Weren't Jewish Scribes Fully Accurate to the Letter?

[00:00:01] Weren't Jewish Scribes Fully Accurate to the Letter by Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth in my previous post, I started to explain which manuscripts we have of the Hebrew Bible and broached the question of whether we know they were accurate. That is, if we read the stories of Genesis or the book of Isaiah or the Psalms, can we be sure we're reading what the authors originally wrote, or could things have been changed? [00:00:30] In this post I explain some of the complications of knowing what the original authors of the Hebrew Bible wrote based on what we know about Jewish scribal practices over the centuries. [00:00:40] It turns out that what we know is not actually what we often hear, that Jewish scribes going all the way back to the beginning had ways of making sure they never changed a single letter of what they copied. [00:00:52] We start with the Masoretic text. [00:00:55] The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today and that is the basis of all modern translations is called the Masoretic text. It is called this because the Jewish scholars who devised the rules for copying Scripture are known as the Masoretes. [00:01:11] The term Masorete comes from the Hebrew word mazorah, which means translation. [00:01:17] The Masoretes were the scholars who worked out ways to preserve the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. [00:01:22] They were active between 500 and 1000 CE. [00:01:26] To understand what the Masoretes accomplished, you need to remember that ancient written Hebrew was a language that used only consonants, not vowels. [00:01:35] Any language that is written only in consonants is open obviously to serious problems of interpretation. [00:01:42] Imagine if you were to write English that way. Apart from context, you would have no way of knowing whether a word spelled NPT was inept or input or whether MNR was minor, manor, moner or manure. [00:01:59] Over the centuries of their work, the Masoretes accomplished several gargantuan tasks. [00:02:04] For one thing, they standardized the entire consonantal text of the entire Hebrew Bible so that there was an agreed on text with no variations. [00:02:14] In addition, they devised a system of dots to be added to all the consonants to indicate the appropriate vowels so that anyone reading the text would know which of the range of possible words was to be accepted as the right one. [00:02:28] And they worked to make sure that no one would ever change the text again by implementing rules to be followed in the copying of the text. [00:02:36] All of this labor had a tremendous and long lasting result. The Masoretes standardized the text. [00:02:42] Moreover, scholars today are reasonably certain that when the Masoretes started their work they were dealing with a continental text that was already well established, that changes had not been made at least significant changes for centuries, since at least the end of the first century ce. [00:03:00] And so we can for the most part rest relatively assured that the Hebrew text we read now, if we read Hebrew, is the same text that was in place 1900 years ago. [00:03:13] But what about before that? [00:03:15] Ah, therein the problem lies the Dead Sea Scrolls. [00:03:21] There are many reasons that the Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 have proved so important for the scholars of ancient Judaism. [00:03:29] One of these reasons has to do with the text of the Hebrew Bible. Over 200 of the scrolls contain texts of the Hebrew Bible. [00:03:37] The most famous is a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah. Most of the texts, however, are fragmentary. Some of them are just scraps. [00:03:46] Still, their importance cannot be undersold. Remember, the Masoretic text that printed Hebrew Bibles are based on is that found in Codex leningrad densis from 1000 CE. [00:03:57] The texts of the Hebrew Bible among the Dead Sea Scrolls are at least a thousand years earlier than that. [00:04:03] By comparing the form of the text in the scrolls with the manuscripts from around the year 1000, we can see how well the text had been copied over all those intervening centuries. [00:04:14] In the end, there is some very good news and some not so good news. [00:04:19] The good news is, in many instances, the Hebrew text found among the scrolls is very, very similar to the continental text standardized later by the Masoretes. [00:04:30] The copy of Isaiah is very much like the copy found in Codex Lenograndensis. [00:04:35] The not so good news is that this is not the case with all of the books of the Hebrew Bible. [00:04:41] Scholars had long noted, for example, that the ancient Septuagint of the Book of Jeremiah was about 15% shorter than the Masoretic text. That is, it had many fewer verseswords. And scholars had suspected that it was because the Hebrew version of Jeremiah known to the ancient Greek translators was significantly different from the Masoretic text. [00:05:05] And as it turns out, one one of the scrolls discovered at Qumran has a Hebrew text of Jeremiah that is closer to that lying behind the Septuagint version than the Masoretic text. [00:05:17] 15% is a big difference. [00:05:19] Other books of the Septuagint are also strikingly different from the Masoretic text, for example the books of Samuel and Kings. [00:05:27] It is possible that the Hebrew texts of all these books were in serious flux before the text came to be standardized by the end of the first century. [00:05:36] And what about the times before the scrolls from Qumran were produced? [00:05:40] How much was the text in flux in the early centuries when it was copied by hand? Time and again among scribes who did not have and could not follow the rules later laid down by the Masoretes. [00:05:52] The reality is that we simply do not know how much the text got changed in what places and for what reasons in the early centuries of copying. [00:06:02] And so the short story is for many many centuries the text of the Hebrew Bible has not changed in any significant way, but we cannot tell how it was altered between the time the books of the Bible were first produced and the time their texts came to be standardized near the end of the first century ce. [00:06:20] Do we have the original wording of any of the books of the Hebrew Bible? [00:06:24] Maybe, maybe not. There's actually no way to know for sure, but for me personally given what we know about scribal practices throughout the world for the bulk of its history, it seems pretty safe to say that things got changed a little a lot before the Masoretes brought order to the chaos.