The Dead Sea Scrolls

Ancient scrolls provide overwhelming evidence.

How do we know that the Bible we have today is even close to the original? Haven't copiers down through the centuries inserted and deleted and embellished the documents so that the original message of the Bible has been obscured, changed, exaggerated or even invented? These questions are frequently asked to discredit the sources of information from which the Christian faith has come to us.

The earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Old Testament dates from circa 900 A.D. , therefore, the crucial question is: "Not having any original copies or scraps of the Bible, can we reconstruct them well enough from the oldest manuscript evidence we do have so they give us a true, undistorted view of actual people, places and events?"

No printing presses existed, so people were trained to copy documents by hand. The task was usually undertaken by a devout Jew, called a Scribe. The Scribes believed they were dealing with the very Word of God and were therefore extremely careful in copying. They did not just hastily write things down. In fact, they trained for years and years, working their way up through apprentice levels. Their work was meticulously checked and rechecked for error. If even the slightest error or imperfection is found their work is destroyed.

In 1947, a young Bedouin goat herdsman found some strange clay jars in caves near the valley of the Dead Sea . Inside the jars were some leather scrolls. The discovery of these "Dead Sea Scrolls" at Qumran has been hailed as the outstanding archeological discovery of the twentieth century. The scrolls have revealed that a commune of monastic farmers (generally considered to be part of the Essene sect) flourished in the valley from 150 B.C. to 70 A.D. It is believed that when they saw the Romans invade the land they put their cherished leather scrolls in the jars and hid them in the caves on the cliffs northwest of the Dead Sea .

The Dead Sea Scrolls include a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, a fragmented copy of Isaiah, containing much of Isaiah 38-6, and fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament. The majority of the fragments are from Isaiah and the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The books of Samuel, in a tattered copy, were also found and also two complete chapters of the book of Habakkuk. In addition, there were a number of non-biblical scrolls related to the commune found.

In the scientific world, there was and still is much discussion (sometimes looks more like warfare) about who wrote the scrolls and who hid them in the caves. However all  agree that these materials are dated around 100 B.C. The significance of the find, and particularly the copy of Isaiah, is that:

1. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written about 100 years before Jesus was born, This is dramatic, because we now have absolute evidence that Messianic prophecies contained in today’s Old Testament (both Jewish and Christian) are the same Messianic prophecies that existed prior to the time Jesus walked on this earth.

2. Comparing the Old Testament texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the known Bible texts from around 900 A.D. shows that the copying by the scribes did not introduce any significant changes! For instance: a comparison of Isaiah 53 (the Servant Song chapter with the most detailed prophecies about Jesus death and resurrection) shows that only 17 letters differ. Ten of these are mere differences in spelling (like our "honor" and the English "honour") and produce no change in the meaning at all. Four more are very minor differences, such as the presence of a conjunction (and) which are stylistic rather than substantive. The other three letters are the Hebrew word for "light." This word was added to the text by someone after "they shall see" in verse 11.

So, next time you read the Old Testament in your Bible, you can now be even more sure you are reading the same texts as were written down by Jewish scribes 2500-3500 years ago!