Writer: Hoku Lani
Subject: Dead Sea Schrolls and Esther
Link: MeWe / 30.11.2021
Dead Sea Schrolls and Esther
The Dead Sea Scrolls were one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. In the seventy years since these ancient documents were found in the Qumran caves, scholars have meticulously assembled thousands of fragments into more than nine hundred scrolls.
Esther is the only Old Testament book not found in the scrolls. The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are extrabiblical writings, but among the more than nine hundred scrolls are over two hundred copies of Old Testament books. Some books of the Bible had dozens of copies. The Qumran caves contained: thirty-nine copies of Palms, thirty-three copies of Deuteronomy, and twenty-four copies of Genesis.
There is at least one copy of all the Old Testament Books except for Esther. Is it because of contradictions listed as follows:
There are certain statements in The Book of Esther which seem to contradict extrabiblical sources whose basic accuracy in the matter is not suspect. Some of these discrepancies or contradictions are quite minor, such as the one hundred and twenty-seven provinces in the empire mentioned in the book, in contrast to Herodotus, who said there were twenty satrapies.
Herodotus was an ancient Greek writer, geographer, and historian born in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire. He is known for having written the Histories a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars.
Esther’s arrival at the court of Susa in 480BC, a time when, according to Herodotus, Xerxes would still have been away fighting in Greece and Mordecai as part of Nebuchadnezzar’s deportation of 597BC, which would make him, and especially Esther, far too old to have accomplished everything attributed to them.
Other contradictions are of a much more serious nature: Esther was queen between the seventh and twelfth years of Xerxes’ reign, but according to Herodotus, Amestris was queen then; moreover, again according to Herodotus, Persian queens had to come from one of seven noble Persian families, a custom which would have automatically ruled out an insignificant Jewess
MOST SCROLLS ARE ABOUT 2,000 YEARS OLD
Scholars used both radiocarbon dating and paleographic dating to estimate the age of the scrolls, and the results were similar. Carbon dating on some fragments suggested that they were from somewhere between roughly 2,400 and 1,900 years old. By analyzing the writing on those same fragments using paleography, scholars estimated they were between about 2,200 and 1,950 years old.
It is now 2021, so the scrolls may had been written perhaps four hundred years before the arrival of Jesus or shortly after his death.
CONCLUSION
If you want to believe this stuff, go ahead and believe it. The fact that you believe doesn’t make it the truth. People believe all sorts of things and doesn’t mean the things they believe are truthful. It’s just what you believe that’s all, nothing more or nothing less. The truth can be documented very easily and people know this. That is why they put so much effort into the business of trying to convince you it is the truth without any evidence or fake representations of the truth. How can something be fake or real when there is no evidence it was real or ever existed from the start. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that copies were made of many books of the Old Testament about 2,000 years ago and left in a cave. Everything else is speculation.
Hail Lilith
Now and Forever
Hail Lilith’s Beautiful Scribe
Hoku Lani
Now and Forever
Thank you My Brother Xpanther for sharing Her Wisdom
Esther is rather interesting, not for the holocaust-avoided message, but because it shares a characteristic with another book, Daniel: The text in the Protestant Bible, and in the Masoretic text on which Luther based his edition of the Old Testament, omits portions of text found in the first translation of the Jew Bible, the Septuagint. For one thing, in the excluded passages the villain Haman, bless his name, is described as a Macedonian. To me, this suggests that Esther was written after the Athenian Golden Age, probably around the year 300, a time when Macedonia had conquered the entire Middle East, and did indeed reign “from India even unto Ethiopia.”
It looks to me like a work of fiction based on a mixture of knowledge about the late Achaemenid Empire, and the Alexandrine Empire. It looks as if the writer was vaguely familiar with the recent past, and sought to construct a tale of horror, the near extermination of the Jews, that would be pleasing to their fellow Jews.
Compare this to the plainly fictional Book of Judith, also excluded from the Masorah and the Protestant Old Testament. Judith also tells the tale of a Jewish woman, and that is precisely what “Yehudit” means, who saved the Jews from slaughter.
Again, Judith seems to have been written more than a century after the events it purports to describe, three or four centuries at least.
The excluded chapters in Daniel are mildly amusing, at least the 15-year-old me thought so, detective stories.