Dead Sea Scroll

It is not just the addition of vowel points and word spacing that differentiates the Masoretic text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that entire texts have been changed. The Book of Psalms, as found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is quite different, including a number of psalms missing from both the Masoretic text and the LXX.[i] The book of Jeremiah is quite different, and agrees with the Septuagint instead of the Masoretic text. Karel Van Der Toorn, in his book “Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible”, writes:

Biblical scholars have long been aware of the fact that the Greek translation of Jeremiah as extant in the Septuagint is shorter by one-seventh than the text in the Hebrew Bible. Its arrangement of the material, moreover, differs at some points from that in the Hebrew text. The most striking instance is the position of the Oracles against the Nations. Whereas the Septuagint places them right after 25:13 (“ And I will bring upon that land all that I have decreed against it, all that is recorded in this book — that which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations”), the Hebrew Bible has them at the end of the book (Chapters 46-51). The discoveries in the Judean Desert have yielded a fragment of a Hebrew version of Jeremiah (4QJerb) that agrees with the Septuagint (henceforth JerLXX) against the Hebrew text known from the Masoretic tradition (Henceforth JerMT). Based on this fragment, scholars have concluded that the Greek translation goes back to a Hebrew text of Jeremiah that differs in important respects from the Hebrew Bible. The differences between JerMT and JerLXX are such that they cannot be attributed to scribal errors in the process of transmission. Nor can the Hebrew vorlage[ii] of the Septuagint be interpreted as an abbreviated version of the book. In view of their different placement of the Oracles against the Nations, JerMT and JerLXX represent two different editions of the same book. Chronologically, the edition reflected in JerLXX  precedes the one extant in JerMT.[iii]

Lawrence Boadt, in his book “Reading the Old Testament“, confirms this. He writes:

There were quite a variety of copies of the Hebrew Old Testament available by the time of Jesus. Since copying had gone on for a long time already, many different editions circulated, some longer with sections added in, some shorter with sections omitted. All had some change or error in them. Since a scribe in one area often copied from a local text, the same error or change often appeared regularly in one place, say, Babylon, but not in text copied in Egypt. Thus, at the time of Christ, three major “families” or groupings of text types could be found: The Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Egyptian. …Only at the end of the first century A.D. did the rabbis decide to end the confusion and select one text, the best they could find, for each part of the Bible. In the Pentateuch they chose the Babylonian tradition, but in other books, such as the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, they followed the Palestinian-type text.

These first century rabbis also inaugurated a method of guaranteeing the text from any more glosses and additions, though not completely from copying errors. They counted words, syllables, and sections, and wrote the totals at the end of each book of the Old Testament. …The standard Hebrew text that resulted from the decisions of these early rabbis has become known as the “Masoretic text,” named after a later group of Jewish scholars of the eighth to eleventh centuries A.D., the masoretes, or “interpreters,” who put vowels into the text, and thus “Fixed the words in a definitive form. No longer could a reader be confused by whether the word qtl in the text meant qotel, “the killer,” or qatal, “he killed.”[iv]

Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were from the 10^th or 11^th century. The fact that these two manuscripts exist at all is something of a miracle, because the Jews have a tradition of destroying old, worn manuscripts. Because these were the only extant manuscripts in Hebrew, the Reformers (and the scholar Erasmus) chose them when translating the Old Testament, under the influence of the Renaissance humanists and their cry: “ad fontes”; to the sources. However, we not have older manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts supporting the ancient idea that the Hebrews altered their texts in response to the challenge of Christianity.

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest texts of the Hebrew Bible were in two manuscripts from the 10th or possibly the early 11th century known as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. These manuscripts—the Aleppo Codex, which was recovered partially after a fire and somehow brought to Jerusalem, and the Leningrad Codex, which is now in St. Petersburg—both of these nearly identical texts are what scholars call the rabbinic recension.[v]

The problem is this. The Masoretes fixed the text in a form significantly different than that used by the Jewish diaspora for several hundred years. This was a radical emendation of the text which, when coupled by the Masoretic vowel pointing, fixed the interpretation of the text. Thus it is clear that as Judaism underwent substantial changes subsequent to the destruction of the temple, so too did the text used as the basis for their faith.

Endnotes

[i] (J. A. Sanders n.d.)

[ii] Vorlage: a prior version of a text under consideration.

[iii] (van der Toorn 2007, 199-200, van der Toorn 2007)

[iv] (Boadt 1984, 73-74)

[v] (Shanks 2007, 19)

Bibliography

Boadt, Lawrence. Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction. New York: Paulist Press, 1984.

Sanders, J. A. “English Translation of the Psalms Scroll (Tehillim) 11QPs.” ibiblio.org. n.d. http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/Library/psalms.html (accessed January 02, 2014).

Shanks, Hershel. “The Dead Sea Scrolls—Discovery and Meaning.” Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archeological Society. 2007. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/free-ebooks/the-dead-sea-scrolls-discovery-and-meaning/ (accessed January 30, 2014).

van der Toorn, Karel. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.