A post by Sorekbekarmi is making the rounds on Tumblr. Here’s a number of myths I need to address:
1) “Hebrew has been constantly spoken since antiquity.”
Hebrew was moribund during the Second Temple period and went extinct after the Bar Kokhba revolt during the third century. From then until the 1800s, there existed a “Medieval Hebrew” used almost exclusively by Jewish literati, none of whom spoke it natively. This was the basis of Modern Hebrew which was invented by Eliezar Ben-Yehuda, operating on his knowledge of medieval Hebrew as a second language. Even people who speak modern Hebrew as a native language are working on the basis of at best second-hand knowledge 1600 years after the language went extinct.
2) “Most Christian translations of the Tanakh use the Vulgate and/or Septuagint.”
During the Reformation, Martin Luther (before he became a vitriolic antisemite) used a version of the Tanakh compiled by Jacob ben Chaim, itself a compilation of Masoretic manuscripts. Protestant Bibles have primarily used Masoretic sources for translations of the Tanakh ever since, only rarely using the Septuagint (and even more rarely Targumim, and still more rarely the Vulgate) for Hebrew words of uncertain meaning. For the record, Jewish translations of the Tanakh do this too. The JPS Tanakh from 1985 translates hashmal as “amber” because the Septuagint calls it elektron. Ben-Yehuda repurposed the same word to mean “electricity” in Modern Hebrew for the exact same reason.
3) “Christians have altered the Tanakh for political reasons.”
Arguments like these open the door to arguments such as the one put forward by Israel Finkelstein, et. al. in the paper “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah” that the ban on pork in the Torah was a post-Exilic addition made to distinguish the people of Judah from the people of the northern kingdom of Israel. Do not throw stones in glass houses.
4) “Jews have a better access to the original meaning of Hebrew simply for being Jewish.”
Language knowledge is not genetic. Jewish knowledge of ancient Hebrew and Christian knowledge of ancient Hebrew are both primarily dependent on the work of the Masoretes. We are working from the exact same texts. Of course there are differences in how Jews and Christians interpret the Tanakh, but since everyone has had to contend with ancient Hebrew as a second language (including native speakers of modern Hebrew), the Jewish interpretation is not innately superior.
5) “Speakers of modern Hebrew can read the Tanakh without difficulty.”
Tell that to Avraham Ahuvya, who is currently translating the Tanakh into modern Hebrew, or Ghil’had Zuckerman, a trained linguist who was born in Israel, speaks modern Hebrew, and thinks Ahuvya’s translation is necessary.
5) “Christian scholarship neglects the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Upon their discovery, the Scrolls immediately captivated the attention of Mar Samuel and Ovid R. Sellers. It is important to note that not a lot of the world’s great vaults of literature are located in caves in the middle of the desert that go two millennia without being touched by humans, so most of the Scrolls exist in a fragmentary condition. Not many of the complete sentences found in the Scrolls actually differ meaningfully from the Masoretic texts, and if anything, the Scrolls testified to the stability of the Hebrew text of the Tanakh overtime. But, when they differ, modern Bible translations used by both Jews and Christians mention it in the footnotes.
