Norman Golb, Dead Sea Scrolls Contrarian, Is Dead at 92 | Hacker News Reader

Norman Golb, Dead Sea Scrolls Contrarian, Is Dead at 92

nytimes.com

47 pointsdiodorus44 comments

I studied with Professor Golb for many years at the University of Chicago. He was my doctoral advisor and taught most of the classes I took in my program. He was a genuinely good man, kind, a true gentleman, and the most astute reader of texts ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through Ibn Ezra, the Cairo Genizah, and Judeo-Arabic. He wrote comprehensively on the medieval Jewish community of Rouen, such that he was given the key to the city by the mayor. He was not just a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, even if that his how he is usually known. He was demanding of his students yet gracious and magnanimous. I took a Hebrew Grammarians class one term thinking that we would be reading medieval Hebrew. The first few texts we read were to our surprise in Judeo-Arabic, even though he never determined whether or not we knew any Arabic. He must have just assumed that we would assimilate it through the hard work of dealing with the text, and we did. We read the Copper Scroll together, the Masada fragments of Ben Sira, so many wonderful texts. I regularly had "Indiana Jones" moments, when sitting under the painted, vaulted ceilings of the Research Archives of the Oriental Institute. It was just that awesome. Even though now I am a software engineer and no longer in academia, everything I am as an analyst and a thinker, I owe to Norman Golb. May his memory be for a blessing.

This is a lovely remembrance. May all teachers find such a future home in the hearts and minds of their students.

Digitised data from the scrolls for textual analysis was a thorny topic for years, according to my father who worked a bit on this at Edinburgh University with Andrew Morton. People guarded datasets jealously. The dead sea scrolls centre, places like the Freud archives, they're guardians of artefacts but also guardians of a specific group think. If you attack their credibility, you lose access to the data. It's maybe normal, human, but for scholarship its pernicious. The Vatican archives are in some ways more open i believe, Dan Brown not withstanding.

(My dad and Morton mainly worked on new testament, easier to get the texts maybe. He said if you go back to the earliest Aramaic, its plain the Pauline epistles is the work of a committee which pisses off a lot of people.)

The amount of bullshit in biblical scholarship is crazy. Digs in Israel are finding second and third heads of John the baptist all the time (that's a "name of the rose" joke)

Lots of careers have been built on 1-2cm of scroll. I can't read hebrew ancient or modern, I'm told it's a dense script with ambiguities in written form, which make interpretation overly subjective.

Reminds me of this quote: "I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for [Noah's] ark and didn't find it" [1]

When the foundation of a field is taking things on faith and built up on layers and layers of motivated interpretations over the centuries, I imagine its pretty tough finding people who are truly coming at evidence with an open mind. This has always been the thing that kept me from going deep on this facet of history, despite my curiosity.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/100428-...

When your supervisor warns you if you pursue his field of scholarship your name is mud.. that's a moment. Outsider science .. OK I'm not drawn there. Outsider biblical scholarship, subverting the dominant paradigm one fragment at a time? That's.. a life goal!

Golb should have been a wikipedia editor.

It's amazing contrasting this with Quranic scholarship (the faith I follow now).

I grew up in a Christian school and even they were totally honest about the high probability and academic theories that the 4 gospels were not written by the claimed authors. I always found that odd. You don't even believe your own faith was recorded down correctly but you call it the word of God?

How it was recorded and that it was recorded correctly seem like separate issues (which I don't feel equipped to decide).

sounds like you really need the authentic "word of God" much more than others... like, you can't even appreciate the honesty and pivoted to something written 700 years later based off the same source material? well at least its just one person's rehashing of it and there is no ambiguity there. I can acknowledge that are plenty of other reasons to find Quran scholarship fulfilling, I just can't let a good irony go to waste.

Whether it is one person's rehashing is another debate. We don't possess any original Quranic manuscripts, early manuscripts show changes, parts of the Quranic script was eaten by goats and current manuscripts vary in content, albeit in minor ways.

It's not to say that Mohammed didn't receive a correct revelation, that his followers didn't memorise it correctly and the first version of the Quran wasn't a perfect copy of Mohammed's revelations. It's just we don't have the original scripts to support this claim. And if we're going to subject the new testament to higher criticism then we need to do the same to the Quran.

It's worth reading tom Holland and Dan brubaker. Others will disagree, but from a historical perspective there is a lack of evidence for the perfect recording of a single author.

Could you suggest any particular book by either TH or DB?

TH - in the shadow of the sword DB - Corrections in Early Qurʾān Manuscripts

Well, with the Quran, you've still got the destruction of pre-Uthmanic variants, ahruf, qiraʼat, ...

Coming from a Catholic background, we'd call the blind belief that a piece of text is the accurate and perfect word of God delusion, not faith. Free will, which is also to our understanding a divine gift, is what allows us to differentiate between what's worthy of faith and what's not. Its separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Hence the need for scholarship.

The idea that a text has to be perfectly passed down from God to justify faith and that reciprocally faith dictates that you cannot allow yourself to believe that it isn't is alien to Nicean Christianity.

Who wrote a text is a different question from whether or not the text was copied accurately.

Before the printing press, scribal errors could accumulate over time. It was a fact of life for every religious group that their own copy of a sacred text had at least a few scribal mistakes, and methods were developed to identify and correct errors. I cannot comment on Christian or Muslim approaches, but among Jews it took centuries to develop a sufficiently reliable system of detecting and correcting scribal errors to give us an acceptable copy of the Hebrew bible (the Masoretic text). One of the reasons the Dead Sea Scrolls was such an important discovery is that the Hebrew texts discovered there are extremely close to the Masoretic text, which confirmed its reliability.

The extant Quranic manuscripts are so consistent because early on, Caliph Uthman had an official version of the Quran created and made a concerted effort to destroy the manuscripts that disagreed with it. And in practice, the number of textual variants that actually mean something to Christians in NT texts can be counted on one hand (Comma Johanneum, the ending of Mark, the Pericope Adulterae).

If the Qur'an were the subject of the scholarship the Bible has received, or even allowed criticism without the threat of death there will be nothing left of it, with all due respect.

In many parts it's a poorly reasoned commentary on stories in the Bible (sometimes way below the level of some apocrypha that have been summarily debunked with little work). So the doubt shoe is on the wrong foot. I can go on and on about how the legitimacy of the Qur'an is inextricably bound to that of the Bible (at least the Law and the Prophets) so that every poverty shown by the Bible is at least a double blow to the status of Qur'an as inspired recitations.

For the Pauline epistles comment, do you mean Greek? The earliest manuscripts I'm aware of are all Greek, and I don't think it's a debate that they were. Or are you saying there were aramaic scripts that were inspirations?

I'm definitely not an expert, have just studied Greek and Hebrew in seminary, so was curious.

I'm also not an expert but, I said Aramaic because that's what Sid, my dad said was the earliest recorded script. Web searches suggest its a matter of discussion.

In any event the debate is which letters were or were not written by Paul. There is no reason to suspect he wrote none of them, or at least none were transcribed them to secretary. The debate is which was written by him and which were not.

Your father may have claimed it was very obvious, but nobody else thinks so.

His research focus outside of computer science was stylometry and statistical analysis of authorship. I suspect contextually he was saying it was obvious from a form of analysis. He was a Jewish athiest and completely uninterested in the biblical scholarship questions. His collaborator, rev Morton was a parish minister in the church of Scotland. He used to joke you could be a very good scots minister without worrying about God very much.

Golb's son idolised his father maybe too much. I wouldn't be committing crimes to defend Sid's stylometry results.

I've heard of these types of statistical analyses before, but they always sounded a bit suspicious to me. Have they been verified on known datasets? i.e., if I used your fathers techniques on your comment history, would it find that it was authored by a single person, or would it think there was a committee of you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry is as good a reference as any to the methodologies. I know pointing people at Wikipedia is a bit passé but it gives a good summary.

I think the answer to your implied criticisms would be, "it depends"

That honestly doesn't seem very likely, given the content and audience of the epistles. The epistles repeatedly mention that Paul considers himself the apostle to the gentiles, and most are written to Greek cities. Even saying the Jewish diaspora in those cities retained Aramaic as a daily or religious language, Paul (or even a committee posing as Paul) would have been unlikely to write the letters in such a way as to exclude the Greek christians in those cities.

Further, as others have mentioned, the consensus is overwhelming that Greek was the original language for the pauline epistles, to the point where I can't even find any contradictory views. That's not to say the consensus is correct, but if there is debate, it's not widespread.

Do you know what evidence your dad had for Aramaic being the original language? A search for "aramaic manuscripts of pauline epistles" turns up no results discussing the topic.

"Aramaic priority" is the term if you want to find more information. It's a crank theory.

He died in 1990, but I think would have been delighted to be put in the "crank theoretician bucket in this space, it was a sideline to his work in numerical analysis, vlsi and academic computer sciences. The field of stylometry has come on leaps and bounds since the 1970s and 1980s.

They got people off forged confessions, most of the stylometry work they did was in english, against contemporary documents. Diving into the past was more for fun. The corpus is small and subject to the vagueness of time and editing.

Do you know what evidence your dad had for Aramaic being the original language?

I think I've been misunderstood. Aramaic was the earliest text for which people had high confidence in its transcription from whatever lay underneath. We don't have autograph works, we have copies in varying degrees of fidelity across time, space, language and religious schism.

Did he think aramaic was the origin language? Yes. I believe he did. But, its an outsider theory. Whats less outsider is the age of the text variant, and subsequent divergences.

Thanks, will look into it

> I can't read hebrew ancient or modern, I'm told it's a dense script with ambiguities in written form, which make interpretation overly subjective.

Isn't that true of every language? Especially when reading an older text where we dont have the context of a native speaker.

I'm told ancient written hebrew omits vowels, and lacks stress marks.

Hebrew mostly lacks dedicated vowels period, the same letters can be used in multiple ways.

Nikud which is the diacritical mark system Hebrew uses was developed in the Middle Ages make Hebrew easier to teach and to ensure that pronunciation is more easily preserved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad

you can get on very well about 97+% of the time without the vowels.

It's really the transliterated words that are problems. Though, I find when I read novels and multiple words might might there's a tendency to add the vowels under a single letter.

Which reminds me I need to go to Tzomet...

That is not a problem and is equally true of modern Hebrew writing. The vowel markings were developed by scholars during the middle ages whose goal was to produce a perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, centuries after the original texts were written. Those markings are not strictly necessary for native Hebrew speakers, but when they were invented the majority of Jews, even Jewish scholars, were not native Hebrew speakers.

Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic do not require vowels when written down because of their grammar. For the most part pronunciation can be determined from consonants and the context of each word (the context within a sentence). In English there are a few examples e.g. "He grws" versus "He grw" -- the first is clearly missing an 'o' while the second is clearly missing an 'e'. In Hebrew that can be done with almost every word and sentence, and thus vowels are not typically written because they are unnecessary for native speakers.

Not so much for Hebrew, if you can read modern Hebrew you can read the scrolls.

Interpretation is another thing.

Sanskrit is a possible exception. I know very little about it, but it is an ancient language that one of my professors explained is still read today allowing direct access to ancient literature.

Of course, any language thousands of years old is going to have a complex story, see [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

>(My dad and Morton mainly worked on new testament, easier to get the texts maybe. He said if you go back to the earliest Aramaic, its plain the Pauline epistles is the work of a committee which pisses off a lot of people.)

Paul wrote in koine Greek. The 'earliest Aramaic' versions of the Pauline epistles might be 5th century Syriac copies or maybe the 11th century Khabouris Manuscript which was a copy of a 160AD NT but the originals were koine.

>The amount of bullshit in biblical scholarship is crazy.

Indeed.

I'm a Christian, and a nerd and so the intersection of that puts mW firmly in the amateur biblical historian camp. As a theist reading ancient texts in modern languages you have to do your research on methods of translation, sources, etc. In my 30 years regularly reading in this field this is the first time I've heard a contrary opinion to the essine theory.. And that pisses me off, I rely on good research of the kind Golb provides to be readily available. What Golb says here makes far more sense than a monastic group burying scrolls as a matter of course, especially considering the volume and diversity of the material. The exodus of Jerusalem provides a far more sensible motive for burying a library in the wilderness, Rome was intent on leveling the city and the culture. Historians should be happy and welcome contrary theory, assuming they are interested in truth and not fame.

Norman Golb's hypothesis here was hardly obscure, being frequently covered in Biblical Archeology Review, not to mention actual scholarly journals. I suspect you've found yourself in a confessional bubble.

I think some of the comments here are seeing the word contrarian and dead seas scrolls and assuming he must have had some church forgery grand conspiracy theory instead of the more insider debate he was involved in. For anyone who is interested in the scrolls, I really recommend the great courses class on them which is pretty affordable via audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Dead-Sea-Scrolls-Audiobook/B0...

I can second that recommendation. Contrarians do get their mention in the course albeit briefly. It also gives fascinating insight into the different sects of judaism in that period.

The full announcement linked from the article: http://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-four-wheeled-proce...

That’s an interesting link on the “Lamborghini” chariot, not this article.

Wrong thread?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com