Odds and Ends and Very Odds

Ninth Friday after Pentecost

Let me respond to a couple of comments. Thanks to Jerry for putting me on to St. Benedict's Toolbox, which I reviewed on the blog a couple of weeks ago. Jerry, I admire you for once doing the entire Daily Office, including Vigil, the prayers in the middle of the night. I've never done Vigil, but I do let my dog out in the middle of the night. Hmm, is there an opportunity there?

Most of you have seen on the news around Christmas time a picture of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It's not an impressive looking church, but there is a complex of buildings all interconnected to it and architecturally coherent with it. The Church is Greek Orthodox. There is a Greek Orthodox monastery there, a Catholic Franciscan monastery there, and an Armenian Orthodox monastery there. There is also the cave where St. Jerome translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. His Bible became the only Bible read inside Catholic Churches from then until 1964.

Our little tour group was in the Chapel of the Franciscan monastery at mid-day back in 1993 when the monks began to file in in silence, in their brown albs and with their tonsures: head shaved except for a band of hair from the top of the ear around to the top of the other ear. They began to chant in Latin, It was beautiful with echoes of the stone of the chapel. It lasted about 20 minutes, then they filed out in silence. Only later did I find out that they were chanting Sext, the mid-day prayers in the Daily Office. 

I'm finally responding to Glenn's comment from a couple of weeks ago. I did not know Douglas Petrovich's work and his contention that Hebrew is the oldest alphabet.  I have read a little since then and looked at all the Sinai inscriptions he uses. His work has been pretty thoroughly debunked by reputable scholars. He is a darling of the Creationists, who contend for a literal interpretation of a seven day creation, that the earth in only 6,000 years old, and no species has ever evolved from another species. All these points have been proven wrong with overwhelming amounts of evidence. Fortunately, Creationism does seem to be on the wane. 

Scholars have long thought that the oldest alphabet is the Phoenician, going back to about 2100 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphics which go back to 3,000 BC. and do have some alphabetic elements. Glyphs can double as both words and sounds. The earliest Hebrew writing we have, the Nash papyrus, goes back only to the third century B.C. We do have mentions of habiru (apparently meaning Hebrews) in 14th century BC Ugaritic texts and in the Egyptian Mernepthah Stele which dates to 1187 BC.  

I found photos of the inscriptions Petrovich mentions. They are hieroglyphs. There are little arrows added to the photos that point to glyphs that could be seen as individual Hebrew letters, but they are definitely not words. They could also be seen as several other things. 

This is not my field, but I do read Hebrew. Petrovich, who advertises himself as a Ph.D. candidate, though I can't find out where, does not appear to be a reputable scholar or archaeologist. 

My advice is that when you're reading materials in Biblical Scholarship or archaeology, always check out the credentials of the person you are reading.

Faithfully,

Christian