars didn't have to do this last step because they all produced the same result.
We don't know what sources Costain used, one of several problems with his work. We don't know if his source repeats urban legends that took root in the Aristeas letter. We do know that the KJV repeats one major error in Septuagint, creating a character out of a construct state phrase in Genesis 26. We do know it copies the Septuagint error in Isaiah 7 turning "young woman" into "virgin". We do know that it copies Stephen Langton's chapter divisions which split the narratives and create false impressions.
If anybody out there still thinks DH is worthwhile, you're just not paying attention. When I started posting about DH I frequently asked its fans to ante up sources. That was 8 years ago and I discovered more ammunition against it in the meantime. Start here and find out what you missed.
http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/07/fact-checking-torah-structure-of-torah.html
No comments:
Post a Comment