Of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, one has become a symbol of the whole discovery: the Great Isaiah Scroll, known to scholars as 1QIsa-a (Cave 1, Qumran, Isaiah, first copy). It was among the first seven scrolls found in 1947, and it is the only biblical book among the scrolls that survives complete, all sixty-six chapters, from the first verse to the last.

It is also a natural experiment. Before 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah dated from around 900–1000 CE. The Great Isaiah Scroll was copied about a thousand years earlier. Put the two side by side, and you can see what a millennium of hand-copying did to the text.

The scroll itself

The scroll is made of seventeen sheets of leather sewn together, about 7.3 metres (24 feet) long and some 26 centimetres high, with the text written in fifty-four columns. It shows signs of long use: it was repaired in antiquity, and the outer part, handled most, is worn.

It is usually dated to the second century BCE, around 150–100 BCE, on the basis of its handwriting. Radiocarbon tests in 1990–91 and 1994 gave ranges that agree with an early date. That makes it older than the time of Jesus by more than a century.

The scroll is now kept in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Because of its fragility, a facsimile is usually on display. The whole scroll can be viewed online in high resolution through the Israel Museum’s Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site.

What the comparison showed

When scholars first studied the scroll, the result surprised many of them. Millar Burrows, who led the first publication, wrote that it agreed with the Masoretic text to a degree that was remarkable for a manuscript so old, and that its many differences were mostly matters of spelling and grammar that did not affect the meaning.

That has held up. The differences between 1QIsa-a and the Masoretic text fall into a few groups.

Spelling. The most common difference by far. The scribe of 1QIsa-a used a “full” spelling, adding consonants such as waw and yod to indicate vowels, much more often than the Masoretic text does. This is like the difference between British “colour” and American “color”: the word is the same, the spelling is not. Thousands of the differences are of this kind.

Grammar and pronunciation. Some forms reflect the Hebrew of the scribe’s own day: slightly different pronoun endings or verb forms, and occasional Aramaic influence.

Small slips. Like every manuscript, the scroll has copying mistakes: words skipped and then added above the line, letters confused, a word written twice. Many were corrected by the scribe or a later hand. In one place a scribe skipped from one occurrence of a phrase to the next, and a corrector later wrote the missing words into the margin.

Real variant readings. A smaller number of differences do affect the meaning of a word or phrase. Most are minor: “and” present or absent, singular or plural, a different preposition.

The Great Isaiah Scroll does not belong strictly to the “proto-Masoretic” group of texts; its spelling and some readings are its own. Its companion from the same cave, 1QIsa-b, which is incomplete but covers parts of many chapters, is closer still to the Masoretic text, often identical letter for letter. Together they showed that the text of Isaiah read in synagogues in the Middle Ages was, in substance, the text read in the second century BCE.

A few readings that matter

Some readings in the scroll have been adopted by modern translations. Three examples show how this works.

Isaiah 53:11. The Masoretic text reads, literally, “Out of the anguish of his soul he will see; he will be satisfied.” The verb “see” has no object. The Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsa-b and another Isaiah manuscript from Cave 4 (4QIsa-d) all read “he will see light,” and so does the Greek Septuagint. Several modern translations, such as the NIV, NRSV and NET Bible, adopt “light”; others, such as the ESV, keep the Masoretic reading and mention the other in a note. Either way, the meaning of the chapter is the same: the suffering servant will live beyond his suffering and be vindicated.

Isaiah 21:8. The Masoretic text says, “Then a lion cried out,” which is hard to fit into the scene of a watchman on a tower. 1QIsa-a reads “Then the one who sees cried out,” that is, the lookout. In Hebrew the two words share most of their letters, so it is easy to see how one could become the other. Many translations now follow the scroll.

Isaiah 40:6. The Masoretic text reads “A voice says, ‘Cry!’ And he said, ‘What shall I cry?’” 1QIsa-a has “And I said,” matching the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. The difference is a single letter. Many modern translations adopt “I said,” making the prophet the speaker.

These examples are typical of the real differences. They are worth the care translators give them, and in a few places they improve our understanding of a verse. But none of them changes the message of Isaiah or any teaching that depends on it.

How old was the text before the scroll?

It is easy to think of the scroll as a snapshot of “the original Isaiah.” It is not. It is itself a copy, made several centuries after the prophet’s time in the eighth century BCE and the composition of the later parts of the book. Between the original and the scroll lay generations of copying of which we have no direct evidence. What the scroll proves is not that the text never changed before the second century BCE, but that from that point on it changed very little.

That is still a powerful result. The Masoretic manuscripts on which our Old Testament is based were copied about a thousand years after the scroll, and in that thousand years the text of Isaiah was transmitted with very few changes of substance. If scribes could do that over the millennium we can check, it is reasonable to think that their predecessors, working with the same reverence for the text, did similar work in the centuries we cannot check. But reasonable inference is not the same as proof, and good scholars are careful about the difference.

Isaiah and Open Word Bible

When Open Word Bible translates Isaiah, its starting point is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a Masoretic text. In places where the Great Isaiah Scroll or other ancient witnesses offer a reading that many scholars prefer, as in Isaiah 53:11, the choice is not hidden. The reasoning record for the sentence names the witnesses, shows what each reads, and explains the decision, so a reader can disagree with it if they wish. That is how a translation should handle what the Dead Sea Scrolls have taught us: with gratitude, with care, and in the open.

Sources

  • Abegg, Martin, Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
  • Burrows, Millar, ed. The Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark’s Monastery. Vol. 1, The Isaiah Manuscript and the Habakkuk Commentary. New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1950.
  • Burrows, Millar. The Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Viking, 1955.
  • Flint, Peter W. “The Book of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries, edited by Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov, 229–251. London: British Library, 2002.
  • Kutscher, E. Y. The Language and Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a). Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 6. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
  • Ulrich, Eugene, and Peter W. Flint. Qumran Cave 1.II: The Isaiah Scrolls. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 32. Oxford: Clarendon, 2010.
  • Israel Museum, Digital Dead Sea Scrolls: dss.collections.imj.org.il.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.