The Old Testament Text and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Dr Edward F Hills

 

How the Priests Preserved the Old Testament Text

The Hebrew Scriptures were written by Moses and the prophets and other inspired men to whom God had given prophetic gifts. But the duty of preserving this written revelation was assigned not to the prophets but to the priests. The priests were the divinely appointed guardians and teachers of the law. And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD. saying, Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee (Deut.31:24-26). Thus the law “was placed in the charge of the priests to be kept by them along side of the most sacred vessel of the sanctuary, and in its innermost and holiest apartment.” (1) Also the priests were commanded, as part of their teaching function, to read the law to the people every seven years (Deut. 31:12). Evidently also the priests were given the task of making correct copies of the law for the use of kings and rulers, or at least of supervising the scribes to whom the king would delegate this work (Deut. 17:18).

Not only the Law of Moses but also the Psalms were preserved in the Temple by the priests, and it was probably the priests who divided the Hebrew psalter into five books corresponding to the five books of Moses. It was David, the sweet singer of Israel who taught the priests to sing psalms as part of their public worship service (1 Chron. 15:16, 17). Like David, Heman, Asaph and Ethan were not only singers but also inspired authors, and some of the psalms were written by them. We are told that the priests sang these psalms on various joyful occasions, such as the dedication of the Temple by Solomon (2 Chron. 7:6), the coronation of Joash (2 Chron. 23:18), and the cleansing of the Temple by Hezekiah (2 Chron. 29:30).

How the other Old Testament books were preserved during the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah we are not told explicitly, but it is likely that the books of Solomon were collected together and carefully kept at Jerusalem. Some of Solomon’s proverbs, we are told, were copied out by the men of Hezekiah king of Judah (Prov. 25:1).

Except for periodic revivals under godly rulers, such as Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah, the days of the kings were times of apostasy and spiritual darkness in which the priests neglected almost entirely their God given task of guarding and teaching God’s holy law. This had been the case during the reigns of the ungodly rulers who had preceded the good king Asa. Now for a long season Israel hath been without the true God, and without a teaching priest and without law (2 Chron. 15:3). And during the reign of Manasseh the original copy of the Law had been mislaid and was not found again until Josiah’s time (2 Kings 22:8). Because the priests were thus unfaithful in their office as teachers, Jerusalem was finally destroyed, and the Jews were carried away captive to Babylon (Mic. 3:11-12). But in spite of everything, God was still watching over His holy Word and preserving it by His special providence. Thus when Daniel and Ezekiel and other true believers were led away to Babylon, they took with them copies of all the Old Testament Scriptures which had been written up to that time.

The Traditional (Masoretic) Hebrew Text of the Old Testament

After the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile, there was a great revival among the priesthood through the power of the Holy Spirit. Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zech. 4:6). The Law was taught again in Jerusalem by Ezra the priest who had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments (Ezra 7:10). By Ezra and his successors, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, all the Old Testament books were gathered together into one Old Testament canon, and their texts were purged of errors and preserved until the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry. By that time the Old Testament text was so firmly established that even the Jews’ rejection of Christ could not disturb it. Unbelieving Jewish scribes transmitted this traditional Hebrew Old Testament text blindly but faithfully, until the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. As Augustine said long ago, these Jewish scribes were the librarians of the Christian Church. (2) In the providence of God they took care of the Hebrew Old Testament Scriptures until at length the time was ripe for Christians to make general use of them.

According to G. F. Moore (1927), the earliest of these scribes were called Tannaim (Teachers). These scribes not only copied the text of the Old Testament with great accuracy but also committed to writing their oral tradition, called Mishna. These were followed by another group of scribes called Amoraim (Expositors). These were the scholars who in addition to their work as copyists of the Old Testament also produced the Talmud, which is a commentary on the Mishna.

The Amoraim were followed in the sixth century by the Masoretes (Traditionalists) to whom the Masoretic (Traditional) Old Testament text is due. These Masoretes took extraordinary pains to transmit without error the Old Testament text which they had received from their predecessors. Many complicated safeguards against scribal slips were devised, such as counting the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs in each book. Also critical material previously perpetuated only by oral instruction was put into writing. It is generally believed that vowel points and other written signs to aid in pronunciation were introduced into the text by the Masoretes.

It was this Traditional (Masoretic) text which was printed at the end of the medieval period. The first portion of the Hebrew Old Testament ever to issue from the press was the Psalms in 1477. In 1488 the entire Hebrew Bible was printed for the first time. A second edition was printed in 1491 and a third in 1494. This third edition was used by Luther in translating the Old Testament into German. Other faithful Protestant translations followed, including in due time the King James Version. Thus it was that the Hebrew Old Testament text, divinely inspired and providentially preserved, was restored to the Church, to the circle of true believers.

Manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament — The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Jewish rabbis venerated their copies of the Old Testament so much that they did not allow them to be read to pieces. As soon as their Old Testament manuscripts became too old and worn for ordinary use, they stored them in their synagogues and later buried them. Hence, until rather recently no ancient Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts were available to scholars, the oldest known manuscript dating from no earlier than the 9th century A.D. All the available manuscripts, however, were found to contain the Masoretic (Traditional) text and to agree with one another very closely. The first critic to demonstrate this was Bishop Kennicott, who published at Oxford in 1776-80 the readings of 634 Hebrew manuscripts. He was followed in 1784-88 by De Rossi, who published collations of 825 more manuscripts. No substantial variation among the manuscripts was detected by either of these two scholars.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has altered this situation. These scrolls had been placed in earthen jars and deposited in caves near Wadi Qumran by the Dead Sea. They were first brought to light in 1947 by an Arab who was looking for a goat which had wandered away. After a few months some of the scrolls from this first cave were sold by the Arabs to the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark and others to the Hebrew University. In 1955 the Monastery of St. Mark sold its share of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the State of Israel. Thus these two lots of ancient writings were finally reunited under the same owners.

This collection includes the following documents: (1) Isaiah A, an almost complete copy of Isaiah in Hebrew; (2) Isaiah B, another copy of Isaiah in Hebrew, reasonably complete from chapter 41 onwards but containing only fragments of earlier chapters; (3) a copy in Hebrew of the first two chapters of Habakkuk with a verse-by-verse commentary also in Hebrew; (4) the Rule of the Community, a code of rules of a community written in Hebrew; (5) a collection of hymns in Hebrew; (6) the Rule of War, a description in Hebrew of ancient warfare; (7) an Aramaic paraphrase of chapter 5 to 15 of Genesis. Of these seven manuscripts Isaiah A is regarded as the oldest. One expert sets its date at 175-150 B.C.; another expert makes it 50 years younger. The other manuscripts are thought to have been written from 50 to 150 years later than Isaiah A.

After these manuscripts had been discovered in the first cave, ten other caves in the same vicinity were found to contain similar treasures. Of these Cave 4 has proved the most productive. Thousands of fragments, once constituting about 330 separate books, have been taken from this location. These fragments include portions of every Old Testament book except Esther. Rather recently (1972) O’Callaghan has claimed that certain fragments found in Cave 7 are from New Testament manuscripts. This discovery, however, has been rejected by most other scholars.

The discovery of the first Dead Sea Scroll, Isaiah A, was generally regarded by scholars as a victory for the Masoretic (Traditional) Hebrew text of the Old Testament. According to Burrows (1948), this manuscript agreed with the Masoretic text to a remarkable degree in wording. And according to Albright (1955), the second Isaiah scroll (Isaiah B) agreed even more closely with the Masoretic text. But the discovery in 1952 of Cave 4 with its vast store of manuscripts altered the picture considerably. It became apparent that the Proto-Masoretic text of the Isaiah scrolls was not the only type of Old Testament text that had been preserved at Qumran. In the manuscripts from Cave 4 many other text-types have been distinguished. Accordingly, in 1964 F. M. Cross presented some of the conclusions which he had drawn from his Qumran studies. He believed that three distinct ancient texts of Samuel can be identified, namely, (1) an Egyptian text represented by the Septuagint, (2) a Palestinian text represented by manuscript 4Q from Cave 4, and (3) a Proto-Masoretic text represented by a Greek text of Samuel also from Cave 4. And in the Pentateuch also Cross divides the text into the Egyptian, Palestinian, and Proto-Masoretic varieties. G. R. Driver (1965), however, disagreed with Burrows, Albright, and Cross. According to him, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in the first and early second centuries A.D.

Thus we see that, despite the new discoveries, our confidence in the trustworthiness of the Old Testament text must rest on some more solid foundation than the opinions of naturalistic scholars. For as the Qumran studies demonstrate, these scholars disagree with one another. What one scholar grants another takes away. Instead of depending on such inconstant allies, Bible-believing Christians should develop their own type of Old Testament textual criticism, a textual criticism which takes its stand on the teachings of the Old Testament itself and views the evidence in the light of these teachings. Such a believing textual criticism leads us to full confidence in the Masoretic (Traditional) Hebrew text which was preserved by the divinely appointed Old Testament priesthood and the scribes and scholars grouped around it.
(Source: Edward F Hills, The King James Version Defended, pages 91-93, 100-102.)