Bible Review

The names of the Dead Sea Scrolls incorporate the number of the cave in which they were discovered. 2QJer is the only copy of Jeremiah found in Cave 2 (the second scroll cave to be discovered); 4QJer^a, 4QJer^b, 4QJer^c, and 4QJer^d are the first through fourth copies of Jeremiah from Cave 4.

The name Septuagint, from the Latin for 70, and its abbreviation LXX refer to the legendary 72 Jewish translators brought to Egypt in the third century B.C.E. to translate the Torah for the Greek-speaking Jewish community.

The Masoretic text—the traditonal Hebrew text—is named for the late-first-millenium C.E. Masoretes (meaning “scribes”), who devised a complex system of vowel marks and annotations to safeguard the text of the Hebrew Bible.

The term tradent meaning “preserver of tradition” is a common word among scholarly biblical critics, although it does not appear even in unabridged dictionaries.

It is probably a male voice, so to avoid repeated references to both sexes, I will make this assumption and employ the masculine pronoun.

A more detailed discussion of the parallels, as well as many more examples, appear in Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 1997), edited by Marcus Borg and Ray Riegert.

Midrash a genre of rabbinic literature, includes nonliteral elaboration on the biblical text.

Moses Maimonides (the Rambam) was a great 12th-century philosopher and expert on Jewish law (halakhist)