The Old Testament text in antiquity

I remember well the shock I received more than 40 years ago when as a college student I learned that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament is based on manuscripts that were produced in the ninth century A. D. and later. We had only a fragment of a biblical scroll that was pre-Christian--the Nash Papyrus, which contained a portion of the Decalogue. It was disquieting to ponder how much the Old Testament text might have suffered in the many hundreds of years that elapsed between the time it was originally written and the earliest manuscripts we had. It is no wonder that critics such as Friedrich Delitzsch claimed that the biblical text had experienced a degree of corruption beyond our wildest imagination. ¹ Those who defended the authority of the text had nothing but faith to support their belief that God had kept His hands over His Word and had not allowed it to become corrupted.

Then came the most exciting day in my life as an archaeologist. In the early spring of 1948, as one of W. F. Albright's students, I heard him announce that "the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times" had been made in the Syrian monastery library in Jerusalem.

Albright had just received some photographs of a scroll of Isaiah, and had spent the whole night examining the script of the scroll and collating it with the Masoretic text. He had reached the conclusion, he said, that the script could not be later than the second century B.C. and that the text was almost identical with that of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible.

Nearly 40 years have passed since that memorable day, and much has happened since then. We soon learned that the scrolls did not come from a monastery library in Jerusalem but from a cave in the wilderness of Judea. Ten other caves containing scrolls were found near Qumran, the community center of a Jewish sect, probably the Essenes. Later more fragments of biblical scrolls were discovered in caves to the west and south of Qumran, at Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, and Masada.

Altogether, thousands of fragments of biblical manuscripts and hundreds of noncanonical Jewish works came to light. The fragments come from more than 500 manuscripts. Portions of the Bible are found in 170 different manuscripts. This material is known as the Dead Sea scrolls, a designation given to all scrolls found in the wilderness of Judea since 1947. (See Table 1 for a brief survey of the biblical manuscripts we now have.)

Except for the famous Isaiah scroll from Qumran Cave 1, all the Dead Sea scrolls have come into our hands in fragmentary form. Some rather sizable portions of several biblical books have been preserved, such as a second scroll of Isaiah from Qumran Cave 1 that contains about 20 percent of its original text, a Psalms scroll from Qumran Cave 11 in which more than 35 percent of the original text has been preserved, a scroll of Samuel from Qumran Cave 4 (not yet published) pieced together from hundreds of fragments, and a recently published portion (8 percent) of a Leviticus scroll from Qumran Cave 11.

All other scrolls have come into our hands in many thousands of small fragments. But even such fragmentary texts are of great value since they reveal what text type existed at the time the scrolls were produced.

Because of my desire to keep abreast of other phases of biblical archeology, I had to limit my studies of Dead Sea scroll material to biblical texts only. Through the years I have collated every published biblical manuscript with the Masoretic text and have tried to read most of what other scholars who work on these texts have had to say about them.

When we had only the scrolls from the first Qumran cave, we thought that their texts were for all practical purposes identical to the earliest previously known He brew biblical manuscripts. Variants found in the two Isaiah scrolls from Qumran Cave 1 were almost exclusively spelling mistakes, or of an orthographic, grammatical, or syntactical nature. No where did they affect the sense of the known text.

On the basis of these observations, I stated at the 1952 Bible Conference in Washington, D.C., that the Dead Sea scrolls unmistakably prove that the Hebrew Bible of the days of Jesus was, without any variations, the Masoretic text. Several other scholars had reached the same conclusion. For example, in 1950 Harry Orlinski wrote, "Regardless of the date of Saint Mark's Isaiah scroll, I doubt that its value for the textual critic will amount to very much, except insofar as it will help to convince more biblical scholars that the traditionally preserved text of the Hebrew Bible should be Created with far greater respect than it has been." ²

The discoveries made between 1952 and 1956 in other Qumran caves and those made between 1951 and 1964 in caves of the Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se'elim, and at Masada have proved both his prediction and my categorical claim wrong. The biblical textual material found there showed that we still had a lot to learn about the complexities of the text history of the Old Testament.

The dates of the various scrolls and fragments are of great importance for re constructing the history of the biblical text. All the manuscripts of the Qumran caves come from a period that ended in A.D. 68 or 69, when the scrolls were stored in the caves. Paleographical studies show that the earliest Qumran scrolls were produced in the third century B.C. and the latest in the first half of the first century A.D. These manuscripts, then, span a period of about 300 years.

The biblical text material from Masada predates the capture of that mountain fortress in A.D. 73. So all of the Qumran and Masada manuscripts were produced before the end of the first century A.D. and can be considered to rep resent the text types of the Hebrew Bible that was circulating during the ministry of Jesus and the apostles.

On the other hand, the manuscripts found at the Nahal Hever, the Nahal Se'elim, and in the Wadi Murabba'at were hidden in caves during the Bar Kokba revolt, which ended in A.D. 135.

Two distinct groups

So the biblical Dead Sea scroll material can clearly be divided into two groups: (1) the 170 manuscripts from the 11 Qumran caves and the biblical fragments from Masada,³ all of which predate A.D. 70, and (2) the manuscripts from the other desert caves in the Wadi Murabba'at, the Nahal Hever, and the Nahal Se'elim, hidden there during the early part of the second century A.D.

The second-century manuscripts from the second group are practically identical with the Masoretic text. ⁴ This is especially true of the scroll of the minor prophets from the Wadi Murabba'at, of which 26 percent has been preserved.

On the other hand, the biblical manuscripts from the Qumran caves and from Masada, which all predate the council of Jamnia, show more variation in text form as well as the type of script used.

Let me first deal with the scripts. In the first Qumran cave a few scraps of Leviticus and Numbers written in the preexilic Hebrew or paleo-Hebrew script came to light. When they were first discovered, some scholars thought that they were fragments of biblical manuscripts written prior to the Exile. This view proved to be incorrect when more biblical fragments written in the same script came to light in four other Qumran caves. The grammatical and orthographic forms of these fragments show that they belong to the same general period as do the scrolls written in the later square Hebrew script. (Table 2 lists the extant paleo-Hebrew script material.)

It is significant that of the 170 manuscripts found in the Qumran caves, the only manuscripts written in the paleoHebrew script were those of the Pentateuch and Job--in other words, only those books that Jewish tradition held to have been written by Moses. In a preliminary report, Patrick Skehan, to whom some of the fragments from Cave 4 were assigned for publication, wrote that these paleo-Hebrew fragments represent a recension that can be called a " 'Samaritan' recension, with all the essential characteristics of that fuller text, including its repetitious manner of recounting the plague episodes, its borrowings from Deuteronomy, and its transpositions; this is true at almost every point where the extant fragments make verification possible." ⁵

This is very interesting, the more so since the Samaritans retained the paleo- Hebrew script and, with slight alterations, use it to the present day.

Could it be that in these paleo-Hebrew biblical manuscripts we have texts of the Sadducees? Although they have left us no literature at all, we know from other sources that they accepted only the Torah of Moses, and possibly Job, as canonical. ⁶

Recently the paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll from Qumran Cave 11 was published.⁷ Its text character differs from that of the Cave 4 paleo-Hebrew fragments Skehan described. The Cave 11 paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll represents a text type that, like that of the famous Isaiah scroll from Qumran Cave 1, has been called proto-Masoretic. Its presence among the Qumran scrolls indicates that the library of Qumran contained the books attributed to Moses in both different scripts and different text types--one that agrees with the Samaritan Pentateuch and another that is more in harmony with the text type chosen by the rabbis at Jamnia to become the standard recension for all generations to come.

According to Jewish tradition, Ezra introduced the postexilic square script into Palestine. Among the biblical materials from Qumran, we have about 160 manuscripts in this script, some represented by no more than small fragments, others by scrolls that have preserved about 20 per cent (1QIs^b ), ⁸ 35 percent (HQPs^a), and 50 percent (4QSam^b), to a full 100 per cent (IQIs^a) of the original text.

There is no indication as to which of the hundreds of manuscripts--biblical and nonbiblical--found in the caves were considered canonical by the Qumran sectaries. However, it may be significant that portions of all the books the rabbis at Jamnia accepted as canonical, except for Esther, have been found among the Qumran scrolls. We don't know whether this is an accident of preservation or whether the Essenes--together with many Pharisees of the pre-Jamnia period--rejected Esther.

More than one Old Testament text type

During the period when we had only the scrolls from Qumran Cave 1 (1948-1952) it was thought that the Dead Sea scrolls supported nothing but the Masoretic text, although the two Isaiah scrolls and the fragments differed slightly with each other. The text of the fragmentary Isaiah scroll (IQI^s) is almost identical with the Masoretic text and proved that this text type existed 1,000 years before the Masoretes lived and worked. And the complete Isaiah scroll (1QIs^a) contained a text type that is so closely related to the Masoretic text that in translation its variants would not show up. The translators of the Revised Standard Version accepted only 13 readings from this scroll as being superior to those of the Masoretic text. Even these were extremely insignificant, changing the meaning in not one instance.

This picture changed with the discovery of scores of scroll fragments in Qumran Cave 4 in 1952, and of scrolls in Qumran Cave 11 in 1956. In an article dealing with one of the Samuel scrolls from Qumran Cave 4, Frank Cross in formed the scholarly world of new developments in our understanding of the pre-Masoretic biblical text form.⁹ Cross showed that this particular manuscript agrees more with the Septuagintal than with the Masoretic text. This was the first indication that in the pre-Jamnia period, Hebrew biblical manuscripts had existed that belonged to a different text type than the one with which we were familiar.

After studying more material from Qumran Cave 4, Albright published his programmatic article "New Light on Early Recensions of the Hebrew Bible." ¹⁰ He pointed out that the manuscripts from Qumran represented two main strands of biblical recensions. One of these, the one to which the complete Isaiah scroll from Qumran Cave 1 be longs, he called the Babylonian recension because it contained Assyrian and Babylonian names in an almost correct spelling. This recension, known to us as the Masoretic text, became essentially the Hebrew textus receptus. The other recension he called the Egyptian recension since it seems to have been the He brew biblical text that was in circulation in Egypt during the third and second centuries B.C. when the Septuagint was produced.

During the past 30 or more years Frank Cross has spent more time working with the biblical manuscripts from Qumran than has any other scholar (so much time that his wife said she wished the strayed goat whose loss led to the discovery of the first cave had eaten the scrolls!). He has concluded that before the rabbis chose the one that became the Masoretic text, three major recensions existed.

Cross believes that in the fourth century B.C. two recensions developed out of an archetype that existed through the previous century. One of these recensions was the Babylonian textual family, from which came the Masoretic text. The other was the Old Palestinian textual family, which has been preserved in the Samaritan Pentateuch. In the third century B.C., the Egyptian textual family, of which the Septuagint is the primary witness, also arose from this Old Palestinian textual family.

This does not mean that evidence exists that each of the books of the Hebrew Bible was represented in each of the different recensions. All the extant Qumran manuscripts for Isaiah and Ezekiel belong to only one textual family, while those of Job and Jeremiah represent no more than two textual families. On the other hand, the Qumran manuscripts re veal that three different recensions of the Pentateuchal books and Samuel existed.

Increasing respect for the Septuagint

Even before the discoveries at Qumran, some scholars interpreted the existence of the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch in its various text forms as an indication that different recensions of the Hebrew Bible existed in the pre- Christian era. However, most of us thought that the Septuagint differed from the Masoretic text because the Greek translators took liberties in their work. Similarly, we believed that the differences between the Masoretic and Samaritan Pentateuchs were due mainly to the theological bias of the Samaritan copyists. Today we know that Hebrew manuscripts existed that must have served the Greek translators and the Samaritan copyists as Vorlagen.

The Psalms scrolls from Qumran show even more differences. Because much of it is preserved, 11QPs^a is a good example.

The manuscript, which is comprised of four fragments, is 13 feet 10 inches long and totals 28 columns. It contains, in a sequence not known from any other source, 36 canonical psalms (not all complete); Psalm 151, found otherwise only in the Septuagintal, Old Latin, and Syriac versions; two of five psalms that only the Syriac Psalter contains; 2 Samuel 23:7; a passage from Sirach; and four noncanonical compositions. Apparently the Jewish hymn book of the pre-Jamnia era, if we can call the Psalter a hymnbook, circulated in several different collections, of which the Masoretic, Septuagintal, and Syriac Psalters are three examples that have survived.

Jeremiah is another book of which at least two different recensions were in circulation, one representing the Masoretic text and the other the Septuagintal. Both recensions have come to light as Hebrew manuscripts at Qumran.

It is well known that the Septuagintal text of Jeremiah omits about 2,700 words (about six or seven chapters) that the Masoretic text contains, and that it contains about 100 words for which there are no equivalent passages in the Masoretic text. Furthermore, those chapters that are extant in both recensions--Hebrew and Greek--are in different order, particularly the oracles to the nine foreign nations.

The explanation for these differences must probably be sought in the prophet's habit of issuing his messages separately as they were given to him from time to time. People then collected them as they came to them. Some evidently had more than others, and this accounts for the different lengths of the several collections.

The Qumran discoveries have also provided us with an explanation as to why some of the quotations in the New Testament agree with the Septuagintal text of the Old Testament rather than the Masoretic text. For example, Matthew 21:16 quotes Psalm 8:2 as saying "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise." This agrees with the Septuagintal reading. The Masoretic text reads "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast ordained strength." I do not know whether this particular passage is extant among the Qumran manuscripts not yet published, but I am quite sure that Matthew quoted from a Hebrew text that agreed with the Vorlage that the Greek translators used.

We have learned a lot about the He brew biblical text during the past 40 years. We now have a better idea of what the Bible of Jesus' time looked like. Al though different recensions existed in His time, the divine messages were the same. All of them could have been used profitably by the Christian missionaries. The Christian church used the Septuagint in its foreign mission work and in the Gentile churches with just as much success and power as if they had used the biblical text accepted by the rabbis at Jamnia.

In fact, with the exception of Saint Jerome, the Church Fathers liked the Septuagint better than the later Jewish Greek translations, while the Jews rejected the Septuagint since it did not fully agree with their accepted text and had become the Bible of the Christians. It was not until the Vulgate became available at the end of the fourth century that the Western Christian church accepted the Old Testament in a form that agreed with the Hebrew Bible of the Jews. The Eastern Christian church still considers the Septuagint the authoritative Old Testament text.