Israeli scholar completes mission to 'fix' Bible
A July 31, 2012 photo shows biblical scholar Professor Menachem Cohen, reading from a book, at the library of Bar Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv, Israel. / AP Photo/Dan Balilty
(AP) RAMAT GAN, Israel - For the past 30 years, Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen has been on a mission of biblical proportions: Correcting all known textual errors in Jewish scripture to produce a truly definitive edition of the Old Testament.
His edits, focusing primarily on grammatical blemishes and an intricate set of biblical symbols, mark the first major overhaul of the Hebrew Bible in nearly 500 years.
Poring over thousands of medieval manuscripts, the 84-year-old Cohen identified 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew language texts that have been corrected in his completed 21-volume set. The final chapter is set to be published next year.
The massive project highlights how Judaism venerates each tiny biblical calligraphic notation as a way of ensuring that communities around the world use precisely the same version of the holy book.
According to Jewish law, a Torah scroll is considered void if even a single letter is incorrect or misplaced. Cohen does not call for changes in the writing of the sacred Torah scrolls used in Jewish rites, which would likely set off a firestorm of objection and criticism. Instead, he is aiming for accuracy in versions used for study by the Hebrew-reading masses.
For the people of the book, Cohen said, there was no higher calling.
"The people of Israel took upon themselves, at least in theory, one version of the Bible, down to its last letter," Cohen said, in his office at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
The last man to undertake the challenge was Jacob Ben-Hayim, who published the Mikraot Gedolot, or Great Scriptures, in Venice in 1525. His version, which unified the religion's varying texts and commentaries under a single umbrella, has remained the standard for generations, appearing to this day on bookshelves of observant Jews the world over.
Since Ben-Hayim had to rely on inferior manuscripts and commentaries, numerous inaccuracies crept in and were magnified in subsequent editions.
The errors have no bearing on the Bible's stories and alter nothing in its meaning. Instead, for example, in some places the markers used to denote vowels in Hebrew are incorrect; or a letter in a word may be wrong, often the result of a centuries old transcription error. Some of the fixes are in the notations used for cantillation, the text's ritual chants.
Most of the errors Cohen found were in the final two thirds of the Hebrew Bible and not in the sacred Torah scrolls, since they do not include vowel markings or cantillation notations.
Cohen said unity and accuracy were of particular importance to distinguish the sacred Jewish text from that used by those sects that broke away from Judaism, namely Christians and Samaritans.
To achieve his goal, Cohen relied primarily on the Aleppo Codex, the 1,000-year-old parchment text considered to be the most accurate copy of the Bible. For centuries it was guarded in a grotto in the great synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, out of reach of most scholars like Ben-Hayim. In 1947, a Syrian mob burned the synagogue, and the Codex briefly disappeared before most of it was smuggled into Israel a decade later.
Now digitized, the Codex, also known as the Crown, provided Cohen with a template from which to work. But because about a third of the Codex — nearly 200 pages — remains missing, Cohen had to recreate the five books of Moses based on trends he observed in the Codex as well as from other sources, such as the 11th-century Leningrad Codex, considered the second-most authoritative version of the Jewish Bible.
Cohen also included the most comprehensive commentaries available, most notably that of 11th-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, known as Rashi.
The result is the completion of Ben-Hayim's work.
"It was amazing to me that for 500 years, people didn't sense the errors," said Cohen, who wears a knitted skullcap and a gray goatee. "They just assumed that everything was fine, but in practice everything was not fine."
He's not the only scholar to devote decades to the task. In 1976, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer published a version of the Torah based mainly on the Aleppo Codex. The Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem has also been working on a scientific edition of the Hebrew Bible, but theirs is directed toward scholars, while Cohen's output is aimed at wider consumption.
Rafael Zer, the project's editorial coordinator, called Cohen's work "quasi-scientific" because it presents a final product and does not provide the reader a way of seeing how it was reached. He credits Cohen for bringing an exact biblical text to the general public but said it "comes at the expense of absolute accuracy and an absolute scientific edition."
With the assistance of his son Shmuel, a computer programmer, Cohen launched a digital version he hopes will become a benchmark of the Israeli education system. He said his ultimate goal was to "correct the past and prepare for the future."
As a former teacher, Cohen said he took particular pride in a sophisticated search engine that allows even novices to explore his work with ease. He called computers a "third revolution" to affect Jewish scripture, following the shift from scrolls to bound books and the advent of the printing press.
"I want the Bible to be user-friendly," said Cohen, a grandfather of eight. "Today, we can create sources of information and searches that allow you to get an answer to everything you are wondering."
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"God's first editorial staff choices were hacks; Corrected by some anal super annoyed dude in Israel"
"Original Bible writers were sloppy"
"Man finally gets God's act together for him"
"God really didn't intend for his words to be read by the poor uneducated masses after all"
"What to do when you've had no new miracles for over 2,000 years and book sales begin to wane? Edit the old ones"
"Correction: God isn't perfect either, at least now his words are!"
"You think finding good help is difficult? It took God 4,000 years to find the right editor! Quit your btching"
But then the average athiest doesn't know what Kaluza Klein theory is or even that the simplest bacterium we know of has over 600,000 DNA pairs. Funny, for a bunch of people who think they're so smart, most of them are damn ignorant of the same science they claim disproves everything.
Actually read some of that scripture. God is not a loving magic man who lives in the clouds. God will mess your life up and put you through hell on earth just to prove a point. Sodom and Gomorra, men women and children burned. The walls of Jerico, commanded his people to kill every living thing in the city. He ordered Lott to sacrifice his own son to prove his faith, and gave permission to Lucifer to kill Job's family and all his servants just to prove a point. THAT God doesn't give a damn about proving he exists to a bunch of ignorate idiots who don't even understand their own science.
THAT is accurate scripture.
BELIEVERS have ALREADY explained all of these things. In fact a HUGE number of believers believe that UNGUIDED evolution is something created by God - meaning that God created the mechanism for adaptation and natural selection in life itself, and sat back just to see what life itself would create.
As for the stories in Scripture that you take as cannon, is it your intent to just consider SOME of the Holy Bible to be sacred - or the whole thing? Because if you think the whole thing is indeed sacred, then you would understand that in the New Testament, Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Once Jesus came down from Heaven, God no longer engaged in "messing your life up" to prove points, or killing people to prove points - because Jesus makes all of that obsolete and unnecessary.
THAT is what your man-in-the-sky sacred texts actually say - and if you profess to believe them, you would accept Jesus's words - which utterly rebuke and invalidate the entire Old Testament. All of your "just prove a point" nonsense is out of a text - old testament - which has been rebuked by Jesus and replaced by his existence.
Not only have you no understanding of Science, you have no understanding of your own religion. You are indeed a lost soul and I pity you as you flail around in darkness, never knowing either Gods or Jesus's love, even though it's being freely offered to you.
But if this is true then you must understand that what is also true is that it isn't possible for the mind of Man to know the mind of God - according to this very scripture.
Thus, the actual words in the Bible are an attempt by an imperfect creation - Man - to set down the words of a perfect creation - God. Since by definition it isn't possible for an imperfect creation to know the thoughts of a perfect creation, the actual words in the Bible are thus only a pale echo of what God was thinking.
Try this. Go to 6 year old and explain mathmatical quantum theory to them then tell them to write this down in a book. What you will get is equivalent to God telling a tribesman who didn't even understand what Gravity was, 2000 years ago, God's own words.
You also might ask why is it that the last book of the Bible was written 2000 years ago and there has been zero "word of god" passed down to any prophet since. Why doesen't a religious text written 1000 years ago by a pious man who was inspired by God deserve to be in the Bible? Or a text written yesterday? How do we know that God right now isn't dictating more Scripture through some pious believer sitting at a keyboard?
For all anyone knows, this very post of mine your reading is the Word of God by God using the exact same mechanism that God used to inspire the first writers of Genesis, 4000 years ago. How do you know that it shouldn't be included in the Bible? Pretty freaky, huh?
It appears that much of what Dr. Cohen has corrected in the Hebrew Bible involves the cantillation symbols, the "nikkudot" which are the vowel signs, and the "ta'amim" which are accent marks, most of which were added to the texts by the Masoretes beginning in the 7th century.
Certainly a life's work for a scholar.
Oh wow! Another humanistic atheist thinks he's found more justification for rejecting Jesus Christ and the Bible. Try reading the article without an anti-Christ agenda.
The meaning of the scriptures was not altered by the work of Mr. Cohen.
Google Daniel B. Wallace to learn about the veracity of the New Testament.
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Well you just go ahead & send you're money to the likes of Billy & Frankie Graham and get that good 'n gooey feeling in the belly! I am happy for ya!