On Sun, 17 Jan 2021 08:01:39 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 15:19:00 -0800 (PST), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Saturday, January 16, 2021 at 2:59:14 PM UTC-8, jbeattie wrote:
Uh, Tom, it was written in Hebrew. Google it. I know this from
going to friend sons' Bar Mitzvahs and seen those stressed out
boys struggle through their Hebrew Torah reading.

I still recall going through the Bar Mitzvah ordeal process. Stressed
out boys was a chronic problem for the rabbis, who had an excellent
solution. Part of the ceremony was the Bar Mitzvah brat would drink
from a cup of wine. That should calm him down a little. I had no
idea what was going to be in the cup and it hit me unexpectedly.
Instead of wine, they had substituted some kind of non-alcoholic
energy drink, probably to avoid prosecution for contributing to the
delinquency of a minor. It was mostly of grapefruit juice and I hated
grapefruit juice. I made a rather sour face, which the audience
decided was humorous and which brought the proceedings to a temporary
standstill.

Originally old Hebrew was not a written language which is why
the Torah that Moses brought down from the mountain from the
burning bush was in the language that Moses was fluent in.

Moses received a royal primary education which was in Egyptian. As a
hot headed adolescent, he got into a fight, killed a local, and had to
leave town in a hurry. He ended up in the Land of Midian, which was
probably somewhere in the Arabian peninsula for 40 years in exile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midian
https://ancientexodus.com/where-was-ancient-midian-2/
Midian was founded by one of descendents of Abraham. In Midian,
Moses's knowledge of Egyptian was useless, so he switched to the local
tongue, which was probably spoken Aramaic. As a sheep herder, Moses
would have no need to do any reading or writing.

Incidentally, Moses and the suffix "mose" mean "born of" in Egyptian.
Since nobody knew the name of Moses' father, they just left off the
name.

Question: Since there was no such thing as paper at that time
and papyrus could only be found near the River Nile, where did
Moses get the papyrus upon which to write down the words of
God directly?

He used parchment or vellum. Parchment is made from untanned animal
hides and could only be written on one side. Vellum is made from much
finer calves skin and can be written on both sides. For "ink", they
used a concoction of soot, plant sap or gum, and water. Same as the
Greeks.

Contrary to the CB DeMille version of the Ten Commandments, God did
not inscribe his commandments on two slabs of stone. If he did, it
would have been inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphic. God might have
been clever and used clay tablets which favored the cuneiform stick
writing. More likely, he suspected that Moses was not going to
survive the trip down the mountain carrying 50 lbs of stone tablets
and opted for something lighter and more familiar such as parchment.

However, there's a problem. Moses was illiterate. He might have been
able to read Egyptian if he could remember any of it from his youth.
If is recall was anything like my ability to recall German, French,
Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish from my youth, forget that idea.
So what to do?

Well, God probably dictated his commandments and Moses took notes. For
writing material, Moses had the sacrificial lamb that was caught in
the thicket on the mountain. For ink, he had charcoal and gum from
the burning bush. So Moses took notes as fast as he could scribble,
probably in a very crude version of a Aramaic or maybe pictograms.

After the burning calf idolatry incident, Moses had to do it all
again. However, this time he was prepared. He probably brought some
writing materials with him up the mountain, or simply hired a scribe
to follow behind.

In any case, what he brought back was probably not readable to the
Jewish scribes who left Egypt who were expected to read the word of
God to masses. As recent refugees, these scribes spoke Egyptian and
not Aramaic. Moses probably couldn't remember Egyptian and certainly
couldn't write it. So, he had his brother Aaron translate Moses's
parchment scribbling into Egyptian. After wandering around the desert
again for another 40 years, someone probably translated it again into
Aramaic. Incidentally, Moses tended to stutter, so he had his brother
Aaron do most of the talking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron

Incidentally, I'm not sure if the translators edited the 613
commandments down to 10, or whether the bureaucracy expanded the
initial 10 to 613 commandments.
https://www.jewfaq.org/613.htm

And where did he get the coloring with which to
write? Ink was only known in China at the time.

The Mechanics of Scriptu Materials Used to Write the Bible
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Mechanics-of-Scripture

Tommy, do you make things up deliberately? Or does it come to you in a
dream.

I'll not speculate on his motivation or methodology. However, I will
note that whatever he's doing, it's not working.

Moses quite obviously must have spoken the Egyptian of his times,
after all he was educated as a part of a member of the Egyptian
royalty.

Nope. Receiving the 10 commandments on Mt Sinai was 40 years after he
fled from Egypt. Also, his education in Egypt probably did NOT
include writing as that was the job of a scribe and the scribes union
might object. I had much the same problem in the early days of
computers. Upper corporate management did not want to learn how to
operate their personal computer and left the job to their secretaries.
I had a few managers have me send every incoming email directly to the
printer.

And equally obvious he must have spoken the language of God,
who spoke to him from the burning bush, probably ancient Hebrew.

Aramaic would be my guess. Among the tribes and caravan organizers of
the time, it was the main spoken language.

As for paper, the first known use of paper seems to date from about
225 B.C., in China so obviously Moses couldn't have used that.
However, the earliest known fragment of written papyrus, The Ebers
Papyrus, dates from approximately 1550 B.C.

As I previously mumbled, spoken language and written symbols are
fairly independent. Similarly, the writing media varies with the
available resources. Egypt had the Nile river, so writing on reeds
was a economical solution. The nomadic goat herders of the deserts
had animal skins, so that's what they used for writing. In
Mesopotamia, they had river mud, which was quite suitable for
cuneiform stick writing:
https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/Adkins_Cuneiform
If there had been more water and plants, vegetable paper would have
been suitable writing as well as cooking:
https://www.ahlstrom-munksjo.com/campaigns/GVP/
Writing on stone worked for the cave man, but carving in stone really
sucks but has only one advantage. It's fairly permanent.

As Moses was said to have lived from about 1391–1271 BC, some 200
years after papyrus had been used in Egypt there is no reason that he
couldn't have written God's Word on that "paper".

He wasn't anywhere near Egypt when he received the ten commandments. I
suppose the local Midian stationary store only carried the local
parchment and vellum.

Now Tommy, the above is not some sort of archaic knowledge known to a
few initiates it is rather commonly known, to those interested in the
subject. I googled the term "The Ebers Papyrus" and got 440,000 "hits"
so you could have looked it up and have spoken from a background of at
least minimal knowledge instead of the subject instead of your usual
blathering of weird notion that is your usual contribution.

Whatever. What I see here is a very common problem. People like to
believe what they read. Worse, they adjust what they read to conform
to their biases. That's human nature and can't be fixed. Tom did the
right thing by asking the right questions. How did God and Moses
communicate? On what was the original 10 commandments inscribed.
However, he didn't go far enough because that would be trampling on
hallowed ground. Had he dealt with even a few of the problems I've
mentioned, I would have been very impressed. There are still a few
major unanswered questions in the Exodus, such as on what were perhaps
60,000 Jews doing to stay alive wandering around the desert for 40
years? The answer is easy, if you think of it in terms of what would
you and your family do to survive in a desert for 40 years.


--
Jeff Liebermann
PO Box 272 http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558