2. The Texts and Books of the OT (2)

☼ Exhibit #1: The Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran

In 1947 a young Bedouin goat herdsman found strange clay jars in caves at Qumran near the valley of the Dead Sea. Inside were leather scrolls. This led to the discovery of 40,000 fragments from about as many as 870 separate scrolls in 11 different caves, all between 1947 and 1956. Carbon-14 dating (very reliable for organic material of this era) as well as textual analysis and handwriting analysis, suggest the scrolls were written in the period 250 BC to 68 AD.

Caves at Qumran

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been hailed as one of the most outstanding archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The scrolls have revealed that a community of farmers, likely a Jewish, strict Torah-observant sect called the Essenes, flourished in the Qumran area from 150 BC to 70 AD.

The Essenes are mentioned by Jewish historian Josephus and by a few others, but not in the New Testament. Evidently when they saw the Romans invade the land, they put their sacred scrolls in the jars and hid them in the caves of Qumran in the cliff region northwest of the Dead Sea.

The scrolls are most commonly made of animal skins (about 85%), but also papyrus (15%) and even one of copper. They are written with a carbon-based ink, from right to left, using no punctuation except for an occasional paragraph indentation. In fact, in some cases, there are not even spaces between the words. Most of the texts are in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and a few in Greek.

What do the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us? The Dead Sea Scrolls can be divided in four groups:

Old Testament texts: Roughly 30% of the Dead Sea Scrolls are Biblical texts containing (partial) copies of every OT book, except for Esther. The best preserved scroll contains the book of Isaiah, consisting of one complete copy of the book and 21 other fragmented manuscripts. Others fragments include 39 manuscripts of the book of Psalms, 33 of Deuteronomy, 24 of Genesis, 18 of Exodus, 17 of Leviticus and 1 to 10 (fragments of) manuscripts from all the other books of the OT.

Apocrypha: Also found were partial copies of known as apocryphal (“hidden”) books, including Enoch, Tobit, Jubilees and Sirach.

Religious, non-Biblical texts: Scattered among the scrolls were numerous religious writings, including commentaries on the OT, psalm-like hymns, prayers and prophecies.

Sectarian texts: Lastly, numbers of writings about the beliefs, regulations and membership requirements of the sect were found, including the Manual of Discipleship, The War Scroll, and The Copper Scroll.

The Dead Sea Scrolls gave new insights into the daily life of a Jewish community in the days of Jesus, but by far their greatest value is their confirmation of the reliability of the Old Testament texts as they were copied over the centuries. As such, the scrolls are like a time machine that provides access to extensive manuscripts of the Hebrew OT as much as 1,100 years older than the Masoretic texts. Comparing these texts reveals that the copying process was indeed accurate with no changes or additions. There were few or no textual changes found in those Masoretic texts where comparisons were possible. Therefore, it would be fair to conclude that the Masoretic scribes had probably been just as faithful in their copying of the other Biblical texts not found with the Qumran material.

The Isaiah Scroll

The significance of the find, and particularly the complete book of Isaiah, was recognized by Merrill F. Unger when he said, [2] "This complete document of Isaiah quite understandably created a sensation since it was the first major Biblical manuscript of great antiquity ever to be recovered. Interest in it was especially keen since it antedates by more than a thousand years the oldest Hebrew texts preserved in the Masoretic tradition."

What was learned? A comparison of the Qumran manuscript of Isaiah with the Masoretic text revealed that both were extremely close in accuracy to each other. “Of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only seventeen letters in question, Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the sense. Four more letters are minor stylistic changes, such as conjunctions. The remaining  three letters comprise the word “ligh,” which is added in verse 11, and does not affect the meaning greatly…Thus, in one chapter of 166 words, there is only one word (three letters) in question after a thousand years of transmission – and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage.”[3]

World-renowned archaeologist Gleason Archer states that the Isaiah copies of the Qumran community “proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”[4]

In his book, Can I Trust My Bible, R. Laird Harris concluded, [5] "We can now be sure that copyists worked with great care and accuracy on the Old Testament, even back to 225 BC . . . indeed, it would be rash skepticism now to deny that we have our Old Testament in a form very close to that used by Ezra when he taught the word of the Lord to those who had returned from the Babylonian captivity."

The Dead Sea Scrolls overwhelmingly confirm that the Old Testament has navigated the centuries well. As Notre Dame professor Eugene Ulrich, chief editor of the Qumran Biblical texts for the Oxford Discoveries in the Judean Desert series, observed: [6]

“The scrolls have shown that our traditional Bible has been amazingly accurately preserved for over 2,000 years.”  

Read on about: (3) Exhibit #2: the Septuagint or LXX

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