As evidence of this the first man to ever print the scriptures in English, William Tyndale, once commented that Hebrew was ten times easier to translate into English than any other language. Their words form a clear picture in your mind. Hebrew has one thing in common with English: they are both “picture languages”. If they made even the slightest mistake in copying, such as allowing two letters of a word to touch, they destroyed that entire panel (the last three or four columns of text), and the panel before it, because it had touched the panel with a mistake! While most Christians today would consider this behavior fanatical and even idolatrous (worshiping the scripture, rather than the One who gave it to us), it nevertheless demonstrates the level of faithfulness to accuracy applied to the preservation of God’s Word throughout the first couple of thousand years of Biblical transmission. The Jewish scribes who painstakingly produced each scroll were perfectionists. An entire Torah Scroll, if completely unraveled, is over 150 feet long! As most sheep are only about two to three feet long, it took an entire flock of sheep to make just one Torah scroll. When the entire Pentateuch is present on a scroll, it is called a “Torah”. Animals considered “unclean” by the Jews, such as pigs, were of course, never used to make scrolls.
These writings were passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years on scrolls made of animal skin, usually sheep, but sometimes deer or cow. The Old Testament scriptures were written in ancient Hebrew, a language substantially different than the Hebrew of today. The earliest scripture is generally considered to be the “Pentateuch”, the first five books of the Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy… though there is some scholarly evidence to indicate that the Old Testament Book of Job may actually be the oldest book in the Bible. The language used was almost certainly an ancient form of Hebrew, the language of Old Covenant believers. Biblical scholars believe this occurred between 1,400 BC and 1,500 BC… almost 3,500 years ago. The first recorded instance of God’s Word being written down, was when the Lord Himself wrote it down in the form of ten commandments on the stone tablets delivered to Moses at the top of Mount Sinai. The story of the Bible is much older than that, however. Indeed, if we go back more than just one thousand years, there is no language recognizable as “English” that even existed anywhere. The story of how we got the English language Bible is, for the most part, the story of the Protestant Reformation which began in the late 14th Century AD with John Wycliffe.
0 kommentar(er)
