The Scrolls at Seventy

DIRT OF AGES: Picture of my Dig team in Jerusalem in 1970 just below the Temple Mount which fed my interest in the Scrolls and Archaeology in general. I'm front right. What a summer! Click photo to enlarge.

Ten years ago three of us from our Glendora church visited an exhibit of fifteen Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts at the San Diego Natural History Museum (see sdnhm.org) and a vanload went later. Then, a little later, Azusa Pacific University offered to display the five fragments they had acquired.

I have found over the years that when discussing the veracity of the Bible and its manuscripts (MSS) people say, Yeah what about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The assumption is that the Scrolls confute or contradict the part of the Bible we call the Old Testament. Text.

This is a gross distortion. The Scrolls are important for Christians for the very opposite reason.

Here it is: The scrolls allow O.T. text critics to make a comparison between the 1947 discoveries and the Hebrew manuscripts behind our English Old Testaments. Cave 4 held a well-preserved copy of the Book of Isaiah from about 150 B.C. How did our text of Isaiah measure up, since the King James translators of 1611 were using a copy of the Hebrew text that dated back to only 1000 AD?

Disputes about “variations” obscure the fact that the similarities are overwhelming. Gleason Archer’s Survey of the Old Testament mentions that slight spelling variations (e.g. Elijah and Elias) pale before the fact that the Isaiah Scroll “proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text” (page 19). Geisler and Nix report: “In one chapter of 166 words (Isa. 53) there is only ONE WORD (3 letters) in question after a thousand years of transmission – and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage” (General Introduction to the Bible, page 263).

Much is owed to the skill of the Masoretes (from “massorah”=to hand down). These careful Jewish scholars based at Tiberias copied the Hebrew Old Testament from the period 500 to 915 A.D. Their rules of copying included: calculating the number of letters on each page; the middle word of each book; the middle letter of each book; the middle letter of the first five books of Moses; similar expressions tallied separately (e.g. “sins of Jeroboam” versus “the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat”), etc.

Here is good evidence for what we read in Psalm 12:6, “The words of the Lord are pure words…like silver purified seven times.” Thus some argue that the Dead Sea Scrolls should be measured by the Masoretic Text and not vice versa.

For Christians, it is encouraging to know that the O.T. text we hold in our hands follows extremely closely what God’s people have treasured across time. We have more to come on this but for now this will serve as a warm-up.