My Dead Sea Scroll Unicode font is complete! In creating this font, I surveyed the Great Isaiah Scroll, Leviticus fragment MS4611, and the Paleo-Hebrew Tetragramaton in 11QPS. DSShebrew-1.0 is released under the GPL Font Exception License. Download the font for Windows, Linux/Mac, or head to the Resources section of this site.
Despite concomitant conflict both from outside and within; despite wars, exiles, genocides, slaveries, and even divorce from her own God, Judaism has survived the trials of time. But let no one say that through it all, the religion of Israel has remained unchanged. Judaism is nothing if not a religion of transition. In each new age, the children of Israel have looked through their own particular lens: deciphering the present, past, and future as acts of their God. For since the beginning
, no Word of Yahweh was known unless it manifested in and moved through the material and physical world.
Although the last couple centuries before Hadrian saw a great variety of theological interpretation manifest in what Josephus calls philosophic schools
, history preserved only two of these sects. If by his creation, the will and way of the Creator is made known, then the arm of Yahweh stretches across these historic circumstances and summons the world to see and know it. Just as the early Christians pointed to the historical events of Yeshua’s wondrous deeds, culminating in his physical resurrection, as validation for their theological message, so we meet in the second century AD a theological message behind the second Jewish sect. The Word of Yahweh is interpreted as manifest and moving material and physical history in the being of Israel’s final governing and legislative elders, who revealed in time through the tradition of their actions and decisions, The Mishnah, or Oral Law.
Tractate Aboth, the Sayings of the Fathers
, interprets the historically assured establishment of the thoughts and ways of Pharisaic tradition. When it says Moses received the [Oral] Law from Sinai
(Aboth 1:1) and it was passed on through successive generations until written codification, this is the assertion that Rabbi Akiba’s or Rabbi Johanan’s words and actions that have bearing on religious understanding and practice were prefigured and have fulfillment for the present day in the Law at Sinai. Christians, of course, have asserted that it was Yeshua’s words and actions that were prefigured and have fulfillment in the Law at Sinai (taking it back in some cases even to the work of creation itself).
The Judaic lens reveals Yahweh’s theological truth in historical event. This is not a strange conception, for if there is a God, what he does must be in some way according to himself as the final and deciding authority. Therefore, by looking at creation and history, those things he has done, we may see something of him. The Mishnah is the alternate (and in some sense, competing) second century interpretation of Yahweh’s work in history alongside the claims of Christianity. Throughout time, others have arise from outside, assimilating the Judaic lens for their own purpose (such as Muhammad and the Qur’an). It is our esteemed privilege that we get to look at creation and history in order to judge where, how, and if Yahweh moves in and through reality.
In the Talmud Bavli (better known as the Babylonian Talmud), the Rabbis describe a prayer that was added to the 18 Benedictions after the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome. The subject of this additional prayer (called the Birkat Ha Minim) was the minim or Jewish heretics (see Tractate Berakoth, folio 28b and 29a). Any sectarian Jew who recited the prayer would bring down a curse of Yahweh’s condemnation and judgment upon himself. Therefore, by requiring this to be spoken aloud in the synagogue along with the other 18 Benedictions, it was the purpose of the rabbis to expose the non-Orthodox who would not speak such a thing upon themselves. Several rabbis spoke of these Benedictions metaphorically as vertebrae in the spinal column. To use a modern equivalent of the metaphor, this means that the Rabbis saw these Benedictions (including the additional one against minim) as being the backbone of their faith. One of the Jewish sects that the word minim undoubtedly represented was that of the Jewish believers in Yeshua, the Nazarenes. An ancient version of the Birkat Ha Minim found in the Cairo Geniza actually makes this identification explicit.
For the renegades let there be no hope, and may the arrogant kingdom soon be rooted out in our days, and the Nazarenes and the minim perish as in a moment and be blotted out from the book of life and with the righteous may they not be inscribed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who humblest the arrogant.
published by Solomon Schechter inGenizah Specimens, Jewish Quarterly Review 10
Not that I’m an advocate of government stealing from me or you what we have rightfully earned in order to use it for its own brand of arbitrary ethical propaganda…
But in light of Microsoft’s absurd declaration against open source software, saying that it violates at least 235 of its intellectual property
patents, I had me a thought. Since the government has felt free over the past several years to use my money to tell me how bad smoking is and that I shouldn’t do it, wouldn’t it be great if government came out with another campaign–a campaign against Microsoft? Think of the commercial possiblities… There could be billboards saying free yourself from Windows
or see a Vista they won’t let you see
showing a woman racing from a glass house into a field of flowers in the fresh open air, new worlds waiting to be discovered on the horizon.
Like the glass structures of the same name, Windows is enclosing. It limits your freedom by controlling and defining your actions and possibilities. Microsoft is not leading the way in faster, more efficient, more innovative, or more affordable software. Each new version is more system dependant. More resource intensive. And full of more holes and problems. Instead of following software standards meant to increase individual and public utlitiy, efficiency, and interoperability, Microsoft has created their own standards
in order to create a software slave market. Microsoft does not exist to give you more power, but to increase its power over you. Most people are shocked to discover that when they laid down their hundreds of dollars for Windows, they didn’t actually purchase an operating system–only a license to use one. Microsoft still owns, controls, and authorizes your computer use–not you. And the more you try to open their Windows, the harder Microsoft will shut it in your face (Vista).
Enter Open Source. Everything that Microsoft isn’t, open source is. It’s for that reason that open source has taken the world by storm and Microsoft is trying desperately to control it–from selling cripled versions of its operating system and software for 3 dollars overseas to making empty threats of patent violation lawsuits. In time, the Tyrant will fall and the digital Middle East will be free. Until then, Microsoft is a much bigger threat to civilization than cigarettes. Of course, I’m a computer addict, not a tabacco one.