Thanks.
***
So, dig this.
Clearly, CNN anchorperson Kyra Phillips was about to lay something heavy on the viewing public.
A man was bulldozing a bog in central Ireland the other day when he noticed something unusual in the freshly turned soil. Turns out he'd unearthed an early medieval treasure: an ancient book of Psalms that experts date to the years 800 to 1000. Experts say it will take years of painstaking work to document and preserve this book, but eventually it will go on public display. Now here's the kicker. The book, about 20 pages of Latin script, was allegedly found opened to Psalm 83. Now, if you're a scholar, as you know, Psalm 83: 'God hears complaints that other nations are plotting to wipe out the name of Israel.'
This would have been a hell of a kicker if it were true; the dapper president of Iran had just recently made a campaign promise to wipe Israel off the map, and thus said psalm would have neatly applied to the international situation in 2006. It would have also neatly applied to the international situation in 1948, 1967, 1972, and most especially to the time in which Psalm 83 was actually written, when Israel faced
But as it turned out, the psalm to which the miraculous manuscript was open no doubt due to the divine intervention of Yahweh Himself - had nothing to do with complaints, plots, or the wiping out of anyone's moniker, as Psalm 83 by the Latin reckoning of that period actually corresponded to Psalm 84 of the Greek reckoning from which our modern psalms are taken. And so the psalm in question actually concerned an annual Hebrew pilgrimage and how swell it was to undertake. This was explained in due course by the archaeologists involved, but the various news outlets had already reported the more newsworthy Israel angle newsworthy in the modern sense, not in the sense of it actually being true - and if the reader is familiar with the way these things work, the reader will consequently be unsurprised that few corrections were printed or reported.
Rachel Trusheim
Executive Editor
212.244.2084 ext. 111
On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Barrett Brown wrote:
Going through the epilogue just now, I realize that I need to revise certain portions of it for clarity, so I'll send you a revised version later today.