Probably wasn’t edited because it wasn’t a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.
People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven’t had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.
It’s not specific to Judaism, any oral tradition relies on the length of a sentence and rhyming and repetitions to make sure you got the right phrasing. That’s how you come up with poetry and alexandrine and all that, everyone uses it.
Wouldn’t go quite that far, but given you needed to be relatively educated to qualify for the task it wouldn’t surprise me to learn there were some acceptable tricks for catching or preventing errors that we would recognize as parity checks.
Probably wasn’t edited because it wasn’t a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.
People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven’t had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.
Wait wait wait, did Judaism invent the basic concept of a checksum?
That is… very interesting. I know numerology and the like are very popular parts of Jewish occultism.
It’s not specific to Judaism, any oral tradition relies on the length of a sentence and rhyming and repetitions to make sure you got the right phrasing. That’s how you come up with poetry and alexandrine and all that, everyone uses it.
Wouldn’t go quite that far, but given you needed to be relatively educated to qualify for the task it wouldn’t surprise me to learn there were some acceptable tricks for catching or preventing errors that we would recognize as parity checks.