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Re: orion Newsday piece
David Crowder:
> I recall no one really dispensed with the "mother of God" reference we
> heathens stumbled upon at 7:11 in the Isaiah scroll, especially after the
> message from the writer in Oslo who said two 12 year olds had easily read
> it that way. Are we stupid to ask who could possibly have been writing
> about the mother of God in 200 BCE?
Not stupid to ask the question, but perhaps consider listening to an
answer? I looked at your reference and it is a simple, routine
instance of error correction. There are hundreds of others like it
in 1QIsa(a) and a comparable incidence in other Qumran texts. These
are errors and corrections of errors based on a scribe copying, word for word,
confusing a word either graphically by sight or phonologically, as in
this case, by sound, and then the error being caught in a
proofreading and corrected. If you will look at the photo of that
letter you can see the correction. It is legitimate to ask in
any individual case which way the correction went. That is a
text-critical issue asked of any correction or unusual reading. This
correction is _obviously_ in the direction of the reading attested in
MT, LXX, etc. etc. to the word "with" rather than "mother" of God.
This crackpot notion that Catholic theology was being written into this
text or edited in by a later correcting scribe suffers from the elementary
observation that if this were the case, you would have more examples
of such tendentious corrections or variants in 1QIsa(a), i.e. demonstrate
a pattern not explicable as coincidence or scribal error, but there is no
such pattern. Is this helpful in what you were seeking?
Greg Doudna
Copenhagen