He wrote a volume called Whose Bible is it? (as I recall). It’s a quick read about how Catholics, Jews, and Muslims view the ancient texts.
Wha stuck with me was his exposition on how much tradition is really involved in understanding scripture.
Without chapter numbers, verse numbers, punctuation, vowels, footnotes, etc. the Hebrew text requires a lot of training just to read, not to mention understand.
When you open up your Old Testament and start reading anyplace in English, you are buying into a whole lot more of tradition than you probably would think you are, with a lot of evidence of how some arbitrary decisions were made.
The modern English names of books of the Bible are still adhered to in Jewish Enlish translations, although it is their custom to name the books from a key word in the first several words of a book.
So,the book of Numbers has a lot of numbers in it, of course, but the Jews like to use the word which means “In the Wilderness” which is also descriptive of the book and taken from the first line.
Deuteronomy means something llike “second law” but the Jews title the book Devarim (“words”) taken from the first line, referring to the fact that this book is largely the words of Moses.
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