Chapter 5: How the Old Testament Was Preserved
The scribes
For some fifteen centuries, the Old Testament was preserved by hand-copying. The Jewish scribes (sopherim) took extraordinary care. According to rules preserved in the Talmud, a scribe had to write on the skins of clean animals, use special ink, copy from an approved master text, and never write anything from memory (b. Menahot 29–32). Later scribes counted letters and words to be sure none had been lost. This care was grounded in the command not to add to or take from the Word (Deuteronomy 4:2) and in Jesus’ own assurance that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law” (Matthew 5:18).
The Masoretes
From about the sixth to the tenth century AD, a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes (masorah means “tradition”) worked at Tiberias and elsewhere to preserve the text. They added vowel points and accent marks to the consonantal Hebrew text so its reading would never be lost, and they recorded notes in the margins to guard against copying errors, including counts of letters, words, and verses. The standard Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text, is the result of this labour. Its best-known manuscripts are the Aleppo Codex (about AD 930) and the Leningrad Codex (AD 1008–1009), which is the base for the modern printed Hebrew Bible (Tov 2012).
For many years, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were this late. Critics asked how anyone could know the text had not drifted over the thousand years between Malachi and these manuscripts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The answer came in 1947. A Bedouin shepherd, searching for a lost animal, found jars of ancient scrolls in a cave near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. In the following years eleven caves yielded some nine hundred manuscripts, among them portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. They date from about the third century BC to the first century AD, which put them a thousand years earlier than the Masoretic manuscripts.
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a), about 125 BC and over seven metres long, contains the whole book of Isaiah. When scholars compared it with the Masoretic text, they found it agreed in all important respects. The differences are mostly spelling, minor wording, and slips of the pen, and none of them changes a doctrine of the faith (Tov 2012; Geisler and Nix 1986). A thousand years of copying had left the text remarkably unchanged.
The scrolls also show that, in the centuries before Christ, some copies of the books stood closer to the Greek Septuagint or to the Samaritan Pentateuch than to the later Masoretic Text. This does not show that the text is unreliable. It shows that there was a variety of copies, that scholars can compare them to find the original reading, and that the main text is secure. Where the Masoretic text appears to have a copying error, the Septuagint and the scrolls are available to correct it, and the translators of the King James Version and later translations have used all available witnesses.
Other witnesses
The Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls. Two tiny silver amulets, found in a burial cave in Jerusalem in 1979, carry a form of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26. They date from about the seventh to sixth century BC (Barkay et al. 2004), and they are among the oldest known fragments of biblical text.
The Septuagint, the Greek translation (third to second century BC), preserves another early line of the text.
The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Targums (Aramaic translations and paraphrases) are further early witnesses.
The Cairo Geniza, a storeroom of old manuscripts in a synagogue in Old Cairo, discovered in the 1890s, yielded hundreds of thousands of fragments, many of them biblical.
God’s promise to preserve
Behind the work of the scribes stands the promise of God: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8); “The words of the LORD are pure words… Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psalm 12:6-7); and Jesus’ own, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). The evidence of the manuscripts shows God keeping his promise through ordinary human means: careful scribes, faithful communities, and discoveries that came at the right time.
Summary. The Old Testament comes to us through the care of generations of Jewish scribes. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in the twentieth century, confirmed that the text we hold agrees, in all that matters, with what was read in Jesus’ day.