You Left Stuff Out!

Over the years, lots of stuff has been left out of the Bible. These edits - all done by fallible men -are part of what make me want to dig further on everything.

I was talking with a friend on Facebook the other day. He had a post about the book of Esther not mentioning God. Esther, ironically, is also the first book in the Bible that calls the chosen people "Jews" instead of "Hebrews" or "Israelites."

I asked said friend why Esther had more verses in it until 1885. His response?
"Because those chapters were not in the original Hebrew only in the Greek Septuagint."

Funny. 

Really funny. 

The Hebrew texts are rewrites of the Greek texts in some parts. Otherwise, they would not rename Xerxes to "Ahasuerus." The English name Ahasuerus is derived from a Latinized form of the Hebrew Akhashverosh, which is a Hebrew rendering of the Babylonian Achshiyarshu.

Further, the Hebrew was not considered more technically accurate in all aspects - the book of Daniel, for example, survives in its current form as a translation from the Greek, not the Hebrew. Someone at some time (Jerome, 390) decided that one was "more authentic" than the other. So, keeping with one translation over another is uncertain, at best.

This gets into a classic debate of Septuigint (abbreviated LXX) vs. Masoretic Text (MT) vs. Latin Vulgate (LV). I'm certainly not going to settle that argument here. Instead, the simple fact that it is debated among scholars is enough for me to know that one version is not necessarily more accurate than another. I'll take all the text, and review for myself, thank you!


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