How Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Show the Reliability of the Old Testament Text?

How Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Show the Reliability of the Old Testament Text?

Written in the three languages of Scripture (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek), the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a collection of at least 1,000 manuscripts dating from 250 BC–AD 68. However, some of these, written by Jews, are from the later period of the Jewish revolts against Roman occupation (AD 68–73, and 132–135). The earliest of these documents were written and/or preserved by the members of a Jewish sect that established a community (Qumran) by the Dead Sea during the late Second Temple period (c. 100 BC–AD 70).

These ancient manuscripts, written on either parchment (animal hide) or papyrus (plant used as an early form of paper), are comprised of Jewish literature: two-thirds are nonbiblical texts (Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha) and sectarian texts (personal letters, deeds, community documents and commentaries on biblical texts), and one-third are biblical texts (Old Testament). Among these caches, there were unique scrolls that predated the Qumran sect and had a quasi-scriptural authority (Temple Scroll, 11Q19) and one, a treasure map, engraved entirely on copper (Copper Scroll, 3Q15). Only a few of the scrolls (Great Isaiah Scroll, Temple Scroll, Copper Scroll) are complete, and all are damaged.

The vast majority of the documents found in the 11 caves known to have contained scrolls are fragmentary (between 25,000-50,000 small pieces). Remarkably, scholars have spent more than 50 years piecing together these fragments in order to study and publish their contents.[1]

What Is the Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Land of Israel, and at the time they were found, they were the first known documents from the Second Temple period. They are uniquely important to those who study this period and especially to students of the Bible (both the Old and New Testaments).

This can be seen by the fact that the scrolls cover a transitional period in Jewish history from the time of the Maccabean rule through the Roman occupation. This period of time includes the life of Jesus, the formation of the church, the writing of much of the New Testament, as well as the turbulent period of the second century, during which there were Jewish revolts and exiles (events that sharpened the divide between Jews and Christians).

Interestingly, the scrolls provide previously unknown information about historical figures, political situations, and legal, religious, and social practices only dimly echoed in the much later rabbinic writings (Talmud, Mishnah).[2] They also give new insights into the languages spoken by Jesus and His disciples, as well as the cultural conditions and conflicts that produced Jesus’s parabolic method of teaching. In addition, much is learned about His debates with so-called establishment Judaism,[3] as well as the religious background of issues addressed in the Pauline letters.[4] Of particular importance is their contribution to our understanding of the messianic and eschatological beliefs of Jews during this period.[5] The scrolls show us that the developed messianic interpretations found in the New Testament were not the unique provenance of early Jewish Christianity, but the shared interpretation of Jews whose expectations were centered on the prophetic revelation of the Old Testament.

Moreover, the scrolls also provide a pre-Masoretic body of texts that can be compared with other existing texts, such as the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) and the Samaritan Pentateuch. What is more, the Dead Sea Scrolls offer material necessary for an accurate understanding of the transmission of the Hebrew text and for modern translations of the Bible.

What Old Testament Books Were Found Among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The biblical texts represent the oldest known portions of the Old Testament and contain every book of the Old Testament except the book of Esther (although it is reflected in other writings among the scrolls). There are no New Testament manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls because most of the New Testament was written toward the end of the time of the community’s existence. Moreover, because Jewish Christians do not appear to have been a part of the community, it should not be expected that the New Testament would have been distributed to this strictly Jewish sect. The chart on the next page shows the number of manuscripts of each book of the Old Testament discovered until today.[6]

This chart indicates which books of the Bible were considered the most popular among the Dead Sea Scrolls—namely the books of the law, the Psalms, and the prophets. Among the books of the law, the book of Deuteronomy has the most copies; Isaiah and Daniel stand out among the prophets, and Psalms among the Writings. It is interesting that Deuteronomy was also one of the books most cited by Jesus, and that the Psalms, Isaiah, and Daniel played an important role in Jesus’s messianic teaching as well as in the rest of the New Testament’s defense and explanation of the messianic program.

How Were the Dead Sea Scrolls Preserved?

The Dead Sea Scrolls were placed in sealed ceramic jars and stored within caves near the community’s settlement, today called the site of Qumran, situated on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, about 19 miles from Jerusalem. Scrolls from the later period of the Jewish revolts come from regional caves stretching some 33 miles southward from Qumran to Masada (particularly Wadi Murabba’at, Nahal Hever, En-Gedi, and Masada). For the Qumran community, the purposeful hiding of these scrolls may have been simply to preserve them, as suggested by God’s direction to the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 32:14). However, the revolt period scrolls were left behind in caves that were used as hiding places by soldiers and as living quarters.

Two types of caves were used for the storage of the scrolls:

(1) manmade marl caves surrounding and in the sides of the broad plateau upon which the community’s buildings were situated, and (2) natural fault caves located in the limestone cliffs that line the western shore of the Dead Sea.

These cave repositories often had rock-cut niches where the jars containing the scrolls were stored.

The Qumran sect may have gained a reputation as caretakers of valuable documents, and it is possible that people from Jerusalem, Jericho, and other nearby cities brought their scrolls to the community for safekeeping. Most likely, many of these scrolls were removed before the Roman army invaded area and destroyed Qumran, but it is believed that others could not be removed due to their remote location and the sudden nature of the Roman attack, and thus they remained in these caves until modern times.

While there are some ancient accounts of biblical scrolls being found in this area, the discovery of these texts is best known from Bedouin (local nomadic Arab shepherds) looters who found jars in some of the caves from the late 1940s–1950s and subsequently sold the contents on the black market. In 1993, the Israel Antiquities Authority launched Operation Scroll and sent hundreds of archaeologists throughout the Judean Desert to locate and identify caves that had the potential to house scrolls. Though these caves were numbered and survey trenches were made in many of them, no excavations were carried out at the time.

In 2017, Operation Scroll was renewed with the excavation of one cave south of Qumran—a cave that was revealed to have contained as many as seven jars that once contained scrolls. Although these scrolls had been removed in antiquity, the discovery provided evidence that many more discoveries await further excavation of the nearly 300 caves in the region.[7]

Therefore, it is possible that our knowledge of Scripture, as based on the scrolls, has only just begun!

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Reliability

There is little doubt the Dead Sea Scrolls constitute the most important manuscript discovery of all time. Their significance lies in their antiquity, their preservation of the biblical text and related Jewish literature, and their description of a Jewish sect that was unknown before their discovery. The scrolls are of great value and significance when it comes to confirming the reliability of the biblical text and examining the transmission of the text so we can better understand textual variants (small differences) that support a more accurate translation and understanding of the text.

Statement of the Divine Origin and Authority of the Biblical Text

While some scholars debate whether Second Temple Judaism recognized a canon (open or closed), the Qumran sect seems to have had an understanding of which books they accepted as Scripture (of divine origin), and which they did not (of human origin). They used the Paleo-Hebrew script (used before the Babylonian exile) for the name of God (YHWH) in the biblical texts, indicating that these texts were accorded greater sanctity and therefore greater authority.[8]This agrees with Jesus’s use of only the authoritative biblical texts from the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible (Matthew 5:17; 7:12; 22:40; 25:56; Luke 1:70; 16:16,29,31; 18:31; 24:27,44; John 1:45). Importantly, the fact that fragments of every book in our present Old Testament canon existed at Qumran before its destruction by the Roman army in AD 68 reveals recognition of the canonical books from ancient times. This recognition was then passed on to the medieval scribes who produced the Masoretic Text (the traditional biblical text of Judaism).

Evidence of the Careful Transmission of the Biblical Text

The Dead Sea Scrolls also allow us to see how well the scribes preserved the text for us. Until their discovery, our oldest version of the Hebrew text was that compiled by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher in the tenth century AD.[9]

Our modern-language Old Testaments were translated from these late medieval manuscripts. This tenth-century text was compiled by Jewish rabbinic scribes called the Masoretes (from the Hebrew word masora, meaning “tradition”). Their text has come to be the received or traditional text of Judaism, known as the Masoretic Text.

As old as this text may seem, it is still more than 1,000 years removed from the last of the original texts of Scripture penned by the prophets. This huge gap of time in which there were no Hebrew witnesses to the transmission of the text (with the exception of some verses of the Ten Commandments preserved in the second century BC Nash Papyrus) left a doubt as to the accuracy of the Masoretic Text, since it was compiled from these older yet unverifiable texts. It seemed possible that scribes working from fading manuscripts in which many letters look alike, and having poor illumination and no eyeglasses, could have made mistakes in the course of copying the biblical texts, and that these errors could have passed on to the Masoretic Text from which our Bibles were translated. After all, the Septuagint and other versions demonstrated that significant variants existed from the Masoretic Text. How could it ever be proven that what we have now is what they had then? How could we know if our own Bible text was reliable?

Remarkably, the discovery of biblical texts in Cave 1 at Qumran, and especially the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), made it possible to finally answer this question. The book of Isaiah is one of the longest books in the Old Testament (66 chapters) and this copy was dated to 125 BC (although its use as a well-marked study copy can push the date of its text back at least another 100 years). With the discovery of the Great Isaiah Scroll, scholars now possess the oldest and most complete copy of a book of the Bible from this lost period before the Masoretes. In addition, its text could be compared to the much later Masoretic Text from which our Bibles were translated. The result of the comparison between these texts revealed an almost 95 percent level of agreement, with the variations coming from spelling differences and some significant variants (more in 1QIsaa than 1QIsab). This high percentage of agreement was more or less the same for the other fragments of the biblical books found in other caves, especially Cave 4, which provided the greatest number of manuscripts.

From this new knowledge of the text, based on analyses of the scrolls, which reveal a conservative scribal tendency to follow the exemplar in both text and form,[10] we can approach our own translations with greater confidence. We can know the Jewish scribes did a careful job of transmitting the text through time.[11] And most importantly, we can also see that the remarkable consonance with the Masoretic Text indicates that it is a stable text that could serve as a textus receptus (traditional text) for Judaism and as the basis for authoritative translation into other languages.

Textual Criticism with the Dead Sea Scrolls Restores Greater Accuracy

While an examination of the biblical text is known as textual criticism, it is necessary to discover certain details about how various texts relate and compare to each other. This helps scholars to have a more accurate reading, translation (into modern languages), and restoration of the original Bible.

Even though there was essential agreement between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text, there were significant variants (small differences) in the Dead Sea Scroll texts that have proved important to textual critics (those who seek to restore the original text). The Great Isaiah Scroll alone had 200 variants,[12] some important to Christian scholars because they are related to messianic interpretation. Having this wealth of textual evidence from different texts (many of which informed the Masoretes in their compilation of a standard text) has allowed scholars to weigh the evidence of these texts as compared to other known texts of the time (e.g., the Greek Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch). This has also enabled textual critics to offer their verdict as to which reading of a particular text was closest to the original.

A comparison of these variants with Old Testament citations in the New Testament has been extremely helpful in confirming the source of the citations.[13] Also, the vocabulary and doctrine of the sectarian (nonbiblical) scrolls, set in a time parallel to the advent of Jesus, as well as the events recorded in the Gospels and the writing of most of the New Testament, reveal that terms and religious concepts once thought unique to the New Testament were in fact in common use in the first century.[14] As a result of this new knowledge, since 1950, every translation of the Bible has utilized this textual evidence in their translation work.[15]

Conclusion

The Dead Sea Scrolls offer evidence to address other apologetic concerns in the Old Testament. These include the unity of the book of Isaiah, the date of the book of Daniel,[16] and recognizing that the scrolls are vital for biblical research, exegesis, and apologetics. This has been forcefully stated by Emanuel Tov:

When we collect data of this kind we realize that the Scrolls do make a difference and they should be taken into consideration, not only in the study of textual criticism but also in the [area of] exegesis, [for] in that area there too the knowledge of the Scrolls is an absolute requirement for anyone studying the Bible critically.[17]

Today, as the search for additional scrolls in the caves around Qumran is underway, new discoveries of manuscripts may be made with the promise of an even greater witness to the reliability of the Old Testament.

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[1] For a justification of this protracted period of research and publication, see my Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1996), 51-72.

[2] See “Why Are the Scrolls Important for Understanding Second Temple Judaism?” in C.D. Elledge, The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, SBL Archaeology and Biblical Studies 14 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 97-114.

[3] See James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

[4] See Murphy O’Connor and James H. Charlesworth, eds., Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Crossroad, 1990).

[5] See Lawrence H. Schiffman, Qumran and Jerusalem: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 270- 320

[6] From 2006–2015, a number of new manuscript fragments were sold by the Kando family to US institutions (Princeton University, Azuza Pacific University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) and domestic and foreign private collectors (the Green family/Museum of the Bible, Mark Lanier, Martin Schøyen of Norway, David Sutherland of New Zealand). I have also seen unpublished fragments of the Temple Scroll and a number of Old Testament books that remain with the Kando family, including a three-column fragment of Genesis 41.

[7] Operation Scroll was initiated in 1993 to survey the caves in the Judean Desert with the intention of excavating caves with high potential in order to recover more scrolls before the area, then in negotiation, was given over to Palestinian control. These surveys were published in ‘Atiqot 41:1-2 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquity Authority, Civil Administration for Judea and Samaria, 2002). Politics in the region prevented systematic exploration and excavation of these cavesuntil 2017, when Randall Price (Liberty University) and Oren Gutfeld (Hebrew University) codirected the excavation of Cave 53 at Qumran. The discovery there of some seven scroll jars hidden in rock-hewn niches in the recesses of the cave, although without scrolls, but with scroll fragments and scroll wrappings, proved that many of the caves are scroll caves and may yield future manuscript finds. For further information, see O. Gutfeld and R. Price, “The Excavation of a Dead Sea Scroll Cave (Cave 53) at Qumran,” paper presented to the Qumran section of the Society of Biblical Literature, Boston, MA, November 19, 2017, and Marcello Fidanzio, The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 118 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016).

[8] James VanderKam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2002), 152.

[9] Both the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex (AD 1008) represent the BenAsher tradition. However, because of the incomplete condition of the Aleppo Codex, most versions of the Masoretic Text are based on the Leningrad Codex.

[10] M. Martin, The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Louvain, Belgium: Publications Universitaires, 1958), 44-45.

[11] For further evidence to support this conclusion, see Bruce K. Waltke, “The Reliability of the OT Text” in “How We Got the Hebrew Bible: The Text and Canon of the Old Testament,” in Peter W. Flint, ed., The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape and Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 47-50.

[12] For these variants see Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint, “Qumran Cave 1: The Isaiah Scrolls,” Discoveries in the Judean Desert 32 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), Part 2: Introductions, Commentary, and Textual Variants.

[13] See James D.G. Dunn, “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., Caves of Enlightenment: Proceedings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Symposium: 1947–1997 (North Richard Hills, TX: Bibal Press, 1998), 105-127.

[14] See Craig A. Evans, “Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave 4” in Craig A. Evans and Peter W. Flint, eds., Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997): 91-100.

[15] Harold P. Scanlin, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Modern Translations of the Old Testament (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993), 27, 107.

[16] For a study of these apologetic issues, see my Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 154-163.

[17] Price, Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 154-163.