Word Finder - scribes

definition

Someone who writes; a draughtsperson; a writer for another; especially, an official or public writer; an amanuensis, secretary, notary or copyist.

definition

A writer and doctor of the law; one skilled in the law and traditions; one who read and explained the law to the people.

definition

A very sharp, steel drawing implement used in engraving and etching, a scriber.

definition

(in particular) A journalist.

The scribes show no suspicion, however, of the name's being, anything but a singular.'

But this certainly was not the leading point of view with the mass of the Rabbins; 1 and at any rate it is quite certain that the synagogue is a post-exilic institution, and therefore that the Sabbath in old Israel must have been entirely different from the Sabbath of the Scribes.

As it stands in these ancient laws, the Sabbath is not at all the unique thing which it was made to be by the Scribes.

The steps by which the practice of resting from labour on the Lord's day instead of on the Sabbath was established in Christendom and received civil as well as ecclesiastical sanction are dealt with under Sunday; it is enough to observe here that this practice is naturally and even necessarily connected with the religious observance of the Lord's day as a day of worship and religious gladness, and is in full accordance with the principles laid down by Jesus in His criticism of the Sabbath of the Scribes.

The line is traced through biblical teachers to Ezra, the first of the Sopherim or scribes, who handed on the charge to the "men of the Great Synagogue," a much-discussed term for a body or succession of teachers inaugurated by Ezra.

In the second and following centuries it was interpolated by Christian scribes, and finally condemned undiscriminatingly along with other apocryphs.

It was the usual garb of scribes, servants and peasants, and in the earlier dynasties was worn even by men of rank.

The English dialect in which the Anglo-Saxon laws have been handed down to us is in most cases a common speech derived from West Saxon - naturally enough as Wessex became the predominant English state, and the court of its kings the principal literary centre from which most of the compilers and scribes derived their dialect and spelling.

There were libraries in most of the towns and temples; an old Sumerian proverb averred that " he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn."

The scribes, on the other hand, formed a more important class in Assyria than in Babylonia.

But that scribes could make mistakes in their reckoning is definitely proved by the discovery at Shergat of two totally conflicting accounts of the age and history of the great temple of Assur.

Until, therefore, through parallel passages or through explanatory lists prepared by the Babylonian and Assyrian scribes in large numbers as an aid for the study of the language, 5 the exact phonetic reading of these divine names was determined, scholars remained in doubt or had recourse to conjectural or provisional readings.

In Jabneh (Jamnia), where during the siege of Jerusalem the scribes of the school of Hillel had taken refuge by permission of Vespasian, a new centre of Judaism arose under the leadership of the aged Johanan ben Zakkai, a school whose members inherited the authority of the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem.

In many passages the name seems to be only a more solemn substitute for the simple Yahweh, and as such it has probably often been inserted by scribes.

The history of Christian preaching with which alone this article is concerned has its roots (I) in the activity of the Hebrew prophets and scribes, the former representing the broader appeal, the latter the edification of the faithful, (2) in the ministry of Jesus Christ and His apostles, where again we have both the evangelical invitation and the teaching of truth and duty.

Irrespective of the large number of clerks, village scribes and state and municipal employes which can be drawn upon with but slight interruption of official routine, there is a fair supply of casual literary labour up to the moderate standard required.

In 1644 he was appointed one of the scribes or secretaries of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster.

For these Tigqune Sopherim or " corrections of the scribes " see Geiger, Urschrift, pp. 308 f.; Strack, Prolegomena Critica, p. 87; Buhl, Canon and Text of the Old Testament, pp. 103 f.

Less important are the Itture Sopherim, or five passages in which the scribes have omitted a waw from the text.

The text has been corrected by two scribes, one (the S copOw,r) contemporary with the original writer, the other belonging to the 10th or 11th century.

The text was written, according to Tischendorf, by four scribes, of whom he identified one as also the scribe of cod.

This is a fairly strong case, but it falls short of demonstration because it cannot be shown that the MS. corrected by Pamphilus was still at Caesarea when it was used by x, and because it is not certain either that the chapter divisions in Acts were added by the original scribes, or that x and B were at that time in their original home, or that the chapter divisions were necessarily only to be found at Caesarea.

The Alexandrian was clearly a literary recension of it, and WH strove to show that the Western was merely due to the non-literary efforts of scribes in other parts to improve the narrative.

Copies of the full text of the Scotichronicon, by different scribes, are extant.

Among the most curious documents of early America is the Popol-Vuh or national book of the Quiche kingdom of Guatemala, a compilation of traditions written down by native scribes, found and translated by Father Ximenez about 1700, and published by Scherzer (Vienna, 1857) and Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris, 1861).

It was in all probability the original from which all the above-mentioned Old English glosses were derived, though in several instances changes and modifications were introduced by successive scribes.

Tens of thousands of clay tablets, systematically arranged on shelves, contained the classics of the Babylonian literature for which his scribes ransacked and copied the treasures of all then known centres of literary life.

Returning to the cloister, a vaulted passage admitted to the small cloister (I), opening from the north side of which were eight small cells, assigned to the scribes employed in copying works for the library, which was placed in the upper story, accessible by a turret staircase.

The small cloister beyond, with its scribes' cells, library, hall for disputations, &c., is the centre of the literary life of the community.

The small cloister is at W, where were the carols or cells of the scribes, with the library (P) over, reached by a turret staircase.

Such alterations may be due to the writer or writers of the MS., called the scribe or scribes, or to some other person or persons (for there may be several) called correctors.

For but a small proportion of scholars' corrections are really amendments, and a far smaller proportion of scribes'.

The usual character of scribes' alterations is well illustrated by a passage in Bacon's Advancement of Learning, II.

Secondly, since different scribes are prone to different kinds of error, we must ever bear in mind the particular failings of the scribes responsible for the transmission of our text as these failings are revealed in the apparatus criticus.

But when the prophets were succeeded by the scribes, the interpreters of the written word, and the yoke of foreign oppressors rested on the land, Yahweh's kingship, which presupposed a living nation, found not even the most inadequate expression in daily political life.

The scribes were mainly busied with the law; but no religion can subsist on mere law; and the systematization of the prophetic hopes, and of those more ideal parts of the other sacred literature which, because ideal and dissevered from the present, were now set on one line with the prophecies, went on side by side with the systematization of the law, by means of a harmonistic exegesis, which sought to gather up every prophetic image in one grand panorama of the issue of Israel's and the world's history.

The full development of the method belongs, however, to the post-canonical literature, and was naturally much less regular and rapid than the growth of the legal traditions of the scribes.

The struggle between the Pharisees and Sadducees, between the party of the scribes and the aristocracy, was a struggle for mastery between a secularized hierarchy whose whole interests were those of their own selfish politics, and a party to which God and the exact fulfilment of the law according to the scribes were all in all.

Thus the party of the scribes, when they came into conflict with an active political power, which at the same time claimed to represent the theocratic interests of Israel, were compelled to lay fresh stress on the doctrine that the true deliverance of Israel must come from God.

And while the polemical motive is obvious, and the argument from prophecy against the legitimacy of a non-Davidic dynasty is quite in the manner of the scribes, the spirit of theocratic fervour which inspires the picture of the Messiah is broader and deeper than their narrow legalism.

Each judge has an auxiliary; to the tribunal are attached a promotor fiscalis, charged with the duty of securing the due application of the law, and an official charged with the defence of marriage and ordination; there is also a clerical staff (notaries, scribes) attached to the court.

Great care was taken by the scribes in these renderings to mitigate the anthropomorphic expressions applied to God in the Scriptures, and by paraphrase, the use of abstract terms and indirect phraseology, to prevent such expressions from giving rise to erroneous views as to God's personal manifestation in the popular mind.

As to manners and customs, although we possess no systematic descriptions of them from a native source-, the native artists and scribes have presented us with exceptionally rich materials in the painted and sculptured scenes of the tombs from the Old and Middle Kingdoms and the New Empire.

Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half intelligible to the learned scribes of another.

The bulk of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are written in a more or less artificial literary language; but in business documents, letters, popular tales, &c., the scribes often adhered closely to the living form of the tongue, and thus reveal its progressive changes.

There is evidence that the amount of stress on syllables, and the consequent length of vowels, varied greatly in spoken Coptic, and that the variation gave much trouble to the scribes; the early Christian writers must have taken as a model for each dialect the deliberate speech of grave elders or preachers, and so secured a uniform system of accentuation.

The split reed of the Greek penman was occasionally adopted by the late demotic scribes.

Their reign was long enough to establish this tradition in respect of ritual, and even when this golden age - as it seemed to later Scribes - was over they exercised a paramount influence upon the common people.

They contain denunciations attributed to our Lord and assigned - with obvious injustice in some cases - to the scribes of this sect.

As for the denunciations, apart from the charge of insincerity, it appears that the scribes in question are pilloried for the defects - or the excesses - of their qualities.