The Silver Scrolls

A  text only post, and about history, afield from fauna and flora, sort of...and grim, so dear readers, a caution to read on...

some of youtube's menus are like a museum, and I find myself wandering its corridors of wonders...I found myself diverted from seeing a clip about Dirac and Dirac's Sea to a clip about Napoleon in Egypt...The Secret Life of Napoleon in Egypt...and found myself wondering about what Napoleon was about in the towns of Jaffa and Acre and other towns on the seacoast of Israel...back home in France, hearing glowing reports of victories (he was meeting setbacks and defeats), it was thought he would re-establish Israel and Jerusalem for the Jews in particular, and conquer the world in general like Alexander the Great for France...and I found some more comprehensive explanations of his founding a new Sanhedrin...he had put all religions in Europe on equal footing, a separation of 'church and state' like America had just done, and this had freed the European Jews from the confines of ghettos that Christian Europe had segregated them into...this was a remarkable step in the tale of the Jewish diaspora since the fall of the Second Temple...Napoleon made a branch of government that managed all religions in France, and each religion had its own internal government answerable to it, which is what Napoleon tasked the new Sanhedrin with...

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The decree of 1806 was an attempt to bring Jews out of their isolation, and the Great Sanhedrin of 1807, whereby Judaism became an official religion, tied Jews closely to the regime. Indeed, the resolution adopted by the Sanhedrin of 1807 formed a sort of concordat which remains, still today, the legislative base for French Judaism. In many ways, this was the continuation of the Concordat of 1801 and the Code civil of 1804.
Napoleon and the Jews
Papot Emmanuelle

http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/papot_jews.asp                                      

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More copies of the Bible have been printed than any other book, and more books have been written about Napoleon than anyone else!...and with that thought, I can get back to where I wanted to be for this post...the alphabet of the Phoenicians...it was the same alphabet that the early Israelites used, and of course, it's the predecessor of most all western alphabets....I was trying to figure out when the Bible was first written down...an oral tradition of the lore of the Israelites seems to have followed along with Moses  to the Promised Land, Israel...and with the building of the first Temple, this lore had a home...Temples back then were like the Library of Congress is to us today...it's where all the record keeping was...and when the First Temple was destroyed, and the Babylonians took the Israelites into captivity (predominantly the aristocracy and priests it seems), something must have happened to the lore, the records...Jeremiah is told to write down his prophecies, and the Book of Kings looks to have been written down then...this from a cursory look about...I'm guessing, that at this time the Israelites had command of writing with the alphabet they shared with the Phoenicians, and had the beginning books of the Old Testament with them...curious that they are in Babylon where they have found millions of clay cuneiform tablets...so books and writing were possible...the oldest 'book' is carved into an early Egyptian pyramid...

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Jewish tradition as expressed in the Talmud^[17] holds that the Torah was written by Moses, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy describing his death and burial.^[18][19] and the Mishnah^[20] includes the divine origin of the Torah as an essential tenet of Judaism. The modern scholarly consensus is that the Torah has multiple authors, and that its composition took place over centuries.^[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah#Pentateuch

Well, they just dug up a little pyramid like platform along an old major street in Jerusalem, and maybe it was where the Torah was read, a tradition that was established sometime, and I'm going to imagine it was in Babylon...not everyone could have a Torah, and a captive people will have maintained their traditions by oral story telling...

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We believe the structure was a kind of monumental podium that attracted the public’s attention when walking on the city’s main street. It would be very interesting to know what was said there 2,000 years ago. Were messages announced here on behalf of the government? Perhaps news or gossip, or admonitions and street preaching – unfortunately we do not know.”

Israeli archaeologists unearth unique stepped structure in City of David

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/08/31/israeli-archaeologists-unearth-unique-stepped-structure-in-city-david/

At any rate, God told Jeremiah to write things down...

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According to Jewish tradition the author of Kings was Jeremiah, whose life overlapped the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE

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

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The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, 2Thus speaketh the LORD God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. 3For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.

Jeremiah 30

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Oh!...looking just now, I find a better source than I did before trying to source the oldest Torah, or Torah fragment...I was kinda stuck in 1000 AD for a full Torah, and for fragments a few older pots and things the archaeologists have been finding...didn't know they had found this:

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In 1979 two tiny silver scrolls, inscribed with portions of the well-known apotropaic Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers and apparently once used as amulets, were found in one of the burial chambers. The delicate process of unrolling the scrolls while developing a method that would prevent them from disintegrating took three years. They contain what may be the oldest surviving texts from the Hebrew Bible, dating from around 700-650 BCE.

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

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God looks to be telling Jeremiah, write this down, you are going to need it, and that was for the anticipated fall of the First Temple and the Babylonian captivity...and I imagine the Torah was even more needed after the fall of the Second Temple, and by then it was much longer...and the Torah held the Israelites together...it does a good job of that with Muslims and Christians too!...a central core of lore is at the heart of all religions...some go so far as to say the US Constitution is divine...have to see how it fares over thousands of years!...the verses on the silver scrolls are famous...

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Barkay initially dated the inscriptions to the late-7th/early-6th centuries BCE, but later revised this date downward to the early 6th century on paleographic grounds (the forms of the delicately incised paleo-Hebrew lettering) and on the evidence of the pottery found in the immediate vicinity.

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the dating is done by seeing the kind of lettering, alphabet signs, being used...

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This dating was subsequently questioned by Johannes Renz and Wolfgang Rollig,^[6] who argued that the script was in too poor a condition to be dated with certainty and that a 3rd/2nd century BCE provenance could not be excluded, especially as the repository, which had been used as a kind of "rubbish bin" for the burial chamber over many centuries, also contained material from the fourth century BCE.
A major re-examination of the scrolls was therefore undertaken by the University of Southern California's West Semitic Research Project, using advanced photographic and computer enhancement techniques which enabled the script to be read more easily and the paleography to be dated more confidently. The results confirmed a date immediately prior to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586/7 BCE.^[7] Dr. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in ancient Semitic scripts, has said the study should "settle any controversy over [the date of] these inscriptions".^[8]

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It also may be said before a long journey, and some people will write it out and wear/keep it as an amulet

Priestly Blessing

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'daviddavid, what were you doing on the dirac sea?'

Next: the Dirac Sea