First line of Bible translation error.., page 1

Hi Yellow Card--

Unfortunately (contrary to your claim !) we do NOT have the 'original texts' at all of any Hebrew 'sacred' scriptures, just very late copies of copies of copies of of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies etc. of oral material that morphed over time.

The post destruction Jews (i.e. after AD 70) did not start to count 'middle letters' in the proto-Masortetic texts they were copying until around AD 300.

Before that it was 'open season' in terms of copying by hand any text version in front of a scribe with no central control over the content until the middle ages (compare the unpointed (unvowelled) Hebrew 'underlay' Vorlage to the Greek LXX Septuaginta found amongst the fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll material.

And what has come down to us prior to AD 960 was copied BY HAND WITHOUT VOWELS (i.e. unpointed Hebrew consonants)--

A close examination of the Cave Fragments of the Torah and other Hebrew writings show that many versese were found to have been taken out of the later pointed (vowelled) Masoretic text of AD 960 from Leningrad (more than a 1000 years later than the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, found in caves 1 to 11 and sealed up in AD 68 during the 1st Failed Jewish War against Rome, and when partly re-discovered in November 1946 (to as late as Jan 1957) these ancient textual hords were revealed clearly that the Dead Sea Scroll material formed an embarassing 'time capsule' for both Jews and Chrisitians in terms of their 'bible' texts--- since they revealed the actual mis-matched state of the confused copies of hand written texts of the Hebrews in the late 2nd Temple period up to AD 68 both in the actual texts themselves and in the books that were thought in those days to be 'sacred' (i.e. canonical), a different list of books than what is in the 'bible' today...

Small wonder that neither the Rebbes nor the Vatican nor the Protestant churches wanted to publish them for the prying eyes of their tax-free offering paying public to see and compare their 'sacred' and 'inviolate' text copies...!! )

The Qumran Dead Sea Scroll Caves also held copies of the so-called Samaritan Pentateuch (SamPent) of the Torah in copies that were even older reflecting an even earlier text type (from around c. BCE 420) and showed even MORE line by line and letter by letter differences between the texts.

So we are not dealing with a single text at all, but several CONTRADICTORY text families of the Torah and Psalms and Prophets that only became sorted down to the single ('authorised') 'protoMasoretic' version by the Rebbes after the Rabinnic Council of Javneh (=Jamnia) in 90CE under the Babylonian Hillel II's orders AFTER Rome groundd Jerusalem to powder.

All other copies of the Torah floating around in those days were destroyed/supressed by the Hillel backed Rebbes who imposed THEIR OWN TEXT TYPE on modern Rabinnic Judaeism even to this day (but they did not know about the time capsule copies in caves 1-11, otherwise they would have supressed them too !)

Still all those variant reflecting Greek versions of the Torah and prophets/psalms that had been floating all around Asia Minor and Egypt after Javneh survived for centuries in the Synagogues in the Diaspora away from all the Jerusalem destruction--so that glimpses of the textual confusion could be clearly seen and pondered by persons such as Origen who in in the late 3rd century AD (scratching his head no doubt ! ) tried to line up all the different Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures which were being translated OUT OF different Hebrew originals in his Hexapla, fragments of which still survive to this day, in COLUMNS lid out side by side in TEN VOLUMES to show all the tiny differences in the text--

All this proves that the coyists of the Hebrew Scriptures before AD 70 were NOT copying the middle letters of a page of copy until much later when the text started to become 'settled'

We can see this from what survives of Origen's HEXAPLA, where a close verse by verse comparison of the Proto-Masoretic unpointed (unvowelled MT) Hebrew next is written next to to Aquila's LXX Greek in its own column and next to Theodotion's LXX Greek in its own column next to Symmmachus' LXX Greek, etc. all showing vast differences in the Greek translations -- clearly arising from a translation of DIFFERENT Hebrew consonantal texts, just as we moderns found in the embarassingly older Hebrew underlay copies (vorlagen) in the caves 1-11 at Qumran beginning again in 1946).

But back on topic: the heb. consonants B-R-A (prob pronounced 'bara') in the opening verses of Genesis comes from the 1st Creation Myth (Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:4a) and generally means 'to create from zero' as opposed to the other Hebrew word for 'form from pre-existent material' as we see in the Creation Myth #2 starting in Chapter 2:4b where ADAM is formed from mud.