Re: [sword-devel] clean bible or bad phantasy?

[Daniel Russell]

I failed to mention that the Hebrews did in fact occassionally separate words with a point or stroke, like the Phonecians and Moabites (whose languages' alphabets were almost identical to old Hebrew). These points must not have been regularly used in the original text however, since the Septuagint often makes word-divisions different from those of the Masoretic text. Jewish tradition mentions several passages in which the separation of words was regarded as doubtful.

As i understand it, the situation looks like this:

original and old copies from the original
/ \
Masoretic Text Septuigant

Most Old Testament translations come from the Masoretic Text since we have had those Masoretic Text as our best Hebrew texts the longest time, while New Testatment quotations of the Old Testament come from the Septuigant (which the New Testament writers used as their Bibles). There are quite a few disagreements. We can not be sure of how often word divisions were indicated in the original original text. The Masoretic Text refers to several "old" codices such as the Leningrad Codex (published as 'Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia' and the Aleppo Codex).

Unfortunately, the oldest Manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date back only to around the year 900 A.D.. Most are from 1100 A.D. or later, and no complete Text is earlier than that 1100 A.D.. If you are thinking of these codices when you think that the original text had word divisions, you must remember that these are not original, but only about 1000 years old. We don't have the original text (except perhaps for a few small fragments which we are not even certain are THE original). Some of the earliest comprehensive Hebrew texts we even have the Dead Sea scrolls, and those were not written until around the 3rd century BC to 68 A.D.