[beth1447]

Hey guys! I'm looking for someone who knows something about the Hebrew Bible, or the history of... I don't know how to phrase it. Basically, I've had alot of debates with a guy who likes to debate back with: " But in the original Hebrew..." and I'm wondering if someone could tell me how much has been left out and if anything's been added between Hebrew and NIV

[Qingu]

Originally Posted by beth1447

Hey guys! I'm looking for someone who knows something about the Hebrew Bible, or the history of... I don't know how to phrase it. Basically, I've had alot of debates with a guy who likes to debate back with: " But in the original Hebrew..." and I'm wondering if someone could tell me how much has been left out and if anything's been added between Hebrew and NIV

We don't have the "original Hebrew." In fact, many of the earliest texts we have for the OT are written in Greek (from the Septuigint, which is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible very popular around the time of Christianity), and sometimes are written in Latin from the Vulgate.

The earliest Hebrew texts we have are the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are not comprehensive, many are just fragments of texts (and many more are apocryphal). The Dead Sea Scrolls generally match a later compilation known as the Massoretic text, which is generally considered the most authoritive text of the OT. But the Massoretic text dates to the 10th century AD. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, though early, were still composed several centuries after the hypothetical "original" Hebrew scriptures were written (most scholars agree that the text of the Hebrew Bible was largely written down around 500-300 BC, and the compositions come from earlier oral traditions from as early as 1000 BC.

The modern translations of the Bible we have do not rely on some imaginary "original Hebrew." What we have are a number of Hebrew source texts, of varying antiquity and reliability--modern translations draw from them as they see fit. Now, there is always a chance that there's a subtlety in these Hebrew source texts that is not captured in an English translation, and in this case knowledge of the Hebrew language would certainly help you understand it better. But I don't think anyone can appeal to something that's in "the original Hebrew" when nobody knows what the original Hebrew says, or if there ever was an original authoritive Hebrew version of the Bible. Like most religious texts, the Bible grew out of several oral traditions and was written down and interpreted by many different people; appealing to "the original Hebrew Bible" is like appearling to "the original Sanskrit Mahabharata"--an appeal to something that is probably imaginary and that, even if it's not, we will never have anyway.