When the Dead Sea Scrolls were first announced, many people asked one question: would they show that the Bible had been changed? The answer turned out to be more interesting than either a simple yes or a simple no.

On the one hand, the scrolls showed that the Hebrew text which became the basis of our Old Testament existed, in essentially the same form, more than two thousand years ago, and was copied with great care. On the other hand, they showed that in the last centuries before Jesus, some biblical books circulated in more than one form, and that the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, often reflects a real Hebrew text rather than a free translation. This article explains both findings.

Over two hundred biblical manuscripts

Among the roughly nine hundred manuscripts from the caves near Qumran, more than two hundred are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. Further biblical manuscripts come from Masada, Wadi Murabba’at, Nahal Hever and other sites in the Judean desert. They range in date from the third century BCE to the second century CE. Most are fragments; only the Great Isaiah Scroll is complete.

The books best represented at Qumran are Psalms (more than thirty copies), Deuteronomy (about thirty), Genesis and Isaiah (around twenty each). Every book of the Hebrew Bible is represented except Esther. The biblical scrolls were published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, and are gathered in English translation in The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible by Martin Abegg, Peter Flint and Eugene Ulrich.

Different kinds of text

Emanuel Tov, who led the publication of the scrolls, has classified the biblical manuscripts from Qumran into groups according to how they relate to the texts we already knew (Tov 2012). His categories, slightly simplified, are:

  • Proto-Masoretic texts. These are close to the consonants of the medieval Masoretic text. They form the largest group, roughly half of the Qumran biblical scrolls on Tov’s count.
  • Pre-Samaritan texts. These share the distinctive features of the Samaritan Pentateuch (the Torah as preserved by the Samaritan community), such as harmonising expansions, without its specifically Samaritan changes. A scroll of Exodus written in paleo-Hebrew script, 4QpaleoExod-m, is the best example.
  • Texts close to the Hebrew behind the Septuagint. A small number of scrolls agree with the Greek translation against the Masoretic text in significant ways.
  • Non-aligned texts. Many scrolls do not consistently follow any one of these, but agree now with one, now with another, and sometimes go their own way.
  • Texts written in the “Qumran scribal practice.” Tov identifies a group with a distinctive full spelling and grammar, which he associates with scribes of the Qumran community.

Eugene Ulrich, another editor of the biblical scrolls, prefers to describe the situation in terms of successive “editions” of biblical books, each copied faithfully for a time and then revised. Scholars debate how best to describe the evidence, but they agree on the main point: in the period of the scrolls, the text of some books existed in more than one form, side by side.

Three examples

Jeremiah. The Greek Septuagint version of Jeremiah is about one-seventh shorter than the Hebrew Masoretic text, and arranges some chapters differently. Before 1947 many scholars assumed the Greek translator had abbreviated freely. But fragments from Cave 4, especially 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, preserve a Hebrew text of the shorter kind. Other Jeremiah scrolls from the same cave have the longer Masoretic form. Both editions existed in Hebrew and were copied in the same period. Translators today follow the longer Masoretic edition, which is the form Jewish and Christian communities have read for two thousand years; the shorter edition helps scholars understand how the book grew.

1 Samuel 11. A large manuscript of Samuel from Cave 4, 4QSam-a, contains a paragraph before 1 Samuel 11 which is not in the Masoretic text. It describes how Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been oppressing the tribes of Gad and Reuben and gouging out their right eyes, which explains why his demand in 11:2 is so cruel. The first-century historian Josephus seems to have known this material (Jewish Antiquities 6.68–71). The New Revised Standard Version (1989) included the paragraph in its text; most other translations do not, or mention it in a note. Scholars still debate whether it was accidentally lost from the Masoretic text or added in the tradition behind 4QSam-a.

Goliath’s height. In 1 Samuel 17:4 the Masoretic text makes Goliath “six cubits and a span” tall, about 2.9 metres. 4QSam-a, the Septuagint and Josephus give “four cubits and a span,” about 2 metres, still a very big man. A few modern translations, such as the NET Bible, adopt the lower figure.

Other well-known cases include Deuteronomy 32:8, where a Cave 4 scroll (4QDeut-j) reads that God divided the nations “according to the number of the sons of God,” with support from the Septuagint, rather than “the sons of Israel” as in the Masoretic text, a reading followed by the ESV and NRSV; and the large Psalms scroll from Cave 11, which has many of the later psalms in a different order and includes Psalm 151, known previously only from the Septuagint and Syriac.

What did not change

These examples are real, and a translation should take them seriously. But they need to be kept in proportion.

First, the great majority of variants in the biblical scrolls are small: spelling, grammar, single words. Large differences of the Jeremiah or Samuel kind are found in only a handful of books.

Second, the variety belongs mostly to the earlier period. The biblical scrolls from Masada (before 74 CE) and from the Bar Kokhba caves (132–135 CE) are almost identical to the consonantal Masoretic text. By the end of the first century CE, the proto-Masoretic form had become the standard text within Judaism, and from then on it was transmitted with the extraordinary care described in Copying with care.

Third, the scrolls did not reveal a different religion. The God of Israel, the covenant, the law, the prophets and the psalms are the same in the scrolls as in the Masoretic text. As Peter Flint and James VanderKam put it in their survey, the scrolls generally confirm the reliability of the traditional Hebrew text, while giving scholars many valuable readings to consider in particular places.

Why the Septuagint matters again

One result of the scrolls has been a new respect for the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in the third to first centuries BCE. Where it differs from the Masoretic text, it was once common to blame the translators. Now we know that it often reflects a Hebrew text that really existed, sometimes preserved at Qumran. That makes the Septuagint an important witness to the Hebrew text, especially in books such as Samuel and Jeremiah. Its story is told in The Septuagint, the first Bible translation.

How a translation uses the scrolls

Almost all modern translations of the Old Testament, Jewish and Christian, are based on the Masoretic text, as Open Word Bible is. The scrolls are used in a disciplined way: where a scroll, often with support from the Septuagint or other witnesses, has a reading that explains how the Masoretic reading arose, or makes much better sense where the Masoretic text seems damaged, translators may adopt it, and say so in a note. Where the Masoretic text makes good sense, it is usually kept, even if a scroll differs.

In Open Word Bible, every such decision is recorded in the sentence’s reasoning: which witness reads what, which reading was chosen, and why. The scrolls are a gift to translators, and readers deserve to see how that gift is used.

Sources

  • Abegg, Martin, Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
  • Cross, Frank Moore, Donald W. Parry, Richard J. Saley, and Eugene Ulrich. Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 17. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005.
  • Josephus. Jewish Antiquities 6.68–71.
  • Lange, Armin, and Emanuel Tov, eds. Textual History of the Bible. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2016–2017.
  • Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.
  • Ulrich, Eugene. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1999.
  • Ulrich, Eugene. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 169. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
  • VanderKam, James C., and Peter Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.