“Works with suspect content of this or any other sort will not be included in the canon.”
Jerusalem, February 18 – Redactors of a collection of sacred texts almost let through a prank that would have plagued millennia of readers with the sudden playing of a hackneyed music video, a spokesman for the group disclosed today, if not for the alertness of a copyist who neutralized the trap just in time.
A Men of the Great Assembly representative named Simon revealed to journalists today that a yet-unidentified practical joker had inserted a line of malicious code into the text of the book of Esther, that, when triggered, would have subjected to reader, and anyone else within earshot, to a clip from the video of the 1987 Rick Astley hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” A junior scribe detected the prank before the book received formal approval from the Assembly for inclusion in the Jewish Biblical canon, thus thwarting an embarrassment of historic proportions.
“At this point we are going to conduct another thorough review of the remaining books with an eye toward this sort of thing,” Simon announced. “We suspect that only later books will be found susceptible to this kind of malarkey, but some of the later prophetic works might also bear some scrutiny, just in case.” He added that the more ancient books such as those of the Pentateuch already have an established canonical text with which tampering in such a fashion would prove next to impossible, but the Assembly has appointed a committee to examine whether that could have occurred, as well, and how to prevent it going forward.
“Works with suspect content of this or any other sort will not be included in the canon,” he continued. “The consequences of leaving a Rickroll in there beggar the imagination. Picture a scholar more than a thousand years from now, say, in the Alsace region of Gaul, writing a commentary destined to become synonymous with first-level Biblical textual interpretation, who has to make sense of this. We dodged an arrow here. Further investigation, and time, will determine whether more of these arrows remain to be dodged.”
Sources within the Men of the Great Assembly, speaking on condition of anonymity, hinted at closure of the canon to all future works, owing to the Rickroll danger. “But that’s maybe the least of it,” he observed. “If you manipulate certain passages enough, even some of the vetted, authoritative ones, there’s a risk of a distorted theology in which humanity is irredeemable without some mumbo jumbo involving wafers and wine. We might want to take a look at forestalling such developments as well.”
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