|The history of tampering with the word of God
is as ancient as God’s holy scriptures. Invariably, such tampering
has been provoked by powerful human prejudices. One of the most flagrant
interferences in the word of God is currently evident in the Torah. Someone
was driven by racial bias to alter the name of Abraham’s son in Genesis
22:2 from Ishmael to Isaac. For prejudicial reasons they wanted to bestow
the honor on Isaac,
||father of the Jews, rather than on Ishmael, father
of the Arabs. In the process of tampering with the word of God, the guilty
party committed a grievious mistake. Furthermore, when the absurdity of
the original mistake was discovered, someone tried to cover it up by committing
another falsification. Since two wrongs do not make a right, the second
mistake proved far more serious.
The oldest translation of the Torah I could
find was copyrighted in 1917 by the Jewish Publications Society of America.
Its title is THE HOLY SCRIPTURES according to the Masoretic
Text, A New Translation with the Aid of Previous Versions, and With Constant
Consultation of Jewish Authorities.
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