Lesson 6: The Bible’s Beginnings, Part 1

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Lesson 6: The Bible’s Beginnings, Part 2

00:01

All right, so if you got your workbooks, open up to lesson number six, The Bible's Beginnings. For those of you who may be joining us for the very first time, we're going through a series of how we got our

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Bible, talking about the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy and infallibility and preservation. And then last week, we looked at the current form that our

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Bible takes, that we have two covenants, an Old Covenant and a New Covenant, and the writings surrounding both of those. We looked at the structure of the books and how they're organized in our

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English Bible, how they're organized in the Hebrew Bible, and talked a little bit about the benefit and blessings of different ways of organizing the books in Scripture.

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So today, we're moving on to lesson six. So let's bow our heads before we begin. Our Lord, we do pray your blessing upon our time of study here this morning.

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We're so grateful for this place to meet, for the fellowship that we enjoy in your Son, for the blessing of our salvation, the blessing of your word.

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We pray that today, our time of study here and reflection would give us an appreciation for what you have done to give us

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Scripture, and that we may appreciate that book, and we may see in it, hear in it your voice, and see in it your glory.

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And so we pray that you would bless this time and give us understanding and insight and be glorified here through all that is said in the meditation of our hearts, we pray in Christ's name, amen.

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All right, so we're still dealing with some of the foundational issues of how we got the Scriptures, and today, it's gonna seem like, wow, this seems like an ancient history lesson and really nothing to do with Scripture, but I promise you that as we lay this foundation today, looking at the various forms that writings have taken over the course of human history, that in the weeks ahead, some of this,

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I'll be referring back to some of this stuff that we're covering today, so it is necessary. We're gonna be talking today about the early writing materials that people used throughout human history, and this is necessary to understand this,

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I think, first, so that we can have an appreciation for the Scriptures that we have today, how it came to be, but also so that we can understand the history of how writings were transmitted throughout human history.

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So early writings, we're talking about an area, as we're gonna be talking about an area today, we're gonna be zeroing in on this area right here,

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Israel, and what's called the Fertile Crescent right there, so I'm gonna zoom in on a couple of those maps. You can see

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Israel here, this is the Dead Sea, and this is the Sea of Galilee up here, and then the Fertile Crescent is this area up here around the cradle stages of human history, it's called, in the northern area of north of the

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Syrian desert, north of Israel. That is where civilization really started, and by civilization starting, I don't mean that primates evolved into human beings in that area, what

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I mean by civilization started is that the earliest records that we have of people settling after Noah got off the boat with his three children and their wives, and his wife is in that area of the

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Fertile Crescent, and that's really where human civilization, after the worldwide flood, began to flourish.

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I'm gonna talk for a moment about stone tablets, early writings, let me, before we go into stone tablets for a second, let me talk a little bit about the history of writing.

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The earliest writings that we have are from 3000 B .C. in the Mesopotamian area, which was that area that I just showed you here, and oh,

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I gotta remember, this is my pointer, I gotta get this right, this is my pointer, but not my clicker, my clicker's down here. Okay, so the form of some of the earliest writings you're familiar with,

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Egyptian hieroglyphics, we see that, we get that, the whole pictures, the way of communicating through pictures, we're familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphics, those writing or, yeah, human script or writing communicating through written language was really done in pictures before it was done with any kind of an alphabet, so the writing with pictures goes back to 3000

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B .C. in Mesopotamia, and it took the form of Egyptian -style hieroglyphics, though different civilizations had different hieroglyphic styles.

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The first alphabet script was devised around 1750

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B .C., that was the first alphabet script that was ever used, and it was used in that area, the

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Fertile Crescent, and in what we call Palestine, but we'll just call it Israel because Palestine is not a land, and it was used by Semitic peoples, so it was the

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Semitic -type peoples that first developed alphabets and used alphabet -type scripts.

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Before that, they didn't have alphabets, they had pictures that they would use for communicating in writing. Yeah. Semitic means, like, of Shem's tribe, so the

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Jews, the Jews people and the Jews who were the descendants of Shem, off of the art. The Proto -Sinatic inscriptions date to 1500

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B .C., and they're found about 50 miles from the traditional site of Mount Sinai, and there are, of course, rock carvings and everything that date back to that time, so just think, prior to 1750, it was pictures.

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After 1750, they started to, 1750 B .C., they started to develop alphabet script that was used in writings.

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At one time, by the way, it was thought that writing did not exist at the time of Moses. Does anybody know when Moses lived? 1500

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B .C., keep that in mind, 1500 B .C. It was believed that there was no such thing as writing before the time of Moses, and then archaeologists started to discover writings that predate

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Moses by hundreds of years, and now we know that they were using alphabet script at least 250 years before Moses' time.

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So, of course, that led critics to say that Moses couldn't have written the first five books of the Bible because there was no writings at the time of Moses, so they wanted, of course, to date those writings long after the time of Moses, and just as liberals were coming up with ways to undermine the authority of Scripture in that way, archaeologists start discovering, oh, there was alphabet writings long before the time of Moses.

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Yeah, how do they find the stone tablets and writings and then date them? I think, I'm gonna give a real shallow answer to this.

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I think that it has to do with unearthing other things near those writings or with those writings that would identify the civilizations that they were with,

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Babylonian civilization or Medo -Persian civilization, et cetera. So that, I think, is part of it.

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I'm not an archaeologist, so I'm not sure about that, about the dating of them, but I'm just going with what I do know to be true from people who are reliable sources.

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Okay, any questions before we move on to the writing materials? Here's another example of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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That's difficult to decipher that. Obviously, an alphabet script is far more fluid and usable than hieroglyphics.

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Yeah, I don't know, there is something called

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Rosetta Stone. I'm not sure exactly how this works, but correct me if anybody else knows this, but there is a

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Rosetta Stone which kind of was like a key to unlocking a lot of these ancient languages and what the symbols meant.

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And of course, the people who study this could put together different types of hieroglyphics and the nearness of them and probably find overlap in languages, much like English and Spanish has overlap in the language.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Rosetta Stone, that kind of talks about like a cipher, basically.

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And when they discovered that, they were able to unlock a lot of that meaning. Now, in case the next question is, can you read that to us,

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I can't. Go ahead, Jess. I have no idea.

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Like I said, I can't read that, so I don't know if that's a recipe for roasted lamb. Maybe this is and Hebrew wasn't,

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I don't know. All right, so let's talk about early writing surfaces.

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This is the various early writing surfaces that they used were stones. Does anybody know what that stone is there?

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That's the Hammurabi Code. You ever heard of the Hammurabi Code? It's the oldest known law that we are familiar with, that we know of, that was written down, and it was written down on that stone.

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Around 1750 BC, it was the written code of the Babylonian kings. There's 250 laws on the

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Hammurabi Code. So that dates to almost 4 ,000 years ago. And of course, we know from Exodus that God wrote on stone.

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We know that from scripture, that some of the earliest writings were carved into stone. Deuteronomy 27 talks about the children of Israel coming through,

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I think it's through the Jordan River, and then setting up stones, and then whitewashing them with plaster, and then writing on them the words of God on the stones.

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And that was an ancient method of using stone. They would find a stone, and they would write, or they would plaster it over with some sort of a plaster mixture, and then they would write on those stones.

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Now you can see, as we go through these various things, oh, let me back up for a second. Well, as we go through the various forms of writing, and the various ways that people wrote,

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I'm gonna talk also about the benefits and drawbacks of each of these for a moment, because we're gonna be going through history, and what

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I want you to remember is that there's no way of knowing the exact timeline of how these various writing surfaces were developed, or who developed them.

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So it's not like we can go back and say, well, the stone tablet was first written on by Alfonso of Arabia, and it was a love letter to his wife written on March 17th in 1757

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BC. We don't know that, that's not how history develops. So there are various civilizations that, you see the stone tablets and stone surfaces cropping up with writings on them, but there's no hard and fast rule to say we know the exact day of the week on which this writing style was invented.

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And various civilizations were developing independent of each other, too. So you could have a certain type of a writing surface develop in various places, probably closely related to one another, in various civilizations.

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So this is the earliest stone inscription that we have. Here's a picture that I took down in California in February.

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I was at the Reagan Library, the Reagan Presidential Library, which is like my form of Mecca. So my wife and I went to Mecca, and after we had worshiped at the

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Reagan Library part of it, we went into this sort of this ancillary display area that they had, which was of a bunch of relics discovered off the coast of Egypt down in the ocean of a city that's been long since buried by water.

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And it was a recent discovery, and they had uncovered a bunch of writings and Egyptian artifacts on this flooded or buried city.

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And so here is a picture of one of those writing surfaces. My T -shirt says, I smell hippies at the bottom of it, if you can't read that from there.

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So by the way, I get a lot of comments on my Reagan T -shirt at the Reagan Library. So that is one of the artifacts that they discovered.

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And here's a close -up picture of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Now that's stone, that's buried underwater for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, hundreds of years,

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I forget what the date of that was. Do you remember? It's hundreds of years that that's been buried underwater. So one of the benefits of writing on stone is obvious.

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What is it? It lasts forever. Now what are some of the drawbacks of writing on stone?

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It lasts forever, that can be right. It's like the internet, it never forgets. Yeah, somebody might drop and break it.

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You can't erase it if you make a mistake. Do you think that would take a long time or a short time to etch that out?

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How many man hours do you think is involved in that? Now rock is plentiful, especially in the

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Middle East. You can go anywhere and find a rock to write on. So that's easy, it's always available, it's durable. But if you had to carry around your entire

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Bible carved out in stone, would that be easy or difficult? Horribly difficult, right? Very inconvenient.

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So that's one of the drawbacks of stone. All right, the next one, oh, here's another example.

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And I put myself there next to that, not so you can see Reagan in all his glory, but so you can see the size relative of the rocks that we're looking at.

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Here's another closeup of some of those rocks. This is the

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Hammurabi, sorry, what? Did they ever figure out what the city was? Yeah, they did, I just don't know what the city was. I was more interested in other stuff at the

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Reagan Library than that. I was kinda going through that because it was there, it was free, and so we went through it. And then when

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I got in there, I thought, oh, I'm gonna be teaching on God wrote a book, I should take some pictures of these carved rocks. So this is a carving which is the

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Hammurabi stone I mentioned earlier. Here's another example of some rock carvings.

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Okay, so just keep in mind the benefit. There's benefits and drawbacks to each one of these forms of writing.

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The benefit, of course, is that it's durable, it endures, it lasts forever. Well, not forever, but you know what I mean, a long, long, long time.

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The drawback is that it's heavy, it's not portable, and it takes a tremendous amount of man hours to carve into something like that.

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All right, the next one is clay tablets, or what we call cuneiform, wedge -shaped letters were used to inscribe in clay tablets.

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Jeremiah 32, verse 14 mentions clay tablets. And here are some examples of clay tablets, writings in clay tablets.

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Well, if you're writing in clay, usually they would write in clay when it was soft. So the question was, can you think about how you would erase something if you made a mistake?

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If you're writing in clay, it's soft, and you would be able to wipe it out and rewrite what you want.

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That was an ancient whiteout, was just rubbing the clay like that. So here's an example of a clay tablet that they've discovered.

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Here's a picture of somebody using, in modern day sense, that's not an ancient picture from 1700s, but that's how you would write in a clay tablet.

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You take a piece of clay like that, and while it's wet, you can etch in there whatever you want, and then once it hardens up, you have a, not a permanent, but you do have a lasting record of what you were writing.

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What are the benefits of this? It lasts a long time.

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Yeah. It's, yeah, very good. So this is faster to write in, right?

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So this is a development in terms of man hours. It's also lighter than stone.

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Anything else? You can make it any shape you want.

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What's that? Yeah, you can erase it. But if you drop this, is it more durable than a slab of stone, or more fragile?

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All right, so each one of these methods of writing has its own positives and its own drawbacks. So this is a positive.

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This is easier to port this around, but still, if you had to carry your Bible around on clay tablets, how convenient would that be?

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You would probably not even be able to get the New Testament in a wheelbarrow load to bring to church on a Sunday morning. We'd have to have little, like I said, a handicap spots, we'd have to have wheelbarrow parking spots at the end of every pew, and pass your clay tablet of the book of Hebrews down to somebody else at the other end of the row.

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The next one is wood and wax tablets. Wood and wax tablets. This is mentioned in Numbers 17,

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Ezekiel 37. Wood was used as a page or a sign, and sometimes these were called albums.

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In ancient times, they were coated with wax and could be erased and reused as the occasion demanded. So just think of this as the early etch -a -sketch.

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So they would take a piece of wood, a slab of wood. They could make it as thin or thick as they wanted. They could put wax over the top of it.

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Then they could write on top of the wax, and then when it came time to erase it, they could erase it and reuse the slab. Here's an example of that.

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That's a piece of wood with an etching tool of some sort, and they could write in that wax coating on the front of that, and then they could erase it when they wanted to and rewrite over top of it.

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What's the advantage of this, by the way? What's the advantage of that?

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The weight? Yep. It's reusable. Yeah, it could be used in daily things.

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You don't etch your Walmart list into stone before you take it down to Walmart, but you could do that on an etch -a -sketch, on an ancient etch -a -sketch like this.

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You could write that out, and then you could reuse it. You could erase that, and it would be gone, and you could use it for something else. So in terms of the, but this is far less durable, obviously, than stone, far more durable than clay tablets, because if you break this, or you drop this, you don't break this like you might stone or like you might, obviously, a piece of clay or a clay tablet.

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You couldn't write a letter to anybody. Right, you'd have to send the whole piece to them.

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Okay, any other drawbacks to this? Yeah, you couldn't keep that in your hot car, right?

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You wouldn't let it sit out in the sun. You wouldn't wanna let it sit out in the sun because the wax might melt. What's that?

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Termites, what'd you say? Oh, it burns, yeah. All right, the next is metal.

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This is mentioned in Exodus 28, verse 36. So now we're going forward in time. Hope you're seeing that.

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We're moving forward from stone through clay, and clay tablets and clay shards, and we're moving forward.

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At some point in this process, we go from hieroglyphics to an alphabet style of language.

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And the next one in the history of technology would be metal, using metal. In the

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Roman Empire, Roman soldiers, at the time of their discharge from active military service, they would receive what they called a diploma, which was a small bronze tablet with engravings that granted them special rights and privileges.

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And here is an example of, oh, there's another wooden wax table. Here's an example of that.

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You can see the word Caesar kind of etched in the table up there. You can see the word tribute up there as well, if you're close enough to read some of that.

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So that is an example of one of these diplomas that they've discovered. Here's another example of that, a metal plate with etching in it.

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You could make these obviously thinner. So what are some of the advantages of metal plates? They're lighter, right?

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They don't break. They're thinner. Sorry, what was it? They don't burn.

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That's right. Sorry? Long lasting, yeah.

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It is extremely durable. Was the hole in there so that they would hang it on them?

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I'm not sure what that is for. They would take some of the metal plates and they would bind them together into booklets and be able to bind them together with holes in them.

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So that's another benefit, right? You can't do that with stone tablets. You wouldn't want to do that with stone tablets, bind six or seven of them together so that you had a full book.

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It would be obviously immovable. So that's another benefit that you could bind these together and you could collect more of them in one place.

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It is durable, it's lighter, but we're still dealing, again, one of the drawbacks is the man hours that it would take to etch this in stone unless you could find a way to do it rather quickly.

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Or sorry, in metal, unless you could find a way to do it rather quickly, which would obviously be quicker than writing in stone, but not as easy as writing in clay.

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And I'm just doing this for the purpose of comparison and contrasting. Next one moving forward was what's called astraka.

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These were pot sherds. Broken pottery was used like scraps of paper. Large numbers have been found in Egypt dating back to 3100

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BC. Some were found in the land of Israel dating to 735 BC, recording the name of Pekah, king of Israel.

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So they would take sometimes chunks of pottery. So these are not necessarily clay tablets that are engraved when they're wet.

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These are pieces of pottery that then are written on with some sort of a writing ink or a stylus of some sort.

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That's what we're looking at here. Here's another example of them. Now, when you live in an agrarian society where pottery is all of your vessels, your clean vessels, your unclean vessels, your eating vessels, your baking vessels, there's one thing that is very, very common.

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And what is it? It's broken pottery. So this was easy to come by and this was a way of reusing something that they had already purposed for something else.

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And you broke pottery and you didn't throw it away. You would collect it and say, okay, now we have a bunch of post -it notes.

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So collect all of the pottery together and put it in this box. And if we ever need to write a quick letter to the

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UPS guy and tell him to leave the package on the doorstep, we could do that on a piece of shard. You wouldn't have to use a piece of metal for that or carve it into a stone tablet or work up a soft piece of clay.

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You could just etch something out on the back of a piece of pottery. Yes? The ink that was used?

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Yeah, some sort of an ink or a dye that they would use to write on something like that. So that's not etched into the pottery like the other ones we use, the clay tablets we looked at earlier.

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This is something written on the surface of it. Okay, what's another benefit of this? Number one, it's common, it's cheap.

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It's a way of repurposing materials. So you're not buying stone tablets or metal plates or wood tablets or something like that.

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It's easier to carry around, right? They're small, they're everywhere. When was ink developed?

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I don't know. Sometime before they wrote on this. Well, this is mentioned, there are pieces of pottery with writing on them back as far as 735

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BC, mentioning a king in Israel. So we're still talking about before the time of Christ, before the

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Greek empire. Right, any other questions? Okay, what's the drawback of this?

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They break, you can cut yourself, right? You get cuts looking up Hebrews 9, 12, whatever.

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Brian, what? They're sharp, yeah, right. They can be easily lost, they're small, you can't fit very much on them, right?

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So they served a purpose, it was a convenient purpose, and we have examples of it, but it wasn't really a popularly used one.

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Now, all of the above ones that we've talked about have distinct advantages and disadvantages, and now we're gonna take a giant leap forward in terms of technology and talk about papyrus.

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Papyrus was a light, flexible writing material, it's mentioned, papyrus is mentioned in the book of Job, chapter eight.

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It had multiple uses, it was used for fuel, for burning when it was dry, it was used as food, it was used in the construction of boats, ropes, baskets, sandals, clothing, tables, and chairs.

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It's mentioned in Isaiah 18, verse two, and Isaiah nine, verse 26. Pliny said that civilization depends on the use of papyrus, and we know that papyrus was used in Egypt from as early as 3000

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BC. It wasn't used for paper as early as 3000 BC, it wasn't until later that papyrus came to be used to paper.

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So here is how Pliny describes using papyrus to make paper. He says, quote, paper is made from the papyrus plant by separating it with a needle point into very thin strips, as broad as possible.

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The choice quality comes from the center and thence in the order of slicing. So here's a picture of a papyrus plant.

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They would take these reeds out of the water and they would use a fine point to separate the threads of this.

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Then they would take those threads and they would lay them in a crisscross pattern like that, and then they would lay them out in the sun to dry, and then once they were dried, they could take that and sort of polish up that surface and make a nice writing surface out of it.

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So the strips were laid crosswise, trimmed and pressed together, dried in the sun, and the result of this was various qualities, various levels of quality of writing paper, writing surface.

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Now just looking at this picture here, what are some of the positives and the negatives of writing on papyrus?

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What would be the positive of using papyrus? What's that? You can use both sides of it.

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Of course, you can use both sides of a clay pot, clay tablets, metal sheets, and rocks as well.

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It's light and it's storable. You can fold this. Or you could roll it up into a scroll, can't you?

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Like that. You could roll it up into a long scroll. And of course, scrolls couldn't be of infinite length.

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They could only be so long. In fact, most ancient scrolls of that length were about 30 feet in length, which is about long enough that you could write out, say, the

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Book of Luke on it or the Book of Acts, which is why I think that those are two volumes and not one.

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Because there came a point where you'd roll up the Book of Luke, Luke would fit on one scroll, Acts would fit on one scroll as well.

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Because Luke and Acts really are two volumes of the same continuing story. But go back to this.

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What are some of the other benefits of that? So you can store it easy. It's light.

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Isn't it light? Very light. You can put these together into books, can't you? What are the drawbacks of this, of writing on papyrus?

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Pardon? Is it burnable? It's not durable, is it? What's that?

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It deteriorates, and it can deteriorate quickly with use. Yeah, you wouldn't want to get it wet, it'd fall apart.

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Exactly, so here's a huge drawback. This was enormously expensive. Rock, clay, pottery, those are available to everybody.

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How many man hours do you think it would take to put into one piece of paper to write on papyrus? How many man hours?

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That is a lot, right? That's a lot of man hours, and man hours equates to cost to produce something like that.

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So being able to write on this surface, being able to have access to these kind of materials, this was a rich man's sport, as it were.

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Though it was common in the sense that papyrus was right there, it took a lot of effort to create that piece of paper, knowing even that it could eventually deteriorate rather easily or quickly.

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By the way, those strands and those strips and those fibers through there, no matter how well you polished it, have you ever tried to write on a surface that's bumpy?

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Okay, what is that like? You're trying to write cursive, what happens? Right, your J goes up like this and then hits a line and goes over instead of down on the loop like that.

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Have you ever had that happen? Okay, so some of the earliest writings on papyrus in the

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Greek language were all in capital letters and without what we call the cursives, which we're gonna look at next week. They were all in capital letters, which were straight lines in the

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Greek language. They were straight lines. Why is that a benefit? It's a lot easier to write on papyrus with straight lines than it is to try and do any kind of cursives or curved lines on papyrus.

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So our New Testament was first written on papyrus. We get our word paper from papyrus, by the way.

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Have you figured that out yet? We get our word paper from papyrus. The Greek word that they would use to refer to this was chartes, and it denotes a sheet or a scroll of papyrus paper.

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The Latin used the word charta, which in English is chart or charter or card.

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So these are all things that you write, a chart, charter, or a card. The Greek word was biblios, which was a term for papyrus.

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Biblion was a papyrus roll. Biblia was plural for papyrus rolls, meaning simply the books. So the biblia was the books, and eventually the books became the book, and then the book, which was a reference to sacred scripture.

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So our word Bible goes back to the word papyrus, because the word papyrus was eventually, the

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Greek word for that, eventually just came to be transliterated into English as Bible, or the biblia, for the book.

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See, I think I've covered all the positives and drawbacks there. Number six was what?

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Astraka, papyrus is number six. Astraka was number five, which was the shards of broken pottery.

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Oh, I'm not sure what that was for. Can I see it real quick? Five, six, oh, number seven should have two blanks, which is leather and parchment.

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So we're still on number six. If there's two blanks there, ignore them. Move on to number six. Just create your own notebook if you want to, if you need to.

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You don't have it? All right. I will take that up with whoever's in charge of getting that. Okay, so here's, we went through the papyrus roll there.

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There's a papyrus all rolled out. A scroll could be up to 30 feet long.

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After that, it became unwieldy, in terms of the ability to roll up and unroll it. Oh, one of the drawbacks, and this comes in later on, with examining ancient church manuscripts of the

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New Testament and Old Testament, with papyrus, it deteriorates, as we mentioned, but folding a piece of paper, if you've ever had a piece of paper with something written on it, and you fold it, and it gets folded enough times, or it gets rolled up enough times, then what eventually happens to the writing on there?

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Yeah, you can have a crease. You can have a crease in a certain place where you actually can't tell if that letter should be one letter or another letter.

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And there are variants within our manuscripts that come down to, was that a this letter, or was that a that letter?

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All right, and there's a difference of the word, where either word might work in the context, but the ancient document that we're looking at, we can't tell, because there's a crease in the papyrus, and the ink is worn off, if it's word

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A or word B. And so that's one of the drawbacks of writing on papyrus, is the fact that it deteriorated quickly, which is why, by the way, as an aside,

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New Testament documents written on scrolls and papers were rapidly copied and rapidly distributed.

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That is, one of the ways that God preserved his word for us, was through the rapid replication, duplication of those documents, and the distribution of them far and wide.

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That's how God has preserved his word for us, not by writing it down on a piece of paper that's stored somewhere in the basement of a monastery, but in the fact that these documents, multiple copies of them can be found all over the ancient world from all different time periods, and we can compare copies with copies, but because they were duplicated rapidly, and because they were spread so quickly, that is how

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God has preserved it. Well, what was the necessity behind duplicating them constantly and rapidly? It was the deterioration of the parchments.

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They had to be duplicated rapidly. Peter, do you have a question? Yeah. Well, we're gonna get into that a little bit later in a later lesson, how we deal with variance and how we weigh different manuscripts, et cetera.

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All right, the next one, so papyrus, the next one is parchments and leather, or leather and parchments, whichever order you prefer.

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These were used heavily in Pergamum by King Eumenes II to build a library to rival

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Alexandria, so it seems that the use of skins for writing on was pioneered around the area of Pergamum.

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Eumenes II seemed to have developed and perfected the treatment process for parchment skins, so many of the

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Dead Sea Scrolls are written on leather. Many of the Old Testament copies were written on parchments from the earliest times, meaning written on leather.

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2 Timothy 4, verse 13, you remember Paul refers to the parchments, likely his Old Testament text, bring me my coat and my parchments before winter.

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What was he referring to? He was referring to his copies of the Old Testament that were written on leather skins.

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The word parchment, by the way, is a derivative from Pergamum, which is where it was first used. Neil Lightfoot, the historian, says this, "'There is a difference, however, "'between leather and parchment, "'depending on how the animal skins are treated.

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"'Both leather and parchment are dehaired "'and soaked in limewater, but leather is tanned "'by the application of chemical reagents, "'while parchment is stretched and dried on a frame.

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"'The skins are mainly from small animals, "'such as sheep, goats, and calves. "'Speaking vellum,' which is related "'to the

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English word veal, refers to calf skin, "'but the term is also applied to other fine skins. "'Generally, however, vellum and parchment "'are used interchangeably to describe "'a smooth, thin writing surface of any skin.

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"'Parchments eventually replaced papyrus,' "'because,' did anybody guess why? "'Why would leather skins eventually replace parchments?

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"'As the preferred writing surface, longevity, right? "'A piece of leather lasts a long time, "'a lot longer rolled up than a piece of parchment.

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"'Okay, if you rolled it up "'and the writing was on the inside, "'you could actually get it wet on the outside "'without destroying the writing on the inside.

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"'You couldn't do that with parchment. "'So throughout time, parchment, or papyrus, "'became less and less available.

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"'From 300 to 1500,' this is AD now, "'after the time of Christ, from 300 to 1500, "'the principal receptacle for the word of God "'was parchment, skins, and not papyrus.'"

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All right, any questions about that? Oh, sorry, here's an example.

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I got so many things going on up here. I got my pointer, I got my clicker, I got my notes. I got questions, so here's an example of parchments.

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These are thin skins rolled up into scrolls. So what's another advantage of this, as opposed to all of the other ones we've looked at?

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It's portable, Peter, cheaper. Yeah, is it take less time or more time, man hours -wise speaking, to create a scroll of parchment over a scroll of papyrus?

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Less time, yep, less time, and very readily available. You're already eating the animal, right?

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So the skin is there, there's an abundance of it. You can stretch it out and use it to make a scroll upon which you would write something.

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Yeah, Rob, no, but you could probably stitch it together.

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Maybe a giraffe, from all the way to the back of the head, all the way down to the tail. No, they don't have tails, do they?

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Well, they do, I mean, but it's not like a brontosaurus tail or a, you know, yeah. No, you can't get any skin out of the tail.

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That was my point, you can't get any skin out of the tail. Can we stop talking about giraffe tails for a bit?

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What'd you want, Rick? Yeah. All right, so it's cheaper, it's lighter, it's more durable, more available to everybody, again.

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Any drawbacks to parchment that you can think of?

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What do we write on today? I'm just gonna think about this for a second. When I write something, most of my writing, it's not on paper or stone, it's on a machine, right?

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And where are those documents? They exist, but they don't exist, right?

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And the only way that they exist is if I tell the device that I use to write it that I want it to exist on paper, and then that device will print it up on another piece of paper.

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How cheap is paper for us compared to parchment in ancient times? For five bucks, I can, 500 pieces of paper, right?

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That's a lot. Paper is really cheap. And we have developed the ability to use paper and to use it easily and quickly and cheaply, but we've also developed the ability now to write on the ether.

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To write, but without even actually writing. I mean, we're not even writing down anything. We're not inscribing anything on anything when we write today, for the most part.

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There's no physical surface on which your text or your emails exist. There's no physical surface.

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They don't actually exist in time and space, do they? The matrix, it's all an illusion?

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Okay, so what will people think of our age, years from now, when they're considering how we wrote things down?

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So what are the advantages now of our time in which we live in our writing of things down and recording of things?

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I can access it anywhere? How much can I carry around on this little thing compared to a stone tablet, right?

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I have hundreds of Bibles on this device. Not only that, but I have more books than I could read in my lifetime on this device.

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And then I have access to almost everything that has been written throughout human history on this device, right?

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And I carry this around in my pocket. But do any of those writings, do any of the writings that I access on here actually exist anywhere on any physical surface in terms of being etched or written?

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They really don't, do they? Isn't that wild to think about that? When you look at the history of humanity and you realize where we're at today, then what's gonna happen 1 ,000 years from now when they're evaluating our period of time?

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They're gonna say, what are the advantages of that? Well, obviously it's life. You can put more on something, but what's the disadvantage?

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One EMP and all of that goes away, right? One solar flare, a natural disaster of some sort, and all of that vanishes with no record of it anywhere because it doesn't actually exist.

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But I mean, it does exist, but you know, it doesn't exist. Cornell? Oh, thank you.

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Good, so the NSA has it, that's good. That relieves, that makes me feel better. All right,

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Peter? No.

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Brian? Interesting.

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Yes? I'll listen slowly, too.

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Yes, my computer?

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Oh, I see what you're saying. Someplace where all this information is stored. I'm sure there is somewhere.

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Yeah, I'm sure there is someplace where all this information is stored. My only point is that now I have access to it, and now

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I can write and read on something that boggles the mind. And it really should make us appreciate what it is that we have today compared to what they had to have back then.

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So as you look through the history of how these things were written, and how writing developed, and how people wrote on things, can you see how difficult it would be for people who lived thousands of years ago to have the wealth of knowledge and the wealth of the word of God that we take for granted in our own day?

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People in Paul's day, not everybody in Paul's day had access to scripture.

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That didn't happen. Widespread access to that stuff didn't happen for another 1 ,500 years after Paul. It was very difficult to find written books.

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Only the wealthy owned those things. There were cities that had libraries that people would go to to see books and to see writings.

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But the proliferation of writings that we enjoy today is virtually, it's unheard of, and what we enjoy today has only been enjoyed for the last six seconds of human history, what we get to enjoy.

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Relatively speaking, it's just a small slice of the timeline that gives us access to all of these things that for hundreds of years people never had because of the way that technology allowed people to write and to communicate.

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So I hope that even this brief history gives you some idea of how fortunate we are and how blessed we are to have the word of God the way that we have it in the abundance that we have it.

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It really is truly a blessing that very little of human history has ever enjoyed. Yes. Yeah, that's right, it's a good observation.

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Most people couldn't read, even. They couldn't even read the language that they would be writing in or that others would have written in.

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All right, we're halfway through that lesson. I went through this whole lesson with the youth in less time than that.

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But they didn't listen like you guys listen anyway, so they're just, when you're talking to a painting, you can just speak as fast as you want, and they don't care.

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All right, so next week we will go over part two, which was the form of ancient books, and we're gonna look at the scroll and the codex and codices and different manuscript families like Vatican Manuscript, the

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Sinatic Manuscript, Alexandrian Manuscript, and we're gonna talk about unseals and minuscules and all kinds of other fun stuff.

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Codices, it just gets glorious next week, so that's what we'll talk about next week. Let's pray.

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Father, we are so grateful to you for the blessing that you have given to us in your word, and even this brief perusal of human history and writing and reading has given, it has to give us an appreciation for the wealth of wisdom and knowledge that you have provided for us in the written word of God, and that we can access it, that we can read it and study it and know it, what a blessing that is, and we thank you for it.

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Thank you that we live in the time that we do. It is truly a blessing, and even though it brings its challenges, it also has brought to us such a rich blessing and such rich grace, and so we thank you as your people.

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We pray your blessing upon our time of study and fellowship and worship, which is to follow, be glorified through that, we pray in Christ's name, amen.