The Book of the Law!!

by peacefulpete 7 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  Remember the story when Josiah orders the Temple restored after hundreds of years of neglect and miraculously the Book of the Law was found by the high priest Hilkiah. He hands it to the king who reads it aloud and tears his clothes and laments the sins of Isreael.(in substance). I was reading about how this story was one of the first clues recognised by modern linguists as evidence that the Bible was not what it was claimed to be. Why? The book was said to have been by the very hand of Moses who according to Bible chronology had lived 800 years earlier. Anyone who knows anything about languages (including Hebrew) knows that in that amount of time spelling grammer and idiom change so greatly that it would be unintelligable to all but a linguistic specialist. Yet young Josiah supposedly reads it off as a modern text!

  Language varients are readily evident by just traveling a few hundred miles or back in time a few hundred years. English for example:Our Father who is in heaven...Was ..Our father which art in heauen...was...Oure fadir that art in heuenes...was...Fader ure (letter that looks similar to a p)u (same obsolete letter)e ert on heofene...This variation was in just 750 yrs

  As Josiah was a recognized King of Judah, the story was viewed as likely expressing some historical event. The most plausable explanation was that instead of the book being written by moses and ancient , it was in fact a work by the then high priest Hilkiah!.. Later scholars have seen no reason to change that basic conclusion, as it harmonizes well with the Documentary Hypothesis. In other words Josiah was suckered into doing what the then empowewred priesthood wanted.
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  stillajwexelder

  peacfulpete --this is beautifully explained in Who Wrote The Bible by Friedman -- there has been a thraed on this book about two months ago

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/58218/1.ashx
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  peacefulpete

  thank you for the recomendation i have read the book and some of his source material. The story was the point of the thread.
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  stillajwexelder

  Your point about Young Josiah being suckered is almost certainlty correct - we need to look at the politics of the day to get the sense of what happened - -as you say Hilkiah was the man. To your point about language -- I think the English language has changed in the last 50 years -- in other words in my lifetime -- so yes 800 years is huge
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  Satanus

  Oh, you mean like if pat robertson was to tell w bush that god had dictated a book to pat that contained instructions as to what w was supposed to do, among them, that w bush was to be obediant to pat? Something like that?

  Heck, a couple of churches i attended frequently got 'words' directly from the god of the universe, channeled through the speakers, instructing different idividuals as to what they were to do. Often speakers would recieve new revelations about scriptural meanings as they were speaking. They claimed that they hadn't previously known what they had just uttered. It seems that religious scamstering is as old as .. uh, the bible

  SS
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  City Fan

  Pete,

  Basically, how do you introduce new holy writings to a nation which have supposedly been written centuries earlier by ancient patriarchs. Simple. You 'discover' them.

  I first came across this event in the bible when I read 'The Bible Unearthed' by Finkelstein and Silberman. Page 276 says about the 'book of the covenant':

  'Josiah's messianic role arose from the theology of a new religious movement that ultimately produced the core documents of the bible - chief among them, a book of the Law, discovered during renovations to the Jerusalem Temple in 622 BCE, the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign. That book, identified by most scholars as an original form of the book of Deuteronomy, sparked a revolution in ritual and a complete reformulation of Israelite identity. It contained the central features of biblical monotheism.'
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  Faraon

  Peaceful,

  Language varients are readily evident by just traveling a few hundred miles or back in time a few hundred years. English for example:Our Father who is in heaven...Was ..Our father which art in heauen...was...Oure fadir that art in heuenes...was...Fader ure (letter that looks similar to a p)u (same obsolete letter)e ert on heofene...This variation was in just 750 yrs

  I think that you are wrong. People in slavery keep their original languages. A good example of this is how Martin Luther King spoke in Swahili to Afroamericans in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

  Moses, a shrewd politician, spoke Hebrew because he needed it to talk to the enslaved Jews since they could not be made to speak Egyptian.

  Anyone who has read Shakespeare knows how easy to understand it is.

  Everyone knows that a gay person is simply a happy one. A mouse is a rodent, a speaker is someone who speaks. A keyboard is a place to keep your house keys. etc.
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  peacefulpete

  Thanks for the comments. Faraon I assume you were pulling my leg.(that will a fun one to translate 800 years from now)
  City Fan I also enjoyed Finkelstein's book. A great read for anyone wishing to understand the present reconstructions of Israel's past. I hope my first response didn't sound as arrogant to others as it sounded to me when I just now read it. I'm a student and a new one at that.