...of parchment in the evening.

Hi, Dan ~

Which dead language - Hebrew? Aramaic?

Rumors of their demise are premature...

Three nights ago we celebrated the end of the harvest festival Sukkot (aka the Festival of Booths) with a special holiday called Simchat Torah: "Rejoicing in Torah". Most congregations have what amounts to a party with Torah as the guest of honor; all of the ones I've visited on that night take their scroll(s) from the Ark and take turns dancing around the sanctuary with them. Some even unroll one completely (being careful not to let the parchment touch the ground)! The occasion coincides with the end of the yearly reading cycle - the service proper includes the last passages of Deuteronomy and the first of
Genesis.

Back to the time of Torah's first compilation, adoption and dissemination as canon (in post-Davidic Judah, if I remember my studies correctly), ritual scribes have ensured with reverence that all subsequent copies are precise, not only letter by letter but in the way each letter on every page is formed. No Jew trained to read Torah since that time would have any more trouble reading one on which the ink had just dried than he or she would reading one from the 4th C. BCE.

You get no argument from me about interpretation of parable, or of prophecy, or of narration presented as historical fact (the Book of Joshua, for instance) - therein lie all the differences among all the sects of all the Peoples of the Book. The Language of the Book is not dead.

E'

[btw, the language of the Gospels, Koine (essentially Hellenistic Greek), is not in daily use as a spoken tongue anywhere, as Hebrew and Arabic are, but is still studied and preserved.]